U.S. Campaign Reader: “The Incredible Shrinking Obama”
By Charles Lemos on September 21, 2008 at 10:00 PM in Barack Obama, John McCain
Here are a dozen articles from both the US and international media about the US Presidential race. Highlights of each article provided with a link to the full article.
The Incredible Shrinking Obama
By Rex Murphy in Toronto’s Globe and Mail.
Journalists used to tell stories, now they plumb narratives. Narrative is a pretentious borrowing from the abstraction-clotted world of academic criticism, where texts are interrogated, authors are dead and high-toned fatuousness is king. I’ll see your postmodern and raise you a meta.
Mr. Obama’s campaign, however, has renewed narrative’s trendy fizz. It is the very Perrier water (or is it San Pellegrino now?) of the better campaign reportage. Take no hike up Pundit Mountain without it. From the moment, the Obama surge took forceful shape, everyone – reporters, the scholars of blogland, the partisan howler monkeys of cable-news cage matches – has chattered on about Mr. Obama’s narrative.
Trouble is, most of the story of the campaign isn’t so much coming from the candidate himself as it is created by all those who, most in worshipful terms, have talked, written and reported on or about him. The Obama campaign is one great text generator, the grand fable of his fans.
Same-Sex Marriage Ban Is Tied to Obama Factor
By Jesse McKinley in the New York Times.
Could Senator Barack Obama’s popularity among black voters hurt gay couples in California who want to marry?
That is the concern of opponents of Proposition 8, a measure on the November ballot that would amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage, which was legalized in May by the State Supreme Court.
Add Black homophobes to my list of worries.
Meltdown Puts Obama Back in Driving Seat
By Dennis Staunton in the Irish Times.
THIS WEEK’S meltdown in the markets has produced few winners but if the ill wind that has blown away half the investment banks on Wall Street has benefited anyone, it is Barack Obama.
After two weeks in the doldrums in the wake of the Republicans’ unexpectedly buoyant convention and the emergence of Sarah Palin as a fresh political star, the Democrats are back on top in the race for the White House.
Obama has regained the lead in national polls and wiped out McCain’s advantage in a number of key battleground states as the economy drives every other issue out of sight.
Is Obama Really that Good a Speaker?
By Daniel Finkelstein in the Times of London.
Bill Clinton’s policy adviser William Galston is frustrated with Barack Obama.
He thinks Obama is losing the debate on the economy, allowing McCain’s analysis – that lobbyists and Washington are the problem – to triumph because he doesn’t offer an analysis of his own.
Here They Go Again
By Jonathan Darman in Newsweek.
Rovean tactics alone do not win the Republican Party elections. This is a center-right country, and Democrats ignore this at their own peril.
To Democrats it simply does not make sense. The past eight years, with Republicans in control of the White House, have, they say, been disastrous for America. The military is beleaguered and beaten down after two long and taxing wars. The nation, they go on, has been disgraced in the eyes of the world. The economy has collapsed. The financial system is broken. Eighty percent of voters believe the nation is on the wrong track. Yet, a month and a half before the November election, the Democratic nominee for the presidency only slightly leads the Republican standard bearer in most polls. The GOP, in spite of everything, might somehow be able to hold on to power.
McCain and Obama Mostly Mum on Bailout
By Glenn Thrush and Tim Grieve writing for Politico.
If you think Henry Paulson’s three-page rewrite of the nation’s financial and governmental systems was vague and open-ended, you might want to check out the responses to his plan from John McCain and Barack Obama.
The presidential candidates are hardly powerless bystanders in the financial crisis — as senators and as leaders of their respective parties, either could have suspended his campaign and headed to Washington to lead his party’s legislative response to the proposal.
Far from that, neither McCain nor Obama has yet to venture so much as a detailed comment on the substance of today’s proposed $700 billion bailout. Instead the candidates are sticking to party-appropriate bromides while waiting to discern the public’s reaction, and also what move their parties’ respective congressional leaders are planning to make.
Biden: ‘It’s Nice To Be Back In Coal Country’
By Debra McCown in the Bristol Herald Courier (Virginia).
In his first visit to Southwest Virginia, Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, speaking at the United Mine Workers’ annual fish fry here on Saturday, was quick to tout his ties to coal.
“I hope you won’t hold it against me, but I am a hard-coal miner, anthracite coal, Scranton, Pa.,” Biden said. “It’s nice to be back in coal country. … It’s a different accent [in Southwest Virginia] … but it’s the same deal. We were taught that our faith and our family was the only really important thing, and our faith and our family informed everything we did.”
Biden, a U.S. senator from Delaware, told the story of his great-grandfather, a mining engineer who was elected to the state Senate in 1904 and was rumored to be a Molly Maguire, a member of a secret organization tied to union activism and crime in the Pennsylvania coalfields in the 19th century.
“He went out of his way to prove that he wasn’t, and we were all praying that he was,” he said.
The Molly Maguires were a mostly Irish Catholic secret organization in the post Civil War era in the anthracite coal region of the United States that stretches from western New York down to Alabama. Barbara Freese, an Assistant Attorney General in Minnesota, wrote a book called Coal, A Human History. In it, she describes the Molly Maguires as “coal mining terrorists who for many years advanced their interests in the anthracite region through arson, beatings, and the systematic murder of coal bosses and others who stood in their way.” In a bloody five-month long strike in 1875, the Molly Maguires derailed trains, sabotaged machinery and burned down mine buildings. Their violence actually set back the process of union building in the early period of American industrialization. Someone may want to point this out to ol’ smokin’ Joe.
Texas’ Female Politicians Can Relate to Palin’s Ordeal
By Anna M. Tinsley in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Kay Granger knew what was coming. As soon as she heard that the governor of Alaska — a mother of five — was the Republican vice presidential candidate, Granger said she knew that Sarah Palin would be questioned about issues ranging from motherhood to job qualifications.
“Been there, saw it coming,” said Granger, a Republican congresswoman and former Fort Worth mayor. She and other locally elected women say they were grilled on similar issues when running for office years ago.
“There’s absolutely a double standard,” said Rebecca Deen, who heads the political science department at the University of Texas at Arlington. “People are still asking questions. And the questions that will be asked of a woman, at least in the foreseeable future, will be different than those asked of a man.”
Democrats’ Prejudice May Cost Obama Votes
By David Paul Kuhn writing for Politico.
The AP-Yahoo study concluded that white Democratic racism may cause 2.5 percent of voters to “turn away from Obama because of his race,” roughly the margin of President Bush’s victory over John F. Kerry in 2004.
White Democratic supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton were almost twice as likely as Obama’s primary supporters to cite a negative adjective in describing blacks — a finding consistent with trends in earlier polling. Only 59 percent of Clinton’s white Democratic supporters wanted Obama to be president.
The AP study also seems to have been conducted among a population of Democrats more skeptical of Obama than normal. While both the ABC News/Washington Post polls and the massive weekly summaries of the Gallup Poll show that since late August between 83 and 85 percent of Democrats say they will vote for Obama, the AP study interviewed a population where just seven in 10 Democrats said they support Obama.
Cindy McCain Campaigns — As She Lives — By Her Rules
By Lydia Martin in the Miami Herald.
The Arizona heiress with seven homes has traveled the globe for years doing humanitarian work, mostly aiding children and quietly donating plenty of money from a fortune estimated at $100 million. She may be the wife of a senator and presidential candidate, but from the time John McCain was elected to Congress in 1982, she has preferred to keep out of the political limelight. Spending time with kids — her four and the countless others with whom she has connected in orphanages and medical facilities — is how she feels most at ease.
McCain Drew $8.8 million in Two Days after Palin Selection
By Dan Morain in the Los Angeles Times.
John McCain raised more than $8.8 million in the two days after he announced that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would join him on the Republican ticket — his biggest two-day haul of the long-running presidential campaign.
The Republican National Committee collected $4.5 million the day McCain selected Palin, newly filed Federal Election Commission reports show.
McCain’s decision to tap the then-little-known politician excited the Republican rank and file, helping him raise about $2.1 million in increments of less than $1,000 in two days.
Altogether, McCain raised $6.8 million Aug. 30, the day after the Palin announcement, and $2 million the next day. Until then, McCain had never topped $2 million in a single day in this presidential campaign, the Federal Election Commission data show.
McCain, Obama Offer No-Pain, All-Gain Energy Promises
An editorial from the Austin American-Statesman.
The United States has two broad energy problems: its heavy dependence on foreign oil production to move its cars, trucks, trains and aircraft; and its dependence on two other fossil fuels, coal and natural gas, to produce well over half of its electricity. And burning oil, natural gas and coal all produce the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
Both major presidential candidates, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., promise to tackle these huge problems, but in ways that sound like all gain no pain for the American people. If only.
The United States gets almost 70 percent of the oil it uses every year from wells in other countries. As Texas financier and oilman T. Boone Pickens has pointed out in his quest to reduce that dependence, the United States is paying $700 billion a year to other nations for their oil, money that some will use to build their own economies and others to finance terrorists or their own wars.
Unfortunately, the solutions offered by both candidates are flawed because they are trying to politically engineer their way into office without causing any discomfort to Americans — for whom the problem isn’t dependence on foreign oil but high gasoline prices.
Obama in the Mud: So Much for Honesty
Editorial in the Manchester Union Leader (New Hampshire).
When Barack Obama first began campaigning in New Hampshire in early 2007, many voters swooned. We watched him speak to retirees in Claremont one snowy February day that year. Not a single voter we talked with before he spoke planned to vote for him. Afterwards, many said they would. The word that spontaneously came from the lips of multiple attendees: sincere. They couldn’t remember a politician who spoke with such sincerity, they said. And many of them had been voting since World War II.
We wonder what those same voters think of Obama’s sincerity now. In the past few weeks, Obama has thrown so many false accusations against John McCain that just keeping track of them has become difficult. And these aren’t innocent errors. They are deliberate distortions of the sort Obama has always said he reviles.
From my blog, By The Fault.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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