The Iowa Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling Friday finding that the state’s same-sex-marriage ban violates the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian couples, making Iowa the third state where marriage is legal.

In its decision, the court upheld a 2007 district court judge’s ruling that the law violates the state constitution. It strikes the language from Iowa code limiting marriage to only between a man a woman.

“The court reaffirmed that a statute inconsistent with the Iowa constitution must be declared void even though it may be supported by strong and deep-seated traditional beliefs and popular opinion,” said a summary of the ruling issued by the court.

The ruling set off celebration among the state’s gay-marriage proponents.

“Iowa is about justice, and that’s what happened here today,” said Laura Fefchak, who was hosting a verdict party in the Des Moines suburb of Urbandale with her partner of 13 years, Nancy Robinson.

Ms. Robinson added: “To tell the truth, I didn’t think I’d see this day.”

Des Moines attorney Dennis Johnson, who argued on behalf of the gay and lesbian couples, said “this is a great day for civil rights in Iowa.”

I’ll say! Good for them – now THAT’S some good ol’ middle American values right there – making sure they stay faithful to the Constitution!

And for once, this will stand without argument:

Court rules dictate that the decision will take about 21 days to be considered final, and a request for a rehearing could be filed within that period. That means it will be at least several weeks before gay and lesbian couples can seek marriage licenses.

But Polk County Attorney John Sarcone said the county attorney’s office won’t ask for a rehearing, meaning the court’s decision should take effect after that three-week period.

“Our Supreme Court has decided it, and they make the decision as to what the law is and we follow Supreme Court decisions,” Mr. Sarcone said. “This is not a personal thing. We have an obligation to the law to defend the recorder, and that’s what we do.”

The case has been working its way through Iowa’s court system since 2005 when Lambda Legal, a New York-based gay rights organization, filed a lawsuit on behalf of six gay and lesbian Iowa couples who were denied marriage licenses. Some of their children are also listed as plaintiffs.

The suit named then-Polk County recorder and registrar Timothy Brien.

The state Supreme Court’s ruling upheld an August 2007 decision by Polk County District Court Judge Robert Hanson, who found that a state law allowing marriage only between a man and a woman violates the constitutional rights of equal protection.

The Polk County attorney’s office, arguing on behalf of Mr. Brien, claimed that Judge Hanson’s ruling violates the separation of powers and said the issue should be left to the Legislature.

Well, I could be wrong, but it seems to me that it is perfectly appropriate for a judge to rule on the side of equal rights, and staying true to its own Constitution…

There is much rejoicing throughout the land, at least from the LGBT community:

Lambda Legal scheduled a news conference for Friday to comment on the ruling. A request for comment from the Polk County attorney’s office wasn’t immediately returned.

Massachusetts and Connecticut permit same-sex marriage. California, which briefly allowed gay marriage before a voter initiative in November repealed it, allows domestic partnerships.

New Jersey and New Hampshire also offer civil unions, which provide many of the same rights that come with marriage. New York recognizes same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, and legislators there and in New Jersey are weighing whether to offer marriage. A bill that would legalize same-sex marriage in Vermont has cleared the Legislature but may be vetoed by the governor.

The ruling in Iowa’s same-sex-marriage case came more quickly than many observers had anticipated, with some speculating after oral arguments that it could take a year or more for a decision.

This is good news, good news indeed. It would be, um, NICE, if we had federal rights, with all the same benefits heterosexuals have. But for now, state by state is a beginning, and surely better than nothing. Go, Hawkeyes! I’ll take it – I’ll take any state that respects its Constitution, and equal rights for all.

We still have a long way to go, though. Suze Orman says it all in the video below, as well as acknowledging the financial impact of NOT having the same rights:

Amen, sister – preach it! It doesn’t have to be Valentine’s Day to want Equal Rights for all, in every state, with full federal benefits. It’s the right thing to do, indeed. Good for Iowa for recognizing that, and the basis on which it made its decision. I hope and pray that other states will follow suit, and soon…

Riffing off of the Newsweek editors’ quesiness over the cult of personality surrounding Barack, let me just add that I too think the worshipful descriptions of Barack as a new kind of Messiah is creepy. Guys feeling a tingle up their leg when he talks, swooning women, and fawning reporters is not a healthy situation in a democracy. I was watching the BBC earlier today with the sound off. They played a clip of the former Korean dictator, Kim Il Sung, walking among his people, who cheered and wept at his very appearance. Now, I’m not saying Barack is a Korean dictator, but the mindless praise is eerily similar.

I am amused by the innocent, naive belief by many “Progressives” that their messiah has come and the new era of progressive politics is upon us. One of my Progressive friends sent me the following analysis from Think Progress claiming it is a myth that America is Center-Right:

My friend, who lives in California, was earnest and sincere in sending this along. I sent back a respons–”You have got to be shitting me?” Why? The first piece of evidence is Proposition 8. California, the so-called land of moderate progressives, passed Proposition 8 last Tuesday banning homosexual marriage. Now if that happens in California, what do you think would happen in Kentucky, Kansas or Iowa? At least on the matter of personal sexual conduct when it comes to homosexuality America is very, very conservative.

Personally, I don’t understand why conservatives want to have government regulating conduct between consenting adults. I guess I am a libertarian conservative. I believe that sexual relations between consenting adults is not the business of any government. Worrying about erecting barriers to prevent homosexual men and women from getting married is a silly distraction in a world where we have real problems before us. I am betting that Barack Obama and his team are not going to get out in front of this issue. They will follow the popular will. Rather than try to use the bully pulpit of the White House to make the case that homosexual adults are entitled to the same rights as heterosexual adults, I am betting team Obama will be silent. I think there is some more disillusion coming for the Gay/Lesbian community on this issue.

Looking for a quick withdrawal from Iraq? I don’t think that is going to happen either. In fact, look for team Obama to start making the case that the situation has changed on the ground and that the Iraqi government wants us as a partner to help rebuild their society and infrastructure. Truth is the actual substance of U.S. policy in Iraq is not likely to change. At the same time look for the boost in U.S. combat forces going to Afghanistan and continued covert cross-border raids into Pakistan.

As I noted in an earlier piece, Rahm Emanuel is no pacifist. To the contrary. He was an uber-hawk on Iraq. We are witnesses to a fascinating split in the American Jewish community. The Jewish community is no different than the Christian community. It really is not a community and represents diametrically opposed points of view. Barack Obama and Emanuel have both been backed financially by very wealthy Chicago jewish families–the Crowns and the Pritzkers. They are not in sync with the more conservative neo-cons embodied by the likes of William Kristol. They are pro-Israel but anti-likud. Prospects of war with Iran are probably reduced with this crowd.

Last year I participated in a war game looking at the future of the Middle East. The assembled experts agreed at the end of the game that the one policy move that could put Iran on the defensive would be an agreement between Syria and Israel over the Golan Heights. Up to now the Bush Administration has opposed such a move. If the Obama team goes in that direction they might get a breakthrough in the Middle East that has seemed so elusive. That would be good news and might help Obama calm the fears of his Palestinian supporters who see him stacking his Administration with prominent Jewish Americans who carry pro-Israel credentials.

What about ignoring FISA (i.e., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)? Now that this power is in the hands of Democrats will they relinquish it? I don’t think so. I would like to see a full restoration of FISA and a requirement that no serveillance is undertaken without having judicial review. Someone other than the Executive Branch needs to have a say in this matter.

Finally, there will be the economic policy front. Will Barack and company embark on a massive public employment program or seek to invest in the private sector and promote jobs thru some form of capitalism? If it is the former the Progressive will rejoice. But, if it is the later, Progressives will chalk up another example of a politician promising them one thing but delivering the opposite. It does look that Barack and his team recognize America is Center Right and are going to play to the element. For a guy who hung with Tony Rezko and dissed Hillary (bonehead moves in my book) Barack could establish himself as a very smart pol. We’ll see.

“When it comes to reform, has he hever once said, ‘We did’ instead of ‘I will’?

I backtracked my DVR to be sure to catch every word of her speech. Here you go:

“John and I — we’re discussing some new responsibilities that I’m going to have as your vice president.

“First, I’ll help lead the mission of energy security. And here in Iowa, high gas prices — they’re making a full tank of gas seem like it’s a luxury nowadays. The cost of living is going up. The cost of groceries is going up. But the value of your paycheck is going down because of energy costs. People blame Washington on this one for doing next to nothing, and they’ve got that right. As governor, what I do now is oversee a very, very large portion of our domestic production of oil, coming from up there from Alaska. Recently, through negotiations, through compromise, and through a heck of a lot of competition being allowed, we got agreements to build a nearly 40 billion dollar natural gas pipeline to bring Alaska’s clean, green natural gas to you to very hungry markets down here.

“And, as your vice president, I’ll help John McCain expand our use of alternative fuels. And we’re going to drill now to make this nation energy independent.

“Folks, it is a matter of national security and future prosperity. We need American resources brought to you by American ingenuity and produced by American workers, and we can do this.

“Second, I’ll help lead the mission of reforming government. And we’re going to make government more transparent and more accountable and more accessible for those who want to serve. We’re going to recruit the best people to run our agencies, regardless of party affiliation even, regardless if they have that Washington experience.

“We’re going to do a few new things also. For instance, as Alaska’s governor, I put the government’s checkbook on line, so that people could see where their money is going. We’re going to bring back transparency. [applause] We’ll bring that kind of transparency, that responsibility and accountability, back to D.C.

“And, third, I’ve told Senator McCain about a few things that I’ve learned as a governor and as a mom. Ever since I took the chief executive’s job up north, I’ve sought funding for students with special needs. And it’s an issue that has touched my heart beginning about 13 years ago with the addition to our extended family of a nephew with autism. And now we have been so blessed in our family with a special added perspective with the birth of our beautiful baby boy Trig about four months ago. We’ve joined so many American families that know that with some of life’s biggest joys sometimes come with some unique challenges.

“We’re going to make sure that government is on their side.

‘When it comes to the big issues in our campaign — back to our opponent — he likes to point the finger of blame.

“But has he ever really lifted a finger to help? Has he ever reached out a reformer’s hand to the other side of the aisle? Has he ever told his own party, ‘No!,’ so he could work well with others, to get others to say yes?

“When it comes to reform, has he hever once said, ‘We did’ instead of ‘I will’?

“John McCain and I — we are optimistic about solving the big problems. And why? It’s because we’ve gotten results. We have the track record, a consistent track record of being committed to reform and putting government on the side of the people. We’ve brought about change and reform.

“And joining the ticket with John McCain, I know that it is a great privilege. To serve beside him as vice president of the United States will be the highest but also the most humbling of honors.

“Our opponents have been going on lately about how they fight for you, they say. My running mate won’t say this on his own behalf so I’m going to say it for him. There’s only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you. …

He is the only one ready to serve us as our 44th president …

I’ve been thinking about Liz Phair’s response to the rockin’ but boorish Rolling Stones after reading Jacob Weisberg’s If Obama Loses: Racism is the Only Reason McCain Might Beat Him in Slate. Unlike Phair, I won’t attempt a point-by-point rebuttal; Weisberg’s piece is so riddled with distortions and hyperbole that a laundry list argument cannot summarize my feelings.

Weisberg’s article is so bad on so many levels that it’s amazing it was published at all, but it does fit with the media’s love affair with Obama. It’s a deceptive piece of writing and it relies on faulty logic, which I show below. But of course that is not an accident. A strident media partisan like Weisberg cannot rely on facts. So let’s start from the beginning:

John McCain, a sub-par Republican nominee with a list of liabilities longer than a Joe Biden monologue. Obama has built a crack political operation, raised record sums, and inspired millions with his eloquence and vision. McCain has struggled with a fractious campaign team, lacks clarity and discipline, and remains a stranger to charisma. Yet at the moment, the two of them appear to be tied. What gives?

Weisberg overstates the effectiveness of Obama’s operation. The trip to Europe, the faux presidential seal, his many policy reversals, and his disastrous debate performance at Saddleback are not mentioned.

Now notice how Hillary’s name is not mentioned. Nor the fact that 18 million voters chose her, approximately 200,000 more than chose Obama. Obama did not win a decisive victory. He was pulled over the finish line by Reid and Pelosi.

In fact, Obama as a brand has actually been declining — if you look at primary results and polls — since March. McCain, on the other hand, has actually run a surprisingly nimble operation, releasing ads which deflate the self-important Obama.

He continues:

If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin.

This would be a shocking conclusion if it were true. Older white voters, Weisberg is telling us, are racists. What’s his evidence?

Five percent of white voters acknowledge that they, personally, would not vote for a black candidate.

Five percent? Repeat. Five percent. Is Weisberg innumerate or does he think we’re stupid? That means 95 percent will not take race into consideration. Does this satisfy Weisberg? Of course not.

Five percent surely understates the reality. In the Pennsylvania primary, one in six white voters told exit pollsters race was a factor in his or her decision. Seventy-five percent of those people voted for Clinton. You can do the math: 12 percent of the Pennsylvania primary electorate acknowledged that it didn’t vote for Barack Obama in part because he is African-American.

Here he assures us that the number he just cited is wrong. Why did he cite the five percent to then just swat it down? Because it doesn’t serve the necessary condition of his argument; in fact, it refutes his thesis. Weisberg’s logic is not just twisted, it’s fabricated. Furthermore, just because Pennsylvania voters said race was a factor does not mean they view it as a problem. Indeed, the language of the polling is so vague that the race factor may have been Pennsylvanians voting for Obama because of his race. Does Weisberg mention Obama’s victory in lily-white Iowa ?, a state which is less diverse than Pennsylvania. No. Nor does he mention any of the deep-red and very white caucus states where Obama won. Because, as he says with a bit of sarcasm, “Obama may be too handsome, brilliant, and cool to be elected.” You see, Obama is really so wonderful that it must be racism.

Not once does Weisberg mention the sexism and misogyny directed at Hillary. Not once does he mention Hillary’s decidedly blue-collar appeal, her populist economic message, and the older, white female voters who fell hard for her. No, these ladies (and men) must be racists.

Except for health care, Weisberg does not consider issues important to older white voters:

You may or may not agree with Obama’s policy prescriptions, but they are, by and large, serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face: a failing health care system, oil dependency, income stagnation, and climate change.

He is silent on national security and terrorism, international relations, the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, job creation, and fuel prices. Weisberg’s litany, like Obama’s, is a distinctly Whole Foods Nation brand of liberalism, and it fails to address the economic insecurities of the poor and middle class. The blogger Anglachel writes:

Where has Obama lost ground among Democratic voters? In the populations most endangered by the faltering economy and the long term erosion of socio-economic standing. He did not address what mattered most to them, which was their increasing vulnerability to the ordinary dangers of life – insurance, health care, retirement, wages, job security, housing. To fail to do this was what makes Obama come across as elitist.

McCain is talking about drilling to reduce gas prices, and charging Obama with wanting to raise taxes. This message is gaining traction with many working Americans. As Anglachel puts it:

The [Obama] wing is all too enamored of its own moral superiority on race, too contemptuous of the Bubbas and the Bunkers, to make the slightest move to win back and thus defend this constituency.

Weisberg utterly fails to prove that the race is tied because of racism.

So let’s talk about what a vote for Obama actually signals: voting for Obama is condoning a culture that hates women (Keith Olbermann’s idea for Beating Hillary: Literally Beating Hillary). It’s a tacit acceptance for the media and the Democratic establishment giving preference to a far less qualified man over a much more qualified woman. It’s telegraphing to our daughters — to all women — that a man is rightfully at the front of the line, regardless if he lost nearly every important state and the popular vote. It’s telling our daughters — and all women — that violent imagery against a female candidate is acceptable if it benefits the male candidate. It is the familiar salt-in-the-wound for millions of women, the majority of the Democratic Party, that bullying and force — by the media, the liberal blogs, by the Democratic Party — is the way to crush a woman who tries to achieve too much.

Voting for Obama is to support a candidate who listens to and publicly references music which celebrates the degradation and abuse of women.

Voting for Obama is condoning race-baiting, like Weisberg’s. It’s accusing Hillary of suggesting that she was waiting for Obama to be assassinated because she mentioned RFK’s assassination in reference to the length of past campaigns when the media was trying to force her out; it’s having your surrogates imply that President Clinton’s remarks about Obama’s Iraq statements was racist (even producing a memo describing the plan), and it’s using coded language like “bamboozled” to mostly African Americans audiences in order to dislodge their support from the Clintons.

Voting for Obama is to embrace using race as a divisive strategy in a Democratic campaign.

Voting for Obama is being party to a rigged election. It condones voter intimidation, caucus fraud, and gaming your opponent’s states. It’s voting for outright bias by Party leaders like Dean, Pelosi, and Brazile. It’s an intentional violation of the one person, one vote ideal.

Voting for Obama is embracing intentional voter disenfranchisement.

Weisberg insists that Obama has a progressive agenda. But there’s nothing in the way Obama conducts his campaigns that would give us that idea. Many of us, Hillary supporters like myself, will vote for McCain because Obama’s treatment of Hillary goes against everything we believe in. And I want the Democratic Party to repudiate his tactics, and their own. Obama’s supporters must, some day, listen carefully to the very real reasons of why we’re angry, and they need to examine their consciences over their silence on the sexism towards Hillary and Obama’s race-baiting strategy.

Weisberg is wrong: Obama may lose because he conducted a despicable primary campaign, and he failed to offer a compelling economic message during the General Election.

In order to “save” the Democratic Party, Brazile resolved back in 2003 that she might have to destroy it first. And who better to help her in this lofty pursuit than her new best friend, the man neoconservatives call “The Architect”.

…………………………..

BY ROSEMARY REGELLO

It’s not every activist politico who gets to write a post in the Washington Times that begins like this: "As I sat by my window and staring out at the wonderful Washington, D.C., landscape, my office announced a phone call from Air Force One."

Evidently, Donna Brazile was reminding all the little people on Capitol Hill that she had friends in high places. In summer of 2007, Bush senior advisor Karl Rove wasn’t answering any subpoenas from Congress, but he didn’t mind talking to Brazile. From his perch at 20,000 feet, he informed her that this was probably a good time for him to get out of Dodge.

“Mr. Rove’s resignation is not a retirement,” Brazile reassured readers of the right of center newspaper. “It’s just another opportunity for him to create that lasting Republican majority he envisioned years ago and to spend his waking days doing what he so enjoys — beating Democrats in the alleys and gutters. Just ask Sen. Hillary Clinton, Mr. Rove’s target when he called in to speak to Rush Limbaugh. He couldn’t help it. Mr. Rove just had to take one last shot before riding out of town. More to come, Team Clinton.”

Brazile’s breezy account confirms what many have long since suspected. Rove’s claim to be sitting out the 2008 race is hogwash. The mastermind of today’s unraveling U.S. constitution is in no position to kick back, down gin fizzes and watch the country collapse under an Administration he put into office twice. The list of crimes that Bush’s top henchman could potentially be charged with – everything from fraud to war crimes – should be enough to keep him and his fellow Sopranos in hair-trigger mode until the next president gets sworn in. And the notion that he’d leave the choice of commander-in-chief in less capable dirty hands than his own requires more than the willing suspension of disbelief. It requires medication.

That’s why the Rove-Brazile tryst merits further exploration. They first hooked up some time in 2002, according to a New York Times article. The connection might have been a means for Brazile to expand her clientele, but she dismissed that angle in an interview, implying she had bigger fish to fry. It was the Democrats’ lackluster relations with African Americans and poor track record in elections, she said, that led her to start trailblazing new frontiers. To put it in a Brazile nutshell, the Republicans had a better machine.

”The idea is to re-energize the African-American electorate and revive the Democratic Party at the same time,” she told Times reporter Katharine Seelye, ”I want to revitalize the party from the grass roots up. We’re losing voters.”

With that noble cause in mind, she and Rove began to "chirpily exchange e-mail, chat on the phone and write letters, indulging in their shared zeal for the inner workings of politics," Seelye wrote.

Rove said he’d sometimes call Brazile before a press appearance to get feedback on various Bush policy angles he planned to discuss. In exchange, he furnished Brazile’s clients with access to White House social events.

"People think I’m crazy talking to Karl Rove," the strategist confessed to the Washington Post a month after the Times story appeared, "but there’s something about this guy."

Yes, there certainly is something about Karl Rove. In consultation with Vice-President Cheney’s office, it was Rove who outed Valerie Plame’s C.I.A. identity over a flap about uranium in Niger. Three years later, those subpoenas were overflowing his in-box because he’d told Alberto Gonzalez to fire nine U.S. Attorneys who refused to do his bidding. Rove is also under investigation for an entrapment scheme that put Alabama Democratic Governor Don Siegelman in prison for two years.

Those Republicans sure do know how to close the deal in politics. In addition to basking in The Architect’s dapper charm and irresistible company, Brazile opened diplomatic ties across town with archconservative Grover Norquist. Norquist heads one of Jack Abramoff’s favorite charities, Americans for Tax Reform, and is famous for his remark that he’d like to see federal government crippled to the point where he can take it home and drown it in his bathtub. For a brief window of opportunity, he set aside that morbid fantasy to help one of Brazile’s closest friends, D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes, push some legislation to increase revenues in her district.

According to the same Times article, “Mr. Norquist said he and Ms. Brazile, both Washington residents, were devising a plan to urge Congress to allow the city to raise the height limit on buildings as a way to broaden the tax base and improve schools.”

Brazile served as Holmes’ chief of staff and press secretary during the nineties. In that same action-packed year, her old boss teamed up with other D.C. officials to schedule an unauthorized, nonbinding earlybird presidential primary for 2004. DNC chair Terry McAuliffe sent sent out calls to the candidates to boycott the affair, but Howard Dean didn’t heed the directive. The former Vermont governor swept into D.C. and gobbled up almost as many endorsements as another candidate, Rev. Al Sharpton. Who needed those arcane DNC rules, anyway?

The Brazile Factor

At the time of these contentious political developments, Brazile chaired the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute, a program set up after the Florida recount debacle in 2000. During that earlier episode, she’d experienced firsthand Karl Rove’s unscrupulous knack for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Now she was tasked with brainstorming new strategies to prevent any future gaming of the electoral system.

In 2004, Dean ended his presidential bid after the Wisconsin primary and Kerry lost the general election. This time, Rove generated thousands of extra Bush votes in key Ohio precincts where only a few hundred Republicans lived. Not surprisingly, Brazile remained unimpressed with her party. That winter, she submitted an essay for the left-leaning website Slate.com, which was running a series called “Why Americans Hate Democrats – A Dialog”.

Hard as it must have been to top that inspirational title, the political strategist managed with her piece “Tapping the Obama Factor”. The Chicago politician had just been elevated to the U.S. Senate, but instead of offering an introduction to him, she mostly dwelled on her own life story – rising up from poverty in Louisiana, listening to her grandmother read scripture, etc. etc. Eventually, the essay worked its way back to the stated topic.

"This is a new moment to identify and recruit better messengers," she wrote. "Perhaps it’s time to tap into the ‘Obama’ factor: Scour statehouses for young, energetic, inspiring, and emerging leaders with the ability to connect the head and heart. Too many of the old Democratic guard have stayed in Washington, D.C., too long to fully recognize how most Americans live their lives."

It was a novel way to spin the Illinois election. Obama did score a landslide victory that year, but it had little to do with his age, energy level or the obsolete nature of the Democratic Party establishment. His campaign manager David Axelrod ran the classic Rovian smear campaign, first accusing Obama’s top primary contender of sexual impropriety. After disgracing Blair Hull out of contention, Axelrod used the same device against the G.O.P. primary winner, Jack Ryan.

Of course, this is where things get interesting. House Speaker Dennis Hastert decided he must stick his oar into the battle, calling on Ryan to end his senate bid. The candidate dutifully bowed out, and in his stead, the Illinois Republican Party fielded an unknown, African American bible-thumper from Maryland named Alan Keyes. Clearly, the G.O.P. wanted Obama to win that election. No other explanation can account for the party sacrificing a senate seat to a (supposedly) liberal Democrat who’d (supposedly) spoken out against the Iraq War in 2002.

A Hollywood script writer couldn’t have come up with this storyline. Within a year of arriving in Washington, Brazile’s rising star – the product of a globe-trotting Kansas woman and a philandering tribal leader in Kenya – had launched his presidential exploratory committee. The Internet fundraising team of Howard Dean signed on for the ride. So, too, did some of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks, corporate law firms, and energy giants. By the end of 2007, Obama would post a record-breaking haul of $100 million in campaign contributions. And all while he was still "introducing himself", as Brazile and other analysts put it, to the American public.

Who exactly brought the banks and oil companies to the table still remains to be ferreted out, but it wasn’t Dean or Brazile, or even the man who placed Obama on the speaker’s list at the 2004 Democratic Convention, John Kerry. It’s more likely that Karl Rove huddled with top Bush fundraisers to set that gravy train in motion. Among the candidate’s money bundlers were George Kaiser and Robert Cavnar, both oil industry executives. Other Bush campaign pioneers joined the bandwagon soon afterward.

Now Brazile was impressed. Judging from another My Day installment penned in 2005, following Hurricane Katrina, she sounded like a woman who had been born again:

“While my family was hurting, when they were on the edge feeling left to fend for themselves, the last thing I wanted to do was whine. I got into the groove quickly and contacted Ken Melhman, Chairman of the Republican National Committee and an old friend, Karl Rove, Deputy Chief of Staff for the White House.”

Then she started tossing out the cupcakes: “President Bush, who promised to rebuild the Gulf coast in a speech at Jackson Square, invited some African American leaders over to the White House on December 7th to discuss a broad range of issues…To my great surprise, the meeting with President Bush was cordial and candid. The President listened intently and reassured us that his Administration would not drop the ball.”

Funny how such innocuous fluff takes on a new and sinister meaning when read in hindsight. Yet even from the perspective of a contemporary audience, those claims were a stetch. For people living in New Orleans, the Katrina ball had already been dropped. When the levees broke, Sec. of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was attending a conference on bird flu, the President relaxing on his Crawford ranch. Back in Brazile’s home state, over a thousand people drowned during three days of waiting for rescuers to reach their homes. Several million homeless residents survived, homeless, only to a second disaster called FEMA.

But Brazile didn’t let facts on the ground spoil her picnic. Continuing her upbeat dispatch, “Since then, I have met once more with President Bush and other leaders who are committed to working together to restore the lives and the communities devastated by these two hurricanes…I can tell from the meetings that the rebuilding of Louisiana remains high on his list of priorities.”

Preparing for Battle

One can only speculate on Brazile’s motives in streaming out that hallucination. As she would mention in the Washington Times article two years later, her “old friend” Rove had hit the ground running with the start of the 2008 election cycle, appearing on talk shows to bash frontrunner Hillary Clinton. Behind the scenes, G.O.P. rank and file activists were organizing crossover voting drives to knock Clinton out of the race before November. In the red states, they could easily outnumber Democrats at the caucuses, enriching Obama’s delegate count and allowing him to boast later “I’ve won more states.”

To recruit additional foot troops for this effort, New Hampshire G.O.P. leader Stephen DaMaura started the Facebook website “Stop Hillary Clinton (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary).”

On the Democratic side, it became Brazile’s job to smooth over Obama’s path to the nomination. That required manipulating the primary calendar. Picking up on the diversity argument of Eleanor Holmes and the D.C. coalition, she pressed for an earlybird South Carolina primary and a Nevada caucus to augment the Iowa and New Hampshire dates.

While the advantages of South Carolina were obvious, by necessity the second contest required a less obvious, more covert action plan to avoid any accusations of stacking the deck. Although the Clinton camp didn’t realize it at the time, a caucus in Nevada (like a caucus anywhere) would naturally benefit Obama, since her base of blue-collar, older and non-English-speaking supporters would not be driving across town to attend some meeting run by disorganized volunteers. On the other hand, motivated Republicans could be counted on to show up, especially if the G.O.P. candidates could be persuaded not to campaign in the state. (They didn’t.)

Nevertheless, the reason for adding more earlybird contests in the first place centered on ethic diversity, so selling the DNC (and the public) on Nevada required some tweaking of those caucus parameters. That’s why arrangements were made to allow the state’s casino workforce of some 60,000 predominantly Latino workers to attend specially set up caucus sites just for them.

But wouldn’t this huge Hispanic voting block put Clinton over the top in Nevada? Not necessarily. It turns out that the union representing casino employees, S.E.I.U., would be backing Obama, just as they had supported Dean in his presidential bid. So those voters could now be added to the Obama column.

Thus, with caucuses scheduled in Iowa and Nevada, a primary in South Carolina with its near majority African American demographic, and the New Hampshire Republican brass on the job in that state, the chance of Clinton heading into Super Tuesday at cruising altitude had spectacularly diminished.

“Including two more states will not only be good for our country, it will be good for our party and good for our nominee," Brazile told the Los Angeles Times in August 2006.

Sounding an early portent of doom, the South Carolina delegate on the rules committee said in the same article, “If you campaign in a state that is outside the rules, then you’re not entitled to delegates from that state."

A year later, that scenario unfolded like a bad dream for the DNC. Over the objections of Florida’s state Democratic Party, a Republican-controlled legislature moved its primary to January 29, 2008, one week before the official February 5^th cusp adopted by both the Republican National Committee and the DNC.

On August 25, 2007. the DNC rules and bylaws committee met to adjudicate this unspeakable crime. State party chair Karen Thurman testified at the meeting, walking the committee through the chronology of her long and fruitless battle to overturn the date switch. The Republicans had attached it as a rider to another bill, one authorizing the replacement of electronic paperless voting equipment with more traditional optical scanners. Unable to defeat the rider on a partyline vote, the Democrats begrudgingly approved the larger measure.

Anyone who has watched the re-broadcast of those DNC proceedings on CSPAN can’t help but be dumbfounded by the discussion that followed Thurman’s presentation. A slam-dunk case for a rule waiver turned into a shameless bout of piling on, as committee member Brazile and several others accused the state party of not trying hard enough to change the date. (One also noticed from the broadcast the unusually high number of African Americans on the 30-member committee, as opposed to near zero representation for other minorities.)

When asked by Brazile why she hadn’t made any plans to hold a caucus in place of the primary, Thurman balked. The logistics and $8 million price tag, she said, were beyond comprehension, given that Florida boasts 4 million eligible Democrats.

"I understand how states crave to be first,” Brazile blustered in a Washington Post interview the next day, as if none of what Thurman told her had registered. “I understand that they’re envious of the role that Iowa and New Hampshire have traditionally played, The truth is, we had a process . . . We’re going to back these rules."

Later, the head of the DNC Voting Rights Institute published an op-ed in the same newspaper, this time under the combative heading, “Why We Stood Up to Florida”. With the cockiness that was fast becoming her trademark, Brazile griped, “It was hardly an extraordinary act, although you wouldn’t know it from the furious reaction that ensued in some quarters…Why the uproar? It’s simple: state envy.”

She went on to list all the economic benefits coveted by states vying to hold early primaries, again diverting from the core issue of Republican meddling in Democratic affairs. Inexplicably, the press coverage of the showdown also overlooked the G.O.P.’s role in moving up the primary date.

The same week the rules committee stripped Florida of all its convention delegates, Michigan’s state legislature voted to move up its primary to January 15th. Both states could have easily been pegged as Clinton strongholds, making their exclusion from the election cycle suspect. Michigan is an industrial blue-collar enclave with few of the upper-middle-class voters and college students that represent Obama’s base. Florida’s Hispanic population is huge, and combined with an abundant supply of New York retirees, would likely also resist the Obama "surge".

Moreover, using Republican crossover voting to shave points off Clinton’s victories posed problems in both states. In Michigan, native son Mitt Romney had a significant campaign apparatus in place, while Rudi Giuliani was expecting to draw his line in the sand in Florida. Where these battleground territories were in play, neither gentleman would appreciate Rove siphoning away their voters. Better just to invalidate the primaries on the Democratic side. That way, Clinton’s delegate lead could be held in check on Super Tuesday.

"Seeds of Doubt"

With the votes of the country’s fourth and eighth largest states thus consigned to the junk heap, Brazile turned to other pursuits. Hired as a paid election analyst for CNN, she carried on a double life – one as an official DNC spokesperson, the other as a partisan campaigner for Barack Obama. In February, when best-guess estimates gave Clinton the support of two-thirds of the superdelegates, she declared, "If 795 of my colleagues decide this election, I will quit the Democratic Party."

If party leaders were as worried about negative fallout and damage control then as they claimed to be a month later, they might have reeled in their contract employee at this point for a heart-to-heart chat. That didn’t happen. Brazile just reloaded her pistol and repeated her empty threat to all who would listen. On another occasion, she accused former President Bill Clinton of being a racist. It was inexcusable, she said, that during a speech Clinton referred to Obama as a "kid" and suggested his presidential bid amounted to little more than a "fairy tale".

"And I will tell you," Brazile bristled with emotion, "as an African American I find his words and his tone to be very depressing."

To be sure, Clinton said Obama’s evolving position on the Iraq War was a fairy tale, not his candidacy. As for alluding to his youth, Brazile and other cheerleaders for the Illinois senator had been doing it themselves for the past four years. It was a classic example of the Mark Twain quip that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has put its shoes on. Only CNN’s presence in the equation gave the adage literal meaning. Surely, the DNC would intervene now that Brazile had insulted a former Democratic president on national television. But nothing.

Notwithstanding the character smears and 24/7 swiftboating by the American media, Sen. Clinton persevered, scoring big wins in the Texas, Rhode Island and Ohio on March 4^th. On March 5th, she was accused of engaging in a “negative” campaign designed to "destroy" her adversary.

“Despite Obama’s impressive victories in February, Clinton’s comeback is based on sowing political seeds of doubt,” Brazile informed the Associated Press that day, “If these attacks are contrasts based on policy differences, there is no need to stop the race or halt the debate. But, if this is more division, more diversion from the issues and more of the same politics of personal destruction, chairman Dean and other should be on standby."

(ABC’s Jake Tapper went Brazile one better, claiming Clinton was exercising the "Tanya Harding option".)

In response to the call to arms, Dean promptly petitioned Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to intervene in the protracted race, while Senators Dodd, Richardson and Leahy demanded that Clinton end her candidacy for the good of the party.

Now this sounded familiar. Jack Ryan must have been chuckling to himself from his perch inside a bar, drinking rot-gut whiskey. In Washington, meanwhile, Reid promised that “things will be done” to determine a nominee before the convention. Pelosi told George Stephanopolis on his Sunday talk show that the superdelegates should not overturn “the will of the people”, but denied rumors that she was telling members of Congress that Clinton, if nominated, would be a "drag" on their own campaigns. As the Democratic Party version of the Adams Family was thus occupied in their hand-wringing, chest-beating and sharing of apocalyptic visions, Clinton pressed ahead, picking up 9 out of the final 13 primaries. Three of them she won by more than 30 points.

But no sooner had the daylight begun to shine at the end of the tunnel when another Rove-Brazile shoe dropped. For some reason, her triumph in the popular vote was not matched proportionally by delegates earned, and it had something to do with Obama’s phenomenal gains in the caucus states of Idaho, Nebraska, Kansas, etc. One would not have expected an African American liberal to clobber his opponent by a two-to-one margin as he did in many cases. More importantly, her delegate gains in the primaries involving millions of voters seemed to pale in comparison. This made no sense.

In late May, a disability activist named P. Cronin appeared on scene to sort out the Twilight Zone phenomenon. Cronin, who like most disabled people is not a big fan of caucuses, spent some time in late May analyzing the tallies from the 2008 Democratic contest, comparing the impact of the two different voting methods on the race.

According to Cronin’s study, nearly all of Obama’s 138-delegate lead over Clinton could be traced to 12 red state caucuses. In most of these contests he routinely won by 2-1 margins, even though polls in those states showed the candidates much closer. In Idaho, for instance, with its scant African American population, few colleges and relatively few Starbucks outlets, he captured 15 of the state’s 18 delegates.

Something fishy was going on here. Did Dean’s so-called 50-state strategy include the recruitment of pro-Obama activists to organize on the candidate’s behalf in caucus states? Did the number of DaMaura’s G.O.P. crossover voters wildly exceed expectations? Or was there just downright lying in the computation of the vote tallies?

The case of Washington state underscores the mystery of this Bermuda Triangle for Clinton delegates. On February 9^th, Obama earned a whopping 52 of the Washington’s 78 delegates after a 36-point victory in the party-run caucus. Over 240,000 allegedly eligible voters cast ballots in that contest. But a week later, just ahead of a state-run certified primary, the polling data showed that Clinton might actually win the election. On February 19th, after 650,000 ballots were counted Obama eked out a 5-point victory, hardly the 2-1 margin responsible for his 26-delegate net gain in the state. Unfortunately, the primary was non-binding.

Cronin notes in the study that those states that furnished the newcomer’s vast delegate booty contribute a grand total of 69 electoral votes in the general election. Few of these territories have voted Democratic since 1964.

It also appears that the votes of those lucky caucus-goers counted for 5-10 times more than the traditional Democrats who attended primaries. Obama netted more delegates in his Idaho win, for instance, than Clinton in her entire Ohio-Texas-Rhode Island romp on March 4th. The following table illustrates the questionable validity of these dispersements. Notice that the last column shows the delegate gain for the winner:

2008 Democratic Presidential Preference Election © 2008 P. Cronin
—————————-

Even in the Navada caucus that Clinton won, Obama was awarded more delegates. The New York senator couldn’t seem to win for winning. There, the S.E.I.U. endorsement dissolved into wishful thinking when the casino workers broke for Clinton two to one, giving her a 6-point victory. A few months later, Obama left the state convention with 3 more delegates.

While there’s no evidence implicating Dean in Obama’s caucus routs, the DNC had maintained staff on the ground in all 50 states since 2005, when he first became the chair. In August 2007, a few weeks before his rules and bylaws committee stripped Florida of its delegates, he announced in a press release that his 50-State Strategy project, the Voting Rights Institute and another DNC division known as the National Lawyers Council were collaborating on a nationwide survey of voter databases, registration procedures and other "election mechanics". According to the release, DNC staff would work with local election boards in gathering information in advance of the 2008 presidential election. "Protecting the right of every eligible American to vote is a top priority for our party," Dean and Brazile said in a joint statement. "Every eligible American deserves the confidence that when they go to the polls to cast their ballot they can do so without fear of intimidation or harassment, and that their vote will be counted fairly and accurately."

Throwing Mama Under the Bus

On May 31, 2008, the rules committee reconvened to discuss those "eligible Americans" living in Florida and Michigan. A week before the meeting, the Democratic Party tried to attach an air of legitimacy to the proceedings by having legal counsel weigh in on the dispute. Although by Brazile’s own account, the Supreme Court gives political parties wide latitude for determining how they pick their nominees, the lawyers claimed it would be unlawful to fully honor the certified votes of January 15^th and 29^th . The committee could do no more than restore half the nearly 350 convention delegates up for grabs.

Always amenable to compromise, the Clinton campaign accepted that limitation but rejected a proposal for Obama to receive some of her Michigan delegates, plus those of all the other candidates in the Michigan primary. After all, the Illinois senator voluntarily withdrew his name from the ballot, then vetoed a re-do primary which Clinton donors raised $10 million to fund. In a sane world, one could argue that he forfeited the state and therefore deserved no delegates.

Former Governor of Michigan Jim Blanchard didn’t present that line of attack, however. The Clinton spokesman stuck to the modest request that the candidate receive delegates in proportion to the votes cast for her. A few minutes later, it was Brazile’s turn to speak, and the CNN analyst first took the opportunity to congratulate herself for displaying restraint in the meeting up until that point. Then she repudiated Blanchard as if he were a child.

"My mama taught me to play by the rules and respect the rules…When you decide to change the rules, especially, in the middle of the game, it’s called cheating."

Dispatching the governor to go stand and in a corner and contemplate the error of his ways, Brazile’s committee allocated the Michigan delegates according to a fruitcake-like recipe involving exit polls, alleged write-in votes for Obama, the palm-reading of a psychic (just kidding) and the actual tally. In the end, Clinton gained a mere 4.5 delegates from the contest.

Any masochist following the 2008 election knew by then that Brazile had disregarded her own mother’s counsel long ago. Neither she nor her co-horts have lost any sleep over the thousands of complaints filed about the conduct of the caucuses, including some 2,000 submitted in Texas alone. Voter intimidation, stacks of fabricated sign-in sheets slipped in with the legitimate records, phony declarations from Republicans about their intention to switch parties, votes delayed until deep into the night, inaccurate tallies called in by phone, and other dirty tricks have yet to warrant even a cursory investigation by those who preach that playing by the rules represents a core value of the Democratic Party.

Even in the aftermath of her power grab, Brazile continues to denigrate those who challenge the authority of the party’s new African American leadership. In a July 22nd post on Daryl Cagle’s website, she groaned, "How many ways do these Hillary delegates, voters and supporters need to hear it before they get it? Sen. Barack Obama is the party’s nominee. He won. He will get to choose his running mate. Obama sets the agenda for the convention, and, while I understand their passion in wanting Hillary to be on the ticket and to have a prominent role at the convention, it’s not her decision… As much as we all would have loved to see a woman in the Oval Office, it wasn’t Hillary’s time. Period."

It’s ironic when you think about it. The DNC’s Voting Rights Institute was created to stop exclusionary practices and increase participation at the polling booth. Now its chairwoman is presiding over one of the most hostile and fraudulent campaigns since those newspaper delivery trucks ran over the boy scouts in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

"Mr. Rove proved you can win elections with rumors, fear, division and manipulation." Brazile wrote back in 2007, after that friendly exchange with Air Force One. "But you can’t win hearts that way."

No, you can’t. But then, this influential political fixer no longer appears to have use for that particular organ. Which may be why she finds men like Karl Rove and Grover Norquist so appealing.

- Rosemary Regello editor@thecityedition.com

(For more on the G.O.P. manipulation of the Democratic Primaries, see our in-depth report Bamboozling the American Electorate Again)

Copyright 2008 TheCityEdition.com

Hillary Shrugged

Hillary’s Complaint

I, Obama

Obama and the Art of Media Manipulation

The Obamabots Guide to the Galaxy

A Portrait of the Young Man as a Politician on the Make

The Prime of Master Barack Obama

Hillary’s End

Fahrenheit 1/3/08

A High Wind in Iowa

2008: An American Tragedy

After looking up the one hundred greatest movies, I could only come up with two titles that seem to work:

Raging Bullshit

The Silence of the Superdelegates

Fischer was interviewed by the media extensively prior to the Iowa caucuses. He is most recently famous, however, for his untoward remarks about President Bill Clinton of a few months ago. After Clinton has the audacity to use the words, “McCain, patriotism and Obama” in the same sentence, Fischer wrote at the political web site he maintains (www.iowatrueblue.com) that the former president had left a stain on his own reputation “bigger than the one he deposited on Monica Lewinsky’s dress.” As an Obama supporter, Fischer is now calling–of course–for Democratic Party unity. He offered a lame apology in the interim but it’s not hard to see the way this guy thinks.

At the time Fischer was the Iowa Democratic Party chairman, one of my oldest daughter’s best friends from high school was a full-time staffer within the organization. She arranged for Fischer and me to have lunch last June in Des Moines (he bought) and I pitched him on supporting Hillary Clinton for president. Fischer remained uncommitted at the time.

In August Fischer wrote the Des Moines Register to advise them of a renewed launch of his political web site. He vowed to keep his comments “100 percent positive” at all times and to focus especially on campaign finance reform.

In early October Fischer announced with much fanfare at the Obama campaign that he would be supporting Illinois’ junior senator for the presidency. In a joint conference call from Obama headquarters in Des Moines coincident with this announcement, Fischer questioned Hillary’s progressive credentials and the favorability ratings that he considered unacceptably negative for her at the time.

I sent Fischer an e-mail reminding him of his pledge to keep things “one hundred percent positive” and questioning his motivations for backing Obama. Fischer immediately called Hillary’s state campaign director, Teresa Vilmain, to complain about me as one of Hillary’s volunteers.

About a month later I was visiting Fischer’s web site in vain attempts to find something…anything… positive he had to say about Hillary Clinton. I noticed a tab at the web site entitled “contributions.” I wrote Fischer to ask him how he could be soliciting contributions for his web site under current campaign finance laws when this venue was so obviously now an extension of the Obama campaign.

Although Fischer did not write me back, the next time I went to his site later that day the “donation” tab had been removed. I wrote Fischer again and noted this fact. I also told him that I was considering the filing of a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) against him.

Later that night (on a Sunday) I received an e-mail from Teresa Vilmain demanding that I meet with her to talk about Fischer. Obviously, he had been in touch with her once again to complain about my private correspondence with him. I refused to meet with Vilmain on the matter which I felt was between Fischer, the FEC and me.

The next day on his web site Fischer posted an item entitled “Iowa True Blue Makes No Cents” in which he ridiculed the “rants” that I had sent to him the previous day. He went on to belittle my open, honest and—until that time—private communications with him.

On the following day Fischer posted yet another item about me at his web site. This one was entitled “Honest.” He maintained in this piece that I was interpreting his actions as threatening to me and a form of intimidation. Yet Fischer has never attempted to explain the purpose of his calls to Vilmain or posts at his web site about me, let alone the intent behind them. I did write Fischer to ask if he, as a practicing attorney, routinely argues legal matters on blogs via the Internet.

A few days later I filed my FEC complaints against Fischer. I suggested that he had broken campaign finance laws and had compounded his problems by trying to keep me from filing my claims against him. As a practicing attorney and former head of the Iowa Democratic Party, I maintained in my complaint that Fischer should be held to the highest possible standards with respect to Federal Election Commission laws.

Within a couple of weeks, I received an acknowledgement of my complaint from Jeff S Jordan, a Supervisory Attorney at the FEC. It is now referred to as matter “MUR 5949.” Unfortunately, I have heard nothing since about this situation since November 6, 2007.

On October 29, 2007, Mark Daley of Hillary Clinton’s Iowa campaign staff asked me not to make appearances any longer at their offices in Des Moines. Daley was handling press relations at the time in Iowa for Senator Clinton. Formerly, he did similar work for the organization Gordon Fischer has headed, the Iowa Democratic Party. Although Daley did not explain his request to me, it obviously stems—in very large part, at least—from the many phone calls Gordon Fischer made to Hillary’s campaign about me.

I have never been more disillusioned about politics than I am today. On the other hand, disillusionment (e.g., to be disabused of our illusions) is mostly a very good thing.

Am I bitter? Yes, I am. Am I clinging more closely to my bible and guns? Again, I would have to answer in the affirmative, but I’ve grown quite a bit closer to the latter than the former based on this experience.

From my limited perspective, the role Doyle played in Hillary’s campaign in Iowa was a mixed bag, at best. My biggest criticism of the campaign throughout the fall was that Hillary was being kept too far from the people attending her events and from the reporters (particularly with the national media) who were covering those events. This approach made it easy for some to characterize Hillary as being aloof. It also led to embarrassing moments such as the charge that her campaign had planted questions with event attendees in Iowa.

My constant request last fall was for the campaign to “let Hillary be Hillary.” This is exactly what she was allowed to do in the later contests and the main reason why she won Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, South Dakota and so forth.

Beyond my criticism of Hillary being too closely protected from Iowans and the media, I have few negative things to say—on balance—about the campaign she conducted in Iowa. Almost everything, however, about the nature of this year’s Iowa Democratic caucuses worked to Hillary’s disadvantage.

First of all, the left-wing of Iowa’s Democratic Party was very anti-war and felt that they had found a candidate in Obama who deserved support for his initial stand against the War in Iraq. Some (particularly those under age 30) found him to be attractive because he was young and black. It also did not hurt that Obama was from the neighboring state of Illinois.

Perhaps the biggest factor in Obama’s success in Iowa, however, was in an area that I completely misunderstood. It had to do with the $15 million or more in television ads he ran portraying himself as someone uniquely equipped to change the way Washington works. The ads were patterned after those his media consultant, David Axelrod, had used in Obama’s senate race in Illinois and in the most recent governor’s race in Massachusetts.

These ads drew a disproportionate number of moderate Republicans and Independent voters to Obama’s campaign. Most had never participated in an Iowa Democratic caucus in the past and these voters were the ones who really made the difference for Obama.

Finally, there was consistent evidence in polls taken before the caucuses that the second tier of candidates in combination (Richardson, Biden and Dodd) was the choice of roughly fifteen percent of Iowans. But on caucus night less than three percent of the delegates chosen were assigned to any one of these three individuals. This was the result of the Iowa Democratic caucuses’ archaic and undemocratic “viability” rules. Almost all Richardson, Biden and Dodd supporters ended up caucusing for Obama or Edwards.

Obama won in Iowa with roughly 37% of the delegates chosen and Hillary virtually tied Edwards at 30% of the delegates elected. The total number of Iowans who supported Hillary, however, was roughly equal to the number that John Kerry garnered here in his winning effort of 2004. Support for Obama totaled something like 83,000 Iowans versus about 68,000 voters each for Hillary and Edwards. In other words, a mere 15,000 Iowans made the critical difference in the nomination process for the Democratic Party this year.

Iowa’s viability rules probably gave Obama and Edwards as many as 10,000 extra supporters each. Had votes here on the Democratic side counted as they did on the Republican side (where there are no viability rules) the outcome might have looked like this:

Obama 32%

Clinton 30%

Edwards 25%

Richardson 7%

Biden 4%

Dodd 2%

As many as a third of Iowa Democratic caucus attendees this year were either re-registered Republicans or Independents. If fifty percent of them—or 37,500 voters– supported Obama (a low estimate, in my opinion), over forty percent of his total support came from nominal Democratic Party members.

Hillary could have attracted few of these supporters to her primary campaign in Iowa and she undoubtedly had many women who crossed party lines to support her here. But due to the focus of his advertising campaign and of his grassroots operations, Obama won the lion’s share of former Republican and Independent voters. If Richardson-Biden-Dodd supporters and Republican-Independent voters were taken out of the equation, I believe Hillary beat Obama by roughly 58,000 to 45,000 votes.

One has to give credit to the Obama campaign for seeing the path to victory that they followed. But the way the media played up the nature of that victory was beyond the pale and is what really gave Obama the nomination. How in the world can anyone claim that a 15,000 vote victory in a caucus state like Iowa is more important than a ten percent win in the California primary? But the effect of Obama’s win in Iowa was that it was infinitely more important that anything he or Hillary achieved thereafter. Something has to change about that particular equation in the future.

Unexpectedly or perhaps surprising to me anyway, energy policy is actually getting debated. That’s a good thing even though I don’t really expected it to lead to the tough choices we need to make in the time frame we need to make them. To be honest, we are past the tipping point. We’re doomed. The only question left is when does it all unravel. A few wise investments and we might push out the end line a few decades but unless some new technology arrives on the scene in the next twenty years, our way of life will come to a sudden and crashing end.

I have never liked Barack Obama. In fact, I can’t stand Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois either. The reason? They voted for the Bush-Cheney Energy Policy, the worst piece of legislation ever to pass the Congress. Thomas Friedman referred to the bill as “the sum of all lobbies.” U.S. PIRG noted that the bill’s “heavy tilt toward big oil companies reflects the influence of Exxon Mobil and other oil companies on policy-makers in Washington, DC.” The Washington Post editorialized that the bill was a “piñata of perks for energy industries.”

Indeed, the bill contained $6 billion in subsidies to the oil and gas industry and $12 billion to the nuclear power industry through 2015. Past that, the sum is likely to approach $30 billion.

Although Sen. Obama voted for the legislation, he speaks as if he opposed it on the campaign trail, criticizing it repeatedly. At a presidential debate he said “You can look at how Dick Cheney did his energy policy…he met with oil and gas companies forty times, and that’s how they put together our energy policy.” He’s attributed the failure of our current energy policy to Congress’s “failure to stand up to the lobbyists.” In Pennsylvania he ran this deceptive ad.

Here’s Brit Hume debunking the Obama ad:

That’s Obama, one big deception. But Obama probably owes his presumptive nominee status to corn ethanol. Without his support for corn ethanol, it is unlikely that he would have won the Iowa caucuses and without that victory I think it fair to say his candidacy would have been finished by Super Tuesday. Winning Iowa gave him a boost. To win Iowa, Obama touted corn ethanol. From the New York Times:

When VeraSun Energy inaugurated a new ethanol processing plant last summer (2007) in Charles City, Iowa, some of that industry’s most prominent boosters showed up. Leaders of the National Corn Growers Association and the Renewable Fuels Association, for instance, came to help cut the ribbon — and so did Senator Barack Obama.

Then running far behind Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in name recognition and in the polls, Mr. Obama was in the midst of a campaign swing through the state where he would eventually register his first caucus victory. And as befits a senator from Illinois, the country’s second largest corn-producing state, he delivered a ringing endorsement of ethanol as an alternative fuel.

Mr. Obama is running as a reformer who is seeking to reduce the influence of special interests. But like any other politician, he has powerful constituencies that help shape his views. And when it comes to domestic ethanol, almost all of which is made from corn, he also has advisers and prominent supporters with close ties to the industry at a time when energy policy is a point of sharp contrast between the parties and their presidential candidates.

In the heart of the Corn Belt that August day, Mr. Obama argued that embracing ethanol “ultimately helps our national security, because right now we’re sending billions of dollars to some of the most hostile nations on earth.” America’s oil dependence, he added, “makes it more difficult for us to shape a foreign policy that is intelligent and is creating security for the long term.”

Nowadays, when Mr. Obama travels in farm country, he is sometimes accompanied by his friend Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader from South Dakota. Mr. Daschle now serves on the boards of three ethanol companies and works at a Washington law firm where, according to his online job description, “he spends a substantial amount of time providing strategic and policy advice to clients in renewable energy.”

Mr. Obama’s lead advisor on energy and environmental issues, Jason Grumet, came to the campaign from the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan initiative associated with Mr. Daschle and Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican who is also a former Senate majority leader and a big ethanol backer who had close ties to the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland.

Not long after arriving in the Senate, Mr. Obama himself briefly provoked a controversy by flying at subsidized rates on corporate airplanes, including twice on jets owned by Archer Daniels Midland, which is the nation’s largest ethanol producer and is based in his home state.

Jason Furman, the Obama campaign’s economic policy director, said Mr. Obama’s stance on ethanol was based on its merits. “That is what has always motivated him on this issue, and will continue to determine his policy going forward,” Mr. Furman said.

Asked if Mr. Obama brought any predisposition or bias to the ethanol debate because he represents a corn-growing state that stands to benefit from a boom, Mr. Furman said, “He wants to represent the United States of America, and his policies are based on what’s best for the country.”

Mr. Daschle, a national co-chairman of the Obama campaign, said in a telephone interview on Friday that his role advising the Obama campaign on energy matters was limited. He said he was not a lobbyist for ethanol companies, but did speak publicly about renewable energy options and worked “with a number of associations and groups to orchestrate and coordinate their activities,” including the Governors’ Ethanol Coalition.

Of Mr. Obama, Mr. Daschle said, “He has a terrific policy staff and relies primarily on those key people to advise him on key issues, whether energy or climate change or other things.”

Ethanol is one area in which Mr. Obama strongly disagrees with his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona. While both presidential candidates emphasize the need for the United States to achieve “energy security” while also slowing down the carbon emissions that are believed to contribute to global warming, they offer sharply different visions of the role that ethanol, which can be made from a variety of organic materials, should play in those efforts.

Mr. McCain advocates eliminating the multibillion-dollar annual government subsidies that domestic ethanol has long enjoyed. As a free trade advocate, he also opposes the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff that the United States slaps on imports of ethanol made from sugar cane, which packs more of an energy punch than corn-based ethanol and is cheaper to produce.

“We made a series of mistakes by not adopting a sustainable energy policy, one of which is the subsidies for corn ethanol, which I warned in Iowa were going to destroy the market” and contribute to inflation, Mr. McCain said this month in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de São Paulo. “Besides, it is wrong,” he added, to tax Brazilian-made sugar cane ethanol, “which is much more efficient than corn ethanol.”

Mr. Obama, in contrast, favors the subsidies, some of which end up in the hands of the same oil companies he says should be subjected to a windfall profits tax. In the name of helping the United States build “energy independence,” he also supports the tariff, which some economists say may well be illegal under the World Trade Organization’s rules but which his advisers say is not.

Corn ethanol only nets 1.3 times the fossil fuel energy required to produce it, sugar-based ethanol can return 8 times the fossil fuel energy. And corn ethanol, while cleaner, than octane, pales in comparison to sugar ethanol.

So how green is Barack Obama really? Not very. In terms of energy policy, Obama is a third term for Bush-Cheney. From the Washington Post:

Given that energy appears likely to be a dominant issue in this election season, Barack Obama’s campaign may want to settle on a more consistent message when it comes to subsidies for ethanol, the corn-based alternative fuel that is hailed by some as a key resource in weaning America off foreign oil and forestalling global warming but lambasted by others as a wasteful boondoggle that is driving up food prices.

Since entering the Senate in 2005, Obama has been a staunch supporter of ethanol — he justified his vote for for the Bush Administration’s 2005 energy bill, which was favorable to the oil industry, on the grounds that it also contained subsidies for ethanol and other forms of alternative energy, and he has sought earmarks for research projects on ethanol and other biofuels in his home state of Illinois, the second-highest corn-producing state after Iowa. Obama’s support for ethanol is shared by many farm state senators (even Hillary Clinton came around after an ethanol industry took root in upstate New York) but it contrasts sharply with John McCain, who has for years been so critical of the subsidies that he decided not to compete in the 2000 Iowa caucuses.

Today, in a New York Times article on Obama’s support for ethanol, Jason Furman, the Obama campaign’s new economic policy director, is quoted saying that Obama’s stance on the issue was based on the merits, a determination that ethanol subsidies are in the national interest. “That is what has always motivated him on this issue, and will continue to determine his policy going forward,” Furman said. The article continues: “Asked if Mr. Obama brought any predisposition or bias to the ethanol debate because he represents a corn-growing state that stands to benefit from a boom, Mr. Furman said, ‘He wants to represent the United States of America, and his policies are based on what’s best for the country.’”

It was the expected answer during a presidential campaign — except that it flies in the face of what Obama himself said on the issue a few months ago. Asked about his support for ethanol during a press conference at a gas station in Indianapolis in April, Obama was remarkably candid in explaining why he backed the subsidies: “Look, I’ve been a strong ethanol supporter because Illinois … is a major corn producer,” he said. He went on to say that he was concerned about reports that ethanol was helping drive up food prices, and that he saw ethanol as merely a transitional option that would eventually give way to biofuels that were more efficient and has less of an impact on food prices, such as ones made out of switchgrass.

Furman came on board the campaign only this month, so it is understandable if he is not entirely on the same page yet with the candidate. The fact is, though, that Obama’s record in the Senate has been very clearly influenced by what he viewed as the needs of his Illinois constituents, particularly those in “downstate” Illinois, where Obama has pointed to his popularity as proof that he can win over voters in more rural and conservative areas. Obama is supporting the new farm bill, which McCain also derides as wasteful, because he believes it will help farmers in his state; he backed last year’s $14 billion Water Resources Development Act (also opposed by McCain) after making sure it included money to upgrade locks on the Illinois and Mississippi rivers) and he backed huge subsidies last year for liquified coal — a highly controversial technology that would be a boon for Southern Illinois mines — before backing away from the idea under fire from environmentalists.

If there is a single issue to care about or to vote on, it is energy. Our lifestyle depends on it and we have wean ourselves off oil as a transportation fuel within 15 years or 20 years tops. If I vote for John McCain it will be because the election is close and because of McCain’s better energy plans and the fact that he didn’t vote for the Bush-Cheney Energy Policy, unlike Barack Obama.

From my blog, By The Fault.

The youth vote has been basically dubbed Obama’s strongest, most reliable voting bloc. There is, as we all know, a weird phenomenon amongst the youth that so vigorously supported him, and I have seen it first hand.I am a student, as my name would suggest, at the University of Iowa, Iowa’s largest school. A large percentage of these kids come from the Chicago-land area. I have had a front-row seat to Obama-mania, or Obama-cultism for over a year. This is a phenomenon that should be studied more, but I first want to address something else. 

I wish people on all sides of this race would stop painting the youth vote as all going for Obama.There is a large percentage of young voters that went for him, and almost nowhere was this more true than in Iowa, but there are kids who thought this decision out rationally. I am one of them.

I give props to people my age that supported Hillary, Senator Edwards, Governor Richardson, and all the others, even the republicans, because they didn’t fall for the fake prophet. We are the ones that thought through this decision. We chose to support someone other than Obama, because things other than oratory skills spoke to us. Issues, records, and personality all played into our decisions. Not just personality. 

I got to meet the candidates, I can say that I don’t like someone because of their personality because I met them. Most of these Obamabots have never met him, or even touched him. They jumped on this bandwagon because their friends did. They have no interest in the political scene for the most part, they have done nothing for the party prior to Obama’s campaign, and they have no major stakes in this election. They tend to be from well-off families, from suburbia. They have had most things in life handed to them. They have paid no attention to politics other than being able to join in Bush-bashing, something I like doing myself, and otherwise having little political knowledge. They think it is cool to be for Obama, because everyone else is, and if other kids are not, they are just stupid. 

These people will hear no wrong about Obama, they believe nothing is bad, everything is good, and that Obama is a shoe-in for November….well….. They will never sober up, but for those of us who have, we know there could be nothing further from the truth. Obama is no progressive. Obama is unelectable. Obama is a false prophet. Obama is an empty suit. Obama has done nothing to help the youth of America. Obama is a brand, America and the youth especially have been sold a brand name, and a very sad one at that.

I have seen the shirts here on campus: “Got Hope?”, “Bros Before Ho’s”, and the campaign shirts. All of this hype, he is built up, and let me tell you, he is a big let-down. Hillary is not a let-down. Her work on SCHIP, GEAR-UP, and the National Guard bills she passed, has shown people who really cares and has cared for the youth of America. Hillary still beats McCain by over 50 electoral votes in the electoral college, Hillary still has Universal Healthcare as a top priority.

These young voters that all blindly flocked to Obama will all soon realize they have been had. It’s a sham. Thanks to them, we have McCain to look forward to. Their belligerence and harsh actions have pushed me and many others to a point where we can no longer support Senator Obama, no matter what happens. And McCain may be the beneficiary. Who knows? I sure do.

I became interested in politics, specifically democratic politics when I became of voting age almost 3 years ago. I missed the opportunity to hold my nose and vote for Kerry/Edwards. I am on the Executive Board of the University Democrats here on campus, the largest student organization at this university.

I am also President of Students for Hillary Clinton. I first saw Barack Obama speak in November of 2006 when he was campaigning for then candidate for governor Chet Culver in Iowa City. He was a good speaker. Then in January, a funny thing happened, a woman announced she was running. Hillary Clinton announced and then she came to my state.

I first saw her speak in Davenport, my hometown, on a cold morning (negative 14 degrees). She was awesome. She hit every point that mattered to me: college costs, the environment, health care. I was very impressed. She mentioned specific statistics on uninsured Americans, college loan interest rates, and on emissions in our country. In the months to follow I got the pleasure to hear all of our candidates, and meet all but Mike Gravel. I was hooked on Hillary Clinton.

Shady things started in Iowa around the time of the JJ Dinner in Des Moines.

We traveled in a caravan of cars from Iowa City that morning, and before we departed, a car load of people from Illinois, they told us from Joliet, pulled up and asked us if we were going to Des Moines to see Barack, and we told them we were going to Des Moines to see Hillary. They said thanks and left, but this is when the trend of “bussing” began with the Obama folks. At JJ, Joe Biden said what we were all thinking when he got on stage and said “Hello Iowa!” and then turned to Barack’s crowd and shouted “and Hello Chicago!”

Fast forward to caucus night. This is where it all became clear to me about how his supporters really felt about progressive issues. And this is where it became clear to me that I COULD NEVER VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA. The night was interesting, my precinct captain and I were the first people there besides the monitor, and about 20 minutes later a bus arrived, from Chicago according to the info on the side of the bus, full of 80 Obama people.

We went in to the caucus, and there things got heated. We were in one of the toughest places in the entire state for Hillary, in a precinct in Iowa’s most liberal city and which included mostly campus housing and apartments. We had 11 strong Hillary backers, and we were not viable on the first go.

On the second round we got all of Biden’s and Dodd’s supporters, and we had 19, you needed 20 for a delegate. The Obama precinct captain came over, with two friends, and tried to get our supporters to cave. They all refused (God bless em’) and she, the Obama precinct captain, exploded yelling “your not even viable anyways!”, and she stormed off, in the process calling me a “fag”. That was the buzzword. Her friends restrained her and they went back to their corner to, I am not kidding, get in a circle and chant “Fired Up and Ready to Go”. Cultish anyone?

This is the point I realized these people are not progressive, nor do they care about progressive causes. They are a giant personality cult. They offended every gay person there that night, me most directly, and we all heard her say this because every gay person was in Hillary’s corner. This was piled up in my mind alongside the Donnie McClurkin gaybash tour of 2007, and Obama’s refusal to both get a picture with pro-marriage equality San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and his refusal to acknowledge gay rights as civil rights.

Add this together with his healthcare plan (not progressive enough), his energy record (not progressive…2005 Cheney bill), and the fact that not only has he said he would want to invade Pakistan, but he would employ people like Lake and Rice to advise him…..tells me he is no progressive,and his supporters for the most part are even less-so.

Now, Add all of this up with his unelectability in the electoral college, the shady way he received the nomination/coronation, his now sky high negatives, his shady past with figures like Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, and his gaffe-prone wife, well, he is going to lose in November. How can he win when his strongest point is that he was against the war from the beginning, while he will be debating a former POW, war hero, and a man with a son serving in Iraq? He cannot win. Hillary Clinton can win, we saw this from the election maps on Hillbuzz.

John McCain is a republican. Barack Obama is a cult leader appointed by the RBC of the DNC as our nominee. The Democrat in this race is Hillary Clinton. She was chosen by the party,and the leadership ignored this and showed their true loyalties.

I will stand by my woman and vote for her in November, however, if Iowa has no write-in slot, it will depend on how I feel that day when I walk into that booth, and how supporters of each candidate present themselves on election day. I give props to John McCain for going on Ellen and discussing his views on civil unions and his support of equal legal rights. I respect him for voting against the FMA. Barack Obama has also voted against the FMA, which I am glad for. I am also glad he is pro-civil union.

Looks like no matter who wins, gay rights will still not be included in civil rights, and that no matter who wins we will not get universal healthcare. No matter who wins we will be further engaged in the middle east, whether it be in Iraq for years, or whether it be in northwest Pakistan.

Should Clinton not be on this ticket, I will be resigning from the UDEMS, and deciding what to do with my student group. Many of the members want the endorsement to go to McCain, which is a real possibility.

Hillary Clinton 2008