OBAMARAMA

Most Democratic primary states split their delegates, including California. Even so, the “winner” of Super Duper Tuesday is bound to be the one who walks home with California, at least in the eyes of a media looking to name a victor.

Which makes this especially exciting news:

A new poll out Sunday suggests Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are locked in a dead heat for the biggest prize on Super Tuesday: delegate-rich California.

According to a just released poll from the Field Research Corporation, Clinton only holds a statistically insignificant 2 point lead over Obama in California, 36 percent to 34 percent. Meanwhile the poll shows 18 percent of California Democrats have yet to make up their minds.

The poll suggests the race has significantly narrowed in the state in only a matter weeks– most polls two weeks ago showed Clinton with a double-digit lead there. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll taken a week ago showed Clinton with a 17 point lead there.

Nuclear!

Should Hillary Clinton win in South Carolina and subsequently steamroll her way to the nomination, the historians and pundits will point to the racial conflagration of the last few days as the Machiavellian key to her success.

Essentially, a series of remarks from the Clinton campaign has been construed by some black leaders as being anywhere from politically tone deaf to out-and-out racist. These remarks include:

• Bill Clinton suggesting that the idea that Sen. Obama has consistently opposed the Iraq war is a “fairy tale“
• An unnamed Clinton advisor saying that Obama voters are just looking for a “hip, black friend“
• Sen. Clinton’s suggestion that despite Martin Luther King Jr.’s contributions, ultimate credit for the Civil Rights movement lies with President Johnson
• Clinton surrogate Andrew Cuomo’s comment that Obama can’t “shuck and jive” his way to the White House

In my view, while a couple of these remarks use loaded language and certainly raise questions about the message the speakers were trying to send, none rises to the level of actual racism. What bothers me is less the content of the remarks than how the Clinton campaign is deflecting the subsequent criticism it has received from the black community.

On Meet the Press this morning, Sen. Clinton claimed that her words have been distorted and pointed a finger directly at the Obama campaign, saying that “I think it clearly came from Senator Obama’s campaign.” She provided no evidence to back this up, however — and in fact, the most public criticism of her remarks came from African American SC Rep. Jim Clyburn, who told the New York Times he was disappointed by them. Yet Clyburn is no Obama surrogate (though he has suggested that the Clinton’s remarks may push him in that direction).

What could be damaging to the Obama campaign is the implication that he is playing what pundits everywhere joyously call “the race card.” This is a charge to which Sen. Obama, being black, is uniquely susceptible, and one that could hurt him by creating the impression that he is trying to use race and inflame racial sensitivities to his political advantage.

He’s done no such thing; in fact, it’s my opinion that Sen. Obama’s unwillingness to take this low road — despite ample opportunities to do so — is directly responsible for making him such a viable candidate in the minds of Americans of every race. Yet Sen. Clinton’s attempt to drag him into the racial imbroglio her campaign created could potentially convince people otherwise.

In the real world, Sen. Obama’s only true comment on the controversy came today, after being personally accused by Sen. Clinton of distorting her words. And what outlandish thing did he say to stoke the flames of racial discontent? He called Sen. Clinton’s MLK comment “unfortunate” and her accusation of Obama’s culpability “ludicrous.”

Indeed, it is. But the irony is that, should the mud she’s throwing stick, the Obama juggernaut could be sunk by a controversy in which it literally played no role. Ah, Rovian politics, how I’ve missed you.

Michelle Obama had a great appearance on Good Morning America yesterday.  Have a look:

Following up on a New York Times article that exposed telemarketing firms that prey on older Americans, Sen. Obama sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission “to express my concern that the Federal Trade Commission is not doing more to deter such schemes and to protect elderly consumers from abusive and fraudulent telemarketing practices.”

This Direct Marketing News article has more:

In his May 21 letter, Mr. Obama said, “yesterday, the New York Times published an investigation into telemarketing fraud schemes that exploit vulnerable American seniors, often robbing them of their dignity, their good credit, and even the life savings and financial resources they rely on to pay for food or medication. I am writing to express my concern that the Federal Trade Commission is not doing more to deter such schemes and to protect elderly consumers from abusive and fraudulent telemarketing practices.”

…Mr. Obama asked the FTC to answer six questions, including “what, if anything, is the FTC doing to assess and address the particular consumer protection challenges faced by seniors or other groups of American consumers who may be especially vulnerable to abuse?” and “In particular, what is the FTC doing to regulate the sale of telemarketing databases to companies that are under investigation or have been prosecuted for fraud?”

He asked for a response by June 8, 2007.

“We have a very long, 25 year-plus record fighting against telemarketing fraud, and we are looking forward to providing all of that information to the Senator,” said Eileen Harrington, deputy director of the bureau of consumer protection at the FTC.

The piece also quotes “a privacy and information policy consultant” who observes that “This issue involves telemarketing fraud along with cheating the elderly — two things that together make it a perfect issue for politicians.”

This interesting segment from ABC News discusses the unwillingness of all of this campaign’s major presidential candidates — from both parties — to release their tax information.

All but one, that is.  Have a look:

One particularly interesting and provocative moment from Sen. Obama’s This Week interview came when he was asked about affirmative action. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson describes his answer:

Obama waded into the central issue of the affirmative action debate: race vs. class.

…George Stephanopoulos asked Obama whether his daughters should be able to benefit from affirmative action when the time comes for them to go to college. The girls “should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged,” Obama said.

Stephanopoulos was driving at the question of whether race-based affirmative action programs are still needed. Another way to frame the issue is whether race or class is the more important factor in our society. Are minorities who are raised in middle-class or wealthy homes still held back by racism? Or should we now focus on socioeconomic status as the principal barrier keeping people from reaching their potential?

Obama’s answer, basically, was yes. To both questions.

Robinson went on to note that “Obama has repeatedly gone on record as a supporter of affirmative action,” but added that “He seemed to side with those who think class predominates when he said, ‘I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed.’”

In other words, an acknowledgment that racial prejudice remains a major obstacle to educational ascendancy in this country, but an affirmation that it is increasingly the economic hurdles of college applicants that make the most sense for admissions officers to consider.

It is not something that is often discussed aloud, it is quite simply not every day that an African American politician suggests shifting affirmative action from a race-based to a class-based system. This is precisely the sort of chutzpah and commitment to ideas — as opposed to ideologies — that has propelled Sen. Obama to the front of this race.

We’ve done bluster and bravado. The 2008 campaign will be about pragmatism, reason and results. Sen. Obama understands this, perhaps better than anyone.

For those who missed it, Sen. Obama had a great discussion with George Stephanopoulos yesterday on ABC’s This Week. Here’s the video, in three installments courtesy of YouTuber lovingj1:

As is so consistently their custom, conservative blogs picked up and ran with a report claiming that Sen. Obama made a mistake — in this case, that he misstated the fuel economy of Japanese-made cars — without checking to see if he was actually wrong.

Newsflash: he wasn’t.

As Media Matters for America documents, the hubbub began when a Chicago Tribune columnist “wrote that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) ‘has more homework to do’ and ’should [hire] a fact-checker’ because Obama stated that ‘Japanese cars [are] now getting an average of 45 miles to the gallon.’” The article quoted a Toyota rep saying “I’m not sure where he got that figure…No carmaker gets 45 m.p.g.”

Instantly, rightwing blogs picked this up and ran with it like a fat kid with a piece of cake. As Hotline On Call points out, the rightwing media site Newsbusters used it as an excuse to launch one more liberal bias jihad against the media:

Obama makes another mistake, will media report it? –The junior senator and god-in-the-making bungles the facts on the fuel efficiency of American and Japanese cars. Will the media report this “lie?”

As of this posting, Newsbusters has yet to wipe the egg off their face. But the facts are undeniable, as the Hotline and Media Matters also note. From the Hotline:

Obama was right. In the US, Japanese-made cars would get 45 m.p.g. assuming they were subjected to the US fuel economy test cycle. Here’s the wonky paper he based his claim on.

And MMFA:

The report also stated that, according to the Japanese Automobile Manufacturers Association, the 2002 average fleet fuel economy value in Japan was 46.3 miles per gallon. More recently, on March 21, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) asked former Vice President Al Gore at a House hearing if he supported an “increase [in fuel-economy standards] like they have in Japan, that’s over 45 miles per gallon?”

Media Matters goes on helpfully to chart the uncorrected, mindless repetition of this falsehood through the conservative blogosphere. I’m beginning to understand why unaccountability is so rampant among Republican politicians, who apparently take the cue from their supporters…

• In a May 10 blog post, National Review Online contributor Jim Geraghty wrote that Obama “Botched the Facts” and that the column was a “good catch.”
• In a May 10 post, Power Line blogger Paul Mirengoff uncritically wrote that “Jim Geraghty reports that Obama botched his facts.” Fellow Power Line blogger John Hinderaker added that “Obama is showing a disconcerting tendency to make things up, as well as a lack of common sense” because “it should be obvious that no company’s entire fleet of automobiles — let alone a country’s — averages 45 mpg.”
• In a May 11 post, Jim Addison of Wizbang Politics uncritically cited Mirengoff’s post, writing that Obama “misstated fuel economy statistics, according to Paul Mirengoff of Power Line.” Addison added that “Obama’s youth and inexperience is [sic] beginning to show.”
• A May 11 post on Human Events Online’s Rightometer blog linked to the Tribune column under the headline “Obama Must be Tired Again.” The post also quoted “The Whistler” of the blog Say Anything, who wrote in a May 11 post about the Tribune column that Obama is “a fool” who is “willing to make up anything he has to” and suggested that Obama has no “grip on reality.”

Memo to conservative bloggers: it’s called research. Give it a try sometime.

I received an email tonight from a staff member at ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, where Sen. Obama will be appearing this Sunday. She made a very interesting pitch that is unprecedented among the Sunday shows, as far as I know. Have a look — I think you’ll be impressed:

[Y]our readers may be interested in a new feature for This Week - “Be Seen, Be Heard” We’ve set it up so people can submit video questions to our guests (with chosen ones featured on This Week). They can submit videos to Senator Obama at this link: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/BeSeenBeHeard/story?id=3078388, or they can email questions to thisweek@abc.com.

This strikes me as an excellent opportunity to ask any questions you may have for Sen. Obama in a public forum — and a valuable chance for him to address the concerns of real people, in real time.

What are the best questions we can pose? Questions that give him a chance to talk about his plan to end the war in Iraq? His thoughts on the administration’s lack of accountability? His top priorities for his first term? It would be great to read your thoughts on this and any ideas for questions in the comments section.

And here’s the video promo for this week’s This Week:

Oliver Willis highlights the recent pro-Obama sartorial stylings of stunning actresses Jessica Biel and Halle Berry.

Will they bring millions of voters with them? Perhaps not. But they do represent something even more important: the draw many previously unaffiliated voters feel toward the Obama camp.

And how strong is that draw? According to this article, strong enough to lure “disillusioned supporters of President George W. Bush” into the fold. The article reports that former Bush donors, friends, and even staffers “are defecting to Barack Obama, the Democratic senator for Illinois, as the White House candidate with the best chance of uniting a divided nation.”

Click below for more from the article (which is very much worth a read).

(Read more after the jump…)

Apparently Sen. Obama is coming to the aid of netizens interested in posting video segments of the presidential debates online, something they are currently technically forbidden to do (though we did it here).  From the AP:

In a letter to Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, the Illinois senator said he supports an effort by a bipartisan coalition of academics, bloggers and Internet activists who have asked the Democratic and Republican parties to make the video available.

…”I am a strong believer in the importance of copyright, especially in the digital age,” Obama wrote. “But there is no reason that this particular class of content needs the protection. We have incentive enough to debate. The networks have incentive enough to broadcast those debates.

“Rather than restricting the product of those debates, we should instead make sure that our democracy and citizens have the chance to benefit from them in all the ways that technology makes possible.”

Now the head of the centrist DLC following a bruising 2006 Senate campaign in Tennessee, Harold Ford told students at Malcolm X College yesterday that “You’ve got to fit in the mainstream on values issues. You’ve got to be fair when it comes to economic policy. And you’ve got to be accountable to people” in order to win in the south.

From the article, titled “Ford: Obama can win in South“:

“Can somebody who is black win? The answer is yes,” said Ford.

…A five-term House member who now works as a vice chairman of Merrill Lynch & Co., Ford said he has no Obama envy and remains neutral in the nomination race, despite having long-standing friendships with Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). Both lent him support during his failed bid last year for a Senate seat in his home state.

One other point worth noting: in building his case that southern voters will look past race, the reporter suggests that “Ford’s campaign last fall gained national prominence for reasons beyond his race,” since “Republicans attacked him as a hypocrite in a television ad that featured his past attendance at a Super Bowl party held by Playboy magazine.”

Attacked him as a hypocrite? If you watched the ad, which features a scantily-clad white woman telling Ford to “call me,” you may well have gotten the impression he was being attacked less as a hypocrite than as a black male predator of white women. The controversy over the ad was by no means “beyond his race” — and was decried for that reason by Democrats and Republicans alike. Even Ford’s opponent called for it to be pulled off the air, which it eventually was.

I’m glad to hear that Sen. Obama’s race won’t preclude him from competing in the South, and I’m confident that is the case — but let’s not sugarcoat the particular political potency of racial stereotyping there.

Over the past five months, we’ve documented the wide array of attacks that have been launched against Sen. Obama by his opponents in politics and the media. For the most part, these baseless caricatures have been debunked and have largely fallen by the wayside (”He’s a junkie,” “he’s a Marxist leftist,” “he’s too black,” “he’s not black enough,” “he’s a hypocrite,” “he’s a Muslim“…just to name a few).

Up until now, though, the attack that has arguably stung Sen. Obama’s supporters the most is the suggestion that he is “all style, no substance.” We’ve known that it’s not true, but given the nature of the campaign, its quick and early start, and Sen. Obama’s need as a relative newcomer to build momentum and enthusiasm, we haven’t had as many tools as we’d like to rebut it.

That’s about to change.

Earlier this week, Sen. Obama addressed the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, where he discussed his foreign policy vision. It was a 40-minute speech that was reported in the New York Times under the headline, “Obama Outlines His Foreign Policy Views,” and was very well received by pundits and experts alike.

Lest there be any question about the substantial nature of the speech, here is a video of Sen. Obama’s remarks in their entirety:

As Sen. Obama builds on his momentum and grassroots support by laying out the specifics of his candidacy, I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more speeches like this one. And as we do, OBAMARAMA will lay them out here in a new segment called “Here’s the Beef.”

Frankly, it’s just nice to know that the biggest knock against Sen. Obama is based on a total underestimation of his ability to back up charisma with meaty policy proposals. Those of us who have been following him know that won’t be any problem — and appreciate having such a low bar to step over.

And to think I ever thought “Obamarama” sounded good — today, the Wall Street Journal runs an article titled “Seeking Clues to Obamanomics,” which takes a look at Sen. Obama’s emerging economic vision.

From the article:

The emerging picture shows a politician willing to use the government to intervene in markets to further core Democratic goals, though careful to avoid hard-edged liberal rhetoric.

One example of how the Illinois Democrat might approach economic policy is an unusual bill he first introduced to little notice shortly after entering the Senate in 2005 — and reintroduced last week. The “Health Care for Hybrids” proposal would offer federal assistance to car makers struggling with hefty retiree health-care costs in exchange for their building more fuel-efficient automobiles.

The piece has a critical tone — it did run in the conservative WSJ, after all — that stems from its general dissatisfaction with leaders who think it’s appropriate for governments to intervene in markets under any circumstances (and particularly to “further core Democratic goals,” such as ensuring that American citizens don’t freeze, starve, etc.). All I can say is thank God the WSJ wasn’t in charge of getting us out of the Great Depression.

But in general I think the article paints a fair picture of Sen. Obama’s economic stance, especially as it compares to the other candidates. It places him “somewhat to the left of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, but to the right of former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards,” a location that strikes me as both accurate and politically advantageous.

The article also profiles some of Sen. Obama’s eminently qualified economic advisors and outlines his stated position on health care and trade. Very much worth a read if you have a chance.