OBAMARAMA

In an interview on Wednesday night, President Clinton once again tried to conflate his wife’s record on the war with that of Sen. Obama. As quoted by the Hotline:

CLINTON: Because in the beginning, there was this impression that he was the only one that was really against the president’s policy in Iraq, which I don’t think is accurate, but it nevertheless had some legs out there.

His voting record and Hillary’s are almost identical, I think, on all the relevant issues.

Asked about the comments yesterday, Sen. Obama didn’t mince words:

“I suppose that’s true if you leave out the fact that she authorized it, and supported it, and I said it was a bad idea,” said Obama. “That’s a fairly major difference.”

It begs the question: Can you smell what Barack is cooking?

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.

Much is being made in some quarters over Sen. Obama’s comment in Iowa that there’s “at least one senator in Iowa who could be helpful” in overriding President Bush’s veto of Congress’s Iraq funding bill. In response, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley — the subject of Sen. Obama’s remark — called the comment “not senatorial,” adding that “when you’re in another state, you don’t take pokes at a fellow senator.”

Boo freaking hoo. According to the Chicago Tribune, Grassley went on to assert that “he would never go into Illinois and tell Obama’s constituents to ‘get on him about something.’” “You know what really makes it less presidential,” Grassley said, is “I’m not running for president. I’m not one of his opponents.”

Except that, on the issue of the war, you are.

Inexplicably, the Trib titles their report on the exchange “Obama’s Faux Pas,” as if encouraging people to encourage their representatives to override the veto is somehow a “mistake” — as if adhering to the “gentlemanly” senatorial protocol is somehow more important than the moral imperative of ending an immoral war.

Sorry Chuck, but it looks like the U.S. Senate is no longer a safe haven for thin-skinned whiners. To reappropriate a favorite old phrase, You’re ass is Grassley, and Sen. Obama’s the lawnmower.

UPDATE: This evening’s Post headline: “Obama Renews Pressing Grassley on Iraq.”

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.

A great piece up today at Media Matters for America looks at journalists’ obsession with touting trivial non-stories about Sen. Obama — from his uncontroversial driveway purchase to his investment non-scandal — and promoting them as significant simply because they “raise questions.”

It’s a pretty low bar to set for news, especially since these “questions” usually come from unnamed “political strategists” (some of whom are later revealed to be “political operatives” who actually work for Sen. Obama’s “opponents”).

The latest non-story involves a photograph of Sen. Obama talking with his communications guru David Axelrod in his Senate office — a situation that manages to “raise questions,” according to Roll Call, despite the fact that it violates exactly no ethics rules. As the inimitable SSM makes clear:

The Roll Call column is just the most recent example of an emerging trend in the media’s treatment of Obama. In the past six months, there have been several news reports that have purported to expose wrongdoing on Obama’s part, but, at the same time, noted that there exists no allegation or evidence that Obama acted improperly. Nevertheless, these reports claim that Obama’s actions “raise questions” or “raise flags” — presumably as justification for publishing a piece that contains no real evidence of impropriety.

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, that’s what I always say.

Critics of Sen. Obama have been looking for anything to throw at him, and have lately seized on the fact that a story he said he read as a child in Life Magazine wasn’t able to be located there. The story was about a black man who had tried to bleach his skin, and Sen. Obama wrote in his memoir that it was a formative moment in the development of his racial identity.

After the Chicago Tribune reported that they could find no such story in the archives of Life (or Ebony, another possibility), many looking to score cheap political points on an issue of minor importance have highlighted the incident, ostensibly as an example of some sort of intellectual dishonesty.

A recent discovery means it’s time for that stop.

(Read more after the jump…)

I’m not generally in the habit of writing FOX News-esque rhetorical-question titles like the one above. But then again, I’m not Associated Press reporter Nedra Pickler.

An AP article by Pickler and published this morning in the Washington Post is entitled “Is Obama All Style and Little Substance?” — but it has some serious substance issues of its own, particularly when it comes to Sen. Clinton.

In an attempt to reinforce the image of Sen. Obama as inexperienced, Pickler falsely claims that John Edwards is “the only other candidate to serve less time in elective office than Obama.” Edwards was a US Senator for six years; Sen. Obama has served in the US Senate for over two years, following eight years as a state senator in Illinois.

But what about Sen. Clinton? She was reelected to the US Senate last year, and has served for just over six years — nearly exactly the same amount of time as Edwards. This is her first time holding elective office. So why does Pickler not include her among the ranks of candidates who have served less time in elective office than Sen. Obama?

Perhaps it’s for the same reason that she lets Sen. Clinton off the hook for not having a written health care plan yet, while with the other hand she attacks Sen. Obama for the same infraction. Here is her stunning justification:

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a written plan yet, but no one questions her expertise, since she was the chief proponent of the issue during her husband’s presidency.

No one questions her health care expertise? Seriously? I’m not in the business of attacking fellow Democrats, but I do expect an AP political reporter to have at least some familiarity with political history.

Pickler doesn’t exactly have a clean slate when it comes to covering Democrats. Sen. Obama’s policy proposals will undoubtedly come in time, and talking about their absence in the meantime is certainly fair game. What’s deplorable is that Pickler has chosen to do so by distorting the facts about other candidates in order to paint Sen. Obama in a negative light.

UPDATE: Media Matters takes Pickler to task for her claim that Sen. Obama has “delivered no policy speeches” and “provided few details about how he would lead the country,” noting the utter inaccuracy of those assertions.

In what has become a ridiculous and inexplicable pattern, The Politico’s Mike Allen has penned yet another gratuitous and insubstantial attack piece on Sen. Obama and cloaked it in the guise of “political journalism.”

Titled “Rookie Mistakes Plague Obama,” the article documents exactly zero instances of what could reasonably be classified as rookie mistakes, opting instead to harp on the sort of unimpressive minutiae that could be found in any campaign.

It opens breathlessly by suggesting that Sen. Obama is disingenuous when he condemns the practice of having lobbyists write legislation, since he once voted for and (gasp!) publicized his support of a Senate energy bill. But nowhere does Allen provide evidence that the bill was written by energy lobbyists, something he would need to do to support his implied charge of hypocrisy.

Nor does Allen note that the bipartisan bill included substantial funding for alternative fuel development, did not open the Arctic to drilling (as the House version did), and addressed “the concerns of Democrats and environmentalists that more needs to be done to conserve energy and develop cleaner energy alternatives,” according to an actual newspaper, The Washington Post.

(Read more after the jump…)

First CNN sent a reporter to Jakarta following FOX News’s fallacious reporting on Sen. Obama’s schooling. Now ABC has analyzed Sen. Obama’s position on the Iraq War following the Clinton’s campaign’s disingenuous claims about its consistency.

Their finding: “However much others try to fuzz up the record,” Sen. Obama has had a “consistent anti-war message” and “stood out” for “opposing the war quite firmly when the war was overwhelmingly popular.” The reporters analyzed Sen. Obama’s interviews and remarks — including those cited by the Clinton campaign — and concluded that his opponent’s spin on his position is precisely that: spin.

The article quotes Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton, who sums it all up:

“The important thing here is that Obama has been 100% consistent in his opposition to the war, and now he has a responsible plan to end the conflict,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton. “Even when you look at the statements he’s made about others who supported the war, it’s clear that he’s in sharp opposition to the war.”

ABC also has a comprehensive video to back up their findings entitled “Obama Opposes Iraq War From Start.”

Given Sen. Obama’s consistency, it’s understandable that Josh Gerstein at the New York Sun is saying that “why Mrs. Clinton’s team would want Mr. Obama’s strongly anti-war statements from 2002 in broader circulation is beyond me.”

Us too.

An article appearing on the website of the American Conservative magazine and titled “Obama’s Identity Crisis” gives a skewed and racially-charged analysis of Sen. Obama’s personal history, calling him “an updated Black Pride version of the old ‘tragic mulatto’ stereotype” and asserting (without support, obviously) that “He wouldn’t be a serious candidate for president at age 45 if he weren’t part black.” The author is Steve Sailer, a columnist for the xenophobic VDARE website.

The article, which focuses primarily on Sen. Obama’s recounting of his life in his autobiography Dreams From My Father, accomplishes little more than presenting excerpts from the book in negative, racially-loaded terms. For instance, Sailer suggests that Sen. Obama’s father “added two more wives to his collection” and refers to him as his “polygamous pop.” He also claims that Sen. Obama’s “overwhelmingly white upbringing is apparent in his coolly analytical depiction of his mother” — suggesting that only a white upbringing could yield “cool analysis” — and asks rhetorically, “Why was Obama so insistent upon rejecting the white race?”

As for Sen. Obama’s supporters, Sailer claims (once again, without support) that “The message much of white America hopes to send to black America by electing Obama is: Don’t Be So Black. Act More Barack.” Sailer’s misconception is not unlike that of many in the traditional media, who assume all African Americans will support Sen. Obama based on his race. Similarly, Sailer seems to think all Sen. Obama’s white supporters are doing the same, apparently in a bizarre attempt to send a message to the black community.

What unites both misinterpretations is their failure to account for the possibility that Sen. Obama’s supporters back him because of his values, his character, and his policies.

(Read more after the jump…)

In the seventh paragraph of its article about investments in two companies that were made on behalf of Sen. Obama in a blind trust he set up, the New York Times notes that “There is no evidence that any of his actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight months that he owned the stocks.”

If you only read the first six paragraphs, however, you would get a distinctly different impression. According to the article, the purchases “raise questions” about how Sen. Obama came to invest in the companies — Skyterra and AVI BioPharma — which work with the federal government and whose stockholders include major donors to Sen. Obama’s campaign.

Sadly, the article does not elaborate on what these “questions” are. Nor does it point out that wealthy political donors also tend to be major stockholders in many companies, making the possibility that a senator will wind up investing in some of the same companies as people who contribute to his campaign practically an inevitability.

Instead, the Times opts to “raise questions,” and then proceeds chart the feeble connections between Sen. Obama’s purchases and his legislative priorities in order to suggest some wrongdoing it has already acknowledged isn’t there. These connections include his push for an avian flu vaccine and his investment in AVI (though, as the article notes in its 24th paragraph, this company “has not received any federal money for its avian flu research”).

Further undercutting the article’s suggestion of impropriety and insider dealing is the disclosure in the article’s 11th paragraph that Sen. Obama lost $15,000 on his investment in Skyterra, bringing his net profit on these “questionable” investments to a scandalous NEGATIVE $13,000. It seems to me the only questions this story raises are about the stock-picking aptitude of the people who manage Sen. Obama’s blind trust.

Fortunately, he’s not running for investor-in-chief.

UPDATE: Media Matters points us toward a breathless MSNBC report on “Sen. Obama’s first scandal.” Watch the video and see if you can identify exactly where the scandal is. Even the guest suggests there’s no “there” there.

UPDATE 2: When asked about the subject, Sen. McCain called Sen. Obama “a very honest and fine person.”

Greg Sargent over at TPM’s Horse’s Mouth blog has an incisive post about the discrepancy in media outrage over Sen. Obama’s “gaffe” immediately following his official campaign announcement — where he referred to the lost lives of soldiers in Iraq as having been “wasted” — and an almost identical comment by Sen. John McCain this week.

Here’s Obama’s remark from two weeks ago:

Obama, discussing his opposition to the Iraq war, said the war “should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged, and on which we’ve now spent $400 billion, and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.'’

Meanwhile, announcing his candidacy on “Late Night with David Letterman,” Sen. John McCain said the following:

“Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be,” McCain said about the Iraq War. “We’ve wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives.”

The difference between the two comments in terms of substance? Nonexistent. But the difference in the public attention each remark has received is astounding.

(Read more after the jump…)

Once again, The Politico manages to take a perfectly benign — some might even say positive — news story about Sen. Obama and twist it into something ugly.

As has been widely reported in much less loaded tones, the Federal Election Commission ruled yesterday on Sen. Obama’s request that he have the option to return money raised for the general election in order to accept public matching funds. The FEC declared that he could.

Yet, rather than reporting that Sen. Obama’s request was accepted and that he is now well-positioned to challenge his Republican opponent to accept matching funds (something, as we’ve noted, they will feel pressure to do — especially if they are Sen. John McCain), Politico writer Kenneth P. Vogel opted instead to headline his article “Obama Ruling Could Prove Moot, Backfire.”

What is his evidence for this claim? I’m glad you asked.

(Read more after the jump…)

On so many levels, FOX News pundit and political turncoat Dick Morris does not understand the dynamics of the Democratic presidential primary. Maybe he’s blinded by his fierce obsession with Sen. Hillary Clinton, or maybe he’s just spent too much time with Republicans. Whatever the reason, his analysis of the Democratic campaigns consistently leaves actual political observers scratching their heads and wondering if he’s watching the same race.

Take his latest column, “Blacks may doom Barack.” According to Morris, “Obama needs to carry the African-American vote overwhelmingly” if he’s going to win the primary, while other Democrats must maintain only minimal black support in order to “blunt the edge of Obama’s challenge.”

What Morris is actually saying here is that white people won’t vote for Sen. Obama in nearly the numbers they’ll vote for Sen. Clinton or John Edwards. This is an implicit assumption that some Americans may hold, but for a political columnist to espouse it in light of all the evidence to the contrary is just ignorant. After all, if Sen. Obama is running a strong second to Sen. Clinton already, and if he lacks black support as Morris claims, then what explains his current success?

(Read more after the jump…)

Greg Sargent over at TPMCafe reports on a statement from Sen. Clinton’s campaign responding to comments by David Geffen, Hollywood mogul and Obama fundraiser, that were critical of the Clintons and appeared in the New York Times today. According to the release, Sen. Clinton is demanding that Sen. Obama “immediately denounce these remarks” and “remove Mr. Geffen from his campaign and return his money.”

In fact, Geffen’s comments, while not particularly nice, were generally innocuous, undoubtedly represent his unvarnished political opinion, and were not at all inaccurate. Here are the remarks he reportedly made to Maureen Dowd, who reprinted them in her column:

“God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton?”

“I think they [Republicans] believe she’s the easiest to defeat.”

“She’s so advised by so many smart advisers who are covering every base.”

“Everybody in politics lies, but they [the Clintons] do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”

“It’s not a very big thing to say, ‘I made a mistake’ on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t.”

Hmmm…which of these remarks do you think most peeved Sen. Clinton?

(Read more after the jump…)