Tag: Blithe Spirit

I may vomit some more

The Obamas: Portrait of an American Family

Gwen Ifill
 
Obama family

Soon we will vote for our next president, and for the first time in history, one of the two candidates is a Black man. For a year, Essence pursued an interview with the entire Obama family‹to no avail. Finally, this summer ESSENCE became the only Black media outlet allowed a glimpse into the lives of Barack, Michelle and their two girls, Malia and Sasha, when we were invited to their South Side Chicago home. Weeks later, veteran political journalist Gwen Ifill was with the family as they campaigned in a small mostly White western town, and she flew with them to a Black church in the urban Midwest.

Sounds like a real scoop.

Barack Obama is sitting in the back of his rented luxury campaign bus with its granite counters and two flat-screen TVs. The Illinois senator’s arms are wrapped around his wife, Michelle, whom he doesn’t get to see much these days. At this very moment he is, of all things, singing.

Etc.

No wonder she’s going to ask these questions:

Mayor Palin, Barack Obama is a handsome, charismatic demigod. How many boxes of Kleenex will you need after your crushing loss?

Senator Biden, what is your favorite color? And if you have time for a follow-up question: Why?

Mayor, you talk funny and you own a tanning bed. Why haven’t you released Trig’s birth certificate?

Senator, have you seen those pictures of Obama in his swim trunks? If not, I have them right here.

Etc., here.  And it’s only a partial list!

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I may vomit

Doubleday says that [Gwen] Ifill “surveys the American political landscape, shedding new light on the impact of Barack Obama’s stunning presidential campaign and introducing the emerging young African American politicians forging a bold new path to political power.”

. . . in her new book about “the age of Obama.” 

The title is the opening line of the Monty Wooley character in the 1939 Broadway play and 1942 movie and 2000 TV film (Nathan Lane), “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” 

For a rather fetching mockup of the expected Ifill approach tomorrow night, look here.

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Black power

Ifill

Gwen Eye-full hits the bookstands Jan. 20.  It’s The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, and is sure to be a hit — especially if the Big O. wins next month.  To which end it won’t hurt if S. Palin flops in tomorrow night’s debate, moderated by — yes, the one and only Gwen I.  What do you know about that!

[No fair, says Greta Van S.]

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Wake me when it’s over

In my humble opinion, Jim Lehrer was annoying last night.  His shtick of “I’m trying to get you two to fight with each other” — “he tried his best to goad the two into battle,” said one commentator approvingly — was obvious and intrusive.  Why should they take his lead on this?  Each will fight in his own time and maybe not at all. 

It takes a sharp panel of news people, each with his or her own hard fact-based questions aimed at pinning the debater to the wall, to provide real, as opposed to manufactured drama.  Some who recall the original “Meet the Press” will ask, “Where are today’s Lawrence Spivaks and why aren’t they up there trying to skewer the candidates?

Rush Limbaugh predicted correctly: it was like watching paint dry.

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What happened at the White House?

Obama screwed it up yesterday at the White House, says Rush Limbaugh.  All four Democrat leaders handed him the ball at meeting start, and he took off after the House Republicans in quite obstreperous manner.  That’s when meeting blew up.

More later . . .  

Later: Rush cited American Spectator, which is so busy a site it was hard to get to it.  It has this:

When Sen. Barack Obama was given the floor to speak during White House negotiations, according to White House aides, he did so raising concerns about a House Republican alternative to the Paulson/Bernanke $700 billion bailout. But those concerns weren’t necessarily his, as he was not aware of the GOP plan before reviewing notes provided him by Paulson loyalists in Treasury prior to entering the meeting.

How else does AmSpec (it’s Prowler blog) know this?

According to an Obama campaign source, the notes were passed to Obama via senior aides traveling with him, who had been emailed the document via a current Goldman Sachs employee and Wall Street fundraiser for the Obama campaign. “It was made clear that the memo was from ‘friends’ and was reliable,” says the campaign source.

And what the effect of this impromptu blast across the aisle?

The memo allowed Obama and his fellow Democrats to box in Republican attendees and essentially took what President Bush had billed as a negotiating meeting off the rails.

And where does Paulson come in?

“Paulson and his team have not acted in good faith for this President or the administration for which they serve,” says a House Republican leader who was not present at the White House meeting, but who instead is part of the team hammering out the House GOP alternative.

He suspects skullduggery:

“We keep hearing about how Secretary Paulson is working with Democrats on this or that, yet he never seems to consider working with the party that essentially hired him. Perhaps he’s auditioning for a Democratic administration job. Our proposal didn’t just spring forth fully formed; we’ve been working on this for several days, and Treasury staff has known about it.”

And O. had a chance to do away with politics as usual.  This be what he does without a TelePrompter?

Other points by Rush:

* Dems have votes for this but want House Repubs to repudiate their principles and want cover if it doesn’t work out.  (Pelosi has specified the need for 100 Repubs in favor of this bill.) 

* Dems including O. have known where House Repubs stand but act surprised and indignant.

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Time warp, warped outlook

“Blame deep-seated racism if Obama loses,” argues Sun-Times woman Deborah Douglas, who seems stuck in a pre-civil-rights movement past.

Pssst! I have a not-so-secret to tell you: America is no place for uppity black folks. At least that’s what I’ve been finding out lately.

Does she really think a white guy could have beat Hillary in the primary?  Or, for that matter, that she’d be where she is if she were white? 

The question arises, inevitably, in our race-preferential society, which has raised victimhood to an art form and laid guilt on non-black people — the younger, the more susceptible.

For more on this, see Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, by William McGowan, a 2001 book.

In this piece, Douglas refers to “grass-chewing Southerners” who call blacks “uppity” and to herself as “a nappy-headed black woman.” 

O. would be “way ahead if 40 percent of white Americans didn’t have negative views of African Americans,” she writes.  “The Great American Gut Check won’t give Obama a break,” however, citing the recent

AP-Stanford University poll that validates what [she has] suspected: If Barack Obama doesn’t win in November, we can blame racism.

Yes, the poll:

“There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean there’s only a few bigots,” said Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman who helped analyze the exhaustive survey.

That might be so, by why did the study only address how the prejudices of whites are impacting the campaign while totally ignoring how racist feelings by blacks are entering the equation?

asked Noel Sheppard at News Busters.

My point exactly.  What white candidate could count on 78% of the black vote in S. Carolina, for instance, as he did in the recent primary?  Works both ways.

============

See Dennis Byrne for comments on same subject, including:

The poll finds that nine percent of all respondents said that Obama being the first black president would make them less likely to vote for him. Yes, this is wrong. But if you bother to read the survey’s next line, you find that another nine percent said that Obama being the first black president would make them more likely to vote for him.

The lady missed that point.

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He comes with lots of tricks up sleeve

Meanwhile, at the Wednesday Journal of OP&RF:

However the cookie crumbles in November, when the final poll is taken, I’m a winner. Even if my man and woman come up short, I will get to watch a miracle-when Big O. and his Delaware sidekick create jobs while raising tax rates. He will truly be The Messiah if he pulls that off.

Needless to say, there’s more more more where than came from.

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Big O. goes for the experienced accountant

An FDR baby, no less:

Franklin Delano Raines, the former chairman of Fannie Mae, repeatedly moved through a revolving door of high-power political positions in Washington and the financial industry until he was forced to resign amid an accounting scandal.

But there was life after Fannie, Wash Post reported last July:

[T]he post-scandal Raines “has been quietly constructing a new life for himself” and had recently “taken calls from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters.”

On what not to do?

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The bomb-thrower and the candidate

Obama needed Bill Ayers’s ok to get on the board of Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), which he chaired and whose

agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. [Italics added]

Ayers believed in this sort of thing.  He wrote

that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. . . . .  “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” [he] said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

CAC was made to order for him.  It

translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn). [Italics added]

More more more in WSJ, where Stanley Kurtz delivers on his plowing through the UIC library archives. 

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You take the “Dem” out of Democrat, and nothing’s left

It starts with “Dem-“ and it’s Democrat, right? 

Partly.  Try “demagogue.”

In Daytona Beach, Obama said that “if my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would’ve had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week.” He referred to “elderly women” at risk of poverty, and said families would be scrambling to support “grandmothers and grandfathers.”

Remember when he talked about rejecting old-style politics?

Actually,

The plan proposed by President Bush and supported by McCain in 2005 would not have allowed anyone born before 1950 to invest any part of their Social Security taxes in private accounts. All current retirees would be covered by the same benefits they are now.

“In our “Scaring Seniors” article posted Sept. 19,” says Fact Check, 

we took apart a claim in an Obama-Biden ad that McCain somehow supported a 50 percent cut in Social Security benefits, which is simply false. Then, on Saturday Sept. 20, Sen. Barack Obama personally fed senior citizens another whopper, this one a highly distorted claim about the private Social Security accounts that McCain supports.

It’s what the teleprompter had written on it, apparently.

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