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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (33564)	7/6/2008 10:38:46 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	Respond to of 224845

Obama’s voice admitting drug use may haunt him By: David Mark and Kenneth P. Vogel, politico.com July 6, 2008 Barack Obama has proved to be a difficult target to hit — just ask Hillary Rodham Clinton. Opposition researchers, though, hope that they’ve found a weapon to wound Obama in his own voice as recorded for the Grammy Award-winning audio version of his 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father.” While candidates often have their own words turned against them in attack ads, it’s one thing to see past statements in block text and something else entirely to hear the same words in the office-seeker’s own voice. “I think the audio version makes a much more immediate impact” than the print version of his memoir, said conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who has played audio excerpts from the book on his syndicated radio show. “It turns out to be very jarring to many ears to hear Obama talking about his youthful adventures, his attitudes on race.” In “Dreams from My Father,” Obama tells the story of his multiracial background, childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, college career in Los Angeles and New York, and years as a community organizer in Chicago, before entering Harvard Law School in 1988. The abridged audio version was released in May 2005 after Obama entered the Senate and was already being mentioned as a presidential candidate. It won the 2006 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. ”Dreams from My Father” has been widely acclaimed as an introspective and insightful read far from the anodyne campaign-oriented books politicians often produce, traits that Obama’s critics believe make it ideal for use against the candidate. In a passage describing his high school experience in Hawaii, for example, Obama explains the allure of drugs: “I kept playing basketball, attended classes sparingly, drank beer heavily, and tried drugs enthusiastically. … If the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down,” Obama intones, “it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly.” While many voters know that Obama used drugs as a young man, they haven’t heard the senator describe his drug use in those terms, or in his own voice. Nor have they heard him extensively quoting from the first sermon he heard from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., his longtime clergyman whom he renounced during the primary, saying, “The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago." In one excerpt from the audio book that Hewitt played on his show in March, Obama alters his voice to mimic Wright’s and repeats passages from a sermon decrying a society “where white folks’ greed runs a world in need.” Later Obama says of Wright’s preaching, “I found the tears running down my cheeks.” Hewitt said that on his radio show he has been careful to play book clips in their entirety, not just in snippets that can give the wrong impression. It’s possible that the audio clips could be used in political ads, but that’s not his intention, he said. The snippets, though, seem tailor-made for attack ads against Obama, who at first responded to media coverage of Wright’s inflammatory remarks by asserting, “The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation.” But in the audio book, Obama recreates the very first sermon he heard Wright deliver — “The Audacity of Hope,” a phrase Obama has since used frequently, including as the title of his second book — which includes several remarks similar to those that sparked the controversy. Obama describes the sermon as “a meditation on a fallen world. … Rev. Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House.” Other potentially troublesome clips feature Obama swearing and quoting others using racial slurs.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (33564)	7/7/2008 7:10:30 AM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224845

McCain promises to balance budget By MIKE ALLEN \| 7/6/08 10:41 PM EST Text Size: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to promise on Monday that he will balance the federal budget by the end of his first term by curbing wasteful spending and overhauling entitlement programs, including Social Security, his advisers told Politico. The vow to take on Social Security puts McCain in a political danger zone that thwarted President Bush after he named it the top domestic priority of his second term. McCain is making the pledge at the beginning of a week when both presidential candidates plan to devote their events to the economy, the top issue in poll after poll as voters struggle to keep their jobs and fill their gas tanks. “In the long-term, the only way to keep the budget balanced is successful reform of the large spending pressures in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” the McCain campaign says in a policy paper to be released Monday. “The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.” The pledge is a return to an earlier position he'd later backed away from. On April 15, McCain backed off a February pledge to balance the budget in his first term when asked about it by Michael Cooper of The New York Times, who reported that McCain said “at a news conference … that ‘economic conditions are reversed’ and that he would have a balanced budget within eight years.” McCain advisers admit that the document is a repackaging of previous policies, without dramatic new initiatives. Some Democratic officials had thought McCain might try to make a splash by proposing a bold middle-class tax cut. Jason Furman, Obama's economic policy director, called McCain's pledge “preposterous." Furman pointed out that the Congressional Budget Office now estimates a 2013 deficit of $443 billion, assuming the Bush tax cuts are extended. And he estimated that McCain would have to cut discretionary spending—including defense—by roughly one-third to bring the budget into the black by then. "McCain would have to pay for all of his new tax cuts and other proposals and then, on top of that, cut an additional $443 billion from the budget—which is 81 percent of Medicare spending or 78 percent of all discretionary spending outside of defense," Furman said.