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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 (36572)	7/26/2008 11:32:45 PM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 224737

July 27, 2008 Op-Ed Columnist How Obama Became Acting President By FRANK RICH IT almost seems like a gag worthy of “Borat”: A smooth-talking rookie senator with an exotic name passes himself off as the incumbent American president to credulous foreigners. But to dismiss Barack Obama’s magical mystery tour through old Europe and two war zones as a media-made fairy tale would be to underestimate the ingenious politics of the moment. History was on the march well before Mr. Obama boarded his plane, and his trip was perfectly timed to reap the whirlwind. He never would have been treated as a president-in-waiting by heads of state or network talking heads if all he offered were charisma, slick rhetoric and stunning visuals. What drew them instead was the raw power Mr. Obama has amassed: the power to start shaping events and the power to move markets, including TV ratings. (Even “Access Hollywood” mustered a 20 percent audience jump by hosting the Obama family.) Power begets more power, absolutely. The growing Obama clout derives not from national polls, where his lead is modest. Nor is it a gift from the press, which still gives free passes to its old bus mate John McCain. It was laughable to watch journalists stamp their feet last week to try to push Mr. Obama into saying he was “wrong” about the surge. More than five years and 4,100 American fatalities later, they’re still not demanding that Mr. McCain admit he was wrong when he assured us that our adventure in Iraq would be fast, produce little American “bloodletting” and “be paid for by the Iraqis.” Never mind. This election remains about the present and the future, where Iraq’s $10 billion a month drain on American pocketbooks and military readiness is just one moving part in a matrix of national crises stretching from the gas pump to Pakistan. That’s the high-rolling political casino where Mr. Obama amassed the chips he cashed in last week. The “change” that he can at times wield like a glib marketing gimmick is increasingly becoming a substantive reality — sometimes through Mr. Obama’s instigation, sometimes by luck. Obama-branded change is snowballing, whether it’s change you happen to believe in or not. Looking back now, we can see that the fortnight preceding the candidate’s flight to Kuwait was like a sequence in an old movie where wind blows away calendar pages to announce an epochal plot turn. First, on July 7, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, dissed Bush dogma by raising the prospect of a withdrawal timetable for our troops. Then, on July 15, Mr. McCain suddenly noticed that more Americans are dying in Afghanistan than Iraq and called for more American forces to be sent there. It was a long-overdue recognition of the obvious that he could no longer avoid: both Robert Gates, the defense secretary, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had already called for more American troops to battle the resurgent Taliban, echoing the policy proposed by Mr. Obama a year ago. On July 17 we learned that President Bush, who had labeled direct talks with Iran “appeasement,” would send the No. 3 official in the State Department to multilateral nuclear talks with Iran. Lest anyone doubt that the White House had moved away from the rigid stand endorsed by Mr. McCain and toward Mr. Obama’s, a former Rumsfeld apparatchik weighed in on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page: “Now Bush Is Appeasing Iran.” Within 24 hours, the White House did another U-turn, endorsing an Iraq withdrawal timetable as long as it was labeled a “general time horizon.” In a flash, as Mr. Obama touched down in Kuwait, Mr. Maliki approvingly cited the Democratic candidate by name while laying out a troop-withdrawal calendar of his own that, like Mr. Obama’s, would wind down in 2010. On Tuesday, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced a major drawdown of his nation’s troops by early 2009. But it’s not merely the foreign policy consensus that is shifting Obama-ward. The Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens has now joined another high-profile McCain supporter, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in knocking the McCain nostrum that America can drill its way out of its energy crisis. Mr. Pickens, who financed the Swift-boat campaign smearing John Kerry in 2004, was thought to be a sugar daddy for similar assaults against the Democrats this year. Instead, he is underwriting nonpartisan ads promoting wind power and speaks of how he would welcome Al Gore as energy czar if there’s an Obama administration. The Obama stampede is forcing Mr. McCain to surrender on other domestic fronts. After the Democrat ran ads in 14 states berating chief executives who are “making more in 10 minutes” than many workers do in a year, a newly populist Mr. McCain began railing against “corporate greed” — much as he also followed Mr. Obama’s example and belatedly endorsed a homeowners’ bailout he had at first opposed. Given that Mr. McCain has already used a refitted, hand-me-down Obama campaign slogan (“A Leader You Can Believe In”), it can’t be long before he takes up fist bumps. They’ve become the rage among young (nonterrorist) American businessmen, according to USA Today. “We have one president at a time,” Mr. Obama is careful to say. True, but the sitting president, a lame duck despised by voters and shunned by his own party’s candidates, now has all the gravitas of Mr. Cellophane in “Chicago.” The opening for a successor arrived prematurely, and the vacuum had been waiting to be filled. What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them. Mr. McCain could also have stepped into the leadership gap left by Mr. Bush’s de facto abdication. His inability to even make a stab at doing so is troubling. While drama-queen commentators on television last week were busy building up false suspense about the Obama trip — will he make a world-class gaffe? will he have too large an audience in Germany? — few focused on the alarms that Mr. McCain’s behavior at home raise about his fitness to be president. Once again the candidate was making factual errors about the only subject he cares about, imagining an Iraq-Pakistan border and garbling the chronology of the Anbar Awakening. Once again he displayed a tantrum-prone temperament ill-suited to a high-pressure 21st-century presidency. His grim-faced crusade to brand his opponent as a traitor who wants to “lose a war” isn’t even a competent impersonation of Joe McCarthy. Mr. McCain comes off instead like the ineffectual Mr. Wilson, the retired neighbor perpetually busting a gasket at the antics of pesky little Dennis the Menace. The week’s most revealing incident occurred on Wednesday when the new, supposedly improved McCain campaign management finalized its grand plan to counter Mr. Obama’s Berlin speech with a “Mission Accomplished”-like helicopter landing on an oil rig off Louisiana’s coast. The announcement was posted on politico.com even as any American with a television could see that Hurricane Dolly was imminent. Needless to say, this bit of theater was almost immediately “postponed” but not before raising the question of whether a McCain administration would be just as hapless in anticipating the next Katrina as the Bush-Brownie storm watch. When not plotting such stunts, the McCain campaign whines about its lack of press attention like a lover jilted for a younger guy. The McCain camp should be careful what it wishes for. As its relentless goading of Mr. Obama to visit Iraq only ratcheted up anticipation for the Democrat’s triumphant trip, so its insistent demand for joint town-hall meetings with Mr. Obama and for more televised chronicling of Mr. McCain’s wanderings could be self-inflicted disasters in the making. Mr. McCain may be most comfortable at town-hall meetings before largely friendly crowds, but his performance under pressure at this year’s G.O.P. primary debates was erratic. His sound-bite-deep knowledge of the country’s No. 1 issue, the economy, is a Gerald Ford train wreck waiting to happen in any matchup with Mr. Obama that requires focused, time-limited answers rather than rambling. During Mr. McCain’s last two tours of the Middle East — conducted without the invasive scrutiny of network anchors — the only news he generated was his confusion of Sunni with Shia and his embarrassing stroll through a “safe” Baghdad market with helicopter cover. He should thank his stars that few TV viewers saw that he was even less at home when walking through a chaotic Pennsylvania supermarket last week. He inveighed against the price of milk while reading from a note card and felt the pain of a shopper planted by the local Republican Party. The election remains Mr. Obama’s to lose, and he could lose it, whether through unexpected events, his own vanity or a vice-presidential misfire. But what we’ve learned this month is that America, our allies and most likely the next Congress are moving toward Mr. Obama’s post-Iraq vision of the future, whether he reaches the White House or not. That’s some small comfort as we contemplate the strange alternative offered by the Republicans: a candidate so oblivious to our nation’s big challenges ahead that he is doubling down in his campaign against both Mr. Maliki and Mr. Obama to be elected commander in chief of the surge.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (36572)	7/26/2008 11:37:05 PM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 224737

July 27, 2008 Op-Ed Columnist Texas to Tel Aviv By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN What would happen if you cross-bred J. R. Ewing of “Dallas” and Carl Pope, the head of the Sierra Club? You’d get T. Boone Pickens. What would happen if you cross-bred Henry Ford and Yitzhak Rabin? You’d get Shai Agassi. And what would happen if you put together T. Boone Pickens, the green billionaire Texas oilman now obsessed with wind power, and Shai Agassi, the Jewish Henry Ford now obsessed with making Israel the world’s leader in electric cars? You’d have the start of an energy revolution. The only good thing to come from soaring oil prices is that they have spurred innovator/investors, successful in other fields, to move into clean energy with a mad-as-hell, can-do ambition to replace oil with renewable power. Two of the most interesting of these new clean electron wildcatters are Boone and Shai. Agassi, age 40, is an Israeli software whiz kid who rose to the senior ranks of the German software giant SAP. He gave it all up in 2007 to help make Israel a model of how an entire country can get off gasoline and onto electric cars. He figured no country has a bigger interest in diminishing the value of Middle Eastern oil than Israel. On a visit to Israel in May, I took a spin in a parking lot on the Tel Aviv beachfront in Agassi’s prototype electric car, while his sister watched out for the cops because it is not yet licensed for Israeli roads. Agassi’s plan, backed by Israel’s government, is to create a complete electric car “system” that will work much like a mobile-phone service “system,” only customers sign up for so many monthly miles, instead of minutes. Every subscriber will get a car, a battery and access to a national network of recharging outlets all across Israel — as well as garages that will swap your dead battery for a fresh one whenever needed. His company, Better Place, and its impressive team would run the smart grid that charges the cars and is also contracting for enough new solar energy from Israeli companies — 2 gigawatts over 10 years — to power the whole fleet. “Israel will have the world’s first virtual oilfield in the Negev Desert,” said Agassi. His first 500 electric cars, built by Renault, will hit Israel’s roads next year. Agassi is a passionate salesman for his vision. He could sell camels to Saudi Arabia. “Today in Europe, you pay $600 a month for gasoline,” he explained to me. “We have an electric car that will cost you $600 a month” — with all the electric fuel you need and when you don’t want the car any longer, just give it back. No extra charges and no CO2 emissions. His goal, said Agassi, is to make his electric car “so cheap, so trivial, that you won’t even think of buying a gasoline car.” Once that happens, he added, your oil addiction will be over forever. You’ll be “off heroin,” he says, and “addicted to milk.” T. Boone Pickens is 80. He’s already made billions in oil. He was involved in some ugly mischief in funding the “Swift-boating” of John Kerry. But now he’s opting for a different legacy: breaking America’s oil habit by pushing for a massive buildup of wind power in the U.S. and converting our abundant natural gas supplies — now being used to make electricity — into transportation fuel to replace foreign oil in our cars, buses and trucks. Pickens is motivated by American nationalism. Because of all the money we are shipping abroad to pay for our oil addiction, he says, “we are on the verge of losing our superpower status.” His vision is summed up on his Web site: “We import 70 percent of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year ... I have been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of. If we create a renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil.” Pickens made clear to me over breakfast last week that he was tired of waiting for Washington to produce a serious energy plan. So his company, Mesa Power, is now building the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle, where he’s spent $2 billion buying land and 700 wind turbines from General Electric — the largest single turbine order ever. The U.S. could secure 20 percent of its electricity needs from wind alone. But Pickens knows he’s unique. Unless, he says, “Congress adopts clear, predictable policies” — with long-term tax incentives and infrastructure — so thousands of investors can jump into clean power, we’ll never get the scale we need to break our addiction. For a year, Senate Republicans have been blocking such incentives for wind and solar energy. They vote again next week. If only we had a Congress and president who, instead of chasing crazy schemes like offshore drilling and releasing oil from our strategic reserve, just sat down with Boone and Shai and asked one question: “What laws do we need to enact to foster 1,000 more like you?” Then just do it, and get out of the way.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (36572)	7/27/2008 12:16:01 AM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224737

Exclusive! Barack Obama Barack Obama will be Tom Brokaw's exclusive Sunday morning guest on Meet the Press -- for the full hour.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (36572)	7/27/2008 8:57:59 AM
From: TideGlider	Respond to of 224737

Yes of course you remember and were a big political follower in those days. No play for you, just following polls for Kenneth lol You lying phoney.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (36572)	7/27/2008 9:12:55 AM
From: TideGlider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224737

Of course there is the REAL story Kenneth ignores. Taking Jim Crow out of uniform: A. Philip Randolph and the desegregation of the U.S. military - Special Report: The Integrated Military - 50 Years Black Issues in Higher Education, August 21, 1997 by Karin Chenoweth Nearly fifty years ago, during his reelection campaign, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 ordering the "equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services." In the years since, the military has gone from being viciously segregated to being widely regarded as the best integrated institution in the United States. As a result, Truman's decision to integrate the army has become, arguably, one of the most important decisions of his presidency. And yet why he made the decision is not entirely clear. His opponent, Republican Thomas Dewey, had not made civil rights a particularly key issue in his campaign. Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas and Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace had, but they could be dismissed as fringe candidates. In his 1994 book Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, John Egerton analyzed the situation as follows: " was accused of playing politics on the military desegregation order - and as far as his timing was concerned, there can be little doubt that he acted with an eye on the campaign. But who saw any political advantage in taking the initiative on such a controversial issue? A 1946 national opinion survey had found that two-thirds of all [W]hite Americans believed [B]lacks were already being treated fairly in the society at large. Congress passed a new Selective Service Act in June 1948 that left segregation in place, and Truman signed it into law. Southerners in both houses were fighting tooth and nail against any modification in the racial rules of the armed forces, and most of the military top brass were also dragging their feet on the issue. Just about the only person pressing Truman to take action was A. Philip Randolph - a forceful and persuasive man, to be sure, but not one who wielded great power. Some of the President's advisers did see political capital to be made from a liberal stance on race, but prudence might have led them to suggest waiting until after the election to take Jim Crow out of uniform." Egerton goes on to say that Truman agreed entirely with the substance of desegregating the military, but for "a man who was looking like a double-digit loser in the polls, it was a bold decision." Egerton dismisses the efforts of Randolph. Nevertheless, a case can be made that Randolph's efforts played a significant role in Truman's decision - particularly after considering Randolph's influence with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had been instrumental in convincing Roosevelt to integrate the federal workforce in 1941. To bring political pressure on Roosevelt, Randolph began organizing a March on Washington Movement and threatened to bring 100,000 African Americans to the nation's capital. Frightened by the thought of such an unprecedented demonstration, Roosevelt ordered Joseph L. Rauh, then a young assistant in the Office of Emergency Management, to draft an executive order which would satisfy Randolph. After writing several drafts which Randolph rejected as not being strong enough, Rauh questioned his superiors, "What the hell has he got over the President of the United States?" Finally, Rauh submitted a version which pleased Randolph and six days before the march was to take place, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which permitted African Americans to fill the lucrative jobs that were opening up in preparation for World War II. That executive order did not change segregation in the armed forces, however. Given the political situation of the time - preparing for World War II - Randolph had decided not to push for military desegregation and called off the march. He would later revisit the concept of peaceful mass demonstration in 1963 when he led the March on Washington which featured Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Randolph would get his opportunity to push for military desegregation after the United States won World War II with the enthusiastic and important participation by African American troops. When Truman called for a peacetime draft in 1948, Randolph - along with Grant Reynolds, Commissioner of Corrections for New York State - founded the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training. With the help of a young pacifist named Bayard Rustin, the committee began a civil disobedience campaign against the segregated military. On March 22, Truman invited a group of Black leaders to the White House to discuss the subject of an executive order. Among them were: Randolph; Walter White, executive secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Mary McLeod Bethune, the noted civil rights activist and educator; and Charles Houston, a special counsel for the NAACP. The following description of the meeting comes from A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait: "As Randolph remembers, the meeting had been proceeding smoothly and amicably, until he said to Truman, 'Mr. President, after making several trips around the country, I can tell you that the mood among Negroes of this country is that they will never bear arms again until all forms of bias and discrimination are abolished.' "In a battle of bluntness Harry Truman came out second to no man, and he told Randolph, 'I wish you hadn't made that statement. I don't like it at all.' "Charles Houston intervened: 'But Mr. President, don't you want to know what is happening in the country?' Truman said he certainly wanted to know what was happening in the country; a president attracted more than enough yes men. "'Well, that's what I'm giving you, Mr. President,' Randolph said, seizing the advantage before it disappeared again. 'I'm giving you the facts.' When the President allowed him to proceed, Randolph ran headlong into Truman again: 'Mr. President, as you know, we are calling upon you to issue an executive order abolishing segregation in the armed forces.' At this point, Truman simply thanked his visitors for coming, and said there didn't seem to be much more that they could talk fruitfully about. "But Truman's rebuff merely aroused Randolph's defiance. Testifying, nine days later, during hearings on the universal military training bill, Randolph told the Senate Armed Services Committee: "'This time Negroes will not take a Jim Crow draft lying down. The conscience of the world will be shaken as by nothing else when thousands and thousands of us second-class Americans choose imprisonment in preference to permanent military slavery...I personally will advise Negroes to refuse to fight as slaves for a democracy they cannot possess and cannot enjoy.'" Randolph was not supported in his campaign against a segregated military by many establishment voices. The Amsterdam News, one of the nation's most widely read Black newspapers, wrote an editorial condemning Randolph. However, a poll of young Black men showed that 71 percent favored a civil disobedience campaign against the draft - a striking poll, given the history of participation in the military by African Americans. And words were being joined by actions. In one of the best-known cases, Winfrid Lynn, a Long Island landscape gardener, told his draft board that while he was "ready to serve in any unit of the armed forces of my country which is not segregated by race," he would "not be compelled to serve in a unit undemocratically selected as a Negro group." He went to jail. At the 1948 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia - where the young mayor of Minneapolis, named Hubert H. Humphrey, led a fight against the Southern segregationists known as Dixiecrats - scores of African Americans - led by Randolph - picketed the convention hall. Less than a month later, Truman signed the executive order. After the order was signed, Randolph sent Truman a telegram praising the president for his "high order of statesmanship and courage." With that, the civil disobedience campaign officially came to an end. It is difficult to say whether Randolph's campaign was a key factor in Truman's decision - the new biography of Truman by David McCullough does not discuss it. But the fact is, it was one of the few organized public expressions of moral revulsion against segregation at the time. And it was one of the forerunners to later battles against segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. COPYRIGHT 1997 Cox, Matthews & Associates COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group findarticles.com