Obama Campaign Remembers Earliest Donors

I just got an email from Barack Obama telling me something interesting -- I was one of his earliest donors:

You were one of the first 100,000 people to own a piece of this campaign. You provided the strength needed to build a movement.

Back then, few pundits or insiders thought we had a chance. But thanks to you, we overcame steep odds. Twenty months later, millions of Americans all across the country have joined you, working for change.

But in these final three weeks, our opponents are signaling they will do whatever they can to distract voters and distort the truth, so we need to redouble our efforts.

We need to grow this movement by 100,000 new donors before Friday.

By promising to match the contribution of a new supporter, you'll encourage them to give for the first time. This is your last opportunity to partner with a fellow supporter and make your donation go twice as far.

At the time I first gave money to Obama, I wasn't backing his campaign yet. I make a practice of giving small contributions to candidates early in presidential primaries to learn more about them. I gave money to Obama, John Edwards and Joe Biden, deciding on the eve of the Iowa Caucus that Biden was my preferred candidate. Once you give money to a politician you never hear the end of them. Edwards sent me text messages before each debate. Obama paired me up with other donors. Biden's wife Valerie sent me campaign updates in email. I had trouble explaining my contribution policy to a BusinessWeek reporter in January without sounding insane.

I even heard from Biden a few times after he dropped out.

If Obama wins the election, voter concerns about the economic meltdown will be cited as the main reason, but I think the campaign he's run has as much to do with his success. Obama's motivated people to work for his campaign in numbers I've never seen before in past elections, and he's gotten his volunteers to do the real work of campaigning -- knocking on doors and hitting the phones -- rather than just putting up signs in their yards. Over the past two weeks I've received five phone calls and a personal visit from Obama supporters. They want to know first who I'm voting for, and second if I'll volunteer time to getting the vote out here in Florida. I've also been invited to a neighborhood gathering of Obama supporters.

Registered as a Democrat in the red states of Texas and Florida during presidential elections, I've never been personally visited by a campaign before, even in 2000 when Florida was anticipated to be one of the most important swing states. Obama's better at getting people to own a piece of his candidacy than any Democrat in my lifetime. The email he sent today, which shows he kept track of his earliest donors, is an inspired way to encourage us to do more in the home stretch.

Though it's still possible for John McCain to rally and beat Obama -- Democrats should never underestimate our ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory -- the former community organizer has built an extremely well-organized community of voters. Considering the number of Republicans who ridiculed that part of his background during their convention speeches, I'm hoping he gets the last laugh.

Politics · 2008/10/13 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Sarah Palin: 'How Dare They Boo Piper!'

My favorite Amy Carter moment was when a reporter asked her if she had any message for the children of America. She looked at the reporter square in the eyes, thought for a few moments, and then gave this brilliant reply: "No."

-- Danny Miller, Huffington Post

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin dropped the puck at the Philadelphia Flyers game Saturday night and was greeted with either a loud chorus of boos or a mixed response, depending on which media account you read. On the videos I've seen, such as this one, you can hear a lot of boos before the Flyers public address system cranks up the volume on patriotic music all the way to 11, which makes me think they were hearing a pretty negative reception.

Palin came out on the ice with her daughters Willow and Piper, the younger girl dressed in a Flyers jersey. A Fox News producer, Shushannah Walshe, says that Palin intentionally dressed Piper that way to discourage boos:

The GOP Vice-Presidential nominee said at an earlier fundraiser that she would stop some of the booing from the rowdy Philadelphia fans by putting her seven year old daughter, Piper in a Flyers jersey. She said, "How dare they boo Piper!"

Her secret weapon may have worked.

National Journal corroborates the producer's account.

What kind of parent would expose a seven-year-old child to a potentially abusive crowd in an attempt to defuse hostility? Philly fans are notorious for being tough -- they once booed Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin as he was being taken off the field strapped to a gurney with a potential spinal injury.

I hate to encourage the Palin sideshow, since the economic meltdown has already made her a non-factor in this election, but there's something skeevy about the way she's used her kids in this campaign. When Bristol Palin's pregnancy was announced, as intense media coverage and ugly blog speculation about the teen were at their height, the McCain/Palin campaign orchestrated an event during the Republican National Convention so McCain could greet Bristol and the child's father, Levi Johnston, on an airport tarmac as the news media broadcast the event live.

McCain's public embrace of the teens was bizarre. If the purpose was to put Bristol Palin and her boyfriend at ease, it could've been done privately. Instead, the campaign used them to demonstrate the social tolerance of the Republican presidential candidate, making a press spectacle of Palin's daughter at the same time they were issuing statements telling the press to lay off Palin's family.

Now Piper Palin's being used as a prop to save her mother the embarrassment of being booed by a sports crowd in a swing state.

Contrast that approach to how the Carters, Clintons and Bushes treated their young daughters during their campaigns and subsequent presidencies. The children were kept out of the public eye as much as possible, reinforcing the message they were off-limits. Chelsea Clinton, Jenna Bush and Barbara Bush never worked political events until they were in their 20s -- aside from the obligatory family gatherings at the end of convention nominating speeches. If Palin has made a single campaign appearance without trotting out her kids, I haven't seen it.

Politics · 2008/10/12 · 38 COMMENTS · Link

Scoring the Second Obama/McCain Debate

On a night when he had to change the dynamics of a presidential race he's losing, John McCain wandered all over the place during Tuesday's presidential debate, both figuratively and literally. Sometimes walking around to no purpose as Barack Obama spoke, McCain even had the bad luck at the end of blocking the camera, an Abe Simpson moment that separated moderator Tom Brokaw from his teleprompter.

As the faltering economy dominates the election, McCain continues to struggle to put together a steady message that provides comfort to concerned lower- and middle-class voters. Instead, he sprang a dramatic new proposal on the world without laying any groundwork first. Last time around, he proposed a spending freeze. Tuesday night, he offered to buy up all bad mortgages in the country:

As president of the United States, Alan, I would order the secretary of the treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes -- at the diminished value of those homes and let people be able to make those -- be able to make those payments and stay in their homes.

A visitor to Workbench recently derided me as a "socialist," a term that may never be less effective than it is today when directed pejoratively at a liberal. The U.S. just took over our largest insurance company and made a $700 billion bail-, er, rescue of our largest banks. Now the Republican candidate in the race wants to take ownership of hundreds of thousands of American mortgages, a massive aid proposal that could keep Americans in their homes at the cost of a ginormous new bureaucracy. The party of small government has become the party of all government. President Bush is one guayabera shirt from being Fidel Castro. Now if we could just get our right-wing socialists to bail out uninsured Americans the way they rescued unscrupulous Wall Street bankers.

Because he doesn't develop his ideas -- throwing them out as recklessly as he chose Sarah Palin -- McCain can't sell them in a manner that engenders confidence in his ability to carry them out. As Obama spoke about the need to help middle-class people, McCain instead referred twice to how we have to "buy up these bad loans," a phrase that took CNN's wired-up undecideds straight to their unhappy place.

McCain said "I know" 16 times during the debate, but he often didn't follow through and explain how he'd exhibit his knowledge in practice. Americans just have to take his word for it. This was most clear on the subject of Osama Bin Laden. "I'll get Osama bin Laden, my friends," McCain said. "I'll get him. I know how to get him. I'll get him no matter what and I know how to do it."

Like President Nixon's secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, McCain has a secret plan to get Bin Laden. If he knows how to get him, why hasn't he told Bush?

I don't think Obama was great during the debate, but he did a much better job of addressing economic concerns and criticizing the fiscal recklessness of President Bush. He repeatedly tied McCain to a Republican administration that was handed a budget surplus and will scurry from office leaving the nation desperately in hock to China:

When George Bush came into office, our debt -- national debt was around $5 trillion. It's now over $10 trillion. We've almost doubled it.

And so while it's true that nobody's completely innocent here, we have had over the last eight years the biggest increases in deficit spending and national debt in our history. And Sen. McCain voted for four out of five of those George Bush budgets.

The transcript shows that McCain has gone another debate without once using the term "middle class." (On the plus side, he didn't use the term "maverick" either.)

Obama has now won both debates, according to the media's polls and focus groups, and I think in part it's due to the Democratic Party's well-earned reputation for being stronger on the economy. Nobody's buying the idea that today's borrow-and-spend Republicans are better than yesterday's tax-and-spend Democrats.

But another reason for Obama's success is the reassuring consistency of his message. He's not reaching for gimmicks and distractions all the time, trying to win news cycles with sideshows about lipstick on a pig and the new trumped-up nonsense about palling around with terrorists. If we need "a steady hand at the tiller" in tough times, as McCain said last night in his closing statement, there's only one candidate in that race. On issues and temperament and ideas, McCain's constantly on the move.

Politics · 2008/10/08 · 23 COMMENTS · Link

Campaign Ad: 'Maverick Maverick Maverick!'

The ad agency Goodby, Silverstein and Partners has created some inventive fake campaign ads for the presidential campaign. This one's good enough to be a real ad for Obama.

Two more over-the-top ads from the agency can be found on Stunningly Bad.Com.

I've thought for a while that the world needs an ad agency that specializes in creating attack ads for subjects outside of politics. Our most sarcastic voiceover actors shouldn't be put on a shelf for three out of every four years. If Madison Avenue can sell the most powerful job in the free world by employing sneering contempt for rivals, there's no reason the same technique can't be an effective way to sell things like erectile dysfunction medicine, soft drinks and public-service campaigns.

Politics · 2008/10/07 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Review: 'Indignation' by Philip Roth

Philip Roth's Indignation describes the short unhappy life of Marcus Messner, a college student in the early '50s who is paranoid about getting kicked out of school and drafted to serve in the Korean War, in spite of the fact that his grades are so strong he could become valedictorian. Messner, the dutiful son of a kosher butcher in Newark, transfers from a local school to Winesburg College in Ohio, trying to escape an overprotective father who has become overwhelmed by fear that his son will die.

Messner's a mess, a bundle of unexpressed antisocial rage who can't get along with his roommates, rejects numerous invitations to socialize with classmates and can't seem to take joy from anything -- not even his first sexual relationship, which falls into his lap in a classmate's 1940 LaSalle Touring Sedan.

I've never read Roth before, but the way he writes sex in Indignation reminded me of the 40-Year-Old Virgin bluffing his way through a discussion of sexual conquest among male friends by talking about "bags of sand."

Sex figures heavily into Messner's story -- excruciatingly bad sex, both in execution and description. Anyone suffering from "prolonged excitation" can cure the problem by reading the sex scenes in this book.

Indignation picks up when it covers the rest of Messner's life, where his Bertrand Russell-inspired atheism causes him to rebel against the requirement that all Winesburg students attend chapel. A prolonged argument between Messner and the Dean of Men -- where Messner schools the dean on Russell's famous 1927 lecture "Why I Am Not a Christian" -- drives the remainder of the book towards a conclusion you know will be tragic for the student. I found the setting of Winesburg, which Roth copped from Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, a pleasant reminder of the way a college can be a world unto itself.

Unfortunately, just when you think the story's going somewhere, the small-page, big-font, 233-page book abruptly ends. Roth constructs a plot device in which he can stop Messner's story at any time, and he does, cutting it off before the crisis that leads Messner to leave school. He never justifies how the young man, who believes that leaving college means certain doom in Korea, throws away his academic career. He never shows you how Messner's father reacts to the thing he most feared, the notion that in life, "the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences."

Instead, you get a seven-page wrap up zooming through all the events you missed because the book ended too soon. Talk about indignation.

Books · 2008/10/06 · Comment · Link

Rich Lowry: 'I Think She Just Winked at Me'

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review for the past 11 years, posted this comment on The Corner about Sarah Palin's performance in the vice presidential debate:

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.

It isn't every day you see a 40-year-old man react to a political candidate like a tween at a Jonas Brothers concert. Lowry's other comment on the debate was to declare that Piper Palin was the night's "other big winner" because she's adorable.

Does anyone else find it disturbing that one of the conservative opinion leaders in this country believes that people on TV are communicating directly with him?

Politics · Television · 2008/10/04 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

Scoring the Biden/Palin Debate

The summer before third grade, I became the oldest kid on my block to ride my bike with training wheels, a subject of increasing ridicule among my peers in Garland, Texas. My dad, attempting to solve the problem as dads are prone to do, decided the best solution was to take off the training wheels and push me down our steep driveway on my bike. Instinct would kick in. I would navigate the incline with increasing confidence, execute a deft 90 degree turn down the alley and ride through the neighborhood, removing the stain from my reputation.

Instinct did not kick in. Arms locked in terror, I was propelled straight down the driveway, across the alley and into a field, where I was separated from my bike by a utility pole's guy wire.

Sarah Palin was pushed down the driveway without training wheels Thursday night, and she did not hit a guy wire. Her performance sufficiently proved that she is not the slack-jawed bumpkin she seemed to be in the Katie Couric interview, frozen in fear at such simple questions as "What newspapers do you read?" and "What Supreme Court cases do you disagree with?" If the goal was to avoid cringe-inducing blunders and reduce calls for her removal from the ticket by right-wing critics, mission accomplished.

But if the goal of the vice presidential debate was to help your running mate win the presidency, Joe Biden did considerably more to meet that objective. All night long, as Palin kept steering questions back to her talking points and laying on the corn pone charm, Biden was engaged in a substantive debate at a crisis point in our history. As Palin ran down a checklist of objectives on her note cards -- ask to call him Joe, check! use "say it ain't so, Joe" attack line, check! -- Biden smiled past her dumber remarks to avoid the trap of looking like a bully and launched into a serious critique of the voting record and policy goals of John McCain, both of which are sharply out of sync with public opinion. Biden didn't even point out that Palin botched the name of the U.S. military officer in charge of Afghanistan, twice calling Army Gen. David McKiernan "McLellan." It was as if they were speaking at two different events airing in split-screen.

I think this was clearly the right approach for Biden, who can speak convincingly to the "kitchen table" concerns of the American public as a senator from a working-class background who never enriched himself in public office, unlike many other Democrats and Republicans of his generation. Palin didn't have a good answer on the economy aside from saying over and over that Democrats will raise your taxes and kill your jobs, a warning that probably works better on the Americans who still have jobs. She amusingly said at one point that "it's a toxic mess, really, on Main Street that's affecting Wall Street," a malaprop that accurately describes the Republican concern for protecting Wall Street with decades of deregulation.

There are times when charisma and pluck are enough to propel a politician into national office, and Palin has both in abundance, but I do not believe this is one of those times. Biden's a reassuring presence in this election, the quintessential steady hand who bolsters Barack Obama's claim to be ready to lead the nation. Biden conveys as strong a command of foreign policy as any Democratic politician in my lifetime.

I think one of the key points of the debate was the exchange on how to deal with the presence of Al Qaeda in Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan, an issue in which Obama's willingness to hit them with air strikes has been long ridiculed by McCain as a sign of his inexperience. McCain and Palin both continue to pursue this line of attack, even as the U.S. conducts air strikes in Pakistan.

Last night, Biden said this about the threat:

John continues to tell us that the central war in the front on terror is in Iraq. I promise you, if an attack comes in the homeland, it's going to come as our security services have said, it is going to come from Al Qaeda planning in the hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's where they live. That's where they are. That's where it will come from. ... that's where bin Laden lives and we will go at him if we have actionable intelligence.

Palin, echoing McCain in the first debate, ignored the threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan and went back to justifying the Iraq War, our $10 billion-a-month boondoggle that overstretches our military, drains our budget and will never end in a McCain administration:

... as for who coined that central war on terror being in Iraq, it was the General Petraeus and al Qaeda, both leaders there and it's probably the only thing that they're ever going to agree on, but that it was a central war on terror is in Iraq. You don't have to believe me or John McCain on that. I would believe Petraeus and the leader of Al Qaeda.

In the first two debates, McCain and Palin have both vouched for Osama Bin Laden's judgment on where the U.S. should be directing its military response to the war on terror, giving the architect of 9/11 his props. If Bin Laden had a debate watching party at his cave, you have to think that this shout-out prompted culturally appropriate high-fives and "you the mans!"

As folksy as she is, Sarah Palin should be familiar with the expression "Br'er Fox, please don't throw me into the briar patch."

Credit: The photo of a winning Palin Bingo card was taken by Dan Perry and is available under a Creative Commons license.

Politics · 2008/10/03 · 63 COMMENTS · Link

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