Obama/Biden 2008

"U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has chosen veteran Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, a leading voice on international affairs, as his vice presidential running mate, his campaign said on Saturday.

Biden, 65, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is one of the most knowledgeable Democratic experts on foreign policy -- an area where Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, has been criticized as inexperienced."


http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2ad91f28-70d3-11dd-b514-0000779fd18c.html

 

For McCain, there couldn't be better news; Biden is an arrogant, pompous windbag who can't help but to talk down to people.

NOT a good choice for Obama, IMO.

 

Biden was born in 1942 and Obama was born in 1961. Hence we have a 47-year-old presidential candidate running with a 66-year-old vice-presidential candidate. Does anybody see anything wrong with this picture?

 

With his vp pick, "Change you can believe in" and talks of Washington politics become mute. The new age energetic campaign that he ran in the primaries has fizzled. If he really wanted to get the campaign going, an Obama/Clinton ticked would have created some bang.

I understand that he picked biden, an old school politician, to counter the claims of inexperience. In doing that, his primary campaign talking points and slogans went "down the tubes" ( as George Carlin would say ). Now he disappointed a lot of women voters, college students, and gays ( I don't mean this to be derogatory ) who were rooting for Clinton. Will their minds change ( flip flop ) and vote for Mccain? This is what I sense from the blogoshere.

Mccain/Rice? Some in the blogoshere are actually in favor of those two teaming up.

 

I can see many Clintonians voting for McCain out of spite, or just staying home on election day.

I predict McCain/Romney. That will bring many conservatives back on board, and Romney's biggest strength (economy) is McCain's weakest. The fact that Mitt looks like Dream Date Ken and has a Leave it to Beaver family certainly doesn't hurt, either.

 

Not that it means much, because these people change their minds so often, but Rice already stated she has no desire to be on the ticket, and simply wants to return to her formal role in education.

-Matt

 

Yeah. I would have preferred to see an Obama-Powell ticket. The combination would have lit a fire under the American populace and truly signaled a change in politics as usual. Obviously, my opinion is worth less than a plug nickel.

 

Yea, she informed the public of her desire to return to education. I think she wants to leave the white house and have a lower profile in a career that will be a lot less stressful for her. I wonder if Jindal is looking ahead to 2012 for a VP spot or the top job. Jindal has stated his intention to remain as governor of Louisiana. His position as governor will add to his resume if he decides to campaign in 2012.

 

Agreed (on the Obama-Powell ticket )

 

I live in a 55+ community - I hear that many residents, who believed Obama might be too inexperienced, are now relieved to hear Obama has an experienced mentor. Reportedly the "AARP set" vote in larger numbers than younger voters.

I don't know of any residents, friends, or acquaintances (repub, demo, or non-afilliated) who are happy with either of the presidential candidate choices.

 

Curious. I don’t normally offer comment on this subject but what the hoo. I'm compelled to write after listening to some of the afternoon b-team pundits at the Convention. Few, it seems, would know a political reality if one jumped up and bit the in the A$$.

Among women of a certain age that I know (most of whom, like me, are political junkies and activists – though not necessarily on the same side), there is a suspicion tending to palpable dislike of Obama, and a near visceral hatred directed at elements of the MSM. They are personally offended by the treatment of the Clintons, much more so any of the men. These are members of Hillary Clinton's constituency of course. Talking to them at length, before the primary season, over the primary season, and on up until last night, their enduring enmity seems to have been fueled by:

1. The perceived misogynistic message of the Obama campaign channeled by its surrogates in the press and designed to humiliate Clinton, particularly in the period directly after Iowa to just before New Hampshire.

2. The perceived slandering/libeling of Bill Clinton as a racist, by the Obama campaign with the complicity of the MSM, and the congressional black caucus, beginning pre the South Carolina primary.

3. That Saturday meeting of the rules committee of the DNC where full voting representation for the Florida and Michigan delegates was denied. They saw this as the party bosses putting their thumb on the scale to ensure an unassailable lead for Obama in the delegate count. It would be hard to understate their fury at this "carve-up" (as they saw it).

4. The post primaries dissing of Hillary Clinton by Obama himself with respect to showing her consideration and respect, and separately, never seriously considering her for the VP slot.

5. Michelle Obama. They really do not like her, at all.


Note that the alleged threat to Roe v Wade by McCain-presidency SCOTUS nominees, does not phase them. They don’t buy it given the near certain domination of the Senate by the Dems post the general. (no one right-radical could get confirmed). Their other not entirely flippant reason is that they are post menopausal – so why should they care.

Drilling. Perhaps, counter intuitively, they are generally in favor of it.

My sense of it is that few of them will, in the end vote for McCain, but some will write-in Hillary, and a greater number will abstain . The remainder will hold their noses and vote for Obama. At the moment the total net loss to the Democratic vote in the fall, among this cohort, looks like being 65%. The net loss of democrats actually shifting TO McCain is likely to be about 15% .

Again, these are politically savvy, motivated, women. Precisely none indicated they’d changed their mind because of Hillary’s speech, on Tuesday, or Bill’s last night, by the way.

 

I agree with just about everything that Lawrie wrote. (!!!Eeek!)

My own unscientific impression is that the media are starting to alienate people with Obama-overkill. Every time we pick up the paper or turn on the tv, there's Obama Obama Obama! The coverage is so fawning and so uncritical, that it's starting to create a subtle messianic impression. Obama as a demigod, larger than life. And that in turn only makes him seem less connected with blue-collar America and with the working women who favored Hillary.

It doesn't really help a candidate named "Barack Hussein Obama", an Ivy Leaguer who doesn't the least bit resemble the swing-voters that he's trying to attract. He needs to connect with them and show that he understands them and shares their concerns. He can't seem haughty, elite and disdainful of them. Expect the McCain campaign to exploit that impression (albeit very very carefully) by making Obama out to be the radical candidate of the university campuses and the big-city celebrity elites.

Obama doesn't seem to be getting any bounce from the Democratic convention. It will be interesting to see whether his huge sports-stadium speech with its fake Greek column backdrop (the demigod thing again) helps him or hurts him. And it will be interesting to see what kind of bounce, if any, McCain manages to get from his own VP choice and convention. Maybe nobody's bouncing this year. But then again, there may be a lot of Hillary voters up for grabs. McCain could help himself by choosing a strong female running-mate. (And given his age, she might conceivably succeed to the Presidency.)

Obama's probably going to win, but it's almost in spite of Obama, not because of him. Bush is so unpopular that a generic Democrat could beat a generic Republican by ten points. The country is surging Blue this year, after eight years of Red hubris. Yet Obama and McCain are nevertheless running even in the polls. Obama does energize the Democratic core like nobody really has since John F. Kennedy, but he's not reaching beyond that true-believer core as effectively as he might.

I sense that there's street-level discomfort with Obama, even among Democrats who fully intend to vote for him. But you would never know it from the media who love him with such a burning passion. And ironically that's part of the problem. Many of Hillary's supporters still resent their candidate's having been at the receiving end of it.

 

Jill Biden's Doctorate

The media is saying Joe Biden's wife has a Ph.D. Out of curiosity I looked her up at Proquest. Turns out she has an Ed.D.

"Student retention at the community college: Meeting students' needs
by Jacobs-Biden, Jill Ed.D., Student retention at the community college: Meeting students' needs, University of Delaware, 2007, 136 pages; AAT 3247570"

 

If Bill is talking about his own opinion, then it doesn't have to be scientific. If he's generalizing, then he's right, it's unscientific, and I wonder how he arrives at his conclusion. Is he conducting his own poll?

I agree that the coverage of Obama is a bit over the top, but I think this is partly due to the media, like ants, going where the food is. Let's face it, McCain is boring.

It may be true that lower income, blue collar voters haven't connected with Obama yet. However his platform clearly favors those people. Yes he's Ivy League, but his background does resemble those people. He grew up in a single parent family without a lot of money, and he worked his way up the old fashioned way. He certainly has more in common with the working class folk than that other Ivy Leaguer - George Bush.

If you've been listening to his speeches (and those of Hillary, his wife, and Bill Clinton), his major theme is fighting for the vanishing middle class - universal health care and all the rest.

It's funny, 4 and 8 years ago we had a clear, silver-spooned elitist in George Bush. He has done virtually nothing for the lower and middle classes in 8 years, yet there are still those who would like to have a beer with him. Now we have a guy who came from the low-middle class, has worked hard for everything he has, who clearly proclaims that he is fighting for the middle class, and yet people want to pin the elitist tag on him. I don't get it.

 

You raise good points Tom. To try and pin Obama as an elitist is so ridiculous. He and Michelle just finished paying off their student loans a year or two ago. He was raised by grandparents and a single mother, who was sometimes on food stamps. Elite? Come on.

His speech at the DNC convention hit all these points. He clearly debunked all of the elitist nonsense, and made mincemeat of the celebrity status McCain has tried to pin on him. The funny thing is, the RNC is going to have the Terminator at their convention. They seem to like Hollywood when it suits them. When it involves Dems, it is Hollyweird and elitism. Ok. How do try to take away coverage of a homerun DNC convention? Introduce someone noboby expected. I will be anxious to see how being a Gov of Alaska for less than two years will prepare her for debates on global/foreign affair issues, something Biden is renowned for by Republicans and Dems. Moreover, it comes off a little desperate as well. It kind of says "Ok, you guys are running a black guy and had a woman on your ticket, we have a woman so we are agents of change as well". Not.

I have nothing agains Palin, however, when things settle down and the media begins to look for weaknesses, we will see.

Let the games begin!

Abner

 

If you don't think Hollywood as well as Obama himself consider him a full-blown celebrity, I don't know what to tell you. The mainstream media and the usual list of vapid celebrities (Affleck, Baldwin, etc.) act like giggly schoolgirls when talking about him, and for what? He's an empty suit spouting empty rhetoric.

 

Bruce and I are on the same wave-length today. Obama is riding the wave of a manufactured cult of personality. There is no substance behind his platform except for "change" and he has no record of any substantial legislative accomplishments to point to.

 

We will see.

Abner

 

Here is what I am trying to say. To say he is at the functional level of a celebrity is what McCain is trying to argue. Oh, he is just like Paris Hilton. I don't think so. He graduated on top of his class at Harvard, and taught constitutional law before going to work in the trenches for the common man. Not only did he get into Harvard, he did not check the race box when he did so. Nobody can say he got a free ride because of his race. But back to my response. Celebrity in the sense that McCain is trying to paint him? No. There is an attempt by the McCain camp to paint this Paris Hilton impression, and thus distort perception. Distortion perceptions have been used way to many times in the last two elections a la Karl Rove. The problem with those tactics, they stop working once over used. People see through them eventually. The fear factor is gone as well. Oh well. Release the hounds!



Abner

 

These are some of the issues that concern me about barack obama which is swinging my vote towards Mccain/Palin.

1. They met in 1990. Obama was a student at Harvard Law School and got an unsolicited job offer from Rezko, then a low-income housing developer in Chicago. Obama turned it down.

2. Obama took a job in 1993 with a small Chicago law firm, Davis Miner Barnhill, that represents developers -- primarily not-for-profit groups -- building low-income housing with government funds.

3. One of the firm's not-for-profit clients -- the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., co-founded by Obama's then-boss Allison Davis -- was partners with Rezko's company in a 1995 deal to convert an abandoned nursing home at 61st and Drexel into low-income apartments. Altogether, Obama spent 32 hours on the project, according to the firm. Only five hours of that came after Rezko and WPIC became partners, the firm says. The rest of the future senator's time was helping WPIC strike the deal with Rezko. Rezko's company, Rezmar Corp., also partnered with the firm's clients in four later deals -- none of which involved Obama, according to the firm. In each deal, Rezmar "made the decisions for the joint venture," says William Miceli, an attorney with the firm.

4. In 1995, Obama began campaigning for a seat in the Illinois Senate. Among his earliest supporters: Rezko. Two Rezko companies donated a total of $2,000. Obama was elected in 1996 -- representing a district that included 11 of Rezko's 30 low-income housing projects.

5. Rezko's low-income housing empire began crumbling in 2001, when his company stopped making mortgage payments on the old nursing home that had been converted into apartments. The state foreclosed on the building -- which was in Obama's Illinois Senate district.

6. In 2003, Obama announced he was running for the U.S. Senate, and Rezko -- a member of his campaign finance committee -- held a lavish fund-raiser June 27, 2003, at his Wilmette mansion.

7. A few months after Obama became a U.S. senator, he and Rezko's wife, Rita, bought adjacent pieces of property from a doctor in Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood -- a deal that has dogged Obama the last two years. The doctor sold the mansion to Obama for $1.65 million -- $300,000 below the asking price. Rezko's wife paid full price -- $625,000 -- for the adjacent vacant lot. The deals closed in June 2005. Six months later, Obama paid Rezko's wife $104,500 for a strip of her land, so he could have a bigger yard. At the time, it had been widely reported that Tony Rezko was under federal investigation. Questioned later about the timing of the Rezko deal, Obama called it "boneheaded" because people might think the Rezkos had done him a favor.

8. Eight months later -- in October 2006 -- Rezko was indicted on charges he solicited kickbacks from companies seeking state pension business under his friend Gov. Blagojevich. Federal prosecutors maintain that $10,000 from the alleged kickback scheme was donated to Obama's run for the U.S. Senate.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/watchdogs/757340,CST-NWS-watchdog24.article

The Obama campaign, as of late March 2007, has accepted $159,800 from executives and employees of Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear power plant operator.

The Illinois-based company also helped Obama’s 2004 senatorial campaign. As Ken Silverstein reported in the November 2006 issue of Harper’s, “[Exelon] is Obama’s fourth largest patron, having donated a total of $74,350 to his campaigns. During debate on the 2005 energy bill, Obama helped to vote down an amendment that would have killed vast loan guarantees for power-plant operators to develop new energy projects … the public will not only pay millions of dollars in loan costs but will risk losing billions of dollars if the companies default.”

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/07/barack-obamas-nuclear-ambitions/

Sheep in wolves clothing. It is quite possible.

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You are correct abner. The fear strategy does not work on Obama anymore. The public has been desensitized and any attempt to reinitialize fear is quickly squashed. Recently, a republican organization printed fake $3 bills of obama dressed as a muslim.

"The head of the Snohomish County Republican Party apologized Tuesday after the organization's booth at the Evergreen State Fair in Monroe sold "$3 bills" depicting Barack Obama wearing Arab headgear and featuring a camel."

"The $3 bills, which are sold on a conservative Web site, feature signatures from "Teddy Kennedy" as chief socialism adviser and Al Sharpton as new spiritual adviser. Obama's face, in the traditional Arab headgear, is pictured above the words "Da man."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008140846_fair27m0.html

If the mccain camp wants to go after obama, they have to use palin's experience as governor, middle class family background, her gender, and youthful vigor. So far, it is working well. Instead of repeating the same talking points over and over again, obama should talk about his experience in the senate and talk about how the issues he has worked on will benefit his target market.

Committee Membership

Barack Obama could promote his involvement in the following committees:

- Member, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
Chairman, Subcommittee on European Affairs
Member, Subcommittee on African Affairs
Member, Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs
Member, Subcommittee on International Development and Foreign
Assistance, Economic Affairs and International Environmental Protection
- Member, Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
Member, Subcommittee on Children and Families
Member, Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety
- Member, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs
Member, Subcommittee on Ad Hoc Subcommittee on State, Local, and
Private Sector Preparedness and Integration
Member, Subcommittee on Investigations
Member, Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government
Information, Federal Services, and International Security
- Member, Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs

"Barack Obama has sponsored 136 bills since Jan 4, 2005, of which 122 haven't made it out of committee and 2 were successfully enacted. Obama has co-sponsored 647 bills during the same time period. From 2005-2006, I counted a total of 152 Bills according to http://thomas.loc.gov. From 2007-2008, he sponsored a total of 129 bills according to the library of congress.

Some of Obama's most recently sponsored bills include...

S. 2030: A bill to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 that require reporting relating to bundled contributions made by persons other than registered lobbyists.
S. 2111: Positive Behavior for Effective Schools Act
S. 2066: Back to School: Improving Standards for Nutrition and Physical Education in Schools Act of 2007
S.Con.Res. 46: A concurrent resolution supporting the goals and ideals of Sickle Cell Disease Awareness Month.
S. 2044: Independent Contractor Proper Classification Act of 2007

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/person.xpd?id=400629