The Indisputable Truth

From Huff Post:

Now more of a movie icon than Washington power broker, former Rep. Charlie Wilson still maintains a key interest in all things political. And when it came time for him to vote in the Texas primary, the longtime Democrat and inspiration for the film, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” sided with the candidate he thought could best secure the White House.

“I voted for Barack Obama,” Wilson told The Huffington Post. “The main thing was that he just didn’t draw the immediate ferocious opposition that Hillary does, although I personally like her very much. But I just voted for who I thought could win. Is that a bad thing?”

Indeed, for Wilson, the primary focus is not necessarily the policy differences between the Democratic candidates, but the ability of either of them to win. That’s because, when it comes to the next president, the former congressman sees a myriad of international crises that President Bush created and that a Democrat must fix.

“I can’t think of any capacity where [the Bush administration] hasn’t erred as far as foreign affairs and diplomacy is concerned,” said Wilson. “This idea that the neocons have that you go in and conquer the Arab countries that have somehow offended you, and all of the sudden the world is wonderful, is just the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard really.”

Wilson’s take on the matter is certainly well founded. His work in Congress, to secretly fund covert operations in Afghanistan, helped contribute to the downfall of the Soviet Union, while his shot-down effort to get post-conflict aide for the war stricken country remains a disappointment.

And when it comes to surveying the current landscape, Wilson, despite being friendly with Sen. John McCain, expressed grave concerns with the Arizona Republican’s approach to Iraq.

“It is very hard, with the exception of Germany and Japan, which is a completely different situation,” he said. “I never heard of democracies being created at the barrel of the gun. People have got to want democracy. Perhaps the Germans and the Japanese, with their experiences with the harsh dictatorships they had, perhaps they wanted something else. But the Arabs, from my experience, is that they don’t. My experience is that they prefer authoritarian governments.”

It is, in a way, a difficult line for Wilson to take. One of the closing themes of his book and movie is that the United States had a moral obligation to rebuild Afghanistan after the Soviets left. And even Wilson admits there are parallels between that time period and the current U.S. involvement in the Middle East.

“We have a history of doing miraculous things and then having a very short attention span. And that is what happened [with the post-9/11 invasion of] Afghanistan,” said the Texas Democrat. “It is a little bit of a stretch but it will also be interesting to see what happens in Iraq, in far as helping them rebuild their country, which we have personally destroyed. The Russians destroyed Afghanistan and we destroyed Iraq. I hope we at least try in Iraq, I hope we pull out in next year. But I hope we at least try to do the proper reconstruction there to give them a better hope… I think we need to have a certain military presence, but we don’t need 160,000 soldiers to do it. I would like to see those resources put back into Afghanistan where the real terrorists were and are. And I think that if we had the type of military presence we had there before we took our eye off, I think we would have had bin Laden by now.”

In order for these shifts to occur, Wilson argues, there must first be a broader refocusing of U.S. foreign policy. It begins, he theorizes, by having a Democrat retake the White House, followed by a renewed emphasis to the type of political bipartisanship and collaboration that allowed him to secure covert ops aid for Afghanistan. Ultimately, however, it requires America to “pull in its horns a little bit in order to rebuild its influence” within the international community.

Obama, he believes, is best suited for the task. But would Wilson like to be back in Washington to help? Not really.

“I miss my friends but I don’t really miss being in Congress,” he said. “I was there 24 years and as you know I had an active life there. And I won my war, so that’s about all you can do. If you win your war and get a book published and get a good movie out of it, you’ve done about all you can do.”

It was a well fought Primary in Pennsylvania and after months of waiting we finally have a verdict.

Now it’s time to look forward to North Carolina and Indiana.

It’s time for us Obama supporters to try to mend these wounds, let’s stop attacking

Clinton, and fight out this primary by encouraging to vote with their opinions, not
trying to bring up each other’s negatives and blunders.

From Huff Post-

The furor over ABC’s Democratic debate last week was not universally shared.

While Obama supporters (and many media critics) decried what they saw as biased, gotcha-style questioning, a vocal minority (mostly Clinton supporters) was unmoved. Where was the media outrage when Hillary was being grilled in past debates? She got it “much much tougher” than Obama did from ABC, Clinton spokesman Jay Carson charged.

This debate over debates had me curious. Was ABC’s debate really in a lowly class of its own? Or were Obama backers (inside the press and out) just being overly-sensitive? So I went through each of the four one-on-one contests between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, starting with CNN’s debate way back on January 31, and cataloged every question, classifying them as follows:

Policy and expertise: In this category, I put any questions about a candidate’s policy preferences or legislative record, as well as questions about a candidate’s experience (”Neither one of you have ever run a business, so why should either of you be elected to be CEO of the country?”).

Non-policy questions: Questions focused on politics, including electability and the role of superdelegates, as well as those about campaign management, such as releasing tax records or accepting public financing.

Scandal questions: Questions about hot-button, non-policy issues like Jeremiah Wright or Clinton’s Bosnia trip. (Note: this category does not include follow-up questions on these issues given to the opposing candidate; ie. Clinton being asked about Wright, or Obama being asked about Bosnia.)

This is obviously not a scientific process. I did not factor in the tone of the policy questions, which were often framed as critiques of the candidates and their views (although I found relative parity between Clinton and Obama in this respect). Moreover, for the purposes of this analysis, I’m not taking a position on whether any of the scandal questions were fair or legitimate lines of inquiry.

That said, I found the results of applying this method surprising. Here are the notable takeaways:

1) ABC’s debate was in a class of its own, with more scandal and non-policy questions than any other. ABC asked the most scandal questions, and both ABC and NBC devoted only half of their questions to policy issues. The CNN debates were dramatically more policy-focused. Here’s a breakdown:

Policy     Non-Policy    Scandal
CNN (1/31)    31         3              1
CNN (2/21)    23         5              2
NBC               24        17              5
ABC               32         14             13

2) Barack Obama has received the overwhelming majority of scandal questions over the course of the four debates, by a margin of 17 to 4. Obama has fielded questions about his “bitter” remarks, his connections to 60s-era radical William Ayres, two questions about flag lapels, two questions about his alleged plagiarism of speeches, three questions on Louis Farrakhan, and eight about Jeremiah Wright.

Clinton has received only four such questions — two about her Bosnia trip, one about a photo of Obama in African garb that was linked to her campaign without evidence by the Drudge Report, and one over-the-top inquiry about Bill Clinton (”If your campaign can’t control the former president now, what will it be like when you’re in the White House?”).

3) Networks ‘balanced’ scandal questions to Obama by repeatedly asking Clinton about Obama’s electability/readiness. In three of the four debates, moderators followed scandal questions to Obama by asking Clinton whether she doubts Obama’s electability or experience.

CNN (2/21): “Are you saying that your opponent is all hat and no cattle? … Are you saying that Senator Obama is not ready and not qualified to be commander in chief?”

NBC: “Is your contention in this latest speech that America would somehow be taking a chance on Senator Obama as commander-in-chief?”

ABC: “[A] simple yes-or-no question: Do you think Senator Obama can beat John McCain or not?”

Of course, such questions are politically sensitive for Clinton; however they are hardly comparable in degree to scandal questions Obama received. In each case, they essentially provided Clinton an opportunity to expound on why she believes she is better suited to be the Democratic nominee.

4) The debate famously mocked by Saturday Night Live was actually very favorable to Clinton. In the SNL rendition, CNN’s February debate was a mix of aggressive, biting questions to Hillary Clinton and softballs to Barack Obama. In fact, the candidates received identical or virtually identical questions about Cuba policy, immigration, bilingualism, the economy, Iraq, and earmarks. On the other hand, Obama was called out on an apparent shift over Cuba (”[T]hat’s different from your position back in 2003. You called U.S. policy toward Cuba a miserable failure, and you supported normalizing relations. So you’ve backtracked now…”), Clinton was offered multiple questions on Obama’s readiness to be commander-in-chief, and Obama was pressed to explain the plagiarism allegations.

Clinton actually had it much rougher at CNN’s earlier one-on-one debate in Hollywood. That was the only debate of the four where Clinton was asked a scandal question while Obama was not. Moreover, Clinton faced three questions on her initial support for the Iraq war (”Why can’t you just say right now that that vote was a mistake?”), one question about Sen. Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama, and another on the perception of a Bush-Clinton dynasty (”How can you be an agent of change when we have had the same two families in the White House for the last 30 years?”).

After a commercial break, Joe prefaced his rebuttal to Rachel’s point by saying “I don’t engage in Crossfire-type debates and certainly I don’t want to talk about what people do in bathrooms.” When he finished speaking, and after David Gregory had shut Joe vs. Rachel down, John Harrow came on camera. Then, viewers can hear Joe taking off his microphone (2:47 into the below video). When the panel picture came back, no Joe.

Watch Rachel and Joe make their points, hear Joe unplug, and then (after a jump) see the panel after Joe has gone:

Video will be up soon

Update from MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines

“Joe didn’t walk off. He chose not to participate in the final couple of minutes of the discussion because he felt the conversation didn’t fit his role as a political analyst.”

I love this kind of citizen v. establishment occasions. It truly shows that we have a voice.

Dear MoveOn member,

If you missed the Democratic presidential debate on ABC last night, Editor & Publisher called it “perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years.”1 (Click below to see video excerpts.)

Moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson spent the first 50 minutes obsessed with distractions that only political insiders care about—verbal gaffes, polling numbers, the stale Rev. Wright story, and the old-news Bosnia story. And, channeling Karl Rove, they directed a video question to Barack Obama asking if he loves the American flag or not. Seriously.

Enough is enough. The public needs the media to stop hurting the national dialogue in this important election year. Can you sign the petition to ABC and other media outlets and pass it on to friends who are also fed up? Click here for our must-see video with excerpts from last night—and to sign the petition:

http://pol.moveon.org/enoughdistractions/?id=12458-9097508-9zI.GL&t=4

The petition says: “Debate moderators abuse the public trust every time they ask trivial questions about gaffes and ‘gotchas’ that only political insiders care about. Enough with the distractions—ABC and other networks must focus on issues that affect people’s daily lives.”

We’ll deliver petition signatures to ABC and the networks hosting future debates. And if we reach 100,000 signatures, we’ll reprint the petition in an ad campaign targeting the networks on this issue.

ABC’s natural inclination will be to ignore their critics, so we need to go above and beyond to show them that the public is truly outraged. So, please, think about some friends who may be fed up with 2008 media coverage and forward them this email. If thousands of us do that, it’ll make a huge difference.

The reaction to last night’s debate has been very consistent:

“A stinker, an absolute car crash—thanks to the host network ABC…[It] ran the gamut from banal to inane. At the end of the debate members of the crowd appeared to be booing moderator Charlie Gibson.”—The Guardian’s Richard Adams2

“Halfway through the debate, not a single question on any policy issue had been asked.”—OpenLeft.com’s Chris Bowers3

“For the first 52 minutes…Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with.”—Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales.4

“We’ve revisited bitter. We’ve gone back to Bosnia. We’ve dragged Rev. Wright back up onto the podium. We’ve mis-spent this debate by allowing Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos to ask questions that skirt what in my mind is what we need to know now.”—Philadelphia Inquirer’s Daniel Rubin5

Shame on ABC for letting voters down with last night’s abysmal debate. Bad debates aren’t just painful to watch—they actually hurt the country by distracting voters and politicians away from big issues of the day.

Please send a message to ABC and other media outlets that we need our national dialogue to focus on the real issues facing Americans. Click here to sign the petition:

http://pol.moveon.org/enoughdistractions/?id=12458-9097508-9zI.GL&t=5

Thanks for all you do.

–Adam G., Patrick, Anna, Peter, Justin, and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

Sources:

1. “Clinton-Obama Debate: ABC Decides Top Issues Facing Americans Are Gaffes, Flag Pins and ’60s Radicals,” Editor & Publisher, April 16, 2008

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3580&id=12458-9097508-9zI.GL&t=6

2. “Worst. Debate. Ever.” The Guardian blog, April 16, 2008

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3582&id=12458-9097508-9zI.GL&t=7

3. “Philadelphia Debate Thread,” Chris Bowers, OpenLeft.com, April 16, 2008

http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=5195

4. “In Pa. Debate, The Clear Loser Is ABC,” Washington Post, April 17, 2008

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3581&id=12458-9097508-9zI.GL&t=8

5. “The Debate Debacle,” The Philadelphia Inquirer blog, April 16, 2008

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3583&id=12458-9097508-9zI.GL&t=9

Support our member-driven organization: MoveOn.org Political Action is entirely funded by our 3.2 million members. We have no corporate contributors, no foundation grants, no money from unions. Our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. If you’d like to support our work, you can give now at:

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Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

From the Courage Campaign:

Did you watch ABC’s prime-time character assassination of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton?

Americans are still shaking their heads in disbelief at what they witnessed, sarcastically speculating whether ABC News decided to launch an early roll-out of the Republican “swift boat” campaign.

Our friends at MoveOn produced a short YouTube video on Wednesday’s travesty (watch it here) and described the most unbelievable moment:

“Moderators George Stephanopolous and Charlie Gibson spent the first 50 minutes obsessed with distractions that only political insiders care about–gaffes, polling numbers, the stale Rev. Wright story, and the old-news Bosnia story. And, channeling Karl Rove, directed a video question to Barack Obama asking if he loves the American flag or not. Seriously.”

It’s worse than that — the video question specifically asked Obama about his thoughtful reluctance to wear an American flag-pin lapel. Apparently, wearing a flag pin is a legitimate symbolic proxy for whether or not a person is patriotic enough to be President. Questions about global warming, the economy, and the war? Mere trivialities in ABC’s bizarro world.

Please join us at ABC/Disney’s headquarters in Burbank from 4-7 p.m on FRIDAY to protest and pass out flag pins to ABC/Disney employees leaving their Disney corporate office.

Your mission: Ask ABC/Disney employees whether they can pass their own flag-pin litmus test: “Are you patriotic enough to wear a flag-pin?” We need to know how many people are coming, so watch MoveOn’s video video on the travesty and please RSVP below.

At 4 p.m. please join the Courage Campaign and your fellow activists at ABC’s Disney Studios in Burbank in front of the West Alameda Gate, between S. Buena Vista and Keystone Streets (CLICK HERE FOR A MAP). We’re going to protest ABC’s debate disaster and pass out flag pins to their employees until about 7 p.m.

We’ve got the flag pins. Now, we just need you.

From Huff Post:

By David Coleman,

Last Sunday evening I attended the San Francisco fundraiser that has been the center of recent political jousting. The next day, when asked about the talk Obama delivered, I too commented about his answer to a question he was asked about Pennsylvania. Over the past week, though, I have had a Rashomon-like experience concerning those remarks.

Clinton, McCain, and media pundits have parsed a blogger’s audio tape of Obama’s remarks and criticized a sentence or two characterizing some parts of Pennsylvania and the attitudes of some Pennsylvanians. In context and in person, Senator Obama’s remarks about Pennsylvania voters left an impression diametrically opposed to that being trumpeted by his competitor’s campaigns.

At the end of Obama’s remarks standing between two rooms of guests — the fourth appearance in California after traveling earlier in the day from Montana — a questioner asked, “some of us are going to Pennsylvania to campaign for you. What should we be telling the voters we encounter?”

Obama’s response to the questioner was that there are many, many different sections in Pennsylvania comprised of a range of racial, geographic, class, and economic groupings from Appalachia to Philadelphia. So there was not one thing to say to such diverse constituencies in Pennsylvania. But having said that, Obama went on say that his campaign staff in Pennsylvania could provide the questioner (an imminent Pennsylvania volunteer) with all the talking points he needed. But Obama cautioned that such talking points were really not what should be stressed with Pennsylvania voters.

Instead he urged the volunteer to tell Pennsylvania voters he encountered that Obama’s campaign is about something more than programs and talking points. It was at this point that Obama began to talk about addressing the bitter feelings that many in some rural communities in Pennsylvania have about being brushed aside in the wake of the global economy. Senator Obama appeared to theorize, perhaps improvidently given the coverage this week, that some of the people in those communities take refuge in political concerns about guns, religion and immigration. But what has not so far been reported is that those statements preceded and were joined with additional observations that black youth in urban areas are told they are no longer “relevant” in the global economy and, feeling marginalized, they engage in destructive behavior. Unlike the week’s commentators who have seized upon the remarks about “bitter feelings” in some depressed communities in Pennsylvania, I gleaned a different meaning from the entire answer.

First, I noted immediately how dismissive his answer had been about “talking points” and ten point programs and how he used the question to urge the future volunteer to put forward a larger message central to his campaign. That pivot, I thought, was remarkable and unique. Rather than his seizing the opportunity to recite stump-worn talking points at that time to the audience — as I believe Senator Clinton, Senator McCain and most other more conventional (or more disciplined) politicians at such an appearance might do — Senator Obama took a different political course in that moment, one that symbolizes important differences about his candidacy.

The response that followed sounded unscripted, in the moment, as if he were really trying to answer a question with intelligent conversation that explained more about what was going on in the Pennsylvania communities than what was germane to his political agenda. I had never heard him or any politician ever give such insightful, analytical responses. The statements were neither didactic nor contrived to convince. They were simply hypotheses (not unlike the kind made by de Tocqueville three centuries ago ) offered by an observer familiar with American communities. And that kind of thoughtfulness was quite unexpected in the middle of a political event. In my view, the way he answered the question was more important than the sociological accuracy or the cause and effect hypotheses contained in the answer. It was a moment of authenticity demonstrating informed intelligence, and the speaker’s desire to have the audience join him in a deeper understanding of American politics.

There has been little or no reaction to the part of the answer that was addressed to the hopelessness of inner city youth who have been rendered “irrelevant” to the global economy. No one has seized upon those words as “talking down” to the inner city youth whose plight he was addressing. If extracted from an audio tape HuffPost Blogger Fowler, those remarks could (and may yet) be taken out of context as “Obama excuses alienation and violence by urban youth.” But in context, Senator Obama’s response sounded like empathetic conclusions and opinions of a keen observer: more like Margaret Mead than Machiavelli.

As the week’s firestorm evolved over these remarks at which I was an accidental observer, I have reflected upon the regrettable irony that has emerged from Senator Obama’s response to a friendly question: no good effort at intelligent analysis, candor — and what I heard as an attempt to convey a profound understanding of both what people feel and why they feel it - goes unpunished. Such insights by a political candidate might otherwise be valued. In a national campaign subject to opposition research, his analytical musing has instead created an immense amount of political flak.

Now and “in this time,” to invoke one of the candidate’s favorite riffs, such observations and remarks shared among supporters are just a push of a record button on a tape recorder away from being spread across the internet to be dissected by political nabobs. What struck me immediately after the fundraiser as so refreshing turned out to be a moment Senator Obama is forced to regret. Today we marvel at de Tocqueville insights about American communities. Apparently, such commentary is valued as long as it is three centuries old and doesn’t come from the mouth of a contemporary observer who might be elected president.

So much for the political ironies. But there is one more personal observation that was missed.

I happened to be on the balcony when Senator Obama’s vehicles arrived and he emerged from the Secret Service SUV. Obama shouted the friendly greeting “How are you guys up there doing?” to the group of us looking down from the balcony and then said, “You have to excuse me, I need to call my kids in Chicago now.” All of us stood and watched the leading candidate for the Democratic party nomination for president have a short conversation with his kids before he entered a fundraiser to make his remarks.

No tape of that conversation has emerged as yet. Who knows how casual remarks of a father to his children or his wife on a cell phone could be spun to support the argument that as a father speaking to his kids two time zones away before they go to bed, his comments sounded as if he “looked down” upon them. Given his relative height and the age of his kids, he probably does. But that would be precisely as relevant to his capacity to unite and lead this country as were the remarks at the fundraiser that have been so deconstructed over this past week.