• 
• • Michael Tomasky
  • The Guardian,
  • Monday October 20 2008
  • Article history

A year or two ago, if you'd told me that Barack Obama would be leading John McCain by a seemingly comfortable margin with two weeks to go and asked me what, in their desperation, the Republicans would be talking about to try and scare my fellow Americans into voting against him, I'd have said race. After all, Republicans have race-baited in one form or other in most of our presidential contests since Richard Nixon's time, so it would have seemed impossible to me that they'd miss the chance to do so at a time when Democrats had actually gone to the trouble of nominating an African-American candidate.

It's true that we're hearing racial-code talk here and there. But the main fear tactic being employed now is something else. It's that Obama and his associates - and for that matter his supporters and even the regions of the country that he's destined to carry - are anti-American.'
Last Friday, in North Carolina, Sarah Palin told a rally that she was proud to be "with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation". She means here of course that there are anti-American areas of America, and they are where the liberals live, and the people there are voting for Mr Anti-America.

This was especially interesting coming from a woman whose husband, Todd Palin, was until just six years ago an enrolled member of a rightwing fringe political party that wanted the state of Alaska to secede from the US. But if you understand rightwing logic, then you'd know that Mr Palin had no choice but to join the Alaska Independence party in 1995, because by that time the America he thought he knew and loved had been brought to ruin by the liberals and socialists and America-haters. See?

Likewise, earlier this month, Joe McCain, the brother of John, said that Alexandria and Arlington, the two major cities in the northern Virginia suburbs that lie just across the Potomac River from Washington, were "communist country" as far as he was concerned. His brother lives in Arlington when in the nation's capital for work, and his brother's campaign is headquartered there as well, but never mind. A McCain spokeswoman offered a wan apology at the time, but lo and behold, just last Saturday a different McCain spokes-woman said on television that while Obama would perform well in northern Virginia, "the rest of the state - real Virginia if you will - I think will be very responsive to Senator McCain's message". This did not seem a planned one-liner. The spokeswoman made the fatal error of saying what she actually thinks. Republican Virginia equals real Virginia. Democratic Virginia is alien and impure.

Do you folks do this sort of thing in Britain? I know there's something about the chap on the Clapham omnibus who's supposed to represent some kind of middling everyman. And I know you've got your xenophobes just like we do. But trust me. You don't have a right wing that's anything like our right wing.

This point was proved most dramatically by a woman named Michele Bachmann, a member of Congress from Minnesota. In an interview last Friday on Hardball, a leading US cable talk show, host Chris Matthews asked Bachmann whether Obama worried her. "Absolutely. I'm very concerned that he may have anti-American views," she said. He asked her what she thought distinguished liberal from hard left from anti-American. If she maintains such distinctions in her mind, she refused to acknowledge them. Then, finally, Matthews - who deftly fed her the rope to hang herself - asked her how many members of the US Congress held, in her view, anti-American views.

It's been almost a two-year campaign. There have been moments we've thought of as memorable, only to see the tide of events erase their mark from the sand. Bachmann's answer, however, will live imperishably: "What I would say - what I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating exposé and take a look. I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America? I think people would love to see an exposé like that."

Before we go any further - who is this Bachmann? She's a first-term backbencher from exurban Minneapolis who says the Lord told her to run for Congress. She declared herself "a fool for Christ" in 2006 when she announced her candidacy. By all accounts she's down with the whole rightwing Christian package: immigrants bring disease and pestilence, homosexuals want to indoctrinate straight children, and so on. Republican leadership undoubtedly pushed her out on to television because she is, as you Brits say, a looker - at least by the standards of Congress.

The call for an investigation into the beliefs of every federal lawmaker, and an exposé of those found wanting in their patriotism, certainly takes us into deeply creepy territory. I would not call Bachmann herself a fascist. Odd as it sounds, to do so would be to grant her far too much credit. For one to embrace an -ism, even a repugnant one, one needs to have read a certain amount of history and political philosophy. Bachmann is just an idiot. She wouldn't know Edmund Burke from Billie Burke (she played the good witch in the Wizard of Oz), and she obviously has no idea that, in her rejection of the two bedrock American principles of separation of church and state and freedom of thought, she is the one who is as anti-American as they come.

But friends, all is not darkness. Bachmann's appearance caused a national uproar. Colin Powell, in endorsing Obama yesterday, said of Bachmann's comments that "we have got to stop this kind of nonsense and pull ourselves together". Her Democratic opponent raised nearly half a million dollars from around the country in just 24 hours, and he now has a chance of beating her.

That would be nice. But let's go back to the big contest. With Bachmann, the lid came off the rightwing id. It will happen many more times over these next two weeks. McCain, now openly using the word "socialist" to describe Obama's proposals (the week after his friend George W Bush took federal control of nine major banks!), and especially Palin have shown every sign of encouraging it. Their goal is to scare Americans about Obama, but moderate, independent voters might well decide that Obama looks a lot less scary than they do.

The battle for the Old Confederacy

North Carolina has been a Republican stronghold for decades. So can Barack Obama really overcome the history of racial prejudice in the southern states? Leonard Doyle reports from Raleigh

Monday, 20 October 2008

Leonard Doyle

Carter Wrenn: 'Obama has a chance here'

• More pictures

Partial  from Planet War discussion -

The U.S. military is probably one of the few sectors of society where Obama support flags, and as president the national security neophyte will undoubtedly go through a Clinton-like hazing, particularly if he has the audacity to suggest that the military needs to tighten its belt for the sake of the economy. 

Colin Powell’s endorsement certainly must sting for McCain and the administration, but will it help with the military?  I say not one bit.  The political general has already lost his bond with today’s military, and his very partisan endorsement runs against a pretension on the part of many in uniform that they are above politics.  If would be nice if they were, but they’re not.  The Powell endorsement in fact just muddies these waters.

Peter: I think Powell has more of a bond with the military establishment than Bill suggests, but I generally agree that his endorsement of Obama is not a game changer.  It gives the campaign one more talking point - why should you worry about Obama as commander-in-chief when General Powell has endorsed him? -- but I don't think it is likely to change many people's minds one way or the other.  I think it helps a bit during an Obama transition by reinforcing the imagery of "steady hands on the tiller."  But those positives will have to be weighed against the following likely negative: Powell is now a go-to guy for quotes to second-guess Obama decisions.  The most obvious one will be anything President Obama does on the "don't ask, don't tell" policy so closely associated with General Powell's tenure as Chairman of the JCS.  But on any national security issue, Powell's views are fair game.  I expect that Powell will be a very loyal soldier - he has already proven how loyal he can be - but he also has his own independent views on what should be done.  Just as it is a page 1 story when Powell endorses Obama, it is a page 1 story if-or-when Powell disagrees with an Obama national security decision.

from LATimes.com BLOG -

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Under fire, U of Nebraska cancels speech by Obama friend William Ayers

...multimillion-dollar university donor in past years -- threatened to halt all of its donations to the university over the invite, and numerous other donors promised such action if the event proceeded.

Some university teachers warned the Omaha paper that canceling the Ayers speech would hurt the school's academic reputation as an appearance of censorship and make future faculty recruiting more difficult.

Saturday, however, a university spokeswoman announced that the invitation to Ayers, now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an Obama neighbor, had been rescinded for the College of Education and Human Sciences centennial celebration for "safety reasons."

She would not elaborate.

Ayers' association with Obama, which included work together on two city education projects in the 1990s, first emerged during the Democratic Party's primary season, when the freshman Illinois Democrat described the unrepentant Ayers merely as an acquaintance whose "despicable" acts occurred during Obama's childhood. He has since said Ayers would play no role in his administration.

The Republican presidential campaign of John McCain has sought to make their relationship a continuing question of Obama's judgment along with his association with others such as Tony Rezko, recently convicted on federal fraud charges.

Despite the cancellation, the Nebraska state auditor, Mike Foley, sent the university a request for detailed information on the proposed event's funding. While the state attorney general, Jon Bruning, called the cancellation decision "good news for the university."

"I don't think there was any good way for the university to disassociate itself with his past," Bruning said.

-- Andrew Malcolm

Powell’s Endorsement Puts Spotlight on His Legacy

WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s endorsement of Senator Barack Obama on Sunday represented his own transformative moment in a lifelong journey through war and politics.

It was not only an embrace of a presidential candidate from the other party, but also an effort to reshape a legacy that he himself considers tainted by his service under President Bush.

The endorsement, which came after months of conversations between Mr. Powell and Mr. Obama on a wide range of foreign and domestic policy issues, made clear Mr. Powell’s dismay at the Republican Party. He said he felt that the party had become too conservative under Mr. Bush, and that Senator John McCain’s campaign was not good for the country or its reputation around the world.

In that sense, his remarks further stirred the brewing debate about the nature of the post-Bush Republican Party.

“I have some concerns about the direction that the party has taken in recent years,” Mr. Powell told Tom Brokaw on “Meet the Press” on NBC as he made his endorsement of Mr. Obama. “It has moved more to the right than I would like to see it.” In recent weeks, Mr. Powell added, “the approach of the Republican Party and Mr. McCain has become narrower and narrower.”

It will be up to the next president, Mr. Powell said, “to fix the reputation that we’ve left with the rest of the world.”

People in both parties debated the impact of Mr. Powell’s endorsement, but on a Sunday morning in Washington the conclusion was that the action revealed less about Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain than about Mr. Powell, who 13 years ago was himself thinking of trying to become president.

In saying he would vote for Mr. Obama over Mr. McCain, Mr. Powell aligned himself squarely against Mr. Bush, who has been counting on a Republican victory next month to see through his strategy of avoiding a rigid timetable for withdrawals in Iraq — the issue, more than any other, on which the president’s legacy will rest.

Mr. Powell’s role in selling the invasion, despite his frequent clashes with other members of Mr. Bush’s team about how to proceed, has also come to dominate his own place in history. In siding with Mr. Obama, who from the start was an opponent of Iraq, he seemed to be making a clear break with the more hawkish elements of the Republican Party and signaling an effort to reshape how he is judged on the war.

One major factor in Mr. Powell’s decision appeared to be Mr. Obama’s careful wooing of the former secretary of state. In recent months the two have had one face-to-face meeting and some half-dozen telephone conversations, all initiated by Mr. Obama.

A friend of Mr. Powell’s said Mr. Obama sought the advice of Mr. Powell before Mr. Obama’s trip in July to Europe and the Middle East, and has also had long discussions with him on Iraq, Iran and North Korea as well as education and health care policy. The two last spoke some two weeks ago about the worldwide economic crisis, the friend said.

In contrast, Mr. McCain met with Mr. Powell, a friend of two decades, in June, and has not spoken to him since, the friend said.

Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Powell has long represented to millions of people around the world the possibilities of the American dream. The son of immigrants from Jamaica who was born in Harlem and reared in the South Bronx, Mr. Powell earned a degree from the City University of New York and then embarked on a rapid rise through the military, perhaps the most integrated institution in American life.

He became a military assistant to Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger in 1983, national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan in 1986 and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first President Bush during the 1991 Gulf War.

By 1995 he was flirting with the idea of running for president, and a friend said he briefly considered leaving the Republican Party to run as an independent. But his wife, Alma, said she would worry about his safety. Mr. Powell finally announced he would not run in 1996 because it was “a calling that I do not yet hear.”

Mr. Powell had a tumultuous tenure as President Bush’s first-term secretary of state, when he was frequently undercut by Vice President Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, in the period before the Iraq war. Although Mr. Powell had major misgivings about the war and what he considered the inadequate number of troops, he not only agreed to the invasion but also made the administration’s case for war in a presentation to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003.

Much of what he said is now known to be based on false information provided by the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Powell has been widely criticized for the appearance, including by Mr. Obama, a fact that Mr. Brokaw brought up on Sunday.

Mr. Brokaw read aloud a passage from Bob Woodward’s most recent book, “The War Within,” that quoted former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a Republican, as saying that Mr. Powell was “the one guy who could have perhaps prevented” the war from happening.

Mr. Powell, who friends say remains angry about his time in the Bush administration, briskly responded that “it was not a correct assessment by anybody that my statements or my leaving the administration would have stopped it.”

The fissures within the Bush administration and the fractious Republican foreign policy establishment have in the meantime played out in the 2008 presidential campaign. In many ways, Mr. Powell’s endorsement reflected the rift between the so-called pragmatists, many of whom have come to view the Iraq war or its execution as a mistake, and the neoconservatives, a competing camp whose thinking played a pivotal role in building the case for war.

Mr. Powell, who is of the pragmatist camp and has been critical of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war, was said by friends in recent months to be disturbed by some of the neoconservatives who have surrounded Mr. McCain as foreign policy advisers in his presidential campaign.

The McCain campaign’s top foreign policy aide is Randy Scheunemann, who was a foreign policy adviser to former Senators Trent Lott and Bob Dole and who has longtime ties to neoconservatives. In 2002, Mr. Scheunemann was a founder of the hawkish Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and was an enthusiastic supporter of Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile and Pentagon favorite, who was viewed with suspicion and distaste at the State Department during Mr. Powell’s tenure.

Although Mr. Powell had some warm words for Mr. McCain on Sunday — he said that he admired him and that he would make a good president — friends say that Mr. Powell has felt cut out by Mr. McCain’s campaign foreign policy circle and concerned that Mr. McCain speaks too off the cuff about national security and has not taken the time to do the deeper homework required of a presidential candidate.

In addition, a friend said that when Mr. Powell met with Mr. McCain at Mr. McCain’s Arlington, Va., apartment in June, Mr. McCain spoke almost exclusively to him about the war in Iraq and the increase in troop strength, or surge, that Mr. McCain had strongly supported. Mr. Obama, who met with Mr. Powell at Mr. Powell’s Alexandria, Va., office, discussed a broader range of issues and actively solicited Mr. Powell’s expertise, the friend said.

Mr. Powell’s endorsement was such a powerful break from his past that Mr. Brokaw asked if he anticipated a role in an Obama administration, perhaps as an ambassador at large to Africa or in some role in Middle East peace negotiations.

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