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Gilbert B. Kaplan: President Obama Brings 10,000 Manufacturing Jobs Back from China (Headlines We'd Like to See)

2009-11-06T14:16:12Z

I am glad that a company called Teletech Governmental Solutions in Englewood, Colorado used our stimulus funds to hire 635 call center employees to provide assistance to people transitioning to digital TV's. But I would be happier if a single one of those TV's were being made in the United States. The simple fact is, over and over again the United States is using its economic might and even our stimulus dollars to send jobs overseas. Some of this is conscious and obvious. There is no doubt that televisions are all made abroad these days. There was simply no reason that, coupled with the requirement to move to digital earlier this year, the United States government could not have invested several billion dollars in television plants in California, Texas, New York or anywhere else with a ready, willing and able unemployed high-tech work force. But none of this was done.

Why not? Because we have neglected the manufacturing base of our economy in much the same way we have neglected financial regulation. There simply is no manufacturing policy in the United States. To his credit, President Obama has appointed Ron Bloom to coordinate manufacturing policy in the White House. But there is an opportunity next week, when the President goes to China, to kick start this coordination effort and begin to make things happen.

There are two steps the President could take as part of his trip to retake the initiative on job creation in the United States. The creation of real jobs will take real work. It is not just a question of pouring money into financial institutions. Also, it will rub some of our trading partners the wrong way. So what? They've had it coming to them, and if there's any lesson the President should take from Tuesday's election results and today's unemployment numbers topping 10%, it's that the American people will not be satisfied with job creation efforts that only help the big banks. Trickle-down economics, which seems to be the theory underlying this policy, is not popular in New Jersey, in Virginia, or in the rest of the country.

The two actions the president can take will create jobs in the United States, will start passing the benefits of the anemic economic recovery more broadly to the American middle class, and will begin the revitalization of the manufacturing sector. First, he must tell the Chinese that they need to let their currency float freely against the dollar. This will immediately relieve the United States of the equivalent of a 35-40% duty charged by China on everything we ship there. More importantly, it will remove a 35-40% benefit, or subsidy, that Chinese companies receive every time they ship something here. The Chinese government gives their exporters this subsidy grant every time they exchange the dollars they get on their export transactions for their local currency, the Renminbi ("RMB"). This has the effect of supercharging China's exports in the manufacturing sector, and speeding the decline of the U. S. heartland.

There is almost uniform acknowledgment that the Chinese currency is undervalued and that this creates an enormous trade advantage for China. Ben Bernanke made this point strongly all the way back in 2006. The United States Treasury Department made the same point in an April 15, 2009 report. But nothing is done. Nothing changes.

On this issue, President Obama cannot come back empty-handed. He must either get a promise from the Chinese to freely float their currency, or take trade action to off-set the export subsidy. If we need trade action, he can apply what is called the countervailing duty law to currency manipulation, permitting the imposition of a duty on exports financed by currency subsidies. Or he can authorize the commencement of what is called a Section 301 case, which requires an intensive negotiation with the respondent country guilty of the subsidy practice. If the negotiation does not lead to a successful result in a short period of time, he can retaliate with a number of trade off-sets. Faced with these potential actions, the Chinese should act on their own, avoiding a confrontation. But if it is confrontation they want, we should be prepared for that. Tuesday's elections make clear that bailing out banks and leaving the job base in ruins will not be enough for the American people.

The second action President Obama should take is to tell the Chinese government they must end all industrial subsidies to manufacturing companies. These have taken the form of direct grants to manufacturers to build new plants, tax breaks, low cost inputs and a score of other innovative ways to create and brace up manufacturing companies. Over $50 billion has gone to the Chinese steel industry, over $30 billion to the Chinese glass industry, nearly $30 billion in subsidies to the textile industry each year. Some limited subsidy practices may have made sense twenty years ago when China was struggling to start up its economy and put its people to work. It makes no sense now that China has a sustained $250 billion trade surplus with the United States, and has had the largest trade surplus with our country of any other trading partner for 89 straight months. Our beneficence can only go so far. China is now a big boy, to put it mildly, and we should demand an end to these WTO-illegal subsidies. Here too, if the president cannot reach agreement in a short period of time, he should take action by self-initiating a large series of trade actions against China and bringing them to a quick resolution.

No doubt some people will say that we have subsidized our auto industry with bailouts. But there is an enormous difference. The Chinese subsidies go to export-oriented industries that are targeting the United States and other export markets. The subsidies to the U.S. auto industry do not affect China's companies, because the U. S. auto companies export hardly anything to China. In 2008, U. S. auto manufacturers exported about 46,000 vehicles to China, composing less than one half of one percent of the Chinese market. In contrast, for example, exports from Chinese pipe producers constituted close to 30% of the U.S. market several years ago. In apparel, China exported over $23 billion of product to the U.S. in the last year.

We have become a country of two economies. The bank, Wall Street and investment economy seems to be reviving. People are making money and going out to dinner with bailout funds. But the middle class economy of manufacturing workers is struggling to right itself after twenty years of government neglect, even before the additional burden of the financial crisis hit them.

The creation of real jobs that are sustaining and that will provide a long term successful life style for American workers can begin next week. But it won't begin without tough action and a demand for real change.

Michael Steele Flip-Flops On Moderate Republicans [UPDATE]

2009-11-05T16:06:36Z

Remember Election Night 2009? The big takeaway from the 23rd District of New York -- where Democrat Bill Owens prevailed as the first Democrat to win that Congressional seat since the Ice Age -- was that conservatives were at war with each other. Brother against brother! Establishment against fringe! Well, as it turns out, that battle is being waged most bloodily inside the Imaginarium Of Michael Steele.

Yesterday, Michael Steele was defending Delicate Flower of Center-Right Moderation Olympia Snowe from the stern rhetoric of Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, telling the Morning Joe coffee-klatsch:

"I say, Welcome. Welcome. Each member of this party has a unique footprint. And it's different from region to region. I can't win in the Northeast with a candidate best suited for the South and vice-versa."

But that was yesterday, when the largest looming concern was the NY23-FAIL. Today, Capitol Hill is ramped up into Bachmann Tea Party Overdrive, and Michael Steele is suddenly drawing down on anyone who thinks they're gonna bring their "unique footprint" into his "big tent":

"So candidates who live in moderate to slightly liberal districts have got to walk a little bit carefully here, because you do not want to put yourself in a position where you're crossing that line on conservative principles, fiscal principles, because we'll come after you," Steele continued.

"You're gonna find yourself in a very tough hole if you're arguing for the president's stimulus plan or Nancy Pelosi's health plan. There's no justification for growing the size of government the way this administration and this Congress wants to do it."

So there you have it: Michael Steele is sort of riding a wave of confusing emotions.

UPDATE: Wow. Michael Steele is just spinning like a pinwheel, trying to decide what sort of Republicans he likes and what sort he doesn't. Via Sam Stein:

Hours after Michael Steele warned moderate Republicans that they woud be targeted if they didn't support conservative principles, the RNC Chairman called discussion of intra-party feuding "stupid" and insisted that the GOP would lose if "we play politics amongst our own."

More from Sam, here.

RELATED:
Meet The New, Very Violent Michael Steele [Wonkette]
Hitching Wagon to Tea Partiers, Steele Threatens to 'Come After' GOP Moderates [The Washington Independent]

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2009 Election: Young Voters Who Helped Obama Stayed Home

2009-11-04T17:07:13Z

RICHMOND, Va. — Last year, 23-year-old Rashida Hill watched the presidential debates, visited the college political party meetings and put a Barack Obama bumper sticker on her townhouse door. She voted for Obama because she felt like the election was about "being a part of something."

But on Tuesday, the Virginia Commonwealth University student didn't bother voting in the governor's race because, she said, the candidates didn't give her anything to get excited about.

Rove Criticizes White House Response To Elections: "A Contemptuous Gesture"

2009-11-04T16:51:39Z

Karl Rove wasn't too happy about the way the White House dismissed the Most Important Off-Off-Year Elections In United States History, and amid a weird counterfactual analysis in which he reverse-extrapolated a few races in three states and applied them to the 2008 election results, he let Fox News viewers know it, saying:

ROVE: Actually, it was almost contemptuous of the process. And who's kidding themselves? I've been inside the West Wing. Every president on every election night is watching the returns. And so, [White House Press Secretary Robert] Gibbs, by going out there and saying, 'Well, it may have mattered to the American people and the people in Pennsylvania and Virginia and New Jersey, but it didn't matter to President Obama,' left a...well it was tone deaf. It would have been better if the president's spokesman had gone out there and said, 'We got the message, we understand the concerns of Americans and we're going to work to assuage their concerns. And instead it was a dismissive and I thought it was almost a contemptuous gesture.

WATCH:

Oh, well, then! Let's take a trip back to the year 2007, where we'll find Rove being dismissive, and -- I guess? -- contemptuous!

Rove downplayed the significance of the 2006 elections, where the Republicans lost both the House and Senate. He cited Republicans' corruption scandals and excessive federal spending and earmarks.

He said it was a "normal off-year election" and had little to do with the unpopularity of President Bush and then-GOP majority Congress.

"If you look at the sweep of American history, the White House party has lost an average of 28 seats in the House and five in the Senate. We lost 30 in the House and six in the Senate," Rove said on Fox. "We lost. There's no doubt about it, but it was a close loss."

So, if and when that sweep of American history returns to reduce Democratic congressional majorities in 2010, will it be "contemptuous" to dismiss it, or will it merely be "Rovian?" And is there really a lot of daylight between those two terms?

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The State Of Your Post-Election Media Memes

2009-11-04T11:08:04Z

If you missed out on last night's election, well, don't you know that you missed out on the most important off-off-year election in our lives? It's true! Expectations were set and memes were created and votes were cast and winners were selected and the results were a resounding... uhm: MEH? Mixed bag, really. So, hey: here's a rundown of real talk on what happened last night.

Virginia Governor's Race: So, what happens when a Democrat who lacks Barack Obama's popularity runs against a Republican who doesn't alienate Virginia conservatives the way John McCain does? The Republican wins, to the surprise of nobody who actually lives in the Commonwealth. Virginia's been recently oversold as a blue state, but let's get some perspective. In state-wide races, the closest thing the Democrats have had to a slam dunk has been Mark Warner. His fellow senator, Jim Webb, is an accomplished, intelligent, articulate man who won a tight race over a guy who used racial slurs on the stump. Warner's coattails just managed to get Tim Kaine over the line in the last gubernatorial election. Kaine's coattails obviously came with diminishing returns for Creigh Deeds.

Let's also recall that Deed and McDonnell had matched up once before, and McDonnell won. Was there any fundamental, locally-felt change in dynamic between the candidates since then? The answer is no, so similar results should have been expected. Deeds went on to compound his problems by accruing the greater share of structural campaign errors during the race. The best things Deeds thought he had going for him was a crazy thesis that McDonnell had written, and the frantic endorsements of the Washington Post. The only problems were that lots and lots of Virginia voters had no problem with McDonnell's thesis, and that outside of northern Virginia, nobody in the state gives a hot toss what the Washington Post has to say about Virginia politics.

The media will find a way to hang this one on Obama, of course, but there was no amount of Obamasauce that could have helped the hapless Deeds, and he dispensed it pretty sparingly. You might encounter someone who'll tell you that Terry McAuliffe might have fared better against McDonnell. Trust me, they are wrong.

New Jersey Governor's Race: Even though he was widely disliked in New Jersey, it's fair to say that John Corzine went down harder than expected to Chris Christie, He went into the race with a toxic 35% approval rating, and more or less waged a scorched-earth campaign, trying to drag Christie down to the same levels. It's pretty fair to say that neither candidate was too widely-beloved. Corzine ended up needing about 100,000 votes to materialize, and they weren't there, because the tone of the race encouraged their non-participation. Meanwhile, those who did embraced a New Jersey tradition that has carried a high approval rating: turning out the incumbent in the state house.

There was a not a single county in New Jersey where Corzine matched his performance in 2005. It seems to me that his best hope was for [Independent candidate] Christopher Daggett to at least perform to his polling peak, plus a little extra. That didn't happen. Daggett's fortunes faded over the last days of the campaign, and a significant number of people obviously ended up pulling the lever for Christie.

Obama was up against the odds in this race, too, but he'll rightly take the hit for the results because this was the race on which he chose to put his marker. It may be tough to imagine why, given the fact that Corzine's approval rating wasn't great, and he was running the sort of campaign Obama nominally prefers to eschew. Part of the rationale likely stems from the fact that Corzine left a Senate seat he could have stayed in perpetually to give the Democrats a gubernatorial win in 2005. On top of that, Corzine's polling tended to run ahead of approval, and, late in the game, Obama's intervention came and looked like it was helping. The White House's help brought Corzine ahead in the polls, and it looked like everything was trending in his favor. As it turns out, Obama merely inflated a bubble, which popped at the worst possible time. The fact that Obama's mojo proved to be perilously fleeting is the strongest case going in the whole "referendum on Obama" meme.

New York City Mayor's Race: This race ended up being much closer than advertised, and for about fifteen minutes last night, the gap between incumbent Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Democratic Party rival Bill Thompson narrowed to about 2,400 votes. The upset threat quickly faded, but not before some of the people who called the race for Bloomberg early had to temporarily un-call it.

It will go under-reported, but this is a good example of a race where you can fault Obama. The president demonstrated an interest in intervening in New York politics when he attempted to get dead-duck Governor David Paterson to quit the race. Obama's actions in the governor's race caused a fair share of knobby-kneed observers to pop their garters, but I'd have to say that Obama should have demonstrated the same shrewdness in the mayoral election, and given Thompson some support. As Peter Feld points out:

But the President's biggest headache is likely to be blowback from the narrower-than-expected victory of Michael Bloomberg, edging Bill Thompson by just under five points, 51%-46%, after Obama gave Thompson only the most grudging of endorsements and declined to invest any political capital in the race. Democrats are going to look at this near-miss with anger, and at a time when Obama is already under fire from Democrats for falling short of last year's promised changes, and losing ground to Republicans in NJ and Virginia, he's likely to bear the brunt of the recriminations.

And Anthony Weiner is already sniping at the White House for not getting involved.

That said, I can count on no hands the number of people I've met who've been willing to attest that NYC Dems have their act together. And left-leaning New York City residents are sort of mired in an existential crisis over Bloomberg, where too many people seem to view things like the revitalization of the High Line as an adequate trade-off to the fact that small businesses are closing and nobody can afford to rent an apartment. I'm not sure what's going to happen when the entirety of Manhattan's service sector can't afford to live within 50 miles of the city. Probably Bloomberg will invent some robot baristas and call it a win.

California 10th District: California Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi won a seat in Congress in a district that was traditionally Republican until Ellen Tauscher won her seat in 1997. (The special election was needed after Tauscher accepted the position of Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs in the Obama administration.) Garamendi's election represents a leftward shift in the 10th, relative to Tauscher's more moderate positions. Because a leftward political shift didn't fit any of the media's narratives, nobody did any reporting on this race.

New York 23rd District: The biggest losers of the night were the proponents of the Tea Party Revolution, who paved the way for the 23rd to be represented by a Democrat for the first time since Hadrian's Wall was built. There perhaps exists an imaginary Congressional district, bound within the networked minds of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, where Doug Hoffman could have been a big winner. In the actual district, bound by reality and physical geography, not so much. Anyway, Hoffman did a better job visiting the fantasy district than the actual one, and so Democrat Bill Owens staked a lead early in the night and held it.

This is a surprise win for the Democrats and a told-you-so victory for the Republican Party establishment, should they choose to claim it. As things stand, the Democrats will probably sit back and hope that the Tea party insurgents will keep it up, and the GOP will cross their fingers and hope that this reverses the emerging trend toward coalition fracture.

The media invested pretty heavily in this storyline, of course, and now that their exciting storyline has been stolen away, affection for Tea Party nonsense may well sour. The media loves winners, because winners have the invites to all the cool parties. What will go under-reported is the fact that while the Tea Partiers have something of an electoral strategy, mining the paranoid style of politics doesn't translate into coherent policies or a strategy for governance. Sooner or later, someone should maybe point out that you cannot ameliorate actual problems by drawing a Hitler mustache on them.

At any rate, brace yourself for a Sunday filled with dire warnings of the Democrats' imminent demise in 2010 and Obama's ousting in 2012. If anyone on any panel anywhere simply points out that the Democrats' fortunes are entirely tied to the unemployment rate -- that if it improves they'll be fine and if it doesn't they'll be doomed -- give that person a medal and invest heavily in their insights -- the end.

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Warning To Democrats: It's Not 2008 Anymore

2009-11-04T08:33:20Z

Off-year elections can be notoriously unreliable as predictors of the future, but as a window on how the political landscape may have changed in the year since President Obama won the White House, Tuesday's Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey delivered clear warnings for the Democrats.

Steele: Election Results Show "Transcendent" GOP

2009-11-04T08:16:43Z

WASHINGTON — An ebullient Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele asserted Wednesday that GOP victories in governors' races in New Jersey and Virginia demonstrate "a transcendent party" on the move again. The White House said the elections were not a repudiation of President Barack Obama.

"We're not crowing, we're just smiling," Steele said in a nationally broadcast interview. "I think it's a bellwether for the party ... You look at where we were nine months ago."

Election Day: What To Watch For In New Jersey, New York And Virginia

2009-11-03T08:27:29Z

WASHINGTON — Independents who swept Barack Obama to a historic 2008 victory broke big for Republicans on Tuesday as the GOP wrested political control from Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey, a troubling sign for the president and his party heading into an important midterm election year.

Conservative Republican Bob McDonnell's victory in the Virginia governor's race over Democrat R. Creigh Deeds and moderate Republican Chris Christie's ouster of unpopular New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine was a double-barreled triumph for a party looking to rebuild after being booted from power in national elections in 2006 and 2008.

Karzai Appears Set To Agree To Runoff In Afghan Election

2009-10-20T00:42:15Z

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Under heavy international pressure, President Hamid Karzai appears set to concede as early as Tuesday that he fell short of a first-round victory in the nation's disputed presidential election, but the path to ensuring that the country has credible leadership remains uncertain, American and European officials said Monday.

Kai Eide: UN Official Defends Afghanistan Election Despite Widespread Fraud

2009-10-12T00:54:35Z

Days before the outcome of Afghanistan's contentious presidential vote was expected to be announced, the head of the United Nations mission in the country acknowledged Sunday that widespread electoral fraud had occurred.

But the official, Kai Eide, strongly contested allegations by his former deputy that he had engaged in a cover-up of vote-rigging by supporters of President Hamid Karzai.

Paul Fitzgerald: A Hidden Denial in the Afghan Election

2009-09-30T08:59:24Z

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

The Afghan election results are finally in and, to no one's surprise, they have inflamed a crisis of credibility. Afghanistan's latest effort in democracy was marred by widespread fraud, violence, and intimidation.

The U.N.-backed Independent Election Commission awarded President Hamid Karzai 54.6 percent of the vote, putting him over the critical 50 percent necessary to secure victory without a runoff. But with a third of Karzai's 3.1 million votes facing an audit there is little chance the final decision will avoid a long and painful runoff election.

It is the worst of all possible outcomes and a staggering blow to President Obama's Af-Pak war strategy. Experts estimate it will take the U.S. at least 12 to 18 months for signs of progress to show. Now, half of that time will be spent under a cloud of illegitimacy even if Karzai wins reelection.

It wasn't supposed to be this way, but according to an Afghan human rights expert, Sima Wali, who represented King Zahir Shah at the Bonn conference in 2001, the process of building a new Afghanistan was doomed from the beginning. "During the debates establishing the post-Taliban government of Afghanistan in 2001, Islamist principles that had never been considered Afghan and were never a part of previous Afghan constitutions were infused into the new constitution. Many in leadership positions in the current government of Afghanistan also subscribe to extremist ideologies of the Islamic kind that were never part of Afghan politics."

According to Afghanistan expert David B. Edwards, the extremist, anti-modernist ideologies of the Taliban and the seven major Peshawar mujahideen organizations were known to be as alien to Afghanistan's traditional ideas of governance as anything introduced by foreign colonial powers.

From the founding of the modern Afghan state in the 1880s under Amir Abdur Rahman Khan to the period of Amir Amanullah Khan in the 1920s to the Marxist coup of 1978, Afghan politics exhibited a determination to both modernize and moderate Afghan society.

From David B. Edwards' book Before Taliban:

"Abdur Rahman nevertheless forged the basis of governance in Afghanistan and the understandings that people have retained of the natural and proper duties, role and comportment of its leaders. Amanullah provides an illuminating secondary point of reference for this analysis because he anticipated many of the reforms that the Marxists would later try to put in place."

In addition to placing former Taliban madrassa students in positions of authority, the decision by the administration of George W. Bush to bring warlords into the tribal Loya Jirga that established the new government, had an irreversible effect.

A Pakistani journalist, Ahmed Rashid, wrote in his book Descent Into Chaos about a European diplomat's shock at the American strategy. " 'Giving the warlords a front seat was a blow to the Afghans and a negative symbol of U.S. influence,' said one ambassador."

Operating under the false assumption that warlords were always a fundamental aspect of governance in Afghanistan, few in the media or Washington policy establishment questioned the thinking behind such decisions. But the fatal moment arrived when the Bush administration made the unilateral decision to sideline the one person who could have pulled the country together after 30 years in exile, King Zahir Shah.

One commentator, William Pfaff, wrote: "Washington manipulated the Loya Jirga (national assembly of tribal leaders) called in June 2002, so as to put Karzai in office. This was despite the will of the majority of the assembly to bring back the royal family, and the ex-king, as nonpartisan and traditionally legitimate influences in the country's affairs."

As a gauge of legitimacy for an escalating American presence, the Afghan elections meant a great deal to Washington. The U.S. must now scramble to deal with a disintegrating political system in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, a worsening security situation and an increasing lack of credibility.

On Sept. 9, the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, outright rejected Af-Pak, stating: "Afghanistan and Pakistan are distinctly different countries that cannot be lumped together."

In Afghanistan, a pre-election poll showed that at least 50 percent of Afghans don't want Americans fighting their war, either, and want them to go home. In the U.S., polls indicate that 58 percent of adult Americans now say the war is not worth fighting.

Today, Washington faces up to an election process of its own making. But if the U.S. is trying to build a viable Afghan government by ignoring a major progressive theme in Afghan politics for over a century, it will be denying itself the last chance for success.

Published on Globalpost: September 29, 2009 12:05 ET

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story, available from City Lights Books.

Bill Thompson Wins Mayoral Primary, Takes On Bloomberg Next

2009-09-16T00:32:58Z

NEW YORK — New York City Comptroller William Thompson Jr. has cruised to victory in the Democratic mayoral primary and will face billionaire incumbent Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

With 62 percent of precincts reporting, Thompson had about 69 percent of the vote. City Councilman Tony Avella of Queens had 22 percent.

Erik Ose: The Secret Superdelegate War Revealed

2009-06-04T16:24:30Z

Now that President Obama has settled into the job enough to give Brian Williams a backstage pass to the West Wing, the heat of last year's campaign has faded. Especially with Secretary of State Clinton at his side as they tour Egypt to help repair U.S.-Arab relations, the significance of June 4th to Obama's rise may have diminished.

But it was one year ago today that Hillary Clinton announced plans to suspend her campaign for the Democratic nomination, and urged her supporters to unite behind Barack Obama. It was an overdue end to a seemingly endless primary campaign. And a surprising one, considering that until actual primary voters weighed in, the nomination had appeared to be Clinton's for the taking.

Bill and Hillary at New York rally, June 3, 2008

She had money, momentum, and crucial to the Democratic nominating process, Clinton had a big lead in superdelegate support. The rules said these Democratic elected officials and other party leaders could choose to back whomever they wanted, regardless of how their states or districts voted.

One of the unanswered questions from the primary campaign was why more superdelegates didn't endorse Clinton over Obama, even though they were party insiders, and she was the insider candidate. Plus, the conventional wisdom was that Hillary might be a stronger general election pick.

After Obama battled Clinton to a standstill on Super Tuesday, parts of the Democratic establishment were open-mouthed in disbelief. For the next three months, the Clinton campaign did its best to fan doubts about Obama's electability. They were helped as controversies involving the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Obama's "bitter" comments swirled around his candidacy. Clinton won crucial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, largely by rebranding herself as a "fighter" and tailoring her message to older, white, working class Democrats.

(In hindsight of Obama's resounding victory over John McCain in the fall, the conventional wisdom was dead wrong. If Hillary had ended up as the nominee, many disillusioned Obama voters would have stayed home. McCain would never have picked Sarah Palin as his VP, instead going with his gut instinct to choose someone far less politically radioactive, like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty or former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge.)

Yet Obama kept getting a steady trickle of superdelegate endorsements. In mid-February, Clinton was backed by 100 more supers than Obama, but her advantage gradually shrank. On May 9, various news organizations reported Obama had overtaken Clinton in the superdelegate chase. The final tally as of June 4 was 389 superdelegates for Obama versus 282 for Clinton.

Interviewed for the New York Times' official post-mortem on Hillary's campaign, Pennsylvania superdelegate Jason Altmire explained the "frustration" within Hillaryland, since "they kept winning state after state and they expected others [superdelegates] to start turning their way and it just didn't happen."

So what happened? Harold Ickes would surely like to know. In addition to being a divisive presence in Hillary's inner circle, the legendarily hot-tempered Democratic operative was in charge of the Clinton superdelegate operation.

Certainly, some superdelegates saw the writing on the wall. They recognized Barack Obama was both the Democratic Party's future and the strongest candidate against McCain, and endorsed accordingly. Some were reluctant to fight past battles and ready for the party to embrace new leadership. All had personal reasons for their choices.

As a blogger and activist who campaigned for superdelegates to support Obama over Clinton, I had a window on the behind-the-scenes maneuvering going on largely out of view of the press and the campaigns themselves. There was a secret war being waged by both Obama and Clinton supporters to convince individual superdelegates to endorse their preferred candidates.

The Clinton campaign, in an all-out struggle to prevent the nomination from slipping away, was very public about its strategy. They openly encouraged their supporters, particularly big money donors, to pester and cajole superdelegates on Clinton's behalf, unconcerned that heavy-handed lobbying might turn off the very superdelegates they were trying to influence.

But they were beaten to the punch by Obama supporters, who organized spontaneously, and used the power of the internet to shine light on who the superdelegates were and how ordinary citizens could contact them. None of this was encouraged by the Obama campaign, who had their own, internal strategy to woo the supers. Barack and Michelle began personally calling superdelegates as early as March 2007, something Hillary agreed to do only after the Texas and Ohio contests on March 4. Although Team Obama eventually decided a little citizen lobbying might not be such a bad thing. Yet throughout the primaries, lobbying was happening fast and furiously at the grassroots and netroots levels.

While careful to remain neutral, Democratic Convention Watch was essential for anyone tracking superdelegates. A no frills, Blogger-hosted site run by two Denver political junkies, DemConWatch became the most trusted source for news about superdelegate endorsements, more accurate and up-to-date than any brand name media outlet.

The Superdelegate Transparency Project was another independent, neutral resource. A joint project of LiteraryOutpost, OpenLeft, DemConWatch, and HuffPo's Off the Bus, organizer Jennifer Nix described the effort as a "collaborative project among all interested parties to bring transparency and accountability to the Democratic National Convention." They posted state-by-state breakdowns of which superdelegates had endorsed which candidates, what popular vote totals each had received, and whether the supers' endorsements lined up with the votes in their respective districts.

Obama supporters on MyBarackObama.com and sites like DailyKos and Democratic Underground were constantly circulating lists of uncommitted superdelegates. In mid-February, MoveOn.org jumped into the fray when it began an online petition drive that 400,000 signed, calling for superdelegates to "let the voters decide between Clinton and Obama, then support the people's choice." The San Francisco-based group Color Of Change delivered 25,000 e-mails urging Congressional Black Caucus members to follow their districts' votes.

In North Carolina, our congressional superdelegates originally backed former Sen. John Edwards. When Edwards exited the race in late January, most had yet to endorse another candidate.

So a few Obama supporters in N.C. decided to lobby them and organized Voters for Obama. Our website, votersforobama.org, launched on President's Day (Feb. 19). Using info gathered by DemConWatch and STP, we posted state-by-state lists of supers, their endorsements, and going a crucial step further, included contact info (work mailing addresses, e-mails, and phone numbers) for selected superdelegates. We provided simple instructions on how to make polite, respectful phone calls or send e-mails asking superdelegates to support Obama.

Over the next few months, 15,000 people visited our site, and we helped voters from around the country generate an estimated several thousand e-mails and phone calls to superdelegates. Volunteers gathered thousands more signatures on petitions in seven states including North Carolina.

And together with similar efforts by other Obama supporters, it made a difference. Most superdelegates are politicians, and they pay attention to the voters who elect them. Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory announced his support for Obama on Feb. 25 as a superdelegate from Ohio. Following a news story about his previous indecision, Mallory said he heard from many community members. "[I] got lots of calls and e-mails, mostly telling me to support Obama," he said. "I got three or four calls in support of Clinton, but it was very lopsided."

In mid-Feburary, approximately 400 superdelegates remained uncommitted. We targeted half of them, mostly elected officials and state Democratic party leaders, who we thought would be the most responsive to their constituents and rank-and-file Democrats in each state. Of the 205 superdelegates we posted contact info for, 130 of them (63%) endorsed Obama during the three and a half months leading up to June 4, when Hillary announced her intention to suspend campaigning. 56 superdelegates that we lobbied (27%) remained neutral, while only 19 (or 9%) came out for Hillary. Our target superdelegates delivered an 111-delegate net gain for Obama.

Superdelegate endorsement graph courtesy of DemConWatch

Belatedly, the Clinton campaign set up their own online lobbying operation, including slick, interactive websites. But whoever was running the show was decidedly not slick enough to realize the dangers of providing contact info for all the supers, including those who had already endorsed Hillary. Ditto for posting personal cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

NObama Democrats backing Hillary were late to the game, but they made up for it with frenzied enthusiasm once they got going. Taylor Marsh harangued her listeners to lobby superdelegates for Hillary, and sites like JustSayNoDeal.com and PUMAPAC.org (Party Unity My Ass) were hot on the bandwagon.

A project called LobbyDelegates.com also launched, and although officially neutral, became the go-to site for disgruntled Clintonistas. Three of the top five URLs directing traffic to LobbyDelegates.com were official Clinton websites, and a fourth was a site affiliated with PUMA PAC.

By late May, Obama's high profile supporters were anxious to get the nomination fight settled. Perhaps fed up with the efforts of Hillary dead-enders to keep dividing the party, on May 22 Arianna Huffington called for superdelegates to endorse Obama, and encouraged her readers to contact and lobby them.

In the end, enough superdelegates swung behind Obama to allow pledged delegates from the final primaries to put him over the top. Obama reached a majority of 2,118 delegates on the night of June 3, after voters in Montana cast their ballots in the 54th nominating contest of the season. The next day, Democratic members of Congress who had remained Clinton supporters up until that point urged her to withdraw, and she announced she would. Hillary delivered her concession speech three days later on June 7th, at a final event packed with her supporters.

A year later, I would like to thank all our Voters for Obama coalition members, volunteers, and supporters. Special thanks go out to co-organizers Mani Dexter, who did most of the superdelegate research necessary to first set up our site, and Dana Lumsden, for his enthusiasm and unwavering support; SuperVoters Susan Baylies and Scott Priz, for being willing to put on capes for Obama and help deliver 2,000 signed petitions to N.C. Gov. Mike Easley; and local organizer Cristobal Palmer, whose tireless efforts helped make our N.C. petition drive a success.

And a big thanks to everyone who visited votersforobama.org and used its tools to call, e-mail, or sign a petition to superdelegates for Obama. We let our party leaders know their constituents wanted Obama to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008, and they listened.

Erik Ose is a veteran of Democratic campaigns in North Carolina and blogs at The Latest Outrage.

Shashi Tharoor: Which Way India? Decision Next Week

2009-05-20T16:10:06Z

New Delhi -- A month after they first queued to vote in India's mammoth general election, the country's voters will learn the outcome on May 16. The election, staggered over five phases -- involving five polling days over four weeks, rather than one "election day" -- will determine who rules the world's largest democracy. Only one thing is certain: no single party will win a majority on its own. India is set for more coalition rule.

That may not be a bad thing. India's last two governments each served a full term and presided over significant economic growth, even though they comprised 23 and 20 parties, respectively. Coalition politics gives representation to the myriad interests that make up a diverse and complex society, and ensures that the country as a whole accepts the policies ultimately adopted.

But coalition rule can also often mean governance of the lowest common denominator, as resistance by any of the government's significant members to a policy can delay or even thwart it. In India's parliamentary system, if a coalition loses its majority, the government falls, and keeping allies together can sometimes prove a greater priority than getting things done.

Sonia Gandhi holds up an ink stained finger to show that her vote has been cast at a polling station during the fourth phase of polling, in New Delhi on May 7. AFP
India's national elections are really an aggregate of thirty different state elections, each influenced by its own local considerations, regional political currents, and different patterns of political incumbency. Soon after May 16, the largest single party that emerges will seek to construct a coalition out of a diverse array of victors from the various states.

Several outcomes are possible. The most likely is that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Indian National Congress, currently leading the government, emerges once again as the largest single party and assembles a new ruling coalition. The main alternative would be majority alliance put together by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by the 82-year-old Lal Krishna Advani.

But there is a third possibility: a motley collection of regional parties, together with the Communists, gets enough seats to prevent either of the two big parties from forming a government. In that case, a "hung parliament" could see a "third front" coming to power as a minority government, supported tactically by one of the big parties. This has happened before -- and each time, the government that resulted fell within a year.

Each alternative could have serious implications for India. Though the big parties are broadly committed to continuing an economic policy of liberalization and growth, the BJP is mostly focused on the well-being of India's merchant class, whereas Congress wishes to redistribute enhanced government revenues to the poor through generous social programs. The left, which would strongly influence any "third front" government, are staunchly opposed to economic liberalization and wish to strengthen, rather than dilute, India's large public sector.

In foreign policy, India's growing closeness with the United States under both the BJP and the Congress has proved controversial at home, with leftist parties threatening to scrap the Indo-US nuclear deal and break defense ties with Israel if they come to power.

Should the regional parties dominate the government, domestic politics would strongly impact India's foreign policy: the anger of Tamil voters over events in Sri Lanka, or of Muslims over Gaza, would be reflected in the government and therefore constrain policy options. The BJP has promised a more hawkish security posture than Congress in the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, but when it was in power it conducted itself remarkably similarly to its rival, initiating a peace process with Pakistan.
The biggest differences among the various groupings consist in the tone and tenor of their respective visions of India. Congress remains a "big tent" party, committed to preserving India's pluralism and conscious of the multiple identities and interests of India's many peoples. The BJP, which accuses Congress of "appeasing" India's minorities, hews to a staunchly Hindu-chauvinist line, and has received support from some of the most bigoted and intolerant sections of Indian society.

The "third front" involves assorted petty particularisms -- parties representing the sectarian interests of specific castes, sub-regions, or linguistic groups. The danger is that such groups could accentuate the divisions of a fractious society, rather than pull everyone together in the collective national interest.
That would be a startling change from five years ago. The 2004 elections were won by the Congress party, led by a woman political leader of Roman Catholic faith and Italian descent (Sonia Gandhi), who made way for a Sikh prime minister (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) in a country that is 81% Hindu. That single moment captured much of what elections have meant for this diverse democracy.

But the ultimate reality will remain that of a coalition government trying to make progress in a contentious polity. In India, policy changes require political consensus within the ruling coalition, labor laws are strongly defended by unions and political parties, and controversial decisions can be challenged on the streets, in the courts, and ultimately at the polls. Necessary policy reforms advocated by a ruling party are often held hostage to the prejudices of its allies.

So change comes slowly. But it does come, and once a policy consensus has been established, it tends to be durable. Indian democracy has often been likened to the stately progress of the elephant -- ponderous in its gait and reluctant to change course, but not easily swayed from its new path when it does.

The elephant of Indian democracy will acquire a new set of mahouts before the month's end. Who they are will have a major impact on the fortunes and prospects of one-sixth of humanity. That alone makes the election results due on May 16 worth the world's attention.

NOTE: This piece was originally published on 10 May 2009 by Project Syndicate

South Africa Election: ANC Leads In Preliminary Results

2009-04-23T08:24:56Z

JOHANNESBURG — South Africa's governing party set off fireworks and popped fizzy bottles of champagne Thursday as ballots were counted in the country's latest election. ANC chief Jacob Zuma said he was only thanking campaign workers _ but the celebration left little doubt about his ascension to the presidency.

Zuma reminded several thousand supporters gathered outside his party's downtown Johannesburg headquarters that the tally was still going on _ a technical point that hardly affected the party mood.

Macedonian Election Winner Pledges End to Name Dispute With Greece

2009-04-06T14:06:47Z

The man who has won Macedonia's presidential elections has pledged to solve a dispute with Greece over his country's name, which has delayed its entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Shunit Harpaz: It's Netanyahu Again

2009-02-25T12:11:11Z

Benjamin Netanyahu was appointed by Israeli President Shimon Peres to establish the next government, following the February 2009 general elections in Israel. Netanyahu is going to be the next Israeli Prime Minister and there is no reason to Yahoo about it. Chances are that he is going to build a narrow right-wing government, together with the parties that have recommended appointing him as PM, carrying 65 of the 120 seats in the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset). Commentaries say it reflects the Israeli people's will. After giving the left-wing parties a chance multiple times, they figured that peace is still a vague dream rather than a reality. Israelis are tired of living in fear, and residents of many cities in the south wanted to deliver the message -- No More. Out of this fear and hopelessness they elected right-wing parties to deal with Hamas and Hezbollah.

The irony is that Netanyahu himself is going to appear as somewhat "dovish" in his new government. To his right he'll have Avigdor Lieberman, the real story behind this election. Lieberman, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, led a negative campaign questioning the loyalty of Arab citizens living in Israel and their representatives in the Knesset. His key election platform was the commitment to require Arabs, by law, to declare their loyalty to Israel rather than Hamas and Hezbollah. At the backdrop of this election campaign were the frequent incidents of Arab representatives in the Knesset criticizing Israel for hurting Palestinian residents. Their unbalanced approach -- ignoring the suffering of Israelis who were hit by Hamas missiles -- found a growing segment of the public very resentful. Those who were angry with the Israeli Arabs' empathy towards Palestinians chose Lieberman to the Knesset -- making his party the third in size, leaving behind the veteran Labor party. Joining Lieberman in this right-wing government will be numerous smaller parties, including the nationalist 'Jewish Home' and 'National Union' along with religious 'Shas' and 'Torah Judaism'.

Now the question is -- how is this going to work out? And the answer is: quite poorly.
Netanyahu will face pressure from Europe and America to continue the peace process. In return, Netanyahu will provide the brightest explanations and clear rationale of why its mission impossible. The relationship between Netanyahu and the world is going to be one of rhetoric attrition. Netanyahu is a man of many words; most of them will make you run to the mountains screaming. He is an artist of making people fear of coming doomsday; this is how he won the Israeli elections -- twice.

It should be interesting to listen to the first meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. One will be hopeful and present opportunities and the other will pick and choose historic details as an example to show no feasibility. It's hard to imagine them working well together, coming from different ideologies, different character personas. Obama and Netanyahu will not be natural partners for achieving peace. All the political progress that Obama has in mind with the Syrians and the Palestinians will advance towards Netanyahu's besieged barrier. There will be no good-will gestures, as no member of the new government is going to support any. Netanyahu will be blocked by his own cabinet members from offering anything to the new American administration.

How can a government work this way? Well, it really can't. It is impossible to put the Middle East into deep freeze. The truth of the matter is that no political horizon evolves from the already-tense situation. The Hamas will not dissolve itself just because there is a right-wing government in Israel. Furthermore, it will increase its effort to hurt Israelis wherever they are. In response, Netanyahu's government will fight back, focusing on assassinating Hamas leaders via direct air strikes. The vicious circle will not dissolve. Netanyahu's government will not last long; a country cannot function when there is no political advancement. The only hope is that Israelis will regain their composure and next time vote for peace-longing parties and Prime Minister.

Lawrence Lessig: Small Donors are Going on Strike: A Strike for Change

2009-01-09T15:35:44Z

Last week I posted at the Huffington Post, starting a dialogue about how to fight corruption in Congress. Hundreds of people wrote in with thoughtful comments, but almost everyone agreed on one main truth: that the political system is broken by too much money from special interests, and not enough influence for small-dollar donors.

Today I'm writing again to announce some big news. At Change Congress, we're launching a political "donor strike" where thousands of people pledge only to donate to politicians who support a system of public funding — plus Obama-style small-dollar donations — for congressional elections.

We call this "citizen-funded elections." The 2008 election proved the power of grassroots donations. Now's the time to turn that power into real change. We're giving Congress a choice: you can either have our money or money from special interests, but not both. We'll reward the reformers. But those who oppose reform won't get any money from us. Nada. Zip.

Already, the Associated Press has written a story about this donor strike. Can you help add to the momentum by taking the pledge today at this link? It will only take a minute.

Our pledge reads: "I'm pledging not to donate to any federal candidate unless they support legislation making congressional elections citizen-funded, not special-interest funded." You can sign it here.

Last night, I was on the Colbert Report and talked with Stephen Colbert about the corrupting influence of money on Congress. I then taped a special video from the Colbert green room announcing today's big news. You can watch it here or at the bottom of this post.

Last year, 10 senators (including Barack Obama) and nearly 60 House members co-sponsored the type of reform we're proposing. It's up to us to add to those numbers — and to get the backs of those who are fighting for change.

As Congress begins to debate the big issues of the day, we all have issues that we care about most. But progress will be blocked on every big issue until we solve the threshold problem: special interests having too much clout in our public debates. Especially with the economic crisis we face, it makes no sense for our elected leaders to spend their time begging for campaign contributions from the very special interests that got us into this mess.

Ironically, in these tough economic times, you can do your part to clean up the system by pledging to give nothing. Thousands of people pledging to give nothing will go a long way. Here's what some of our partners in the reform movement are saying about this new campaign:

DEMOCRACY MATTERS's Adonal Foyle: "As a professional basketball player, I am proud to pledge that I will donate only to candidates who support citizen-funded Congressional elections."

COMMON CAUSE's Bob Edgar: "If millions of small donors make it clear to Congress that they are serious about real reform now, that will make a huge difference in our ability to get Congress to do what more and more members are realizing they need to do: End their addiction to money from a handful of big donors, once and for all."

PUBLIC CITIZEN's David Arkush: "We're near a tipping point in Washington politics. Small donors made a huge impact in 2008, but unfortunately, big money still has more sway. Now small donors have a chance to change the pay-to-play system and have their voices heard."

U.S. PIRG's Lisa Gilbert: "In order to see change on critical issues like the economy and our healthcare system, we need a clean campaign funding system that allows regular voters to be heard by our politicians."

AMERICANS FOR CAMPAIGN REFORM's Dan Weeks: "What we're seeing is the small donor revolution starting to leverage its power on a broken Washington system."

Can you watch the video announcing the donor strike and take the pledge today?

Mary Lyon: Blago for Senate Majority Leader

2009-01-08T02:10:37Z

1 7 09

Blago for Senate Majority Leader
By Mary Lyon

There! I said it.

Yes. I know embattled and ethically - well, um - relaxed Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has no business in the U.S. Senate. There's more than a fair amount of people who quite reasonably believe his shenanigans redefine him as having no business in the Illinois governor's job, either. But there's something I've just gotta give the guy (besides a piece of my mind).

I'd like to give him a round of applause. He's evidently a world-class political maneuverer in the way he's left Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spluttering and stammering over the Roland Burris affair. I would never want to play chess - or poker - with this guy, considering how he played the "I-can-TOO-appoint-whoever-I-want-to-fill-Barack-Obama's-Senate-seat,-regardless-what-kind-of-corruption-trouble-I'm-in" game. The same Harry Reid who declared just days ago that Burris would not be allowed into the most exclusive club in the world is now facing another capitulation. Blago outplayed him. Sent an appointee who was remarkably unimpeachable, with the added luster of maintaining the scant representation (a single seat) for African-Americans in the Senate.

Believe me, I'm no fan of Blago aside from some sheer partisanship years ago when my son, then in 5th grade, chose his grandma's home state of Illinois on which to report, and we learned that Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, had recently replaced the GOP's disgraced George Ryan as governor. A Dem taking over from a Republican. Always good news to me. If anything, I'm just plain ticked that Blago would then set about giving Democrats a black eye and bloody nose with his own corruption misadventures. Thanks a heap, pal. Whose side are you on? And of course it all conveniently comes to a head when everyone regardless of party needs to be pulling together behind a Democrat: President-Elect Barack Obama. Just what we need is one of ours (a Democrat) giving all of theirs (Republicans) reason to try to make life more difficult for our new Commander-in-Chief.

But Blago played this shrewdly and brilliantly, painting Harry Reid into a corner, and it's a safe bet that our beloved Harry can be counted on to capitulate yet again. Sigh. Been there, done that, Senator Reid. All this means is that Reid is widely portrayed as the loser (that's how it's viewed especially in the analytical class - it's inevitably reduced rather simplistically to a winner and a loser, for better or worse). And because perception is everything in politics, you simply do NOT want to appear to be, or somehow positioned as, a loser. It matters not the reason, whatever justification you can find in the fine print, or how correct you think you are.

Let me say that again. Perception is everything in politics, whether any of us likes it or not. And with the wickedly-calculated appointment of Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama's now-vacant Senate slot, Rod Blagojevich now looks oddly and begrudgingly like a hero, with the hapless Harry Reid as the goat. Played again, Sam, by yet another Machiavellian master.

I sure wish our Senate leaders (AND House leaders, too, for that matter) could maneuver the way Blago just did. We need a LOT of that and ASAP, not merely as Democrats but as a whole nation. As Democrats, now is THE time, and perhaps the ONLY time, to show gargantuan guts, because there's a huge amount of change that is going to have to be strong-armed through the House and the Senate to rescue our nation, our economy, our reputation in the world, our moral authority, and a great deal more. The GOP has decided to dig in their heels and try to block every inch of progress and every new approach that America desperately needs to pull us out of the Republican-authored abyss of the last eight years. So far, there is NO ONE in either house of Congress attempting to remind them of what happened in November (they LOST), what a substantial and unspinnable majority of Americans voted for (neither the Republican NOR his more-of-the-same ideas), and what direction the voters dictated (AWAY from the GOP's way of doing things).

Didn't anybody notice in DC? Didn't anyone see or read, or comprehend, the writing on the wall last fall? Did they all fail miserably yet again, this time misunderstanding the mood of the people - and the new and wholly different approaches they endorsed? They still don't get it? Elections have consequences, as do the across-the-board results the Republicans produced. Basically, the message was for the infants and adolescents to go to the back of the class, sit down, and shut up - while the adults return, at long last, to restore order and clean up the mess. Republicans, they didn't want you running things anymore. The proof couldn't have been more clear. Many of us don't even want to hear from the lot of you for awhile, for how badly you've screwed things up, on YOUR watch, in OUR name, and with OUR money. You had your say and your glory days and you blew it big-time. You Republicans have thereby forfeited any right to have any say about anything, hopefully for quite awhile with your lousy conduct and even lousier policies. Frankly, your Democratic colleagues in both Houses owe you nothing but the backs of their hands.

The last thing we need is ANYTHING that gives the GOP ANY openings at all to throw more monkey-wrenches into the machinery. Why give them ANY in's whatsoever? America already decided it wanted no more of what they're still selling. Since they're clearly not willing to recognize this or bow to it, and they seem determined to keep making trouble, what we need, as Americans - not just Democrats, is a team of roaring, snarling tigers and shrewder-than-thou poker players. So far, I don't see many. The voters called for big changes and installed the Democrats in the driver's seat. The challenges ahead demand backbones of steel among Democrats, because the work will be crushing, the problems nearly sickening, and the extent of the change we need won't come overnight. It's critical that we have the strong, the sharp, and the surly to grab the wheel and shift the gears. And with Harry Reid in the lead, I fear we have none of the above.

We do have an incoming Democratic president who's declared his intentions to reach out to the opposition (oh great - offering them a hand to bite, if not try to bite off). So okay then. Let him be Good Cop. In the House and Senate, on the other hand, we need the Bad Cops - and dozens of them. SOMEONE needs to have Barack's back. And it looks as though nobody does. Reid is even talking about standing up to the new president when it's deemed necessary. Oh yeah? Senator, you've had years to figure that one out, and years to apply it to a president who should have been obstructed at every turn. And you failed. Only now did you just get religion. I say again: "Harry, whose team are you on?"

We need world-class chess and poker players working for us. Because now more than ever, we Democrats need to project an image of power, guts, intimidation, and invincibility - to deflect and defeat any further interference from the losing team. It doesn't make much difference whether Reid was technically correct regarding parts of the Burris-Blago business. Perception is still everything in politics, and the picture now painted is of a guy who got rolled - AGAIN. Oh great. Just what we need as our representatives prepare to do hand-to-hand combat to pull our country back from the Republican-built brink. The guy most likely to get punked, out-played, and out-bluffed. What's required, instead, is someone willing to play hardball, making Obama's congenial persona all the more appealing by contrast. Someone willing to manipulate the public perception. Somebody with the devious smarts of a Rod Blagojevich - who knows how to be the roller rather than the roll-ee. We may not like B-Rod much, but dammit, Democrats, he won this. And he's still ours. While he is, we ought to find a way to make something out of it. Or at least take a lesson on political gamesmanship from it.

Meanwhile, I'm wondering whether the Senate Majority Leader might be interested in some sort of poker game...

Jeffrey Shaffer: Rumors For The Next Campaign

2009-01-06T18:24:32Z

This message is for all potential candidates who are already planning ahead for
the 2012 elections. Politics is no cakewalk. You've got to prepare for worst-case scenarios. There may come a time during the contest when the polling numbers go in the tank, your talking points start falling flat, and a lot of voters seem to be getting bored with the whole process.

The solution is simple: you must jolt the entire campaign out of the doldrums with some high-voltage charges about your opponent that will create doubts about his character and judgment.

Taking the offensive will make you look decisive. Don't worry about being truthful. If the past ten years have proven anything, it's that significant numbers of Americans will give credence to negative rumors about a candidate regardless of how often the stories are debunked.

If challenged by a reporter to back up your claims, simply say, "The issue isn't about facts. It's about starting a necessary discussion." Or, to put it more persuasively, just because an allegation isn't true doesn't mean it should be swept under the carpet.

Don't wait until your approval ratings have sunk to single digits. Pick up the phone and start the leaks flowing. Here are some eye-brow raising accusations that will quickly swing the momentum back in your favor.

1) My opponent may not be a citizen of this country. I've heard reports that he was born on an airliner flying over the ocean. By not being born on the surface of our planet, I believe he cannot legally be classified as an Earthling.

2) Reliable assertions have been made that my opponent believes the internet is just a fad and our communication needs would be better served by a nationwide system of skywriting.

3) My opponent has said on numerous occasions that he thinks "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is the greatest movie ever made.

4) Friends of my opponent claim he once belonged to a shadowy cult that believes Arthur Godfrey is still alive in a secret mountain hiding place and will someday return to rule over a New Golden Age of Television.

5) My opponent once visited the Los Alamos Nuclear facility and was overheard asking a guard, "Where do you guys keep the Kryptonite?"

6) A reliable official in the state department revealed that my opponent wants Disneyland to have seat on the UN Security Council.

7) Former high school classmates say my opponent started wearing an eyepatch during his senior year and lied on his college application by claiming to be the real life model for bubble gum icon Bazooka Joe.

8) My opponent wants all foreign language classes in public schools canceled immediately and replaced with Esperanto.

9) My opponent has bragged repeatedly that he gets his ideas about economics by listening to old Led Zepplin records played backwards.

10) All those great speeches my opponent gives are mostly pre-recorded. At least 90-percent of the time he's just lip-synching.

Gerald Bracey: The Hatchet Job On Linda Darling-Hammond

2009-01-04T14:20:13Z

When Senator Clinton was still a candidate for president, both she and Senator Obama sought counsel from an educator friend of mine. He told them both not to say anything about education. No matter what you say, he told me that he told them, you're going to make a lot of people mad (he made his point in more colorful language). Oh, man, how right can you be?

In the run-up to Obama's picking a secretary, two sides formed in a debate over the desiderata for a secretary and might have duked it out, but only one side was permitted to throw punches in public. It wasn't Dems vs. the GOP. Indeed, that huge sucking sound you hear is Republicans trying to control their laughter. The two groups are largely within the Democratic Party. They might duke it out still because some see secretary of education-designate, Arne Duncan, as the right man in the right place and others see him as evil incarnate (though not quite so incarnate as Joel Klein or Michelle Rhee). If not evil incarnate, a man to further the corporatization of education and the commodification of childhood.

The winners in the fight-that-wasn't were the people who managed to get themselves anointed by the mainstream media--or "corporate media" as some call them--as reformers. They thereby once again illustrated George Lakoff's powerful concept of "frame." This gang consisted of Mike Bloomberg, Joel Klein, Paul Vallas, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan and, weirdly enough, Al Sharpton. Really. It is useful to remember that "reform" means only to reshape, not necessarily improve.

The losers were actual educators in schools and universities who were mostly not permitted in the ring. The "reformers'" advocates managed to label their opposition candidate, Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond, as an instrument of the "status quo" and as a teachers union tool. Ludicrous? Yes, but it happened.

In Newsweek, Jonathan Alter wrote that Obama knew "that if he chooses a union-backed candidate such as Linda Darling-Hammond...he'll have a revolt on his hands from the swelling ranks of reformers." Swelling ranks? Says who? Edward Sarby in the New Republic asked "How dangerous is Linda Darling-Hammond, Obama's old-school, pro-union education guru?" "Worst case scenario," answered Mike Petrilli of the Right-wing Fordham Institute. The Washington Post said the secretariat was "A Job for a Reformer." It described the choice as between "warring camps within the Democratic party, those pushing for radical restructuring and those more wedded to the status quo." After Obama selected Duncan, the Post ran a puff piece on his sterling qualities.

The "reformers" panicked at one point because Darling-Hammond, who had served as Obama's proxy in several education policy debates, was named to head the education sector of his transition team. They worried this signaled future elevation to secretary. David Brooks in the New York Times said, "I got a flurry of phone calls from reform leaders nervous that Obama was about to side against them...The stakes are huge. For the first time in decades there is real momentum for reform." Brooks apparently has been holed up in the same cave as bin Laden, only longer, say, 50 years.

Aside from a few letters to editors and blogs, about the only published support for Darling-Hammond came from John Affeldt in the Huffington Post, Alfie Kohn in The Nation, and the San Francisco Chronicle in an editorial. Fred Klonsky's blog called the one-sided and often loaded language used by the pro "reformers" bunch as "The hatchet job on Darling-Hammond." Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) emphatically agreed and headlined its take on the sad affair, "The media's failing grade on education 'debate.'"

FAIR observed, "One prominent exception to the corporate media's one-sided presentation of the education nominee was Sam Dillon's news article in the New York Times. Not only did it avoid caricaturing Darling-Hammond by citing views of both her critics and supporters, the article included some accurate media criticism:

"'Editorials and opinion articles in the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have described the debate as pitting education reformers against those representing the educational establishment or the status quo. But who the reformers are depends on who is talking.'"

"Unfortunately," continued FAIR, "in most establishment media accounts, only one side has been allowed to do the talking."

Amen, FAIR and Sam.

Fred Klonsky's brother, Mike, suggests that Duncan, once out from under the thumb of Chicago Mayor Daley might be "neither as bad as some on the Left have predicted or as 'good' as some on the Right are hoping for." We can only hope Mike's called this one right. In the meantime, we wuz framed.

Jacqueline Salit: How the Independent Movement Went Left by Going Right

2009-01-02T10:07:40Z

How the Independent Movement Went Left By Going Right

A Special Post-Election Report

By Neo-Independent Executive Editor Jacqueline Salit.

On election night I watched Barack Obama give his victory speech in Grant Park, cheered on by millions of Americans across the country. They were celebrating the fall of barriers - racial barriers, cultural barriers, partisan and political barriers. As I watched, I thought about the independents and the 20 years we've spent fighting to tear down those barriers in our movement, so that we could help the country to turn the political page.

Analysts will look back at the campaign and highlight what they deem to have been the turning points. They will tell you, for example, that the South Carolina primary in late January was a watershed moment, when a majority of black voters moved to Obama's side and he defeated Hillary Clinton. But the official analysts are short on the details of what was occurring on the ground, the pivotal moments when the words and actions of independents produced change from the bottom up.

On election night I thought of Wayne Griffin, a long-time African American independent, the leader of the South Carolina Independence Party who has spent 20 years building political coalitions between the black community and white independents. Wayne played that role again in the South Carolina Democratic primary, when he stepped out to say that African Americans and white independents should be going for Obama in the state's open primary. And they did. He knew that such an unusual coalition could come together around the need to change the nature of the political process itself because he'd seen it happen in the independent political movement. He brought his experience and vision to the table when it mattered most.

I thought about Mitch Campbell, the founder of the American Independent Movement in Idaho, who shaped our federal court case there to save open primaries and preserve the rights of independent voters. Mitch called me one day, as the Idaho Democratic caucuses (open to independents) were approaching, and said to me: Jackie, it's time for independents to go for Obama. He reached out with that message to show America that in the reddest (and whitest) of red states, independents would support a black progressive for president.

I thought about Russ Ouellette in New Hampshire, who sat across the table from Obama just weeks before the New Hampshire primary. In a dialogue about nonpartisan government, with TV cameras recording the conversation, Obama said: "If there's a Republican out there who is the best person for any particular Cabinet position or any administrative agency that's going to make a difference, then I will make that appointment." Russ replied, "That's great. But I don't think being independent means just reaching across to Republicans." And Obama replied, "Well, that includes independents. I mean, independents even better."

Twenty-nine percent of Americans who voted in the 2008 election are independents. In the election those voters said some things - not just about a new direction for our country, but about themselves. If you listen to what they said, you discover that independent voting is changing, taking on a more organized and progressive dimension. What follows is a narrative of that change, a story of how a contemporary political eruption that began on the center-right with little connection to communities and concerns beyond its borders developed into a culturally and racially diverse movement on the center-left and elected the first black President of the United States.

1. The Independent Vote in 2008

In the 2008 presidential election over 128 million Americans cast ballots, sending Barack Obama to the White House with a popular vote mandate of 53%. (John McCain received 46% of the popular vote.) Obama carried every region in the country (the Northeast by 57%, the Midwest by 54%, the West by 55%) but the South. The shift in the popular vote from Republican to Democrat since 2004 was a 10-point swing, as Obama wove together a new national coalition that swept a majority of women (56%), voters under 45 (he took 69% of first-time voters), blacks (95%), Latinos (67%), moderates (60%), most income and educational background groups, and independents.

Obama polled 52% of the independent vote as compared with McCain's 44%, strong evidence that independents have become more progressive than conservative. (In 2004 independent voters split nearly evenly, 49% going for John Kerry and 48% for George Bush.) The relative size of the independent voting bloc was higher. Twenty-nine percent of the electorate were independents, up three points from 26% in 2004. (The Democrats' share went up by two points; the Republican share dropped by five points.) And in another notable change in the independent demographic, 6% of the overall electorate were independents of color - African American, Latino, Asian American and Native American. Seventy percent of those voters chose Barack Obama.

Gone are the days when independent voting was the sole province of the "angry conservative white male." It is estimated that more than 20%, or one in five, of the independents who voted for Obama on November 4 are people of color. While national exit polls show that white independents split between Obama (47%) and McCain (49%) - with white voters overall breaking for McCain (55% to 43%) - in some of the most hotly contested battleground states that Obama carried, independents of all hues voted for him. In Ohio, they supported Obama over McCain 52% to 44%. In Pennsylvania, 58% of independents were Obama voters. In Florida, 52% backed him. In Indiana - where a Democratic presidential candidate hasn't won for 44 years - 54% of independents supported Obama, providing the margin of victory in his one-point win over McCain. In New Hampshire, 59% of independents backed Obama. Fifty-six percent of New Mexico independents and 54% of independents in Nevada supported him as well.

In several states that went for McCain, Obama still carried or split independents. Notably, McCain's home state of Arizona was one of these. There, 51% of independents backed Obama, a pointed reminder of the extent to which McCain turned his back on his own history of maverick independence to be the Republican nominee.

Some 19.3 million independents cast ballots for Obama, nearly the size of the vote for Ross Perot in 1992. This number in and of itself should make the pundits (or at least Larry King!) sit up and take notice. But the story of the independent vote for Obama is about much more than the numbers. A closer look at the evolution of the independent voting bloc - from a center-right uprising fomented by the mercurial billionaire Perot to a diverse and decentralized center-left movement for political reform that carried Obama to his victory in the Democratic primaries and subsequently played a decisive role in his general election coalition - reveals just how important that shift was to the outcome of this historic election.

How did such a shift occur? It is, in part, a matter of changing times, changing demographics, changing technology and spectacularly high levels of distrust in political parties and Beltway politics. It has also been propelled by small but highly organized networks in the independent political movement, which helped to re-route the trajectory of non-aligned voters to the left while replacing the operative paradigm within the organized independent political movement itself.

The new paradigm reworks the premise that independents best (or only) express their interests by voting for independent or third-party candidates. The new paradigm, largely pioneered by IndependentVoting.org, the online counterpart of the Committee for a Unified Independent Party (CUIP), appeals to independent voters to leverage their power through shifting tactical alliances with candidates based on their support for the independent agenda and regardless of their partisan affiliation. The gradual movement to the center-left, together with a shift in tactics, ushered in a kind of realignment in the independent movement, which in turn found expression in broad-based support from independents for Obama.

2. The Shift in the Politics of the Independent Vote: Some Factors That Broadened the Vision of the 1990's Independent Movement, Including the Challenge to Centrism.

During the Perot era, most progressives wrote off the emergent independent political movement as "too far to the right." But CUIP's founders - progressives who had built a base for independent politics in the black, Latino, gay and left communities in the 1980s - wanted to experiment with new kinds of left-center-right coalitions, which included African Americans and other communities of color. Without the constraints of partisan divisions, in a distinctly nonpartisan environment, new coalitions among independents might be possible. Put another way, the rightward leanings of the Perot-style independent movement might not be fixed in stone, especially if the political and cultural embargo by the left could be broken.

Accordingly, as the Perot movement began to regroup post-1992, a far-flung network of Perot activists, who were seeking to transform their electoral earthquake into an ongoing national political party, found willing partners on the progressive side of the independent aisle. A year of exploratory left-right dialogues and joint events were spearheaded by Nicholas Sabatine, the Pennsylvania attorney who had run the Perot effort in the Keystone State, with Lenora Fulani, America's leading black independent, who in 1988 had become the first woman and the first African American presidential candidate ever to be on the ballot in all 50 states, her chief strategist and political mentor Fred Newman, and this writer. Not unexpectedly, the road to founding that national party was bumpy, even detoured at times.

A party-building meeting of the Federation of Independent Parties (FIP), convened by Perot's pollster, Gordon Black, pointedly excluded Fulani and her supporters. The exclusion of the Fulani forces was, according to Black, a necessary condition for creating what he envisioned as a "centrist party." Progressive and African American independents were not, in Black's view, the target population for a voter revolt against the political status quo. Based on his analysis, articulated in The Politics of American Discontent - How a New Party Can Make Democracy Work Again, published in 1994 just as the FIP process was getting underway, a new political party that would restore pragmatism and democracy to the American political process would be formed by white moderates peeled away from both the Republican and Democratic parties. In his book, Black argued that under this arrangement, "The Democratic Party could become the true champion of minorities, the poor, and the public employees unions, with the liberal wing in power."

In other words, blacks and progressives should stay behind in the Democratic Party, leaving the new reform movement to be led and actualized by moderate whites. Fred Newman was particularly outspoken against the centrism thesis. In his view, not only was Black's model racially discriminatory and politically sectarian, it relied on the premise that there was, in fact, a "political center" in American politics - a place of permanent moderation to which most Americans gravitated. For Newman, a Stanford-trained philosopher and postmodern change theorist, a prevailing characteristic of the times, manifest in the Perot rebellion itself, was that the "center" was failing to hold. Attempts to recreate one would only meet with failure, as there was no longer any social or economic basis for it. The Perot rebellion, and the overall disalignment from the major political parties, were not indicators that Americans were searching for a "center" - in between the ideologically left Democratic Party and the ideologically right Republican Party. Instead, according to Newman, the emergent independent impulse was away from ideology and partisanship altogether, creating the potential for new coalitions of the left and right in support of nonpartisan political reform.

The idea that the Perot movement might broaden its borders and that the base for a new political party should be politically and culturally heterogeneous met with resistance. But after Sabatine was selected by the FIP conference to oversee the founding of a new national party, he established objective criteria for qualifying delegates to a founding convention. One consequence was that Fulani and Newman, with whom Sabatine had become friendly, brought a sizable delegation to the founding convention of what became the Patriot Party in Arlington, Virginia. This gave an entirely different (multi-racial and progressive) twist to the affair.

At the Patriot Party convention, African American youth wearing Malcolm X tee-shirts (this was still the pre-Obama era!) sat at tables alongside Perotistas sporting tricorner hats and other American Revolutionary paraphernalia.

But the cultural strangeness of the event only seemed to deepen the sense of collective empowerment. As convention deliberations got underway, one delegate moved to strike the term "centrist" from the party's draft mission statement on the grounds that it was exclusionary. The motion carried with broad support. Gordon Black, present at the convention as a delegate from New York, stormed out.

Aware that the strength of Fulani's delegation meant that she could be elected to any officer position of her choice, and afraid of the controversy that would thereby surround the fledging party, Sabatine asked that she refrain from seeking any official position. Fulani and Newman agreed, while nominating key allies to national executive committee posts. Among them was California's Jim Mangia, who would later help to influence Perot's decision to form the national Reform Party.

After Sabatine was elected chair, Fulani was nominated for vice chair. In declining, she told the assembled delegates that she would always put the interests of the movement and the country ahead of her own. The convention erupted into thunderous cheers and applause. A black and independent alliance was making its first appearance on the political stage, with an African American progressive as its popular voice. Moreover, the "centrist" model of independent politics had been roundly repudiated by the delegates.

Five years later, there was much water under the bridge: the Patriot Party's successful effort to persuade Perot to reorganize United We Stand, America into the national Reform Party with which Patriot would eventually fuse; the hotly contested Reform Party presidential primary between Perot and the liberal former Colorado governor Dick Lamm; Perot's second presidential run in 1996 with economist Pat Choate as his vice presidential running mate; the formal creation of the Reform Party following the election (Patriot dissolved itself into Reform in 1996); and Jesse Ventura's election as governor of Minnesota in 1998. But by 1999, with Bill Clinton's second term drawing to a close, the Reform Party had come to a crossroads.

Reform had become a national political entity with ballot status parties in over 30 states. It stood to receive $18 million in federal funding for its 2000 presidential candidate. While Perot was bowing out, the ranks of the party were chafing at the increasingly tight-fisted control exerted by Perot's circle in Dallas. Fulani and the CUIP networks, meanwhile, were a significant rank-and-file force inside the party, with sizeable - though minority - representation on the National Committee. (Mangia was the party's national secretary.) At the party's 1999 national convention in Dearborn, Michigan, the Dallas group intended to transfer power (the chairmanship and vice-chairmanship) to Perot loyalists, believing they had the votes for an easy win.

Meanwhile, the pro-democracy forces were searching for ways to overcome Dallas control and expand the base of the movement. The Ventura camp, critical of Perot's governance, was isolated inside the party but had an outsize megaphone thanks to Ventura's high profile.

Ventura had chosen a candidate for chairman, Jack Gargan, to contest Perot's control. But the Ventura forces did not have anywhere near the requisite support among convention delegates to prevail. Fulani's base of support, meanwhile, had grown. The black leftist was held in high regard by a cross-section of delegates; they viewed her as an honest broker who had integrated the party, largely without acrimony, while rejecting identity politics in favor of an inclusive, populist, pro-democracy vision. Uniquely, she had ties to all camps inside the party.

Ventura, prevented from flying into Dearborn by a sudden rainstorm, telephoned into the convention to nominate Gargan. Two Perot stalwarts were also nominated for top positions as the convention delegates debated the best way forward for the party. In a private meeting, Gargan asked Fulani for her support. She, in turn, asked that her chief lieutenant, Cathy Stewart, be appointed head of the Party Building Committee in a Gargan administration, charged with expanding the party's base at the grassroots, a mission that had been long neglected by the Perot regime. Gargan agreed. Fulani and Stewart began quietly putting the word out that they were supporting Gargan.

The Dallas contingent did not grasp what was happening until it was too late to respond. Amidst an uproar on the convention floor, Gargan was elected party chairman and Dallas was toppled.

But the surprises weren't over. Fulani's name was placed in nomination for vice chair and Dallas struggled feverishly to recoup. Calling in chips across the floor, after several ballots they mustered 55% of the vote for the Perot loyalist. But Fulani had polled 45% of the vote of the majority white and center-right convention, suggesting that ideological and racial boundaries were not as rigid as they might appear. Obama would make historic use of that insight nine years later.

The left-center-right pro-democracy uprising in the Reform Party was put down in short order. The Dallas forces regrouped, drove Gargan out of the chairmanship in a matter of months, and brought in conservative Republican-turned-independent presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan to become the party's standard-bearer. After a season of shifting alliances (including a brief attempt at a right-left partnership between Buchanan and Fulani), Buchanan was declared the Reform Party nominee in time to preside over the party's implosion. He polled under half a million votes.

The Reform Party was not the only third-party casualty of 2000. The other independent force making a bid for mainstream influence was the Green Party, whose nominee, Ralph Nader, had set as a goal for his presidential bid garnering 5% of the national vote. This would have given the Greens national party status and made them eligible for federal funding in the 2004 presidential election. Nader fell short, polling 2.7%.

The public furor over Florida and the charge that Nader cost Al Gore the election sent many high-profile left-wing Nader supporters rushing back to the Democratic fold. But the intra-left acrimony served to obscure the deeper problems with the Green party-building strategy. The energy of the anti-partisan voter bloc was growing post-Perot. But it was not gravitating towards a third party, Reform, Green, Libertarian or otherwise. The largely sectarian efforts of the Greens and Nader to channel it in that direction had fallen distinctly flat.

With increasing numbers of Americans disaligning themselves from any political party, CUIP strategists sought to develop an approach to independent organizing that reflected on-the-ground realities. Most organized elements of the independent movement (Greens, Libertarians, the remnants of Reform, the Constitution Party) were stuck in the party paradigm, notwithstanding its obvious failures. Meanwhile, the mass of independent voters - 35% of the electorate - did not have a defined voice in the political process. The CUIP insight was, in many respects, simple. Couldn't "swing voting" by independents be harnessed? Couldn't independents begin to choose candidates based on the options and circumstances in a given election, and use these coalitions to elevate the power of independents? CUIP's networks began to test that approach.

3. From 2004 to 2008: New Politics and New Tactics

As the war in Iraq began to alarm growing numbers of Americans, independents, too, started to question U.S. policy there. In the summer of 2003, 59% of independents believed going to war was the "right decision." Two years later a majority, 53%, were "negative about the decision to go to war." The short-lived but electrifying 2004 presidential primary campaign of Howard Dean - supported by younger and independent voters, including many in the CUIP networks - suggested that a sea change might be underway. But once Dean was forced out of the race by the "always searching for the center" Democratic Party establishment, the opportunity for a Dean/independent coalition was foreclosed. Meanwhile, Nader was floating the idea of another presidential run, but this time based on a different model.

Two years earlier Jim Mangia had presented Nader with a strategy memo in which he outlined an alternative approach to an independent presidential campaign. Mangia argued that if Nader ran again, he should not run as a Green Party candidate, or as the candidate of any other single party. Rather, he should mount a coalitional candidacy to unify diverse elements of the independent movement. Mangia and CUIP felt strongly that traditional ideology-based third-party strategies had run their course. And in late 2003, as the Dean candidacy was destructing, Nader reached out to Mangia. He was seeking CUIP's support for a coalitional run.

Nader appeared at CUIP's "Choosing An Independent President" conference in New Hampshire in January 2004, when 400 delegates from 35 states assembled to assess best options for the 2004 presidential election. George Bush was not an option. The second and third tier Democrats, including John Edwards, Wesley Clark, Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton, were already on the wane. With Dean out of the picture and the centrist Kerry on the ascent, a partnership with the pro-war Democrats was less and less appealing. Nader made his independent pitch and was well received. While in New Hampshire, Newman, Mangia and I held a private meeting with Nader during which Newman asked Nader for assurances that the Greens, who had been hostile to Nader's decision to follow the CUIP blueprint, would not be allowed to play a disruptive role in the coalition. At first, Nader acted surprised at the notion, but later agreed to do what he could.

The CUIP networks energetically supported Nader, while CUIP's election attorney Harry Kresky was deployed to aid him in what became an avalanche of ballot access challenges against his candidacy, led and coordinated by the Democratic National Committee. The Greens, not unexpectedly, balked at Nader's coalition plan and nominated David Cobb, whose "safe states" strategy was designed to avoid any repetition of the spoiler scenario. The Greens' national vote total plummeted to 119,859. CUIP leaders brought the New York Independence Party and the South Carolina Independence Party into the fold for Nader, while the remnants of the Reform Party backed him, too. He polled 465,650 votes. As noted earlier, independent voters overall split between Kerry and George Bush.

Meanwhile, big news in independent politics was happening locally, particularly with respect to the emergence of new political coalitions. In 2005, CUIP leaders in New York (Fulani, Newman, Stewart, Kresky and I) were the architects and organizers of a history-making change in voting patterns: our endorsement of then-reformer Mayor Mike Bloomberg on the Independence Party line resulted in an astonishing 47% of the African American vote and 60% of the independent vote for his re-election. A black and independent alliance had dealt a body blow to the city's entrenched Democratic machine.

A year later 59% of independents voted for Democrats in the midterm elections, largely on the basis of opposition to the war, thereby giving the Democratic Party control of Congress for the first time since 1994. The stage was set for the 2008 presidential race and for CUIP to pursue the best partnership for independents.

4. Open Primaries Fuel the Black and Independent Alliance

Hillary Clinton had voted for the war but believed that dissatisfaction with Bush policies could fuel a Democratic victory. Clinton's political instincts and strategies were those of a partisan. She had disastrously bad relationships with the independent movement, having gone so far as to try, unsuccessfully, to have Fulani and her allies excised from the Independence Party of New York in the hopes of returning it to the center-right where it had originated in Perot's heyday.

Obama, on the other hand, opposed the war. A self-described post-partisan, he recognized that independents were emerging as a crucial swing force and that, unlike in the 1990s, this constituency was now in motion towards the center-left. The increasingly multi-racial character of the movement, its natural attraction to a vision of changing the culture of politics, and the decline in its political xenophobia meant that he could appeal to a broad cross-section of those voters. Independents in the CUIP networks found a hospitable response from the Obama campaign as numerous state organizations reached out to query his level of interest in connecting with the independent movement. That 33 states would hold Democratic (and Republican) primaries or caucuses in which independents were allowed to vote accelerated the intersecting of the CUIP strategy and the Obama strategy.

Obama carried independents in Iowa's open caucuses and again in New Hampshire's open Democratic Party primary. But in New Hampshire, more independents than expected chose to vote in the Republican primary and broke heavily for McCain. While this resuscitated McCain's campaign and set him on the path to the Republican nomination, it also deflated Obama's independent edge over Clinton, who won the Granite State primary. The next major proving ground was South Carolina, an important open primary state.

The Clintons were counting on South Carolina to be their firewall with black voters. Many black churches acted as a Clinton echo chamber, re-enforcing the idea that this was "Hillary's Time."

Wayne Griffin, an independent on the city council in Greer, heard the Clinton drumbeat and thought the odds might be in her favor. But Griffin deeply disliked the Clintonian style of politics. Under the banner of the newly formed Independents for Obama, he ran radio commercials across the state promoting this message:

I'm Wayne Griffin. I was born and raised here in South Carolina. I have a family, I run a small business and I'm part of a growing movement of African American independents who want to get beyond the same old political games.

There are a lot of people like me - who are independent in their political views; who think insider politics in Washington and Columbia have to change. Among younger African Americans, over 35% consider themselves independents, and don't relate to the "win at all costs" style of elections.

Independents can vote on Saturday and we've got a lot of reasons to do so. The Democratic Party establishment - now run by Bill and Hillary Clinton - sees the country in terms of old labels, old coalitions and old tactics. They think change comes from the top.

But the change I am a part of is coming from the bottom. It's coming from ordinary people, young people, and politically independent people. Barack Obama has spoken out for that kind of change and that's why so many independents like me are supporting him.

If we want to change the direction of our country, we have to change the way we do politics. It's that simple.

Obama won the South Carolina primary handily, with 78% of the black vote and a plurality (42%) of the independent vote. (John Edwards polled 32% and Clinton 26% of independents.) The Clinton firewall had collapsed. More importantly, the first state in the line-up with a significant black population had made visible the new black and independent coalition that would carry Obama to victory.

After South Carolina, exit polling picked up a new trend for the first time in a number of Super Tuesday states. In Massachusetts 33% of black voters who cast ballots in the Democratic primary self-identified as independents. In Missouri it was 18%, Connecticut 22%, California 14%, New Jersey 13%, in Tennessee 17%. Among black independents, Obama's support was astronomical. In Georgia, where 12% of all African American voters in the Democratic primary were independents, 97% went for Obama. The Black Independent, which Fulani, Griffin and others had been organizing as a new constituency, became a recognized category of voter.

Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina carried things to the tipping point. Outreach to and from the Obama campaign brought many CUIP state organizations into line with the idea that the most fruitful coalition was with Obama and his supporters. Mangia, widely recognized as California's leading independent, endorsed Obama with significant results. Although Clinton won the state, 58% of California independents backed Obama. In Missouri the split among independents for Obama over Clinton was crushing - 67% to 30%. In other open primary states Obama won self-identified independents handily: in Georgia, he won 63% to Clinton's 33%; in Illinois, he won 72% of these voters to Clinton's 22%; in Virginia, Obama won 69% to Clinton's 30%; in Mississippi, he won 53% to 43%; in Indiana, he won 54% to 46%.

In the 33 states that held open primaries or caucuses, 65% of independents chose to vote in the Democratic contests. Of those, 60% - or 2.7 million independents - voted for Obama. Many in the CUIP networks were there, on the ground, calling independents' attention to the rules that allowed them to vote and backing Obama in those crucial open primary and caucus states. Obama's margin in the popular vote was 281,370 out of a total of almost 33 million cast. If all primaries and caucuses had excluded independents, Hillary Clinton would have won the popular vote (not counting Florida or Michigan) by 373,910.(1) Independents were his clear margin of victory, making Obama the first Democratic Party presidential nominee in history to clinch the nomination with the support of an outsider movement. Arguably, the core strength of the Obama primary win came from a black and independent alliance - the very coalition envisioned, test run and marketed by CUIP.

5. New Conversations on Race

Obama's sensitivity to the challenges inherent in creating multi-racial electoral alliances that are not traditional liberal coalitions - where conflicts and tensions tend to be submerged - came to the forefront in the controversy around Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama responded deftly, breaking down the particularities of the black experience in America, the resentments on both sides of the color line and the opportunity to create a new and different kind of national conversation about race.(2)

On a smaller and less publicized scale, the independent movement has built on these kinds of cultural and political conflicts (and the efforts to opportunize off of them) since we first began to bring the Perot movement together with the black community. Conversations about the common interests of the "overtaxed and the underserved," about not being overdetermined by past resentments, were part of bridging the cultural divide in the Patriot Party, the Reform Party and in creating the independent coalition that backed Mike Bloomberg's mayoral runs in New York City in 2001 and 2005.

In keeping with the unorthodox paradigms of the independent movement, Obama did not invoke notions of centrism or "restoring a political center" during the campaign. To the contrary. In the Democratic primary, he ran directly against Clintonian centrism. And he exhorted the American people to go beyond existing political categories to a new kind of pragmatically oriented change.

While the Republican opposition attempted to brand him as a "socialist" in an effort to foment a backlash against him, he was well served by the prevailing notion that black America is fundamentally conservative. No one believed he was a socialist. Moreover, the "class warfare" gambit was going nowhere. Race, not class, is the defining feature of American politics. Thus Obama, as an African American, was uniquely qualified to present himself as the healer of America's deepest fault line. Consequently, with the full support of black America and with the independent movement having made a small but significant turn to the left, he was able to draw on a new paradigm to create a new political majority.

6. Going Right to Go Left

On November 4 independents asserted their place as a prominent element of the Obama coalition. The independent vote for Obama was eight points ahead of the independent vote for McCain, giving Obama over 19 million of his 65 million votes.

Unlike the more traditional players in the independent movement, CUIP had not gone out in search of either an ideologue or a billionaire to run on a third-party ticket. We created an up-from-the-bottom process through which we could connect to a candidate who was, in turn, shaped by our movement and who materialized a new alliance for transforming the body politic.

Understanding how America has changed entails understanding how the independent movement has changed. To do that, you have to look at the new concepts of independent politics and how they were engineered and developed in and by the CUIP networks. The "centrist" model was discarded early on in favor of a left-right coming together for nonpartisan reform. The reliance on a "great man" (Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Jesse Ventura) or a rich man (Ross Perot, Mike Bloomberg, Tom Golisano) or an ideological man (or woman) (Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, Bob Barr) was also discarded. In 2008, that paradigm failed to impact. The four major minor presidential candidates - Nader, Barr, McKinney and Chuck Baldwin - together polled a little over 1.6 million votes, or 1.2% of the vote nationally.

The paradigm that prevailed, which allowed independents to play a vital, even decisive role in the most significant "hinge" election since 1932, was the CUIP paradigm.

How did the independent movement go left? It did so by going right. When a network of progressives joined the Perot movement to create new models of cooperation (like the left-right partnership and the black and independent alliance), new paradigms for organizing (without a party or a patron), and a new framework for political reform (open primaries), a new era of independent politics began.

Now analysts are busy determining whether the Obama win represents a full-blown political realignment, whether that realignment is "hard" or "soft" and whether the election results portend Democratic Party dominance for a generation.

This much is clear. The independent movement, realigned from center-right to center-left, gave Barack Obama the edge he needed to realign the Democratic Party, away from Clintonian centrism to a black-led nonpartisan movement for change. Thus realigned, the Democratic Party, with the continued support of independents, defeated conservatism and realigned the country.

How durable is that realignment? Impossible to know, but there are lessons to be learned. Now that Hillary Clinton, on her way into the Obama Cabinet, is enshrined as a partisan relic of the old style of politics, somewhere in this country are the next hopefuls who will want to become the first female, or Latino or gay president. A word to the wise: Keep your door open to the independents.

________________

(1) This impact analysis of independent voters is based on exit poll data furnished to the media by Edison Research Associates. The data are available on major political websites (e.g., CNNPolitics.com, MSNBC.com) Pollsters asked a statistically valid sample of presidential primary voters: "No matter how you voted today, do you consider yourself a Democrat, a Republican, an independent or something else?" Data were compiled on what percentage of the participants in the primaries self-identified as "independent or something else" and for which candidate they voted. The above analysis is an arithmetic extrapolation of this data, computed in the states whose Democratic presidential primaries were open to independents.

(2) For a fuller discussion of this subject see the chapter by Dr. Omar ALi to appear in T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, ed., The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" (New York: Bloomsbury; 2009)

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Jacqueline Salit is the Executive Editor of The Neo-Independent and the president of the Committee for a Unified Independent Party / IndependentVoting.org

Maegan Carberry: From Iowa to Inauguration: A Retrospective on the Precariousness of Primary Politics

2008-12-29T16:30:52Z

As 2008 ends with Barack Obama heading to his new pad on Pennsylvania Avenue, my thoughts keep returning to what was happening at this time a year ago, when I ventured to the Iowa caucuses to find out why a bunch of farmers deserved to pick our president. While I remain pleased with the outcome of the election, I'm still not convinced that this system is the most effective way to select our nation's leaders. Inevitably, the issue will fall to the wayside behind our struggling economy and the third intifada, then rear its ugly head again in four years, just in time for a routine round of lipservice before the status quo is sustained.

As such, in an effort to remind people of the absurdity that dictates who makes the most important decisions on planet earth, this week I am publishing my private emails from the time I spent in Iowa last winter while making a video about the caucus process. I went as a concerned citizen who felt marginalized by the process looking for answers. What I discovered was quite complicated: a struggle to preserve grassroots political discourse in a humongous nation versus an inherently exclusive and precarious system. Please enjoy my stories from the road, where antics and adventure were certainly abound for my posse of newly-mobilized millennials.

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DISPATCHES FROM IOWA (VOL. 1) December 28, 2007

Intern Jillian and I are stranded in Denver Wednesday, waiting in line at the United Airlines customer service counter, when suddenly I am the victim of a right-wing conspiracy, clandestinely dressed as a cuddly granny.

Our flight to Omaha, Nebraska, where we will be camped out at a (rockin') roadside La Quinta Inn until Jan. 4 after the election, has been delayed by 3 hours, and we are grumpy that we'll now be arriving at circa 5am. So, chatty-as-usual, I start a casual conversation with the elderly couple behind me. Randomly, they are from Encinitas, my hometown in San Diego. Under the impression I'm bonding with kindred spirits, I share that Jill and I are volunteering for Barack Obama and we are trying to make an 11am training session in Iowa the next morning.

The color in Cuddly Granny's face drains, and aghast, she says: "Ba-ROCK O-BOMB-A? Why, I hope he burns up in flames!"

Taken aback, I search for words as she continues, "He's one of those ... what do you call 'em, honey? [slaps dozing husband on the elbow] ... AY-rabs. Yes, AY-rabs! Obama? Osama? He's a terrorist!"

My reporting skills are obviously getting rusty, as I missed some telltale warning signals: Jill later tells me that she'd already noted a Bill O'Reilly book peeking out of Cuddly Granny's tote bag, as well as a "Jesus-is-the-reason-for-the-season" pin on her lapel.

I pause to prepare a measured response. As much as I want to shake her until her beauty-salon bob curls unravel, I want even more to channel the subtle, thoughtful respect Barack would likely give her, despite her wretched ignorance. To retort with my innermost thoughts or even spark a fiery debate would only fuel a knee-jerk, circuitous affirmation of her hateful attitude.

"Well, he's definitely not a terrorist," I say. "Obviously, I strongly disagree with that, since I'm such a big supporter that I've flown from California to help him win the election. Presumably you're a conservative?"

"Oh, God, yes! All stupid people are Democrats."

I shrug.

"I suppose I could respond to that, but I'm not sure that I'd like to push beyond casual airport conversation and harass you with my personal beliefs."

My dig flies over her head, the husband (now fully alert) grins at me and chuckles.

Some other amusing exchanges ensue until fortuitously, we are able to solve our problem over the phone and are whisked out of line to our gate. As we leave, I put on my fakest, my-grandma-Sallye-taught-me-to-kill-evil-people-with-kindness smile and doe eyes and say, "You all have a lovely trip; I wish you the best of luck and safe travels."

But for an hour I'm fuming. I grab a notepad and write furiously. I say to Dad on the phone, "We are NOT in Los Angeles anymore. Welcome to the election!"

Our time in Iowa has been uneventful by comparison. Well, except for when our rental car was attacked by excitable dogs the one time I dared to drive up an icy lane during our door-to-door field outreach. Unfortunately, Brett isn't coming with the camera until Monday. But the experience involved some shrieking, swearing, and a 20-minute attempt to drive in reverse back down the 300-yard lane while not running over said beasts, with me in a full-blown anxiety attack and the interns rolling in laughter. Needless to say, we marked that house, "NOT HOME," and fled!

Tomorrow we will go to Des Moines to scope out the buzz and media scene. We'll be seeing Michelle Obama, John Edwards, Joe Biden and Barack speak over the weekend. We're hoping to also see Hill & Bill (mostly Bill!), which I'm sure we'll be able to accomplish.

Mostly we've just been getting situated and raiding the local Wal-Mart for Cheez-Its and Diet Coke. (I thought about storing it in the car until I remembered that the cans explode when they're frozen! "Oops! Sorry, Hertz Lady!") We had a fantastic dinner at Applebees last night, and now we're heading out for a real-life Omaha Friday night.

I'm sure I'll have some more intellectual updates over the course of the week. My initial reaction is: I can't believe this is what it takes to be elected President!

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman: Why Al Franken Should Not Be Riding Private Planes

2008-12-23T13:42:31Z

The tragic and suspicious death of Karl Rove's election thief in chief should send
a clear message to Al Franken and other key liberals: don't be riding in any small private planes.

Death by air crash now seems to be the favored means of ridding the Rovian right of troublesome characters.

The most recent is Michael Connell, who died Friday night when his private plane crashed near his northern Ohio home. Connell was the information techology whiz kid who helped Rove steal the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, along with a few in between -- possibly including the 2002 senatorial campaign in Minnesota that followed the death of Paul Wellstone.

Connell was an expert pilot whose plane crashed in clear weather. He held virtually all the secrets to how George W. Bush was foisted on the American people -- and the world -- for eight horrifying years. By manipulating computerized results in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 Connell made history. By some accounts, he was about to tell the attorneys in the on-going King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights lawsuit how he did it. He also approached expressed a willingness to appear under oath before Congress. But now he is dead.

Current cover stories include the possibility that his plane ran out of fuel. But its crash was accompanied by a very large fireball explosion that burned for more than ten minutes. A trooper on the scene immediately identified Connell, but newspaper accounts say his body was charred beyond recognition.

Connell told various sources that he was being threatened by Rove. He canceled at least two previous flights due to mechanical failure. A father of four, his decision to fly from a highly restricted airport in Maryland remains a mystery. Connell reportedly did contract work for security-industrial agencies, like the CIA. Connell also openly acknowledged that he was the first IT contractor to move his servers behind the firewall of the US House of Representatives where he oversaw the websites of the House Judiciary Committee, Intelligence Committee, Ways and Means Committee, and Administrative Committee, arguably the four most powerful committees in the House.

He now joins such critical players as Paul Wellstone, Mel Carnahan, Ron Brown, Mickey Leland, John Tower, John F. Kennedy, Jr., and many more critical public figures who have died in small plane crashes at questionable moments.

In all cases there are non-nefarious potential explanations for their deaths. Conspiracy theories can, indeed, be frivolous.

But so can their out-of-hand dismissal by coincidence theorists. Both Wellstone and Carnahan died two weeks before critical Senatorial elections they were favored
to win in a divided Senate. In 2000, Carnahan's Missouri seat was taken by his wife, who subsequently lost it.

Wellstone, the leading liberal light in the US Senate, had been personally threatened by Dick Cheney for opposing the Iraq war. Wellstone's plane crashed under dubious circumstances, carrying himself, his wife and daughter. In an extremely questionable outcome, Norm Coleman got his seat.

Coleman was hand-picked by Karl Rove to run against Wellstone. His ensuing victory over stand-in candidate Walter Mondale was the highly unlikely outcome of a messy, manipulated election that coincided with equally dubious senatorial vote counts in Georgia and Colorado.

Al Franken may now be poised to take back the Wellstone seat for the Democratic Party. As an Air America talk host, he repeatedly mocked those who were investigating the theft of the 2004 election.

But he now owes the possibility of being elected to the diligent work of election protection activists who have fought all these years for fair, open and reliable vote counts. Had former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell been in charge of this year's Minnesota election, Franken would not even be in the running.

Ironically, a brutal right-wing hate campaign is now being waged against Franken, charging him with election theft. Among other things, it claims he "went to Hollywood" for money to steal his way into the Senate.

Were it not for the deaths of so many others before him, such talk could be dismissed out of hand.

But under the circumstances, we would strongly urge Al Franken not to be flying in any small planes.

--------------------
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election
protection, including HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION..., and
AS GOES OHIO, available at www.freepress.org, where this article was
first published. They are attorney and plaintiff in the King-Lincoln
civil rights lawsuit pursuing Michael Connell.

Lincoln Mitchell: We Still Know Some of the Things We Knew

2008-12-15T15:50:35Z

The 2008 presidential election may have been the beginning of a new era in presidential politics where assumptions and ground rules which we have known for decades will have to be revisited but, in at least some respects, the 2008 election looked quite similar to other recent elections. At least some of the things we knew about presidential elections remain relevant even after this election that seemed to have changed everything.

This election again confirmed the central import of fundraising in presidential campaigns. Barack Obama's record shattering fundraising was a key piece of his election victory allowing him to not only dominate the airwaves and other paid media, but to implement his campaign's brilliantly planned field campaign. Perhaps more importantly, Obama's early fundraising success in 2007 allowed him to position himself as the only serious challenger to Hillary Clinton. As of the end of 2007, Obama had raised $101.4 million, while Clinton had raised $104.5 while all the other Democratic candidates combined had raised less than $75 million. In the Democratic nominating season of 2008, early fundraising clearly was still the first primary and helped narrow the field quickly to two candidates. By early 2008, Obama began to consistently raise more money than Clinton, making it possible for him to overcome the advantages that Clinton, as the early frontrunner, enjoyed.

For the Republicans, fundraising was somewhat more complex. McCain was the early frontrunner, but stumbled badly in the first half of 2007. Clearly, early money was not as important for the Republicans. Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani both had raised more money than McCain going into 2008. Although the comeback from the brink of collapse in mid-2007 became a driving narrative for the McCain camp during the short-lived Republican primary season, it now seems relatively clear that the lack of discipline and focus which made it difficult for McCain to raise more than $37 million before 2008, also characterized a campaign that could neither stay on message or avoid making rash decisions.

One of the reasons early fundraising remained important this year was that the primary schedule was changed again going into 2008, becoming more frontloaded than ever. Interestingly, even with the new schedule, Iowa and New Hampshire still mattered. For many people, Obama's victory in Iowa is what made him seem like a plausible candidate for the first time, rather than just an interesting side story to the bigger story of Hillary Clinton's nomination. Correspondingly, McCain's victory in New Hampshire put him back in the Republican race again and on a swift route to his party's nomination. Candidates who built strategies that did not include on winning one of these states, most notably Rudy Giuliani, or who were unable to win either of these states, such as John Edwards, saw their campaigns end quickly after the New Hampshire primary.

The reasons for the persistent import of these Iowa and New Hampshire are not obvious.. The media and punditry all was aware of the front-loaded schedule and the relatively small size of these two states, but the narratives in 2008 with regard to Iowa and New Hampshire, with several candidates being in a do or die situation in one of these states, was similar to what we might have seen in 1976 or 1988. Thus, on the Republican side, for example, after Huckabee and McCain won Iowa and New Hampshire, with Romney coming in second in both, it was almost as if Rudy Giuliani, only a month removed from being the front-runner and still a popular figure nationally, no longer existed for many in the media, punditry and blogosphere.

Although their was a sharp anti-intellectualism and contempt for book learnin' from the McCain-Palin campaign, and even at times in the Democratic primary from the Clinton campaign, the 2008 election again saw the country elect a president who was educated at elite private universities. From 1948-1988, we only had one Ivy League educated president, John F. Kennedy, but since 1988 all of our presidents have had at least one Ivy League degree. Obama, oddly enough like President Bush, of course, has two, and has also taught law at a third leading university. So, in the year of Joe the Plumber, Americans again showed a preference for our most elite academic institutions.

Lastly, the 2008 election also proved that one of the most fundamental rules of American politics -- that if the economy is in bad shape and the country is stuck in an unpopular war, the incumbent party will not get reelected. It is not possible to isolate reason while Obama was able to win such an initially unlikely election, but it seems relatively certain that these factors were important. McCain's ignorance of economic matters would not have been such a big problem for him had the country been in good shape economically. Similarly, McCain's never-ending discussion of the success of the surge might not have fallen on deaf ears from most of the electorate if the war in Iraq was not already so wildly unpopular. These big picture events framed the 2008 election, and Obama's victory like they frame every election.

The 2008 election saw a well-financed Ivy League educated candidate win the Iowa caucus and go on to defeat the nominee from the incumbent party at a time when the country was mired in an unpopular war and an imploding economy. This may not be the dominant narrative, or the most exciting angle on the recent election, but it is still an important one, which may tell us more than we would expect about how much has or has not changed in our political system.