Final Week – Cathi

New York Times

The Nation

The Year of Living on the Edge of Our Seats

By FRANK BRUNI

On Tuesday the nation’s fretful, hopeful voters will finally have their say, and none of the rigorously calibrated polls or demographically incisive analysts out there can tell us with any certainty what will happen.

Will one candidate win by millions, or lose by thousands? If there is a clear victor, will he be the first black American ever elected to the presidency, or the oldest American ever to win a first term?

We don’t need to know the answers to be certain of this much: no matter the outcome, it will be the climax of one of the most extraordinary presidential elections in this nation’s 232-year history, and “the first” and “the oldest” capture only some of what has made it so remarkable.

Whether judged by the milestones reached, the paradigms challenged, the passions stirred or simply the numbers — the 85 percent of Americans who believe the country is on the wrong track, or the record-demolishing $640 million fund-raising mark that Barack Obama passed by mid-October — the election of 2008 actually warrants the sorts of adjectives and phrases that are often just journalistic tics: epochal, pivotal, historic, once-in-a-lifetime.

It’s been so rich with precedent and incident — and so very, very long — that we have, if anything, undervalued and even lost sight of its significance at times. In these final hours there’s some sense in pausing, pulling back and taking the broad measure of a contest that’s sure to affect not only this country’s civic life but also its emotional and psychological landscape for some time to come.

Much of its impact boils down, yes, to race and gender, Mr. Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin, who could become the nation’s first female vice president.

In this fiercely waged election, longstanding barriers were challenged and toppled, at times to the seeming surprise of the person doing the toppling.

Think back. When Mr. Obama took the stage in Iowa after his victory in the state’s caucuses last January, he was not yet the favorite for the Democratic nomination, and he was a long way from becoming the general-election frontrunner.

In videotape from that night, you can see and sense an astonishment and exhilaration — in him, around him — that seem almost quaint just 10 months later.

“They said this day would never come,” he tells a euphoric Iowa crowd, and not just his eyes but the whole of him twinkles, gleams. “They said our sights were set too high.”

While he’s talking specifically about himself and his campaign troops, it’s impossible not to hear in his words a statement about all minorities in America, for whom the week-by-week, month-by-month advance of his candidacy would hold an especially powerful message.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates observed that as Mr. Obama’s quest for the presidency caught fire, “I knew, for the first time in my life, that it would be a good year to be black.”

“Consider this fact: the most famous black man in America isn’t dribbling a ball or clutching a microphone,” Mr. Coates continued, in a recent essay for Time magazine. “He has no prison record. He has not built a career on four-letter words.”

“Words like hope, change and progress might seem like naïve campaign sloganeering in a dark age,” Mr. Coates further wrote. “But think of the way those words ring for a people whose forebears marched into billy clubs and dogs, whose ancestors fled north by starlight, feeling the moss on the backs of trees.”

Over the course of a campaign that was part therapy session, part consciousness-raising seminar, a few of the principal players took on meanings much, much larger than themselves. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton became vessels for the aspirations and frustrations of entire classes of aggrieved Americans. Their journeys encouraged the airing of hurts and the discussion of difficult issues.

In Philadelphia in March, Mr. Obama delivered a set-piece speech that sought to do nothing less than explain centuries of racial enmity and move Americans past it. In New Hampshire in January, Mrs. Clinton welled with tears that became catalysts for a charged examination of the treatment of women in American life.

Was sexism more potent than racism? This was the sort of impossible question raised on television shows and in newspapers, at restaurant counters and kitchen tables, revolving around Senator Clinton in winter and spring, Governor Palin in summer and fall.

For many of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters she was Everywoman, called on to prove her toughness without wholly abandoning her softness, asked in the end to yield once more to an ambitious, impatient man. Come Tuesday, will these supporters be haunted anew by what might have been? And will they be haunted more by an Obama victory or an Obama defeat?

How will some younger voters react if Mr. McCain prevails? Or some older ones if Mr. Obama does? In recent weeks, the ire and ugly catcalls of some supporters of the McCain-Palin ticket have suggested a division in this election that goes well beyond tax policy or Iraq strategy.

There’s more generational, cultural and stylistic difference between Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama, ages 72 and 47, than between rivals in most presidential contests over the last half-century.

Bill Clinton and the first President Bush were three years closer in age, and while Mr. Clinton’s victory marked the ascension of baby boomers, Mr. Obama’s election would be emblematic of something more profound: that the multicultural, postracial society so often discussed in the news media but so seldom affirmed in public life was now, literally, the face of our nation. Mr. Clinton was Fleetwood Mac. Mr. Obama is India.Arie.

Candidates in many past presidential contests lacked life stories as compelling as those of Mr. Obama, the son of a man from Kenya and a woman from Kansas, and Mr. McCain, who endured years of imprisonment and torture in Vietnam.

But these two weren’t the only vivid characters in a campaign that, purely as narrative, proved sensational.

Who would have believed, at its start, that Mike Huckabee was going to outlast Rudy Giuliani? That John Edwards’s pledges of support for his seriously ill wife were going to give way to a public apology for infidelity?

That Mr. Obama would choose a running mate who once described him, in terms of plausible aspirants to the White House, as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean?” That Mr. McCain would choose a running mate who could field-dress a moose and would take the stage at the Republican convention with a pregnant, unwed teenage daughter in tow?

Perhaps that’s one reason voters paid such close attention. In any case, the 2008 election contradicted any and all claims that Americans were alienated from politics.

Although cable news was supposed to be moribund, programs devoted to politics got some of their best ratings in years. “Saturday Night Live” sailed temporarily into prime time on the winds of political parody. An average of about 34.5 million viewers a night tuned into the Republican convention, versus 22.6 million in 2004. For the Democratic convention, viewership rose to an average of 30.2 million from 20.4 million four years ago.

“We’re seeing record levels of interest in the campaign,” said Michael P. McDonald, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an associate professor at George Mason University who studies voting patterns. Mr. McDonald cited evidence like new voter registration and responses in polls that asked how interested in the election voters were.

And he extrapolated from that to predict turnout of 64 percent, which would be the highest since 1908, when, he said, 65.7 percent of those Americans eligible to vote did. He said that just under 64 percent voted in the Kennedy-Nixon election of 1960, adding that 2008 turnout could top that.

One of the most striking measures of voters’ engagement has been Mr. Obama’s fund-raising, built in large measure on small donations made over the Internet. The final total may well exceed $700 million. In the 2004 election, the presidential candidates combined raised $684 million before their conventions, after which President Bush and Senator John F. Kerry took public financing.

Only Mr. McCain did that this time, and as a condition has had to limit his spending between the convention and Election Day to $84 million. Mr. Obama broke an early promise to take public financing and thus evaded such limits. He spent $21 million on television advertising alone during one week in October.

If Mr. Obama wins by a wide margin on Tuesday, that victory will reflect more than strides in race relations, thirst for change and the strength of his appeal. It will also reflect the power of money, and it could usher in the end of general-election candidates participating in the public financing system.

An Obama victory could redraw the political map, patches of red becoming blue or at least purple, swaths of the South no longer conceded to Republicans from the start.

So many other assumptions have been upended already. A black man with an exotic-sounding name wasn’t supposed to flourish in an overwhelmingly white state like Iowa, but Mr. Obama beat Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton there by 8 percentage points.

Someone who failed to win Democratic primaries in New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, New York and New Jersey wouldn’t seem to be on a successful path to the Democratic nomination, but Mr. Obama was.

He hasn’t fit neatly into the usual paradigms, and that could manifest itself in some way in Tuesday’s voting — if this election, like the 1980 race between President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, will reveal some new political dynamics and yield some new political alignments.

Are we still the center-right country we’ve heard so much about over the last decade? Mr. Obama’s success even to this point calls that into question, just as Mr. McCain’s triumph in the Republican primaries raises doubts about the putative sway of religious conservatives within — and beyond — his party. The 2008 election suggests an evolving body politic, not a palsied one.

Then again it’s hard to tell, because what may ultimately be most extraordinary about this election is its context. The country is facing what is widely regarded as the greatest financial crisis since the Depression, and that’s not just election-season hyperbole. America is fighting wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And its claim to global leadership is being undercut by Russia, which defied the will of the West in invading Georgia last summer, and China, which staged an Olympics that was the envy of the world.

The 2008 presidential election stands out from so many before it, and will have repercussions for so many after it, because it’s a decision about who can guide us through the worst of times. We’re in trouble if we get it wrong. And maybe even if we get it right.

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Here is why Cathy wants us to see this…

I thought this article was worth sharing because I think it is a very good

overview of the entire election. The good the bad and the ugly. This will be an election

that will go down in history no matter the outcome. There has been much mudslinging,

name calling and finger pointing. Now with 2 days left let us focus on what is important,

and vote!!!

Final Week – Will

Feds investigating leak about Obama’s aunt

from The Associated Press

WASHINGTON November 2, 2008, 06:10 pm ET · The government is investigating whether any laws were broken in the disclosure that Barack Obama’s aunt was living in the country illegally.

Obama’s half aunt, who is from Kenya, was ordered to leave the United States years ago after an immigration judge denied her request for asylum, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press late Friday. This person spoke on condition of anonymity because no one was authorized to discuss the case.

The woman, Zeituni Onyango (zay-TUHN on-YANG-oh), is living in public housing in Boston and is the half-sister of Obama’s late father.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked its inspector general and the Office of Professional Responsibility on Saturday to investigate whether any policies were violated when information about Onyango’s case was publicly disclosed, ICE spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said. The Homeland Security Department, which oversees ICE, cannot disclose details about an individual’s immigration status.

Information about Onyango’s case was disclosed and confirmed by two separate sources, one a federal law enforcement official. The information they made available is known to officials in the federal government, but the AP could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved in its release, just five days before the presidential election. Obama’s campaign strategist David Axelrod said people are suspicious about stories that surface so close to an election.

In an interview with CBS News’ Katie Couric on Sunday, Obama said: “If she is violating laws those laws have to be obeyed. We’re a nation of laws. Obviously that doesn’t lessen my concern for her, I haven’t been able to be in touch with her. But I’m a strong believer you have to obey the law.”

The campaign said it was returning $260 that Onyango had contributed in small increments to Obama’s presidential bid over several months. Federal election law prohibits foreigners from making political donations. Onyango listed her employer as the Boston Housing Authority and last gave $5 on Sept. 19.

Onyango, 56, is part of Obama’s large paternal family, with many related to him by blood whom he never knew growing up. Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., left the future presidential nominee when the boy was 2, and they reunited only once — for a monthlong visit when Obama was 10. The elder Obama lived most of his life in Kenya, where he fathered seven other children with three other wives. He died in a car crash in 1982.

NPR Obama was raised for the most part by his mother and her parents in Hawaii. He first met his father’s side of the family when he traveled to Africa 20 years ago. He referred to Onyango as “Auntie Zeituni” when describing the trip in his memoir, saying she was “a proud woman.”

Onyango’s refusal to leave the country would represent an administrative, noncriminal violation of immigration law, meaning such cases are handled outside the criminal court system. Estimates vary, but many experts believe there are more than 10 million such immigrants in the U.S.

The AP has not been able to reach Onyango for comment.

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Here is why Will picked this…

I chose this article because it gives a good history of Obama and his family. As far as I know, no presidential candidate in history has had this problem before. This article brings up the topic of immigration as well. Obama seems to abide the law even when a family member is in question.

Final Week – Joshua

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Sen. Barack Obama didn’t know his aunt might be living illegally in the United States, as media outlets are reporting, and his campaign will return contributions she made, an aide said Saturday.

The half-sister of Sen. Barack Obama’s Kenyan father reportedly lives in this complex in South Boston.

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“Sen. Obama has no knowledge of her status but obviously believes that any and all appropriate laws [should] be followed,” campaign spokesman Bill Burton said.

According to The Associated Press, a court refused four years ago to accept the asylum application of Zeituni Onyango, 56, the half-sister of Obama’s Kenyan father. However, she has continued to live in a public housing complex in South Boston, AP reported.

Onyango’s refusal to leave the country would be an administrative violation, not a criminal matter.

CNN has not been able to independently verify her immigration status. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said the agency “is prohibited from commenting on any individual’s status.”

Democratic U.S. Rep. John Conyers of Michigan fired off a letter asking Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to investigate whether someone leaked the information to the media in an effort to damage Obama.

“The AP reports that it ‘could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved,’ a very disturbing (suggestion) indeed,” read the letter from Conyers, who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee

“This leak is deplorable and I urge you to take immediate action to investigate and discipline those responsible.”

The Department of Homeland Security had no immediate response to the letter.

The Obama campaign did not indicate whether Obama has been in touch with his aunt, whom he describes in his book “Dreams from My Father.”

The Boston Housing Authority did not return calls or an e-mail from CNN on Saturday.

No one answered calls Saturday to a phone number listed under Onyango’s name.

In his book, Obama writes of meeting his aunt when he visited Kenya as a young man.

“A tall, brown-skinned woman was smiling beside us, and Auma [Obama's half-sister] turned and said, ‘Barack, this is Auntie Zeituni. Our father’s sister,” Obama wrote.

“‘Welcome home,’ Zeituni said, kissing me on both cheeks.”

It is not clear when Onyango arrived in the United States.

She told the London Times that she travels back and forth between the United States and Kenya.

“I have been coming to America ever since 1975. I always come and go,” the Times quoted her as saying.

Federal campaign finance records indicate Onyango contributed at least $65 to Obama’s campaign in July and September, in $5 and $25 increments. Obama spokesman Burton said the campaign has identified $265 in contributions from Onyango, including those not yet reflected in federal filings, and plans to return the funds.

The gifts would appear to violate federal campaign finance law, which prohibits political donations by non-U.S. citizens.

“The responsibility is the campaign’s to ensure the funds they receive are from permissible sources in appropriate amounts,” Bob Biersack, a spokesman for the Federal Election Commission, told The Times of London.

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Here is why Joshua picked this…

This article to me just gives an idea of corruption in Washington. It shows those at high places abusing their right to personal information. If I was put in Obama’s aunt position I would be sickened. Yes she’s breaking the law but the government is going out and leaking all her information. We know shes illegal but this is just setting her up to be a target of hate. This is a personal attack on Obama because now he has to go against his own family which must be incredibly hard on him with only two days till the election.

Final Week – Michelle

November 1, 2008, 11:30 am <!– — Updated: 12:13 pm –>

A New Wrinkle in Palin Clothing Hubbub

By Michael Luo

One outstanding mystery of the hubbub over the $150,000 spent by the Republican National Committee to outfit Gov. Sarah Palin was several thousand dollars in charges at Atelier, which many had initially assumed to be a high-end men’s store in New York.

But a fashion-conscious reader recently pointed out to The Caucus that there was another possibility, Atelier Designers, which produces a series of trade shows for women’s boutique buyers, including one that ran Sept. 13-15 at the Doubletree Hotel in Times Square. Indeed, the address listed in Federal Election Commission records, “7th and 47,” corresponds with the location of the show, not the men’s store on Crosby Street downtown.

One potential discrepancy is the date of the $4,902.05 charge in campaign finance records is Sept. 10, but the dates in these filings do not always exactly correspond with when the charges were made. If it is true that the purchases were actually made at the trade show itself, this appears to be in tension with statements Ms. Palin has made in which she insisted the clothes were only bought for her use at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, which ran Sept. 1-4.

“Those clothes are not my property,” Ms. Palin said in an interview on Fox News last week. “We had three days of using clothes that the R.N.C. purchased.”

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Ms. Palin said the clothes were “loaned to us during the convention.”

The McCain campaign has said about a third of the clothes were returned after the convention and much of the rest has never been worn. The R.N.C.’s most recent campaign finance filing for the first half of October does not appear to show any record of returns. Officials said the remaining clothes would be given to charity after the campaign is over.

The biggest charges made on Ms. Palin’s behalf were $75,062.63 at Neiman Marcus and $49,425.74 at Saks Fifth Avenue.

The owners of Atelier New York, a high-end men’s store, had been puzzled by news of the charges ostensibly at their store and searched through their receipts and could not find any that matched the purchase amount in campaign finance records.

Atelier Designers’ Web site describes itself as offering “creative international fashion collections of women’s wear and accessories to the wholesale trade only. Active in New York fashion trade shows for 13 years, Atelier represents over 100 studio designers. In three trade shows yearly during New York Fashion Market Week at the Doubletree Times Square in Manhattan, a selection of these designers show designer fashion, couture, evening wear, jewelry and accessories.”

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Here is why Michelle chose this…

I really don’t like Sarah Palin and this article proves it. Why does someone need to spend that much money on clothes? Michelle Obama (okay I am a little biased) only spends 150 dollars on the dresses she wears. Micelle Obama also only spends the money from her pocket. Not the Democratic party’s money. I mean Sarah Palin is from Alaska and primly wears only what Alaska has to offer but honestly the only time we talk about her or McCain is when were saying something bad not good in any way.

Final Week – Adam L

New York Times

November 1, 2008

In a Place of Bitter Defeat, Gore Stumps

By MICHAEL FALCONE

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Returning to the state that eight years ago made hanging chads famous and barely denied him the White House, former Vice President Al Gore urged Floridians on Friday to take advantage of early voting and cast their ballots for Senator Barack Obama.

“Take it from me: elections matter, every vote matters,” Mr. Gore said, alluding to the troubles that plagued Florida polling stations in the election of 2000 and the narrow margin that gave the state, and the presidency, to George W. Bush.

Mr. Gore, who was joined by his wife, Tipper, delivered an emotional pitch for Mr. Obama, telling crowds here and in Pompano Beach that Florida could be pivotal again next Tuesday.

“Florida, as you know, may well be the state that determines the outcome of this election,” he said. “You may well be the person that determines the outcome here in Florida. This is the time to really turn it on.”

Many polls in the state show Mr. Obama with a slight edge over Senator John McCain, but some Democratic strategists privately consider the race a virtual tie and say turnout could be the deciding factor.

It could escape no one that Mr. Gore’s visits Friday were to Palm Beach and Broward Counties, the central battlegrounds during the 36-day period eight years ago when the outcome of the election remained in doubt. But the chaos of that late autumn may have given Mr. Obama an advantage this year. Partly as a result of that debacle, the practice of early voting won approval in Florida and other states, and as of Friday, the Florida Democratic Party estimated, Democrats had cast roughly 52 percent of the ballots, compared with about 30 percent cast by Republicans.

Mr. Gore swooped in as Mr. Obama’s chief surrogate in the state after a weeklong stretch in which both presidential nominees spent considerable time campaigning here. Mr. Obama plans to return on the eve of the election for a rally in Jacksonville.

In their appearances on Friday, Mr. Gore and his wife drew a straight line between elections separated by almost a decade.

“Come on, Florida, let’s finish the job that you started eight years ago,” Mrs. Gore told a few hundred people in West Palm Beach, adding wryly, “Leave nothing hanging.”

And Mr. Gore, who also devoted part of his remarks to a scathing indictment of the Bush administration, counseled Obama supporters against complacency.

“Don’t let anybody tell you that this election is not still up in the air,” he said. “It is.”

Among those in the crowd here was Annette Primozic of Palm Beach Gardens, who said that she had already cast her vote for Mr. Obama but that she had wanted to show up anyway because she felt as if she owed it to Mr. Gore to demonstrate support for the man she voted for eight years ago.

“At least I think I did,” said Ms. Primozic, who recalled voting then on one of Palm Beach County’s infamously confusing butterfly ballots. “When I left the booth, it felt weird.”

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Here is why Adam wants us to see this…

I choose this article because It shows that the election is becoming really tight and each canadite is trying his hardest to gain the vote of the people. With Obama having Al Gore on his side and McCain with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger both canadites are getting big public attention with these famous political figures rallying on their side.  Right now as the polls show Obama has a slight lead over McCain but who knows the polls are still up in the air and at any moment it could change.

Final week – Bethany

October 28, 2008

New to Campaigning, but No Longer a Novice

 

By PATRICK HEALY

 

AKRON, Ohio — On a visit to her husband’s campaign office here the other day, Michelle Obama was handed a phone and a script of talking points and made calls to a few undecided voters. Mrs. Obama mixed policy on taxes and health care with chitchat about Ohio, laughter about her life in politics and tidbits about her family.

After a couple of calls, she realized that she had not been following the typewritten notes. “I didn’t look at the script,” she said, speaking more to herself than to the volunteers on the phones next to her.

But no matter. While some of Senator Barack Obama’s advisers once viewed Mrs. Obama as an unpredictable force who sometimes spoke her mind a little too much, she is now regarded within the campaign as a disciplined and effective advocate for her husband. She has also, advisers believe, gone a long way toward addressing her greatest unstated challenge: making more voters comfortable with the idea of a black first lady.

Mrs. Obama and her aides have carefully chosen her appearances on the national stage this fall, mostly selecting high-profile venues that are politically safe. Joking Monday night with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show,” she told of her older daughter’s ordering Mr. Obama not to “mess with my TV” regarding his 30-minute commercial on Wednesday night, which will pre-empt some shows. She also expressed some sympathy for Gov. Sarah Palin over the recent wardrobe controversy, while noting that the Obamas bought their own clothes.

By the standards of a national political campaign, Mrs. Obama does maintain a somewhat limited schedule. (She has stumped outside Chicago on 20 of the 57 days since Labor Day, the traditional start of the fall election season.) Most of the time she is at home taking care of the couple’s 10- and 7-year-old daughters, a choice that advisers hope will pay dividends among women of all races who can relate to her priorities.

But when she is at political events — occasionally with Mr. Obama, though much more often on her own — she is drawing large crowds, speaking with new confidence and generally avoiding gaffes as she confronts one of the trickiest tasks in the campaign. Many voters view first families as symbols of the nation, and Mrs. Obama is selling a package that for large numbers of Americans poses a real change.

Addressing a raucous rally in a gym here on Friday, Mrs. Obama had the crowd — a mix of a few thousand black and white voters — laughing and cheering throughout.

“So many precious little babies like that one!” she said after noticing one infant near the stage. “Just completely delicious!”

The audience roared with delight. And many clapped, too, when she said: “I also come here as a mother; that is my primary title, mom in chief. My girls are the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning and the last thing I think about when I go to bed. When people ask me how I’m doing, I say, ‘I’m only as good as my most sad child.’ ”

In one sign of the campaign’s confidence in her, Mrs. Obama is being deployed where it matters most. Since Labor Day, she has spent three days campaigning in Florida and two days each in Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as days in other swing states (sometimes two in a day).

She usually holds rallies (her biggest was with 11,000 people in Gainesville, Fla., last week) or small round tables on the needs of working women and military families, the two groups she speaks about the most. On Saturday, she delivered the Democratic Party’s weekly radio address, urging her husband’s supporters to turn out on Election Day.

As first lady, Obama advisers say, Mrs. Obama would focus first on her family and then on the issues facing women and military spouses as those groups deal with the economic crisis and the return of troops from Iraq. She also plans to take up national service as an issue, aides say. She will not have a major policy role, they say, and does not plan to have an office in the West Wing.

Advisers to the spouses of past Democratic nominees — Teresa Heinz Kerry in 2004, Tipper Gore in 2000, Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1992 — say they spent more time campaigning in the fall than has Mrs. Obama. All their children were older, however, and Mrs. Kerry and Mrs. Clinton were often sent to secondary media markets, because they were unpopular with some undecided voters and independents.

Chris Lehane, an adviser and spokesman for the Gore campaign, said Mrs. Gore traveled constantly in the fall of 2000, and he described a somewhat larger traveling retinue than Mrs. Obama has. (She is accompanied by a handful of aides and a Secret Service contingent, but there is no press corps on her plane.)

Echoing private comments of some Obama advisers, Mr. Lehane said he believed that the Obama campaign had been unsure at first about Mrs. Obama’s potential appeal, in part because of some early missteps and in part because of the novelty of a black woman’s auditioning for the role of first lady.

“My sense,” Mr. Lehane said, “is that the campaign was initially apprehensive, because they recognized that she was going to be treated unfairly and held to a hard-to-meet standard.”

Indeed, for months Mrs. Obama was a political target. A Fox News anchor referred to an affectionate fist bump between the Obamas as a “terrorist fist jab.” Republicans, including Cindy McCain, criticized her for saying in February that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” (They omitted the words that followed: “And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”) A blogger supporting Senator Clinton spread an unfounded rumor that Mrs. Obama had once used the word “whitey.”

The Obamas’ need to deal with race as a factor in the campaign came to the fore this spring as Mr. Obama confronted incendiary remarks by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who had married the couple and baptized their children. As the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, Mr. Obama has often drawn on his biracial experience to help bridge racial divides. Mrs. Obama does not have that background to draw on, making her political challenge that much more complex.

David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, said in an interview that Mrs. Obama, not being a politician, had gone through a period of “getting comfortable” with campaigning. She learned a great deal on her own, Mr. Axelrod said, noting that aides had not had to tell her to avoid fist bumps or remarks like “proud of my country” in the future.

“I didn’t think she needed to be told,” he said. “She is very, very smart and sensitive, and I think she learned from experience that in this business, you have to be very precise with your words so people don’t misinterpret them. That’s part of the learning experience. There’s no question that she’s learned.”

Still, the Obama campaign has limited interviews that would entail tough questions from national newspapers and cable news programs. “There is not one vote she will get from doing Wolf Blitzer,” an aide said.

Instead, she has appeared several times on the morning network programs and on entertainment shows like “The View,” “Ellen,” “The Daily Show,” “Rachael Ray” and, twice each, “Access Hollywood” and “Entertainment Tonight.”

If Mrs. Obama is not as blunt as she once was (in describing some of her husband’s habits, for instance), she is by no means hiding her personality, either. On “The Tonight Show,” she noted that she and her husband still sparred privately like the lawyers they are, and added: “You want to know how Barack prepares for a debate? He hangs out with me, and he’s ready.”

At the Akron rally, she drew appreciative laughter from many in the audience when, her voice at once growing hushed and yet rising in pitch, she referred to her husband as “baby” while sharing an anecdote.

“My assumption,” she said, “is that Barack Obama is going to be the underdog until he is sitting in the Oval Office. At the start of this, I said to him, ‘Look, baby, you can do a lot of things.’ He believes he can do a whole lot. If he works hard, he can change the world.”

But, she added, if he is to win, he needs for his supporters to be sure to vote. The audience erupted in applause

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Here is why Bethany picked this…

This article shows that she is ready to become the First Lady. I don’t remember seeing or
hearing about Mrs.Bush taking a interest in her husbands’ campaign or seeing Hillarie
Clinton act like she really cared. I really hope Senator Obama gets elected and becomes
President because not only would he make a great president, his wife would be an
outstanding first lady. They almost remind me of the Kennedys.

week 7 -Jonathan G

CNN

October 26, 2008

Palin “annoyed” with CBS interviewer

Posted: 12:00 PM ET

From CNN Political Producer Peter Hamby

Palin said Saturday she was ‘annoyed’ with Couric after her interview.

FORT WAYNE, Indiana (CNN) – Campaigning Saturday in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a city once represented in Congress by another vice presidential candidate named Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin delivered one of her longest stump speeches to date and revealed that she was “annoyed” with the line of questioning presented by Katie Couric in her now-infamous interview with CBS.

Palin reprised a story she last told a week ago in Noblesville, Indiana about her sit-down with Couric, which was widely panned.

“Last time I was here I got to tell a crowd that I had to give a national interview that didn’t go so well,” she said. “And it was because I was kind of annoyed with the questions that I was being asked because I thought they were kind of irrelevant to, you know, national security issues and getting our economy back on track, so I kind of showed some of that annoyance.”

Couric did, in fact, ask Palin several questions about the economy and national security, focusing in particular on the congressional bailout package, the mortgage crisis, John McCain’s record on regulation, the war in Afghanistan, hunting terrorists in Pakistan, Russia, Iran, Syria, Israel and the role of the United States in the world.

Palin joked, however, about another line of questioning.

“But I think the one question that I answered that everyone could agree on, it maybe shows where my heart is… too is, she asked me this relevant question: What was my favorite movie? And I said ‘Hoosiers!’”

The governor continued to press the campaign’s message of the day: that Barack Obama and congressional Democrats will, if elected, expand government and redistribute the hard-earned dollars of regular Americans, criticisms that brought on accusatory shouts of “socialist!,” “Communist!” and, at one point, “Hussein the socialist!”

Palin said that on election day, “what we’re going to have to do together, voters, what we have to do is fight for what is right and free and uniquely American. Let us put our trust in each other, not big government.”

The Indiana crowd — easily Palin’s largest of the day — was warmed up by country legend Hank Williams, Jr., who often appears at Palin campaign events to perform his recently-penned ode to the GOP ticket: “McCain-Palin tradition.”

But Williams may have been channeling the enthusiasm of the crowds for Palin — and also reflecting recent reports that Palin is “going rogue” with an eye toward the 2012 presidential race. At one point during his performance, he intentionally scrambled the song’s lyrics and put the Alaskan at the top of the ticket, praising a “Palin-McCain tradition.”

That musical witticism earned Williams a loud cheer from the crowd.

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Here is why Jonathan picked this…

This article does a good job of showing Sarah Palin’s incompetence.  Palin says that the questions asked in the interview were irrelevant, but I think that a possible vice president not being able to name any other Supreme Court cases besides Roe v. Wade is pretty relevant.  She is clearly not qualified, and I find her jokes and mudslinging to be a bit crass.

week 7 – Joshua

October 26, 2008, 1:45 pm <!– — Updated: 3:54 pm –>

Palin on Wardrobe: ‘This Is Ridiculous’

By Julie Bosman

TAMPA — “This whole thing with the wardrobe,” said Gov. Sarah Palin, standing before a crowd in a bright pink suit. “You know, I tried to just ignore it. Because it’s so ridiculous.”

Apparently Ms. Palin could ignore it no longer, opening her remarks at a rally here by confronting the subject of her much-discussed $150,000 wardrobe, purchased by the Republican National Committee after she was chosen as the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

Ms. Palin has stayed fairly tight-lipped about the purchases, even as Republicans have cringed and television commentators have snickered for the last five days.

“Those clothes, they are not my property,” Ms. Palin said. “Just like the lighting and the staging and everything else that the R.N. C. purchased. I’m not taking them with me. I’m back to wearing my own clothes from my favorite consignment shop in Anchorage, Alaska.”

She added: “The double standard here, gosh, we don’t even want to waste our time.”

And she went on to talk about her accessories. Beaded earrings, handcrafted by her mother-in-law, a Native Alaskan. A $35 wedding ring from Hawaii that she bought herself. And a flag pin, which she wears in honor of her son Track, who is stationed in Iraq.

“But enough about clothes and hairdos and high heels,” Ms. Palin said. “I want to talk about the important things.”

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Here is why Joshua picked this article…

In recent news a lot of the political buzz has gone towards Ms. Palin about the ridiculous amounts of money spent on her wardrobe. This would of not of angered me if she doesn’t try to make her self-sound like the average middle class family. The one comment that real bothered me was “Those clothes, they are not my property, just like the lighting and the staging and everything else that the R.N. C. purchased…” I found this just ignorant because the lights and sound they can use for any event or any candidate but the clothes are her specific size, and any other woman candidate isn’t going to want second hand clothes.

Week 7 – Adam

New York Times

Books of The Times

Obama’s Foursquare Politics, With a Dab of Dijon

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Skip to next paragraph

THE AUDACITY OF HOPE

Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

By Barack Obama

375 pages. Crown Publishers. $25.

Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois and the Democratic Party’s new rock star, is that rare politician who can actually write — and write movingly and genuinely about himself.

His 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” written before Mr. Obama entered politics, provided a revealing, introspective account of his efforts to trace his family’s tangled roots and his attempts to come to terms with his absent father, who left home when he was still a toddler. That book did an evocative job of conjuring the author’s multicultural childhood: his father was from Kenya, his mother was from Kansas, and the young Mr. Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia.

And it was equally candid about his youthful struggles: pot, booze and “maybe a little blow,” he wrote, could “push questions of who I was out of my mind,” flatten “out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.” Most memorably, the book gave the reader a heartfelt sense of what it was like to grow up in the 1960’s and 70’s, straddling America’s color lines: the sense of knowing two worlds and belonging to neither, the sense of having to forge an identity of his own.

Mr. Obama’s new book, “The Audacity of Hope” — the phrase comes from his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address, which made him the party’s rising young hope — is much more of a political document. Portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech, and the bulk of it is devoted to laying out Mr. Obama’s policy positions on a host of issues, from education to health care to the war in Iraq.

But while Mr. Obama occasionally slips into the flabby platitudes favored by politicians, enough of the narrative voice in this volume is recognizably similar to the one in “Dreams From My Father,” an elastic, personable voice that is capable of accommodating everything from dense discussions of foreign policy to streetwise reminiscences, incisive comments on constitutional law to New-Agey personal asides. The reader comes away with a feeling that Mr. Obama has not reinvented himself as he has moved from job to job (community organizer in Chicago, editor of The Harvard Law Review, professor of constitutional law, civil rights lawyer, state senator) but has instead internalized all those roles, embracing rather than shrugging off whatever contradictions they might have produced.

Reporters and politicians continually use the word authenticity to describe Mr. Obama, pointing to his ability to come across to voters as a regular person, not a prepackaged pol. And in these pages he often speaks to the reader as if he were an old friend from back in the day, salting policy recommendations with colorful asides about the absurdities of political life.

He recalls a meet-and-greet encounter at the White House with George W. Bush, who warmly shook his hand, then “turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand.” (“Good stuff,” he quotes the president as saying, as he offered his guest some. “Keeps you from getting colds.”) And he recounts a trip he took through Illinois with an aide, who scolded him for asking for Dijon mustard at a T.G.I. Friday’s, worried the senator would come across as an elitist; the confused waitress, he adds, simply said: “We got Dijon if you want it.”

In his 2004 keynote address Mr. Obama spoke of the common ground Americans share: “There is not a Black America and White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.” And the same message — rooted in his own youthful efforts to grapple with racial stereotypes, racial loyalty and class resentments — threads its way through the pages of this book. Despite the red state-blue state divide, despite racial, religious and economic divisions, Mr. Obama writes, “we are becoming more, not less, alike” beneath the surface: “Most Republican strongholds are 40 percent Democrat, and vice versa. The political labels of liberal and conservative rarely track people’s personal attributes.”

Mr. Obama eschews the Manichean language that has come to inform political discourse, and he rejects what he sees as the either-or formulations of his elders who came of age in the 60’s: “In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004,” he writes, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage. The victories that the 60’s generation brought about — the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority — have made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions — that quality of trust and fellow feeling — that bring us together as Americans.”

His thoughts on domestic and foreign policy try to hew to this consensus-building line. Some of his recommendations devolve into little more than fuzzy statements of the obvious: i.e., that America’s “addiction to oil” is affecting the economy and undermining national security, or that the education system needs to be revamped and improved. Others echo Bill Clinton’s “third way,” methodically triangulating between traditionally conservative and traditionally liberal ideas.

Mr. Obama writes that “conservatives — and Bill Clinton — were right about welfare as it was previously structured: By detaching income from work and by making no demands on welfare recipients other than a tolerance for intrusive bureaucracy and an assurance that no man lived in the same house as the mother of his children, the old A.F.D.C. program sapped people of their initiative and eroded their self respect.”

He uses the Bush administration’s tough language to talk about national security in the age of terrorism (“if we have to go it alone, the American people stand ready to pay any price and bear any burden to protect our country”) but adds, crucially, that “once we get beyond matters of self-defense,” he is “convinced that it will almost always be in our strategic interest to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally when we use force around the world.”

He assails President Bush for waging an unnecessary and misguided war in Iraq and for promoting an “Ownership Society” that “magnifies the uneven risks and rewards of today’s winner-take-all economy.” Yet he also takes the Democrats to task for becoming “the party of reaction”: “In reaction to a war that is ill-conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We lose the courts and wait for a White House scandal.”

This volume does not possess the searching candor of the author’s first book. But Mr. Obama strives in these pages to ground his policy thinking in simple common sense — be it “growing the size of our armed forces to maintain reasonable rotation schedules” or reining in spending and rethinking tax policy to bring down the nation’s huge deficit — while articulating these ideas in level-headed, nonpartisan prose. That, in itself, is something unusual, not only in these venomous pre-election days, but also in these increasingly polarized and polarizing times.

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Here is why Adam picked this article…

I choose this article because when you read this you get a good idea what kind of person Obama is.  A lot of politicians and news teams are always trying to ruin his campaign imagine and always try to dig up dirt to make him look bad. He also understands what troubles the Americans today such as the welfare programs or the war in Iraq.  When I read this I got a good vibe of obama because he seems like the guy that doesn’t go around kissing babies and stuff for a good imagine, he does it because he means it.

week 7 – Nicole

MSNBC

Powell endorses Obama for president

Republican ex-secretary of state calls Democrat ‘transformational figure’

msnbc.com and NBC News

updated 7:02 p.m. ET, Sun., Oct. 19, 2008

WASHINGTON – Former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., for president on Sunday, criticizing his own Republican Party for what he called its narrow focus on irrelevant personal attacks over a serious approach to challenges he called unprecedented.

Powell, who for many years was considered the most likely candidate to become the first African-American president, said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he was not supporting Obama because of his race. He said he had watched both Obama and his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, for many months and thought “either one of them would be a good president.”

But he said McCain’s choices in the last few weeks — especially his selection of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his vice presidential running mate — had raised questions in his mind about McCain’s judgment.

“I don’t believe [Palin] is ready to be president of the United States,” Powell said flatly. By contrast, Obama’s running mate, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, “is ready to be president on day one.”

Powell also told NBC’s Tom Brokaw that he was “troubled” by Republicans’ personal attacks on Obama, especially false intimations that Obama was Muslim and the recent focus on Obama’s alleged connections to William Ayers, a co-founder of the radical ’60 Weather Underground.

Stressing that Obama was a lifelong Christian, Powell denounced Republican tactics that he said were insulting not only to to Obama but also to Muslims.

“The really right answer is what if he is?” Powell said, praising the contributions of millions of Muslim citizens to American society.

“I look at these kind of approaches to the campaign, and they trouble me,” Powell said. “Over the last seven weeks, the approach of the Republican Party has become narrower and narrower.”

In an interview Sunday on Fox News, McCain said he was not surprised by the announcement.

“I’ve always admired and respected General Powell,” said McCain, who cited the endorsements he had received from former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger. “We have a respectful disagreement.”

Bolstering Obama’s international credentials
Obama said in an interview airing Monday on NBC’s TODAY that he welcomed Powell’s support and looked forward to discussing what role, if any, Powell might have in an Obama administration should he be elected.

“Here is what I can say for certain: He will have a role as one of my advisers.  He has already served in that function even before he endorsed me,” Obama told NBC’s Matt Lauer. “Whether he wants to take a formal role — whether there’s something that’s a good fit for him — I think is something that he and I would have to discuss.”

Powell, a retired Army general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first President Bush before becoming secretary of state in the current administration, is one of the most highly decorated military officers of modern times and an admired figure in both parties. The Obama campaign is likely to cite the endorsement as an answer to critics and undecided voters who have questioned the foreign policy credentials of Obama, a first-term senator whose national experience amounts to four years in the Senate.

Powell said a major part of his decision to turn his back on his own party was his conclusion that Obama was the better option to repair frayed U.S. relations with allies overseas.

“This is the time for outreach,” Powell said, saying the next president would have to “reach out and show the world there is a new administration that is willing to reach out.”

In particular, he said, he welcomed Obama’s president to “talk to people we haven’t talked to,” a reference to Obama’s controversial statement that he would be open to direct diplomacy with Iranian leaders.

“I think that [Obama] has a definite way of doing business that will serve us well,” Powell said.

 

Won’t campaign for Obama
As recently as a month ago, Powell said that electing an African-American president would be “electrifying” for the world but that he remained undecided. The unsteadiness of the Republican campaign in recent weeks, especially on the economic crisis, went a long way toward pushing him off the fence, he said.

“It isn’t easy for me to disappoint Senator McCain as I have this morning,” said Powell, who emphasized that he would not campaign for Obama because of his admiration for McCain’s long record of service in the military and in Congress.

But as he examined both campaigns in the last few weeks, he said, he became “concerned” that “in the case of Mr. McCain, he was a little unsure how to deal with the economic problems.”

“Every day, there was a different approach,” he said, adding that he also “would have difficulty with two more conservative appointments to the Supreme Court.”

McCain would be a good president, Powell said, but Obama is “a transformational figure” who would be an “exceptional” leader.

“I truly believe that at this point in America’s history we need a president who will not just continue … basically the policies we have followed in recent years,” he said. “We need a president with transformational qualities.”

For that reason, he said, “I will be voting for Barack Obama.”

 

By Alex Johnson of msnbc.com

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Here is why Nicole picked this article…

 

I liked this article because Powell goes against his own Republican Party for a Democrat.  I agree with Powell when he says in the article that Palin isn’t ready to be president.  It was said that he is endorsing Obama because they are the same race but I don’t think that’s true but obvious that people would pull out the race card.  I think it’s true when it’s said that more African Americans will vote, which is a good thing, but I think everyone knows Obama will be a great president, whether he was black, white, pink, purple, or green!