History > 2008 > USA > Politics (VII)

Steve Sack

cartoon

Minnesota

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Cagle

17.10.2008

L to R: Barack Obama, John McCain

Mikhaela Reid

Cagle        15.10.2008

http://www.mikhaela.net/

L to R : Sarah Palin, John McCain

If Elected ...

From 2 Rivals, 2 Prescriptions

October 15, 2008
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — With Senator John McCain unveiling a $52.5 billion package of proposals on Tuesday, both presidential candidates have now outlined their plans for addressing the economic crisis, leaving voters with a clear choice when it comes to one of the biggest challenges the next president will face.

Mr. McCain’s new plans include tax cuts on capital gains and on withdrawals from retirement accounts by people 59 and older, bigger write-offs for stock losses and a tax waiver for unemployment benefits.

Those proposals, which would be effective for two years, complement an overall economic program that hews to the Republican playbook: tax cuts geared especially to individuals and businesses at the top of the income scale, in the belief that they will stimulate the economy and create jobs that benefit everyone.

“If I am elected president,” Mr. McCain said Tuesday in Blue Bell, Pa., “I will help to create jobs for Americans in the most effective way a president can do this, with tax cuts that are directed specifically to create jobs and protect your life savings.”

The $60 billion stimulus package that Senator Barack Obama announced Monday, combined with his longstanding economic agenda, reflect Democratic emphasis on tax cuts intended for middle-class and low-wage workers and for the smallest businesses, as well as spending increases for public works to create jobs.

In setting out his approach on Monday, Mr. Obama predicted that in the long run he would create “five million new, high-wage jobs” by investing in renewable-energy industries and “two million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools and bridges.”

Even with the new proposals, which come on top of the hundreds of billions of dollars the government has already committed to bail out financial institutions and other faltering corporations, both candidates continue to promise that as president they would reduce the ballooning annual budget deficits, without forfeiting any of the big-ticket promises they made pre-crisis.

Mr. McCain stands by his vow to extend the Bush tax cuts and to layer on several more, including a big reduction in corporate income taxes. And he still insists he would balance the budget by the end of his first term in 2013, though few analysts, if any, believe that is possible.

Mr. Obama vows to reduce deficits, while keeping his early promises for near-universal health care coverage and more. Because oil prices have been falling, he has shelved a proposal to offset the estimated $65 billion cost of his proposed tax rebates to the middle class with a windfall-profits tax on oil companies, leaving himself an even bigger budget gap.

“Before the crisis, neither of them was telling how it really was going to be,” said the economist Robert D. Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “Now one really doesn’t know how it’s going to be because we seem to have blown away any notion of fiscal limitations.”

“At some point,” Mr. Reischauer added, “we as a nation are going to have to ask, ‘Where are we going to get the money to do all this, and at what price?’ That’s the question no one can answer.”

For now, both parties have taken the position that action is more important than short-term budget discipline. The politics of the moment, less than three weeks from the election, almost demanded that the candidates flesh out their philosophical approaches with detailed proposals to try to mitigate the effects of what could be a serious recession.

“Combine a time of potential national crisis with the last weeks of an election, and you have two powerful forces for politicians to show they care through a smorgasbord of supposedly new policies,” said C. Eugene Steuerle, vice president of the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which was formed to raise awareness about the nation’s economic challenges.

Whatever the relative merits and flaws, both candidates’ proposals would most likely have some short-term benefit for investors, homeowners, retirees and other groups.

They have been less forthcoming about the longer-term challenges facing the economy, from a low savings rate to the related problem of an aging population and rapidly rising costs of the two big entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare.

Besides their own proposals, the candidates’ different approaches have been evident in their responses to the emergency actions of the Bush administration. Mr. Obama gave early public support to the Treasury’s move this week to inject $250 billion into major banks. Mr. McCain was silent on the approach for days as the action was under consideration; his party’s free-market conservatives were outraged by the plan, and Mr. McCain’s economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said it was “not the way things should be done in the United States.”

The capital injection plan was widely credited with steadying the financial markets in the last two days, and on Tuesday Mr. McCain gave grudging approval. He told a reporter in Florida, “Well, I feel we’re in a crisis, but I want us out of the banking business as quickly as possible.”

Mr. Obama, like other Democrats, would provide billions in aid to strapped states, which have fewer revenue-raising options, so they can keep financing public works and avoid cutting education and Medicaid health programs — by far the states’ biggest expenses. Mr. McCain, like Republicans generally, opposes sending more money to states and cities, maintaining that it discourages them from cutting spending.

Mr. Obama has proposed several actions that could be taken in a lame-duck session of Congress, before the next president takes office. For example, he has called on the Democratic-controlled Congress to expedite his proposed middle-class tax cut of $500 for individuals and $1,000 for couples so that the Internal Revenue Service could potentially get rebate checks to taxpayers before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.

Mr. McCain mostly has proposed steps that he has said he would pursue after he is president, though advisers say a lame-duck Congress could pass the tax breaks proposed on Tuesday. Those would be for tax years 2008 and 2009, meaning taxpayers would not see the first benefits for months after January.

That $52.5 billion plan is on top of Mr. McCain’s announcement last week that, as president, he would order his Treasury secretary to begin buying up to $300 billion in troubled mortgages from lenders, and replace them for the homeowners with government-guaranteed mortgages reflecting their homes’ lower value. While Mr. McCain initially said that lenders would cover the cost, a day later his campaign said that taxpayers would do so.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama called the McCain mortgage plan one of his “very bad ideas.” But the mortgage relief has also drawn opposition from the right, including Republican leaders in Congress, casting doubts on the proposal’s prospects. Administration officials are critical of Mr. McCain’s plan to use the government’s $700 billion bailout funds, since that money is for propping up struggling financial institutions nationwide. And Americans scraping to pay their mortgages are already objecting to bailing out others.

But Mr. Holtz-Eakin, in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, said the benefits would go far beyond the homeowners saved from losing their homes. “Then the houses as a result do not sit vacant and lead to neighborhood blight,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin said. “We stabilize the housing values for every American homeowner who has seen their house values fall and their property taxes go up. We break that cycle.”

The tax breaks would mostly go to older Americans. Whatever their policy benefits, they could hold political gains in a group that is about 40 percent of the electorate and whose support Mr. McCain has been losing.

“It’s not clear that either of these plans would do much good,” said Leonard Burman, director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. “But the benefits of Obama’s plan would be more widely distributed. McCain’s tax proposals would help most those with pretty high incomes — the group least in need of assistance.”

Mr. McCain’s most costly proposal, at $36 billion, would let people 59 and older who withdraw money from IRAs or 401(k) plans pay a tax rate of 10 percent, instead of current rates of up to 35 percent for the most affluent “to help the seniors who are counting on their retirement accounts to manage their lifestyles,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin said.

Mr. McCain would halve to 7.5 percent the current 15 percent tax on investors’ capital gains. Mr. Obama was critical, telling reporters, “Nobody really has capital gains right now.”

As for those with stock losses, Mr. McCain would raise to $15,000 from $3,000 the amount they could deduct. Both tax proposals would disproportionately benefit older taxpayers.

But even some in his own party say Mr. Obama has pandered to older Americans as well. He has long called for eliminating income taxes for older people with less than $50,000 in income.

On retirement accounts, given the market’s drop, both candidates proposed to waive the requirement that at age 70 1/2, taxpayers had to begin withdrawing their savings.

But where Mr. McCain proposed a lower tax rate for older Americans who do withdraw money, including the wealthy, Mr. Obama would help younger savers who tap into their retirement accounts to get by in the downturn. He would waive the 10 percent tax penalty for withdrawals before age 59 1/2. Many economists object that doing so would further reduce the already low savings rate in the United States.

    From 2 Rivals, 2 Prescriptions, NYT, 15.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/us/politics/15elected.html

In Voting Booth,

Race May Play a Bigger Role

October 15, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON — With less than three weeks until Election Day, a big question is looming over the campaign for the White House, and it has nothing to do with the economic crisis or the caustic exchanges between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain over character and credentials.

It is race.

Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain almost never talk directly about it. In some cases, like the condemnation of the Republican ticket issued last weekend by Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat who is a civil rights leader, the topic has come up openly: Mr. Lewis invoked George Wallace, the noted segregationist, in rebuking Mr. McCain as tolerating political rallies marked by crowds yelling insults and threats at Mr. Obama.

But more often, it is found only in sentiments that are whispered, internalized or masked by discussions of culture or religion, and therefore hard to capture fully in polling or even to hear clearly in everyday conversation.

Political strategists once assumed that polls might well overstate support for black candidates, since white voters might be reluctant to admit racially tinged sentiments to a pollster. Newer research has cast doubt on that assumption. Either way, the situation is confounding aides on both sides, who like everyone else are waiting to see what role race will play in the privacy of the voting booth.

Harold Ickes, a Democrat who was the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s senior adviser when he ran for president — and who worked in the civil rights movement in the 1960s and for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in her race against Mr. Obama this year — said that when he looked at polls now, he routinely shaved off a point or two from Mr. Obama’s number to account for hidden racial prejudices. That is no small factor, considering that Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain are separated by very thin margins in many polls in battleground states.

“If he were white, this would be a blowout,” Mr. Ickes said. “I think the country has come a long, long, long way since the 1960s. I think everybody would agree with that. But if you talk to people in certain states, they will say there are impulses that do not benefit Barack Obama because of the color of his skin.”

Saul Anuzis, the Republican chairman in Michigan, said he had become accustomed to whispered asides from voters suggesting they would not vote for Mr. Obama because he is black. “We honestly don’t know how big an issue it is,” Mr. Anuzis said. But Representative Artur Davis, an African-American Democrat of Alabama, said race was no longer the automatic barrier to the White House that it once was.

“There is a group of voters who will not vote for people who are opposite their race,” Mr. Davis said. “But I think that number is lower today than it has been at any point in our history. I don’t believe this campaign will be decided by race; there are too many other important issues. Jesse Jackson would not have been elected in 1988. But we’ve changed.”

But it is hard to tell, as Mr. Ickes and Mr. Anuzis said, to what extent voters who are opposing Mr. Obama might seize other issues — his age and level of experience, his positions on the issues, his cultural and ideological background — as a shield.

And if Mr. Obama is losing support simply because he is black, that is not a one-sided equation. A crucial part of Mr. Obama’s theory for winning the election is turning out blacks in places like Florida and North Carolina, a state that Mr. Obama’s advisers view as in play largely because of the significant African-American population.

    In Voting Booth, Race May Play a Bigger Role, NYT, 15.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/us/politics/15race.html

Door to Door

Volunteers for Obama

Face a Complex Issue

October 15, 2008
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

ELKO, Nev. — On a recent evening here in eastern Nevada, Cathy Vance, a volunteer for the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama, went knocking on doors of voters who had been identified as potential Obama supporters. Elko County is largely rural, with few black residents, located in a state with a dearth of black elected officials.

Among the people she found that night was Veronica Mendive, who seemed cautiously warming to Mr. Obama’s candidacy. But she had a thought.

“I don’t want to sound like I’m prejudiced,” Ms. Mendive said. “I’ve never been around a lot of black people before. I just worry that they’re nice to your face but then when they get around their own people you just have to worry about what they’re going to do to you.”

Ms. Vance responded: “One thing you have to remember is that Obama, he’s half white and he was raised by his white mother. So his views are more white than black really.” She went on to assure Ms. Mendive that she was so impressed with Mr. Obama the person, that she failed to notice the color of his skin anymore.

The exchange, posted on The Caucus blog on nytimes.com, evoked outrage among many readers. “Amazing how even white people who support Obama and are canvassing for him default to classic white supremacist language,” wrote one reader.

Another said, “What in the world is this volunteer thinking?”

But Ms. Vance’s efforts reflect the complex task that many volunteers canvassing for Mr. Obama face. While she and other Obama volunteers may feel offended by remarks like Ms. Mendive’s, an admonishment would not persuade a voter on the fence to pull the lever for Mr. Obama. So she often takes another tack.

“I meet people like that from time to time,” Ms. Vance said later. She described one woman she met who explained that she knew herself to be “prejudiced,” had come to abhor that quality in herself, and also saw it reflected through her young son, “who she said was full of hate,” Ms. Vance explained.

“We sat and talked at her kitchen table for a long time that day,” Ms. Vance recalled. “I tried to explain to her that maybe the only way to heal those years of hatred and prejudice was to finally make the move and vote for Obama.”

David W. Nickerson, a professor of political science at Notre Dame who studies campaign voter outreach, called it unusual for someone to admit racial bias to a stranger. A person from the community where the voter lives might be more persuasive on racial issues, he said.

“If you were going to persuade someone on an issue like race,” Professor Nickerson said, “I’d imagine that it would have to come from a credible source. Having it come from someone you know or someone from your neighborhood that represents.”

Darry A. Sragow, a political consultant based in Los Angeles who has worked on various Democratic campaigns, said volunteers were generally trained to “shift the discussion from anything that sounds like it may be race-based to arguments that are working best for the Obama campaign, like the economy.”

He added: “It’s like selling a car. You’re not going to convince them it’s a beautiful car if they think its ugly. But you get back to whatever the strongest points are. You don’t get far trying to convince someone that something they think of as negative is positive.”

Another person who posted a comment in response to the nytimes.com blog item from Elko wrote: “I’m canvassing for Obama. If this issue comes up, even if obliquely, I emphasize that Obama is from a multiracial background and that his father was an African intellectual, not an American from the inner city. I explain that Obama has never aligned himself solely with African-American interests — not on any issue — but rather has always sought to find a middle ground.”

Rebecca Cathcart contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

    Volunteers for Obama Face a Complex Issue, NYT, 15.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/us/politics/15nevada.html

Living Apart

Hot Topic Is Secondary in a Part of Colorado

October 15, 2008
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON

BUENA VISTA, Colo. — Black people are simply not in the picture in this part of Colorado. What that means, said many people in the nearly all-white corridor through Chaffee and Lake Counties along the spine of the Rockies, is that race is not on the table much when talk turns to Senator Barack Obama’s bid for the White House.

“Because there’s not any sort of daily interaction to sway us either way, to make us prejudiced in either direction, it makes it more of a candidate choice,” said Laurie Benson, 36, who owns the Buena Vista Roastery, a coffee supplier on Main Street, with her husband, Joel. “It’s more just who is the best candidate.”

The debate over race — and for some, the soul-searching — that Mr. Obama’s history-making candidacy as the Democratic nominee has engendered are clearly present here, just different. Republicans and Democrats alike, in several dozen interviews in Chaffee County (1.6 percent black) and Lake County (0.3 percent black), agreed with Ms. Benson that the lack of racial interaction made Mr. Obama’s race more of an intellectual concept, secondary to ordinary political considerations.

But in a sign of the limits of tolerance, some white voters also expressed a vague fear that if they did experience daily life in black America, their opinion of black people might change for the worse.

Peggy MacKay, a 63-year-old supporter of Mr. Obama and resident of Buena Vista, tried recently to imagine an alternative universe. What if she lived instead in an urban neighborhood where race, poverty and crime were the backdrop of life? Would she still vote for a black man?

“If I were an inner-city person, and I was confronted with those problems every day, I would hope that I could rise above it,” said Ms. MacKay, a corporate consultant and trainer. “To be honest, I don’t know that I could.”

Hugh Neas, a retired engineering worker who described himself as a Republican (he supported President Bush in 2000 and Senator John Kerry in 2004, and he plans to vote for Mr. Obama in November), said that voting for a black man was simply easier in a place where social problems were divorced from a discussion of race. He said he had been thinking lately of a police officer friend who took a job in a black neighborhood in Los Angeles years ago and came out a racial bigot.

“I’d like to think that would not happen to me,” Mr. Neas said. “But if your nose is rubbed in it every day, you have problems.”

Other people are not so sure that racism has faded. Bud Elliott, the mayor of Leadville, a depressed mining town in Lake County, said he thought Mr. Obama would win there because of the historic alliance of the mining unions and the Democratic Party. But Mr. Elliott also expects a gap, with Mr. Obama winning by a smaller margin than other Democrats, because of race-based defections.

Whether voters are newcomers with experience in other parts of the country or old-timers whose sense of race comes from television and movies is perhaps also a factor, Mr. Elliott said.

Supporters of Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, also said race had no place in their consideration. Some said that the election was about liberal versus conservative, and that they would vote as they always had — for the conservative.

But mostly, people here say that naked racism, if it still exists, is buried deep. Few residents, Democrat or Republican, said they had overheard overt racial comments. Some see that as a victory.

“At least it’s gone covert and underground,” said Pat Landreth, an artist and co-owner of Bungled Jungle, a gallery in downtown Salida. “So some good is happening.”

    Hot Topic Is Secondary in a Part of Colorado, NYT, 15.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/us/politics/15colorado.html

The South

For Some, Uncertainty Starts at Racial Identity

October 15, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

MOBILE, Ala. — The McCain campaign’s depiction of Barack Obama as a mysterious “other” with an impenetrable background may not be resonating in the national polls, but it has found a receptive audience with many white Southern voters.

In interviews here in the Deep South and in Virginia, white voters made it clear that they remain deeply uneasy with Mr. Obama — with his politics, his personality and his biracial background. Being the son of a white mother and a black father has come to symbolize Mr. Obama’s larger mysteries for many voters. When asked about his background, a substantial number of people interviewed said they believed his racial heritage was unclear, giving them another reason to vote against him.

“He’s neither-nor,” said Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter who works at a factory north of Mobile, while standing in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store just north of here. “He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.”

Whether Mr. Obama is black, half-black or half-white often seemed to overshadow the question of his exact stand on particular issues, and rough-edged comments on the subject flowed easily even from voters who said race should not be an issue in the campaign. Many voters seemed to have no difficulty criticizing the mixing of the races — and thus the product of such mixtures — even as they indignantly said a candidate’s color held no importance for them.

“I would think of him as I would of another of mixed race,” said Glenn Reynolds, 74, a retired textile worker in Martinsdale, Va., and a former supervisor at a Goodyear plant. “God taught the children of Israel not to intermarry. You should be proud of what you are, and not intermarry.”

Mr. Reynolds, standing outside a Kroger grocery store, described Mr. Obama as a “real charismatic person, in that he’s the type of person you can’t really hate, but you don’t really trust.”

Other voters swept past such ambiguities into old-fashioned racist gibes.

“He’s going to tear up the rose bushes and plant a watermelon patch,” said James Halsey, chuckling, while standing in the Wal-Mart parking lot with fellow workers in the environmental cleanup business. “I just don’t think we’ll ever have a black president.”

There is nothing unusual about mixed-race people in the South, although in decades past there was no ambiguity about the subject. Legally and socially, a person with any black blood was considered black when segregation was the law.

But the historic candidacy of Mr. Obama, who has said he considers himself black, has led some voters in the South to categorize him as neither black nor white. While many voters said that made them uncomfortable, others said they were pleased by Mr. Obama’s lack of connection to African-American politics.

“He doesn’t come from the African-American perspective — he’s not of that tradition,” said Kimi Oaks, a prominent community volunteer in the Mobile area, with apparent approval. Ms. Oaks, along with about 15 others, had gathered after Sunday services at Mobile’s leading Methodist church to discuss the presidential campaign. “He’s not a product of any ghetto,” Ms. Oaks added.

At the same time, however, she vigorously rejected the idea that race would be important in the election, a question met with general head-shaking from those assembled; Ms. Oaks said she was “terribly offended,” as a Southerner, at even being asked about this.

Jim Pagans, a retired software manager, interviewed in a strip mall parking lot in Roanoke, Va., said that while Mr. Obama was “half-Caucasian,” he had the characteristics of blacks.

“But you look at his background, you don’t think of that,” he said. “He’s more intelligent and a smarter person than McCain.”

Bud Rowell, a retired oil field worker interviewed at a Baptist church in Citronelle, Ala., north of Mobile, said he was uncertain about Mr. Obama’s racial identity, and was critical of him for being equivocal and indecisive.

But Mr. Rowell also said that personal experience had made him more sympathetic to biracial people.

“I’ve always been against the blacks,” said Mr. Rowell, who is in his 70s, recalling how he was arrested for throwing firecrackers in the black section of town. But now that he has three biracial grandchildren — “it was really rough on me” — he said he had “found out they were human beings, too.”

    For Some, Uncertainty Starts at Racial Identity, NYT, 15.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/us/politics/15biracial.html

Obama Details Plan to Aid Victims of Fiscal Crisis

October 14, 2008
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES and JEFF ZELENY

TOLEDO, Ohio — Senator Barack Obama proposed new steps on Monday to address the economic crisis, calling for temporary but costly new programs to help employers, automakers, homeowners, the unemployed, and state and local governments.

In an address here, Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, proposed giving employers a $3,000 tax credit for each new hire to encourage job creation. He said he would seek to allow Americans of all ages to borrow from retirement savings without a tax penalty; to eliminate income taxes on unemployment benefits; and to double, to $50 billion, the government’s loan guarantees for automakers.

Mr. Obama also called on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to create a mechanism to lend money to cities and states with fiscal problems, and to expand the government guarantees for financial institutions to encourage a return to more normal lending. He also proposed a 90-day moratorium on most home foreclosures; it would require financial institutions that take government help to agree not to act against homeowners who are trying to make payments, even if not the full amounts.

“We need to give people the breathing room they need to get back on their feet,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of more than 3,000 people at the SeaGate Convention Centre in downtown Toledo.

Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, Senator John McCain, will make new proposals for the economy on Tuesday, advisers said. They did not provide any details.

Late Sunday, after Mr. McCain and his team looked at a variety of policy options over the weekend, a campaign spokesman said Mr. McCain, who has been losing ground to Mr. Obama in the polls, would have no new proposals unless events warranted. Mr. McCain has been emphasizing his plan to help people with financial difficulties get more affordable mortgages, with taxpayers picking up the tab.

In his speech on Monday, Mr. Obama said: “I won’t pretend this will be easy. George Bush has dug a deep hole for us. It’s going to take a while for us to dig our way out. We’re going to have to set priorities as never before.”

The package of new proposals was the most detailed and ambitious offered by Mr. Obama since the financial crisis became acute last month, clouding the economic outlook and transforming the presidential campaign.

This struggling manufacturing city is representative of both the economic crisis and the political battle for industrial-belt swing states that could determine the winner of the election. Mr. Obama is spending three days in northwestern Ohio, just south of the auto-making capital, Detroit, mostly sequestered with advisers to prepare for the third and final presidential debate on Wednesday at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y.

Mr. Obama’s advisers emphasized that many of the new steps he called for could be taken quickly by the Democratic-controlled Congress in a lame-duck session this year, instead of waiting until after the new president is sworn into office in late January. Several steps could be taken by the Treasury and Federal Reserve using their powers under current law, the advisers said.

At the Capitol on Monday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi would not commit to calling Congress back immediately after the elections to consider a stimulus plan, given the potential that Mr. Bush would veto it. House Democratic leaders met with economists and afterward said they would develop a package for increased spending on public works, health care subsidies for states, extended unemployment pay and food stamp assistance.

Obama advisers put the cost of Mr. Obama’s full economic stimulus plan at $175 billion, including $60 billion for the steps announced Monday.

Of the earlier $115 billion, $50 billion would be used to help states and to speed construction of roads and other infrastructure projects that create jobs. About $65 billion of it would be the cost of a second round of rebates to taxpayers this year.

Mr. Obama had initially proposed to offset the rebates’ expense with a new windfall-profits tax on oil companies, but the campaign indicated Monday that he would scrap that plan assuming that oil prices do not rise above about $80 a barrel. The shift was just one sign of how the economic crisis has shoved concerns about budget deficits to the sidelines.

Despite criticism from the McCain camp that increasing taxes would further endanger the economy, Mr. Obama has “no plans to change” his longstanding proposal to repeal the Bush tax cuts next year for households with an annual income of more than $250,000, said Jason Furman, Mr. Obama’s economic adviser. Under Mr. Obama’s plan, most individuals and families would get a tax cut, and in terms of total dollars, he would cut taxes on lower- and middle-income people more than he would raise them on upper-income people.

McCain advisers on Monday reiterated their argument that the higher taxes, together with Mr. Obama’s plan for expanded health care, would hit small businesses with costs they could ill afford. Many small businesses pay taxes as individuals. But the Obama campaign and independent fact-checking groups argue that relatively few would be affected by the tax increase on upper-income levels.

The recent surge of government spending to bail out financial institutions and other corporations are likely to drive projections for the federal deficit this year and beyond far above the $438 billion shortfall recorded for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Yet the McCain campaign insisted Monday that Mr. McCain would balance the budget by 2013, which would be the end of his first term. Nonpartisan analysts consider that unlikely if not impossible. Mr. Obama is promising to reduce annual deficits from the current level.

The most costly of Mr. Obama’s new proposals is the one giving businesses a $3,000 income tax credit for each new full-time employee they hire above their current work force. The proposal, which would be effective for the next two years and is based on a concept that has been used in past downturns, would account for about $40 billion of the new package’s $60 billion price tag.

About $10 billion of the $60 billion would go to eliminating income taxes on unemployment benefits and extending aid to the long-term unemployed by 13 weeks, on top of the existing 26 weeks.

Mr. Obama’s proposal from last week to allow struggling small businesses to apply for loans from the Small Business Administration’s disaster funds would cost more than $5 billion. The expense of covering additional loan guarantees for the auto industry would mean more than $4 billion more.

While not costly to the Treasury, perhaps more controversial is Mr. Obama’s proposal to allow Americans to withdraw without tax penalty 15 percent of their retirement savings, up to $10,000, from their tax-favored Individual Retirement Accounts and 401(k)s. They would still have to pay income taxes on the withdrawal. Current law requires savers younger than 59 ½ to pay taxes and a 10 percent penalty.

Economists and nonpartisan analysts generally oppose making it easier for Americans to tap into retirement savings, considering that the United States has a net negative savings rate that is the lowest among the world’s industrialized nations. But Obama advisers counter that many Americans need that money to get by and should not be penalized when major financial institutions are getting bailouts.

For savers, the downside to withdrawing money now is that they would get less value given the slide in the stock markets. With that in mind, Mr. McCain last week proposed waiving federal rules that require older Americans to begin withdrawing funds as soon as they reach age 70 ½. On Monday, Mr. Obama praised Mr. McCain’s proposal, telling the Ohioans, “I want to give credit where credit is due.”

To impose the 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures, Mr. Obama would have the government, using its existing authority, require financial institutions that take advantage of the Treasury’s rescue plan to agree not to foreclose on the mortgages of any homeowners who are making “good faith efforts” to pay, even if their payments fall short.

Jackie Calmes reported from Washington, and Jeff Zeleny from Toledo. Carl Hulse contributed reporting from Washington.

    Obama Details Plan to Aid Victims of Fiscal Crisis, NYT, 14.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/us/politics/14campaign.html?hp

Obama Expands Economic Plans

October 14, 2008
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES and JEFF ZELENY

TOLEDO — Senator Barack Obama on Monday expanded his economic platform, including proposals to spur new jobs, to give Americans penalty-free access to retirement savings to help them through the downturn, to urge a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures and to lend money to strapped local and state governments.

Mr. Obama also is calling on Congress to double $25 billion the government loan guarantees for automakers and to temporarily eliminate taxes on unemployment benefits.

Campaign advisers said those steps and several others could be taken before January through current laws or by the Democratic-controlled Congress acting in a lame-duck session.

Mr. Obama is outlining his revised plan in Toledo, Ohio, a struggling city that is representative of the economic crisis and the battle for industrial-belt swing states that could determine the winner of the Nov. 4 election.

Senator John McCain, his Republican rival, also gave an economic speech in Virginia Beach, Va., but he had no new policy prescriptions, having rejected his advisers’ options over the weekend as too gimmicky, according to one Republican close to the campaign.

Mr. Obama was not originally scheduled to present new policy proposals in his speech at the Sea Gate Convention Centre in downtown Toledo. But when word spread on Sunday evening that Mr. McCain would not offer new economic proposals, as had been suggested by some aides, the Obama campaign saw an opportunity to expand upon Mr. Obama’s plans to offer relief for the middle-class with ideas on the table.

“We have the advantage of sharing ideas that are consistent with theideas we have shared before,” David Axelrod, the campaign’s chiefstrategist, said in an interview. New polls suggest mounting economic anxieties among voters are fueling Mr. Obama’s growing lead in many polls against Mr. McCain.

The main new proposals would:

— for the next two years, give businesses a $3,000 income-tax credit for each new full-time employee they hire above the number in their current workforce;

— allow savers with tax-favored Individual Retirement Accounts and 401(k)’s to withdraw 15 percent of those retirement savings, up to a maximum of $10,000, without paying a tax penalty as the law currently requires for withdrawals before age 59 and a half;

— bar financial institutions that take advantage of the Treasury’s rescue plan from foreclosing on the mortgages of any homeowners who are making “good-faith efforts” to make payments;

— direct the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to create a temporary facility for loans to state and local governments, similar to the Fed’s new arrangement to loan corporations money by buying their commercial paper, which are the I.O.U.s that help businesses with daily operating expenses like payrolls.

    Obama Expands Economic Plans, NYT, 14.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/us/politics/14campaign.html?hp

Obama’s Speech on Economic Policy

October 13, 2008
The New York Times
 

The following is the text of a speech given by Senator Barack Obama on his economic policy in Toledo, Ohio, on Monday as prepared for delivery and provided by the Obama campaign.

We meet at a moment of great uncertainty for America. The economic crisis we face is the worst since the Great Depression. Markets across the globe have become increasingly unstable, and millions of Americans will open up their 401(k) statements this week and see that so much of their hard-earned savings have disappeared.

The credit crisis has left businesses large and small unable to get loans, which means they can't buy new equipment, or hire new workers, or even make payroll for the workers they have. You've got auto plants right here in Ohio that have been around for decades closing their doors and laying off workers who've never known another job in their entire life.

760,000 workers have lost their jobs this year. Unemployment here in Ohio is up 85% over the last eight years, which is the highest it's been in sixteen years. You've lost one of every four manufacturing jobs, the typical Ohio family has seen their income fall $2,500, and it's getting harder and harder to make the mortgage, or fill up your gas tank, or even keep the electricity on at the end of the month. At this rate, the question isn't just "are you better off than you were four years ago?", it's "are you better off than you were four weeks ago?"

I know these are difficult times. I know folks are worried. But I also know this – we can steer ourselves out of this crisis. Because we are the United States of America. We are the country that has faced down war and depression; great challenges and great threats. And at each and every moment, we have risen to meet these challenges – not as Democrats, not as Republicans, but as Americans.

We still have the most talented, most productive workers of any country on Earth. We're still home to innovation and technology, colleges and universities that are the envy of the world. Some of the biggest ideas in history have come from our small businesses and our research facilities. It won't be easy, but there's no reason we can't make this century another American century.

But it will take a new direction. It will take new leadership in Washington. It will take a real change in the policies and politics of the last eight years. And that's why I'm running for President of the United States of America.

My opponent has made his choice. Last week, Senator McCain's campaign announced that they were going to "turn the page" on the discussion about our economy so they can spend the final weeks of this election attacking me instead. His campaign actually said, and I quote, "if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose." Well Senator McCain may be worried about losing an election, but I'm worried about Americans who are losing their jobs, and their homes, and their life savings. They can't afford four more years of the economic theory that says we should give more and more to millionaires and billionaires and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. We've seen where that's led us and we're not going back. It's time to turn the page.

Over the course of this campaign, I've laid out a set of policies that will grow our middle-class and strengthen our economy in the long-term. I'll reform our tax code so that 95% of workers and their families get a tax cut, and eliminate income taxes for seniors making under $50,000. I'll bring down the cost of health care for families and businesses by investing in preventative care, new technology, and giving every American the chance to get the same kind of health insurance that members of Congress give themselves. We'll ensure every child can compete in the global economy by recruiting an army of new teachers and making college affordable for anyone who wants to go. We'll create five million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in ten years, and we'll create two million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges.

But that's a long-term strategy for growth. Right now, we face an immediate economic emergency that requires urgent action. We can't wait to help workers and families and communities who are struggling right now – who don't know if their job or their retirement will be there tomorrow; who don't know if next week's paycheck will cover this month's bills. We need to pass an economic rescue plan for the middle-class and we need to do it now. Today I'm proposing a number of steps that we should take immediately to stabilize our financial system, provide relief to families and communities, and help struggling homeowners. It's a plan that begins with one word that's on everyone's mind, and it's spelled J-O-B-S.

We've already lost three-quarters of a million jobs this year, and some experts say that unemployment may rise to 8% by the end of next year. We can't wait until then to start creating new jobs. That's why I'm proposing to give our businesses a new American jobs tax credit for each new employee they hire here in the United States over the next two years.

To fuel the real engine of job creation in this country, I've also proposed eliminating all capital gains taxes on investments in small businesses and start-up companies, and I've proposed an additional tax incentive through next year to encourage new small business investment. It is time to protect the jobs we have and to create the jobs of tomorrow by unlocking the drive, and ingenuity, and innovation of the American people. And we should fast track the loan guarantees we passed for our auto industry and provide more as needed so that they can build the energy-efficient cars America needs to end our dependence on foreign oil.

We will also save one million jobs by creating a Jobs and Growth Fund that will provide money to states and local communities so that they can move forward with projects to rebuild and repair our roads, our bridges, and our schools. A lot of these projects and these jobs are at risk right now because of budget shortfalls, but this fund will make sure they continue.

The second part of my rescue plan is to provide immediate relief to families who are watching their paycheck shrink and their jobs and life savings disappear. I've already proposed a middle-class tax cut for 95% of workers and their families, but today I'm calling on Congress to pass a plan so that the IRS will mail out the first round of those tax cuts as soon as possible. We should also extend and expand unemployment benefits to those Americans who have lost their jobs and are having a harder time finding new ones in this weak economy. And we should stop making them pay taxes on those unemployment insurance benefits as well.

At a time when the ups and downs of the stock market have rarely been so unpredictable and dramatic, we also need to give families and retirees more flexibility and security when it comes to their retirement savings.

I welcome Senator McCain's proposal to waive the rules that currently force our seniors to withdraw from their 401(k)s even when the market is bad. I think that's a good idea, but I think we need to do even more. Since so many Americans will be struggling to pay the bills over the next year, I propose that we allow every family to withdraw up to 15% from their IRA or 401(k) – up to a maximum of $10,000 – without any fine or penalty throughout 2009. This will help families get through this crisis without being forced to make painful choices like selling their homes or not sending their kids to college.

The third part of my rescue plan is to provide relief for homeowners who are watching their home values decline while their property taxes go up. Earlier this year I pushed for legislation that would help homeowners stay in their homes by working to modify their mortgages. When Secretary Paulson proposed his original financial rescue plan it included nothing for homeowners. When Senator McCain was silent on the issue, I insisted that it include protections for homeowners. Now the Treasury must use the authority its been granted and move aggressively to help people avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes. We don't need a new law or a new $300 billion giveaway to banks like Senator McCain has proposed, we just need to act quickly and decisively.

I've already proposed a mortgage tax credit for struggling homeowners worth 10% of the interest you pay on your mortgage and we should move quickly to pass it. We should also change the unfair bankruptcy laws that allow judges to write down your mortgage if you own six or seven homes, but not if you have only one. And for all those cities and small towns that are facing a choice between cutting services like health care and education or raising property taxes, we will provide the funding to prevent those tax hikes from happening. We cannot allow homeowners and small towns to suffer because of the mess made by Wall Street and Washington.

For those Americans in danger of losing their homes, today I'm also proposing a three-month moratorium on foreclosures. If you are a bank or lender that is getting money from the rescue plan that passed Congress, and your customers are making a good-faith effort to make their mortgage payments and re-negotiate their mortgages, you will not be able to foreclose on their home for three months. We need to give people the breathing room they need to get back on their feet.

Finally, this crisis has taught us that we cannot have a sound economy with a dysfunctional financial system. We passed a financial rescue plan that has the promise to help stabilize the financial system, but only if we act quickly, effectively and aggressively. The Treasury Department must move quickly with their plan to put more money into struggling banks so they have enough to lend, and they should do it in a way that protects taxpayers instead of enriching CEOs. There was a report yesterday that some financial institutions participating in this rescue plan are still trying to avoid restraints on CEO pay. That's not just wrong, it's an outrage to every American whose tax dollars have been put at risk. No major investor would ever make an investment if they didn't think the corporation was being prudent and responsible, and we shouldn't expect taxpayers to think any differently. We should also be prepared to extend broader guarantees if it becomes necessary to stabilize our financial system.

I also believe that Treasury should not limit itself to purchasing mortgage-backed securities – it should help unfreeze markets for individual mortgages, student loans, car loans, and credit card loans.. And I think we need to do even more to make loans available in two very important areas of our economy: small businesses and communities.

On Friday, I proposed Small Business Rescue Plan that would create an emergency lending fund to lend money directly to small businesses that need cash for their payroll or to buy inventory. It's what we did after 9/11, and it allowed us to get low-cost loans out to tens of thousands of small businesses. We'll also make it easier for private lenders to make small business loans by expanding the Small Business Administration's loan guarantee program. By temporarily eliminating fees for borrowers and lenders, we can unlock the credit that small firms need to pay their workers and keep their doors open. And today, I'm also proposing that we maintain the ability of states and local communities that are struggling to maintain basic services without raising taxes to continue to get the credit they need.

Congress should pass this emergency rescue plan as soon as possible. If Washington can move quickly to pass a rescue plan for our financial system, there's no reason we can't move just as quickly to pass a rescue plan for our middle-class that will create jobs, provide relief, and help homeowners. And if Congress does not act in the coming months, it will be one of the first things I do as President of the United States. Because we can't wait any longer to start creating new jobs; to help struggling communities and homeowners, and to provide real and immediate relief to families who are worried not only about this month's bills, but their entire life savings. This plan will help ease those anxieties, and along with the other economic policies I've proposed, it will begin to create new jobs, grow family incomes, and put us back on the path to prosperity.

I won't pretend this will be easy or come without cost. We'll have to set priorities as never before, and stick to them. That means pursuing investments in areas such as energy, education and health care that bear directly on our economic future, while deferring other things we can afford to do without. It means scouring the federal budget, line-by-line, ending programs that we don't need and making the ones we do work more efficiently and cost less.

It also means promoting a new ethic of responsibility. Part of the reason this crisis occurred is that everyone was living beyond their means – from Wall Street to Washington to even some on Main Street. CEOs got greedy. Politicians spent money they didn't have. Lenders tricked people into buying home they couldn't afford and some folks knew they couldn't afford them and bought them anyway.

We've lived through an era of easy money, in which we were allowed and even encouraged to spend without limits; to borrow instead of save.

Now, I know that in an age of declining wages and skyrocketing costs, for many folks this was not a choice but a necessity. People have been forced to turn to credit cards and home equity loans to keep up, just like our government has borrowed from China and other creditors to help pay its bills.

But we now know how dangerous that can be. Once we get past the present emergency, which requires immediate new investments, we have to break that cycle of debt. Our long-term future requires that we do what's necessary to scale down our deficits, grow wages and encourage personal savings again.

It's a serious challenge. But we can do it if we act now, and if we act as one nation. We can bring a new era of responsibility and accountability to Wall Street and to Washington. We can put in place common-sense regulations to prevent a crisis like this from ever happening again. We can make investments in the technology and innovation that will restore prosperity and lead to new jobs and a new economy for the 21st century. We can restore a sense of fairness and balance that will give ever American a fair shot at the American dream. And above all, we can restore confidence – confidence in America, confidence in our economy, and confidence in ourselves.

This country and the dream it represents are being tested in a way that we haven't seen in nearly a century. And future generations will judge ours by how we respond to this test. Will they say that this was a time when America lost its way and its purpose? When we allowed our own petty differences and broken politics to plunge this country into a dark and painful recession?

Or will they say that this was another one of those moments when America overcame? When we battled back from adversity by recognizing that common stake that we have in each other's success?

This is one of those moments. I realize you're cynical and fed up with politics. I understand that you're disappointed and even angry with your leaders. You have every right to be. But despite all of this, I ask of you what's been asked of the American people in times of trial and turmoil throughout our history. I ask you to believe – to believe in yourselves, in each other, and in the future we can build together.

Together, we cannot fail. Not now. Not when we have a crisis to solve and an economy to save. Not when there are so many Americans without jobs and without homes. Not when there are families who can't afford to see a doctor, or send their child to college, or pay their bills at the end of the month. Not when there is a generation that is counting on us to give them the same opportunities and the same chances that we had for ourselves.

We can do this. Americans have done this before. Some of us had grandparents or parents who said maybe I can't go to college but my child can; maybe I can't have my own business but my child can. I may have to rent, but maybe my children will have a home they can call their own. I may not have a lot of money but maybe my child will run for Senate. I might live in a small village but maybe someday my son can be president of the United States of America.

Now it falls to us. Together, we cannot fail. Together, we can overcome the broken policies and divided politics of the last eight years. Together, we can renew an economy that rewards work and rebuilds the middle class. Together, we can create millions of new jobs, and deliver on the promise of health care you can afford and education that helps your kids compete. We can do this if we come together; if we have confidence in ourselves and each other; if we look beyond the darkness of the day to the bright light of hope that lies ahead. Together, we can change this country and change this world. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless America.

    Obama’s Speech on Economic Policy, NYT, 13.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/us/politics/13obama-text.html?ref=politics

Abortion Rights on the Ballot, Again

October 13, 2008
The New York Times
 

Once again this year, opponents of women’s reproductive rights have managed to get initiatives aimed at ending or limiting abortion rights on ballots — in South Dakota, Colorado and California. These measures, which violate women’s privacy and threaten their health, have implications far beyond those states. If voters approve them, they will become a weapon in the right-wing campaign to overturn Roe v Wade.

The South Dakota initiative is a near twin of the sweeping abortion ban handily rejected by South Dakota voters just two years ago. To make the ban seem less harsh, its backers have included language purporting to make exceptions for incest, rape or the life and health of the mother. But no one should be fooled. The exceptions were drafted to make it nearly impossible to get an abortion, even during the first trimester of pregnancy.

The measure is clearly unconstitutional under existing Supreme Court rulings, and that’s just the point. The underlying agenda is to provide a vehicle for challenging Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion.

The Colorado ballot proposal attacks Roe v. Wade by a different route. Known as Amendment 48, this preposterous measure would redefine the term “person” in the state’s Constitution to include fertilized human eggs — in effect bestowing on fertilized eggs, prior to implantation in the womb and pregnancy, the same legal rights and protections that apply to people once they are born.

The amendment, which has split anti-abortion groups, carries broad implications, ranging from harmful to downright ridiculous. Potentially, it could ban widely used forms of contraception, curtail medical research involving embryos, criminalize necessary medical care and shutter fertility clinics. A damaged fertilized egg might be eligible for monetary damages.

Noting the “legal nightmare” the amendment would create, and its potential to endanger the health of women, Gov. Bill Ritter, a self-described “pro-life” Democrat, has joined the opposition to Amendment 48.

In California, meanwhile, abortion opponents have put the issue of parental notification on the ballot for the third time in four years. The proponents of Proposition 4 say mandating notification is necessary to safeguard underage girls. But most 15-year-olds who find themselves pregnant instinctively turn to a parent for support and guidance. Far from protecting vulnerable teens, Proposition 4 would make it difficult for young women caught in abusive situations to obtain an abortion without notifying their parents, even in cases where the father or stepfather is responsible for the pregnancy.

If approved, Proposition 4 would inevitably drive some to attempt a self-induced abortion or to seek the procedure later in pregnancy. California voters were right to reject this damaging approach on the first two attempts. They should do so again.

    Abortion Rights on the Ballot, Again, NYT, 13.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/opinion/13mon1.html

The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama

October 13, 2008
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG

The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama’s background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that helped set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: “Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion.”

That statement, contained in a press release, spun a complex tale about the ancestry of Mr. Obama, who is Christian.

The press release was picked up by a conservative Web site, FreeRepublic.com, and spread steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and books. It continues to drive other false rumors about Mr. Obama’s background.

Just last Friday, a woman told Senator John McCain at a town-hall-style meeting, “I have read about him,” and “he’s an Arab.” Mr. McCain corrected her.

Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyberwhisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs.

But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.

He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

Though he is not a lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he made unsuccessful attempts to win public office for both parties in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as a writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases.

Mr. Martin, in a series of interviews, did not dispute his influence in Obama rumors.

“Everybody uses my research as a takeoff point,” Mr. Martin said, adding, however, that some take his writings “and exaggerate them to suit their own fantasies.”

As for his background, he said: “I’m a colorful person. There’s always somebody who has a legitimate cause in their mind to be angry with me.”

When questions were raised last week about Mr. Martin’s appearance and claims on “Hannity’s America” on Fox News, the program’s producer said Mr. Martin was clearly expressing his opinion and not necessarily fact.

It was not Mr. Martin’s first turn on national television. The CBS News program “48 Hours” in 1993 devoted an hourlong program to what it called his prolific filing of frivolous lawsuits. He has filed so many lawsuits that a judge barred him from doing so in any federal court without preliminary approval.

He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.” He ran as a Republican for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he aired a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine.

In the 1990s, Mr. Martin was jailed in a case in Florida involving a physical altercation.

His newfound prominence, and the persistence of his line of political attack — updated regularly on his Web site and through press releases — amazes those from his past.

“Well, that’s just a bookend for me,” said Tom Slade, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party, whom Mr. Martin sued for refusing to support him. Mr. Slade said Mr. Martin was driven like “a run-over dog, but he’s fearless.”

Given Mr. Obama’s unusual background, which was the focus of his first book, it was perhaps bound to become fodder for some opposed to his candidacy.

Mr. Obama was raised mostly by his white mother, an atheist, and his grandparents, who were Protestant, in Hawaii. He hardly knew his father, a Kenyan from a Muslim family who variously considered himself atheist or agnostic, Mr. Obama wrote. For a few childhood years, Mr. Obama lived in Indonesia with a stepfather he described as loosely following a liberal Islam.

Theories about Mr. Obama’s background have taken on a life of their own. But independent analysts seeking the origins of the cyberspace attacks wind up at Mr. Martin’s first press release, posted on the Free Republic Web site in August 2004.

Its general outlines have turned up in a host of works that have expounded falsely on Mr. Obama’s heritage or supposed attempts to conceal it, including “Obama Nation,” the widely discredited best seller about Mr. Obama by Jerome R. Corsi. Mr. Corsi opens the book with a quote from Mr. Martin.

“What he’s generating gets picked up in other places,” said Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University who has investigated the e-mail campaign’s circulation and origins, “and it’s an example of how the Internet has given power to sources we would have never taken seriously at another point in time.”

Ms. Allen said Mr. Martin’s original work found amplification in 2006, when a man named Ted Sampley wrote an article painting Mr. Obama as a secret practitioner of Islam. Quoting liberally from Mr. Martin, the article circulated on the Internet, and its contents eventually found their way into various e-mail messages, particularly an added claim that Mr. Obama had attended “Jakarta’s Muslim Wahhabi schools. Wahhabism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging jihad on the rest of the world.”

Mr. Obama for two years attended a Catholic school in Indonesia, where he was taught about the Bible, he wrote in “Dreams From My Father,” and for two years went to an Indonesian public school open to all religions, where he was taught about the Koran.

Mr. Sampley, coincidentally, is a Vietnam veteran and longtime opponent of Mr. McCain and Senator John Kerry, both of whom he accused of ignoring his claims that American prisoners were left behind in Vietnam. He previously portrayed Mr. McCain as a “Manchurian candidate.” Speaking of Mr. Martin’s influence on his Obama writings, Mr. Sampley said, “I keyed off of his work.”

Mr. Martin’s depictions of Mr. Obama as a secret Muslim have found resonance among some Jewish voters who have received e-mail messages containing various versions of his initial theory, often by new authors and with new twists.

In his original press release, Mr. Martin wrote that he was personally “a strong supporter of the Muslim community.” But, he wrote of Mr. Obama, “it may well be that his concealment is meant to endanger Israel.” He added, “His Muslim religion would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles.”

Yet in various court papers, Mr. Martin had impugned Jews.

A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”

In another motion, filed in 1983, Mr. Martin wrote, “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.”

In an interview, Mr. Martin denied some statements against Jews attributed to him in court papers, blaming malicious judges for inserting them.

But in his “48 Hours” interview in 1993, he affirmed a different anti-Semitic part of the affidavit that included the line about the Holocaust, saying, “The record speaks for itself.”

When asked Friday about an assertion in his court papers that “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome,” he said, “That one sort of rings a bell.”

He said he was not anti-Semitic. “I was trying to show that everybody in the bankruptcy court was Jewish and I was not Jewish,” he said, “and I was being victimized by religious bias.”

In discussing the denial of his admission to the Illinois bar, Mr. Martin said the psychiatric exam listing him as having a “moderately severe personality defect” was spitefully written by an evaluator he had clashed with.

Mr. Martin, who says he is from a well-off banking and farming family, is clearly pleased with his newfound attention. But, he said, others have added to his work in “scary” ways.

“They Google ‘Islam’ and ‘Obama’ and my stuff comes up and they take that and kind of use that — like a Christmas tree, and they decorate it,” he said. For instance, he said, he did not necessarily ascribe to a widely circulated e-mail message from the Israeli right-wing activist Ruth Matar, which includes the false assertion, “If Obama were elected, he would be the first Arab-American president.”

He said he had at least come to “accept” Mr. Obama’s word that he had found Jesus Christ. His intent, he said, was only to educate.

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

    The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama, NYT, 13.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/us/politics/13martin.html?hp

Clintons Launch Campaign Swing for Obama in Pa.

October 12, 2008
Filed at 2:47 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- When Bill and Hillary Clinton take the stage Sunday at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, it will be the launch of an active campaign for their former nemesis Barack Obama in the home stretch of the 2008 presidential race.

The nation's best known and most powerful Democrats for nearly two decades, the former first couple is getting used to a new role: cheerleaders for Obama, who vanquished Hillary Clinton last spring in a Democratic primary contest for the ages.

Whatever recriminations the Clintons may still harbor from that long battle seem to have been nudged aside as they campaign in earnest for the Democratic ticket.

The New York senator and the former president will appear with Obama's running mate, Joe Biden, at a rally Sunday in Scranton, a working class town that has assumed something of an outsize role in the presidential race.

Biden was born in Scranton and lived there for several years as a child, while Hillary Clinton's father grew up in the town and is buried there. Both Biden and Clinton have emphasized their Scranton roots to illustrate their connection to blue collar voters.

After the rally, the Clintons will follow separate itineraries through presidential battleground states. They will also campaign on behalf of Democratic House and Senate candidates across the country.

Bill Clinton, who worked tirelessly for his wife during the primaries, seemed to take her loss more personally. Nonetheless, he gave Obama his full-throated endorsement at the Democratic convention in August. But he began stumping for the Illinois senator only recently, appearing at fundraisers and headlining two major events in Florida earlier this month.

After the Scranton rally, the former president was headed to Richmond and Roanoke, Virginia. He also planned events in the next few days in Ohio and Nevada, battleground states he won in 1992 and again in 1996.

Hillary Clinton was scheduled to hold a fundraiser for Obama on Sunday night in Philadelphia and planned a rally for him Monday in Montgomery County, a Philadelphia suburb rich in swing voters.

Clinton trounced Obama by 10 points in last spring's Pennsylvania primary, largely due to her strength among white working class voters. Sensing opportunity, Republican John McCain has campaigned actively in Pennsylvania but recent polls show Obama opening up a comfortable lead.

Hillary Clinton also planned return visits to Ohio and Florida in the next few days and has scheduled trips to Omaha, Neb., and Minnesota.

She traveled Friday to Arkansas, her husband's home state and where she served 12 years as first lady, in hopes of making it more competitive for the Democratic ticket. A swing through Western battleground states is in the works as well.

Clinton did radio interviews this week in North Carolina, a reliably Republican state that has become a battleground in this presidential election. She also spoke to a Hispanic station in Florida and launched a women's canvass in Wisconsin Saturday by phone.

Aides said Hillary Clinton has been remarkably stoic about taking on the role of an Obama cheerleader following the close and often bitter primary in which she raised questions about his electability and readiness to govern.

Clinton's long and often bumpy career in public life has taught her to compartmentalize her feelings, her aides said, and by nature she does not dwell on the past.

In campaign appearances, she has pressed the need for a Democratic president to take on the nation's sour economy and crippling financial crisis. Polls during the Democratic primaries found voters gave her a clear edge over Obama when asked who would be a better economic steward.

''I think it is safe to say we have not seen more troubles at one time since World War Two,'' Clinton told a rally in Little Rock, Ark., Friday. ''Probably no president will inherit more challenges that President Obama will, since Harry Truman had to take over from Franklin Roosevelt.''

Aides said Clinton has headlined more than 50 events for Obama and has raised $10 million for his campaign since suspending her own presidential effort in June.
 

(This version CORRECTS Corrects one of Clinton visits will be Omaha, Neb., sted Iowa.)

    Clintons Launch Campaign Swing for Obama in Pa., NYT, 12.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Clintons-Obama.html

Concern in G.O.P. After Rough Week for McCain

October 12, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and ELISABETH BUMILLER

After a turbulent week that included disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin and signs that Senator John McCain was struggling to strike the right tone for his campaign, Republican leaders said Saturday that they were worried Mr. McCain was heading for defeat unless he brought stability to his presidential candidacy and settled on a clear message to counter Senator Barack Obama.

Again and again, party leaders said in interviews that while they still believed that Mr. McCain could win over voters in the next 30 days, they were concerned that he and his advisers seemed to be adrift in dealing with an extraordinarily challenging political battleground and a crisis on Wall Street.

The expressions of concern came after a particularly difficult week for Mr. McCain. On Friday night, new questions arose about his choice of Ms. Palin as his running mate after an investigation by the Alaska Legislature concluded that she had abused her power in trying to orchestrate the firing of her former brother-in-law, a state trooper.

“I think you’re seeing a turning point,” said Saul Anuzis, the Republican chairman in Michigan, where Mr. McCain has decided to stop campaigning. “You’re starting to feel real frustration because we are running out of time. Our message, the campaign’s message, isn’t connecting.”

Tommy Thompson, a Republican who is a former governor of Wisconsin, said it would be difficult for Mr. McCain to win in his state but not impossible, particularly if he campaigned in conservative Democratic parts of the state. Asked if he was happy with Mr. McCain’s campaign, Mr. Thompson replied, “No,” and he added, “I don’t know who is.”

In Pennsylvania, Robert A. Gleason Jr., the state Republican chairman, said he was concerned that Mr. McCain’s increasingly aggressive tone was not working with moderate voters and women in the important southeastern part of a state that is at the top of Mr. McCain’s must-win list.

“They’re not as susceptible to attack ads,” Mr. Gleason said. “I worry about the southeast. Obama is making inroads.”

Several party leaders said Mr. McCain needed to settle on a single message in the final weeks of the campaign and warned that his changing day-to-day dialogue — a welter of evolving economic proposals, mixed with on-again-off-again attacks on Mr. Obama’s character — was not breaking through and was actually helping Mr. Obama in his effort to portray Mr. McCain as erratic.

“The main thing he needs to do,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota, “is focus on a single message — a single, concise or clear-cut message, and stick with that over the next 30 days, regardless of what happens.

“He’s had a lot of attack lines. But it’s time to choose.”

John C. Danforth, a retired Republican senator from Missouri, said Mr. McCain should turn his attention mainly to drawing contrasts with Mr. Obama and “essentially go back to the basics.”

“I don’t think it’s enough to talk about earmarks incessantly,” Mr. Danforth said. “He’s made that point. You’ve got to get beyond that and talk about the very dramatic taxes and spending in the Obama program.”

Even that might not be enough, Mr. Danforth said. “This is a year where everything that could go in Obama’s favor is going in Obama’s favor,” he said. “Everything that could go against McCain is against him. It’s absolutely the worst kind of perfect storm.”

Mr. McCain’s advisers said they remained confident of victory.

“My sense of where things are: John McCain beat back what was a political climate that would have snuffed out any other candidate in the Republican Party,” said Nicolle Wallace, a senior adviser. “He’s beat back every hurdle that was ever placed in front of him.”

Mr. McCain acknowledged the challenge Saturday as he campaigned in Iowa, where President Bush won narrowly in 2004 but where polls show Mr. Obama with a healthy lead.

“I’d like to remind you that the political pundits have been wrong several times,” Mr. McCain said, “and they’re wrong because we will win the state of Iowa in November.”

Yet there were continued signs of confusion and turmoil in the McCain campaign, as his aides wrestled with conflicting advice, daunting poll numbers and criticism from state party leaders increasingly distressed with the way the campaign has been run.

Republicans said he had been damaged by several rallies last week in which supporters shouted insults and threats about Mr. Obama, prompting Mr. McCain on Friday night to chide audience members. His aides suggested that they were trying to find a balance between attacking Mr. Obama and painting him as untested and risky without stirring unruly crowd reactions.

Emotions are raw in the campaign, where Mr. McCain’s top advisers have voiced frustration at what they said was an unfair focus by the news media on the rowdy crowds.

“I think there have been quite a few reporters recently,” said Mr. McCain’s closest adviser, Mark Salter, “who have sort of implied, or made more than implications, that somehow we’re responsible for the occasional nut who shows up and yells something about Barack Obama.”

The difficulties of the McCain campaign have led some Republican leaders to express concern that he could end up dragging other Republican candidates down to defeat. “If Obama is able to run up big numbers around the country,” said Mr. Anuzis, the Michigan party chairman, “the potential for hurting down-ballot Republicans is very big.”

One sign of that has emerged in Nebraska, where Representative Lee Terry, a Republican, ran a newspaper advertisement featuring words of support for him from a woman identified as an “Obama-Terry voter.”

In this churning environment, Mr. McCain was getting conflicting advice from party leaders about what to do. Former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who was a rival of Mr. McCain for the Republican nomination, said Mr. McCain, who has offered scattershot proposals on the economy, should present a broad vision of how he would lead the country through the economic crisis.

“I’m talking about standing above the tactical alternatives that are being considered,” Mr. Romney said, “and establish an economic vision that is able to convince the American people that he really knows how to strengthen the economy.”

But no subject has more divided Republicans than the one that has been a matter of disagreement in the McCain camp: how directly to invoke Mr. Obama’s connection to his controversial former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground who has had a passing association with Mr. Obama over the years.

In Colorado, a traditionally Republican state that Mr. McCain is struggling to keep in his column, the party chairman, Dick Wadhams, urged Mr. McCain to hit the issue hard, arguing that it was fair game and could be highly effective in raising questions about Mr. Obama in the final weeks of the campaign. He said he was surprised Mr. McCain had failed to do so in the debate last week.

“I think those are legitimate insights into who Senator Obama is,” Mr. Wadhams said. “I do not think it is irrelevant to this election.”

But Fergus Cullen, the Republican chairman in New Hampshire, said Saturday that he thought it would be a mistake for Mr. McCain to go down that road, warning that it would turn off moderate voters in his state who have a history of supporting Mr. McCain.

“I don’t think he should be giving into elements of the base who have been asking him to be going after, using Wright, using Ayers,” Mr. Cullen said. “Think about it as an undecided persuadable voter.”

Although Mr. McCain has declared Mr. Wright off limits, the campaign has brought up Mr. Ayers. But the campaign appeared to step back a bit in raising that relationship Saturday. At a rally in Iowa, Mr. McCain stuck to his usual attacks on the Democratic nominee on taxes, the financial crisis and housing.

For her part, Ms. Palin appeared to pull back on the sharp jabs at a fund-raiser in Philadelphia.

“We just want to make sure that in this campaign, that we uphold the standards of tolerance and truth-telling,” she said. “There have been things said, of course, that have allowed those standards to be violated on both sides, on both tickets. We want to uphold those standards, and again it’s not mean-spirited, it’s not negative campaigning, when we call someone out on their record.”

Mr. Cullen said he still thought that Mr. McCain could win his state but acknowledged it would be difficult. “The national news has not been politically favorable for us in the last two or three weeks,” he said. “He either has to come up with a way to make the discussion on the economy reflect better on the Republicans or change the subject to something else.”

Mr. Romney referred to his own defeat at the hands of Mr. McCain in arguing that Mr. Obama should not be packing his bags for the White House quite yet. “Never count John McCain out,” he said. “Who knows? He has ground to make up. But he makes up ground in a big hurry. He did it in the primary.”

Michael M. Grynbaum and Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting.

    Concern in G.O.P. After Rough Week for McCain, NYT, 12.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/us/politics/12strategy.html?hp

Op-Ed Columnist

The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama

October 12, 2008
The New York Times
By FRANK RICH

IF you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.

Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.

“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.

Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.

It wasn’t always thus with McCain. In February he loudly disassociated himself from a speaker who brayed “Barack Hussein Obama” when introducing him at a rally in Ohio. Now McCain either backpedals with tardy, pro forma expressions of respect for his opponent or lets second-tier campaign underlings release boilerplate disavowals after ugly incidents like the chilling Jim Crow-era flashback last week when a Florida sheriff ranted about “Barack Hussein Obama” at a Palin rally while in full uniform.

From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.

McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

The operatives who would have Palin quote Pegler have been at it ever since. A key indicator came two weeks after the convention, when the McCain campaign ran its first ad tying Obama to the mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Rather than make its case by using a legitimate link between Fannie and Obama (or other Democratic leaders), the McCain forces chose a former Fannie executive who had no real tie to Obama or his campaign but did have a black face that could dominate the ad’s visuals.

There are no black faces high in the McCain hierarchy to object to these tactics. There hasn’t been a single black Republican governor, senator or House member in six years. This is a campaign where Palin can repeatedly declare that Alaska is “a microcosm of America” without anyone even wondering how that might be so for a state whose tiny black and Hispanic populations are each roughly one-third the national average. There are indeed so few people of color at McCain events that a black senior writer from The Tallahassee Democrat was mistakenly ejected by the Secret Service from a campaign rally in Panama City in August, even though he was standing with other reporters and showed his credentials. His only apparent infraction was to look glaringly out of place.

Could the old racial politics still be determinative? I’ve long been skeptical of the incessant press prognostications (and liberal panic) that this election will be decided by racist white men in the Rust Belt. Now even the dimmest bloviators have figured out that Americans are riveted by the color green, not black — as in money, not energy. Voters are looking for a leader who might help rescue them, not a reckless gambler whose lurching responses to the economic meltdown (a campaign “suspension,” a mortgage-buyout stunt that changes daily) are as unhinged as his wanderings around the debate stage.

To see how fast the tide is moving, just look at North Carolina. On July 4 this year — the day that the godfather of modern G.O.P. racial politics, Jesse Helms, died — The Charlotte Observer reported that strategists of both parties agreed Obama’s chances to win the state fell “between slim and none.” Today, as Charlotte reels from the implosion of Wachovia, the McCain-Obama race is a dead heat in North Carolina and Helms’s Republican successor in the Senate, Elizabeth Dole, is looking like a goner.

But we’re not at Election Day yet, and if voters are to have their final say, both America and Obama have to get there safely. The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The onus is on the man who says he puts his country first to call off the dogs, pit bulls and otherwise.

    The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama, NYT, 12.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html?em

Editorial

Politics of Attack

October 8, 2008
The New York Times
 

It is a sorry fact of American political life that campaigns get ugly, often in their final weeks. But Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have been running one of the most appalling campaigns we can remember.

They have gone far beyond the usual fare of quotes taken out of context and distortions of an opponent’s record — into the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia. Senator Barack Obama has taken some cheap shots at Mr. McCain, but there is no comparison.

Despite the occasional slip (referring to Mr. Obama’s “cronies” and calling him “that one”), Mr. McCain tried to take a higher road in Tuesday night’s presidential debate. It was hard to keep track of the number of times he referred to his audience as “my friends.” But apart from promising to buy up troubled mortgages as president, he offered no real answers for how he plans to solve the country’s deep economic crisis. He is unable or unwilling to admit that the Republican assault on regulation was to blame.

Ninety minutes of forced cordiality did not erase the dismal ugliness of his campaign in recent weeks, nor did it leave us with much hope that he would not just return to the same dismal ugliness on Wednesday.

Ms. Palin, in particular, revels in the attack. Her campaign rallies have become spectacles of anger and insult. “This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” Ms. Palin has taken to saying.

That line follows passages in Ms. Palin’s new stump speech in which she twists Mr. Obama’s ill-advised but fleeting and long-past association with William Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground and confessed bomber. By the time she’s done, she implies that Mr. Obama is right now a close friend of Mr. Ayers — and sympathetic to the violent overthrow of the government. The Democrat, she says, “sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

Her demagoguery has elicited some frightening, intolerable responses. A recent Washington Post report said at a rally in Florida this week a man yelled “kill him!” as Ms. Palin delivered that line and others shouted epithets at an African-American member of a TV crew.

Mr. McCain’s aides haven’t even tried to hide their cynical tactics, saying they were “going negative” in hopes of shifting attention away from the financial crisis — and by implication Mr. McCain’s stumbling response.

We certainly expected better from Mr. McCain, who once showed withering contempt for win-at-any-cost politics. He was driven out of the 2000 Republican primaries by this sort of smear, orchestrated by some of the same people who are now running his campaign.

And the tactic of guilt by association is perplexing, since Mr. McCain has his own list of political associates he would rather forget. We were disappointed to see the Obama campaign air an ad (held for just this occasion) reminding voters of Mr. McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five savings-and-loan debacle, for which he was reprimanded by the Senate. That episode at least bears on Mr. McCain’s claims to be the morally pure candidate and his argument that he alone is capable of doing away with greed, fraud and abuse.

In a way, we should not be surprised that Mr. McCain has stooped so low, since the debate showed once again that he has little else to talk about. He long ago abandoned his signature issues of immigration reform and global warming; his talk of “victory” in Iraq has little to offer a war-weary nation; and his Reagan-inspired ideology of starving government and shredding regulation lies in tatters on Wall Street.

But surely, Mr. McCain and his team can come up with a better answer to that problem than inciting more division, anger and hatred.

    Politics of Attack, NYT, 8.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/opinion/08wed1.html?ref=opinion

Campaigns Get Personal, McCain Called 'Erratic'

October 5, 2008
Filed at 1:10 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Democrat Barack Obama's campaign called his Republican rival ''erratic'' in a television commercial released Sunday as both campaigns stepped up personal attacks.

''Our financial system in turmoil,'' an announcer says in the ad. ''And John McCain? Erratic in a crisis. Out of touch on the economy.''

The ad, slated to start running Monday on national cable, seeks to capitalize on John McCain's response to the nation's financial crisis while rebutting Republican attacks on Obama's character.

As Congress worked to pass the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, McCain announced that he would suspend his campaign and skip the first presidential debate while he worked on a solution. He inevitably attended the debate even as the deal in Congress faltered.

Republicans argue that McCain's actions showed leadership while addressing a serious issue.

''In the midst of it all, I think you saw Sen. McCain, unlike Sen. Obama, come off the campaign trail, because that's John McCain in the middle of a crisis,'' Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a McCain supporter, said Sunday in a broadcast interview.

Democrats say McCain tried to politicize the crisis with a campaign gimmick, and they've adopted ''erratic'' as their buzzword to describe him.

It is a loaded term and a not-subtle suggestion that the 72-year-old senator's age and temperament might be an issue. McCain struggled to gain political traction as Congress debated the bailout package, but Republicans said his efforts helped bring about a deal.

Obama's surrogates were well-synchronized on the Sunday talk shows, with Sens. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Dianne Feinstein of California using the word ''erratic'' to describe McCain's handling of the unprecedented financial rescue package.

''One day, no bailout. The next day, a bailout. One day, I'm suspending my campaign. The next day, I'm not,'' McCaskill said.

''I thought John McCain was very erratic in how he behaved,'' Feinstein said.

The ad refers to McCain advisers saying they want to shift the debate from the nation's struggling economy while attacking Obama's character.

''No wonder his campaign's announced a plan to turn a page on the financial crisis, distract with dishonest, dishonorable assaults against Barack Obama,'' the ad says. ''Struggling families can't turn the page on this economy and we can't afford another president who's this out of touch.''

On Saturday, McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, said Obama is ''palling around with terrorists'' and doesn't see the U.S. like other Americans.

''Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country,'' Palin told a group of donors in Englewood, Colo. She echoed the line at three separate events Saturday.

''This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America,'' she said.

Palin was referring to Obama's relationship with William Ayers, a member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground. They worked on community boards years ago and Ayers hosted a political event for Obama early in his career. Obama, who was a child when the Weathermen were planting bombs, has denounced Ayers' radical views and actions.

Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, said the Palin attack was ''fair game.''

''If the shoe was on the other foot and John McCain had one of his earliest campaign events at the home of somebody who had formed a right-wing group that had bombed buildings and then had been on a board with the guy for several years, you bet the Obama campaign would have been raising that question,'' Lieberman said. ''It's just the way it is.''

McCaskill said the ''American people deserve so much better.''

''Do they really think America is going to think that Barack Obama's palling around with terrorists?'' McCaskill said. ''What that man did Barack Obama has condemned. And by the way, he did it when Barack Obama was 8 years old. Come on.''

Lieberman and McCaskill were interviewed on ''Fox News Sunday.'' Feinstein was interviewed on CBS' ''Face the Nation.''

----

On The Net: Obama ad: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/thisyear--ad/ 

    Campaigns Get Personal, McCain Called 'Erratic', NYT, 5.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Obama.html

Analysis:

Palin's Words May Backfire

on McCain

October 5, 2008
Filed at 1:23 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- By claiming that Democrat Barack Obama is ''palling around with terrorists'' and doesn't see the U.S. like other Americans, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin targeted key goals for a faltering campaign.

And though she may have scored a political hit each time, her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.

First, Palin's attack shows that her energetic debate with rival Joe Biden may be just the beginning, not the end, of a sharpened role in the battle to win the presidency.

''Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country,'' Palin told a group of donors in Englewood, Colo. A deliberate attempt to smear Obama, McCain's ticket-mate echoed the line at three separate events Saturday.

''This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America,'' she said. ''We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism.''

Obama isn't above attacking McCain's character with loaded words, releasing an ad on Sunday that calls the Arizona Republican ''erratic'' -- a hard-to miss suggestion that McCain's age, 71, might be an issue.

''Our financial system in turmoil,'' an announcer says in Obama's new ad. ''And John McCain? Erratic in a crisis. Out of touch on the economy.''

A harsh and plainly partisan judgment, certainly, but not on the level of suggesting that a fellow senator is un-American and even a friend of terrorists.

In her character attack, Palin questions Obama's association with William Ayers, a member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground. Her reference was exaggerated at best if not outright false. No evidence shows they were ''pals'' or even close when they worked on community boards years ago and Ayers hosted a political event for Obama early in his career.

Obama, who was a child when the Weathermen were planting bombs, has denounced Ayers' radical views and actions.

With her criticism, Palin is taking on the running mate's traditional role of attacker, said Rich Galen, a Republican strategist.

''There appears to be a newfound sense of confidence in Sarah Palin as a candidate, given her performance the other night,'' Galen said. ''I think that they are comfortable enough with her now that she's got the standing with the electorate to take off after Obama.''

Second, Palin's incendiary charge draws media and voter attention away from the worsening economy. It also comes after McCain supported a pork-laden Wall Street bailout plan in spite of conservative anger and his own misgivings.

''It's a giant changing of the subject,'' said Jenny Backus, a Democratic strategist. ''The problem is the messenger. If you want to start throwing fire bombs, you don't send out the fluffy bunny to do it. I think people don't take Sarah Palin seriously.''

The larger purpose behind Palin's broadside is to reintroduce the question of Obama's associations. Millions of voters, many of them open to being swayed to one side or the other, are starting to pay attention to an election a month away.

For the McCain campaign, that makes Obama's ties to Ayers as well as convicted felon Antoin ''Tony'' Rezko and the controversial minister Jeremiah Wright ripe for renewed criticism. And Palin brings a fresh voice to the argument.

Effective character attacks have come earlier in campaigns. In June 1988, Republican George H.W. Bush criticized Democrat Michael Dukakis over the furlough granted to Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who then raped a woman and stabbed her companion. Related TV ads followed in September and October.

The Vietnam-era Swift Boat veterans who attacked Democrat John Kerry's war record started in the spring of 2004 and gained traction in late summer.

''The four weeks that are left are an eternity. There's plenty of time in the campaign,'' said Republican strategist Joe Gaylord. ''I think it is a legitimate strategy to talk about Obama and to talk about his background and who he pals around with.''

Palin's words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee ''palling around'' with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn't see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers' day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as ''not like us'' is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

The fact is that when racism creeps into the discussion serves a purpose for McCain. As the fallout from Wright's sermons showed earlier this year, forcing Obama to abandon issues to talk about race leads to unresolved arguments about America's promise to treat all people equally.

John McCain occasionally says he looks back on decisions with regret. He has apologized for opposing a holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. He has apologized for refusing to call for the removal of a Confederate flag from South Carolina's Capitol.

When the 2008 campaign is over will McCain say he regrets appeals such as Palin's? ------

EDITOR'S NOTE -- Douglass K. Daniel is a writer and editor with the Washington bureau of The Associated Press.

    Analysis: Palin's Words May Backfire on McCain, NYT, 5.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Palins-Words-Analysis.html

Palin, on Offensive,

Attacks Obama’s Ties

to ’60s Radical

October 5, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER

SEDONA, Ariz. — Stepping up the Republican ticket’s attacks on Senator Barack Obama, Gov. Sarah Palin on Saturday seized on a report about Mr. Obama’s relationship with a former 1960s radical to accuse him of “palling around with terrorists.”

“This is not a man who sees America as you see it, and how I see America,” Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, said in Colorado, according to a pool report. “We see America as the greatest force for good in this world. If we can be that beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy and can live in a country that would allow intolerance in the equal rights that again our military men and women fight for and die for all of us.

“Our opponent though, is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

The article to which she referred, in The New York Times on Saturday, traced Mr. Obama’s sporadic interactions with Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weathermen who later became an education professor in Chicago and worked on education projects there with Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee for president.

The article said: “A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers.”

Ms. Palin seized on their relationship after the campaign of Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, said it planned to shift its strategy and try to turn the campaign into a referendum on Mr. Obama.

“Well, I was reading my copy of today’s New York Times and I was interested to read about Barack’s friends from Chicago,” Ms. Palin said at the fund-raiser in Englewood, Colo. “Turns out one of Barack’s earliest supporters is a man who, according to The New York Times, and they are hardly ever wrong, was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol. Wow. These are the same guys who think patriotism is paying higher taxes.”

The Obama campaign responded by noting that McCain officials had been quoted as saying that they hoped to “turn the page” on the fiscal crisis, which has hurt Mr. McCain’s standing in the polls, and to devote more time to attacking Mr. Obama.

“Governor Palin’s comments, while offensive, are not surprising, given the McCain campaign’s statement this morning that they would be launching Swift-boat-like attacks in hopes of deflecting attention from the nation’s economic ills,” said Hari Sevugan, an Obama spokesman. “What’s clear is that John McCain and Sarah Palin would rather spend their time tearing down Barack Obama than laying out a plan to build up our economy.”

Todd Palin Agrees to Interview

ANCHORAGE (AP) — Todd Palin plans speak to an investigator looking at abuse-of-power accusations against his wife, Governor Palin, his lawyer, Thomas Van Flein, said Saturday.

Mr. Van Flein said he asked the investigator, Timothy Petumenos, an Anchorage lawyer, to reserve the third week of October to interview Mr. Palin, who refused to testify under subpoena last month in an investigation by the Alaska Legislature.

Mr. Petumenos is heading a parallel effort by the Alaska State Personnel Board into whether Ms. Palin acted improperly when she fired Walt Monegan as public safety commissioner.

Palin, on Offensive, Attacks Obama’s Ties to ’60s Radical, NYT, 5.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/us/politics/05palin.html