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Obama Kicked-off his two-week “Change That Works For You” tour with an economic speech in Raleigh, North Carolina today. And as Todd points out, Obama and the larger progressive movement is doing a good job reminding people of the McCain-Bush similarities. But today’s speech text also has some positive signs that Obama will work to hold the larger conservative governing philosophy responsible for our economic circumstance, not just George Bush:

We did not arrive at the doorstep of our current economic crisis by some accident of history.  This was not an inevitable part of the business cycle that was beyond our power to avoid.  It was the logical conclusion of a tired and misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington for far too long.

George Bush called it the Ownership Society, but it’s little more than a worn dogma that says we should give more to those at the top and hope that their good fortune trickles down to the hardworking many.  For eight long years, our President sacrificed investments in health care, and education, and energy, and infrastructure on the altar of tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs - trillions of dollars in giveaways that proved neither compassionate nor conservative.

And for all of George Bush’s professed faith in free markets, the markets have hardly been free - not when the gates of Washington are thrown open to high-priced lobbyists who rig the rules of the road and riddle our tax code with special interest favors and corporate loopholes.  As a result of such special-interest driven policies and lax regulation, we haven’t seen prosperity trickling down to Main Street.  Instead, a housing crisis that could leave up to two million homeowners facing foreclosure has shaken confidence in the entire economy.

I understand that the challenges facing our economy didn’t start the day George Bush took office and they won’t end the day he leaves.  Some are partly the result of forces that have globalized our economy over the last several decades - revolutions in communication and technology have sent jobs wherever there’s an internet connection; that have forced children in Raleigh and Boston to compete for those jobs with children in Bangalore and Beijing.  We live in a more competitive world, and that is a fact that cannot be reversed.    

But I also know that this nation has faced such fundamental change before, and each time we’ve kept our economy strong and competitive by making the decision to expand opportunity outward; to grow our middle-class; to invest in innovation, and most importantly, to invest in the education and well-being of our workers.

We’ve done this because in America, our prosperity has always risen from the bottom-up.  From the earliest days of our founding, it has been the hard work and ingenuity of our people that’s served as the wellspring of our economic strength.  That’s why we built a system of free public high schools when we transitioned from a nation of farms to a nation of factories.  That’s why we sent my grandfather’s generation to college, and declared a minimum wage for our workers, and promised to live in dignity after they retire through the creation of Social Security.  That’s why we’ve invested in the science and research that have led to new discoveries and entire new industries.  And that’s what this country will do again when I am President of the United States.

Full text here.

As millions of Americans start tuning into our political process for the first time, it’s crucial that they hear detail about which underlying causes brought us to this mess in the first place - it’s not enough for people to assume that George Bush’s incompetence sunk everything. Politicians come and go, but the bogus assumptions about “tax cuts,” “privitization” and “free markets” have endured long past Reagan. It’s good to see a Democratic nominee talking concretely about the good things our government can accomplish.

Update [2008-6-9 16:54:25 by Josh Orton]: As diarist sricki notes, Obama also mentioned his intention to partner with Elizabeth Edwards on his health care plan. Elizabeth, as we remember, chose initially to endorse Clinton’s plan over Obama’s.

Tags: Barack Obama, Election 08 (all tags)

Politicians will do funniest things on the campaign trail and Hillary Clinton is not an exception. Like a firefly caught in a jar, the struggling former First Lady has zig-zagged the tiny commonwealth island of Puerto Rico to attract as much attention as possible to her candidacy. Out of desperation, she may just compromise the country she hopes to lead.

So far, the Democratic primaries have been like a long running Spanish speaking soap opera, even if you don’t understand the language, it’s easy to tell the good guys from the bad; the music changes when the bad guy speaks and the reaction are always exaggerated, melodramatic. Hillary has had to be dramatic too.

Politics in Puerto Rico can usually be reduced to one word “Status”. In several referendums, Puerto Ricans have had to chose between three scenarios: independence, statehood or commonwealth.

Read on . . .

Three Choices, no decisions.

Puerto Ricans are extremely nationalistic, but the idea of full independence is a political pipedream. If Americans want to observe a massive evacuation of nearly four million people, try declaring Puerto Rico an independent state.

The last referendum in Puerto Rico barely went in favor for maintaining the status quo as a commonwealth, but what if the majority of Puerto Ricans voted for statehood? Should an island nation, with Spanish as an official language, become the 51st state?

Although the American/Puerto Rican soap opera goes back over a century, the drama continues. For the overwhelming majority of Puerto Ricans there are far too many advantages to being associated with the United States of America; every year Puerto Ricans teeter between victimhood and patriotism, like an abused wife, battered and beaten, but too dependent to leave the home.

Because of their status, Puerto Ricans pay very little or no federal income taxes, but reap the benefits of billions of dollars in federal funding. Unlike much of Latin America, Puerto Rico has a modern infrastructure with a comparable per capita income—despite disproportionate welfare rolls.

For the poor, there are tons of entitlements from subsidized housing to student loans. What’s even more difficult to quantify are the immaterial things like the use of the American dollar as currency, a stable political process and the protection of the United States military.

The current governor was indicted after a campaign finance scandal—he supported Senator Obama–and is currently waiting trial. Of all the Spanish-speaking island nations, Puerto Rico has never known a dictator.

Although Puerto Ricans are American citizens, they are not eligible to vote in American presidential elections, unless they change their residency to the United States. Puerto Ricans are, however, free to travel and establish residency in the United States without travel restrictions.

A Billingual Country?

The main problem of Puerto Rican statehood is that history, society and culture will always make Puerto Ricans different from Americans—no matter how intimate the ties between the two nations may be.

My grandfather, born and raised in Puerto Rico, was an Army medic during the 1st World War, but despite Puerto Ricans serving in every conflict since, Puerto Ricans voted to kick the Navy out of Vieques, mostly because they viewed the American military as occupational force.

No matter what the politicians say, the admittance of Puerto Rico as the 51st state would not be the welcoming of new immigrants to a freshly adopted homeland; it would be the introduction of a parallel people into the national body—a state in name alone. An artificial nationality for a distinct culture and separate people.

Due to the elections, the soap opera goes on and both Democratic candidates are determined to add to the drama. Senator Clinton believes “disenfranchising Puerto Rico is like disenfranchising the District of Columbia”. After a huge victory on the island, the senator “wants Puerto Ricans to have the same rights as others Americans to determine your future.”

Unfortunately, statehood advocates do not expect Puerto Ricans to actually become Americans, they would just like to acquire the benefits of statehood, while politicians are far too eager to dole those benefits out.

Let’s hope the next president will be wise enough to keep Puerto Rico exactly where it is, a separate nation with close ties to the 50 states beside it.

Earlier, I introduced Jim Johnson, the head of Barack Obama’s vice presidential search team. He is also a lobbyist, operative for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale (is this the change we need?), representative of a former head of state, bundler for the Obama campaign, and disgraced mortgage executive who mistated Fannie Mae profits to get a bigger bonus. Oh yeah.

Today, the NY Sun tells us that he also got sweetheart mortgages from bankrupt (legally, not merely in other ways) mortgage dealer Country Wide Financial:

James Johnson, one of three people tapped by Mr. Obama recently to oversee the search for his running mate, took at least five real estate loans totaling more than $7 million from Countrywide Financial Corp. through an informal program for friends of the company’s CEO, Angelo Mozilo, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

But I am sure that Barack Obama sees nothing wrong with that. After all, he got a subsidy on his own house from now-felon, then-FBI investigation target Tony Rezko.

So next time Barack Obama complains about the Housing crisis, ask him about his Vice Presidential search guy who gets sweetheart deals. Or even about his own sweetheart deals. He hasn’t answered enough questions there only, “like eight questions.” We agree with the Chicago Sun Times that that is not enough.

In the heat of the campaign season, pundits often forget that the American people like leadership. While there is endless debate on the fine points of each candidate’s character (and occasionally debate about the issues), in the end, I believe Americans vote for candidates who offer a compelling and cohesive vision for America. That vision must give voters a story to connect the various proposals and anecdotes that politicians use on the campaign trail.

As I touched on a couple of weeks ago, John McCain has had three months to run unopposed and so far, he hasn’t been making a convincing case to the American people that he has an overarching idea of where America should be going. I’ve been watching McCain’s campaign closely over the last few months, and the multiple and often competing “visions” he has been laying out don’t coalesce into anything that makes sense.

McCain’s original pitch to the American people after locking up the nomination was that he would be a “different kind of Republican,” willing to reach out to those who don’t often vote Republican and get their views. McCain then embarked on a tour of “forgotten places,” mostly in Democratic strongholds in the South like New Orleans.

There, while holding a myriad of town hall meetings, he continued to support policies created by George Bush that hurt the very people he was supposed to be “reaching out to.” John McCain was going on tour and listening, but there was no action behind his words. His straight talk was cold comfort to those in New Orleans still without housing or employment, or those in the rural South hurting from free trade agreements.

While ostensibly reaching out to people in “forgotten places,” McCain was also trying to solidify the Republican base. His speech on Supreme Court judges, in particular, was a dangerous bit of pandering. Many on the left and in the media missed the significance of that speech and the cases McCain referenced, but Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker caught it:

The giveaway here was that McCain did not reveal the subject matter of this supposed judicial outrage. The case was Roper v. Simmons, in which a seventeen-year-old boy murdered a woman after breaking into her home, and was sentenced to death. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion overturned the sentence and held that the Constitution forbids the death penalty for juvenile offenders. McCain’s reference to the Court’s “discourse” on the law of “other nations” refers to Kennedy’s observation of the “stark reality that the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty.” Likewise, Kennedy noted that the only other countries to execute juvenile offenders since 1990 have been China, Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. According to McCain, the United States apparently belongs on this dismal list.

Nor were his references to penumbras and emanations accidental. Those words come from Justice William O. Douglas’s 1965 opinion for the Court in Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the Justices recognized for the first time a constitutional right to privacy, and ruled that a state could not deny married couples access to birth control. The “meaning of life” was a specific reference, too. It comes from the Court’s 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed the central holding of Roe v. Wade, and forbade the states from banning abortion. In short, this one passage in McCain’s speech amounted to a dog whistle for the right–an implicit promise that he will appoint Justices who will eliminate the right to privacy, permit states to ban abortion, and allow the execution of teen-agers.

A speech slyly promoting the death penalty for teenagers and raging against birth control and abortion cuts against McCain’s message as a “different kind of Republican.”

Finally, on Tuesday, with the Democratic nomination all but over, John McCain sought to re-brand himself again. This time, he declared that he represented the “right kind of change” in front of a hideous green backdrop. In his speech, McCain argued that Obama represented a return to 70s and 80s style liberalism, his policies were different from Bush, and he has the experience necessary to bring about the “right kind of change.”

It should be pretty clear to most people here that none of these arguments are going to work. Once again, Jeffrey Toobin had it right, proclaiming on CNN, “That was pathetic!”

First, does anyone really believe, after listening to Barack Obama, that he is looking backwards in his policies? Obama has been able to convince huge swaths of America that he is looking beyond the partisan battles of our past towards a new, hopeful future. There is nothing in the language that he uses or the way he presents himself that smacks of old, Carter-era politics. It’s hard for me to imagine that line of attack sticking.

Next, while McCain believes his policy positions are original, I’ve yet to uncover a single major plan that breaks from Bush’s course in any way.  (I used to be able to point to global warming, but given his recent statement that he’s against Lieberman-Warner, I can’t even say that anymore.) Put that together with McCain’s voting record - 100% with Bush this year and 95% with Bush last year - and you begin to perceive the truth. McCain’s presidency would represent four more years of Bush.

Lastly, John McCain seems to want to fight the experience vs. change battle again. With all due respect towards Hillary Clinton, that battle has already been fought. Change won. If McCain wants to have that discussion again, be my guest. I don’t think it’s going to work out any differently this time around.

Of course, McCain’s schizophrenic messaging can be easily contrasted with Barack Obama’s clear voice. For better or for worse, Americans know what Obama stands for - hope and change. All of Obama’s policies, anecdotes, and language fit under this rhetorical umbrella. While it’s difficult to understand why McCain doesn’t support the G.I. Bill or wants a manned mission to Mars, given his campaign theme, Obama’s focus on technology and nuclear disarmament fits right in with his hope and change message.

McCain has no coherent vision and seems to be running on his checkered Senate voting record and his war-hero persona. As Holly Bailey and Jon Meacham at Newsweek point out, he is beginning to primarily define himself by what he is not (Bush, Obama), a sure-fire losing strategy. Americans - who by and large care about their country but don’t have the inclination to understand every nuance of policy of character - tend to elect candidates with a coherent message because they feel secure that whatever a candidate’s policies are, they will fit into the message they are preaching.

There is a lot of time between now and November, but so far, Obama has a 17 month head start in getting out a clear message to America. McCain just might be playing catch-up this entire race.

(P.S. If you’re wondering what all those random links reading “McCain” are about, I’m participating in Chris Bowers’ search optimization project “Searching For McCain,” and you should too!)

J Ro’s opinions are his own and do not represent any other person or organization.

Tags: John McCain, Barack Obama, 2008 elections (all tags)

I know we’ve said it over and over: “Pro-lifers” don’t seem to care much for “life” once people actually enter the world. They oppose contraception access, which could prevent millions of abortions; their political allies take no steps to assist low-income women; they oppose universal health-care; and they generally stand against any social program that […]

A press release from the Obama campaign announces he is 12 delegates away from clinching the Democratic nomination. The superdelegate that put him there is a dramatic reversal:

Today, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) endorsed Barack Obama for President. Waters switched her endorsement from Clinton to Obama citing his ability to unite the country and leadership on issues such as the housing crisis and war in Iraq.

Waters gave Clinton some serious anti-war cred in California and delivered one of my favorite talking points from a surrogate this year: “The people I represent have plenty of hope, they don’t need more hope, they need help.” I suspect Waters may be the latest in what may become a stream of superdelegate switches.

Tags: 2008 presidential election, democratic nomination (all tags)

At Fort Benning in Georgia, the Army has assigned soldiers suffering from PTSD to housing located just 200 yards away from firing ranges. The “barrages from rifles and machine guns” make these wounded soldiers “cringe” and “stay awake and on edge,” and recently “sent one soldier to the emergency room with an anxiety attack.” Complaints […]