simblr.com

Politicians deploy righteous indignation like college students use credit cards—to excess and with abandon. For such seasoned performers, the emotion is easy to muster, and there are few upfront costs. Rail against powerful interests or the mendacity of your opponent on the stump, and the crowd goes nuts.
But there are sometimes hidden costs in the fine print, interest payments not due for months, especially when the outrage is calculated for maximum political effect. And that outrage came back to haunt Barack Obama Wednesday when Jim Johnson, the man running his vice presidential search team, stepped down after the Wall Street Journal reported that he had received preferential deals on mortgages because he was friendly with an executive at Countrywide Financial, which has been tied to the subprime foreclosure crisis. “Jim did not want to distract in any way from the very important task of gathering information about my vice presidential nominee, so he has made a decision to step aside that I accept,” Obama said in a statement.
The road that led to Johnson’s withdrawal began back in February, when Obama and his Democratic allies started highlighting the many lobbyist ties that bind together the Republican campaign of John McCain. “His top advisers in the campaign are lobbyists,” Obama told his traveling press, making no secret of his disdain for politicians who fraternize with influence brokers.
The approach initially paid off handsomely, given that the McCain campaign is, in fact, broadly populated by former lobbyists who have done the bidding of enormous corporations in the U.S. and sometimes in unsavory countries around the world. Current lobbyists also populate the ranks of McCain’s unpaid advisory staff. Eventually, the torrent of stories about these ties, driven largely by opposition researchers working for the Democratic cause, forced McCain to create a new conflict-of-interest policy and unceremoniously jettison several trusted advisers from his campaign.

time.com

U.S. Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi, center, speaks as Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, left, and Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, right, listen during a news conference at DNC’s headquarters June 10, in Washington, DC.
U.S. Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi, center, speaks as Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, left, and Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, right, listen during a news conference at DNC’s headquarters June 10, in Washington, DC.
WASHINGTON –First up was Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker. John McCain, she said, promises four more years of job losses, soaring gas prices, home foreclosures, budget deficits, tax cuts for the rich and “war without end” in Iraq.
Next up was Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader. He called McCain a “flawed” candidate for president. “His temperament is wrong,” Reid said. “He’s wrong on the war. He’s wrong on the economy.”
With that, the Democrats who run Congress left no doubt Tuesday that they would marshal their power over the House and Senate to torment McCain and promote their party’s probable White House nominee, Barack Obama.
For Obama, a senator from Illinois, support from congressional leaders could prove an important asset. They can help him drive his campaign agenda, as they did Tuesday with a Senate vote on a measure, blocked by Republicans, to impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies. Obama supports such a tax; McCain does not.
But, as Republicans are quick to point out, Obama must keep in mind the public’s poor opinion of Congress. Whereas voters may see him as “fresh, new and different,” said GOP strategist Don Sipple, they view congressional leaders as “stale, old and inept.”
“He’s going to have to show he can work with them and achieve results, but be under no illusion that these people are at all popular,” Sipple said.

latimes.com

WASHINGTON—A special group of FOBO’s–Friends of Barack Obama who are at the top of the Obama fund-raising pyramid–were on presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama’s plane to Minnesota on Tuesday, where Obama flew to clinch his nomination.
The FOBO manifest….
1. Valerie Jarrett….top Obama advisor without portfolio, which means she has a hand in all portfolios. In Obama history, her chapter starts when she hires Michelle, then Obama’s fiance, to be her deputy in Mayor Daley’s City Hall.
2. Eric Whitaker, a doctor who is frequently on the Obama campaign plane is the executive vice president for strategic affiliations and associate dean for community-based research at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where Michelle Obama worked before she took a leave for the campaign. Before that, Whitake was the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health
3. Marty Nesbitt, one of Obama’s best friends who is the treasurer of the Obama presidential campaign. Nesbitt is the CEO of the Parking Spot.
4. Billionaire real estate magnate Penny Pritzker –of Chicago’s Pritzker family–is the Obama National Finance Director. Pritzker has long been an Obama financial backer.
5. Ariel Investment founder John Rodgers is an Illinois Finance co-chair and longtime friend.
6. Industrial magnate Jim Crown– of Chicago’s Crown family is an Illinois Finance co-chair.
“[A]s people have looked away [from our nation’s political life] in disillusionment and frustration, we know what’s filled the void. The cynics, and the lobbyists, and the special interests who’ve turned our government into a game only they can afford to play. They write the checks and you get stuck with the bills, they get the access while you get to write a letter, they think they own this government.”
Here’s hoping that Obama wasn’t joshing us when he said he wants to change that.

blogs.suntimes.com

Obama won the Virginia primary 64 percent to 35 percent, but he lost to Sen. Hillary Clinton in the 9th Congressional District by 33 percentage points, one of the first signs of a pattern of vulnerability among white working-class voters that continued to nag him through primaries in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
David "Mudcat" Saunders, a Roanoke-based strategist who has advised politicians on how to reach out to rural voters, said southwest Virginia is "a logical place" for Obama to start because he will need to appeal to those voters in other crucial battleground states as well.
"If Virginia truly is in play, it’s a practical move for him because he can get the western Pennsylvania bunch, the southeast Ohio bunch," Saunders said. "It’s the same region. It’s the same bunch of people; they just live in different states."
He added, "These are the people around the country who decide the president of the United States, and they are neglected. The Republicans take them for granted, and the Democrats don’t try to come get ‘em. God bless Barack Obama for for trying to go get ‘em."
The three Democrats who have won statewide races in recent years — Webb, Gov. Tim Kaine and former Gov. Mark Warner — were each elected on the strength of support from liberal and moderate voters in northern Virginia. But each candidate managed to make healthy inroads among Appalachian voters as well.
Saunders noted the 9th District is a "fickle" swing district in general elections. In 2000, for instance, then-GOP Senate candidate George Allen netted 56 percent of the vote to win the election. The next year, Warner, a Democrat, was elected governor with 52 percent of the district’s vote.
Warner, the front-runner to replace retiring Sen. John Warner, R-Virginia, will campaign Friday with Obama in Bristol, a town on the Tennessee border.

cnn.com

When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, an influential megachurch pastor from Texas made an early endorsement that helped him win over skeptical evangelical conservatives.
That pastor was the Rev. John C. Hagee.
At the time, Mr. Hagee was pretty much the same public person he is today: a hard-line pro-Israel preacher and best-selling author whose evangelistic enterprise was built on apocalyptic prophecies that many Jews, Roman Catholics and other Christians found disturbing. Yet it was never an issue when Mr. Bush’s campaign trumpeted the support of Mr. Hagee, as well as that of multimedia evangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.
Eight years later, Mr. Hagee’s presidential endorsement is suddenly more a curse than a blessing.
On Thursday, four months after Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican candidate, stood next to Mr. Hagee at a news conference and announced how delighted he was to have his endorsement, Mr. McCain renounced it. He acted after a Web site released a recording of a sermon in which Mr. Hagee said Hitler and the Holocaust had been part of God’s plan to chase the Jews from Europe and drive them to Palestine.
Mr. McCain also rejected the endorsement of the Rev. Rod Parsley, an Ohio pastor who had been retooling his church into a get-out-the-vote machine for Republicans. The problem for Mr. McCain was that Mr. Parsley was vocally anti-Islam.
Presidential candidates have always had to vet their vice-presidential candidates, their consultants, their pollsters and their major donors. Campaign 2008 is proving that they also have to vet their members of the clergy.
It started with Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the leading Democratic candidate, who denounced his own former pastor and spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., after Mr. Wright aired his Afro-centric version of conspiracy thinking at the National Press Club.

nytimes.com

Just moments after the South Dakota polls closed on Tuesday night (June 3), CNN projected that Democratic Senator Barack Obama had secured enough votes to be the first black man in U.S. history to become the presidential nominee of a major American political party.
“Tonight, we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another — a journey that will bring a new and better day to America,” Obama said during his victory speech in Minnesota, which focused not on the historic nature of his accomplishment, but on the people who helped him achieve it and on his mission to turn back the policies of the Bush administration. “Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.”
As for the results of Tuesday’s primaries, Senator Hillary Clinton is projected to win in South Dakota 56 percent to 44 percent, with 68 percent of precincts reporting. Obama is projected to win in Montana by CNN by a 58 percent to 39 percent margin with 9 percent of precincts reporting at press time. The delegate total in Tuesday’s contests in South Dakota and Montana — the final two votes in a long, hard-fought nomination battle between the two rivals — was small at just 31 delegates.
Before the South Dakota vote was counted, Obama’s tally stood at 2,114 delegates, just a shade below the 2,118 needed to secure his long-sought goal. The presumptive victory by Obama, which was secured in part by the enthusiastic support of young voters, an army of Internet donors and a message of hope and change, helped the first- term Illinois senator rise up from 30 points behind Clinton last year to the nomination of his party in an epic battle between a political dynasty and a brash newcomer that will go down in U.S. political history. Clinton, vying to be the first female presidential nominee of a major U.S. party, was the presumptive front-runner when she entered the race last year, and her success in large states and among older voters and women presented a formidable challenge to Obama once his momentum began to take shape early in the primary season.

mtv.com

A fine theory, reaction to which is split among commenters in the Headlines item. The missus does seem to be the more aggrieved of the two and thus a more natural fit for Wright’s truthiness-to-power take on the gospels, but if she’s the driving force behind their attendance at Trinity then the Messiah’s suspected sympathies with Wright’s worldview are that much more unlikely. Why does Hitch even care, you ask? Because he’s a righteous Clinton-hater who fears we might have another co-presidency foisted upon us if Obama’s elected, in which case we’d better know where Mrs. O stands as well:
If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.
I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama’s 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be “read” at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she’s much influenced by the definition of black “separationism” offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America… I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can’t go on much longer without an answer to the question: “Are we getting two for one?” And don’t be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it’s too late to ask.

hotair.com

“It’s great for the party to be a battleground state for the first time in 40 years,” said state Democratic Chairman Dan Parker, who is backing Clinton.
Former longtime Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton, who was making campaign stops in southern Indiana on behalf of Obama on Saturday and planned more Sunday, said, “The eyes of the world are on Indiana this Tuesday and certainly the eyes of the nation.”
Obama, joined by his wife Michelle and their daughters Malia and Sasha, spoke in Indianapolis on Saturday and planned more stops in Noblesville, Kempton and Lafayette.
Bill Clinton was making a swing through six northern Indiana cities. He planned to join his wife and their daughter Chelsea for a rally Saturday night in Indianapolis featuring a performance by Hoosier rocker John Mellencamp.
Actors and actresses were stumping for the candidates, including Rob Reiner, Ted Danson and Sean Astin for Clinton. Women for Obama planned a Saturday night “get-out-the-vote” rally at an Indianapolis mall featuring actress Jessica Lange.
Former Democratic U.S. House leader Richard Gephardt was making campaign stops for Clinton, as was Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, who campaigned hard for her in the Ohio primary she won. Gov. Tim Kaine of Virgina, a state Obama won, was campaigning for him.
Even an out-of-state legislator was involved. Massachusetts state Sen. Marc Pacheco made some stops on behalf of Clinton, which included talking to average folks on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis.
Sporting a button that said “Real men vote for Hillary Clinton,” he urged Michelle Clendenning of Kokomo to vote for Clinton because “she is a person who means what she says and does what she says.”
Clendenning, 29, sitting outside a Starbucks coffee shop, said neither candidate had won her over.
“It’s just really hard to decipher with all the negativity that’s in the press,” she said.

chicagotribune.com

Barack Obama capped off a long campaign day in Indiana by playing a game of pickup basketball. He donned sweat pants and a USMC shirt to take on some area high-schoolers. Obama’s team won 15-5. (April 26)

youtube.com

“People don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody is going to help them,” Obama told a crowd at a Terre Haute, Ind., high school Friday evening. “So people end up voting on issues like guns and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. They take refuge in their faith and their community, and their family, and the things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.”
So people end up voting on issues like guns and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. They take refuge in their faith and their community, and their family, and the things they can count on.

powerlineblog.com