Obamanos: Phil-Am for Bam!

Obama beats McCain 13%
in 4-man nationwide relay

Barack up 43% among Hispanic votes 

By MITCH R. CONFESOR
OIC (Obamanos-in-Chief)
25 July 2008
 
 
DEMOCRATIC frontrunner Barack Obama has a 13-point lead over Republican contender John McCain in a four-man presidential race including perennial nuisance candidate Ralph Nader and Libertarian progressive Bob Barr, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Wednesday.
 
In the four-man race, Obama leads at 48 percent, McCain follows at 35 percent, while Nader trails behind at 5 percent and Barr at 2 percent, the poll said. Meanwhile, in a two-man race, Obama leads McCain by 47 to 41 percent for the November election, or 6 percent unchanged from last month.
 
With an overall error margin of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, the survey of 1,003 registered voters was conducted July 18-21, during the start of Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe.
 
But according to a nationwide survey of 2,015 Latinos conducted from June 9 through July 13 by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center, registered Hispanic voters support Obama over McCain by 66 to 23 percent, or a 43-percent lead.
 
It said Obama’s strong showing in the Hispanic survey has represented a sharp reversal in his fortunes from the primaries, when Obama lost the Latino vote to Hillary Clinton by a nearly two-to-one ratio, giving rise to then speculations in some quarters that Hispanics had been disinclined to vote for a black candidate.
 
Yet in the new survey, three times as many respondents said being black would help Obama (32 percent) with Latino voters than those who said it would hurt him (11 percent). The majority (53 percent) said his race would make no difference to Latino voters.
 
Obama is rated favorably by 76 percent of Latino registered voters, making him much more popular among that voting group than McCain (44 percent favorable) and President George Bush (27 percent favorable). Clinton’s ratings among Latino registered voters are 73 percent favorable and 24 percent unfavorable; Obama’s are 76 percent favorable and 17 percent unfavorable.
 
Further, the survey said more than three-quarters of Latinos who reported that they had voted for Clinton in the primaries now say they are inclined to vote for Obama in the fall election, while just 8 percent say they are inclined to vote for McCain.
 
That means that Obama is doing better among Hispanics who supported Clinton than he is among non-Hispanic white Clinton supporters, 70 percent of whom now say they have transferred their allegiance to Obama while 18 percent say they plan to vote for McCain, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
 
Aside from their strong support for Obama, the survey said, Latino voters have moved sharply into the Democratic camp in the past two years, reversing a pro-Republican tide that had been evident among Latinos earlier in the decade.
 
According to the survey, some 65 percent of Latino registered voters now say they identify with or lean toward Democrats, compared with just 26 percent who identify with or lean toward Republicans.
 
This 39-percentage point Democratic identification edge is larger than it has been at any time this decade, the survey said.  It added that as recently as 2006, the partisan gap was just 21 percentage points.

McCain’s foreign policy frustration

By JOE KLEIN
TIME, 23 July
 
 
“I HAD the courage and the judgment to say that I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war,” John McCain said during a Rochester, New Hampshire town meeting on July 22. “It seems to me that Senator Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” It was a remarkable statement, as intemperate a personal attack as I’ve ever heard a major-party candidate make in a presidential campaign, the sort of thing that no potential President of the United States should ever be caught saying. (A prudent candidate has aides sling that sort of mud.) It was also inevitable.
 
You could see McCain’s frustration building as Barack Obama traipsed elegantly through the Middle East while the pillars of McCain’s bellicose regional policy crumbled in his wake. It wasn’t only that the Iraqi government seemed to take Obama’s side in the debate over when U.S. forces should leave (sooner rather than later). McCain was being undermined in Washington as well, by his old pal George W. Bush, who seemed to take Obama’s side in the debate about whether to talk to Iran. Bush sent a ranking U.S. diplomat to negotiate with the Iranians on nuclear issues – and also let it be known that a U.S. Interests Section could soon be established in Tehran, the first U.S. diplomatic presence on Iranian soil since the 1979 hostage crisis.
 
In the end, both Obama and McCain seemed to have a piece of the truth about Iraq, but Obama’s truth was larger and more strategic. Obama had been right about the war in the first place. It was a disastrous idea, a phenomenal waste of lives and American credibility that diverted focus from our real enemy, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And Obama was right about the war now: the progress in Iraq was enabling a quicker withdrawal – a plan already hinted at by Bush. And Obama was right about the future: the Iraqis don’t want long-term U.S. bases on their territory, a McCain keystone and the source of his infamous comment about staying in Iraq for 100 years. McCain’s piece of the truth was tactical: he was right about the surge and right about the brilliance of David Petraeus’ battle plan, which had helped quiet down Iraq. McCain was justifiably infuriated that Obama wouldn’t acknowledge that success – indeed, Obama seemed to understand that he was pushing McCain’s buttons, hoping perhaps to elicit McCain’s Vesuvian temper, and in Rochester the eruption occurred.
 
McCain’s greatest claim to the presidency – his overseas expertise – now seems squandered. He has appeared brittle and inflexible, slow to adapt to changes on the ground, slow to grasp the full implications not only of the improving situation in Iraq but also of the worsening situation in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan. Some will say this behavior raises questions about his age. I’ll leave those to gerontologists. A more obvious explanation is that McCain has straitjacketed himself in an ideology focused more on enemies (real and imagined) than on opportunities. “It is impossible to ignore the many striking parallels between [McCain] and the so-called neoconservatives (many of whom are vocal and visible supporters of his candidacy),” writes the Democratic diplomat Richard Holbrooke in a forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs. “I don’t know if John has become a neocon,” says a longtime friend of the Senator’s, “but he sure has surrounded himself with them.”
 
Neoconservatism in foreign policy is best described as unilateral bellicosity cloaked in the utopian rhetoric of freedom and democracy. McCain hasn’t always sided with the neocons – he opposed torture, wants to close down Guantánamo – but his pugnacity seems a natural fit with theirs. He has been militant on Iran, though even there his statements have been tactical rather than strategic: his tactic is not to talk to the bad guys.
 
The strategic question here is whether to go for regime change or diplomatic engagement. McCain hasn’t said he was for regime change, but he has rattled sabers noisily, joked about bomb-bomb-bombing Iran and surrounded himself with, and been funded by, Jewish neoconservatives who believe Iran is a threat to Israel’s existence. He has also taken a rather exotic line on Russia, which he wants to drum out of the G-8 organization of major industrial powers (a foolish proposal, since none of the other G-8 members would abide by it). His notion of a “League of Democracies” seems a transparent attempt to draw a with-us-or-against-us line in the sand against Russia and China. But that’s the point: McCain would place a higher priority on finding new enemies than on cultivating new friends.
 
The sudden collapse of McCain’s Middle East policy is a stunning event, although McCain’s regional stridency raised questions from the start. This is a long campaign – with, I fearlessly predict, at least one major Obama downdraft to come – but John McCain seems panicked, and in deep trouble now.
 

Germany goes gaga as crowd
of 200,000 ‘volks’ mob Obama

‘People of Berlin – people of the world
– this is our moment. This is our time.’

By MITCH R. CONFESOR
OIC (Obamanos-in-Chief)
24 July 2008
 
 
HIS crowd in Pennsylvania in March was 20,000.  Portland in Oregon expected 30,000 but that crowd in May ballooned to 70,000.
 
Yet the German capital of Berlin on Thursday delivered 200,000 and a rock-star status for Barack Obama, where he declared himself a citizen of the world in an historic speech at the Victory Column in the central Tiergarten park, reminiscent of the equally historic speeches of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate.
 
Call it ObamaMania Lovefest, or Obamapolooza.
 
A couple of days earlier, when somebody would take a walk in Berlin, it would seem that Germany was the 51st state of the United States, with joggers in local parks proudly sporting Obama T-shirts, according to a Time web article.
 
It said the trendy expatriate hangout White Trash Fast Food had been turned into an Obama campaign center for a day, while a Berlin magazine had published instructions on how to make little U.S. flags to wave in welcoming the Democratic presidential frontrunner.
 
Meanwhile, a German survey showed that 60 percent had been in favor of Obama speaking at the initial prospected venue, at Brandenburg, and 74 percent would choose Obama if Germans could vote in the U.S. election.
 
For his first stop in Europe, it just showed how the peoples of the world – from Berlin to the Philippines – has always viewed him as the New Generation JFK.