Elizabeth Edwards, to many, embodied grace under fire

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/1207/Elizabeth-Edwards-to-many-embodied-grace-under-fire

Elizabeth Edwards, to many, embodied grace under fire
Elizabeth Edwards was indispensable to the political career of her husband, two-time presidential aspirant John Edwards. Faced with personal and political hardship, Elizabeth Edwards sought to persevere through 'faith in the power of resilience and hope.'
Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer
December 7, 2010

Elizabeth Edwards, who helped bolster the political career of her husband, John Edwards, faced tragedy and heartache with a belief in, as she said in her final note, "the power of resilience and hope."

"She was an inspiration to all who knew her, and to those who felt they knew her," said Vice President Joe Biden in a statement.

Ms. Edwards' public battle with cancer – a diagnosis revealed the day Mr. Edwards lost his vice presidential bid as part of the 2006 Democratic ticket with John Kerry – earned the lawyer and mother of four a unique measure of respect, sympathy, and visibility for a politician's wife. She was widely seen as a loyal partner and trusted adviser determined to fight through personal hardships, as the couple had with the death of their 16-year-old son, Wade.

But her husband's 2006 affair with a campaign videographer, which resulted in the birth of a child, revealed her inner struggles publicly. She eventually admitted that she knew about the affair even as she continued to support Edwards through his failed 2008 bid for the presidency. The couple separated in 2009, though Mr. Edwards was at her bedside on Tuesday morning.

Asked in 2009 whether she still loved John, Edwards answered, "You know, that's a complicated question."

Edwards faced allegations in the book, "Game Change," that there was a wide disparity between her public and private personas.

"Mrs. Edwards .... reviewed [her husband's] television advertisements and major speeches, helped pick his lieutenants, joined internal debates over tactics and strategy, and sometimes dressed down, or even forced out, campaign aides she thought had failed her husband," writes the New York Times' Robert McFadden.

A more difficult political reality, as explained by campaign insiders, is that her popularity – especially after announcing her diagnosis – threatened to upstage her campaigning husband on the stump.

But to many women, especially, Edwards' ability to cope with tragedy and betrayal while facing illness – and her willingness to talk about her experience on shows like "Oprah" – came to symbolize a bold brand of grace under fire that deepened, for many, the tragedy of her passing.

"She was not a Pollyanna, she looked [her husband's affair] in the face, talked about it with people, and didn't seem to be bitter in public," says Pat Hawkins, a regional director for the Democratic Women of North Carolina. "She was trying to present a good example for her daughter and for all the other women who find themselves in these terrible situations."

As North Carolinians recalled Edwards' life today, one fact stuck with Ms. Hawkins. Despite Edwards' anger with her husband, she met his child on Christmas last year, explaining that she didn't want the girl to grow up believing she was not part of a broader family.

Edwards posted a note on Facebook on Monday. “I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces – my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope.”

Edwards Admits Fathering Love Child

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01/21/report-john-edwards-set-admit-paternity-love-child/

January 21, 2010
Edwards Admits Fathering Love Child, Reportedly Separates From Wife
FOXNews.com

Former presidential candidate John Edwards has admitted fathering his former campaign videographer's child.

In a statement released to NBC News, Edwards said, "I am Quinn’s father. ... It was wrong for me ever to deny she was my daughter and hopefully one day, when she understands, she will forgive me."

Friends of the family said that Edwards and wife, Elizabeth, have separated, NBC reported.

The admission comes after months of denials from Edwards that he fathered former mistress Rielle Hunter's daughter, Frances Quinn. The revelation also comes a week before his former campaign aide, Andrew Young, is set to appear in an ABC News interview saying he posed as the father when the scandal first broke as a favor to Edwards.

The two-time presidential candidate also admitted to providing financial support to the child and said in the statement that he has "reached an agreement with her mother to continue providing support in the future."

"To all those I have disappointed and hurt these words will never be enough, but I am truly sorry," Edwards said.

Edwards' wife told The Associated Press that "the whole family feels relieved" that her husband claimed paternity, but she would not comment on the status of their marriage.

Young's interview is scheduled to air on ABC next Friday, but may be pushed forward.

Previous reports have claimed that a secret DNA test proved Edwards' paternity to the child.

The test was taken after Hunter tried to get financial help from Edwards for Frances.

Edwards admitted in August 2008 to an affair with Hunter that he says ended in 2006. That year, Edwards' political action committee paid Hunter's video production firm $100,000 for work. Then the committee paid another $14,086 on April 1, 2007.

A federal grand jury last year investigated whether Edwards broke campaign finance law by paying "hush" money to Hunter and Young over the affair.

Ex-aide says Edwards fathered mistress' child

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/09/ex-aide-says-edwards-fathered-mistress-child/

Ex-aide says Edwards fathered mistress' child
NY Times: Edwards aide who claimed paternity of mistress' child says Edwards fathered child
AP News
Sep 19, 2009

A man who once claimed to have fathered the child of John Edwards' mistress says in a book proposal the former presidential candidate is the real father and that Edwards and worked with his campaign finance chairman to hide that secret, according to a newspaper report published online Saturday.

The New York Times said the book proposal by former Edwards aide Andrew Young states he helped facilitate the affair between Edwards and Rielle Hunter. According to the newspaper, Young wrote that Edwards once told Hunter they would wed after Edwards' wife, who has cancer, died.

Edwards told Hunter that the ceremony would be held on a rooftop in New York and the Dave Matthews Bands would make an appearance, the newspaper said, citing its examination of the book proposal.

St. Martin's Press has said Young signed a book deal with the publisher in June and it involved a strict confidentiality agreement. A spokesman for the publisher did not immediately return a phone message and e-mail seeking comment Saturday.

Edwards has said the affair with Hunter ended in 2006. That year, Edwards' political action committee paid Hunter's video production firm $100,000 for work. Then the committee paid another $14,086 on April 1, 2007. The Edwards camp has said the latter payment from the PAC was exchanged for 100 hours of unused videotape Hunter shot.

The same day, the Edwards presidential campaign had injected $14,034.61 into the PAC for a "furniture purchase," according to federal election records.

Edwards, a U.S. senator representing North Carolina from 1998 until his vice presidential bid in 2004, acknowledged in May that federal investigators are looking into how he used campaign funds. Grand jury proceedings are secret, and the U.S. attorney's office in Raleigh has declined to confirm or deny an investigation.

Edwards adamantly denied during an interview with ABC News last summer that he had fathered a child with Hunter, and he welcomed a paternity test. His wife, Elizabeth, has said she doesn't know if her husband is the father.

Young said in 2007 he was the child's father. Hunter said around the same time that Young was the father and the birth certificate does not list a father's name.

Michael Critchley, Hunter's attorney, declined to comment Saturday. A lawyer for Young did not immediately return messages left at his office Saturday.

Joyce Fitzpatrick, a spokeswoman for Edwards and his attorney, Wade Smith, said that Edwards would not comment Saturday. Smith has said Edwards may make a statement at some point in the future about the paternity of Frances Quinn Hunter, who is 19-months old, but there was no timetable for that.

Young hasn't spoken publicly since saying he was the father in 2007 and has repeatedly ignored reporter requests for interviews.

Young got his last campaign paycheck in the middle of November, a month before he and Hunter publicly declared through attorneys that he was the father. Fred Baron, who was Edwards' national finance chairman and a wealthy Dallas-based trial attorney, said last year he quietly sent money to Hunter and to Young's family to resettle in California.

Baron, who died following complications from cancer just a few months after Edwards acknowledged the affair, said he provided the money on his own, to "help two friends and former colleagues rebuild their lives when harassment by supermarket tabloids made it impossible for them to move forward on their own."

The New York Times said the book proposal states Edwards knew from the start that he was the father of the child and expended considerable effort trying to conceal that. The proposal says Edwards pleaded with Young to claim paternity and asked Baron to check whether a doctor would fake the results of a paternity test.

JOHN EDWARDS SECRET DNA TEST

http://www.nationalenquirer.com/john_edwards_secret_dna_test_proves_paternity_mistress_testifies_federalgrand_jury_/celebrity/67120

JOHN EDWARDS SECRET DNA TEST PROVES HE'S THE DADDY!
08/12/2009

BOMBSHELL WORLD EXCLUSIVE! John Edwards has secretly undergone a DNA test - and it proves he's the father of his mistress' love child, The ENQUIRER has learned exclusively.

Multiple sources confirm the bombshell development, and reveal lawyers for the disgraced presidential candidate are privately hammering out child support payments with his former lover Rielle Hunter.

Edwards - who hotly denied he was the child's father when he publicly confessed his affair with Rielle on ABC's Nightline a year ago - has broken the news to his cancer-stricken wife Elizabeth, sources say.

But The ENQUIRER has also learned that Rielle testified against Edwards before a federal grand jury that's probing whether he broke campaign finance laws by secretly funneling money to her - and her testimony could send the former North Carolina senator to jail!

The positive DNA test finally ends the elaborate cover-up that Edwards engineered to hide the fact that he fathered Rielle's 18-month-old daughter Frances.

As The ENQUIRER previously reported in a series of explosive investigative reports, the cover-up involved "hush money" paid to Rielle and Andrew Young, a once-loyal Edwards aide who claimed he'd fathered her child. The secret payments were made by the late Fred Baron, who was Edwards' national finance chairman.

With Young being left out to dry by Edwards, he pulled a "John Dean" to testify before the grand jury before he could publish his tell-all book about the conspiracy.

"Rielle had no choice but to demand John take a DNA test," said the close friend.

"She was worried about getting long-term financial support for her daughter. So she hired an attorney, and John consented to undergo a secret swab test to establish paternity.

"There was no surprise: The results of the DNA test proved John was Frances' daddy."

Another source confirmed to The ENQUIRER: "John always knew he was the father of Rielle's baby.

"Despite the ongoing financial negotiations, sources say Rielle testified against Edwards in front of the grand jury, spending nine hours inside the courthouse on Aug. 6 in Raleigh, N.C.

Rielle's testimony against Edwards came as a "cooperating witness" for the government, added a source familiar with the investigation.

"Rielle is not dumb. She knew the feds had subpoenaed her bank statements and knew about every payment she received," said the source.

"The FBI told her it was in her best interests to tell the truth, and she did. And unlike the others who have testified, Rielle was driven to the court by FBI agents and escorted in by them. She got favorable treatment because she testified against John."

FOR THE FULL STORY with all the details you won't find anywhere else get the latest ENQUIRER on sale now!

Edwards hit by new love-child allegations

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/edwards-hit-by-new-lovechild-allegations-1726204.html

Edwards hit by new love-child allegations
By David Usborne
Wednesday, 1 July 2009

A former aide to John Edwards, the one-time senator whose presidential campaign last year came spectacularly to grief on the rocks of an illicit affair, is set to claim in a tell-all book that his erstwhile boss assured him he would be "taken care of for life" if he pretended to be the father of a child the woman bore.

The remarkable assertion is one of the highlights of a proposal for his book reportedly presented to the St Martin's Press publishing house. In it, the aide, Andrew Young, also claims that Mr Edwards made a sex videotape with his former mistress, Rielle Hunter, which he subsequently discovered.

Asking Mr Young to pose as the father, Mr Edwards purportedly told him, "You know how much I love you. You know I'd walk off a cliff for you, and I know you'd walk off a cliff for me." The candidate, who was once the Democratic Party's golden boy and was John Kerry's running mate in 2004, went on: "I will never forget this. And I will always be there for you."

The book will apparently assert that the father of the child is indeed Mr Edwards. The one-time rival of Mr Obama in the 2008 primaries has so far not submitted to a DNA test to determine the truth of this. However, he is still at the heart of a federal investigation into whether campaign money was used in connection with the affair or to help with the efforts to cover it up. Mr Young says that the FBI has already interviewed him in this regard.

The startling new details contained in the proposal – and the prospect of the book coming out – make the chances of a political rehabilitation for Mr Edwards seem more remote than ever. "In a culture in which it is almost impossible to sin yourself into permanent banishment... Edwards may have pulled the feat off," Jay Bookman, a commentator for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted yesterday. "It is impossible to feel sympathy for the man."

Not that Mr Young himself is likely to solicit very much sympathy. As part of his alleged deal with Mr Edwards, he invited the pregnant Ms Hunter to move in with him, his wife and their three children. This most peculiar co-habitation ended only after Ms Hunter gave birth.

The saga is thus also about the suffering of the wives involved. In her own recent book, Resilience, Elizabeth Edwards admits that there is one "pathetic" former aide to her husband she cannot bring herself even to name. "I will call him Jim," she writes, calling him an "obsessed fan", who showed an "unbridled loyalty" to her husband and a "willingness to do anything". Few have any doubts that she is referring to the aide who has now turned author, Mr Young.

Obama: “Everybody thinks they’re economists”

http://www.infowars.com/obama-everybody-thinks-theyre-economists/

Obama: “Everybody thinks they’re economists”
Infowars
February 6, 2009

The Associated Press reports:

President Barack Obama says in Washington these days, everyone’s an economist—or thinks they are.

Obama introduced a team of outside economic advisers Friday at a White House ceremony in which he also renewed his demand that Congress act quickly on his economic recovery package.

As the country struggles with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Obama said there has been no shortage of advice on how to solve the nation’s woes.

“You’ve got some economists and some folks who think they’re economists. By the way, these days everybody thinks they’re economists,” he joked.

Obama made his funny while announcing members of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board — or more precisely, the board cobbled together by his globalist masters. It will be run by none other than Paul A. Volcker, the former Fed mob boss who thinks Americans have been living beyond their means for too long. “It is the United States as a whole that became addicted to spending and consuming beyond its capacity to produce,” Volcker lectured the Economic Club of New York in April, 2008. “It all seemed so comfortable.”

It will all become exceedingly uncomfortable and sooner before later if Volcker and the globalists have their way.

“As previously announced, the inestimable Austan Goolsbee will serve as the Board’s Staff Director and Chief Economist,” reports Jake Tapper for ABC News.

Austan Goolsbee is the guy who told the Canadians back in April of 2008 during the election campaign that Obama really didn’t mean it when he declared he would “renegotiate NAFTA.” It was just a parlor trick designed to fool the American people.

“Obama adviser Austan Goolsbee told a recent CFR meeting that ‘free trade is not the enemy,’” the Washington Post reported on November 3, 2008.

“Goolsbee is widely reported to have told Obama not to back a compulsory freeze on home mortgage foreclosures to help the struggling middle class in the current depression crisis, as demanded by former candidate John Edwards,” Webster Tarpley wrote on February 4, 2008. Tarpley also reveals Goolsbee’s connection to the elitist occult Skull & Bones club.

It is apparently a joke to Obama and his handlers that so many Americans are now talking about economics. Obviously, we should leave the economy up to Obama’s board of establishment insiders, never mind the appointed boss of this globalist coterie of corporatist economists has stated you are living too high on the hog.

Here is the full list of folks who will be punching your meal ticket:

1. William H. Donaldson, former Chairman, SEC
2. Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., President & CEO, TIAA-CREF
3. Robert Wolf, Chairman & CEO, UBS Group Americas
4. David F. Swensen, CIO, Yale University
5. Mark T. Gallogly, Founder & Managing Partner, Centerbridge Partners L.P.
6. Penny Pritzker, Chairman & Founder, Pritzker Realty Group
7.. John Doerr, Partner, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers
8. Jim Owens, Chairman and CEO, Caterpillar Inc.
9. Monica C. Lozano, Publisher & Chief Executive Officer, La Opinion
10. Charles E. Phillips, Jr., President, Oracle Corporation
11. Anna Burger, Secretary-Treasurer, SEIU
12. Richard L. Trumka, Secretary-Treasurer, AFL-CIO
13. Laura D’Andrea Tyson, Dean, Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley
14. Martin Feldstein, George F. Baker Professor of Economics, Harvard University
15.. Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO, GE

Beast of the Month - July 2008

Yes, I know, this is a little late, but better late than never...

Beast of the Month - July 2008
Barack Obama, Democratic Presidential Candidate

"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"

"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”
Barack Obama regarding Reverend Wright on March 18, 2008, giving the black community fair warning

The economy is tanking, Iraq is a fiasco, and George W. Bush is even more hated than Nixon was in the worse days of Watergate. Even more telling, in three special 2008 Congressional elections so far, Republican strongholds were lost to Democrats: in both Louisiana and Mississippi (hardly progressive areas) and the seat held by former House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois. Given these facts, and given John McCain has proven himself to be a clueless jackass over the last year and a half, it should be the Democratic Party's game to lose the White House in 2008. The conventional wisdom is the only way Dems can blow it is by running a stunningly incompetent campaign.

That the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson has continued to be the mainstream representative of the working class over the past century - for better (FDR's New Deal) and for worse (George Wallace's racist segregation demagoguery) - makes this pretty significant. And while The Konformist would agree claims the Democratic Party represents the common man become flimsier each election cycle, it’s also true they come way closer to feigning these concerns than the GOP ever could, especially after eight years of Shrub. At the very least, the Democratic Party gets its votes from the poor and middle class over bread and butter issues, so must provide their base something in order to quell an out and out mass rebellion. From this viewpoint, an era where Democrats control the White House tends to be better than when Republicans are in charge, a viewpoint supported by history.

At the start of the year, Hillary Clinton seemed a shoe-in to win the Democratic nomination, and, in the process, the White House. Unless some stunning surprise happens before the Democratic convention, that isn't going to be the case. And for such a stunning upset victory, Barack Obama, The Konformist Beast of the Month, deserves a lot of credit. Just as much, it says something about Obama's admittedly appealing attributes. They were on wide display four years ago in Boston during the Democratic convention, when he gave a star-making speech as keynote speaker. The last time something like that was seen was twenty years earlier by then New York Governor Mario Cuomo. But while Cuomo wasted higher office opportunities playing Hamlet, Obama decided to seize the moment and go for gold while the iron was hot. The end result is a campaign that has captivated the media, and put an African-American man in the finals for running the White House.

It's not just talking heads who have been caught up in the Obama circus. On the frivolous side, numerous celebrities have joined, including George Clooney, Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas and Oprah Winfrey. (Then again, considering the last two major endorsements Oprah has done were for phony "autobiography" writer James Frey and dubious New Age scam The Secret, this may be a bad sign.) And as far as lightweight arguments go, The Konformist will take a movement that includes Jessica Alba, Scarlett Johansson and Nicole Scherzinger of the Pussycat Dolls over endorsements by Sly, Arnold and Chuck Norris. (The male Konformist editorial staff particularly appreciates Halle Berry plug for Obama, where she bluntly declared: "I'll do whatever he says to do." Of course, if she said that about one of us, it would lead to the greatest celebrity home porn video ever.) More substantive is the following he’s achieved among the young and African American communities, groups previously politically marginalized and apathetic. Whatever the hype behind Obamamania, the excitement he inspires is authentic.

That said, has there been a more shallow presidential campaign than that crafted for mass consumption by Team Obama? As Walter Mondale asked in 1984: "Where's the beef?" But beneath the empty slogan chanting of "Change" and "Hope" there really is little there there. Indeed, part of Obama's appeal is his vague, tofu-like blandness wrapped in admitted charisma, which even supporters concede has made people see in him what they want. But it seems with Obama, the public will soon be stuck with the tofu-like negatives of an inferior protein source that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

It doesn't help that media reporting has been so sycophantic during the campaign. He's already been on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine twice, which is more airtime than they've given Coldplay. (Talk about tofu-like blandness, but that's for perhaps another Beast of the Month.) The fluffy, inane coverage of Obama as a rock star makes one wish for the days of hard-hitting political analysis given by John-John's George magazine, back when "politics as celebrity worship" was at least novel. There hasn't seen this much empty "news" reporting on a man who may run the White House since, well, since George W. Bush eight years ago. Perhaps this is because Obama, like Bush before him, has become the recipient of records amount of cash from the rich and powerful, especially from Wall Street.

Despite this, he's been supported by a bizarre cheerleading by most of the progressive set. MoveOn.org, DailyKos.com, HuffingtonPost.com and BuzzFlash.com have wagged their pom poms like he's some perfect mixture of JFK, RFK and MLK - only even better! Along the way, they've joined an increasingly nasty campaign to demonize Bill and Hillary in the ugliest of fashions, practically accusing the pair of plotting to murder Obama in a political coup after Ms. Clinton invoked the RFK assassination in June 1968 to show the history of late-running campaign battles. What makes this stranger is these same outlets have long overly lionized the Clintons as the paragon of Democratic Party virtues. The conventional wisdom is Hillary's support for the Iraq War did her in, and there is some truth to that. Still, while Obama brags about his supposed strong opposition to the quagmire, opposing it while representing a primarily black Chicago state congressional district hardly showcased noble bravery. Mr. Clinton probably put it best in January while speaking at Dartmouth College:

"It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, numerating the years, and never got asked one time, not once, 'Well, how could you say that, when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution, you said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war and you took that speech you're now running on off your website in 2004 and there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since?' Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."

Slick Willie was blasted in the media for this statement, but there isn't a single lie in it. So it seems the main raison d'etre for the Obama campaign success is an easily uncovered hoax, if only the mainstream press had done their job and actually asked Obama some basic questions. (That Bill was basically calling out the korporate media on this one may partially explain the outraged response.) And it seems the smearing of Bill & Hill have less to do with Iraq than the progressive set being seduced by a cult of personality.

Given the lack of investigation of Obama by establishment mouthpieces, and given the flimsy resume he has as a man applying for Leader of the Free World, the right wing has filled the information vacuum with its predictably ugly displays. The general talking points of this smear campaign are that he's a radical black man and a closet Muslim who secretly hates America. Oh, and by the way, did we mention his middle name is Hussein and his last name rhymes with Osama? Thanks to these attacks, Obama's negatives have crept up, and his campaign has launched a Website, with the clever title of FightTheSmears.com, to battle these attacks. The Konformist supports his fight on dishonest attacks, as it would be a shame for him to lose the White House over what he is not. But while hack jobs by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity proliferate, another picture is presented by other critics of Obama, an image of a smug, narcissistic opportunist of the worst sort. It can be found on Websites such as HillBuzz ( http://hillbuzz.blogspot.com/ ) and No Quarter ( http://noquarterusa.net/ ) - two sites, it must be noted, run not by right-wingers but rather Democrat supporters of Hillary Clinton disgusted by his campaign in the primaries.

These are not sore losers who need to "get over it" - an actual quote by Obama in a Congressional meeting over what female supporters of Hillary must do. (Charming that the Obama campaign incorporates GOP catchphrases popularized during the 2000 election swindle as their own.) They are offended in no small part by the accurately perceived sexism used by Team Obama and its supporters in the Democratic race. Any YouTube search can confirm the crude discourse presented by Obama shills such as MSNBC's Keith Olbermann & Chris Matthews. (Of particular note is Olbermann's solution to the supposed problem of Hillary refusal to end her campaign early: "Somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.") Meanwhile, NPR political editor Ken Rudin cracked on CNN that Hillary was like "Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, she's going to keep coming back, and they're not going to stop her." And then there's this lovely quote with no subliminal intent from Obama himself: "I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically when she’s feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal."

Beyond this criticism of Obama is the analysis of more left-wing Websites such as BlackAgendaReport.com. Tellingly, while Black Agenda Report, as its name applies, covers news and politics with a radical African-American critique, it shows little sympathy for their fellow black man in Barack. From their view, the Obama hype is a dangerous mass duping of the black community by a barely concealed fraud.

Ironically, it is African-Americans that fueled Obama over Hill. Without them, while Obama dominated the Yuppie vote, he would’ve been trounced among blue collar workers, who are more plentiful than latte-sippers among Democrats. Blacks, however, represent a sizable percentage of the Democratic vote (nearly one in five) so Team Obama began a push to take over the demographic, which Hillary was actually leading in last year (in no small part thanks to Bill, the most beloved politician in black America over the last twenty years.) They did this with a whisper campaign of race-baiting smears that would do Karl Rove proud. Tellingly, they developed a memo of talking points accusing the Clinton campaign of playing the race card, the same talking points that then began to dominate the chatter class. Meanwhile, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., an Obama campaign co-chairman and son of the previously most successful black presidential candidate ever, had this to say about Hillary's emotional outpour that helped propel her to victory in New Hampshire: "Those tears also have to be analyzed. They have to be looked at very, very carefully in light of Katrina, in light of other things that Mrs. Clinton did not cry for, particularly as we head to South Carolina where 45 percent of African-Americans will participate in the Democratic contest, and they see real hope in Barack Obama." Bill's own "fairy tale" quote was used against him, distorted to imply some racist connotation. The end result of the sleazy strategy: Bill Clinton morphed in the mainstream media's presentation from the best friend in politics to Black America to a virtual closet Klansman, and Obama captured over ninety percent of the black vote.

The mainstream media tries to present white working class opposition to Obama merely as an issue of race (as though Yuppie liberals are above any racism in their own right.) Of course, The Konformist concedes racial dynamics among American voters can't be dismissed. But it seems what makes the Obamaheads go crazy over Barack is precisely what turns off Joe Blue Collar. Hip campaigns and repetitive slogans may satisfy those with disposable income, but those struggling want something that actually helps them survive in tough times. These voters were courted and won over by Hillary, who, like her wonky husband, actually seemed concerned about their plight and offered concrete agenda to help. Obama, meanwhile, merely sniffed they were bitter people clinging to guns and religion and went back to his vague generalities.

Any serious research of the Obama campaign proves the working class to be a shrewd judge here. Paul Krugman, the New York Times liberal economist, is one of the few mainstream voices to look under the hood at Obama’s economic agenda, and he’s responded with utter disdain. Despite his following among the progressive set, Obama's economic agenda is to the right of both Hillary and John Edwards. Two case studies are revealing, on the issues of healthcare and the subprime crisis, issues that are of highest concern to the working class base. It is telling that while both Edwards and Hill laid out plans to provide universal health coverage, Obama's would still leave fifteen million uninsured by most estimates. Meanwhile, though both Edwards and Ms. Rodham proposed a moratorium on foreclosures and a freeze on ARM loan rates, Obama offered no such help to bitter subprime victims. This shouldn’t be a surprise when one learns the leading economic advisor for the Obama campaign is Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economics professor. Though he is on the "left" side of the U of C economic school, in a department made famous by ardent free market guru Milton Friedman, this means little. Goolsbee has pushed for all the right wing economics that Obama has cheerfully embraced, and has also taken one position Obama has yet to publicly support: the privatization of Social Security. Two other often cited Obama economic advisors, Jeffrey Liebman and David Cutler, have taken the same right-wing (or as they prefer to call it, "centrist") positions. It should be no surprise that Obama also used right wing talking points to bash Edwards and Clinton's plans during the primaries. Given these positions, it’s hard to believe the African-American community would back his candidacy if he were white.

The punch line is though Obama is quick to whine victimhood of racism whenever he's in a corner, he is paradoxically the one black politician who has gone out of his way to deny racism is a problem in modern society. Indeed, a major theme behind his campaign has been his election as president would prove we live in a post-racial society, where racism is a relic of the past. In a speech at Selma, Alabama, he declared that blacks were "90 percent of the way to equality," implying his election would provide the final dime in the battle. In fact, he and his mouthpieces in the media seem to argue the only way he can lose the 2008 contest is by racism. It appears the only person Barack Obama thinks is still suffering from racism in the USA is Barack Obama himself.

This stands in stark contrast to the political careers of Jesse Jackson Sr. and Al Sharpton. Whatever their faults (and certainly both have many) they are black leaders who dedicated their lives to siding with the poor and disenfranchised. And yet, though they are often vilified in the most racist of language (often labeled as "racial pimps" in discourse) neither would claim blackness is their greatest impediment to political victory, but rather their radical message of social justice. That there is no profound message behind Obama's marketing ploy explains why he reaches for the race card, as nothing else about him is threatening to the political establishment. After all, Al Jolson in blackface is about as progressive as Obama.

That said, the election is still the Democrats to lose. Still, it’s important to note the only time Obama has won a national office, his GOP opponent was the absurd joke candidate Alan Keyes. Yuppies, blacks and the young may be enough to win the Democratic nomination, but can it win in November? There's a reason Hillary drubbed Obama's ass by 41 points in West Virginia, and no, it isn't racism. This was the message behind Thomas Frank's 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas?, that the Democrats needs to connect with the working class poor by a populist message of economics to combat cultural conservatism demagoguery. Instead of courting the BoBos (Bourgeois Bohemians) that are Obama's base, the Democrats should be creating WoBos, working class folks who identify with Michael Moore, Willie Nelson and Bruce Springsteen. Hillary, like her husband before her, was able to connect precisely with these voters because, for all the Clinton's "centrist" leanings, they actually believe in the ideals of the New Deal and, in the case of her husband, delivered over 22 million jobs in eight years while creating record budget surpluses. This is why every Red state the Democrats need to flip (including Ohio and Florida) Hillary won, along with California, Texas, New York and any other big state aside from Obama's home turf in Illinois. With the voters that Democrats need to win behind her and the states the Democrats need to get 270 electoral votes in her corner, it appears the Democrats have bet on the wrong horse.

And this is before the Republican slime machine has started any Swiftboating. While the Clintons have had their skeletons examined closer than any other politician after the White House years, Obama is still an untested, unknown entity. Already the public has been exposed to his controversial ties to sleazy real estate swindler Tony Rezko and his pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and his sniveling evasive response in both cases doesn't inspire confidence. Meanwhile, there are rumors of a purported video of Barack's wife Michelle ranting about "Whitey" being the cause of the world's ills in front of a group of African Americans (which, if true, shows even she doesn't believe his "post-racial" baloney.) Obama has denounced the rumors on FightTheSmears.com, but HillBuzz has already uncovered a photo of an event in June 2004 where Ms. Obama appeared with Louis Farrakhan's wife, an event that seems to jibe with the rumored tape. The rumor claims GOP operatives already have the tape, and are waiting to unleash it in October as an election surprise. Needless to say, while The Konformist may not dispute the reputed sentiments, they probably would not play too well in Middle America and would essentially hand the election to McCain.

In some ways, an Obama defeat is better than the alternative of Obama winning. Author Webster Tarpley has written a powerful expose of Obama, titled Obama - The Postmodern Coup. (A little disclosure here: yes, as Obamaheads will quickly exclaim, Tarpley is indeed a follower of Lyndon LaRouche, and perhaps that will lead some to distrust his work. Fair enough. But say what you will about LaRouche and Tarpley, they do their homework, and this book - like Tarpleys's previous unauthorized biography of George H. W. Bush - is a rigorous examination of Obama and his links that reveals what the establishment press has ignored.) Tarpley identifies the missing Mr. Big when it comes to Obama's foreign policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who isn't satisfied with mere war in the Middle East like the Neocons, but rather desires a Cold War sequel against Russia. And as the saying goes, sequels almost always suck. Z-man even wrote about this in a 1998 book titled The Grand Chessboard, where he outlined that control of oil in the Caspian Sea would be the major imperial power battle of the 21st century. (Guess he's been proven wrong on that one.) To support Brzezinski's strategy, already two political coups have been staged in the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia, where charismatic politicians backed by millions from US financiers ran slogan heavy, substance light campaigns that caught the masses up in a political frenzy. (Sound familiar?) Both movements are now heavily unpopular in their nations, as the right-wing neoliberal economic agenda they secretly pushed via the hysteria have hurt their people's working class. Hmm...

Okay, just because the ugliest elements of the Democratic Party in both economics and foreign policy are behind Obama doesn't mean he supports their whole agenda. Maybe so, but beyond ideology, he's proven consistently over the past year when it comes to fighting about issues, "Obambi" caves when the going gets tough. His opportunism may be immense, but his spine is virtually non-existent. Quickly after wrapping up the Democratic nomination, he immediately went to work betraying the progressive base that supported him: backing Bush's notorious "faith-based" initiative, siding with the most reactionary Supreme Court justices on the death penalty issue, rejecting to limit fundraising for public finance after long promising he would. And then there's the big two: voting for a FISA bill (which he had promised not only to vote against, but filibuster) that retroactively shielded telecoms from punishment over their criminal alliance with the Bush Administration, and stating he was willing to "refine" (i.e. "reverse") his position on pulling out of Iraq. These last two even caused the Obama cult among progressives to denounce his moves and wonder if they've been hoodwinked. (Answer: yes, you have.) Meanwhile, though most of the mainstream media treated these moves as a "shift to the center" in reports, even an Obama toady like Bob Herbert of the NY Times couldn't help but call it what it was: "He’s lurching right when it suits him, and he’s zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash."

Anyone watching Obama's handling of the Reverend Wright fiasco should've seen this coming. After all, whatever one thinks of Reverend Wright's controversial comments (and there was nothing Wright said that The Konformist could disagree with) he was Obama's pastor for 22 years, a man who married him to his wife, a man who even inspired the title to Obama's bland bestseller The Audacity of Hope with a sermon. Considering that history, Obama should have been expected to stand by Reverend Wright. In fact, Obama personally denounced Wright during his "More Perfect Union" speech in Philadelphia in March that left yuppie liberals gushing. (Here's the quote in case you missed it: "We've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.") Then, after two Wright speeches in April caused a media uproar, he completely disowned his association with the preacher, though Wright never bad-mouthed Obama in any way. Oddly, while the latte-sippers were in a hissy fit demanding the denouncement, it was conservatives who called it what it was: throwing someone from the bus.

If politics is a battlefield, going to war with a decided coward seems to guarantee political defeat in shifting the frame of debate. It seems possible an Obama presidency of duplicitous surrendering may shift the United States even farther to the right than Dubya ever could. From that standpoint, perhaps McCain clueless leadership for four years while he's pooping in his granddad diapers, followed by a Hillary victory in 2012, may be better in the long run.

In any case, we salute Barack Obama as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Barry!!!

The Political Machine 2008

Thanks to About.com's ( http://compsimgames.about.com/ ) Computer Sim Games Guide for alerting The Konformsit of the following game.

The Political Machine 2008

Description: The Political Machine 2008 puts players in control of the 2008 presidential campaign. Play as the campaign manager for a host of candidates including Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, historical candidates or design one from scratch. Players then choose their campaign battlegrounds and are off on the campaign trail to face a host of challenges including fund raising, talk show appearances, hiring spin doctors and winning endorsements. The game is won on Election Day by the player who gets the necessary electoral votes to become President. The Political Machine is both a single and a multiplayer game - players can either compete against the computer or against others online.

***

http://www.politicalmachine.com

Welcome to the new Political Machine!

Ever thought you could run for President? Now's your chance with The Political Machine. Pick a candidate (real or imaginary) or design your own from scratch. Then choose a political party and start your campaign.

The Political Machine is a strategy game that takes the real world mechanics of political campaigning and uses it to create an award-winning strategy game. Raise money, hire spin-doctors, win the endorsements of important groups, go on TV interviews, take out ads, fight off smear merchants and much more in your quest to win the 270 electoral votes you need to get into the white house.

Your opponents can be controlled either by human players over the Internet or by a diabolical computer AI designed by Stardock's renowned artificial intelligence team. With multiple maps and scenarios to choose from, a candidate editor and much more, The Poliltical Machine is not just a timely bit of fun during the campaign season but a strategy game that will stand the test of time.In between your gaming exploits, hang out here on PoliticalMachine.com, discussing the issues of the day on a non-partisan site where people of all political persuasions can advocate their positions.

***

From Wikipedia.org:

Presidential candidates

Democrats

Fmr. President Bill Clinton (D-AR)
Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY)
Fmr. Sen. John Edwards (D-NC)
Fmr. Vice President Al Gore (D-TN)
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)
Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL)
Gov. Bill Richardson (D-NM)
Fmr. President Jimmy Carter (D-GA)
Fmr. President John F Kennedy (D-MA)
Fmr. President Lyndon B. Johnson (D-TX)
Fmr. President Woodrow Wilson (D-NJ)
Fmr. President Thomas Jefferson (D-VA)
Fmr. Senator Mike Gravel (D-AK)
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)

Republicans

Lord Kona (fictional)
President George W. Bush (R-TX)
Vice-President Dick Cheney (R-WY)
Fmr. New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-NY)
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)
Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX)
Fmr. Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA)
Fmr. President Ulysses S. Grant (R-OH)
Fmr. President Richard Nixon (R-CA)
Fmr. President Ronald Reagan (R-CA)
Fmr. President Theodore Roosevelt (R-NY)
Fmr. President George Washington (VA)
Fmr. President Abraham Lincoln (R-IL)
Fmr. Governor Mike Huckabee (R-AR)

***

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/thepoliticalmachine2008/news.html?sid=6191527

The Political Machine 2008 Q&A: Tackling the Issues
The election simulation and satire is back in 2008. Who wins?
May 23, 2008

The Political Machine was a tongue-in-cheek look at North American politics released just in time for the 2004 presidential election. Using John Kerry, George W. Bush, or any number of fantasy candidates such as Ulysses S. Grant, you didn't simply tackle the issues; using spin doctors, PR machines, celebrity endorsements, and negative advertising, you ran right over them. Now The Political Machine is back, revised for 2008 with a new list of issues, a new list of candidates, and some pleasant surprises, like the 1860 election, which was informed by slavery and the Civil War. For the latest on The Political Machine 2008, we sat down with Brad Wardell, the lead designer as well as the president and CEO of Stardock Corp. Here's what he had to say (and mud in your eye).

GameSpot: The 2004 election was intense, to be sure, but nothing in American history rivals what we've seen in 2008 in terms of media coverage, political trickery, and outright passion. Have you intensified the action in The Political Machine 2008 to capture such a charged political climate?

Brad Wardell: Definitely. Players can bring in spin doctors, smear merchants, media consultants, fixers, and more to help get themselves elected. We've created a custom candidate maker, scenarios, better multiplayer, more operatives, etc.

GS: In addition to creating your own candidate, which real-life candidates will we see? You also had a great cast of fictional candidates in 2004, including Arnold Schwarzenegger. Is there any chance of an unlockable Al Gore, John Kerry, or Bob Dole?

BW: Absolutely. One of the nice things about a game like this is that it lets us do some fun things with the release. For instance, as the political season heats up this summer and fall, we'll be releasing free candidates up on PoliticalMachine.com for users to download and add in. The game comes with most of the big names, either as default or unlockable, but we plan to continue to add more and more as the election nears.

GS: Any candidate-specific special attacks in the Machine? A Hilary "crying button"? A McCain war-story dialog tree? Huckabee dancing minigame?

BW: Haha. No, we have tried to stay away from anything that might give the impression that the game is rooting for any particular candidate.

GS: Certainly many of the issues in 2004 have changed, while many have sadly remained the same. What are the hot-button topics candidates will touch on this election, and what are some of the best strategies for handling them?

BW: There are some interesting topics that have come up this time. You still have the war in Iraq, and the economy is right at the top too. But this time we have things like alternative fuels being a hot topic, as well as freezing mortgage rates and other things in which the political parties differ on.

One of the biggest changes is that we have scenarios. So we not only have the 2008 US election, but we include a Civil War scenario with the issues from 1860. We also include "Europa," which is Europe as seen by a typical American tourist (i.e., highly politically incorrect satire); "Germania," "that little country by Poland"; "Australia" (as opposed to Austria), with the issues being, well, let's just say not accurate.

And of course, this time you can finally run for Emperor of the Drengin Empire. Are you pro slavery or pro genocide? These are the tough issues that Drengi politicians have to deal with.

GS: Aside from the issues, The Political Machine was a great satire on political media coverage, featuring fiery talk-show hosts and endorsements from celebrities. How have you updated this for 2008?

BW: Big time. This time we have a satire on the Colbert Report. It's a big upgrade.

GS: One issue we had with the original game is that the AI candidates didn't always focus on the most important states. Tell us how you've updated the AI and some of the different political strategies we'll see from them.

BW: This is one of those things where time helps. We've had a lot more time to focus on the computer AI to master the strategy. When I program computer AI, I'm playing the game and learning the game, and then incorporate those strategies into the computer players. When we did the 2004 edition, I hadn't had much time to play the game, so my strategies weren't as far along as they are now.

GS: The 2004 edition was somewhat of a crystal ball in that it predicted 48 of the 50 states, and also George W. Bush to defeat John Kerry. What factors are you looking at, and why do think the game predicted the outcome so accurately?

BW: For the most part, it's all about demographics and issues. The election is really decided by issues and turnout. It's not as sexy as the media might like it to be, but at the end of the day, it's really just about a) getting your base out to vote, and b) getting independents to care about an issue that makes you different from your opponent. Last time, the game got every state right except for Ohio and I think Iowa (and that was in June of 2004, prior to the Swift Boat advocacy).

This time it's a lot more complicated because the candidates are not quite as different as they were in 2004. McCain has a number of atypical positions for a Republican. There is also a significant difference in financial resources between the parties this time. On the other hand, Obama has weaker demographic support in key electoral states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, which the Democrats have to win.

GS: We haven't seen many blue states go red in the general election, or vice versa. How can a candidate like Obama win Texas? Is it even possible?

BW: In The Political Machine, anything's possible. In the real world, candidates play as true experts. But in The Political Machine, players can do gambits that just would never happen in the real world. For instance, with enough spin doctors, advertisements, and other operatives, I've won California with McCain, which is certainly not going to happen in November.

GS: Thanks for your time.

***

http://www.gamepro.com/article/reviews/195968/the-political-machine-2008/

Review
PC - Simulation - The Political Machine 2008
By Andrew Dagley June 30, 2008
We take a look at Stardock's latest political sim!

Political junkies have had one hell of a ride these last few months. The recently concluding primary season has been perhaps the most bitterly contested, but still vicariously entertaining spectacles of the last few decades. So it comes as no surprise that when The Political Machine 2008 landed on my desk I was more than a little excited - what exciting matchups could I concoct? Barack Obama vs. John McCain? Bill Clinton vs. Richard Nixon? Woodrow Wilson vs. Theodore Roosevelt? Sufficed to say, The Political Machine doesn't disappoint, offering an excellent improvement over the last version released four years ago - but it's ultimately hamstrung by some nagging issues and the lack of full-fledged improvements.

The Political Machine ships with four full scenarios - the 2008 campaign, 1860, a hypothetical (and highly amusing) European Union scenario, and a scenario based of Stardock's successful Galactic Civilizations series in which you play as a candidate for the highly militaristic Drengin Empire. It is a nice mix of scenario's and does give players an interesting mix of potential what if's. These can often manage to descend into the realm of pure amusement that comes only when you can pit Bill Clinton against Dick Cheney in 1860, where Clinton makes speech after speech supporting slavery, or Al Gore setting up TV ads across Europe extolling his hatred of America and love of partying.

Most campaigns take place over a period of 41 turns - one turn per week - you'll select your candidate who has their own specific statistics (McCain is old for instance, and has less stamina, and therefore can't do as much per week), and thereafter begin attempting to sway individual states over to either the Democratic or Republican parties. While many of the states are swingable the game does keep many safely in the realm or either party - it's unlikely you'll ever get Massachusetts to swing Republican for instance. Each turn candidates can make appearances in individual states, giving speeches on individual issues, fund-raising, creating ads, or gaining endorsements. During the scenario for this years election you'll find just about all current issues popping up on the campaign trail, allowing you to take positions on subjects such as the War in Iraq, Health Care, Climate Change, and smaller (often state specific issues) such as farm subsidies or Katrina relief. Each candidate has his own values for each specific issue - Obama is naturally going to have the upper hand on McCain on the economy for instance, and vice-versa when it comes to Iraq and the War on Terror. You'll find different issues in all four of the scenarios, and each time you play a campaign - even with the same candidates - things such as the importance of issues in each state are randomized just enough to keep things interesting. One election the topic of high gas prices might be the key to winning, but attempting to do that a second time might backfire as the important issues have changed.

This all works fairly well and creates its own dynamic campaigns. As noted, you'll never experience the same campaign twice, but the AI has some significant limitations. For one it frequently manages to ignore the most important swing states or states in which its human opponent is paying the most attention. Moreover computer candidates often pay too much attention to areas in which you're not going to be competitive or aren't visiting - Republicans paying visits to Alaska every four or five turns to name one such oddity. Besides this there are a few other disappointments. Only the top candidates of either party this year are represented in the game - it would be nice to play a campaign as Mike Gravel, Tom Vilsack, or Sam Brownback. More importantly, after this years important and highly engaging primary season the lack of a primary season, no matter how short, is a disappointment in game. Endorsements, gained through political clout, while a good idea - giving candidates bonuses to certain issues - are also little used, being too few and so cheap as to limit their effectiveness to early in the campaigning season only. Vice Presidential running mates also don't feel as fleshed out as they could have been.

These issues are, however, ultimately minor. As it stands The Political Machine 2008 is a fine follow-up to Stardock's earlier political gem. Though most games only last an hours or two, the game offers enough to keep potential candidates coming back from just one more campaign. Political junkies will almost certainly find themselves sucked in, along with those who have only a smattering of knowledge about the American political process.

John Edwards and Fake Morality

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=747&Itemid=1

John Edwards and Fake Morality
Wednesday, 20 August 2008
by Mel Reeves

Big Business media are coming to resemble the National Enquirer more each day. Former senator and presidential aspirant John Edwards' marital indiscretions loomed larger in the corporate media mind than matters of war and peace, fiscal solvency or human rights. There seems to be no correlation between spousal fidelity and presidential performance. "It does appear that the current president has been faithful to his wife - yet George Bush has committed every transgression imaginable against the U.S. Constitution, and has behaved faithlessly towards to the citizenry he is sworn to protect."

"Porn posing as news is right up our alley."

Despite all the recent hoopla over when and how long former North Carolina Senator and recent Democratic party presidential contender John Edwards cheated on his wife Elizabeth and whether he and Reil Hunter have a love child or not, at the end of the day it has very little bearing on our collective wellbeing.

When someone watches Entertainment Tonight or picks up a supermarket tabloid, they do so because they are interested in the private lives of the rich and famous. They do it out of morbid curiosity, or simply to know how the other half lives.

But when one reads the "news" it is with the anticipation that you will be provided with useful information. So when we are served a menu of tabloid news - the information on Edwards's affair was initially taken from the National Enquirer - one has to ask: what does this have to do with me?

Is infidelity an indicator of how a politician will perform in office? I think not. Judging from past presidents that were philanderers it didn't seem to limit their effectiveness in office. While Bill Clinton may have been the worst of the lot, in terms of sexual discretion, he was still able to steer the US imperial ship and impose America's will on the world. John Kennedy was rumored to have shared Marilyn Monroe with his brother and was otherwise unfaithful to his wife, Jacqueline. It does appear that the current president has been faithful to his wife - yet George Bush has committed every transgression imaginable against the U.S. Constitution, and has behaved faithlessly towards to the citizenry he is sworn to protect.

"Most print and broadcast outlets do not give us actual news, but rather, their own prepackaged, prejudiced perspective on the world."

Salacious reporting about extramarital affairs and rumors of affairs is part of the pornification of the news. Most print and broadcast outlets do not give us actual news, but rather, their own prepackaged, prejudiced perspective on the world. And since the American public has been trained to be entertained more than informed - titillated rather than intellectually stimulated - porn posing as news is right up our alley.

While FOX news is little more than an infomercial for right wing ideology - and the worst offender in this race to numb our minds - the other "news" organizations are not far behind. CNN, supposedly "the most trusted name in news," and MSNBC brought in their experts to kick the John Edwards scandal around, and CBS, NBC and ABC all used up precious airtime dabbling in dirt.

Not that there is a dearth of real news. There are two big Bush wars that are barely covered beyond the airing of official press releases and Pentagon-inspired commentary. Why aren't the media scandalized by the General Accounting Office's discovery that $23 billion slated to be spent in Iraq is unaccounted for? Why does the Attorney General of the United States think that folks should go Scott-free for unlawfully filling Justice Department jobs? There are enough unanswered questions to busy any 24-hour news machine - if explicating the world were actually the objective.

But the press chose to belabor Edwards' indiscretions.

"Edwards had the nerve to run a populist campaign."

Edwards is no longer running for office, though there were rumors that he was being considered as a vice presidential candidate.

I suspect that one of the other reasons the former presidential candidate was attacked with such ferocity was because he had the nerve to run a populist campaign in an age when the ruling class feels no need to throw a bone to working people. Whatever the reason, Edwards showed real heart and compassion, touring poverty-stricken areas and speaking of the "two Americas." Like none of the other contenders, he put a spotlight on New Orleans. In some ruling circles, that's considered a crime.

If a politician came along who made sure that Johnny could read whether he lived in the Ozarks or the ghetto, kept affordable roofs over our heads, ensured that we all took home a fair and livable wage, were afforded universal health care and equal opportunity, few of us would care about the condition of his or her marriage.

Corporate media keep us focused on false morality - on the private affairs of luminaries - so that we won't confront the real forces that devalue the lives of the vast majority of us.

Mel Reeves is an activist living in Miami. He can be contacted at mellaneous19@yahoo.com

Get Rielle

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/08/16/rielle_hunter/

Get Rielle
The life of John Edwards flame Rielle Hunter has been a novel, literally, with Bolivian marching powder, movie scripts called "It's All About Uranus" and electrocuted horses.
By Justin Jouvenal

Aug. 16, 2008 Before John Edwards' mistress was a journalistic curiosity, she was a literary inspiration. Rielle Hunter was the model for the drug-addled Alison Poole, a vapid and endearing Manhattan party girl who appeared in at least three novels by two of the bright lights on the '80s literary scene, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis.

We can only guess what attracted Edwards to Hunter. He told Bob Woodruff in the now famous ABC interview that he shared the details of the affair with his wife, Elizabeth, and that was all he was saying. By the time Edwards met Hunter in 2006, she had put down the coke spoon and picked up "The Power of Now," a self-help book by Eckhart Tolle. She had remade herself into a New Age guru and was on a mission to help "people wake up in their lives." Whatever the reason for it, the attraction between the well-coiffed Southern politician and the once wild New York party girl has granted added intrigue to this year's political sex scandal.

McInerney, made famous by "Bright Lights, Big City," his highly entertaining descent into the dark side of yuppiedom, briefly dated Hunter in the '80s. He has said he was so "intrigued and appalled" by the hedonistic Hunter and her friends that they became the raw material for his 1988 novel, "Story of My Life." At the time, Hunter was an aspiring Manhattan actress, who ran with a crowd as devoted to cocaine as art. She made the rounds with Ellis and partied with artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

"I still remember the first time I saw her," Pigeon O'Brien, a friend of Hunter's in New York, told Salon. "I was going to a party. As I approached, the doors of this 1920s building burst open. [Hunter] and Jay were laughing hysterically and collapsed on the sidewalk together. They looked like Scott and Zelda to me." In fact, like one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous characters, Hunter was hiding her own dark family secret.

Hunter, whose given name was Lisa Druck, was born in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 1964. Her father, James Druck, was a wealthy attorney, who ABC News reported flew his own plane and owned a horse farm called Eagle Crest in Ocala, Fla. In her youth, according to ESPN, Hunter loved riding and competed in shows across the state on her favorite horse, Henry the Hawk.

But after James Druck got into financial trouble, he allegedly hired a man named Tommy "The Sandman" Burns in 1982 to electrocute Henry the Hawk, so Druck could collect a $150,000 life insurance policy he had taken out on the horse.

In a 1992 story in Sports Illustrated, Burns claimed Druck showed him the technique: slice an extension cord into strands, attach alligator clips to the exposed end of each strand, stick the alligator clips on the horse's ear and rectum and then plug the extension cord into a wall socket. Burns went on to execute a number of horses this way as part of insurance scams for other wealthy equestrians.

"You better get out of the way," Burns told Sports Illustrated. "They go down immediately. One horse dropped so fast in the stall, he must have broken his neck when he hit the floor. It's a sick thing, I know, but it was quick and it was painless."

Burns was among a group of 35 people, who were arrested and convicted in the '90s of crimes related to the killings. After Henry the Hawk's death, Hunter reportedly completed high school in Florida and then studied for less than two years at the University of Tampa, before dropping out.

At some point in the '80s, Hunter made her way to New York to pursue acting and fell in with McInerney's social circle. O'Brien described Hunter, who was still going by the name Lisa Druck, as "intense" and a "firecracker." "She was kind of a little unsophisticated," O'Brien said. "She was like a horse just getting its legs. She had this great intellect but hadn't yet harnessed or focused it." In a 2005 discussion between Hunter and McInerney in the now defunct Breathe Magazine, McInerney recalled meeting Hunter at Nell's, a famous New York club. She disputes that they met there, but confesses that "so much of ["Story of My Life"] was real."

"For me you're a little bit frozen in time, a little bit Alison Poole, the 21-year-old party girl in that book who runs around New York going to night clubs, doing drugs, and abusing credit cards," McInerney told Hunter. "And I'm sure that your life wasn't that simple or that extreme or that wasteable." Via a publicist, McInerney declined to be interviewed.

In "Story of My Life," Poole is exactly how McInerney describes her. She is a jaded aspiring actress, who lives off an allowance from her rich father, while flitting between clubs, coke and acting classes. "Men. I've never met any," she laments. "They're all boys. I wish I didn't want them so much. I've had a few dreams about making it with girls, but it's kind of like -- sure I'd love to visit Norway sometime."

In one scene, Poole scams $1,000 from a Wall Street type with whom she had an affair -- who gave her a sexually transmitted disease -- by claiming she is pregnant by him and needs money for an abortion. Later, Poole falls in love with a commodities trader with a thing for Shakespeare, but ultimately they betray each other. Poole is not totally unredeemed. She has a blunt, unflinching honesty that McInerney told Hunter in the Breathe interview he drew directly from her.

The novel also echoes Hunter's past and, in some eerie ways, the Edwards affair. In the final chapter, Poole reveals that her father may have killed her prize horse, Dangerous Dan, by poisoning him. And like the current scandal, Poole finds out she is pregnant, but there are two separate men that could be the father. The type of man Poole is attracted to seems strikingly like Edwards. "I like straight guys, I'd never go out with anybody who's as irresponsible as me," she says. "Most of the guys I know have really high powered jobs and make up for lost time when they're not in the office. The Berserk After Work Club. I seem to attract them in a big way, all these boys in Paul Stuart suits with six-figure salaries and hellfire on a dimmer switch in their eyes."

Alison Poole makes return appearances in Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho" and "Glamorama" reprising the same Manhattan siren who captivates men and repels women. In one scene in "American Psycho," a woman snipes about Alison, "If you had an American Express card she'd give you a blow job."

Ready for something new, Hunter left New York for Los Angeles to escape the drugs and pursue her acting career. In 1991, she married attorney Alexander M. Hunter III, whose father was the prosecutor in the JonBenet Ramsey case, and the couple lived in Beverly Hills.

Ensconced in the movie industry, Hunter assumed a new role for herself. She legally dropped Lisa Druck for Rielle Hunter and penned scripts for TV and movies with oddball titles such as "Jupiter Where Are You?" "Shit Happens: The Never Ending Search for the Perfect Diaper," and the seemingly porn ready "It's All About Uranus." None of these treatments appears to have made it into production. Nor did a later idea to create a television series about women who have affairs with men to help them get out of loveless marriages. Hunter's marriage was equally a flop. She divorced Alexander in 1999.

In 2000, Hunter shot her only film credit, a short comedy called "Billy Bob and Them," which she wrote, produced, acted in and directed. The film's cinematographer, George Mooradian, told Fox News that the movie, which was shot in Hunter's home, had little plot and featured New Age-style altars, temples and crystals. Mooradian's agent said he was not giving further interviews.

"She definitely had some connection to the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, and there was an offer to meet the Dalai Lama," Mooradian has said. With her move to California, Hunter had discovered a new high in New Age spirituality. In Breathe Magazine, she described a dramatic encounter with a healer, who cleared her "energy field," snuffing out her desire for drugs and alcohol. "I became sober overnight," she told McInerney. "And then I became a spiritual seeker -- addicted to higher consciousness, addicted to enlightenment."

Hunter pursued spirituality with the same abandon that she had once pursued drugs. On her Web site, Hunter wrote she spent "thousands and thousands" of dollars on gurus. At one point, she hocked a rare statue of one of her favorites -- Baba Muktananda -- to raise money for a retreat. Hunter said at the 2004 retreat she had a spiritual breakthrough, or, as she later put it: "Shift happens."

In 2005, Hunter and her friend O'Brien crossed paths again. "The first thing she said to me was, 'I am awake,'" O'Brien told Salon. "She said she had achieved some higher level of consciousness."

Hunter set up a nonprofit foundation called Being Is Free to spread her spiritual ideas. The foundation's Web site has been scrubbed from the Internet, although parts of it have been preserved at Deceiver.com. Salon contacted the foundation's directors by e-mail and phone, but they did not respond to inquiries. On the site, Hunter effuses about her spiritual journey, Prada backpacks and her relationships, exhibiting the sense of humor of the old party girl: "I've come to realize through a lot of experience that men are in fact good for a couple of things. Three things to be specific. Penetration, moving heavy objects and causing enlightenment."

Just as she met McInerney, Hunter, in 2006, met Edwards in a New York bar. While he may have been smitten with her in the obvious ways, she was on a messianic mission. Jonathan Darman, a Newsweek reporter, who befriended Hunter while he was covering Edwards, wrote that Edwards was Hunter's latest enlightenment project. "Edwards, she said, was an old soul who had barely tapped into any of his potential." He had the power to "change the world." If Edwards could only tap into his heart more, Hunter believed he could be a leader on par with Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr.

Hunter set up a video production company and received $100,000 from Edwards' campaign to film a series of short Web films about him. The candid movies were supposed to present John Edwards uncut -- a loose, spontaneous version of the candidate. In the first "Webisode," Edwards jokes and lounges on a plane as he prepares a speech. "I've come to the personal conclusion that I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am," Edwards said. "But I don't know what the result of that will be."

Hunter, who once sought the media spotlight like a moth does a flame, has fluttered into the shadows since the scandal broke. Her phone number is unlisted and e-mail sent to her personal address bounces back.

Edwards Admits Sexual Affair

Robalini's Note: When I first heard of the recent Enquirer story, my instincts were that it was true, that the only reason Edwards was at the hotel was because he did father Hunter's baby. While he still denies that part of the story, most of the Enquirer allegation has been proven correct. The unstated question: did information on the affair and/or lovechild push Edwards out of the Democratic Presidential race early? At the time, Edwards, while unlikely to win, could have used his kingmaker status with his delegates to push for a choice pick as VP again. It is interesting to note that at the time, I was one of many who observed that Edwards and Obama were splitting the anti-Clinton vote, and Edwards' departure help paved the rise of Obama from a likely distant runner-up to the top vote-getter. It is also important to remember the Enquirer's role in the rise of Arnold in California, where American Media, owners of the tabloid, paid at least one women $20K for her exclusive story on an alleged affair, a story which they then squashed. Given this history of covering up for a GOP politician, is it possible they were part of a secret move to force Edwards to exit the campaign? I heard from multiple GOP sources in February they felt the only chance McCain had of winning this year is if the Democratic Party tore itself in half during the primary, and Edwards bowing helped push the bitter Obama-Clinton feud forward.

Enquiring minds want to know...

http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=5441195

Edwards Admits Sexual Affair; Lied as Presidential Candidate
In an ABC NEWS NIGHTLINE Interview, Edwards Reveals He Cheated, But Didn't Father Child
By RHONDA SCHWARTZ, BRIAN ROSS, and CHRIS FRANCESCANI
August 8, 2008 —

John Edwards admitted to ABC News in an interview with Bob Woodruff Friday that he repeatedly lied about an extramarital affair with a 42-year old campaign employee, but strenuously denied being involved in paying the woman hush money or fathering her newborn child. The former Democratic U.S. senator from North Carolina said he would be willing to take a paternity test and divulge the results publicly.

"Two years ago I made a very serious mistake, a mistake that I am responsible for and no one else. In 2006, I told Elizabeth about the mistake, asked her for her forgiveness, asked God for his forgiveness. And we have kept this within our family since that time."

Edwards, 55, said he told his entire family about the affair after it ended in 2006, and that his wife Elizabeth, who has incurable breast cancer, was "furious" but that their marriage would survive. The couple have three children, Cate, 25, Emma, 9, and Jack, 7. When he confessed his affair to his wife, "she was mad," Edwards said.

"She was angry," he said. "I think 'furious' would be a good way to describe it. She didn't understand. We both went through a process of trying to figure out how it happened, why it happened." Late Friday evening, Elizabeth Edwards posted a message on her blog, saying that she and her children will stand by Edwards.

"Our family has been through a lot. Some caused by nature, some caused by human weakness, and some  most recently  caused by the desire for sensationalism and profit without any regard for the human consequences," she wrote on http://elizabethedwards.dailykos.com/. "None of these has been easy. But we have stood with one another through them all. Although John believes he should stand alone and take the consequences of his action now, when the door closes behind him, he has his family waiting for him."

She too, denied in the blog post that Hunter's child was fathered by her husband.

Edwards told ABC News that he met secretly with former lover Rielle Hunter as recently as last month in a California hotel room at her request because "she was having some trouble, she just wanted to talk."

"I wanted her not to tell the public what had happened," he said at another point. "Very simple. That's the reason I went."

Edwards contacted ABC News and requested that he be interviewed about the allegations. He agreed before the interview to place no limitations on the questions he would be asked, but limited the amount of time he would be questioned. He declined to clarify exactly when the relationship began or ended but said it was over before he announced his campaign for the presidency on Dec. 28, 2006.

"I think my family is entitled to every detail," Edwards said. "They've been told every detail&I think beyond the basics&I think that's where it stops in terms of the public because I think everything else is within my family and those privacy boundaries out to be respected."

A series of dramatic allegations revolving around the affair have been reported by the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer. The most serious of those allegations is that Hunter has been receiving hush money through the Edwards campaign in order to keep her quiet.

In the interview, Edwards denied knowing anything about any support being provided to Hunter or to Andrew Young, the former Edwards campaign aide who has said that he, not Edwards, is the child's father.

If any such support was being provided, Edwards insisted, "I had nothing to do with any money being paid, and no knowledge of any money being paid, and if something was paid, it wasn't being paid on my behalf."

Edwards' 2008 national finance chairman Fred Baron said late Friday that he had provided "assistance" to Hunter and others without Edwards' knowledge.

In a statement emailed to ABC News, Baron said that he "decided independently to help two friends and former colleagues rebuild their lives when harassment by supermarket tabloids made it impossible for them to move forward on their own." "I did this of my own volition without the instruction or suggestion of anyone, and made a conscious decision not to tell anyone, including John Edwards, that assistance was provided. The assistance was offered and accepted without condition. This is now and shall always remain a private matter between these individuals and me."

Edwards said he knows he could not be the father based on the timing of the baby's birth on February 27, 2008.

A grainy photo that appears to show Edwards holding a child was published recently in the National Enquirer, which claimed that the baby was Rielle Hunter's child Frances Quinn. Edwards said he couldn't make "sense" of the photo.

"I don't know if that picture is me," Edwards said. "It could well be. It looks like me. I don't know who that baby is. I have no idea what that picture is."

Pressed to clarify whether the child in the picture was Hunter's child, Edwards suggested that the tabloid may have digitally altered the picture, but also noted the frequency with which politicians hold babies. "Do you know how many pictures have been taken of me holding children in the last three years? I mean it happens all the time."

Edwards was asked again about the meeting.

"Are you saying you don't remember holding that child of Miss Hunter?"

"I'm saying you asked me about that photograph. I don't know anything about that photograph, I don't know who that baby is. I don't know if the picture has been altered, manufactured, if it's a picture of me taken some other time, holding another baby&I have no idea. I was not at this meeting holding a child for my photograph to be taken I can tell you that."

Edwards finally told Woodruff that he did not remember a baby being present at the meeting last month in California.

Edwards blamed the affair on the adulation surrounding his remarkable rise into presidential politics.

"I went from being a senator, a young senator to being considered for vice president, running for president, being a vice presidential candidate and becoming a national public figure. All of which fed a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism that leads you to believe that you can do whatever you want. You're invincible. And there will be no consequences."

According to friends of Hunter, Edwards met her at a New York city bar in 2006. His political action committee later paid her $114,000 to produce campaign website documentaries despite her lack of experience. Edwards said the affair began during the campaign after she was hired. Hunter traveled with Edwards around the country and to Africa.

When the National Enquirer first reported the alleged Edwards-Hunter affair last October 11, Edwards, his campaign staff and Hunter vociferously denounced the report.

"The story is false, it's completely untrue, it's ridiculous," Edwards told reporters then.

He repeated his denials just two weeks ago.

Edwards today admitted the National Enquirer was correct when it reported he had visited Hunter at the Beverly Hills Hilton last month.

Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife's cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter. Elizabeth Edwards has since been diagnosed with an incurable form of the disease.

Edwards was asked whether he loved Hunter.

"I'm in love with one woman," he responded. "I've been in love with one woman for 31 years. She is the finest human being I have ever known."

The former senator was asked why his wife was not by his side as he made the admissions about his affair to ABC News.

"I have seen these public figures who bring their wives along when they say they've done something wrong; confessing some wrong and the wife - they bring their wives to stand beside them I guess, to show support - Elizabeth didn't do anything wrong. I didn't ask for her to be here. I asked for her not to be here. Uh, this is my responsibility; my alone. I have to be the man and take responsibility."

Earlier in the interview, Edwards described his experiences in personal, visceral terms.

"I am imperfect," he said. "And anybody, anybody watching this broadcast or who hears about this who wants to beat me up for this, they should have at it. The truth is you can't possibly beat me up more than I have already beaten myself up."

News Flash: Obama Tells Lies

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=676

News Flash: Obama Tells Lies
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
by Paul Street

The author has kept a scrupulous record of untruths, half-truths and evolving reconstructions of truth from Barack Obama's mouth, over the years - and there's always a fresh supply to chronicle. It's hard - truly hard - to woo Black and progressive voters while plotting a wholly different agenda with captains of industry and finance and military expansionists. However, Obama's many transgressions against truth don't set him apart. "The American narrow-spectrum corporate-crafted presidential election extravaganza is not about truth-telling - it's about corporate-managed deception."

News Flash: Obama Tells Lies
by Paul Street
This article originally appeared in Znet.

U.S. politicians lie. They lie a lot.

Oh, you knew that.

But try this one: Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is no special exception to the rule. Beneath all his claims to represent a "new kind of politics," one based on honesty and transparency, he lies too. He does it a lot.

This is less well known.

The latest example is Obama's decision to choose winning over his word on public campaign financing in the general election.

Just the other day Obama coldly contradicted his earlier promise to go with money from the U.S. presidential public financing system and to accept accompanying spending limits if his Republican opponent did the same. He admitted that he will rely solely on private financing in the general election, making him the first presidential candidate to do so since the public system was set up after Watergate.

"Obama is disproportionately funded by people from the top 1 percent of Americans."

There is no mystery about why: the opportunity to financially bury John McCain is irresistible to Obama, who did not imagine that he was going to set obscene new campaign fundraising records, fueled largely by the likes of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Obama has raised $265 million - a new record, at this stage - so far, nearly three times as much as John McCain ($97).

When Obama offered his populist-sounding public-financing pledge last year, the reactionary Republican arch-militarist McCain said he would abide by the limits and accept public money.

McCain is in fact going to go with taxpayer funds, agreeing to accept spending limits. There will no such limits for Obama.

Obama's defiance of his previous oath was announced in a creepy video to supporters in which he praised ordinary Americans for "fueling" his candidacy with donations of "five dollars, ten dollars, twenty dollars, whatever you can afford." He said, "Let's build the first general election campaign that's truly funded by the American people."

Too bad the system he's rejecting is funded by taxpayers who give $3 to the presidential election fund when they file their taxes.

Too bad Obama is disproportionately funded by people from the top 1 percent of Americans, who own nearly 40 percent of the nation's wealth ands who account for more than 80 percent of campaign contributions above $250. Through April of 2008, the Campaign Finance Institute reports, Obama received more than $89 million in contributions of $1000 or more, just $8 million less than McCain's total take ($97.3 million)[1].

According to the Center for Responsive Politics Obama's top contributors include Goldman Sachs (#1 at $571,000), UBSAG (#3 at $365,000), JP Morgan Chase (#4 at $362,000), Citigroup (#5 at $358,000), Lehman Bros. (#7 at 4319,000), Google (#8 at $318,000), multinational corporate law firm Sidley Austin LLP (#10 at $294,000)and nuclear energy powerhouse Exelon (#15 at $236,000}[2].

Obama's campaign finance comments are pretty damn disingenuous: not exactly the "straight shooter" talk he claims to represent.

But it's hardly the first Obama deception to date - not by a long shot. Here (below) are some of the bigger examples of stark dishonesty I've discovered in the process of writing a book on the Obama phenomenon and U.S. political culture.

"Nuclear Legislation I've Passed": False Posturing

During the pivotal Iowa campaign, Obama sought to burnish his populist "tinge" by telling a misleading story about his response to an Exelon nuclear accident that outraged Illinois residents in late 2005 and early 2006. On December 1 of 2005, Exelon admitted that it had discovered radioactive by-products of nuclear power in monitoring wells at its Braidwood plant, located in central Illinois. Citizen concerns deepened when radioactive tritium was discovered in a home drinking well near the plant and Exelon revealed that this substance came from millions of gallons of water that had leaked from the plant over many years. Exelon had not been required to report the leaks since the radioactive discharges had not reached the level of what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission called "an emergency."

Last November, Obama told a campaign crowd in Iowa that he had introduced a U.S. Senate bill that required nuclear plant owners to notify local and state authorities immediately when even small leaks had occurred. The bill, he told Iowa voters, was "the only nuclear legislation that I've passed. I just did that last year," Obama claimed, eliciting "murmurs of approval" [3].

But, as the New York Times reported in a front-page story two days before Super Tuesday, the truth of what happened after the Braidwood leak was very different than Obama's self-serving version. "While he initially fought to advance" a bill very much like what he claimed to have "passed," Times reporter Mike McIntire noted, "Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon, and nuclear regulators. Those revisions propelled the bill through a crucial committee. But contrary to Mr. Obama's comments in Iowa, it ultimately died amid parliamentary wrangling in the full Senate despite the removal of language mandating prompt reporting. Instead, the bill simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported links." As McIntire suggested, this ignominious legislative aftermath contradicted Obama's campaign claim and followed in natural accord with the following facts [4]:

* Obama had received at least $227,000 in campaign cash from Exelon since 2003.

* "Exelon's support for Mr. Obama far exceeds its support for any other presidential candidate."

* Exelon executives met repeatedly with Obama's staff to discuss Obama's ultimately diluted and aborted bill.

* Obama's chief political strategist David Axlerod had worked as a consultant to Exelon since 2002.

Maytag and Galesburg: "Fundraising, Rhetoric Collide"

In Obama's stump speech during the long campaign leading up to the Iowa Democratic presidential caucus, the Maytag workers of Galesburg, Illinois played a central role. Obama repeatedly told the story of how their jobs had been shipped to Mexico. "It is a ready applause line, for the Illinois presidential hopeful," Chicago Tribune reporter Bob Secter noted four days before the Super Tuesday Primaries, "one that he has been reciting almost verbatim since he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2004, when appliance giant Maytag was in the process of shutting a refrigerator plant [in Galesburg], putting 1,600 people out of work." Obama was trying to steal John Edwards' laborite thunder in Iowa by inveighing against mean-spirited corporations who used trade pacts to replace highly paid union workers with cheaper labor abroad

Despite Obama's claims of deep concern for Galesburg's proletarian victims, however, Maytag union members told Secter that Obama had done remarkably little to save the Galesburg workers' jobs. Those workers belonged to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, whose president noted that "Obama's support for Maytag workers was more show than substance."

"Maytag union members said Obama had done remarkably little to save the Galesburg workers' jobs."

Maytag employees and former employees were particularly rankled by Obama's inaction because he possessed a special relationship with a leading Maytag decision-maker. Between 2003 and 2008, Obama received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the family of Lester Crown, one of Maytag's directors and largest investors. The Crowns and employees of their family-managed holding company (Henry Crown Investments) gave at least $195,000 to Obama's senate and presidential campaigns between 2003 and 2008. According to Crown, however, Obama never once raised the fate of Maytag's Galesburg workers with him.

"The high profile treatment given the Maytag situation" by Obama, Secter noted, "is a reminder of the often awkward intersection of the populist rhetoric, complex issues, and the financial realities of presidential campaigning." It stood in ironic relation to Obama's repeated criticism of his Democratic presidential rivals for "straying from their own populist images," as when he hit Hillary Clinton for serving many years ago on the board of the anti-labor Wal Mart Company [5].

Pseudo-Populist "Campaign Rhetoric" on NAFTA and "Trade"

When addressing working-class audiences in the primary campaign, Obama recurrently boasted of his purported opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) - widely and rightly blamed for massive job and wage losses by organized labor and working class voters but deemed a boon to the U.S. economy by the corporate interests that provided campaign dollars for his campaign. "I don't think NAFTA has been good for Americans, and I never have," Obama claimed before the Ohio Democratic primary, where "trade" and NAFTA emerged as leading campaign issues [6].

The reality of his record on the corporate-neoliberal "investor rights" bill [7] was considerably less populist than that comment suggested. During his 2004 Senate campaign, he argued for "more deals such as NAFTA," claimed that one of his primary opponent's call for higher, job-protecting tariffs would "spark a trade war," and spoke repeatedly of the "enormous benefits" that "accrued to his state from NAFTA"[8].

In late February of 2008, New York Times business writer David Leaonhardt noted that both Obama and Senator Clinton had been "straddling NAFTA and trade issues." After quoting an Obama speech telling Youngstown, Ohio workers they'd seen "job after job disappear because of bad trade deals like NAFTA," Leaonhardt noted that "none of" Obama's trade agenda was "particularly radical. Neither candidate calls for a repeal of NAFTA, or anything close to it. Both instead want to tinker with the bureaucratic innards of the agreement... It's a bit of an odd situation," Leaonhardt added. "They call the country's trade policy a disaster, and yet their plan starts with, um, cracking down on Mexican pollution" [9].

"During his 2004 Senate campaign, Obama argued for ‘more deals such as NAFTA.'"

Matt Gonzales noted around the same time that Obama had dropped the populist ball when given an opportunity to protect workers from unfair trade agreements. Obama cast the deciding vote against an amendment to a 2005 Commerce Appropriations bill that would have "prohibited US trade negotiators from weakening US laws that provide safeguards from unfair foreign trade practices." The amendment would have been "a vital tool to combat the outsourcing of jobs to foreign workers" [10].

Obama's ambiguous position on "trade" received some especially unwelcome attention in the week before the Ohio and Texas primaries of early March 2008. That's when his campaign was hit by the revelation that a top Obama staff member had made a revealing comment to Michael Wilson, the Canadian Ambassador to the United States. As the Canadian Television network (CTV) reported on February 27, 2008, the Obama staffer told Wilson to disregard Obama's populace-pleasing political language on NAFTA and "trade." That language was geared toward winning working-class votes in Ohio and should not be taken as a serious threat to the corporate globalizatization agenda U.S. and Canadian elites share, the Obama aid wanted the Canadian government to know. According to CTV News, "Barack Obama has ratcheted up his attacks on NAFTA, but a senior member of his campaign team told a Canadian official not to take his criticisms seriously, CTV News has learned... The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticism would only be campaign rhetoric and should not be taken at face value" [11].

Subsequent inquiry determined that the "staff member" was none other than Obama's top economic adviser, University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee, who also happened to be the chief economist of the regressive corporate-sponsored Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)[12].

527 Hypocrisy

Late in the Iowa Caucus campaign, Obama criticized John Edwards for serving the same "Washington special interests" that Edwards claimed to oppose because Edwards received support from independent labor-based groups ("527s") affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) [13]. Obama knew very well (a) that Edwards had spoken against large corporate interests, not labor and (b) that capital, not labor, exercises dominant influence over the federal government. He also turned around and started taking money from the same exact groups prior to the Nevada Caucus. It was all very disingenuous, to say the least.

Wal-Mart Con

Especially when speaking before labor audiences, primary candidate Obama has made a point of slamming Wal-Mart for its notorious low-wage and worker-abusing practices. "I don't shop there," he said during the primary campaign. Great, but Obama has appointed as his economic policy director Jason Furman - a corporate-neoliberal economist (from the conservative "Hamilton Group") who has defended the Wal-Mart as a blessing for poor Americans [14]. Obama also gave his endorsement in the spring of 2007 to the pro-Wal-Mart Alderman Dorothy Tillman, who joined Chicago Mayor Richard Daley in opposing a city council resolution that would have required Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers to pay workers a livable wage in the city of Chicago. Despite Obama's endorsement, Tillman was defeated by Pat Dowell, who supported the "big box" ordinance, which was vetoed by Obama's close ally Daley - the business-friendly "mayor for life" with whom Obama shares his chief media consultant (David Axelrod) [14A].

"I believe you care"

Speaking to Wall Street leaders at NASDAQ's headquarters in the late summer of 2007, Obama told financial elites that "I believe all of you are as open and willing to listen as anyone else in America. I believe you care about this country and the future we are leaving to the next generation. I believe your work to be a part of building a stronger, more vibrant, and more just America. I think the problem is that no one has asked you to play a part in the project of American renewal" [15].

These were strange beliefs to (claim to) hold in light of the actual historical pattern of business behavior that naturally results from purpose and structure of the system of private profit. An endless army of nonprofit charities and social service-providers, citizens, environmental and community activists, trade union negotiators, and policymakers has spent decades asking (often enough begging) the "American" corporate and financial capitalist over-class to contribute to the domestic social good. The positive results are generally marginal and fleeting as the "business community" works with structurally super-empowered effectiveness to distribute wealth and power ever more upward and to serve the needs of private investors and capital accumulation over and above any considerations of social and environmental health and the common good at home or abroad. Holding no special allegiance to the American people in an age of corporate globalization, the economic elite is more than willing to significantly abandon the domestic U.S. society and its workers and communities to serve the ultimate business purpose: enhancing its bottom line [16].

Obama, no slouch in the brains department, knows all this very well. That means that his NASDAQ comment was a lie.

"Not fundamentally different"

In his campaign book The Audacity of Hope (2006), Obama tried to demonstrate his distance from black Americans who "angrily" denounce American racism and to curry favor with white middle class voters (many of whom want to think that racism and hence legitimate black anger is a "thing of the past") by claiming that "What ails working- and middle-class blacks is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts" [17]. I am quite certain that he knew this statement to be thoroughly false in a nation where persistent, many-sided institutional racism continues to inflict wildly disproportionate poverty and misery on the black community [18]. A former community organizer, lawyer, and state legislator on the South Side of Chicago, Obama is too smart and too acquainted with basic social facts of U.S. life to believe his statement in Audacity. That would make his statement a lie.

To "protect" Jeremiah Wright

Last February, Obama revoked his then pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright's scheduled statement of a public prayer before Obama's official announcement of his candidacy for the White House, in Springfield, Illinois. A preacher known for fiery sermons against American racism, poverty, and imperialism, Wright was Obama's avowed spiritual mentor - his personal agent of religious conversion on the South Side of Chicago in the middle 1980s.

Last April, Obama told New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor that he was "only shielding his pastor from the spotlight" when he booted Wright from the stage [19]. In July, Obama told Newsweek reporters Darren Briscoe and Richard Wolffe that he "may have been over-protective" toward Wright [20].

"Obama had acted to protect his campaign when he asked Wright to stand down."

But anybody with any political common sense knew very well that Obama had acted to protect his campaign when he asked Wright to stand down. Kantor said as much when she wrote that "Mr. Wright's assertions of widespread white racism and his scorching remarks about American government have drawn criticism, and prompted the senator to cancel his delivery of the invocation when he formally announced his candidacy in February."

"So they got together and Barack Obama was born"

But the Rev. Wright story was just a little white lie compared to the big black fib Obama told in Selma, Alabama in early March of 2007. Trying to sound authentically African-American during a speech memorializing the forty-second anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights March at the Pettis Bridge in Selma, Obama claimed that his black (Kenyan) father and white (Kansan) mother married and conceived the future corporate-sponsored BaRockstar because of the great Civil Rights struggles fought in Selma and Birmingham, Alabama. "There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama," Obama intoned, "because some folks were willing to march across a bridge. So they [his parents] got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born."

"So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama," Obama said. "Don't tell me I'm not coming home to Selma, Alabama. I'm here because somebody marched. I'm here because you all sacrificed for me" [21].

Never mind that Barack Obama Jr. was born in 1961, two years before the famous campaign to desegregate Birmingham, three years before the Civil Rights Act, and four years before the famous Selma march!

It's true that Obama's multicultural conception came four years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but his parents "getting together" across racial didn't have much to do with the Civil Rights Movement. It was more likely a reflection of the fact that his home state of Hawaii was relatively "tolerant" on racial questions - a distant geographic and cultural cry from the racially segregated U.S. South to which Obama absurdly tried to claim strong biographical connection.

McCain, Iraq, The System...

I won't go here into the deep and dark deception involved in Obama's "fairy tale" (as Bill Clinton rightly said) claim to have opposed the occupation of Iraq "from the beginning" - a topic I have addressed at some length in an earlier ZNet essay titled "The Audacity of Deception: Barack Obama and the Manufacture of Progressive Illusion and in my forthcoming (August 2008) book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics. You can find many more sources and examples in that volume (order at www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)

Don't get me wrong. For what it's worth, John McCain is a chronic liar and Olympic-level flip-flopper in his own right - on tax cuts, offshore drilling, lobbyists, immigration reform, and more. He also happens to represent an extremist and dangerous right-wing agenda that progressive voters should resist by voting "for" Obama in contested states. There's more than "a dime's worth of difference" between the two candidates, not because the centrist Democratic contender is progressive (he's corporate-neoliberal and imperial) but because the Republican standard-bearer and party is so dangerously far right. Once, again,as in 2004, this isn't "Coke" (the Democrats) v. "Pepsi" (the Republicans): it's corporate-neoliberal Coke versus arch-authoritarian and messianic-militaristic Crack [22].

"There's more than ‘a dime's worth of difference' between the two candidates."

I also think that most of Obama's lies sadly make perfect sense from the perspective of a campaign that is "in it to win it." The American narrow-spectrum corporate-crafted presidential election extravaganza is not about truth-telling - it's about corporate-managed deception. This goes back a long way; it's not new. Anybody who wants U.S. politicians to stop lying should support the following reforms [23]:

* Take private money out of public elections through the full mandatory equal and public financing of federal campaigns

* Introduce proportional representation in the election of state and congressional representatives.

* Provide extra public resources and public access - a form of political party affirmative action - for third, fourth, and fifth parties that have been discriminated against in the past.

* Introduce a parliamentary system whereby the chief executive is selected by and ultimately subordinated to the representative branch of government.

* If a presidential system remains, introduce "instant run off" voting - a mechanism permitting third and fourth parities to avoid functioning as "spoilers" by requiring that winners must receive at least 50 percent of the total vote. Let all voters mark their second and third favorite choices, hold an instant run off between the top candidates until one candidate secures at least 50 percent plus one.

* Permit "fusion" voting, whereby voters are free to support a major party candidate in the name of their own favorite third (or fourth, etc.) party.

* Mandate free media advertisements for all candidates.

* Remove candidate debates from private media corporations and hand them over to publicly funded, publicly elected, and publicly overseen citizen committees.

* Activate antitrust laws to break up the current corporate media oligopoly and distribute political news and information across a broader and more diverse range of print and media outlets.

* Require media campaign coverage to spend a designated relevant and disproportionate amount of time on policy and ideological differences between and among candidates and parties.

* Sharply restrict corporate lobbying.

* Restrict the right of corporations to draft laws governing their industries.

* Make it illegal to use shareholder funds for political reasons.

* Forbid former high-level politicians from becoming business lobbyists for ten years or more.

* Forbid current or former high-level corporate officers from sitting on commissions with regulatory power over their industries.

* Make it illegal for corporations to try to influence their employees' votes.

* Repeal "investor rights" clauses in trade agreements, which let foreign and multinational corporations sue a national government for passing environmental, safety (job and consumer), labor, and/or anti-discrimination laws.

* Prohibit the granting of subsidies to companies who do not contribute to social and ecological health.

* Institute penalties for companies that extort concessions from workers, communities, and governments by threatening to leave a city, county, state or country.

* Significantly expand public media and provide significant new public subsidies and other resources for alternative and grassroots citizen's media.

Introducing many of the top reforms suggested above, it should be acknowledged, would almost certainly require a Constitutional Amendment. However they are pursued and implemented, these are meaningful changes that should be consistently advanced by progressives. All of them are consistent with Obama's recurrent call for Americans to act to change not just policies but also the very process and nature of U.S. politics itself.

Veteran radical historian Paul Street ( paulstreet99@yahoo.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (forthcoming in summer of 2008).

NOTES

1. Read at www.cfinst.org/pr/prRelease.aspx?ReleaseID=191].

2. Read at www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N000096380.

3. Mike McIntire, "Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama," New York Times, 3 February, 2008, section 1, p. 1.

4. McIntire, "Nuclear Leaks."

5. Bob Secter, "Obama's Fundraising, Rhetoric Collide," Chicago Tribune, February 2008, sec.1, p.7.

6. Public Broadcasting System, PBS News Hour, "Free Trade Agreement is Issue for Ohio Voters" (March 3, 2008), read at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/us/jan-june08/nafta_3-03.html

7. For a useful and powerful analysis of NAFTA, see Jeff Faux, The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future and What It Will Take to Win it Back (New York: Wiley, 2006),pp. 9-37, 45-47, 126-54..

8. Associated Press, February 28, 2008.

9. David Leonhardt, "The Politics of Trade in Ohio," New York Times, 27 February, 2008.

10. Matt Gonzales, "The Obama Craze: Count Me Out," BeyondChron: San Francisco's Online Daily (February 28 2008) read online at www.beyondchron.org/articles/index.php?itemid=5413#more.

11. CTV.ca News Staff, "Obama Staffer Gave Warning of NAFTA Rhetoric," www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080227/dems_nafta_080227/20080227

12. Doug Henwood, "Would You like Change With That?" Left Business Observer, No. 117 (March 2008). From here on, I dispense with sources and people are referred to my forthcoming (due out in August) book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm Publishers).

13. Paul Krugman, "State of the Unions," New York Times, December 24, 2007.

14. Josh Gerstein, "Wal-Mart Defender to Direct Obama's Economic Policy," New York Sun (June 10, 2008).

14A. For details, see Paul Street, "Obama's Forgotten Wal-Mart Endorsement," ZNet (August 28, 2007).

15. Barack Obama, "Our Common Stake in America's Prosperity," New York, New York (September 17, 2007).

16. An excellent account is Faux, The Global Class War.

17. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New York: 2006), p. 247.

18. For an investigation of this in Obama's own metropolitan backyard, see Paul Street, Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).

19. Jodi Kantor, "A Candidate, His Minister and the Search for Faith," New York Times, 30 April 2007, p. A1.

20. Richard Wolffe and Darren Briscoe, "Across the Divide: Barack Obama's Road to Racial Reconstruction," Newsweek (July 16, 2007).

21. Barack Obama, "Selma Voting Rights Commemoration," Selma, Alabama, March 4, 2007. read at www.barackobama.com

22. "Kerry is Coke, Bush is Crack," ZNet Magazine (March 24, 2004), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=33&ItemID=5204.

23. Much of what follows comes from Charles Derber, Hidden Power: What You Need to Know to Save Our Democracy (San Francisco, CA: 2005)