Beyond the noise, listen to the substance of the candidates. peace, mjh
Peter Beinart – Obama at the Helm
Luckily, Obama doesn’t have to rely on his legislative resume to prove he’s capable of running the government. He can point to something more germane: the way he’s run his campaign.
Presidents tend to govern the way they campaigned. Jimmy Carter ran as a moralistic outsider in 1976, and he governed that way as well, refusing to compromise with a Washington establishment that he distrusted (and that distrusted him). Ronald Reagan‘s campaign looked harsh on paper but warm and fuzzy on TV, as did his presidency. The 1992 Clinton campaign was like the Clinton administration: brilliant and chaotic, with a penchant for near-death experiences. And the 2000 Bush campaign presaged the Bush presidency: disciplined, hierarchical, loyal and ruthless.
Of the three candidates still in the 2008 race, Obama has run the best campaign by far. McCain’s was a top-heavy, slow-moving, money-hemorrhaging Hindenburg that eventually exploded, leaving the Arizona senator to resurrect his bankrupt candidacy through sheer force of will. Clinton’s campaign has been marked by vicious infighting and organizational weakness, as manifested by her terrible performance in caucus states.
Obama’s, by contrast, has been an organizational wonder, the political equivalent of crossing a Lamborghini with a Hummer. From the beginning, the Obama campaign has run circles around its foes on the Internet, using MySpace, Facebook and other Web tools to develop a virtual army of more than 1 million donors. The result has been fundraising numbers that have left opponents slack-jawed (last month Obama raised $40 million, compared with Clinton’s $20 million).
Peter Beinart – Obama at the Helm – washingtonpost.com
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For one thing, under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and “wiretaps without warrants,” he said. (He was referring to the lingering legal fallout over reports that the National Security Agency scooped up Americans’ phone and Internet activities without court orders, ostensibly to monitor terrorist plots, in the years after the September 11 attacks.)
It’s hardly a new stance for Obama, who has made similar statements in previous campaign speeches, but mention of the issue in a stump speech, alongside more frequently discussed topics like Iraq and education, may give some clue to his priorities.
In our own Technology Voters’ Guide, when asked whether he supports shielding telecommunications and Internet companies from lawsuits accusing them of illegal spying, Obama gave us a one-word response: “No.”
(Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Edwards and Republican Ron Paul, for their part, came to the same conclusion in our survey.)
Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
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Obama pledges Net neutrality laws if elected president | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Posted by Anne BroacheIf elected president, Barack Obama plans to prioritize, well, barring broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast from prioritizing Internet content.
Affixing his signature to federal Net neutrality rules would be high on the list during his first year in the Oval Office, the junior senator from Illinois said during an interactive forum Monday afternoon with the popular contender put on by MTV and MySpace at Coe College in Iowa.
Net neutrality, of course, is the idea that broadband operators shouldn’t be allowed to block or degrade Internet content and services–or charge content providers an extra fee for speedier delivery or more favorable placement.
The question, selected through an online video contest, was posed via video by small-business owner and former AT&T engineer Joe Niederberger, a member of the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org. He asked Obama: “Would you make it a priority in your first year of office to reinstate Net neutrality as the law of the land? And would you pledge to only appoint FCC commissioners that support open Internet principles like Net neutrality?”
“The answer is yes,” Obama replied. “I am a strong supporter of Net neutrality.”
Obama pledges Net neutrality laws if elected president | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
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When Barry Became Barack | Print Article | Newsweek.com
Obama had made up his mind that he wanted to move to a more urban, intense and polyglot place. “He said something to the effect that he needed a bigger and more stimulating environment intellectually.”
Obama wanted a clean slate. “Going to New York was really a significant break. It’s when I left a lot of stuff behind,” he says. “I think there was a lot of stuff going on in me. By the end of that year at Occidental, I think I was starting to work it through, and I think part of the attraction of transferring was, it’s hard to remake yourself around people who have known you for a long time.” It was when he got to New York that, as he recalls it, he began to ask people to call him Barack: “It was not some assertion of my African roots … not a racial assertion. It was much more of an assertion that I was coming of age. An assertion of being comfortable with the fact that I was different and that I didn’t need to try to fit in in a certain way.”
He stopped drinking and partying, leading what he calls “a hermetic existence” for two years. “When I look back on it, it was a pretty grim and humorless time that I went through,” he recalls. “I literally went to class, came home, read books, took long walks, wrote.” Politics was a passion, but he was disillusioned by radicals who claimed to have all the answers. At one point after graduation, he went “in search of some inspiration” to hear Kwame Toure (the former Stokely Carmichael) speak at Columbia. A thin young woman stood up to question Toure’s push to establish economic ties between Africa and Harlem: was that practical, given the difficult state of African economies? Toure cut her off, calling her brainwashed, and others shouted her down. “It was like a bad dream,” Obama wrote later.
Obama kept detailed journals in New York. It was good practice. “Writing journals during those two years gave me not only the raw material for the book, but also taught me to shape a narrative in ways that would work,” he says. When he later became a community organizer in Chicago, part of his job was storytelling. “His job largely consisted of interviewing community members and creating a narrative out of their experiences, the problems the community faced,” says his boss at that time, Gerald Kellman. Eventually, even Chicago would seem too small a stage. He told Kellman “he did not feel there would be large-scale change brought about by organizing.” Large-scale change was what Obama was aiming for.