Deep Inside ‘Bittergate’
The secret story of how Obama's gaffe made its way to the Huffington Post, of all places, and how it might affect campaign coverage from now on.
It’s one of the great ironies of the campaign. The resolutely pro-Obama Huffington Post, the site Barack Obama chose last month to put out his statement on Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s outrageous comments, this month is the source of one of his biggest campaign crises. Its namesake co-owner, the conservative-turned-liberal commentator profiled recently in the New York Times as “Citizen Huff,” Arianna Huffington, was on David Geffen’s yacht in Tahiti when the deal went down.
I’m referring, of course, to the Huffington Post’s report of the now notorious comments Obama made on April 6th at a private fundraiser in San Francisco. There, the freshman Illinois senator, opining about people in small towns where the jobs have fled, said: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Those few words, transcribed from a more than 45-minute recording of Obama, buried in the midst of a very ruminative, rather personally-oriented piece by Mayhill Fowler, an activist blogger who supports Obama and contributed the maximum allowable $2,300 to his presidential campaign, kicked off a media firestorm.
“It’s stunning,” Arianna Huffington told me last night, “the way the Clinton campaign has completely distorted the meaning of what he said. It’s stunning Hillary chose to confirm every right-wing demagogic characteristic about her own party.”
“We recognized it was a politically volatile story and thought it would create news,” says Marc Cooper, editorial coordinator of Huffington Post’s “Off The Bus” project for “citizen journalists” such as Fowler. “We had no idea that the controversy would reach this magnitude.”
One person who did is Steve Schmidt, a senior advisor to John McCain who ran Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s landslide 2006 re-election campaign, and before that the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign war room. He seized on a handful of magic words — bitter, cling, guns, religion — in the midst of Fowler’s heartfelt prose about Obama, words that cast the Democratic frontrunner as a demeaning elitist.
“This is elitist behavior by Senator Obama,” says Schmidt. “The condescension he shows toward the values of people who are the backbone of America is very clear.”
Team McCain team swiftly blasted the magic words out through not only its own campaign apparatus but every media organ of the Republican Party. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, reeling from the latest gaffe by former President Bill Clinton, who had just come up with a multi-faceted fabrication to explain Hillary’s multi-faceted fabrication about her Bosnia trip, was only too happy to change the subject by jumping on the issue with both feet.
It turns out that the momentous decision by Huffington Post to run this piece which would cause so much trouble for the site’s preferred presidential candidate was made in just a few hours last Friday morning, with Huffington weighing in via cell phone from the South Pacific.
Some have speculated that the lag time from the San Francisco fundraiser on April 6th to the appearance of the Huffington Post story on April 11th was sign of an internal debate about the story. But that’s not so. The editors never saw or heard what turned out to be the offending quote until early Friday. That’s when Fowler, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, had flown to New York and turned in her piece to Off The Bus director Amanda Michel and made her recording available. Huffington Post is run out of Huffington’s Brentwood home in Los Angeles –where editor Roy Sekoff works– and an office in Manhattan, where HuffPo co-founder Ken Lerer –who hosted an Obama fundraiser last year at his Central Park West apartment– lives and works.
Before that, Fowler had turned in a piece which ran April 7th and caused a ripple, with Obama telling the San Francisco fundraiser crowd that he doesn’t need a foreign policy expert as his running mate because he already knows a lot about foreign policy. Huffington, who was about to leave for Tahiti, was concerned about that piece, which had no political impact other than pointing up Obama’s cockiness.
This is when the Obama campaign got more than concerned. The campaign is wisely staying out of the business of publicly expressing dismay about an activist blogger supporter publishing material on a very high-profile new media news and opinion outlet that is taken from a private event to which the press was not allowed. (I asked to attend the event and was told it was “private, off the record, and closed to the press.”) But Obama campaign sources say privately that they are furious with the situation.
They had a different expectation of Fowler. For the past year, the 61-year old Vassar graduate, wife of a wealthy Bay Area attorney, has hung around with people in the Obama campaign and traveled to several states, blogging all the while about her experiences and perceptions of the campaign and candidate. She was seen as an opinionated activist blogger, a supporter, someone who had a tendency at times to lecture the campaign in her copy but was ultimately an enthusiast. She was not viewed as a journalist.
Fowler told her editors that she had more from the private fundraiser, that Obama had said some things about small town America not in his standard stump speech. But she was not sure if she wanted to write more, and would think about it. Since she is unpaid, they didn’t direct her to turn over her recording of the event so they could determine what could be done with the material. The first time they got ahold of the recording was Friday, a few hours before the article and the recording were posted on the Huffington Post.
That, according to sources, is when Arianna Huffington, thousands of miles away in the South Pacific where she was staying on billionaire Obama backer David Geffen’s 454-foot yacht, learned of the brewing issue. She signed off on the story, which was then underway.
“Roy (Sekoff) and I were on the phone multiple times,” says Huffington. “I agreed with how he and Marc (Cooper) decided to handle it, placing Obama’s thoughts in context and avoiding sensationalism.”
She had not, according to sources, been thrilled with Fowler’s earlier piece from the private fundraiser, with a cocky Obama saying he didn’t need a running mate with foreign policy expertise.
Huffington’s partner in New York, Ken Lerer, according to sources, had not liked the first piece either. Nor was he happy about the second piece. Lerer talked yesterday with top Obama campaign figures in New York and elsewhere.
A Clinton campaign official, speaking not for attribution, described the Huffington Post as “a conveyor belt” for material that is pro-Obama and anti-Hillary. The relationship between the publication and the Obama campaign has been close, and Huffington scored a major coup when she procured Obama’s first statement on the Jeremiah Wright firestorm, which appeared in the form of a personal blog by Obama on the site.
But the Clinton campaign is happy to take thousands of hits in exchange for the cudgel which the McCain campaign and they discovered in the midst of Mayhill Fowler’s post, like the prize in a box of cracker jacks.
Fowler, with help from editors Cooper, Michel, and Sekoff, framed her concerns about how Obama characterized some rural voters in a sympathetic light, with plenty of context. “It was not written in a sensational manner in any way,” says one Huffington Post figure. But the reality is that the piece was simply grist for the campaign mill. Fowler’s heartfelt commentary mattered not in the least; the few magic words contained therein are what mattered. For the Steve Schmidts of the world, who employ smart young researchers to scour media outlets for potentially damaging material, the new technologies that enable a Mayhill Fowler to have a major outlet for her musings are tools to further accelerate the political demolition derby.
“After a short time,” says Huffington, speaking of last Friday, “I didn’t have to call Los Angeles. It was all on CNN International, with constant updates.”
A new media outlet clearly favoring a candidate –and conventional media outlets have faced such questions for as long as they’ve existed– can weigh at some length the impact of what it reports, and make decisions about what to report and what not to report. But in this case, not having had the tape or transcript in advance, with only a few hours to consider what to a political pro is clearly incendiary language to be deployed against the candidate, and with Huffington in Tahiti, there was no lengthy period in which to assess the possible political impacts.
Which, from a journalistic standpoint, is admirable. But distinctly unhelpful to HuffPo’s favorite presidential candidate.
And from the standpoint of Obama campaign figures, the material was gotten under false pretenses. One top Obama hand speaks of the campaign and candidate being blindsided. Fowler was a supporter, a contributor, an activist, a blogger, not a reporter. With the event closed to the press, Obama spoke with less care than he would have otherwise had he known a reporter, of any sort, was in attendance.
With the rise of new media, campaigns frequently hold conference calls for the press, and conference calls for bloggers. The blogger calls are designed to stir up the partisan base, to provide enthusiasts on the Internet with talking points to spread throughout the blogosphere and, to a certain extent, on talk radio, which has a significant overlap on the hyperpartisan right.
This episode may well mean the end of allowing activists who blog access to private campaign events.
But that doesn’t mean that the situation is controlled. Not any more, that is. Cooper makes a good point when he says of the Obama campaign (and this applies to any campaign): “If Joe Shmo Obama Supporter had loved O’s remarks and posted his video of the event to YouTube, and that becomes central to a media frenzy, what do you do about that?”
With all the electronic devices we have, many now highly portable, anyone can become a media outlet. But how many would bother to record 45 minutes of a talk, and prepare a column about the event, without access to a recognized outlet? For all the people pointing little camera devices at Obama that day in San Francisco, no video has emerged of him talking about bitter people clinging to guns and religion.
And for all the talk of how YouTube helped turn the U.S. Senate from Republican to Democratic when George Allen had his “macacca” moment, it was actually a staffer for Jim Webb, tracking the Virginia senator with his little video camera, who prompted the meltdown at a very public event.
Still, the metaphorical cat is out of the media bag. Absent Mayhill Fowler, what Barack Obama thought was a talk in a private setting to a group of supporters would have remained simply that. But sometime, somewhere, some candidate would learn the hard way that his or her unguarded moment was suddenly memorialized for all time by one of those cute little devices clutched in the hands of an eager supporter. Or at least someone who paid to get into the fundraiser.
Private space just got a bit smaller. That might mean that more will get a virtual backstage pass as a result. Or it may just mean that politics will become even more stage managed and less candid.
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123 Comments
1. Ciscokid:Huffington while floating on David Geffen’s 454ft yacht in Tahiti, made decisions concerning what to do. Gee, I wonder how they missed seeing all the bitterness caused by running this story. Obama, their brother elitist Harvard law school grad, was only confirming what other elites likely believe about small town America. I guess you learn something new everyday on a 454ft yacht. Huffington post will now just need to find another way to convince people living in small town America to also feel like a victim.
Apr 15, 2008 - 5:11 am 2. ApplePie:Great to know with certainty that the Huffington Post is nothing more than a shill for Barack Obama’s. I used to post regularly there but when it became obvious to me that HuffPo-ites consistently gave BO a halo and swooned over his every word - I began to feel sick. HuffPo then went on to highlight every pro-Obama media person- with MSNBC clearly producing the most overt fans. (Olbermann, Matthews, Schuster and alas even Gregory)Then I started to feel angry.
HuffPo & MSNBC had spent the past years pilloring other news agencies for being pro-Bush and not doing the questioning and research that the media was supposed to do……………now that they were wearing Vote for Obama buttons these same accusers were guilty of also producing incredibly slanted, biased pro Obama articles/stories. Hillary became the enemy - to belittle and attack. What does HuffPo do and MSNBC’s The Big O and the shiverry leg Matthews do? Why their own version of swift-boating Hillary Clinton all while Hillary is blamed, by them, for wrongly staying in the Dem. Pres. nominee race and for “being devisive”.
HuffPo has lost all credibility with me and many other Democrats. Clearly sitting on the Geffin yacht, in Tahiti, she wouldn’t recognize an elitist comment if it were issued from her own mouth.
MSNBC is now nothing more than the liberal left wing version of FOX TV - the entire station deserves to be named “Worst Person In the World” for their hypocrisy.
As far as Obama’s remarks - he said them in front of what he considered a safe crowd. He let his guard down amongst his high dollar contributor “equals” and allowed his own elitism to eek out. His comments clearly stated in “small town” talk read:
PA and other USA small towns are full of Redneck Bible Thumpin’ Gun Crazed Bigots
Well HuffPo and Barack - at least we’re not hypocrites.
Apr 15, 2008 - 5:12 am 3. Gary Ogletree:I recall that the first response from the Obama camp was to deny outright he said any such thing. Then the existance of the tape became known.
Apr 15, 2008 - 5:19 am 4. huxley:Fascinating article. What’s striking is the pro-Obama people–Mayhill, Huffington, Cooper–who allowed the Obama quotes to reach the public, and the overall atmosphere of wealth around the quote from the “Billionaire’s Row” neighborhood in San Francisco where Obama gave the talk to the huge yacht owned by billionaire, David Geffen, where Huffington stayed while making the decisions about running the quote.
As much as Obama, Huffington et al may wish to blame others for the “distorting” the quote, the real problem is that Obama and his supporters are tone-deaf to how bad that quote sounds outside the upscale liberal world in which Obama voiced the quote and his supporters passed it on.
Apr 15, 2008 - 5:25 am 5. HRPKathy:They didn’t predict the political firestorm because they believe it is true. Rasmussen reports that Obama supporters agree with the remarks.
Funny thing about elitism, it’s blinding to itself.
Wonder who’s bitter now?
Apr 15, 2008 - 7:00 am 6. Misanthropicus:“Deliverance” revisited - the following is a copy of a message prepared by Emperor Hussein Glib’ama the 1st. for the incoming, April 22, Pennsylvania primary election, message obtained by Misanthropicus through some occult sources:
Malibu, April, 15th. Le Plymorphous Sybarite [NB: David Geffen's mansion]
Apr 15, 2008 - 7:09 am 7. Saltherring:My dear low-class Pennsylvanians, last night I and my fiercely intelligent wife Michelle have re-watched the classic motion picture “Deliverance” which confirmed my impressions about Pennsylvanian white folks.
My dear low-class Pennsylvanians, I have to say that the fuss that followed my San Francisco description of your benightedness
has confirmed our, and our liberal Manhattan, Maui, Malibu, Hamptons and Bel-Air and Tibet liberal friends’ compassionate views about you.
I and my fiercely intelligent wife Michelle were again inspired from seeing that film which realistically depicts the dire results of the Clinton/Bush reigns and offers a glimpse of the bitter environment in which Pennsylvania white folks live and are prepared for life - in a conversation with my friend and adviser John Kerry and his fiercely intelligent wife Theresa (via satellite phone, they being at their retreat in Tibet), they confirmed my impression.
My dear low-class Pennsylvanians, trust me that I and my fiercely intelligent wife Michelle are not dissmisive in this matter, I and Michelle know what hardships are, we had a period in our life when we we struggled with the cost of the piano lessons for our daughters, and we are concerned that despite our recent financial betterment (Michelle having received a small raise of $135.000), we’ll have to get some GSL for them to accomplish their cultural anthropology studies at Princeton and Harvard.
My dear low-class Pennsylvanians, I and my wife Michelle know that, despite your benightedness, the forthcoming and compassion I and my wife Michelle show in defusing this unproductive situation will be appreciated by you, Pennsylvanians who, after returning from the woods where you shoot animals, read the Bible, make moonshine and amphetamine and sodomize rafters from Beverly Hills, will still chose in the voting booths the hope’n change which will come in, albeit a bit dented, vessel of your hopes - emperor Hussein Glib’ama the 1st.
{Misanthropicus’ note: we have knowledge that Emperor Glib’ama is working on an even more mobilizing message to the benighted folk of Indiana. Keep you informed —-)
ApplePie,
After years of receiving a free pass from an adoring “Old Media”, the Clintons are discovering what it is like to have every word scrutinized, every phrase lifted from supporting context, every statement investigated for truthfulness. They now reside in the realm called accountability, where respect and admiration are earned, and words are chosen carefully. No slanderous sneers are allowed, nor are “off the record” comments or “knowing”, condescending winks of the eye. Welcome to the real world Hillary, the same media sphere Republicans have been subject to for decades.
And hopefully Obama the elitist will be next. It will be justice listening to him stutter.
Apr 15, 2008 - 7:12 am 8. Sorry, not offended:Funny how all the DC/NY professional media pundits decrying the “elitism” of Obama are far-removed from the small towns they claim to speak for.
The truly elitist snobs on the East coast are the ones who claim to know that the “Dunkin Donuts voters” in them there flyover states will reject this supposed San Francisco elitism.
I went to San Francisco once. Nice town. I’d like to go back one day. I don’t obsess over their local politics because you know, I actually have a life. If they’re all liberal out there it doesn’t change a damn thing in my world.
Note to pundits: get over yourselves. People outside of your little groupthink media bubble don’t all react the same way. And we’re smart enough to realize when we’re being patronized, either by a candidate, or more often, a cable news sock-puppet telling us when to be offended.
My two cents.
Apr 15, 2008 - 7:41 am 9. Ratatosk:people in small towns where the jobs have fled, said: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
It’s sad that Obama is being busted up for this comment… because the comment is true. The basic behavior of most, but not all, individuals when things become uncertain, is to cling to the things they feel that they can be certain about. In rural USA, (as a born and raised Appalachian) that boils down to guns, religion and tends to include a mistrust of anyone from outside the ‘community’. This isn’t surprising and its been well documented by psychologists over the years. However, apparently we damn anyone who shows that Americans behave like human beings. Have we fallen so far that we can’t bear to look into the mirror at all?
Apr 15, 2008 - 7:50 am 10. exhelodrvr:“It’s stunning Hillary chose to confirm every right-wing demagogic characteristic about her own party.”
So, Arianna, those “right-wing demagogic characteristic” were right on target! Of course, we on the right knew that, and you on the left knew (but hid) that. Now those in the center will hopefully realize it, too.
Apr 15, 2008 - 8:11 am 11. Anita:Fascinating account of an important story, once MSM seem to report. Thanks to “Rathergate”, Pajamas Media thrives in modern-day reportage.
Apr 15, 2008 - 8:12 am 12. Hogarth:So this is the so-called “New Media,” eh?
In the tank for the chosen-one, trying to spin, bias, or keep things from ever seeing the light of day. Doing their damndest to influence an election “by the People, for the People” to suit their own craven desires.
Please, tell me again how this is any different from the “Old Media.”
Apr 15, 2008 - 8:15 am 13. Wellspring:With so little known about Obama, we were bound to have an unpleasant surprise. Fowler may totally agree with Obama, but she might have inadvertantly exposed some real insight into how he thinks.
OK let’s juxtapose this latest “bitter” statement, which basically says religion is really just an anodyne (dare I say opiate?) for class conflict, with the Wright controversy. If Obama thinks that all this spirituality stuff is just people fooling themselves because they are bitter about their economic status, then why the hell is he hanging out in Wright’s church?
His whole argument is that he disagrees with Wright on a host of political issues, but considers him a spiritual mentor. If religion to Obama is just a hoax designed to distract from politics, then spirituality goes out the window. The only value that Obama’s 20 year association with Wright could have then is political and personal.
Apr 15, 2008 - 8:15 am 14. slick:“But in this case, not having had the tape or transcript in advance, with only a few hours to consider what to a political pro is clearly incendiary language to be deployed against the candidate, and with Huffington in Tahiti, there was no lengthy period in which to assess the possible political impacts.
Which, from a journalistic standpoint, is admirable.”
How the hell is that ADMIRABLE??? That’s a ridiculous conclusion to draw.
Due to logistics, circumstances, and time constraints it turns out that the right thing somehow, almost accidentally, happened - and you think that is admirable??? You give HP credit for that? There is nothing to admire here. Had they had more time, and considered it more closely, the odds are we would have never known what Obama said! That is the OPPOSITE of admirable.
Also, it’s sad that Huffington has such a biased (paranoid?) view of Republicans. She would never talk that way about blacks or any other designated liberal victim group.
I’m so tired of “us and them”. Aren’t progressives supposed to be smarter than that? Apparently not.
Apr 15, 2008 - 8:18 am 15. The press and Benedict | The Anchoress:[...] over at Pajamas Media, btw, there besides my poor effort. Bill Bradley lhas two piece ups, both on “Bittergate”, with the second looking at how Obama’s stunning elitism will be used against him, Mohammed [...]
Apr 15, 2008 - 8:20 am 16. t.dubya:what one says and does in private must be the same as when in public. that applies to all citizens, both public and private. obvious personal integrity from a presidential candidate will influence my vote at least as much as their experience and positions on issues. this event is just one of many reasons why Senator Obama will not receive my vote.
Apr 15, 2008 - 8:21 am 17. Bill Bradley:Because it means, “slick,” that they didn’t hold the material back from publication.
Deep, I know.
Apr 15, 2008 - 8:25 am 18. Bill Bradley:Oh?
>Gary Ogletree:
I recall that the first response from the Obama camp was to deny outright he said any such thing. Then the existance of the tape became known.
Apr 15, 2008 - 8:26 am 19. Cafe_mom:Apr 15, 2008 - 5:19 am
“But in this case, not having had the tape or transcript in advance, with only a few hours to consider what to a political pro is clearly incendiary language to be deployed against the candidate, and with Huffington in Tahiti on her 454 yacht, there was no lengthy period in which to assess the possible political impacts.”
You mean there wasn’t enough time to drop the facts down the memory hole?
I hope Geffen and Huffington came up with some ideas on how to help the poor while they were there….
Apr 15, 2008 - 8:35 am 20. NC Indie:The locals jokingly call Pacific Heights “Specific Whites”.
Apr 15, 2008 - 8:45 am 21. Percy Dovetonsils:Guess I’m a nonspecific white.
“…the conservative-turned-liberal commentator profiled recently in the New York Times as “Citizen Huff,” Arianna Huffington, was on David Geffen’s yacht in Tahiti when the deal went down.”
You just can’t make this stuff up. Although I am becoming more open to punitive taxation of the rich; it’s about time these damn Democrats pay their debt to society.
Apr 15, 2008 - 8:48 am 22. edh:As an aside, I’m Glad to hear Ariana was doing her part to fight “climate change” by jetting-off to Tahiti to wallow on David Geffen’s yatch.
Apr 15, 2008 - 8:51 am 23. Lily:To the people who keep claiming Obama’s comments are true: What the comments are is an ugly stereotye. And I think it is approprate that the comments ‘got out’. This man has asked to be the Leader for ALL Americans. And therefor Americans have the right to know what this potiential President really thinks of us.
Apr 15, 2008 - 8:55 am 24. D Palmer:This just goes to show you that there no longer is such a thing as “off the record”.
It is clear that politicians still don’t understand that the only place that their thoughts are safe is in their head.
For Obama to have made such a comment in front of a group of people, regardless of how private, was exceptionally foolish.
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:00 am 25. Thomass:I think your own PM contributor Zombie posted the audio on their website.
You guys could have broken this.
And yeah, I love that Hill is now Right Wing… just shows that it is a catch all term for bad for lefties and has no meaning….
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:07 am 26. smaack:For a moment, forget “bitter”, forget “cling” and “guns” and “religion.” What does it say that Obama, who has promised to sink Nafta and supports blocking the Columbian trade deal, balmes “anti-trade sentiment” on rural bitterness?
Doesn’t this point out that he is either hypocritical or entirely disingenuous on the issue of free trade?
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:09 am 27. flicka47:“that they didn’t hold the material back from publication.”
That’s funny! Did you read the same Huffpo post that I did? The whole post was like wading thru cotton candy,mindless droning “Obama wonderful! Obama wonderful!”
They didn’t hold it back because they were too busy singing the praises of the Messiah!
They never saw anything wrong with it.
Admiralble? Deep? more like clueless to the fact that other folks don’t share their idealogies, and would be offended by the great ones words.
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:16 am 28. Thomass:smaack:
“Doesn’t this point out that he is either hypocritical or entirely disingenuous on the issue of free trade?”
Yeah, and that as a typical leftist he questions motives and ignores ideas… this is a core component of their DNA.. they have to write you off (racist, sexist, dumb, bitter, or you stand to profit) vs. engaging your ideas… So, he chooses to jump to motives and ignore positive or rational reasons people might want their Guns, God, or limit illegal immigration. As to free trade, the small town people lost me there… but I’d listen and debate them on it. Not write them off as embittered. Considering
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:20 am 29. Paul from Hamburg:Bradley, even though you imply that the story is blown out of proportion (”magic words”), the statement cleary reveals Obama’s own prejudices. If he had simply said “When times are difficult, some people cling to religion”, that would not have been a big deal. Obama obviously dislikes people with true religious faith. He equates religion with racism. He mentions religion in the middle of a list of other things he would view as hateful. This quote also helps explain why he attended Jeremiah Wright’s church for so many years. Since he doesn’t like religion anyway, he isn’t going to mind if a false prophet distorts Christianity. Sitting in the pew served him politically, and that was all that mattered.
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:24 am 30. Bill Bradley:Evidently, “flicka,” in your reading of the HuffPo piece you missed the headline.
“Bitter” is right at the top.
What the editors did is let the blogger have her self-indulgent way with her material.
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:25 am 31. Bill Bradley:He just picked up the audio off the Net.
>Thomass:
I think your own PM contributor Zombie posted the audio on their website. You guys could have broken this.
And yeah, I love that Hill is now Right Wing… just shows that it is a catch all term for bad for lefties and has no meaning….
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:07 am
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:27 am 32. Sarge:What’s most interesting to me is that “the campaign” feels it was “blindsided by a fan”… for having let the candidate’s own words leak out. Which to my mind smacks not only of tone-deafness, but an implicitly hypocritical view of their own, and their cantidate’s, professed values as opposed to what they really think.
After all, if there were no difference between what Mr. Obama says publicly, and what he says privately, there’d be no story, would there?
Obama’s campaign appears every day to be more and more focused on keeping the truth of their cantidate’s beliefs from leaking out - - more so even than the Clinton campaign’s comparatively amateurish attempts at same.
And that’s extremely worrisome.
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:32 am 33. michaelt:“Or it may just mean that politics will become even more stage managed and less candid.”
And what was Obama doing? Saying one thing to one group and another thing to another group - how could it get more stage managed?
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:35 am 34. Shannon Love:Ratatosk,
In rural USA, (as a born and raised Appalachian) that boils down to guns, religion and tends to include a mistrust of anyone from outside the ‘community’. This isn’t surprising and its been well documented by psychologists over the years. However, apparently we damn anyone who shows that Americans behave like human beings.
You just don’t get it. People don’t mind being characterized as bible-thumping, gun-toting, “you-aint-around-from-here” yahoos. They’ve long since gotten used to that.
They viscerally object to the idea that their beliefs arise from the lack of government programs and that their beliefs are so shallow and materialistic that if the government just gave them enough money they would abandon all the ideals that Obama and other leftist find so troubling.
It’s obvious that Obama has absolutely no respect for these people on an intellectual level. He does not view them as citizen equals but rather from a crypto-marxist viewpoint as automatons programed by economic circumstance.
Nobody wants to be thought of that way.
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:35 am 35. LeatherPenguin » It’s Not About “Bitter.” It’s About the Man Saying What He Really Believes:[...] Media has an interesting story, Deep Inside ‘Bittergate’, that recounts how Zsa Zsa’s House of Preening Moonbats, who are totally in the tank for [...]
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:38 am 36. Rubicon:Just as he did with the Wright controversy, Obama initially did deny the comments. Then, again, just as he did with the Wright controversy, Obama said, “I was misquoted & what I meant to say was…. Finally, almost like the Wright controversy, Obama said, “I am sorry my comments offended, but, they are true.” (therefore, you rubes need me watching out for you & running your lives!)
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:39 am 37. Charlie (Colorado):The comments, along with Obama’s history & his politics, exposes a seriously radical leftist mentality that disdains anything that is not collectivist, socialist, leftist, or more accurately, Marxist mentality.
That attitude has been sold to the masses over the decades, & has only eventually produced serious suffering every time the average people of a nation have bought into it!
The man is a study in Marxism. His childhood adviser was a Marxist. His preacher sure sounds like one or one who embraces many socialist/Marxist ideals. The man wants America to reflect the views of the very failed states of old Russia that are still trying to rise up out of the muck & mire of that misery producing political philosophy.
Socialism has North Korea, Venezuela, the old Soviet Union, & other failed &/or failing socialist states to hold up as examples. By now, even the Chinese are abandoning many of their objections to democracy ideals (albeit at a painfully slow pace), & free markets & they are prospering because the have.
Obama made comments at a party of wealthy contributors. No big deal since ALL politicians depend on wealthy donors. It skews the process & subverts the will “of the people,” but it is also our reality.
However, he made these condescending socialist comments w/the expectation he could get away with it among his peers. Now that is patronizing! The comments are an example of how he & his cohorts have filtered out who the “real” Barack Obama is. And who he is, is not very pretty.
Faith, to those who believe, is not something one “clings to pathetically.” Faith is some-thing believers embrace in bad times for solace & in good times in thanks. Clinging implies its false. Only a leftist &/or actual non-believer would start from that premise.
Some people actually do enjoy sport shooting, hunting, & have an actual reason to carry a gun for their own protection. Its easy to say that’s what the police are for, but in reality by the time the overworked police get to the scene, many are dead already because they have no means of defense! Those people “hired” to
protect out patronizing class, also carry guns for protection of those very same patronizing people. WHY is it OK for “them” to carry guns or be protected by those who do, but us “folk” are bitter & frustrated clingers if we do? Many average people have as much training as those professional gun carrying guards do!
Additionally, the premise that just because one has an opposition view on the illegal alien issue, does not mean they are bitter, frustrated, or have an antipathy toward those who may be different from them. Perhaps, just perhaps, some actually care about our laws & recognize that by glutting America w/ slave labor rate employees, the elite greedy are also driving down wages of those bitter & frustrated folk who have to deal with the consequences of those who enable those who break laws to come here, stay here, drive here, work here, collect social services here, & commit crimes here. Not all “immigrants” do these things. Those who are serious about being actual “immigrants” probably do not. Those who actually plan to work here & return home probably do not. However, there is a large percentage of illegal aliens who have no intention to be “immigrants.” They are users & abusers of ANY society, including that of their native country.
Where illegal aliens are from is NOT the issue.
The consequences of their actions IS! And if many of those nations who want us to embrace their citizens who come to America & just want to work, those governments would simply work with our government to effectively & legally deal w/ their citizens legally rather than finance & enable them to come here illegally, stay here illegally, & game our legal systems to stay here illegally, then we may not have some of the problems we currently face!
This nation also faces serious problems with illegal drugs & many tons are crossing over our porous & virtually unprotected southern border. There are not enough BP Agents & I doubt we could hire enough. A fence would seriously impair illegal crossing activities & especially crossings by those burdened with backpacks loaded down with drugs. It would also seriously slow down crossings by any who may fit a terrorist profile. (Yes, when it comes to terrorists, I think there IS a profile & we must address it or suffer consequences.)
If Americans are frustrated, it might be because we are tired of patronizing politicians who speak one voice to us, & another altogether behind our backs. And worse, those politicians who tell us they care while they enable actions & policies whose results we see as detrimental to our national interests!
Turning our government over to someone planning billions more in “additional” taxes, plus planning on seriously reducing spending on our national defense as we face radicals who plan to destroy our country & kill as many as they can, & who plans to introduce an incredibly expensive additional cost to
“compel” Americans to join a national health care system similar to those failing in Britain & Canada (go see the large contingent of foreigners at major Americans hospitals here for treatment because the wait in their own nation would leave them dead!), plus one who wants to compel us to spend trillions (the price tag is actually totally unknown since none can even begin to determine what to do let alone how to do it), to save the planet by reducing temperatures by a half a degree F over a fifty year period, if that, simply makes NO sense at all.
We need less government intrusion, not more!
Bush has done a terrible job on a number of issues. Ironically, Bush was elected NOT as a real Republican, but as the alternative to Kerry & Gore. One of their presidencies were seen as even worse than Bush by many Americans.
McCain is not a real Republican. He is a crossover candidate. Real Republican platforms positions will never be represented to the public so long as we get compromise candidates.
The same holds true for Democrats, unless they actually do intend to drive the nation into deeper bankruptcy & give the government total control of our everyday lives. Personally, I don’t think that mentality reflects real Democrats wants & desires. But hey, I’m a conservative Christian free market Republican, so what do I know!
Heh. That thing is comparable in size to an Arleigh Burke Ægis destroyer.
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:46 am 38. workingclassguy:The layers of irony are almost too rich: Obama, speaking to a gathering of billionaires in San Francisco, has his speech transcripted and run on a website who’s prorpietrix is on a megayacht in Tahiti, and, he’s the change we’ve been waiting for? he’s the man who is going to unite “the people”?
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:46 am 39. Bill Bradley:Incidentally, folks, as someone who has been around many campaigns in both parties … They are all saying today, there but for the grace of God go I.
Politicians say all kinds of stuff when the press isn’t around or they are off the record.
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:48 am 40. Tex Taylor:These people not only don’t get it, the media elites, not only don’t get it, but refuse - you cannot talk to them about this subject without them saying about a second into the conversation, “Oh, well if you think there’s a bias, that proves you’re biased.” That’s what they think when anybody brings this up. And I said to myself, “These people are as arrogant as anybody I’ve ever run into.” ~ Bernard Goldberg
Bernie Goldberg nailed this crowd long ago…and Obama, “The Reverend” Wright, and Obama’s shameful wife are right there at the top of the list.
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:49 am 41. Bill Bradley:Actually, no.
Obama initially not only did not deny the comments, he was defiant about them.
>Rubicon:
Just as he did with the Wright controversy, Obama initially did deny the comments.
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:50 am 42. MarkJ:Word on the street is that Obama will tap the “Deliverance Kid” to be his Veep and “provide demographic balance to the ticket.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esl2NNOtHQE
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:59 am 43. iceberg:It’s too good to be true — Ariana Huffington hoist by her own petard on the Geffen yacht spending carbon miles like the enviro doesn’t exist, crying obama obama and okaying the banana skin which slipped him up…..
Apr 15, 2008 - 10:13 am 44. Rubicon:Bill Bradley… my bad. You are correct, Obama was defiant. An MSNBC commentator had said members of Obama’s campaign had come out early on saying he didn’t say that &/or was misquoted.
Apr 15, 2008 - 10:15 am 45. G-whiz:Oh what a tangled web we weave! This article is a superb illustration of the mental illness or liberal socialists.
Bill Bradley… you seem a little bitter. Not just in your apologetics for liberal socialism, thinly veiled as internet journalism, but in your follow on posts to “slick” and Gary Ogletree. You just can’t resist tossing in a little bitter, elitist condescension of your own can you?
I love how your twisted logic Mr. Bradley seeks to blame B.O.’s dilemma on Steve Schmidt “…a senior advisor to John McCain who ran Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s landslide 2006 re-election campaign, and before that the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign war room. He seized on a handful of magic words — bitter, cling, guns, religion — in the midst of Fowler’s heartfelt prose about Obama, words that cast the Democratic frontrunner as a demeaning elitist.” Nice try, but as B.O. said himself “words have meaning.”
BREAKING NEWS UPDATE!
HRPKathy makes shocking disclosure about liberal socialist “elitism!”
“They didn’t predict the political firestorm because they believe it is true. Rasmussen reports that Obama supporters agree with the remarks. Funny thing about elitism, it’s blinding to itself.”
Ratatosk goes on to say “This isn’t surprising and its been well documented by psychologists over the years.” G-Whiz agrees with Ratatosk in another context that psychologists and psychiatrists have thoroughly documented the mental disorder that millions of liberal socialists suffer from as schizophrenia and pathological lying.
Conservative Patriots tell Bill Bradley… “Deep, I know!”
Apr 15, 2008 - 10:21 am 46. Bill Bradley:Actually, it was not a gathering of billionaires in San Francisco. SF doesn’t have many billionaires. For that, you go to New York or Moscow.
It was a mostly upper middle class crowd. Some people got in for only a few hundred bucks.
Obama’s record-breaking fundraising is due primarily to small contributions on the Internet. The guy has more contributors than the entire Republican presidential field combined.
Apr 15, 2008 - 10:25 am 47. Bill Bradley:Talk about your overthinking things …
Actually, Steve Schmidt is a friend of mine and I give very good coverage to the John McCain campaign.
But if you want to divine a socialist conspiracy, you will.
I simply tell you how things happen and why. It doesn’t fit either hyperpartisan narrative.
>I love how your twisted logic Mr. Bradley seeks to blame B.O.’s dilemma on Steve Schmidt
Apr 15, 2008 - 10:28 am 48. Increase Mather:>Ratatosk
Are you serious?
Obama was not delivering a paper to the ASA on economic change and in-group/out-group sentiment in rural Pennsylvania. He was giving a campaign speech at a private fundraiser. He was trying to elicit (or cement)the support of his audience, not gain their assent to some sociological truth. He did this by flattering these wealthy and urbane elites from San Francisco. The point that Obama’s critics are making is that this piece of flattery was made at the expense of folks who live in rural America.
Now, I don’t think that there would be much of an uproar if he had merely said that rural Pennsylvanians were bitter because their region was economically depressed. Nor would Obama have angered many, perhaps, if he had merely avoided using the word “cling” when he asserted that impoverished and bitter Pennsylvanians “cling” to religion (etc.). To argue that members of a community “cling” to a belief in the face of economic adversity, and to the point that they ignore the real causes of their misery (in Obama’s view, the administrations of Bush I, Bush II, along with those of Hillary Clinton’s husband), is to say that those folks are being irrational. Irrational in the sense of suffering from “false consciousness.” Now, most folks don’t like to be called irrational. Thus, the (parlor Marxist) insult.
Another point that may be worth expressing is that part of the uproar over what Obama said is that underlying his assertions about rural Americans is a stereotype. It is a stereotype of several parts. One reason that this may be an important point is that Obama’s defenders have been excusing his remarks by focusing on the relationship between bitterness and “religion.” However, they leave out too much. It’s obvious that Obama casts his net wide: he connects bitterness to “guns” OR “religion” OR “antipathy to people who aren’t like them” OR “anti-immigrant sentiment” OR “anti-trade sentiment.” Let’s see, what do you call a person who typifies these traits? A populist-redneck? A theocratic “Christian crazy”? Whichever label you choose, it seems obvious that Obama is using a fairly common stereotype here. And, last I heard, people who live in rural areas tend to feel such stereotypes are essentially demeaning, and that to use them rude. Thus, the (Ivy League elitist) insult.
Apr 15, 2008 - 10:34 am 49. G-whiz:Apologetics, apologetics and more apologetics Mr. Bradley! You’re selling and we are NOT buying. It is very amusing though. Keep it coming!
Apr 15, 2008 - 10:35 am 50. dirigible:Great story. Both Obama and Huffington come across as clueless jerks. It sounds like they were meant for each other. But not for me. I wouldn’t touch Obama with a ten-foot ballot.
Apr 15, 2008 - 10:48 am 51. Keith_Indy:I think it’s incredibly demeaning to say people cling to their religion, or any issue to explain away their frustrations.
Although, I can see how sitting in a church for 20 years, listening to the worst of Rev. Wright, might lead him to believe that.
Has anyone asked Obama why he still “clings” to religion?
Apr 15, 2008 - 10:56 am 52. Keith_Indy:“He was trying to elicit (or cement)the support of his audience, not gain their assent to some sociological truth. He did this by flattering these wealthy and urbane elites from San Francisco. The point that Obama’s critics are making is that this piece of flattery was made at the expense of folks who live in rural America.”
Next up for Obama, a reciprocal speech where he blames problems on elite wealthy East and West coasters, who are out of touch with the average blue collar worker…
Apr 15, 2008 - 11:01 am 53. Michael McNeil:San Francisco may not have many billionaires, but Silicon Valley does, and it’s just a hop, skip and a jump down the Peninsula from S.F.
Apr 15, 2008 - 11:23 am 54. M. Simon:Bill,
Half of Obama’s money is from small donors (if what I read on the www is true).
Apr 15, 2008 - 11:27 am 55. M. Simon:Bill,
Obama’s upbringing was in a Marxist household. One of his mentors was Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).
Black Liberation Theology at the core of TUCC/Wright is politically Marxist.
Obama’s analysis of flyover country makes more sense if you think the Big O looks at the world through the eyes of a Marxist. Given his upbringing and his mentors and then his work as a “community organizer” (organize for what? - what part of the political domain uses that term?) he could very well be a Marxist at heart.
You really need to get out more.
Apr 15, 2008 - 11:42 am 56. Big Ben:Obama was not doing very well with white working class voters in the East and Mid-West even before HP post. The antenna of these good people had already tuned it to the radical chic faux socialism tendencies of the BHO revivalist crusade.
Apr 15, 2008 - 11:43 am 57. Bill Bradley:That’s a very interesting assertion. I’d be interested in seeing your evidence.
>M. Simon:
Bill,
Obama’s upbringing was in a Marxist household. One of his mentors was Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).
Apr 15, 2008 - 11:51 am 58. G-whiz:Bill Bradley – Your words too have meaning. It is overwhelmingly clear that you attempt to blame your “friend” Steve Schmidt and the Republicans for this mess. “Team McCain team swiftly blasted the magic words out through not only its own campaign apparatus but every media organ of the Republican Party. Your choice of the word “organ” is in no way edifying of your friend Steve Schmidt or Republicans who truly feel offended by these “magic words.” You then have the gall to try and pin the blame on Mayhill Fowler instead of laying it squarely where it belongs, on the golden tongue of Barack Obama.
So, you’re the objective voice of reason in this huh? “I simply tell how things happen and why.” Have you noticed, in your objectivity, how many posts here today are, in your words, “overthinking” and “hyperpartisian” simply because we do think for ourselves and hold to our fundamental belief that more government socialism is not the “change” we want in America.
Your condescending and patronizing liberal socialist attitude is more than just a bunch of stupid hayseeds divining up our kooky socialist conspiracy. We’re sick and tired of liberals like you and B.O. talking down to us and telling us we can’t run our own lives without you and your government programs. We laugh it off most of the time, but it is getting serious now. It is truly poetic justice that Mayhill Fowler and HuffPo are the ones left mired in the crap that flowed freely and gladly from the mouth of Barack Obama.
Apr 15, 2008 - 11:55 am 59. Bugs:The man has lost whatever interest I may have had in him. He’s a bigot - pure and simple. So’s Hillary, for that matter - elitist bigots, both of them. But condescending elitism is central to the Progressive philosophy. Nobody should be surprised.
This leaves me to vote for…McCain. Some choice.
Apr 15, 2008 - 12:07 pm 60. Bill Bradley:It was not a gathering of billionaires, despite what a few commenters here would like to think.
There also aren’t that many billionaires in Silicon Valley, either. There aren’t many billionaires, period. And of those there are, I bet John McCain does at least as well as Obama. Probably better.
>Michael McNeil:
San Francisco may not have many billionaires, but Silicon Valley does, and it’s just a hop, skip and a jump down the Peninsula from S.F.
Apr 15, 2008 - 11:23 am
Apr 15, 2008 - 12:10 pm 61. A. N. Pierson:I suspect that Obama is already done and that the only hope for the Democrats this year is Hillary, who is not likely to be nominated. Ferraro of course was one hundred percent correct. Obama would not have even been considered as a freshman senator had he been white. The founder of the Black Entertainment Network said the same thing today. He’s a Hillary reporter, but so what? He’s still right-and everyone knows it. Obama wasn’t ready. First came the wretched Reverend Wright from whom Obama cannot really disassociate himself because he stayed with him for Twenty Years! This alone will kill Obama in the general election. Now this elitist nonsense, showing Obama is tone death. Actually Obama is no more than a hack poll. McCain won’t have to open his mouth. Many are now whispering that McCain could clean Obama’s clock as thoroughly as Nixon cleaned McGovern’s–and more deservedly. Have you heard anyone suggest it will be the other way around? I haven’t.
Apr 15, 2008 - 12:12 pm 62. Sarah de Luca:There is no such thing as “personal space” when you are running for President. Just think back to all the stuff the press digs up for all nominees. Is there anything, good or bad, about President Bush, which hasn’t been aired over and over again? Obama, a Harvard graduate, should be smarter about these things, and so should his advisors.
Apr 15, 2008 - 12:25 pm 63. Bill Bradley:According to Matt Drudge, McCain would still prefer to run against Hillary as an easier target.
Steve Schmidt, who I’m texting with right now, is figuring how to keep hammering Obama with the elitist theme.
Hillary can’t raise the enormous dough that Obama does on the Internet with his well over one million contributors. The hatred of her on the Republican side is much more deeply ingrained. She has no appeal to independents, which is where this election will be won. The Clinton mishegass continues and deepens. And Obama is a better talker — he rescued himself on the Wright fiasco, though he still has some serious problems there — whose candidate skills keep improving.
Now every politician has learned from this incident that you have to act like the press is around even when the press isn’t around.
Still, McCain has some real advantages. He is a real expert on national security. He’s the most famous Vietnam War hero in the country. His surge strategy in Iraq was the right approach, which the White House finally adopted after years of fumbling. And even though the Republicans are extremely unpopular now, McCain, who has many years of dealing with reporters on the record, in mostly uncontrolled situations, has good combat skills and high credibility with the Scots-Irish backbone of much of the country.
Apr 15, 2008 - 12:27 pm 64. Don Jaksa:It just kills me to see that the DEMOCRATS have become the party of the elite and the REPUBLICANS have become the party of the common man.
One thing hasn’t changed though, DEMOCRATS are STILL the party of HYPOCRISY, and now their cover is blown.
All McCain has to do is keep on being the “nice guy” and he raises his hand in 2009
Do ya think Mayhill Fowler will be invited again?
Apr 15, 2008 - 12:39 pm 65. Beej:Bill Bradley
Thank you for all this background into the story. It’s been fascinating.
Apr 15, 2008 - 12:49 pm 66. Tom W.:Having lost my long-term girlfriend to a mega-wealthy, hyper-liberal, John Kerry supporting psychiatrist who lives in a sprawling mansion in San Francsico, I’m extremely bitter.
However, I didn’t buy a gun, start going to church, or turn against immigrants, minorities, and free trade.
Instead, I got the hell out of San Francisco.
The last time I was there, I was almost overcome by the fumes rising from the oceans of urine pumped out by the homeless.
I’d rather be bitter in Los Angeles than gassed to death by urine fumes in San Francisco.
Apr 15, 2008 - 12:58 pm 67. Ian S.:Bill, considering you’re writing for PJM you seem unaware of the excellent original reporting that’s been done on this by bloggers. I point specifically to this:
http://www.zombietime.com/obama_visits_billionaires_row/
$2300 a plate, at the Getty mansion, on “Billionaire’s Row”. I daresay most of the attendees were rich. And this was specifically the dinner where the famous “bitter” speech went down.
And of course McCain would prefer Hillary as an opponent in the general. If Obama gets the nomination the media will close ranks behind him and hammer McCain as a racist fossil, even the ones currently in the tank for Hillary.
Apr 15, 2008 - 12:59 pm 68. M. Simon:Bill,
There are a couple of good link at Obama is a Marxist. I have also covered it extensively at the Pajamas site: Classical Values.
Here are a few more links:
Trinity United Church of Christ
With that to start you ought to be able to Google the rest. But hey I thought you could do that with the key words I put in my comment. Any way. Glad to be of service.
Let me add that the current way in America to sell Marxism is to avoid labeling yourself as a Marxist it is toxic. That is why Obama up until now has run a value free campaign.
Apr 15, 2008 - 1:09 pm 69. M. Simon:Bill,
The blogs were on fire over this well before the McCain Campaign joined in.
Heck. Instapundit was on this almost from the beginning. You should check him hourly for the pulse of the ‘net.
Apr 15, 2008 - 1:16 pm 70. Alex, from Texas:The thing I cannot understand is that as an NRA member from a small town in Texas and a believer in a higher being that doesn’t require me to assault, kill or maim others why I’m not insulted by this elitism. I’m not…He’s right and truth be told (pun intended) I’d rather have someone running against McCain that tells the truth and deals with the consequences rather than continually say they “misspoke”.
FYI…Elitism can be defined by getting a free pass using such legal language as “It depends on what your interpretation of what ‘it’ is.” Try that in traffic court and see how far it gets you non-bitter person.
Apr 15, 2008 - 1:18 pm 71. seah:Obama Insulted All Americans when he insulted small town America.
He was wrong in his Statement, words and how he portrayed small town and rural America.
He owes us an Apology, for selling us out to The crowd in San Fransisco for Money!
Barrack does not think much of The American people and he definitely does not know us at all.
When he came back with, Yes you are bitter, and frustrated, Showed ue he is stuck up way to high on his pedestal.
Apr 15, 2008 - 1:24 pm 72. Bill Bradley:Anything that tells you it cost $2300 to get into the event is wrong. As I’ve mentioned, quite a few people got in for only a few hundred dollars.
>Ian S.:
Bill, considering you’re writing for PJM you seem unaware of the excellent original reporting that’s been done on this by bloggers. I point specifically to this:
http://www.zombietime.com/obama_visits_billionaires_row/
$2300 a plate, at the Getty mansion, on “Billionaire’s Row”. I daresay most of the attendees were rich. And this was specifically the dinner where the famous “bitter” speech went down.
And of course McCain would prefer Hillary as an opponent in the general. If Obama gets the nomination the media will close ranks behind him and hammer McCain as a racist fossil, even the ones currently in the tank for Hillary.
Apr 15, 2008 - 1:46 pm 73. Bill Bradley:Apr 15, 2008 - 12:59 pm
Thanks for the tip.
However, I know when the McCain campaign jumped on this and what they did.
>M. Simon:
Bill,
The blogs were on fire over this well before the McCain Campaign joined in.
Heck. Instapundit was on this almost from the beginning. You should check him hourly for the pulse of the ‘net.
Apr 15, 2008 - 1:48 pm 74. Bill Bradley:Apr 15, 2008 - 1:16 pm
Okay, your evidence that Obama was brought up in a Marxist household is linking to your blogging where you assert that Obama was brought up in a Marxist household.
That’s not what I meant.
>M. Simon:
Bill,
There are a couple of good link at Obama is a Marxist. I have also covered it extensively at the Pajamas site: Classical Values.
Apr 15, 2008 - 1:52 pm 75. Steven:“One top Obama hand speaks of the campaign and candidate being blindsided. Fowler was a supporter, a contributor, an activist, a blogger, not a reporter. With the event closed to the press, Obama spoke with less care than he would have otherwise had he known a reporter, of any sort, was in attendance.”
What comical phrasing — “spoke with less care.” In other words, “said what he really thought.”
Apr 15, 2008 - 2:18 pm 76. beb:When discussing a 454 ft yacht, it’s common to average up to 500. That just makes things easier.
Also, it would probably be acceptable to refer to it as “nearly 1/10 mile” or “1 1/2 football fields”.
Equally acceptable would be “almost as long as a 46 story building is high” or “nearly four times longer than the first Wright Brothers’ flight”.
Apr 15, 2008 - 2:45 pm 77. M. Simon:Alex is a Moby,
No NRA member (well the number is incredibly small if they exist at all) would be for a gun grabber like Obama.
Apr 15, 2008 - 2:57 pm 78. M. Simon:Bill,
It did not cost $2,300 to get into the event. That is how much the lady who recorded it donated to the Obama campaign. I’m not sure of time line of her donations.
Apr 15, 2008 - 3:00 pm 79. Gary Clinger:She was just on a yacht that was “going somewhere anyway”. I thought she was a global warming kool-aid guzzler.
Apr 15, 2008 - 3:02 pm 80. M. Simon:Bill,
Follow the links at the blog. I sent you to one place because it was handy. Not because all the evidence is there. You are a very bright guy. Do some research. Dig. That is supposed to be the reporters jobs isn’t it?
The Stuff is all over the net. Start with Frank Marshal Davis. Start with Black Liberation Theology.
Go deep. It is out there.
Apr 15, 2008 - 3:04 pm 81. Bill Bradley:You take what Obama said, perform a five-second rewrite on it, with pretty much the same meaning mind you, and there is no media firestorm.
Whether he is really an elitist or not, that’s a fact.
That’s what I mean by “speak with care.”
Apr 15, 2008 - 3:15 pm 82. cv:Who was it that said words have meaning?
Apr 15, 2008 - 3:41 pm 83. pch1013:Apparently the only correct response to Obama’s stereotyping of small-town Pennsylvanians is to stereotype San Franciscans.
Apr 15, 2008 - 3:43 pm 84. Bill Bradley:I know it didn’t cost $2300 to get into the Obama fundraiser. I’ve already mentioned that a couple of times. The blogger who reported that it did is wrong.
Mayhill Fowler gave her $2300 over a period of several months.
She got into the event for free, as the guest of a lower-level Obama fundraiser.
>M. Simon:
Bill,
It did not cost $2,300 to get into the event. That is how much the lady who recorded it donated to the Obama campaign. I’m not sure of time line of her donations.
Apr 15, 2008 - 3:00 pm
Apr 15, 2008 - 3:44 pm 85. Bill Bradley:Words always have meaning. And if I were able to sneak into private events with pick-a-politician, I would probably be able to find him or her saying something with some other magic words in it.
The upshot of this is that politicians are going to have to be better actors now.
>cv:
Who was it that said words have meaning?
Apr 15, 2008 - 3:41 pm
Apr 15, 2008 - 3:47 pm 86. RatPoof:“With the event closed to the press, Obama spoke with less care than he would have otherwise had he known a reporter, of any sort, was in attendance.”
That’s the whole point of the controversy. Obama spoke his true thoughts when he knew he wouldn’t get in trouble and (correctly) assumed his ideas would be nodded and agreed to by his liberal fat cat (rich people are bad, unless they vote Democrat)audience. This, as opposed to using small words and subterfuge that we racist, gun loving, bible thumping Midwesterns could understand is the reason he is being castigated.
Apr 15, 2008 - 4:08 pm 87. Bill Bradley:That’s your whole point of the controversy.
That is a whole point of the controversy.
Another whole point of the controversy is that politicians of both parties across America are very glad this didn’t happen to them.
Now they know they have to be very careful, even at their private events.
Apr 15, 2008 - 4:47 pm 88. Bill Bradley:… Incidentally, another whole point of the controversy is that you can take what Obama said, rewrite it very slightly with more careful language, and there is no media firestorm.
He’s saying essentially the same thing, as many politicians do, you may not agree with it — or you may, hearing it with different words — but we’re not having this discussion and the fact that I found out Arianna Huffington was vacationing on a giant yacht in a South Pacific paradise is of interest only to a New York gossip column.
Apr 15, 2008 - 4:52 pm 89. Louise Cate:Does anyone know if Obama donated a regular 10% of his income each year to Rev Wright’s church? If Obama did tithe regularly, would that be some measure of Obama’s commitment to Rev. Wright? If Obama did NOT tithe, what would that mean? Rev. Wright encouraged tithing and Obama went to Wright’s church for about 20 years.
Apr 15, 2008 - 4:56 pm 90. sbourg:Gee, I wonder if Huff and Geff believe in man-made global warming, while gassing around on a mansion-sized ship in the ocean? But seriously, about Obama, will any leftists or ignoramuses, see the folly of what OBAMA says?
Apr 15, 2008 - 5:00 pm 91. Laika's Last Woof:He says he’ll help rust-belt states by taxing the 1% wage-earners even MORE, and giving free health care. Does anyone wonder how in the world that would create any jobs? It won’t. The only way to create jobs is to make govt SMALLER, and reduce taxes, so that more money will circulate into productive enterprises, and job creation.
Obama would be an OBAMANATION TO THE ECONOMY!
Mayhill Fowler is a genius. She managed to smuggle the REAL Obama past the Huffington filter and deliver it wholesale to the entire world.
Apr 15, 2008 - 5:56 pm 92. beb:I’m reminded of Jon Stewart asking the Cambodia question.
Fowler deserves a Pulitzer for her watershed journalistic achievement. Bypassing the filter is supposed to be what good journalism is all about, and humble independent blogger Mayhill Fowler has scooped the pros, who even now are broadcasting her unfiltered unmasking from every tower.
One person CAN make a difference.
Mr. Bradley,
I wouldn’t characterize your column as resembling a NY Gossip Column just because you mention the yacht twice. But when rube like me reads of a gargauntuan boat being played on by the west coast elites I depend on to inform me about my oversized carbon footprint, I take notice.
Obama spoke the truth in the sense that he said what a lot of people, friends of mine included, believe about small towns. He didn’t speak a truth that holds across the country but one held by those that actually believe themselves superior to small town america. Most of those friends actually came from those small towns.
I hear such nuggets of wisdom on a regular basis but their stupidity finally becomes clear when they are voiced in an open forum. The more they are defended, the more out of touch the defenders reveal themselves to be.
Apr 15, 2008 - 6:00 pm 93. Beej:>Okay, your evidence that Obama was brought up in a Marxist household
I don’t know about his being brought up in a Marxist household, but I know I read somewhere that the friends of Obama’s mother described her as a “fellow traveler” (although not a card carrying member of any organization).
Apr 15, 2008 - 6:47 pm 94. Blogs For Victory » The Genesis of “Bittergate”:[...] 16th, 2008 at 12:13am Mark Noonan Bill Bradley over at Pajamas Media has the whole story of how Obama’s comments managed to make it on to Huffington Post, and then out to the rest of [...]
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:12 pm 95. Bill Bradley:You read somewhere that Obama’s mom was a “Marxist fellow traveler.”
Frankly, I’ve read — somewhere — all kinds of stuff about Obama and McCain. They’re the most corrupt, traitorous SOBs ever to run for president of this great country.
Anybody can write anything they want on the Internet.
Incidentally, unless Obama’s grandparents are Marxists … It doesn’t really matter, does it?
>Beej:
>Okay, your evidence that Obama was brought up in a Marxist household
I don’t know about his being brought up in a Marxist household, but I know I read somewhere that the friends of Obama’s mother described her as a “fellow traveler” (although not a card carrying member of any organization).
Apr 15, 2008 - 6:47 pm
Apr 15, 2008 - 9:13 pm 96. EckerNet.Com » Blog Archive » Lack Of Creativity Is No Defense:[...] I don’t care who started it, but this insanity has GOT to stop. I know everyone is doing it but for the sake of originality and [...]
Apr 15, 2008 - 10:15 pm 97. Campaign 2008: Update on Barack Obama and Bittergate | conservativeintelligencer.com:[...] Pajamas Media has some great reporting on Obama’s comments on Pennsylvania. Read this excerpt and consider what this says about the mindset of Obama: “And from the standpoint of Obama campaign figures, the material was gotten under false pretenses. One top Obama hand speaks of the campaign and candidate being blindsided. Fowler was a supporter, a contributor, an activist, a blogger, not a reporter. With the event closed to the press, Obama spoke with less care than he would have otherwise had he known a reporter, of any sort, was in attendance.” [...]
Apr 15, 2008 - 10:27 pm 98. Californio:Companeros! Ah Ha! Finally! Now we will have the raising of the taxes to fund education and food for the peoples. Clearly, those who have 454 ft yachts can afford, nay must SURRENDER their ill-gotten gains for the good of the people. Or Is Mr. Geffen now a “citizen of the world” and thus not subject to U.S. taxation?
Apr 16, 2008 - 1:38 am 99. Michael McNeil:Bill Bradley wrote:
It was not a gathering of billionaires, despite what a few commenters here would like to think.
There also aren’t that many billionaires in Silicon Valley, either. There aren’t many billionaires, period. And of those there are, I bet John McCain does at least as well as Obama. Probably better.
While probably in absolute numbers (such as the number of stars in the sky) there aren’t that many “billionaires” per se, I personally would adjudge the many folks with merely hundreds of millions to be quite wealthy too — and speaking of billions, according to this Washington Post article, there are five billionaires, among many lesser moguls, amongst Obama’s reported “79 bundlers.”
In the world of Presidential politics, billions (and mere hundreds of millions) are still real money.
Apr 16, 2008 - 4:09 am 100. Marie:It looks ridiculous that someone like Annie Oakly Hillary who lies at every turn and who has no concern for anyone, is so offended by the remarks of Obama. She lied everyday about her Bosnia sniper fire and it shows how untrustworthy she is. She is a phony!
Apr 16, 2008 - 5:29 am 101. Alex, from Texas:M. Simon
NRA Shooting competitions since I was nine years old. I took my concealed handgun shooting test left handed….and passed. My father is in the trap/skeet shooters hall of fame.
I’m not FOR Obama. I’m FOR a chance for a general election that has a real dialog. I honest believe that McCain v. Obama gives us a shot (another pun…sorry) at that. Hillary v. McCain that’s a joke and no one will discuss anything.
Apr 16, 2008 - 5:49 am 102. FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog » Day By Day by Chris Muir April 16, 2008:[...] Read Bill Bradley’s excellent piece over at Pajamas Media on the “inside story” of how a political, activist AND Obama supporter blogger got the drop on the Obama campaign at a private fundraisng event. [...]
Apr 16, 2008 - 6:05 am 103. TIG:What everyone seems to fail to notice, is the equal condescension Obama showed his “elitist” audience, when he referred to small town America in comparison, i.e. ’so different from you non or anti-religious, anti-gun, non-bigoted, all-embracing libs.’ Wow. See, it’s not his elitism from Harvard, it’s that he is so pompous and patronizing to everyone, all the while saying he’s inclusive and loving. And so many people would rather believe what he says about himself, than examine how he behaves.
Apr 16, 2008 - 6:49 am 104. audacity:huffing on yacht
poetical justice?!
Apr 16, 2008 - 8:12 am 105. Believer:When a man’s heart is in the right place, he can speak openly and freely with anyone.
His words are powerful with wisdom and love. They lead the hearer in the direction of what is right and good.
And his actions are not inconsistent with those words.
Apr 16, 2008 - 8:22 am 106. charlie:Obama’s strength has been in the red states and with this little statement he may have lost the cross over vote which means he looses
Apr 16, 2008 - 8:35 am 107. avgjoe:in the fall. I listened to Bill yesterday and it made me realize that Obama and Bill talk to
you while Hillory talks at you. What she says has more meaning but just isn’t heard.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
Apr 16, 2008 - 9:02 am 108. Beej:Sir Winston Churchill
>Anybody can write anything they want on the Internet.
Yeah, ditto the old media. Thus the loss of audience.
Thanks for assuming I am unable to discern a reliable source when I find it.
Apr 16, 2008 - 11:01 am 109. shef Rogers:Try this on: what Obama said is absolutely true. Rove’s demographic is fear and bitterness. Small-town America IS bitter, scared and willing to bring down the whole country as long as it annoys the liberals. Since when is telling the truth a “gaffe”?
Apr 16, 2008 - 1:28 pm 110. Sue:“And from the standpoint of Obama campaign figures, the material was gotten under false pretenses. One top Obama hand speaks of the campaign and candidate being blindsided. Fowler was a supporter, a contributor, an activist, a blogger, not a reporter. With the event closed to the press, Obama spoke with less care than he would have otherwise had he known a reporter, of any sort, was in attendance.”
Welcome to Bill Clinton’s world! What a bunch of whiners. They’re fine when it’s happening to the Clintons.
Apr 16, 2008 - 3:18 pm 111. Sue:Read this NYT interview with Fowler. The offense to these remarks aren’t ALL manufactured; Fowler herself was offended them:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/us/politics/14web-seelye.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
Ms. Fowler said she found his response “professorial” and judgmental toward blue-collar voters and that even though she supports him, she was “taken aback” by them.
“I’m a religious person, and I grew up poor in a very wealthy family — sometimes we didn’t have enough to eat, but my larger family was rich,” she said. Her father was a hunter. “Immediately, the remarks just really bothered me. For the first time, I realized he is an elitist.”
She also knew they could hurt him, so at first, she didn’t tell anybody about them.
Apr 16, 2008 - 3:32 pm 112. Tom the Redhunter:Note to clueless libs: The offending word is not “bitter” but “cling”
We on the right get that people can be bitter if they believe that politicians ignore them.
But it’s the “they cling to guns or religion… as a way to explain their frustrations.” bit that’s annoying.
In other words, to Obama the problem is that the people of middle America are too stupid to listen to him and his lib-elite friends. If they did they wouldn’t “cling” to antiquated things like religion (”opiate of the masses”) or guns.
It’s all false-consciousness stuff. Some years ago a lib named Thomas Frank: wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America” a book that essentially says the same thing; that the people of middle America are stupid and so vote on matters like guns and abortion, whereas if only they were enlightened like Frank they’d vote their “true economic interests” ie Democrat.
Apr 16, 2008 - 7:15 pm 113. FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog » links for 2008-04-17:[...] Pajamas Media » Blog Archive » Deep Inside ‘Bittergate’ Bill Bradley’s inside story on how Bitter-Gate made its way into the Huffington Post (tags: politics 2008 Barack_Obama Mayhill_Fowler) [...]
Apr 17, 2008 - 1:34 am 114. Peg C.:Anything that reveals the truths about politicians and their opinions and ideologies good and it doesn’t matter how it happens. These people have become the newest “lowest of the low,” and we need to know what we’re getting. This latest flap is a godsend.
The arrogance, hubris and hypocrisy are breathtaking. I grew up lefty in Brentwood; I’m now a righty in upstate NY. I know these people and am glad to be done with them. Huffington, Brentwood lefty, she with her miserable accent flapping over OUR carbon footprints while she privately jets around the world and parties on 454 ft. billionaires’ yachts (they also lecture us about OUR carbon footprints), totally blows the control she might have had over the release of incendiary blabberings to other billionaires by her socialist candidate of choice. Does it get any better than this? Only when listening to Rush cover it (which I wouldn’t miss for anything).
This new media, ya gotta love it. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Apr 17, 2008 - 6:01 am 115. Thom:RE:Ratatosk
I would not argue you feel clingy and ’scared’ but to say that is just the way it is and Obama is right is just mistaken. I know many small town people most welcoming of strangers and have the faith of steel that no one is going to shake by fearmongering. Do you believe Obama on not taking any oil money? Shame on you if you haven’t studied how he might as well be lying about that, too. He plays with wording hoping rural voters don’t catch on. I am not sure why the urban sophisticated folks are easily taken in by it and he doesn’t have to worry about them.
Apr 17, 2008 - 6:18 pm 116. John S.:——————————————————————————–
The Bad Company Of Barack Obama
April 13, 2008
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(National Review Online) This column was written by Andrew McCarthy
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Why is Barack Obama so comfortable around people who so despise America and its allies? Maybe it’s because they’re so comfortable around him.
He presents as the transcendent agent of “change.” Sounds platitudinous, but it’s really quite strategically vaporous. Sen. Obama is loath to get into the details of how we should change, and, as the media’s Chosen One, he hasn’t had to.
But he’s not, as some hopefully dismiss him, a charismatic lightweight with a gift for sparkling the same old vapid cant. Judging from the company he chooses to keep, Obama’s change would radically alter this country. He eschews detail because most Americans don’t believe we’re a racist, heartless, imperialist cesspool of exploitation. The details would be disqualifying.
MICHELLE
So, instead, we get glimpses. The most profound influence in his life, his wife Michelle, is notoriously less circumspect than her careful husband about where she’s coming from. Her college thesis, which Princeton tried to keep under lock and key, testifies to a race-obsessed worldview. She may have refined it, but she’s never grown out of it.
After four years at one of America’s most esteemed academic institutions, Michelle recoiled at the thought of “further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.” That the sky has been the limit for her, that she has managed to ride the “periphery” from Princeton to Harvard Law School, to one of the country’s top law firms, and to a plethora of prestigious institutional positions, has not much altered her perspective. Through the windows of her mansion on Chicago’s south side, American society still appears as a caste system.
The United States, she says, is “just downright mean.” Never, prior to her husband’s presidential run, had she had a reason to feel proud of it, she told a campaign throng. But by last November, with Barack’s pursuit of the brass ring catching momentum, she suddenly got plenty proud. And confident: so much so that she was moved to tell MSNBC, “Black America will wake up and get it” — unite and carry him over the finish line.
THE REV. WRIGHT
Years earlier, the Obamas had gravitated to the baleful Rev. Jeremiah Wright, an unapologetic racist and hard Left firebrand. They were comfortable with him — and he with them.
By the senator’s own account, Wright is the inspiration for his memoir, The Audacity of Hope — the title is cribbed from a Wright sermon (“The Audacity to Hope”). For Michelle, who had written that a racial “separationist” would have a better understanding of American blacks than “an integrationist who is ignorant to their plight,” Wright’s Trinity Church mission statement had to resonate, right from its opening declaration:
We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian… Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain ‘true to our native land,’ the mother continent, the cradle of civilization.
Rev. Wright inspired his congregation — of which the Obamas were 20-year members — with “black liberation theology.” The doctrine is itself the inspiration of James Hal Cone, a professor of “Systematic Theology” at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Cone is also the author of several books, which a tendentious Wright urged Sean Hannity to read during a recent interview.
It’s a useful suggestion. For example, there is Cone’s 1969 opus, Black Theology and Black Power, in which he helpfully explains:
Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community…. Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.
Black liberation theology, as Wright has elaborated, is closely aligned with the “liberation theology” of Nicaragua during the seventies and eighties: i.e., the doctrine that catalyzed Marxist revolutionaries. It spurred an unabashedly Leftist movement that emphasized, you guessed it, the crying need for “change” — as George Russell aptly described it in a 2001 Time magazine analysis, “social change in the process of spiritual improvement.”
It is this same drive for upheaval, for supplanting a political order which purportedly treats blacks as “less than human,” that impelled Wright’s plea for God to “damn America.” In the oppression narrative, the murder of 3000 Americans on 9/11 isn’t terrorism but social justice. America, after all, had it coming. For Wright, it was “chickens coming home to roost.” Indeed, Wright sometimes prefers to call our country “the U.S. of KKK A” — a grotesque sentiment which, we shall see, is shared by others with whom the Obamas choose to associate themselves.
For their part, the Obamas couldn’t get enough of Wright. Barack and Michelle had him marry them. They chose him to baptize their children, who were routinely exposed to Wright’s race-baiting bombast.
Obama and his supporters brusquely dismiss the drawing of sensible inferences from these gestures of admiration as “guilt by association.” In point of fact, though, the Obamas didn’t just associate with Wright. They subsidized him to the tune of over $20,000 — not exactly chump change from a couple without great means or any history of philanthropy to speak of. And until recent public attention to the pastor’s noxious rants threatened to derail his White House bid, Sen. Obama kept Wright officially on board as part of his campaign’s “African American Religious Leadership Committee.”
BILL AYERS AND BERNADINE DOHRN
With this as background, is it really all that startling that Sen. Obama enjoys a friendly relationship with Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, a pair of terrorists?
I want to be clear here: Not terrorist sympathizers. Terrorists.
The mainstream media, in their zeal to elect a Democrat, are assiduously airbrushing Ayers: “an aging lefty with a foolish past,” as the Chicago Sun-Times has so delicately put it. In fact, it is the press that is rife with foolish, aging lefties. Ayers, by contrast, is an unapologetic terrorist with a savage past — one who beat the system he so reviles when, after his years of fugitivity, terrorism charges were dropped due to government surveillance violations. He’s “guilty as sin,” by his own concession, but “free as a bird.”
Ayers didn’t just carry a sign outside the Pentagon on May 19, 1972. He bombed it. As his memoir gleefully recalled, “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”
Whether Pentagon bombing day was more or less ideal than other days, when he, Dohrn and their Weathermen comrades bombed the U.S. Capitol, the State Department, and sundry banks, police stations and courthouses, Ayers does not say. But on each occasion, there was surely optimism that the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.
There were lots of bombs. There is no remorse. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” he told the New York Times in 2001, sorry only that he and the others “didn’t do enough.” Like what? We can’t be sure, though National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg recounts Ayers’s sentiments back in the day: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.”
Ayers and Dohrn have done the actual dirty work of terror, while Jeremiah Wright draws the line at waving pom-poms. But the prism through which they assay the dirty work is precisely the same: America has it coming.
For them, that makes all the difference. It’s not terror, just chickens coming home to roost. “Terrorists destroy randomly,” Ayers rationalizes with nauseating arrogance, “while our actions bore … the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate.” Right. As her companion Discover the Networks profile illustrates, Dohrn now goes even further: insisting their bombings weren’t terrorist acts at all: “We rejected terrorism. We were careful not to hurt anybody.”
Maybe she’s forgotten the “bastards getting what was coming to them” part. Or maybe she’s just lying. She was, we can be confident, something less than a model of compassion back then — like at the Weathermen “War Council” meeting in 1969, when she famously gushed over the barbaric Manson Family murders of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and three others: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”
Charming. The “War Council,” it should be noted, concluded by first condemning the United States for — what else? — its pervasive racism, then formally declaring war against what the Weathermen called “AmeriKKKa.” Rev. Wright would have understood.
It was at the Chicago home of Ayers and Dohrn that Obama, then an up-and-coming “community organizer,” had his political coming out party in 1995. Not content with this rite of passage in Lefty World — where unrepentant terrorists are regarded as progressive luminaries, still working “only to educate” — both Obamas tended to the relationship with the Ayers.
Barack Obama made a joint appearance with Bill Ayers in 1997 at a University of Chicago panel on the outrage of treating juvenile criminals as if they were, well, criminals. Obama apologists say, “So what? People appear with other people all the time.” Nice try. This panel was orchestrated by none other than Michelle Obama, then an Associate Dean of Student Services. Ayers didn’t happen to be there — he was invited by the Obamas to educate students on the question before the house: “Should a Child Ever Be Called a ‘Super Predator?’”
And here’s how the University’s press release chose to describe this would-be super predator:
William Ayers, author of A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court (Beacon Press, 1997), says “We should call a child a child. A 13-year-old who picks up a gun isn’t suddenly an adult. We have to ask other questions: How did he get the gun? Where did it come from?”
Ayers, who spent a year observing the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago, is one of four panelists who will speak on juvenile justice[.]
The other panelists included “Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama … who is working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system.” The goal was to promote change, to actuate the vision of “Chicago reformer” Jane Addams, who’d sought “the establishment of a separate court system for children which would act like a ‘kind and just parent’ for children in crisis.” Never mind the crises they’d caused the victims of their wanton murders and mayhem — the fault for those, surely, was our downright mean society.
The Ayers and Obama, meantime, kept up. There was yet another panel in 2002, Obama and Ayers waxing on “Intellectuals in Times of Crisis.” Dohrn, too, was asked to weigh in, on a panel addressing the question, “Why Do Ideas Matter?” I’m sure it was, er, wild.
RASHID KHALIDI
In the interim, Ayers and Obama had teamed up for three years on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago charitable organization. Together, they voted to donate $75,000 of the largesse they controlled to the Arab American Action Network. The AAAN was co-founded by Rashid Khalidi, a longtime supporter of Palestinian “resistance” attacks against Israel, which he openly regards as a racist, apartheid state. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, Khalidi peremptorily denies having been a PLO operative or having directed its official press agency for six years (from 1976 to 1982). There can be no gainsaying, though, that he was an influential apologist for Yasser Arafat, the terror master who spawned two Intifadas and ordered the murder of American diplomats.
In the mean, besotted United States, of course, being a terrorist, a terror apologist, or simply raging at the machine qualifies one for a cushy academic soapbox. Thus did Khalidi eventually land on his feet at the University of Chicago, where he ran in the same circles as Associate Dean Michelle Obama, Law Professor Barack Obama, University of Illinois-Chicago Education Professor Bill Ayers, and Northwestern Law Professor Bernadine Dohrn (who prepared for a career in instructing future officers of the court with a stint in federal prison for flouting a judge’s order that she testify in a grand jury investigation into the Weathermen’s infamous Brinks robbery-murders).
For Khalidi, though, greener pastures called: the opportunity to become a professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. There, he now directs Edward Said’s legacy: Columbia’s notoriously Israel-bashing Middle East Institute — though, much to the University’s chagrin, he was scratched in 2005 from a program designed educate teachers on instructing their young students about the Middle East. New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein concluded Khalidi’s splenetic meanderings mightn’t be the best model.
They didn’t faze Barack Obama, though. He was front and center with Ayers and Dohrn at a farewell bash when Khalidi left Chicago for New York. It was only right. Khalidi, after all, had hosted a fundraiser for Obama in 2000, when the latter launched an unsuccessful campaign for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. And so it goes. A few weeks ago, Khalidi told worldnetdaily.com he supports Obama’s presidential run “because he is the only candidate who has expressed sympathy for the Palestinian cause,” and because Obama has promised negotiations with Iran.
Ayres, too, provided a minor ($200) contribution to Obama, in 2001. That was the year of September 11, just a few days before the Times published its excerpt of Ayres’s remembrances of bombings past. Read the short interview and ask yourself: Could anyone, let alone someone as sophisticated as Barack Obama, chat with Bill Ayers for about 30 seconds and not know exactly where is coming from?
Could they really have been friends? Well, Ayers is virtually channeling Michelle Obama and Jeremiah Wright when he wails that American “society is not a just and fair and decent place.”
“God, what a great country,” he scoffed to the Times. “It makes me want to puke.”
Hey, right back at you there, Professor. At least that’s how most of us are likely to feel. But not Sen. Obama. And that’s why Ayers — like Khalidi and Wright and Michelle Obama, and others who know the senator well while we’ve been told precious little — sees in Barack Obama the change he’s been waiting for.
No thanks.
By Andrew McCarthy
Reprinted with permission from National Review Online.
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Apr 18, 2008 - 10:43 am 117. Michael Canzano:Feedback Terms of Service Privacy Statement
Anyone who cannot see Obama is a “White People Hating Anti Semetic Muslim Sympathizer” by now should re enroll in kindergarten.
Apr 19, 2008 - 8:05 am 118. maya:American Christian Infidel
Michael Canzano
How come no one is screaming about Sen. Obama’s association with Prof. Rashid Khlidi who is know for supporting the Arab American Action Network, In fadt his wife is president Mona Khalidi. an organizqtion that promotes the PLO.
Apr 19, 2008 - 11:48 pm 119. Laika's Last Woof:Barack Obama funded this organization with Bill ayers. Rashid Khlidi was working ith the PLO directly.
Are we insane to allow Obama to get away with this?
The Americans who care about Israel are fewer in number than those who care about condescending politicians accusing small-town Americans of loving God for want of money, so it’s the “cling to religion” comment that gets all the attention.
One might say “Bittergate” has sucked all the oxygen out of all the other Obama scandals.
Apr 20, 2008 - 2:08 pm 120. Blogs και πολιτική: το κενό που αφήνουν τα παραδοσιακά Media | NYLON:[...] Οι οικοδεσπότες του ABC, o George Stephanopoulos και ο Charles Gibson έκαναν ό,τι μπορούσαν για να μείνει η συζήτηση έξω από τα πραγματικά προβλήματα του μέσου Αμερικάνου πολίτη (εδώ το πλήρες κείμενο των ερωταπαντήσεων). Η κουβέντα στράφηκε σε ζητήματα όπως, οι γκάφες της Χίλαρυ, η υπόθεση της Βοσνίας, το πρόβλημα του Obama με τον πάστορα Jeremiah Wright, ή το Bittergate. [...]
May 4, 2008 - 12:16 am 121. Howard:Where in the Hell did this caustic obnoxious person, Arriana Huffington come from? I think it started by her getting a bunch of money from a divorce. How come she spews her distorted views with such impunity? She’s harder to listen to than Fran Dresher, and has less relevant things to say! Why isn’t there an equally powerful opposing blog site on the internet? We sure need one.
Jul 1, 2008 - 10:23 am 122. laspalmas:OMEN!!!!!!!!!!
I’m not certain what games are going down but the objective is to devide and conquer. I believe that if Obama wins the enemies of this nation will have a much better shot at sinking what is left of this great country. Anyone with a brain can see the misuse and abuse of the racial tensions to devide the people of the U.S.A. They are all playing right into the hands of our worst nightmare. Obama may be well educated but he is too full of himself and ignorant to see that or perhaps he is just another Castro, Chavez, Putin, etc. waiting to happen.
Oct 12, 2008 - 7:56 pm 123. Patriot Games Radio - BlogTalkRadio Podcasts Social Media Internet Radio » Blog Archive » More Grist for the Mill - Happy Columbus Day:[...] I never had opportunity to post on Obama’s small-town America problem. Here is its origin. [...]
Oct 13, 2008 - 9:25 am