My little politics blog

"Mom, Obama, and Me"

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-munoz2feb02,0,1138667.story

What's more, while Mr. Obama's advisers were right to think voters valued change over experience, they ignored the fact that a change candidate still has to put to rest questions about his experience if he wants voters to take a chance on him. Had they more forcefully challenged Mrs. Clinton's initial contention that she alone was ready to govern, they might not have had to spend the rest of the campaign trying to get past the idea that Mr. Obama isn't.

Good post (what the heck do you call individual blog entries? I haven't gotten the hang of that yet) from Matt Bai on the positives and negatives of Obama and Hillary accepting their "Change vs. Experience" pigeonholes at the beginning of the race:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/the-change-vs-experience-pitfall/#more-4118

I especially agreed with this:

Quote:

What's more, while Mr. Obama's advisers were right to think voters valued change over experience, they ignored the fact that a change candidate still has to put to rest questions about his experience if he wants voters to take a chance on him. Had they more forcefully challenged Mrs. Clinton's initial contention that she alone was ready to govern, they might not have had to spend the rest of the campaign trying to get past the idea that Mr. Obama isn't.

Do you know how you can tell who is a tough guy, and who isn't?

Tough guys don't need to remind you that they are tough.

Clinton's constant mantra of '35 years of experience' is a ploy to convince people that she actually has experience.

If she was really experienced, to the degree that she claims, she wouldn't need to mention it once.

For us, the choice at hand is actually quite simple. It is not about the woman candidate vs. the Black male candidate. It is about the candidate who works to dismantle the bomb, rather than drop it; the candidate who works to abolish the old paradigm of power, rather than covet and rise to its highest point; the candidate who seeks solutions and dialogue rather than retaliation and punishment.

As feminists our freedoms have been hard won and we'd like to think that we have learned from our mistakes along the way. The feminism we fought so hard for and benefited from was not to make us blind to the complexity, but to help us see beyond simple formulas and body politics.

Gutierrez, an early Obama supporter, said the Obama campaign "didn't commit'' the level of resources to capture the Latino vote that it should have.

"That is a failure of running a national campaign. The person that we came to know that is on the cover of Newsweek and national magazines many times does not get to the household table where people are dealing with how you pay the mortgage," he said.

"At least 4 out of 10 Latinos do not get their opinion of public officials from English-speaking media," he pointed out.

"I do not go out there and hear Latinos using any kind of racism against Barack Obama," Gutierrez said. "That just didn't happen. Why don't we just assume that it was a failure of the campaign to see the need to communicate."
Forced to examine our views

To prove his point, Gutierrez pointed to New Mexico, where 43 percent of the registered voters are Latino. Late Wednesday, Obama was still in a dead heat with Clinton as votes were tallied.

In pondering how difficult it has been for Obama to attract the Hispanic vote, both Rangel and Gutierrez brought up Mayor Harold Washington's primary race against Jane Byrne and Richard Daley in 1983.

"Latinos did not come out in big numbers and vote for Harold Washington in the primary," Rangel noted. "But when the general election came around, Latinos backed the Democratic nominee. I would venture if Obama wins the nomination, Latinos will come out in big numbers for Barack."

Gutierrez also noted that when Washington ran in the general election, white voters moved to vote for Republican Bernie Epton, blacks rallied for Washington, and Latinos stayed with the Democratic Party, boosting Washington's Latino tally from 10 percent to 60 percent.

"They rejected the bigotry," Gutierrez said. "Those leaders who inspire hope allow us to overcome our innate bigotry and prejudices."

That's part of Obama's crossover appeal, said George Kobitz of Covington, who drove across Lake Pontchartrain before dawn with his wife and a sign reading "Obamacan," signifying an Obama Republican. Obama has talked about trying to appeal to Republicans much the same way President Ronald Reagan garnered support from whole blocs of Democratic voters.

"I've been a Republican all my life and this Bush thing didn't go over very well. If it was just Clinton, I would stay a Republican and vote for (Arizona Sen. John) McCain, but Obama's about change," said Kobitz, who has sent several donations to Obama's campaign. "The Bush-Clinton era is over. We're sick of it."

We can't gamble every hurricane season. When I am President, we will finish building a system of levees that can withstand a 100-year storm by 2011, with the goal of expanding that protection to defend against a Category 5 storm. We also have to restore nature's barriers - the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and protect the people of the Gulf Coast.

Obama ads target both young, formerly young

Good speech at Tulane, I saw some of it live and there was at least some ad-libbing that departed from these prepared remarks:

http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/02/barack_obamas_speech.html

Lots to like but I'll semi-randomly select this:

Quote:

We can't gamble every hurricane season. When I am President, we will finish building a system of levees that can withstand a 100-year storm by 2011, with the goal of expanding that protection to defend against a Category 5 storm. We also have to restore nature's barriers - the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and protect the people of the Gulf Coast.

I became convinced of the importance of that last part after Katrina.

sozobe wrote:

Good speech at Tulane, I saw some of it live and there was at least some ad-libbing that departed from these prepared remarks:

http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/02/barack_obamas_speech.html

Lots to like but I'll semi-randomly select this:

Quote:

We can't gamble every hurricane season. When I am President, we will finish building a system of levees that can withstand a 100-year storm by 2011, with the goal of expanding that protection to defend against a Category 5 storm. We also have to restore nature's barriers - the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and protect the people of the Gulf Coast.

I became convinced of the importance of that last part after Katrina.

But that's really just so much nonsense. Cat-5 protection isn't economically viable. Katrina proved this, more than anything else. While it is true that beefed up levies would have survived that storm; had the storm struck slightly further to the west; those beefier levies would have resulted in 100 times more carnage as the storm surge filled the city like the bowl it is. Galveston is the same way… and it's no coincidence that it's also the home of two of the nations worst disasters.

While it is true that beefed up levies would have survived that storm; had the storm struck slightly further to the west; those beefier levies would have resulted in 100 times more carnage as the storm surge filled the city like the bowl it is. Galveston is the same way… and it's no coincidence that it's also the home of two of the nations worst disasters.

OCCOM BILL wrote:

While it is true that beefed up levies would have survived that storm; had the storm struck slightly further to the west; those beefier levies would have resulted in 100 times more carnage as the storm surge filled the city like the bowl it is. Galveston is the same way… and it's no coincidence that it's also the home of two of the nations worst disasters.

But that's what the part about the wetlands and marshes was about. Those areas act as buffers to the storm surge.