I just sent an e-mail to a guy named Bruce.  He's apparently the macher behind Floyd Brown's grotesque website, "exposeobama.com." I'm guessing many of you are aware of the site; it's been getting some attention on HuffPo and elsewhere. 

Floyd Brown, producer of the infamous Willie Horton commercial, has decided to celebrate his 20th year of sowing and exploiting racial fears by setting up a website dedicated to spreading lies about Obama.  Currently the site features a web ad accusing Obama of being--you guessed it--a secret Muslim.

I sent Bruce an e-mail, the text of which I'll share below, but I want to throw out this question to the TPM community: What is the smart layperson response to these sort of slanders?

On the one hand, calling shenanigans on the bastards seems like the right thing to do--after all, the Obama campaign itself has resolved to do just that, aggressively responding to these internet rumors.

On the other hand, these folks feed on free publicity, good or bad.  Any attention, after all, just helps them introduce their virus in the cultural bloodstream.

On the other other hand, the act of letter writing-- done either collectively or individually--probably won't do much harm, but can it do any good? Or is it just be a way for folks like us to blow off some steam? What do we hope to accomplish with this sort of action?

I'm curious as to what folks think about all this. I certainly won't discourage anyone from picking up their e-mail pen and sending a letter of their own to bruce@exposeobama.com. But I'm also happy to entertain other, potentially more effective ideas as well. 

Here's the letter I wrote.  Feel free to critique it, borrow from it, or ignore it:

Dear Sir,

Your deceptive, divisive, and sleazy tactics will not work this time. 

This
election, you'll discover that real Americans are better than that: we
are not falling for race-baiting, fear-peddling, Islamophobia, and
plain old-fashioned lies.

Your campaign will only serve to hurt McCain's campaign and damage
his credibility by undermining any of his pretensions to
high-mindedness and dignity.

Best of luck with that, you un-American hate-monger.

Sincerely,

Lumped together with Bush on an irresponsible foreign policy. Subjected to a withering speech by Obama. Embarrassed by his own statements that he'd deal with Hamas.  How could this news cycle get any worse for McCain?

Well,
How about getting booed at an NRA meeting?  McCain will be speaking at the National Rifle Association of America annual meeting in Louisville, KY, today at 4:30.  I'm hoping the microphones will pick up the sound of P.O.'d gun nuts.  Even if he does get a polite reception, prepare for him to say something foolish about gun rights that will directly contradict statements he made in the past. 

The McCain candidacy is a gift from heaven.  The man's path to the White House essentially is one long minefield--he has to navigate between an skeptical & unenthusiastic base and an appalled anti-Bush public.  And every time he has to pander to the base, they guy gets tinier and tinier...

Call it... McPocrisy?

I was just reading James Rubin's excellent WaPo Op-Ed about McCain's 2006 statements on Hamas, and this line jumped out at me:

McCain, meanwhile, is guilty of hypocrisy. I am a supporter of Hillary Clinton
and believe that she was right to say, about McCain's statement on
Hamas, "I don't think that anybody should take that seriously."
Unfortunately, the Republicans know that some people will. That's why
they say such things.

Only in a campaign fight this long and bruising, only in a primary that has so divided Democrats, could the statement "I am a supporter of Hillary Clinton and..." add credibility to a defense of Barack Obama.  If, in 2000, someone wrote an Op-Ed saying, "Even though I supported Bill Bradley in the primaries, I have to admit Al Gore is right when it comes to Social Security," people would respond, "Yeh? So? The primaries are over, and you've fallen in line. What do I care who you supported in February?"

But this time around, the animus between the two Democratic candidates and their supporters is so real and deeply felt, that when Clintonites come to the defense of Barack (or when Hillary herself does so, as she has been  doing during these last few days), that carries with it a political and cultural valence it might not have had had this thing been wrapped up months ago. 

The rank-and-file will fall in line in the end, of course. Clinton surrogates won't be foolish enough to sit on their hands during this crucial election.  But the media has invested so much in the Hillary/Barack split that the emergence of Democratic solidarity will be covered as though it were an important story.  Networks will feign surprise at this latest "twist" in the narrative:

"Amazing, Keith-- Carville and Richardson on the same stage! Both supporting Barack Obama." 

"Amazing! White people--Hillary's main constituency--seem to have shown up in droves for Obama's big rally here in Sioux City! I guess the primaries really are over!"

I can't predict exactly what sort of impact this crazy primary fight will have on the general. There are clearly both positive and negative aspects to it.  But keep your ears perked for the opening line, "Now, I am/was a die-hard Hillary supporter, but..." And keep track of how useful it is as a rhetorical tool (both as a weapon against McCain, and as a tool for promoting unity among the Democrats).  I'm curious to see how it will play.

Minutes after Senator Hillary Clinton finished her victory speech in
West Virginia, AARP Senior Fraud Defense lawyer Roberta Flume received
a panicked call from Senator John McCain.  According to Ms. Flume, the
call went as follows:



Flume: Hello?

McCain: [off-phone] Cindy, do I need to press the call button or does this thing just dial automatically?

Flume: Hello??

McCain: Hello?

Flume: Hello?

McCain: Just a second. [off-phone]  Of COURSE I plugged in the
charger! Who do you think I am, you—listen, Cindy, let’s discuss this
later—the girl’s on the phone.  Ah, sorry about that, Miss.

Flume: That’s all right.  What can I do for you, sir?

McCain: You’ve got to help me—I think I—I think I was the victim of some sort of sweepstakes scam.

Flume: OK, can you tell me a bit more about what happened? Was
this an e-mail you received, or a telephone call?  One of these
“Nigerian prince” letters?

McCain: Well, it’s like this: I keep getting these messages asking me for money, saying “We can win this!”

Flume: So, this a sham lottery that’s been contacting you?  Were you asked for your credit card information?

McCain: Let me tell you what happened.  I was watching the TV
tonight, flipping through the infomercials that me and Cindy like so
much, and I came upon one channel that looked particularly
interesting.  The speaker was telling inspirational stories—one about
an old woman who wanted to cast a vote before she died, and another one about a poor boy who sold his bicycle and toys and donated the proceeds
to a campaign.   The speaker, she said that giving her money, it’s like
an investment, and that I shouldn’t let anyone tell me it wouldn’t pay
off, because if I invest in her she’ll never give up and never stop
fighting for me, and just imagine the return on an investment like
that! I’d never have to depend on Cindy for my allowance again!  So she
gives out her internet’s website address over the air, and, naturally,
I make my way over to the AOL and type out my credit card number.  Not
a minute goes by and I get a call from Diner’s Club, telling me
I’ve exceeded my balance!  I—I don’t know what to do… They've cleaned me
out!

Flume: OK, sir, we’ve been getting a lot of these calls lately,
from other seniors who have taken in by fundraising pleas from the
Clinton campaign—

McCain: Clinton campaign??

Flume:  That is who you’re referring to, isn’t it?  Do you have the scammers’ web address?

McCain: I wrote it down, lemme see.  Ahhh... W-W-W... ...Dot...  Fuck. Yeah, it’s her. 
Flume: OK, sir.  Nothing to be alarmed about.  They’re twenty
million dollars in debt, and, predictably, they’ve been taking
advantage of society’s weakest in order to pay it off.  We can get you
your money back, I’m certain--but before we can take any action on your
behalf, I need to take down your personal information.

McCain: Sure.  My name is John, J-O-H-N, McCain, and that’s McCain with an “M.” And my credit card number is 9-6-8-0—

Flume: No credit card number necessary, sir—

McCain: ...1-1-3-2...

Flume: Mr. McCain—

McCain:  That’s SENATOR McCain, hussy!

Flume: Wait, seriously? This is Senator John McCain?

McCain: [silence]

Flume: Oh… that IS embarrassing.

[click]

If anyone doubts how difficult it will be for Obama to get the media and the rest of our decadent culture to grow the f--- up and start focusing on issues that matter, take a look at what's sharing top billing on CNN's front page with the Wright Nontroversy.


It's the fall of the Roman Empire. I'm getting an ulcer. And this is excellent news for Hillary.

Internal Memo - CONFIDENTIAL

January 2008

From: Axelrod and Plouffe, in conjunction with the Dark Crusaders.

To: Not Bill Clinton (Because if he got his hands on this, it would be political dynamite!!!)



Dear Secret Cabal of Obamabots:

As we know, January's "victory" in Iowa, while fortuitous, did not really count, because it came in the form of an elitist caucus.  Therefore, to shore up support and lend our fly-by-night campaign some measure of legitimacy, we must use every advantage at our disposal to discredit Hillary (as well as her charming and still-strikingly-good-looking husband, Bill).  And, as any freshman political science student can tell you, the only thing that's more of a "slam-dunk" electorally than running a black candidate for national office is that candidate's ability to effectively employ the fabled "The Race Card."

For those of you that don't know what the "Race Card" is, and how it is played, let me briefly explain.  Remember when Harold Ford Jr. was running for a senate seat in 2006?  Recognizing he was behind in the polls, Ford secretly orchestrated an RNC ad that hearkened back to those days in which miscegenation was a hangin' offense.  The liberal commentariat was up in arms, and public sympathy migrated from Ford's opponent to Ford himself.  By preying on white guilt--playing the "Race Card"--Harold Ford was able to manipulate the electorate, successfully losing the Tennessee senatorial election by a respectable margin.  What's more, by the time everything was over, most folks agreed that he was a fine young man.  Score!

I propose that this campaign take a similar tack.  Of course, Sen. Obama's stated aim has been to look past race and unite us as a nation, and frankly, that's adorable.  He might at first bristle at our nefarious plans, arguing that becoming pigeonholed as the "black" candidate is political suicide; that his only chance for broad electable viability would come from his specifically NOT playing the "Race Card," and that the less said about race during this campaign, the better. 

But we're smarter than that.  If we can get America thinking that the Clintons are a bunch of amoral race-baiters (even though they totally aren't duh!!!), then Obama might just have a shot at this election, even though we are bereft of ideas and the Clintons are actually the ones embody political dynamism and the one who care about the U.S. Americans for real!!!!

So here's the plan:  Right before the N.H. Primary, bribe Billy Shaheen into blabbing something about rumors of Obama's past drug use (to grease the wheels, you might consider giving him one of those "spin your own cotton candy" machines--I hear he loves those).  Later, get Bob Johnson to intimate that Obama dealt black-sounding drugs in black-sounding neighborhoods when he was a black-sounding community organizer.  I predict that through our subtle application of the Race Card, the ever-gullible MSM will think it is actually Shaheen and Johnson behind these nutty statements, and, ironically, the blowback will damage the Clintons' credibility, rather than ours!  With the exception of that cursed clear-eyed straight-shooter Sean Wilentz, the media will simply assume that it's the Clinton campaign cynically playing the race card, not us!!!!

Later, if we win South Carolina by a healthy margin (and if our Race Card strategy goes off without a hitch, that should definitely work to our benefit in the Palmetto State), then let's get some of those media-types we've got in our pocket to goad President Clinton into making the eminently reasonable comparison between Obama's win, and Jesse Jackson's mop-up job in the state twenty years earlier.  It's an innocuous comparison, to be sure--but I'll bet we can spin it into seeming somehow "racist"--as though Clinton was trying to tag Obama as a marginal "black" politician along the lines of Jesse Jackson; or that he was trying to create the impression that the votes of blacks in largely African American states were less important than the millions of white voters in the regular states. 

So, friends, those are my thoughts for now.  If this all works out as successfully as I am hoping it will, I've got some other tricks up my sleeve as well.  There's some great Muslim stuff that we can use to further embarrass the Clinton campaign, and I've heard that Geraline Ferraro has been known to let off some steam when you get her liquored up.  I'll be supplying the "Daily Breeze" offices with plenty of box wine the day she comes in for her interview.   Let's watch the fur fly, and enjoy our underhanded handiwork.  Bill Clinton--first black president? More like the first president to be rolled by a black future-president's racially cynical campaign! Awww yeah!!!!

...Get out the kitchen sink.

Call it a fixation, but everywhere I look, I am seeing Tom Buffenbarger, head of the machinists union and ham-handed Hillary supporter.

In early February, Buffenbarger made an ass of himself, effectively calling voters from Coeur D'Alene, Savannah, and East St. Louis, "latte-sipping, birkenstock-wearing, Prius-driving elitists."  In late February, he was at it again, making hay out of the Goolsbee silliness, and asserting that Hillary is the only one you can trust to be consistent and honest on NAFTA.

Now, as jdw112 has been good enough to note, Buffenbarger's aide Rick Sloan has been circulating a tip sheet for Republicans regarding Ayers and Obama that would even make Lee Atwater blush. 

Thanks to his buffoonish and divisive antics, Tom Buffenbarger may have done more than any other single HRC supporter (aside from Bill and Hillary herself), to harm the Demcrats' chances in November.

Also, he has a hilarious and irresistible name. 

Therefore, I would like to try and revive my earlier campaign to start using his name as a verb (much as Dan savage noun-ified "Santorum").  Here goes.

Buffenbarger (BUH-fen-bar'gr) verb:
1. When one Democrat tries to slime another with the label "elitist," or otherwise employ pseudo-populist divide-and-distract wedge issue  Republican politics. 
2. To engage in desperate pre-election name calling.
"I will not be Buffenbargered by someone who just came back from spending two weeks in the Hamptons."

No longer the province of one or two nutty surrogates, Bufferbargering has become official HRC campaign strategy. Now that the 109 Million Dollar Woman
is trying to tag Obama with the label "elitist," it's time to take a stand and fight back against Bufferbargering!  As a wise man once said, "This aggression will not stand, dude."

To speak out against Buffenbargering in all its nefarious forms, consider hitting "recommend." (shameless.)  And please feel free to add your own examples of Buffenbargering that you've witnessed this silly-season.

Is an idiotic debate excellent news for Hillary?
Just asking.

It's looking as though as a possible hook for tomorrow's stories maybe be the debate itself, rather than the candidates' responses (throwing one more "meta-" into the hyphen parade).  It was the "Gotcha Debate," as HuffPo is reporting.  Does the dirt rub off on Hillary, who has been jumping the shark in peddling this very same nonsense? Or does it stick to Obama,  considering the sheer volume of it lobbed at him by FoxLite and Hillary together?  I have to admit, it was a pretty low energy performance from Obama. A little piece of me dies inside every time that "flag pin" shit is brought up, and I can't help but think Obama felt the same way: "Seriously, Chuck? You're pushing the flag thing? Why do I even bother? This is just pathetic. Or, better, idiotic."

One of the biggest ironies of tonight's time-suck was that it took place in the very same hall in which Barack gave his speech on race. Remember that one? The speech where he rejected a culture of sound bites and gotchas, and appealed to the news media to actually do its job?  Regardless of the damage done or benefit to either candidate, I think we can all agree that as far as our political discourse is concerned, tonight was anything but excellent news. 

I've just finished watching tonight's Colbert Report, with a highball of vodka and Squirt brand grapefruit soda at my side.  And may I just be the first to say: Michelle Obama is a fox.

Goodnight, all.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Democratic Party treats its losing
candidates badly.  This is a debatable point, but there are a number of
examples that seem to back it up: Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry-- all thrown
on the scrap heap, all doomed to irrelevance.  Same thing goes for Dems
that lose the contest for their party's nomination. Howard Dean and
Gary Hart--good guys who were made into the butt of jokes before they
could work their way back to respectability.

Now Hillary, the current presumptive non-inee (tm) seems to be doing
everything she can to diminish her stature and make a joke of her
legacy even before she drops out.

So, How can Hillary stop the hemorrhaging?  How can she become a respected
party leader again once she is out of the running?  Perhaps it would be
instructive to look at two leaders who have ended their races with
dignity intact for advice. 

Bill Richardson and Al Gore have bowed out of their respective contests
yet remain party leaders.  So, what separates the Gores of this world
from the Dukaki? The answer should be obvious.  If Hillary is to
regain respectability after dropping out, she would be wise to to take
a tip from these two statesmen and allow for a nice, leisurely
"decompression period" (in Richardson's words).  The Hillary that comes
back into the public eye will be rested, a little more casual, and have
that certain je ne sais quoi that we've come to embrace in our failed candidates. 

Et voila!

Today at Cooper Union University, Senator Obama gave an important speech on the state of the economy. You can read the transcript here.  As the New York Times reports, the speech was notable for Obama's rejection of DLC-style neoliberal economic policy and the sort of reckless deregulation that the Clinton Administration aided and abetted during the 1990s:
 

"But Mrs. Clinton said the current financial difficulties were rooted in the housing slump, while Mr. Obama took pains to cast the blame for it on a decade's long easing of government regulatory oversight.

"Mr. Obama said the housing crisis was a result of the popping of yet another large bubble that has distorted the economy during the past decade. And in each case, he said, there was a failure to pass meaningful reforms. No one doubted, he noted, the need to change the Depression-era law that separated commercial banks and investment banks. But, as Mr. Obama's aides noted in handouts supporting the speech, the banking and insurance industries spent more than $300 million on a successful campaign to repeal the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.

 "This new economic world, Mr. Obama said, granted far more freedom to bankers but without modernizing the regulatory framework and insisting on transparency. And the same pattern played out in the regulation of home mortgages, he said.

"'When subprime mortgage lending took a reckless and unsustainable turn,' he said, 'a patchwork quilt of regulators were unable or unwilling to protect the American people.'"

What this speech tells me is that if the state of the economy gets worse, and it almost certainly will, Obama is the only candidate with the intellectual independence and perspective to take bold, Rooseveltian chances in responding, rather than just employing Robert Rubin/Herbert Hoover-style Capitalist tinkering.  Neither McCain nor Hillary will challenge the free-market fundamentalism on which our last economic bubbles were premised.  And that's part of the reason why Obama's sloganeering about  "a new generation of leadership" is not just words: As this speech demonstrates, he is not beholden to the same ideological orthodoxies championed by Reagan and consolidated by Clinton. If we get into an economic hole that demands fresh thinking and a departure from the free-market fundamentalism that dominates the current political discourse, Obama's the only one with the capacity to apply creative solutions for digging us out. (Well, I suppose I'd trust John Edwards to dig us out too, but what can you do...)

Hillary's Kitchen Sink campaign should be called the logical fallacy
campaign. And it should make Democrats (and other thinking people)
cringe.

Remember when the HRC campaign was floating the
possibility of Obama as VP while simultaneously declaring he was not
ready to be Commander in Chief? As Obama pointed out, there was
something a bit disingenuous and silly about delivering these two
directly contradictory statements. Kinda makes you question the
sincerity of the message. And the candidate.

Something similar is afoot this week.

On
one hand, we have Hillary banging the disenfranchisement drum,
saying--in what could become a self-fulfilling prophecy if she keeps up
the beat--that Florida and Michigan's Democrats might not vote for the
candidate that 'disenfranchised' them. And then there's Penn and
Wolfson and the rest of Team Embarrassing declaring that caucuses are
undemocratic and, by implication, illegitimate.

On the other hand, Hillary keeps pushing the idea that "every delegate with very few exceptions is free to make up his or her
mind however they choose. We talk a lot about so-called pledged
delegates, but every delegate is expected to exercise independent
judgment."

OK. So.

Caucuses are undemocratic, but disregarding the results of primaries and caucuses isn't.

"Disenfranchisement"
is unacceptable to the Clinton campaign when they stand to gain from a
re-vote, but it's A-OK when it comes to poaching delegates won by Obama
in previously-held contests.

This isn't hypocrisy. Hypocrisy,
"the homage that vice pays to virtue," is an almost universal trait,
and that's nowhere more true than in politics. Certainly you'll find
evidence of hypocrisy within the Obama campaign. But what the HRC
campaign is engaged in is different than hypocrisy and more corrosive.
They are in the bullshit business. When I use the term "bullshit," I
mean it in the same way that philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined it in
his essay, "On Bullshit." To quote Wikipedia:

"Whereas the liar needs to know the truth the better to conceal it, the
bullshitter, interested solely in advancing his own agenda, has no use
for the truth. By virtue of this, Frankfurt claims, 'bullshit is a
greater enemy of the truth than lies are.'"

Does
anyone want to defend HRC's talk of delegate poaching--not from a
strictly legalistic standpoint (we know a delegate turncoat won't be
thrown in the slammer and that's really not the point here), but from
an ethical one? I obviously have my own feelings on the matter, but I'd
like to see a positive case made for the wooing of committed delegates.
It just seems sorta... shitty.

I have seen quite a few comments charging that the only way Hillary can win the nomination is to effectively destroy the Democratic party.  Tear Obama down to the point that he appears unelectable, overrule the decision of the delegates and likely popular majority, leave newly-engaged voters sitting on their hands in November-- these are the scenarios I've seen described again and again.  Indeed, I've used some of these arguments myself. But I want to try something different.  In the spirit of others who've crossed the sectarian divide on this site, I'd like to conduct a thought experiment:

HRC supporters, draw me a picture of the Denver convention, with your candidate triumphant.  Explain how she's gotten to this point, what the convention scene is like, what the Dems' prospects are for the fall, where you envision Obama in all of this.  Explain what's happened with the delegates, superdelegates, Florida, Michigan; describe the level of intra-party acrimony or harmony.  Feel free to get creative with this-- I am all for reading your imagined HRC convention speeches.  

Just one general request: please don't respond if you are just interested in scoring easy political points. There's been too much of that from both camps, and the Democratic nomination will not be won or lost on the comments section of a reader's blog on TPM.  I am hoping for a little intellectual honesty here.  Who knows? It's possible that the results of such an exercise could offer some comfort both to supporters of Hillary and Obama, and all of us who are likewise anxious about our party's prospects for the fall.

It has been nearly a month since Colin Powell hinted at the possibility of an Obama endorsement on Meet the Press.  Nearly nine months since it was first reported that Powell was advising Obama on foreign policy.  Well, if you're planning on coming forward, General Powell, now's the time. 

When you have HRC trashing Obama, recklessly asserting that either she or her good friend John McCain would make a fine Commander in Chief, a Powell endorsement would serve as quite a strong rebuke (particularly if it were paired with an apology for his role in the rush to war, but let's not get greedy here...).

Edwards, shmedwards-- this would be the endorsement that mattered.