Mid-Week Campaign Roundup (with video)

"Biden and Clinton on Women's Issues," video (32:37) (BarackObama.com):

Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton host an internet discussion on women's issues, based on questions submitted from across the country. (H/t to Crystal Ainardi)

"Ben and Jonathan on Martha Stewart," video (06:24)(Politico.com).

"Obama Uses the C-Word (excerpt)" (Al Giordano):

Obama - in a statement just put out by his campaign in response to the Fed bailout of AIG corporation - goes there:

"This crisis serves as a stark reminder of the failures of crony capitalism and an economic philosophy that sees any regulation at all as unwise and unnecessary. It's a philosophy that lets Washington lobbyists shred consumer protections and distort our economy so it works for the special interests instead of working people; a philosophy that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to the rest."

A day of important contrasts on the left: While Barack Obama slams "crony capitalism," Ralph Nader gazes narcissistically into his navel and talks to a bird (why do I have the immediate sensation that Mike Gravel's "performance art" ad team is now working for Nader?)

For those that say there's no real economic policy difference between Obama and McCain, tug on their beards murmuring "what's the deal with Al's interest in the Obama movement?," flirt with spoiler candidacies, don't see any significance in Obama's training and tendency toward community organizing (because most of them have never done it themselves, which, I'm sorry, it must be said, disqualifies some of my friends on the left from any claim to having a clue about the working class in America), and don't seem to prioritize the importance of a multi-racial movement of the kind that hasn't existed in the US for four decades, I figure they would have said the same about Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932.

'Thirty-two and the years that followed marked a paradigm shift for the American left, a time when certain tendencies of its creative class finally engaged in a conversation with the workers and for years after that listened to them and served their interests in the books, plays, songs and movies and journalism they wrote (the later McCarthyism purges in fact were aimed at breaking that historic alliance). The irony of that moment was that it took an electoral campaign and an unlikely president to catalyze that alliance.

When we hear, in 2008, a major party nominee for president at an hour of economic crisis unafraid to use the word "capitalism" critically, we can see that the American left is at just such an historic crossroads today.

"Obama: Old Boys Network = McCain Campaign Staff Meeting," video (03:54)(Jed Report):

Sep. 17, 2008 in Elko, NV.

Barack Obama