Trippi: "10 Days to Reach Our Goal"

Joe Trippi (email):

This is it— with 10 days left in the second quarter, we're about two-thirds of the way towards our goal of raising $9 million—double what we raised at this time in the 2004 race. And I know what you're thinking—my $25 doesn't matter for a hill of beans against all those four-figure checks rolling in to the campaigns.

And you'd be right—unless you believe there are thousands of people like you—thousands who support John Edwards' bold vision for America, and who believe that all of us together giving small change can make big change. And there are.

Now is the time when you've gotta believe that there are other people out there just like you, giving today. And just like you're counting on them to do their part, they are counting on you to do yours.

We are all counting on each other to accomplish our goal. So let's make it happen—give today.

www.johnedwards.com/action/contribute/form

This is not about out-raising our opponents in a meaningless fundraising arms race. This is about executing our plan—raising enough money to push our message in the critical early states, and building our operation around the country. When we started this campaign, we calculated that we would need to raise $40 million by the Iowa caucuses to get our day in the sun in each of the early states and win the nomination.

Right now, we're ahead of that pace—but to stay there, we need to reach $9 million by June 30th. And to do that, we need a lot of people to contribute what they can afford.

Together, we can turn a lot of small change into big change. Big change on poverty. Big change for middle-class families trying to make ends meet. Big change in Iraq. Big change on health care and halting global warming. Great things are possible—we can build one America. But we gotta believe. And we gotta believe in each other.

Our time is now. Together, let's make it happen.

Your friend,

- Joe Trippi
John Edwards for President

"Whatever It Takes: The Bloomy Switch"

Mark Green:

Michael Bloomberg's surprise renunciation of his Republican affiliation makes it now likely, based on my unique experience with him, that he will run for president as an Independent (assuming that his mayoral predecessor is not the Republican nominee) and spend $2 billion in some 30 Blue or Purple states with 350 electoral votes.

Yes I'm the Mark Green who was his 2001 general election opponent. But I do think that Bloomberg has been a largely successful mayor who's a far more likeable person than 95% of the politicians I've met on both sides of the aisle. And yes it's expedient and opportunistic that he switched from being a life-long Demcorat to running as a Republican in 2001 merely to get on the ballot for mayor...and now switches again to get in position for an Independent candidacy for president. But opportunism apparently hasn't been a fatal flaw among politicians previously.

What's the principle here, other than personal ambition? The real principle here is that Mike's a businessman whose bottom line is not party or ideology but doing whatever it takes to get from here to there. Which will be very appealing to folks dismayed by ideological partisanship in Washington.

Every successful politician relives if not replicates his/her first campaign and victory in later campaigns. In April of 2001, Bloomberg said that he'd spend up to $30 million to win -- and anything more than that would be "obscene." But when he was behind me by 20 points at $30 million, he simply opened the spigot and spent $74 million to win by 2 points.

Conclusions: the chance he runs for president, high; his chance of winning, still infinitesimal because of Electoral College math; his chance of affecting the fall campaign, significant. Which way? It depends on whether he runs on more Democratic issues (anti-Iraq, global warming, guns) or on Republican stalwarts (balanced budgets, 9/11 and terrorism) -- while obviously also doing a pox-on-both-your-houses schtick that strikes a public nerve. Since Bloomberg's no fool and utterly uninhibited by party or philosophy or donors, you've got to figure that he'll run on proven popular Democratic issues such as universal quality health care, greening America, getting out of Iraq -- and "nobody owns me."

Unlike Perot, he has an estimable public record and is no loon -- so there's the real possibility that he could beat Perot's 19% in 1992 if the anti-everything, wrong-track public mood continues. While $2 billion in 2008 dollars is some 2000% more than Perot's $65 million, it's even more than that since the mayor is likely to spend it only in states that he could be competitive in -- i.e., states like Florida, New York, New Jersey, even Maine and Wisconsin. That means that his spending presidentially could possibly approach the $100 a vote he reached in 2001. (Bloomberg's not worth the $5 billion often reported but closer to $15 billion when his majority of stock in Bloomberg Inc. is taken into account.)

Can't win in a two-party America, you say. The last 3rd party candidate to win was Lincoln, and obviously Bloomberg's no Lincoln. Yes. But. Remember, nearly everyone told him that he couldn't win in 2001...and then voters got a mailing a day in three colors, couldn't watch a Yankee game without seeing an ad an inning, saw billboards in different languages in different communities. All Mike, all day. So when people tell him he can't win, he says to himself -- where have I hard that before?

So the bottom line for Mr. Bottom Line: if he thinks he won't embarrass himself and could break 19% nationally and more than that in swing states, he runs and takes 3 votes from the Democratic nominee for every 2 votes he takes from the Republican nominee. A guy who's only book is entitled Bloomberg by Bloomberg should not be underestimated.

(Mark Green, president of Air America Radio, was the Democratic nominee for mayor against Mike Bloomberg in 2001.)

"Liberals Convene — and Air Differences Over Democrats"

NY Times (from Congressional Quarterly):

It is hard to boil down anything about the highly diverse and often fractious Democratic Party to an either/or choice.

But there appeared to be two major schools of thought at the sixth annual Take Back America conference in Washington, D.C., this week — organized by the liberal group Campaign for America’s Future and attended by a mix of 3,000 pamphlet-pushing activists, headphone-wearing bloggers and buttoned-down political pros.

In one group are the Democratic Party regulars such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, and the front-running candidates for the party’s 2008 presidential nomination, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, who were featured speakers at the conference.

Certainly characterized by the Republican opposition as liberals, these Democratic leaders hailed the party’s takeover of Congress in the 2006 elections and pledged to continue raising their voices against President George W. Bush’s policies on the Iraq war and other issues — even though the Democrats’ lack of filibuster-proof and veto-proof majorities has frustrated their ability to implement much of their agenda.

In the other camp at the conference were activists who view themselves as on the front lines of the progressive political movement — and who regard Democratic leaders as too willing to bow to Bush’s will rather than confront him.

This was evident Monday when Eli Pariser, executive director of the political action committee associated with the liberal activist organization MoveOn.org, delivered his opening remarks at the conference.

Pariser joked that he hoped he could say at the next Take Back America conference, “Okay, we’ve got America back, what do we do with it now?” To which an audience member, referring to the Democrats, exclaimed, “Take back the party!”

On Wednesday morning, Clinton spoke about the shortcomings of the U.S.-supported Iraqi government and its role in the continued violence in Iraq, saying "the American military has done its job." She was booed by some in the audience who view her as too much a centrist on the war and who never have forgiven her for voting in favor of the 2002 resolution that authorized Bush to employ military force in Iraq.

A loss of faith among the Democratic Party’s liberal base has contributed to the overall bottom-scraping job approval ratings for Congress that have been seen in some recent polls. Both the Quinnipiac University and NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey organization completed polls on June 11 that produced 23 percent positive job approval scores for the newly Democratic-controlled legislature.

“It’s hard to understand why Democratic leaders have made some of the concessions they have in the last few weeks,” Pariser said, referring to the Democratic leadership’s yielding to Bush’s veto of a timeline for withdrawal of U.S. troops that was included in a supplement spending bill for Iraq war operations.

Pointedly criticizing the Democratic leaders who participated in the conference, Pariser stated, “We should not be waiting around for Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to deliver us from conservatives.”

Pariser has not hesitated to raise the specter of electoral opposition to Democrats seen as hedging on Iraq, saying in a statement last month, “MoveOn members are asking us to consider all options for Democratic members of Congress who ran on ending the war but vote for more chaos and more troops in Iraq — including in-district advertising and recruitment of primary challengers.”

But the hardline position quickly drew a rebuke from freshman Rep. Keith Ellison, who has drawn attention as both the first African-American member of Congress from Minnesota and the first Muslim ever to serve in either the House or the Senate.

Speaking directly after Pariser, Ellison warned the activist crowd, “Don’t turn your dissatisfaction into a cannibalistic enterprise.”

Illinois Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who spoke at the session that featured Pariser and Ellison, sounded exasperated. “We have to remember that some of us in the Congress are you,” she said. “One of those people is the Speaker of the House. There’s no one who wants to end this war more than Nancy Pelosi.”

It would be a mistake, though, to suggest that disharmony ruled the day at the conference. Leaders at the gathering united behind the issues of labor rights, overhauling the nation’s energy policy, and above all ending the war in Iraq. Politicians praised grassroots organizers, and activists strained to take pictures of big-name lawmakers.

The party’s strategy, said liberal strategist Brad Woodhouse, should be to “unite Democrats, divide Republicans and isolate Bush.”

The tug between purism and pragmatism is typical of the Democratic Party, according to Paul Herrnson, director of the Center for Politics and American Citizenship at the University of Maryland.

“I think the Democratic Party, unlike the Republican Party, is very diverse and there is a constant battle among the groups,” Herrnson said. But he added that liberal activists are aware of the importance of electoral politics in advancing their ideas. “They recognize that there are two campaigns, the campaign for votes and the campaign for money,” he said. “They realize that their ability to influence elections depends on their part in these two campaigns.”

MoveOn and similar groups have been extremely influential in raising money for Democratic candidates and on behalf of progressive issues. In the 2006 election cycle, MoveOn's political action committee collected almost $28 million, spending millions of dollars on advertising campaigns in contested races.

The organizers of Take Back America say that the American electorate is moving to the left and bringing the Democratic Party with it. “What you see is that progressives are driving the national debate,” said Toby Chaudhuri, spokesman for the Campaign for America’s Future. “They are driving the debate in the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party is driving the national debate.”

But Chaudhuri conceded that the many members of progressive organizations are cautious about identifying with a political party. “To these folks, it isn’t necessarily about Democrats or Republicans, it’s about the progressive agenda,” he said.

"DIGBY REVEALED @ TAKE BACK AMERICA" (video)

Digby comes out at the "Take Back America" conference, (video 13:00). She riffs on the netroots.

Edwards and Obama Speak at the "Take Back America" Conference (videos)

Both videos are here, courtesy of Matthew Yglesias.

"Edwards Suggests Obama, Clinton Could Cost Swing States"

Iowa Independent:

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards Sunday warned Iowa voters about what he perceives as the perils of nominating a candidate who down-ticket Democrats in some parts of the nation may decline to appear with in their own campaign events.

Speaking in Carroll, Edwards made the observation after saying there are "three of us who are most likely to be the Democratic nominee."

"It's not just a question of who you like," Edwards said. "It's not just a question of whose vision you are impressed with. It's also a question of who is most likely to win the general election. It's a pretty simple thing. Who will be a stronger candidate in the general election here in the State of Iowa? Who can go to other parts of the country when we have swing candidates running for the Congress and the Senate? Is the candidate going to have to say, 'Don't come here. Don't come here and campaign with me. I can't win if you campaign with me.'"

He added later, "I think it's just a reality that I can campaign anyplace in America."

Edwards is one of the top Democratic contenders in polls and fund-raising along with U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D, N.Y., and U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

In an interview with Iowa Independent and The Carroll Daily Times Herald, Edwards strongly rejected the suggestion that his comments about being the most electable candidate in the Democratic field were a way of saying America won't vote for a black man (Obama) or woman (Clinton) without actually saying it - to a largely white, elderly rural audience in Carroll with no national media present.

"No, I think there are differences," Edwards said. "First of all, if you look at who led on the big issues that America will be faced with I came out with a universal health-care plan first. I am so far the only candidate with a truly universal health-care plan. I came out with an aggressive energy plan to deal with global warming, to transform the way we do energy."

Edwards said he's the only candidate to focus seriously on poverty, and that he's more willing to tackle substantial and potentially politically costly issues than his opponents.

About 175 people filled a Carrollton Centre banquet room heavily decorated with campaign banners and posters for a town-hall style forum with Edwards, a former U.S. senator from North Carolina and the 2004 Democratic nominee for vice president. Edwards delivered no prepared remarks and jumped right into a question-and-answer session that was dominated with domestic issues, particularly health-care.

Some members of the audience pressed Edwards on how he would combat aggressive campaign tactics from Republicans of the brand that helped sink U.S. Sen. John Kerry's Democratic presidential bid in 2004.

Edwards said he would seek to link the Republican candidate with President George W. Bush. If the North Carolinian is the nominee, and reaches a general election debate, Edwards said, he would point to his opponent and tell the audience, "This guy right here is George Bush on steroids."

The majority of Edwards' time then moved to health-care issues. Edwards has released what he terms a universal health coverage plan.

"It is aggressive," Edwards said. "I'll be the first to tell you that."

Among other things, his plan would provide for mental-health parity and mandate the use of more efficient record-keeping and preventative medicine. He would also deny patents to pharmaceutical companies for breakthrough drugs. Companies that develop such drugs would be given "cash incentives" instead, with the drugs becoming generic and therefore available to more people at lower costs, he said.

The plan is estimated to cost between $90 billion to $120 billion annually, The Associated Press and USA Today have reported.

In Carroll, Edwards said some of the money for the program would come from higher taxes on families making more than $200,000 annually.

Edwards said the plan has a focus on specific rural initiatives. For example, he would offer tuition assistance for medical students who agree to practice in underserved areas for at least five years.

"I'd do the same thing for nurses," Edwards said.

On the issue of illegal immigration, Edwards said he would support tougher controls on the border, stronger sanctions on employers who hire illegal workers and requiring immigrants to learn English. He doesn't want the system for immigration to be easy, reasoning that the nation then could end up with permanent "second class workers."

In the interview following his town-hall event Sunday night, Edwards said he is concerned about the disproportionate burden rural America is shouldering in the war in Iraq, in terms of service and casualties.

"If you're out campaigning in Iowa and rural places in America you see and hear it all the time," Edwards. "First of all, I think we should end the war in Iraq. That's the global solution."

When pressed as to whether rural America's participation in the war stems from heightened patriotism or fewer economic opportunities, Edwards said: "I think it's probably some of both."

Among the audience were some loyal Edwards supporters and others there to kick the tires of the candidates.

Lloyd DeMoss of Arcadia, 67, said he is supporting Edwards in 2008, just as he did in 2004.

"He's really tuned into the people and I thought his whole presentation here was based on allowing the folks to get next to him with their questions and respond to them rather than come in with a canned speech," DeMoss, who is retired, said. "I've seen both sides of him and this went exceptionally well."

Attorney David Bruner of Carroll, an undecided voter, said he was intrigued with Edwards' health-care plan.

"Something needs to be done in that area obviously and he's put some thought into this and he said it was his passion," said Bruner, whose father, the late Robert Bruner ran for Carroll County attorney on the same ticket once with Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Bruner said he wants to see all the candidates who come to Carroll before making a decision.

"I think it is important to see them face to face," Bruner said.

Howie P.S.: John is polling a distant third in his birth state, South Carolina.

"Blogging the AFSCME Presidential Forum"

Jonathan Singer on MyDD (excerpt):

The next candidate is Barack Obama, who appears to get the loudest response from the crowd. Obama talks about organizing 150,000 new voters in 1992 with AFSCME. Also talks about need for universal healthcare, right to unionize through cardcheck, a new energy plan and an end to the Iraq War (notes his opposition to war from the start).

Matthews first question is on how this was a bad decision, not just a badly-implemented plan. Obama lays out his case for opposing the war at the beginning. Says "we need to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in," that a phased redeployment needs to begin. "It is time for us to bring our troops home." On the next question, Obama says that the problem with this President is that he is too wedded to ideology, that the facts do not conform with his beliefs. This is as true about Iraq as it is tax cuts and the economy; increases in the stock market aren't going to lift all Americans. Matthews says that Obama sounds like Bobby Kennedy, but wonders about Obama's call to end some of those old fights. Obama says that he will fight, but we also need to win some fights, get the Independents on our side. "George W. Bush has been a good advertisement for the Democratic Party," he says. Talks about, for instance, coming together to raise fuel economy standards to 40-45 mpg, which would end need for foreign oil. But there should not be compromise on workers' rights to organize, right to education, on civil rights, on retirement rights. Matthews asks if Obama will be a Hubert Humphrey (restriction of trade) or Bill Clinton (free-trade) Democrat, and Obama says he won't want to lose like Humphrey. "I believe in trade," he says, but there need to be labor standards, environmental standards -- and standards that are enforced -- and that there needs to be a Department of Labor, not a Department of Employers. Flubs name of Employee Free Choice Act for a moment, but notes support for card check and then gets name of legislation correct.

In closing statement, Obama says he needs support of the grassroots, that he needs a movement around the country; notes large crowds, numbers of supporters. Also hits on key themes like Iraq, healthcare, etc.

Ari Berman's "Obama's Day at Labor" in The Nation paints a similar picture. Here's the text of the speech.

"Richardson criticizes rivals over Iraq stance" (with video)

MSNBC with video (from the AFSME convention this morning):

Presidential candidate Bill Richardson is accusing his Democratic rivals in the Senate of creating too many escape clauses for President Bush to leave U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely.

In a speech planned Tuesday before liberal activists, the New Mexico governor tried to differentiate himself in the primary race by stressing that he would leave "zero troops" in Iraq. He pointed out that his leading opponents have supported legislation that would leave behind an undetermined number of residual forces to train and equip Iraqi forces, among other things.

"With all due respect to my Democratic colleagues, Senators Clinton, Obama, Dodd and Biden all voted for timeline legislation that had deliberate loopholes," Richardson said in prepared remarks. "Those loopholes allow this president, or any president, to leave an undetermined number of troops in Iraq indefinitely. And this is the same legislation that former Senator Edwards says we should send back to President Bush over and over again until he signs it."

Richardson would leave a small Marine contingent behind in Iraq to protect the U.S. Embassy. But, he said, "if the embassy isn't safe, they're coming home too, along with embassy personnel."

He was among several candidates expected to address the conference organized by the Campaign For America's Future, a gathering of more than 3,000 progressive activists who are overwhelmingly opposed to the war. A year ago, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was booed at the conference for opposing a set date for pulling U.S. troops from Iraq.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama were scheduled to speak midday Tuesday. Clinton and Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich were scheduled to speak Wednesday.

Until now, Richardson has typically been less critical of his opponents, repeatedly saying that the important thing is to elect a Democrat in 2008 and proposing that the candidates sign a pledge against going negative against each other.

Richardson's new approach comes as he is moving up in polls in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, thanks to a successful television ad campaign. He still trails Clinton, Edwards and Obama in those states and is even farther behind nationally.

"Don't Forget the Unsung Candidates"

John Fout (READER ADVISORY--This author makes a reference to Howard Dean that irritates me and he fails to place both Dean and Timmy in proper context):

In 2003, Howard Dean, a little-known governor from Vermont, joined the 2004 presidential race to raise the profile of health care in the national discourse. A few well-timed comments on Iraq coupled with a revolutionary Internet strategy shoved him into an unlikely role: Democratic front-runner.

It was a monumental moment in American politics and a throwback to elections of decades ago, when candidates could come from nowhere and wind up contending for the White House. We have only to go back 33 years, when Jimmy Carter, a virtually unknown governor from Georgia, announced his candidacy for presidency, only to spend his first year on the campaign as a nonevent in the polls. After his win in the Iowa caucuses, Carter was finally recognized as a possible contender.

Carter is not alone as a long-shot Democrat who wound up in the Oval Office. According to the White House Historical Association, Franklin Pierce, a senator from New Hampshire, emerged as the Democratic nominee for president in 1852 after his name was entered as a compromise candidate on the convention's 35th ballot. Although Pierce received the Democratic nomination, his party renounced him as a failure. Pierce, a handsome man who photographed well, went on to become the 14th president of the United States.

Dean wasn't as successful and wound up a joke after his well-publicized screaming fit. One edited video turned a passionate speech to supporters into a raving rant. Today's candidates have to be reminded that the camera is always rolling.

But Dean, Carter and even the history of Pierce make me wonder which of the lesser-known presidential hopefuls will make a similar move in the 2008 election season, if any.

The last two Democratic presidents were both governors: Carter and Clinton. They shared obscure poll numbers at this point in the election cycle. Only one Democratic governor has entered the 2008 race: Bill Richardson of New Mexico.

Richardson faces a loaded presidential field with hardened campaigners -- Sen. Hillary Clinton (D., N.Y.), former senator John Edwards and a popular newcomer, Sen. Barack Obama (D., Ill.)

The best weapons for an insurgent candidate are creative campaign strategies and establishing an appeal in the base of your party. The Richardson team has been working both angles.

Richardson was the first Democratic candidate to run campaign ads in Iowa and New Hampshire. He has received attention from the media and from viewers of his ads on YouTube. Richardson's ads are cleverly done. They mimic a job interview where the governor presents his past qualifications -- one of the ads states that he's overqualified for the position -- see them for yourself.

The ads are right. Richardson remains a standout among the Democratic candidates because of his experience serving in Congress, as a diplomat, as an ambassador, as secretary of energy and as governor. No other candidate can match his varied resume. Interestingly, President Clinton named him to several of those positions.

Richardson also has announced a new book -- scheduled for release on Nov. 2. It offers an opportunity to show his range on one of the most important issues facing our country. The title explains it all: Leading by Example: How We Can Inspire an Energy and Security Revolution.

The Richardson campaign hasn't stopped there. He took an aggressive position on the war in Iraq in early May. Richardson called for Congress to exercise its powers under Article I of the Constitution to revoke the authority for the war. This de-authorization could not be vetoed by the president.

His aggressive stance got noticed. It was red meat on the liberal blogosphere, and it affected other candidates. Both Clinton and Obama voted against the Iraq troop funding bill later in May. They were in the minority: It passed the Senate, 80 to 14.

Richardson's campaign points to his move in poll numbers in New Hampshire after the debates -- from 4% to 10%. Has the breakout begun?

Aggression can backfire, however. I cringed during the recent debate in New Hampshire at one point. Speaking on Darfur, Richardson suggested: "Third, we need China, to lean on China, which has enormous leverage over Darfur. And if the Chinese don't want to do this, we say to them, maybe we won't go to the Olympics." This smacks of a "cold" war with China and another boycott made by another governor who became president -- Jimmy Carter.

Another misstep was Richardson's appearance May 27 on NBC's Meet the Press. Many observers were mesmerized by the meltdown as he ducked and ran from difficult questions from Tim Russert -- see here. Richardson seems to have survived, but is it a Dean-like foreshadowing?

Howie P.S.: The rest of the article is about Ron Paul.

"Mike Gravel - Fire"

Video, (7:41).

"Obama Calls Clinton Memo 'Dumb Mistake'"

AP:

NEWTON, Iowa - Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama on Monday said his campaign made a "dumb mistake" (1) when it circulated a memo criticizing rival Hillary Rodham Clinton's financial ties to India.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Obama disavowed the memo which carried the headline _ "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab) _ and referred to Bill and Hillary Clintons' investments in India; her fundraising among Indian-Americans; and the former president's $300,000 in speech fees from Cisco, a company that has moved U.S. jobs to India.

"It was a dumb mistake on our campaign's part and I made it clear to my staff in no uncertain terms that it was a mistake," Obama told the AP in a brief interview in which he referred to the memo as "unnecessarily caustic."

Last Thursday, Obama's campaign sent the memo to reporters, demanding that it not be attributed to their campaign. The Clinton campaign obtained the document and sent it to journalists. Since then, it has created a furor in the Indian-American community and raised questions about Obama's claims that he is above attack politics.

"It is not reflective of the long-standing relationship I have had with the Indian-American community," Obama said in the interview.

"The issue of outsourcing is a genuine and important issue but to refer to one particular country was, I think, an error and I let all of us know that we've got to be more careful about how we communicate," he said.

In a statement on his Web site, Obama said he was not aware of the contents of the memo before it was distributed. The Illinois senator said he was responsible for the mistake and the campaign had taken appropriate action "to prevent errors like this from happening in the future."

The campaign said the new policy is to ensure that senior staff will review materials before they are distributed publicly.

Obama was campaigning in Iowa on Monday. Stopping in an Iowa town rocked by the closure of a Maytag plant, he called for new efforts to create jobs and end tax subsidies for companies that shift jobs overseas.

Obama focused on economic issues during his visit to Newton, a town of about 15,000 dealing with the loss of nearly 2,000 jobs due to the closure of a Maytag plant and offices. The appliance manufacturer based in Newton was bought last year by rival Whirlpool Corp.

"While it's not possible to stop globalization in its tracks, what we can do is make sure we have a government that's looking out for our workers," Obama said. "We can do more to create a government that's creating quality jobs here in America, and we can do more to create a government that's helping workers who lose their jobs."

In Newton, Obama spoke before about 300 people and promised to increase federal grants and job training programs to communities dealing with job losses.

Howie P.S.: The New York Times headlines the story: "Obama Calls His Clinton Document ‘Screw-Up’(2). The Chicago Tribune has "Obama: India memos were "stupid." (3) Howie opinion: (1), (2), (3): Yes, Yes, Yes.

"On the Campaign Trail With Elizabeth Edwards" (with video)

NY Times, with video (2:51):

Elizabeth Edwards was holding court in the sweltering basement at the Cedar County Courthouse in Tipton, Iowa, where local Democrats fanned themselves under fluorescent light. Her husband, John Edwards, watched and winced as Mrs. Edwards quizzed her audience about what they knew about the biography of her husband, who is making his second bid for the presidency.

“How many know how many members of his family went to college before he did?” Mrs. Edwards inquired.

The correct response emerged in the form of murmured guesses from a few members of the audience: None.

Mrs. Edwards nodded approvingly, and went on to question No. 2.

“How many people know what his father did?”

Again, the correct response could be heard from a few people in the audience who recalled the stock line from Mr. Edwards’ 2004 campaign speech: Worked in a mill.

Mrs. Edwards nodded proudly, so she moved in for the final question.

“How many people know the price of his most expensive haircut?”

The room burst out in a roar of laughter. Mr. Edwards grinned, barely if gamely, at the reference at the $400 hair cut that made him the subject of some derision here.

“She’s been doing this joke all day,” Mr. Edwards said to the audience.

Mrs. Elizabeth was laughing at her husband with her audience. “I’m having fun,” she said. “How about you guys?”

Indeed she was. This was supposed to be Mr. Edwards’ big splash across Iowa this past weekend – 14 communities in three days, a signal to Iowans and the political world that he indeed views victory in this state as critical to his hopes of winning the nomination. (He lost the state by a whisker to Senator John Kerry in 2004).

But even when she wasn’t talking, Mrs. Edwards was often the center of attention. Mrs. Edwards has always been a dominant figure in Mr. Edwards’ political life; the news that she has been diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer has also made her a riveting figure in her own right, and her swing through Iowa produced moments that broke the mold of traditional behavior for political spouses.

Typically, Mrs. Edwards would introduce her husband at the campaign events with the joke about the haircut, reflecting her own keen political instincts and her role in the campaign. Who better to force feed Mr. Edwards a little humble pie, and make a few jokes at his expense, than his wife, who presumably felt she could do those things without undermining him as a person or a candidate. The introductions over, she would then sit at the side of the stage and whisper advice -- and corrections -- to Mr. Edwards when he spoke. Mr. Edwards kept one eye on his questioner, and one eye on his wife.

When he arrived for an interview Friday evening at a hotel in Des Moines, Mrs. Edwards was with him. She sat at the next table, out of camera shot and away from the microphone. Yet she was as much a presence at the interview as he was, checking him – and checking his questioner – on matters large and small..

Mr. Edwards was answering a question about the evolution of his views on foreign policy. “I have more clarity,” he was saying, “ about the specifics of particular issues that affect the rest of the world and affect America as a result, and the connectedness.”

Mr. Edwards stopped and turned nervously to his wife, looking like a student seeking approval from a teacher. “Is that a word? Connectedness?”

Mrs. Edwards nodded. “Yes,” she said.

When Mr. Edwards was asked about his increasingly aggressive stance in confronting opponents this year, he somehow sensed a rise at his side “No you can’t answer the question, Elizabeth,” he said, smiling and nodding his head and never even looking her way.

Mrs. Edwards laughed. I suggested they both answer the question

“Let me answer the question first, then I’ll be glad to let Elizabeth chime in,” he said. “She always has her own opinion.”

Mr. Edwards proceeded with a lengthy, if earnest, response in which he talked about his essentially positive nature, and said that he thought it was important in a campaign like this to point out his differences with opponents on issues like the war in Iraq and providing universal health care.

And then it was Mrs. Edwards’ turn. Her response was sharper.

“Early in that debate, Mrs. Clinton said something about basically we’re all the same about this and that wasn’t actually accurate,” she said. “They weren’t all the same and if everything all looks like it’s packaged like butter but some of it’s oleo, you know, or margarine, you’ve got to -- voters need to know what it is they’re buying.”

Mrs. Edwards broke with her husband’s motorcade soon after she arrived here on Saturday – to go shopping, he said. She smiled demurely at the end of events when, at times, more Iowa residents were gathered around her than her husband, offering her words of support and hope.

Mr. Edwards these days seems more fatigued than he did four years ago; he does not smile as often as he did during the last campaign. But there was one stirring moment Saturday afternoon at the Johnson County Fairgrounds, where Mr. Edwards was conducting a town hall meeting alone. Suddenly, he glanced across the hall to see who was walking in, and then practically rose on his feet.

“Here comes Elizabeth!” he said, in a voice that amounted to an exuberant roar. “Did you get your shopping done?”

His audience – her audience -- rose in a hail of applause, flashbulb snaps and more than a few tears.NY Times, (with video, (2:51)):
Elizabeth Edwards was holding court in the sweltering basement at the Cedar County Courthouse in Tipton, Iowa, where local Democrats fanned themselves under fluorescent light. Her husband, John Edwards, watched and winced as Mrs. Edwards quizzed her audience about what they knew about the biography of her husband, who is making his second bid for the presidency.

“How many know how many members of his family went to college before he did?” Mrs. Edwards inquired.

The correct response emerged in the form of murmured guesses from a few members of the audience: None.

Mrs. Edwards nodded approvingly, and went on to question No. 2.

“How many people know what his father did?”

Again, the correct response could be heard from a few people in the audience who recalled the stock line from Mr. Edwards’ 2004 campaign speech: Worked in a mill.

Mrs. Edwards nodded proudly, so she moved in for the final question.

“How many people know the price of his most expensive haircut?”

The room burst out in a roar of laughter. Mr. Edwards grinned, barely if gamely, at the reference at the $400 hair cut that made him the subject of some derision here.

“She’s been doing this joke all day,” Mr. Edwards said to the audience.

Mrs. Elizabeth was laughing at her husband with her audience. “I’m having fun,” she said. “How about you guys?”

Indeed she was. This was supposed to be Mr. Edwards’ big splash across Iowa this past weekend – 14 communities in three days, a signal to Iowans and the political world that he indeed views victory in this state as critical to his hopes of winning the nomination. (He lost the state by a whisker to Senator John Kerry in 2004).

But even when she wasn’t talking, Mrs. Edwards was often the center of attention. Mrs. Edwards has always been a dominant figure in Mr. Edwards’ political life; the news that she has been diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer has also made her a riveting figure in her own right, and her swing through Iowa produced moments that broke the mold of traditional behavior for political spouses.

Typically, Mrs. Edwards would introduce her husband at the campaign events with the joke about the haircut, reflecting her own keen political instincts and her role in the campaign. Who better to force feed Mr. Edwards a little humble pie, and make a few jokes at his expense, than his wife, who presumably felt she could do those things without undermining him as a person or a candidate. The introductions over, she would then sit at the side of the stage and whisper advice -- and corrections -- to Mr. Edwards when he spoke. Mr. Edwards kept one eye on his questioner, and one eye on his wife.

When he arrived for an interview Friday evening at a hotel in Des Moines, Mrs. Edwards was with him. She sat at the next table, out of camera shot and away from the microphone. Yet she was as much a presence at the interview as he was, checking him – and checking his questioner – on matters large and small..

Mr. Edwards was answering a question about the evolution of his views on foreign policy. “I have more clarity,” he was saying, “ about the specifics of particular issues that affect the rest of the world and affect America as a result, and the connectedness.”

Mr. Edwards stopped and turned nervously to his wife, looking like a student seeking approval from a teacher. “Is that a word? Connectedness?”

Mrs. Edwards nodded. “Yes,” she said.

When Mr. Edwards was asked about his increasingly aggressive stance in confronting opponents this year, he somehow sensed a rise at his side “No you can’t answer the question, Elizabeth,” he said, smiling and nodding his head and never even looking her way.

Mrs. Edwards laughed. I suggested they both answer the question

“Let me answer the question first, then I’ll be glad to let Elizabeth chime in,” he said. “She always has her own opinion.”

Mr. Edwards proceeded with a lengthy, if earnest, response in which he talked about his essentially positive nature, and said that he thought it was important in a campaign like this to point out his differences with opponents on issues like the war in Iraq and providing universal health care.

And then it was Mrs. Edwards’ turn. Her response was sharper.

“Early in that debate, Mrs. Clinton said something about basically we’re all the same about this and that wasn’t actually accurate,” she said. “They weren’t all the same and if everything all looks like it’s packaged like butter but some of it’s oleo, you know, or margarine, you’ve got to -- voters need to know what it is they’re buying.”

Mrs. Edwards broke with her husband’s motorcade soon after she arrived here on Saturday – to go shopping, he said. She smiled demurely at the end of events when, at times, more Iowa residents were gathered around her than her husband, offering her words of support and hope.

Mr. Edwards these days seems more fatigued than he did four years ago; he does not smile as often as he did during the last campaign. But there was one stirring moment Saturday afternoon at the Johnson County Fairgrounds, where Mr. Edwards was conducting a town hall meeting alone. Suddenly, he glanced across the hall to see who was walking in, and then practically rose on his feet.

“Here comes Elizabeth!” he said, in a voice that amounted to an exuberant roar. “Did you get your shopping done?”

His audience – her audience -- rose in a hail of applause, flashbulb snaps and more than a few tears.

"Richardson Is Counting on Nevada, a State He Has to Himself"

WaPo:

LAS VEGAS -- Gov. Bill Richardson has found a second home in Nevada.

The two-hour flight is not a short hop from the New Mexico governor's mansion in Santa Fe, but Richardson hopes Nevada will become a critical aspect of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"You're now important," he told a group of Las Vegas Democrats last week. "You used to not be that important."

The decision by Nevada Democrats to move their caucuses to Jan. 19, 2008, making them second after Iowa's on the party's nominating calendar, was supposed to make the state -- better known for gamblers and showgirls -- a prime destination for presidential candidates. But so far, the gregarious New Mexico governor has been the only one to make it a priority.

Richardson has had about as many events in the state as the three front-runners for the Democratic nomination have combined. The gap was illustrated starkly on Wednesday. Richardson held four events in the state, and his only competition was the wife of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Michelle, who campaigned in Las Vegas. Before Richardson spoke at a meeting of the Stonewall Democrats, a group of gay activists, a DVD was played in which Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) offered a personalized message about what she would do to defend gay rights. Richardson has one major reason to like campaigning in Nevada: He often has it all to himself.

There are many reasons the Silver State has been almost an afterthought in the presidential primary process, including an unsettled primary calendar, the traditional roles of Iowa and New Hampshire as the early-voting states, and the distance of Nevada from Washington.

When Democrats, pushed by Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, moved Nevada up on the calendar last August, officials in New Hampshire fumed about losing their status as the second state in the country to vote. So far, those officials, who had scheduled their primary for Jan. 22, have seen little to confirm their fears about losing influence to Nevada. A long list of states, including California, will hold primaries on Feb. 5, so campaigns are investing more energy than expected to prepare for a day that will be virtually a national primary.

In picking Nevada, Dean and Reid wanted to ensure that the Democratic nomination process was more diverse. A Western state that is 23 percent Latino and has high union membership seemed perfect. But one thing has been missing from the Nevada contest in the first few months of the race: candidates.

Other than holding events before or after forums that the candidates are expected to attend, Obama has made one trip to Nevada, compared with the dozens of events he has had in New Hampshire. Clinton has made one more stop than Obama, but one of her visits last month was of the kind that has defined the candidate's less-than-diligent efforts in the state. Clinton landed and held events in Las Vegas on May 30 but left before evening for what might have been her real destination: the campaign ATM that is California.

"This is probably the most attention Nevada has ever gotten in the primary cycle," said Jenny Backus, a Democratic strategist, but "they haven't made it 100 percent to the major leagues."

Aides to Clinton and Obama say it is mainly a matter of distance. Getting to Nevada simply takes a much longer flight than the other early-voting states, and it is tough to schedule a trip there when the Senate is in session.

"I don't think at the end of the day people will write off Nevada," said Bill Buck, who worked in the presidential campaigns of Vice President Al Gore and retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, and is one of several consultants the Nevada Democratic Party has hired to help run the caucuses.

"It's a little bit of a wait-and-see game to see how it turns out, but we're taking it seriously," said Steve Hildebrand, who oversees Obama's strategy in the early states. "It's very new, and all the candidates are trying to get a handle on how they campaign here."

To be sure, the candidates are investing far more in Nevada, compared with most other states and with spending in Nevada in 2004, when the state was virtually ignored in the nomination process. Former senator John Edwards (N.C.), Obama, Clinton and Richardson have installed state directors and field organizers. Nevada Democrats argue that all of this early work will help their party win a state in November 2008 that Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) lost narrowly in 2004.

The Nevada GOP seems worried about that possibility and moved its caucus up to Jan. 19, although the move happened so quietly that even some campaigns of the leading Republicans did not know until recently and have done little in the state.

Edwards, Clinton and Richardson have sought the endorsement of Oscar Goodman, the Las Vegas mayor best known for his work in the '70s as a lawyer, when he defended clients accused of being mobsters, and more recently for the martini-making class he teaches. His advice for the candidates: Pronunciation is key. The A's in "Nevada" are like the A in "cat," and the area where the state's residents don't want nuclear waste dumped is Yucca Mountain, said like "yuck" rather than "uke." Lamenting that Kerry mispronounced both in his 2004 campaign stops, Goodman said, "By the time I got him straightened out, the election was over."

Goodman is only one part of the unusual political situation that is Nevada. The state has long held caucuses, a process by which voters, rather than casting ballots as in a primary, meet and discuss the various candidates and then divide themselves into groups based on whom they support.

But Nevada, which has historically had low voter turnout in Democratic caucuses, had just one caucus in each county in 2004. Now, with much higher turnout expected, the Nevada Democratic Party will increase its number of caucus groups from 17 to 1,700.

There are obstacles to winning the state through Latino support. Not only are many Latinos in Nevada not registered to vote, but also there is no Spanish equivalent for "caucus." Party officials met with Spanish-language media in the state to figure out terms they would use to explain the voting process.

Nevada's cities are scattered, with the two biggest, Reno and Las Vegas, about eight hours apart by car. The rural communities in between are also far apart.

In Las Vegas, many people work at the casinos at night, meaning an early-morning visit from a campaign might wake them up. Richardson's campaign says there are enough casino workers that it will try to hold some events there, but Edwards aides said it would not be not worth the hassle of wading through tourists -- most of whom cannot vote in the caucuses.

"The casinos themselves are just too messy to campaign in," said Bill Hyers, Edwards's Nevada director. "To go into a casino and hand out leaflets would be a nightmare."

The candidates seem to agree on one thing: The most important person in Nevada right now is D. Taylor, the head of the state's Culinary Workers Union, which has 60,000 members. Every candidate who stops in the state for even a day seeks to meet with him.

The math in this is simple: The state has about 400,000 registered Democrats, and with caucus participation expected to be 10 to 20 percent, the backing of even half of the union members could win Nevada.

"They don't want to just see the candidates come in and kiss babies," said Pilar Weiss, the union's political director. She noted that the union's membership is 45 percent Latino, and many of those voters are closely watching the presidential hopefuls' positions on immigration.

Polls in Nevada, like those nationally, show Clinton with a double-digit lead, and she has already picked up major endorsements, including one from Reid's son, Rory, a Clark County commissioner. As in other states, her campaign has focused on making her seem like the inevitable nominee, releasing long lists of endorsements from Hispanic and black activists in the state.

Richardson says he understands Nevada -- from the problems of a dry climate to the large Latino population -- better than other candidates because of his time as New Mexico's governor. "This is a state where I must do well," Richardson said in an interview. "I've got to show some strength here."

But even Richardson says he knows where presidents are made, and at least for now, that's not anywhere near the Strip. The governor loves to catch the fights of boxer Oscar De La Hoya, but he missed the May bout at the MGM Grand because he was in New Hampshire campaigning.

"South Carolina and Nevada are players," he said. "Iowa and New Hampshire are in a class by themselves."

"Obama, as Dad"

Video, (4:39).

"Staking His Campaign on Iowa, Edwards Makes a Populist Pitch to the Left "

NY Times:

Four years ago — facing what seemed to be a certain defeat in the Iowa Democratic caucuses — John Edwards recast his presidential campaign with weeks to go before the vote, unveiling an emotionally powerful speech about poverty that he delivered relentlessly across the state. Mr. Edwards came within a few thousand votes of victory. To this day, he tells associates he would have won with another week.

This year, Mr. Edwards has picked up where he left off in 2004. He visited 14 places in Iowa in the course of three days this weekend, an itinerary reflecting just how much he has settled on this state as the place where his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination will rise or fall.

Mr. Edwards’s latest trip here offered evidence of just how much he studied the lessons of his Iowa defeat last time, though he would prefer to view it as a near victory. It also suggests the extent to which the rhythms of Iowa Democratic politics have shaped Mr. Edwards’s decidedly different candidacy this time around.

This time, he is a candidate of the left in a state marked by a strong antiwar and liberal streak, filling a vacancy created as Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have campaigned from the center. Mr. Edwards has shown a new eagerness to draw contrasts with his opponents on issues like the war in Iraq and health care, in no small part motivated by his struggle not to get lost in a field of big names. And he has gone from the boyish, easygoing one-time senator from North Carolina to a candidate displaying an urgently engaging manner as likely to seize as to charm an audience, an approach that appears to be particularly effective in the close-quarter meetings that fill his days here.

Beyond that, Mr. Edwards is seeking to quell one line of criticism of him from 2004: that he was inexperienced and intellectually light. At every opportunity, he fairly leaps to offer a detailed response to a question, intended as much to provide a contrast to other candidates as to address any concerns about his own depth.

“Here’s what I think,” Mr. Edwards proclaimed repeatedly as he answered a welter of questions throughout the day, an introductory phrase that signaled a lengthy discussion on his opposition to the war in Iraq, his call for national health care or his view of terrorism.

In an interview, Mr. Edwards said any changes observed by those who watched him last time were the product of maturity and experience, rather than any political retooling. He noted that he had spent the last two years filling potential gaps in his resume, founding a poverty center in North Carolina and traveling abroad.

“More seasoned,” Mr. Edwards said by way of self-assessment, leaning forward and squinting his eyes in the interview, between a late-afternoon jog and an early-evening fund-raiser. “I’ve done a lot of work since the last campaign. And I will say in all honesty that there clearly is some additional depth on these issues. Particularly world issues.”

Though Iowa voters who knew Mr. Edwards in 2004 are finding a different candidate on their doorsteps this time, they are struck more by what they described as his move to the left.

“It seems to be that the last time he was running, he was trying to be the candidate of the D.L.C., trying to be moderate, more centrist,” said Gordon Fischer, who was the state Democratic chairman in 2004 and has not endorsed a candidate this time. He was referring to the moderate Democratic Leadership Council.

“This time around, he’s sort of cut loose from that,” Mr. Fischer continued. “And he is outflanking Senator Obama and Senator Clinton on the left.”

For now, Mr. Edwards’s efforts seem to be paying off. Democrats across the state say he appears to have built strong support here. Mr. Edwards’s hope is that beating Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton in Iowa would slingshot him into the front of the field as the race moves across the nation, allowing him to overcome the financial and name-recognition advantage his two main rivals enjoy.

Mr. Edwards has experienced a rough few months, starting with the personal turmoil of the news that his wife, Elizabeth, had received a diagnosis of incurable cancer. It continued with critical disclosures that Democrats here said threatened to undercut his populist appeal — from his employment by a hedge fund to the $400 haircut he received that was the subject of mirthful coverage by Iowa newspapers for a month.

Mr. Edwards, his party’s vice presidential candidate in 2004, has found his candidacy overshadowed by those of Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, though he insists that causes him no distress. “I think it’s completely understandable,” he said. “You’ve got a woman running who is a very serious candidate. You have an African-American candidate running who is new and dynamic.”

He is girding for a fund-raising report later this month that many Democrats predict will show him trailing Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, a result that would very well be deflating.

A number of Democrats argued that Mr. Edwards’s shifts could provide ammunition for Democrats trying to stoke an image of Mr. Edwards, a trial lawyer by trade, as opportunistic and politically calculating.

“The problem with him is that he talks very much like a car salesman — you see what I mean?” said Rhonda Fisher, a sociology professor at Drake University, standing in the back of a auditorium after Mr. Edwards expressed sympathy to her upon learning that her son was returning for another tour of duty in Iraq.

Ms. Fisher, who said she supported Mr. Edwards last time, said the car-salesman perception of Mr. Edwards was “not fair,” but that it was prevalent enough to give voters like her pause about supporting him again out of concern that he could take the Democrats to defeat in 2008.

Mrs. Edwards accompanied Mr. Edwards for two of the days he was in Iowa, presenting a toughly affectionate foil to her husband before rapt audiences, who laughed when she joked about his $400 haircut.

She sat to the side during the interview in a Des Moines hotel, jumping in at one point when Mr. Edwards was discussing his aggressive response to Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton on the issue of the war at a debate in New Hampshire last week.

“Early in that debate, Mrs. Clinton said something about basically we’re all the same about that,” Mrs. Edwards said. “That wasn’t actually accurate. They weren’t all the same. If everything all looks likes it’s packaged like butter, and some of it’s oleo — voters need to know what they are buying.”

Mr. Edwards, in discussing his approach to the race, noted that in 2004, a major criterion for Democratic voters was whether their nominee would be a strong general election candidate. So convincing voters of one’s electability is not enough in this environment, Mr. Edwards said.

Mr. Edwards said that accounted for why he sounded like a different kind of candidate than he did in 2004. He has gone from a co-sponsor of the resolution authorizing the war in Iraq, to one of its biggest critics. “I think Congress has a responsibility to force George Bush to end this war,” he told voters in Tampa, Fla.

Paul Begala, a Democratic consultant who was a senior adviser to Mr. Clinton in 1992 and is now close to Mrs. Clinton, said: “In 2002, he sounded like General Patton. Now he sounds like Mahatma Gandhi.”

Father's Day with Sen. Jim Webb (video)

NBC News, video.

"Edwards says caucus is key to nomination"

Times-Republican (IA):

JOHNSTON — John Edwards said Friday he’s essentially banking his presidential hopes on a strong showing in Iowa’s leadoff precinct caucuses.

Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, said it will be difficult for any Democratic candidate to win the party’s nomination without faring well in Iowa.

‘‘I think that anybody who wants this nomination — not just me, but it would apply to me — if you don’t do well in Iowa it is very hard to win this nomination,’’ said Edwards. ‘‘I think John Kerry effectively won the nomination in 2004 when he won the Iowa caucuses.’’

Edwards credited Kerry with having a better understanding of the caucus’ significance. Edwards was second in 2004, a surprising finish that earned him a spot as Kerry’s running mate.

‘‘I actually give him (Kerry) credit for that,’’ said Edwards. ‘‘If you remember, he figured it out, he closed his operations everywhere else and moved everything to Iowa. I and other people didn’t do that.’’

Edwards spoke during a taping of Iowa Public Television’s ‘‘Iowa Press’’ program, airing this weekend. In the interview, he defended his low-key campaign approach, which has often drawn smaller crowds than have turned out for Democratic rivals Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

‘‘I know what it takes to campaign in Iowa,’’ said Edwards. ‘‘You can’t just go to events where there are 2,000, 3,000 people. You’ve got to get into people’s homes, you’ve got to get into smaller town and communities and you’ve got to do the work, you’ve got to do the organizing.’’

Edwards was beginning a three-day trip to Iowa, where he planned to promote a health care plan he unveiled earlier in the week. The plan would force health insurance companies to spend 85 percent of the premiums they collect on patient care.

At an event later Friday in Tama, Edwards gave his health care pitch to more than 100 people jammed into an elementary school. He called it a moral imperative to broaden health coverage.

Edwards was peppered with questions on topics ranging from women’s rights to food safety to the war in Iraq.

‘‘If you listen instead of talk, you realize that people care about more than the war and health care,’’ Edwards said.

Pressed on his views about congressional action to continue funding the war, Edwards accused Congress of knuckling under to President Bush.

‘‘They should have never have capitulated to this president,’’ Edwards said of congressional Democrats.

Edwards labeled Bush’s war on terror an abject failure.

‘‘It’s not complicated,’’ he said. ‘‘We have fewer allies and more terrorists. We are not safer.’’

"The American Left's Silly Victim Complex"

Matt Taibbi:

The biggest problem with modern American liberalism may be the word itself. There’s just something about the word, liberal, something about the way it sounds – it just hits the ear wrong. If it were an animal it would be something squirming and hairless, something that burrows maybe, with no eyes and too many legs. No child would bring home a wounded liberal and ask to keep it as a pet. More likely he would step on it, or maybe tie it to a bottle-rocket and shoot it over the railroad tracks.

The word has a chilling effect even on the people who basically agree with most of what it stands for. I myself cringe, involuntarily as it were, every time someone calls me a liberal in public. And I’m not the only one. When I called around for this article about the problems of American liberalism to various colleagues who inhabit the same world that I do – iconoclastic columnists and journalists who’ve had bylines in places like The Nation – they almost universally recoiled in horror from the topic, not wanting to be explicitly linked in public with the idea of the American left.

“Fuck that,” responded one, when I asked if he wanted to be quoted in this piece. “I’d rather talk about my genital warts. I’d rather show you pictures of my genital warts, as a matter of fact.”

“Ugh. Not sure I want to go there,” read one e-mail.

“I really wish I wasn’t associated with the left,” sighed a third.

When the people who are the public voice of a political class are afraid to even wear the party colors in public, that’s a bad sign, and it’s worth asking what the reasons are.

A lot of it, surely, has to do with the relentless abuse liberalism takes in the right-wing media, on Fox and afternoon radio, and amid the Townhall.com network of newspaper invective-hurlers. The same dynamic that makes the junior high school kid fear the word “fag” surely has many of us frightened of the word “liberal.” Mike Savage says liberalism is a mental disorder, Sean Hannity equates liberals with terrorists, Ann Coulter says that “liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole.” These people have a broad, monolithic audience whose impassioned opinions are increasingly entrenched. In the pseudo-Orwellian political landscape that is modern America, to self-identify as a liberal is almost tantamount to thoughtcrime, a dangerous admission that carries with it the very real risk of instantly and permanently alienating a good half of the population, in particular most of middle America. That reason alone makes it, in a way, wrong and cowardly to abandon liberalism and liberals. If Ann Coulter wants to call all of us fags, well, then, fine, I’m a fag. For the sake of that fight, I’ll stay a liberal till the end of time. But between you and me, between all of us on that side of things, liberalism needs to be fixed.

At a time when someone should be organizing forcefully against the war in Iraq and engaging middle America on the alarming issue of big-business occupation of the Washington power process, the American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.

It shies away from hardcore economic issues but howls endlessly about anything that sounds like a free-speech controversy, shrieking about the notorious bugbears of the post-9/11 “police state” (the Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, CARNIVORE, etc.) in a way that reveals unmistakably, to those who are paying close attention, a not-so-secret desire to be relevant and threatening enough to warrant the extralegal attention of the FBI. It sells scads of Che t-shirts ($20 at the International ANSWER online store) and has a perfected a high-handed tone of moralistic finger-wagging, but its organizational capacity is almost nil. It says a lot, but does very little.

The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it’s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position it’s in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.

And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?

Here’s the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein’s monster of incongruous parts – a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

Thus, the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans’ rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them – like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming, or the “All Things Considered” interview on NPR with the British author of Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. They haven’t yet come up with something to replace the synergy of patrician and middle-class interests that the New Deal represented.

Bernie Sanders, the new Senator from Vermont and one of the few American politicians in history to have survived publicly admitting to being a socialist, agrees that this peculiar demographic schism is a fundamental problem for the American political opposition.

“Unfortunately, today, when you talk about the ‘American left,’” he says, “as often as not you’re talking about wealthy folks who are concerned about the environment (which is enormously important) who are concerned about women’s rights (which are enormously important) and who are concerned about gay rights (which are enormously important).

“But you’re not really referring to millions of workers who have lost their jobs because of disastrous trade agreements,” he says. “You’re not talking about waitresses who are working for four bucks an hour.” As often as not, he says, you’re talking about “sophisticated people who have money.”

David Sirota, author of Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government – and How We Can Take it Back, is a guy who frequently appears on television news programs defending the “left” in TV’s typical Crossfire-style left-right rock-‘em-sock-‘em format. Like a lot of people who make their living in this world, he’s sometimes frustrated with the lack of discipline and purpose in American liberalism. And like Sanders, he worries that there is a wide chasm between the people who speak for the left and sponsor left-leaning political organizations, and the actual people they supposedly represent.

“Perhaps what the real issue is that the left is not really a grassroots movement,” he says. “You have this donor/elite class, and then you have the public . . . You have these zillionaires who are supposedly funding the progressive movement. At some point that gets to be a problem.”

Sanders agrees, saying that “where the money comes from” is definitely one of the reasons that the so-called liberals in Washington – i.e. the Democrats – tend not to get too heavily into financial issues that affect ordinary people. This basically regressive electoral formula has been a staple of the Democratic Party ever since the Walter Mondale fiasco in the mid-eighties prompted a few shrewd Washington insiders to create the notorious “pro-business” political formula of the Democratic Leadership Council, which sought to end the party’s dependence upon labor money by announcing a new willingness to sell out on financial issues in exchange for support from Wall Street. Once the DLC’s financial strategy helped get Bill Clinton elected, no one in Washington ever again bothered to question the wisdom of the political compromises it required.

Within a decade, the process was automatic – Citibank gives money to Tom Daschle, Tom Daschle crafts the hideous Bankruptcy Bill, and suddenly the Midwestern union member who was laid off in the wake of Democrat-passed NAFTA can’t even declare bankruptcy to get out from the credit card debt he incurred in his unemployment. He will now probably suck eggs for the rest of his life, paying off credit card debt year after year at a snail’s pace while working as a non-union butcher in a Wal-Mart in Butte. Royally screwed twice by the Democratic Party he voted for, he will almost certainly decide to vote Republican the first time he opens up the door to find four pimply college students wearing I READ BANNED BOOKS t-shirts taking up a collection to agitate for dolphin-safe tuna.

But money and campaign contributions aren’t the only reason “liberal“ politicians screw their voters.

“It’s also a cultural thing,” Sanders says. “A lot of these folks really don’t have a lot of contact with working-class people. They’re not comfortable with working-class people. They’re more comfortable with environmentalists, with well-educated people. And it’s their issues that matter to them.”

This is another dirty little secret of the left – the fact that, at least when it comes to per-capita income, those interminable right-wing criticisms about liberals being “elitists” are actually true. According to a 2004 Pew report, Americans who self-identify as liberals have an average annual income of $71,000 – the highest-grossing political category in America. They’re also the best-educated class, with over one in four being post-graduates.

The same is true of the political media in Washington – not just the few journalists on the left, but all of the media. Reporters in Washington of both the liberal and conservative variety tend mostly to be interested in issues that they themselves care about, and as a result they end up defining the political landscape in terms of orthodoxies that make sense to them.

“With the media, it’s like, ‘Are you pro-choice? Yes? Then you’re a liberal.’ It’s bullshit,” scoffs Sanders. The senator went on to point out that a recent Senate hearing on veterans’ issues attracted over 500 angry war veterans – and no reporters. “It’s just not their thing,” he sighs.

Progressive politicians in Washington frequently complain that the political mainstream’s abandonment of working-class issues opens the door for Republicans to seize the ignored middle-American electorate, mainly by scaring them with bugaboo images of marrying queers, godless commie academics, dirty bearded eco-terrorists, and so on.

To them, the essentially patrician structure of the political left is mostly a logistical political problem, one that can theoretically be solved, as Sanders solved it in his state, by shunning corporate campaign donors, listening to voters again, and re-emphasizing working-class issues.

But having rich college grads acting as the political representatives of the working class isn’t just bad politics. It’s also silly. And there’s probably no political movement in history that’s been sillier than the modern American left.

What makes the American left silly? Things that in a vacuum should be logical impossibilities are frighteningly common in lefty political scenes. The word “oppression” escaping, for any reason, the mouths of kids whose parents are paying 20 grand for them to go to private colleges. Academics in Priuses using the word “Amerika.” Ebonics, Fanetiks, and other such insane institutional manifestations of white guilt. Combat berets. Combat berets in conjunction with designer coffees. Combat berets in conjunction with designer coffees consumed at leisure in between conversational comparisons of America to Nazi Germany.

We all know where this stuff comes from. Anyone who’s ever been to a lefty political meeting knows the deal – the problem is the “spirit of inclusiveness” stretched to the limits of absurdity. The post-sixties dogma that everyone’s viewpoint is legitimate, everyone‘s choice about anything (lifestyle, gender, ethnicity, even class) is valid, that’s now so totally ingrained that at every single meeting, every time some yutz gets up and starts rambling about anything, no matter how ridiculous, no one ever tells him to shut the fuck up. Next thing you know, you’ve got guys on stilts wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats leading a half-million people at an anti-war rally. Why is that guy there? Because no one told him that war is a matter of life and death and that he should leave his fucking stilts at home.

Then there’s the tone problem. A hell of a lot of what the left does these days is tediously lecture middle America about how wrong it is, loudly snorting at a stubbornly unchanging litany of Republican villains. There’s a weirdly indulgent tone to all of this Bush-bashing that goes on in lefty media, a tone that’s not only annoyingly predictable in its pervasiveness, but a turnoff to people who might have tuned in to that channel in search of something else.

“I share the position of a lot of those people, and some of that feel-good Bush-bashing is okay, I guess, but also – can I get some information here?” says Christian Parenti, a journalist who frequently writes for The Nation. “I think just reporting the facts can be enormously empowering, but there’s not enough of that. That moralistic thing . . . I think it’s something that’s built deep into the culture, not just on the left but everywhere.”

But to me the biggest problem with American liberalism is that it hasn’t found a new legend for itself, one to replace the old one, which is more and more often no longer relevant. I’ve got no problem with long hair and weed and kids playing “Imagine” on acoustic guitars at peace marches. But we often make the mistake of thinking that the “revolution” of the sixties is something that rightly should continue on to today.

While it’s true that we’re still fighting against unjust wars and that there’s unfinished business on the fronts of women’s rights, civil rights, and environmental preservation, there’s no generational battle left for America’s rich kids to fight. In the sixties, college kids had to fight for their right to refuse to become bankers, soldiers, plastics executives or whatever other types of dreary establishment lifestyles their parents were demanding for them. And because they had to fight that fight, the interests of white college kids were briefly and felicitously aligned with the blacks and the migrant farm workers and the South Vietnamese, who were also victims of the same dug-in, inflexible political establishment. Long hair, tie-dye and the raised black fist all had the same general message – screw the establishment. It was a sort of Marxian perfect storm where even the children of the bourgeoisie could semi-realistically imagine themselves engaged in a class struggle.

But American college types don’t have to fight for shit anymore. Remember the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill album? Remember that song “Fight for Your Right to Party”? Well, people, that song was a joke. So was “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “And the Cradle Will Rock.” The only thing American college kids have left to fight for are the royalties for their myriad appearances in Girls Gone Wild videos. Which is why they look ridiculous parading around at peace protests in the guise of hapless victims and subjects of the Amerikan neo-Reich. Rich liberals protesting the establishment is absurd because they are the establishment; they’re just too embarrassed to admit it.

When they start embracing their position of privilege and taking responsibility for the power they already have – striving to be the leaders of society they actually are, instead of playing at being aggrieved subjects – they’ll come across as wise and patriotic citizens, not like the terminally adolescent buffoons trapped in a corny sixties daydream they often seem to be now. They’ll stop bringing puppets to marches and, more importantly, they’ll start doing more than march.

That, in sum, is why I don’t call myself a liberal. To me the word “liberalism” describes an era whose time is past, a time when a liberal was defined more by who he was fighting against – the Man – than what he was fighting for. A liberal wielding power is always going to seem a bit strange because a liberal always imagines himself in an intrepid fight against power, not holding it. I therefore prefer the word “progressive,” which describes in a neutral way a set of political values without having these class or aesthetic connotations. To me a progressive is not fighting Mom and Dad, Nixon, Bush or really any people at all, but things – political corruption, commercialism, pollution, etc. It doesn’t have that same Marxian us-versus-them connotation that liberalism still has, sometimes ridiculously. It’s about goals, not people.

In a few years it will be half a century since the 1960s began. The Baby-Boomer generation that shaped modern liberalism will soon be moving on to the nursing home, many of its battles – for civil, gay, immigrant and women’s rights, for workplace protections, and against the Vietnam war and Richard Nixon – already won. They did a lot of good things, but their fight doesn’t always make sense anymore. In any case, you can smell something new rising out of the mess in Iraq and the changed American labor market. From among the veterans of this new bad war and the refugees of the global economy, some kind of movement is bound to arise. Who knows what that will be called – but it’s safe to say it won’t be called liberalism.

Howie P.S.: Some very good points, some others and a headline that makes no sense to me.

"A New Kind of Politics Closely Resembles the Old" (UPDATED)

UPDATE: "Obama campaign rankles Indian community" (Chicago Tribune):

Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign expressed regret Friday for the "tone" used in recently disclosed campaign documents that raised questions about rival Democrat Sen. Hillary Clinton's ties to India and Indian-Americans.

The statement from Obama's campaign manager came after complaints from an Indian-American group, whose leader complained about "anti-Indian-American stereotyping" in the documents.

"There cannot be a suggestion that Indian-Americans are somehow taboo," said Sanjay Puri, chairman of the 50,000-member U.S.-India Political Action Committee. "That is not the message we want any leader to be presenting."

In a letter to Obama's campaign, the group is asking the Illinois Democrat to "respond directly" to the reports and to "let us know if indeed your staff is promoting these hurtful stereotypes."

At issue are documents distributed to some news organizations by Obama aides on a not-for-attribution basis that offered a harsh analysis of the Clintons. One appeared under the headline "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)'s personal financial and political ties to India."

A copy of the documents was obtained by Sen. Clinton's campaign, which then provided them to the Tribune and other news organizations. Obama's campaign confirmed the authenticity of the documents.

"Barack Obama has been a longtime friend of the Indian-American community and our campaign is fortunate to have strong support from Indian-Americans across the country," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said in a statement. "The intent of the document was to discuss the issue of outsourcing, but we regret the tone that parts of the document took."

NY Times:

WASHINGTON, June 15 — Senator Barack Obama often offers a crisp sales pitch to voters, imploring them to be part of something new, different and hopeful. “If you want a new kind of politics,” he says, “it’s time to turn the page.”

But as the chase for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination intensifies, the high-wire act of political purity is becoming more difficult for him to maintain, particularly on days when the race takes on the air of a bare-knuckles street fight.

The latest episode unfolded Thursday. As Mr. Obama spent a rare day in the Capitol, researchers at his headquarters in Chicago distributed a document that directly — and sharply — took aim at Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

It was, of course, in a similar vein and tone as documents prepared by any sophisticated political operation. But is there a different standard for Mr. Obama, who pledged to run a new kind of campaign?

“In this business, half the time we are being attacked for not being tough enough, and now we’re being attacked for being too harsh,” said David Axelrod, the campaign’s chief strategist. “The truth is that this is a tough, competitive business.”

And Mr. Obama, of Illinois, is finding out just how tough.

In Chicago, he has been dogged about his friendship with a businessman indicted on federal charges of business fraud and influence peddling. (A columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times declared: “suddenly this gleaming presidential hopeful and paragon of new politics behaves just like any other dissembling, dismissive Chicago pol, ducking the discussion while pretending not to.”)

Earlier this year, his campaign mixed it up with the Clinton campaign over remarks made by David Geffen, the entertainment industry executive, leading Mr. Obama to urge his staff, as he put it, “to be careful not to slip into playing the game as it customarily is played.” The Clinton campaign called on Mr. Obama to distance himself from Mr. Geffen after he suggested that Mrs. Clinton was unelectable and Mr. Clinton untrustworthy.

The political brawls that become public are just one manifestation of a less-visible battle conducted through competing opposition research teams that employ real and not-so-real scandal, changed policy positions and old and new relationships with people whose reputations are less than sparkling to try to shape news coverage and impressions of the candidates.

Barely a day passes when campaigns do not prepare documents against their rivals, excerpt the flashiest passages and shop them around to political reporters or bloggers, hoping someone will bite. Competing campaigns respond in kind, hoping to deflect possibly damaging bullets. Journalists sometimes play along, picking up a phrase, a nugget of information or a perspective that furthers the agenda of one side or another.

Much of this drama unfolds behind the curtains of today’s technologically driven political campaigns. But the curtain was pulled back this week, at least for a moment, when a document prepared by the Obama campaign landed in the hands of the Clinton campaign.

Referring to various ways in which Mrs. Clinton, of New York, and her husband had benefited, financially and politically, from support from Indian-Americans and companies that do business in India, the Obama campaign circulated a document to reporters on the basis that they not reveal where it had come from. Under a bold headline, the document referred to Mrs. Clinton as “(D-Punjab).”

The Obama campaign was forced to acknowledge authorship when the Clinton campaign got a copy and shared it with The New York Times.

For the Clinton campaign, drawing attention to a document attacking its own candidate had the effect of demonstrating that Mr. Obama, like other candidates, is not above a bit of political street fighting and, by implication, should not be allowed to cast himself as a champion of a purer version of public service. But in this case, the disclosure also threatened to create a substantive problem for Mr. Obama by leading an Indian-American group to accuse Mr. Obama of engaging in racial stereotyping.

“As representatives of the Indian-American community, we have been encouraged by your message of inclusion and your promise to bring a new kind of politics to our country,” Sanjay Puri, chairman of the US India Political Action Committee, said in a letter to Mr. Obama. “This is why we are so concerned about media reports indicating your staff may be engaging in the worst kind of anti-Indian-American stereotyping.”

In a statement on Friday, the Obama campaign expressed its regret.

“Barack Obama has been a longtime friend of the Indian-American community and our campaign is fortunate to have strong support from Indian-Americans across the country,” said David Plouffe, the campaign manager. “The intent of the document was to discuss the issue of outsourcing, but we regret the tone that parts of the document took.”

Mr. Obama declined an interview request.

The mini-furor over the opposition research documents highlights the intensity and fragility surrounding the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination. And it highlights the challenges for Mr. Obama as he pursues his quest to embrace a new kind of politics in a campaign operating under the old rules of politics, where every deviance and every negative word is almost certain to be seized upon.

“Will we be judged by a different standard? We have, in many ways, held ourselves to a different standard,” Mr. Axelrod said, but added: “When they throw the stink bomb at you, you can’t be caught unaware.”

The Caucus Blog: The Backstory on Obama-Clinton Attack MemosObama Campaign

Document on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (pdf)

Obama Campaign Document on Former President Bill Clinton (pdf)

Howie P.S.: Maybe Barack really doesn't want to be on the ticket as Hillary's Vice-Presidential running mate. I can also imagine some people turning to John Edwards to escape this episode.