Oprah - turning up the race card.

In the past few weeks, I have been seething with frustration at being away from New Hampshire. It is such a critical time.
And, heavens, there has been Oprah to contend with.
On that subject, perhaps it is better I am not there. The squillionaire TV star out on the campaign trail is just too much for me. My blood boils. Who the hell does she think she is? What a complete moron is Barak Obama for taking her onboard - as if he does not have the clout or the wit or the media interest and he needs to lean on her popularity. Well, that is probably so. Whenever one comes in contact with Obama, it is a suprisingly underwhelming experience. Anticlimactic. There is no "there" there. He is bland, bland, bland.
So, yes, he needs someone to grab attention on his behalf - and he has Oprah.
The only problem with this is that Oprah turns everything into a racial issue. Suddenly the fact that Obama is black becomes more important than it was or should be.
I think Oprah has an appalling cheek to use her media popularity in this way.
I think she thinks she has the power to control the vote - she thinks she is so bloody important. Oh, what money does to people.
What I don't think is that the voting public is easily suckered - and I suspect that she may have done Obama a disservice.
From this vast distance, I do not weep.

Instead, I quietly cheer for Hillary. By default, I think that egomaniacal Oprah has done her a favour.

As for trying to pin Joe Biden down on the race issue in the last Democratic debate. Oh really. Isn't it clear that the only candidate playing a race card is pushy Oprah?
Oops. Did I call her a candidate?

Hmmm.

And the debate verdict is...

There they stood behind their oddly tapering lecterns under the kitsch, over-arty red, white and blue MSNBC debate set - Hillary Clinton, the tiny one, Barack Obama, the tall one, and then John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Biden - and who the hell is that other fellow?

I'd never heard of Mike Gravel, the former senator from Alaska.
Well, we all know him now. The man who said he felt like a potplant perched at the edge of the lineup turned out to be the star of the debate. Talk about fresh blood and fresh perspective. He is an old-fashioned sage. A no-bull man! A realist.
Terrorism, he asserted, "has been with civilization from the beginning, and it will be there till the end. We're going to be as successful fighting terrorism as we are fighting drugs with the war. It doesn't work. What you have to do is to begin to change the whole foreign policy."
On Iran and nuclear threats, he noted that the US was the greatest violator of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. "We signed a pledge that we would begin to disarm, and we're not doing it. We're expanding our nukes. Who the hell are we going to nuke?" he blustered.
He also said this:
"We have no important enemies, We've got to deal with the rest of the world as equals. Who are we afraid of? We spend more on defence than any other country...the military controls not only the budget, it also controls our culture." Wow!

Straw polls following the debate have given Gravel a surprising surge.
On Daily Kos, he has zoomed to a 10 per cent vote, ahead of Kucinich, Biden, Richardson and Dodd - but behind Hillary, Obama and Edwards.

I was pleased with Hillary Clinton, however. She was my winner. She has a confident clarity. Her voice has a headmistress timbre, so we pay attention. She is emotionally controlled - calm and rational. She also is comprehensively informed on any topic you throw her. She can think on her feet. She is diplomatic, always knowing what not to say as well as what to say. She has been criticised for this, but, hell, that is what politics is all about.
She also has been endlessly criticised for insufficient mea culpa about voting for the War on Iraq. How many times does she have to regret it? How many times does she have to say that, if she knew then what she knew now, she would never have done so? Anyway, she said it all again - and was criticised all over again by the likes of Edwards and Kucinich.
It was a rather delicious irony to note that she was the most generous-spirited among the candidates, ready to give credit to others.
Oh, yes, she stood right out.

John Edwards lost ground for me in the debate. He says his $400 haircut was "a mistake which has been remedied now". How? He paid the campaign fund back? That is really not a remedy to the primping vanity of $400 haircuts. Edwards went on to defend his "privileged" millionaire lifestyle by claiming not to have forgotten his roots and went into a Southern boy, Down Home childhood tale of how the family left a restaurant when his millworker father realised he could not afford to pay its prices. I think we have had enough of these cornball anecdotes from Edwards. I, for one, have heard them all before. Furthermore, he was the only candidate to suggest that he felt a need to consult his "Lord" .

Dennis Kucinich also lost ground. I had respected his uncompromising leftist views - but in the debate, he showed a bitchy streak I did not like, sniping at his peers, glancing at Hillary and saying "apologies aren't enough". What the hell? Apologies are enough - and forgiveness is all. Kucinich also admitted to being a gun-owner. Hillary was one of the few who indicated never having owned a weapon, at the same time reiterating careful placations to the mighty gun lobby. Everyone seems to do this.

Bill Richardson is known as the darling of the gun lobby. He is a Westerner and he owns guns - but thinks the screening processes for gun purchase are lacking, as evidenced by Cho and the Virginia Tech shooting.
I found Richards a bit bombastic, something of a hothead and too fond of speaking in lists. From this quaint pressure-cooker appearance, I wouldn't put him in the White House.

Joe Biden is charming and he looks the way a president should look. When asked about his greatest mistake, he said it was in "overestimating the competence of this administration" and "stupid enough to believe that I could influence George W Bush's thinking". He brought the house down when, accused of "uncontrolled verbosity" and being a "gaffe machine" and asked if he would have the self-control for the role of president, he said simply "yes" - and not another word. Silence.

Chris Dodd pointed out his considerable qualifications for the job of president but was underwhelming in debate, especially when he spoke on civil unions versus same-sex marriage. He is for the former and against the latter. I liked his idea of diplomacy rather than war, and his quote: "This administration treats diplomacy as if it were a gift to our opponent; a sign of weakness, not a sign of strength".

Barack Obama was my biggest loser. He seemed extremely nervous, which is forgivable. But he also seemed arrogant. He never makes a speech that does not mention his wife and children, which is beginning to grate - and, gratuitously, he mentioned them again. His big mistake in my book was when he went to town on Iran, showing that he has swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the current media campaign to turn Iran into an immediate threat. It is rather reminiscent of the Iraq and "weapons of mass destruction" campaign. Obama said that he believed that Iran was a nuclear threat as well as the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the form of Hezbollah and Hamas and therefore was a threat to the security of the USA.
My conclusion is that Obama is, indeed, the young and inexperienced candidate - and it showed. He is simply not ready for the presidency.

Hillary is.

Obama style and substance

The hype surrounding Barak Obama's run for Democrat presidential nomination has worried me a bit. It is highly youth-driven and youth-oriented in a way that reminds of the Howard Dean campaign wherein, when the voting crunch came, those droves of youthful enthusiasts had dissolved into the woodwork and did not seem to be reflected in the ballot numbers.
But Barak is young. He is new. He is fresh and vivid. He is sensationally bright. He is unsullied by the shadows of a long political history and, what's more, he is an open book with a fierce sense of ethics. Hence, he is what one might dare to pun "a Barak-away" candidate.
He told us: "I'm not just interested in winning an election. I'm interested in transforming the country".
He said he sought "a commonsense, practical, non-ideological agenda for change."
He cites his background as a community organiser as a unique qualification for the rallying of people.
"What I have is a really good talent for bringing people together to solve problems," he declared.

I had heard that he was less interested in listening to the sound of his own voice than in that of others - and it proved to be so in Nashua. His preamble speech was relatively brief. After commenting on the public loss of confidence in the political process, he explained his belief in the way "we are connected as a people".
"If a child in Nashua cannot read, we must care, even if it is not our child. If there is someone foraging in a dumpster, it diminishes us as a nation."
While hearing such sentiments of social justice from a politician pleases me no end, it was not what the Nashua people wanted to know.
They revved up when he noted that an economy that was good for Wall Street still left the real people living from paycheck to paycheck.
But when he said that the country was involved in "a war that should never have been authorised", they erupted into a storm of applause.
The Iraq War has become profoundly unpopular among these people.
I have noted that where, only a year ago, cars en masse were smothered with "Support the War", "Support Our Troops" stickers, they are now few and far between.

Obama, of course, has been an opponent of the Iraq War from the outset. One of the few to have dared to speak out when the country had been methodically post 9/11 brainwashed. He has articulated a precise policy for bringing the combat troops home by March 31, 2008 - which, he says, gives Iraq plenty of time to get internally re-adjusted.
Since Obama's style is to listen to and interact with the people, he gave over most of the meeting time to questions wherein people could articulate their concerns.
Naturally, Iraq came up again, a woman saying: "I've just learned that my nephew is being sent to Iraq and I can't breathe. When can I breathe again?"
Obama expressed his sorrow for her and said that everywhere he went he was encountering agonised people who had offspring either going to, in, home wounded or dead from the War in Iraq. He had already expressed fury at President Bush's intention to veto the Bill calling for troop withdrawal. Bush was "obstinate", he said, lamenting the senators who would not allow Congress to override the veto. Two NH senators are among those who stand in the way.

Of course there were questions about health insurance, one man saying that, diagnosed with prostate cancer, his uninsured brother-in-law faced only two options - "bankrupt the family or die". Obama expounded on his principles for universal health care, the two trillion dollars spent in the USA on health "more than any other country in the world" which, absurdly yielded such inequity and suggested that the USA needed to "adopt a system similar to other countries".
An Obama administration would have the government negotiate for the best prices for prescription drugs, too, and not allow the pharmaceutical companies to keep making 17 per cent profit margins, he promised.
Questions from veterans opened the can of worms of the tragedy of Iraq, of the mass of undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder in the returned troops, many of whom ended up homeless and on the streets. There was a question about redundancies to which he said that new bankruptcy laws were needed to prevent companies from going under to save paying out staff pension obligations and then reforming as another company. There were questions about pensions and, extraordinarily, one about gun control.
This is the question the politicians are avoiding post the Virginia Tech massacre.
Obama trod lightly.
He wondered if there was anything that may have guaranteed that violence would not be seen that day at Virginia Tech, or could have lessened it. The issues he saw were that "they are still selling handguns to crazy people".
"There is supposed to be a system to screen backgrounds. The system failed,'' he said.
Citing the use of a semi-automatic weapon with a clip allowing 19 shots, he said:
"I don't hunt. I respect hunters and sportsmen. No one is infringing on their rights. But I don't know any self-respecting hunter who needs 19 rounds. No one shoots 19 rounds at a deer." Ignoring or not hearing interjections that no one hunts deer with handguns, he concluded that there was a need for "sensible laws in place".
That is as good as one is going to get on the election trail. No one, except perhaps fearless minority leftist Dennis Kucinich, would stick out their necks as targets of the gun lobby.

Obama returned to safer ground with other questions, responding on issues such as disease prevention, closing tax breaks for companies who moved their operations offshore to elude tax and more on the Iraq war.
"We have dug ourselves such a deep hole. Ending Iraq is 100 billion dollars saved but we haven't paid for it. We borrowed it," he exclaimed.

When he reached time for the last question, there were hands waving all over the hall. Oddly, Obama chose to give the question to the one and only child present - "a chance for the next generation".
"I don't know much," said the little boy. "I just want to know what do you have that Hillary Clinton and John Edwards don't have?"
The crowd dissolved into laughter. Obama with it. "Are you sure he's not a midget?" he asked. "Is he a plant?"
When mirth abated, he tackled the question.
"I try not to compare the other candidates," he said. "We are on the same team. Hillary Clinton gets things done and does great work. John Edwards has great ideas. I like them both and I think they'd make great presidents...but we are on the same team. We're all trying out for quarterback."

Barak Obama comes to town

The Barak Obama machine is moving smoothly through New Hampshire. Organisationally, it is way ahead of Hillary's. Already I have had several phone calls from its young volunteers in the Manchester office who say the opening of a Nashua campaign office is imminent. Hillary's team say they are still waiting for phones in their new Manchester office and have no idea when they will get Nashua up and running. It is unsurprising, therefore, that they have failed to respond to my offer to work for them. Obama's team, on the other hand, is courting - hence the invitation to attend his Nashua meeting.

This was an invitation-only meeting. The Obama buzz is such that he is drawing crowds like a rock star.
Nonetheless, when we rocked up for the "Town Hall" meeting at the handsome, modern seniors complex, it seemed all rather low-key. There was just one volunteer outside - selling wild and zany Obama buttons at three for $10.

He was doing a brisk trade and the rows of buttons on his board were diminishing fast. They ranged from sedate "Obama for President" to "Hot chicks love Obama". I indulged in "Carpe Diem - Barak Obama", "Superbama" and "The Three Stooges - Jr. Dick Rummy". Inside, beside the sign-in desk, were all the free coat and bumper stickers as well as glossy policy brochures complete with NH campaign head office address, phone number and email. As I said, they are well-organised.


Of course, the Americans for Health Care team was there with the same ebullient Tammy Clark ominpresent giving out brochures, entreating everyone to wear their stickers and offering free "I'm a Heath Care Voter" t-shirts to anyone who would put them on.

When Obama appeared, he was sporting one of her stickers.

There was a good phalanx of media but not, as with Hillary, a sense of media entourage, let alone obvious security. A couple of solidly-built men, one black and one white and both wearing dark suits, looked as if they may have been the official heavies.

An all-smiles girl wearing an apron and carrying a basket worked her way around the room handing out cookies...Pentagon Cookies adorned by a vivid pie chart showing that the Pentagon's expenditure of more than half of the US's discretional budget. Its PrioritiesNH label on the back suggested that $60 billion wasted each year on obsolete weapons should be turned to programs that built strong families and communities. The icing melted on my cookie on the way home. It looks rather messy now. Like the Iraq War?

Of course there was something of a wait before the Senator appeared. Quasi reggae music played discreetly and the people bubbled about expectantly. I found a place by the wall where I could stand up and take photos and we ate our sandwiches, enjoying the hubub. I eavesdropped on the chair of NH Women for Obama enthusing about the stress and pleasure of introducing Obama's wife at an earlier function and how desperate she was to get him to autograph her copy of her book. I've been reading his first book, Dreams from My Father, and am very impressed with his literary eloquence.

He was less lyrical on the hustings, however. After the exuberant standing ovation and the requisite effusive introduction, he spoke with chatty informality, explaining how his name was Kenyan but his accent was from Kansas and how the most important thing he had to before deciding to run for president was to ask his wife.