The Politics of Denunciation (This is Why I Oppose Obama’s Candidacy)

Abu-Jamal said what I have been saying all along, but he said it so much better.

The Politics of Denunciation
[col. writ. 4/30/08] (c) '08
By Mumia Abu-Jamal

When was the last time that you saw a politician asked to denounce a
religious leader with whom he or she was associated?

For generations, we have seen a succession of presidents, from both
political parties, under the wing of the Rev. Billy Graham.

Historians have recently reported that Graham and his Oval Office
acolytes have spoken in racist and xenophobic terms about both Blacks
and Jews.

The Rev. Graham recently was lionized as the personal spiritual
advisor to presidents, in times of stress, pressure, war and peace.

Neither he, nor his presidential prayer pals have ever been damned or
denounced for profoundly racist speech in the palaces of the
powerful.

Now, as a Black man begins to climb the greased pole of American
political power, he is asked to either defend or denounce a man whom
he has known and admired for a generation.

Barack Obama opted for the latter.

He has all but jettisoned the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright from the close
circle to the cold periphery of the political realm.

Whence comes this demand for denunciation?

If we are honest, it arises from the specter of white fear, that
demand of Black people a higher standard than that of their own.

For what reason has Jeremiah Wright been jettisoned - if not for his
proud, open Blackness?

Rev. Wright is an advocate of Black Liberation Theology - a school of
Black religious thought that sees the hand of God in the liberation
of Black people from bondage.

White Americans are so used to hearing Blacks speak with quiet and
pacific tones, that when a man expresses himself fully, as did Rev.
Wright, they are, quite frankly, frightened.

(What do they fear, that Blacks will dare remember?)

Through the corporate media talking heads, they demanded that Obama
"distance himself" from that scary, Black (uppity?) preacher - and do
it fast.

Yowza, boss.

The politics of denunciation is, ultimately, the politics of
betrayal. It asks - no - it demands that the candidate denounce those
whom the White Nation opposes.

If they don't, then they are presumed to be a supporter of that
person, or ideology.

Meanwhile, white conservative preachers can say virtually anything,
and calls for denunciation are swallowed into silence.

Former presidential candidate, and Republican supporter, Rev. Pat
Robertson, called for the killing of a foreign head of state! (I
speak here of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.)

Did the White House denounce this prominent religious supporter? Not
to my knowledge (in fact, it would be rather difficult, given the
current regime's failed coup d'etat against him).

But Barack, the son of a continental African, cannot be seen calling
for Black Liberation; for he seeks not to become leader of the Black
Nations, but the world's leading White Nation.

Once again, Blacks, and their deep indigenous concerns, are pushed to
the periphery. Their free expression ain't free, for there is a cost.

When I saw his latest dis' of the Rev. Dr. Wright, I thought of a
question posed in the Bible, in the words of Jesus of Nazareth
speaking to his disciples (in Matthew 16:26): For what is a man
profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?...

What would you do to get a job? --(c) '08 maj

[Source: Holy Bible, St. Matthew (King James Version.]

5:03 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Hamas condemns the Holocaust

From the Guardian, May 12, 2006

We are not engaged in a religious conflict with Jews; this is a political struggle to free ourselves from occupation and oppression

As the Palestinian people prepare to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nakba ("catastrophe") - the dispossession and expulsion of most of our people from our land - those remaining in Palestine face escalating aggression, killings, imprisonment, ethnic cleansing and siege. But instead of support and solidarity from the western media, we face frequent attempts to defend the indefensible or turn fire on the Palestinians themselves.

One recent approach, which seems to be part of the wider attempt to isolate the elected Palestinian leadership, is to portray Hamas and the population of the Gaza strip as motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment, rather than a hostility to Zionist occupation and domination of our land. A recent front page article in the International Herald Tribune followed this line, as did an article for Cif about an item broadcast on the al-Aqsa satellite TV channnel about the Nazi Holocaust.

In fact, the al-Aqsa Channel is an independent media institution that often does not express the views of the Palestinian government headed by Ismail Haniyeh or of the Hamas movement. The channel regularly gives Palestinians of different convictions the chance to express views that are not shared by the Palestinian government or the Hamas movement. In the case of the opinion expressed on al-Aqsa TV by Amin Dabbur, it is his alone and he is solely responsible for it.

It is rather surprising to us that so little attention, if any, is given by the western media to what is regularly broadcast or written in the Israeli media by politicians and writers demanding the total uprooting or "transfer" of the Palestinian people from their land.

The Israeli media and pro-Israel western press are full of views that deny or seek to excuse well-established facts of history including the Nakba of 1948 and the massacres perpetrated then by the Haganah, the Irgun and LEHI with the objective of forcing a mass dispossession of the Palestinians.

But it should be made clear that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian government in Gaza denies the Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust was not only a crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern history. We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity and all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or nationality.

And at the same time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe, we categorically reject the exploitation of the Holocaust by the Zionists to justify their crimes and harness international acceptance of the campaign of ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging against us - to the point where in February the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai threatened the people of Gaza with a "holocaust".

Within 24 hours, 61 Palestinians - more than half of them civilians and a quarter children - were killed in a series of air raids. Meanwhile, a horrible crime against humanity continues to be perpetrated against the people of Gaza: the two-year-old siege imposed after Hamas won the legislative elections in January 2006, which is causing great suffering. Due to severe shortages of medicines and food, scores of Palestinians have lost their lives.

It cannot be right that Europeans in general and the British in particular maintain a virtual silence toward what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians, let alone supporting or justifying their oppressive policies, under the pretext of showing sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust.

The Palestinian people aspire to freedom, independence and peaceful coexistence with all their neighbours. There are, today, more than six million Palestinian refugees. No less than 700,000 Palestinians have been detained at least once by the Israeli occupation authorities since 1967. Hundreds of thousands have so far been killed or wounded. Little concern seems to be caused by all of this or by the erection of an apartheid wall that swallows more than 20% of the West Bank land or the heavily armed colonies that devour Palestinian land in a blatant violation of international law.

The plight of our people is not the product of a religious conflict between us and the Jews in Palestine or anywhere else: the aims and positions of today's Hamas have been repeatedly spelled out by its leadership, for example in Hamas's 2006 programme for government. The conflict is of a purely political nature: it is between a people who have come under occupation and an oppressive occupying power.

Our right to resistance against occupation is recognised by all conventions and religious traditions. The Jews are for us the people of a sacred book who suffered persecution in European lands. Whenever they sought refuge, Muslim and Arab lands provided them with safe havens. It was in our midst that they enjoyed peace and prosperity; many of them held leading positions in Muslim countries.

After almost a century of Zionist colonial and racist oppression, some Palestinians find it hard to imagine that some of their oppressors are the sons and daughters of those who were themselves oppressed and massacred.

Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust but find themselves punished for someone else's crime. But we are well aware and warmly welcome the outspoken support for Palestinian rights by Israeli and Jewish human rights activists in Palestine and around the world.

We hope that journalists in the west will begin to adopt a more objective approach when covering events in Palestine. The Palestinian people are being killed by Israel's machine of destruction on a daily basis. Nevertheless, we still see a clear bias in favour of Israel in the western media.

The Europeans bear a direct responsibility for what is befalling the Palestinians today. Britain was the mandate authority that handed over Palestine to Israeli occupation. Nazi Germany perpetrated the most heinous crimes against Jews, forcing the survivors to migrate to Palestine in pursuit of safety. We, therefore, expect the Europeans to atone for their historic crimes by restoring some balance to the inhuman and one-sided international response to the tragedy of our people.

4:32 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

The Goal is to Win

May 05, 2008

The Goal is to Win

By Susan Estrich

"We'll know it when we see it," Geoff Garin, one of Hillary Clinton's top political advisers said last week, in describing just how "close" she might come to Barack Obama in the contest for pledged delegates and the popular vote by the time the season -- or maybe this year, it should be called the pre-season -- of primaries and caucuses ends on June 3rd.

That is, of course, just about word for word what the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart so famously wrote in an effort to define the line between constitutionally protected speech and obscenity subject to criminalization.

It's a famous way of saying, who knows?

The fact is that this nomination is not going to be decided by the pledged delegates, at least not unless the Democratic National Committee Rules and By-Laws committee changes course at its meeting at the end of this month and decides to seat some or all of the delegates Hillary "won" in Florida and Michigan.

The math just doesn't work.

That means the key to the nomination will be the "superdelegates," the unpledged party leaders, elected officials, and assorted hacks and has-beens (I say this with great fondness, since I used to be one, by the way) who were put in place as automatic delegates precisely because the party, stung from a series of defeats unbroken only by the election of the then-much maligned Jimmy Carter, was convinced that too much small "d" democracy every four years, particularly as dominated on the grass roots level by the "crazies" (excuse me, the feminists and the gay and the minorities and the rest of my crowd) was leading the grown-ups in the party to view the convention as a must-miss event and the patients who were taking over the asylum to choose candidates who shouldn't be nominated and couldn't win.

Nearly a decade after the party went down to defeat under the banner of George McGovern, considered the prototype of the sort of candidate who should never have been nominated, and was selected at a convention largely run by the left and largely boycotted by the responsible elders, the then Rules Commission (with yours truly leading the fight in opposition, complete with the slam that we were creating an elitist category of yes, "superdelegates," as I called them) ultimately adopted as a "reform" proposal that was intended to ensure that there be no more McGoverns, no more grass roots supported, unelectable nominees who represented the preferences of the ideologues who dominated, especially in caucus states, rather than the swing voters who would be needed in the fall election.

I have to laugh every time I hear someone complain that "superdelegates" are un-democratic, or that they should be bound by the popular vote, even if the popular vote, as reflected in caucus results, represents about 4 percent of all Democrats.

Where were you folks when I needed you, when Maxine Waters and I were going down in flames fighting the effort to take the nomination away from the people and bring back the back-room boys?

In the years since, as the number of unelectable nominees supported by the ideologues has increased, so has the number of superdelegates. What started out as a proposal to get congressmen and senators and governors back to the convention, and the table, was not surprisingly expanded by the Democratic National Committee itself to include, yes, themselves. That's how I made it in the room. Hotel room, floor pass, party invitations, and yes, a much desired vote, all yours for the being. All ex-party chairmen. I wonder who came up with that?

Do these people deserve to control the nomination?

Maybe.

If you think the purpose of all these primaries and caucuses is to build the party, empower the grass roots, and celebrate democracy, then the answer is and should be no.

But after a few decades of campaigning, too many of them for candidates who probably never had a chance of winning, I'm convinced that the other purpose is the one that should dominate.

Winning.

The role of superdelegates is not to vote for the candidate who has shown the greatest popularity among the grass roots activists who dominate this season, particularly in caucus states.

It's to pick the one with the best chance of winning.

The goal here is to elect a president, not select a nominee.

If we wanted a perfect democracy, we could have a national primary, or at least a series of regional primaries.

The superdelegates are a check, a fail-safe, a second look to make sure that the first choice of the voters is the best choice for the party. Most years, it doesn't matter. Most years, it's just a free pass to the convention. But this isn't most years, and this year, the superdelegates have to earn their way. Or their seats. When will enough of them decide to put one candidate over the top? Who knows? We'll know it when we see it.

The fact is that this nomination is not going to be decided by the pledged delegates, at least not unless the Democratic National Committee Rules and By-Laws committee changes course at its meeting at the end of this month and decides to seat some or all of the delegates Hillary "won" in Florida and Michigan.

The math just doesn't work.

That means the key to the nomination will be the "superdelegates," the unpledged party leaders, elected officials, and assorted hacks and has-beens (I say this with great fondness, since I used to be one, by the way) who were put in place as automatic delegates precisely because the party, stung from a series of defeats unbroken only by the election of the then-much maligned Jimmy Carter, was convinced that too much small "d" democracy every four years, particularly as dominated on the grass roots level by the "crazies" (excuse me, the feminists and the gay and the minorities and the rest of my crowd) was leading the grown-ups in the party to view the convention as a must-miss event and the patients who were taking over the asylum to choose candidates who shouldn't be nominated and couldn't win.

Nearly a decade after the party went down to defeat under the banner of George McGovern, considered the prototype of the sort of candidate who should never have been nominated, and was selected at a convention largely run by the left and largely boycotted by the responsible elders, the then Rules Commission (with yours truly leading the fight in opposition, complete with the slam that we were creating an elitist category of yes, "superdelegates," as I called them) ultimately adopted as a "reform" proposal that was intended to ensure that there be no more McGoverns, no more grass roots supported, unelectable nominees who represented the preferences of the ideologues who dominated, especially in caucus states, rather than the swing voters who would be needed in the fall election.

I have to laugh every time I hear someone complain that "superdelegates" are un-democratic, or that they should be bound by the popular vote, even if the popular vote, as reflected in caucus results, represents about 4 percent of all Democrats.

Where were you folks when I needed you, when Maxine Waters and I were going down in flames fighting the effort to take the nomination away from the people and bring back the back-room boys?

In the years since, as the number of unelectable nominees supported by the ideologues has increased, so has the number of superdelegates. What started out as a proposal to get congressmen and senators and governors back to the convention, and the table, was not surprisingly expanded by the Democratic National Committee itself to include, yes, themselves. That's how I made it in the room. Hotel room, floor pass, party invitations, and yes, a much desired vote, all yours for the being. All ex-party chairmen. I wonder who came up with that?

Do these people deserve to control the nomination?

Maybe.

If you think the purpose of all these primaries and caucuses is to build the party, empower the grass roots, and celebrate democracy, then the answer is and should be no.

But after a few decades of campaigning, too many of them for candidates who probably never had a chance of winning, I'm convinced that the other purpose is the one that should dominate.

Winning.

The role of superdelegates is not to vote for the candidate who has shown the greatest popularity among the grass roots activists who dominate this season, particularly in caucus states.

It's to pick the one with the best chance of winning.

The goal here is to elect a president, not select a nominee.

If we wanted a perfect democracy, we could have a national primary, or at least a series of regional primaries.

The superdelegates are a check, a fail-safe, a second look to make sure that the first choice of the voters is the best choice for the party. Most years, it doesn't matter. Most years, it's just a free pass to the convention. But this isn't most years, and this year, the superdelegates have to earn their way. Or their seats. When will enough of them decide to put one candidate over the top? Who knows? We'll know it when we see it.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/05/the_goal_is_to_win.html

10:02 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

What led Obama to Wright’s church

chicagotribune.com

What led Obama to Wright's church

How a man of ambition found connections at Chicago's Trinity

By Christi Parsons and Manya A. Brachear

Tribune reporters

3:31 AM CDT, May 3, 2008

The day Barack Obama first showed up in the office of Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., more than 20 years ago, the pastor warned him that getting involved with Trinity United Church of Christ might not be "a feather in your cap."

Obama was a community organizer trying to build support for his group on the South Side of Chicago, and a friendly minister at another church had suggested he'd have more luck with black clergy if he joined a congregation himself.

"Some of my fellow clergy don't appreciate what we're about," Wright told him that day, as Obama would later recount it. "They feel like we're too radical. Others, we ain't radical enough."

Obama ended up joining, a story he tells in his memoirs, and later was influenced enough by Wright to derive the title of a subsequent book, "The Audacity of Hope," from one of the pastor's sermons.

But despite the warning, the association did not seem to be a terribly risky one for Obama, given the arc of the career he was beginning to craft even then.

He was building his résumé as a street-savvy community organizer while also applying for admission to law school. Within the walls of Trinity he found a connection to the African-American community he'd lacked as a child raised by his white mother and grandparents, an important cultural marker for a biracial candidate who later would try to appeal to black and white voters alike.

He'd share church membership with some of Chicago's influential thinkers and leaders, among them lawmakers, judges and Oprah Winfrey. And in Wright he would find an inspirational messenger—not to mention one of Chicago's most prominent black ministers—in a setting where church affiliation can form part of a person's political pedigree.

For someone thinking of running for mayor, governor, senator or any statewide office, being part of Trinity would likely be an asset.

On the national stage, that asset has become a liability. Obama's association with Wright has sent his once-soaring presidential campaign into a strategic tailspin, thanks to controversial statements from old sermons the minister publicly repeated at high volume last week.

As Wright's remarks have filled the airwaves, many have wondered why Obama remained a member at Trinity for so many years. He says he wasn't present at church for some of the most outrageous comments, yet there were signs that Obama and his campaign were aware that an association with Wright could be controversial. Obama last year in effect disinvited Wright from giving an invocation when he announced in Springfield he was running for president.

Some of Wright's more controversial sermons burst into public view in March, and Wright's appearance at the National Press Club last week seemed to reveal a strong provocative streak. Wright voiced anger about what he depicted as an attack on the black church as a whole.

Why Obama stayed

Black liberation theology

8:20 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

The ’Race’ Speech Revisited

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 2, 2008; A21

From The Washington Post

"I can no more disown him [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother."

-- Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18

Guess it's time to disown Granny, if Obama's famous Philadelphia "race" speech is to be believed. Of course, the speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union. A New York Times columnist said it "should be required reading in classrooms across the country." College seniors and first-graders, suggested the excitable Chris Matthews.

Apparently there's been a curriculum change. On Tuesday, the good senator begged to extend and revise his previous remarks on race. Moral equivalence between Grandma and Wright is now, as the Nixon administration used to say, inoperative. Poor Geraldine Ferraro, thrice lashed by Obama in Philadelphia as the white equivalent of Wright's raving racism, is off the hook.

These equivalences having been revealed as the cheap rhetorical tricks they always were, Obama has now decided that the man he simply could not banish because he had become part of Obama himself is, mirabile dictu, surgically excised.

At a news conference in North Carolina, Obama explained why he finally decided to do the deed. Apparently, Wright's latest comments -- Obama cited three in particular -- were so shockingly "divisive and destructive" that he had to renounce the man, not just the words.

What were Obama's three citations? Wright's claim that AIDS was invented by the U.S. government to commit genocide. His praise of Louis Farrakhan as a great man. And his blaming Sept. 11 on American "terrorism."

But these comments are not new. These were precisely the outrages that prompted the initial furor when the Wright tapes emerged seven weeks ago. Obama decided to cut off Wright not because Wright's words or character or views had suddenly changed. The only thing that changed was the venue in which Wright chose to display them -- live on national TV at the National Press Club. That unfortunate choice destroyed Obama's Philadelphia pretense that this "endless loop" of sermon excerpts being shown on "television sets and YouTube" had been taken out of context.

Obama's Philadelphia oration was an exercise in contextualization. In one particularly egregious play on white guilt, Obama had the audacity to suggest that whites should be ashamed that they were ever surprised by Wright's remarks: "The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning."

That was then. On Tuesday, Obama declared that he himself was surprised at Wright's outrages. But hadn't Obama told us that surprise about Wright is a result of white ignorance of black churches brought on by America's history of segregated services? How then to explain Obama's own presumed ignorance? Surely he too was not sitting in those segregated white churches on those fateful Sundays when he conveniently missed all of Wright's racist rants.

Obama's turning surprise about Wright into something to be counted against whites-- one of the more clever devices in that shameful, brilliantly executed, 5,000-word intellectual fraud in Philadelphia -- now stands discredited by Obama's own admission of surprise. But Obama's liberal acolytes are not daunted. They were taken in by the first great statement on race: the Annunciation, the Chosen One comes to heal us in Philly. They now are taken in by the second: the Renunciation.

Obama's newest attempt to save himself after Wright's latest poisonous performance is now declared the new final word on the subject. Therefore, any future ads linking Obama and Wright are preemptively declared out of bounds, illegitimate, indeed "race-baiting" (a New York Times editorial, April 30).

On what grounds? This 20-year association with Wright calls into question everything about Obama: his truthfulness in his serially adjusted stories of what he knew and when he knew it; his judgment in choosing as his mentor, pastor and great friend a man he just now realizes is a purveyor of racial hatred; and the central premise of his campaign, that he is the bringer of a "new politics," rising above the old Washington ways of expediency. It's hard to think of an act more blatantly expedient than renouncing Wright when his show, once done from the press club instead of the pulpit, could no longer be "contextualized" as something whites could not understand and only Obama could explain in all its complexity.

Turns out the Wright show was not that complex after all. Everyone understands it now. Even Obama.

8:50 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

The New Corporate Media Fashion: Clinton-Bashing

Really, only two people in the mainstream media have gotten the character of this primary season right, one's name is Sean Wilentz, who proves, with as wealth of evidence, that the Obama campaign played the race card against the Clinton is a big way, and the other is David Greenberg.  This piece is excellent.  Print it out and share it with your friends and relatives.  Everybody should recognize how the media is leading the public to support the candidate who will lose the election for the Democrats.

"You Get a Very Bad Grade in History"

David Greenberg

The New Republic

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Cops Get Away with Racist Murder

11:30 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Self-Inflicted Confusion

Krugman, The New York Times

After Barack Obama's defeat in Pennsylvania, David Axelrod, his campaign manager, brushed it off: "Nothing has changed tonight in the basic physics of this race."

He may well be right — but what a comedown. A few months ago the Obama campaign was talking about transcendence. Now it's talking about math. "Yes we can" has become "No she can't."

This wasn't the way things were supposed to play out.

Mr. Obama was supposed to be a transformational figure, with an almost magical ability to transcend partisan differences and unify the nation. Once voters got to know him — and once he had eliminated Hillary Clinton's initial financial and organizational advantage — he was supposed to sweep easily to the nomination, then march on to a huge victory in November.

Well, now he has an overwhelming money advantage and the support of much of the Democratic establishment — yet he still can't seem to win over large blocs of Democratic voters, especially among the white working class.

As a result, he keeps losing big states. And general election polls suggest that he might well lose to John McCain.

What's gone wrong?

According to many Obama supporters, it's all Hillary's fault. If she hadn't launched all those vile, negative attacks on their hero — if she had just gone away — his aura would be intact, and his mission of unifying America still on track.

But how negative has the Clinton campaign been, really? Yes, it ran an ad that included Osama bin Laden in a montage of crisis images that also included the Great Depression and Hurricane Katrina. To listen to some pundits, you'd think that ad was practically the same as the famous G.O.P. ad accusing Max Cleland of being weak on national security.

It wasn't. The attacks from the Clinton campaign have been badminton compared with the hardball Republicans will play this fall. If the relatively mild rough and tumble of the Democratic fight has been enough to knock Mr. Obama off his pedestal, what hope did he ever have of staying on it through the general election?

Let me offer an alternative suggestion: maybe his transformational campaign isn't winning over working-class voters because transformation isn't what they're looking for.

From the beginning, I wondered what Mr. Obama's soaring rhetoric, his talk of a new politics and declarations that "we are the ones we've been waiting for" (waiting for to do what, exactly?) would mean to families troubled by lagging wages, insecure jobs and fear of losing health coverage. The answer, from Ohio and Pennsylvania, seems pretty clear: not much. Mrs. Clinton has been able to stay in the race, against heavy odds, largely because her no-nonsense style, her obvious interest in the wonkish details of policy, resonate with many voters in a way that Mr. Obama's eloquence does not.

Yes, I know that there are lots of policy proposals on the Obama campaign's Web site. But addressing the real concerns of working Americans isn't the campaign's central theme.

Tellingly, the Obama campaign has put far more energy into attacking Mrs. Clinton's health care proposals than it has into promoting the idea of universal coverage.

During the closing days of the Pennsylvania primary fight, the Obama campaign ran a TV ad repeating the dishonest charge that the Clinton plan would force people to buy health insurance they can't afford. It was as negative as any ad that Mrs. Clinton has run — but perhaps more important, it was fear-mongering aimed at people who don't think they need insurance, rather than reassurance for families who are trying to get coverage or are afraid of losing it.

No wonder, then, that older Democrats continue to favor Mrs. Clinton.

The question Democrats, both inside and outside the Obama campaign, should be asking themselves is this: now that the magic has dissipated, what is the campaign about? More generally, what are the Democrats for in this election?

That should be an easy question to answer. Democrats can justly portray themselves as the party of economic security, the party that created Social Security and Medicare and defended those programs against Republican attacks — and the party that can bring assured health coverage to all Americans.

They can also portray themselves as the party of prosperity: the contrast between the Clinton economy and the Bush economy is the best free advertisement that Democrats have had since Herbert Hoover.

But the message that Democrats are ready to continue and build on a grand tradition doesn't mesh well with claims to be bringing a "new politics" and rhetoric that places blame for our current state equally on both parties.

And unless Democrats can get past this self-inflicted state of confusion, there's a very good chance that they'll snatch defeat from the jaws of victory this fall.

7:58 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Heads Up - Nasty Stuff on the Way

This trash is being distributed by Human Events, a right-wing publication, widely read by reactionaries. People who care about progressive values, whether they support Obama or not, need to prepare for the flak coming down the pike. I monitor right-wing groups for a reason: so I know what's coming.  You should know what's coming, too.

Sincerely, Andrew

"President Barack Hussein Obama," those have to be the scariest four words in the English language!

Ask yourself... do you really want the next President of the United States of America to be a man with ties to known Marxists such as Frank Marshall Davis and terrorists such as Bill Ayers and former PLO operative Rashid Khalidi?

Consider the fact that Barack Hussein Obama refuses to wear the flag on his lapel, or that he does not place his hand over his heart in the presence of the American flag.

Consider the fact that Barack Hussein Obama embraces Jeremiah Wright, a man who has preached the most vile racial hatred and anti-American sentiments from the pulpit for twenty years, while at the same time Barack Hussein Obama accuses decent hard-working Americans of bigotry when he says things like, "It's not surprising that they get bitter. They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them... ."

Consider the fact that Barack Hussein Obama's wife Michelle said that her husband's candidacy marked, "the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country."

But what really makes "President Barack Hussein Obama" the scariest four words in the English language is that fact that HE CAN BECOME THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!

While the media would love to extend the news cycle as far as humanly possible throughout the primary season, the truth of the matter is that unless Hillary Clinton pulls off some kind of mathematical miracle, Barack Hussein Obama will go to the Democratic National Convention with more delegates.

And, with the exception of the Jeremiah Wright story, the liberal media has basically given Barack Hussein Obama a free pass -- and will continue to give him a free pass!

Moreover, Socialist billionaire George Soros of MoveOn.org fame, and some of his cronies, have already spent millions of dollars and recently pledged to spend millions more to put this obscure first term United States Senator from Chicago into the White House.

Make no mistake, there are people in the United States who despise America... hate America... and hate our way of life.  Barack Hussein Obama is THEIR CANDIDATE and they will do everything in their power to make sure that patriotic Americans do not understand exactly how dangerous Barack Hussein Obama really is.   They'll hide his record and his past and they'll tar-and-feather his opposition.

And the only thing that stands in their way is patriotic Americans like you!

George Soros and his friends may have millions and the liberal media may still control the information that most people see and hear, but patriotic Americans can still fight back.  We have just launched ExposeObama.com -- call it the Obama Truth Squad -- and in the coming weeks and months, we will tell the American people the truth about Barack Obama.

We've just completed our first major television ad.  And if you use this hyperlink you can see it right now!  But we just don't want you to view this ad, we want you to join us. We need to raise $300,000 in the next 72 hours to buy the ad time on television that will expose Barack Hussein Obama to the American people .

Please watch this ad and if you agree that all Americans should know the truth about Barack Hussein Obama please join us.  Your financial assistance of $5000 or $1000 or even $100 or $50 or $25 is urgently needed right now.

Remember Willie Horton?

One of the key members of our team is Floyd Brown.  You may remember Floyd as the man who created the Willie Horton ads which brought the truth about Mike Dukakis directly to the American people.

Before the Willie Horton ads came out, Dukakis had a healthy lead over George H.W. Bush in the polls, in part, because the liberal media glossed over Dukakis' liberal record. And it looked like Dukakis' march to the White House was unstoppable.

 Willie Horton was a convicted killer serving a life-sentence without the possibility of parole.  Horton callously stabbed a 17-year old gas station attendant 19 times and left him in a garbage can to die.

 And yet, Horton was given a total of 10 weekend passes from prison. 

 During one of those weekend passes, Horton kidnapped a young couple, stabbed, beat and gagged the boyfriend and then repeatedly violated the girlfriend multiple times while the boyfriend watched -- helpless to do anything.

 Dukakis supported the furlough program that gave Willie Horton and so many others like him weekend passes -- even after the Willie Horton affair came to light.  Moreover, when the Massachusetts legislature attempted to close the furlough program, Dukakis vetoed the bill .

When the Willie Horton ad came out, the left-wing media went into spin mode and attacked Floyd.  Twenty years later, fabrications and lies concerning the Willie Horton ad are still misreported by a biased media.

But when the Willie Horton ads were released, the American public saw the truth.  There was no hiding the fact that Dukakis was soft on crime.

The media will attempt to elect the next President of the United States for you and that president may be Barrack Hussein Obama.

You can let that happen or you can join us as we expose the truth about Barack Hussein Obama!

If you agree that the American people need to know the real Barack Hussein Obama, then join us in the fight and in the coming weeks and months, we will tell the American people what the liberal media refuses to report when it comes to Barack Hussein Obama.

We've just completed our first major television ad.  And if you use this hyperlink you can see it right now!  But we just don't want you to view this ad, we want you to join us. We need to raise $300,000 in the next 72 hours to buy the ad time on television that will expose Barack Hussein Obama to the American people .

Please watch this ad and if you agree that all Americans should know the truth about Barack Hussein Obama please join us.  Your financial assistance of $5000 or $1000 or even $100 or $50 or $25 is urgently needed right now.

Obama and Racism...

Barack Hussein Obama slapped hard-working Americans in the face when he said that "bitter" people "cling to guns or religion."

But how does Obama react when he actually encounters bigotry?

Do you remember what Jeremiah Wright, the man who preached to Obama for 20 years, married him to his wife, baptized his children and served as his spiritual advisor said about the United States?

Here's what Wright said:

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing God Bless America? No, no, no! Not God bless America. God d*** America! It's in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God d*** America..."

Wright actually said that when terrorists killed over 3,000 innocent people on September 11, 2001, "America had it coming!"

Wright once called the United States of America, "the U.S. of K.K.K.A"

Wright even accused the United States government of developing the AIDS virus to exterminate blacks.

For 20 years, Barack Hussein Obama listened to Jeremiah Wright preach hate and didn't say a word.  When confronted with Wright's race-baiting he refused to disown the man... and yet he has no problem insinuating that hard-working, God-fearing Americans are bigots!

What does that tell you about Barack Hussein Obama?

George Soros and his friends may have millions and the liberal media may still control the information that most people see and hear, but we can fight back.  We have just launched ExposeObama.com -- call it the Obama Truth Squad -- and in the coming weeks and months, we will tell the American people the truth about Barack Obama.

We've just completed our first major television ad.  And if you use this hyperlink you can see it right now!  But we just don't want you to view this ad, we want you to join us. We need to raise $300,000 in the next 72 hours to buy the ad time on television that will expose Barack Hussein Obama to the American people .

Please watch this ad and if you agree that all Americans should know the truth about Barack Hussein Obama please join us.  Your financial assistance of $5000 or $1000 or even $100 or $50 or $25 is urgently needed right now.

If He's Weak On Crime, Will He Be Weak On The War On Terror And National Security?

When it comes to the issues, most people simply don't know where Barack Hussein Obama stands.  The liberal media won't give you that information!

For example, when it comes to crime, Barack Hussein Obama seems to care for criminals more than victims:

In 2002, while gang related crime infected Chicago like an open, festering sore, Barack Hussein Obama voted NO on HB 1812, a bill designed to toughen penalties for crimes committed in furtherance of gang activities.

And the problem is only getting worse!

On Sunday, the CBS affiliate in Chicago issued the following report:

"A violent and deadly weekend continues in Chicago. At least 12 people have been shot, two of them killed, since Saturday morning. Two others were stabbed in a home invasion. This comes after at least 20 people were shot, four of them killed, from Friday night through early Saturday."

Ironically so many of the victims of these gang-related crimes are, innocent African-Americans from Barack Hussein Obama's hometown of Chicago!

Question: If Barack Hussein Obama REFUSED to vote in favor of tougher penalties for those who commit atrocious crimes against innocent people in his own hometown, how will he react when confronted with America's enemies and those who want to harm innocent Americans?

When terrorists around the world, such as Osama bin-Laden, look at Barack Hussein Obama's record on domestic crime, will they dance in the streets?

Our very first ad takes a hard, no-nonsense look at Barack Hussein Obama's record on what the Chicago Sun Times called "urban terrorism" in Obama's own backyard and asks:

"Can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?"

When the time comes to be tough, will Obama choose to be weak?

Of course, if you join us, this will only be the first of many nationwide commercials spotlighting Barack Hussein Obama's record on the issues!  You can help us make it happen!

If you haven't done so already, view our very first ExposeObama.com television ad for all the gut-wrenching details.

If you agree that the American people need to know the real Barack Hussein Obama, then join us in the fight and in the coming weeks and months, we will tell the American people what the liberal media refuses to report when it comes to Barack Hussein Obama.

We've just completed our first major television ad.  And if you use this hyperlink you can see it right now!  But we just don't want you to view this ad, we want you to join us. We need to raise $300,000 in the next 72 hours to buy the ad time on television that will expose Barack Hussein Obama to the American people .

Please watch this ad and if you agree that all Americans should know the truth about Barack Hussein Obama please join us.  Your financial assistance of $5000 or $1000 or even $100 or $50 or $25 is urgently needed right now.

Bruce Hawkins
Executive Director
ExposeObama.com

P.S. Even if you can not join us in this effort right now, you can still help us expose Barack Hussein Obama by sending this e-mail to at least 10 of your friends.

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New Insights Into Kennedy’s Assassination

Documents show that Oswald, the mob, anti-Castro Cubans, and right-wing groups really did conspire to kill the president

By DAVID KAISER

Sometime in the last week of September or the first few days of October 1963, three men knocked at the door of Silvia Odio, a young, divorced Cuban woman living in Dallas. Odio was packing for a move with the help of her sister. Their parents were in prison in Cuba, where they had been arrested after participating in an unsuccessful assassination conspiracy against Fidel Castro. Odio belonged to JURE, the Revolutionary Junta in Exile, an anti-Castro organization. By the fall of 1963, JURE, with covert American assistance, was preparing for a descent upon Cuba.

Two of the three men at the door identified themselves as "Leopoldo" and "Angelo." The third man, a young, slim American introduced as "Leon," said almost nothing. The men asked for assistance in identifying possible Dallas-area donors to the Cuban cause. Odio was polite but noncommittal, and they left.

A day or two later, she received a phone call from Leopoldo. The call, she surmised, reflected some romantic interest on his part, but he also asked what she thought of "the American." When she had nothing to say, he explained that the American was a former marine and an excellent shot, a slightly crazy fellow who might do anything. He speculated that Leon might be able to shoot Castro if he could be gotten into Cuba and also reported that Leon himself had commented that Cubans should have shot President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs.

As Odio explained to the Warren Commission, investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy many months later, she felt they were feeling her out to see if she had useful contacts in the Cuban underground. But she had no such contacts and did not reciprocate Leopoldo's romantic interest. A little less than two months later, after the assassination of President Kennedy, she saw Lee Harvey Oswald's picture and recognized him as Leon. Within two weeks she had given the essence of her story to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but the agency did nothing to pursue it for more than six months.

The Odio incident was immediately recognized by Warren Commission investigators and by readers of the commission's 1964 report as one of the most provocative pieces of evidence in the case. But it has taken more than 40 years, and the release of millions of pages of original documentation in the late 1990s, to finally identify who Odio's callers were and how their visit confirms that President Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy for which Oswald was simply the trigger man.

As it turns out, the visit links Oswald and his crime to an enormous network of mobsters, anti-Castro Cubans, and right-wing political activists. Together with other new evidence, it allows us to name several key players in the conspiracy. The men who visited Odio were almost certainly Loran Hall, Lawrence Howard, and Oswald. Hall was an American military veteran and part-time mercenary who went to Cuba in 1959, joined Castro's army as a trainer, and then spent several months in a Cuban transit prison after falling afoul of the authorities. In the same prison at the same time was one of the United States' most notorious criminals, Santo Trafficante Jr., owner of several Havana casinos and mob boss of northern Florida. During that summer, Trafficante was also visited in his cell by a Dallas club owner named Jack Ruby.

Hall had been involved in many discussions of assassination plots against Castro and had also heard a good deal of talk about assassinating President Kennedy. As he implied to Odio, he realized that in Oswald he had come across a man willing to do either job. Hall, moreover, was not the only Trafficante associate in Dallas early that fall. His visit coincided with a talk by John Martino, who was involved in gambling in both the United States and Havana, and who had been jailed from 1959 through 1962 by Castro. Once released and repatriated to the States, Martino became a link between Trafficante and anti-Castro Cubans in the Miami area. Sometime in November 1963, he was watching the television news with his family when the newscaster referred to President Kennedy's trip to Texas. "If he goes to Dallas," Martino remarked, "they are going to kill him."

The Central Intelligence Agency had nothing to do with Kennedy's assassination, but it was involved with organized-crime figures while pursuing anti-Castro activities. In late 1960, agency operatives used the private investigator Robert Maheu to recruit mobsters, particularly those who had lost their Havana casinos, to kill Castro. Their efforts continued well into 1963. Both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations allowed the CIA to create a large zone of illegality within which it carried out various acts of sabotage, propaganda, and conspiracy against Castro.

In all probability, Oswald's attempt to reach Cuba via Mexico City — a trip he undertook either immediately after or immediately before "Leopoldo" introduced him to Odio — was designed to give him a chance to assassinate Castro. But the Cuban consulate in Mexico City refused to grant him a visa. Oswald then returned to Dallas and, within five weeks, accepted the assignment of assassinating President Kennedy for a "significant sum" of money.

Oswald, just 24 years old in 1963, grew up with a single parent in New Orleans and joined the Marines at the age of 17. Immediately after his discharge, in 1959, he traveled to the Soviet Union and publicly defected from the United States. Three years later, he managed to return to the United States with a Russian wife, Marina, and a new baby. Within a few months, he had begun corresponding with American Communist and socialist groups, and in the spring of 1963, after moving from Dallas to New Orleans, he formed a one-man chapter of a Communist-front organization. For four and a half decades, those activities have convinced most Americans that Oswald was a sincere leftist.

But the evidence suggests otherwise. His later activities fit into a well-documented, broader effort by the FBI and independent right-wing groups to discredit left-wing organizations in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the South.

The organized-crime bosses whom the CIA recruited to help assassinate Castro masterminded the killing of President Kennedy. They did that because of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's unprecedented effort to put the American mob out of business. Robert Kennedy's other key target was Jimmy Hoffa, of the Teamsters, who had close business ties and shared a lawyer with Trafficante.

In May 1963, Hoffa received a message from two mob bosses that it was time to execute President Kennedy. Both Carlos Marcello, a New Orleans mobster, and Trafficante had already discussed or foretold the killing of the president, and Sam Giancana, a Chicago mob boss, in conversations recorded by the FBI, had frequently expressed his resentment of the Kennedys. Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald just two days after the Kennedy assassination, had links to all three men. The killing of President Kennedy, followed by the resignation less than a year later of Robert Kennedy, seriously curtailed the government's effort to clean up organized crime — just as intended.

The Kennedy assassination, then, must be understood in the context of two much larger stories. The first is the government's campaign against organized crime, which actually began in the late 1950s, after the discovery of an infamous Mafia conclave, held in Appalachin, N.Y., proved that a national crime syndicate existed. The campaign accelerated dramatically under Robert Kennedy. The second story recounts the efforts of two administrations, and various private groups as well, to bring down Castro. A great deal has been written on those two subjects in the last 30 years, much of it exaggerated and far off the mark. The truth provides ample interest.

The Eisenhower administration recruited top mobsters to assassinate Castro, and their plots continued during the Kennedy years, though the Kennedy administration thought they had stopped. On the other hand, JFK's administration clearly viewed the assassination of Castro as a possible solution to the problem of Communism in Cuba, and it encouraged the CIA to bring about that result without involving the mob.

Ironically, however, the administration's failure to support the Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1961, combined with its refusal to take military action during the Cuban missile crisis, convinced most Cuban exiles that John and Robert Kennedy had no intention of toppling Castro. The Kennedys' favoritism toward relatively leftist exiles angered conservative Cubans and their American allies still further.

The assassination of the president was not a random event. At bottom it grew out of moralistic obsessions in American life: the insistence on outlawing the satisfaction of certain human appetites for gambling, sex, and drugs that created and sustained organized crime; and the refusal to respect the rights of foreign regimes that seemed to threaten American values and interests. Those two broad problems made the assassination possible; the actions of particular men made it happen. Oswald was an extraordinarily useful assassin, and his sudden death at the hands of Ruby — despite its highly suspicious nature — made it much harder for the truth to emerge.

In the 1970s, when key events in the background of the crime became known to law-enforcement agencies, the additional murders of Giancana and crime figure Johnny Roselli kept the details secret for two more decades and shielded living conspirators from legal action. The only prosecution of the crime, by District Attorney Jim Garrison in New Orleans, was a farce, and those conspirators who can now be identified are long since dead. But the truth of the assassination, its historical impact, and the ways in which it is still with us can now be told.

This is possible as a result of the release during the 1990s of enormous documentation by the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 and the very thorough and intrepid work of the Assassination Records Review Board, led by the historian Anna K. Nelson, which was appointed to put it into effect. The records include not only all of the original FBI files on the investigation of the assassination itself, but also FBI files on numerous key organized-crime figures. More astonishingly, the CIA was persuaded to release not only all of the materials it had provided to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977-78, but also individual files on a large number of Cuban exiles and exile groups.

Unfortunately, a few important files were overlooked, and it has now become harder than ever to secure their release in usable form. Still, the new CIA and FBI materials allow us to tell far more of the assassination story than has ever been told before, and also to evaluate, based on the original FBI reports, many of the key incidents in Oswald's life. Also released was all of the original testimony before the Senate select committee known as the Church Committee of 1975-76, which had been convened to study government intelligence activities. That testimony included a great many important facts that did not make it into the committee's final report. The files of the House of Representatives' assassination committee — which concluded that President Kennedy had "probably" been assassinated by a conspiracy involving organized crime — have also been made available. Hundreds of books on the Kennedy assassination have appeared, but not by professional historians who have done research in the available archives.

Ruby's murder of Oswald and the apparent improbability of some of the critical evidence in the case — including the single-bullet theory, which the House committee convincingly determined to be true — got research into the Kennedy assassination off to an unfortunate start. Much of the early work became an exercise in trying to show that Oswald, who was indeed guilty, had not committed the crime. On the other hand, most of those who believed that Oswald was the assassin argued vehemently, in the face of a great deal of contrary evidence, that he had acted without any help or encouragement from anyone.

The truth lies squarely between those two extremes. A true understanding of President Kennedy's assassination requires the reconstruction of a complex network of relationships among mobsters, hit men, intelligence agents, Cuban exiles, and America's cold-war foreign policy. The story touches on an extraordinary range of locales and includes a remarkable cast of characters. It also involves the paradoxical policies of John F. Kennedy himself, who sought the relaxation of the cold war but apparently could not resign himself to the continuance of the Castro regime. And there are heroes as well, such as the hundreds of FBI agents who carefully put information on paper, the investigators for the House committee, and a few CIA operatives who believed that the American people deserved to know the truth. And now, at long last, we can see how all those various paths converged, and how a conspiracy of mobsters and misfits got away with assassinating a president.

David Kaiser, a historian, is a professor at the Naval War College. His books include American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Harvard University Press, 2000). This essay is adapted from his The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, to be published this month by Harvard University Press, copyright 2008 by David Kaiser.

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Obama Could Get ’Swift Boated’

From ABC News: Clinton Supporter Says Anti-Obama Campaign in the Works

By KATE SNOW

April 19, 2008

Rick Sloan says he doesn't want to see the Democrats get "Swift Boated" again this time. So the communications director for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers has sent a couple of dozen friends  union leaders and Democratic activists, mainly  an urgent plea to pay attention to Sen. Barack Obama's connections with the 1960s anti-war group, the Weather Underground, and other leftist thinkers.

Democrats "can't be an ostrich on this" with their heads buried in the sand, Sloan said in an interview.

He sent a copy of the memo to ABC News by e-mail.

Titled "What Is Rove Up To?," Sloan writes that Rove will seek to redefine Obama's signature slogan "Change We Can Believe In" and brand it instead as "revolutionary change, change driven by an alien ideology, change no patriotic American could stomach. And he intends to do so by channeling Sen. Joseph McCarthy."

The IAMAW endorsed Clinton last year, and Sloan is an avid Clinton supporter. The document makes no mention of Sloan's position with the union, and he told ABC News he sent it as a private citizen, not in his role as a spokesman for the union.

"Democratic operatives ought to be aware of what the Republican attack machine has been doing for two weeks," Sloan said in the interview.

He compared the timing of his memo to the time frame in 2004 when the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth registered its Web site domain and began making plans to take down former presidential candidate John Kerry, D-Mass. "This is history repeating itself," Sloan said.

In the memo, Sloan lays out the case he believes Republicans are making and would make against Obama if he were the Democratic nominee, linking the senator to Weather Underground founders Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

"According to Weatherman communiqués and papers compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation into a 403 page summary, Ayers and Dohrn toed the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line. They were hardcore Communists bent on world revolution," Sloan writes.

.. --> page -->"Ayers and Dohrn were responsible for bombings of the US State Department, US Capitol, the Pentagon, the National Guard Headquarters and nineteen other sites. Two other Weathermen, the parents of Ayers and Dohrn's adopted son, Chelsa, were convicted of murdering two policemen and a security guard during a Brinks truck robbery," he says.

Sloan says Rove and Republicans would "eviscerate" Obama if he were the Democratic presidential candidate. He recalls links that have been reported in the press between Obama and Ayers and brings up other leftist leaders and ideologues.

"Rove's frame for the fall campaign will be filled with revolutionary figures -- Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. His audio tapes of Ayers, Dohrn and other Weathermen will provide the screams of revolution. The bombing of the US Capitol, the Pentagon and the US State Department will serve as b-roll for his television ads that will have one final visual as the announcer gravely intones 'Their Change -- Not What You Had In Mind?'" he predicts.

Asked about Sloan's memo, Clinton campaign communications director Howard Wolfson said he took no responsibility for Sloan's language.

"Rick is a supporter," Wolfson said. "He is acting on his own in this instance. It is not something we endorse."

Wolfson did say, however, that Obama's answer to a question about his connections to Ayers in a televised debate last week "was not as forthcoming as it should have been."

A spokesman for Sen. Obama dismissed the Sloan document as nothing more than negative campaigning.

"Hillary Clinton has set the gold standard for negative campaigning, and these sorts of tactics have been rejected repeatedly, all over the country," said Bill Burton, spokesman for Obama.

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Rebuttal to Bartels and Krugman

Krugman's Latest Attack on Obama Not Supported by Evidence

By Alan Abramowitz

Paul Krugman continues his bashing of Barack Obama by attacking Mr. Obama's recent comments about "bitter small town voters." In his recent column, Krugman makes two claims about the political behavior of white working class voters that he says prove that Obama's characterization of these voters was simply incorrect. Leaving aside the fact that Krugman is taking Obama's comments out of context and distorting their real meaning, both of Krugman's claims are demonstrably false.

1. Krugman claims that the relationship between frequency of church attendance and Republican voting is much weaker among lower income white voters than among upper income white voters. This claim is not supported by evidence from the 2004 national exit poll. According to the exit poll data, the relationship was equally strong among lower and upper income white voters. Among white voters with family incomes of less than $30 thousand, George Bush was supported by 68% of those who reported attending church more than once per week vs. 33% of those who reported never attending church. Among white voters with family incomes of $100 thousand or more, Bush was supported by 81% of those who reported attending church more than once per week vs. 46% of those who reported never attending church. Thus, while upper income whites consistently supported Bush at a higher rate than lower income whites, the difference in support between the most and least frequent church-goers was identical in the two groups.

2. Citing the research of Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels, Krugman claims that Democrats do better among working class voters now than they did during the 1960s and that the success of the Republican Party in American politics since that time is entirely explained by GOP gains in the South. But this is simply not the case. Republican gains in the South are only part of the story of GOP success since the 1960s. Republicans have also made significant gains among white voters outside of the South, and these gains have been especially striking among two groups that were once mainstays of the New Deal Democratic coalition: Catholics and blue collar workers.

According to data from the American National Election Studies, Democratic identification (including leaning independents) among white voters outside of the South fell from 50% to 44% between 1962-70 and 2002-2004 while Republican identification rose from 45% to 51%. Thus, an eight point Democratic advantage during the 1960s was transformed into a seven point Republican advantage in 2002-2004.

But Republican gains were much larger among two key Democratic constituencies. Among northern white Catholics, Democratic identification fell from 65% during the 1960s to 44% in 2002-2004 while Republican identification rose from 26% to 49%. Thus a 39 point Democratic advantage among northern white Catholics was transformed into a five point Republican advantage. Similarly, among northern white blue collar workers, Democratic identification fell from 61 percent during the 1960s to 41 percent in 2002-2004 while Republican identification rose from 31 percent to 48 percent. Thus, a 20 point Democratic advantage among northern white blue collar workers was transformed into a seven point Republican advantage.

It is clear from these data that the Democratic Party's problems in recent years have not been confi