See how Barack Obama voted on key votes -- the most important bills, nominations and resolutions that have come before Congress, as determined by washingtonpost.com.
“In order for Barack to win, it’s going to be important for people to know everything there is to know about him,” Robinson said. “Getting to know the rest of his family is just as important. The country doesn’t know how to understand a black candidate. They’re going to want to evaluate him up and down, know his background and his family’s background.”
The real reason for not desiring a Hillary coronation, as described to me by California Democrats, is resentment of her cautious sidestep rightward over the past six years. They still cannot get over her sponsorship in 2005 of legislation against flag burning. The whispered worry is that Clinton as the presidential nominee would be a loser in a year when the stars seem aligned for a Republican defeat.
The current video presents the erroneous and slanted stories Fox recently ran about Barack Obama. In response, Obama refused to appear on Fox.
Hillary Clinton lately has deployed the argument among Democrats that she should be nominated because she has a proven record of vanquishing her enemies. So she might think it's to her advantage to put her knife-fighting skills on display. Former Vice President Al Gore has privately told friends that his familiarity with the Clintons' hardball campaign style is one of the reasons he would be leery of making a run against Hillary. Geffen told Dowd he expected a brutal primary because the Clinton "machine is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective." But Obama showed, despite his official disdain for pugnacious politics, that he knows how to punch back when he's hit.
The battle to be the 2008 Democratic candidate for president went negative Wednesday, as leading contenders Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama got into a virtual shouting match. This is a spin by Fox!The campaigns exchanged heated words after Clinton suggested Obama return funds to Hollywood bigwig David Geffen, who insulted Clinton in a newspaper article.
Minnesota U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison says he supports Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for president."Not because he's black," said Ellison, who is black, on Tuesday. "That's identity politics. I reject identity politics.
More than 3000 people gathered to see Senator Hillary Clinton make her first presidential campaign stop in South Carolina today, while over the weekend, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois drew a crowd approaching five thousand at historically black Claflin College.
I don’t believe the authenticity problem lies with African Americans. The authenticity problem lies with white Americans. The real question is: Why have White pundits, journalists and newscasters been so eager to comment on Obama’s being biracial and the son of an immigrant, rather than his history of civil rights activism or his long time involvement in African American social and political communities? Does it reveal a desire, among whites, that he not be authentically black (whatever that means), but somehow “different?”
Sen. Barack Obama received rock-star treatment here from Democratic donors. On Tuesday, he tests his appeal in Hollywood — a political stage long owned by Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Sen. Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, in Springfield, IL.
He warned that if government doesn't address such issues as global warming, the federal deficit and lack of investment in education, ``We may be consigning the next generation to an America that is a little meaner and a little poorer than the one we inherited.
This photo provided by Harvard University Law School shows Barack Obama as a student at the school in Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 6, 1990. Obama came to Harvard in the fall of 1988 after graduating from Columbia University and spending four years as a community organizer in Chicago. At the end of his first year, Obama was selected to serve on the Law Review as one of 80 "editor"-students; midway through his second year, on Feb. 5, 1990, Obama was elected president, becoming the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. (AP Photo/Harvard University, Joe Wrinn)
You have to admit, this is a pretty cool photo of the young Obama.
"People talk as if this is, like, some kind of option for him," Cobb-Hunter said. "When Obama looks in the mirror in the morning, what do you think he sees? There is no way that he has any confusion about being a man of color. I think this issue is being manufactured by people who want to get us off focus. I don't hear the national media questioning Hillary Clinton about being a woman."
If the Democrats’ candidate in 2008 is Obama, we can be sure that the right-wing Republican noise machine will denounce the nation’s potential first non-white male president as a dangerous “leftist.” The charge will be absurd, something that will hardly stop numerous people on the portside of the narrow U.S. political spectrum from claiming Obama as a fellow “progressive.” Certain to be encouraged by Obama and his handlers, this confusion will reflect the desperation and myopia that shaky thinking and the limited choices of the U.S. electoral system regularly instill in liberals and some squishy near leftists.
So what sorts of policies and values could one expect from an imagined Obama presidency? There is quite a bit already in Obama’s short national career that has to be placed in the “never mind” category if one is to seriously to believe his claim (cautiously advanced in The Audacity of Hope) to be a “progressive” concerned with “social and economic justice” and global peace.
In the black caucus at the DNC meeting Illinois State Senate President Emil Jones caused a ruckus when he slammed the caucus for murmuring that Barack Obama isn't 'black enough'.
The general gist of his comments was 'how long are we going to have to pay back the Clinton's', and it revealed a generational split among black political leaders between the old patronage model and a newer movement model.
The rush of upward mobility produced the inevitable identity crisis, which led in turn to endless discussions about the meaning of blackness in a world where skin color was beginning to matter less.
Black Americans who came from successful, upwardly mobile families were regularly dismissed as white or inauthentic. The authentic black experience, it was said, was limited to the hard-core, impoverished upbringing that black people often chose to brag about, even when they had actually grown up in the lap of luxury.
What does it mean to be black, and who is the arbiter of authentic blackness? As Sen. Barack Obama's "blackness" has increasingly been discussed on black-oriented radio shows, at political conferences and on Sunday morning news shows, I've grown more dismayed by the day.
This is a narrow-minded and divisive notion. At a time when blacks living in this country, whether by birth or by choice, should be harnessing their collective political clout to empower all black people, we're wasting time debating which of us are truly black.
I think Obama's appeal to some white people is his perceived calmness -- that's he's not stuck on the civil rights movement, that he can shrug off a Biden comment and do the good ol' boy thing with Sen. John McCain.
I've been told that I'm naive, and that of course Obama can't say what he thinks and still win. Sorry, folks, but I would like to go to the polls and vote for someone who I believe in.
