Sir Charles!

In South Philadelphia where this dude got his professional start, we call this attytood:




Trading Charles Barkely was a disaster for the 76ers franchise and I wish it had never happened.
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Thanks to Karen.

This is what happens

Yesterday, I was shooting the sh-t with a gal friend of mine about some politics and whatnot. She was saying how she didn't really like Hillary Clinton all that much and gave me some fairly perceptive reasons.

I asked her what she thought about Barack Obama. She said she liked him but had reservations...

Like what?

"Did you know that he's a practicing Muslim?"

I died a little bit on the inside as she finished the question.

How could this happen? How could this lie have gone so far?

My friend is not stupid. She's not exactly politically inclined or informed, but she's not stupid. She's rational and capable and smart. She's also extremely good looking but that's neither here nor there.

She saw that her comment upset me.

"It's not like it's a big deal. I think it would make a great statement to elect a Muslim President."

So so frustrating. I kept my cool and explained that the "Obama is a practicing Muslim" line was a lie perpetuated by the right that has festered on the internet for a real long time.

Mr. Obama, rather, is the most spiritual Christian amongst the Democratic contenders. In fact, he probably invokes the Bible more than any other candidate for President on either side of the aisle, save Huckacrazy.

Yet, not long after Mr. Obama announced his candidacy, one usual suspect tried out an unsubstantiated and vile attack strategy:



I know, I was SHOCKED too. The story dropped a year ago. Here's another transcript of Fox News coverage.

Their reports cited Insight Magazine, a subsidiary of the Washington Times, which is in turn owned by the Unification Church. The Unification Church is a sect founded in the 1940s in Korea. It has a conservative agenda and, again, have acquired the Washington Times and its subsidiaries.

This New York Times piece described how the story spread quickly to other popular conservative media outlets.

Now Insight Magazine has pointed out that the crux of their piece was not an investigation into Mr. Obama's childhood. Instead, they were merely reporting what was dug up by Hillary Clinton's dirty tricks team.

Mrs. Clinton, for her part, virulently denied that allegation, saying the story was a hitjob on both candidates.

I tend to believe her, given that Insight got its start slinging muddy allegations against her husband. But it doesn't matter, I'm not discussing that angle.

CNN, amazingly, saw the story reported on Fox News and actually sent a reporter to the school in Indonesia that Mr. Obama attended as a young boy:

But reporting by CNN in Jakarta, Indonesia and Washington, D.C., shows the allegations that Obama attended a madrassa to be false. CNN dispatched Senior International Correspondent John Vause to Jakarta to investigate.

He visited the Basuki school, which Obama attended from 1969 to 1971.

"This is a public school. We don't focus on religion," Hardi Priyono, deputy headmaster of the Basuki school, told Vause. "In our daily lives, we try to respect religion, but we don't give preferential treatment."

Vause reported he saw boys and girls dressed in neat school uniforms playing outside the school, while teachers were dressed in Western-style clothes.

Meanwhile, both Senators Clinton and Obama condemned the Insight story and its subsequent coverage as a hit job, etc.

Fox "corrected" the story later. Insight Magazine did not:

In an interview Sunday, Mr. Kuhner, 37, said he still considered the article, which he said was meant to focus on the thinking of the Clinton campaign, to be “solid as solid can be.” But he declined to say whether he had learned the identity of his reporter’s sources, and so perhaps only that reporter knows the origin of the article’s anonymous quotes and assertions. Its assertions about Mr. Obama resemble rumors passed on without evidence in e-mail messages that have been widely circulated over the last several weeks.

And so the media world turned and turned. Britney Spears threw a baby against a wall or something, John Edwards got a hair cut for an unelectable amount of money, and a good-looking white woman went missing.

The various incantations of the lie that Senator Obama is a Muslim or a terrorist or something went back to the cesspool that is the right-wing online rumor mill.

And then we all went on and had a glorious campaign season, right?

Unfortunately, no.

Fanatical whisper artists continued to perpetuate totally make-believe stories about Mr. Obama's childhood, his connection to Islam, etc. One even left a comment on this little website. If they were here, they were everywhere, spreading the lie on bulletin boards and as comments on mainstream sites all over the internet. Those rumors, of course, never were given any kind of caveat explaining that it was just opposition research from the Clinton team or that the rumors were false...

Obama, after his original debunking of the Insight story, largely let the thing languish. I imagine his rationale must have been something along the lines of:

If I bring it up to deny it, it'll give the story more traction than if I just let the whack jobs waste their breath...

Unfortunately, that clearly was an inoperable strategy.

The lie has persisted in its existence. The lie has grown in size. The lie has spread in reach.

At a few campaign stops, Mr. Obama has addressed the rumor, but clearly did not want to keep bringing it up for the news. There were signed letters on from clergy testifying to Obama's faith in Iowa.

Now, in South Carolina, with just days before the big Feb. 5th primary that could determine the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama has been forced to confront the lie campaign forcefully.

But for every rational explanation he gives about the sincerity of his commitment to Christian faith, there is another headline that says

"Obama confronts Muslim rumors"

or

"Obama says he's not a Muslim"

Headlines which, though I have no way of knowing, are probably just as damaging as the original malicious chain emails that have perpetuated all this.

Dick Polman ran a piece today about a mostly unrelated line of attacks against Barack Obama that this time have come from the Clinton campaign. It has to do with this thing he said about Ron Reagan having good political timing. Oyster debunks it as well as anybody.

I bring up that article because Mr. Polman closes it with a famous story about Lyndon Johnson's early political career:

This is the grist of politics as usual, and it brings to mind the old story about how Lyndon Johnson clawed his way to a Senate seat back in 1948. While systematically tarring his rival, fellow Democrat Coke Stevenson, the young LBJ said it might be a fine idea to spread the rumor that ole Coke was fond of having carnal relations with farm animals. His aides were shocked. Lyndon, they said, you know that's not true. To which LBJ replied, "I know that. I just want to make him to deny it."

And here is Mr. Obama denying over and over again that he is or has ever been affiliated with Islam. It is an unfortunate lie that attempts to scare people based on emotional, irrational, and uninformed fears of a people they've been told to fear again and again. It has gained an unfortunate and discouraging amount of traction within the fringe and mainstream media.

It has gained so much traction that a nonreligious casual follower of the campaign, a political independent, a likely Obama supporter believed it to be true.

That is so so sad.

It is a lie it is a lie it is a lie it is a lie it is a lie! It's a lie!

And I don't even care what religion he is either.

More on the Meaning of Huckabee

Adrastos linked to a recent article by Thomas Edsall, who I mentioned in the post on Huckabee and the empowerment of the Religious Right.

His analysis is excellent as always and adds a lot to the conversation below.

He explains why Huckabee should be considered a major threat to take the Republican nomination and makes it clear that this would be an excellent thing for Democrats.

What Huckabee Means

There's been a lot of back and forth chatter about the significance of Mike Huckabee's rise toward the top of the Republican field for their Presidential nomination.

Check me out. Check oyster out. Check Jeffrey out.

Oyster and I, especially, have been debating Mr. Huckabee's chances at getting the Republican nomination in the end.

I've argued that he has an excellent shot. In my more passionate moments, I've come close to outright predicting his nomination.

Oyster, in the meantime, has argued that Huckabee's economic populism is an anathema to the traditional Wall Street Republicans that need to be on board financially for a Republican candidacy to work. Here's what he said today:

I never said he didn't have "appeal". He's got a lot of it. But he hasn't fully received the media "treatment" yet, and he's got powerful enemies in his own party.

Here's what I wrote over at Library Chronicles:

For all Huckabee's political talent, and his admirable "intimacy" on camera and in person, his enemies in the GOP are legion. They are some of the most powerful and effective elements in conservatism. They will work hard so that he won't redefine "their" party, and they'll cede a Presidential election if need be, in order to regroup.

Huckabee won't raise a ton of money, won't energize national turnout, has no foreign policy advantage, his dumb sales tax idea undercuts his "populism", and he won't attract independents with his fundagelical social extremism.

I was teasing Oyster about Huck's convincing win over the economic establishment choice, Mitt Romney because I'd been arguing all along that Huckabee represented a grassroots movement more powerful than the divided and uninspired Wall Street Republican preferred candidates.

I would now like to expand upon those thoughts and maybe, in the end, synthesize the points that Oyster and I have been discussing into something that everyone can cherish forever.
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It all started in the 1960s.

As Democrats worked to thrust the New Deal coalition into a working political majority for that decade, Republicans reinvented their party. As conservative southern democrats became increasingly unwelcome because of their reactionary stances to the Civil Rights Movement, the Republican Party opened their arms. Barry Goldwater's "law and order" rhetoric spoke in code to Americans upset about African American empowerment. He lost big in 1964 but set up the Republican Party for the next 40 years.

Fiscal conservatives, having made MAJOR concessions during the FDR Presidency, were extremely alarmed at LBJ's Great Society's pledges to redistribute a certain level of wealth via social programs. They huddled down and figured out how to create a new coalition for victory by convincing poor whites to vote against their own financial self-interest in order in exchange for promises to correct the "social injustices" of racial preferences and the other relaxed social moors of that emerged in national discourse during that era.

The Dwight Eisenhower model, the rational patrician Republican, no longer captained the Republican ship. Gerald Ford was a special case for a variety of reasons. By 1966, Ronald Reagan was governor of California and Democrats began to lose grip of Congress. A powerful, largely exclusive alliance was born between social and fiscal conservatives.

One book that changed my life is called Chain Reaction. It was written by Mary and Thomas Edsall and it provides the best historical account of how conservatism came to power from a top-down perspective.

For a bottom-up perspective, let us consider What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank. In it, his thoughts on the Conservative stranglehold on middle America are quite revealing.

Essentially, economic conservatives were able to argue that the social programs of the Democratic Party ignored "average Americans" because they were geared mostly to the minorities and rights groups that were fueling the social unrest of the 60s and 70s. Voters concerned with these changes to the social fabric put aside their economic self-interest to vote for Neocons that promised to deliver on issues like gay rights and abortion.

Frank argues that the Republicans have largely done little to reverse the course of social change in America but have been able to reek economic havoc on these small town communities through economic deregulation, etc. He argues that there exists a cycle of sorts because the inability to get results on issues like abortion and homosexuality allows Republicans to further insist upon the pressing need to elect more neoconservatives to office.

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President Bush is a PERFECT example of this style. His 2004 reelection campaign relied heavily on the turnout of social conservatives highly motivated by the Bush team's cultivation of homosexuality as a national emergency and by raising the possibility of changes to the Supreme Court that might reverse Roe v. Wade. Meanwhile, his top post-election priority was an attempt to privatize social security. His most defining domestic "accomplishment" has been his tax cuts to the wealthy, not any particular reaction to any of the social issues that his grassroots base find so important.

Things, however, are changing. The coalition between Wall Street Republicans and Main Street Evangelicals has begun to fracture. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, though it ultimately failed, enraged the evangelical base of the party. Another example is the gang of ten compromise that saved the filibuster option and made the nomination of a explicit anti-abortion judge unlikely. Religious conservatives were mad at their Republican representatives, disillusioned by promises not kept again and again.

Meanwhile, the Republican apparatus had just spent the last 40 years building up the religious right, empowering them, giving them a voice. They reached out to poor whites that felt disenfranchised by Great Society Democrats perceived to answer primarily to minority voters and hippies.

So now, they're empowered. Individual churches and fundamentalist leaders know how to get out the vote, know how to raise money, know how to write letters to Congress. Grassroots religious conservatives in the South and Midwest have become more important as an electoral base than the traditional fiscal conservatives from New York and New England. Because they were largely credited with bringing victory to W. Bush in 2004, there must indeed be a reasonable perception amongst evangelicals that they can drive the Republican Party themselves.
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That brings us the the Republican field for the 2008 nomination. The Wall Street Republicans seem to have fallen in behind either Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani. They were the first to begin aggressive campaigning and fund-raising and have been considered the two front runners for the nomination for the majority of 2007.

How do you think grassroots evangelicals felt about those two guys?

Not great is my guess. I think they took it as a big F you. They see Romney's past as a social liberal. They see Giuliani's present as a social liberal. They largely have not benefited financially from the economic policies of the candidates they've supported in the past. Why support Giuliani or Romney when they're to continue to screw you economically without even making any promises on the social end?

Throughout much of the run up to yesterday's Iowa Caucus, every poll showed remarkable Republican disinterest in the race and dissatisfaction with the candidates available.

On the Democratic side, voters have been largely enthusiastic about their top choices, Clinton, Edwards, and Obama. Edwards, and especially Obama, have created a social movement buzz about their candidacies by stressing connections to the grassroots, enhanced by an incredible campaign organizations, personal charisma, etc.
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Along came Huckabee.

Without any kind of Iowa organization or campaign bank account, Mike Huckabee was a real long shot candidate. Because of his own extremely impressive charisma and charm, Huckabee was able to sneak into second place at the Ames straw poll over the summer. The fund-raising and media attention boom thrust Huckabee into the spotlight.

Grassroots religious conservatives, the electoral base of the Republican Party, have responded resoundingly to him. Why? Well, he's an evangelical minister that is right with the base on every important social issue.

Maybe more importantly, Huckabee represents something else.

The very fact that Huckabee's economic populism has made him a problem to the establishment Wall Street Republicans is a plus for the grassroots evangelicals.

As Obama and Edwards have won big big big with the rhetoric of change and promises to buck the old way of the Democratic Party, Huckabee has represents an anti-establishment Republican. His charisma is remarkably Obama-like. He's young, he's an outsider. For grassroots Republicans, he's clearly disconnected from a presidential administration and republican mainstream that has sandbagged party popularity for the upcoming race and stabbed evangelicals in the back by failing to produce results on any number of social issues. This makes, for grassroots Republicans, Huckabee just as "electable" in a general election as a Rudy Giuliani or a Mitt Romney or a John McCain.

I've previously referred to it as Obama-envy.

But it could be even more than that. This is from today's New York Times:

Mr. Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, rode a crest of evangelical Christian support to victory on Thursday over his rival Mitt Romney, capping a remarkable ascent over the last two months from near the bottom of the Republican field. A poll of people entering the Republican caucuses on Thursday showed more than 8 in 10 of his supporters identified themselves as evangelicals.

The same surveys showed extraordinary turnout among evangelicals, who represented some 60 percent of Republican caucusgoers. In years past, Republican Party leaders in Iowa put evangelical turnout at about 40 percent.

That's seems to be a pretty significant point. There could be very enthusiastic, very real Huckamania amongst grassroots Republicans energized by this candidate's ability to coalesce support by utilizing the on-the-ground networks of evangelical churches instead of the ad money of Wall Street.

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Oyster argues, with a great deal of validity, that Governor Huckabee still faces monumental obstacles in a wide-open primary race. Certainly. The Republican field is still much too fluid to call winners now. Oyster has said, in essence, that Huckabee has yet to receive the full treatment of media scrutiny. This is true. Oyster has said that there are powerful legions within the GOP that consider Huckabee's economic populism to be dangerous and will do everything they can from preventing his ascendancy to the top of the party, even if it costs them 2008.

I may also agree with this. If Wall Street Republicans are unable to take Huckabee down in favor of Giuliani or Romney, they may indeed ditch the Republican party for 2008 for an independent run by their own man, Michael Bloomberg.

I think so. I think they would do this. They'll need to flex their muscles to take back control of the GOP, put evangelicals back in their place, dictate the policy down to the grassroots instead of take policy up from the grassroots.

The question for now, however, is whether or not grassroots evangelicals can continue this show of power through the primary season. Huckabee will certainly finish outside of the top two in New Hampshire, but South Carolina could be a resounding victory. What happens after that? Will he be able to get the money necessary to compete on Feb. 5? I don't know.

I do know that the roots, the most likely Republican voters, those most empowered, outraged, fearful, and activist will be out for Huckabee and out for Huckabee with pride. He will indeed continue to be the evangelical choice. The challenge for Huckabee is to mobilize those evangelicals in enough numbers to trump whatever Giuliani and Romney and McCain can put up on television.

I think he can be the Republican nominee for the Presidency. Will he? I don't know. But I do know that the movement mobilization of grassroots Republicans was underestimated by Democrats and the punditocracy in both 2000 and 2004. It is happening again now, perhaps more naively than ever.

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One last side note, an interesting observation about Republican voters.

When I made my prediction for the Republican Caucus results, I, in the end, gave Huckabee only the smallest of victory margins over Romney. The reason I did this, instead of picking the convincing Huckabee victory that I had been anticipating for months, was because of some truly bad foreign policy blunders by the Governor from Arkansas over the last two weeks of the campaign. Here's a link to one of those stories. Given that Republicans have relied so heavily on advantages in voter perception of foreign policy credentials, I thought that Huckabee's factual mistakes would bring him down significantly.

This did not happen and I began to think about why.

And I realized that Republican voters don't look for foreign policy credentials, they look for tough-talk rhetoric. It didn't matter that Huckabee didn't know that Pakistan had lifted martial law, it didn't matter that Huckabee made up that Pakistani illegal immigrants were a major threat.

I remembered the 2000 election and I remembered one little story that came and went without much fanfare. A reporter gave Bush a simple foreign policy quiz in which he was asked to name some leaders from some world hot spots. He flunked it, badly. But who cared, really? Many probably thought the President was ambushed by those questions, I mean how could anyone be expected to know foreign people's names anyway?

And I remembered statistics that I've read about Americans' knowledge of the world. In 2002, as we prepared to go to war, only about 13% of Americans between 18-24 could find Iraq on a map. I don't imagine the percentage of all adult Americans to be too much higher than that.

I realized that rank and file Republican voters don't care even a little bit how much you know about other cultures, other countries, world events because grassroots Republicans themselves know so very little about these things.

So maybe Huckabee's assertion that Benazir Bhutto's assassination more than anything else proves we need a border fence was more shrewd than I originally thought. Because it so played upon the fearfulness, ignorance, and bunker mentality of grassroots evangelicals, it may have even been a genius "gaffe" that gained him more votes than it cost. If he had only said that it justified our second amendment and that more Americans should arm themselves...