Valerie Jarrett: Engineer Of Obama Campaign

Black Commentator | Dr Martin Kilson | Monday, June 9, 2008

Future historians of the 2008 primary contests will no doubt identify Valerie Jarrett as an important factor in the Obama campaign's historic achievement — in fact, as the engineer of the Obama campaign. In an Wall Street Journal (May 12, 2008) article that scooped other major newspapers, the country was informed of the virtually unknown political personality of Valerie Jarrett, whom the newspaper called "an essential member of [the Obama campaign's] inner set". She was also identified as "Obama's brain trust...that Barack Obama says he doesn't make a major decision without consulting adviser Valerie Jarrett."

The article continued:

'She is one of our best friends, somebody who is practically a sister' to him and his wife, Michelle, Mr. Obama said in an interview. 'I don't make any major decisions without asking her about them first.' When she isn't traveling with him, Ms. Jarrett speaks to Mr. Obama two or three times a day, the candidate said. She is also an essential member of the coterie of advisers who have helped the couple navigate countless decisions, from whether he should run for president to how he should handle Hillary Clinton's resurgence after the Pennsylvania primary.

One week after the Wall Street Journal article on Valerie Jarrett, Newsweek Magazine (May 19, 2008) added to our knowledge of her relationship to Senator Obama. "When he wanted to run for the U.S. Senate," reports Newsweek, "he first had to convince Michelle and Jarrett that it was a good idea. He's been seeking her counsel ever since."

It might be said that there's little that's ordinary about Valerie Jarrett as an "inner set" adviser to the presidential nominee of a major political party. The Wall Street Journal article that first informed the country of Jarrett's existence had comparative references to Burt Lance who was a key adviser in Carter's campaign and Karen Hughes who was a key adviser to George W. Bush, but their resumes were, one might say, culturally, professionally, and politically slim compared to Jarrett's. Why do I say this?

First, culturally Jarrett is an African-American, a fact containing-in-itself unique American life defining dimensions. She's the daughter of a medical scientist — a pathologist — who was the first African-American full-professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at University of Chicago, and the daughter too of a psychologist who was the president of the Erickson Institute, a Graduate School and Research Center in Child Psychology at the University of Chicago that was named after the famous development psychologist Eric Erickson. Also, Jarrett's grandfather was the first African-American to direct a major city bureaucracy in the United States — the Chicago Housing Authority during the 1940s.

Jarrett, now 51 years old, gained her law degree from the University of Michigan Law School. Like others among her generation-cohort of 20th century African-American professionals (the fifth-generation cohort), Jarrett and her Black professional peers benefited from the existence of numerous Black Mayors through whom they could gain significant experience in the public policy arena — a situation not available to previous generations of Black professionals. As Newsweek Magazine (May 19, 2008) informs us, Valerie Jarrett "got her start [in public policy arena] working for Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor." And Jarrett's initial experience in the public policy arena was substantive and significant, as the Wall Street Journal (May 12, 2008) relates:

As a court-appointed overseer to the desegregation of public housing in Chicago, she negotiated between the city, residents of down-and-out housing projects such as Cabrini-Green, and real-estate developers who were replacing the projects with mixed-income communities. [And] as the chairman of the board of the Chicago Stock Exchange, she juggled the concerns of hard-driving traders and New York bankers who bought a sizable stake in the sliding exchange.

Obama And Dean Team Up To Recast The Political Map - HuffPost

Huffington Post | Sam Stein | Thursday, June 5, 2008

Sixteen months after he launched his campaign for the White House, Sen. Barack Obama may, just now, be entering his campaign's most perilous stage. Facing a rift of sorts within the Democratic Party and concerns over the scope of his political base, the Illinois Democrat is pursuing an unconventional path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave: unlike those before him, he has pledged to redraw the electoral map by putting new, traditionally Republican states in play.

A slew of political factors will determine Obama's success in turning red states blue. But the Senator, in no small measure, will be aided in his task by reforms that preceded his run for the presidency. For all of the hoopla surrounding the candidates, the 2008 presidential election will be the first truly national test of the viability and prescience of Howard Dean's 50-state strategy.

Four years ago, when Dean was vaulted to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee — following a failed presidential bid months earlier — he pledged to rewrite the rules concerning where and how Democrats would compete. In the subsequent months, resources and staff were invested into unconventional and even previously untouched locales. The idea was that the party simply couldn't compete without a margin for error.

But at the time, party insiders, who believed Dean was stripping away important resources from key races, were privately and, on occasion, publicly livid.

"He says it's a long-term strategy," said Paul Begala, the longtime Clinton aide and Democratic strategist. "What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose."

When the Democrats made major congressional gains in 2006, questions persisted as to whether the electoral success had simply been the product of a fortunate circumstance. Dean himself admitted to Time Magazine, "I didn't expect much to come of this strategy for four or even six years."

Now, four years have passed. And the Democrats have nominated a candidate that seems perfectly equipped to test-drive the party's 50-state vehicle. Obama has built his candidacy off of the pledge to expand the electoral playing field. Moreover, his campaign has leaned on an ability to drum up both grassroots support and the recruitment of Republicans and independents — two stated objectives of the Dean vision.

On Thursday, Obama symbolically endorsed the DNC's efforts, declaring that Dean would remain party chairman heading into the general election.

As Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, told The Huffington Post: "I think that we are going to have a larger battlefield in 2008... I think we are going to stretch the Republicans. I don't think they can take for granted nearly as many states as they have in the past. And I think we are going to add several to the Democratic column this year and so our coalition is going to be broader."

Using the Holocaust to Smear Obama - HuffPost

Huffington Post | Menachem Rosensaft | Wednesday, May 28, 2008

I never thought I'd see the day when the Holocaust would be used as a tool for "gotcha" politics. But over the last two days, we have seen John McCain's supporters at the Republican National Committee and at Fox News launch tasteless attacks on Barack Obama. In their attempt to score a few political points, they have diminished the experience of those who suffered and died at Buchenwald, and disrespected the service of the heroic American troops who liberated them.

It started yesterday when the RNC put out a statement slamming Obama for referring to Auschwitz as he related a family story on Memorial Day. Instead of merely asking for clarification, the RNC smeared Obama's "dubious claim," and suggested — tongue in cheek — that perhaps Obama's uncle "was serving in the Red Army." They went on to say that the story raised questions "about his judgment and his readiness to lead as commander in chief."

"A more perfect union" - the speech on race in America

Race to the Bottom - Clinton fights sexism and uses racisim (The Nation)

The Nation | Betsy Reed | Thursday, May 1, 2008

In the course of Hillary Clinton's historic run for the White House — in which she became the first woman ever to prevail in a state-level presidential primary contest — she has been likened to Lorena Bobbitt (by Tucker Carlson); a "hellish housewife" (Leon Wieseltier); and described as "witchy," a "she-devil," "anti-male" and "a stripteaser" (Chris Matthews). Her loud and hearty laugh has been labeled "the cackle," her voice compared to "fingernails on a blackboard" and her posture said to look "like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court." As one Fox News commentator put it, "When Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear, Take out the garbage." Rush Limbaugh, who has no qualms about subjecting audiences to the spectacle of his own bloated physique, asked his listeners, "Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?" Perhaps most damaging of all to her electoral prospects, very early on Clinton was deemed "unlikable." Although other factors also account for that dislike, much of the venom she elicits ("Iron my shirt," "How do we beat the bitch?") is clearly gender-specific.

Watching the brass ring of the presidency slip out of Clinton's grasp as she is buffeted by this torrent of misogyny, women — white women, that is, and mainstream feminists especially — have rallied to her defense. On January 8, after Barack Obama beat Clinton in the Iowa caucuses, Gloria Steinem published a New York Times op-ed titled "Women Are Never Front-Runners." "Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House," Steinem wrote. Next came Clinton's famous "misting-over moment" in New Hampshire in response to a question from a woman about the stress of modern campaigning. For that display of emotion, Clinton was derided, on the one hand, as calculating and chameleonlike — "It could be that big girls don't cry...but it could be that if they do they win," said Chris Matthews — and, on the other, as lacking "strength and resolve," as her Democratic rival John Edwards put it, in a jab at the perennial Achilles' heel of women candidates. Riding a wave of female sympathy, Clinton won New Hampshire in what was dubbed an "anti-Chris Matthews vote."

Thus, feminist opposition to the sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton has morphed into support for the candidate herself. In February Robin Morgan published a reprise of her famous 1970 essay "Goodbye to All That," exhorting women to embrace Clinton as a protest against "sociopathic woman-hating." In the Los Angeles Times, Leslie Bennetts, author of The Feminine Mistake, wrote of older female voters fed up with the media's dismissive treatment of Clinton: "There are signs the slumbering beast may be waking up — and she's not in a happy mood." A recent New York magazine article titled "The Feminist Reawakening: Hillary Clinton and the Fourth Wave" described how "it isn't just the 'hot flash cohort'...that broke for Clinton. Women in their thirties and forties — at once discomfited and galvanized by the sexist tenor of the media coverage, by the nastiness of the watercooler talk in the office, by the realization that the once-foregone conclusion of Clinton-as-president might never come to be — did too."

The sexist attacks on Clinton are outrageous and deplorable, but there's reason to be concerned about her becoming the vehicle for a feminist reawakening. For one thing, feminist sympathy for her has begotten an "oppression sweepstakes" in which a number of her prominent supporters, dismayed at her upstaging by Obama, have declared a contest between racial and gender bias and named sexism the greater scourge. This maneuver is not only unhelpful for coalition-building but obstructs understanding of how sexism and racism have played out in this election in different (and interrelated) ways.

Yet what is most troubling — and what has the most serious implications for the feminist movement — is that the Clinton campaign has used her rival's race against him. In the name of demonstrating her superior "electability," she and her surrogates have invoked the racist and sexist playbook of the right — in which swaggering macho cowboys are entrusted to defend the country — seeking to define Obama as too black, too foreign, too different to be President at a moment of high anxiety about national security. This subtly but distinctly racialized political strategy did not create the media feeding frenzy around the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that is now weighing Obama down, but it has positioned Clinton to take advantage of the opportunities the controversy has presented. And the Clinton campaign's use of this strategy has many nonwhite and nonmainstream feminists crying foul.

While 2008 was never going to be a "postracial" campaign, the early racially tinged skirmishes between the Clinton and Obama camps seemed containable. There were references by Clinton campaign officials to Obama's admission of past drug use; the tit-for-tat over Clinton's tone-deaf but historically accurate statement that Martin Luther King needed Lyndon Johnson for his civil rights dreams to be realized; and insinuations that Obama is a token, unqualified, overreaching — that he's all pretty words, "fairy tales" and no action.

From the point of view of Obama's supporters, the edge was taken off some of these conflicts by the mere fact of his stunning electoral success, built as it was on significant white support. Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton and an Obama volunteer, recalls that for black Americans "Iowa was an astonishing moment — watching Barack win the caucus felt like Reconstruction. There was something powerful about feeling as though you were a full citizen." In democracy, Harris-Lacewell explains, "the ruled and rulers are supposed to be the same people. The idea that black folks could be engaged in the process of being rulers over not just black folks but over the nation as a whole struck me as very powerful."

Soon enough, however, that powerful idea came under attack.

Obama - 5 suits, 4 pair of shoes and one real person

Dems' suspense may be unnecessary - Politico

Politico | Elizabeth Drew | Friday, April 25, 2008

The torrent of speculation about the end game of the Democratic nomination contest is creating a false sense of suspense — and wasting a lot of time of the multitudes who are anxious to know how this contest is going to turn out.

Notwithstanding the plentiful commentary to the effect that the Pennsylvania primary must have shaken superdelegates planning to support Barack Obama, causing them to rethink their position, key Democrats on Capitol Hill are unbudged.

"I don’t think anyone’s shaken," a leading House Democrat told me. The critical mass of Democratic congressmen that has been prepared to endorse Obama when the timing seemed right remains prepared to do so. Their reasons, ones they have held for months, have not changed — and by their very nature are unlikely to.

Essentially, they are three:

(a) Hillary Rodham Clinton is such a polarizing figure that everyone who ever considered voting Republican in November, and even many who never did, will go to the polls to vote against her, thus jeopardizing Democrats down the ticket — i.e., themselves, or, for party leaders, the sizeable majorities they hope to gain in the House and the Senate in November.

(b) To take the nomination away from Obama when he is leading in the elected delegate count would deeply alienate the black base of the Democratic Party, and, in the words of one leading Democrat, "The superdelegates are not going to switch their votes and jeopardize the future of the Democratic Party for generations." Such a move, he said, would also disillusion the new, mostly young, voters who have entered into politics for the first time because of Obama, and lose the votes of independents who could make the critical difference in November.

(c) Because the black vote can make the decisive difference in numerous congressional districts, discarding Obama could cost the Democrats numerous seats.

One Democratic leader told me, "If we overrule the elected delegates there would be mayhem." Hillary Rodham Clinton’s claim that she has, or will have, won the popular vote does not impress them — both because of her dubious math and because, as another key Democrat says firmly, "The rules are that it’s the delegates, period." (These views are closely aligned with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s statement earlier this year that the superdelegates should not overrule the votes of the elected delegates.)

The best description of Obama's political style I've read yet

TPM Cafe | John H. McFadden | Wednesday, December 31, 1969

It Is the Process, Stupid: The Unappreciated Power of Obama's Empathic Problem-Solving Method

Most commentators fault Obama for not being like Hillary, not as steeped in policies and programs as she. They think voters want to know what the candidates will put in place after they're elected. That conclusion has some merit, but that's a small picture view. The big picture, as Obama knows, the two parties have been stalemating each other for at least since the Nixon Administration. Neither one can form a consensus long enough to create lasting, viable change. So the overarching problem in America is entirely a process problem.

The problem is, How do you form a consensus to create the kind of progressive changes both candidates envision? To be more precise, How do you take your left of center base and unite it with the Far Left and the 20 percent in the middle to create a 60 percent majority?

It does seem that process really is the most important issue at this point in our history. Were I Obama, I would be pounding the above analysis and conclusion every time I spoke. I agree that it's a difficult point to make, especially with people who don't study process and use it in their work.

The particular difficulty he's having is that his process--his style of creating coalitions--is unfamiliar to most people. The old style, power politics as advocated by Lyndon Johnson, one of Clinton's heroes, is to slap together a package of pork and arm-twisting along with straightforward appeals to enlightened self-interest of the stakeholders. The emphasis is, as Hillary has so frequently said, on being a "fighter."

Of course, she never answers the question, What has your style of fighting gotten us? It can be argued that, if she had Obama's method of solving problems, she could have gotten universal health care approved during the first years of her husband's presidency. She fought. She excluded her opponents from the proceses, which polarized them. Fighting really is the cause of the debilitating stalements from whch we've suffered for decades.

Bitterness: What Obama really said

Obama Outraises Clinton 2-1 in March

SFGate.com | Jim Kuhnhenn, Associated Press Writer | Thursday, April 3, 2008

Barack Obama raked in $40 million in March, leaving Hillary Rodham Clinton and her $20 million in the fundraising dust and stuffing his campaign treasury so he can outspend her in the crucial Pennsylvania primary.

His haul in new donations also buttressed his argument to Democratic superdelegates that he has built a vast network of donors and volunteers that they wouldn't want to lose by denying him the nomination.

Obama has attracted nearly 1.3 million donors, largely through the Internet.

He has raised $131 million in just the first three months of this year to $70 million for Clinton. Republican John McCain's campaign has not revealed his March fundraising, but he has been far behind the Democrats, raising less than $23 million in January and February combined.

Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, claimed a double benefit from the Illinois senator's fundraising. "Many of our contributors are volunteering for the campaign, making our campaign the largest grass-roots army in recent political history," he said.