Feminist Pitch by a Democrat Named Obama - New York Times

Feminist Pitch by a Democrat Named Obama - New York Times

In West Iowa, Obama’s Man Thinks Locally - New York Times

In West Iowa, Obama’s Man Thinks Locally - New York Times
November 26, 2007
In West Iowa, Obama’s Man Thinks Locally
By JEFF ZELENY
MISSOURI VALLEY, Iowa, Nov. 24 — Rory Steele had bounced along a gravel road that rides like a washboard to get to the farmstead. He stepped across a few rows of soybeans, climbed up the steps of a red Case combine and squeezed into a seat next to Lyle McIntosh, who was circling a field.

Mr. Steele drove 17 miles from his office in Council Bluffs that crisp October morning to see how the harvest was coming along. He had no stake in the crop yields or commodity prices, but another question weighed on his mind: Would the work be finished in time for Mr. McIntosh to help drum up support for Senator Barack Obama?

For all the uncertainties in presidential campaigns, Mr. Steele would not have guessed that a soggy, unusually long harvest would complicate his task of building an organization for Mr. Obama. Yet since arriving here in March, he had learned to think like a local, which in this part of Iowa means only gently pestering people about politics.

Mr. Steele, a 29-year-old former marine who has worked as a truck driver in the Pacific Northwest and a crab fisherman in Alaska, is the face of the Obama campaign in western Iowa. His territory of 21 counties, the largest in the state, is an essential front line in one of the most competitive presidential races that anyone here can recall.

The outcome of the Iowa caucuses, a set of 1,781 precinct meetings to take place across the state on Jan. 3, hinges on creating a strong and loyal person-to-person network. Mr. Steele is among the hundreds of Democratic and Republican campaign aides stationed in Iowa responsible for building — and sustaining — those networks throughout the state’s 99 counties.

That is precisely what took Mr. Steele to the soybean field. In August, Mr. McIntosh signed on as Mr. Obama’s Harrison County co-chairman, so Mr. Steele drops by from time to time to see if Mr. McIntosh is satisfied with the campaign’s direction and to replenish a supply of Obama DVDs he lends to neighbors.

“If I could make one suggestion, I would get the senator to Dunlap or Ottaway or Missouri Valley,” said Mr. McIntosh, 64, talking over the combine’s purr as he referred to three nearby towns. “I realize he can’t go everywhere, but we really need to get him over here.”

On Saturday, after more than a month of negotiating and planning by his campaign, Mr. Obama bounded onto the auctioneer’s platform at the Dunlap Livestock Auction and was greeted with applause from more than 300 people who filled the orange seats usually occupied by cattle buyers. (The campaign advance team wanted to hold the event in the local high school, but Mr. Steele and other aides fought that option, which pleased Mr. McIntosh.)

Mr. Steele is a political strategist, an office manager, a real estate prospector, a party planner, a life coach, a cheerleader, a concierge and a problem solver. Even in a campaign that has raised more than $80 million and spent $5 million on TV spots in Iowa alone, getting the office computer printer to work falls on his abilities to beg and barter.

“I can only control what I can control,” he said, “or I’d spend all day freaking out.”

So neither Mr. Steele, a soft-spoken, bearded man, nor his ever-growing cadre of young staff members spend time tracking daily campaign developments on cable television or the proliferating blogs. They seldom have time to watch the presidential debates. Their lens is purposefully microscopic.

On the ground floor here, which the campaign has designated Region 5, he and his team are recruiting precinct captains, the supporters who will organize Obama followers on caucus night. Finding a reliable captain for the Ashton Belvidere precinct in Monona County is far more important than fretting over poll numbers.

“I’m trying to find a gong,” Mr. Steele said. “Every time we get a new precinct captain, I will ring it.”

To inspire his troops, he not only encourages “Snoop Dogg breaks” — brief naps on the sofa near the front doorway of the campaign office — but he also holds competitions. On the Fourth of July, he vowed to have himself tattooed with the initials of whoever turned in the most signed supporter cards. Delane Adams, a campaign organizer from Chicago, won by submitting 33.

So on Mr. Steele’s right bicep, just below a Marine Corps tattoo, is another work of art: “DA 33 July 4.” (“I thought it would have been weird to tattoo “Obama” on my arm,” he said, “but now I have some dude’s initials on me.”)

For all this, Mr. Steele is paid roughly $2,300 a month (plus occasional mileage reimbursements) to supervise about a dozen workers and scores of volunteers. He took a temporary apartment in Council Bluffs, where he relocated for the presidential race — his first — after working the last election cycle for local Democratic candidates in Washington State.

Since arriving here eight months ago, he has logged nearly 26,000 miles on his red Chevrolet S-10 truck. He has listened to a recording of “The Audacity of Hope,” Mr. Obama’s second book, four times. He is intimately familiar with Mr. Obama’s voice, his positions and his biography, yet Mr. Steele has had only a few passing conversations with him.

Mr. Steele has never seen the campaign’s sprawling national headquarters in Chicago, on the 11th floor of a downtown skyscraper, with views of Lake Michigan and the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier. From his sparse office on the first floor of a Council Bluffs office building, a window overlooks nothing.

Across the rolling bluffs and the flat plains of his territory, in towns like Defiance and Denison, Honey Creek and Harlan, it is his responsibility to know which caucusgoing Democrats are supporting which candidate.

And if the answer is someone other than Mr. Obama?

“Like a girlfriend who cheats on you, we don’t give up on people,” Mr. Steele said during an evening drive to a house party in Greene County. “We never want to burn those bridges and we never — ever — speak ill of another candidate.”

Beyond civility, there is also a practical reason for this. With six Democrats running serious campaigns for the nomination here, candidates who do not receive 15 percent of support in a caucus are deemed unviable in that caucus, so their supporters have to make a second choice. Mr. Steele does not want anyone in his region to be irked at Mr. Obama.

That does not mean he is not constantly looking for poaching opportunities, particularly a “maven,” which is campaign shorthand for a community leader, party official or, quite simply, someone who can persuade others to join the Obama team.

Consider the story of Karl Knock, a vice president of a Creston bank.

On a late-summer afternoon, Mr. Steele and Mr. Adams, the tattoo contest winner, drove two hours across southern Iowa to see Mr. Knock, a prominent Democrat who was undecided but had favorable feelings toward Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware.

Mr. Steele had been eying this maven for weeks. He had already given Mr. Knock a free ticket to attend an Obama fund-raiser in Omaha with Warren Buffett. Now, he was hoping to sign him on as leader for Mr. Obama’s effort in Union County.

In a basement conference room of the bank, over cans of soda, the three men talked for more than an hour. Mr. Steele mostly listened and took pages of notes on a yellow legal pad, writing down Mr. Knock’s concern about presidential powers and what he fears are threats to the Constitution and the politicization of the Justice Department.

“I like what I see with Senator Obama,” Mr. Knock said as the meeting drew to a close. “But I’ve got to figure out how I can step away from Biden. They gave me the cellphone of his national political director and his niece!”

In his daily report to state headquarters in Des Moines that evening, Mr. Steele passed along a summary of the meeting. Within a week, a campaign policy aide from the Chicago office was on the phone, answering Mr. Knock’s specific questions.

When Mr. Obama went to Creston a month later, Mr. Steele arranged a brief one-on-one meeting between the senator and Mr. Knock, who signed on to the campaign soon after.

This month at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Des Moines, the Democratic Party’s marquee event of the year, who was seated at Mr. Obama’s table? Mr. Knock and his wife, Jan. Later, Ms. Knock told her husband that Mr. Obama had “swept her off her feet,” but she remained a committed supporter of former Senator John Edwards.

This could be Mr. Steele’s next project. He has less than six weeks.

AlterNet: Obama Supporters Reach Out to Latino Voters

AlterNet: Obama Supporters Reach Out to Latino Voters

Obama - the early years in New York City

October 30, 2007
The Long Run
Memories of Obama in New York Differ
By JANNY SCOTT
Barack Obama does not say much about his years in New York City. The time he spent as an undergraduate at Columbia College and then working in Manhattan in the early 1980s surfaces only fleetingly in his memoir. In the book, he casts himself as a solitary wanderer in the metropolis, the outsider searching for a way to “make myself of some use.”

He tells of underheated sublets, a night spent in an alley, a dead neighbor on the landing. From their fire escape, he and an unnamed roommate watch “white people from the better neighborhoods” bring their dogs to defecate on the block. He takes a job in an unidentified “consulting house to multinational corporations,” where he is “a spy behind enemy lines,” startled to find himself with a secretary, a suit and money in the bank.

He barely mentions Columbia, training ground for the elite, where he transferred in his junior year, majoring in political science and international relations and writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament. He dismisses in one sentence his first community organizing job — work he went on to do in Chicago — though a former supervisor remembers him as “a star performer.”

Senator Obama, an Illinois Democrat now seeking the presidency, suggests in his book that his years in New York were a pivotal period: He ran three miles a day, buckled down to work and “stopped getting high,” which he says he had started doing in high school. Yet he declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.

“He doesn’t remember the names of a lot of people in his life,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman.

Mr. Obama has, of course, done plenty of remembering. His 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” weighs in at more than 450 pages. But he also exercised his writer’s prerogative to decide what to include or leave out. Now, as he presents himself to voters, a look at his years in New York — other people’s accounts and his own — suggests not only what he was like back then but how he chooses to be seen now.

Some say he has taken some literary license in the telling of his story. Dan Armstrong, who worked with Mr. Obama at Business International Corporation in New York in 1984 and has deconstructed Mr. Obama’s account of the job on his blog, analyzethis.net, wrote: “All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks.”

In an interview, Mr. Armstrong added: “There may be some truth to that. But in order to make it a good story, it required a bit of exaggeration.”

Mr. Armstrong’s description of the firm, and those of other co-workers, differs at least in emphasis from Mr. Obama’s. It was a small newsletter-publishing and research firm, with about 250 employees worldwide, that helped companies with foreign operations (they could be called multinationals) understand overseas markets, they said. Far from a bastion of corporate conformity, they said, it was informal and staffed by young people making modest wages. Employees called it “high school with ashtrays.”

Many workers dressed down. Only the vice president in charge of Mr. Obama’s division got a secretary, they said. Mr. Obama was a researcher and writer for a reference service called Financing Foreign Operations. He also wrote for a newsletter, Business International Money Report.

“It was not working for General Foods or Chase Manhattan, that’s for sure,” said Louis Celi, a vice president at the company, which was later taken over by the Economist Intelligence Unit. “And it was not a consulting firm by any stretch of the imagination. I remember the first time I interviewed someone from Morgan Stanley and I got cheese on my tie because I thought my tie was a napkin.”

Mr. Obama arrived in New York in August 1981, at age 20, from Occidental College in Los Angeles. According to his memoir, he passed his first night in an alley near 109th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, unable to get into his apartment. The next morning, he bathed at a hydrant alongside a homeless man.

Like other transfer students, Mr. Obama lived off campus and bounced from one apartment to another. For a while, he said, he lived with a Pakistani whom he calls Sadik. He recalls that when he lived in a walk-up on East 94th Street, he would chat with his Puerto Rican neighbors about the Knicks or the sound of gunfire at night.

He writes that “it was only now that I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well,” where the graffiti was both racist and anti-Semitic.

In a long profile of Mr. Obama in a Columbia alumni magazine in 2005, in which his Columbia years occupied just two paragraphs, he called that time “an intense period of study.”

“I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk,” he was quoted as saying.

He said he was somewhat involved with the Black Student Organization and anti-apartheid activities, though, in recent interviews, several prominent student leaders said they did not remember his playing a role.

One person who did remember Mr. Obama was Michael L. Baron, who taught a senior seminar on international politics and American policy. Mr. Baron, now president of an electronics company in Florida, said he was Mr. Obama’s adviser on the senior thesis for that course. Mr. Baron, who later wrote Mr. Obama a recommendation for Harvard Law School, gave him an A in the course.

Columbia was a hotbed for discussion of foreign policy, Mr. Baron said. The faculty included Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, and Zalmay Khalilzad, now the American ambassador to the United Nations. Half of the eight students in the seminar were outstanding, and Mr. Obama was among them, Mr. Baron said.

Michael J. Wolf, who took the seminar with him and went on to become president of MTV Networks, said: “He was very smart. He had a broad sense of international politics and international relations. It was a class with a lot of debate. He was a very, very active participant. I think he was truly distinctive from the other people in that class. He stood out.”

Mr. Obama graduated in 1983. In his memoir, he says he had decided to become a community organizer but could not persuade anyone to hire him. So he found “more conventional work for a year” to pay off his student loans.

“Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors — see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand — and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve,” Mr. Obama wrote.

Cathy Lazere, his supervisor at Business International, described him as self-assured and bright. “He was very mature and more worldly than other people — on the surface kind of laid back, but kind of in control,” she said. “He had a good sense of himself, which I think a lot of kids at that age don’t.”

After about a year, he was hired by the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit organization that promotes consumer, environmental and government reform. He became a full-time organizer at City College in Harlem, paid slightly less than $10,000 a year to mobilize student volunteers.

Mr. Obama says he spent three months “trying to convince minority students at City College about the importance of recycling” — a description that surprised some former colleagues. They said that more “bread-and-butter issues” like mass transit, higher education, tuition and financial aid were more likely the emphasis at City College.

“You needed somebody — and here was where Barack was a star — who could make the case to students across the political spectrum,” said Eileen Hershenov, who oversaw Mr. Obama’s work for Nypirg. The job required winning over students on the political left, who would normally disdain a group inspired by Ralph Nader as insufficiently radical, as well as students on the right and those who were not active at all.

Nearly 20 years later, Mr. Obama seemed to remember the experience differently. Gene Karpinski, then executive director of U.S. PIRG, a federation of state watchdog groups, met Mr. Obama in Boston. It was at the time of the 2004 Democratic convention, when Mr. Obama delivered the speech that made him a party luminary. Mr. Karpinski introduced himself. And, he recalled, Mr. Obama told him: “I used to be a PIRG guy. You guys trained me well.”

Barack Obama Becomes More Assertive

October 28, 2007
Obama Promises a Forceful Stand Against Clinton
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 27 — Senator Barack Obama said he would start confronting Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton more directly and forcefully, saying Friday that she had not been candid in describing her views on critical policy issues, as he tries to address mounting alarm among supporters that his lack of assertiveness so far has allowed her to dominate the presidential race.

Mr. Obama’s vow to go on the offensive comes just over two months before the first votes are cast for the Democratic nomination, and after a long period in which his aides, donors and other supporters have battled — and in some cases shared — the perception that he has not exhibited the aggressiveness demanded by presidential politics.

In an interview on Friday that was initiated by his campaign to signal the change of course, Mr. Obama said “now is the time” for him to distinguish himself from Mrs. Clinton. While he said that he was not out to “kneecap the front-runner, because I don’t think that’s what the country is looking for,” he said she was deliberately obscuring her positions for political gain and was less likely than he was to win back the White House for Democrats.

Asked in the interview on Friday if Mrs. Clinton had been fully truthful with voters about what she would do as president, Mr. Obama replied, “No.”

“I don’t think people know what her agenda exactly is,” Mr. Obama continued, citing Social Security, Iraq and Iran as issues on which he said she had not been fully forthcoming. “Now it’s been very deft politically, but one of the things that I firmly believe is that we’ve got to be clear with the American people right now about the important choices that we’re going to need to make in order to get a mandate for change, not to try to obfuscate and avoid being a target in the general election and then find yourself governing without any support for any bold propositions.”

For months, Democrats, including some within his campaign, have questioned whether his promise to pursue a brand of politics that transcended partisanship had so handcuffed him that he could not compete in the most partisan of arenas.

Alan D. Solomont, a former contributor to both Clintons who is now raising money for Mr. Obama in Boston, said there was a growing consensus that Mr. Obama had to ratchet up his intensity and draw sharper distinctions with Mrs. Clinton, of New York, and other rivals.

“The only way that he’s going to be able to be clear with the American people,” Mr. Solomont said in an interview, “is to draw a distinction between his candidacy and his ideas about change and those of other candidates. It’s fair to say that he is beginning to do that, but he hasn’t done enough yet.”

In the interview, Mr. Obama acknowledged that he had held back until now, though he asserted it was a calculated decision to introduce himself in early voting states before engaging opponents. He said he regularly took lines out of speeches prepared by his campaign that he felt were “stretching the truth.”

But Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said the plan had always been for him to begin taking on Mrs. Clinton more directly in the fall. And he glared and responded no when asked if he lacked the stomach for confrontational politics. “It is absolutely true that we have to make these distinctions clearer,” he said. “And I will not shy away from doing that.”

The interview came amid growing signs that Mr. Obama was looking for a fresh start for his campaign after nine months in which his aides said they were startled by the effectiveness of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, and worried that her support was not as brittle as they had once believed.

Mr. Obama has built up his campaign war room, started frequently traveling with a speechwriter — reflecting concern of his aides that his public speeches tend to be long-winded — and begun spending more money on television advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire.

His senior aides said they were now spending much of their day fielding calls from concerned donors and other supporters asking why Mr. Obama was not challenging Mrs. Clinton more forcefully and warning that he could cede the role of the main anti-Clinton candidate to former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, who is running an aggressive campaign in Iowa. Typically, one aide said, the supporter asks some version of the same question: “What happened to the Obama we saw at the 2004 Democratic convention?”

At the same time, aides said there was disagreement in the campaign about whether he should now begin investing all his time in Iowa, where polls show him to be running neck-and-neck with Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards, hoping that a victory there would give him a lift in New Hampshire, where polls show him trailing.

Morale at his Chicago headquarters, aides said, has been dragged down by the perception that Mrs. Clinton is lapping Mr. Obama. And aides said that they had been struggling for weeks for a balance between offering a contrast with Mrs. Clinton and avoiding the anger that they said had marked Mr. Edwards’s candidacy.

In a 53-minute interview over breakfast aboard a chartered jet that brought him here from Chicago, Mr. Obama said Mrs. Clinton had been untruthful or misleading in describing her positions on problems facing the nation. He accused her of “straddling between the Giuliani, Romney side of the foreign policy equation and the Barack Obama side of the equation.” He said that she was trying to “sound or vote” like a Republican on national security issues and that that was “bad for the country and ultimately bad for Democrats.”

Mr. Obama suggested that she was too divisive to win a general election and that if she won, she would be unable to bring together competing factions in Washington to accomplish anything.

“There is a legacy that is both an enormous advantage to her in a Democratic primary, but also a disadvantage to her in a general election,” he said. “I don’t think anybody would claim that Senator Clinton is going to inspire a horde of new voters,” he said. “I don’t think it’s realistic that she is going to get a whole bunch of Republicans to think differently about her.”

Asked about Mr. Obama’s remarks, Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said: “Senator Obama once promised Americans a politics of hope. But now that his campaign has stalled he is abandoning that strategy and is engaging in the same old-style personal attacks that he once rejected. We are confident that voters will reject this strategy, especially from a candidate who told us he would do better.”

Mr. Obama said he was not concerned by a repeated spate of national polls showing lopsided support for Mrs. Clinton. “The national press for the last three months has written glowingly about her and not so much about me, so it’s not surprising,” he said. He described himself as an “underdog” running against a campaign that has “a 20-year head start when it comes to managing the spin of the national politics.”

Many people are only beginning to focus on the race now, and early front-runners can easily stumble when the voting starts. But the Obama campaign has faced a political narrative in recent weeks that even Mr. Obama’s aides have described, in no small part because of a succession of polls, as establishing Mrs. Clinton as the front-runner. In one small example, a member of Mr. Obama’s national finance committee, Robert Farmer, told the campaign last week that he was formally switching allegiances to the Clinton campaign. Mr. Farmer contributed money to five Democratic presidential candidates this year, including the maximum amount allowed to Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards.

Though Mr. Obama’s criticisms of Mrs. Clinton were sharper than he has voiced during this campaign, they were, nonetheless, still somewhat restrained, certainly when compared with the criticisms that have been voiced of Mrs. Clinton by Mr. Edwards and much of the Republican field.

Mr. Obama rejected the suggestion that he had been constrained in taking on Mrs. Clinton more forcefully because of his promise, at the start of the campaign, to avoid the bitter partisanship of past campaigns. Mr. Obama, who aides suggested might be spending too much time reading blogs and newspaper clippings about the campaign, dismissively noted how the Clinton campaign regularly raised that line against him.

“I’ve been amused by seeing some of the commentary out of the Clinton camp, where every time we point out a difference between me and her, they say, ‘What happened to the politics of hope?’ which is just silly,” he said, laughing.

Asked why it was silly, he responded: “The notion that somehow changing the tone means simply that we let them say whatever they want to say or that there are no disagreements and that we’re all holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’ is obviously not what I had in mind and not how I function. And anybody who thinks I have, hasn’t been paying attention.”

That said, Mr. Obama and his campaign have until now frequently avoided potential confrontations. Mr. Obama’s aides said, for example, that they had declined an invitation from some networks to appear on Sunday morning talk shows after Mrs. Clinton the day she appeared on five in one day to talk about her health care plan.

Never Trust Anybody Over 49 - New York Times

Never Trust Anybody Over 49 - New York Times
September 29, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Never Trust Anybody Over 49
By GAIL COLLINS
Earlier this year at a campaign rally, Bill Clinton said that when he was at Yale, he told Hillary: “I have met all the most gifted people in our generation and you’re the best.”

Now, it’s always nice to hear a husband say he thinks his wife is tops. But I can’t get past the idea that while Bill Clinton was still in law school he believed he already knew every baby boomer worth knowing.

“I didn’t even know everybody in my dorm,” said a friend when I told him this story.

Obviously, Clinton wasn’t including Barack Obama, who was only about 12 at the time. Now, Obama’s campaign is the revenge of Gen XYZ — an inconvenient reminder to the 50- and 60-somethings that they’ve become part of the system they used to decry. His big rally this week in Greenwich Village was an event that Hillary could never have pulled off — politics as a dating scene. Thousands and thousands and thousands of mostly young people swarmed into Washington Square Park where they were warmed up by a 25-year-old Asian-American rapper named Jin, who announced that Obama was going to be getting “my first vote ever.”

To this crowd, Clinton is what you hope you won’t have to settle for at the end. Better than Bush, of course, but not a real agent for change. “There are competent people who will manage the system the way it is,” said Obama about you-know-who, and, of course, the crowd cheered that no, they wanted someone braver and better and maybe even ... younger.

The Democratic Party seems to be gradually acclimating itself to the idea that Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee. It’s a little like that frog in a beaker of water that Al Gore talks about in his global warming speech — the one who won’t notice he’s being boiled to death if you turn up the heat ever so gradually. Day by day, debate by debate, poll by poll, the sense of Hillary’s inevitability seems to be seeping in.

She thinks she’s got it nailed as long as she doesn’t make any mistakes, and that can be a trap. It is possible to be so careful that you drive everybody crazy, make them so itchy for adventure, for a noble mission instead of a winnable hand of poker, that they’ll be willing to undo all your hard work just to juice things up.

During the latest Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton was exactly that kind of candidate. When she was asked if she favored lifting the cap on Social Security taxes (currently only the first $97,500 in income is taxed), all she would say was that she wanted to “put fiscal responsibility first.”

As opposed to all the other people who want to put it last.

When the moderator, Tim Russert, asked whether she was completely ruling out the idea of lifting the cap, this is what Clinton had to say:

“Well, I take everything off the table until we move toward fiscal responsibility and before we have a bipartisan process. I don’t think I should be negotiating about what I would do as president. You know, I want to see what other people come to the table with.”

This is an excellent example of how to string together the maximum number of weasel words in one sentence. It was also pretty typical of Hillary’s entire evening. It’s one thing to refuse to answer a hypothetical question about whether there is any circumstance under which you might ever use nuclear weapons against Iran. It’s another to refuse to commit on who you’d root for if the Yankees played the Cubs in the World Series. No young person is going to fall in love with politics because of a candidate who says: “I would probably have to alternate sides.”

The Republican debates have become an ongoing suspense drama in which viewers try to guess which of these unlikely suspects will actually become a presidential nominee. The Democratic ones, meanwhile, are becoming less about the competition and more and more focused on how Hillary performs. That’s bad for the Clinton camp, since her strategy is all about not losing. She never gets caught in a disaster, but if you’re waiting for her to say something unexpected or pointed or forthcoming, you may have a long night.

In that last debate, the candidates were asked if they thought it was appropriate for a teacher to read young children a story about a handsome prince who marries a — handsome prince. Clinton started off by taking an all-purpose stand against divisiveness and ended with a plug for hate crimes legislation. In between, she said this: “With respect to your individual children, that is such a matter of parental discretion. I think that, obviously, it is better to try to work with your children, to help your children understand the many differences that are in the world and to really respect other people and the choices that other people make, and that goes far beyond sexual orientation.”

Now people, don’t you think the most gifted person of her generation could do better than this?

Loyal Network Backs Obama After His Help - New York Times

Loyal Network Backs Obama After His Help - New York Times

October 1, 2007
Loyal Network Backs Obama After His Help
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
In 2000, after losing a Congressional race, Barack Obama was looking to revive his political fortunes. And he soon found a springboard — a group of black entrepreneurs also trying to break out.

Month after month, Mr. Obama, then an Illinois state senator, showed up at the Chicago group’s meetings, listening to members’ concerns about the difficulties they faced in getting government and corporate business, and asking them what he could do to help.

And help them he did. Members of the group, the Alliance of Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs, say Mr. Obama checked into their problems and helped start a drive that enabled minority investment executives to win millions of dollars in business from the state’s giant pension funds.

If Mr. Obama was able to deliver by helping the executives overcome some of the historical barriers facing minority-owned companies, he also would subsequently benefit from his ties to the group. Several of the businessmen or their wives would help clear the debts from his Congressional race, and six of the group’s members are now among the top fund-raisers for his presidential campaign, according to campaign finance records.

All told, employees at more than 30 of the 42 companies listed on the group’s Web site and their relatives donated more than $300,000 to help Mr. Obama win his seat in the United States Senate in 2004 and set fund-raising records early in the 2008 presidential race.

In his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama has been running on a platform of reducing the influence of money in politics. But with Mr. Obama, as with every politician, money has been the blood flow of his campaigns. And at a critical point in his career, he greatly expanded an early pillar of his fund-raising network while trying to help the black entrepreneurs secure work with the state.

The senator’s courtship of the Chicago group and its members is a little-known chapter in his political development that shows the inextricable link between money and politics and the different interpretations people attach to it.

Jay Stewart, executive director of an Illinois watchdog group known as the Better Government Association, said that in helping these and other executives as a state senator, Mr. Obama also benefited from the kind of special-interest-driven politics he now decries.

“Raising large chunks from special interests was common in Illinois,” Mr. Stewart said. “Obama did that too. Now he’s talking about chasing away special interests; that’s great. But that doesn’t change the past.”

Mr. Obama says his involvement with the alliance reflects his longtime passion for ensuring that minority businesses are treated fairly, and there is no indication that he helped the businessmen simply to secure their donations.

“The suggestion that these pioneering leaders would need my help or anyone’s help in order to succeed is troubling, to say the least,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “I’m proud that I’ve spent my career fighting to ensure that minority-owned businesses would have a chance to compete, and I will continue to do so as president.”

Mr. Obama also recently pointed to his work on the Illinois pension issue as a model for what he would do as president to promote minority-owned companies.

In that push, Mr. Obama met with three state pension boards and introduced a bill on the executives’ behalf. He also worked closely with the state’s top legislative leaders to encourage the pension funds to increase the share of their investment portfolios managed by minority-owned firms. That share has risen to 12 to 20 percent now from 1 to 3 percent in 2000.

Other alliance members said Mr. Obama also looked into whether they could get state business in other areas, including legal work on bond issues and the printing of official notices. As Stephen H. Pugh, a lawyer who belongs to the group, said, “He wanted to understand what our needs were and how government could help.”

Mr. Obama, Mr. Pugh said, “would be our representative — our advocate — to bring our views back to state government.”

The alliance was founded in 1992 to help Chicago’s top black executives and entrepreneurs share business tips and push for greater opportunities. According to the group’s Web site, the companies — which also include architecture, engineering, transportation and communications firms — average 65 full-time employees and annual revenues of $19 million.

The goal was always “to open up doors,” said John W. Rogers Jr., the chief executive of Ariel Capital Management, one of the investment firms that received state business. “It was, as the Rev. Jesse Jackson has eloquently put it, to force other industries to have their ‘Jackie Robinson’ moment.”

During its early years, the group’s main political patron was State Senator Emil Jones Jr., who later became the State Senate president and one of Mr. Obama’s chief mentors. In 1993, Mr. Jones took the first crack at opening up the pension business, persuading the Legislature to pass a bill encouraging the multibillion-dollar funds to use minority-owned firms “to the greatest extent feasible.”

But by the time Mr. Obama, then a junior state senator, began meeting regularly with the group in 2000, little progress had been made. As a result, said Hermene Hartman, the alliance president, the pension issues got “a lot of attention” in the discussions with Mr. Obama.

The investment firms were also among the largest and most prominent companies in the group, and some of their executives were among Mr. Obama’s closest friends.

Mr. Rogers, who also sits on the boards of the McDonald’s Corporation and other major companies, played basketball at Princeton University with Mr. Obama’s brother-in-law. James Reynolds Jr., the chief executive of Loop Capital, a brokerage firm, had been a top fund-raiser for Mr. Obama’s Congressional race.

Mr. Rogers said the investment managers also solicited support from Michael J. Madigan, the powerful Democratic speaker of the Illinois House. In 2001 and 2002, Mr. Madigan and Mr. Obama — at times joined by the investment executives — made formal pitches before three of the state pension boards.

And after Mr. Jones became the State Senate president in 2003, he assigned Mr. Obama to a committee looking into the pension questions to help raise his political profile.

During this period, campaign finance records show, executives from Ariel, Loop and two other leading Chicago investment firms, Holland Capital Management and Capri Capital, sharply increased their donations to Mr. Obama’s State Senate campaign fund. And once he began his campaign for the United States Senate, they quickly became a fund-raising core that has carried over into the presidential race.

Mr. Rogers, who is one of three people at his company who have each bundled at least $50,000 in donations for Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign, said that his financial support for the senator had “no connection” to his company’s efforts to win state contracts, but that it reflected the broader excitement over what Mr. Obama’s success meant for blacks in America.

Pointing to his parents’ struggles to break into the legal business in Chicago, Mr. Rogers said that pushing for greater opportunities was “in your blood, and when you have a peer come along like Barack, who is your own age and lives in your neighborhood, you can’t wait to help him.”

Mr. Reynolds of Loop Capital, who is also one of the bundlers in Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign, did not return calls for comment.

In the end, Mr. Obama dropped off the State Senate committee in late 2003 as his United States Senate race heated up, and just as the panel began a series of hearings that produced the most substantial changes.

Still, William Atwood, the director of the Illinois State Board of Investment, said Mr. Obama regularly asked about minority participation in the pension funds when their paths crossed. “He would ask: ‘How are we doing? Are we making progress?’” Mr. Atwood recalled.

The changes have generated several million dollars in fees for some of the investment firms, although the complete totals could not be obtained. Loop Capital, for instance, saw its brokerage fees related to one of the pension funds shoot up to $2.4 million last year from just $5,700 in 2001. All told, Loop Capital received $5 million in fees from managers for that fund over those six years.

Still, things have not worked out as well for some of the investment managers. Both Ariel and Holland were given several hundred million dollars to invest. But one of the funds dropped Ariel and two dropped Holland last year after their investment returns lagged behind those of other firms.

Mr. Rogers, the Ariel chief executive, said his firm’s value-oriented stocks tended to lag in fast-rising markets, and other state funds say they are sticking with Ariel for now because it has produced impressive long-term returns. Officials at Holland declined to comment.

But Mr. Rogers also complained that the Illinois funds, which are free to hire minority managers from anywhere in the country, have given much of their business to out-of-state firms owned by women and Asian-Americans.

And while Mr. Obama recently told the Urban League that if he was elected president he would use the same model in helping black-owned businesses nationwide as he did on the pension issue, Mr. Rogers said, “Actually, it is a model of how hard it is to get sustained traction.”