Tag: Barack Obama (page 17)

Colorado Senator Ken Salazar this week laid out Obama's appeal to rural voters:

Obama has supported farm bills aimed at revitalizing rural America, Salazar said, while McCain has opposed all of them the last 15 years.

Obama has championed renewable energy, including biofuels that can be a way for America to help grow its way to energy independence, and McCain has not, Salazar said. The Bush administration has largely ignored rural America, home to 50 million people, the last eight years, Salazar said. What he calls "the forgotten America" includes 44 of Colorado's 65 counties. Those areas have lost jobs, health care facilities and schools, Salazar said.

What is McCain's message to rural voters? More politics of distortion. Today, at Gov. Palin's campaign rally, McCain's Colorado press spokesman Tom Kise falsely told local CBS news (video here) that Obama is against people owning guns.

Update: Sarah Palin's next interview will be with Sean Hannity.

Update: Markos:

We're going to win this thing the way campaigns are won -- by playing hardball. Politics is a blood sport. Republicans understand this and never flinch from flinging the sh!t. We won't win until we learn to fight back in kind. And I'm more than happy to get down in the mud with our friends on the Right so Obama doesn't have to.

Same here, although I think Obama should do it too.

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Sen. Barack Obama runs against John McCain, and only John McCain, at his peril -- and ours.

Family Research Council Action waded ever deeper into the world of electoral politics on Friday with the announcement by Mr. Perkins of the formation of a new political action committee.

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Sen. Barack Obama got in a little campaigning on the David Letterman show Wednesday night:

Ultimately what we’ve seen over the last week is a concession on the part of the McCain campaign that this election is going to be about change. You’ll recall, you know, for the last two years, we’ve been talking about needing to change how Washington works, how the country is managed and people were saying, ‘No, it’s about experience, experience, experience,’ and over the last week and a half I think they recognized that, no, the American people want something fundamentally different and for a good reason. Because when you travel, it doesn’t matter whether you’re here in New York City or a tiny hamlet somewhere in the Midwest, what you find is people are just having a tough time right now.

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The Washington Post reports on the smear campaign on multiple fronts Sen. John McCain has launched against Sen. Barack Obama. Most are clearly swift-boating.

Take this one. In the Illinois Senate, Obama voted for a bill that allowed school boards to determine appropriate sex education courses. It didn't specify what kind of program or what ages would receive it.

Kindergarten teachers were given the approval to teach about appropriate and inappropriate touching to combat molestation.

The McCain advertisement calls it "Obama's one accomplishment" in education: "legislation to teach comprehensive sex education to kindergartners." "Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama, wrong on education, wrong for your family," the ad concludes.

So, John McCain opposes teaching kindergartners how to recognize molestation. John McCain doesn't care about preventing sex assaults of children? If I were a parent of a kindergartner, he wouldn't get my vote based on that alone.

Let's face it. These attacks only matter in the swing states. McCain already has the evangelicals, the radical right and Republicans.

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Obama criticizes McCain's blatant attempt to swift-boat him over the lipstick comments.

"Spare me the phony outrage. Spare me the phony talk about change," Obama said at the start of an education event in Norfolk, Virginia.

"We have real problems in this country right now. The American people are looking to us for answers, not distractions, not diversions, not manipulations. They want real answers to the real problems we are facing.

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John McCain's phony outrage over Sen. Barack Obama's use of the cliche and oft-used lipstick on a pig analogy in reference McCain's co-opting of his change meme when McCain/Palin will just be a continuation of failed Bush policies.

The Obama campaign, via Politico:

Enough is enough. The McCain campaign’s attack tonight is a pathetic attempt to play the gender card about the use of a common analogy – the same analogy that Senator McCain himself used about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health care plan just last year. This phony lecture on gender sensitivity is the height of cynicism and lays bare the increasingly dishonorable campaign John McCain has chosen to run.

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Here's the actual results from the NBC/WSJ poll (pdf) that had good news for both candidates. Here's the article describing the results.

With eight weeks until Election Day, the Journal survey found a dead heat: 46% of registered voters favor Sens. Obama and Joe Biden, and 45% favor McCain-Palin.

...The survey had good news for Sen. Obama as well, showing that he improved his standing with the electorate in areas where he had been seen as weak. More voters found said they were comfortable with him as president that they did in a Journal poll three weeks ago, as did the portion who said they were confident in his ability to be commander in chief.

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Former New York Mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat who has supported both Republicans and Democrats in the past, today endorsed Sen. Barack Obama for president. The chief reason: Sarah Palin.

I have concluded that the country is safer in the hands of Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic Party and protector of the philosophy of that party. Protecting and defending the U.S. means more than defending us from foreign attacks. It includes defending the public with respect to their civil rights, civil liberties and other needs, e.g., national health insurance, the right of abortion, the continuation of Social Security, gay rights, other rights of privacy, fair progressive taxation and a host of other needs and rights.

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Sen. Barack Obama has a strong record of support for veterans' rights, including legislation he passed and supported while serving on the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs and in Illinois. Compare and contrast with that of Sen. John McCain:

• As a member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, Obama passed legislation to improve care and slash red tape for our wounded warriors recovering at places like Walter Reed. He passed laws to help homeless veterans and offered an innovative solution to prevent at-risk veterans from falling into homelessness.

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In an earlier post I wrote about Saturday's McCain-Palin rally in Colorado Springs, and how the candidates and speakers, while stressing the importance of Colorado and El Paso County in particular this November, failed to give even a passing nod to the evangelical social agenda. That brings to mind a larger question.

Is El Paso County, with its high concentration of evangelical and military-oriented voters, enough to push McCain to victory in Colorado in November? Taking a look at various numbers, I would say it's a close question, but unlikely. [More...]

Received by e-mail from the Catholic Democrats Communnications PAC:

An independent nationwide survey run the week of September 1, 2008, by the Catholic Democrats Communications Political Action Committee shows that nearly all the Catholic voters who voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton will now cast the vote for Sen. Barack Obama. Nearly 500 Catholics responded to the survey.

It is clear that the alleged defection of Clinton voters to McCain is not happening, " said Bill Roth, President of the PAC. "Nearly 95% of the Clinton voters now intend to vote for Sen. Obama. This repudiates the idea that Gov. Palin should somehow appeal to the Clinton voter." [More...]

At a campaign rally Monday night, Sen. Barack Obama explained his views on why we need habeas corpus for everyone, even those suspected of terrorism:

"Habeas corpus ... is the foundation of Anglo-American law, which says very simply, if the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, `Why was I grabbed?' and say, `Maybe, you've got the wrong person.'

"The reason we have that safeguard is we don't always have the right person. We don't always catch the right person. "We may think this is Muhammad the terrorist. It might be Muhammad the cab driver. You may think it's Barack the bomb-thrower. But it might be Barack, the guy running for president."

As to Gov. Sarah Palin's "reading their rights" slam of him during her acceptance speech, he responded: [More...]