William Katz: Urgent Agenda
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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2008
THE CONTINUING WAKE-UP CALL
Posted at 10:09 p.m. ET
One of the things we want to do at Urgent Agenda is to remind readers that there are other issues, besides our election and the financial crisis, that require our constant attention. One of them, clearly, is Iran.
My friend Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi alerts me to a Ken Timmerman article at NewsMax, about negotiating with Iran. It's pretty stark stuff, especially as the source is a French diplomat who's actually tried to reason with the mullah regime. A copy of this should be sent to each one of Barack Obama's four or five thousand foreign-policy advisers, at least the ones who haven't been thrown under the bus.
Barack Obama can talk about negotiating with Iran until he’s blue in the face, but a top French official who has been there and done that contends that any efforts by a future president to open direct talks with Iran would be a waste of time.
“Good luck” is the advice that Therese Delpech would offer to the next U.S. president if he wanted to negotiate with the Tehran regime.
And this is from the French. Not exactly guys who run from the negotiating table.
“We’ve been negotiating with the Iranians since 2003, five years,” the nuclear adviser to French President Nicolas Sarkozy told Newsmax during a visit to Washington. “We came to the conclusion that they are not interested at all in negotiating, but in buying time for their military (nuclear) program.”
Will someone please let the Democratic Party in on this?
Obama has pledged frequently that, if elected president, he would open direct talks with Tehran “without preconditions,” in an attempt to talk the Iranian regime out of its nuclear weapons program.
But such talks would be a fool’s errand, Delpech said in a scarcely veiled reference to the Democrat.
And...
“At no point in the five years of our talks with the Iranians have they ever asked” for the type of concessions Obama and his advisers say they are prepared to offer Tehran, she said.
“They never said, ‘If only we would get security guarantees form the Americans, if only we would get economic investment from the Americans, if only they wouldn’t tell us we are part of the axis of evil’ – you name it. They never made any of those statements, at no point at all,” Delpech said.
I wonder if we'll see this diplomat quoted in the mainstream media. Why am I not holding my breath?
“So if you want to try for another deal, the big deal (with Iran), believing that this will be a new departure and you will succeed where we failed, good luck!” she said.
Finally...
French nuclear expert Delpech also expressed surprise that anyone was still talking about the much-disputed National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran that concluded in December 2007 that Iran had shut down its nuclear weapons program in late 2003.
“I thought the NIE was dead,” she told Newsmax. “It was killed by the (International Atomic Energy Agency) itself, which is ironic, because the IAEA is not generally that harsh on Iran.”
She referred to a closed-door session in February in which the agency’s safeguards chief, Olli Heinonen, produced internal Iranian government documents that showed ongoing nuclear weapons work in Iran well after the intelligence estimate said it had been stopped.
You may be sure that certain elements of the left will still use that NIE whenever it suits them. To them, the cause is greater than the facts.
Mr. Obama has some illusions to conquer.
October 10, 2008. Permalink 
UPDATE AT 8:41 P.M. ET: ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- A legislative committee investigating Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has found she unlawfully abused her authority in firing the state's public safety commissioner.
And from CNN: Gov. Sarah Palin abused her power in a state official's firing but did not violate the law, an Alaska legislative panel finds.
COMMENT: So, the AP finds that she acted unlawfully. CNN finds that she didn't violate the law. Maybe we should have journalism courts, where these disputes can be worked out. But it really doesn't matter. The whole idea here was to damage Sarah Palin with a report released close to the election. Why let facts, or issues of lawbreaking, intervene?
UPDATE AT 1:34 P.M. ET: Gallup tracker shows Obama up 10. It was 11 yesterday.
UPDATE AT 1:32 P.M. ET: Dow is off 388.
UPDATE AT 12:43 P.M. ET: The Dow is down 319.
UPDATE AT 11:10 A.M. ET: Hotline poll shows Obama up seven. No question: Obama has a solid lead, and has gained this week. McCain hasn't got much left to fire. If he's got a secret weapon, he'd better use it.
UPDATE AT 11:06 A.M. ET: Dow is off 251.
UPDATE AT 10:25 A.M. ET: Battleground poll shows Obama up eight, a gain of five points from yesterday. Look, this poll has been all over the place, and I worry about trackers that change that much in a day. Be cautious.
BULLETIN AT 9:46 A.M. ET: The Dow is off about 160, but the market is volatile, so that number can change rapidly.
UPDATE AT 9:31 A.M. ET: Two trackers are out. Both Rasmussen and Zogby show Obama up five. Three more trackers will publish later today. It's pretty clear, though, that Obama has a solid lead, which is holding. No progress for McCain this week, partly because of a lackluster debate performance, and partly because of the massive economic crisis.
NOTE AT 8:40 A.M. ET: If you want to read something that really defines the word "amoral," be sure to read this asinine essay at Slate, defending Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn. It's as if the author sat down with a former concentration-camp guard and said, "Okay, I understand how you felt. Now let's talk about the future."
UPDATE AT 8:15 A.M. ET: SINGAPORE (AP) - Oil prices plummeted to a one-year low below $83 a barrel Friday in Asia as investor fears of a severe global economic downturn sparked a panicked sell-off of equities and crude.
COMMENT: Sometimes there is good news.
UPDATE AT 7:59 A.M. ET: From The New York Times: PARIS — Global stocks plummeted Friday after the rout a day earlier on Wall Street, where the Dow Jones industrial average lost more than 7 percent, and investors were looking to global financial authorities meeting later in Washington for new measures to stem the turmoil.
FRIENDS
Posted at 7:20 a.m. ET
Ed Lasky at American Thinker, alerts us to a great piece by Charles Krauthammer, putting into perspective the issue of Barack Obama's strange associations, and why they're important.
Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.
But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.
McCain helped create the problem by not hitting the issue earlier:
McCain has only himself to blame for the bad timing. He should months ago have begun challenging Obama's associations, before the economic meltdown allowed the Obama campaign (and the mainstream media, which is to say the same thing) to dismiss the charges as an act of desperation by the trailing candidate.
McCain had his chance back in April when the North Carolina Republican Party ran a gubernatorial campaign ad that included the linking of Obama with Jeremiah Wright. The ad was duly denounced by the New York Times and other deep thinkers as racist.
This was patently absurd. Racism is treating people differently and invidiously on the basis of race. Had any white presidential candidate had a close 20-year association with a white preacher overtly spreading race hatred from the pulpit, that candidate would have been not just universally denounced and deemed unfit for office but written out of polite society entirely.
Nonetheless, John McCain in his infinite wisdom, and with his overflowing sense of personal rectitude, joined the braying mob in denouncing that perfectly legitimate ad, saying it had no place in any campaign.
I'm afraid it's true, it's true.
What do Obama's associations tell us about him?
First, his cynicism and ruthlessness. He found these men useful, and use them he did. Would you attend a church whose pastor was spreading racial animosity from the pulpit? Would you even shake hands with -- let alone serve on two boards with -- an unrepentant terrorist, whether he bombed U.S. military installations or abortion clinics?
And...
Second, and even more disturbing than the cynicism, is the window these associations give on Obama's core beliefs. He doesn't share the Rev. Wright's poisonous views of race nor Ayers's views, past and present, about the evil that is American society. But Obama clearly did not consider these views beyond the pale. For many years he swam easily and without protest in that fetid pond.
Yet the media will not hold him responsible. I wonder why.
Today, on the threshold of the presidency, Obama concedes the odiousness of these associations, which is why he has severed them. But for the years in which he sat in Wright's pews and shared common purpose on boards with Ayers, Obama considered them a legitimate, indeed unremarkable, part of social discourse.
Do you? Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect. There is a difference between temperament and character. Equanimity is a virtue. Tolerance of the obscene is not.
How wonderfully stated. Now Mr. Krauthammer will probably be attacked as a neo-con with a funny name, and, of course, a closet racist. That's the way the game is played.
A vote for president often comes down to this question: Which candidate would you trust, in a crisis, to do the right thing for the nation? Is there any doubt? Sadly, if the polls are correct, there is.
October 10, 2008. Permalink
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2008
NOTE AT 9:52 P.M. ET: Reader Ted Miller alerts us to an excellent piece by Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media, which contains this great quote:
Whatever else it is, this election is a referendum on two very different visions of America. Obama’s vision is of country crippled by sin; McCain and Palin’s vision is of a country fired by high ideals and expansive opportunity.
“You’re beautiful, I love you, now change.” That is Team Obama’s message. “You’re beautiful, I love you as you are”: that is the message of McCain and Sarah Palin. It’s the difference between the utopian–who finds himself disgusted with every real-world polity, and who finds himself willing, indeed, eager, to sacrifice real people for the sake of the ideal ones he wishes to create–and the simple patriot who says Yes to the family, community, and country in which he finds himself.
Most Americans, I believe, love their country for what it is–not what it could become if suitably socialized, taxed, neutered, and otherwise recast. If McCain-Palin can effectively articulate that message, they will win.
Yes they will.
DURING THE PANIC
Posted at 8:07 p.m. ET
One of the worst things about any panic is that it diverts attention from other things, equally important, that are happening at the same time. We now have a kind of panic in the financial markets. I am not a financial expert and make no judgment as to when this volatility will end. But one thing is clear: It is diverting attention from other matters.
One of those matters is the fact that, Wall Street or not, we will elect a president within the next month. That president, if current trends continue, will be a man who has gone virtually unexamined by a press that approaches him on bended knee. And so, as Americans worry about the financial crisis, factors in our election are slipping by us. One of them is the potential for significant voter fraud. Fortunately, Investors Business Daily, one of the sanest publications around, will not be panicked into avoiding this question: Is ACORN stealing the election?
It's a legitimate question to raise now that the FBI has raided the offices of the nonprofit Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now in Nevada and North Carolina, two states where Obama and John McCain are running neck-and-neck. ACORN has registered bogus voters in both states.
The group's voter-registration fraud is rampant, and authorities plan a nationwide sweep of ACORN offices to collect records.
In Nevada, state officials say the fraudulent registrations included forms for the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team, including quarterback Tony Romo.
"Romo is not registered to vote in the state of Nevada," Secretary of State Ross Miller said, "and anybody trying to pose as Terrell Owens won't be able to cast a ballot on Nov. 4."
Well, at least the fraud is creative.
In Missouri, one ACORN registrant named Monica Rays showed up on no less than eight forms, all bearing the same signature.
Look, she's just a public-spirited citizen, that's all.
In Kansas City, 15,000 registrations have been questioned, and last year four ACORN employees were indicted for fraud.
In addition, ACORN officials have also been indicted in Wisconsin and Colorado. Investigations against others are active in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
An attempt to suppress the people. Don't you think?
What does all this have to do with Obama, besides the fact that he'd be the beneficiary of most, if not all, of these new votes?
For starters, Obama paid ACORN, which has endorsed him for president, $800,000 to register new voters, payments his campaign failed to accurately report. (They were disguised in his FEC disclosure as payments to a front group called Citizen Services Inc. for "advance work.")
What's more, Obama worked as executive director of ACORN's voter-registration arm, Project Vote, in 1992. Joined by two other community organizers on Chicago's South Side, Obama conducted the voter-registration drive that helped elect Carol Moseley-Braun to the Senate that year.
Come on. The ACORN people were just guys who lived in the neighborhood.
The next year, 1993, Obama joined the civil-rights law firm Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, where he sued the state of Illinois on behalf of ACORN to implement the federal "Motor Voter" law, which the GOP governor at the time refused to do. Then-Gov. Jim Edgar argued, presciently, that the Clinton law would invite voter fraud.
Just doing his job as a lawyer. Right?
ACORN's corruption is not just out in the field, as they claim. There's a pattern of corruption from the top down.
McCain would be wise to start preparing a challenge to voter registration rolls should he lose the race in a close contest. He'd be crazy not to contest the results in light of these events.
But you know what will happen. McCain will be charged with racism, and he'll back off. That's the tragedy.
October 9, 2008. Permalink
UPDATE AT 4:28 P.M. ET: Apparent final market: Dow down 678.91.
BULLETIN AT 4:06 P.M. ET: We're trying to get final market figures. As you know, counting goes on after the 4 p.m. close. Current tentative closing status: Dow down 660, a loss of more than seven percent. Tentative closing index: 8598.
BULLETIN AT 3:57 P.M. ET: The Dow is down 493, with three minutes to closing.
UPDATE AT 3:38 P.M. ET: The Dow is down 413, with 22 minutes to closing.
NOTE AT 3:34 P.M. ET: There's a piece by the ultra-reliably liberal Joe Conason at RCP. Here is the headling: McCain Misunderstands the Meaning of Honor. I have seen nerve, but this takes the prize.
UPDATE AT 3:21 P.M. ET: The Dow is now down 327, with about 40 minutes to go until closing.
UPDATE AT 2:03 P.M. ET: The Dow is down 80.
UPDATE AT 1:55 P.M. ET: The final tracker of the day, Gallup, has been released. Gallup has Obama up 11 points, same as yesterday.
COMMENT: I'm going to not count Gallup, since it's such an outlier. Averaging the other four trackers for today, Obama is up 4.5 points.
UPDATE AT 10:16 A.M. ET: The Hotline tracker is now out, and is not good. Hotline has Obama up six points. It was only one point yesterday. Go figure.
UPDATE AT 9:54 A.M. ET: The Dow is up 140.
UPDATE AT 9:35 A.M. ET: Rasmussen, just published, has Obama up five. It was six yesterday, and eight two days ago.
A CBS VIEW
Posted at 9:29 A.M. ET
Dean Reynolds of CBS News has been covering the Obama campaign, and has now spent some time with the McCain team. His report on the difference is quite revealing. We've knocked the McCain campaign here, so it's a pleasure to pass on some comments on the good things.
Obama is the big time orator, McCain is the guy who struggles with a teleprompter or even note cards strategically placed nearby. Obama's crowds are larger, more enthusiastic. McCain's events are smaller, but to my eye, better choreographed. And now with the addition of Sarah Palin to some of his events, McCain can boast of crowds that match Obama's in energy.
Ah Sarah, Sarah.
There is an urgency to the McCain campaign now that I don't think was there before. Due to the fact that he is running second, no doubt, but it may also be because McCain has a finishing kick. Whatever the case, he is sharper on the stump than he was before. (Though I would suspect a candidate running behind would want to schedule two or three appearances per day, instead of the one McCain usually does.)
Yup. The good and the bad. Mac is a great closer, but the campaign isn't intense enough.
Obama's campaign schedule is fuller, more hectic and seemingly improvisational. The Obama aides who deal with the national reporters on the campaign plane are often overwhelmed, overworked and un-informed about where, when, why or how the candidate is moving about. Baggage calls are preposterously early with the explanation that it's all for security reasons.
Add this to the general dishonesty of the campaign.
The national headquarters in Chicago airily dismisses complaints from journalists wondering why a schedule cannot be printed up or at least e-mailed in time to make coverage plans. Nor is there much sympathy for those of us who report for a newscast that airs in the early evening hours. Our shows place a premium on live reporting from the scene of campaign events. But this campaign can often be found in the air and flying around at the time the "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" is broadcast. I suspect there is a feeling within the Obama campaign that the broadcast networks are less influential in the age of the internet and thus needn't be accommodated as in the days of yore. Even if it's true, they are only hurting themselves by dissing audiences that run in the tens of millions every night.
When you're the The One, you make your own rules.
The McCain folks are more helpful and generally friendly. The schedules are printed on actual books you can hold in your hand, read, and then plan accordingly. The press aides are more knowledgeable and useful to us in the news media. The events are designed with a better eye, and for the simple needs of the press corps. When he is available, John McCain is friendly and loquacious. Obama holds news conferences, but seldom banters with the reporters who've been following him for thousands of miles around the country. Go figure.
I just loved reading that. Maybe the reporters are catching on.
Maybe none of this means much. Maybe a front-running campaign like Obama's that is focused solely on victory doesn't have the time to do the mundane things like print up schedules or attend to the needs of reporters.
But in politics, everything that goes around comes around.
Yes indeed. Change is coming, and not necessarily the kind Obama plans.
October 9, 2008. Permalink
UPDATE AT 9:05 A.M. ET: The second tracker is out. Battleground has Obama up three. It was four yesterday. Rasmussen should be out within a half hour.
UPDATE AT 7:25 A.M. ET: The first tracker is out. Zogby, whose methodology is open to question, has Obama up four, a gain of two from yesterday. Zogby reports that Obama benefited from the debate, so expect possible future gains for him in the days ahead, at least in this poll. We'll wait for the four other trackers, due later today.
COMMENT: All Obama had to do was stand there and be reassuring, and he won. McCain had to turn things around, and he didn't.
UPDATE AT 7:14 A.M. ET: STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- The Swedish Academy says French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has won the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature. The academy on Thursday called Le Clezio "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
COMMENT: Terrific. I can't wait to go to my next New York party and listen to all the people who'll claim to have read him for years. An online bio says: "A great traveler, J.M.G. Le Clézio has been writing since age seven or eight." You know: "Dear mommy, I was thinking today about the condition of the proletariat. Oh, can I have ice-cream money?"
THE WAYWARD PRESS
Posted at 7:08 a.m. ET
The phrase, "the wayward press," is from A.J. Liebling, the late press critic, who would probably be appalled at what he sees today.
But we have the great Dorothy Rabinowitz, one of the best investigative writers of our time, who examines what we've been talking about here at Urgent Agenda for months - the constant problem of the in-the-tank-for-Barack press:
The single constant in the eternal election remains the media, whose activist role no one will seriously dispute. To point out the prevailing (with honorable exceptions) double standard of reporting so favorable to Mr. Obama by now feels superfluous -- much like talking about the weather. The same holds true for all those reports pointing to Mr. Obama's heroic status outside the United States -- not to mention the cascade of press analyses warning that if he fails to win election, the cause will surely be racism.
She is on target. Obama is not only The One, he's the heroic The One. Sounds like something out of the people's republic of somewhere. I wonder why.
That first debate brought the usual legions of commentators -- among them CNN foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour. John McCain, she pointed out, had stumbled over Ahmadinejad's name, and as he was supposed to be the expert on foreign policy, it made her giggle.
"That's not fair -- people make mistakes all the time," Anderson Cooper shot back. But Ms. Amanpour, whose capacity for sustained levels of bombast is one of the wonders of the world, was having none of it.
She would go on to raise the theme so central to the Obama campaign, and held, as revealed truth, by the politically progressive everywhere -- that the U.S., fallen low in the eyes of the world, is now in dire need of moral salvation. Everywhere she went in America, Ms. Amanpour declared, she found "desperate Americans" -- desperate, that is, about the low esteem in which the country was held, desperate to have a president who would lift America up.
If it weren't for that put-on British accent, Christiane Amanpour would be reporting on pest control in Bolivia, and that's an insult to the Bolivians. She proves that ignorance, bigotry, and an inability to distinguish truth from fiction are no barriers to success in journalism.
On Obama:
When asked, in one of the earliest debates of the primary, his first priority should he become president, his answer was clear. He would go abroad immediately to make amends, and assure allies and others in the world America had alienated, that we were prepared to do all necessary to gain back their respect.
It is impossible to imagine those words coming from Mr. McCain. Mr. Obama has uttered them repeatedly one way or another and no wonder. They are in his bones, this impossible-to-conceal belief that we've lost face among the nations of the world -- presumably our moral superiors. He is here to reform the fallen America and make us worthy again of respect. It is not in him, this thoughtful, civilized academic, to grasp the identification with country that Mr. McCain has in his bones -- his knowledge that we are far from perfect, but not ready, never ready, to take up the vision of us advanced by our enemies.
Wonderfully stated.
Sen. Obama is not responsible for the political culture, but he is in good part its product. Which is perhaps how it happened that in his 20 years in the church of Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- passionate proponent of the view of America as the world's leading agent of evil and injustice -- he found nothing strange or alienating.
Finally...
These sharp differences between the candidates as to who we are as a nation may not seem, now, as potent an issue for voters as the economy, but they should not be underestimated. This clash -- not the ones on abortion or gay marriage -- are the root of the real culture war to play out in November.
I'm afraid she's right, as Dorothy usually is. And the situation is in doubt. The future of this nation will depend on who wins the culture war that has been reignited by the left and its followers in the mainstream media.
October 9, 2008. Permalink
"What you see is news. What you know is background. What you feel is opinion."
- Lester Markel, late Sunday editor
of The New York Times.
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