And then there's the accountability and self-reliance . . .

It still wasn't bad strategy to play up how he acted courageously in Nam.  It's just that because he'd accepted public financing for the GE (stupid stupid move), his campaign would have squandered a good deal of fed resources fighting the battle in the ad wars prior to the fall.  

Some great photos in there, too.

I'm Barack Obama and I share your values. Cue Jeremiah.

I would suggest that he needs to run on the issues, but he clearly does not do that well. His flip-flopping on Jerusalem, Iran and public financing are just three examples.

No, better to play to his strengths, which have gotten him this far.*

Jim clyburn's attacks on the Clinton's destroyed Clinton's share of the African American vote in SC.

I am going to say something impolitic

Focusing on his white mother and grandparents was not something he was going to do before South Carolina.

There, now you made me say it. It is part of what made Clyburn's behavior in South Carolina so despicable - the one thing for sure the Clinton campaign was NOT going to do in South Carolina was play racial politics.

One thing is for sure: McCain would never run as racist a campaign as the Clintons just did.

Gah.  The man's such an idiot!  He's been ridiculed by the Left for years.  Now he thinks he's one of the boyz because he's hitched his itchy pants to the Obama wagon?

The Bell Curve he championed and he calls someone ELSE a racist?

But once she sensed that she would not win, then imposing the "he's black, of course he will win" line, with the implication that the Obama is the candidate for the blacks, and she is the candidate for the whites, is an obviously winning strategy for the rest of the race.

Once the black community began moving to Obama, after they percieved he could actually win, then she must have known that she would never get them back, not from Obama. So on some level, it seems pretty obvious that her campaign was willing to cede that vote to Obama, and focus on ginning up support elsewhere.

Those are reasonable political calculations. But once your mind is thinking along those lines, then you are prone to make comments, if you are not careful, that reflect that - and which can come off sounding pretty harsh.

Look, the big primary facing Hillary after NH was OBVIOUSLY the SC primary.

It made zero sense for her or anyone in her campaign to start engaging racial remarks at that stage: it would be pure loss for her. If the supposed pattern had emerged AFTER SC, perhaps you'd have an argument. But it was the Obama campaign that started alleging racial remarks. The Obama campaign was caught red handed with a memo outlining how that case would be made, using obviously contrived instances of that alleged pattern.

Obama had everything to gain, and nothing to lose by stirring up racial resentments before SC; Clinton had everything to lose and nothing to gain.

And yet, dishonest to the core, you want to pretend that the motivations were opposite.

I'll grant you the honesty claim - I have no doubt that you came to sincerely believe the spin put out around here. But that doesnt mean it is anything other than extreme spin - the most ridiculouslly pro-Hillary interpretation of events. Or should I say, anti-Obama, since animus toward him seemed to be even more fundamental than Hillary love.

You seem so far gone off the deep end that it is barely possible to reach you, I suspect. I would suggest that at some point, when you are ready to rejoin the real world, you go back and read about the events of the primary from MANY different sources. Including from people who you might otherwise respect, but who, since they werent fanatic Clinton supporters, you might have ignored till now.

I can assure you that my opinions are sincere, and I am representing them as honestly as I can. I, and btw, the majority of people, feel that it was the Clintons who were playing the race card, not Obama. Getting beyond race was a major theme of his campaign, of his entire life.

YOu may not be in the frame of mind to understand this, but there was NOTHING for Obama to gain by playing the race card. Putting himself in the 'black candidate" box - you seriously think that was in his interest?

It's completely obvious that the Clinton campaign had nothing to do with blatant dog-whistles like Jesse Jackson Jr.'s comment that "Hillary didn't cry over Katrina," let alone the 4-page memo from Obama's SC campaign detailing a whole ton of bogus racism accusations.  The suggestion that a majority of people agree with your narrative is, frankly, about the most irrelevant thing you could ever bring up.  More people agreed that Al Gore lied about inventing the Internet.  The fact that the media ran with an anti-Clinton narrative and persuaded a lot of people to buy into it doesn't make it true.

And then what do you do? Engage in a large, unfocused attack on me because of my point of view -- namely that I'm steadfastly against Obama.

Yes, that I am; that much is true.

But, you see, there are reasons I am against Obama. All I do is present those reasons. I don't engage in arguments I don't believe have genuine merit. I try as best I can not to distort what really is going on. There are bad and dishonest arguments against Obama, and I do everything I can to detect them and avoid them.

Your arguments, however, often have no merit -- and the particular argument you are putting forth now, that it was somehow in Hillary's interest, and not Obama's, to stir up racial issues before the SC primary clearly has no merit. It is a dishonest argument; you are being dishonest in continuing to push it when its obvious fallacies are pointed out.

And, trust me, I am not in the least impressed that "most people" believe that it was Hillary's campaign, and not Obama's, who first pushed the racial issues. That shows nothing more than that the media, as per usual, took up cudgels against Hillary on Obama's behalf on this issue. If "most people" once upon a time believed that Saddam was somehow responsible for 9/11, does that mean that he was indeed? Are you that naive? Is this the sort of consideration that convinces you?

Clyburn's statements were a fairy tale he deliberately and maliciously concocted unless he is a moron. And I know he is not a moron.

I was wondering what your opinion of that was.

Anyway, I disagree, but if mccain or mccain's campaign can avoid making such statements, statements that you believe are race baiting, then maybe sully's statement below has some weight to it.

Losing is one thing, Clinton got blown out in South Carolina.

In other words, he was someone who could be seen by white voters as a credible candidate - he would not be another Jackson, or Sharpton, who would be universally seen as just a presence on the stage to raise the concerns of the black community.

Don'tcha know, Bill Clinton destroyed the Democratic Party?

How could one congressman's comments move more black people than the suddenly emerging possibility of electing a black man president?

Besdies, Clyburn's comments were not wrong.

She married her Indonesian husband when Obama was how old? 5? and they moved to Indonesia when he was still 5 or when he was 6?

My mother was widowed when I was 12, so I guess I could say I was raised by a single mother--but I've never even thought of it that way for whatever reason. In fact, It just occurred to me as I was asking this question about Obama.  Altho, of course, my mother was indeed single after my father's untimely heart attack.  

And wasn't his father a polygamist?  

He doesn't HAVE to say he struggled financially.  He chooses to create this "I struggled just like you" mythology which is easily -- and devastatingly -- debunked with just a bit of cursory digging.

Just wait for the GOP commercials highlighting those who are REALLY struggling juxtaposed with Barack's prep school and how his Grandmother's salary compared with the average salary in Hawaii at that time.  And then watch as the "um"s and "ugh"s spill out of Barack's mouth when he moves to defense and has to explain how he, in light of what the average family in Hawaii made at that time, can say he "struggled" financially.  

This inevitable smear is so unnecessary and stupid.

link

I think this is a mistake, too. It gives the GOP an opening to question his credibility. Never a good thing.

Oh well. At least he didn't try the old "I was raised by a single mother on food stamps" that he trotted out a few times last spring. Apparently his campaign has wisely decided that one was too big of a whopper.

Dunham was born Madelyn Payne in Peru, Kan., on Oct. 26, 1922. When she was 3 years old, Payne's family moved to Augusta, Kan., where young Madelyn was raised, Soetoro-Ng said. She married Stanley Armour Dunham in 1940. Madelyn Dunham attended college at the University of Washington before becoming an aircraft inspector for Boeing during World War II.

After the war, she attended UC-Berkeley, worked various jobs, then came to the Islands, where she joined the Bank of Hawaii in 1960.

Where in the timeline could Barack's mother have been born in Kansas? His mother went to high school at Mercer Island High in Seattle (they've interviewed classmates in the past).

People will begin to think at the least that he's a bit of a Johnny One Note, and they could get turned off majorly with egregious appeals to sympathy.  

And those college loans, were probably partially forgiven if he put in time in a poor neighborhood as he claims to have done after graduation instead of taking a job at Wall Street. I think they're called fellowships.

Some digging could clear that up.

Then we'll start to hit the "contrast" ads, where Obama casually mentions what he stands for--and oh, by the way, John McCain does not--but not in an inflammatory tone or anything like that. That comes later.

And lastly comes the nastier ones that make direct accusations at your opponent in order to shift paradigms mentally right before Election Day, not allowing for any sort of a settling-down or fact-checking.

In all reality, it's not a big deal.  But any opening he gives the GOP to make him look like a liar they're going to take.  And the last thing Barack needs it to be on the defense saying "well, yes, my grandmother was a VP for a bank and I did go to private school, but, trust me, we really struggled financially"

They'll take any opportunity to make him look dishonest or not trustworthy, to make the American Voter doubt WHATEVER comes out of his mouth or wonder if what he's saying is really the truth.  Things like this Basic Bio stuff should be a no-brainer for Barack, but he's turned it into yet another Smear In The Making for a now jubilant GOP.