One Debate We All Lose

Senator Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has announced that not only is he going to continue one of Bush’s most constitutionally questionable policies, the faith-based initiative, but he is actually going to expand the program. In fact, the New York Times reports that if Obama is elected, he “would consider elevating the director of his Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to a cabinet-level post.”

Is this the sort of “change” that we can expect from an Obama presidency? I am not naïve enough to expect a candidate to agree with me on every policy position, but this is one of the more offensive initiatives that Bush has brought us. Despite the arguments that church-based organizations are often able to provide services better and/or cheaper than their secular counterparts, the government should not be giving money to them. Bush’s faith-based initiative represents a crack in the wall separating church and state; as such it should be filled, not expanded. I feel that Obama is really letting me down on this one.

One silver lining of the Obama plan is that he has pledged to rescind Bush’s executive order that allows the church-based organizations receiving tax dollars to discriminate in their hiring and firing based upon a person’s religious beliefs. Predictably, some religious groups are out of their minds over this.

“If you can’t hire people within your faith community, then you’ve lost the distinctive that is the reason why faith-based programs exist in the first place,” said Richard Land, head of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Well, damn. And here I thought the reason the faith-based programs existed was to help people in need. Shows what I know.

For his part, Straight-talk McCain chimed in on the matter as well.

A McCain campaign spokesman, Brian Rogers, said Mr. McCain “disagrees with Senator Obama that hiring at faith-based groups should be subject to government oversight.”

So McCain believes that not hiring someone because of their religious beliefs is okay. Do we really need laws protecting people from discriminatory hiring practices? If McCain is elected, maybe we can get rid of them and find out. You know, free market blah blah blah.

So who wins the great faith-based initiative debate? Nobody. The religious nuts come off as religious nuts; McCain comes off as clueless once more; and Obama shows himself to be a sellout. The real losers, though, are the American citizens. The separation of church and state is a cornerstone of our democracy, and it seems that no matter who we put in office, that separation will be a little narrower as a result.
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Why The US Needs Obama's Foreign Policy

A lot of hay has been made by conservatives over Obama's foreign policy plans. The sentiments of the right were summed up nicely by President Bush when he stated that anyone who would have a dialog with our "enemy" was the equivalent of Chamberlain, who thought that appeasing the Nazis would avert a war.

Bush's analogy was, of course, absurd. Last I checked (though admittedly, I don't get CIA briefing on these things) Iran was not amassing troops at their border, preparing to attack a neighbor. Not even Israel.

Marco Vicenzino has an interesting article in the Turkish Daily News. In part, he states:

The reality is that dealing with Iran is less contingent upon who occupies the White House and more dependent on who wins Iran's next presidential election in 2009, and even more so upon the ultimate discretion of Grand Ayatollah Khamenei. If moderate rhetoric prevails on both sides at the early stages of both new presidencies, some form of a new direct or indirect dialogue could possibly evolve in a very gradual manner by the middle of each respective president's term.

Something that doesn't get a lot of play in the US media is the fact that Iranians elect their president. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not a dictator, no matter how much the Bush administration likes to paint him as such. The coming election in Iran is at least as important as this fall's US election to the process of peace or war in the Middle East.

In the US, we have two main choices: Barack Obama or John McCain. McCain wants to bomb Iran. He has stated as much and even sang a song about it. With McCain in the White House, the people of Iran will have real reason to fear the US. They will live every day wondering if American HellFire is going to rain down on them and destroy their homes, their lives, and their country. McCain will push for more sanctions and further isolation of Iran from the global community. If those measures have their desired effect, the people of Iran will suffer as their economy takes a serious hit.

Within that context, they will be confronted by a choice: should they elect a president who will try to bargain with the Great Satan, or should they stick with Ahmadinejad, who stands defiantly thumbing his nose at the superpower?

Fear is a strong motivator. Just look at Bush's approval ratings after 9/11. Just look at the Republican scare tactics used in 2002 and 2004. All of you conservatives, think back to the election of '04 where you were faced with the threat of "Islamofascists" and had to pick between Kerry, who wanted to find a way to reduce our military involvement in the Middle East, and Cowboy Bush, who is so tough he told the enemy to "bring 'em on." Whom did you choose?

If the Iranian people are presented with a US president who is willing to work with their leaders to meet the security interests of the region and the world, while bringing them into the global economic community so they can prosper and have better lives, would they choose to reelect the radical Ahmadinejad, or the more moderate candidate who wants to work with the US to make their lives better?

So we have to decide: do we want to put the warmongering John "Bush III" McCain in charge so he can continue saber-rattling, all but guaranteeing that Ahmadinejad will win reelection and the spiral toward war will continue? Or do we want to put Barack Obama in the White House, so he can start moving Iran, and the Middle East, toward a more moderate leadership, so they can join the rest of the global community and perhaps make the Middle East a place where the constant threat of war is little more than a fading memory?

We need Obama's foreign policy. It's as simple as that.

NOTE: For an opposite view of Obama's foreign policy, check out According To Nikki.

The Blue Wave

Last Thursday, Bob Beckel over at Real Clear Politics had an article about how the election this fall will be a blowout in Obama's favor. He makes a strong argument, starting with the results of the 2004 election, which looked like this:



He gave McCain New Hampshire, which seems fair. Then he gave Obama Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico and Ohio. He took Montana, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida away from McCain since they are all too close to call. His map looks like this:



Which would result in a nice big win for Obama, no matter which way the four swing states fell.
I think that Beckel missed one important state, though. There is one state that has been a Republican stronghold recently, and in most scenarios is considered a gimme for the GOP. Let me put a picture of it here, so you all can start to get used to seeing it.



The latest poll I can find shows McCain leading Obama in Texas by only 5 percent, 48 to 43, with 9% undecided. I think that as McCain tries to play tough on illegal immigration and border fences in order to placate the GOP base, a lot of hispanics are going to shift over to the Democratic camp. Add to that the quarter-million blacks displaced from New Orleans who now call Texas home and the emergence of Bob Barr as a Libertarian alternative for Ron Paul's supporters, and I think that the Lone Star State will tip back to blue, as it was in almost every election through 1976. This is what my electoral map looks like:



Isn't that nice? I left Florida as undecided because it's too hard to say how that one's going to fall. I think it will be blue, but I'm not confident in that prediction. I also gave North Dakota to Obama because he's currently leading McCain in that state as well.

So, will McCain get wiped out this November or is it just wishful thinking? We'll find out in five months. Stay tuned.

NOTE: All of the maps here were created on my new favorite web site: 270toWin.com. Go check it out.
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When A Loss Is A Win And A Win Is A Loss

Last week, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton split the two contests, with Obama taking North Carolina and Clinton winning Indiana. On the surface, it seemed to be a draw and everyone sighed as the marathon primary season continued. A more thorough look at the results shows that last Tuesday was for all intents and purposes the end of the road for Hillary.

Obama won in North Carolina 56% to 42%, a decisive margin of victory. Clinton took Indiana, on the other hand, by 2%, 51 to 49. According to Joe Klein in the May 19 edition of Time:

Clinton's slim margin of victory in Indiana was provided, appropriately enough, by Republicans, who were 10% of the Democratic-primary electorate and whose votes she carried 54% to 46%...

If that's the case, Clinton's margin without the help of the Republicans would have been .34%, or about 4,000 votes. This after Obama took a beating in the press over his various "scandals," ranging from Reverend Wright to a flag pin absent from his lapel. And in a state that Clinton was expected to win, no less.

Indiana was not a victory for Clinton. Her last-ditch effort to sway the remaining super delegates has been to claim that she is more electable than Obama. She would have needed to win Indiana by a good 10 points or more in order for her claim to have any credibility. Winning the state by .34% or 2% just doesn't cut it.

So while Obama technically lost Indiana, I think he can claim it as a victory because not only did he split the Democrats in a state he was presumed to lose, but he even got 45% of the Republicans who crossed over and voted in the Democratic race. That means that Obama received enough Republican votes to finish ahead of Huckabee, Romney and Paul.

Obama has the lead in pledged delegates and in the popular vote, and has taken the lead in super delegates. At this point, the only questions that remain are, how much longer until Clinton bows out, and whom will Obama pick as his running mate.

Obamarama Rolls On

Last night, Obama won the Wisconsin primary and the Hawaii caucus. Neither contest was even close. He took Wisconsin by a margin of 17%, and Hawaii by 52%. At this point in the race, those numbers spell almost certain doom for the Clinton campaign. The real dagger last night was that Obama cut into Hillary's core voters. Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics.com sums it up nicely.

Clinton suffered significant loses across many of her core constituencies. White women, Democrats, union workers, downscale voters, and white Catholics all drifted to Obama last night - some so much that Obama actually won them.

What this shows is that the Clinton Campaign strategy of going negative in recent weeks didn't help her, and in fact may have backfired.

It's 13 days now until Hillary's D-Day. She has to pull out strong victories in both Texas and Ohio in order to even have a sliver of a chance of getting the nomination. Right now, according to CNN, Obama is ahead in the pledged delegate count by 143. While Clinton leads in the polls in Ohio, a Monday CNN poll shows Texas as a dead heat.

Can Hillary stage a comeback? Negative tactics don't seem to work against Obama's message of hope and change. The real question is whether the Clinton campaign has any new tricks up its sleeve, because the old ones aren't getting the job done.