TBPtv: Kennard finds his Wabo

TakingBackPolitics.com columnist Matt Kennard reporting from the Sammy Hagar concert during the 2008 Republican National Convention.

TBPtv on Sammy Hagar

The former Van Halen frontman performs in Minneapolis for the RNC. Shot by Eugene Mulero.

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The Man Behind the Man of Hope and Change

By EUGENE MULERO, CORRESPONDENT

When David Axelrod attended the Democratic Caucus luncheon in the Ohio Clock Corridor section inside Capitol Hill on June 17, reporters did not recognize him. Axelrod, who’s about six feet two inches with black hair and an average build, walked like an unknown near the elevators between the lunchroom and the Senate’s chamber floor.

The reporters whispered amongst themselves trying to figure out who he was. After a few minutes, another reporter and I realized that it was Axelrod—Obama’s brain.

As soon as word about his identity got around, the reporters flocked to him. His visit to Capitol Hill ended up receiving minor TV and print news coverage.

I was only able to recognize “Ax,” as he’s known in his inner circle, because I had read a profile about him in The New York Times Magazine in 2007; otherwise, I’m sure he would’ve been just another face for me. However, seeing how clueless my fellow members of the media were that day about who Axelrod was, made me think that most people are probably not paying close attention to Obama.

Let me put it this way—Axelrod is to Obama as Karl Rove was to Bush. I mean, Axelrod provides Obama with his stuff. That speech we heard Obama give at the Democratic National Convention just a few days ago—that was Axelrod talking.

This should be alarming to most voters because Axelrod is a former Chicago Tribune hack who left journalism for the unpleasant life of a political strategist. Axelrod’s specialty, no less, is getting African-American candidates elected—seriously. He has succeeded in Massachusetts, with Gov. Deval Patrick, and in Philadelphia with former Mayor John F. Street.

Obama is the most sellable African-American candidate Axelrod could find. Obama learned politics from Illinois’s established political boss (Emil Jones, Jr.) and he’s aligned himself with the established Democratic guard on Capitol Hill (Sen. Ted Kennedy).

A professor at McGill University gave me new perspective on the whole Obama campaign a few weeks ago when he told me, “A lot of voters will be disillusioned if Obama wins.”

Axelrod must know this to some degree. While the strategy he is pushing, “hope” and “change,” propelled Obama to the democratic nomination, I find it insulting.

“Hope” and “change” should be nothing more than song titles on an early Beatles album, not the campaign talking points for a man seeking the post of Commander-in-Chief. And only a few news organizations (ie, The Economist, The New Yorker) have picked up on this. The rest of the herd media is pumping the “H & C” tune, which is ensuring a job in the White House for Axelrod.

But think about Axelrod’s strategy. Hope is the ego relying on artificial stimuli to help convince itself of an outcome that might occur (often when the ego is in a state of desperation). And, change is the constant in our universe. Anybody can guarantee change. That’s like me telling everybody I can provide them with gravity.

Obama tells audiences “there’s not a black America … there’s only a United States of America.” However, is hope going to help the African-Americans in New Orleans who are still homeless three years after Katrina, or Mexican-American day laborers who are mistreated in Arizona, or the Dominicans in Washington Heights worried about corrupt police officers?

Of course not.

Eugene may be reached at Eugene.Mulero@gmail.com.

Walker Rant: Palin v. Clinton, Woman on Woman

In The Newsroom with Casey and Eugene: Sept. 1

Time for Voters to Take Responsibility

BY JASON WALKER, Columnist

I have a question for you…

What will you do if your candidate loses?

Actually, I’ve got several questions.

What will happen to all the excitement and interest in politics this “unprecedented” presidential race has supposedly generated after the election is over?

The public is fickle. It was in Rome; it was in England; it is today. Like those dynasties, we will eventually fall, and our lack of interest in our government may be the basis.

To avoid this fate, don’t the respective parties have a responsibility to help keep interest up even if they lose? Isn’t that what all the ads, celebrities, ministers and politicians are always saying? How much your vote means and how important it is to be a part of the political process. If that is true than no matter who wins isn’t it your responsibility to support the system even if you think the wrong candidate was elected? If you truly believe in the system it’s your duty to support whoever represents you.

So where has the support been the last few years? No, I’m not saying you should blindly follow your government and not acknowledge mistakes. But you should help be a part of guiding our country to a better outcome, not stall the process by constantly pointing fingers. That is what has happened.

You can blame Bush all you want, but everyone plays a part. It’s easy to be supportive when everything is going smoothly, but it is when times are the most turbulent that your representatives need your support and guidance the most. Unfortunately, during those times, they have been criticized the most and abandoned. Rarely is focus centered on the problem and not on the elected officials. This is a country full of fair-weather friends.

Who is to blame?

Politicians are cannibals. Each party expends so much effort pointing out the flaws of the other. Each candidate works so hard to discount his or her opponent. It should be expected that the public would adopt the same mind-set. Then politicians wonder why they are held under a microscope and why it is so hard to believe them when, after vigorously trashing their opponent for the last couple of years, they are “sincerely” endorsing the same person in a speech at the national convention. You can’t have it both ways. Negativity breeds negativity, and we have been on this path for so long that it may be impossible for a candidate to get elected using a different approach.

The public is not without blame either. It does not benefit the county when your interest only exists when your candidate is involved.

Presidential candidates are like teams in the Super Bowl. Your team probably isn’t playing, but for one reason or another there is one team you would rather see win. You want to see a hated rival defeated. You have money on the game. Maybe you just get caught up in the vibe at the party.

This isn’t a game. This is the presidency and it deserves to be treated with more importance. The average person can tell you more about any random athlete or actor than they can about the man who gets their vote.

Is the fate of the country better left to those who have a genuine interest in the process and not to the masses that only show interest every four years? No. The process only works if everyone can be a part of it. But there should be criteria beyond reaching a certain age and not being convicted of a serious crime to participate.

Maybe the candidates don’t need to endure more scrutiny, the people voting should. It’s more difficult to pick a cell phone and calling plan, more time consuming to join a social networking site and more costly to vote on a reality show than to vote for the leader of our country.

How valuable do you consider your right to vote? Value is determined based on what has to be endured, sacrificed or paid. There was a time when people were willing to sacrifice their lives for the privilege to vote, and it was priceless to them. Now that right is of little value to a majority of the public.

No wonder the rest of the world hates us. They see Americans taking for granted the rights they receive from birth, like an heiress squandering her family’s wealth while people work 60-hour weeks to feed their families. Most people never know how good they really have it.

There is a chance to parlay this momentum into a real interest in the political process. A chance to show those still watching after November 4 how their votes can affect their lives and get people interested in their local and state governments. A chance to motivate people by showing them the results of their contributions. The question now is, where do your loyalties lie? With your interest or with the process?

A Case of Censorship by Omission

BY MATT KENNARD, Columnist

Over the months of December 2007 and January 2008 the London Sunday Times published some of the most revelatory and important stories to have graced the British newspapers for decades. Their investigative team dug deep into claims by a former FBI translator that Marc Grossman, a top State Department official, “was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the [nuclear] information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.” It emerged last week, through an interview with one of the journalists on the story, that the FBI was complaining to the Sunday Times about its propensity to take journalism seriously and interview a few of their formers. A quick digest of what the case involves and how it has been inexplicably blacked out by the U.S. media is a shocking tale of political corruption and media venality.

Thirty-eight-year-old Sibel Edmonds is the whistleblower, and her claims are stunning. Grossman, who was the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey from 1994 to 1997, and later Under Secretary of State, is accused by Edmonds of “aiding foreign operatives against U.S. interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

The nuclear secrets that he is alleged to have let seep out for his own personal aggrandizement were dribbled to agents from Pakistan and Turkey. It is assumed that they have since fallen into the hands of infamous Pakistani nuclear scientist and trader A.Q. Khan, who is known to have sold secret nuclear information to a host of rogue regimes from North Korea to Iran.

The FBI hired Edmonds nine days after 9/11. They fired her six months later. She has claimed that she was fired because she highlighted the criminality of her seniors and her principled stand was not to be tolerated. She took her claim to the courts and filed suit against the Department of Justice, the FBI and several high-level officials in July 2002. In October 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the State Secrets Privilege—a politicized and often misused legal doctrine—to block the release of any of the material that Edmonds had in her possession because it endangered national security.

But in the Sunday Times she has rehashed these claims with more damning furnishings. The latest revelation is that Grossman “tipped off a foreign contact about a bogus CIA company used to investigate the sale of nuclear secrets.” She came into possession of all this information as she translated hundred of hours of intercepted recordings made during a six-year FBI investigation focused on an international nuclear smuggling ring.

And it is not only Grossman who is implicated. On Edmonds’ website she also fingers Douglas J. Feith, Undersecretary of State for Policy from July 2001 to August 2005, and Richard N. Perle, Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, among a dozen others. And the FBI has been accused by the Sunday Times of lying blatantly when they denied the existence of a key case file detailing corruption in the FBI after a Freedom of Information Act request from a human rights group. The Sunday Times claims it knows the file exists.

But these earth-shattering revelations have, astonishingly, not appeared in one mainstream newspaper in the United States. A whistleblower highlighting criminality at the highest echelons of government, the FBI blatantly lying about a report in its possession: these scoops have been plastered across one of the most august journals in Britain, yet not one outlet deigns to print it here in the U.S. What is going on?

The reticence is worse than weird. It is genuinely conspiratorial. Why on earth would titles like the New York Times and the Washington Post deem this story not important enough to get even a few column inches in their newspapers? Why is there this sordid silence?

Harry Shearer, one of the voices behind the Simpsons, asks these same questions on his Huffington Post blog. “The theft of U.S. nuclear secrets, the diverting of them to Pakistan (and, according to Edmonds, Saudi Arabia), the involvement of Israel in the scheme,” he writes, “all of these would justify as jaw-droppingly newsworthy in a rational journalistic universe. Clearly, that’s not where we live.”

Daniel Ellsberg, the great CIA whistleblower who released the Pentagon Papers (an internal CIA evaluation of the Vietnam War decision-making) in 1971 goes further. The release of the Pentagon Papers caused a national political storm and changed the trajectory of the war in Indochina. He says Edmonds’ revelations are potentially even more explosive, but laments the mute media. “It’s a measure of how far the New York Times and Washington Post have fallen from their responsibilities to the public, to their profession and to American democracy, since I gave them the Pentagon Papers in 1971,” he writes. “They printed them then. Would they today?” he asks.

“For the last two weeks—one could say, for years—the major American media have been guilty of ignoring entirely the allegations of the courageous and highly credible source Sibel Edmonds…. It is up to readers to demand that this culpable silent treatment end.”

Various rumors and theories are ricocheting around the blogosphere. Various commentators are saying there is evidence that the powerful individuals being targeted by Edmonds are contacting media outlets and beseeching them not to print, and that the newspapers are being craven and supine under this duress. Others are cleaving towards the more prosaic explanation that the story ‘lacks legs’ and adds nothing new to Edmonds’ previous utterances since she was fired. I know which of the theories I believe.

Reams of comments have appeared under the Sunday Times articles, many coming from despairing American citizens railing against their impotent media. The latest installment—the third in the series—has Michael Monk, from Raleigh N.C. lamenting in the comments section: “You can be the free press we don’t have in the states.” Ron Curtis, of Cleburne, T.X., writes more pugnaciously, “The American ‘news’ media is a disgrace and nothing more than a modern-day Izvestia or Pravda of the Soviet era, spewing propaganda and brainwashing Joe Sixpack with images of Britney and nothing-else-matters-wall-to-wall election coverage.”

Is Mr. Curtis right? One of the most potent tools of thought control in an ostensibly democratic society is censorship by omission: it does not involve overt manipulation of reality, but the more insidious shielding of germane information from the populace. The American media need to show us, and show us soon, that they haven’t consciously imbibed this technique to keep the corrupt politicians happy and the people in the dark. Otherwise this transatlantic blockade of information is going to get more embarrassing and the silence increasingly hard to uphold.

Is Obama Asian?

BY MIRA JANG, Columnist

At a May gathering of nearly 2,000 Asian Americans leaders and activists in the heavily Asian city of Irvine, CA, Barack Obama spoke by phone to the group. “I am a Pacific Islander,” he said. “…I consider myself a part of you.” And at a fundraiser this month in San Francisco, he told South Asian immigrants that he is one of them, too.

Many Asian Americans seem to have accepted and embraced these assertions. Polls indicate that most Asians are backing Obama, and experts say the majority of this group will support the senator in November. And an article in The San Francisco Chronicle claims that if Obama wins he would be the first Asian American president.

But is Obama a Pacific Islander and a South Asian, and by extension, an Asian American?

By now, it is widely known that Obama was born and raised in Hawaii, the only state with a majority Asian population. Recently, he vacationed there, and his half-Indonesian half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng—to whom he is close—still lives on the island with her Chinese Canadian husband and their daughter. Obama’s Asian connection extends to his childhood in Indonesia and his Indonesian stepfather.

Surely, living in Hawaii and Indonesia and having a strong bond with his Asian family members have influenced Obama’s identity in significant ways. Hawaii is so rich with various Asian cultures and so unique in its lifestyle that its residents adopt an entirely new identity as Hawaiians. And in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-dominant country, Obama likely encountered a myriad of ethnicities and languages that were starkly different from his own.

Yet it’s unclear how Obama’s Asian background has affected him, and more importantly, how it may, or may not, manifest if he’s in the White House. After all, once he was in a position to choose his own destiny he chose to root himself in the black community. He married a black woman who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, worked with black churches as a community organizer, attends a black church, and settled in Chicago, a place far removed from the places of his childhood.

Fortunately for Obama, he does not need to convince Asians that he is one of them—literally or otherwise—to win their vote. Many Asians are proud to see a viable minority candidate, and they appreciate his multicultural and international background, along with his educational and career achievements. If anything, their support for Obama reflects their own racial consciousness and solidarity with African Americans, despite isolated incidents of racial tension and the unfounded belief that their mutual racism runs so deep that Asians would not back Obama.

That Obama has been able to attract such a large following of Asians says much about their shared status as racial minorities as well as Obama’s representing a new brand of black politics. He has proven to be black enough to win the black vote without fashioning himself after the divisive Jessie Jackson or Al Sharpton. On the contrary, many groups seem to claim Obama as their own, and Obama is comfortably glowing under the many spotlights.

But by doing so, Obama risks appearing like a typical politician who panders to every crowd. When he says he’s South Asian or Pacific Islander, it sounds naïve, if not opportunistic. Perhaps these statements are his way of showing affection for Asians, but so far, it just rings hollow and appears symbolic at best.

Obama is not Asian, and he will never be Asian. He is half black and half white. His white mother hails from Kansas, and his African father is Kenyan. In America, he is perceived as a black man, an identity that brings with it a unique set of experiences vastly different from that faced by a Chinese immigrant or a Cambodian refugee. To say that he is one of them is to trivialize their experiences and undermine this country’s sad but very real system of racial hierarchy and oppression. Imagine an Asian American candidate saying that he is black because he grew up in Kenya. While he could sympathize and try to understand African Americans, he will never be black.

The key question is just how inclusive Obama will be if he becomes president. To what extent will he include Asians—a majority immigrant group that comprises many different ethnicities, languages, histories, and cultures—and be responsive to them? Only his conduct in the White House will show whether his bond with Asians ended long ago or if he continues to hold an affinity so strong and significant that Asians, who make up only five percent of the U.S. population, will feel included. More than any other presidential candidate in history, Obama is best posed to understand and advocate for them.

For the first time, Obama has the opportunity to galvanize Asian Americans to form a solid voting bloc in his favor. With each presidential election, Asians have become more Democratic, and as they become increasingly disillusioned with George Bush and the Republican Party Obama has an even greater opening to capture the Asian vote. And Obama could achieve this feat by being himself.

Walker Rant: Hate Conventions?

My Mama Really Does Love Obama

By KRISTIN JONES, CORRESPONDENT

As a member of the working press, I am of course non-partisan and thoroughly objective. But in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say that my mother is a total Obamamaniac. She’s extreme. On two cars, she has placed no less than three Obama bumper stickers. She has many different varieties of Obama buttons, which she will sometimes kiss. She sighs when she sees him on TV. My mom has a serious crush on Obama.

In my last post, I wrote that despite the message of change, this year’s Democratic convention has brought about the usual amount of insider partying and back-room dealings. But my mom—who is more than a little suspicious of my reporting activities—went out  of her way this week to prove that politics is actually for the people, and any cynicism is probably misplaced.

A Denver resident for 19 years and a lifelong Democrat who is elated by the nomination today of Barack Obama, my mother has taken full advantage of the DNC’s public events. Though she didn’t win the lottery to see the acceptance speech tonight, she has braved the detours, police, crowds, and seething Clinton supporters to grab all the democracy she can get her hands on.

On Monday, she went to the Seniors Caucus. On Tuesday, she went to the Women’s Caucus. The events led her to muse on John McCain’s threat to social security and the intact glass ceiling for women in this country.

On Denver’s squeaky-new lightrail, she acts like someone who hasn’t learned (as I have) that public transportation is for ignoring people. She strikes up conversations with people like Rich Locklear, a young delegate here from New Jersey who spent five years in the military, served in Iraq, and appreciates Obama for his opposition to the war. Young people involved in politics energize my mother—so long as they’re not Republicans—and she tells them so. She showed up at a Trick-or-Vote costume party to rally young voters, grabbed a cocktail, and after congratulating the youth on their enthusiasm, urged them to forsake their 501c3 status and throw their support behind Obama.

It’s been a long time since the Democratic Party inspired this kind of fervor among its supporters. My mom still talks about JFK. Maybe it’s just what it needs to win.

Tonight, Mile High Stadium will be short one very vocal fan. But my mom is sure to be glued to the TV, swooning and crying.

Kristin Jones may be reached at KristinJones5000@gmail.com.

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