State of Change

Hillary's Debt (to Mark Penn)

By Ari Berman

Yesterday the Democratic National Committee sent out an email urging Obama supporters to help pay off Hillary Clinton's outstanding campaign debt. DNC exec director Jen O'Malley Dillon wrote:

When she ran for President, Hillary Clinton showed America just what kind of party we are -- one that believes in breaking new ground, with opportunities for everyone to reach our highest office. She blazed a trail for women across the country and represented the values and ideals of all Democrats.

Now she needs our help. When Hillary agreed to join President Obama's administration, she made the decision to continue her lifelong commitment to serving our country. But with that commitment came the reality that she could no longer be personally involved in paying down the debt from her historic campaign.

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April 21, 2009

The Trouble With Tea Parties

By Ari Berman

I've been trying my darndest not to follow the supposedly "grassroots" right-wing tea party revolt (organized by the likes of Dick Armey, Fox News and the Club for Growth) against dear leader Comrade Obama, but it's too amusing to completely ignore.

The best coverage of the would-be revolutionaries comes from the Washington Independent's Dave Weigel, himself a libertarian and recovering man of the right. On his blog Weigel points to a rather illuminating op-ed in the Austin American-Statesman by Matt Mackowiak, who compares the wannabe tax revolt to the cult hit Fight Club. Mackowiak writes:

The coming revolution is akin to "Fight Club," the 1999 film that follows the struggles of day to day life for a regular guy who starts an underground fight club as radical and not terribly productive psychotherapy.

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April 15, 2009

Gay Marriage in...Iowa?

By Ari Berman

Gay marriage is now legal in Massachusetts, Connecticut and...Iowa. Yep, you heard right. The Iowa Supreme Court unanimously ruled this morning that the state cannot bar gay couples from seeking to marry.

It's a decision, obviously, that will have wide-ranging ramifications that stretch far beyond Iowa's cornfields, becoming a test case for how this issue will play in the Heartland. You'd be hard pressed to find a more middle of the road state than Iowa, where I grew up. It is neither red (though it went for Bush in 2000), nor blue (though it voted Obama, twice, by comfortable margins), but solidly purple, veering back and forth depending on the political climate of the country.

The Republican Party in the state has been taken over by social conservatives, which is one reason Democrats have had success at the statewide level in recent years. These Republicans are sure to react with fury to the court's decision. Congressman Steve King, an outspoken right-winger from western Iowa (the most conservative part of the state), released this statement today:

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April 3, 2009

Organizing for Obama at Ikea

By Ari Berman

Obama for America took its newly reconstituted campaign organization, Organizing for America (OFA), out for a test drive this weekend, asking its 13 million person email list to gather support for Obama's budget.

More than 1,100 canvasses were scheduled in 50 states on Saturday, and I attended one in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn. There are few places in the country where Obama's support is stronger than in Ft. Greene--a vibrant, multi-ethnic, racially and socio-economically mixed neighborhood with tree-lined streets, old brownstones and a spacious park in the middle. On a sunny afternoon, about two dozen OFA volunteers gathered on the edge of the park, across from a farmer's market selling Apple Cider and fresh pies.

"We're here to send a message to Washington that the country is still activated," said Geoff Berman, a theater director and volunteer coordinator for OFA who spent nine weeks in southeast Missouri last fall for Obama. The ostensible purpose of the day was to get people to sign forms pledging their support for Obama's budget, which would then be passed on to members of Congress. More importantly, it was an opportunity for OFA to get the rust off, keep its volunteers active (and hopefully recruit more) and see how voters in communities across the country were responding to Obama's agenda. "The organization itself is taking shape and we don't want it to take shape in a vacuum," Berman (no relation) said. "The Obama campaign and Administration want to learn from everything we do." OFA, a subset of the Democratic National Committee, is gearing up to hire field organizers across the country who will constitute the next phase of the DNC's modified 50-state strategy.

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March 23, 2009

Dodd's Dumb Move

By Ari Berman

As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Chris Dodd was more interested in mounting a hopelessly far-fetched presidential campaign than in drafting the type of legislation and doing the sort of vigorous oversight that might have prevented or at least softened the economic meltdown, particularly in the banking and housing sectors that Dodd had jurisdiction over.

Now comes word that Dodd drafted legislation to cap bonus payments to firms that received bailout money, only to scrap the provision from the economic stimulus bill after the Obama Administration objected. The language was rewritten at the final hour, when no one had a chance to read the bill or even knew it had occurred. So much for changing the culture of Washington.

"We are outraged to learn that Sen. Dodd, at the behest of the Obama administration, inserted a last-minute loophole into the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that allowed AIG employees to receive exorbitant bonuses at the American taxpayers' expense, and the vast majority of elected officials, not to mention the American public, missed the amendment because they only had 13 hours to read the bill!" the Sunlight Foundation commented today.

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March 19, 2009

The Real Leaders of the Right

By Ari Berman

Now we know who the leaders of the Republican Party are: Rush Limbaugh, Michael Steele, Newt Gingrich, Joe the Plumber and a 14-year-old from Atlanta.

In case you missed it, Jonathan Krohn, Bill Bennett devotee and budding author of "Define Conservatism," was a big hit at CPAC over the weekend and made the front page of the New York Times style section on Sunday.

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March 11, 2009

Hillary vs. The Israel Lobby

By Ari Berman

In her 2000 race for the US Senate, Hillary Clinton was loudly denounced by uncritical right-wing supporters of Israel for a 1999 trip to Ramallah, where she kissed Palestinian First Lady Suha Arafat and listened as Arafat denounced Israel (in Arabic). Pictures of "the kiss" were repeatedly slapped across the cover of the New York Post, in TV ads and invoked by the campaigns of Rudy Giuliani and Rick Lazio. The flap almost derailed Clinton's campaign.

Clinton learned her lesson and for nearly a decade afterward offered only boilerplate praise of Israel, which made her a favorite of the right-leaning Israel Lobby.

Now, as Secretary of State, she's forced to confront another reality: the difficulty of forging peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Anything she says that might be perceived as even slightly critical of Israel will land her in hot water with right-wingers back home. Just ask Chas Freeman, who Barack Obama appointed to head the National Intelligence Council despite fierce opposition from war-hungry neoconservatives.

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February 27, 2009

Jindal Doesn't Levitate to the Occasion

By Ari Berman

Ronald Reagan gave us "voodoo economics." Dennis Kucinich spotted a UFO. Credit Bobby Jindal for making "magnetic levitation" and "volcano monitoring" national buzzwords.

The Louisiana boy wonder has always been an eccentric fellow, converting from Hinduism to Catholicism in high school, changing his name from Piyush to Bobby and reportedly participating in an exorcism in college (at Brown, no less!). He's signed legislation as Governor of Louisiana to chemically castrate sex offenders and recently refused to accept extended unemployment benefits for his economically depressed state as part of the stimulus.

His folksy demeanor, on display in his response to Obama last night, helps to conceal his hard right politics.

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February 25, 2009

Republicans May Reject Stimulus Money

By Ari Berman

After only three Republicans in Congress voted for President Obama's stimulus bill, new data from the White House projects that the stimulus will create more jobs in Republican districts than in Democratic ones, according to Sean Quinn's crunching of the numbers. Quinn says GOP Congressmen will net an average of 418 more jobs per district over a two-year period. Oh, the irony! Maybe that's why Republicans are now touting projects they publicly opposed.

Four Republican governors, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Florida's Charlie Crist, Connecticut's Jodi Rell and Vermont's Jim Douglas, supported the stimulus, leading The New Yorker's Rick Hertzberg to remark that "a Republican governor, you might say, is sort of like a Republican congressman--except with actual responsibilities."

True enough, except not all Republican governors take those responsibilities equally seriously. At least four prominent GOP govs--Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, South Carolina's Mark Sanford, Mississippi's Haley Barbour and, fittingly, Wasilla's own Sarah Palin--say they may refuse federal funding at a time when their states are in deep economic crisis.

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February 19, 2009

Obama's Bipartisan Utopia Mugged By Reality

By Ari Berman

Barack Obama's fantasy of a bipartisan utopia inside the Beltway has been mugged by reality, to borrow a popular neoconservative expression, and not a moment too soon.

It wasn't for lack of trying--Obama repeatedly wooed House Republicans only to have them vote unanimously against his stimulus bill. He loaded up the legislation with tax cuts and cut popular spending provisions and still only three Senate Republicans voted aye. He named a conservative Republican as his Commerce Secretary--the third Republican in his cabinet--only for Judd Gregg to turn around and cite irreconcilable ideological differences, withdrawing without even giving the White House a proper heads up.

The Obama team has finally learned their lesson. Remember when President Bush said "we can't negotiate with terrorists?" Well, the same goes for much of the GOP. (No, I'm not comparing the Republican Party to Al Qaeda, simply pointing out that most of the Republicans that remain in Congress represent conservative states and conservative districts and thus have little incentive to cooperate with Obama, although it does turn out that Texas Republican Pete Sessions recently compared his caucus to the Taliban.) As Rahm Emanuel admitted last night, "There's an insatiable appetite for the notion of bipartisanship here and we allowed that to get ahead of ourselves."

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February 13, 2009