Obama Is Going To Have To Jump Into The Fray

Bill Clinton has been busy. You really have to watch that guy, because he thinks he is the Isaac Newton of politics, and he suggests as much in his autobiography. There is this reference to the Clinton's Laws Of Politics. One of them is, elections are always about the future. And that particular law works in Obama's favor. It does not matter that Bill Clinton was an amazing president, that is in the past. 2008 is not going to be about how fabulous a president Bill Clinton was.

How does Bill Clinton get busy? The guy will plain pick up the phone, likely late at night.And he will call up some obscure reporter at some major media outlet, someone he has not talked in a long time. Hey, how you doing? Just thinking about you. How is your wife? How are your children? And so you know this is off the record. This is informal. And then he will dig in. You know, I don't understand why you media guys are not seeing this. Barack Obama and my wife have the exact same voting record on Iraq ever since Obama came over to the Senate. This is so unfair that you guys pillory my wife over Iraq. And then he will move on to talk about golf. The work is done. When that reporter next writes up his piece, what is on his mind has been put on his mind by none other than the magic boy from Arkansas, the one and only Bill Clinton. And there is not a trace of him doing it anywhere.

Bill Clinton has been very busy. Iraq is the biggest weapon Obama has on Hillary, and Bill Clinton is out to erase that. He wants to make Iraq null and void. Some time late last year, some hapless voter in Texas asked Billie Clinton about his wife's vote on the Iraq war. And Bill Clinton just glowered at him for a few seconds before he said with some emotion that he thought it was time to stop looking at the past and start looking at the future.

And the future looks identical. Obama wants to end the war, so does Hillary. Obama is promising universal health care, so is Hillary. And those are the two big ones.

How you run your campaign counts. Who raises more money matters. Who has a larger, more robut organization? Who has the larger brain trust? Who has the most endorsements?

Bill Clinton works like a demon, he always has. He works like a demon, and he makes it look all so easy and casual. And that is actually a double whammy, more effective than if it showed that he was sweating.

If Hillary is going to be the nominee, she is going to be president. It will be this or that Democrat in 2008. That much is a foregone conclusion. McCain and Rudy will tear each other apart, and we will have the last man standing for breakfast. And that makes me wonder if we should not treat Fox News as our real opponent for 2008. As in, let new media beat Fox.

If Hillary ends up president, I am not going to beat my chest. I think the world of her. I was as behind her before Obama showed up as I am behind Obama. My favorite story about Hillary is this. She shows up in some small Indian village as First Lady. And the local women surround her to tell her she has no idea what it means to them that she is there. Those women are right. Hillary has no idea.

I have met her a few times in person.

But I have thrown my weight behind Obama. It is exciting to play shadow boxing with the man himself, the one and only Bill Clinton.

It is perfectly legitimate for Hillary to have Bill Clinton for husband. It is fair game. And of course the guy will turn heaven and earth for his wife. That is fair enough. It is absolutely fair that Hillary will raise a lot of money. It is absolutely fair that Hillary has much establishment support.

I guess there are no short cuts.

Obama will have to get in and work hard. He is going to have to go head to head with Hillary on money, message and organization.

He has to jump into the fray. The Hillary camp has already found and targeted Obama's Iraq. Where is Obama's counterpunch? What would be Obama's counterpunch?

Obama's Iraq is that he is not a woman. If he is elected president, he is not going to be the first woman president. That is his weak point.

How do you counter that? You outwoman Hillary. You suggest having a woman for running mate would be great at this point in history. You suggest about half your cabinet will be female. You suggest Hillary has been mostly symbolic, she has not really done much for women as a leader with much power. You expand the policy debates on gender beyond the prochoice position to also talk about workplace issues like equal pay, and sexual harassment, and relationship issues like domestic violence and better policing on the same. It might be time to declare War On Domestic Violence. Talk of recruiting more women into the police force so as to better tackle domestic violence. That is how you outwoman Hillary. Tell the voters she has been meek on gender issues. She has not really stood up for women, has she? I mean she has, but she has been so miserly about it.

Obama has got to get on the offensive. He got hit on Iraq by none other than Bill Clinton himself very recently, and he did not even notice. It is like John Kerry's boat veterans' attacks. The attacks were false, but they worked because Kerry did not hit back.

You got to hit back. That is one of the basic laws of politics. You don't have to get down and dirty. Staying clean and hitting back are not mutually exclusive.

Those who stay above the fray lose. Politics is a contact sport. Who said that? Bill Clinton.

In The News

Blair fury as hostage letter seeks withdrawal from Iraq The Australian
Defying Bush, Senate Passes Iraq Spending Measure New York Times
Jesse Jackson Endorses Barack Obama CBS News
Senator Clinton Picks Up NOW Endorsement All Headline News
Spanish edition of Obama's 'Audacity of Hope' to come out in June WQAD
Clinton aids Vilsack with campaign debt Herald News Daily
Interim Govt Likely To Be Formed On Friday In Nepal All Headline News
Protests by ethnic Madhesi in southern Nepal turned violent (Reuters) Swissinfo
Bihar villager endures 27 years bonded labour for 40 kg rice Reuters India
Bush Loyalist Rose Quickly Washington Post
Arab leaders urge Israel to take peace offer Reuters
Israel rejects Arab peace plan Aljazeera.net
Castro signals resumption of public role Houston Chronicle
Battles rage as troops try to restore order in Mogadishu Independent
NextWave Raises $355 Million To Fund Drive Into WiMax And Wi-Fi InformationWeek
VTR Selects Motorola to Deploy 802.16e WiMAX Network WiMax.com
Millions are caught in great credit card heist Times Online
'Evidence of misconduct' at Dell MSN Money
Circumcision is backed for Africa Boston Globe
WHO hails circumcision as vital in HIV fight New Scientist (subscription)
Dell Gives In to Linux Lovers TechNewsWorld
Microsoft launches Deepfish, new Web browser for smart phones Seattle Post Intelligencer
U2's Bono awarded British knighthood Actress Archives

The not-so-simple story of Barack Obama's youth Chicago Tribune his mother, Ann, a brilliant but impulsive woman; his grandmother Madelyn, a deeply private and stoically pragmatic Midwesterner; his grandfather Stanley, a loving soul inclined toward tall tales and unrealistic dreams. .... Stanley Ann Dunham ..... Known as Ann throughout her adult life, she kept to herself. ..... He describes making friends easily, becoming fluent in Indonesian in just six months and melding quite easily into the very foreign fabric of Jakarta. ..... Obama and his mother joined her new husband, a kind man who later would become a detached heavy drinker and womanizer ...... "Barry," a chubby little boy very different from the gangly Obama people know today ...... All say he was teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood .... Teachers, former playmates and friends recall a boy who never fully grasped their language and who was very quiet as a result. ...... young Obama, a hopelessly upbeat boy who seemed oblivious to the fact that the older kids didn't want him tagging along ....... "His friends called him `Negro,'" Darmawan said. The term wasn't considered a slur at the time in Indonesia. ...... In an essay about what he wanted to be when he grew up, Obama "wrote he wanted to be president," Sinaga recalled. "He didn't say what country ...... As he had at the old school, Obama sat in a back corner. He sketched decidedly American cartoon characters during class. ....... Rik Smith, a black Punahou student two years older than Obama, remembers a Halloween when white students would dress as slaves, coming to school in tattered clothes with their faces painted black with shoe polish. "Like being black was a funny costume in and of itself," recalled Smith, now a doctor who specializes in geriatrics in California. ...... "Punahou was an amazing school," Smith said. "But it could be a lonely place. ...... "He was a very provocative thinker. He would bring up worldly topics far beyond his years. ....... mother, a woman said to have been born with a keen sense of wanderlust ...... Obama and his teammates brought Punahou the state championship in 1979, his senior year. ...... Adept at nailing long jump shots, Obama was called "Barry O'Bomber" by teammates. Alan Lum, who later would coach the basketball team at Punahou as well as teach elementary school there, recalled Obama as always being the first to confront coaches when he felt they were not fairly allotting playing time. ....... He also thanked the "Choom Gang," a reference to "chooming," Hawaiian slang for smoking marijuana. ..... Kakugawa, a convicted drug felon, said Saturday that he had never been the "prototypical angry black guy" that Obama portrays ......... While Obama rocketed to political prominence, his friend headed down the troubled road Obama had feared he was following. Since 1995, Kakugawa has spent more than 7 years in California prisons and months in Los Angeles County Jail on cocaine and auto theft charges.......... The night, Obama later wrote, made him furious as he realized that whites held a "fundamental power" over blacks. ....... Did you know that in Thomas Jefferson's day, and right up through the 1930s, anybody who had the price of tuition could go to Harvard?

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SAP Defends Itself in Oracle Suit Wall Street Journal (subscription)
Oracle accuses SAP of 'corporate theft' RTE.ie
US Army Recruits Dell for Servers, Storage and Services PressZoom (press release)
Alcohol and tobacco `worse' than dope The Standard
Study: Alcohol, Tobacco Worse Than Drugs Washington Post alcohol and tobacco among the top 10 most dangerous substances ..... 20 different drugs, including heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy, amphetamines, and LSD. ..... Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was Ecstasy. ........ "The exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is, from a scientific perspective, arbitrary" ....... Tobacco causes 40 percent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is blamed for more than half of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. The substances also harm society in other ways, damaging families and occupying police services.

House Backs Troop Withdrawal in Challenge to Bush (Update3) Bloomberg
Bush Vows to Veto Legislation Calling for US Iraq Withdrawal Voice of America
House vote orders Bush to bring troops home Daily Breeze
Bihar's fiscal liabilities alarming: CAG Hindu
Iran seizes 15 British marines and sailors in Gulf Reuters India
US backs Britain over Iran seizure of navy personnel Reuters AlertNet
Iran: Brit Sailors In Our Waters WTOV9.com
OBAMA ANSWERS CLINTON' IRAQ ATTACK Free Market News Network
For China only: Dell develops new desktop PC People's Daily Online
MoveOn moves in with Pelosi Salon
Britney: $20 mln divorce settlement? Xinhua
Teheran: British sailors trespassed into Iranian waters Jerusalem Post
Yepsen: Will endorsement from Vilsack help Clinton? DesMoinesRegister.com
Vilsack to endorse Clinton Blogger News Network
Bill Clinton Challenges Netroots' Obama Embrace Yahoo! News
Terai carnage casts shadow on Nepal poll Times of India nearly 50 people still missing and dozens fleeing to India to escape retribution. At least 19 of the victims were said to be Maoist supporters. .... a four-member panel to probe the incident and submit its report within 15 days.
European Parliament Chairperson Disappointed Over Nepal's Current ... All Headline News
Giuliani, Wife Each Married Three Times Forbes
Sen. McCain on Rudy Giuliani: 'He's Very Popular' NewsMax.com
India gas plans will help Tehran's nuke aims: US The Daily Star
India, Pakistan make progress over transit fees for gas pipeline Kuwait News Agency
India grapples with energy issues Asia Times Online
India dismisses NPT as 'fraud' treaty Central Chronicle We have also consistently been a leading advocate of the elimination of all nuclear weapons. .... "If India did not sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), it is not because of its lack of commitment for non-proliferation, but because we consider NPT as a fraud treaty and it did not recognise the need for universal, non-discriminatory verification and treatment," Mukherjee said. ..... India also does not have any territorial ambitions and do not even believe in exporting ideology.
Congo's army regains control of capital Houston Chronicle
Gates at Harvard: Richest Dropout Makes Good TechNewsWorld
Harvard's famous dropout to get his degree from the UniversityEarthtimes.org will be awarded an honorary degree in June

1.	27 March	20:48	University of Connecticut, Storrs, United States
2.	27 March	20:50	The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., United States

6.	28 March	04:02	National Grocers Co. Ltd., Canada
7.	28 March	06:59	Tbroad Chungbu Broadcasting CO Ltd., Korea

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28 March

14:14

The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., United States

17.

28 March

21:06

Alestra (AT&T), Mexico

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29 March

09:23

TMnet Telekom Malaysia, Malaysia

27.	29 March	12:36	American International Group, Inc., United States
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29 March

15:07

Yipes Communications, Inc., San Francisco, United States

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29 March

21:11

Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom

Barack: The Magic Presidential Candidate

Racism from FOX can be expected, that is racism from the right. But racism from the center and the left also has to be expected. That is where America as a country is today. Barack Obama promises to be Race 2.0. Racism still exists, but in a post-racism environment, race still matters. Identity never goes away, it is never supposed to go away. Racism can be outright, vicious, shameless. But it can also be sophisticated, it can also pass for progressive thinking, like the title of this article below. And you thought the word "negro" had been retired. We have been talking of African Americans for decades now.

The only thing Obama is running for is President Of The United States. He has a magic touch to retail politics, kind of like Bill Clinton, who fought his own Southern demons.

Obama has a past going back hundreds of years, and he proudly claims so. He talks of his grandfather being a "houseboy to the British .... so don't tell me I am not coming home when I am coming to Selma." Black people do not walk around wearing their blackness on their lips any more than white people go around wearing their whiteness. The white identity is a porridge. There are rich strands of ethnic identities within that white identity that have lead to civil wars within the past decade. So don't oversimplify.

Obama is not trying to fit in to the white imagination. Heck, he is not trying to fit in, period. He is who he is. And he is running for president.

Obama's biography talks of at least one white girlfriend who gave up saying she "can't be Black." In a country where 99.9% of the people marry within their own race, Obama's black to black marriage is hardly news. Is Clinton's? Marriage is private.

Obama is deeply devoted to his family. Beyond that is private.

This is LA Times. There is so much movie talk. Talk some reality. Talk up sociological studies. Talk up your own personal experiences. Movie review after movie review after movie review do not throw light on the candidacy of Obama. He is running for president, he is not in the race for an Oscar.

"That's where Obama comes in: as Poitier's "real" fake son." This statement is offensive beyond the blue. This is racist. Obviously this writer has no idea what the President Of The United States does on a day to day basis. The POTUS runs a country. The POTUS sits on top of a state machinery that is unprecedented in its power. Obama is running to get elected leader of the free world. He is not running to make white people feel good about themselves. The White House is not a movie set. This columnist is confusing between a movie screen and a TV screen.

Okay, so if you keep digging and digging into the column, you get to discover the guy is black, the writer is black. That does not change a thing. Blacks struggle with race just like whites do. And there is plenty of internalized racism going round the block.

The vast majorities of blacks are not ready for some black dude who seems to have cross-racial appeal. Black leaders are supposed to lead black people, not both black and white people. That has been the thinking. Well, I guess that thinking will have to make way for Barack Obama.

The truth is boring. The guy just wants the job. It is a job. The stock of the black people is not going to dramatically improve just because Barack Obama is president, although improve it will, because he is a progressive, a Democrat, someone who is talking of universal health care, and ending the war in Iraq. Black or white, he just wants your vote. A businessman, he would have asked for your dollar.

This column talks more of the struggles of this columnist, and perhaps many black men like him, than it does of Barack Obama the candidate, and that is just fine. When Bill Clinton ran for president, many fatherless people got to feel it is okay, it is not okay, but then it is okay that you don't have a father, you can still be president. It is okay to be black and struggling with your identity. It is fine. It is more than okay to talk about it, so talk. But the campaign is going to focus on health care and other issues.

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Obama the 'Magic Negro' The Illinois senator lends himself to white America's idealized, less-than-real black man. By David Ehrenstein, L.A.-based DAVID EHRENSTEIN writes about Hollywood and politics. March 19, 2007 AS EVERY CARBON-BASED life form on this planet surely knows, Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, is running for president. Since making his announcement, there has been no end of commentary about him in all quarters — musing over his charisma and the prospect he offers of being the first African American to be elected to the White House. But it's clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination — the "Magic Negro." The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. "He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist," reads the description on Wikipedia http://en.-wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Negro . He's there to assuage white "guilt" (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest. As might be expected, this figure is chiefly cinematic — embodied by such noted performers as Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Scatman Crothers, Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Smith and, most recently, Don Cheadle. And that's not to mention a certain basketball player whose very nickname is "Magic." Poitier really poured on the "magic" in "Lilies of the Field" (for which he won a best actor Oscar) and "To Sir, With Love" (which, along with "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," made him a No. 1 box-office attraction). In these films, Poitier triumphs through yeoman service to his white benefactors. "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" is particularly striking in this regard, as it posits miscegenation without evoking sex. (Talk about magic!) The same can't quite be said of Freeman in "Driving Miss Daisy," "Seven" and the seemingly endless series of films in which he plays ersatz paterfamilias to a white woman bedeviled by a serial killer. But at least he survives, unlike Crothers in "The Shining," in which psychic premonitions inspire him to rescue a white family he barely knows and get killed for his trouble. This heart-tug trope is parodied in Gus Van Sant's "Elephant." The film's sole black student at a Columbine-like high school arrives in the midst of a slaughter, helps a girl escape and is immediately gunned down. See what helping the white man gets you? And what does the white man get out of the bargain? That's a question asked by John Guare in "Six Degrees of Separation," his brilliant retelling of the true saga of David Hampton — a young, personable gay con man who in the 1980s passed himself off as the son of none other than the real Sidney Poitier. Though he started small, using the ruse to get into Studio 54, Hampton discovered that countless gullible, well-heeled New Yorkers, vulnerable to the Magic Negro myth, were only too eager to believe in his baroque fantasy. (One of the few who wasn't fooled was Andy Warhol, who was astonished his underlings believed Hampton's whoppers. Clearly Warhol had no need for the accouterment of interracial "goodwill.") But the same can't be said of most white Americans, whose desire for a noble, healing Negro hasn't faded. That's where Obama comes in: as Poitier's "real" fake son. The senator's famously stem-winding stump speeches have been drawing huge crowds to hear him talk of uniting rather than dividing. A praiseworthy goal. Consequently, even the mild criticisms thrown his way have been waved away, "magically." He used to smoke, but now he doesn't; he racked up a bunch of delinquent parking tickets, but he paid them all back with an apology. And hey, is looking good in a bathing suit a bad thing? The only mud that momentarily stuck was criticism (white and black alike) concerning Obama's alleged "inauthenticty," as compared to such sterling examples of "genuine" blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg. Speaking as an African American whose last name has led to his racial "credentials" being challenged — often several times a day — I know how pesky this sort of thing can be. Obama's fame right now has little to do with his political record or what he's written in his two (count 'em) books, or even what he's actually said in those stem-winders. It's the way he's said it that counts the most. It's his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden ham-fistedly reminded us, is "articulate." His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn't called his opponents names (despite being baited by the media). Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn't project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.

In The News

Dell targets China with budget PC 999 Today The computer, dubbed the EC280, will be priced between 2,599 yuan ($335) and 3,999 yuan .... "Today, there are one billion people online worldwide, and many of the world's second billion users are right here in China. ...... The EC280 model will have an Intel processor, up to 515 megabytes of memory, a 40 or 80 gigabyte hard drive and will run Windows XP Home Edition. ..... It has been designed by engineers at Dell's China Design Centre in Shanghai. ..... Dell, who has also launched a corporate blog in Chinese, said the low-cost model could be targeted at other emerging markets.
Media giants to compete with YouTube Los Angeles Times, CA News Corp. and NBC Universal said today that they were creating an online video site stocked with TV shows and movies, plus clips that users can modify and share with friends. .... Google is expected to gobble up nearly a third of all online advertising revenue this year .... the most disruptive force your business has seen ever ...... "This is a game changer for Internet video," Chernin said. "We'll have access to just about the entire U.S. Internet audience at launch. And for the first time, consumers will get what they want -- professionally produced video delivered on the sites where they live." ..... YouTube, which Google bought in November for $1.65 billion, draws more viewers than the television networks' combined online audience ...... Google executives' disdain for the project is evident in their nickname for the consortium: Clown Co. .... "The biggest challenge will be to see how the parents of conglomerates work together in decision-making," said Bourkoff, the media analyst. "Is this going to be a great press release, or will it actually function as a business?" ...... fear that giving programming to Google and YouTube could weaken their leverage in subsequent negotiations