Once again the very junior Senator from Illinois, the one who heads a subcommittee on European Affairs with direct oversight over NATO’s operations in Afghanistan, misspeaks. I am still bemused by the fact that in San Francisco he claimed that one area of expertise he felt assured that he knows more than most is foreign affairs.
Obama posited — incorrectly — that Arabic translators deployed in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan — forgetting, momentarily, that Afghans don’t speak Arabic.
“We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then its harder for us to use them in Afghanistan,” Obama said. The vast majority of military translators in both war zones are drawn from the local population. Naturally they speak the local language. In Iraq, that’s Arabic or Kurdish. In Afghanistan, it’s any of a half dozen other languages — including Pashtu, Dari, and Farsi.
No sooner did Obama realize his mistake — and correct himself — but he immediately made another.
“We need agricultural specialists in Afghanistan, people who can help them develop other crops than heroin poppies, because the drug trade in Afghanistan is what is driving and financing these terrorist networks. So we need agricultural specialists,” he said.
So far, so good.
“But if we are sending them to Baghdad, they’re not in Afghanistan,” Obama said.
Iraq has many problems, but encouraging farmers to grow food instead of opium poppies isn’t one of them. In Iraq, oil fields not poppy fields are a major source of U.S. technical assistance.
There are other infrastructure problems both countries share that U.S. advisors have struggled to address — a lack of safe roads, schools, adequate electricity, etc. — but Obama did not mention these.
The American whaling industry rose from modest beginnings in the late 18th century to become an international giant to feed a growing demand for whale oil for lamps and industrial lubricants. The peak year was 1846 when 735 ships and 70,000 people served the industry out of New England ports such as New Bedford and Salem. As whale stocks and reserves decreased, whalers were forced to go farther and farther from their New England home ports. Increasingly whalers were forced to round Cape Horn and venture to far off and desolate locations such Hawaii (whaling led to New England missionaries and the rest is as they say is history), Guerrero Negro on the Baja coast and up to the Bering Strait.
My faith teaches me that I can sit in Church and pray All I want, but I won’t be fulfilling God’s will unless I go out and do the Lord’s work.
So he’s doing the Lord’s work? His poor mother must be spinning in her pagan grave. This is just pandering pure and simple. It’s more of Obama wanting to be all things to all people. Would he run this ad in San Francisco? No, there he dismissed the small town Americans for clinging to religion. How much hypocrisy is this man capable of? Apparently, quite a bit. I can only think of this song by Dar Williams, “The Christians and the Pagans.”
Senator John Edwards today endorsed Senator Obama and in so doing he has signed the death warrant of the Democratic Party. Last week, Edwards was on Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough talking about the Democratic race. From the conversation, it appeared that he and Elizabeth had voted differently in the North Carolina primary held on May 6, 2008.
I still hold John Edwards in great esteem nor will this prevent me from working with him to end poverty in America for that remains a moral imperative. But whatever collaboration in the future will come, it will happen outside the hubris of the Democratic Party. That life-long relationship is coming to an end. I have no regrets but I will not for I cannot support a party that is divorced from the values that made this country great.
While specualtion is running rampant that this means Edwards will be offered the Vice Presidential slot on an Obama led ticket, my thinking is that unlikely to be the case. In any regard, should that come to pass it is unlikely to save the Democratic Party from failing to win the White House. That damage has been done. We now await an November execution date.
And you know the sun’s settin’ fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
‘Cause your heart’s bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.
Up the street beside that red neon light,
That’s where I met my baby on one hot summer night.
He was the tender and I ordered a beer,
It’s been forty years and I’m still sitting here.
But you know the sun’s settin’ fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
‘Cause your heart’s bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.
It’s here I had my babies and I had my first kiss.
I’ve walked down Main Street in the cold morning mist.
Over there is where I bought my first car.
It turned over once but then it never went far.
And I can see the sun’s settin’ fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
‘Cause your heart’s bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.
I buried my Mama and I buried my Pa.
They sleep up the street beside that pretty brick wall.
I bring them flowers about every day,
but I just gotta cry when I think what they’d say.
If they could see how the sun’s settin’ fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
‘Cause your heart’s bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.
Now I sit on the porch and watch the lightning-bugs fly.
But I can’t see too good, I got tears in my eyes.
I’m leaving tomorrow but I don’t wanna go.
I love you, my town, you’ll always live in my soul.
But I can see the sun’s settin’ fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on, I gotta kiss you goodbye,
But I’ll hold to my lover,
‘Cause my heart’s ’bout to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to my town, to my town.
I can see the sun has gone down on my town, on my town,
Goodnight.
Goodnight.
As a Wall Street Equity Anaylst, I covered the Food & Drug Retailers (Wal-Mart, Kroger, Albertson’s, Safeway, SuperValu, Ahold/Stop n Shop, and Delhaize/Food Lion among others). To do my job well meant going out and visiting stores across the country. I have been to more Wal-Marts than I care to count, certainly in the hundreds. Not a complaint really, I loved going across this great land and meeting people and talking to them about their supermarkets. In Richmond, they love their Ukrop’s, in Charlotte, they love Harris-Teeter and in Florida they just adore Publix. In Iowa, it’s Hy-vee or up in Seattle they rave about Larry’s but down in San Antonio it’s HEB or Central Market. But this is a story about one small town whose name I can’t even remember. Lost and forgotten in southeastern Kansas (Cherokee County) near the Missouri and Oklahoma border.
I stumbled upon this town by accident after visiting a series of stores in Springfield, Missouri and heading down to visit more stores in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was a warm Sunday in early May with Spring in the air, the grass green and the trees budding. Life was in the throes of its annual renewal, or so I thought. I pulled off the Interstate to explore and find some lunch. Not much there except the occasional farm but there was the promise of a meal so the sign said some five miles off the beaten path. And so I drove on. Then came the posters of a classic car fair. Cool, lunch and a show.
There was no town there. Main Street was boarded up. Not a single store open for business. No hardware store, no market, no bait & tackle shop, no coffee shop. All gone except for a Dairy Queen on the outskirts of town. The nearest Wal-Mart twenty-five miles away had put a whole town out of business. There were still people living in and around on the outskirts. I am sure many earned a living farming but without a commercial sector what hope was there for this town?
If not for the classic car fair that day, there would not been a soul on Main Street that day. If not for the classic car fair that day, I would have dined at the Dairy Queen. I walked through the town and met people from far and wide who had brought their rather expensive jalopies to this classic car fair. I met a few locals. Nice people still stuck there for this was their home, where they were born, where they had their first kiss, had their kids, buried their parents. They had a life and perhaps a future of their choosing limited as that might be but America has let them down. They wouldn’t quite put it that way. They are proud people. They helped to build this country. And we’ve let them down. I am saying that we have let them down.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town.
Obama can’t relate to this. It’s beyond him. He has no conception of what life is like for real hard-working Americans. To him, they’re bitter and clinging to guns and religion. They are neither bitter nor clinging to anything but values of decency and hard work. And it is because I have been to a small lost and forgotten town in southeastern Kansas that I can say with pride that I am Clinton Democrat and nothing else. When I hear Hillary Clinton speak, I think back to that day and I realize she gets it. She understands what needs to be done. And while John McCain may not get what needs to be done to fully revitalize small town America, he doesn’t talk down to them either and he certainly doesn’t go around behind close doors here in San Francisco telling billionaires that half of America is just downright bitter. What will cost Obama this election is that he just doesn’t get the angst in small town America where the sun is setting fast.
Having just praised Scott Kleeb as a historian, I now come to trash another, Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo. Josh Marshall comes unhinged in surmising Obama’s demise in West Virigina:
During the 18th and 19th centuries, in the middle Atlantic and particularly in the Southern states, there was a long-standing cleavage between the coastal and ‘piedmont’ regions on the one hand and the upcountry areas to the west on the other. It’s really the coastal lowlands and the Appalachian districts. On the other side of the Appalachian mountain range the pattern is flipped, with the Appalachians in the east and the lowlands in the west.
These regions were settled disproportionately by Scots-Irish immigrants who pushed into the hill country to the west in part because that’s where the affordable land was but also because they wanted to get away from the more stratified and inegalitarian society of the east which was built by English settlers and their African slaves. Crucially, slavery never really took root in these areas. And this is why during the Civil War, Unionism (as in support for the federal union and opposition to the treason of secession) ran strong through the Appalachian upcountry, even into Deep South states like Alabama and Mississippi.
As I alluded to earlier, this was the origin of West Virginia, which was originally the westernmost part of Virginia. The anti-slavery, anti-slaveholding upcountry seceded from Virginia to remain in the Union after Virginia seceded from the Union. Each of these regions was fiercely anti-Slavery. And most ended up raising regiments that fought in the Union Army. But they were as anti-slave as they were anti-slavery, both of which they viewed as the lynchpins of the aristocratic and inegalitarian society they loathed. It was a society that was both more violent and more self-reliant.
This is history. But it shapes the region. It’s overwhelmingly white, economically underdeveloped (another legacy of the pre-civil war pattern) and arguably because of that underdevelopment has very low education rates and disproportionately old populations.
For all these reasons, if you’re familiar with the history, it’s really no surprise that Barack Obama would have a very hard time running in this region.
Being a historian myself, I’d like to remind Joshua Micah Marshall that the last Democratic President to win the White House and lose West Virginia was Woodrow Wilson, a historian, in 1916. You would think they would teach this at Princeton. And Jack Kennedy, a Catholic, had no problem winning both West Virginia in the primary and in the general election. In fact, Josh, it might please you to know that it was Jack Kennedy’s victory in the West Virginia primary that secured the nomination for him back in 1960 over Lyndon Johnson.
Nebraska held a non-binding primary yesterday. On February 9, 2008, Obama won the Nebraska caucus carrying 68% of the vote. While Obama had won 61 of Nebraska’s 93 counties in the caucuses, Clinton carried most counties Tuesday, winning 63. Nearly all the counties where results flipped were in rural parts of the state. A 4,000-vote victory margin in Douglas County was largely responsible for Obama’s statewide narrow 49% to 47% win. The difference in the two tallies reflects both a component of buyer’s remorse and the wholly undemocratic nature of the caucus system. As opposed to primary elections where voters can vote absentee and where the election is held over the course of the day, a caucus is held at a specific time and place. Military personnel serving overseas are disenfranchised and the caucus system discriminates against lower income voters who often can not get to the caucus at the specified time due to conflicts with their jobs or families.
And my favourite new face of the Democratic Party, Scott Kleeb, won the US Senate nomination for the Democratic Party. Scott, fourth generation Nebraskan and a dairy farmer, is also a historian from Yale. We need more historians in politics. Scott, by the way, is 32.
Congress voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to order the Bush Administration to stop depositing oil in the National Strategic Petroleum Reserve even though lawmakers predicted the impact for consumers would be modest at best. The only effect is that there should be a modest uptick in supply. Bush had threatened to veto the measure but it passed with a veto proof majority. He is expected to sign it.
The Democratic Party picked up a seat in Mississippi in a special by-election to fill a vacant seat. Democrat Travis Childers won a U.S. House of Representatives seat the special election over Republican Greg Davis. Analysts said that this should serve as a warning to Republicans gearing up for November’s congressional elections. It should be noted that Travis Childers also spent a lot of time running away from the Democratic leadership in Washington and in particular from Barack Obama. I wonder if Obama is the nominee, if many Congressional candidates will be running away from Obama.
