Victory for Obama
Before a vast crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park, Barack Obama delivered a powerful victory speech after winning a remarkable election victory. Here it is in two parts:
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Couric posts final Obama interview
CBS news anchor Katie Couric has just posted her final interview with Democratic candidate Senator Barack Obama on YouTube. It has some good moments.
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A poignant moment
A day before the election and a week after Barack Obama interrupted his campaign to visit her in Hawaii, the Democratic candidate’s grandmother has died at 86. Madelyn Dunham was a central figure in Obama’s life, raising him during important childhood and teenage years when his mother was absent in Indonesia. On the night he secured the Democratic nomination in June, Obama paid an emotional tribute to his grandmother and he spoke movingly about her at a North Carolina rally on Monday night:
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Rev Wright Returns
A few months ago, John McCain rebuked North Carolina Republicans for using controversial statements by Barack Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright in an attack ad against the Democrat. Some conservatives believe McCain’s high-mindedness deprived his campaign of a useful weapon against Obama, who has renounced Wright after a relationship lasting 20 years.
Now, Pennsylvania’s Republican Party has revived Wright as an election issue in this ad, which is airing in the state in the closing hours of the campaign:
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Obama’s Big TV Show
Barack Obama’s 30-minute infomercial, broadcast in primetime on most of the major networks on Wednesday, was flawlessly produced, featuring the stories of middle class Americans and testimonials from prominent Democrats and Republicans. The tone was entirely positive, with no mention of John McCain, deftly weaving Obama’s personal narrative into the stories of contemporary American life and the struggles of hardworking voters. Here it is in four parts:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
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Even-handed Reporting in Florida
Florida TV interviewer Barbara West is being celebrated as a conservative martyr following an interview with Democratic running mate Joe Biden. The Obama campaign has threaten to boycott West’s TV station because of the tone of the interview, during which she quoted Karl Marx and asked Biden to explain exactly how Barack Obama is not a Marxist.
West told Bill O’Reilly that she had subjected John McCain to an equally tough interview, a puzzling claim when you hear the questions she asked him:
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Closing Arguments
As the campaign enters its final week, the candidates are preparing to make their closing arguments. Barack Obama has bought 30 minutes of prime time on all the major networks on Wednesday and in Canton, Ohio on Monday, he unveils a new speech.
“In his speech, Senator Obama will tell voters that after twenty-one months and three debates, Senator McCain still has not been able to tell the American people a single major thing he’d do differently from George Bush when it comes to the economy,” according to his campaign.
“Obama will ask Americans to help him change this country, and say that in just one week, they can choose an economy that rewards work and creates new jobs and fuels prosperity from the bottom-up, they can choose to invest in health care for our families and education for our kids and renewable energy for our future, and they can choose hope over fear, unity over division and the promise of change over the power of the status quo.”
John McCain and Sarah Palin will spend much of this week in Pennsylvania, a state where Obama enjoys a double-digit lead but which the Republican thinks he can flip. Winning Pennsylvania would allow McCain to survive the loss of states such as Colorado or Virginia, which President George Bush won in 2004, as long as the Republican holds Ohio and Florida.
In Denver on Sunday, Obama drew a crowd of more than 100,000, according to police estimates, just a week after a similarly mammoth audience turned out to hear him in St Louis.
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Rappers for Obama
What promises to be the coolest event of the campaign is happening in Cleveland, Ohio next Wednesday when Jay-Z performs at a rally for Barack Obama – introduced by LeBron James. Obama has become a fan of Jay-Z during the campaign and the rapper is one of dozens to record a song featuring lyrics about the Democratic candidate.
“It’s Ms No More Drama and Barack Obama of rhymers/Feel honoured.”
Here it is, with Mary J Blige, You’re All Welcome:
Will.I.Am performed Yes We Can at the Democratic convention in Denver and the song has become an anthem for the campaign but I’ve always found it a little insipid. For me, the best Obama tribute is Black President by Nas, featuring (and subverting) 2pac’s lyric from Changes:
And although it seems heaven sent
We ain’t ready, to see a black President -
Candidates get Tearful over Birthdays and Death
As campaign events become more tightly scripted in the final days of the presidential race, there are fewer opportunities to view the candidates unplugged. Last week’s Al Smith dinner in New York gave John McCain and Barack Obama a chance to show off their sense of humour. On Wednesday night, CBS news anchor Katie Couric probed their sentimental side, asking each candidate when he last cried – and why:
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Rats, Ships and Neocons
Colin Powell’s declaration of support for Barack Obama prompted some commentators to note the irony of a candidate who owes his party’s nomination in great measure to his opposition to the invasion of Iraq receiving his most important endorsement from the man who made the fraudulent case for war to the United Nations Security Council.
If Powell was a reluctant supporter of the Bush administration’s adventure in Iraq, the same can’t be said for Obama’s latest groupie from the right – Ken Adelman, a former sidekick of Donald Rumsfeld and one of the noisiest neo-conservative voices in support of the war.
Along with many of the war’s early cheerleaders, Adelman jumped ship when things started to go wrong, telling Vanity Fair last year:
“I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.”
Adelman sang a different tune in April 2003, crowing in the Washington Post that analysts who warned that thousands of US troops could be killed in a war in Iraq had been shown to be wrong.
“Now is not an occasion for gloating,” he gloated.
“But now is an occasion for pride, and for thanks to our fighting men and women and those leading them. My confidence 14 months ago sprang from having worked for Don Rumsfeld three times - knowing he would fashion a most creative and detailed war plan - and from knowing Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz well for many years.”
Now Adelman is clambering aboard the Obama caravan, telling George Packer in the New Yorker that the Democrat has the right temperament to be president.
“When the economic crisis broke, I found John McCain bouncing all over the place. In those first few crisis days, he was impetuous, inconsistent, and imprudent; ending up just plain weird,” Adelman wrote in an email to Packer.
”Having worked with Ronald Reagan for seven years, and been with him in his critical three summits with Gorbachev, I’ve concluded that that’s no way a president can act under pressure.”
Adelman identified McCain’s pick of Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate as the trigger for his decision to back a candidate who opposes everything the neo-conservative movement stood for:
“That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office - I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign - Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.”
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