Rosemary Regello

The City Edition

February 19, 2008

Evidence of a covert campaign to undermine the presidential primaries is rife, so it’s curious that the Democractic Party and even some within the G.O.P. have ignored the actual elephant in the room this year. That would be Karl Rove. After rigging two previous presidential elections, this master of deceit would have us believe that he’s gone off to sit in a corner and write op-eds.

Not so. According to an article in Time Magazine, Republican party activists have been organized by the G.O.P. to throw their weight behind Barack Obama, the democratic rival of frontrunner Hillary Clinton. Early in Obama’s campaign, top Republican fundraisers flushed his coffers with cash, something the deep pockets hadn’t done for any candidate in their own party. With receipts topping $100 million in 2007, the first-term Illinois senator broke the record for contributions. It was a remarkable feat, considering that most Americans had not even heard of him before 2005.

The Time magazine article goes on to explain that rank and file Republicans in red states have switched their party registrations, enabling them to vote in Democratic primaries. Some states, like Virginia and Texas, have open primaries, allowing citizens to vote for any candidate regardless of party affiliation. In Nebraska, the mayor of Omaha publicly rallied Republicans to caucus for Obama on February 9th. Called crossover voting, the tactic is playing a crucial role in the Rove push to deprive Clinton of the Democratic nomination. Even with the help of his more familiar hodge-podge of dirty tricks – swiftboating, waitlisting, bogus polling data, paperless electronic voting equipment, Norman Hsu, etc. – Rove would be hard pressed to defeat Clinton in November, since she’s popular nationwide and has promised an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq. If the contest isn’t close, the vote-rigging won’t matter.

If, on the other hand, Obama wins the nomination (or even the VP spot), Rove’s prospects brighten considerably. Largely unvetted by the media, the self-described agent of change carries considerable baggage from his stint as a state legislator, particularly his long-running relationship with a notorious Chicago slumlord named Tony Rezko.So far, the mainstream press has paid lip service to the affair and instead portrayed Obama as a fresh new face in American politics. The author of the Time magazine article, Jay Newton-Small, offered the following explanation to account for the bizarre love affair G.O.P. voters say they’re having with an African American senator on the other side of the aisle. "It seems a lot of Republicans took to heart Obama’s statement in his rousing speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that ‘there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America.’"

Is he kidding? The conservative publication National Journal claims Obama’s voting record is the most liberal in the senate. Although not everyone agrees with the assessment, it’s hard to picture the voting pattern that Mr. Small implies here: Nixon – Reagan – Bush – Dole – Bush – Obama. Yet he and his cohorts across the media spectrum – from NBC to NPR – daily provide this very spin on reality, even as they dismiss Clinton as a disparaged figure within her own party. Last year, at the same time she commanded a huge lead in the national polls, political analysts and professional strategists hired by CNN and other broadcast networks began hammering across the notion that "the voters don’t like her". The adjectives "unlikable", "divisive" and "polarizing" are repeated over and over in the same manner as terms like "biological warfare" and "weapons of mass destruction" were branded on the American conscience in the lead-up to the Iraq War. In both cases, the terminology is traceable to right-wing ideologues, especially those who frequent Fox News programs. "There is no candidate on record, a front-runner for a party’s nomination, who has entered the primary season with negatives as high as she has," Rove told Reuters last August. The Bush Administation’s former senior political strategist recently joined Fox an an election analyst.

Obama himself frequently recites Rove’s "high negatives" comment in press interviews whenever discussing Clinton. His often bitter criticism of the former First Lady and other "Washington insiders", who he says want to "boil and stew all the hope out of him", represents a staple of his core political message. His campaign slogan of "I’m a uniter, not a divider" is also reminiscent of the Bush 2000 campaign, which Rove managed. According to Marisa Guthrie of BC Beat, Obama campaign speechwriter Ben Rhodes is the brother of David Rhodes, a Fox News VP. The latter Rhodes has been with the network since its inception in 1996. You may recall that on election night in November 2000, it was Fox that called Florida for Bush, even though the other networks declared Gore the winner, citing the exit polls. How Fox knew the polls were wrong in advance of the vote tabulation has never been explained.

Her naysayers aside, on Super Tuesday, Clinton captured sizeable majorities in the population-rich states of California, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey. While Obama won most of the the red states in play, Clinton took Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico and Arkansas. Obama later closed the gap in delegates with wins in the caucus states of Washington and Nebraska, along with the Louisiana primary on February 9th. These victories were followed by Maryland, Virginia and D.C., giving Obama a 55-delegate lead, according to the Associated Press. However, neither candidate is expected to reach the 2025-delegate mark needed to cinch the nomination before the convention in August.

Presidential Race or Next American Idol?

Now that McCain has locked up the Republican nomination, it’s likely that crossover voting will intensify in the remaing primary statses. Yet even when the race was hotly contested, only one in three voters cast ballots for Republican candidates nationwide. In red-state New Hampshire, 50,000 more votes were cast for Democrats than Republicans, about 10 pecent of the total voter turnout. In Iowa, the lopsided vote was even more pronounced. G.O.P. winner Mike Huckabee received only half the number of votes cast for Clinton, who placed third behind Obama and Edwards.

As ominous a portent as that may be, the Clinton campaign must also contend with a succesful branding campaign mounted by the professional public relations team working for her opponent. Both traditional progressives and younger voters appear to have taken the Obama agent of change premise at face value. A constant stream of You-Tube videos touting the candidate’s rock star status, especially the popular "Obama Girl" clip watched by millions, hasn’t exactly hurt his cause. And nobody would have predicted a few years ago that left-leaning pundits would join in an unholy alliance with Fox to help defeat a popular liberal promising immediate troop withdrawals, but here we are. Journalists like Ari Berman, editor of The Nation, are popping up on Fox programs they once labeled as 24/7 campaign commercials for the Republican Party. The fact that Obama is known to have watered down legislation requiring nuclear giant Exelon to publicly disclose radiation leaks doesn’t seem to trouble them in the least. Exelon is Obama’s fourth largest campaign contributor. (Read the New York Times article about the controversy.)

In a blog posted the morning after the Iowa Caucus, Adrianna Huffington lauded the Illniois senator as practically the Second Coming. She didn’t have much to offer in the way of specifics, however, and spent the bulk of her remarks railing at Bill Clinton, who she said had conducted himself in an interview as "arrogant and entitled, dismissive and fear-mongering". Huffington, it should be noted, was one of several progressive politicos swindled by the California recall referendum in 2002.That was the year Enron’s Ken Lay, on the hook for $3 billion pilfered trom the state in the rolling blackouts scandal, succeeded in installing "Governator" Arnold Schwarzenegger through the back door. Candidate Huffington dropped out of the race a few days before the election, conceding the entire affair had been a set-up to divide the Democratic vote.

That she and her peers have allowed themselves to be bamboozled a second time is astonishing. With a few clicks of a mouse, they might have easily learned that former Speaker Dennis Hastert and the Illinois G.O.P. fielded a non-Illinois resident named Alan Keyes to run against Obama for the U.S. senate seat in 2004. Keyes, who had little public office experience, was hand-picked to replace Jack Ryan, the candidate who offically won the G.O.P. primary. Ryan was forced to resign in the wake of an alleged sex scandal involving his ex-wife. (A bit of trivia – The ex-wife is actress Jeri Ryan, who played the character "Seven of Nine" in the television series Star Trek Voyager.) In the general election, Alan Keyes received 27 percent of the vote to Obama’s 70 percent.

Here’s a little more history you won’t find at HuffPost or The Nation: At the time of his senate run, Obama was a relatively minor player, a two-term state legislator who lost a congressional race against African American incumbent Bobbie Rush in 2000. Obama’s first significant campaign donor in the 1990’s was Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a Chicago power broker and developer who he met while still in law school. After leaving Harvard, Obama hired on with a community nonprofit agency in Chicago called Project VOTE, where he helped organze voter registration efforts. He later joined the law firm Miner Barnhill & Galland, whose clients included Rezko, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

Obama worked on (and later endorsed as a senator) a low-income senior housing development deal in which Rezko and a partner firm run by Allison Davis collected $855,000 in development fees. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, "In addition to the development fees, a separate Davis-owned company stood to make another $900,000 through federal tax credits." Later, while Rezko was busy fundraising for Obama, tenants in other Rezko developments launched with taxpayer dollars were having their heat cut off and other maintenance problems left unattended. The City of Chicago eventually sued Rezko, and an F.B.I. investigation into unrelated fraud allegations led to a felony indictment. Rezko is charged with illegally obtaining income through kickbacks and bribes, with a trial set to begin February 25th. Last June, Davis’ longtime business associate William Moorehead was convicted of stealing $1 million in public housing funds. (For more on the housing deals and Obama’s strange bedfellows, read the articles in the Sun-Times.)

According to Edward McClelland, writing for Salon.com, "Rezko, after all, built part of his fortune by exploiting the black community that Obama had served in the state Senate, and by milking government programs meant to benefit black-owned businesses." While it may be unclear why Obama would continue his relationship with Rezco after this point, it’s indisputable that he did. In 2005, Obama approached Rezko for help in purchasing a $2 million Georgian-revival home in a Chicago suburb. The property deal involved two adjoining lots that the owner wanted to sell together. Rezko’s wife bought the first, while Obama acquired the parcel with the mansion for $300,000 less than the asking price.

Although no laws were broken in the transaction, Obama’s 17-year long relationship with Rezko may represent a significant liability in achieving his presidential aspirations. Or so one would think. Remarkably, the connection went unreported by the national media until the CNN debate in South Carolina on January 17th, when Clinton raised the matter of the Chicago slumlord. CNN duly followed-up, interviewing the Sun-Times reporter who broke the story, and confirmed her claim.

Some of Obama’s campaign donations over the years have come from sources named in the federal indictment. While the Chicago Sun-Times puts the figure of known tainted cash at $168,000, the senator initially agreed to give half that amount to charity, but only as an "abundance of caution", a senior staffer said.Later, after NBC Nightly News grudgingly broadcast a story about the affair, the campaign announced it would donate the entire amount.Soon, however, the crimes of Clinton’s opponent would be transferred onto her. During an early morning interview broadcast on the Today show, Matt Lauer brandished a photograph showing Rezko posing with President Clinton and his wife during the 1990s, then grilled the sleepy-eyed, former First Lady about her relationship to Rezko. Neither she nor the former President appeared to have any history with the developer, yet NBC deftly managed to cast aspersions on them, not Barack Obama. More recently, Brian Williams repeated the journalistic sleight of hand when airing a segment on Obama’s Exelon ties.

OutFoxing Fox News

NBC may in fact be outFoxing Fox News when it comes to sabotauging Clinton’s presidential hopes. On the night before the New Hampshire primary, Williams followed Obama around on the campaign trail, flashing a Newsweek cover of the senator while proclaining to viewers that the Obama campaign had now become a "movement". During the same broadcast, Andrea Mitchell described the Clinton campaign as broke, desperate, and ablaze with in-fighting. Mitchell continued with this theme the following night, even as Hillary led in the vote tally. She assured viewers that the results would eventually tip in favor of Obama. She was mistaken.

Following the South Carolina primary, both Mitchell and Tim Russert claimed on Nightly News and Today that the leadership of the Democratic Party was "mad as hell" at Bill Clinton for "attacking" Obama, and were lining up to back the Illinois senator. The charge was not corroborated with any sources. Russert also informed Matt Lauer that Ted and Caroline Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama represented a sea change in the election, insinuating that because Bobby Kennedy was friends with Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farmworkers, the endorsement should pave the way for Obama to capture the Latino vote.

What NBC’s crack team of reporters failed to mention was that three of Bobby Kennedy’s own children, the son of Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers union had already endorsed Clinton. In Nevada, Latinos in the 60,000 member Culinary Workers Union defied their white male leadership’s endorsement of Obama and helped Clinton win the caucus there. While the Florida primary was showing Clinton with a 15 percent lead in the polls, CNN fill-in anchor Bob Acosta complemented NBC’s aggressive push by declaring the Obama campaign had become a "runaway train" following its big South Carolina victory. On February 10th, CBS anchor Katy Couric joined the Clinton-bashing fray in a 60 Minutes segment, barraging Clinton with multiple questions about how she would deal with losing the election. The contentious exchange followed a far more upbeat piece on Obama, who at the time was trailing Clinton in delegates.

To wit, if there’s a runaway train in this race, it isn’t either of the candidates. For the past 20 years, media outlets have become increasingly consolidated into chains owned by multinational corporations whose primary mission is to enhance their bottom lines. The NBC/MSNBC network, for example, is owned by General Electric. Tim Russert’s Meet the Press served as a principle outpost in the dissemination of the weapons of mass destruction argument used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, while Andrea Mitchell, who appears on televsion almost exclusively to criticize Hillary Clinton, is married to former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan.

Some journalists admit off-camera that Clinton has not been treated fairly in the course of the campaign. For his part, Howard Kurtz published an article in the Washington Postin December examining the widespread media bias favoring Obama. "The Illinois senator’s fundraising receives far less press attention than Clinton’s," Kurtz wrote. "When the Washington Post reported last month that Obama used a political action committee to hand more than $180,000 to Democratic groups and candidates in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the suggestion that he might be buying support received no attention on the network newscasts." Fear of Flying novelist Erica Jong later offered a possible explanation for the unequal treatment in Hillary vs. the Patriarchy, also published in the Washington Post.

Unlike her big Florida victory, the news of Clinton’s New Hampshire win was not blacked out from coast to coast the next day, but more dark clouds were brewing on the horizon. Accusations of racism surfaced as on-air pundits and Obama surrogates argued that New England’s white voters had betrayed their publicly declared support of the black candidate in the secrecy of the polling booth. When Clinton made a speech in South Carolina tying Martin Luther King’s "I have a dream" speech to President Johnson’s signing of the 1964 Cvil Rights Act, highlighting the role of Johnson, the Obama camp siezed on the opportunity. An advisor circulated a memorandum urging the faithful to slam Clinton for being disrespectful to King.

If you tracked the coverage of the ensuing feud, you would never know that it was this document that sparked the episode. Before the memo showed on the internet, Obama assured reporters that neither he nor anyone on his staff had accused Senator Clinton of any impropriety in her speech about Johnson, adding he was "baffled" by her suggestion that they were somehow involved. Meanwhile, South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn said the Clintons’ aggressive reaction to the accusation of racism had compelled him to renege on an earlier promise to the Democratic National Committee not endorse a candidate before his state’s primary. A few days later, Clyburn retracted his endorsement of Obama, but the damage was done. The Clintons have been barbecued ever since for "playing the race card" against Obama. When the former President launched into an angry (albeit laudable) tirade against the media’s role in executing underhanded campaign manuevers, the networks used the occasion to argue that he was upstaging his spouse. Even as commander-in-chief, the pundits explained, Hillary would still be unable to control him.

Clinton Unplugged

Intelligent and astute, the New York senator has historically shied away from personal attacks, whether it comes from Manhattan’s sexist firefighters or Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball. Her campaign only briefly cut off relations with NBC when another reporter, David Schuster, said the Clintons had "pimped-out" daughter Chelsea as part of their election strategy. This is not to say Clinton isn’t capable of landing a knock-out punch when provoked. During the ABC New Hampshire debate, she slammed the tag-team antics of John Edwards and Barack Obama when they tried to portray her as the voice of the "status quo". She informed the audience that both men supported Vice-President Dick Cheney’s 2005 energy legslation, a bill "larded with subsidies for the oil companies". She opposed the legislation.

However, it was her performance in two CNN debates broadcast from South Carolina and California that elevated Clinton to the A-List of celebrity icons. In both contests, she took the gloves off to pound Obama on his record and statements uttered along the campaign trail. In the first debate, she highlighted his habit of voting "present" in the Illinois legislature, along his characterization of Ronald Reagan as a "transformative" president and the Republican Party during that period as the "party of ideas". She said, "I’m just reacting to the fact, yes, they did have ideas, and they were bad ideas. . . . Bad for America, and I was fighting against those ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor [Tony] Rezko in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago." In Hollywood, she delivered her other memorable soundbite, "It took a Clinton to clean after the first President Bush, and it’s going to take another Clinton to clean up after the second President Bush." Over four million domestic viewers tuned in to the South Carolina debate, breaking a cable record. Twice that many watched the second debate. Many millions more saw the verbal prize fights on CNN’s international broadcast.

Nevertheless, Clinton seems remiss in doing relatively little challenge the media’s manipulation of the electorate. Having agreed to appear in an NBC debate shortly before the Texas and Ohio primaries, she’s sure to be walking into another ambush. Like Benazir Bhutto, the years of political bludgeoning may have short-circuited her ability to navigate the minefields of the body politic (or even to appoint competent advisors). Regarding Karl Rove and the Bush-Cheney team, all she has mustered to date is her oft-repeated statement, “They’re not going to surrender the White House voluntarily." Last spring, she suggested that another terrorist attack against the United States would inevitably play into the hands of the G.O.P.

Vague as they sound, those two comments may prove prophetic in the event the Obama strategy fails and she goes on to win the Democratic nomination. The implications of a female president for American foreign and domestic policy are profound, creating jitters not only on Wall Street but for the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department. It’s possible that a significant number of officials accused of breaking U.S. laws or violating the Geneva Conventions might be arrested and prosecuted by a Clinton-directed Justice Department.

If that’s not enough to keep Bush appointees and generals lying awake deep into the night, their long-running undercover operation with the ayatollahs in Iran (who paved the way for Reagan’s 1980 election), the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, and the Saudi royal family could be curtailed by the staunchly pro-women’s rights democrat. The Saudis especially have reason to fret now that they and their counterparts in Kuwait and the U.A.E. have started buying up huge stakes in U.S. banks. Condolleeza Rice and Nancy Pelosi are one thing. A Clinton White House is quite another.

For his part, President Bush may have implemented a back-up plan last April when he signed National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51, an executive order allowing him to suspend the constitution without prior congressional approval. NSPD 51 gives the President the discretion to declare a state of emergency (i.e. martial law) in the event of a major terrorist attack or other “decapitating” incident against the United States, even if the attack happens outside the country. Under this scenario, he can cancel elections, padlock the Capitol dome and send the Supreme Court justices home. The directive also allows assigns the President’s homeland security assistant ( a low-level position exempt from senate confirmation) to administer what has been dubbed the Enduring Constitutional Government. In other words, another Sept. 11th disaster could reduce this year’s election to nothing more than the status of a season of Survivor. (Here’s the text of the directive.)

Delegating the Superdelegates

Assuming the homeland security assistant doesn’t take over the country before next August, the Democratic Party’s 796 superdelegates will decide the nomination. About half are elected officials, including members of Congress and governors. The other half are party officials, former campaign managers and ex-officials. The specter of less than 800 people determining the ticket in November has set Obama surrogates back on their haunches, this time arguing that a "brokered convention" decided in "smoky back rooms" will destroy the party. Initially it was thought that two-thirds of the superdelegates were pledged for Clinton, but more recent surveys suggest the situation is fluid.

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean has issued a press release reassuring Americans that he will intervene before August if the race still remains deadlocked. The extent of his authority to do so relies on the cooperation of both candidates. The DNC is also considering the possibility of holding caucuses in Michigan and Florida in April or May as a way to allocate their delegates, which were stripped because the states were not granted "waivers" to hold primaries before February 5th. The Clinton campaign, which originally agreed to the ban, has since argued that both delegations should be seated according to the primary results. In the case of the Florida primary, the argument has merit, given that Democratic voters there recorded the largest turnout in history. It also appears some of Obama’s cable TV spots appeared in the state, though he was not accused of violating the pledge not to campaign there. Clinton won 50 percent of the popular vote, Obama 33 percent, and John Edwards 16 percent. State Senator Bill Nelson, a Clinton supporter, has balked at the suggestion that the ballots cast by 1.7 million Floridians – it’s the nation’s fourth most populous state – should be replaced with caucuses that might at best attract 50,000 participants. It was Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature that set the date for the primary, state party officials point out, not them.

Michigan held its primary on January 15th. Since Obama and Edwards pulled their names from the ballot beforehand, the votes for Clinton cannot be said to represent a mandate. Unfortunately for her, the stripped delegates in both cases have worked in Obama’s favor. With its high percentage of hispanic voters, Florida could have been forecast as a Clinton treasure trove. The same is true for Michigan, whose native son Mit Romney’s candidacy precluded the possiblity of a large crossover vote of Republicans there. Michigan boasts a relatively low number of upper-middle-class whites, one of Obama’s strongest performing constituencies. Had the DNC not sanctioned the state, Clinton would likely have hauled in the lion’s share of 156 delegates up for grabs. (The G.O.P., by the way, didn’t punish either state for moving up their primaries.) One cannot blame her for experiencing some measure of frustration.

If the DNC opts to schedule caucuses, Obama would emerge the victor, since this form of voting typically requires traveling long distances, waiting outside a building in while volunteers sort out the logistics, and then attending a meeting that lasts one or two hours. Such factors tend to deter the participation of older voters; immigrants; those who work, need childcare or have other obligations during the narrow time frame of the caucus; and those for whom English is a second language. In a nutshell, this represents the Clinton base.

And it gets worse. Of the remaining states left to vote, Texas and Wisconsin will hold open primaries, which portends of a large crossover vote to put Obama over the top. (Texas was gerrymandered under Tom Delay to favor a Republican lock on most districts.) The state party in Texas also allots a third of its delegates by way of a caucus. Thus, even Clinton’s superdelegate failsafe may prove insufficient in overcoming the shrewdly stacked deck against her. Thanks to Karl Rove and his friends in the shadows, the Democratic nominee may ultimately be determined not by Democrats but by the G.O.P., with the help of its unwitting accomplices at the DNC.

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