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Obama readies plan to reshape the electorate

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Luke Hodiak
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« on: April 03, 2008, 02:10:28 pm »

Obama readies plan to reshape the electorate



Barack Obama's massive, smoothly integrated volunteer organization has been a mainstay of his campaign.
Photo: AP

Even as he fends off Senator Hillary Clinton in the Democratic nomination contest, Senator Barack Obama is already turning his attention to the general election, and to an ambitious plan to reshape the American electorate in his favor.

Bringing new voters to the polls "is going to be a very big part of how we win," said Obama's deputy campaign manager, Steve Hildebrand, in an interview. "Barack's appeal to independent voters is also going to be key."

Hildebrand said the campaign is likely to turn its attention and the energy of its massive volunteer army this fall on registering African-American voters, and voters under 35 years old, in key states.

"Can it change the math in Ohio? Very much so," he said. "If you look at the vote spread between Bush and Kerry in 2004 - we could potentially erase that."

President George W. Bush carried Ohio by about 119,000 votes in 2004, winning the state despite a massive, expensive Democratic effort to mobilize voters there. And there's some reason for skepticism that Obama can do better than Senator John Kerry and his allies. Every four years, Democrats claim, and reporters write, that a massive voter registration and field operation will reshape the electorate in their favor. In recent years, they've been matched or bested by the Republican National Committee's targeted outreach to likely Republican voters.

"It's something that Democrats have tried," said Bill Steiner, the Republican National Committee's director of strategy. "The 2004 election kind of speaks for itself, particularly in Ohio, where that was a big fear."
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But there are signs that this year could be different. In the Obama campaign, youth turnout and Internet-based organizing - so often promised, and rarely delivered in the past - have been made real. And the first black nominee could reach deep into the large non-voting tracts within the African-American community.

"There's the potential here to change American politics for a while. Under-35 voters are just so overwhelmingly Democrats. Getting them registered is a simple, important, not-easy part of that — and Obama can," said Jim Jordan, a consultant who ran the independent group that headed Democrats' national field operation in 2004, America Coming Together. "And the voters who do register will actually vote. African-American voters, under-30 voters will be hugely self-motivated. They'll get to the polls in numbers that aren't typical for new registrants, and they'll do it on their own, on top of the strong turn out mechanics that the Obama guys will surely bring to bear."

Michael Slater, the deputy director of the non-partisan Project Vote, also said he found the Obama campaign's hopes of a dramatic increase in the participation "very plausible" for younger and black voters, groups, he said, which are under-represented in the electorate.

"There's a long history of a lot of hype not delivering on election day," he said. But in this case, "there certainly is a great potential for an African-American candidate to appeal to some voters who have been out of the electorate."

Obama's massive, smoothly integrated volunteer organization has been a mainstay of his campaign. It has been central to his success in caucus states such as Minnesota and Idaho, where a volunteer army - organized online - preceded and noticeably bolstered his staff's organizing efforts, helping to build the huge victory margins that have made him the frontrunner.

His voter registration efforts have drawn far less attention. But they were there from the start. When Obama toured Iowa last February in his first campaign swing, his campaign brought along voter registration cards. As the race there heated up, voter registration became a quiet focus, with registration drives in colleges and even high schools that helped drive Obama's victory.

South Carolina, Hildebrand said, was the site of another intensive effort. "A great case study for voter registration was the South Carolina primary, where we dramatically expanded the African-American vote and dramatically expanded the youth vote," he said. "It was such a big part of getting us to that 28point margin of victory."

Another high-stakes voter registration drive just concluded in Pennsylvania, where the deadline to register as a Democrat and participate in the primary was March 24. The Pennsylvania Department of State reports that more than 234,000 voters have either newly registered as Democrats or switched from other parties, and the state hasn't finished counting the new registrations.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0408/9328.html
« Last Edit: April 03, 2008, 02:11:07 pm by Luke Hodiak » Report Spam   Logged

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Luke Hodiak
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« Reply #1 on: April 03, 2008, 02:11:52 pm »

Students planned Barack Obama hoax

Yesterday morning both University officials and the Obama campaign confirmed that the event was just a hoax.
Photo: AP

April Fools' Day came early, thanks to a campus-wide prank planned by three students.

But contrary to the information contained in eggs and flyers Wharton freshmen Nick Greif and Marko Horvat and College freshman Logan Steinhardt scattered around campus, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama will not speak at Irvine Auditorium tonight.

Greif said the three students came up with the idea for the prank while talking about New York Sen. Hillary Clinton's under-publicized event in Houston Hall last week.

"Logan mentioned that Hillary was on campus, and we said we hadn't heard about it," Greif said. "Then Marko said it would be an awesome April Fools' joke" to pretend Obama was visiting campus as well.

The three students placed plastic eggs, each containing two professionally printed tickets to the supposed speech, on Locust Walk and in the Quadrangle late Sunday night.

Greif said the students did not pull the prank as part of any campus group or as a fraternity pledging activity.

The tickets say the event is sponsored by a group called Penn for Change - which does not exist - and will take place in Irvine at 6 p.m. today with opening remarks from Obama supporter and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

Flyers and a Facebook event also advertised the fake speech, citing a "Haley Reardan" as the organizer of the event.

However, "Haley Reardan" is an alias created by Greif, Steinhardt and Horvat. The name comes from two characters in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged.

Yesterday morning both University officials and the Obama campaign confirmed that the event was just a hoax.

A representative from the Perelman Quadrangle office said there were no political events booked at Irvine today, and University spokeswoman Lori Doyle said, "The University hasn't heard anything about it."

Both Mike Stratton, Penn for Obama co-president, and Matt Lehrich, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, said the event is just a well-planned joke.

While most of the eggs were gone by yesterday morning and the flyers were mostly taken down by the afternoon, many students still heard about the event, and some believed it was true.

College freshman Christiana Dietzen heard about the supposed speech from her French professor, who had found a flyer for the event in Williams Hall.

"Earlier that day I had seen an egg in the bushes in the Quad, so afterwards we went back and got it," she said.

When Dietzen found out the speech was a hoax, she said she was disappointed at first.

"But then I thought, that's actually really funny, I'm really impressed," she said.

Greif said he, Steinhardt and Horvat enjoyed pulling the prank and "basically being the Obama Easter bunny" for an evening.

Obama is scheduled to end his six-day "Road to Change" bus tour in Philadelphia tomorrow, but there has been no indication thus far that he will come to Penn.
Emily Schultheis reports for The University of Pennsylvania’s The Daily Pennsylvanian. The Daily Pennsylvanian is partnering with Campus Politico for the 2008 elections.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0408/9310.html
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Luke Hodiak
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« Reply #2 on: April 03, 2008, 02:13:06 pm »

Jews and Obama: Tolerating misinformation


The basic thrust of the e-mails has been, among others: Obama’s a Muslim, doesn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance, and is affiliated with Louis Farrakhan

I love my Jewish mother. After all, how many of us don’t? However, about once a week or so, she sends me an e-mail or two that she knows will make my blood boil. Lately, these e-mails have been fictional accounts, coming mostly from the right-wing of the Jewish community, about Sen. Barack Obama being a Muslim in disguise.

The basic thrust of the e-mails has been: Obama’s a Muslim who was sworn into office on the Koran, doesn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance, is affiliated with Louis Farrakhan, is anti-Israel (as are his advisers) and is buddy-buddy with terrorists who want to see him as our president.

Just for the record, my mom does not believe this trash, and she certainly knows I do not, either. She says she sends them to me because she enjoys “reading my responses to them.”Thanks, Mom. Now you know why I take blood pressure medication!

I usually write back to my mother with factual information about the senator from Illinois: One of his first foreign policy speeches was before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, where he pledged “clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel.”

True, he has taken on the “Israel can do no wrong” crowd by urging direct negotiations with Iran and Syria (a good idea; we do need to speak with our enemies, not just our friends). But his overall foreign policy record is well within the mainstream. He’s committed to a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians and has criticized Hamas. He has been defended by AIPAC, the neoconservative New York Sun and The New Republic’s Marty Peretz, a staunch Israel hawk.

Still, the e-mails and Internet rumors continue. No matter what the facts are, there is a nasty narrative making its way around the Web, propelled by Jewish — and even conservative Christian — families all across our country. Speaking as a Jew, I find this kind of hate and fictional propaganda amazingly ironic and extremely repugnant.

Throughout history, one could argue that no other people have been as persecuted as Jews. So how could it be that we, as Jews, would allow ourselves to not only write such fiction but promote it around the Internet at the speed of light as the gospel? In my mind, it is close to a 21st-century version of the work of Joseph Goebbels, king of the Nazi propaganda machine. Imagine if he had the Internet at his fingertips during the Hitler regime — would any of us be left?

Given the horrors that resulted from that type of propaganda and garbage being directed at us as Jews, how is that 60-plus years later, some of us can so simply buy into a false and offensive narrative about a single individual? What happened to our clarion call of “Never again”?

Now, I want to be clear: I am not comparing the genocide of 6 million Jews by the Nazis to the political smear that is happening to Obama.Where I am drawing a comparison is in how dangerous fictional hate can quickly become a perception, which in the world of politics becomes a reality.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0408/9340.html
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Luke Hodiak
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« Reply #3 on: April 03, 2008, 02:13:29 pm »

For example, I have relatives — including a beloved uncle — who swear by the Internet rumors that a President Obama would be nothing more than a Manchurian candidate for the radical Islamists. I don’t have any hatred for my uncle; he is a man whom I love dearly. When I was very ill as a teenager, he always came to visit me when I was sick, and we spent many a wonderful Sunday on the golf course together.

But I don’t understand how he, a Jew like me, can believe in such propaganda; he can’t believe that I could support someone like Obama. What we do agree on is that we are blessed to live in a country where two people who are so close have the freedom to disagree.

I believe that Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin, who was the clergy in the synagogue I was brought up in, summed it up best in a book he wrote in 1972, “To Be a Jew.”

“We believe that the nations and the peoples of the world have their divine purposes and their assigned roles to fulfill, too, for God is the God of all of the world, not just of Jewry,” Donin wrote. “And we see our divinely ordained assignment as involving a unique role, one to which history itself bears witness. It implies a special purpose in life, a reason for our existence.

“That purpose is not to make Jews of all the world but to bring the peoples of the world, whatever their distinctive beliefs may be, to an acknowledgement of the sovereignty of God and to an acceptance of the basic values revealed to us by that God. It is to serve as a means by which blessing will be brought to ‘all the families of the Earth’ (Genesis 12:3).”

While I have only vague personal memories of Donin, I believe he and Obama would be kindred spiritual souls.

As Jews, I think we need to think twice before sending to our distribution lists the hate e-mails that slide into our inboxes. Think about the writings of Donin 36 years ago and compare them to the vision of Obama today: “And I will send once more a message to those yearning faces beyond our shores that says, ‘You matter to us. Your future is our future. And our moment is now.’”

Howard Salter lives in Olney, Md. He works for a nonpartisan foreign policy organization in Washington.
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