Legion of Angels News Archive

(CNN) – Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin suggested Tuesday that it would be Sen. Barack Obama’s policies that would spark the international crisis that Sen. Joe Biden has said would be likely within months of Obama taking office.

At a fundraiser Sunday night, Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, said that after taking office, “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. … We’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

He added that the Obama administration would need people to stand with it at the time because “it’s not going to be apparent initially … that we’re right.”

“I guess we have to say, “Thanks for the warning, Joe,’ ” Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, told supporters during a rally in Reno, Nevada.

She speculated that instead of the crisis being generated by another world leader, as Biden suggested, an international crisis could be sparked by Obama’s willingness “to sit down with the world’s worst dictators without preconditions,” to send troops into Pakistan to try to kill Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaeda officials, or to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq.

In response to earlier criticism of the comments from Sen. John McCain, the GOP presidential candidate, Obama-Biden campaign spokesman David Wade issued a statement saying:

“Sen. Biden was making it clear that history has shown presidents face challenges starting on day one, and with our nation fighting two wars and 21st century threats abroad, we know that we need steady leadership in tumultuous times, not the erratic lurching and stubborn ideology of John McCain.”

But Palin zinged her Democratic counterpart, saying, “I guess the looming crisis that worries the Obama campaign right now is Joe Biden’s next speaking engagement.”

Trailing in polls nationally as well as in battleground states, the Republican ticket in recent days has been aggressively jumping on any opening given to it by the Democratic presidential ticket.

To reach voters in critical swing states, Palin and McCain have also increased the number of interviews they have done with local media outlets, in part to blunt the Obama campaign’s huge cash advantage.

On Sunday, the Obama campaign announced it raised a record $150 million in contributions in September.

McCain on Tuesday continued to hammer Obama for the comment the Democrat made to “Joe the plumber” in which — as he defended his decision to raise taxes on couples earning more than $250,000 a year while cutting taxes for people with lower incomes — Obama said that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

“After months of campaign trail eloquence, we’ve finally learned what Sen. Obama’s economic goal is. … Sen. Obama is more interested in controlling who gets your piece of the pie than he is in growing the pie,” McCain told supporters during a rally in Bensalem, Pennsylvania.

McCain also accused Obama of waffling on which team he was backing in the World Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays, which begins Wednesday.

“It’s kind of like the way he campaigns on tax cuts, but then votes for tax increases after he’s elected. Or the way he says he backs the middle class and then goes and attacks Joe the plumber after he’s asked a tough question,” McCain said.

Obama, however, has said he was rooting for the Phillies and has never said he was also rooting for the Rays.

When he was joined by a number of Rays at a rally in Florida on Monday, Obama said, “I am a unity candidate bringing people together, so when you see a [Chicago] White Sox fan showing love to the Rays, and the Rays showing some love back, you know we’re onto something right here.”

On Tuesday, Obama keep his focus on Florida and the economy, the issue that is foremost on voters’ minds. Polls also suggest that voters have more trust in Obama’s handling of the current financial crisis than in McCain’s.

During an economic roundtable discussion in Lake Worth, Florida, Obama called the crisis “the worst since the Great Depression” and blasted the Bush administration for not doing enough to help “Main Street.”

“While President Bush and Sen. McCain were ready to move heaven and earth to address the crisis on Wall Street, President Bush has failed to address the crisis on Main Street — and Sen. McCain has failed to fully acknowledge it,” Obama said. “Instead of commonsense solutions, month after month, they’ve offered little more than willful ignorance, wishful thinking and outdated ideology.”

The nation’s economic woes appear to be affecting the presidential race more than at any previous time this election cycle, according to a poll released Tuesday.

More than three-quarters of voters who responded to a new survey by CNN and the Opinion Research Corp. say the United States is in a recession, and 40 percent say another depression is likely to hit the country within a year.

According to the new poll, 61 percent of registered voters say the economy is extremely important to their vote, a jump of three points since June and more than 10 points higher than the next most important issue on voters’ minds: terrorism.

Source — CNN

Whether Sen. Hillary Clinton stands at the side of Sen. Barack Obama during his bid for the U.S. presidency or not, her exit from the race could give him the boost he needs, a new marketing study suggests.

The research supports an assumption often discussed by pundits: that undecided voters are likely to go with the candidate most similar to the one that drops out.

The study found that if two options vie for a consumer’s or voter’s preference, and a third option enters and leaves the market, the remaining option most similar to the exiting one benefits. The similar features get more attention, and consumers think, “Oh, that must be important,” the researchers say.

“This is exactly what happened in the Democratic primaries this year,” said researcher Akshay Rao of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. “We have Obama and Clinton going at it for months after the Republican primary has been decided. John McCain couldn’t buy media attention at that time because everybody is focused on the attributes that Obama and Clinton were arguing about.”

He added that by withdrawing after the primaries, Clinton left in her wake an impression that the shared Obama-Clinton attributes and issue stances were important. With Clinton out of the picture, Obama could take all of that popular appeal.

Rao and his colleagues tested this phenomenon by having groups of undergraduate students complete questionnaires in which they had to choose between three options, one of which subsequently became unavailable.

These sets of options included unnamed political candidates, beer, healthcare plans, cars and cruise lines.

In one scenario, participants were asked to respond to a newspaper poll about unnamed presidential candidates who had been rated on economic and international policy. One candidate performed well on economic policy, the other on international policy, and the third candidate either dominated the other two on both attributes or outperformed the so-called target candidate on one type of policy.

When the third candidate stayed in this virtual race, 72 percent of the participants chose that person, while nobody chose the target candidate. When the third option dropped out, more than 50 percent of those who originally selected that third option chose the target. None of the participants who had chosen the rival were swayed toward the target.

Asked if staunch “Hillary supporters” would sway toward Obama, Rao said his results can’t answer that question. But the findings do speak to swing voters, which make up about 20 percent of U.S. voters, according to recent Gallup poll estimates.

“The presence or absence of the third option influences people whose attribute preferences are labile — they don’t know which attribute is important,” Rao told LiveScience. “Is energy policy more important than foreign policy? … The fact that you’ve got two candidates talking ad nauseam about energy policy makes them turn their heads and say that must be important.”

The results will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Marketing Research.

Source — MSNBC

WASHINGTON (CNN) – A policy memo by Sen. Hillary Clinton’s one-time chief strategist challenging Sen. Barack Obama’s “American roots” could make it difficult to close any remaining gaps between the former rivals, the magazine writer who revealed the memo said Tuesday.

In a March 2007 memo, Mark Penn, Clinton’s former chief strategist, wrote, “all of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared toward showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050,” according to Atlantic magazine writer Joshua Green.

“It also exposes a very strong weakness for him — his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values,” Penn wrote.

Penn was forced out of his position as chief strategist in April after revelations that he lobbied for a U.S.-Colombia trade deal on behalf of the Colombian government despite Clinton’s opposition to the measure. Penn, however, never left the campaign entirely.

The magazine article was posted on The Atlantic’s Web site Monday evening. It will also appear in the September edition of the magazine, which is expected to hit newsstands August 19.

“Her top adviser suggesting that angle is striking,” Jonathan Martin of Politico said. “These are the kinds of things you see in e-mails that you see circulating about Obama in this sort of subterranean smear campaign against him. You never see these things voiced by the candidates.”

Green noted that Clinton did not pursue the strategy Penn suggested during the contentious Democratic primary battle, which resulted in Obama winning more delegate than the former first lady and locking up their party’s presidential nomination.

“Had Sen. Clinton followed Mark Penn’s advice, it would have caused her more angst than good,” said James Carville, a Democratic strategist and a CNN contributor.

The revelations could keep any remaining animosity between the Obama and Clinton camps alive, Green said.

“What’s going on right now is that a lot of Obama supporters and fundraisers are trying very hard to retire Sen. Clinton’s debt. One reason they’ve had difficulty doing so is the dislike among Obama people for Mark Penn specifically,” Green told CNN on Tuesday. “They tend to blame him for the nature of these negative attacks.”

In the Atlantic article, which is based on internal Clinton campaign memos and e-mail messages, Green highlighted bitter fighting among Clinton’s staff, writing that her advisers “couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other and Clinton never forced a resolution.”

Frustrations over how the New York senator’s campaign ended drove many Clinton staffers to turn over the campaign’s internal communication, Green said.

“This was a historic campaign. People thought it would be an easy march to the nomination and then an easy win in the fall. And instead, we’ve had this historic presidential election where she’s collapsed and a first-term senator has won the Democratic nomination,” Green said. “So I think it’s just the nature of the defeat has made a lot of people frustrated, and there’s certainly people out there who really want the kind of full story to come to light so people can understand exactly what happened.”

The internal communication suggests that the lack of clear lines of authority within the campaign meant that issues that ultimately led to Clinton’s defeat — her lack of support in the Iowa caucuses, the absence of a strategy to capture delegates after the Super Tuesday primaries and her failure to prepare for a protracted primary fight — went unaddressed for months, Green wrote.

“What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from specific decisions she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make,” Green wrote. “Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.”

The documents also suggest that Clinton’s staff remained divided throughout the campaign on whether she should run a positive campaign or attack Obama and her other rivals for the Democratic nomination as being untrustworthy and underqualified, Green wrote.

“Clinton’s top advisers never agreed on the answer. Over the course of the campaign, they split into competing factions that drifted in and out of Clinton’s favor but always seemed to work at cross purposes. And Clinton herself could never quite decide who was right,” he wrote.

Source — CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Sen. Barack Obama’s vote for a federal surveillance law that he had previously opposed has sparked a backlash from his online advocates, who had energized his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

In October, Obama had vowed to help filibuster an update of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that gave telecommunication companies that had cooperated with President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program immunity from lawsuits.

After 9/11, Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop, without the mandated warrant from a federal court, on electronic communication involving terrorist suspects.

Critics said Bush’s Terrorist Surveillance Program was a violation of civil liberties.

The Senate voted Wednesday on the bill updating FISA — which had a provision to shield telecommunications companies that had cooperated in the surveillance. Obama joined the 68 other senators who voted to send the bill to the president’s desk.

Obama did vote for an amendment offered before the final vote by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Connecticut, that would have stripped the immunity provisions from the bill, but the amendment failed.

Bush signed the bill into law on Thursday, saying the bill “will help us meet our most solemn responsibility: to stop another attack.”

The bill does not grant the telecommunication companies direct immunity, but it does contain a provision that allows a federal judge to dismiss the suits if the companies can present a letter from the government stating that the program was legal.

Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, testified before Congress that all the companies received such letters.

The bill also allows any warrantless wiretapping program to be reviewed by a secret federal intelligence court; requires a spy agency to purge any intelligence involving an American unless it gets a court warrant; and, for the first time, requires intelligence officials to get a court warrant if they wish to target an American living abroad. Read what’s in the FISA bill

When pressed to explain his change in position by an angry questioner Thursday, Obama defended his vote, saying he opposed the immunity for the companies but ultimately voted for the bill because he felt that the revisions to the intelligence law were necessary to protect the nation’s security.

“The surveillance program is actually one that I believe is necessary for our national security,” Obama told the questioner. “So I had to balance or weigh voting against a program that I think that we need — and that had been created so that your privacies were protected — or create a situation in which we didn’t have the program in place.”

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a former Democratic presidential candidate and an Obama supporter, said Friday that the improvements to the bill allowed Obama to change his position.

“What changed is that the bill got better and more acceptable to Sen. Obama — the judicial oversight, the fact that the president can’t unilaterally say he’s going to eavesdrop on citizens,” Richardson said. “There are a lot of safeguards in the bill that weren’t there before.

“Now, again, the telecoms — I personally think they shouldn’t have immunity. But, you know, Sen. Obama had to make that decision,” Richardson said. “We do have to protect ourselves against terrorists, but I understand there’s some in the base that are concerned.”

Many of the liberal blogs who touted the Illinois Democrat early on have blasted Obama for changing his position.

One post on the blog DailyKos.com called Obama’s decision to vote for the bill a “sellout” and a “tactical blunder.” iReport.com: Was Obama’s vote a “sellout”?

And on “getfisaright.com,” a self-described group of 23,000 Obama supporters has posted an open letter to the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, saying,”It is disheartening that you decided to support this bill, which does immense damage to the rule of law and our most fundamental democratic institutions.

“Even though we are disappointed, most of us continue to support you as a candidate,” the group wrote. “But as a candidate you have work to do repairing our trust in you and in government.”

But Richardson said the choice Obama made is just one of difficult decisions a senator — and a president — must make.

“There are enough safeguards in the bill and Sen. Obama said he’ll review the bill again, see how it’s working when he’s president,” Richardson said.

“So these are some of the political realities you face when you’re running for president, when you’re also in the Senate and you have to make a judgment on a bill.”

Source — CNN