Vol. 72/No. 20      May 19, 2008

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party race continues without resolution. Barack Obama’s campaign regained momentum this week. Obama won yesterday’s primary in North Carolina by a wide margin, and only narrowly lost to rival Hillary Clinton in Indiana.

Campaigning in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward McCain called the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina “a perfect storm” of mismanagement. “Never again, never again, will a disaster of this nature be handled in the disgraceful way it was handled,” McCain said.

The tour stop in New Orleans is part of a broader campaign strategy to increase the Republican Party’s resonance amongst voters who are Black. McCain told students at a Town Hall meeting at historically Black Xavier University that he has been going to places where people are “perhaps very cynical about government.” Speaking to FOX News the Arizona senator said he intends to work for votes from Blacks. “I may not get a majority of their vote. I may not even get a significant proportion of it. But I want them to know, when I’m president, I’m going to be president of all the people,” McCain said.

On MSNBC, McCain said the Republican Party had been harmed “by a whole lot of things,” including Bush’s presidency. Pointing to economic uncertainty faced by millions in the United States, he said, “you’ve got to give them some straight talk. And I think that’s what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did at the time of the Great Depression.”

In Cleveland McCain criticized statements by Vice President Richard Cheney about al-Qaeda being in its “last throes,” saying they have “contributed over time to the frustration and sorrow of Americans.” He criticized a May 1, 2003, speech by Bush declaring the end of combat operations in Iraq in front of a banner reading, “Mission Accomplished.” As a senator, McCain was an outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq and repeatedly called for additional troops.  
 
Democratic race
Obama won in North Carolina by six percentage points, while Clinton won in Indiana by only two percentage points.

Clinton vowed to continue in the race and has appealed to Democratic Party “superdelegates”—made up of party leaders and elected officials—to back her because she says she is more “electable.”

Obama leads Clinton in pledged delegates from primary elections. She currently leads in superdelegates, with a number still uncommitted.

In an interview on NBC’s “Today Show” Obama tried to distance himself from anti-working-class remarks he had made at a San Francisco fund raiser last month, when he said people in small towns in Pennsylvania “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” Obama said his words were poorly chosen and that the irony is that he and his wife grew up in “much less privileged” circumstances than either of his opponents. Obama was largely raised by his grandfather, a salesman, and his grandmother, a bank executive. Clinton is the daughter of a Chicago businessman, and McCain is a third generation naval officer.

“We are still so close to the lives most Americans are living,” said Obama’s wife Michelle. The Obamas made $4.2 million last year. Michelle Obama, who described herself as a “working mom,” earned more than $100,000 last year as an executive at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

Obama also definitively broke with Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor at his church whose demagogic sermons sparked a controversy in March.

Wright made several news appearances at the end of April, including at the National Press Club, in which he defended earlier remarks he made in sermons accusing the U.S government of inventing HIV/AIDS as a means of genocide against people of color. Pointing to a 40-year government-conducted experiment started in 1932 on Black men with syphilis, known as the Tuskegee Experiment, Wright said, “I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”

He also said Washington was partly to blame for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Obama called Wright’s views “appalling” and said that Wright no longer speaks for him or his campaign.

Wright mixes conspiracy theories with factual events like the Tuskegee Experiment to gain a broader hearing.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home