By Steve Rhodes
1. A tribute.
2. “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” was originally a song about Reagan.
3. Bill Moyers on MLK and LBJ.
4. “Mr. Sawyer’s mayoral terms was conceived in controversy, as a mostly white contingent of aldermen pushed him as the successor to [Harold] Washington, whom they had opposed, over Washington’s floor leader, Tim Evans,” Abdon Pallasch writes today in the Sun-Times’s obituary of Eugene Sawyer.
5. “Some of the most spirited meetings held by this editorial board were jousting matches with John Stroger over his refusal to modernize county government,” the Tribune wrote in its eulogy to the late Cook County board president. “At the close, he’d smile and pump every hand in the room: ‘Nothing personal.'”
6. “Stroger once boasted to us that he was as stubborn as an Arkansas mule,” the Trib also noted. “He memorably stuck with his backing of Richard M. Daley for mayor of Chicago in 1983 – even as other African-American committeemen lined up with ultimate winner Harold Washington. ‘I’d made my commitment,’ Stroger said in a 2003 interview, ‘and I had no reason to change.'”
7. “The Obama camp did it again,” Earl Ofari Hutchinson writes in the Defender. “They manufactured yet another issue out of a non issue when they pounded Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) for supposedly defiling Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by minimizing his role in the civil rights struggle.”
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Reminder: The statement everyone is arguing about isn’t what she actually said. But it’s the one the media – including Chicago Tonight last week – keeps using.
Same with the fairy tale remark.
8. The Obama maneuvering has worked splendidly, though, if you look at the polls. You might even say he’s done a neat job of division.
9. “On Meet the Press, Tim Russert asserted: ‘[T]he Salmon Press in New Hampshire, which endorsed Hillary Clinton, cited as one of the reasons, that when they talked to her in the interview, she listed Ronald Reagan as one of her favorite presidents.’ However, neither Russert nor his guests noted a January 18 statement from the co-owner of Salmon Press Newspapers that Clinton ‘did not say Reagan was her favorite President. She didn’t say anything close to that,” Media Matters reports.
What Media Matters doesn’t tell you is that it was the Obama campaign pushing this story over the weekend in order to deflect criticism of their own candidate’s approving statement that Reagan “changed the trajectory of America” in a way that Bill Clinton did not, and that the Republicans were the party of ideas for the last 10 to 15 years.
10. Obama now says the Clinton campaign has distorted his words, and accuses Bill Clinton of making “statements that are not supported by the facts” – a charge unchallenged by reporters.
Watch the video and decide for yourself.
11. “What I said was, we as Democrats right now should tap into the discontent of Republicans,” Obama says.
Is that statement supported by the facts?
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The truth: The Obama campaign has devised a strategy to tie the Clinton Administration with the Bush Administration as part of the same era. What Obama is saying is quite deliberate. The same strategic vein yielded the decision to to use “Change We Can Believe In” to tap into distrust of Hillary Clinton as well as hopes that the media would dig into Bill’s sex life.
12. “If Dan Seals were not the candidate, Jay [Footlik] would be a very interesting choice,” Dick Durbin says. “But Dan has been battled-tested. He knows the district inside and out. His opponent does not have that kind of experience.”
Durbin has endorsed Obama for president.
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“Footlik worked in the Clinton Administration and recalls flying on Air Force One and shepherding President Bill Clinton into former PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s office in Ramallah. He lived in the Middle East for four years trying to promote peace and he thinks he can better match [Mark] Kirk’s foreign policy resume in the general election. Kirk is a naval intelligence officer who served tours in Iraq, Haiti, Bosnia and and Kosovo.”
This is a campaign for a North Shore congressional district.
13. “We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them,” Obama said at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
Especially in South Carolina.
14. “Who is running with the most progressive rhetoric? Edwards, first. Then Clinton. And then Obama, who is still trying to be a palatable general election candidate rather than close the deal in the primary. So riddle me this – in a Democratic primary, where will many Edwards supporters go? Don’t assume it’ll be Obama if they’re looking for the strongest Democratic voice in the race.
“Obama’s path to the nomination at this point runs through Democratic voters. And ultimately, while my absentee ballot will be mailed out Monday with his name checked off, I’m pessimistic that he can win. He has shown no proclivity for speaking in unambiguous progressive tones, and it could cost him the election.
“I never dismissed [Jerome Armstrong’s] theories that Obama’s fundamental weakness – his refusal to run as a Democrat in a Democratic primary – would ultimately prove his undoing.”
– Kos
15. King in Chicago.
The Beachwood Tip Line: In the name of love.
Posted on January 21, 2008