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from lolpresident.com

Rev. Wright Responds

If you’ve heard anything of Rev. Wright and his ties to Obama, please do yourself a favor and watch this interview with Bill Moyers, the first since his remarks were publicized to attack Obama. Our media and our politics encourages bite-sized factoids that convey news with nuance, content without consideration. Fill in the gaps, and you’ll get…the rest of the story!

Guide to Lobbyists

Please give us more videos in this mode!!

Bitter

Context and complexity are the antithesis of our politics. Candidates do far better by offering less complex promises in media nibbles than they do attempting to offer an explanation that requires a bit more consideration. Its no Philadelphia race speech, but it helps!

Professors

Even though you’d probably expect me to post yet another link about Obama, particularly one that defends him from an attack by the Clinton campaign, this particular attack hits me rather close to home. You see, Obama and I share something in common - we’ve both been adjunct professors at a university. This attack that was put forward against Obama went like this:

Sen. Obama consistently and falsely claims that he was a law professor. The Sun-Times reported that, “Several direct-mail pieces issued for Obama’s primary [Senate] campaign said he was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He is not. He is a senior lecturer (now on leave) at the school. In academia, there is a vast difference between the two titles. Details matter.” In academia, there’s a significant difference: professors have tenure while lecturers do not. [Hotline Blog, 4/9/07; Chicago Sun-Times, 8/8/04]

Well, this is where labels can mean different things to different people, and possibly even to different schools. Besides just what your title is on paper or what your students call you, there’s the matter of which kind of contract you have signed, how many classes you can (or need to) teach, and whether or not you’re on a track to earn tenure. If this isn’t murky enough, there’s usually also unions that have different rules for each, department rules distinguishing faculty from non-faculty, and sometimes even what mailing lists you then belong to! All of this, of course, reflects the arguably undue complexity found in government bureaucracies!

So here we have Obama discussing his life prior (and concurrent) with his career in politics. He makes the statement that he was an adjunct law professor for the University of Chicago in his second book The Audacity of Hope, partly as a way in that chapter to compare his view of politics with his experience teaching students about law. The Chicago Sun Times decides to question that statement, as is their right as reporters, and somehow comes to the conclusion that he wasn’t actually a professor. Even though he did teach college students about law, which was the whole point of the statement at the time!

Well, thankfully the University of Chicago saw fit to clarify that, in fact, “Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School”, was “considered to be members of the Law School faculty”, and “was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position” several times over the 12 years he taught there.

I’m sensitive to this only because of the occasional distinctions made between someone like myself and full-time professor. Though most of my colleagues wouldn’t think to even make this distinction to me in some kind of derogatory way, there have been a few occasions where my “not being faculty” has affected me. I’ve even gone so far as to say that we’re considered “second-class citizens” of the department, partly out of jest anyway. In the instance with Obama, this distinction was only made to attack his credibility. While I’ve never suffered this kind of attack as an adjunct, I can still relate to its effect.

We teach college students material that we either know already, have to relearn after forgetting, or have to learn for the first time. We assume the role of a professor because of our expertise in that area of study, and that expertise grants us sufficient credibility to then be given students that will listen and learn from us. To have that experience or credibility questioned then not because of the role we’ve been assigned, the amount of experience we posses, or even by the degrees we hold. Rather, to have it questioned because of the contract we sign, the amount of classes we teach, or the mere title on our desks is misguided at best and downright misleading at worst!

Girl in 3am Ad Makes Video for Obama

A More Perfect Union

Wright/Obama Kerfufel

Its a difficult reconciling disagreement and friendship, but of course its something we have to do quite often throughout our lives. For those in politics, its even more challenging, to reconcile public positions with both public and private relationships, having so many speak for you overtly or through their own words and actions. McCain faced this recently when a minister with which he had met used Obama’s middle name Hussein to remind his audience of Obama’s father’s religious ancestry. Clinton faced this with the Ferraro Kerfufel. Now Obama faces this with Rev. Wright’s, the minister who brought him to Jesus, divisive comments on America.

I’m used to vehemently disagreeing with members of my own faith, so this doesn’t seem all-to-shocking for someone to deal with, particularly in this age of renewed fundamentalist rhetoric from various faiths. I am, however, glad to see Obama deal with it so directly. David Kuo provides the response, from which came the following:

The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.

and later

With Rev. Wright’s retirement and the ascension of my new pastor, Rev. Otis Moss, III, Michelle and I look forward to continuing a relationship with a church that has done so much good. And while Rev. Wright’s statements have pained and angered me, I believe that Americans will judge me not on the basis of what someone else said, but on the basis of who I am and what I believe in; on my values, judgment and experience to be President of the United States.

As many Christians are so fond of saying, we should remember to “love the sinner and hate the sin.” It is clear that Obama can reconcile his friendship with Wright, his commitment to his family’s church, and these terrible, terrible statements.

Olbermann on Ferraro/Hillary Kerfufel

Clinton’s Appeal to Gays and Lesbians

It has to be said that part of Hillary Clinton’s appeal to many voters, regardless of their orientation, is due primarily to her husband’s time as President. It’s not due to her record as a Senator in New York, nor is it due to her time as the first lady of Arkansas, and its certainly not due to her career as a lawyer. The bulk of her campaign is built around her “experience” in the White House, whether it be representing her husband overtly around the world or, as many suspect, covertly running things behind the scenes. For many, many supporters, Hillary as President would be tantamount of having Bill back.

Though I did not start out this way, I grew to really like Bill Clinton as our President. I thought the whole Lewinsky-gate was a really unfortunate distraction to what I felt like were many more important issues that the Clintons were fighting to achieve. I didn’t always agree with those issues (eg. socialized healthcare), but I was happy to see our nation’s budgets being balanced and our national debt diminishing steadily. In spite of his personal flaws and nauseatingly lawyer-ish doublespeak (eg. “what the definition of ‘is’ is”), I was proud of his era.

Perhaps “proud” wasn’t the best choice of words there. For gays and lesbians, Clinton’s era was, shall we say, underwhelming. Bill Clinton supported/signed-into-law the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy against gays in the military, and more unfortunately, the Defense of Marriage Act. Though the former would at least prevent gay soldiers from being forced to lie about themselves, its pretty well considered a ridiculous and fatally flawed policy that has done little to protect gays and lesbians in the service. DOMA, on the other hand, seemed like a policy that only a gay-fearing conservative would endorse, hoping to stave off a rash off gay marriages by firewalling states and taking it definition away from states for any federal usage. This is all part of the proud legacy of the Clintons!

As if this wasn’t enough to cause concern, there’s also this account that recalls how the Clinton re-election campaign used DOMA as a selling point for Clinton’s support of “family values”. For any gay or lesbian that reads these words, that article is worth a few minutes of your time. Here’s just a bit:

From the Associated Press, October 17, 1996:

After angry complaints from gay-rights advocates, the Clinton campaign on Wednesday replaced an ad running on religious radio stations that boasted of the president’s signature on a bill banning gay marriages….

The Clinton spot also touted his signing of the Defense of Marriage Act, in spite of earlier White House complaints that the Republicans’ use of the issue amounted to “gay baiting.”

Note that I’m also not saying that Hillary Clinton personally felt that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or DOMA were good or bad, but given that her campaign has been built on her “experience” as First Lady, it is reasonable to say that she, at least officially, supported her husband’s decisions both in policy and in campaigning.

Given all of the above, I think its way past time that gays and lesbians stopped unquestionably supporting another Clinton for President!

Two Words

Barack OBollywood