Obama Pivots

His appearance at a Chicago church wasn't well publicized. It wasn't even on the church's Website. Yet Barack Obama's Father's Day address at Chicago's Apostolic Church of God made headlines. First, Obama chose not to speak at the church he just left, Trinity United. Second, he picked a hot button topic, the need for fathers, especially black fathers, to step up and be more responsible. 

The theme isn't new. Bill Cosby has received both praise and criticism for his remarks on the subject. Obama himself has brought it up before. Yet there was new resonance in his words this time. He is now, after all, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. "Any fool can have a child. That doesn't make you a father", says Obama. He used his own experiences as a child and a father to drive the point home.

The effect of his words on fathers themselves will be tough to gauge. Demanding that any group take responsibility for their actions doesn't solve much in the short term. However, politically, it was a brilliant stroke. How better to make yourself known to a skeptical public than to talk about your own less than perfect background? Obama knows about the effect of absentee fathers because he had one. He even went so far as to say he's an imperfect father himself.

Black folks know what Barack Obama was talking about. Let's see how others respond.

Tax Wars

In case you aren't already aware, we're beginning to enter a "fallow" period in political coverage. The presidential nominees of both parties are set, and the national conventions are still a couple of months away. Congress will soon be in recess, so there won't even be much inside the Beltway chatter to report on. Why else would taxes, something most Americans hate but hate to talk about, come center stage?

Barack Obama and John McCain have spent the better part of this week beating each other up over their tax proposals. This is better than questioning each others' patriotism, or who wears a flag lapel pin, but it still makes peoples' heads hurt. McCain is trying hard to paint Obama as just another "tax and spend liberal". Problem is, McCain's tax proposal sounds an awful lot like the one person he's trying to run away from, President Bush.

A non partisan group has studied both plans, and says (no surprise here) that neither is perfect. However, there is some food for thought. Obama's plan would actually reduce taxes on the middle class, that is, families earning from $37,000 to $66,000 dollars. The reduction would be just over $1000. John McCain's plan would also lower taxes for the same group, but only by $319 dollars. In fact, the biggest beneficiaries of McCain's proposal would be those making $2.8 million dollars a year and up.

McCain's people argue that the analysis by the Tax Policy Center is flawed, but as mentioned, the group is non partisan. McCain argues Obama wants the greatest tax increase since World War II. The Tax Policy Center says that's an exaggeration. Republicans have used taxes like a bludgeon against a succession of Democrats, state and national.

McCain may have to find something else.   

Under the Bus, Part 1

So Vice Presidential vetter Jim Johnson was the first to be thrown under the bus by the Obama campaign as it pivots toward the general election. Johnson, the consummate Washington insider, quit his volunteer role after non stop slagging by Republicans over sweetheart mortgage deals he got from the very toxic lender Countrywide Financial. He quit the day after Obama himself tried to downplay the controversy.

All of this should come as no surprise. Countrywide has, rightly or wrongly, been intimately associated with the current mortgage mess. And average Americans wish they could get a sweetheart mortgage just like Jim Johnson did. He should have stepped down, and he did. The incident, however, is instructive for other reasons.

For one, the Republicans found an opening, and wouldn't let go of it. Never mind that Dick Cheney was part of Bush's vetting process back in 2000, and found the best person for the VP job was....(trumpets please) himself! We all know how that turned out. Yet Obama stuck with Johnson for precisely one news cycle. When his campaign realized the story wasn't going away, Johnson did. The speed with which all this happened is an acknowledgment of a new political landscape in America.

No appointment will go without scrutiny. No opportunity to skewer the other side will be missed. And, most importantly, no one will be allowed to become a distraction from the goal of winning the White House.

That goes for Obama and McCain. We'll see who's next to get thrown under the bus. 

Big Brown Letdown

Being out of town this past steamy weekend, and with little else to do before going out to dinner, the wife and I decided to watch the Belmont Stakes on tv. My wife isn't much of a racing fan, what with questions about the treatment of the horses and all. However, it wasn't long before we realized that television had turned at least two hours prior to the race into an infomercial for the favorite, Big Brown. He was, we were told, on the cusp of making history. After all, no horse had won the Triple Crown in 30 years.  

We were then treated to story after story about the horse, his jockey, his jockey's son, his trainer, his trainer's daughter (I'm not making this up), all in the name of building up to this historic mile and a half race. The other horses in the race? Mere fodder for Big Brown's ambition. They were given cursory introductions, and not much more. At one point, I looked at my wife and we both wondered what would happen to this overdriven hype machine if Big Brown lost the race. Then what would they cover?

We got our answer. Big Brown, seemingly positioned in third to overtake the leader Da' Tara, simply ran out of gas in the stretch. The horse finished dead last, the first Derby and Preakness winner to do so. Okay, so what does the media do after a 38-1 shot wins the race from start to finish? Do they focus on the extraordinary upset of Da' Tara? Nope. They spend virtually the entire post race coverage on what went wrong with Big Brown. In fact, it seemed an eternity before they actually had a single shot of Da' Tara in the Winner's Circle.

All this is to say what people saw in the coverage of the Belmont Stakes is all that's wrong with media in the early 21st century. A pre-written script with an unscripted ending turned out to be no script at all.

Worst of all, there will be no lessons learned.