John Kerry For Vice President

There’s been speculation that Obama might pick someone totally unexpected as his running mate as opposed to the names being discussed the most. WBZ TV has one suggestion:

Barack Obama has yet to name a vice presidential nominee and some are wondering if he might turn to Massachusetts to round out the ticket.

John Kerry for vice president?

Don’t dismiss the notion just yet.

Some political insiders are telling WBZ it could happen.

So why would Obama reach out to Kerry as his choice?

Kerry brings more money and name recognition to the table than any other name on the Obama list so far. Americans do tend to love a comeback kid and this would be the most amazing political comeback since Richard Nixon came back from the dead forty years ago.

“I’m not looking for any new job, I’m running for re-election,” Kerry told WBZ last week.

Asked about the V.P. buzz, his press secretary told WBZ in a statement Thursday night:

“If I was bi-lingual, I’d say no in multiple languages. The only job John Kerry is running for, contemplating, or considering is the one he already has.”

If you’re laughing off the idea of Kerry back on the national ticket again, I don’t blame you. While he came close four years ago, his campaign was widely derided as, to put it politely, clumsy.

But consider some reasons why Obama might now turn to Kerry as a running mate.

Polls show many voters question Obama’s foreign policy credentials to be a wartime president. As a decorated veteran and longtime member of the senate foreign relations committee, Kerry could fill that gap.

Obama suffers from being a new face on the political scene, but Kerry – warts and all – is well known to the voters, and in 2004, he did draw more votes than any democrat ever has.

And judging from a new anti-smear web site funded by Kerry’s political action committee, Kerry would eagerly assume the role of attack dog… Allowing a nominee who prefers to float above the fray to minimize the amount of political hardball he has to play.

One other note: the vice presidential nominee will address the convention on Wednesday night, August 27.

The theme set for that evening – a salute to America’s veterans.

The Obama campaign says we shouldn’t read anything into that. We’ll soon see if they’re blowing smoke on that one.

From a political point of view I doubt Obama will choose Kerry as it would mean reopening all the bogus attacks which came in 2004. However this could also work in Obama’s favor as this could highlight the fact that the attacks on Obama are just typical right wing lies which come around every four years, often from the exact same sources. More importantly, Obama could not do better in terms of a running mate who is qualified to be vice president, or president should that become necessary. It also turns out that Kerry has been vetted by the Obama campaign.

Barack Obama Is Not The Antichrist

This comes as a tremendous relief (sarcasm). It has been established that Barack Obama is not the antichrist. The authors of the Left Behind series have evaluated Obama and found he is definitely not the antichrist. Christian Newswire reports:

John McCain’s campaign ad “The One” has generated a lot of buzz regarding the “Left Behind Series.” Political commentators are comparing McCain’s portrayal of competitor Barack Obama with the blockbuster apocalyptic series’ depiction of the antichrist. But even the series authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins don’t think Obama is the antichrist. What may have been created as a farce has generated a firestorm of controversy on the internet.

LaHaye and Jenkins take a literal interpretation of prophecies found in the Book of Revelation. They believe the antichrist will surface on the world stage at some point, but neither see Obama in that role. “I’ve gotten a lot of questions the last few weeks asking if Obama is the antichrist,” says novelist Jenkins. “I tell everyone that I don’t think the antichrist will come out of politics, especially American politics.”

“I can see by the language he uses why people think he could be the antichrist,” adds LaHaye, “but from my reading of scripture, he doesn’t meet the criteria. There is no indication in the Bible that the antichrist will be an American.”

Jenkins and LaHaye don’t take McCain’s commercial or the antichrist speculation over Obama too seriously.

Pundits have pointed out that there are similarities between the “Left Behind Series” character Nicolae Carpathia and Obama. Other than some vocabulary and charisma, Carpathia, a young Romanian politician who eventually oversees a one-world government, and Obama don’t have much in common. “If even the people who created the character Nicolae Carpathia don’t see the comparisons as warranted, then perhaps this is overblown,” says Jenkins.

This is certainly reassuring, but then I’ve always thought that George Bush was the Antichrist. (Hat tip to Outside the Beltway)

Update: More at Raw Story which reports that CNN has picked up this story following a McCain internet ad which suggests Obama is the antichrist. There’s more background at The Trail.

Barack Obama Did Not Blink

It’s bad enough when we have the nuts in PUMA groups creating conflict. We also have to contend with columnists such as Michael Goodwin creating trouble. He compares allowing a roll call at the convention to Russia rolling over Georgia and writes:

Obama blinked and stands guilty of appeasing Clinton by agreeing to a roll call vote for her nomination. That he might not have had much choice if he wanted peace only proves the point that he’s playing defense at his own convention.

What does he get out of it? Not much and not for long.

This is hardly appeasement. While the PUMA kooks may be wrong in claiming that Clinton deserves the nomination or that Clinton received more votes than Obama, it is a fact that Hillary Clinton did come in a very close second. She won a large number of delegates and, looking beyond the unsavory Rovian tactics she employed in her campaign, these delegates cannot be ignored. It would have been wrong for Obama not to have allowed the traditional roll call without Clinton’s permission. Losing candidates have been allowed to have their name placed in nomination with far fewer votes than Clinton received at past conventions.

We know there are a lot of nutty Clinton supporters in the PUMA groups who prefer McCain over Obama and would like to sabotage Obama’s campaign, but that does not mean that Hillary Clinton herself is doing anything contrary to Obama’s wishes. Obama would be wise to keep a close eye on her, but that does not mean needing to refuse a reasonable request such as a roll call vote.

Marc Ambinder has reported that the two are getting along in several posts, and today writes, “The evidence is that no one ‘blinked,’ and if you’re still looking for a blinker, Clinton blinked and agreed to what Obama had first proposed in June.”

Baracky II

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fNgA5xLxao]

First there was Baracky: The Movie. Now we have Baracky II (above).

Posted in Barack Obama. No Comments »

Cover Up Of Edwards Scandal Now Headline News

The cover up often does do more harm than the initial crime. Initially the mainstream media ignored the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter scandal, not due to liberal bias as the right wing bloggers claimed but because, with all parties denying the affair, there was insufficient material for the media to work with. Once Democratic officials began to discuss the implications of the scandal on the convention there was a hook for the media. The story changed further when Edwards both admitted to the affair and gave an explanation which did not appear to be truthful, providing reporters with an avenue for investigation. This includes a front page story at The New York Times on the cover up of the scandal:

As tabloid reports of a sex scandal threatened former Senator John Edwards’s presidential campaign last December on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, two lawyers surfaced with written statements that appeared to exonerate the candidate.

One of them, Robert J. Gordon of New York, said that his client, Rielle Hunter, a pregnant 43-year-old filmmaker, was not carrying Mr. Edwards’s child. Shortly thereafter, the other lawyer, Pamela J. Marple of Washington, sent word that her client, Andrew Young, an Edwards campaign aide, was the baby’s father.

Seemingly issued independently of Mr. Edwards, the statements appeared to deflate the anonymously sourced reports of an Edwards tryst. But what went unnoticed was that the two lawyers shared an important connection to Mr. Edwards that suggests they were part of an orchestrated effort to protect him, one that is continuing even after he admitted last week that he had an affair with Ms. Hunter but denied that he fathered her child.

The lawyers are linked through Fred Baron, a wealthy Dallas lawyer and former finance chairman for the Edwards campaign who was a key player in the campaign’s response to the scandal. Mr. Gordon has worked with Mr. Baron on class-action personal injury cases, and Ms. Marple helped defend a lawsuit brought against both men and their law firms by an asbestos manufacturer.

After initially saying that he did not know how the lawyers were chosen to represent Ms. Hunter and Mr. Young, Mr. Baron acknowledged that he might have played a role.

The revelations of ties among the lawyers emerged through public records and interviews with people close to Mr. Edwards and Ms. Hunter, which suggested that their affair went on longer than Mr. Edwards admitted and that the effort to conceal it by Mr. Edwards’s inner circle was much more extensive than has been reported.

The review found that Mr. Edwards’s political action committee went to unusual lengths to make a final $14,000 payment to Ms. Hunter’s film company months after its contract with the committee had ended. The payment was issued while the committee was short on cash and could pay its bills only after receiving thousands of dollars from Mr. Edwards’s presidential campaign and donations from four people, including Mr. Baron’s wife.

Furthermore, a woman who helped Ms. Hunter create a Web site on New Age spirituality in 2006 says she regularly corresponded with her about a married North Carolina man named John whom Ms. Hunter was dating in March of that year, if not earlier. Mr. Edwards has said his affair with Ms. Hunter did not begin until after she had started doing video work for his political action committee months later.

Political Wire comments on the significance of these reports:

The paper says the Edwards “went to unusual lengths” to make a final $14,000 payment Ms. Hunter. As the AP notes, the payment to Hunter “is significant because its source was Edwards’ OneAmerica political action committee, whose expenditures are governed by U.S. election laws. Willfully converting money from a political action committee for personal use would have been a federal criminal violation.”

Several people close to Edwards have told Political Wire that Edwards’ insistence that the affair was over before he announced his candidacy — which photos now disprove — is important to protect him from campaign finance violations.

Edwards has long been suspected of playing fast and loose with election laws, such as the manner in which he used his poverty center as a front to continuing campaigning after the 2004 election. In this case there might be violations of the law which could lead to prosecution.