The Barry Files
Pic by Karen Bleir, Obama halo…
Obama raised $52 million in June, mostly from big donors, for the second highest total of his campaign. The total is unexpectedly high, given that May was his slowest month yet, with only $21 million raised. Quite simply, John McCain cannot keep up. He raised a mere $22 million in June. But don’t let the $ fool you. Hillary was out raised 2-1 but still wound up getting 500,000 more votes than Obama from March onward.
A story in the Times today about Iraqi opinion of Obama and his withdrawal plan has the week’s money quote:
“In no way do I favor the occupation of my country,” said Abu Ibrahim, a Western-educated businessman in Baghdad, “but there is a moral obligation on the Americans at this point.”
We’ve ignored the moral questions of withdrawal and the Iraqis who’d be affected for too long. Obama must inject a just war rationale, as defined by your Michael Walzer-types, which states a minimal ethical benchmark for foreign armies conducting regime change and occupation as providing a functioning state that can secure itself.
Ryan Lizza’s long “Obama in Chicago” story in the terror-jab issue of the New Yorker lacks the depth and first person accounts of David Mendell’s book “Obama: Promis to Power.” Still, Lizza’s offers new insight on how Obama’s 2002 Iraq speech came to be. Mendell stated that Obama, with an eye on a Senate run, used the speech to win over Axelrod and the Chicago liberal establishment. Lizza says that claim is “dubious.” The piece ends strongly, however:
Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them.Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.
Finally, Obama hit the gym three times yesterday, for a total of 188-minutes of activity, showing up W’s hour per diem of mountain biking and Conde’s bench press/treadmill-ing.
TAGS: Barack Obama, election, Hillary, Iraq, John McCain, mccain, NATO, New York, obama, political, Politics, Review, warWhile Obama spent 91 minutes at a campaign event yesterday, the Illinois Senator spent a total of 188 minutes in the gym yesterday –making three separate stops to Chicago gyms over the course of one day.
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