Obama on Democracy Promotion

I just saw this interview from last weekend with Barack Obama on the Washington Post site today. The first question was on democracy promotion in U.S. foreign policy:

Q. Do you believe democracy promotion should be a primary U.S. goal? If so, how would you achieve it? How would you balance democracy and human rights priorities against other strategic needs in the case of countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China and Russia?

A. We benefit from the expansion of democracy: Democracies are our best trading partners, our most valuable allies and the nations with which we share our deepest values.

Our greatest tool in advancing democracy is our own example. That’s why I will end torture, end extraordinary rendition and indefinite detentions; restore habeas corpus; and close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

I will significantly increase funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and other nongovernmental organizations to support civic activists in repressive societies. And I will start a new Rapid Response Fund for young democracies and post-conflict societies that will provide foreign aid, debt relief, technical assistance and investment packages that show the people of newly hopeful countries that democracy and peace deliver, and the United States stands by them.

I recognize that our security interests will sometimes necessitate that we work with regimes with which we have fundamental disagreements; yet, those interests need not and must not prevent us from lending our consistent support to those who are committed to democracy and respect for human rights.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Playing the Momentum Game

The big news out of Wisconsin and Hawaii is that Barak Obama won in two states that he was expected to win. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on whether or not you are “on the hope train,” this news is not very big at all. In fact, most news outlets have decided to focus their articles on Obama’s win streak or what the exit polls tell us or both.

I’d like just to pause for a moment and bask in the meaning of Wisconsin and Hawaii. The fact that Obama won these states expectedly, particularly Wisconsin, which is seen as a swing state, is a very big deal. Had Hillary won, or even come close, the tenor of the post-February-19th-primary news cycle would have been entirely different.

Because Obama won Wisconsin and Hawaii, two weeks of news will focus on the despair and frustration of the HRC campaign rather than the hopeful optimism that might have been. She will fuel this descent by truncating her articulation of purpose and harping the urgency of her cause. Her message of hope, which was over matched by Obama’s in the first place, will be replaced by attacks on his. Hillary will blame the media for taking her statements out of context and for siding with Obama. No, it couldn’t be her fault that she’s struggling to hang on. Maybe she needs a new campaign manager.

Of course, most of the things I’ve written above have been characteristics of Hillary’s campaign for quite some time. They are more descriptive than predictive. Wisconsin and Hawaii prove that Hillary began digging her grave prematurely: despair became her story even though destiny was still something she could control.

Now, all she has is despair. She may want to make some campaign visits to churches, where maybe she can pray for a prayer.

Cementing my anti-Hillary Position

As the Obama movement proceeds to overtake Hillary’s support base, Hillary has done a good job convincing voters that her campaign is struggling. In January, Hillary had to loan her campaign $5 million of her private funds, which contrasts just a bit with the $32 million raised by Obama. Then, Hillary gets trounced in 6 primaries and caucuses over the weekend and her campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle ‘quits.’ Nothing says ‘desperation’ like firing your go-to-gal in the heat of battle. If voters were not convinced enough that the once overwhelming inevitability of a third Clinton White House was all but a memory, she gets a lashing in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia just a few days later.

What is most troubling about Hillary’s demise is her offensive against the nomination system, a system that has its pluses and minuses, but was adopted by the DNC to act as the rules of the game for this primary. Now that she is losing, Hillary does not like these rules very much anymore. Hillary’s excuses for failure wreak of desperation and a callous disregard for the rules of the game when they do not work in her favor. She must have learned this from her husband; a man who thinks he can get away with anything by questioning the definition of the word ‘is.’

According to Politico, Hillary “has sought to cast doubts on the legitimacy of the process by which pledged delegates are chosen, arguing that caucuses aren’t true reflections of the will of the people, and that the exclusion of Florida and Michigan voters because of a dispute over the primary calendar taints the official tallies.”

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Barack Obama – Political Campaign or Mass Political Movement?

Of course, today is Super Tuesday. If you’re in one of the states, please go vote for whomever you support. If you don’t, I reserve the right to ignore your complaints about politics till November and you can redeem yourself.

Anyway, I just received an interesting e-mail from the Obama campaign. It invited me to help make get out the vote (GOTV) calls to voters in Super Tuesday states. Here is the page linked in the e-mail. Having worked on a few campaigns before, this is a typical exercise done in the lead up to election day. However, it is typically done in a campaign headquarters by volunteers that the campaign workers have talked to and know. By having the volunteers sit in their offices, they can monitor the progress of the volunteers and remove people who fail to stick to the script or are not very good at “cold calling” people.

The Obama campaign has taken an approach that is much more like a issue based or social movement. The page allows Obama supporters to log-in and pick a super Tuesday state to call. The volunteer is then given links to 20 voters to call along with an interface to register if the voter is an Obama supporter or not. These decentralized tactics are used by other mass-based groups such as Moveon.org or Sierra Club.

I am pretty impressed by the level of trust that the Obama campaign has for their supporters to make an good case for Obama and get out the vote on their own. It seems that the Obama campaign may have as much faith in their supporters as they do in him.

UPDATE: Clinton and Edwards have similar programs. My friend from the Edwards campaign said that if you wanted to make calls, someone from the campaign would still talk to you first to walk you through the steps and vet volunteers a bit.  Checking the McCain and Romney websites, it doesn’t appear that they have similar programs in place.