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Tag: Barack Obama
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Cecile Richards gives John McCain a send-up to make her mother proud
With all the talk of political dynasties passing the torch – or being shoved out of the way – little attention has been paid to another Democratic scion who shared the stage with Hillary Clinton last night.
Her name is Cecile Richards. And like her mother, the late Democratic matriarch and Texas Gov. Ann Richards, she is a powerful, in-your-face speaker who drives home political points with wit and, often, raunch.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
Click to activate the interactive map (requires Java)MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.“Elections are about choices, and Mom would have said that women voting for John McCain would be like chickens choosing to vote for the Colonel,” Richards wrote in a recent column on Huffington Post.
Now president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Richards spent her time last night excoriating John McCain’s record on women’s health issues.
“John McCain has voted against women’s health care 125 times,” she said. “You can look it up: he voted against real sex education, against affordable family planning and, if elected, John McCain has vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade.”
Richards also recalled her mother’s sharp-tongued appraisal of then vice-president George H.W. Bush at the 1988 Democratic National Convention.
“Poor George,” Ann Richards had said then. “He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”
(Six years later, Ann Richards would be defeated by George W. Bush in her gubernatorial re-election campaign in Texas. She died from esophageal cancer in September, 2006.)
By all accounts, Cecille Richards is a chip off her mother’s block.
A 2004 Texas Monthly profile described her as ” a striking six-footer and longtime labor organizer with a bright, explosive laugh who can stop a room when she walks into it just as her mother can.”
She told the magazine how her involvement in politics was all but inevitable after growing up stuffing political mailings, learning precinct politics, and hosting anti-war rallies.
“Other families did bowling,” she said. “We did politics.”
Besides her mother’s involvements, her father, David Richards, was a labor lawyer involved in civil rights, among other issues.
“We represented every union in the South,” David Richards told Texas Monthly. “Teamsters and garment workers, plumbers and pipe fitters.”
For entertainment, the family would sit around in the evening, singing old union songs like “Joe Hill.”
After graduating from Brown in 1980, Cecile Richards worked as a union organizer, first among garment workers in the Rio Grande Valley, then with hotel workers in New Orleans and janitors in Los Angeles. Her work directing the Justice for Janitors campaign was dramatized by Adrien Brody in the movie Bread and Roses.
In 1982, Richards met her husband, Kirk Adams, also a labor organizer and now chief of staff of the Service Employees International Union, the largest union in America. The couple, who had three children, moved back to Texas in 1990 so they could work on Ann Richard’s campaign.
Her mother’s defeat in 1994 was what led Cecile Richards to refocus her energies on electoral politics.
After the loss, Richards founded a grassroots organization called the Texas Freedom Network. The idea was to oppose the influence of conservative Christians in Texas politics, particularly in the election of school boards.
Despite importunings to go into electoral politics, Cecile Richards followed her husband back to Washington in the late 1990s, and went to work for Ted Turner “to help build the infrastructure of the choice movement in America,” as she described it.
In 2002, she became deputy chief of staff for Democrat Nancy Pelosi, of California, who had just become minority whip in Congress and was about to become minority leader. Eighteen months later, she left that job to become president of a new organization, America Votes, a coalition of several dozen progressive groups intent on turning out the Democratic vote in 2004.
That was the position from which Planned Parenthood recruited her in 2005. Richard had no health background, but brought the steely resolve, as well as the rolodex, of a seasoned political operative.
“Listen, the reason I took this job is, I feel like we need to go into the 21st century,” she told the Washington Post in 2006. “Clearly, with some folks in the country, we’re going to get there kicking and screaming.”
Under Richards’ leadership, the group has been an unabashed presence at the convention. Volunteers have been stationed outside the Pepsi Center, handing out over 700 pounds of pink-papered condoms labeled “Protect Yourself from John McCain.”
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Joe Biden is Obama’s pick for vice president
Barack Obama obviously didn’t choose Joe Biden as his running mate to gain electoral votes. Delaware has just three.
And he didn’t tap Biden for geographical balance. Two northerners now head the Democratic ticket.
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MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.But the addition of the veteran senator with extensive foreign relations background and a trumpeted tendency to speak his mind means that the two can now assume the roles of good candidate/bad candidate.
Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is in prime position to criticize McCain’s stands on foreign policy, homeland security and defense. Already, he is being called Obama’s “attack dog.”
Joe BidenThe Obama camp announced Biden’s selection by text message at 3 a.m. The two men are scheduled to appear together at a rally in Springfield, IL, at 3 p.m.
Biden has run twice for the White House, in 1988 and 2008. During his most recent campaign, which ended after a poor showing in Iowa, Biden critized Obama as being inexperienced and “not yet ready” for the White House.
The McCain camp seized on this today.
“There has been no harsher critic of Barack Obama’s lack of experience than Joe Biden,” McCain spokesman Ben Porritt told The New York Times. “Biden has denounced Barack Obama’s poor foreign policy judgment and has strongly argued in his own words what Americans are quickly realizing — that Barack Obama is not ready to be president.”
At age 65, 18 years older than Obama, Biden has extensive experience on Capitol Hill, having served six terms in the Senate.
He has also endured many personal tragedies. Soon after his election to the Senate, his wife and daughter were killed in a car crash. Five years later, he remarried. He also has survived two brain aneurysms.
His son Beau, Delaware attorney general and a captain in the Army National Guard, is scheduled to be deployed to Iraq in October.
In the midst of recent spats between the campaigns about who’s wealthier and more elite, Biden is one of the few non-millionaires in the Senate. Having been elected at age 29, he has spent most of his adult life in public office.
Last year he reported his assets were between $62,000 and $405,000, and his liabilities were between $140,000 and $365,000.
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Oprah Winfrey + Barack Obama = 1 million votes (Muckety)
What’s the value of a celebrity endorsement in a political campaign?
In the case of Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, about a million votes.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
Click to activate the interactive map (requires Java)MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.That’s the conclusion of two University of Maryland economists who correlated vote totals with data such as subscriptions to O magazine and purchases of books endorsed by Oprah’s Book Club. They found a close relation in many polling precincts between O subscribers and Obama backers.
Oprah Winfrey“We think people take political information from all sorts of sources in their daily life,” Moore told The New York Times. “And for some people Oprah is clearly one of them.”
Economists Craig Garthwaite and Timothy Moore tracked celebrity endorsements back to the 1920 presidential campaign and concluded that Winfrey was “a celebrity of nearly unparalleled influence.”
Although she has not confirmed any plans to attend the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Winfrey has reportedly rented a Colorado home for $50,000 per week.
Other celebrities expected to participate in the convention include Gwyneth Paltrow, Madonna, Spike Lee, Warren Beatty, Susan Sarandon, Forrest Whitaker, Scarlett Johansson and Kanye West.
Stevie Wonder, Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow and the Black Eyed Peas are scheduled to perform at convention- related events.
Obama already owes much to the stars – and not only to Oprah. Gwyneth Paltrow produced a video backing the campaign and Hollywood fundraisers have contributed more than $4 million to his campaign.
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Is Tim Kaine too much like Barack Obama to be VP choice?
There’s been much speculation this week that Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine may be “very, very high” on Barack Obama’s VP shortlist, as Politico has described it.
We have no insider knowledge of the vetting process, but the parallels between Kaine and Obama – both of whom are Harvard-educated attorneys with Kansas roots and a civil rights orientation – help explain their unusual chemistry. But those similarities could also prove a liability for the Democratic ticket.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.Like Obama and his wife, both Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton, a lawyer and former judge, graduated from Harvard Law School. Holton and Michelle Obama also attended Princeton, although at different times.
That background no doubt attests to both couples’ smarts, but at a time when so many Americans are wary of intellectual achievers whom they see as elitists, the notion of four Harvard-educated lawyers in the White House may not play well in some quarters. (Perhaps that’s why The New Republic has posted a video of Kaine riffing on a harmonica with a blue-grass band as evidence he might cut it with regular folks.)
Kaine, 50, an early Obama supporter, also shares Obama’s preoccupation with civil rights. After graduating from Harvard, Kaine had a law practice specializing in representing people who had been denied housing opportunities because of race or disability. He also taught legal ethics for six years at the University of Richmond Law School.
Like the presumptive Democratic nominee, he boasts of a bipartisan orientation, an assertion that owes less to his record in the Virginia statehouse than the fact that his father-in-law, Linwood Holton, was the state’s Republican governor from 1970 to 1974.
Howard Fineman over at MSNBC points out that Holton, who is about to turn 85, remains a hero to liberal Democrats and African Americans in the Old Dominion.
Back in the 1970s, when public school busing and racial integration was creating a new faction of the GOP — one appealing to the fears and prejudices of working-class white southerners — Holton stood his ground.
As governor of Virginia, he sent his children, including his daughter, Anne, to public schools in Richmond to prove his point.The political friendship between Kaine and Obama is said to have begun shortly after Obama spoke before the Democratic convention in 2004. At Kaine’s invitation, Obama came to Virginia to campaign for him in 2005 as he ran for governor.
Kaine reciprocated last year by becoming the first prominent elected official outside of Illinois to endorse Obama for president.
It may be relevant too, as Fineman suggests, that the two men share a political consultant – the Benenson Strategy Group whose founder, Joel Benenson is advising Obama. The group’s principal consultant, Peter Brodnitz, who gained his reputation handling Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, is advising Kaine.
Kaine does bring some things to a Democratic ticket that Obama lacks. A practicing Catholic who spent close to a year working as a missionary in Honduras, Kaine would presumably appeal to swing Catholic voters, even though political scientist Larry Sabato points out, “he is pro-choice in effect while projecting a pro-life image and accepting of the death penalty despite personal opposition to it.”
Kaine is also fluent in Spanish and would presumably appeal to growing numbers of Latino voters.
Most critically, if he could help Obama win Virginia, which has voted Republican in 13 of the last 14 presidential contests, that could give Obama a decisive Electoral College advantage, according to Sabato.
On the negative side, however, those skeptical of Obama’s readiness to lead the nation may feel the same way about Kaine. With scant background in military and foreign policy, in particular, Kaine would be unlikely to reassure those who have trouble seeing Obama as commander in chief.
Although Kaine has more executive experience than Obama as a sitting governor and a former mayor of Richmond, many pundits there say his record of achievement as a state leader is mixed, in part because he has been unable to move much through a Republican-controlled state legislature.
Finally, as someone relatively new to the Big Leagues, he could hammer away at the Democrats’ change theme – but that would cut both ways since he has little national name recognition.
Which is to say, he might be “Obama squared “– a smart, charismatic and a formidable campaigner, but without enough of a track record to make his promise of change seem credible.
Here’s a taste of Kaine on the harmonica:
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Chesapeake Energy and Aubrey McClendon, masters of the power play
Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon has a former Oklahoma governor (Frank Keating) and U.S. senator (Don Nickles) on his Oklahoma City-based company’s board of directors. That seems only fitting. McClendon’s great uncle, Robert S. Kerr, co-founded Kerr-McGee and served as Oklahoma governor and senator.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.These are boom times for Chesapeake, founded by McClendon – whose middle name is Kerr – and Tom Ward in 1989 with an initial investment of $50,000. The company went public in 1993. After some rough going, its stock price has increased fiftyfold since.
Chesapeake is currently the nation’s third largest producer of natural gas, but McClendon predicts it will be No. 1 by the end of the year. He told shareholders at the company’s annual meeting last month that the Haynesville Shale field in Louisiana and Northeast Texas could be the company’s most significant field ever.
“We are really off to the races in that play,” he said.
Last week, the company announced a $3.3 billion joint venture with Plains Exploration & Production Co. that values Chesapeake’s holdings in the Haynesville region at $30,000 an acre, more than six times what it paid.
The company is also the biggest player in the Barnett Shale region around Fort Worth, where it has employed actor Tommy Lee Jones to tout the benefits of natural gas in radio, TV, newspaper and billboard advertising.
“The Barnett Shale is a national treasure that will benefit all Texans for generations,” the actor says in a TV spot.
Star-Telegram columnist Mitch Schnurman points out that McClendon has a “history of funding aggressive public-opinion campaigns.” He supported the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry, defended the Duke (his alma mater) lacrosse team against rape accusations and fought the construction of coal power plants in Texas.
Coal is a cheaper fuel to use to generate electricity but natural gas is cleaner.
Chesapeake’s main business strategy is to “grow through the drillbit,” meaning exactly what it says. The company claims to have the most active drilling program in the United States.
Like Fort Worth-based XTO Energy, Cheasapeake also actively hedges its future production to provide some price certainty.
As of May 1, according to Chesapeake’s Web site, the company had hedged more than 70% of its natural gas and oil production for the rest of this year, as well as 80% of gas production and 92% of oil production for 2009.
McClendon also hedges his political bets. He has made campaign contributions to many presidential candidates this year, including Barack Obama and John McCain.
At the annual meeting, McClendon said his company will continue to try to convince the U.S. Congress that Chesapeake is one of the energy good guys.
“We are trying to produce more clean-burning, American-produced natural gas,” he said.
Monday, Chesapeake said that Oklahoma State University President Burns Hargis would join the company’s board on Sept. 15. Tuesday, the company said it would issue 25 million additional shares of common stock.