 |
| 
DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 8/1/2003 5:36 AM (GMT -6) |   | He's socially conservative,
He'll likely be economically moderate as president,
and he is a man of integrity.
Of all of the Democratic Candidates, I think he'd be the one that would have a good chance of beating Bush and would be more socially conservative.
Bush is an economic conservative and social conservative but he spends most of his political capital on economic conservative issues and regime change in Iraq(which probably also streamlines with economic conservative goals of gaining more control over world's oil-supply). As such, picking an economic moderate and someone who can do better than Bush at Social-Conservative issues will be more likely to win. Those that don't like Bush, will never vote for him, but you have to find someone who can potentially pull away Bush-supporters to beat Bush(presuming that no-voters will more likely stay no-voters). Among Bush-supporters, social conservatives are more likely to be pulled away(since he does tend to favor his economic conservative base in how he spends his political capital). Joseph Lieberman seems more likely to be able to do this. He has consistently been not in favor of Gay marriages and I'm willing to bet he would come along with a gradualist, referendum-based approach to the legal redefinition of human life. He also would be more likely to support supporting the freedom of religion abroad and reducing the US' dependence on foreign oil.
dlw
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
 |
DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 8/1/2003 6:19 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by Blood Washed Heretic
But what would he do with healthcare? The rest sounds pretty good, but if he doesn't back universal healthcare, it will be hard for me to support him.
Oh, and a stance against global hegemony through the militaristic spread of capitalist imperialism would be nice, too  .
Dude, remember my story about A. Lincoln supporting Zachary Taylor for president, despite his historical opposition to the Mexican-American war?
I'm sure he'll one-up Bush on health-care eve if it ain't universal.
Welcome to the wonderful world of political realism instead of social science fiction. Also, be sure to check out my three-party political economy post that is was a while back on this forum.
dlw
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
|
DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 8/1/2003 6:57 AM (GMT -6) | | To be a candidate, it helps to have wealthy friends
Campaign Klatsch
These Fundraisers Have Bundles Of Friends With Oodles of Cash
advertisement
By Mark Leibovich
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 1, 2003; Page C01
Susie Tompkins Buell and Amy Rao speak every day, inevitably about politics. Buell is godmother to Rao's daughter. Rao spends weekends at Buell's retreat, in a small coastal village north of San Francisco. They are best friends. Between them, Buell and Rao have a lot of other friends. And a lot of people who want to be their friends, some of them quite ambitious.
Sen. John Kerry called Buell one day last fall. Just to say hi, to let Buell know he was thinking of her. Buell likes this about Kerry -- his attentiveness, his sweet touches. "We can have so much fun, Susie," Buell recalls Kerry telling her. He reminded her -- not for the first time -- how great it would be if she supported his presidential campaign. It was a gorgeous Sunday and Buell was in her car crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. She made her decision to support Kerry right then. "And it felt really good," she says.
Kerry began courting Buell a few months earlier. He invited her, her husband and Rao to lunch one day in San Francisco. Buell, the co-founder of the Esprit clothing company, says she felt an "instant connection" to the Massachusetts Democrat. She found him "open and fun," and he followed up with phone calls and notes. He called on her birthday. He gave her his cell phone number. By the time the John Edwards campaign called, and the Joe Lieberman campaign, and the other candidates got around to calling, "there was no need to go there," says Buell.
She hates being called a fundraiser. "It's like being called a shoe salesman," says Buell. She prefers to discuss her bond with Kerry in terms that are less transactional, like "friendship." "Politics tends to deepen your relationships," says Buell.
She is sitting in a bedroom of her seaside home, a few feet away from Rao, who's the founder and CEO of Integrated Archive Systems, a technology services firm in Palo Alto. Rao also dislikes the term "fundraiser." And yet she and Buell raise funds for Democrats in prodigious amounts, a fact that may explain why they are such sought-after friends among Democratic candidates (and why Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton flew out to visit Buell when she turned 60 last August).
To be elected, politicians need a lot of friends, particularly ones who write them checks. Yet the rules have changed, and so, to a significant degree, has the basic anthropology of political financing.
In the McCain-Feingold world -- where "soft money" contributions are banned and no donation can exceed $2,000 -- the big whale donors who can give $50,000 or $100,000 have been replaced by a breed of well-heeled workhorses like Rao and Buell, who create and maintain fundraising networks on behalf of their candidate. They are "bundlers," people committed to gathering donations from friends. And making new friends.
"I've never seen a political network of friends grow as it's growing here and now," says Rao, who herself has a new friend -- Howard Dean. Despite her own lunch with Kerry, Rao spent part of this spring playing phone tag with the former Vermont governor.
She placed the first call, inspired by Dean's opposition to war in Iraq. Dean called back, and kept calling back and leaving long voice mails at Rao's office and on her cell phone. They set two or three times to talk, but Rao kept missing the appointments. "He was better at calling than I was," Rao says. "I wanted to make sure that when we connected we had time to really talk. We're both busy people. He knows that." They spoke for 30 minutes when Dean finally reached her.
Today, Rao, 40, is working strenuously to raise money for Dean. "I consider myself a mom first, a political activist second and a CEO third," says Rao, whose company is privately held. She hosted a fundraiser for Dean at Spago in Palo Alto that raised $70,000. Dean sent her a box of Vermont chocolates in gratitude, along with a "very nice handwritten note."
Making a Bundle
Susie Tompkins Buell, left, and Amy Rao prefer the term friend to fundraiser, and they've been collecting a lot. (Randi Lynn Beach -- For The Washington Post)
Among Democrats, this new culture of bundling is revealed starkly in the San Francisco Bay area, a hothouse of liberal-leaning wealth. Although candidates still raise greater sums in New York and Los Angeles, the Bay Area's economy is marked by interconnected industries, such as computing, venture financing and investment banking, that can yield fast rewards under the new fundraising rules. In a sense, the changed world of political fundraising has come to mimic the culture that incubated so much wealth here in the 1990s. Bundlers recruit and nurture other bundlers -- often by e-mail -- in the same way that entrepreneurs or financiers recruit and nurture new talent.
The presidential campaign is in its "venture funding stage," says Donnie Fowler, vice president at Technet, a bipartisan lobby of technology interests. Candidates are here raising money well before there is any voting, just as an entrepreneur would raise money for a business well before it's operational. Even after the stock market and technology downturns, "it's still like an ATM here," says Fowler.
Until the mid-1990s, Silicon Valley was largely indifferent, even hostile to politics. Washington was viewed as a process-burdened impediment to the open-market chaos that thrived here. But Bill Clinton raised significant money here during both of his campaigns for president. The turning point in the region's politicization came in 1996, when a California ballot initiative proposed making it easier for shareholders to sue companies. Opponents of the initiative -- the most ardent being technology CEOs -- raised a stunning $40 million to defeat it.
In the summer of 2000, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers hosted a fundraiser for then-candidate George W. Bush at his home in Los Altos Hills, Calif., that raised $4 million -- double the record for a Silicon Valley fundraiser. The Bush campaign continues to raise large sums here ($1.6 million during a quickie presidential visit to an airport hotel last month).
But Democrats have been ubiquitous. Sen. Lieberman (Conn.) was here July 22, as was Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.). Sen. Bob Graham (Fla.) was here the day before that, Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) was here the weekend before last. Kerry was here Saturday. Dean has made eight visits since the beginning of this year, including one yesterday. Candidate itineraries often include the annotation "No Public Events," which might as well be a dollar sign. The candidates are not here seeking votes. They are seeking friends, the kind of delicate pursuit best conducted in private.
Kerry alone has made 17 visits to Northern California since the end of the 2000 campaign. He attended a "reception and buffet" in his honor on March 13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It was sponsored by Buell -- and 85 of Kerry's other good friends. The friends were classified thus: six "chairs" (people committed to bundling $50,000 or more), 16 "co-chairs" ($20,000 or more) and 64 "hosts" ($10,000 or more). The affair, which drew 700 people, featured dim sum, spicy tuna tartare, slow-roasted baron of beef and three-cheese tortellini, among other offerings. Kerry did a Q&A. Stephen Stills performed. And the event raised -- if one can put a cash value on friendship -- $900,000 for the John Kerry for President committee. That's more money collected in a few hours than all the other Democratic candidates combined raised in the Bay Area during the first quarter of 2003. Now Susie Buell says that she expects to host a "town-hall-type" fundraiser for Kerry when he comes to San Francisco on Sept. 16.
'They Don't Want to Say No'
The March 13 event was organized by Mark Gorenberg, a partner at Hummer Winblad, one of the Bay Area's signature venture capital firms. Gorenberg, 48, is a minor legend in the new pantheon of bundling. Modest but relentless, he is a true believer who is relatively new to politics (he raised money for Bill Bradley's presidential campaign in 2000). Gorenberg is in a conference room of his San Francisco office, his cell phone ringing. He has a deal in the works (one of the firms he financed is being acquired). He is standing at a dry-erase board, diagramming the mechanics of fundraising in the McCain-Feingold environment. It begins, he says, with a simple principle: "Campaign finance reform has raised the importance of the group rather than the individual."
In the weeks before March 13, Gorenberg held regular conference calls with the event's organizers. Everyone worked from his own Excel spreadsheet, on which potential invitees were catalogued and charted. "Our databases are much more advanced" than those of Washington fundraisers, says David Roux, a venture capitalist at Silver Lake Partners and a self-described "anchor tenant in John Kerry's fundraising mall." Roux has raised close to $250,000 for Kerry's 2002 Senate reelection campaign and 2004 presidential campaign.
Likewise, Roux says, invitations to political fundraisers in Northern California tend to arrive electronically. "In a place like L.A., the invites tend to be these fancy printed things that come in the mail. The events are geared more to social status or some cause. And some quasi-, has-been rocker will entertain." (As opposed to a cutting-edge rocker like Stephen Stills.)
As he has elsewhere, Dean has gained momentum and raised a great deal of cash here in recent months. Compared with Kerry's well-orchestrated network, Dean's operation has the free-form feel of "a guerrilla operation," says Reed Hastings, founder of the online film service Netflix and a friend of Amy Rao's. This is not to say the former Vermont governor is not attentive. "He was incredibly diligent," says Hastings.
Hastings first met Dean at a small reception last fall. There were follow-up phone calls, exchanges of e-mail and a two-hour visit from Dean in Hastings's office when he returned to the Bay Area. Hastings came away "in love with Howard Dean."
Be it by old or new rules, the success of a political fundraiser often distills to the strength of his or her friendships. "One of the reasons people write checks is because they don't want to say no to the person asking them," says Gorenberg, quoting Bob Farmer, Kerry's national campaign treasurer.
As with political activists in Iowa and New Hampshire, many fundraisers have a healthy sense of their own importance. They expect to be called, courted and sent handwritten notes. "They're not as spoiled as people in Iowa or New Hampshire," says Technet's Donnie Fowler. "But they're spoiled enough to want to see everyone at least once. Or at least talk on the phone. Or at least meet them at some round table."
All of which goes to the murky essence of why people become involved in political fundraising. It involves a blend of ideological belief, ego gratification and proximity to eminence. Friendships, to be certain, can carry varied agendas. Friends seek in each other things other than pure fellowship -- be it a sales rep taking a client/friend to a ballgame or a Hollywood director lunching with his good friend, the agent for Julia Roberts.
But the Bay Area's young political culture is less cynical than, say, the Washington norm. Eyes are wider here, affections purer.
Asked if he considers John Kerry his friend, Mark Gorenberg says yes, he does, absolutely. So do a lot of people in Northern California. "He has an incredible ability to be warm and to connect with people," says Gorenberg. Kerry's great at remembering names and picking up where he left off with people. He sees people and can recall details about their families. "It's a great gift," Gorenberg marvels. "It shows that he cares."
It also shows that John Kerry is a skilled politician. Just like George H.W. Bush (whose jotted notes to friends filled a huge volume), just like Bill Clinton (whose Friends of Bill became shorthand for a sprawling personal-political network).
Would Kerry be pursuing these friendships if they didn't benefit his campaign? "We'll see if he remembers those people who were there early," says Gorenberg, who says he is assured that Kerry will. "It's not a question you can really answer now. It's a discussion we can have five years from now." Ideally, during Kerry's reelection campaign.
Kerry does not want to be isolated, Buell says. He seeks connections everywhere. "He really worked on me," Buell says. "I would say he worked me, but that sounds a little crude." In return, Buell, to be crude, worked her network of potential donors on Kerry's behalf.
Each year, Buell and Rao travel to Washington for three days to visit many of the high-level friends they've made. They attended a White House dinner together near the end of the Clinton administration and were seated at the first lady's table. Rao asked why they were placed in such rarefied company, and Hillary Clinton said, "Because you're my girlfriends."
Politics is an exercise in faith for her, Rao says. She cherishes all of the photos she has with politicians, their gratitude, their voice-mail messages. Like the three-minute one she received from Dean after the Spago reception. He told her how much he enjoyed the event, how she did such a great job, had such great energy and was such a pleasure to work with.
Rao saves all of the notes she gets from politicians as keepsakes. They certify her ideals, labors, friendships. She keeps them neatly arrayed in file folders. "So when I'm gone," Rao says, "my kids can look at them and know that their mother did good work."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Campaign Klatsch
These Fundraisers Have Bundles Of Friends With Oodles of Cash
advertisement
By Mark Leibovich
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 1, 2003; Page C01
Susie Tompkins Buell and Amy Rao speak every day, inevitably about politics. Buell is godmother to Rao's daughter. Rao spends weekends at Buell's retreat, in a small coastal village north of San Francisco. They are best friends. Between them, Buell and Rao have a lot of other friends. And a lot of people who want to be their friends, some of them quite ambitious.
Sen. John Kerry called Buell one day last fall. Just to say hi, to let Buell know he was thinking of her. Buell likes this about Kerry -- his attentiveness, his sweet touches. "We can have so much fun, Susie," Buell recalls Kerry telling her. He reminded her -- not for the first time -- how great it would be if she supported his presidential campaign. It was a gorgeous Sunday and Buell was in her car crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. She made her decision to support Kerry right then. "And it felt really good," she says.
Kerry began courting Buell a few months earlier. He invited her, her husband and Rao to lunch one day in San Francisco. Buell, the co-founder of the Esprit clothing company, says she felt an "instant connection" to the Massachusetts Democrat. She found him "open and fun," and he followed up with phone calls and notes. He called on her birthday. He gave her his cell phone number. By the time the John Edwards campaign called, and the Joe Lieberman campaign, and the other candidates got around to calling, "there was no need to go there," says Buell.
She hates being called a fundraiser. "It's like being called a shoe salesman," says Buell. She prefers to discuss her bond with Kerry in terms that are less transactional, like "friendship." "Politics tends to deepen your relationships," says Buell.
She is sitting in a bedroom of her seaside home, a few feet away from Rao, who's the founder and CEO of Integrated Archive Systems, a technology services firm in Palo Alto. Rao also dislikes the term "fundraiser." And yet she and Buell raise funds for Democrats in prodigious amounts, a fact that may explain why they are such sought-after friends among Democratic candidates (and why Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton flew out to visit Buell when she turned 60 last August).
To be elected, politicians need a lot of friends, particularly ones who write them checks. Yet the rules have changed, and so, to a significant degree, has the basic anthropology of political financing.
In the McCain-Feingold world -- where "soft money" contributions are banned and no donation can exceed $2,000 -- the big whale donors who can give $50,000 or $100,000 have been replaced by a breed of well-heeled workhorses like Rao and Buell, who create and maintain fundraising networks on behalf of their candidate. They are "bundlers," people committed to gathering donations from friends. And making new friends.
"I've never seen a political network of friends grow as it's growing here and now," says Rao, who herself has a new friend -- Howard Dean. Despite her own lunch with Kerry, Rao spent part of this spring playing phone tag with the former Vermont governor.
She placed the first call, inspired by Dean's opposition to war in Iraq. Dean called back, and kept calling back and leaving long voice mails at Rao's office and on her cell phone. They set two or three times to talk, but Rao kept missing the appointments. "He was better at calling than I was," Rao says. "I wanted to make sure that when we connected we had time to really talk. We're both busy people. He knows that." They spoke for 30 minutes when Dean finally reached her.
Today, Rao, 40, is working strenuously to raise money for Dean. "I consider myself a mom first, a political activist second and a CEO third," says Rao, whose company is privately held. She hosted a fundraiser for Dean at Spago in Palo Alto that raised $70,000. Dean sent her a box of Vermont chocolates in gratitude, along with a "very nice handwritten note."
Making a Bundle
Susie Tompkins Buell, left, and Amy Rao prefer the term friend to fundraiser, and they've been collecting a lot. (Randi Lynn Beach -- For The Washington Post)
Among Democrats, this new culture of bundling is revealed starkly in the San Francisco Bay area, a hothouse of liberal-leaning wealth. Although candidates still raise greater sums in New York and Los Angeles, the Bay Area's economy is marked by interconnected industries, such as computing, venture financing and investment banking, that can yield fast rewards under the new fundraising rules. In a sense, the changed world of political fundraising has come to mimic the culture that incubated so much wealth here in the 1990s. Bundlers recruit and nurture other bundlers -- often by e-mail -- in the same way that entrepreneurs or financiers recruit and nurture new talent.
The presidential campaign is in its "venture funding stage," says Donnie Fowler, vice president at Technet, a bipartisan lobby of technology interests. Candidates are here raising money well before there is any voting, just as an entrepreneur would raise money for a business well before it's operational. Even after the stock market and technology downturns, "it's still like an ATM here," says Fowler.
Until the mid-1990s, Silicon Valley was largely indifferent, even hostile to politics. Washington was viewed as a process-burdened impediment to the open-market chaos that thrived here. But Bill Clinton raised significant money here during both of his campaigns for president. The turning point in the region's politicization came in 1996, when a California ballot initiative proposed making it easier for shareholders to sue companies. Opponents of the initiative -- the most ardent being technology CEOs -- raised a stunning $40 million to defeat it.
In the summer of 2000, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers hosted a fundraiser for then-candidate George W. Bush at his home in Los Altos Hills, Calif., that raised $4 million -- double the record for a Silicon Valley fundraiser. The Bush campaign continues to raise large sums here ($1.6 million during a quickie presidential visit to an airport hotel last month).
But Democrats have been ubiquitous. Sen. Lieberman (Conn.) was here July 22, as was Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.). Sen. Bob Graham (Fla.) was here the day before that, Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) was here the weekend before last. Kerry was here Saturday. Dean has made eight visits since the beginning of this year, including one yesterday. Candidate itineraries often include the annotation "No Public Events," which might as well be a dollar sign. The candidates are not here seeking votes. They are seeking friends, the kind of delicate pursuit best conducted in private.
Kerry alone has made 17 visits to Northern California since the end of the 2000 campaign. He attended a "reception and buffet" in his honor on March 13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It was sponsored by Buell -- and 85 of Kerry's other good friends. The friends were classified thus: six "chairs" (people committed to bundling $50,000 or more), 16 "co-chairs" ($20,000 or more) and 64 "hosts" ($10,000 or more). The affair, which drew 700 people, featured dim sum, spicy tuna tartare, slow-roasted baron of beef and three-cheese tortellini, among other offerings. Kerry did a Q&A. Stephen Stills performed. And the event raised -- if one can put a cash value on friendship -- $900,000 for the John Kerry for President committee. That's more money collected in a few hours than all the other Democratic candidates combined raised in the Bay Area during the first quarter of 2003. Now Susie Buell says that she expects to host a "town-hall-type" fundraiser for Kerry when he comes to San Francisco on Sept. 16.
'They Don't Want to Say No'
The March 13 event was organized by Mark Gorenberg, a partner at Hummer Winblad, one of the Bay Area's signature venture capital firms. Gorenberg, 48, is a minor legend in the new pantheon of bundling. Modest but relentless, he is a true believer who is relatively new to politics (he raised money for Bill Bradley's presidential campaign in 2000). Gorenberg is in a conference room of his San Francisco office, his cell phone ringing. He has a deal in the works (one of the firms he financed is being acquired). He is standing at a dry-erase board, diagramming the mechanics of fundraising in the McCain-Feingold environment. It begins, he says, with a simple principle: "Campaign finance reform has raised the importance of the group rather than the individual."
In the weeks before March 13, Gorenberg held regular conference calls with the event's organizers. Everyone worked from his own Excel spreadsheet, on which potential invitees were catalogued and charted. "Our databases are much more advanced" than those of Washington fundraisers, says David Roux, a venture capitalist at Silver Lake Partners and a self-described "anchor tenant in John Kerry's fundraising mall." Roux has raised close to $250,000 for Kerry's 2002 Senate reelection campaign and 2004 presidential campaign.
Likewise, Roux says, invitations to political fundraisers in Northern California tend to arrive electronically. "In a place like L.A., the invites tend to be these fancy printed things that come in the mail. The events are geared more to social status or some cause. And some quasi-, has-been rocker will entertain." (As opposed to a cutting-edge rocker like Stephen Stills.)
As he has elsewhere, Dean has gained momentum and raised a great deal of cash here in recent months. Compared with Kerry's well-orchestrated network, Dean's operation has the free-form feel of "a guerrilla operation," says Reed Hastings, founder of the online film service Netflix and a friend of Amy Rao's. This is not to say the former Vermont governor is not attentive. "He was incredibly diligent," says Hastings.
Hastings first met Dean at a small reception last fall. There were follow-up phone calls, exchanges of e-mail and a two-hour visit from Dean in Hastings's office when he returned to the Bay Area. Hastings came away "in love with Howard Dean."
Be it by old or new rules, the success of a political fundraiser often distills to the strength of his or her friendships. "One of the reasons people write checks is because they don't want to say no to the person asking them," says Gorenberg, quoting Bob Farmer, Kerry's national campaign treasurer.
As with political activists in Iowa and New Hampshire, many fundraisers have a healthy sense of their own importance. They expect to be called, courted and sent handwritten notes. "They're not as spoiled as people in Iowa or New Hampshire," says Technet's Donnie Fowler. "But they're spoiled enough to want to see everyone at least once. Or at least talk on the phone. Or at least meet them at some round table."
All of which goes to the murky essence of why people become involved in political fundraising. It involves a blend of ideological belief, ego gratification and proximity to eminence. Friendships, to be certain, can carry varied agendas. Friends seek in each other things other than pure fellowship -- be it a sales rep taking a client/friend to a ballgame or a Hollywood director lunching with his good friend, the agent for Julia Roberts.
But the Bay Area's young political culture is less cynical than, say, the Washington norm. Eyes are wider here, affections purer.
Asked if he considers John Kerry his friend, Mark Gorenberg says yes, he does, absolutely. So do a lot of people in Northern California. "He has an incredible ability to be warm and to connect with people," says Gorenberg. Kerry's great at remembering names and picking up where he left off with people. He sees people and can recall details about their families. "It's a great gift," Gorenberg marvels. "It shows that he cares."
It also shows that John Kerry is a skilled politician. Just like George H.W. Bush (whose jotted notes to friends filled a huge volume), just like Bill Clinton (whose Friends of Bill became shorthand for a sprawling personal-political network).
Would Kerry be pursuing these friendships if they didn't benefit his campaign? "We'll see if he remembers those people who were there early," says Gorenberg, who says he is assured that Kerry will. "It's not a question you can really answer now. It's a discussion we can have five years from now." Ideally, during Kerry's reelection campaign.
Kerry does not want to be isolated, Buell says. He seeks connections everywhere. "He really worked on me," Buell says. "I would say he worked me, but that sounds a little crude." In return, Buell, to be crude, worked her network of potential donors on Kerry's behalf.
Each year, Buell and Rao travel to Washington for three days to visit many of the high-level friends they've made. They attended a White House dinner together near the end of the Clinton administration and were seated at the first lady's table. Rao asked why they were placed in such rarefied company, and Hillary Clinton said, "Because you're my girlfriends."
Politics is an exercise in faith for her, Rao says. She cherishes all of the photos she has with politicians, their gratitude, their voice-mail messages. Like the three-minute one she received from Dean after the Spago reception. He told her how much he enjoyed the event, how she did such a great job, had such great energy and was such a pleasure to work with.
Rao saves all of the notes she gets from politicians as keepsakes. They certify her ideals, labors, friendships. She keeps them neatly arrayed in file folders. "So when I'm gone," Rao says, "my kids can look at them and know that their mother did good work."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
|
honorman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 8/1/2003 7:01 AM (GMT -6) | | | Government in health care? Now THATS a nightmare. Before such grand pronouncment, you might want to TALK with some health professionals who actually work in the system. | | Back to Top | | |
|
Blood Washed Heretic
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2003
Total Posts : 167
| Posted 8/1/2003 7:43 AM (GMT -6) | | I don't know why you've singled me out as an enemy honorperson, but being the son of a healthcare worker who detests HMOs, PPOs, and their ilk has probably influenced me in ways your casual ignorance hasn't.
Oh, and being physically disabled and dealing with insurance people who say things like, "I know you need this but I can't help" probably disqualifies me from being "in the know", according to your reactionary standards.
Yes, I called you "reactionary" again. It sickens me that you flaunt such a label.
In essentials, unity; In matters of opinion, liberty; In all things, love. | | Back to Top | | |
|
DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 8/1/2003 9:07 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by Blood Washed Heretic
I don't know why you've singled me out as an enemy honorperson, but being the son of a healthcare worker who detests HMOs, PPOs, and their ilk has probably influenced me in ways your casual ignorance hasn't.
Oh, and being physically disabled and dealing with insurance people who say things like, "I know you need this but I can't help" probably disqualifies me from being "in the know", according to your reactionary standards.
Yes, I called you "reactionary" again. It sickens me that you flaunt such a label.
Oh, honordude is just emulating his mentor the eminent entertainer Rush Limbaugh. 
dlw
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
|
honorman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 8/1/2003 10:15 AM (GMT -6) | | I comment on stuff I find foolish (as well as other things). Having a wife who treats patients and many friends in the medical profession, I have first hand experience of how wasteful and idiotic it would be to have the government involved in such a massive undertaking. The welfare system along should cause anyone pause who think the government can take on such responsibilities.
If Christian church is unwilling to reach out collectively to those who need it, the government is certainly not going to fill the void. What it will do is waste our money. | | Back to Top | | |
|
honorman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 8/1/2003 10:20 AM (GMT -6) | | | I hope you aren't TOO sick , 'cause I still love the term...I have learned, quite frankly, to take most of what people say about me on this board with a grain of salt. I am not worried that people feel I am "unloving," or other such nonsense. There are too many people out there unwilling to say anything they think would be even remotely offensive. I am not in that group. I find most ideas that people believe to be without merit, when looked at below the surface. I am not going to backdown from being honest. The government, by and large, is a massive money eating machine. Calling on it to care for everyone medically is big waste of money. | | Back to Top | | |
|
honorman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 8/1/2003 10:23 AM (GMT -6) | | What do I do in real life? Sit on my butt and type out offensive words. What else? | | Back to Top | | |
|
honorman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 8/1/2003 10:49 AM (GMT -6) | | If we are too fallen to handle it ourselves, how are we going to reform a goverment that isn't God-centered? I mean, we can't get off our butts and do it, what makes you think we will garnish the will power to reform our government.
Blood, I attack and critique positions and issues, not people. | | Back to Top | | |
|
honorman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 8/1/2003 11:21 AM (GMT -6) | | | I don't think most people who have good health insurance believe that public health effects them. So I don't think most working people with insurance are going to get behind such a public plan. Ask Hilary Clinton. | | Back to Top | | |
|
ReasonableDoubt
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 655
| Posted 8/1/2003 11:41 AM (GMT -6) | | What about the 40 or so million who are uninsured? What about the people laid off from their jobs who can't find work for months (or years) and can't afford the COBRA premiums?
I think about it all the time, even though I do have health insurance - however my insurance is not that great ($1000 deductible) and I've had some health probs where I had to spend a LOT of my own money.
I should hope that those who are adequately insured would be concerned about those who are not. | | Back to Top | | |
|
honorman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 8/1/2003 2:21 PM (GMT -6) | | | Trust me, RD, a lot of them are not, particularly when you have many people who abused the system...there are those out there who need it. There are also those out there who abuse it and give the system a bad name. And those are the only ones many people see. | | Back to Top | | |
|
honorman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 8/1/2003 2:26 PM (GMT -6) | | | Can't support someone who cast his lot with Al Gore. DLW, of course you have to be rich. Where have YOU been?! | | Back to Top | | |
|
DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 8/5/2003 2:42 PM (GMT -6) | | Lieberman Warns Party On Ideology
Candidate Assails 'Extremist' Policies
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 5, 2003; Page A01
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), expanding a fight among Democrats, attacked former Vermont governor Howard Dean and several other rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday, arguing that they have embraced extreme left ideas that threaten to return the party to political exile.
Saying he is in a fight for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, Lieberman said policies rooted in the "vital center" of the political spectrum, not what he termed the antiwar and big government policies of his rivals, provide the only hope of defeating President Bush. He warned Democrats that abandoning the policies that helped elect Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 would result in a terrible setback for the party.
"I share the anger of my fellow Democrats with George Bush and the wrong direction he has taken our nation," Lieberman said in a speech at the National Press Club. "But the answer to his outdated, extremist ideology is not to be found in outdated extremes of our own. That path will not solve the challenges of our time and it could well send us Democrats back to the political wilderness for a long time."
The party's 2000 vice presidential nominee saved his toughest criticism for Dean, the upstart candidate whose passionate opposition to the Iraq war and pugnacious confrontation of Bush have propelled him to the upper tier of the Democratic race. But aides said Lieberman also had in mind two other rivals whom they see standing in the Connecticut senator's path, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) over trade, taxes and health care, and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) for what he described as "ambivalence" over going to war in Iraq.
Lieberman, who was one of Bush's strongest supporters in the run-up to the war in Iraq, has been struggling to find his voice in a year when his centrist ideas and restrained demeanor have appeared out of sync with many Democratic activists. He has led in several national polls for the nomination but he is behind Dean, Gephardt and Kerry in Iowa and behind Dean and Kerry in New Hampshire.
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) warned of "extremist" ideology. (Charles Dharapak - AP)
Lieberman's decision to escalate his rhetoric over the direction of the party came on the eve of a candidate forum at the AFL-CIO executive council meeting in Chicago and ensures that the concerns about Dean's gathering strength and what it represents will continue to be a dominant feature of the battle for the Democratic nomination.
A week ago, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), of which Lieberman is a former chairman, warned that the party is in danger of being captured by the "far ideological left" and other DLC leaders warned that a Dean nomination could result in the kind of landslide defeats Democrats suffered in 1972 and 1984.
With Democrats focused on the two-day union meeting in Chicago, Gephardt continued his campaign to build momentum aimed at winning the AFL-CIO's endorsement this fall. The United Steelworkers of America scheduled a news conference to announce their endorsement this morning in Chicago, with a Gephardt adviser confirming that the former House Democratic leader was the union's choice.
Tonight's 90-minute Democratic candidate forum will begin at 8 p.m. EDT and will be carried on C-SPAN.
As Lieberman was delivering his broadside against what he saw as the leftward drift of the party, Gephardt was in New York offering more elements of an economic plan that would eliminate all of Bush's tax cuts and use much of that money to fund a health care plan designed to provide near universal access to health insurance, including a rise in the minimum wage, accelerated spending from the Highway Trust Fund and a federally guaranteed national development bank to help states through their fiscal problems.
Gephardt said the Bush administration economic policies are decimating the middle class and described Bush's program as "Houdini economics because it almost takes a sleight of hand to make a multi-trillion dollar surplus disappear."
Arguing that the Democrats had helped produce the longest-running expansion in history during the 1990s, Gephardt said, "President Bush has taken us right back to the broken policies of the past, the economics of debt and regret: unaffordable tax cuts for the few, zero new jobs, surging unemployment."
Lieberman was equally unsparing in his criticism of Bush, saying the president "has left our country dangerously unprepared to defend against and defeat the threat of terrorism. And his leadership has clearly driven our great American economy right into the ditch."
Bush, however, was a pretext to draw distinctions with his opponents. "If George Bush and his bankrupt ideology are the problem, old Democratic policies like higher taxes and weakness on defense are not the solution," Lieberman said.
He said repealing all the Bush tax cuts, as Dean and Gephardt have proposed, would hurt the middle class; called Gephardt's health care plan a "break-the-bank $2 trillion program"; warned against raising "the walls of protectionism" on trade; and said the United States "must not shrink from the use of force when our security or our values are at stake."
Together his speech provided a summary of arguments Lieberman began to make in May, at a Democratic debate in South Carolina, which his advisers said have become more relevant because of Dean's success and which they believe will crystallize the choice for Democratic voters more sharply.
During the question period yesterday, Lieberman brushed aside repeated inquiries about the state of his campaign. "I feel good about where this campaign is," he said at one point. At another he vowed, "I'm not going to stand back and let this party be taken over by people who would bring us to the political wilderness again."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
| 54 posts in this thread.
Viewing Page : 1 2 3 |
| Forum Information | Currently it is Monday, November 09, 2026 2:54 PM (GMT -6)
There are a total of 97,718 posts in 6,040 threads.
In the last 3 days there were 0 new threads and 0 reply posts. View Active Threads
|
Forum powered by dotNetBB v2.42EC SP3
dotNetBB © 2000-2026 |
|
|