Obama Fans of 2008

Not since Edward I. Koch disclosed this year that he was suffering from a serious spinal ailment has his online commentary generated the volume of e-mail messages he received in response to his endorsement of Senator Barack Obama for president last week.


President Bush and Edward I. Koch Hugging(He endorsed Bush, and learned from his mistake, He now endorses Obama

Most of the 400 or so responses to the endorsement were extremely positive, he said. About three dozen were not; some of them were downright vitriolic.

“I was surprised primarily by those who criticized me with the invective they used,” the former mayor said, “but I know those who praised me, had I come out the other way, would have used the same invective.”

“There is no acceptance of dissent anymore,” he lamented.

In his commentary, which is e-mailed periodically to roughly 4,000 subscribers, Mr. Koch, who has been a supporter of President Bush, wrote that “the country is safer in the hands of Barack Obama” and that though Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, is “a plucky, exciting candidate,” it “would scare me if she were to succeed John McCain in the presidency.” He also commented on former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s “maniacal laugh” during his speech at the Republican convention.

These are a sampling of responses to Mr. Koch’s endorsement, followed by Mr. Koch’s replies, in italics. Most merited, or received, a simple thank you:

“Though I could not disagree with you more on your backing of George W. Bush, I congratulate you on your choice this time around.”

“Isn’t it possible that both my choices were and are correct? History will make that judgment.”

“I believe you made the wrong decision. ... I just pray that whoever wins is the choosing of our Lord.”

“I really don’t believe God chooses our candidates and winners. If that were the case, how did Hitler win? He was elected in a democratic election before the dictatorship. So let’s leave God out of this.”

“How can you think a community organizer has the backbone to stand up for America?”

“Why do you disparage community organizers? Weren’t Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson in effect community organizers?”

“You have chosen political correctness over the preservation of Israel and this country and this greatly saddens me.”

“Reread your note. Don’t you think it is arrogant? Isn’t it possible that my judgment is more informed than yours? Can’t we simply agree to disagree, without you accusing me of political correctness?”

“No one believes you are really endorsing Obama out of a sincere belief that he is the better candidate after you endorsed Bush in ’04.”

“How foolish of you. ... The fact that I exercised independence of my party then is surely relevant and establishes that I vote my conscience.”

“Obama seems to hold socialist views re: all issues.”

“Please cite three socialist positions taken by Obama, or even one.”

“Universal government-run health care, income redistribution, bigger government. Keeping a name with Muslim origins.”

“Thank you. We disagree on our choice for president and vice president.”

“Wrong choice, just like Neville Chamberlain, who chose ‘appeasement,’ but you are entitled to an error in judgment now and then.”

“Thank you for your generous spirit.”

“If you feel Obama is the right man, with zero experience, anti-American stands, I no longer wish to receive your insights.”

“Removed from e-mail with pleasure and alacrity.”

“You are kinder to Sarah Palin than I would be — I’ve never thought that disemboweling a moose was a strong qualification for a would-be president.”

“I have no problem with Palin being an expert on skinning a moose and turning it into stew. I have a problem with her breaking tie votes in the Senate.”

“If Sarah Palin’s experience scares you, Obama’s lack of experience, and lack of executive responsibilities, should horrify you. However, knowing your liberal left ideology, I understand your endorsement.”

“Although Obama is not a crackpot like Palin, his experience is the equivalent of Palin’s.”

“If you think Sarah Palin does not have better experience than Joe Biden you are way out of touch with what real experience is.”

“Thank you. You haven’t persuaded me that I was wrong in my endorsement.”

“I think that your jealousy of Mayor Giuliani becomes so obvious when you refer to his ‘verbal tic intruding into the hatcheting performance.’ ”

“Everybody I know loved and agreed with my description. You apparently have no sense of humor.”

“I’m hoping it’s just Alzheimer’s that has made you so confused.”

“Your outrageous comment simply because we disagree on a political matter is unacceptable, and precludes further communication.”

(CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama's reference to "lipstick on a pig" has Republicans demanding an apology and Democrats accusing Sen. John McCain of a "pathetic attempt" to play the gender card.

McCain's campaign said Obama's remarks were offensive and a slap at Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin -- despite the fact that the Arizona senator himself used the phrase last year to describe a policy proposal of Hillary Clinton's.

Obama shot back Wednesday and accused the McCain campaign of engaging in "lies" and "swift boat politics."

"I don't care what they say about me. But I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and swift boat politics," he said in Norfolk, Virginia. "Enough is enough."

The phrase "swift boat" comes from the 2004 presidential election, when the group "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" launched an attack ad campaign against Democratic candidate John Kerry.

Obama made his controversial "lipstick" remarks at a Virginia campaign stop late Tuesday afternoon.

"John McCain says he's about change too, and so I guess his whole angle is, 'Watch out George Bush -- except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics -- we're really going to shake things up in Washington,'" he said.

"That's not change. That's just calling something the same thing something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it's still going to stink after eight years. We've had enough of the same old thing."

The crowd erupted in applause when Obama delivered the line.

The Illinois senator then praised both McCain's "compelling story" and Palin's "interesting story," and said his "hat goes off" to anyone who's looking after five kids -- "I've got two and they tire Michelle and me out. ...

"That's why John McCain's campaign manager [Rick Davis] said this campaign isn't going to be about issues, this campaign is going to be about personalities."

Within minutes, the McCain campaign announced a conference call focused on the remark, which they said was a deliberate reference to Palin's line: "You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick."

Palin used the line in the opening remarks of her convention speech, and she frequently uses it on the campaign trail.

In Iowa last October, McCain drew comparisons between Hillary Clinton's current health care plan and the one she championed in 1993: "I think they put some lipstick on the pig, but it's still a pig." He used roughly the same line in May, after effectively claiming the Republican nomination.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers told CNN the campaign saw a "big difference" between the two references: "McCain was referring to a policy proposal. Obama was referring to [Alaska] Gov. Sarah Palin. It's obviously disrespectful and offensive. ...

"Who has been talking about lipstick lately? It was obvious. The crowd went crazy because of it."

It wasn't the first time Obama used the line. In a phone interview with The Washington Post last September, he used it in reference to the situation in Iraq.

"I think that both Gen. [David] Petraeus and Ambassador [Ryan] Crocker are capable people who have been given an impossible assignment," Obama told the Post. "George Bush has given a mission to Gen. Petraeus, and he has done his best to try to figure out how to put lipstick on a pig."

Other politicians have also used the phrase in recent years, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Rep. John Mica of Florida and Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, among others.

Torie Clarke, a former McCain adviser, even wrote a book called, "Lipstick on a Pig: Winning In the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game."

Still, the McCain campaign says Obama's use was intentional, and they want an apology.

"Barack Obama's comments today are offensive and disgraceful. He owes Gov. Palin an apology," said Maria Comella, a McCain-Palin spokeswoman.

Obama's campaign said "enough is enough" and accused McCain of running a "dishonorable campaign."

"The McCain campaign's attack tonight is a pathetic attempt to play the gender card about the use of a common analogy -- the same analogy that Sen. McCain himself used about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care plan just last year," said Obama campaign senior adviser Anita Dunn. "This phony lecture on gender sensitivity is the height of cynicism and lays bare the increasingly dishonorable campaign John McCain has chosen to run."

McCain ally Mike Huckabee took Obama's side on the issue, saying he didn't think it was a swipe at Palin.

"It's an old expression, and I'm going to have to cut Obama some slack on that one. I do not think he was referring to Sarah Palin; he didn't reference her. If you take the two sound bites together, it may sound like it," he said on Fox's "Hannity and Colmes."

"But I've been a guy at the podium many times, and you say something that's maybe a part of an old joke and then somebody ties it in. So, I'm going to have to cut him slack."

But McCain's campaign is not about to let the issue go. They released a Web ad Wednesday that plays Obama's lipstick comments, then asks, "Ready to lead? No. Ready to smear? Yes."

Sarah Kliff has been following Joe Biden on his current swing through the Midwest. Here's her dispatch from Missouri!

ST. LOUIS, Mo.--When it comes to presidential elections, Missouri knows winners. Since 1904, the Show Me State has voted for the eventual president in every contest except 1956. With such a strong track record, it’s not a state you take lightly--as the candidates know all too well. Yesterday, John McCain and Sarah Palin swung through the state, and Joe Biden followed today with appearances at the University of Missouri in Columbia and a suburban high school in St. Louis. Missourians are pretty clued in to their special status, too. “Missouri is a battleground,” Representative Russ Carnahan told Biden's crowd in St. Louis. “We are going to work here like it determines the presidential election, because it does.”

Can the Democrats flip Missouri this year? The state has gone Republican in the last two elections, but Democrats say Obama is more invested in winning this state than McCain. As many of the 700 crowd members in Columbia happily point out, he's opened 40 offices in Missouri (McCain, by his website’s count, has eight). And the state’s Democrats have been leaning toward Obama since the primary season. In January, he won the endorsement of Sen. Claire McCaskill (who's since become one of his most vocal woman surrogates) and, about a month later, he scored a Super Tuesday victory. It was a narrow one, but impressive in a state that boasts many of the demographics associated with former Democratic nominee Hilary Clinton—farmers, veterans and blue-collar union members suffering from job loss and factory shutdowns.

Obama’s been campaigning hard in Missouri since he won the nomination, and not just in the state’s liberal enclaves. One of his first general-election stops, in facts, was in Cape Girardeau, hometown of conservative shock jock Rush Limbaugh. Predictably, supporters at Biden's two Missouri events today said things are looking pretty rosy. “It’s the first time I can honestly say I’ve seen people not involved in politics become excited,” says Andrea Boyles, 35, a Ph.D student at Kansas State University who saw Biden speak in Columbia. “This campaign is a breath of fresh air.”

But viewing the state through the Biden campaign bubble is bound to skew your perspective. In truth, the numbers from the last few elections aren’t particularly friendly to Democrats. During the last election cycle, I saw presidential nominee John Kerry speak in St. Louis and promise Missourians that “this is the Show Me state and we’re going to show George Bush the door.” It didn't quite work out that way. On Election Day 2004, Kerry lost the state by 7.2 percent, more than double Al Gore's margin of defeat in 2000. Experts note that Missouri has shifted rightward over the last two election cycles, and it's unclear whether Obama is the candidate to reverse the slide. As NEWSWEEK contributor Karl Rove pointed out in his recent swing-state map, “Obama performed poorly with culturally conservative voters in the St. Louis metro area and rural outstate” in the state's Super Tuesday primary, and the most recent polls show Obama trailing McCain by about seven points in Missouri — a dispirting deficit in a state that almost always picks the winner.

How can Obama close the gap? Local campaign staffers say the key is proving that his grassroots organizing strategy can work in areas Democrats lost in 2004. Of course, Obama is depending on the urban turnout in St. Louis county and Kansas City but, even combined, they only account for about a quarter of Missouri’s 5.8 million residents. So local Democratic officials are thinking the clincher might be a series of small, rural counties where every additional door knock can make a difference. Take Boone County, for example. It’s home to Columbia, your typically left-leaning college town, so it should be blue. But Kerry lost there by 158 votes in 2004. “This is the type of area that Obama has to win if he’s going to win the election,” says Jack Cardetti, Missouri Democratic Party communications director. He thinks Obama’s grassroots organization in Missouri is strong enough to go the distance. “It’s a completely different organization that what we've seen before [from Kerry and Gore]," he says. "I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s actually bottom-up and it’s working.”

The strategy depends on recruiting new supporters like Jo Huddleston, a 49-year-old mom from Jefferson City--and not just die-hard Dems. Huddleston showed up to the Biden event in Columbia wearing a “Barack the Vote” tee shirt. “I haven’t worn a political tee shirt since the 1970s, when I was in college,” she says. “I was involved with my family, with being a mom, but this campaign made me realize I had to get involved with something bigger.” She's never talked to her friends about politics until this election, but now she urges everyone to vote for Obama--even when she bumps into them at the grocery store. Huddleston testifies that an increasing number of friends have realized that their individual votes actually matter, and she attributes the change both to the close race in Boone County last cycle and the Obama campaign’s success at grassroots outreach. To take her stretch of Missouri, she says, Obama has "to get folks to the polls and go after folks who are not normally engaged." Up in Chicago, the Obama campaign is praying that either its grassroots strategy works wonders--or that this year is more like 1956 than 2004. Or 2000. Or 1996. Or any of the rest of them.

NORFOLK, Va. - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Wednesday accused Republican John McCain's campaign of using "lies and phony outrage and Swift-boat politics" in claiming he used a sexist comment against vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Calling it "the latest made-up controversy by the John McCain campaign," Obama responded to the Republicans' charge that he was referring to Palin when he used the phrase "lipstick on a pig" at a campaign stop Tuesday.

"I don't care what they say about me. But I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and Swift-boat politics. Enough is enough," he said.

Obama's reference was to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, an outside group that in 2004 made unsubstantiated allegations about Democratic nominee John Kerry's decorated military record in Vietnam.

On Tuesday, Obama criticized McCain's economic policies as similar to those of President Bush, saying: "You can put lipstick on a pig ... it's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still going to stink after eight years."

The McCain campaign contended that the comments were directed at Palin, the GOP's first woman on a presidential ticket. In her acceptance speech last week, she had referred to herself in a joke about lipstick being the only difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull.

'Catnip for the news media'

Accusing Obama of "smearing" Palin in "offensive and disgraceful" comments, the McCain campaign demanded an apology — though McCain himself used the folksy metaphor a few times last year, including once to describe Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care plan.

The McCain campaign on Wednesday issued an Internet ad that said Obama was talking about Palin and said of Obama: "Ready to lead? No. Ready to smear? Yes."

Obama began a discussion of education at a Norfolk high school on Wednesday by assailing McCain's campaign.

"What their campaign has done this morning is the same game that has made people sick and tired of politics in this country. They seize on an innocent remark, try to take it out of context, throw up an outrageous ad because they know that it's catnip for the news media," Obama said.

Obama's campaign has accused the GOP camp of engaging in a "pathetic attempt to play the gender card." In an e-mail to reporters Wednesday, the campaign noted two other instances of McCain using the phrase "lipstick on a pig" and its use by other Republicans such as House Minority Leader John Boehner and Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl.