Obama, mentored by Joe Lieberman, "distancing himself" from Durbin (The Nation 4/7/06)

Obama: As He Rises, He Falls
Alexander Cockburn

~ excerpt ~

I was harsh about Senator Barack Obama of Illinois here a couple of weeks ago, and the very next morning his press aide, Tommy Vietor, was on the phone howling about inaccuracies. It was an illuminating conversation.

Obama's man took grave exception to my use of the phrase "distancing himself" to describe what his boss had done when Illinois's senior senator, Dick Durbin, got into trouble for likening conditions at Guantánamo to those in a Nazi or Stalin-era camp. This was one of Durbin's finer moments, and he duly paid the penalty by having to eat crow on the Senate floor.

His fellow senator, Obama, did not support him in any way. Obama said, "We have a tendency to demonize and jump on and make mockery of each other across the aisle, and that is particularly pronounced when we make mistakes. Each and every one of us is going to make a mistake once in a while...and what we hope is that our track record of service, the scope of how we've operated and interacted with people, will override whatever particular mistake we make." That's three uses of the word "mistake." This isn't distancing?

(snip)

Hence Vietor's sensitivity to the allusion in my column to Obama's "mentor" being Senator Joe Lieberman. As a freshman senator, Vietor insisted, Obama had been assigned Lieberman as mentor. Read the Hartford Courant and you'll find Lieberman boasting that Obama picked him.

Either way, it's obvious that Obama could have brokered a different mentor if he'd so desired, the same way he could have declined to go and tout for Lieberman at that Democratic Party dinner in Connecticut at the end of March. But he clearly didn't, because he wanted to send out a reassuring signal, in the same way he's doing with his PAC, the Hopefund, which is raising money for fourteen of his senate colleagues. According to BlackCommentator, ten of them are DLC--half the DLC presence in the Senate.

Continued @ http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20060508&s=cockburn

Dear Friend,

Thank you for contacting me to share your thoughts on impeaching President George W. Bush. I appreciate and share your high level of dissatisfaction and frustration with the President, his actions and his priorities. I disagree with him on many issues, ranging from the war in Iraq to the future of Social Security to funding our children's schools.

I support robust Congressional investigations into his administration and the highly questionable actions it has taken in areas such as domestic spying and the U.S. attorney firings. He has horribly mismanaged the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The Democratic Congress has achieved important progress this year, but we are still stymied by a President who is out of sync with the American people, vetoing legislation to responsibly get us out of Iraq and to support increased stem cell research.

America needs to move forward again, and I don't believe that continuing this era of bitter partisanship is the best course of action. As I travel the country campaigning, I hear the call for a new direction and a change in our politics, a thirst for something more. I don't believe impeachment answers this call. I believe if we begin impeachment proceedings we will be engulfed in more of the politics that has made Washington dysfunctional. We would once again, rather than attending to the people's business, be engaged in a tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, non-stop circus.

Instead, I will continue to move forward with a positive agenda in the Senate and on the campaign trail. I hope you will stay involved and work for progress on the issues that matter most to you. Thank you again for writing.

Sincerely,


Barack Obama


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1316953

"Al Gore distills in his single person the disrepair of liberalism in America today, and almost every unalluring feature of the Democratic Party. He did not attain this distinction by accident but by sedulous study from the cradle forward."

Thus unambiguously do Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn and frequent collaborator Jeffrey St. Clair stake out the terrain in opening their brief against the Vice President. Political handbook rather than full-blown biography, it effectively paints Gore as a walking sandwich board for Democratic Leadership Council values, tapped for higher office because Bill and Hillary saw in him "a kindred soul in political philosophy, hewing to the pro-corporate, anti-union positions...which together they had founded and nurtured." From his family connections to Occidental
Petroleum to his education partly under Martin Peretz (from Peretz's pulpit at Harvard, not The New Republic), Gore's background is shown with no mirth in the balance but his "propensity to boast excessively" demonstrated at every turn.