This week, was not very good for Senator Obama.
Beginning on Monday, he angered the Muslim community with his campaign’s blatant discrimination against Muslims. He got just a little overzealous in fighting the “smears.”
“I was coming to support him, and I felt like I was discriminated against by the very person who was supposed to be bringing this change, who I could really relate to,” said Hebba Aref, a 25-year-old lawyer who lives in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills. “The message that I thought was delivered to us was that they do not want him associated with Muslims or Muslim supporters.”
~snip~
Abdelfadeel, like Aref, felt “disappointed, angry and let down,” she later wrote.
She said she was “let down that the Obama campaign continuously perpetuates this attitude towards Muslims and Arabs — as if being merely associated [with] one is a sin.”
The two women’s friends who witnessed the incidents were disappointed, too. Aref’s friend Miller said he was “shocked” by the contrast between Obama’s message and their experience.
“He was the one candidate who you would expect to stand up for something like that — and behind the scenes, you have something completely contrary to what he was running on,” said Koussan, Aref’s other friend.
Then Thursday, he announced his flip-flop on public financing, and his ethics pals aren’t pleased:
Obama was one of two Democratic senators who took the lead on the legislation, and it was the most significant accomplishment of his short Senate career. Reid paired him up with Russ Feingold of Wisconsin - the Democrat who co-authored the 2002 campaign finance overhaul with John McCain - to take the lead in pushing the ethics legislation through the Senate.
So what did Feingold think of Obama’s decision not to participate in the public-financing system in the general election against McCain? Not much.
“This is not a good decision,” Feingold said in a statement today. “While the current public financing system for the presidential primaries is broken, the system for the general election is not. The entire system must be updated.”
The reactions were similar from the government watchdog groups that worked closely with Obama and Feingold on the ethics overhaul. Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer declared himself “very disappointed” with the decision. Public Citizen president Joan Claybrook said she was “deeply disappointed.”
~snip~
Obama “knew the circumstances surrounding the presidential general election when he made his public pledge to use the system,” said Wertheimer. Claybrook, for her part, shared Feingold’s view that it’s the primaries where the public financing system needs work, not the general election. Obama’s campaign, she said, should have been a model of his dedication to campaign finance and ethics overhauls.
If that wasn’t bad enough, some of Obama’s (former?) supporters are having significant doubts about him and his willingness to follow through on his commitments:
But, he didn’t stop there. Today, his complicity to go along while our Constitution and privacy rights are torn to shreds, has the “progressive” blogosphere “feeling down”:
Here’s what’s so dispiriting about it. One of the riveting things about Barack Obama’s candidacy is that since the outset of the campaign he’s seemed absolutely dead serious about changing the way foreign policy is discussed and argued about in this country [sic].
~snip~
To be clear, I’m not even talking about whether opposing this would or wouldn’t have carried political peril. It really doesn’t matter. Because if there were ever anything that would have tested his operating premise throughout this campaign — that you can win arguments with Republicans about national security — it was this legislation. If ever there were anything that deserved to test this premise, it was this legislation.
And this time, he abandoned that premise.
Glenn Greenwald at Salon has more:
Telling Americans that we have to give up basic constitutional rights — and allow rampant lawbreaking — if we want to save ourselves from “the grave threats we face” sounds awfully familiar. He says he will work to remove amnesty from the bill, but once that fails, will vote for the “compromise.” Obama has obviously calculated that sacrificing the rule of law and the Fourth Amendment is a worthwhile price to pay to bolster his standing a tiny bit in a couple of swing states
The full Obama statement is here
UPDATE VIII: Nobody should be fooled by Obama’s vow to work to remove telecom amnesty from this bill. Harry Reid is already acknowledging that this “effort” is likely to fail and is just pure political theater: Reid said: “Probably we can’t take that out of the bill, but I’m going to try.” The article continued: “Reid said the vote would allow those opposed to the liability protection to ‘express their views.’”
We should continue to demand that amnesty is removed from the bill — and fight it to the bitter end — but this whole separate vote they’ll have in the Senate on whether to remove amnesty is principally designed to enable Obama, once he votes to enact this bill, to say: “Well, I tried to get immunity out, and when I couldn’t, I decided to support the compromise.” It’s almost certainly the case that Hoyer secured Obama’s support for the bill before unveiling it.
Either way, Obama — if amnesty isn’t removed — is going to vote for warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty, and his statement today all but sealed the fate of this bill. There is no point in sugarcoating that, though we ought to continue to fight its enactment with a focus on removing amnesty in the Senate.
All this without even considering how many have had enough of Obama’s arrogance.
For those of us who smelled a rat the entire time, these “betrayals” were a foregone conclusion. But for those who bought the rhetoric, rode the Unity Pony, and drank the kool-aid that came with it, I’m sure it’s a bad day, and week, to be an Obama supporter.
Perhaps soon they’ll join in the growing movement of voters and Just Say No Deal!
