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This is a video of Barack Obama telling a partisan crowd today that John McCain is "out of time". He also thanks John McCain for toning down the rhetoric last night at his own forum...pay attention to the crowd reactions when Obama talks about McCain's service and to the toning down of his remarks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se8ZWuU4U-M

Barack Obama is a "decidedly liberal" senator "who was finding his feet, and then got diverted by his presidential ambitions", according to a frank verdict delivered to Gordon Brown by the British ambassador to the United States. Sir Nigel Sheinwald, ambassador in Washington since last year, delivered his unvarnished assessment of the White House front runner in a seven-page letter to the Prime Minister, obtained by The Daily Telegraph, just before the Democratic nominee's visit to Downing Street just over two months ago. The candid letter, marked as containing "sensitive judgements" and requesting officials to "protect the contents carefully" gives...

If Barack Obama loses the presidential election, it may well be the result of a public perception that he is detached and elitist -- a politician whose expressions of empathy for hard-working Americans stem more from abstract solidarity than a real connection to the lives of millions of citizens. Suggestions that Sen. Obama has failed to relate to working- and middle-class voters in swing states have dogged his campaign for months. His choice of Sen. Joseph Biden as his running mate only marginally corrects the problem. While Obama supporters attempt to dismiss the charges about their candidate's perceived hauteur, they...

'Meet the Press' transcript for August 31, 2008 **SNIP** MS. ANDREA MITCHELL: Well, they, they think now that they have a story. They have a story of a working mom, she is a colorful character, an Annie Oakley, you know, Annie get your gun. They love her story. But when she tried to talk about Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, in western Pennsylvania yesterday at a rally with conservative Republican voters, Hillary Clinton was booed. So she can use the Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro analogy if she wants to in interviews. She cannot use that at Republican rallies. She is...

Senator Barak Obama Has a Right Head Tilt Watching the Saddleback Church Forum with Pastor Rick Warren interviewing Senator Barak Obama on Saturday August 16, I was struck by the marked and obvious tilting of the Senator’s head Forum. The tilt is to the right side. This phenomenon has not been widely written about from a medical perspective. A head tilt can be a sign that a patient has double vision also known as diplopia. Diplopia can be benign if it is caused by a congenital (from birth) eye muscle weakness or it can be associated with autoimmune medical disorders...

WASHINGTON - One of the first images prime-time viewers will see of the Democratic National Convention next week is that of Michelle Obama, who will begin the four-day introduction of her husband, and her family, on her terms. Like everything else at the orchestrated gala, that is by design. Democrats face a number of imperatives at their convention, none trickier than making more voters comfortable with the prospect of putting a candidate with a most unusual background — the son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia — and his...

The sea of shining, hope-filled faces that routinely flood Barack Obama's rallies would be an alien environment for the grizzled features and tobacco-stained temperament of Dave “Mudcat” Saunders. His preferred habitat is up a tree gunning down deer or on the mud flats — which lent him their name — catching catfish, part of an endless struggle with Appalachian wildlife. Along with his Confederate flag bedspread, the stag heads on his walls, his preference for profanity over punctuation, he would horrify what he calls the “northeastern elitist, Metropolitan Opera wing of the Democrats”. But, as one of the party's few...

There was a spring in Barack Obama's step and a sense of heady excitement in the air as he took to the stage beside Berlin's Victory column for his latest Big Speech. Members of his expansive entourage could have been forgiven for dreaming about the West Wing offices they will occupy in January. By any yardstick, the first half of the Illinois senator's foreign tour was everything his campaign staff had wished for and a little bit more. Wherever he went, world leaders wanted to bask in his reflected glory as the presumed next president. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of...

SPIEGEL: It is unusual for a US presidential candidate to travel to Europe in the middle of the campaign. Why is Barack Obama coming? Susan Rice: Senator Obama believes it is critically important for the United States and Europe to cooperate far more effectively than we have in recent years. None of us can tackle the critical global challenges we face in isolation -- be it terrorism, proliferation, climate change, disease, poverty or energy security. Obama will want to discuss in Europe and Germany how we each view these challenges and how we can best address them together. SPIEGEL: Critics...

In his pre-campaign book, "The Audacity of Hope," Barack Obama proclaims, "I find comfort in the fact that the longer I'm in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience." Some might think this odd testimony from a young and inexperienced freshman senator on the cusp of seeking the highest rank, and the most famous position, in the world. It's a bit like a parish priest saying he's happy with his modest lot in...

You can almost hear the violins playing while reading U.K. Guardian writer Zachary Roth  bemoan the "swiftboat" labeling of Barack Obama by those wascally Republicans: Over the last few months, Barack Obama has been variously labelled an "elitist", a naïve softie and simply "out of the mainstream" in his lifestyle and associates. And lately, in what appears to be the centrepiece of the GOP's attacks, Republicans have focused on portraying Obama as arrogant and self-interested....The "arrogant" label could well damage Obama. That's partly because, as with Kerry's rep for flip-flopping, it might contain a kernel of truth. At the very least,...

Tonight on CNN's Election Center, Joe Klein spewed the following while engaged in a group discussion about a comment made by Karl Rove.......BLITZER: Let's turn to another hot topic right now from the campaign trail today, Karl Rove seriously blasting Barack Obama. We have got some of the smartest people here to talk about that, Joe Klein, Leslie Sanchez, Candy Crowley. Candy, here's the quote from Karl Rove at a breakfast, a Republican breakfast today -- quote -- "Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date holding...

ABC News' Christianne Klein reports that at a breakfast with Republican insiders at the Capitol Hill Club this morning, former White House senior aide Karl Rove referred to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, as "coolly arrogant." "Even if you never met him, you know this guy," Rove said, per Christianne Klein. "He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

Vero Possumus, latin for yes we can (or at least an approxmimation of it). While I think that every failed campaign has a "jump the shark" moment. I'm thinking Michael Dukakis in the tank and John Kerry in the bunny suit. Therefore I'm thinking that Obama's campaign has just jumped the possom. What I was hoping is that all you Freepers out there with a command of Latin could have some fun with this and give us alternatives for his use on his new presidential seal. Of course faux Latin would also be much fun

Polls show Clinton holding a stubborn lead over Obama and, if she wins, she will have staved off political death one more time. Yet if Clinton wins by a narrow margin - even after an unusually bad stretch for Obama, including his foolish observation about 'bitter' small-town voters and a horrendous debate on Wednesday - her victory will be underwhelming. In the next two primaries, on 6 May, she trails badly in one (North Carolina) and has surrendered a one-time lead in another (Indiana). Even some Clintonites say they will pressure her to drop out should she lose both those...

The odor of elitism is like onion breath: It’s quick to acquire, hard to mask. Try as he might, Barack Obama cannot camouflage the political stink he exhaled when he dissed small-town Americans as “bitter” Neanderthals “clinging” to their guns, faith, and belief in strict immigration enforcement. It wasn’t the first time the effete Snob-ama revealed himself. In Philadelphia, he passed up the hometown cheesesteak — gloppy, artery-clogging, and blue-collar (yum!) — for a nibble of Spanish-imported, $100/pound ham. In Iowa, he moaned to voters about the price of arugula at Whole Foods. (Fun fact: There aren’t any Whole Foods...

... Because the manipulable masses are easily given a "false consciousness" (another category, like religion as the "opiate" of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow: First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even...

Having grown up in one of those small Pennsylvania towns Sen. Barack Obama sneers at, I know what really makes people there "bitter." It's slick-talking politicians who look down on their beliefs and values. Small-town people get doubly "bitter" when those pols have the gall to ask for their votes while demeaning their lives. See, even hicks don't like being played for suckers. When they accused Obama of being out of touch for saying small-towners "cling to guns or religion" out of frustration, Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain were too kind. Snob-ama is not just out of touch. He's from...

Obama, speaking to a group of supporters in San Francisco, CA. , recently said: "You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment...

  April 13, 2008   This cartoon/graphic is free for noncommercial use in emails, blogs, and forums.  iowapresidentialwatch.com