Are Gaffes and Scandals Engulfing the Obama Campaign

No doubt if you are a liberal Democrat, you are likely to be planning your agenda for the next two years minimum. Of course, as the campaign heads into the home stretch, the focus is now shifting the spotlight entirely onto the Obama campaign. Just in time, the Obama campaign is creating several bit of headaches for itself that gives their opponents hope that they may still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.





1) Four words, "spread the wealth around"





These four words have changed the dynamic of the race in the last couple of weeks. It has given the McCain campaign a whole new attack angle in the last couple of weeks. While the Obama camapign continues with their standard attack attempting to link John McCain to George Bush, the McCain campaign has created a whole new angle for itself. They have turned Joe the Plumber into a mini celebrity and turned these four words into a whole new campaign theme. In the last two weeks of any campaign, it is vital that each campaign find a new message. By Obama repeating the same mantra of Bush/McCain they continue hitting old themes. By McCain finding a new voice linking Obama's policies to Socialism they have found a new message.





2) Joe Biden: Barack Obama will be tested.





What Joe Biden said the other day was stunning, revealing, and most of all perplexing. Here is what he said.

And here's the point I want to make. Mark my words. Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. And he's gonna have to make some really tough - I don't know what the decision's gonna be, but I promise you it will occur. As a student of history and having served with seven presidents, I guarantee you it's gonna happen. I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate. And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you, not financially to help him, we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right.

In my opinion, the biggest problem with this statement is that it's perplexing. In other words, no one is really sure what he means when he says that Obama will be "tested" and when he says, "it's not gonna be apparent that we're right". The Obama campaign hasn't really cleared it up. When a statement is unclear and vague, the talking heads take over. What follows is that said statement becomes a regular part of the media's news cycle. If the media spends the next week doing any sort of analysis of this statement it will not only raise doubts about Obama's readiness, but frankly Biden's gravitas. The media has helped the Obama campaign again by doing everything it can to keep this off the front pages but sometimes that boomerangs. That's because stories like this have a way of creeping onto the front pages anyway and when they take a few days to get there they tend to explode once they do. Look at the initial Reverend Wright story as an example. That didn't explode until days after the initial tapes came out but once it did it became an endless loop. This story is starting to creep into the news cycle as well.





3) New Revelations on Bill Ayers.





Over the last week, two new revelations regarding Bill Ayers and Obama's relationship with him have surfaced. First, it has surfaced that Barack Obama wrote a blurb on Bill Ayer's book about the prison system. This is a direct challenge to Obama's assertion that their relationship was merely tangential. Of course, there is a much bigger looming problem here.

That problem is best explained after we look at the second revelation.




In this video, from 2002, Bill Ayers declares himself not only an unrepentent terrorist but a Marxist and an Anarchist. This interview was done days before both Ayers and Obama sat on a panel together. This should put to rest any doubts that Obama didn't know Ayers current beliefs were as radical as the beliefs he once had.

The bigger problem is what is the content of Ayers' book, A Kind and Just Parent, and what sorts of radical ideas does it have for our prison system. Since Barack Obama endorsed the book by giving it his blurb and calling it searing, he, by extension, also endorsed the ideas in the book. Ayers is a radical, a Marxist, and an Anarchist and those are the sorts of ideas that are in this book. What happens when even one enterprising reporter decides to read the book and analyze its contents. Its contents are what Barack Obama sees as the proper vision for our prison system. That will be the most damning portion of this gaffe and it is coming. In fact, it was already examined by Stanley Kurtz long before this latest revelation.

Meanwhile, Obama worked closely with the Illinois Black Legislative Caucus to slow the bill's progress, expressing skepticism about the blended sentencing provisions. While one report speaks of Obama negotiating with Cook County state's attorney Richard Devine for a compromise, there is good reason to believe that Obama's actual aim was to scuttle the entire bill. We have this on the authority of someone who may very well be Michelle Obama herself. Michelle Obama organized a University of Chicago panel about Bill Ayers's crime book in November 1997, just as the battle over the juvenile justice bill was heating up. That panel featured appearances by some of the key figures discussed in Ayers's book, along with Obama himself, who was identified in the press release as "working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system." In effect, then, this public event was a joint Obama-Ayers effort to sink the juvenile justice bill-Obama's decision to plug Ayers's book in the Chicago Tribune the following month was part of the same political effort.

The book is no doubt a radical platform for transforming our prison systems and soon the country will know it, and Obama's support for its ideas.

4) ACORN and Obama continue to be linked.

(H/T to Hot Air)

The New York Times has uncovered all sorts of explosive information about ACORN and this information leads directly back to Barack Obama.

The June 18 report, written by Elizabeth Kingsley, a Washington lawyer, spells out her concerns about potentially improper use of charitable dollars for political purposes; money transfers among the affiliates; and potential conflicts created by employees working for multiple affiliates, among other things.

It also offers a different account of the embezzlement of almost $1 million by the brother of Acorn’s founder, Wade Rathke, than the one the organization gave in July, when word of the theft became public. …

Ms. Kingsley’s concerns about the way Acorn affiliates work together could fuel the controversy over Acorn’s voter registration efforts, which are largely underwritten by an affiliated charity, Project Vote. Project Vote hires Acorn to do voter registration work on its behalf, and the two groups say they have registered 1.3 million voters this year.

As a federally tax-exempt charity, Project Vote is subject to prohibitions on partisan political activity. But Acorn, which is a nonprofit membership corporation under Louisiana law, though subject to federal taxation, is not bound by the same restrictions.

This report spells out clearly that Project Vote is nothing more than a front group for Barack Obama. Barack Obama has been working with Project Vote since 1992. Thus, this revelation should put to rest any rebuttal by the Obama campaign that his relationship with ACORN is merely tangential. Finally, two new videos have surfaced raising speculation about not only how much influence groups like ACORN will have in an Obama campaign and just how hard ACORN has been working to elect Obama.


In this video, he makes it clear that groups like ACORN will have a serious advisory role in his administration.

In the second video, Maxine Watters rallies up the troops at an ACORN gathering in support of Barack Obama.




Keep in mind that ACORN takes public funds and thus they aren't supposed to be partisan. As such, we have damning evidence that ACORN is involved in serious criminal wrongdoing, Obama and ACORN have had longstanding connections, and that ACORN is working actively, outside the law, to elect Barack Obama.

Only time will tell if this series of gaffes and scandals will mean anything but make no mistake, this race is not over.