CREATIVE MANIPULATION

First, I am admitting I have the flu.  Secondly, one of the attributes of the flu is not sleeping well, tossing and turning, and having extra time to think.  Because of this, sometime around 4:30 this morning, or was it 9:30 when I finally decided to try going back to sleep that I came up with a very brilliant thesis.  Of course it could be combination of Advil, Claritan, and Sudafed.

There was something bugging me the other night about those idiot Iowa Caucuses.  It tickled my throat about the same time the flu bug set in and was causing this really lovely tickle cough.  When caucus goers reported, they had to at their respective locations, and checked in by 6PM.

If I weren’t plague ridden I would have gone with my thoughts that evening.  Think about it.  A person must be in place, their credentials approved by 6:PM.  Do you realize how abjectly exclusionary this is and how tailor made it was for Obama and Edwards. It also makes me wonder how Obama got those numbers of young people to show up.

I then realized no one has even bothered to comment on the 6PM caucus time.  It is outrageously unfair to Republicans.  Anyone who has a job, a business, office, retail, who works for a living is automatically disenfranchised.  Anyone who is retired, is 17 years old, and is a college student from another state is automatically enfranchised.  

You delete the non resident college student votes, and take away the 17 year olds, and I don’t think Barack Obama would have even finished second.  There’s no ground-swell here, only swill and buzz.  I always said he was an empty suit.  Now I am positive of it.

If I were Hillary Clinton I would be furious.

A CAMPAIGN FOR KIDS
Barack Obama has based his entire campaign on change and on the youth vote. He manipulated his win in Iowa by playing a ground game that was almost unethical, appealing overwhelmingly to high school kids and college students.  The problem is you cannot base a Presidential campaign on appealing to children.  Somewhere along the line Obama is going to need to enter the real world and start dealing with the Grown Ups.  Is he capable of doing so?  Frankly, I don't think he is.

HOW MUCH DID OBAMA PAY?
I’ve been trying to find some information about the Obama win in Iowa, because things about it have bothered me.  Finally, I’ve come across a very revealing piece in St. Louis Today.
 Let’s just say you get what you pay for, and the Iowa Caucus was bought and paid for by Barack Obama and his Illinois operatives.  To me it just raises shades of JFK, who Obama is trying to mimic.  I wonder if he is trying to take Illinois the same way JFK did – by cheating?  Or by being smart?

YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR
(St. Louis Today)

1.  He had 36 field offices in Iowa.
2.  He spent $6 million on advertising – compared to Hillary’s $1 million
3.  By the end of Sept. he had raised something like $9.3 million in Illinois
4.  By the end of Sept. had raised only $116,665 in Iowa
5.  Scores of volunteers from Illinois were caravanned into Iowa
6.  He had a “Sister Cities Program” in his Chicago campaign, designed to promote activism from Illinois supporters to that specific local in Iowa.
7.  The Iowa ground campaign was controlled from Chicago and staffed and peopled by Illinois volunteers NOT IOWA volunteers
8.  Very little of the money spent in Iowa was donated by Iowa
9.  Many elected Illinois officials traveled to Iowa to work for Obama
10.  He courted 17 year old high school students who were eligible to vote if they were 18 by the election, registering hundreds of them.
11.  Encouraging college students to register, but not telling them the truth about the whole process.
“…Those students can come caucus, but they will have to change their registration to Iowa. Once they do so they will not be legally entitled to vote in Illinois. Again, the Obama campaign isn’t mentioning that at all. The argument can be made that they can just switch back to Illinois the day after the caucus, but that seems awfully close to lying on the voter registration form, where you certify that you are a legal resident of Iowa, etc. It also leads to the possibility that these students could come back to Iowa, register here, caucus, then go back home, re-register in Illinois in time to vote in the Illinois primary on February 5.  To many people that just does not seem either right or fair….”
12.  144 Iowa High Schools had Barack Obama Student Groups.
“…His campaign Web site lists 144 Iowa high schools with Obama student groups. That's 40 percent of the state's public high schools, and it translates to thousands of teens who say they're committed to caucusing for Obama. The group at Hoover High has about 25 active members. On the Web site, students can check out a map and a pull-down bar with contact information about their schools' Obama groups or how to start one. Iowans as young as 17 can caucus provided they'll turn 18 by next year's general election. It's a significant pool: An estimated 38,500 high schoolers are eligible to caucus in the state's 1,784 precincts, including in rural areas where a handful of unexpected participants can sway the results. That's comparable to the combined student populations of Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa….”

“…But some say Obama has taken it to new levels, using his logistical advantage — Davenport, Iowa, is a straight-shot, three-hour drive from Chicago on Interstate 80 — and his Chicago political acumen.

"Maybe we should call these the Illinois caucuses," David Yepsen, a political columnist for the Des Moines Register, opined last week. He was referring to complaints that Obama's campaign was, in pamphlets, explicitly encouraging young people from Illinois who go to college in Iowa to cut short their holidays and return to campus in time to vote in the caucuses, a legal but controversial practice.

"No presidential campaign in memory has ever made such a large, open attempt to encourage students from another state to participate in Iowa's caucuses," Yepsen wrote. "… But, then, they do elections a little differently in Illinois than we do in Iowa. At least you can't vote for a dead person in an Iowa caucus."

The college-voting issue is one part of a broader feeling among some here that Chicago-style strong-arm politics has been getting sent into their state along with the volunteers and money.  "The political culture of Iowa is very different from the political culture of Illinois, particularly Cook County," said Peverill Squire, a political scientist at the University of Iowa. Obama "is presenting himself as a new kind of candidate. The way to do that isn't to associate yourself with old 'Machine' politics."..”

STUDENT MANIPULATION
 
  In early December, ABC ran a piece about the way Obama was trying to stack the deck in Iowa, and mentioned if he did this, he would be castigated.  Chris Dodd went so far as to pledge not to do what Obama did in Iowa.  While it was legal, was it ethical?  Or is Obama indeed a voice for a generation where there are no laws, morals or ethics. 
"...Those students can come caucus, but they will have to change their registration to Iowa. Once they do so they will not be legally entitled to vote in Illinois. Again, the Obama campaign isn’t mentioning that at all. The argument can be made that they can just switch back to Illinois the day after the caucus, but that seems awfully close to lying on the voter registration form, where you certify that you are a legal resident of Iowa, etc. It also leads to the possibility that these students could come back to Iowa, register here, caucus, then go back home, re-register in Illinois in time to vote in the Illinois primary on February 5.  To many people that just does not seem either right or fair...."

OBAMA MANIA
I have questions to ask: If by some horrible quirk of fate Barack Obama (my mother calls him Bambi) is elected, will he have the guts to even sign a bill or veto one?  Can he make a decision?  So far, his track record says he can’t even show up for a vote.  If I were Hillary, I would slam him with this.  

CHANGE
I am so sick about hearing “Change” I could throw up, of course I could probably throw up anyway, so maybe it isn’t “Change”.  AJ Strata has a great posting about “change” today.   I don’t want change.  I like things just the way they are.  I’m beginning to think CHANGE is just another way to bash George W. Bush and way for Mitt Romney to flip and flop – yet again!  If Obama is so interested in change, why isn’t he admitting that his NH Chair is a registered Lobbyest.
Fact Check is doing a little work on Obama.
Riel World View and Obama’s lobby problem
Is Obama buying votes in NH?

THE IOWA CURSE
Read Susan Estrich’s RCP column today.
“…Indeed, and he should. But first, he is going to face questions that go beyond his message of hope and unity and change and focus instead on his record as a state senator in Illinois and a member of the U.S. Senate. Why all those "present" votes? What issues was he avoiding? Why? What are his accomplishments? Where did he lead? What has he done? What makes him ready not simply to win Iowa, but to lead the country in dangerous times when any hint that he is naive, not tough enough, not ready for a world where we face evil, becomes the kiss of death.

No one should take away from Barack Obama the historic importance of his victory in this state that has long been criticized by minority Democrats for being too white for the prominence it gets in a party that depends on African Americans as its most loyal constituents. To state the obvious, Barack Obama won Iowa because he won the white vote, and that will help him among minority voters in states like South Carolina who were waiting to see if the young senator could appeal to white voters before deciding to cast their own votes with him.

As I've said from the beginning, and maybe it's just Pollyanna but I don't think so, if Hillary can't beat Obama, she shouldn't be the nominee; if he can beat her, he should be. In either case, they'll be stronger candidates for having gone through the process, although it might not feel that way today on the Clinton bus. But it's too early for the Obama folks to be picking out offices in the West Wing….”

YOUTHFUL VOTERS
Time has already done a break-down of the numbers of under 25 who caucused for Obama.
“…According to surveys of voters entering the caucuses, young voters preferred Obama over the next-closest competitor by more than 4 to 1. This suggests that the under-25 set — typically among the most elusive voters in all of politics — gave the Illinois Senator a net gain of some 17,000 votes; Obama finished roughly 20,000 votes ahead of former Senator John Edwards and Sen. Hillary Clinton….”

My question:  How many other states allow out of state college students to register to vote without residential requirements.  Then, how many other states allow high school students who are age 17 to vote?  

WAS IT ETHICAL?
What Barack Obama did in Iowa was legal.  There is no doubt about that one. He was courting students at schools where only 13% of the students were actually from Iowa.  It is legal, but in many ways it is also cheating. It is manipulative.
“…Although out-of-state college students in Iowa can legally return to caucus in the city where their schools are located according to the Iowa secretary of state, Obama's opponents challenged the spirit of his tactics. "I was deeply disappointed to read today about the Obama campaign's attempt to recruit thousands of out-of-state residents to come to Iowa for the caucuses," said Julie Andreeff Jensen, Dodd's Iowa campaign director, in a statement released Dec. 1. "That may be the way politics is played in Chicago, but not in Iowa." At a campaign stop in Clear Lake, Iowa, Clinton said the Jan. 3 caucus "is a process for Iowans. This needs to be all about Iowa, and people who live here, people who pay taxes here." David Yepsen, a columnist for The Des Moines Register, wrote in a column that the Jan. 3 caucuses should instead be called "the Illinois caucuses," referring to Obama's courting of out-of-state students. Although other campaigns on both sides of the political spectrum were admittedly recruiting out-of-state college students to caucus, Yepsen said Obama's attempt to get out-of-state students to return for the caucuses "was unprecedented." "No presidential campaign in memory has ever made such a large, open attempt to encourage students from another state to participate in Iowa's caucuses," Yepsen wrote.But soon after chiding Obama for encouraging out-of-state students to caucus, both the Clinton and Dodd campaigns revised their original positions and now support the rights of out-of-state students to caucus….”

There is something extremely manipulative of the move.  It also makes one wonder why both Clinton and Dodd retracted their previous positions, unless they were afraid of being called racist.  This brings up another question.  Are people afraid to challenge Barack Obama because they are afraid of being tarred with the “Racist” epitaph?

Even conservative bloggers, who would be on the bandwagon to expose Barack Obama, are afraid to do so, I fear, for being called Racist.  Funny isn’t it?  Maybe we’ve grown up enough as a nation to elect a person of a race other than “white” to the most important job in the world.  The big problem is we’ve not over-come enough of our racism and guilt over previous racism to treat that person as we would anyone else.  I truly think Barack Obama is getting a break because of his race.  If we aren’t giving Hillary Clinton a break over her gender, then there is no way this man deserves a pass because of his race.

The bottom line here? If Barack Obama had not manipulated the situation to the point where what he did was still legal, but the ethics of the situation reek, John Edwards would probably have won in Iowa.  There is no ground-swell for Obama, just slick political maneuvering that out slicks the slickest of them all.  I don’t see how this is good for the country.  I do think, though, if his opponents get up enough courage to go negative against him, there’s a heck of a lot they can expose.  The problem, though, is Barack Obama is such a cry-baby and so immature, no one is allowed to touch him.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary's Thoughts, 123beta, Adam's Blog, Right Truth, Shadowscope, Big Dog's Weblog, The Amboy Times, Cao's Blog, Conservative Cat, Nuke's, The World According to Carl, Global American Discourse, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, and Stageleft, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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