Commentary and Analysis: The 2008 Presidential Primaries

Karl Rove Sen. Barack Obama Sen. Hillary Clinton

Bamboozling the American electorate again

Revised and updated July 2, 2008

(Note: Printing out in PDF format is recommended.)

Evidence of a covert campaign to undermine the presidential primaries is rife, so it's curious that many within both the Democratic and Republican parties have ignored the actual elephant in the room this year. That would be Karl Rove, the G.O.P.'s longtime political strategist. Accused of rigging the two previous presidential elections, this master of deceit would have us believe he's gone off to write op-eds and give lectures on college campuses.

Not so. According to an article in Time magazine last November, Republicans were organized in several states to throw their weight behind frontrunner Senator Hillary Clinton's principle rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Barack Obama. While Rove's name isn't mentioned in the story, several former fundraisers and strategists for President Bush are identified. With the help of Wall Street investment firms, these gentlemen helped flush Obama's coffers with cash early on in the race, something the conservative deep pockets had not done for any candidate in their own party. With receipts topping $100 million in 2007, the freshman senator achieved a remarkable feat, given he only first appeared on the national scene in 2004. In fact, the vast majority of Americans did not even hear of him until 2006.

To expedite the Rove strategy, a website and discussion forum called Republicans for Obama formed in 2006. The executive director of New Hampshire's Republican Party, Stephen DeMaura, later established “Stop Hillary Clinton (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary)” on Facebook. At the same time, the Obama camp launched its own initiative targeted at Republican primary voters called "Be a Democrat For a Day". The campaign included a video that was circulated in Florida, Nevada, Vermont and elsewhere explaining the process of switching parties for the election. In addition, many states nowadays hold open primaries, allowing citizens to vote for any candidate, regardless of their party affiliation. In Nebraska, the mayor of Omaha publicly rallied Republicans and Independents to caucus for Obama on February 9th. In Pennsylvania, Time reported on March 19th that Obama was running radio ads in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia asking Republicans to register as Democrats and then vote for him in the state's April 22nd primary.

The tactic, called crossover voting, allowed Obama to open up an unsurmountable lead in pledged delegates. Republicans for Obama was certainly not bashful in making its case in an email appeal linked to its home page before the March 4th contests. "Since Texas has an open primary," the appeal read, "Republicans and Independents should sign in at their polling place and request a Democratic ballot. They should then vote for Barack Obama... Just think, no more Clintons in the White House." Then there was Iowa, which held the nation's first caucus on January 3rd. Here G.O.P. winner Mike Huckabee received just half as many votes as Clinton, who finished third behind Obama and John Edwards.

Of the 17 states holding open primaries, Obama won 13 of them. And an analysis of the caucus results to date shows that a disproportionate sum of delegates has been awarded to Obama, apparently by design of the Democratic National Committee. Thousands of irregularities and formal complaints of cheating have yet to be investigated by the the DNC. Oddly, red states - i.e. those who normally vote Republican in the general election - have been allowed to exercise undue influence on the process, a quirk that dovetailed nicely with G.O.P. strategy to knock Clinton out of the running before November. Obama's 13,700 vote margin in the Nebraska caucus, for instance, resutled in a net gain of 8 pledged delegates, whereas Clinton accumulated only 9 more delegates from her whopping 204,000 vote victory in Ohio's primary. In Texas, which holds both a primary and caucus, Obama gained 5 more pledged delegates than Clinton, despite the fact that she won the primary by a 100,000 vote margin. (Her campaign received over 2,000 complaints from supporters who were deterred from voting or told their caucus had been cancelled.) And although Clinton won the Nevada caucus, the Obama camp managed to finagle more pledged delegates at the state convention held after the vote.

Such discrepancies certainly bring into context what Time meant when it titled its November story "Obama's red state appeal." Even with the full compliment of election-scamming tools available to them - phone bank sabotage, fake polling data, swiftboating, waitlisting, electronic voting equipment, Norman Hsu, etc. - G.O.P. operatives would be hard pressed to eclipse Clinton in a general election. By the end of 2007, she held a commanding lead in public opinion polls and boasted a large campaign war chest of her own. Thus, all the vote-rigging tricks known to man wouldn't make much difference if the contest in November weren't close, and in her case, it likely wouldn't be. Several influential Republicans admitted as much in a February 11th story for Politico. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, also held in February, a single banner strung over the exhibits hall seemed to encapsulate the strategy of the Republican Party for the 2008 primaries . It read "Anybody but Hillary".

On June 4th, that sentiment became reality when Clinton acquiesced to pressure her own party and announced she would both supsend her campaign and endorse Obama. Her supporters angrily denounced the strong-arm tactics, claiming the DNC was conspiring with the Obama campaign to subvert the nominating process. The New York senator had surged towards the end of the primary season, winning 9 out of 13 states, and looked to have a real chance of victory at the convention in Denver. By contrast, Obama's support was teetering in the wake of revelations about his long relationship with Pastor Jeremiah Wright of Trinity Church, as well as his connection to convicted Chicago political fixer Tony Rezko and the Abramoff-like circle of influence peddlers that seemed to surround the Illinois senator.

Yet the issue of electability appeared to be the last thing on the minds of Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other Democratic Party leaders. Citing the need for unity, DNC Chairman Dean declared Obama the official nominee on June 3rd based on the input of superdelegates, a group of nearly 800 elected leaders and party officials who normally don't vote until the convention. (That's why they're called delegates.) Beginning on June 4th, the Obama campaign assumed control over the party apparatus and treasury, and much to the chagrin of Clinton activists, began contacting her donors for contributions and other support.

For the first time in U.S. history, a winning candidate had been forced out of the race by means other than a bullet to the head.

Presidential Race or Next American Idol

Even as the fictional presumptive Democratic nominee, Obama remains a relatively unknown quantity to most voters. The author of the November Time article, Jay Newton-Small, offered the following explanation to account for the love affair G.O.P. rank and file activists claim they're having with an African American senator on the other side of the aisle. "It seems a lot of Republicans took to heart Obama's statement in his rousing speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that 'there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America.'"

Is she kidding? The magazine National Journal claims Senator Obama's voting record is the most liberal in Washington. Not everyone agrees with that assessment by a long shot - for starters, he supported the controversial 2005 Cheney energy bill - but it's nevertheless hard to picture the voting pattern Newton-Small implies: Nixon - Ford - Reagan - Bush - Dole - Bush - Obama. Other journalists advance the equally suspect position that Senator Clinton, the first-ever female frontrunner for president, represents the past.

By now it's old news that the mass media dived head first into this primary election with the intention of crowning Obama the Democratic nominee. Last December, when his rival was commanding that huge lead in the national polls, political analysts and professional strategists retained by CNN and other broadcast networks began hammering across the notion that "the voters don't like her". Using the branding techniques of commercial product marketers, adjectives like "divisive", "polarizing", and "untrustworthy" have been repeated over and over in connection to Clinton in the same manner that "biological warfare" and "weapons of mass destruction" were disseminated in the lead-up to the Iraq War. In the run-up to the Indiana-North Carolina primaries on May 6th, she was labeled a "panderer" across the media spectrum. And beginning in New Hampshire, the senator from New York was roundly derided as the probable loser before each election.

It turns out, much of this pejorative terminology traces back to a cadre of right-wing, neoconservative ideologues who keep the studio seats warm at Fox News Channel. "There is no candidate on record, a front-runner for a party's nomination, who has entered the primary season with negatives as high as she has," Rove told Reuters last August. He and his cohorts have made this argument against Clinton for years, even after she was re-elected to the U.S. Senate by two-thirds of New York voters in 2006. Under investigation by Congress for his role in the firings of nine U.S. Attorneys last year, Rove was hired by Newsweek to write op-eds on the presidential election. In February, he began appearing on Fox as an election analyst.

Throughout the primaries, Obama made liberal use of Rove's "high negatives" comment in press interviews whenever discussing Clinton. His often bitter criticism of her, along with other "Washington insiders", who he says want to "boil and stew all the hope out of him", represents a staple of his core political message. (Ironically, many of those same insiders are the ones who have boiled and stewed all the hope out of Clinton's presidential campaign.) The other half of the stump speech, known as the I'm-a-uniter-not-a-divider pitch, is reminiscent of the Bush 2000 campaign, which Rove managed. And one of Obama's speechwriters, Ben Rhodes, is the brother of Fox News VP David Rhodes, according to Marisa Guthrie of BC Beat. You may recall that on election night in November 2000, it was Fox that called Florida for Bush, even though the other networks declared Gore the winner based on the exit polls. How Fox knew the polls were wrong in advance of the votes being counted has never been explained.

The G.O.P. links to Obama don't end there, either. The Times of London reported on March 2nd that Obama had interviewed conservative Republican lawmakers Senators Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar for key positions in a future cabinet. "Senior advisers confirmed that Hagel, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and one of McCain’s closest friends in the Senate, was considered an ideal candidate for defence secretary." the story revealed. "Some regard the outspoken Republican as a possible vice-presidential nominee although that might be regarded as a 'stretch'." Lugar, who placed Obama's name on his nuclear non-proliferation bill two years ago, is being evaluated as a potential secretary of state.

Although Obama says he has always opposed the Iraq War, he is linked to Bush Administration policy there through his principle political benefactor in Chicago, Tony Rezko. Rezko received a contract to build a power plant in Iraq through a college chum appointed as the new Minister of Electricity in 2003. Like other Iraqi exiles recruited for posts by Coalition Provisional Authority Administrator L. Paul Bremmer, Aiham Alsammarae absconded hundreds of millions of dollars as part of a crime spree dubbed "The Mother of all Heists" by 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft. Currently wanted by Interpol (but apparently not the U.S. Government), Alsammarae lives in Illinois, where he has donated several times to Obama's presidential campaign. (See below for more on Obama's Rezko/Iraq connections.)

Meanwhile, presumptive G.O.P. nominee John McCain still has to be confirmed at his own convention in September. Interestingly, this gathering takes place after the Democratic meeting. Conservatives are unhappy with McCain, who they claim is too liberal, so it wouldn't be a stretch to speculate on the possiblity of a challenge being proffered before the first ballot is held. Curiously, the candidate's fundraising fortunes continued to flounder until April, when he struck an arrangement that generally gives the Republican National Committee the bulk of his receipts at dinner fundraisers. It's possible that Rove may be angling to disqualify him on grounds of poor health, because he was born outside the United States, or by employing some other ruse. Under such a scenario, neoconservatives could then field an alternative ticket with closer ideological roots to the Bush Administration. No hard evidence has emerged, however, to support this .

On the Democratic side, in addition to crossover voting to cancel her out, the Clinton camp has had to contend with both the mass media lovefest and an internet marketing boananza that's allowed her rival to gain an intractable foothold among voters under thirty. In the space of a year's time, the persona that is Barack Obama has barnstormed cyberspace, heralded as something akin to the Starbucks equivalent of Gandhi. A steady stream of free videos touting the candidate's rock star status has appeared on You-Tube since 2007, including the professionally produced "Obama Girl" clip. This trendy visual feast features a bikini-clad actress gyrating her bottom as she lip-synchs lyrics of veneration to the candidate.

Yet even a cursory review of Obama's actual record as a legislator does not bear out the hype surrounding him. During an MSNBC interview in February, Austin State Senator Kirk Watson was unable to list a single accomplishment of the candidate he had just endorsed. A week later, a Q and A session with a focus group for the Fox program Hannity and Colmes uncovered the same knowlege gap. (A CNN focus group yielded similar results in late April.) None of those voters supporting Obama could identify any past achievement. It was Obama's present-day venture that fascinated them, the historic nature of his quest to become the country's first African-American president, along with his inspirational oratory.

In addition to the merchandising angle, nobody would have predicted a few years ago that progressive journalists would join in an unholy alliance with Fox News Channel to promote a politician with such a shadowy proximity group. Yet here we are. Ari Berman, a writer at The Nation, was seen in March popping up on Fox programs he and his staff once regarded as 24/7 campaign commercials for the Republican Party. And editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel regularly used CNN to promote Obama's allegedly squeaky clean credentials in April and May, claiming he gets no support from lobbyists or corporate special interest groups. Although the assertion has been widely debunked by the Center for Responsive Politics' opensecrets.org website, factcheck.org, and an article in the Boston Globe, CNN's "best political team on television" never challenged Vanden Heuvel on her statement. (The cable channel even ran a clip of Obama making the false claim for several days preceeding the Pennsylvania primary.)

Speaking of special interests, the recent spike in oil prices has been traced to speculation by companies that reside on Obama's list of top campaign contributors. Oil exchanges like Nymex in New York and the ICE Futures in London are nowadays holding those oil barrels over a barrel using the device of oil futures contracts (A third exchange, the Dubai Mercantile Exchange is an offshoot of Nymex.) All these entities are operated by investment banks, principally Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley. (UBS Securities is also affiliated with ICE.) These four key players in the manipulation scheme belong to an elite group known as Obama's top 15 donors. Goldman Sachs comes in at number one, with $571,000 in contributions.

Suddenly the slogan "Change we can believe in" takes on a whole new, darker and slightly sinister spin, like that picture Dorian Gray kept locked in his closet.

And we're just getting warmed up, too. In February, the New York Times reported that two years ago Obama watered down legislation that would have required nuclear giant Exelon to disclose its radiation leaks to the public. His efforts were apparently rewarded, because Exelon employees and executives joined the ranks of major Obama contributors in 2008. (The company was his fourth largest donor in 2006.)

The article read, in part, “'Senator Obama’s staff was sending us copies of the bill to review, and we could see it weakening with each successive draft,' said Joe Cosgrove, a park district director in Will County, Ill., where low-level radioactive runoff had turned up in groundwater. 'The teeth were just taken out of it.'” But if the locals are worrying about a potential Obama presidency, the left wing of the Democratic Party sure isn't losing any sleep over the prospect. The MoveOn.org activists who helped vault Obama ahead of Clinton also seem unphased that their candidate, who chairs a senate subcommittee on Europe, has yet to hold a single hearing on NATO's failure to deploy troops to Darfur or address the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

(Note: If Obama supporter Bruce Springsteen or anyone else would like to peruse a little background material on the senator's time in Washington, the New York Times published an interesting piece on March 9th. An article probing his Chicago years was published in the same newspaper on May 11th. The Chicago Tribune has published an in-depth report about his time in the Illinois legislature, while Newsweek offers a comparison of the voting records of Obama and Clinton.)

But why get depressed over the facts when you can be lauding the Illinois senator as the Second Coming? In a blog posted on her website the morning after the Iowa Caucus, liberal mouthpiece Adrianna Huffington naturally didn't offer any specifics on the man who was the answer to all our prayers. Instead, she spent the bulk of her remarks castigating Bill Clinton, who she claimed had conducted himself in an interview as "arrogant and entitled, dismissive and fear-mongering."

Huffington was one of several politicos swindled by the California recall referendum in 2002. In that episode, a Democratic governor was pitched from office shortly after being re-elected when Enron's Ken Lay promoted Hollywood action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger as an alternative. The coup catapulted the state's old guard of Reaganites out of mothballs and back to power in this normally Democratic-leaning state. Candidate Huffington dropped out of the race a few days before the election, conceding the entire affair had been a set-up to divide the vote.

That she would knowingly allow herself to be bamboozled a second time six years later is astonishing. With a few clicks of a mouse, she might have learned that former Speaker Dennis Hastert and the Illinois G.O.P. fielded an ill-qualified, non-state resident named Alan Keyes to run against Obama for the U.S. senate in 2004. Keyes replaced Jack Ryan, the candidate who officially won the G.O.P. primary, after Ryan was embarrassed by Obama campaign manager David Axelrod in an alleged sex scandal involving his ex-wife, actress Jeri Ryan. (Jeri played "Seven of Nine" in the television series Star Trek Voyager.) Not surprisingly, the charge against Ryan was never corroborated. Bible-thumping, small-time Maryland politician Keyes went on to pick up a staggering 27 percent of the vote. In effect, the Republicans handed Obama his senate seat on a silver platter.

Slumming it With Tony Rezko

As a "civil rights attorney", the presidential hopeful represented Rezko in public housing deals managed with a partner company owned by Allison Davis, Obama's boss. Describing one project to benefit low-income seniors, the Chicago Sun-Times explained that "In addition to the development fees, a separate Davis-owned company stood to make another $900,000 through federal tax credits." The article described slumlike conditions in the apartments that included no heat, leading the City of Chicago to sue the partnership in 1994 for contract violations. Obama defended the landlords in court.

Later, as a state senator, he wrote endorsement letters on behalf of Rezko to government agencies allocating funds to build other housing complexes. According to an expose published June 27th in the Boston Globe, "Rezko's company used subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,000 apartments, mostly in and around Obama's district, then refused to manage the units, leaving the buildings to decay to the point where many no longer were habitable." In a similar vain, Edward McClelland, writing for Salon.com, explained that "Rezko, after all, built part of his fortune by exploiting the black community that Obama had served in the state senate, and by milking government programs meant to benefit black-owned businesses."

The Globe story continues, "Grove Parc [one of the projects] and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters," the article stated. "Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama's constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted... 'No one should have to live like this, and no one did anything about it,' said Cynthia Ashley, who has lived at Grove Parc since 1994."

Valerie Jarrett, a senior staffmember for the Obama presidential campaign, is the property manager for Grove Parc. In fact, the Globe discovered that six prominent developers associated with the tenement schemes - including Jarrett, Davis and Rezko collectively donated more than $175,000 to Obama's campaigns through the years and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors.

After Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate, he bought a $2 million Georgian-revival home in Chicago's historic Kenwood neighborhood with Rezko's help. Rezko, who was under investigation by federal authorities at the time, acquired a large side yard for $625,000. Obama and his wife Michelle then bought the adjacent parcel that included the mansion, paying $300,000 less than the asking price. The Chicago Tribune reported the details of this unusual arrangement in November 2006.

Iraqi War Profiteers Get Warm Reception

Although no laws were broken in the transaction (at least, none that we know of), the New York Times reported that the deal may have been an attempt by Rezko to shield assets from creditors in several lawsuits. Even more hair-raising, the developer - who was in bankruptcy proceedings at the time - received a $3.5 million loan in April, 2005 from a longtime business associate, Nadhmi Auchi, a London-based Iraqi exile and one of the world's richest men, according to Forbes. The Pentagon claims Auchi is a former moneyman for Saddam Hussein, the Sun-Times reports.

According to The Times of London, "Mr. Auchi was convicted of corruption, given a suspended sentence and fined £1.4 million in France in 2003 for his part in the Elf affair, described as the biggest political and corporate scandal in post-war Europe." Rezko and Auchi are current partners in a major 62-acre land development in Riverside Park in Chicago. The Times also reported on February 26th that Auchi lent Rezko more money shortly before the purchase of the Obama property. "Under a Loan Forgiveness Agreement described in court, Mr. Auchi lent Mr. Rezko $3.5 million in April 2005 and $11 million in September 2005, as well as the $3.5 million transferred in April 2007."

Obama's unusual mortgage lender visited Chicago in 2004. A college chum of Rezko's, Auchi got his visa with the help of Obama's senate office, even though convicted felons are prohibited from entering the United States. Apparently the Bush Administration had no objection and a reception held in the felon's honor was attended by both Rezko and Emil Jones, president of the Illinois state senate. Jones was a pivotal player in Obama's 2004 U.S. senate bid, according to a CNN report. Obama himself attended the Auchi gathering, held at the posh Four Seasons, but says he doesn't recall meeting the man and was at the hotel on other business. Later a prosecution witness at the Rezko trial in Chicago would testify that Obama met Auchi during a party at Rezko's home April 3, 2004.

Interestingly, Rezko's name had never come up in the national press coverage of Obama's presidential candidacy until Clinton brought the relationship to light during the South Carolina debate in January of this year. Obama responsded to her accusation of going to bat for a slumlord as amounting to no more that "five billable hours" of law work at his firm. When the matter of the home purchase was revealed on nightly newscasts a few days later, he suggested the joint venture with Rezko was a "boneheaded" mistake. Obama continues to insist he's "never done any favors" for his longtime campaign supporter.

The sheer volume of election contributions from Rezko and his associates over the years has lead Obama to donate some of the money from his presidential campaign to charity. Initially, the Sun-Times put the figure of tainted cash at $168,000. In February, the Obama camp agreed to surrender about half that amount, but only as an "abundance of caution", a senior staffer said. However, after NBC Nightly News broadcast a story about the finances, the entire sum was donated. On March 14th, the campaign announced it would surrender another $100,000 when ABC News that uncovered more contributions linked to Rezko associates. According to the Los Angeles Times, Obama's various campaigns over the years have been financed in part using "straw donors", individuals who take money from other sources and contribute it to the candidate under their own names. (Not among those filtering ill-gotten cash, billionaire investor George Soros and four family members contributed an impressive $60,000 to support Obama's senate bid. Soros met Obama just two months earlier.)

And the skeletons continue piling up in the closet. Another Iraqi ex-patriot connected to Obama, Aiham Alsammarae posted more than $2.7 million in property as collateral to help spring Tony Rezko from jail in April, according to a story in the Sun-Times. This was an odd development, since Alsammarae is a fugitive wanted by Interpol. He had earlier been charged in the theft of $650 million in Iraqi reconstruction funds, but claims to have been exonerated in that case. On March 17, 2008, Newsweek reported that Alsammarae'a son sent several faxes to Obama's office in Washington back in 2006, complaining that his father was being unjustly held in a Baghdad jail.

In December of that same year, Alsammarae escaped. Regarding this incident, the New York Times reported that "Iraqi officials initially blamed the Americans and later claimed that a private security detail used by Mr. Alsammarae when he was a minister was responsible, saying that a fleet of S.U.V.’s filled with “Westerners” pulled up to the jail and spirited him away, perhaps with the complicity of some of his jailers." (The security firm Blackwater guarded Alsammarae during his time in government.)

The Sun-Times has quoted an Obama spokesperson as characterizing the faxes as "a routine request from a constituent." Iraq's former minister of electricity, however, boasted that he escaped 'the Chicago way'", according to the New York Times. From the luxury of his compound in Illinois, Alsammarae has donated online to the candidate in January, February and March of this year. The Sun-Tmes recently verified that a warrant for his arrest remains active, but U.S. officials refused to disclose what the warrant is for.

A man of multiple talents, Alsammarae claims to have brokered a peace dialog with two Sunni militant groups in Iraq in 2005. According to the Washington Post, he said the groups, "which he identified as the Islamic Army in Iraq and the Mujaheddin Army, were willing to enter negotiations with U.S. and Iraqi officials." Alsammarae also told the Post that he lead his own predominantly Sunni political group at the time called the Iraqi National Council Front. (CNN interviewed Alsammarae in January 2006. Scroll halfway down the page to read the transcript.)

Not to be left out of the party, Rezko contracted in 2005 to build a $150-million power plant in Iraq with his friend's help, but the the agreement was later cancelled. A private blog called RezkoWatch has reported that Rezko submitted a second proposal to build a training facility for Iraqi power plant security guards in Illinois. How such business dealings might impact Obama's position on American troops stationed in Iraq, if he's elected president, has yet to be debated by the Beltway Boys, the MoveOn.org membership or the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee. (A bit of trivia: an estimated two percent of Obama supporter George Soros's hedge fund is wrapped up in Halliburton stock, one of the Iraq War's biggest beneficiaries to date. He bought into the company in early 2003 when the stock price was flat at $27 per share.)

But here's the strangest twist of all in the Rezko affair (so far): the federal prosecutor in the Chicago trial is Patrick Fitzgerald, the former special counsel in the Valerie Plame C.I.A. leak case. If you remember, a much anticipated indictment against Karl Rove never materialized in that earlier episode. Instead, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby was tried and convicted on four counts of lying under oath. (His sentence was later commuted by President Bush.) Whether Fitzgerald is delaying indictments of Chicago Gov. Blagojevich and Sen. Obama on orders from the Bush Administration is a matter of speculation. Curiously, on April 23rd, Rove's name came up when a witness testified that in 2004, G.O.P. heavyweight Robert Kjellander lobbied Rove to replace Fitzgerald in the case because a vigorous prosecution might hurt Republicans, according to a report ABC News posted on its website. That allegation may be a stretch, since Fitzgerald was the guy tapped by the Administration to handle the Plame incident.

More on the Bush/Rezko connection: Trial records have turned up a a little-known scheme in which Robert Kjellander was allegedly paid $3.1 million for consulting services by the Carlyle Group in connection with the Illinois Teachers Retirement System pension fund. If the name sounds familiar, that's because the Carlyle Group is identified in Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 911 as the high-finance firm whose investors included both the Bush and Bin Laden families at the time of the Sept. 11th tragedy. Due to the spike in Defense-related expenditures that followed the terrorist attacks, Carlyle investors made a killing of their own when the company went public in 2002.

In other Rezko trial developments, on March 10th, Obama was identified as a participant in crafting legislation to reduce the number of members on the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board from 15 to 9, according to the Sun-Times' Rezko Blog. The prosecution alleges that in 2003, the Planning Board was stacked by Rezko in order to steer contracts his way. In another development reported on the CBS News website, the government's principle witness, Stuart Levine, acknowledged in sworn testimony that Allison Davis (Obama's former boss) acted as go-between for Rezko in the shakedown of Hollywood financier Tom Rosenberg, whose film credits include "Million Dollar Baby". The producer was asked to make substantial campaign contributions in exchange for receiving a $200 million dollar contract with TRS, the state pension fund mentioned above. On June 4th, Rezko was convicted on 16 of 24 counts of influence peddling and bribery. He says he will appeal the decision, although if Sen. Obama, becomes President, he probably won't have to bother.

For more background on the Rezko/Obama relationship, read the March 2nd article in the New York Times and the investigative series in the Sun-Times. For a deeper probe into Rezko's various corporate and political connections, check out independent journalist Evelyn Pringle's three-part series.

Other scandal allegations: According to a Chicago Tribune story appearing in June 2007, Obama endorsed and appeared in campaign commercials for Alex Giannoulias, a banker who ran for Illinois state treasurer in 2006. Obama backed Giannoulias despite reports that his family-owned Broadway Bank made loans to bookmakers, prostitution rings and other crime figures. "Records show Giannoulias and his family had given more than $10,000 to Obama's campaign, which banked at Broadway," the article stated [emphasis added]. The presidential candidate also helped another controversial figure, Dorothy Tillman, in her bid for a local alderman seat. "Tillman was then under fire for her stewardship of the scandal-plagued Harold Washington Cultural Center, where contracts benefited members of her family," the Tribune reported.

Such associations and actions clearly contradict Obama's stated platform of clean politics. At the same time, they haven't prevented him from calling on Senator Clinton and her husband to release tax returns for the last several years, along with records pertaining to the former First Lady's eight-year stint in the White House. On March 19th, the National Archives published Clinton's appointment calendar. The tax returns were made public two weeks later. By contrast, CBS News reported that Obama himself had produced no documents regarding his own two terms in the state senate. "Obama's statement that he has no papers from his time in the Illinois statehouse — he left in 2004 — stands in stark contrast to the massive Clinton file stored at the National Archives: an estimated 78 million pages of documents, plus 20 million e-mail messages, packed into 36,000 boxes," according to the article.

Racism, Sexism and OutFoxing Fox News

At the same time that they've underreported Obama's numerous links to crime figures and foreign agents, all the major national broadcast networks have actively harassed Clinton for every misstatement or gaffe on the campaign trail. It was Clinton herelf , and not the American press corps, who first brought up the name of Tony Rezko during the South Carolina debate in January. However, two days later, the Today show's Matt Lauer confronted her with a photo taken in the1990s that showed the senator and President Clinton posing with Rezko at a White House social event.

Lauer offered no evidence that either husband or wife had any history with the indicted developer. And although Clinton explained that she's appeared in thousands of courtesy photos during her two decades of public life, Lauer's terse questioning and skeptical demeanor suggested a more sinister intent. This tendency to transfer onto Clinton the shortcomings of her opponent has been a pattern throughout the primary season. In February, after reporting on Obama's apparent plagiarism during a speech he gave in Wisconsin, Nightly News dug up separate video clips showing Clinton and her husband both reciting the same two-line passage from the bible. This was offered as evidence to show that Obama's use of his friend's "Just Words" speech from 2006 (without crediting the source) reflected a standard practice among politicians.

A few other examples of media bias are worth noting. On the night before the New Hampshire primary, anchor Brian Williams accompanied Obama on the campaign trail, flashing a Newsweek cover of the senator and uttering superlatives about his meteoric rise to political stardom. In fact, Williams acted like someone undergoing a spiritual epiphany. During the same broadcast, Andrea Mitchell derided the Clinton campaign as broke, desperate, and ablaze with in-fighting. She continued along these lines the following night, assuring viewers that the senator's initial three-point lead in the vote tally would eventually evaporate. It didn't.

The attempts to cast doubt on one candidate's viability while creating a bandwagon effect has ultimately formed the backdrop of most media coverage of the 2008 election coverage. Shortly before Super Tuesday, both Mitchell and Meet the Press host Tim Russert claimed that the leadership of the Democratic Party was "mad as hell" at Bill Clinton, and as a result were lining up to back the Illinois senator. No news sources were provided to corroborate this bombshell allegation. Russert went on to explain that Ted and Caroline Kennedy's recent endorsement of Obama represented a sea change in the election, adding that because Ted's brother Bobby Kennedy had been friends with Cesar Chavez (founder of the United Farmworkers), the endorsement should pave the way for Obama capturing the Latino vote.

What NBC's crack team of reporters failed to mention was that three of Bobby Kennedy's own children, as well as the son of Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers union itself had already endorsed Clinton. In Nevada, Latinos in the 60,000-strong Culinary Workers Union defied their white male leadership's endorsement of Obama and helped Clinton win the caucus there. And while the Florida primary was showing Clinton with a 15 point lead in the polls, over at CNN, fill-in anchor Jim Acosta was declaring the Obama campaign a "runaway train" after its big South Carolina victory.

Even more egregious, most of the national media (including internet news services) did not report the results of Florida's January 29th Democratic primary. Clinton beat Obama by 17 points there in a record-breaking turnout. Yet as far as the major networks were concerned, the contest never happened. On February 10th, two days before the Maryland-Virginia-D.C. primaries, CBS anchor Katy Couric joined the Clinton-bashing effort with a 60 Minutes interview of the candidate spiced with multiple questions about how the candidate would deal with losing the election. She also asked the candidate if it were true that in high school, her classmates referred to her by the nickname "Miss Frigidaire". The exchange followed an upbeat piece on Obama in which Steve Kroft virtually replicated the Brian Williams New Hampshire epiphany frame for frame. Obama was still trailing Clinton in delegates at the time CBS conducted the interviews.

To wit, if there's a runaway train in this race, it isn't either of the candidates. For the past 20 years, broadcast and print outlets have become increasingly consolidated into media chains owned by multinational corporations. As part of this merging of advertisers with their mediums, the news, entertainment and advertising divisions of major networks have become increasingly indistinguishable. For example, the NBC/MSNBC network, which has come under fire for the misogynist undertones of its cable newscasters, is owned by General Electric. For her part, correspondent Andrea Mitchell is married to former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, the man many economists blame for the meltdown on Wall Street.

Employees and executives of General Electric also contributed a bundle to Obama's campaign this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The candidate received over $206,000, making GE one of his top donors. (Some years back,Tony Rezko obtained a $10 million loan from a subsidiary, General Electric Capital Corp., for his chain of pizza restaurants, according to a Sun-Times story.) Even higher on message of hope candidate Obama's record-breaking moneybags list is Time Warner, the parent company of both CNN and Time magazine. This outfit's principals have forked over more than a quarter million dollars so far in 2008.

Despite these ties that bind, a few journalists have admitted Clinton has been treated unfairly in the course of the campaign. Back in December, Howard Kurtz published an article in the Washington Post that exposed some of the bias favoring Obama. "The Illinois senator's fundraising receives far less press attention than Clinton's," he wrote. "When the Washington Post reported last month that Obama used a political action committee to hand more than $180,000 to Democratic groups and candidates in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the suggestion that he might be buying support received no attention on the network newscasts." Fear of Flying novelist Erica Jong offers her take on the sexism angle in Hillary vs. the Patriarchy, published in the same newspaper. And Post writer Marie Cocco first reported on the mysoginist vitriol last October. She highlights some of the more memorable attacks since that time in her widely reprinted column of May 15th.

Clinton herself told the Washington Post on May 19th that she believes the hatemongering toward her has posed a far greater problem than any alleged racism exhibited towards her opponent. "The manifestation of some of the sexism that has gone on in this campaign is somehow more respectable, or at least more accepted, and . . . there should be equal rejection of the sexism and the racism when it raises its ugly head," she said. "It does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by the comments by people who are nothing but misogynists."

If she was trying to send a message to the American press corps, she might as well have been talking to the deaf. The scant attention paid to accusations of sexism has been counterbalanced by nonstop coverage of alleged racebaiting by white Americans. After Clinton's big New Hampshire win, for instance, Obama surrogates flooded the television airwaves with the argument that the state's predominantly white voters had betrayed the black candidate in the secrecy of the ballot booth. Later, when Senator Clinton made a speech tying Martin Luther King's efforts to President Johnson's signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, highlighting the role of Johnson, the Obama camp pounced on that, too. A South Carolina staff person sent out a four-page memorandum urging spokespeople to slam Clinton for disrespecting Dr. King.

If you tracked the coverage of the ensuing controversy, you would never know that it was this document that sparked the firestorm of unplesantries that followed. Before the memo surfaced on the internet, Obama insisted to reporters that neither he nor anyone on his staff had accused Clinton of any impropriety in her speech about Johnson. He said he was "baffled" by her suggestion that they were somehow involved. Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, meanwhile, went ballistic on CNN, deriding what she termed inexcusable slurs by former President Clinton. In a speech, Bill Clinton had referred to Obama as a "kid", Brazille bristled, one whose presidential bid amounted to a "fairy tale". (To be sure, he said Obama's position on the Iraq War was a fairy tale, not his candidacy.)

On the heels of the Brazile salvo, South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn claimed Bill Clintons' remarks had compelled him to renege on an earlier promise to the Democratic National committee not to endorse a candidate before his state's primary. Clyburn's incendiary race accusation succeeded in galvanizing Black voters behind Obama, who turned out in huge numbers on election day. Moreover, now that the Clintons had been condemned in the national press for "playing the race card", Obama would no longer have to worry about courting the African American demographic. Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz wrote a long piece analyzing this subject in The New Republic last Februrary.

Before the presidential primaries, Clinton had historically shied away from responding to personal attacks, whether it came from sexist Manhattan firefighters or Chris Matthews' daily disparagement of her on MSNBC's Hardball. Her campaign briefly cut off relations with NBC when another MSNBC reporter, David Schuster, said the Clintons had "pimped-out" daughter Chelsea as part of their election strategy. Over the course of several debates, however, her political reflexes sharpened to the point where no personal attack went unpunished. During a contentious April 8th radio interview, Clinton also shed her genteel image in countering NPR reporter Michele Norris's crude attempt to paint her as a candidate trying to "win ugly".

Martial Law?

Last year, President Bush may have had these ruminations at the back of his mind when he implemented National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51. This executive order allows him to suspend the constitution without prior congressional approval in the event of a major terrorist attack or other “decapitating” incident against the United States. According to the language in the directive, the attack need not take place inside the country.  The directive also him to assign his homeland security assistant - a low-level position exempt from senate confirmation - to administer what has been dubbed an Enduring Constitutional Government.  (Here’s the text of the directive.)

Even if Clinton fades from the picture and an Obama/McCain matchup looms in November, the martial law scenario might still unfold. Were the majority of Americans to become disenchanted with or remain uninspired by either candidate option, President Bush could potentially pull off a coup de tat without starting a civil war. After all, the Democratic Party managed to do it in June with relatively little pushback from the electorate. At least, so far...

Delegates and the Democratic National Convention

In March, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had warned that "things will be done" to make sure a nominee was named before the convention. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested that "the will of the people" should determine the nominee, but later backed way from that sentiment as Clinton surged in the popular vote, eventually beating Obama by nearly 300,000 votes, according to an ABC News tally. In late May, Pelosi announced she would intervene in the nomination battle if no clear winner had emerged after the last primaries on June 3rd. Chairman Dean whined and whimpered throughout the primary season about wanting a nominee decided before the convention, and on an almost weekly basis announced different deadlines for the superdelegates to inform him of their decision. (See their various statements.) The leadership succeeded in getting a slew of these folks to endorse Obama on June 3rd, the day of the last primaries, enough to declare him over the top.

Clinton had other ideas about how the nominating process should proceed. After picking up West Virginia by 41 points, Kentucky and Puerto Rico by 35 points, and South Dakota by 12 points, she announced in her victory speech June 3rd that she wasn't backing down. After all, the superdelegates cannot officially vote until the convention, which made Obama's depiction as the presumptive nominee rather presumptious. She reiterated her intention to forge ahead during an interview published by the Associated Press the next morning. It should have come as no surprise to Howard Dean and the DNC, since her campaign had already said it would challenge a May 31st decision by the rules and bylaws committee to award Obama delegates from Michigan which he had not earned.

By the afternoon of June 4th, Clinton suddenly reversed herself, accouncing that she would suspend her campaign and endorse Obama. The details of how the concession was wrung out of her are largely unknown, but what's undeniable is that it came on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Even so, the pundits continued to pummel her on the grounds that she was not being "gracious in defeat". CNN legal expert Jeffrey Toobin accused her of suffering from "deranged narcissism" by clinging to her presidential hopes. Later, New York Rep. Charles Rangel, who chairs the Ways and Means Committee, told Face the Nation that he himself was instrumental in browbeating the candidate into submission. After sending out an email to millions of donors, she formally suspended her campaign on Saturday, June 7th with a speech long in praise for her opponent, whom she endorsed with a smile.

Only those closest to Clinton know what's going through her mind right now. Many pundits and journalists had previously raised the prospect of violence at the Denver gathering should the nomination not be decided beforehand. Both CNN and Fox were already using this "there will be blood" scenario in their election-reporting title graphics on the night of the Texas/Ohio primaries. On May 23rd, former sixties radical and California state assemblyman Tom Hayden warned on NPR's All things Considered, “If there were the theft of a nomination, if that was the perception of the Obama supporters, then probably there would be a ‘68 scenario.” Hayden himself first achieved national prominence as an instigator of the Chicago convention riot in 1968.

Yet not everyone in the media shares the view that Clinton was trying to "steal" Obama's nomination or fracture the Democratic Party by simply running for President. Sarah Churchwell of the Independent (U.K.) wrote on May 8th,"A similar argument was advanced in 2000, pressuring Gore to concede the presidency to Bush, or risk a 'constitutional crisis' – American code for 'rip the country apart'. He was told he couldn't win, that the people had spoken, that he should concede graciously and let the system work – the one the Republicans were busy rigging. So he conceded." Churchwell adds, "That turned out well, didn't it?"

Eric Boehlert of Media Matters posted a commentary examining close primary contests in years past and found that the calls for Clinton to withdraw are unprecedented in U.S. history. Senator Edward Kennedy was trailing Jimmy Carter by over 600 delegates in 1980, for instance, but no one told him he had to drop out before the convention. In 1984, the first year superdelegates got to vote, Rev. Jesse Jackson received thunderous applause at the San Francisco convention whenever he uttered his slogan, "This is a convention, not a coronation."

The disparity in treatment for the woman candidate in 2008 has since spurred the formation of dozens of pro-Clinton advocacy groups, many listed at the websites JustSayNoDeal.com and Nobamanetwork.com. Among the new entities are Operation Turndown, Women for Fair Politics, PUMA PAC (Party Unity My Ass!) and WomenCount PAC, which ran $250,000 worth of newspaper ads on Clinton's behalf in May. According to Scranton, Pennsylvania talk show host Steve Corbett, " Operation Turndown'lives in the heart of anyone who sees this elegant political hustle for what it is – a dangerous maneuver orchestrated by the party elite to take care of themselves at everybody else’s expense." Many of the New York senator's backers say they will vote for McCain in November if she's not on the ballot.

As stated above, on May 31st, the disputed January primary elections in Florida and Michigan were resolved by the DNC, but not to satisfaction of many Democrats. The delegations of both states were restored at a meeting of the rules and bylaws committee , but only at half strength as punishment for holding their elections prior to Feb. 5th. (Iowa and New Hampshire also violated the rules by moving up there elections but were not penalized.) In addition, the rules committee assigned Obama a genereous allotment of Michigan's pledged delegates (nearly half of them), even though no one actually voted for him during the primary and he later opposed a re-do election. Clinton won 55 percent of the votes cast in Michigan on January 15th. The rest were divided between Dodd, Kucinich, Gravel and the category of Uncommitted (Obama, Biden, Edwards, Richardson).

In Florida, Clinton won 50 percent of Florida's popular vote, Obama 33 percent, and John Edwards 16 percent. Many Floridians were outraged by their poor treatment at the hands of the DNC, some forming their own dissident groups to oppose the stripping of delegates and bussing to the May 31st meeting to protest. Back in August 2007, state party officials explained to the rules committee that Florida's Republican-controlled legislature moved up the primary date over their objections, and for that reason Democrats in the state should not be penalized. A December 17th article in The Nation explored the absurdity of the conflict, while investigative journalist Wayne Barrett published a detailed analysis of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that led both state legislatures to move up their primary dates. By many accounts, Clinton was expected in advance to win both states, leading to speculation that the entire fiasco was fabricated in a bipartisan attempt by party officials to cripple her momentum going into Super Tuesday (Feb. 5th).

Moreover, the loss of Michigan and Florida delegates put Obama ahead of his rival in the all-important pledged delegate count. Since withdrawing from the race, Clinton herself has kept a relatively low profile. After participating in a conference call with hundreds of delegates the week after her concession, the New York Senator was accused by media sources of having officially "released" all her delegates to the convention. That did not happen. If it had, Clinton would have effectively thrown to the wayside 16 months of 24/7 campaigning around the country and 18 million votes, more than any other primary candidate in U.S. history, including Obama.

As more information about Obama's Iraqi and Rezko connections comes to light, it's conceivable that delegates to the convention could defect by the time August rolls around. However, given the extent to which the Democratic Party leadership has rigged the process against her, even if Obama were disqualified it's likely Pelosi, Reid, Dean and their minions would maneuver to get a draft candidate like John Edwards or Al Gore nominated rather than Clinton. As a result, a growing number of Clinton supporters have urged her to run as an Independent in November.

Karl Rove must surely be pleased with how the 2008 campaign season is going so far. Anyone interested in reading an even longer opus on the subject of political chicanery than the one you've just digested might want to check out Henrik Ibsen's classic play Enemy of the People.

- Rosemary Regello editor@thecityedition.com

Note: Activated links for articles cited in this story are available only from TheCityEdition.com website. (Thanks to everyone who has sent in links to additional story sources, identified errors, posted this article on blogs or emailed it to friends.) This article is updated regularly.

Copyright 2008 TheCityEdition.com

More stories on the presidential race:

Why Obama Represents Bush's Third Term

Who is Nancy Pelosi? (PDF file)

Michael Moore Weighs In on the Primaries

Other websites with election news and commentary:

NoQuarterUSA.net

MakeThemAccountable.com