Greg Davis Says Running Against Obama Won't Work

As we learned in the LA-06 and the MS-01 special elections, the strategy of tying local candidates to Barack Obama is a poor plan of action. Republican Woody Jenkins was bested by Democrat Don Cazayoux in the ruby red Sixth Congressional District of Louisiana. Travis Childers soundly defeated Republican Greg Davis in the north Mississippi special election.

In both elections the NRCC spent heavily on negative ads tying the local Democrats to Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wrpght and national Dems. This strategy not only did not work, but backfired completely. The Black voter turnout increased substantially in the special election runoffs, directly after the negative Obama ads were run. Remember that Obama was not on the ticket on the days these special elections were held. These Black voters came out to support Cazayoux and Childers.

I believe the Republicans used MS-01 and LA-06 as test labs for negative advertising against Obama and the Democratic brand. They fired all of their guns, and made note of which ones registered and which ones fired blanks. What we learned in north Mississippi is that Obama might not be so unpopular after all. We also learned that voters are smart enough to realize when their legs are being pulled. The NRCC tried to link Travis Childers to well known politicians in California, Massachusetts, and Illinois, thankfully to no avail.

Greg Davis is here to tell you that strategy will not work.

"We're going to spend more time going out there and meeting with voters and letting them know who I am, and less on the contrast ads which just didn't work," Davis says, referring to ads that tried to link Childers to presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

Both Davis and the Mississippi GOP say they realize the negative ads linking Childers to Obama and the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright didn't do the trick for conservative voters in northern Mississippi.

"The campaign this time around has to be about what Davis is-not what Childers isn't," says Cory Adair, a spokesman for the Mississippi Republican Party. "They completely hijacked the Republican platform," he says, referring to Childers' successful marketing of himself as a conservative during the special election on such issues as the second amendment, abortion, and immigration.

I love the last part of that quote. "They hijacked our brand", cries the GOP. Too bad the Davis campaign was counting on these issues to win. I never even heard a single economic proposa,l or even policy proposal for that matter, in any of Greg Davis's advertising. What solutions did he offer the working people of north Mississippi? Travis Childers had answers, Greg Davis did not.

Davis was counting on painting Childers as some pinko who was gonna take your guns, have gays on every corner, and make abortion commonplace. Once this became an election on REAL issues Greg Davis did not have a chance. To seal the deal, the once astute Republican brain trust decided to motivate the Black vote by running a smear campaign focused on Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright. Bad move, ask Greg Davis.

Howard Dean sets them straight on "Fox News Sunday"

Howard Dean is one of my favorites. He is best known for his supposed meltdown in then 2004 Dem primary. I was split between being an Edwards supporter and a Deaniac in 2004. To Democrats who have a clue about the direction of the party, Dean is the genius who brought is the much needed "50 state strategy".

Some of the big state pols and old school party insiders hate the 50 state strategy, because it diverts funds to states like Mississippi. Never mind that we are making gains that seriously threaten the Republican grip on our state. They attribute this to a negative backlash against Bush. While that is part of the reason, only a fool would deny the revitalized Dem party in the deepest of red states and not attribute a large part of the gains to the 50 state strategy.

In this interview Dean refuses to bedragged in the Wright quagmire, instead sticking to the REAL issues, a strategy that proved fruitful in the 2006 election cycle.

Dean took on the insidious Chris Wallace on Faux News Sunday. I loved this exchange.

Transcript

WALLACE: Governor, has the Reverend Wright controversy made Obama radioactive among Democratic candidates down ticket?

DEAN: First of all, I'm not going to get into the Reverend Wright at all. I think we've spent enough time on Reverend Wright.

The fact of the matter is what people are really interested in is the war, the economy and health care. And that is what the battle is. And the frank truth is that John McCain is out of step on the war, the economy and health care.

Look, the Republicans have run this...

WALLACE: But, Governor, I'll give you plenty of chance to go after McCain, and that's fair, but I'm asking you a specific question here, which is when you've got -- and it's not just there; it was in Louisiana, it was in North Carolina, it's been in Mississippi -- where they're linking Obama and Wright to their local candidates.

And in this one case in Mississippi, you had a local candidate saying, "Obama? Never heard of the guy." I mean, it indicates that he's a problem or a drag, at least in the minds of some local Democratic candidates.

DEAN: Chris, the Republicans -- for the last 30 years, the Republican book is to race bait and to use hate and divisiveness. In 2006, the American people said no to that, and I think they're going to say no to that in 2008.

It is true that the economy, the war and health care are more important to the American people. They are tired of the divisiveness of what the Republicans have done to them, and that's why the Republicans are in trouble, deep trouble.

WALLACE: Governor, are you suggesting...

DEAN: Eight more years of George Bush is not what we need.

WALLACE: Governor, are you suggesting that bringing up Jeremiah Wright is race baiting, and hate and divisive?

DEAN: Yeah, I am suggesting that kind of stuff. I think when you start bringing up candidates that have nothing to do with the issue -- when you start bringing up things that have nothing to do with the candidate and nothing to do with the issues, that's race baiting, and that's exactly what it is, just like Willie Horton was race baiting so many years ago.

I think we're going to take a -- we're going to turn the page on this stuff. I tell you, you know, there's a lot of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats on issues, but the biggest issue of all is we don't use this kind of stuff. We never have used this kind of stuff, and we're not going to start now.

America is more important than the Republican Party, and that's the lesson that the voters are about to teach the Republicans.

WALLACE: But, Governor, I've got to tell you, when I interviewed Barack Obama last week, he said he thought that the Reverend Wright issue was a legitimate political issue -- his words.

DEAN: Well, he can say whatever he wants. I'm going to say whatever I want. I'm not getting into Reverend Wright. He's caused enough trouble for our country over the last several weeks.

What I am going to say is that I think America -- the American people want a united country. For the first time in 30 years, they want us to stop hating each other. They want us to work together. And I think that's what the issue is. That's what our message is going to be.

And we're not going to get into all this stuff about divisive figures. We're just not going to do it.

Daily Journal: Childers responds

Today's Daily Journal featured an article on the embittered MS-01 congressional race. I think we all know about the ad and Rev. Wright, and have our opinions one way or another. Childers responded to the attack ad with these nuggets.


On Rev. Wright:

"The only pastors that should be relevant in this race are my pastor and the countless church leaders across North Mississippi that are the backbone of our communities," Childers said.

On Obama and Wright's relevance to Mississippi:

"But this race is not about a senator from Illinois or a pastor from Chicago," he added. "It's about the people of Mississippi. It's about right and wrong. And the way Greg Davis is running his campaign is wrong."

On the supposed Obama endorsement:

Today, Childers is releasing a new TV ad saying his family "has heard the lies and attacks linking me to politicians I don't know and have never even met." (empahisis mine)

and:

"Let me tell you what kind of endorsements we're looking for ... endorsements from the working people of North Mississippi, working families," Childers told a Memphis TV station in a story about the attack ad.

Let's show our support at Cotton Mouth for Travis Childers and change by donating to the Childers for Congress campaign.

Davis Ad Surfaces

Here's the Davis ad linking Childers to Jeremiah Wright. It's amazing how low these ad folks went.



If you want to donate to Childers' campaign, click here.

NRCC Attack Ad: Childers, Obama, and Rev. Wright

Well it was only a matter of time before the Republicans hit the panic button. With Childers being outspent 2-1 and still kicking their asses, you knew it would get ridiculous soon. Here we go with a new attack ad that is borderline insane, and deeply embarrassing for the state. With the attention the NC ad received, I would not expect this to go away soon. We now have a black-eye for the state. In the Washington Post today:

Another Republican congressional candidate thinks he can get electoral mileage out of linking his Democratic opponent to the presidential candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and the controversies around his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Barely two weeks before a special election to fill a vacant U.S. House seat, GOP nominee Greg Davis has begun airing a political attack ad featuring grainy images of Obama, his former pastor and Davis's Democratic opponent, Travis Childers, who is running an unexpectedly strong campaign in a conservative northern Mississippi district.

"Travis Childers, he took Obama's endorsement over our conservative values. Conservatives just can't trust Travis Childers," the narrator says over pictures of the candidate, Obama and the Rev. Wright.

What an embarrassment for the state. You would think with our poverty levels, the war, and the economy, we could avoid racial politics in Mississippi. But when that is one of only three pages in your playbook (GOP), I guess what else do you do?

It is time to put an end to the politics of fear. Let us make a statement to Greg Davis, the GOP, and the rest of the US that we are not putting up with scare tactics veiled as political ads any more. Let send Childers to Washington on May 13. Please donate to Childers for Congress now, time is running out.

Fox News Taken To Task By Priest Who Knew Wright And King

Hacking Christianity



Fox goes to ambush a priest supporting Obama and he turns around and schools them.

Fox would crucify Jesus Christ if he lived today.

Barack Obama Speech Transcript

In Philadelphia today, Barack Obama delivered a powerful speech on race in America. Personally, I found it very moving as did a Republican friend of mine. Senator Obama even invokes the wisdom of our own William Faulkner at one point. The news channels have been repeatedly reporting that the speech can be compared to a speech by Martin Luther King. I won't go there, but the speech is fantastic.

The speech is long so I won't post the whole thing here. But here is a link to a post on TPM

Here a couple of exerpts :

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

exerpt 2:

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

Obama's Preacher: Jeremiah Wright

Taken Entirely from Devilstower at Daily Kos:

Damn you rich! You already have your compensation.

Damn you who are well-fed! You will know hunger.

Damn you who laugh now! You will weep and grieve.

Damn you when everybody speaks well of you!

A rant from a radical preacher? Without a doubt. Someone on the Obama campaign? Well, Sen. Obama says so. That's the Scholars Translation of Luke 6:24-26, and the speaker is Jesus of Nazareth.

In the King James Version, the first part of Luke 6:24 reads "But woe unto you that are rich!" That comes off as quaint and a lot less shocking to modern ears -- not the kind of preaching that nets you space on Fox News. But Jesus meant his words to be shocking. He meant them to strike against the status quo and shake up the comfortable.

God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.

God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.

That's Jeremiah Wright.

Is the vision of a pastor standing in his pulpit shouting "God damn America" shocking? Yes. But don't mistake Wright's (or Jesus') statement for what some drunk in a bar would mean using the same phrasing. Wright isn't saying "FU America!" he's saying "these actions of America are worthy of God's condemnation." He's just saying it in a way that cuts through the Sunday morning sleepiness and makes people sit up in their pew.

From Gandhi to King, it's in the nature of spiritual leaders to grab their audiences by the throat and their nations by the short hairs. This was true at the time of the Civil War and during the Civil Rights movement. Martyrs did not become martyrs by appealing to the status quo.

Don't take this to mean that I agree with every word that Wright spoke (e.g. the United States did not create AIDS), but neither do I feel like his words require that "his church should lose it's tax exempt status" that he's a traitor, or that he's an embarrassment to his church or to Senator Obama -- all comments that have appeared on this site.

Do I think that 9/11 was the "chickens coming home to roost?" Yeah, I pretty much do. Of course the terrorists bear the personal responsibility for their actions and the deaths that resulted. But to pretend that decades of actions overseas had nothing to do with that terrible morning is far more delusional than anything said by Rev. Wright. If you jab a stick into a hornet's nest and shake it for fifty years, the hornets might do the stinging, but you can't blame only the hornets. Actions have consequences, and though we may pretend to both purity of motive and prescience about outcomes, the truth is that violence tends to generate violence in return. Or, as that radical I quoted above said "those who take up the sword, will die by the sword."

The purpose of a good sermon isn't to placate, ease, and make people comfortable. A dangerous religion isn't one that challenges people and makes them squirm. Makes them angry. A dangerous religion is one that is too amicable to what you already think, one that pats you on the head and sends you forth in assurance of your own righteousness. If you want to search for "traitors" in the pulpit, turn your eye toward those who never find anything wrong in the actions of this nation.

I understand why Senator Obama finds it necessary to distance himself from Rev. Wright. There were plenty of things in those sermons that I don't agree with, and I'm suspect many of the ideas that grate on my nerves also strike the Senator as either wrong or unsustainable politically. These days, three isolated words on the news seem far more important than context or intent. But I wish he didn't have to do so.

Because getting your personal beliefs regularly challenged, rather than reinforced, is important.

Damn You Rich At DailyKos