First appeared April 29, 2008

Battered by his performance among the regular folk of Pennsylvania and Ohio, Barack Obama’s campaign is working hard in North Carolina and Indiana to fight any suggestion that he is elitist.

And what better way to say “I’m not a snob” than with a car magnet, the automobile adornment of the masses.

Perfect for the back of the minivan, alongside that soccer ball and yellow ribbon, the 5-inch “Vote for Change” magnet is free to anyone who contributes $15 or more by midnight Wednesday — when the April fund-raising will be tallied and scrutinized by pundits for possible signs of weakness.

It’s a clever strategy. Everybody likes free stuff. More importantly — it’s a step up from the bumper sticker. If things don’t work out for Obama, the magnet can come right off.

Now that the roller coaster that was 2008 has come to an end, we thought it would be fun to look back at some of our most popular, thought-provoking and entertaining posts from The Streak over the past year. This post was chosen by TWI staff as one of the most memorable of 2008. ]]> http://washingtonindependent.com/23392/best-of-the-streak-obamas-magnetic-ways/feed 0 http://washingtonindependent.com/777/moving-up-the-ranks http://washingtonindependent.com/777/moving-up-the-ranks#comments Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:19:18 +0000 Holly Yeager http://www.washingtonindependent.com.php5-9.websitetestlink.com/?p=777

Lt. Gen. Ann Dunwoody (AP)

When Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced this week that President George W. Bush had nominated the U.S. military’s first woman four-star general, he was happy to tout the significance. “Women continue to achieve great success and make invaluable contributions to the defense of this nation,” Gates said. “This is an historic occasion for the Dept. of Defense.”

But Lt. Gen. Ann Dunwoody, the woman who made that history, seemed to downplay the feminist moment. “This nomination only reaffirms what I have known to be true about the military throughout my career,” she said in a statement released by the Pentagon, “… that the doors continue to open for men and women in uniform.”

Dunwoody and other successful women in the military tread carefully when it comes to talking about their place in what is still a strongly masculine institution. They are determined to see their accomplishments measured against all their peers — male and female — and usually resist anything that might be regarded as special consideration. But despite that determination to fit in, Dunwoody brings an unusual perspective to her work.

“I’m a very positive person,” Dunwoody told me in an interview just over a year ago. “I focus on all the goodness going on.” That doesn’t mean avoiding tough challenges, she explained, but rather, not loosing track of the good things that are happening. But are there a lot of other generals who focus on “all the goodness?” “That might not be the first thing out of their mouths,” she conceded with a laugh.

Dunwoody, when talking about whether men and woman lead differently, brought up a 2004 analysis of four Army divisions that had just returned from tours in Iraq. It found that most leaders had strong technical and tactical skills, but what set the best leaders apart was their interpersonal skills. The study identified what it called the “Big 12”—a set of behaviors exhibited by the officers best able to achieve operational excellence and motivate good soldiers to remain in the Army. At the top of the list: keeps cool under pressure; clearly explains missions, standards and priorities; sees the big picture, provides context and perspective.

Those are the kinds of traits that many place on the female side of the ledger. Though Dunwoody said she didn’t see it that way, “but maybe that’s because I’ve been in a green suit for so long.” She didn’t offer it as proof that women are set to zoom up the chain of command. But, rather, it suggests that if there is a “softer,” female way of doing things, that approach is increasingly valued in the military as it modernizes and also struggles to hold on to its workforce.

Following tradition, Dunwoody isn’t likely to say much until the Senate confirms her appointment as chief of Army Materiel Command, responsible for supplying the Army with all its equipment. But in the interview – conducted for a Wilson Quarterly story on women military officers – she gave plenty of clues about just what kind of four-star general she would be.

Dunwoody didn’t hesitate when asked about her own leadership style, shooting back with her Myers-Briggs personality assessment. She’s an ENFP (extraversion, intuition, feeling, perceiving), which the testing people describe as “Warmly enthusiastic and imaginative. See life as full of possibilities….Spontaneous and flexible, often rely on their ability to improvise and their verbal fluency.” Again, is that a common military type? “I would guess that only 1 percent of the Army” fits that description, she said.

“I am a people person,” Dunwoody said, adding that she likes to lead by walking around, asking soldiers, “How is that chow in the mess hall? How are the barracks?”

The fourth generation of her family to serve in the military, Dunwoody was commissioned as an officer in 1975, about the time the Women’s Army Corps was being disbanded and women were integrated into the rest of the Army. Today, women make up about 15 percent of enlisted personnel in the U.S. military, and a slightly larger portion of the officer corps, including 57 women who are three-star generals and admirals.

Dunwoody, then deputy chief of staff of the Army, described a fundamental change in the U.S. military that has scrambled long-standing rules that bar women from most combat jobs. “Before, it was a linear battlefield,” she said. “In the rear was kind of a safe haven. That is no more –- it is a blurred battlefield out there.”

Many analysts expect the experience in the Iraq war, where those blurred lines have brought many female soldiers into combat situations, to prompt a thorough review of the rules that govern what jobs women can have. “Everything is always open for study,” Dunwoody said.

She talked about the meritocracy of the military (“I truly believe that the Army promotes based on past performance and demonstrated future potential.”) while praising its commitment to diversity. She said women are helping to change the force — not because of their gender, but because they are part of a concerted effort to transform the military into a more modern, agile organization.

When she takes over a new job, Dunwoody says she likes to talk about her leadership philosophy, and about herself. For the first five years of her marriage, her husband, Craig Brotchie, was in the Air Force. This often prompted difficult decisions about what jobs to take, and where to live — even if it meant being apart. “I loved the Army, he loved the Air Force — and we loved each other,” she said. Dunwoody doesn’t have children. “Not because I didn’t want them,” she said. “But do I think I could have done this with children? I don’t know.”

Still, she says she tells her troops, “At the end of the Army, all you have is family. So don’t lose it along the way.” Dunwoody also likes to give an upfront warning about her pet peeves: bad language, overweight soldiers and people who can’t meet their physical fitness standards. “That takes a lot of guess work out of things,” she said.

Dunwoody insisted she’s “not the only compassionate person in the Army. I have worked for others.” But she’s never worked for a woman. “I’ve been coached and mentored by men my whole life,” she said. “I never worked for a female, they weren’t there.”

Yet Dunwoody is clearly thankful for the women who served before her. She also realizes that she is a role model for younger women, who are now seeing more women make their way to more senior jobs across the military. “It just helps everyone to know what the art of the possible is,” Dunwoody said, “and that they can continue to move up the ranks.”

Holly Yeager is a freelance journalist. She covered the early 2008 Democratic and Republican primaries for The Washington Independent as the site’s senior national politics reporter. Before joining TWI, she was a reporter for the Financial Times. She had also covered the Pentagon for The Hearst Newspaper chain and Defense Daily.

The first-term Illinois senator — who built his presidential campaign around the promise of a new kind of politics and launched a movement that drew in young voters, independents and Republicans — is taking control of the Democratic Party.

The shift from insurgency to establishment is only natural, as Obama tightens his grip on the Democratic nomination. But, given his post-partisan pedigree, it poses many challenges.

Obama will be forced to reckon with the party’s old guard -– fund-raisers, elected officials and organizers, including many who rallied around Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and, before that, her husband. He must also adjust his 21st-century coalition to the notion that he has become the standard-bearer for an institution sometimes too wedded to tradition. At the same time, he will face an array of liberal bloggers and activists who have grown comfortable in their criticism of the existing Democratic leadership and are still unsure of Obama’s commitment to their progressive agenda. Oh, and then there are the Republicans.

Unless Clinton ekes out an upset win — an outcome that seems even less likely following John Edwards’ endorsement Wednesday of Obama and the string of other support that has followed – Obama’s crowning moment will come in late August at the party’s convention in Denver.

"Obama will be controlling the Democratic convention," said Simon Rosenberg, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign who is president of NDN, a progressive think tank, "and the entire convention will be about nominating him and his ascension to the top of the party.”

Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, will be there, too, with a prominent role. So will Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader. But even now, while these officials hold important jobs within the party, Obama is already consolidating his power — and early strains are evident.

“We’re now going to see Sen. Obama’s insurgent campaign melding and becoming the party establishment,” Rosenberg said. “There is going to be a new Democratic Party. There is going to be an upheaval and a new order is going to emerge.”

Matt Stoller, a liberal blogger and activist, this month tallied the Obama campaign’s accomplishments in everything from voter registration and fund-raising to grass-roots organizing and use of the Internet to spread his message. Along the way, he said, “Obama has created a number of significant infrastructure pieces through his campaign, displacing traditional groups the way he promised he would by signaling the end of the old politics of division and partisanship.”

Obama’s campaign has also taken steps to discourage wealthy contributors from funding the independent groups that many expected to play a large role in the election. As The Politico’s Ben Smith reported Tuesday, Penny Pritzker, Obama’s national finance chair, told his supporters not to send checks to groups like Progressive Media USA, run by David Brock, the conservative-turned-liberal journalist, and Fund for America, led by John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff. (That may explain Brock’s apparent decision to fold the project.)

Donors and Democratic activists have been quietly debating Obama’s motives: Is he simply interested in keeping his Democratic efforts within his campaign, which is so well funded he doesn’t need outside help? Or is he, as some believe, cutting off funds to groups whose leaders — Brock and Podesta — some Obama aides view as too tightly linked to Clinton?

In either case, Pritzker’s words are the latest in Obama’s remarkably swift and complete consolidation of Democratic Party power. It’s an unprecedented seizure of control that has built him, over the course of a year, the most powerful field organization and the largest financial network in American politics, leaving many existing structures — traditional party organizations in many states, the Clintons’ long-nurtured national network — in the dust.

While Stoller sits far from that kind of traditional organization, his view is very much the same. “You know all that old-style Washington politics preventing real change? As hard as it might be to handle, in a lot of ways he means that those of us who believe in partisan hard edged combat are part of an outmoded system.”

The unsettling of those seasoned political hands may help Obama convince the many new and young voters who rallied to his cause that he is serious about change. But as they see him in new roles, negotiating with old critics and taking charge of old institutions, their support will also be tested.

Robert Eisinger, chairman of the political science department at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, said he has seen remarkable numbers of young people registering to vote for the first time as Oregon’s May 20 primary approaches. Obama drew them into the process, Eisinger said, and, “Now, he is their horse.”

As he settles in to his role as party leader, Eisinger expects Obama to reach out to groups he hasn’t dealt with before, including Democratic-leaning think tanks and interest groups. “A President Obama – and even a President McCain – knows that nothing is going to get done in the House and Senate without cultivating good ties with all wings of your own party and significant wings of the opposition party,” Eisinger said, adding that while President George W. Bush said as a candidate that he understood that principle, he hasn’t acted on it.

Eisinger said there is no guarantee the new voters that Obama has attracted will remain lifelong Democrats. “There was no shortage of Hubert Humphrey Democrats who voted for Ronald Reagan,” he said. “I don think that is something that Sen. Obama, or a future President Obama, has to worry about, if 25 years from now some of those citizens who were behind him become alienated.”

In the short-term, Eisinger doesn’t expect Obama’s supporters – both the newly engaged activists and the more passive voters – to be shaken as their candidate takes up his role as the top Democrat. “If you’re a party volunteer and you’re completely enthused about your ticket, you don’t care,” he said, while the less engaged aren’t likely to notice much of what goes on at the Democratic convention and other big party moments.

But others are less certain of the relationship that will develop between Obama and the diverse coalition that helped catapult him to this position.

Micah Sifry, a campaign finance reform activist and co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum, wrote last week, “Will the Obama movement be a real movement that pushes its leader to keep his promises? Or will it be more of a personalized movement of followers attracted to a charismatic star? Will the network talk laterally and organize pressure upward? We don’t know the full answer yet.”

Even as he cements his grip on the party apparatus and mines untapped — indeed, unimagined — sources of money, few expect Obama to become the kind of old-time party boss with the power to, say, make a phone call and get a determined, but doomed, candidate to withdraw from a hotly contested party primary. It’s the result of the changing nature of politics, the power of the Internet and the push for transparency.

“The party bosses are gone,” said Eisinger. “It’s not that the leaders don’t exist. But rather, the political culture that allows a party elder to tap a senior senator on the shoulder and say, ‘It’s time to bow out,’ is gone.”

But Obama will still be plenty powerful. As Stoller cautioned, “it’s time to think through the consequences of a party where there is a new chief with massive amounts of power….He has control of the party apparatus, the grass-roots, the money and the messaging environment. He is also, and this is fundamental, someone that millions of people believe in as a moral force. When you disagree with Obama, you are saying to these people, ‘Your favorite band sucks.’”

Interestingly, despite his consistent refusal in the past to set a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, he is telling his swing-state audience something a little different.

From The Washington Post’s preview:

Sen. John McCain will pledge today that most American troops will return home from Iraq by 2013 if he is elected president, a position that closely resembles the promises made by both of his potential Democratic rivals.

For more on the future according to McCain, check out this ad, also out Thursday. Spoiler alert: there’s a kid with a camel — and a mushroom cloud.

But a report in The Politico sheds some light on just how bad things look for some House Republicans:

Many House GOP operatives are privately predicting that the party could easily lose up to 20 seats this fall.

Combined with the 30 seats that the GOP lost in 2006, that would leave the party facing a 70-vote deficit against Democrats in the House — a state of powerlessness reminiscent of Republicans’ long wilderness years in the 1960s and ’70s.

Maybe that’s why they came up with a catchy new slogan, "The Change You Deserve."

Wait, haven’t we heard that before?

It’s nice timing for Obama — a day after Hillary Clinton trounced him in West Virginia. And the setting is good, too, as Obama tries to shore up support in a swing state loaded with the kind of Reagan Democrats who really might pay attention to what Edwards has to say. It’s also an early delivery from Obama on his campaign’s promise to work hard in Michigan, even as the state’s Democratic party tries to sort out how to handle its disputed delegates.

It’s nice timing for Edwards, too. His name was on the ballot in West Virginia, and he got 7 percent of the vote — a good moment to weigh in on the Obama/Clinton battle.

One thing that isn’t clear: will it help speed Hillary Clinton’s departure from the race?

Nancy Keenan, president of the group, said pro-choice voters were lucky to have two strong pro-choice candidates and the AP reported that NARAL’s political committee board was about evenly split between Obama and Hillary Clinton — but ultimately backed Obama unanimously.

According to the AP, NARAL officials said:

…the board decided to back Obama over Clinton because he is overwhelmingly favored to win the nomination and to heal what the organization viewed as a growing rift between black voters and white female activists that the protracted Clinton-Obama contest may have caused

That may be true, but it seems to have opened a rift in the pro-choice community.

Ellen Malcolm, president of Emily’s List, which has backed Clinton in a big way, just fired back with this statement:

I think it is tremendously disrespectful to Sen. Clinton – who held up the nomination of a FDA commissioner in order to force approval of Plan B and who spoke so eloquently during the Supreme Court nomination about the importance of protecting Roe vs. Wade – to not give her the courtesy to finish the final three weeks of the primary process. It certainly must be disconcerting for elected leaders who stand up for reproductive rights and expect the choice community will stand with them.

Whatever the motivation, Clinton is guaranteed to be the strongest loser since Reagan ‘76 or Hart ‘84, and both of those losers ended up future front-runners for future races.

What’s second prize?

"Tonight I need your help to continue this journey," Clinton said, pointing the way, once again to HillaryClinton.com.

The money issue looms large, and may be as big a factor as any other in determining just how long Clinton stays in the fight. It’s sure to come up Wednesday afternoon during a long meeting Clinton is holding in her Georgetown home with top supporters and donors.

The campaign is some $20 million in debt. There is a staff payroll to meet, vendors to pay, and, don’t forget the $11m Clinton has loaned herself. Under a little-noticed provision of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, candidates who drop out of the race aren’t allowed to raise money to pay back personal loans after their party’s convention takes place. That’s a pretty tight deadline.

Back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was a struggling presidential candidate facing questions about Gennifer Flowers, he promised a New Hampshire crowd that he would stick with them "until the last dog dies." The speech was a turning point: Bill Clinton placed second in New Hampshire, was dubbed the "Comeback Kid," and rode that wave all the way to the White House.

On Tuesday night, as Hillary Clinton celebrated her victory in West Virginia’s Democratic primary, a fan with a prime spot in the middle of the crowd held a big sign overhead that read, "until the last dog dies."

But if she was hoping for the same kind of turning point, the early signs aren’t good.

Barack Obama’s campaign was up early on Wednesday morning, announcing more superdelegate support:  Christine Schon Marques, chair of Democrats Abroad (who actually only counts as half a superdelegate), and Indiana Rep. Pete Visclosky.