Germans in Berlin and Hispanics in America Seem To Like Obama... A Lot

With McCain wondering when his rotten luck will change-- I mean an oil spill stinking up the air of New Orleans on the day you're scheduled to visit that city to tout the technology that makes oil spills "impossible" could only happen to someone who God just absolutely hates-- Obama is over in Germany experiencing the kind of adulation not a single solitary American president has felt... since Bill Clinton. Hundreds of thousands of Germans turned out to celebrate what many hope will be an end of America's drift towards the kind of fascism that gripped, and ruined, their own country in the 1930s and '40s. GOP propagandists and McCain shills are doing their best to cast aspersions-- but Obama's speech exposes them for the sad, pathetic creatures they are. No one is listening... except themselves as they sit and stew in their own hatred, greed and bigotry.

McCain is having his own semi-German experience today, eating bratwurst, but we don't have to go all the way to Germany to see people embracing Obama's forward-looking message of hope-- and rejecting McCain's old school dark, negative politics, orchestrated, as it is, by Karl Rove. Before he was horsewhipped by the far right xenophobes and racists in his own party, McCain had hoped to woo Hispanic voters to the GOP with the sensible bipartisan plan written by Ted Kennedy that he signed on to. After he was taken to tasks by the anti-Hispanic end of the Republican Party McCain changed his tune and refused to back the Kennedy-McCain immigration bill. And, according to a new Pew Research survey, Hispanic voters have noticed. Although it is clear that Florida right-wing extremists, Congressmembers Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario and Lincoln Diaz-Balart will continue towing the McCain line even if it tows them down to electoral defeat in November, they are just part of a small and shrinking minority of Hispanic-Americans who support McCain.

Hispanic registered voters support Democrat Barack Obama for president over Republican John McCain by 66% to 23%, according to a nationwide survey of 2,015 Latinos conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center, from June 9 through July 13, 2008.

The presumptive Democratic nominee's strong showing in this survey represents a sharp reversal in his fortunes from the primaries, when Obama lost the Latino vote to Hillary Rodham Clinton by a nearly two-to-one ratio, giving rise to speculation in some quarters that Hispanics were disinclined to vote for a black candidate.

But in this new survey, three times as many respondents said being black would help Obama (32%) with Latino voters than said it would hurt him (11%); the majority (53%) said his race would make no difference to Latino voters.

Obama is rated favorably by 76% of Latino registered voters, making him much more popular among that voting group than McCain (44% favorable) and President Bush (27% favorable). Hillary Clinton's ratings among Latino registered voters are 73% favorable and 24% unfavorable; Obama's are 76% favorable and 17% unfavorable.

... In addition to their strong support for Obama, Latino voters have moved sharply into the Democratic camp in the past two years, reversing a pro-GOP tide that had been evident among Latinos earlier in the decade. Some 65% of Latino registered voters now say they identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, compared with just 26% who identify with or lean toward the GOP. This 39 percentage point Democratic Party identification edge is larger than it has been at any time this decade; as recently as 2006, the partisan gap was just 21 percentage points.

Keep in mind that even after 4 years of his miserable policies Bush still got nearly 40% of the Hispanic vote (2004) and two year later, despite having already started down an anti-Latino path, GOP congressional candidates got about 30% of the Hispanic vote. McCain, who once hoped to ride a wave of Hispanic crossover votes to the White House, looks like he could get just half of what Bush got!

This morning's Politico says the new survey has sent shockwaves through the McCain camp. As David Paul Kuhn points out, "Republicans had hoped that McCain’s politically risky support for immigration reform, which infuriated many conservatives, would offer a unique opportunity to bring Hispanic voters back to the party fold." Well... you can fool some of the people, some of the time but...

“That number should be very, very sobering for the McCain campaign,” said Tony Fabrizio, the pollster for 1996 Republican nominee Bob Dole. “The bottom line: Despite all of this positioning he’s taken on immigration, it’s shielded him nothing with Hispanics and it’s another point of distrust with Republicans.”

For months, other surveys have also revealed McCain’s weakness among Hispanics, with his support generally bracketed in the 20 percent to 30 percent range. The Gallup poll’s most recent report pegged McCain with 29 percent support.

But the precision of the Pew poll makes its findings especially troubling for the McCain campaign. Utilizing Spanish-speaking interviewers, who offered respondents the chance to speak in Spanish or English, Pew sampled 2,015 Latinos from June 9 to July 13. Its electoral breakdown was based on 892 registered Hispanic voters, with a margin of error of 4.4 percent.

The Pew data comes on the heels of months of McCain advertising on Hispanic television and radio in Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. On Wednesday, the Obama campaign announced its first media buy of the general election on Hispanic radio in the same states. Obama has not yet purchased advertising on Hispanic television.

“You have to understand in a way that the Republican Party is damaged among Hispanics,” said Hessy Fernandez, McCain’s spokeswoman for Hispanic media. “But at the end of day it’s the contrast between Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama.”

Obama On The Road-- Making Friends For America Again

Barack Obama with King Abdullah of Jordan

If Senator Obama's trip abroad is doing one thing, it is showing American voters back home how completely isolated and stuck in pre-9/11-- even Vietnam era-- thought McCain is. Today's NY Daily News reports another Obama political victory in Iraq. Despite massive pressure from the McBush Regime, the Iraqi leadership finally seems to have found something to unite around: Obama's plan to end the occupation of their country.

After meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and President Jalal Talabani, the Iraqis declared they like Obama's plan to pull U.S. forces from the country by 2010.

"We are hoping that in 2010 that combat troops will withdraw from Iraq," government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told reporters after the meeting in the heavily fortified Green Zone.

The announcement, aligning Iraqi leaders with his 16-month withdrawal plan, is a political coup for Obama, who went overseas after being mocked relentlessly by the GOP for never visiting Afghanistan and last going to Iraq more than 900 days ago.

Obama acknowledged U.S. military leaders have "deep concerns" about a timetable that doesn't account for changing conditions. But he reserved some wiggle room for himself.

"I retain the flexibility of anyone who, in the job of commander in chief, is constantly reassessing facts, risks and so forth," Obama told ABC News.

President Bush shifted a bit toward Obama's position last week, embracing a "general time horizon" to pull out.

But Republican nominee John McCain has not moved that far.

Yes, and he is pretty much all alone... well, all alone with the crazed extremists, the lobbyists, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman (who reports today show is less popular among American Jews than... the same Barack Obama he has been traveling to Jewish communities around the country to slam and malign. As the confused and gaffe-prone McCain stumbles from one inconsistency after another and from one complete misstatement of reality after another, it is becoming clearer and clearer that virtually no one not on the Double Talk Express thinks McCain's Iraq strategy of escalation is the way to end the war. And it isn't just the vast majority of Europeans, Chris Matthews, the Iraqi leadership, American musicians, and American Jews who like Obama. State Department employees and military personnel mobbed him in Baghdad as though he were their savior. Watch the ABC-TV report on Obama at the American Embassy:

al-Maliki Endorses Obama's Plan To End The Iraq War

On MSNBC yesterday I heard one of the GOP shills whining that the big bad librul media better give poor little John McCain equal coverage while Obama is overseas. Although the Phil Gramm and Juan Carlos Benitez scandals are plenty newsworthy, I don't think that's what she had in mind. (The Benitez story has been barely touched by the media and yet it is the perfect reminder of why Republicans are utterly unfit to get anywhere near government spending authorization.)

But instead of covering how the Double Talk Express is completely stocked with the very people who have authored the miseries with which the next president will have to grapple, the media seems to be content to allow McCain to slide while they watch the rest of the world hailing Barack Obama as the salvation from the most hated phenomenon since the deaths of Hitler and Stalin.

Just as the new reports were coming back that Obama had visited American troops in Kuwait and flown on to Afghanistan, Der Spiegel, Germany's biggest news magazine (their Time) releases an interview with John McCain's good friend, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. He may have forgotten to clear it with the McBush folks.

SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we're concerned. US presidential candidate Barack Obama is right when he talks about 16 months. Assuming that positive developments continue, this is about the same time period that corresponds to our wishes.

SPIEGEL: Is this an endorsement for the US presidential election in November? Does Obama, who has no military background, ultimately have a better understanding of Iraq than war hero John McCain?

Maliki: Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems. Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans' business. But it's the business of Iraqis to say what they want. And that's where the people and the government are in general agreement: The tenure of the coalition troops in Iraq should be limited.

I'm guessing McCain would prefer to see a front page profile on Juan Carlos Benitez-- or even another story about how his rabidly homophobic Alabama leadership campaign chairman, Attorney General Troy King, was caught by his wife, Paige, in bed with a young man. Instead he's going to be seeing thoughtful pieces like Spencer Ackerman's Fight War, Not Wars and news coverage about Obama's triumphal progress through country after country.

Maliki has read the tea leaves and evidently realized what the rest of us considered obvious: that the only one demanding that he turn Iraq to permanent foreign domination is a president thoroughly discredited in his own country who'll be out of office in a few months. That president's replacement might very well decide on a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq, abrogating any deal Maliki was strongarmed into signing, at which point the U.S. would essentially be cutting Maliki off. Oh motherfucking shit, Maliki surely thought, if I sign this deal, my people will run my body through the streets and hoist me from a fucking lamppost. Not that the electricity works, but still.

And so Maliki flip-flopped. His newfound resiliency is born of survival -- not merely political survival, either. He has forced George Bush to accept what Bush and McCain has said for years would lead to doom, ruin, humiliation, catastrophe-- a euphemistic "time horizon" for withdrawal. On the one hand, the fact that it won't actually be a timetable is significant, since Bush, of course, won't actually end a war he wants to entrench as the natural order of the world. But on the other, the euphemism is itself important, since once again Bush's attempt at denying reality only creates a trap for McCain. If McCain embraces the time-horizons, he shatters his own previous argument that such a thing will bring national ruin and indicates a certain moral and strategic turpitude on the part of its advocates. His only solution is to magically pretend that Bush's move isn't politically motivated and hope no one laughs at him. But now Maliki evidently wants to stick it to McCain, an indicator that the Iraqi PM knows who's going to be president next January. Reuters reports that Maliki has embraced Obama's 16-month withdrawal plan.

Obama isn't running around looking for bargains in the Kabul carpet markets with Lieberman and Lindsey. He landed at Kabul at noon and he's going to visit Jalalabad in east Afghanistan, on the road to the Khyber Pass. I was there a couple times when there was no war, and it was like the American wild West. According to the NY Times the trip "will give him a first-hand look at the region where American troops are feeling the brunt of increased attacks from militants infiltrating across the border from Pakistan." Instead of dragging along a light in the loafers carpet hunter and a fanatic warmonger who sees everything in the Middle East through his Likud prism, Obama has two deadly serious senior U.S. senators and national security experts with him, Republican Chuck Hagel and Democrat Jack Reed.

This news and the strain of campaigning is all a bit much for an elderly man like McCain, who nodded off during an interview with Conan O'Brien on NBC's Late Night. And the show wasn't even taped late at night; they tape in the afternoon! Or was that another of his lame stunts, part of McCain's one-note plea for sympathy?

UPDATE: OBAMA SCORES