This is PART 4 of a seven-part in-depth look behind the scenes of the campaign, consisting of exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting from the McCain and Obama camps assembled by a special team of reporters who were granted year-long access on the condition that none of their findings appear until after Election Day. This story is based on reporting by Daren Briscoe, Eleanor Clift, Katie Connolly, Peter Goldman, Daniel Stone and Nick Summers. It was written by Evan Thomas.
Going Into Battle
McCain’s inner circle altered the style, feel and direction of the campaign. The candidate’s best hope was to bring down Obama.
McCain was not a natural orator on the stump. He had trouble reading from a teleprompter, and he had an odd way of smiling at inappropriate times, flashing an expression that looked more like a frozen rictus than a friendly grin. During one early debate, he smiled broadly as he discussed crushing the enemy in Iraq. McCain could be moody, and he did not try very hard to disguise his moods. One of his advisers used the word “heady” to describe the candidate. He meant that his speaking style was easily swayed by his emotions. McCain could look hot or riled up (his traveling buddy Lindsey Graham particularly affected his moods, for better and for worse), or he could appear wooden, even sullen. McCain was bored by dreary presentations of his own polling data, but he could get agitated reading about other people’s polls in the press. His staff tried to keep away overstimulating distractions, but it was hopeless. During the campaign’s low-budget period, when the candidate was traveling on the cut-rate airline JetBlue, he would get wound up watching political talk shows on the small video screen facing his seat.
Throughout the spring of 2008, McCain’s uneven speaking style was a source of frustration to his aides. They knew how open and disarmingly honest he could be when he felt like it. But his stubborn integrity (or childish willfulness, depending on your point of view) was as much a liability as a virtue. When McCain didn’t like the words he had been given to read, his inner Dennis the Menace would emerge, and he would sabotage his own speech.
McCain’s subversive instincts had long shown up in his speaking style. Before the 2000 primary in South Carolina, when he spoke in favor of flying the Confederate flag over the state capitol, he would pull a piece of paper out of his pocket and read from it. It was obvious that he didn’t really believe what he was saying and was ashamed of his pandering. His aides had trouble coaching him because the very act of telling him what to do could incite a rebellion. When distracted or restless, a not infrequent occasion, McCain could be tempted to play the high-school prankster. Once at a press availability in Kentucky he spotted a large woman, who was wearing a black T shirt embroidered with two bedazzling martini glasses, standing behind the photographers. He asked her to stand by him at the podium, where she might have a better view. “Is this OK?” he asked. “This is fi-ine!” the lady replied, but as she saw a sea of cameras and smirking reporters, she looked stunned and slightly embarrassed. She started to sidle away, and McCain asked, with mock forlornness, “You leaving me?”
In April, McCain gave a major “Service to America” speech at his alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy. A select audience had been invited, and American flags provided a proud backdrop. But the crowd seemed tiny, dwarfed by the vast football stadium, and the flags flapped wildly and noisily. The morning sun shone on the teleprompter, so McCain couldn’t read it and had to rely on a written speech. He trudged through his speech, but at one point when he looked up while turning a page, the wind caught a second page and turned it as well. McCain kept reading, but by the time he realized he had skipped a page it was too late. In the end it didn’t really matter. His performance was so disjointed that the only people who really noticed were the reporters following the text on their laptops and BlackBerrys.
McCain should have enjoyed an advantage by securing the GOP nomination in March while Obama and Clinton ground on for three more months. But the press by and large ignored the GOP candidate, who was further hobbled by poor advance work as well as by his own listless or crabby performance. At times, McCain seemed to be amused by the haphazardness of his own organization. He would crack jokes about the “well-oiled machine we have here on this campaign.” When the microphones kept dropping out during a Florida press conference, he declared, with mock outrage, “It’s a plot!”
Perversely, part of McCain’s problem behind the podium lay with his talented speechwriter and closest adviser, Mark Salter. The coauthor of his bestselling books, including “Faith of My Fathers” and “Why Courage Matters,” Salter idealized McCain and wanted him to be the heroic figure he was in his books. Salter wrote noble, eloquent speeches for McCain, high-flown words that evoked a spirit of selflessness and patriotism. Yet these sentiments—which McCain, more than any other candidate, personally embodied—sometimes sounded stilted and cringeworthy when they came from his mouth on the campaign trail. McCain may have actually believed the campaign myth that “Salter writes the way McCain thinks”; in any case, he wanted to be the hero that Salter had helped him become, and tried to sound like one. But if he became bored or his mind wandered, he read Salter’s lofty words with all the conviction and gusto of a dutiful schoolboy reciting his Latin.
Salter and McCain had a close but complicated relationship. Salter was indebted to McCain; he had bought a second home in Maine with the money he earned from their books, and he had even met his wife, Diane, in the senator’s office, where she had been a scheduler. At some level Salter worshiped McCain, but he knew not to fawn; indeed, he understood that the best way to get McCain’s attention was to appear indifferent. Salter had the confidence to stand up to McCain—the relationship was more brotherly than father-son. Salter could imagine McCain’s thoughts and supply his words, and he fancied […continued on page 2]
This research paper (authored by the British House of Commons Library) looks at recent developments in the Horn of Africa, where there are a number of protracted and interlocking crises at work, and briefly discusses some of the main factors that have been described as ‘root causes’ of conflict in the region.
The insurgency against the Transitional Federal Government and Ethiopian forces in Somalia is rapidly gathering momentum as efforts continue to form a more inclusive and viable government. There is a humanitarian crisis of massive proportions, with about 40 per cent of the population needing assistance. Almost unnoticed, there are ongoing tensions between neighbouring Somaliland and Puntland over disputed border areas.
Meanwhile, the possibility remains of a resumption of hostilities between Ethiopia and Eritrea over their long- running border dispute. In the Ogaden, which is part of Ethiopia’s Somali regional state, there has also been a humanitarian crisis as a consequence of ongoing fighting between Ethiopian troops and insurgents. Finally, earlier this year Eritrea launched an incursion into Djibouti and is yet to withdraw its forces. Click here to read the paper.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia – Ethiopian superstar singer Teddy Afro has been convicted of the manslaughter of a homeless man killed in a hit-and-run incident in Addis Ababa in 2006.
The singer was found guilty of running the man down in his car and driving away without reporting the incident.
Ethiopia’s best-known pop star was also convicted of driving without a licence. He faces between five and 15 years in prison when sentenced on Friday.
Afro’s music became an anthem for opposition protests in 2005.
Many of his fans believe the charges against him were politically motivated.
But Judge Leul Gebremariam [a member of the ruling party] dismissed Afro’s defense in a long summing-up, says the BBC’s Elizabeth Blunt, who was in the courtroom.
There had been some confusion about which night the homeless man had died.
On the first date the singer – real name Tewodros Kassahun – had an alibi: He was out of the country.
On the second possible date, Afro claimed he had been out with friends. But the judge was not convinced and found him guilty on all charges.
As sentence was passed, the singer tried to protest and was hushed by his lawyers.
But as he left court, having regained his composure, Teddy Afro gave a thumbs-up sign to supporters and told journalists: “I never killed anyone, I didn’t get justice from this court.”
This is PART 3 of a seven-part in-depth look behind the scenes of the campaign, consisting of exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting from the McCain and Obama camps assembled by a special team of reporters who were granted year-long access on the condition that none of their findings appear until after Election Day. This story is based on reporting by Daren Briscoe, Eleanor Clift, Katie Connolly, Peter Goldman, Daniel Stone and Nick Summers. It was written by Evan Thomas.
In the days after his wife’s back- from-the-brink victory in New Hampshire, Bill Clinton was full of righteous indignation. The former president had amassed an 81-page list of all the unfair and nasty things the Obama campaign had said, or was alleged to have said, about Hillary Clinton. The press was still in love with Obama, or so it seemed to Clinton, who complained to pretty much anyone who would listen. If the press wouldn’t go after Obama, then Hillary’s campaign would have to do the job, the ex-president urged. On Sunday, Jan. 13, Clinton got worked up in a phone conversation with Donna Brazile, a direct, strong-willed African-American woman who had been Al Gore’s campaign manager and advised the Clintons from time to time. “If Barack Obama is nominated, it will be the worst denigration of public service,” he told her, ranting on for much of an hour. Brazile kept asking him, “Why are you so angry?”
The former president was restless and petulant; that was obvious. Exactly why was a psychologist’s guessing game. He seemed anxious that his wife was blowing the chance to get the Clintons back in the White House. At some deeper level, the armchair shrinks speculated, he was jealous of her. Or, in some strange way, he may have been envious of Obama. Clinton was proud of the fact that some blacks called him “America’s first black president,” because of his comfort and empathy with African-Americans. Obama was upstaging him by threatening to truly become America’s first black president. More vexingly, Obama, in remarks to some reporters in Nevada, had praised Ronald Reagan as a true change agent and seemingly dismissed Bill Clinton as an incidental politician. It was always hard for Clinton to be anything but the most amazing person in the room, the “smartest boy in the class,” as author David Maraniss had once described him. Clinton wanted to be a major player in his wife’s campaign, and he used an office sometimes inhabited by Mark Penn or Mandy Grunwald at Clinton headquarters in Arlington, Va., just outside Washington. But the staff, including the campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, found his presence, complete with Secret Service, to be uncomfortable, sometimes intimidating. They were happier when he was on the road—that is, as long as he stayed on message, which was never for very long.
Bill Clinton was enormously effective at the Nevada caucuses on Jan. 19, working the casinos in his larger-than-life way, charming the off-duty waitresses and croupiers. Hillary’s narrow victory in Nevada had sustained her post-New Hampshire comeback momentum. The former president wanted to go to South Carolina for the next Democratic test, the Jan. 26 primary. He was sure his touch with African-American voters would blunt Obama’s natural advantage (almost half the Democratic voters in South Carolina are black). The campaign staff was not so sure, and scheduled him for only the briefest of visits. But Hillary sided with her husband when the staff briefed her on their minimalist approach to South Carolina. “This is crazy,” she said. “Bill needs to go to South Carolina.”
He was a disaster. He turned purple yelling at reporters for asking annoying questions. He pointedly compared Obama to Jesse Jackson, who had won the South Carolina caucuses in 1984 and 1988 by appealing directly to black votes. The liberal establishment was appalled—the president seemed to be clumsily playing the race card by trying to marginalize Obama as the “black candidate.” Blacks were also put off. Hillary Clinton lost the African-American vote in South Carolina by 86 to 14. At Clinton headquarters, a meeting was hastily convened and a simple message went out: you cannot dis Obama in any way that suggests race. A campaign emissary secretly approached Jesse Jackson. Would he write a letter saying, in effect, no big deal? Jackson replied that he wasn’t offended by Clinton’s remarks—but declined to say so in a public letter. The Clintons could see their black base, so carefully and genuinely built up over the years, beginning to crumble. The old civil-rights generation was in an awkward place. New York Rep. Gregory Meeks, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, told Harold Ickes, “You don’t understand what it’s like. We get called ‘house Negro’ and ‘handkerchief head’ by our constituents because we’re supporting Hillary.” Rep. John Lewis, a hero of the movement (he had been beaten repeatedly while demonstrating in the South in the ’60s) and a conscience of the Democratic Party, switched his support from Clinton to Obama.
Sen. Edward Kennedy had a difficult phone conversation with Bill Clinton about his divisive campaigning. “Well, they started it,” Clinton told Kennedy. “I don’t think that’s true,” said Kennedy. On Jan. 28, Senator Kennedy and, perhaps more significant, Caroline Kennedy, daughter of John F. Kennedy, held a press conference in Washington to endorse Obama. Clinton campaign aides were distraught and partly blamed Hillary. Despite urging from the staff, she had failed to call Caroline to enlist her support. For all her brassiness and grit onstage, Hillary was privately reluctant to call donors and supporters. She didn’t really like arm-twisting one-on-one. She was no LBJ, thought Harold Ickes.
Caroline Kennedy had never endorsed a candidate who was not a member of the Kennedy clan. But she wrote a New York Times op-ed casting Obama in the mold of John F. Kennedy. Solis Doyle saw the ad, and thought, “Oh, my God, we’re done.”
For the record, the Obama campaign did not worry that race would swing the election. “I think we may lose some votes, but we also may gain some votes because of it,” said David Axelrod. “I don’t think it will determine the outcome.” But when asked about race, Obama campaign officials often seemed touchy and guarded, as if race was a subject best not discussed. In fact, they had reason to worry that racial prejudice could become a factor, albeit in subtle ways and blended with other biases. A good part of Obama’s appeal was that he was post-racial (although Obama himself shied away from this somewhat utopian notion). For some voters, however, race mattered. […continued on page 2]
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (APA) Thousands of Ethiopian Jews (Falashas) still continue their demand to be repatriated to Israel-their promised land-to unite with their relatives already there.
There are still a good number of Falashas camping outside the Israeli embassy in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital waiting to hear if there is good news from the Israeli government about their fate of uniting with their families in Israel.
In August 2008, Israel announced that it has finalized its program of taking more Ethiopian Falashas from Ethiopia. However, there are still thousands of Falashas who continue to ask the Israeli government to unite them with their relatives in Israel.
Falashas means “outsider” in Ethiopia’s national language, Amharic, which is also mainly spoken by the Falashas.
Bitew Mola, head of the Bete Israel Association told APA that there are still around 8,000 Ethiopian Falashas who are waiting to travel to Israel to unite with their relatives in Israel.
“As you know, our families and Ethiopian Falasha associations in Israel continue to ask the Israeli government to look again its decision to stop the resettlement of Falashas in Israel. We are Ethiopian Jews who have the right to travel to Israel,” said Mola, who himself is waiting to unite with his two sisters in Israel.
Zeleke Bihonegn, 26, also told APA that he is still waiting to unite with his father who travelled there some three years ago.
“My father was able to travel to Israel three years ago, but I am still unable to finalize my process and unite with him, which is a must. But the Israeli government is not treating us as they treat the American Jews,” said Bihonegn.
According to available information, Israel is home to more than 120,000 Jews of Ethiopian origin, who trace their roots to the biblical King Solomon and Queen of Sheba.
Many Ethiopian Jews were flown to Israel in airlifts during the 1984 famine and the end of Ethiopia’s civil war in 1991, as well as during the past few years.
Many of the Falashas still left in Ethiopia are waiting for their final fate to unite with their relatives in Israel.
There are several of their elders who cannot read or write, but they still hope to go to live in Israel and die there.
Many Falashas in Israel are supporting their families financially and psychologically here in Ethiopia, with the hope of one day taking them to Israel.
The Falashas, who claim to have been converted to Christianity in the 19th and 20th centuries, are eager to migrate to revive their Jewish roots in Israel, which the Falashas claim to be their “promised land”.
Some of the Falashas are here in Addis Ababa after travelling some 700 and 800 kilometres from Gondor in northern Ethiopia, which is the place the Falashas lived.
“We are living here in a camp and some in rented houses. There are elders aged 60 and 70 waiting to hear from us about their future,” said Mola.
According to information about the Falashas, Ethiopia’s “Falasha Mura” began to practice Judaism in the last decade after converting to Christianity in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
According to Israeli policy, Ethiopian Jews can immigrate to Israel if they have immediate relatives there.
However, getting genuine evidence from them is said to be a difficult job for the Israeli government, which is one of the reasons they had to halt the program in Ethiopia.
In 2007, Israel had criticised many Bete Israel (Home of Israel) local associations here in Ethiopia, and charities supporting the camps, saying they raised false hopes for thousands of Ethiopians — many of whom have no connection with the Falashas.
This is PART 2 of a seven-part in-depth look behind the scenes of the campaign, consisting of exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting from the McCain and Obama camps assembled by a special team of reporters who were granted year-long access on the condition that none of their findings appear until after Election Day.
Like a lot of Americans, Barack Obama says his favorite movie is “The Godfather.” John McCain says his all-time favorite is “Viva Zapata!”, a little-remembered, highly romanticized 1952 Marlon Brando biopic. The hero of the movie is Emiliano Zapata, the leader of a (briefly) successful peasant revolt in Mexico in the early 1900s. McCain loves the idea of a budget-class, guerrilla-style war against the corrupt establishment. He never got over being nostalgic about his 2000 insurgency against George W. Bush and the Republican Party leaders who had settled on George H.W. Bush’s eldest son as heir apparent.
Though himself the scion of a kind of warrior royalty—his father and grandfather had been admirals, and his mother came from a wealthy family—McCain was leery of the overprivileged (and hated being called a
“scion”). He would eventually come to embrace the younger Bush at the 2000 Republican convention, awkwardly hugging a rather startled-looking Bush around the midsection, as high as McCain’s war-damaged arms could go. Privately, he told one of his closest aides that he strongly disliked Bush (the word the aide used was “detests”).
At the time of the 2000 campaign, McCain had pictured himself as Luke Skywalker, going up against the Death Star. Rumbling along with his aides and a gaggle of mostly friendly reporters in a bus called the Straight Talk Express, he had relished the team spirit—the unit cohesion, in the language of his military past—and the teasing back-and-forth. Not long after the 2000 election, he had spoken of the heady time with a NEWSWEEK reporter over a standard-issue McCain breakfast (glazed doughnuts, coffee) in his Senate office. He was sitting at one end of his couch, the purplish melanoma scar down the left side of his face veiled in shadow. “Yeah, we were a band of brothers,” he said, his voice low, his eyes shining.
The 2000 race had been a glorious adventure, a heroic Lost Cause. But the fact was that McCain had lost. In politics, insurgencies produce memories, not victories. Or so believed John Weaver, McCain’s longtime close aide and the man who had first persuaded McCain to start thinking about a presidential run back in 1997. In numerous conversations throughout 2005 and 2006, Weaver, along with other McCain friends and advisers, gently underscored this reality. In their view, Republican nominating politics usually adhered to a rule, attributed variously to Napoleon and Frederick the Great, among others, that God favors big battalions. The key to securing the GOP nomination was to lock up the big money early, round up the best organizers, secure the shiniest endorsements and win the label “inevitable.” That’s how George W. Bush had beaten McCain and everyone else in 2000, and that’s what John McCain needed to do for 2008.
McCain went along, grudgingly. He signed off in the fall of 2006 as his campaign rented sleek, corporate-looking offices in the Crystal City section of Arlington, Va., just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The crystal palace quickly filled with veterans of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, many of whom had never before met McCain. For campaign boss, McCain shoved aside Rick Davis, his campaign manager from 2000, and appointed Terry Nelson, the political director for Bush-Cheney 2004. Boyish and soft-spoken, Nelson was an organization man. His approach was essentially Shock and Awe. By his own admission, he was not the sort of man you would hire for an insurgent-model candidacy of the kind McCain had run in 2000; his relevant experience was more appropriate to crushing that kind of campaign.
McCain was never comfortable playing the front runner. His comment when he first walked through headquarters was “It’s awfully big.” McCain was ill suited to be the establishment’s man. He was suspect to the true believers on the right, the Rush Limbaugh “dittoheads” who regarded him as a RINO (Republican in Name Only). While the Republican right wanted to build a wall and keep out all the immigrants, McCain was trying to forge a compromise—with Ted Kennedy, no less. The party stalwarts had reason to be doubtful about McCain, who could be salty in his private denunciations. To a couple of his closest advisers he grumbled, “What the f––– would I want to lead this party for?”
The McCain campaign was supposed to be a lavish money machine; the draft budget was for more than $110 million. But the money did not come in. Most campaigns can expect 80 to 85 percent of donors to honor their pledges. In the McCain campaign, fewer than half did. “They come, they eat our food, they drink our liquor, they get their pictures taken,” said McCain’s aide Mark Salter. “But they don’t send a check.” Most candidates don’t like doing the “ask,” begging strangers for dollars. McCain virtually stopped making calls, and his chief money raiser, Carla Eudy, stopped asking him to do it. The […continued on page 2]
