GET A MOVE ON
Democrats continue to look for ways to leverage their control of
Congress for campaign gains. According to committee staffers on the
Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus is
looking to hold hearings late in June on U.S. corporate
competitiveness in the global economy. But some members of that
committee want to turn them into a rally against U.S. multinational
companies. “Baucus has the right idea. He understands some of the
economic and tax issues our global companies have to deal with,”
says a Republican staffer on the committee. “But he’s got some
colleagues who just don’t get it.”
Democrat staffers with ties to the offices of Sens. John
Kerry and Ron Wyden, say that both men
want to turn Baucus’s well-intentioned effort around, including
panels on U.S. multinationals’ abuse of the environment, human
rights, outsourcing of jobs, among other ills. “It’s one panel of
speakers on how U.S. tax and regulatory policies are hindering
American competitiveness and two panels on the evil of the American
corporation,” says a Democrat staffer on the committee.
Increasingly, Democrats in both the House and Senate aren’t
satisfied with holding impromptu press conferences in the hallways
of the Capitol or using allotted time when the House and Senate are
in session to gain political points for their supporters. Instead,
they are attempting to use the more impressive venues of House and
Senate hearings to create political theater that will satisfy the
far-left wing of the party.
“They see guys like [Henry]
Waxman and [John]
Conyers in the House getting all that attention in
their hearings, and they want some of the love,” says another
Democrat staffer. “It’s poisoning the hearing process and isn’t
helpful on any level. It probably won’t end until after the
election.”
THE OBAMA ONE-TWO
Revs. Jeremiah Wright and Michael
Pfleger were not the only preachers from the pulpit at
Trinity United Church during Sen. Barack Obama’s
20-year membership in the church, according to Democrat National
Committee staffers, and the DNC is attempting to determine whether
or not there is video of such speakers while Obama or his family
are in attendance. They have asked the Obama campaign to assist
them in doing the research leading into the general election cycle,
where they assume Republicans are attempting to gather similar
information.
“The concern,” says a Democrat political consultant with ties to
Sen. Hillary Clinton, “and it’s a legitimate concern that we have
not been able to voice, is that the remarks we’ve heard from Wright
and now Father Pfleger were commonplace in that Church. This is
what they said and what they believed. This is what members of the
church tithed to hear. So there are two options, neither of them
appealing to Senator Obama.”
The first, says the consultant, is that at some point Obama will
simply have to admit that his participation in the church was not
as he made it appear, that he used the church to further enhance
his standing in a community where he needed their support, and made
appearances at Trinity services infrequently at best. “Or he and
his family were there hooting and hollering to all of the nonsense
we’ve seen from Wright and Pfleger,” says the consultant. “Either
way, this Trinity issue is not going away, it most clearly
illustrates the two traits the campaign has been trying to embed
with little success: either Obama is anti-white, radical with views
far outside the mainstream of most Americans, or he’s just a big
phony with no experience to lead the country.”
Pfleger probably will not go away, either. In Chicago political
and religious circles he is considered by some to be more radical
and political than Wright. The pastor of a church that is largely
African-American, he has been censured by his bishop,
Francis Cardinal George, for comments many
interpreted as threatening the life of a gun-shop owner during an
anti-gun-rights rally.
And last week, after the Trinity video hit the Internet, the
diocese released a statement from George saying, “Fr. Pfleger’s
remarks about Senator Clinton are both partisan and amount to a
personal attack. I regret that deeply. To avoid months of turmoil
in the church, Fr. Pfleger has promised me that he will not enter
into campaigning, will not publicly mention any candidate by name
and will abide by the discipline common to all Catholic
priests.”
Pfleger was considered so radical by some of his bosses in
Chicago that they expected him to split from the church and sign on
with the now disgraced Imani Temple African-American Catholic
Congregation, the sect founded in 1989 by a soon-to-be
excommunicated African-American Catholic priest in Washington,
D.C., George Stallings. Coincidentally, Stallings
announced the founding of the church on The Phil Donohue
Show, which was then taped in Chicago.
