Posts by Sam Stein

Sam Stein is a Political Reporter at the Huffington Post, based in Washington, D.C.

Pastor of Hillary's Former Church: Don't Use Wright to Polarize
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on March 26, 2008 at 7:01 AM.

On Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton re-stoked the flames of the controversy surrounding Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor, saying she would have long ago distanced herself from Rev. Jeremiah Wright if she had attended his church.

"He would not have been my pastor," Clinton told a gathering of the campaign press corps, repeating a line she used earlier in the day on a Pittsburgh radio program. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

But the pastor at the church that Clinton did once attend has recently expressed public support for Wright. He's even proclaimed it a "grave injustice" to make a judgment on Wright based off of "two or three sound bites," and criticized those who would "use a few of [Wright's] quotes to polarize."

Last week, Dean Snyder, the senior minister at the Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington D.C. -- which the Clintons famously attended while in the White House -- released a little noticed statement offering a sympathetic defense of the totality of Wright's work.

"The Reverend Jeremiah Wright is an outstanding church leader whom I have heard speak a number of times," Snyder wrote. "He has served for decades as a profound voice for justice and inclusion in our society. To evaluate his dynamic ministry on the basis of two or three sound bites does a grave injustice to Dr. Wright, the members of his congregation, and the African-American church which has been the spiritual refuge of a people that has suffered from discrimination, disadvantage, and violence. Dr. Wright, a member of an integrated denomination, has been an agent of racial reconciliation while proclaiming perceptions and truths uncomfortable for some white people to hear. Those of us who are white Americans would do well to listen carefully to Dr. Wright rather than to use a few of his quotes to polarize."

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Clinton Camp: Hillary "Misspoke" About Her Role in Bosnia Crisis
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on March 24, 2008 at 2:10 PM.

An aide to Senator Hillary Clinton acknowledged on Monday that the New York Senator "misspoke" about the immediate dangers she faced when, as first lady, she visited war torn Bosnia.

Howard Wolfson, Clinton's chief spokesperson, said on a conference call that "it is possible in the most recent instance with which she discussed this that she misspoke, with regards to the leaving of the plane." Later, he was more certain: "On one occasion, she misspoke."

But Wolfson insisted that the first lady's visit was indeed perilous, as supported by "contemporaneous accounts" in the press.

In recent weeks, Senator Clinton has sought to bolster her national security and foreign policy credentials by highlighting the role she played in Bosnia.

"We came in under sniper fire," she recently told the press. "There was no greeting ceremony. We ran with our heads down, and were basically told to run to our cars."

The account has been, for better or worse, proven false, both by recent press reports and old video footage that shows the senator greeting a child in a ceremonial procession at the Tuzla airport.

On Monday, Wolfson sought to re-frame the debate by citing various newspaper write-ups from the 1996 trip to support the notion that Clinton was, in fact, in a dangerous situation.

"The trip to Bosnia marks the first time since Roosevelt that a first lady has voyaged to a potential combat zone," he read from a Washington Post story on March 25, 1996. "Other fist ladies have visited troops abroad but never in front-line positions."

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Meet the White Man Who Inspired Wright's Controversial Sermon
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on March 22, 2008 at 7:26 AM.

Meet the man who inspired Reverend Jeremiah Wright's now famous tirade about America's foreign policy inciting the terrorist attacks of September 11.

His name is Ambassador Edward Peck. And he is a retired, white, career U.S. diplomat who served 32-years in the U.S. Foreign Service and was chief of the U.S. mission to Iraq under Jimmy Carter -- hardly the black-rage image with which Wright has been stigmatized.

In fact, when Wright took the pulpit to give his post-9/11 address -- which has since become boiled down to a five second sound bite about "America's chickens coming home to roost" -- he prefaced his remarks as a "faith footnote," an indication that he was deviating from his sermon.

"I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday," Wright declared. "He was on Fox News. This is a white man and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out, a white man, an ambassador, that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true: America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Wright then went on to list more than a few U.S. foreign policy endeavors that, by the tone of his voice and manner of his expression, he viewed as more or less deplorable. This included, as has been demonstrated in the endless loop of clips from his sermon, bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuking "far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye."

"Violence begets violence," Wright said, "hatred begets hatred, and terrorism begets terrorism."

And then he concluded by putting the comments on Peck's shoulders: "A white ambassador said that yall, not a black militant, not a reverend who preaches about racism, an ambassador whose eyes are wide open and is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice... the ambassador said that the people we have wounded don't have the military capability we have, but they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them... let me stop my faith footnote right there."

Watch the video (the relevant material starts around the 3:00 mark):

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McCain Spiritual Guide Accused Govt. of Enabling 'Black Genocide'
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on March 21, 2008 at 11:18 AM.

This past week, Sen. Barack Obama's pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, has taken an exceptional amount of heat in part for comments that suggested the U.S. government had introduced AIDS into black communities.

But it turns out he's not the only religious confidant to a presidential candidate who thinks the state has targeted black populations with death and disease.

Reverend Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio -- whom Sen. John McCain hailed as a spiritual adviser -- has suggested on several occasions that the U.S. government was complicit in facilitating black genocide.

In speeches that have gone largely unnoticed, Parsley (who is white) compares Planned Parenthood, the reproductive care and family planning group, to the Klu Klux Klan and Nazis, and describes the American government as enablers of murder for supporting the organization.

"If I were call for the sterilization or the elimination of an entire segment of society, I'd be labeled a racist or a murderer, or at very best a Nazi," says Parsley. "That every single year, millions of our tax dollars are funding a national organization built upon that very goal -- their target: African Americans. That's right, the death toll: nearly fifteen hundred African Americans a day. The shocking truth of black genocide."

He goes on.

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Clinton Camp Throws Kitchen Sink, Chairs, and Table at Obama
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on February 29, 2008 at 1:10 PM.

Earlier this week an aide to the Hillary Clinton campaign publicly predicted that a "kitchen sink" barrage of attacks would be launched at rival Barack Obama -- and the sound you hear today is precisely that of the sink, the flooring and perhaps the plumbing getting thrown around the room.

The first bang this morning was a Clinton campaign ad featuring images of children sleeping and a red phone beeping. A voice asks: "Who do you want answering the phone in the White House when it's 3 a.m. and something has happened in the world?" A studious-looking Clinton is seen diligently answering the call.

The new ad was just one of several attack strategies at the center of a lengthy conference call with reporters later in the day, in which Clinton aides took Obama to task on issues ranging from national security and NAFTA to his ties to indicted Chicago political insider Antoin Rezko.

The campaign operatives also engaged in some standard fiddling with expectations, arguing that if Obama failed to win all four states that vote on Tuesday it would send troubling signals about "dissatisfaction with [his] campaign." The smaller states of Vermont and Rhode Island also vote March 4th.

Speaking for well more than an hour, top Clinton aides Howard Wolfson, Mark Penn, and Phil Singer sounded a markedly aggressive tone. Wolfson lamented what he charged was media unwillingness, up to this point, to dig deeper into Obama's relationship to Rezko, whose federal corruption trial is scheduled to start on Monday.

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John McCain May Have Covered Up Abramoff Email to Protect GOP
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on February 26, 2008 at 5:19 AM.

On the stump, Sen. John McCain often cites his work tackling the excesses of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff as evidence of his sturdy ethical compass.

A little-known document, however, shows that McCain may have taken steps to protect his Republican colleagues from the scope of his investigation.

In the 2006 Senate report concerning Abramoff's activities, which McCain spearheaded, the Arizona Republican conspicuously left out information detailing how Alabama Gov. Bob Riley was targeted by Abramoff's influence peddling scheme. Riley, a Republican, won election in November 2002, and was reelected in 2006.

In a December 2002 email obtained by the Huffington Post -- which McCain and his staff had access to prior to the issuance of his report -- Abramoff explains to an aide what he would like to see Riley do in return for the "help" he received from Abramoff's tribal clients.

An official with the Mississippi Choctaws "definitely wants Riley to shut down the Poarch Creek operation," Abramoff wrote, "including his announcing that anyone caught gambling there can't qualify for a state contract or something like that."

The note showed not only the reach of Abramoff, but raised questions about Riley's victory in what was the closest gubernatorial election in Alabama history.

And yet, despite the implications of the information, McCain and the Senate Indian Affairs Committee sat on the controversial portion of the email. According to an official familiar with the investigation, McCain also subsequently refused to make the email public after the report was released.

There was a brief footnote in the report that quoted William Worfel, former vice chairman of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, saying that Abramoff told the chief of a Mississippi tribe to spend $13 million "to get the governor of Alabama elected to keep gaming out of Alabama so it wouldn't hurt ... his market in Mississippi."

But Riley's name and the details of what was being asked of him were not mentioned once in the 373-page document.

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NY Times: McCain's Alleged Romance with Lobbyist Exposed
Posted by Nico Pitney, Sam Stein, Huffington Post on February 20, 2008 at 8:15 PM.

On Thursday night, an otherwise obscure telecommunications lobbyist by the name of Vicki Iseman was thrust into the media and campaign spotlight, after a New York Times story suggested that she and Sen. John McCain had a close relationship that may have been romantic.

[Iseman] had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client's corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself -- instructing staff members to block the woman's access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist's client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Who is Iseman? A quick search on the Internet turns up some background information, including a picture of her with President Bush.

A website of her alma matter, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated with a degree in elementary education in 1990, documents her fast rise in the world of lobbying.

Iseman, the site notes, secured a job at the firm Alcalde and Fay only a few months after graduation, mostly for secretarial work. Soon thereafter, however, she began moving up the employment ranks. And eight years after she started, she became the youngest partner at Alcalde. Her clients included PAXtv, Religious Voices in Broadcasting, Telemundo, the Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation.

From her page on the firm's website -- which was pulled from the web shortly after the New York Times story broke -- there is this: "[Iseman] has consulted for clients who are interested in government contracting opportunities. She has assisted corporations through the authorization and appropriation process. An active fundraiser, she has organized and participated in many political fundraising events."

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Hillary's Turf Invaded: Obama Wins Women and Working Class
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on February 13, 2008 at 5:44 AM.

The Virginia Democratic primary was supposed to be Sen. Hillary Clinton's best hope for the so-called Potomac Primaries. But a look at exit polls following a significant victory for Sen. Barack Obama shows that the Illinois Democrat's political base is expanding deep into Clinton's turf -- including among women and working class Democrats.

In Virginia, Obama outdid Clinton among women by a margin of 58 percent to 42. He also captured the majority of those voters who make less than $50,000: 59 percent to 40 percent. And even bested Clinton among Latinos by a margin of 55 to 45, though the later made up a small portion of the voting public and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Indeed, Obama had strong performances across the board. He narrowly lost the white vote to Clinton, 48 percent to 51 percent, but won the majority of white men in the state, 55 percent to 43 percent. That group, as recently as the South Carolina primary several weeks ago, also seemed firmly in the Clinton camp.

Obama also maintained what has become the most reliable demographic elements of his electoral base. Ninety percent of blacks supported the Senator, as did 66 percent of those under 40-years-of-age, 66 percent of independents, 70 percent of Republicans who voted in the Democratic primary, and 58 percent of post-graduates.

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McCain Collected $100,000 from Jack Abramoff's Firm
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on February 12, 2008 at 2:37 PM.

On the stump, Sen. John McCain has touted his work tackling the excesses of the lobbying industry to bolster his reputation as a "maverick" reformer.

"Ask Jack Abramoff if I'm an insider in Washington," McCain often contends. "You'd probably have to go during visiting hours in the prison, and he'll tell you and his lobbyist cronies of the change I made there."

But how much change did McCain actually effect? And is he all that removed from Washington's special interests?

A review of campaign finance filings shows that the Arizona Republican has accepted more than $100,000 in donations from employees of Greenberg Traurig, the very firm where Abramoff once reigned.

Those donations include several thousand dollars from registered lobbyists who represent, or have represented, businesses such as NewsCorp, Rupert Murdoch's media empire; Spi Spirits, a Cyprus based company that has fought with the Russian government for the rights to the Stolichnaya vodka brand name; El Paso Corp, a major energy company; General Motors; and the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, a group of businesses and trade associations "concerned" about the shortage of lesser skilled and unskilled labor.

All told, McCain has received more than $400,000 from lobbying firms, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And among his major fundraisers ("bundlers") 59 have been identified as lobbyists by the non-profit organization Public Citizen.

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Sen. Webb Suggests Legal Action Against Bush on Iraq
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on February 12, 2008 at 6:56 AM.

Sen. Jim Webb thinks legal action against the Bush administration may be needed if the president pursues a long-term military presence in Iraq without Congress' approval.

"I'm not convinced we don't need to have a lawsuit ready," Webb told the Huffington Post. "This is a classic separation of powers issue. I started to talk to people about this today."

In recent days the administration has seemingly backed away from attempting to secure extended military-to-military relationship with the Iraqi government to replace a current U.N. Mandate. Webb and others -- most notably Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Sen. Hillary Clinton -- have pushed legislation that would restrict federal money for any such agreement unless it came in the form of a congressional treaty. And while a victory on that front seems within grasp, the possibility still exists, Webb warned, for the administration to ultimately circumvent congressional input.

"They are characterizing this as within the authority of the Executive Branch. They will wait to August when everyone is at the conventions, and leave it on our doorstep," said the Virginia Democrat. "If the Senate hasn't acted by then, they are going to announce an agreement between the Executive Branch and Iraq."

The issue of a long-term military presence in Iraq reemerged on the political landscape today after Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he may suspend the reduction of U.S. troops from the country depending on security considerations.

"A brief period of consolidation and evaluation probably does make sense," Gates told reporters during a short stop at this U.S. base in southern Baghdad.

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Is Obama the "Most Liberal" Senator?
Posted by Jonathan Stein, Mother Jones on January 31, 2008 at 2:34 PM.

According to the National Journal's nonpartisan ratings, released today, Barack Obama was the most liberal member of the Senate in 2007. This raises a number of issues for the senator from Illinois.

First of all, we should point out that the numbers are ridiculous. According to the NJ press release, "Obama voted the liberal position on 65 of the 66 votes in which he participated, while Clinton voted the liberal position on 77 of 82 votes." So he took the liberal position less frequently than Clinton did, and less frequently than a number of senators. But because he was out campaigning, he only returned for big, divisive votes where the Democratic Party needed him. He only cast one vote against the liberal position, meaning he was usually content to skip votes where he would be voting against his party. As B.B. points out, "a senator who takes the 'liberal' position 95 times out of 100 is somehow less liberal than his colleague who takes the liberal position 48 times out of 50." In years past, when Obama voted as many times as a normal senator, he was the 10th and 16th most liberal senator. That is likely a truer representation of his politics. Does anyone really think Obama is more liberal than Russ Feingold or Bernie Sanders (a socialist)?

And let's not forget that John Kerry was identified by the National Journal as the most liberal senator of 2003 just as Kerry was wrapping up the Democratic nomination. Not bad for publicity, huh?

But regardless of how legitimate the numbers are, Obama has now been tagged. Will Hillary Clinton use it against him? That would be awfully low--first, she's just as liberal as he is, and second, a Democrat should never try to sink another Democrat by using right-wing talking points about the "L word." But John McCain or Mitt Romney will use this against Obama, assuming Obama is the nominee. How does he respond?

He can say, "You know what? After eight years of sheer horror, we need someone with an ideology as far from President Bush's as possible. The more liberal the better!" That might warm some hearts around here. But Obama may not want to undertake a project to rehabilitate the "liberal" image in the middle of his presidential campaign. But he can't throw liberals under the bus, either, because there are an awful lot of committed lefties who are going to vote in the remaining Democratic primaries.

It's a tough position to be in. In all likelihood he'll say something like, "My campaign is about moving past these labels that seek to put our politics into small boxes."

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Senate Showdown: Feingold Says "I Really Do Disagree" With Reid on FISA
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on January 24, 2008 at 2:07 PM.

A long-debated provision over whether or not telephone companies would get a free pass for aiding the U.S. government in warrentless surveillance hits the Senate floor today. And it threatens to open up fissures within the Democratic Party.

In an interview with the Huffington Post on Thursday morning, Sen. Russ Feingold, who opposes granting immunity to those companies, expressed disappointment that his party's leader, Sen. Harry Reid, was not doing more to help strike the provision from a newly considered version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

"Of course I have great respect for the Majority Leader," said Feingold. "He is a good friend of mine. But I really do disagree with his way of proceeding."

At issue is the likely passage of a version of FISA that contains retroactive immunity over one that doesn't. Reid has said he supports the former, but legislatively, the path has been paved for the passage of the latter. In addition, there is debate over an amendment offered by Sen. Chris Dodd, to strip immunity from any FISA bill. If that fails -- and it seems likely -- Dodd has threatened to filibuster the whole bill. On Wednesday, Reid was interpreted as saying any such filibuster will be the standing and talking variety as opposed to an agreed-upon 60-vote minimum threshold. Feingold, who supports Dodd's stance, took slight issue with that approach.

"We should have a normal process were this is debated based on a majority vote in the senate," said the Wisconsin Democrat. "That's the way it should have been done and I regret that it's not being done that way. Of course, I support Senator Dodd. He and I were principally involved in making sure this didn't get jammed through before the holidays and I will be supporting him again. But this decision does make it harder."

Speaking on the Senate floor Thursday morning before the debate, Reid addressed these concerns. He noted that he himself supported the Judiciary Committee version of the FISA bill, which would not give telecom companies a free ride from potential lawsuits.

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NH Debate: Clinton Fumes as Edwards Takes Obama's Side [VIDEO]
Posted by Sam Stein, Thomas B. Edsall, Huffington Post on January 6, 2008 at 8:27 AM.

Manchester, N.H. - Hillary Clinton went on the attack against Barack Obama at the Democratic presidential debate Saturday night, but she ran into a tough push back not only from the Illinois Senator but also John Edwards, who took Obama's side and lashed out at her as an agent of "the status quo."

For Clinton, the forum provided her only real chance to stall Barack Obama's momentum before the January 8 state primary. Initially she appeared very cautious, as all the candidates conducted a sober discussion of nuclear and terrorist threats in which there was much more agreement than conflict.

But then, when the discussion turned to domestic policy, Clinton shifted gears to accuse Obama of holding three different positions on federal health care, of voting for the Patriot Act after promising he would vote against it, and of failing to call for federal health insurance that would cover everyone with no exceptions.

Clinton cited a news story contending that Obama "could have three pretty good debates with himself" on health care. "You've changed positions within [the past] three years on a range of issues," Clinton said. In the second half of the debate, she tried to tarnish Obama's claim to be a candidate who will severely constrain the power of lobbyists, noting that Obama's New Hampshire co-chair, Jim Demers, lobbies the New Hampshire legislature in behalf of the pharmaceutical and financial services industries.

"You've changed positions within three years on, you know, a range of issues that you put forth when you ran for the Senate, and now you have changed....you said you would vote against the Patriot Act. You came to the Senate; you voted for it. You said that you would vote against funding for the Iraq war. You came to the Senate, and you voted for $300 billion of it," Clinton declared.

Obama did not appear ruffled by the Clinton assault, stronger than her past rhetoric, and tried to discuss in detail the rationale for his position on health care, but then Edwards stepped in to make a much more aggressive defense both of Obama and himself:

"We [Edwards and Obama] have a fundamental difference about the way you bring about change. But both of us are powerful voices for change. And if I might add, we finished first and second in the Iowa caucus, I think in part as a result of that. Now, what I would say this: Any time you speak out powerfully for change, the forces of status quo attack. That's exactly what happens," Edwards said, clearly identifying Clinton with the status quo.

In a second clear reference to Clinton, Edwards said, "I didn't hear these kinds of attacks when she was ahead."

"I want to make change, but I've already made change," Clinton countered forcefully. "I'm not just running on the promise of change, I'm running on 35 years of change."

As the tension rose, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who was largely on the periphery of the debate, remarked, "Well, I've been in hostage negotiations that are a lot more civil than this."

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