The Filter: June 20, 2008

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

OBAMA CHOSE WINNING OVER HIS WORD
(Liz Sidoti, Associated Press)
The Democrat once made a conditional agreement to accept taxpayer money from the public financing system, and accompanying spending limits, if his Republican opponent did, too. No more. The chance to financially swamp — and maneuver for an enormous advantage — proved too great an allure. Obama, a record-shattering fundraiser, reversed course Thursday and decided to forgo some $85 million so he could raise unlimited amounts of money and spend as much as he wants... And with that, the first-term Illinois senator tarnished his carefully honed image as a different kind of politician — one who means what he says and says what he means — while undercutting his call for "a new kind of politics." ... Not that the Arizona senator has much room to talk. He, too, has cast himself as a reformer who tells it like it is but his words and actions sometimes conflict with that identity. Overall, the race between Obama and McCain amounts to an authenticity contest. Voters are craving change from typical Washington ways and each candidate is claiming he offers a new brand of politics that transcends poisonous partisanship. Yet, each candidate, in what he says versus what he does, also is undermining his own promises not to become the politics of usual.

MORE: Without Public Funding, Sky's the Limit for Obama (Mike Dorning and John McCormick, Chicago Tribune)
Get ready for the $500 million presidential campaign. That's how much money some Democratic strategists think Barack Obama can raise for the fall election now that he has reversed field and decided to opt out of the public financing system that limits the election spending of presidential candidates. "Raising a half-billion dollars is a very realistic figure for him," said Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist and senior adviser to the last two Democratic presidential candidates. The pace of fundraising could be staggering. To make the $500 million mark in the remaining 137 days before Nov. 4, the campaign would need to raise $3.6 million a day, including Sundays, all in increments of no more than $2,300 per person, the legal limit for campaign contributions. That's more than $150,000 per hour, more than $2,500 a minute, much of it likely flowing in over the Internet through mouse-clicks and credit card transactions.

MEANWHILE: McCain Raises Money the Hard Way (Michael D. Shear, Washington Post)
McCain's fundraising has improved dramatically since he secured the nomination in early March. But unlike Obama, he's had to do it the very hard way, slogging through fundraiser after fundraiser, shaking hand after hand. By the count of some reporters who trail him daily, McCain has attended more than 90 fundraisers since March 5, flying around the country to court high-rollers in hotels and private homes.The fundraisers are time consuming, usually entailing a small reception for the biggest donors followed by a larger luncheon or dinner for a bigger group. There's almost always a line of people who get a photo with the candidate. On Monday, for example, McCain held a fundraiser at the the Belo Mansion in Dallas, followed Tuesday by one at the San Antonio Country Club and then two more at private homes in the River Oaks area of Houston.Total take: more than $4 million.

THE TWO OBAMAS
(David Brooks, New York Times)
God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.  But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes. This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside... He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.

MORE: Obama Out of the System, But Not Out of Character (Ben Smith, Politico)
In fact--though he has at times adopted popular reform causes--Obama has never been a traditional reformer. He came to politics through the community organizing movement, whose radical founder, Saul Alinsky, mocked highbrow reformers, and focused instead on the acquisition and use of power, with the ends often justifying the means. In Obama's political life, that approach has translated into pragmatism. He's kept his distance from elements of the Democratic Party that demand purity, from Washington reformers to more ideologically-motivated liberal bloggers. Instead, his campaign has sought the Kennedy mantle, modeling the candidate after a revered Democratic family not known for its scruples. "Their campaign is brutally pragmatic," said one Democratic operative. "They have the most exciting candidate since JFK and like that operation, they have their share of talented, ambitious and at times ruthless people. Barack gets to stay above the fray, while his campaign does whatever it takes to win."

THE REAL MCCAIN
(Eric Alterman and George Zornick, Los Angeles Times)
In a Pew Research Center survey from May, most voters described McCain as "a centrist whose views are fairly close to their own." These voters might as well be visiting Casablanca for the waters. The reality is that McCain has repudiated virtually all of the moderate, supposedly maverick positions that liberal reporters and columnists used to find so admirable. He voted for President Bush's right to waterboarding; he now rejects his own immigration plan; he hopes to extend the tax cuts he once condemned; and he's fine with Bush's plan for domestic spying. Today, McCain calls himself a thorough-going conservative, and he's got the statistics to prove it. He has voted with his party almost 90% of the time this term, which puts him ahead of 29 other Republicans. According to data analyzed at VoteView.com, McCain's voting record in 2005-06 would place him second in the contest for America's most conservative senator in the 109th Congress and eighth in the 110th Senate. McCain supported Bush in 95% of his votes in 2007 and has managed to achieve a perfect 100% score so far in 2008.  But voter ignorance of the "real McCain" is not the fault of the voters. They are simply consuming reports from the media that refuse to take McCain's politics seriously. 

GHOSTS IN THE GOP ATTACK MACHINE
(Jonathan Martin, Politico)
In a web video emailed to supporters Thursday, Barack Obama explained that he was opting out of the public financing system because John McCain is “not going to stop the smears and attacks from his allies running so-called 527 groups who will spend millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations.” Republicans can only wish that were the case. Obama’s alarmist prophecy — a bit of typical campaign rhetoric meant to scare his own donors into reaching for their credit cards — is wildly at odds with the flatlined state of conservative third-party efforts. The truth is that, less than five months before Election Day, there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group. Conversations with more than a dozen Republican strategists find near unanimity in the belief that, at some point, there will be a real third-party effort aimed at Obama. But not one knows who will run it, who will pay for it, what shape it will eventually take or when such a group may form. More worrisome for Republicans who believe such an outside attack apparatus is essential to defeating Obama, some key individuals and groups who were being looked to for help say they won’t be involved. 

OBAMA'S DECISION THREATENS PUBLIC FINANCING SYSTEM
(Leslie Wayne, New York Times)
From the moment that the public financing system was created in the wake of the Watergate crisis, it was viewed as an imperfect way to rid politics of the excesses of special-interest money. But now, with the decision by Senator Barack Obama to become the first presidential candidate to forgo public money, the system is facing the most critical threat to its survival. At various times in its three-decade life, the public financing system has been declared close to its demise. Yet, every four years, it has continued to survive, with all presidential candidates since the system began in 1976 accepting public money to run their general election campaigns — and the spending limitations that come with it. Yet, while candidates have accepted these limitations, large sums of special-interest money have continued to enter politics through inventive loopholes used by major contributors to get around the law’s restrictions... These days the outlet is the Internet, the tool that enabled Mr. Obama to break his promise that he would accept public funds. But the use of the Internet to raise campaign money at least plays into the spirit of campaign finance reform, some analysts said, and possibly does more to rein in the influence of big donors and special interests than 30 years of restrictions imposed by federal law.

TERROR FIRMA
(Jonathan Chait, New Republic)
In the Republican mind, there is a vast metaphysical divide over the question of how you fight terrorists. Tough guys like George W. Bush and McCain understand the evil of terrorism at a gut level and want to fight it with the military, using big guns and bombs. Wimps like John Kerry and Obama have a daintier, more equivocal sensibility, and prefer to deploy nerdy prosecutors to "serve our enemies with legal papers," as Bush liked to say. And so, when Obama let pass from his lips a reference to trying terrorists in court, McCain's campaign pounced. Foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann warned, "Obama holds up the prosecution of the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 as a model for his administration, when in fact this failed approach of treating terrorism simply as a matter of law enforcement rather than a clear and present danger to the United States contributed to the tragedy of September eleventh." McCain's blog scoffed, "It's hardly surprising that a lawyer would think that the war on terror would be fought more effectively by lawyers than by the United States Marine Corps. It doesn't matter that Obama never said, or even implied, that legal prosecution should be the sole method of preventing terrorism. The fact that he even mentioned prosecution apparently proves that he has what McCain's campaign called a "September 10th mindset."

DRILLER INSTINCT
(Paul Krugman, New York Times)
I’m reasonably sure that Mr. McCain’s advisers realize that offshore drilling would do nothing for current gas prices. But they may believe that the public can be conned. A Rasmussen poll taken before Mr. McCain’s announcement suggests that the public favors expanded offshore drilling, and believes (wrongly) that this would lower gasoline prices. And Mr. McCain may also hope to shore up his still fragile relations with the Republican base. As anyone who has read what’s in his inbox after publishing an article on oil prices can testify, there are many people on the right who believe that all our energy problems have been caused by sanctimonious tree-huggers. Mr. McCain has just thrown that constituency some red meat. But I very much doubt that Mr. McCain’s gambit will work. In fact, it’s almost certainly self-destructive. To have a chance in November, Mr. McCain has to convince voters that he isn’t just Bush, continued. Energy policy is one of the areas where he could best have made that case. Instead, he has ceded the high ground on energy to Mr. Obama, and linked himself firmly to the most unpopular president on record.

MCCAIN'S OIL EPIPHANY
(Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post)
At a time when U.S. crude oil production has fallen 40 percent in the last 25 years, 75 billion barrels of oil have been declared off-limits, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That would be enough to replace every barrel of non-North American imports (oil trade with Canada and Mexico is a net economic and national security plus) for 22 years.That's nearly a quarter-century of energy independence. The situation is absurd. To which John McCain is responding with a partial fix: Lift the federal ban on Outer Continental Shelf drilling, where a fifth of the off-limits stuff lies. This is a change for McCain, but circumstances have changed... McCain's problem is that he's only able to go halfway on energy production because he has locked himself into opposition to the other obvious source of domestic oil -- the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. His fastidiousness on this is inexplicable. "I believe that ANWR is a pristine area," he explains. Is it more pristine than the ocean, where he now wants to drill? More pristine than the Arabian Desert from which we daily beg the Saudi princes to pump more oil?