Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Obama: Get Back on Message, Free College

I know it, Barack, you just can't win lately. You stand up for Wright and you get slammed, you renounce him and you get slammed. You're sounding like it's really getting to you, which is only human, which means you've got to fall back to the plan. Why you are doing this.

The pundits and networks are trying to Dean-Scream you with this Wright thing. Pretty amazing, isn't it? The guy says the US has killed innocent civilians and everyone acts shocked. Wright could have put it differently, but you mean to tell me thousands of Iraqi civilians haven't been killed by US bombs and firing into cars at checkpoints? But you're trying to win an election, and that's a downer.

That means, to stop from veering off in all directions, giving a history lesson on one hand and telling white America they're not all evil on the other, you need to pull back to message. You need to say, Look, this is what always happens whenever someone gets too close to the real problem, the disappearance of the middle-class and all the bridges that used to let Americans go from one class to another, just working hard and not needing to be a financial genius.

Bridges like college affordability and worker training. They want to get your minds off the fact that your jobs went overseas or to Mexico, and even if your kids are bright and have the grades they probably can't afford their first-choice college. They want you to forget that a very small number of people have benefited from the lion's share of tax breaks while you can still barely make ends meet.

So here's what you do, Barack. They'll work the social divisions like always, whether it's gay marriage, abortion, or school prayer, unless you show that poor black people and poor white people have more in common than they have dividing them, which is why the billionaires running the networks are trying to stop this Obama phenomenon. Anyone who says, "We have to disaggregate tax policy between the wealthy and the working class or middle class," like you did, is dangerous. Because once you touch on the idea that the interests of the very rich might not be the interests of everyone, well hell, everything that keeps them getting richer no matter what happens might come crashing down.

Do what you do best, which is thinking and uniting. And not by tearing old Jeremiah a new one - yes, he should have shut up after you asked him to, when you explained to him that people can't handle too much truth at once. The last guy who tried that got nailed to a cross. I mean Wright didn't have to say 9/11 was "payback," that's a little harsh, but you mean the CIA didn't overthrow the democratic president of Iran, Mossadeq, in 1953? And install the bloody Shah, which led to the Iranian Revolution and furthered Middle East extremism? Give me a break.

You need to pull out of this nosedive where the talkingheads are, AGAIN, going to snooker people into voting against their own interest, for a woman whose husband fairly personified NAFTA and all those other free trade agreements which they lied would help everyone, but were really aimed at their fat-cat businessman contributors. Sure, that was Bill, but Hillary, as a co-equal like she always says, said not one word against those agreements when she could have politely disagreed with her husband, the way even Laura disagrees with George about some things.

You need to announce the American First Choice College Initiative. (AMFCHOICE? Help me out here.) You've got to think big or media hyenas will keep circling and tearing of little pieces out of you.

The idea is, in the first 100 days of an Obama administration, any American student will have the funds to go to the best school he or she can get into, or wants to go to, from the Opportunity Fund. Max-out what a poor or middle-class parent will pay, and Uncle Sam takes care of the rest. In one very real, concrete way Obama is REBUILDING the bridges to the middle-class.

No kid should have to go to Iraq for college money. The dirty little secret is, over the past 25 years, fewer and fewer kids have been able to afford their first choice college.

Here's the kicker: It's financially do-able. Since you're getting us out of a Iraq, like you said in your Superbowl ad, that $100 billion or so we spend every year could go to this program. Joe Stiglitz calls this the $3 trillion war. "Unmet college need," a rough measure of what this program would cost, runs at about $30 billion a year. Do you know how many times $30 bill fits into $3 trill? You don't want to know. Put your numbers crunchers on it, the guys you pay, and they should be able to come up a some good estimates in under 24 hours. It isn't rocket science. It's arithmetic. $100 billion minus $30 billion leaves enough for 3 more years. Kill that idiotic Star Wars, and we've got the money forever.

Here's your sticker, I want credit:

Obama: Building Bridges, Uniting Americans

Make them forget that your black, and that they're white, and make them remember we're all in this together. And if you really use this idea, I want a job.

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