by David Domke, professor of communication and head of journalism

Editor's note: David Domke,a UW communication professor and head of journalism, is teaching "Online Journalism and Politics" to a group of undergraduates. Read below about their experiences, and check out their work at http://seattlepoliticore.org

Journalists love to write about the rise and fall of politicians in America. The scribes watch candidates get built up, then chronicle them getting torn down. And, as often as not, journalists don’t just write these storylines — they contribute to them and cement them as well.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations today are in descent mode — or at least they seem to be so — and news media post-mortems for her campaign are getting churned out faster than newspaper copies. It was Bill’s fault. It was the lack of planning for a post-Super Tuesday campaign. It was poor allocation of campaign funds. Hillary was too wonky, not enough Bubba. The campaign couldn’t match the grass-roots prowess of Obama’s organization.

My students saw some of these elements up close and personal.

SeattlePoliticore.org
Since early January, a team of 16 journalism students at the University of Washington have been covering the 2008 presidential campaign. We’ve gone new media, adopting a mode of blogging that combines traditional reporting, insights from other news outlets, and first-person commentary. It’s somewhere between the voice of the Seattle Times’ David Postman and the rancor of the blogosphere: part journalism, part pundit, part political-newbies. Altogether, we have presented the campaign through youthful eyes. I’m the students’ prof and head of journalism at the UW.

Our forum has been http://www.seattlepoliticore.org, and our material has gotten play at huffingtonpost, the Seattle Times, the Idaho Statesman, and a number of blogs for which my students write. We’ve covered Democratic Party caucuses in Idaho — the state’s Republicans don’t use this method to select delegates — and the caucuses and primaries of both parties around King County, including Seattle proper and the Eastside. Later this week we head to Texas for our grand finale: coverage of the March 4 primary and caucuses (yes, Texas has both too, challenging Washington’s delegate process for most-screwed-up status). It just might be the last big contest for all of the campaigns.

It’s been a powerful experience, both as students and citizens.

We spent two hours stuck at Snoqualmie Pass working via cell phones and wireless network cards, and then sped to Couer d’ Alene to see Northern Idahoans brave ice and freezing weather to give Barack Obama 80 percent of their caucus votes. We were barred from entering the Republican caucus in the 37^th Legislative District in Rainier Beach — until the Seattle City Library and a sheriff’s deputy intervened — and scored an on-camera interview with governor Christine Gregoire at a Democratic caucus in Magnolia. We saw Mercer Island and Sammamish Dems and Repubs conduct themselves with calm and citizen pride.

And along the way we learned some important things about the Obama and Clinton campaigns. We didn’t set out to learn these pieces — but the campaigns taught us loud and clear.

The Worth of Youth
In our coverage of the Idaho and Washington state caucuses, there emerged a lean toward Obama in my students’ writing about the Democratic contest. This pro-Obama frame occurred for three reasons:

• because some of the students have serious political crushes on him, even though they’ve tried to keep all this in check. He inspires them — and I haven’t sought to squelch this, being a prof interested in helping students become citizens.
• because the class is set up as a blogging class, in which politics meets alternative journalism. So their opinion shines through in places, and this was fine as long as they didn’t cross over into fan mail.
• because the Obama campaign treated us like pros — they called us back within minutes, set up interviews, got us press passes, went out of their way to make the campaign accessible. The Clinton campaign, in contrast, didn’t return a single phone call, didn’t provide press access, and did virtually nothing to encourage our coverage. It was either arrogance or disorganization on the Clinton campaign’s part.

Here’s one example: Jeff Giertz, the Obama team’s on-the-ground point person for the press, answered my phone call when I called to ask about press access to the Obama event on February 8 at Key Arena. He said he’d check on getting passes for my students. I figured I’d wait and see if he actually did.  Within 5 minutes he emailed me back saying it was a go, and he could provide four press passes for my students.  I was impressed.  Clearly he had a vested interest in getting college students into the press area — and he did what a campaign person should do: he treated us well and welcomed us to his candidate. He told me to call him anytime.

So I did.

Lots of my students wanted to cover this event, so I called Giertz back 6 hours later and asked for four more passes.  He said yes. The next day when some of my students arrived at Key Arena after the local police had locked the doors and weren’t allowing anyone in — including reporters from local TV and radio outlets — the students dialed up Giertz and he personally came and vouched for them. He followed up the day after the event with an email checking in on how I thought things went. I don’t for a moment think he did all this just to be a nice guy; he had motives.  Of course. 

Still, it’s telling that I made the exact same pitch about “access to college students” to the Clinton campaign, and they didn’t do anything to facilitate our coverage.  Here’s the voice of one of my students, Jennifer Ware:

I noticed a difference between Obama and Clinton when I first started calling their campaigns in the week before the caucuses. At that point Washington state seemed like an afterthought for the Clinton campaign. Hillary wasn’t anywhere to be found in Seattle, but Obama had a campaign office in the heart of Pioneer Square. He had for months, and everyone there seemed more than happy to help.

When I called the Clinton campaign to ask for a contact at their Washington state campaign office, one staffer tried to tell me that Washington was where their campaign headquarters is. “Yes” she said, “Washington, it’s right next to Virginia.”

Obama had the foresight to know he might need Washington state, whereas Clinton apparently never thought she’d have to reach this far. And a tiny part of me felt excluded.

Every single person I’ve dealt with from the Obama campaign was upbeat, positive and helpful. Even when the press couldn’t initially get into the venue on Friday for Obama’s speech, and a reporter from the Seattle Times was yelling at one of the volunteers, she handled it with poise and kindness. It was almost so good it looked staged, but she was real. She said, “I’m just a volunteer from Shoreline, I’ve never done this before, please bear with me.” Even as Obama volunteers managed mobs of people at Key Arena, they did it with purpose, not burden.

And I think it’s because they feel part of a movement.

John McCain spoke in Seattle [the same day] to about 500 people at the Westin Hotel’s conference room. Clinton spoke to a gathering of 5000 at a waterfront pier [on February 7]. Obama spoke at Key Arena, home to the Seattle Supersonics, it seats 18,000 and it wasn’t nearly big enough. People were sitting on the stairs, in the aisles. Seasoned reporters were smiling and nodding softly as he spoke. Some people had tears in their eyes when he came on stage. There’s all kinds of spin out there, but you simply can’t spin those numbers. Or the stark contrast to the others in the race.

When my students had trouble reaching the Clinton campaign in the run-up to the caucuses, I made a call to her national office. I figured that maybe they’d respond to a UW professor better than a student — which would be an error on their part, but still one that we might use to help our coverage.  I told them we were having trouble reaching people — anyone — on the ground in WA state with the Clinton campaign, and I implored them to make sure my request on behalf of my students for press access to Clinton’s event in Seattle received a response.  They assured me I’d hear from them. I emphasized my point a second time.  They kindly repeated that I would certainly hear from people on the ground here.

I’m still waiting for that call.

The Obama and Clinton campaigns weren’t the only ones to come to town. On the Republican Party side, Ron Paul held a rally on the UW campus. Janet Huckabee held a rally at Northwest College and her campaign team reached out to my students covering her husband’s candidacy — returning calls and making sure they had press access. McCain’s campaign aides went out of their way to let my students know about his press event at the Westin, and to get them in. For those scoring at home, five presidential campaigns came to town — and four reached out to my students, treating them like what they are: journalists and citizens.

It seems that the take-home point here is this: the Clinton campaign has made the case that Obama is nothing but rhetoric; he’s supposedly all words, while she’s all action. Our experiences showed us that their campaigns — at least in Seattle — were exactly the opposite. In their treatment of my students, Clinton’s campaign was all talk, while Obama’s was all walk.

It suggests to me that the Obama campaign’s appeal to younger people is not just because of Obama himself. It’s a campaign that treats young people like full adults. As a college prof, I’ve got to give them props. They got my attention — and my students, and the many young people who have been reading our website. And across Washington state, Obama crushed Clinton, defeating her in every county in the state. It’s been a pattern repeated in every contest since.

By Michael K. Honey, Haley Professor of Humanities

Northern Illinois University is my alma mater. That's where I got my PhD, and the buildings shown on the news are my old haunts. NIU is a small, almost intimate campus, with the main buildings in a cluster. My niece just went there to do research at the library for her PhD. DeKalb is a semi-rural, almost quaint town, built as the railroads moved west. The flying ear of corn along the roadside signals the hybrid DeKalb corn, and maybe some of you have seen that in the Midwest farm country. It is horrifying and deeply saddening that another college massacre would occur here. On April 8, 1968, after Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, his widow, Coretta Scott King, wondered how long "before we can have a free and true and peaceful society...how long will it take?"

by Michael Honey, UW Tacoma professor of history and labor studies

Editor's note:  Julian Bond, long-time leader in the American civil rights movement, spoke at several University of Washington gatherings on Feb. 6.

I remember Julian Bond first of all as that eloquent advocate of the politics of hope elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965. He and his comrades in the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee had begun breaking down white supremacy by putting their bodies on the line. Because of his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam war, Bond's constituents had to elect him three times before whites in the legislature would let him take his seat. It was SNCC that started the refrain, “Hell no, we won’t go.”

My long-time progressive Seattle friend, Lyle Mercer, reminded me last night that the Washington legislature refused to seat someone in the 1930s because they suspected him of being a Communist. Likewise, the schools and various employers refused to hire Lyle because he had been the co-chair of the UW students for Wallace during the Progressive Party effort of 1948. Radicals always have a hard way to go.

Julian Bond served 20 years in the legislature, was nominated for Vice-President in 1968, and has been a voice speaking truth to power most of my adult life. I think of him as a truth-telling, pragmatic radical, always looking for and finding some path to change. At his UW talk, he inveighed against the Republican Supreme Court which has shattered our commitment to desegregation and the 14^th Amendment by claiming that all operations of government must be color blind. “The ludicrous has become law,” he said. “There are no non-racial remedies to racial discrimination.”

In 1968, the Kerner Commission told us we are evolving into two societies, “one white, and one black, separate and unequal.” Things in some ways have gotten so much better, but most whites still don’t understand that due to the heritage of slavery and segregation, white privilege still counts, it is inherited whether you want it or not. Hence, “as long as race counts, we’ve got to count race,” Bond said.

He cited a litany of ways in which the life chances of the majority of African Americans have shrunk under the Bush regime, at the same time as new paths to prosperity have opened up to a significant group of better-educated African Americans. And while we spend $720 million a day for a fiasco in Iraq, poverty rises in America to the highest level in the developed world. In this dichotomous world, the future is one of both promise and peril, Bond said.

By 2050, Hispanics and African Americans will make up 40 percent of the U.S. electorate. In that context, we can all benefit from the movement’s combination of tactics, from litigation, organization, mobilization. The future is about what all and each of us will and can do to make a better world.

Bond gave a similar message to a group of about 50 graduate students earlier in the day, convened by the Graduate Opportunities and Achievement Program, or GOMAP, under the always delightful and able organizing of Yvette Moy.  James Banks, Nikhil Singh, the students and I joined in an earnest conversation about the future, and we found much to be hopeful about.

Should the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People change its name? When we say colored people, said Bond, we take into account that all people are colored, in our various hues, and that all people of good will are welcome. Everyone can do something, make some choice, to give hope. Yes, we can join together to dig out of the horrific, disastrous mess created in the last seven years by a fundamentally dishonest, militaristic, and wrong-headed regime.

He also said one problem we have is we are falling back on leaders, but what we need in addition is organizers, and mass movements. "Engage your body in social change."

It was a good message to hear in a year when it seems, at last, there may be something to be hopeful about in taking the national political apparatus back from extremist reactionaries who would like to turn government into a profit-making enterprise for their friends, and leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves.

Fittingly, Bond ended his public lecture with a grand quote from the Socialist Party labor advocate, Eugene Debs, imprisoned for refusing to support World War I. On the eve of political primaries and caucuses, Julian Bond gave us a moment to savor a few words of reflection from one of the masters of don’t-give-up, stay-in-the-fight, be-pragmatic, but-don’t-lose-your faith exponents of hope. It reminded me of the best ideals this country has to offer, which come deeply from the history of our own struggles for freedom.

by Christopher Parker, UW assistant professor of political science

Last week, the Chairman of the NAACP, Julian Bond, was on campus. He was here to discuss Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy: where do we go from here? A founding member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),Bond served as its communications director from 1961 to 1966. SNCC, as the student-based arm of the civil rights movement, was instrumental to the success of desegregation in the South, fashioning sit-ins and freedom rides to contest Jim Crow laws.

Later, through voter registration drives, SNCC helped black southerners gain access to the ballot. Bond was so committed to the movement, and his post at SNCC, that he  took temporary leave from his studies at Morehouse College, where he majored in English, to devote more time to the freedom struggle.

Save for a select few who remain with us, with 48 years in the struggle and counting, there isn’t anyone more qualified comment on Dr. King’s legacy than Dr. Bond. He laments that the freedom struggle’s lost the “organizing tradition.” For him, it means engaging people, “going door-to-door…protesting, not just speech-making.” Having said that, he likes what he sees with Barack Obama’s campaign, the ways in which it’s inspired people—especially the young. Yet he wonders whether or not folks will remain engaged after the general election, especially if they don’t agree with the result.

In the final analysis, he seemed cautiously optimistic about what an Obama presidency would do for the country. From what I was able to glean, his words conveyed a sense that Obama has tapped into something, something unseen since the SNCC-sponsored events of 1964. Freedom Summer, an event designed to raise the consciousness of white student volunteers from non-southern states while teaching black southerners how to pass the “literacy exams” required for blacks to vote, brought blacks and whites together for a common cause: realizing the promise of American democracy. An Obama presidency, needless to say, offers the same allure, signaling that we, as a country, may have arrived.

by David Domke, UW professor of communication and head of journalism

Editor's note: David Domke, UW communication professor and head of journalism, is teaching "Online Journalism and Politics" to a group of undergraduates.

They're blogging at seattlepoliticore.org, but he's also blogged at dailykos.com, billed as a progressive community blog. Here's his Daily Kos posting from Saturday evening after the Washington state caucuses:

This is how a team of 16 students at the University of Washington saw Democratic and Republican caucuses around King County on Saturday.  King County includes heavily-blue Seattle and the purple Eastside of Lake Washington, which includes Microsoft-dominated Redmond.

We liveblogged the Seattle-area caucuses at seattlepoliticore.org. I'm the students' prof and head of journalism at the UW. The site's content is part journalism, part pundit, part political-newbies. Altogether, the site presents these caucuses through youthful eyes.

Along the way we learned something important about the Obama and Clinton campaigns. We didn't set out to learn this -- but the campaigns taught us loud and clear.

Know this when looking at the site: there is a lean toward Obama in the coverage. This occurred for three reasons:

1. because the students have serious crushes on him, even though they've tried to keep all this in check. 

1. because the class is set up as a blogging class, in which politics meets alternative journalism. So their opinion shines through in places.

1. because the Obama campaign treated us like pros -- they called us back within minutes, set up interviews, got us press passes, went out of their way to make the campaign accessible. The Clinton campaign, in contrast, didn't return a single phone call, didn't provide press access, and did virtually nothing to encourage our coverage. It was either arrogance or disorganization on the Clinton camapign's part.

Here's one example: Jeff Giertz, the Obama team's on-the-ground point person for the press, answered my phone call when I called to ask about press access to the Obama event Friday at Key Arena. He said he'd check on getting passes for my students. I figured I'd wait and see if he actually did.  Within 5 minutes he emailed me back saying it was a go, and he could provide 4 press passes for my students.  I was impressed.  Clearly he had a vested interest in getting college students into the press area -- and he did what a campaign person should do: he treated us well and welcomed us to his candidate. He told me to call him anytime.

So I did.

I called back 6 hours later and asked for 4 more passes.  He said yes. The next day when some of my students arrived at Key Arena after the local police had locked the doors and weren't allowing anyone in, the students called Giertz and he personally came and vouched for them. He followed up today with an email checking in on how things went, from my perspective. I don't for a moment think he's doing all this just to be a nice guy; he's got motives.  Of course. 

Still, it's telling that I made the exact same pitch about "access to college students" to the Clinton campaign, and they didn't do anything to facilitate our coverage.  When I talked to the press folks at the national office, I told them we were having trouble reaching people -- anyone -- on the ground in WA state with the Clinton campaign, and I implored them to make sure my request on behalf of my students for press access to Clinton's event Thursday night in Seattle received a response.  They assured me I'd hear from them.

I'm still waiting for that call.

My point here is this: the Obama campaign's appeal to younger people is not just because of Obama himself. It's a campaign that treats young people like full adults. As a college prof, I've got to give them props. They got my attention -- and my students, and the many young people who have been reading our website. And tonight, across Washington state, Obama is crushing Clinton, 68-31 with 96% of caucus precincts reporting.

UPDATE: On the recommended list???  You just gave my students another reason to think politics and their voices aren't a waste of time. Thank you.

Here's the voice of one of my students.  A couple weeks ago she wrote this. This morning she sent me these thoughts:

I noticed a difference between Obama and Clinton when I first started my project calling their campaigns. At that point Washington state seemed like an afterthought for the Clinton campaign. Hillary wasn't anywhere to be found in Seattle, but Obama had a campaign office in the heart of Pioneer Square, a Seattle centerplace. He had for months, and everyone there seemed more than happy to help.

When I called the Clinton campaign to ask for a contact at their Washington state campaign office, one staffer tried to tell me that Washington was where their campaign headquarters is. "Yes" she said, "Washington, it's right next to Virginia."

Obama had the foresight to know he might need Washington state, whereas Clinton never thought she'd have to reach this far. And a tiny part of me felt excluded.

Every single person I've dealt with from the Obama campaign has been upbeat, positive and helpful. Even when the press couldn't initially get into the venue on Friday for Obama's speech, and a reporter from the Seattle Times was yelling at one of the volunteers, she handled it with poise and kindness. It was almost so good it looked staged, but she was real. She said, "I'm just a volunteer from Shoreline, I've never done this before, please bear with me." Even as Obama volunteers managed mobs of people at Key Arena, they did it with purpose, not burden.

And I think it's because they feel part of a movement.

John McCain spoke in Seattle to about 50 500 people at the Westin Hotel's conference room. Clinton spoke to a gathering of 5000 at a waterfront pier. Obama spoke at Key Arena, home to the Seattle Supersonics, it seats 18,000 and it wasn't nearly big enough. People were sitting on the stairs, in the aisles. Seasoned reporters were smiling and nodding softly as he spoke. Some people had tears in their eyes when he came on stage. There's all kinds of spin out there, but you simply can't spin those numbers. Or the stark contrast to the others in the race.

And here's the voice of another student in my class, from a comment in this diary thread:

If [the Clinton campaign] cared, they could have done more...  Read my diary I wrote this morning. After covering the Obama press conference that morning, we rushed to Key Arena, but the doors were already closed. The police would not let us in, however one call to Jeff from the Obama campaign, and not only did we get in, but he personally came out and got us.  Hillary's campaign didn't even give us the chance. If she care[s] about youth, she could have done something...anything...seriously, anything...

by mrsellers on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 01:21:01 AM PST

One other thing, to be fair to all in this race: there were three other campaigns that came to Seattle this past week -- all on the Republican side. Ron Paul held a rally on the UW campus. Janet Huckabee held a rally at Northwest College and her campaign team reached out to my students covering her husband's candidacy. McCain's campaign aides went out of their way to let my students know about a press event, and to get them in.

To summarize, then: 5 campaigns came to town -- and 4 reached out to my students. I applaud those that did, and scratch my head over the one that didn't.

By John Gastil, UW professor of communication

This Saturday, February 9, Washington voters will participate in Democratic and Republican caucuses to select delegates in each party’s Presidential election. The caucuses have potential to be a remarkable campaign event, in which people meet fellow citizens—neighbors, even—face-to-face to discuss the candidates and issues of the moment. It's a lively scene.

The only problem is, it’s deceptive.

The truth is that the caucus is just a complicated method of head-counting. At best, caucuses are a ritualistic exercise in counting where people’s shoes end up on a gym floor. At worst, they can devolve into shouting and intimidation competitions, as they did at times in Nevada.

The image of a reflective, careful electorate is as false for a caucus as for a primary. The dominant narrative in the Democratic election is “change” (Obama) versus “experience” (Clinton), despite the fact that either candidate would be a radical change, and both have only a modest amount of experience in government.

More striking is that younger voters and African-Americans are flocking to Obama while older voters and women are lining up for Clinton, suggesting more of a demographic-matching process than careful deliberation.

On the Republican side, the press have declared McCain the Republican nominee well in advance of his likely triumph, a fact that incensed Huckabee, who amusingly pled his case once again on the Feb. 7  edition of Colbert Report.

The dominant explanation for McCain’s reemergence as the frontrunner is the alleged recent “success” of the war in Iraq, which McCain had supported even when it was unpopular; this supposedly helped him win over the voters of New Hampshire one at a time. That sounds like a reasoning electorate, but McCain only had a narrow 5-point victory over Romney in the Granite State, with only 37% of the vote. Were the other two-thirds of Republican voters unreasonable? Moreover, does this make the Iowa caucusers irrational for backing Huckbee five days earlier?

All these explanations strike me as tortured, overwrought attempts to rationalize an electoral process that is anything but deliberative. This is the essence of the argument I make in my new book, Political Communication and Deliberation. 

I show some of the ways civic reformers are trying to change the way we hold public meetings. They're working for a new kind of community politics, journalism, and governance that encourage public deliberation. Groups like the November 5th Coalition promote a real kind of deliberation—not the sham deliberation that the caucuses represent.

To be clear, I consider it one’s civic duty to participate in elections. I will be among those  citizens trudging to the caucus on Saturday, in spite of a persistent flu, which I hope none of my fellow partisans catch. However, my being there makes me part of a very, very small percentage of Washington voters who will participate—roughly one-tenth as many can be expected to vote in a primary.

The caucus, particularly the Iowa Caucus, has built up a kind of credibility and “specialness” as a remarkable democratic (little “d”) event. Imagine a process where citizens carefully study their candidates then come together to compare one another’s choices. Imagine opposing partisan camps having the chance to make their case for their preferred candidate, hoping to woo both their counterparts and the clutch of still-undecided or independent-minded citizens who stand between them. I ask us to imagine the deliberation that could take place at these events because it is precisely that—imaginary.

So if you live in Washington, by all means attend the Democratic or Republican caucus. But attend expecting to stand around, tap into some party energy, and maybe bond with your like-minded partisans. Don’t go there expecting an education in democratic deliberation, or you’ll walk away disappointed.

By David Domke, UW professor of communication and head of Journalism

In winning contests in 13 states on Super Tuesday, Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama displayed his ability to draw voters from all corners of America. Most notably, perhaps, he beat primary competitor Hillary Clinton in a large number of states that have tilted Republican in recent decades.

Such successes are intriguing for any Democratic candidate running for president. For an African-American man virtually unknown just a few years ago, there can be only one explanation: God must be involved.

In the politics, that is.

Transcending the chasm of race is difficult in the United States. For politicians in America, an effective way to do so is by accentuating religious faith. More than 90% of U.S. adults consistently say they believe in God or a universal spirit — prompting George Gallup Jr. to remark that it’s not even worth polling the matter. As a result, emphasizing that one is a “person of faith” has the ability to connect more Americans than any other campaign talking point.

This has become particularly so in recent decades. Analysis of more than 15,000 public communications by U.S. political leaders from Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 — the origin of what scholars call the “modern presidency” — through the first six years of George W. Bush’s administration shows an astonishing increase in religious rhetoric beginning in 1980. That year Ronald Reagan ran a campaign shot through with religious themes and calculated outreach to newly mobilized evangelicals. The approach was so successful that subsequent presidents and presidential hopefuls have followed suit. My colleague Kevin Coe and I call this the God strategy.

This approach reaps rewards for any candidate, but for an African American politician it is essential. Faith provides a deeply felt connection that allows — perhaps even compels — many white voters to see a minority candidate as fully human. Yes, history shows that faith prompts some to be more prejudiced; but in the 21st century, far more draw from their sacred texts and traditions the message that God is colorblind.

As Americans struggle to overcome racial biases, invocations of faith by a black candidate go a long way towards appealing to the better angels of all Americans’ nature.

Obama  understands the political value of trumpeting a mainstream Christian faith — and the danger of having those beliefs questioned. His campaign reacted strongly to two e-mail whisper campaigns, one that accused him of being a Muslim and another that accused his church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, of being anti-white.

Obama turned both into opportunities, taking to the airwaves to discuss his faith and putting out a statement describing himself as a “committed Christian.” On Saturday in red-state Boise, before an audience of 14,000 — equivalent to one-tenth of all registered voters in the state — Obama directly addressed the anti-Muslim campaign and declared, “I've been going to the same church for 20 years, praising Jesus.”

All of this has helped Obama reach across demographic and ideological lines to attract voters. Consider that he was the first Democratic presidential candidate to visit Idaho since Harry Truman — an approach that paid off when he won 80% of the state’s caucus delegates, the largest single victory for any presidential candidate in the 2008 campaign.

To understand just how valuable Obama’s emphasis on faith is, consider an event Obama attended in December 2006 — an AIDS summit meeting of key religious leaders held at Saddleback Church in Southern California, home of prominent evangelical Rick Warren.

There, in front of an audience consisting primarily of white conservatives, Obama was gently chided by Republican Senator Sam Brownback — a favorite among Christian conservatives — for moving in on his territory. “Welcome to my house,” Brownback said.

When it was his turn, Obama took the podium and played his trump card. “This is my house too,” he said. “This is God’s house.” The audience gave Obama a standing ovation, accompanied by enthusiastic shouts of “Amen.” Two months later, the junior senator from Illinois announced he was running for president, opening his kickoff speech with these words: “Giving all praise and honor to God for bringing us together here today.”

As we move beyond Super Tuesday and into the rest of the primary season, Obama’s willingness to emphasize his Christian faith might well be his saving grace.

by Walter Williams, UW emeritus professor of public affairs

John Edwards has stopped his presidential run but he still has a critical contribution to make in the campaign and beyond. Like a latter-day Al Gore, he should continue his message that none of the major candidates have addressed.

Only Edwards has cried out, “Corporate greed and political calculation have taken over our government and sold out the middle class.” Only he has warned of “the iron-fisted grip that corporations have on American democracy.”

Edwards faces a Washington establishment that fears real change to the status quo. A Washington Post reporter wrote before the Iowa caucus that “Edwards continued to veer closer into alarmist territory.”

Is Edwards’ message “alarmist“? Definitely not. In our analysis of George W. Bush’s economic policies, The Politics of Bad Ideas, political scientist Bryan Jones and I found that the middle class is in dire straits, that a tiny super-rich elite reap most of the income gains, and corporate America controls the Washington government.

THE MIDDLE CLASS. Census data on income in 2006 (the latest available) shows that real median family income for working-age households fell $1,336, or 2.4 percent, from 2001, when that income level was $56,062.

The decline from 2001 to 2005 is by far the longest string of yearly decreases in the real median family income of working-aged families in the postwar era. Commerce Department data indicate that from 2001 to 2007, a smaller share of gains in income went to workers and a larger share to corporate profits than in any postwar economic recovery.

On average, the entire middle class experienced limited income gains and kept up its living standard by zero saving and massive borrowing. The middle class is hurting.

THE SUPER-RICH. The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimated that in 2006, the 0.3 percent of families (three in a thousand) receiving a yearly income of at least $1 million got, on the average, $118,000 from George W. Bush’s tax cuts. That’s nearly 160 times more in tax benefits than the middle fifth of families that averaged $740 in benefits.

The New York Times’ David Cay Johnson wrote that 28 percent of the investment tax cut savings went to just 11,433 of the 134 million taxpayers, those who made $10 million or more in a year, saving them almost $1.9 million each. By comparison, the nearly 90 percent of Americans who make less than $100,000 a year saved $318 on average.

GOVERNMENT CONTROL. These immense disparities came about solely because of the Bush tax cuts. Such largesse from the Bush tax cuts that funneled benefits to a super-rich elite is a perfect example of control over the government by the rich and powerful.

An excellent case in point is the House of Representatives’ effort to offset the cost of fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) so that it would not hit an added 25 million mainly middle- class households in 2007.

The House chose to offset the lost revenue from the AMT fix by removing certain tax advantages for investment fund advisors and hedge fund managers, some of whom earn over $1 billion a year.

Washington Post reporter Jeffery Birnbaum described what happened:”Dozens of lobbyists were hired to pressure lawmakers, and campaign donations were stepped up, especially from Wall Street executives.”

Wall Street wealth won. Members of Congress were bought. A handful of super-rich people, who are big campaign contributors, escaped a hefty tax increase. The cost of the AMT fix was paid for by borrowing so future generations will bear the costs.

No wonder the number of Washington lobbyists has increased threefold since 1996 to 36,000. That’s over 60 lobbyists per Congress member.

The greater prosperity and economic equality of the early postwar era that made the American Dream realistic to a broad middle class has vanished. John Edward’s notion of two nations now applies. Plutocracy—government by the wealthy—is the order of the day in 21^st century Washington.

Others, including this author, have warned of the dangers of plutocratic governance. So too have people in the case global warming -- without much impact until Al Gore took center stage.

It is as daunting a task to awaken the American people to corporations’ iron-fisted grip on democracy and the likely destruction of the middle class. John Edwards’ credibility and anger plus his honed-toughness as a trial lawyer make him the ideal choice to stay in the bully pulpit.

By Michael K. Honey, UW Tacoma professor of humanities

The legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. casts a shadow over events in our country, and never more appropriately so than in this electoral season of 2008. In a real sense, King paved the way for Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign of hope. Using the Bible and the Constitution, King argued and demonstrated that ordinary people can change history, by organizing themselves into a coherent force for change.

At the same time, many of the democratic advances of the 20th century are in jeopardy today, none more so than the right to organize unions, without which working people cannot raise their incomes and improve their lives. We have a long way to go before people at their workplace are afforded the constitutional and human rights that the civil rights and labor movements struggled for, and that King died for.

Barney Sellers / Courtesy The Memphis Commercial Appeal National Guardsmen on Beale Street, March 29, 1968

The right to organize is under attack
Many of this year's presidential candidates seem to want to demonize illegal immigrants. Former senator John Edwards, who quit the race last week, is almost alone among them in explaining that our "immigration problem" is actually a labor problem. "Free trade" laws have helped U.S. agribusiness to undersell corn farmers in Mexico, sending them streaming north in search of work; those laws make it easier for multinational corporations to outsource unionized jobs with wages that support a family to cheaper labor markets abroad. Families on both sides of the border are hurt by the catastrophic destruction of the farming economy and well-paying working-class jobs.

In Immokalee, Fla., immigrant fruit and vegetable pickers work six days a week, 12 hours a day, for about $13,000 a year, poverty wages by anyone's standard. Florida's growers have invested millions in a campaign to stop them from getting just one penny per pound more for the crops they pick. In Smithfield, N.C., black, Hispanic and white meatpacking workers get poverty wages while employers fire, harass and intimidate, and federal officers raid the homes of immigrant workers and deport them.

South of our border, Mexican authorities beat up teachers in Oaxaca; Guatemalan authorities kidnap unionists at Coca-Cola plants; Colombian death squads kill hundreds of union leaders. Elsewhere in the world, China too often crushes union organizing.

Repression in the United States is not as severe, but Americans are similarly challenged when it comes to guaranteeing people union rights. In Washington, Republicans in the Senate killed the Employee Free Choice Act last year, which would have allowed workers to unionize if a majority sign cards expressing their consent. President Bush's National Labor Relations Board has twisted labor law to make it almost impossible to organize. Tennessee's "right to work" law prohibits the union shop, allowing "free riders" to get union benefits without paying union dues. The laws are stacked against workers.

No wonder that only about 12 percent of American workers belong to unions -- 7.5 percent of those in the private sector and nearly 36 percent of workers in the public sector. Many in the private sector are especially scared to join unions, because so many people have been fired or blocked for promotions when they do.

Low union membership translates to poverty wages linked to high infant mortality and low high school graduation rates for the working and unemployed poor.

Wary of a possible return to the violence that had convulsed Downtown Memphis one day earlier, National Guardsmen blocked off Beale Street as striking sanitation workers protested on March 29, 1968. "All labor has dignity,"  Martin Luther King Jr. preached. "You are ... reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages."

Jack E. Cantrell / Courtesy of Special Collections, the University of Memphis Libraries The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. (left) and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. joined King at a press conference on March 28, 1968, where they vowed that the sanitation workers' protests would continue. "We know that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters," King had told a crowd at Mason Temple days earlier. "What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?"

Workers in the United States and across our borders are not enemies. We have a common interest in enforcing the right of workers to organize, so that wages will rise, consumer spending will increase and our economies will move forward.

What does all this have to do with King and his legacy? A great deal.

'All labor has dignity': King's quest for labor rights
In January, AFL-CIO union members from all over the United States gathered in Memphis to remember King and honor sanitation workers Taylor Rogers, Joe Warren, William Ross, Baxter Leach, J.B. Trotter and others who stood up for their rights with union organizer T.O. Jones in 1968.

During a 65-day strike, the sanitation workers' families lived on very little. Memphis police clubbed people senseless and sprayed them with Mace, a blinding chemical made for use in war. Yet the workers kept marching. Until recently, their story was almost lost to history. But increasingly, others across the country want to hear it.

Americans are also coming around to seeing King as more than a civil rights leader who "had a dream." Most people know King died in Memphis, but many now want to know why. What was going on in this city anyhow? Most people don't know King died fighting for the right of workers to organize unions, in one of the most dramatic and significant battles of the 1960s.

King was far more than a dreamer. He said a union is the best anti-poverty program available to poor people with jobs, and he supported unions all his life. He knew most of the major union leaders in the country and recognized that unions had paved the way for the civil rights movement. He always had a black working-class constituency, from maids in Montgomery to teenagers without work in Birmingham to sanitation workers exploited in Memphis. Time and again, King gave voice to the voiceless, hope to the hopeless.

When King came to Memphis, he shone a beacon of hope, and media attention, on underpaid, overworked laborers for the city of Memphis. "King was like Moses," said striker James Robinson.

"It was just like Jesus would be coming into my life," said striker Clinton Burrows. "I was full of joy and full of determination. Wherever King was, I wanted to be there."

Five weeks into the strike, on March 18, 1968, King delivered an impromptu speech at Mason Temple of the Church of God in Christ. More than 10,000 people crammed the auditorium, many overflowing into hallways and stairways, creating the largest indoor mass rally of the civil rights-era South. "All labor has dignity," King preached. "You are reminding not only Memphis but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. And I need not remind you that this is our plight as a people all over America."

After passage of the civil rights and voting rights bills in 1964 and 1965, he said, "One era of our struggle came to a close and a new era came into being. Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality."

King came to Memphis in the midst of his Poor People's Campaign, whose goal was to organize the unemployed and desperately poor of all colors in America's ghettoes, barrios, Indian reservations and rural areas. He wanted them to go to Washington to demand that money allocated for the Vietnam war be spent instead to abolish poverty. King left Memphis to focus on the Washington campaign, but when he returned to lead a mass march on March 28, chaos occurred.

Black youth, street people and provocateurs broke out downtown windows with picket signs; the police attacked, randomly beating, Macing and shooting people; one youth died and hundreds went to the hospital.

It was a disaster for King, and the city of Memphis. He returned a few days later, planning to lead a nonviolent march, and gave a brilliant speech to a crowd on the stormy evening of April 3. Under immense pressure from multiple death threats, King called on people to be like the Good Samaritan going down Jericho road. Stop to help a stranger in need, he said, even if it imperils your own life. "The question is not, 'If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?' 'If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?' That's the question."

King lived by that creed and died by it. The next day, an assassin cut him down.

The same cause: Labor rights, civil rights, human rights
We need to recall King's warning: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Instead of denigrating immigrants, we need to renew King's call to "planetize our movement for social justice" by helping workers in other countries organize to improve conditions so they don't have to emigrate. At home, we need to regain the right to organize at the workplace. We need to strengthen laws to allow organizing, and reignite our own multiracial coalition. We need to return to King's campaign to end war and poverty and support union rights.

This may sound hopelessly unrealistic to some, yet hope is born from large, idealistic goals. Public-sector workers organized effectively because King and others raised their hopes and eventually government became more accepting of their right to a union. King said that organizing is the only sure way for low-wage workers to raise their wages and change their lives. We can still hope that King's larger goal of a "beloved community" is possible.

But it won't happen unless we remember and understand our history. For most of those who lived through the epic 1968 strike, the lesson of the past to the present is clear: Labor rights, human rights and civil rights remain indivisible. "We can get more organized together than we can apart," King told Memphis workers and their supporters.

Rev. James Lawson, a key ministerial leader in the Memphis strike, called it a "watershed moment" that brought the plight of the working poor to the attention of the country. We should remember that moment and honor its legacy.

This article initially appeared Feb. 3, 2008 in The Memphis Commercial Appeal.

By Bryan Jones, UW professor of political science

Many (including me) have marveled at the support Obama draws from professed liberals, given his more conservative domestic policies in comparison to any of the other Democratic contenders, even those who have withdrawn.

One hypothesis is that they are generally better off and don’t feel the rising inequality that stalks America today. Another is that they applaud his staunch anti-Iraq record, but his stated position is more conservative than either Edwards or Richardson. Or perhaps they are not supporting on the issues.

In any case, Obama’s message of "one America" contrasts strongly with Edward’s "two Americas." It is of course possible that Obama is professing this notion for electoral reasons, but then that would make him a politician, wouldn’t it?

Katherine Sebelius, the governor of Kansas who just endorsed Obama, gave the Democrats' response to the State of the Union speech on Monday. Low key for sure, but far more confrontational in content than Obama, yet not in tone. While Obama touts the "one America'" Sebelius talked of a "new American majority"—clearly a progressive one, but one not based in the more confrontational rhetoric of Edwards.

Obama might study that speech in detail for a somewhat new direction in what I find a tired old reformist pitch in American politics.

Obama links his rhetoric to JFK, but I think that is the wrong link. The most successful insurgent campaign in the Democratic party in modern times was not John in 1960 (he was pure establishment) but Bobby in 1968. He excited the young, spoke eloquently of racial injustice, yet was enormously popular with working-class Americans. “Clean Gene” McCarthy was the classic reformer, but Bobby had working class appeal. Are there lessons for Barak here?