Nicks in the sheen

Potentially damaging news for Senator Barack Obama. The furor over Obama declining public financing for the general election campaign – which I don’t entirely understand, especially since it seems pretty obvious given the amount of money he has been able to raise – may now seem like old news.

Two days in a row earlier this week the “New York Times” ran anti-Obama articles. The first noted that – as he criticizes Senator McCain for McCain’s pro-nuclear power, pro-drilling energy platform (which makes the oil and nuclear power industries happy) and touts alternative energy sources, Obama in fact very close to the ethanol industry, going back to when he was an Illinois state senator looking for support from the rural areas for his statewide run for U.S. Senate. (Obama also supported the farm bill, which may help him rural areas in his presidential election, even though Senator McCain’s opposition to this bill laden with subsidies for an agribusiness sector that is already having a banner year economically (much like the oil industry) is probably more admirable.)

The next day the “Times” noted that Muslim Americans had initially been excited about Obama’s campaign. Although then Governor Bush apparently won a majority of the Middle Eastern American vote in 2000, the government immigration crackdown and the war on terror has turned off Middle Eastern Americans. In addition, Obama’s father was a Muslim American. Unfortunately, I’ve noted first hand the anti-Muslim sentiment and xenophobia that Obama’s candidacy has fueled. Even before Obama operatives prevented two Muslim American women in headscarves from appearing behind Obama at a rally, Minnesota’s own Muslim Congressman, Keith Ellison, noticed that the campaign had spurned him and Muslim Americans had noticed with concern Obama’s extremely vigorous denials that he was Muslim (like there was something wrong with that).

Then at mid-week Obama indicated that he would support the Republican version of the domestic spying bill that protects phone companies from being sued for illegally turning over phone records to the federal government, after 9/11, and he came against the Supreme Court decision finding state laws that provide for the death penalty for child rape (without murder) unconstitutional. As Obama angles to the center for the general election (even as some polls that I don’t trust show him way ahead of McCain) and McCain occasionally flashes his old centrist self, we’ll see if they occasionally converge in the middle (as with their joint opposition to a federal constitutional amendment against same-gender marriage) (despite McCain’s general Karl Rove-style campaign – designed to woo back the Republican Right – so far). No doubt some of this angling to the center will continue to upset my friends and me even as I wish Obama was more competitive in places like Southern Indiana or Central Kentucky