They're Republican Red, and True Blue to Obama
By Mark Z. Barabak
The Los Angeles Times

Monday 25 February 2008

GOP renegades seeking a candidate capable of ending the Washington partisanship are surfacing in the senator's campaign in surprising numbers. "Obamicans," he calls them.
Delaware, Ohio - Chatter bounces off the bare walls and checkered linoleum floor as Josh Pedaline and other Barack Obama supporters burn through their call sheets.

A map of Delaware County splays across a tabletop. Another table is laden with cookies, pretzels and other snacks. Volunteers sit elbow to elbow, pecking at cellphones and pitching the Illinois Democrat in advance of Ohio's March 4 primary. The scene is a typical campaign boiler room.

Except that four of the 13 dialing away are lifelong Republicans, including Pedaline, 28, who reveres Ronald Reagan and twice voted for President Bush.

"I am so sick and tired of the partisanship," Pedaline says before starting his night shift at Obama's outpost in this affluent Columbus suburb. "I don't want to be cheesy and say, 'He'll bring us all together.' But he seems like someone willing to listen to a good idea, even if it comes from a Republican."

Pedaline and other GOP renegades are part of a striking phenomenon this campaign season: They are "Obamacans," as the senator calls them, and they are surfacing in surprising numbers. Though some observers question their commitment, they are blurring - for now, at least - the red-blue lines that have colored the nation's politics for the last several years.

"I'm a conservative, but I have gay friends," Pedaline explains over dinner at a Columbus diner. "I have friends who don't believe in abortion, but I don't condemn them for it; I don't feel like Obama is condemning me for being a Republican."

Pedaline has some high-profile company. Susan Eisenhower, a GOP business consultant and granddaughter of President Eisenhower, has endorsed the Democratic hopeful. Colin L. Powell, who served in both Bush administrations, has hinted he may do so as well.

Former Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, who quit the Republican Party after losing his 2006 reelection bid, endorsed Obama even though he campaigned for Chafee's opponent. Mark McKinnon, a strategist for Republican John McCain, says he will continue to back the Arizona senator but will step aside rather than work against Obama if the two meet in the fall election.

McCain also enjoys crossover support, Democrats attracted by his blunt talk and willingness to break with Republicans on campaign finance and global warming. "We know the old Reagan Democrats," McCain said aboard his campaign charter. "We'll try to get those on our side as well, Democrats who think that I'm more capable, particularly on national security issues."

But so far, Obama has shown more success pulling members of the other party to his side.

Republicans made up 6% of voters in Missouri's Democratic primary, 7% in Virginia's and 9% in Wisconsin's. (Most states make it harder to vote in the other party's contest.) The overwhelming majority cast their ballots for Sen. Obama, according to exit polls.

Johanna Schneider was one of his Virginia supporters. She went door to door for Obama with her 14-year-old son, Chase, convinced that fellow Republicans have lost their way. "I just feel this is a tremendous opportunity to open politics up to a new generation," said Schneider, a former GOP staffer on Capitol Hill. "And I believe that Barack Obama is a genuine transformational candidate."

The support has not come unbidden. Throughout his campaign, Obama has been appealing to Republicans even as he battles Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York for the Democratic nomination. Obama's first TV ad in Iowa featured a GOP lawmaker from Illinois touting Obama's ability to work with Republicans.

"Very rarely do you hear me talking about my opponents without giving them some credit for having good intentions and being decent people," Obama recently told U.S. News & World Report. "There's nothing uniquely Democratic about a respect for civil liberties. There's nothing uniquely Democratic about believing in a foreign policy of restraint.... A lot of the virtues I talk about are virtues that are deeply embedded in the Republican Party."

As noble as those words may be, there are tactical benefits to Obama's outreach. Winning support from Republicans and independents as well as Democrats "shows he's the candidate best situated to take on McCain in the fall," Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman, asserted. "That is an important distinction in this race."

Republican support also reinforces Obama's message as he paints himself as a unity candidate above party labels, capable of ending the Washington sniping. "We're going to build a working majority," he said the night he swept primaries in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. "Not by turning people off, but by bringing them in."

Those words resonate with Lennie Rhoades, 57, who cast his first presidential ballot for Richard Nixon and has voted Republican in every presidential race since. "It seems like Washington has come to a standstill the last eight years," said Rhoades, in between calls at the Obama office in a brick storefront below Delaware County's Democratic headquarters. "I think Obama can get beyond that."

Many are skeptical that Republicans will stick with Obama until November. They point out that many of his proposals - including a timetable for ending the war in Iraq, repealing Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, expanding the government's role in healthcare and supporting gay rights and gun control - cut too much against GOP orthodoxy.

"Even in this day and age, partisanship carries a lot of weight," said David Redlawsk, a University of Iowa political scientist whose polling last summer picked up early signs of Obama's Republican appeal.

But for Pedaline, who spent months researching candidates before embracing Obama, there is no going back. Even though he questions the feasibility of Obama's plan to withdraw from Iraq and figures government would grow under the Democrat's administration, his support "is not a policy decision."

"It's a personality decision," Pedaline says. "It's an inspirational decision."

Pedaline, a loan officer at a Columbus mortgage company, grew up in rural Ohio and still carries the heft of his high school football days. His father, a salesman, and his mother, who ran a pizza shop, were largely apolitical. But Pedaline was bothered when the Democratic congressman from nearby Youngstown, James A. Traficant Jr., went to prison on corruption charges. "I had a bad taste in my mouth about Democrats from the beginning," he says over a chicken dinner.

During his college years in Columbus, the political talk was all about President Clinton and impeachment. That compounded Pedaline's contempt for Democrats in general, and the Clintons in particular. "Disingenuous," he says of the former first lady. He will vote for McCain if Clinton is the Democratic nominee.

Like many, he discovered Obama through the candidate's soaring address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. His words put "chills on the back of my neck," Pedaline says, especially when he talked about America's shared values. He followed Obama on the Washington talk-show circuit and went to YouTube to download his February 2007 speech announcing his presidential candidacy.

By then, Pedaline had soured on Bush and the "conservative ideologues" he blamed for Washington's gridlock, especially when it came to Social Security, an issue important to his parents.

He wrote a long MySpace missive calling for a candidate "who is flexible, creative, intelligent and willing to compromise." After Obama entered the race, Pedaline posted his statement on a campaign message board with an addendum: "My biggest hope is that his refreshing outlook and attitude will rub off on his opponents both Republican and Democrat alike...."

Soon, Pedaline heard from John Martin, a New York law student and co-founder of Republicans for Obama, a loosely knit grass-roots organization, who asked him to head the Ohio chapter. (There are 22 across the country.) Pedaline agreed, even though he was still weighing support for McCain and former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Obama's two autobiographies sold Pedaline. After reading them last summer, he was convinced Obama possessed both the desire and a singular capacity to unite Americans. "Maybe it's just a fairy tale," Pedaline says, "but maybe we can at least get back to a point where people can listen and respect each other."

He committed to the Obama campaign six nights a week through the March 4 primary and hopes to volunteer in the fall, when Ohio will be a top target of both parties. His day job, which requires the occasional cold call, helps in phone canvassing. Two hours into his boiler-room shift, Pedaline sounds as relentlessly cheery - "Hi, this is Josh, from Sen. Obama's presidential campaign!" - as he did starting out.

Seated nearby is Royal Morse, 56, a small-business owner and another lifelong Republican. He too hungers for more civility and productivity in Washington. "I've never been as passionate about any presidential candidate in my 35 years of voting," Morse says during a break. "Never."

The two dial, chat, dial, chat, each in his own conversation until Morse gets some grief from the other end of the line. He glances at Pedaline. "Another one of those stuffy Republicans," he says.

The two smile, and keep dialing.

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mark.barabak@latimes.com

Times staff writers Johanna Neuman and Maeve Reston contributed to this report.

Your stressing me out

just wait till the real battle starts...McCain is going to take Obama apart just by forcing Obama to reveal he has no clue on how to pay for what he has promised....

And the moral of the story is...each person should make their own decisions, not those dictated to them by others, whether those others are their own party or people on internet forums

sorry about that

Mcain is a nutjob he will wilter in the light of day.bring him on........

I see you are hoping anyways, hope is good

very true, I always try to look objectively at all information and never trust on source, ever

I agree, being a POW can't have helped his objectivity to war and such that is for sure.

Lazy, tree huggin' hippies that want the government to give and give free health care, welfare for those who maybe capable of supporting themselves on and on. But wait they cant tell me how to spend that money or what doctor to go to. How about some self reliance and personal accountability for a change. And for that matter all that great stuff Obama and Hillary promise how do you think it will get paid for? Shocking as it might be taxes will go up no doubt. Who wants to pay more taxes? Go ahead a show of hands would be welcomed.

Oh a couple less aircraft carriers, one less war......a few tax breaks for billionairs taken away.......should about cover it

Craig Kielburger and Marc Kielburger
In war, things are rarely what they seem.

Back in 2003, in the days leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon adamantly insisted that the war would be a relatively cheap one. Roughly $50 billion is all it would take to rid the world of Saddam Hussein, it said.

We now know this turned out to be the first of many miscalculations. Approaching its fifth year, the war in Iraq has cost American taxpayers nearly $500 billion, according to the non-partisan U.S.-based research group National Priorities Project. That number is growing every day.

But it’s still not even close to the true cost of the war. As the invasion’s price tag balloons, economists and analysts are examining the entire financial burden of the Iraq campaign, including indirect expenses that Americans will be paying long after the troops come home. What they’ve come up with is staggering. Calculations by Harvard’s Linda Bilmes and Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz remain most prominent. They determined that, once you factor in things like medical costs for injured troops, higher oil prices and replenishing the military, the war will cost America upwards of $2 trillion. That doesn’t include any of the costs incurred by Iraq, or America’s coalition partners.

“Would the American people have had a different attitude toward going to war had they known the total cost?” Bilmes and Stiglitz ask in their report. “We might have conducted the war in a manner different from the way we did.”

It’s hard to comprehend just how much money $2 trillion is. Even Bill Gates, one of the richest people in the world, would marvel at this amount. But, once you begin to look at what that money could buy, the worldwide impact of fighting this largely unpopular war becomes clear.

Consider that, according to sources like Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs, the Worldwatch Institute, and the United Nations, with that same money the world could:

Eliminate extreme poverty around the world (cost $135 billion in the first year, rising to $195 billion by 2015.)

Achieve universal literacy (cost $5 billion a year.)

Immunize every child in the world against deadly diseases (cost $1.3 billion a year.)

Ensure developing countries have enough money to fight the AIDS epidemic (cost $15 billion per year.)

In other words, for a cost of $156.3 billion this year alone - less than a tenth of the total Iraq war budget - we could lift entire countries out of poverty, teach every person in the world to read and write, significantly reduce child mortality, while making huge leaps in the battle against AIDS, saving millions of lives.

Then the remaining money could be put toward the $40 billion to $60 billion annually that the World Bank says is needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, established by world leaders in 2000, to tackle everything from gender inequality to environmental sustainability.

The implications of this cannot be underestimated. It means that a better and more just world is far from within reach, if we are willing to shift our priorities.

If America and other nations were to spend as much on peace as they do on war, that would help root out the poverty, hopelessness and anti-Western sentiment that can fuel terrorism - exactly what the Iraq war was supposed to do.

So as candidates spend much of this year vying to be the next U.S. president, what better way to repair its image abroad, tarnished by years of war, than by becoming a leader in global development? It may be too late to turn back the clock to the past and rethink going to war, but it’s not too late for the U.S. and other developed countries to invest in the future.

Craig and Marc Kielburger are children’s rights activists and co-founded Free The Children, which is active in the developing world.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/21/6507/

_________________

I figure there will be lots of Republicans voting for Obama, since Mc Cain has made it plenty clear that he is a warmonger. I still have doubts that Mc Cain won any state period, that is how much I trust our voting counts. But Obama is winning by landslides and it would be too obvious if they say otherwise. But they keep trying to pretend that things are close, NOT TRUE!! Nobody is close to Obama, so I have been reading from good sources.

so please tell me why you think McCain is a warmonger and not Obama after you read the speeches Obama gave...and since you read a lot on Obama how is he going to pay for all the promises he made?

This war would be over if it weren't for senile Donald Rumsfeld and the other beaurcratic buffoons who mismanaged it!

They thought we would be hailed as heroes and underestimated the insurgency. They let Halliburton and others raid the Treasury like it's their own personal bank account and hired a private army of goons (Blackwater) with absolutely no oversight!

I hope there's a special circle in Hell for them when they die.

they are not the first leaders to underestimate an enemy and the war won't be over until the terrorists are annihilated...the terrorists are hoping for a special circle of hell for infidels like yourself when they slice your head off...those you criticize are responsible for you keeping you head..

It is well noted that Obama has not given a way to pay for his domestic policies.

However, it should also be noted that there has been no mention of how we will continue to pay for our military operations should they continue indefinitely.

Always back to the terrorists. Look, if this war had been managed better, we would have more money and troops to fight Al Quaeda, Hezbollah, and other terrorist groups around the world!

Capice?

Great answer! Too bad it is the same brainwash that we have been fed for 6+ years. Iraq is not the homeland of terrorists, Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, all terrorist are not arabic, Iraq is not a stronghold for terror, Iraq will make no dent in terror, a war on terror is world wide and we did not enlist the world for this pseudo war on terror, etc...... Bull, brainwashing. Too bad people do not have a enough balls to think for themselves and not buy the bull, huh?