I’m happy to defer to Mark Schmitt who used to work on this dreary subject full-time on all issues related to campaign finance, so check out his take here. Basically, Obama has not, in fact, pledged himself to take public funds in the general election and McCain is pulling some shady stunts regarding the primary.

The story of JFK winning the black vote and the election because of the decision to call Coretta Scott King on the occasion of MLK’s unjustified arrest could use a little complication. Northern blacks started voting Democratic during FDR’s time and were an important source of support for Harry Truman’s re-election bid in 1948. But in 1952, the Democrats put Alabama’s John Sparkman on the bottom of the ticket, and Ike picked up a bigger share of the black vote than Republicans had been getting recently. In 1956, Eisenhower got Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s endorsement and his share of the black vote went up further still to something in the neighborhood of parity.

The second Eisenhower administration featured a couple of high-profile fights on civil rights in which Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson were all playing slightly murky roles with everyone trying to play to incompatible audiences all simultaneously. But the stage had, in essence, been set for the GOP to make a strong play for regaining the loyalty of black voters — they’d been making electoral inroads, the Eisenhower years had witnessed more progress on civil rights than any administration since LIncoln, and the Democrats were once again “ticket balancing” with a southern vice president. The 1960 election wound up not playing out that way, and then by 1964-65 the Johnson administration secured a civil rights record that left anything the Republicans had ever done in the dust.

Today on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol mourned that an “emboldened” Congress refused to give telecommunications companies retroactive immunity for cooperating with the administration’s warrantless wiretapping.

Kristol said it was “unbelievable” for lawmakers to question the judgment of administration officials. Instead, he argued, Congress should just give them the “benefit of the doubt”:

I think it’s kind of unbelievable, frankly. It’s a judgment call. We don’t know. Not to give the administration the benefit of the doubt when they have career people, military people, intelligence people like Mike McConnell and Mike Hayden, and the attorney general, Mike Mukasey — I mean, these are not political hacks. These are not ideological people.

When they say this is important for our national security, the Congress — to block this legislation I find pretty amazing.

Watch it:

The Bush administration secretly conducted spying in violation of the Constitution and the law for four years before The New York Times disclosed it in 2005. For years, the White House lied about these activities to the American public. For example, in 2004, Bush claimed that “a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way.” At least one telco refused to comply with the Bush administration’s request because it knew the actions were illegal.

Even now, the administration continues to lie about the consequences of the Protect America Act expiration. Just yesterday, Bush stated that it will now “be harder for our government to keep you safe from terrorist attack.” But as an expert from the Cato Institute admits, this statement isn’t true: “There’s no reason to think our nation will be in any more danger in 2008 than it was in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, or 2006.”

Transcript: Read more

Jeff Zeleny writes an article for The New York Times about how Barack Obama is attempting to respond to critics by offering more detailed, policy oriented speeches these days. It doesn’t, however, mention any of the details. If you’re interested in detailed discussion of health care mandates the internet will, however, oblige at any number of locations. And for policy matters beyond the mandate, you could check out Sara Mead’s analysis of the Obama education agenda, for example. Or Dave Roberts on Obama’s energy and climate proposals.