by Chris Bodenner Jamie Kirchick has two problems with me arguing that the symbolic narratives of Obama and McCain are equally relevant to the election:
The first is that, unlike Obama, McCain has not predicated his campaign on his identity or personal story. He's predicated it upon his experience, namely, his more than two decades of service in the House and Senate. ... Obama's greatest tangible accomplishments are two books, both of which he wrote about himself.
"McCain has not predicated his campaign on his identity or personal story"?! That's not just generally wrong, it's literally wrong; McCain's first campaign ad was titled "624787," and it featured grainy, B&W footage of
McCain as a POW. (The ad was so overt, my colleague Jenn Skalka unveiled it with:
"John McCain. ... American hero. Let the branding begin.") And
McCain's first act of the campaign was a biographical, cross-country tour of McCain's old stomping grounds.
Also, for the record, McCain has authored five McCain-centered books over the past nine years (plus a made-for-TV movie). And he seems to have been even more MIA than Obama in the Senate (which says a lot). But beyond those quibbles, the point remains: Mr. HopeChange and the Mr. Straight-Talk Maverick Express are both self-aggrandizing political brands, second only to Billary.
Secondly, to the extent that McCain has used the "awe-inspiring symbolism of his own personal sacrifice and duty to country" as a campaign theme, it's relevant to being president. Contrary to what Wesley Clark says, getting shot down over Vietnam and being tortured for five years, while certainly not a requirement for presidential office, is a qualification. It's a real demonstration of love of country, honor, and leadership capability. ... The "symbolism" of John McCain is attributable to what he did, "his own personal sacrifice," not who he is. What has Barack Obama "sacrificed" for America?
It's certainly arguable that McCain's narrative has more practical worth for the presidency. (Though one could also argue that Obama's "awe-inspiring symbolism of his ability to transcend barriers and bring people together" is more relevant in the wake of Bush-Rove than "duty to country" -- a theme the White House overplayed and perverted.) However, the premise of my post wasn't the pragmatic power of their narratives, but rather their symbolic relevance (which has real, if intangible, impact). On that score, Obama clearly trounces McCain. McCain's POW experience is unique, awe-inspiring, and timeless. But it isn't timely; Obama's "post-racist" persona provides the country a desperately-needed chance for symbolic healing -- not just on race, but on three decades of Bushes, Clintons, and boomers in general.
By Patrick Appel Eve Fairbanks calls Vick Vickers, who is trying to take Senator Ted Stevens's seat:
The best hope the GOP has in Alaska is for a fresh face to knock off Stevens in the August 26 primary, allowing Republicans to approach the general election from higher ground. Well -- Vickers is nothing if not fresh. "As an American historian, I’ve studied every president," he told me over the phone today from Anchorage, "and I can say with authority that George Bush is the worst president in American history."
Oh, yes. Vic Vickers is a George-W.-Bush-hating, Exxon-despising, Iraq-War-loathing Republican who wants to "put an end to the stranglehold that Big Oil" has on Alaska and has an Iraq withdrawal plan -- if the Jordanians and Saudis don't start cutting big checks, you just pack everyone up and come right home -- that would make even Eli Pariser queasy.
McCain's campaign is trying to play the aggrieved victim card, trying to generate the type of outrage that legitimately follows when the "race card" is played illegitimately. Also, by putting on their poker face a day after the Britney/Paris ad, McCain's campaign might be trying to associate criticism of McCain's tactics with the allegedly laid down race card. McCain's aides have been waiting to use this "race card" card for a while, saving it up like one of those Uno Draw Fours.
By Patrick Appel Saletan is worried about South Central's ban on the construction of new fast-food restaurants:
It's true that food options in low-income neighborhoods are, on average, worse than the options in wealthier neighborhoods. But restricting options in low-income neighborhoods is a disturbingly paternalistic way of solving the problem. And the helplessness attributed to poor people is exaggerated. "You try to get a salad within 20 minutes of our location; it's virtually impossible," says the Community Coalition's executive director. Really? The coalition's headquarters is at 8101 S. Vermont Ave. A quick Google search shows, among other outlets, a Jack-in-the-Box six blocks away. They have salads. Not the world's greatest salads, but not as bad as a government that tells you whose salad you can eat.
Besides being paranoid, the idea that McCain's genuinely weak "Celeb" ad draws from Triumph of the Will is remarkable for something else: its implicit contempt for modern Germans. It is not much better than the pro-war German-bashing that took place during 2002-03 when war supporters frequently complained that the Germans had lost their former enthusiasm for conflict. Both treat Germans in an essentialist way and try to reduce them to the most cartoonish stereotypes, as if a cheering throng of Germans in Berlin, c. 2008, must necessarily conjure up associations with Nazi rallies. To assume this says more about the critics of the ad than about the people who made it. As for the notion that the images from the ad resemble the techniques of Riefenstahl, one might as well accuse the television news directors who covered the event of imputing Hitlerism to Obama, since the footage and camera angles are all taken from the news broadcasts of the speech. Obama supporters haven't been this good at embarrassing their candidate with hysterical commentary since Orlando Patterson felt compelled to compare Hillary Clinton's "3 a.m." ad to Birth of a Nation.
Despite its great importance for U.S. interests in Afghanistan and the region, the failed, rather clumsy attempt by the Pakistani civilian government to rein in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and place it under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior has not received nearly as much comment as it should. Coming in the wake of the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul earlier this month, which was backed by elements within the ISI (detailed in the 7/28 TAC print edition), and the recent coordinated bombings in Ahmedabad in Gujarat, both the issuing and the reversal of the administrative order are particularly ominous. Having attempted to assert control and been rebuffed under pressure from the military, the civilian government has shown its limitations and exposed itself to a backlash from the same forces that are trying to foment disorder in Afghanistan and India. The inability of Gilani's government to control the ISI is at the heart of the ongoing threat to the security of Afghanistan and the unreliability of Pakistan as an effective ally.
In The Times of India, Prof. Sumit Ganguly of Indiana-Bloomington describes the extent of the problem:
The Pakistani military having wielded decades of political power has weakened every other institution within the Pakistani state. In aggrandising its extraordinary prerogatives from Ayub Khan to Yahya Khan to Zia-ul-Haq and most recently, Pervez Musharraf, it has used the ISI to serve a variety of political ends well beyond the tasks of espionage and counter-intelligence. Consequently, any civilian regime hoping to make the organisation more accountable will first have to think about how best to limit the privileges of the Pakistani army.
Until they can devise some institutional means to make the army more accountable to civilian authority, any attempts to control the activities of the ISI will not only be futile but dangerous.
The situation also calls for a reassessment of U.S. policies that disregard Pakistani sovereignty, whether they are advanced by President Bush or Sen. Obama, not least since PM Gilani has already declared this unacceptable. Any association of his government with compromises of Pakistani sovereignty will further undermine civilian rule. The recent attacks against Indian interests should also cause us to remember that the Pakistani military itself, and not simply rogue elements in the ISI, have been diverting American military aid to building up its conventional forces against India. If the Pakistani military continues to use U.S. support in this way and if elements within the ISI continue to exploit the "war on terror" to pursue an anti-Indian agenda at the expense of U.S. interests, Washington will need to reconsider the level of military aid our government provides and Pakistan's formal status as a major non-NATO ally.
By Patrick Appel Marty Lederman parses today's decision:
1. First [Judge Bates] unequivocally rejects the centerpiece of the Administration's privilege argument: the notion that the House has no legitimate interest in inquiring with respect to why the U.S. Attorneys were fired. At pages 39-41, Judge Bates explains why Congress does have a legitimate and important interest in getting to the bottom of what happened to the U.S. Attorneys, and why, and then at page 89 he adds, for good measure, that "[n]otwithstanding its best efforts, the Committee has been unable to discover the underlying causes of the forced terminations of the U.S. Attorneys. The Committee has legitimate reasons to believe that Ms. Miers's testimony can remedy that deficiency. There is no evidence that the Committee is merely seeking to harass Ms. Miers by calling her to testify."
We want to have a serious debate. But so far, we've been hearing about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. I do have to ask my opponent: is that the best you can come up with? Is that really what the election is about? Is that worthy of the American people? ...
Ann Coulter books sit stacked by the fireplace, and a picture of Ronald Reagan hangs on the wall. Fox News plays on all the televisions, and stock market quotes scroll along an electronic ticker above the cash register.
Behind the counter, owner Dave Beckham smiles proudly in a khaki T-shirt that reads "Zip It, Hippie." The shirt is for sale at the Crown Point, Ind., cafe, along with ones that say "Peace through Superior Firepower."
"It's a change from the traditional liberal bastion coffeehouses," Beckham says. "No one is going to bad-mouth America in here."
By Patrick Appel "The executive's current claim of absolute immunity from compelled Congressional process for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law,"—Judge John D. Bates, who ruled on Bolten and Miers trying to evade Congress.
...the name goes on trial. Take the case of Weather'by Dot Com Chanel Fourcast Sheppard:
The Court: All right. Now, do you have some objection to him being renamed Samuel Charles?
Sheppard: Yes.
The Court: Why? You think it's better for his name to be Weather'by Dot Com Chanel ... Fourcast, spelled F-o-u-r-c-a-s-t? And in response to that question, I want you to think about what he's going to be — what his life is going to be like when he enters the first grade and has to fill out all [the] paperwork where you fill out — this little kid fills out his last name and his first name and his middle name, okay? So I just want — if your answer to that is yes, you think his name is better today than it would be with Samuel Charles, as his father would like to name him and why. Go ahead.
Sheppard: Yes, I think it's better this way.
The Court: The way he is now?
Sheppard: Yes. He doesn't have to use "Dot Com." I mean, as a grown man, he can use whatever he wants.
The Court: As a grown man, what is his middle name? Dot Com Chanel Fourcast?
Sheppard: He can use Chanel, he can use the letter "C."
By Patrick Appel Prop 8 supporters are suing to make the formal ballot description of the measure more Orwellian. Badtux summarizes:
The proposition is truthfully described on the ballot as, "Eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry". But the truth, they apparently fear, is something that is too inflammatory. So they sued the State of California for telling the truth about what the ballot proposal does.
Not enough has been said about John Schwenkler's fine TACessay on culinary conservatism, and unfortunately too much of what has been said has been ridiculous, so it is gratifying to see my Scene colleague Alan Jacobs taking up the subject in this first of two posts. Before I say anything more about the essay itself, there is something that needs to be addressed whenever we try to discuss the relationship between food culture and philosophical and political persuasions. Something that culinary conservatives and their good friends the "crunchy" cons and agrarians generally take for granted, as John notes in his essay, is that eating is a political act.
Myers' confident condemnations put me in mind of that great American preacher, Jonathan Edwards, who waxed eloquent in his famous 1741 speech, "Sinners [in] the Hands of an Angry God," about the miserable delusions that lead humans to reject the truth and spend eternity in hell. We still have preachers like Edwards today, of course; they can be found on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. But now we also have a new type of preacher, the Rev. PZ Myers.
The campaign controversy of the moment seems to be whether McCain has been telling lies about his opponent, with the additional accusation from the opposing camp that he is also engaged in race-baiting. Of course, he is telling lies, and he isn't engaged in race-baiting, but in this bizarre election cycle you can be sure that he will be rewarded or at least forgiven for the former and then punished for something that he isn't doing. This is exactly what happened during the primaries when McCain lied about Romney's views on the war and Obama's campaign and supporters denounced the Clintons for exploiting racism, and it is all happening again just as it did earlier in the year. It is happening again mainly because this is how the two campaigns seem to operate when they are in closely-contested elections, which means we will continue to see more of this until November.
Trivial as they seem, these episodes sum up both campaigns and the media's treatment of both remarkably well. As he did in the primaries, McCain is simply making things up about his opponent's positions and actions, and just as his campaign did during the primary fight against Clinton Obama and his supporters are pushingfantastic claims that McCain is exploiting racism. (As with Clinton, McCain may be benefiting from prejudice, but attempts to show that they are actively exploiting it have been laughably weak.) Remember the memo the Obama campaign circulated documenting the instances of how the Clintons allegedly politicized racism? Then as now, the things that have provoked criticism have typically been entirely or mostly unrelated to race, and even when there is some small connection it requires hysteria and hypersensitivity to find something malevolent in that connection. This line of attack on Obama's opponents is not a new one, but the Obama campaign may be making a serious mistake in assuming that this attack will work as well in the general election as it did in the Democratic primary. Regardless, it will receive more attention and gain more traction in the press on the assumption that they have been using all year long, which is that whatever race-baiting the Clintons were supposedly employing, the GOP would use it even more extensively.
Back in January, the media criticized McCain for his lies about Romney, but ultimately forgave him on the twisted grounds that he doesn't enjoy lying, and so he remained their hero. The same will happen concerning McCain's lies about Obama. Meanwhile, McCain will suffer more damage from sustained media criticism that he is supposedly trafficking in racist tropes, despite the self-evident absurdity of the charge. The phony controversy about the alleged racism in McCain's horrible ads will distract attention from their insipid quality, but it will still generally work to McCain's detriment if journalists accept the idea that McCain's campaign is trying to promote or use racism in the election. If their response to the accusations against the Clintons is any indication, many will accept this idea, and Obama will profit from this sort of scurrilous charge. One thing seems likely: as I guessed a few months ago, the election will turn heavily on the biography and character of the candidates, and it will therefore be one of the more divisive and unpleasant general election campaigns we have experienced.
What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch.
By Patrick Appel Andrew Romano scoffs at McCain crying elitism:
The McCain camp wants voters to believe that Obama's "arrogance" befits his "celebrity" and makes him "selfish"--unlike (you guessed it) McCain, who always puts "Country First." Or so his slogan says. The only problem? It makes just as much sense to call McCain an elitist as Obama. Nevermind that the Illinois senator is a bi-racial child from a broken family raised in a modest single-parent household. Or that there are plenty of "country clubs" still unwilling to accept African-Americans as members. Or that the last "celebrity" to occupy the Oval Office was Ronald Reagan, McCain's hero. Simply imagine the memo David Axelrod could send to reporters about the Republican nominee. "Only a celebrity of John McCain's magnitude could star on blockbuster television shows like '24' and appear in big-budget motion pictures like 'Wedding Crashers,'" it would read. "These are not campaign commercials or news interviews, but major Hollywood productions--which is no surprise, given that he's pals with Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lorne Michaels. Only celebrities like John McCain own seven homes, date Brazilian models, marry blond heiresses worth $100 million, attend Virginia's tony "old boy" Episcopal High School, forget the last time they pumped their own gas and wear $520 black calfskin loafers by Ferragamo." Get the picture?
...soft skills are the key to workforce success, not hard skills. It may be difficult to measure creativity, perseverance, and flexibility, but they not only underpin entrepreneurship, but also serve as the basis for productive teamwork. The danger I see is a school system that is increasingly managed from the top, emphasizing measurable hard skills, but too politically correct and legalistic to enforce classroom discipline, teacher excellence, or personal responsibility. Of course, competition is another cultural advantage America once had, but the very idea of competition among children is becoming a taboo.
by Chris Bodenner "This ad is in some ways a celebration of his celebrity," -
McCain spokesperson Nicolle Wallace, asked on the "Today" show whether the Britney ad is demeaning towards Obama.
You can make Obama into Britney Spears, or John Kerry, or Malcolm X. I'm not sure you can make him into all three at the same time. (Is there a template in American culture for an Ivy-league-snob, black-militant, out-of-control former Mouseketeer?)
By Patrick Appel I get very tired of this sort of analysis:
A mere three days ago, Barack Obama sat comfortably perched atop a nine point lead in the Gallup tracking poll. Now it’s down to four. Rasmussen shows an even tighter race. In Rasmussen’s tracking numbers, Obama’s six point lead of four days ago has shrunk to two. And let’s not forget the notorious Gallup non-tracking poll which showed McCain with a four point lead. True, that one was an obvious outlier and as responsible analysts we should ignore the outliers. But the big picture is obvious – Barack Obama’s lead is a slim one.
The Wisconsin Advertising Project, which monitors campaign ad spending nationwide, reported yesterday that of the $48 million worth of ads the two campaigns have aired since Obama clinched the nomination in early June, 90 percent of Obama's ads have been positive and mostly about himself, while about one-third of McCain's commercials referred to Obama negatively.
As chief scientist in charge of making the world a better place, once
I’d found a way of making men give birth, or at least lactate, I’d
devote myself to abolishing the need for sleep. Apart from the dangers
of letting your guard down, there’s the matter of time. Instead of
trying to extend the life of human bodies beyond their cellular
feasibility, the men and women in lab coats could be studying ways to
retrieve all the time we spend asleep. A third of our lives, they say –
and that probably doesn’t take the afternoon nap into account. Even if
we died aged what is these days a rather youthful 70, finding a way to
stay awake would increase our functional life to the equivalent of 93.
And if we happened to live to 93 then we’d effectively be . . . oh,
even older. Plus the nap time. Sleep, we’re told, is essential,
repairing the wear and tear on body and mind, but sex was once solely
for the purpose of propagating the species and we pretty much found a
workaround for that biological constraint.
Ross counters the claims of crypto-racism by Josh Marshall et al over McCain's new ad. A reader adds:
I honestly believe the choice to use Paris Hilton and Britney Spears has nothing to do with their race, gender or sexual availability. I believe they were chosen because they are both vapid, vacuous individuals who are famous for no other reason than tabloid gossip. Britney Spears is a has-been and Paris Hilton is a never-was.
All of those other individuals are famous for something - there is substance behind their celebrity. Britney and Paris are paper-thin and without any substance whatsoever. That's the comparison McCain was going for - trying to allege that Barack Obama is without substance, a celebrity for celebrity's sake.
For blacks, Jim Crow America meant, not simply white people not wanting to be around them, it meant a concerted effort to restrict the creation of wealth. Redlining wasn't just offering a racial preference to whites (indeed it actually punished whites for living around black people) it was a government-conceived and sponsored effort to devalue the homes of black people, thus draining what little wealth there was in the communities. When post-slavery Southern and Midwestern blacks--following Booker T's conservative line--created wealth by working the land, and building their own businesses, white terrorists violently undermined their efforts at every turn while the government refused to do its most basic job--protecting its citizens. The spectacle of lynching is horrifying--but its actual effects, dissuading black people from competing with whites--were (are) devastating. Indeed couple that with housing discrimination, job discrimination, the defunding of segregated schools and you see a comprehensive effort to render black people a servile class.
Addressing racial inequality in the same breath as economic inequality seems natural to me. Conservatives often chastize liberals (often rightly) for social engineering, but it's hard to deny that the root of racial inequality was a massive system of social engineering itself, meant to economically advantage whites. Though the most malicious elements of that system have been dismantled, inequalitites persist generation to generation partially because of prior meddling. These long-term effects are what make social engineering so dangerous in the first place.
This is another way that the electric cars could become practical long-range vehicle. For short trips you drive. For long trips you fly. If there's sufficient gas in reserve, the flying chassis could even charge your battery as you go. It could even become a popular alternative to commercial flying.
Mr. McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of members of
President Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the
czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent,
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal through a daily blitz
of sound bites and Web videos that were carefully coordinated with Mr.
Bush’s television advertisements. The run of attacks against Mr. Obama over the last couple of weeks
have been strikingly reminiscent of that drive, including the Bush
team’s tactics of seeking to make campaigns referendums on its
opponents — not a choice between two candidates — and attacking the
opponent’s perceived strengths head-on.
For a long time, Republicans inside and outside the campaign have griped privately about the need to find their storyline. And there have been fierce debates about how to do it. Some of McCain's former advisers have said that McCain needs to stick to his historic strengths, his maverick, straight-talking approach, which appeals to the political center. Others have urged McCain to charge at Obama head on. If the race is going to be about Obama, they reason, then Obama must be taken down. Now the debate has come to an end, and the more aggressive approach has clearly won out.
by Chris Bodenner I'm the last person to buy into the so-called "racist" intentions of mainstream Republicans. And I think Democrats usually cry wolf on the matter, to the detriment of race relations. But reading John Riley's post gave me pause:
We just got off a conference call with Camp McCain, defending their
new ad comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. They said they thought the ad was legitimate because Obama is a big
celebrity..., and
Britney and Paris were Number 2 and 3. The problem: Anyone with even a vague sense of pop culture knows that Britney and Paris are yesterday's news. Here's a link to Forbes' Celebrity 100. Paris and Britney don't even make the list any more. Instead, the top 10, in order: Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Angelina
Jolie, Beyonce Knowles, David Beckham, Johnny Depp, Jay-Z, The Police,
JK Rowling, Brad Pitt. So, they didn't pick other big celebrities, who were either men, or black, or married. What they picked was two sexually available white women.
America is a country based on celebrity, a country where nearly everybody wants to be a celebrity, an American Idol, and decrying the cult of celebrity is an empty exercise in moralizing. After JFK, Reagan, and Bill Clinton, the candidate as glamour figure is already wired into our collective psyches, and Fred Thompson's celebrity status didn't seem to trouble Republicans when he looked like a contender, until they realized his gravitas was indistinguishable from indigestion.
By Patrick Appel Greg Anrig and Harold Pollack counter Hanna Rosin's article on the connection between crime and section 8 vouchers:
Memphis's weak economy, unmentioned in The Atlantic, almost certainly bears greater responsibility for the spreading violence in a city that has a long history of high crime rates. From 1997 to 2004, Memphis experienced a 14 percent increase in the share of school children living in poverty. Robert L. Wagmiller Jr. of the University at Buffalo found that the percentage of Memphis neighborhoods classified as having low male employment nearly doubled from 6.7 percent to 12.7 percent between 1990 and 2000 -- the highest level among America's 50-largest metropolitan areas. During this time of nationally declining poverty rates, conditions in Memphis markedly worsened.
By Patrick Appel Weigel is dumbfounded by McCain's recklessness:
It's really hard to tell when an attack will backfire, but at the rate McCain's cranking out attack ads and lines about Obama lusting "to lose the war," the higher the odds he'll wreck his image. And then Obama can say whatever he wants about McCain without much blowback. I can't believe McCain doesn't remember how this works.
By Patrick Appel Ramesh Ponnuru agrees with Weaver that McCain's recent ads are juvenile. Allahpundit expands:
The problem is that it follows a line of spots that were either stupid, dishonest, or borderline incoherent; that’s why some GOP analysts are worried about Maverick’s negative turn lately. It’s not that attacks are bad per se, it’s that McCain has a solid brand of his own that he’s neglecting or even devaluing by hitting Obama in such petty ways.
by Chris Bodenner McCain had a made-for-TV movie based on his life, yet Obama is the "celebrity candidate"? CarlosBulosan:
Where was John McCain to decry celebrity status when Arnold
Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California as a Republican?
Where was John McCain when pop icon Sonny Bono, and actors Noble
Willingham, Jerry Doyle, and Fred Grandy all ran for Congress as
Republicans? Where was John McCain when Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson
addressed the Republican National Convention? Where was John McCain to
decry celebrity when former actor and Republican idol Ronald Reagan was
elected to the Presidency not once but twice? ... John McCain isn't
a packaged celebrity of course, he's a packaged war hero. There's a
difference. Right?
by Chris Bodenner Politicoranks the top ten competitive Senate races:
There’s no escaping the fundamental reality that the outlook is bleak for Senate Republicans. The question isn’t whether Democrats will pick up seats; it’s whether the GOP can minimize its losses. In an indication of how bad the national landscape is for Republicans, our initial rankings feature just one Democratic-held seat among those most likely to change hands.
By Patrick Appel Cause for celebration, though the fight isn't over yet:
Some Capitol Hill insiders have speculated that the Bush administration might decide to leave the HHS policy in place, preferring to let the next president decide whether to repeal it. That would leave the ban in place until at least late January.
A spokesperson for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said Obama opposes the ban and would take action to end it if he’s elected president.
A spokesperson for the campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, did not return a call seeking McCain’s position on the issue.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announces his intention to resign as Prime Minister of Israel on July 30, 2008 in Jerusalem, Israel. Embattled Prime Minister Olmert will step down from office in two months time when his Kadima Party chooses a new leader from it's scheduled leadership vote on September 17. Olmert said he will stand down because his family is being hurt by the corruption allegations against him. A corruption inquiry as well as criticism of his handling of recent conflicts have put pressure on Olmert to resign. Image by photo pool/Getty.
July 27, 2008 - August 2, 2008
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