Candace

Talmadge

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September 22, 2008

Longtime Republicans Back Obama with Book, Advocacy

During last week’s market meltdown, two-longtime Republican insiders did more than just call attention to their support for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

They published a book they co-wrote called Turning Red States Blue: Obama’s Mission to Win the Republican Vote (Genesis Press; $9.95 paperback).

The authors of the 104-page tome are Wilbur O. Colom and James W. Parkinson. Both men are attorneys. The former began his GOP activities in Mississippi in 1975, while the latter is based in California. They have supported numerous Republican candidates in their respective states and on a national level, and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for GOP candidates.

“It’s time for country-club Republicans to get out of their golf carts and ask the person mowing the lawn, ‘How’s your life going?’” Parkinson explains in an interview. “The economy is really hurting and people are scared.”

In their book, he and fellow author Colom slam Republican presidential candidate John McCain as an extension (and most likely worse) of Bush policy blunders that include the Iraq war, tax cuts, energy, education and Social Security. “John McCain is going to be a Herbert Hoover redux, not George Bush,” Parkinson says.

Hoover was the Republican president who refused to take any government action after the 1929 Wall Street crash and remained unwilling to intervene even as the country collapsed into the Great Depression of the early 1930s.

This book – really an extended essay in the tradition of political pamphleteers Thomas Paine or John Milton – is no Swift Boat-style slash-and-run. The authors make a detailed and meticulously documented comparison of the two candidates’ proposed policies for education, energy, government spending, the Iraq war, Social Security and tax levels. They come down on Obama’s side in every issue. They even take on the religious right wing of the GOP and comment on the culture war that has ignited anew with McCain’s vice presidential selection.

As just one example, Colom and Parkinson do an outstanding job of highlighting the fallacies in McCain’s energy policy, which the candidate himself has summed up as “drill more, drill now, drill here.” They point out that any new oil finds in the United States won’t be reserved for this country alone. All oil, no matter where it is produced, goes on the international market and is sold to the highest bidder. Drilling offshore or in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will not make more oil available to the United States at lower prices.

One of the work’s glaring omissions, however, is no discussion of the systematic dismantling of business regulation during the past four decades, a major contributor to the tsunami that has swamped U.S. financial markets. “We didn’t have the time to discuss deregulation,” Parkinson says, adding that the two wanted to get their book into print before the Nov. 4 election in the hope that it will have some effect on the national discussion.

The two maintain that the key to a victory for Obama lies outside the larger urban areas and cite the successes of Mississippi State Sen. Eric Powell (D-District 4) and Alabama State Rep. James Fields (D-District 12) as evidence that African-American politicians can appeal to rural whites.

For that reason, they have aimed their treatise at Republican districts in Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi, Ohio and Pennsylvania. They have already published the complete book as a supplement in 25 weekly newspapers in northeast Mississippi and, Parkinson says, will spend “a substantial sum” of their own money to publish it in more weeklies in the other states.

Parkinson also says that although the book throws a lot of facts and figures at readers, voters will take the time to read it and think. “People are starting to reject the glib and celebrity spin,” he says. “Bumper-sticker people might not read it but there are enough people looking for the meat of our argument in Obama’s favor.”

Let’s hope so, because it will take a Republican to convince other Republicans that the best choice this November isn’t on the GOP ticket. 

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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