MoveOn is an American progressive public policy advocacy group and political action committee. Formed in 1998 in response to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton by the U.S. House of Representatives, MoveOn.org has raised millions of dollars for left-wing candidates in the United States of America. It also runs a petition website similar to Change.org.
John Charles Hagee is the founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church, a megachurch in San Antonio, Texas. Hagee is the founder and National Chairman of the Christian-Zionist organization Christians United for Israel. His televangelist message is broadcast nationally in the United States as well as elsewhere, via his non-profit corporation Global Evangelism Television and others.
Hardball with Chris Matthews is an American television talk show on MSNBC, broadcast weekdays at 7 PM ET hosted by Chris Matthews. The program was originally broadcast on the now-defunct America's Talking and then later, on CNBC. The current title was derived from a book Matthews wrote in 1988, Hardball: How Politics Is Played Told by One Who Knows the Game.
Douglas W. Kmiec is an American legal scholar, author, and former U.S. ambassador. He is the Caruso Family Chair and Professor of Constitutional Law at Pepperdine University School of Law. Kmiec came to prominence during the United States presidential election, 2008 when, although a Republican, he endorsed Democrat Barack Obama. In July 2009, he was nominated by President Obama to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Malta. He was confirmed by the Senate and served for close to two years as ambassador to Malta. He resigned his post effective May 31, 2011.
On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama, then-junior United States Senator from Illinois, announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States in Springfield, Illinois. Obama announced his candidacy at the Old State Capitol building, where Abraham Lincoln had delivered his "House Divided" speech. Obama was the main challenger, along with John Edwards, to front-runner Hillary Clinton for much of 2007. He had only recently emerged as a national figure in Democratic politics, having delivered the DNC keynote address just three years prior and won his Senate election shortly thereafter.
Stanley Ann Dunham was an American anthropologist who specialized in the economic anthropology and rural development of Indonesia. She was the mother of Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. Dunham was known as Stanley Ann Dunham through high school, then as Ann Dunham, Ann Obama, Ann Soetoro, Ann Sutoro and finally after her second divorce as Ann Dunham.
Maya Kasandra Soetoro-Ng is the Indonesian-American maternal half-sister of the 44th United States President Barack Obama. Formerly a high school history teacher, she is currently a Faculty Specialist and Director of Community Outreach and Global Learning at the Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace & Conflict Resolution, which is based in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
"A More Perfect Union" is the name of a speech delivered by then Senator Barack Obama on March 18, 2008, in the course of the contest for the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Speaking before an audience at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Obama was responding to a spike in the attention paid to controversial remarks made by Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor and, until shortly before the speech, a participant in his campaign. Obama framed his response in terms of the broader issue of race in the United States. The speech's title was taken from the Preamble to the United States Constitution.
The Jeremiah Wright controversy gained national attention in the United States, in March 2008 when ABC News, after reviewing dozens of U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright's sermons, excerpted parts of his sermons about terrorist attacks on the United States and government dishonesty, which were subject to intense media scrutiny. Wright is a retired senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and former pastor of Obama.
During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, controversy broke out regarding Barack Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, a Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a former leader of the Weather Underground, a radical left organization in the 1970s. Investigations by CNN, The New York Times and other news organizations concluded that Obama did not have a close relationship with Ayers.
The 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama, then junior United States Senator from Illinois, was announced on February 10, 2007 in Springfield, Illinois. After winning a majority of delegates in the Democratic primaries of 2008, on August 23, leading up to the convention, the campaign announced that Senator Joe Biden of Delaware would be the vice presidential nominee. At the 2008 Democratic National Convention on August 27, Barack Obama was formally selected as the Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States in 2008. He was the first African American in history to be nominated on a major party ticket.
Barack Obama, who was elected as the 44th President of the United States, has elicited a number of public perceptions regarding his personality and background. As the first African-American President of the United States, his race and culture have played a prominent role in this, both positively and negatively. His relative youth has alternately resulted in his being praised for his freshness and criticized for his inexperience. His temperament and demeanor have drawn praise for his perceived unflappability and criticism for the perception of his lacking emotional attachment.
The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate, by author David Freddoso, is a bestselling book published in late 2008, providing a critical examination of the life and opinions of the then United States presidential candidate and Senator Barack Obama.
During Barack Obama's campaign for president in 2008, throughout his presidency, and afterwards, a number of conspiracy theories falsely asserted Obama was ineligible to be President of the United States because he was not a natural-born citizen of the U.S. as required by Article Two of the Constitution.
Our Country Deserves Better PAC (OCDB) is a political action committee (PAC) formed in August 2008 to oppose the election of Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama. The organization, based in Sacramento, California, is one of the largest conservative PACs in the United States. Its current mission is to challenge President Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress for their stance on raising taxes on the wealthy, health care, national defense, energy policy, immigration, and judicial appointments, as well as defeat the election of liberal Democratic candidates. In February 2010, Our Country Deserves Better was among the twelve most influential groups in the Tea Party movement, according to the National Journal.
The Almanac of American Politics (2008) rated Barack Obama's overall social policies in 2006 as more conservative than 21% of the Senate, and more liberal than 77% of the Senate.
Allegations that Barack Obama secretly practices Islam, or that he is the antichrist of Christian eschatology, have been suggested since he campaigned for the U.S. Senate in 2004 and proliferated after his election as President of the U.S. in 2008. As with conspiracy theories surrounding his citizenship status, the claims are promoted by various fringe theorists and political opponents, with American bloggers and conservative talk radio hosts particularly promoting the theories.
CatholicVote.org is a conservative, non-profit political advocacy group based in the United States. While the organization acknowledges the authority of the Magisterium, it is independent of the Catholic Church. It had a stated a goal of "electing new pro-life and pro-family candidates to Congress and, of course, electing a pro-life candidate to the Presidency in 2012."
The topic of Barack Obama's usage of social media in his political campaigns, including podcasting, Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube has been compared to the adoption of radio, television, MTV, and the Internet in slingshotting his presidential campaign to success and as thus has elicited much scholarly inquiry. In the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama had more "friends" on Facebook and Myspace and more "followers" on Twitter than his opponent John McCain.
Priorities USA Action is the largest Democratic Party super PAC. Founded in 2011, it supported Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign. It was the primary super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. It focused mainly on high-dollar donors. As of September 2016, it had amassed $132 million in support of Clinton. The top six donors to the super PAC have given $43.5 million, which is a third of the money collected by Priorities USA Action in the 2016 election cycle. The super PAC raised $21.7 million in August 2016, marking its largest monthly fundraising haul.
