My thoughts are with the Obama Family:
Senator Barack Obama will suspend his campaigning for more than 36 hours this week to visit his grandmother Madelyn Dunham, who is gravely ill in Hawaii.
Mrs. Dunham, 85, all but raised Mr. Obama during his teenage years in Hawaii, and he has spoken of her often on the campaign trail. A campaign spokesman, Robert Gibbs, declined to specify the nature of her illness, other than to say it was quite serious. Mrs. Dunham lives in Honolulu.
I very much hope that Mrs. Dunham recovers and is in good spirits to watch the election returns on November 4th.
BooMan, Obama will not suspend his campaign; the candidate will suspend campaigning Thursday and Friday. Call me pedantic, but sometimes semantic nuances matter.
Best wishes to Mrs. Dunham.
That is buying into the Mainstream’s meme. Same with the biggest blogs like HuffPo. They need to sell ads, so they’ll take the most provocative and misleading wording they can find from somebody’s talking points, and use it to draw eyeballs. You have to read deep into the articles to discover that Obama has a very sick Grandmother.
A proper headline could say, “Family Emergency Calls Obama” and then mention that he is rescheduling events in order to visit her, followed by word that Michelle will cover for him on Friday, and that he expects to be back Saturday. THIS framing makes clear that he is a caring family-centered man with priorities in order AND that the campaign is continuing to function.
Sheesh!
When Biden needed to take a couple of days off to deal with a family funeral, did anybody sane talk about “suspension”. Nope.
Suspension implies a huge gap to cross over. 36 hours is more like a detour.
Look at Congress. They may be fools, but they know how to rate time off. They distinguish between weekends, breaks, vacations. 2-4 days of no gaveling is no problem. 2-4 weeks, OTOH, and they jostle to prevent recess appointments.
Given the laughable “suspension” and theatrics employed by an increasingly erratic McCain, that is a loaded word right now.
We can avoid using their words and their framing. We have a bigger vocabulary.
That said, I do hope that his grandmother can hold on long enough to see him elected and inaugurated; she must be very proud of the kind of man she raised.
will read it with the sense that Obama’s “suspending” based on the need to actually do something real, versus McCain’s “suspending” which was so much sky is falling bullshit.
My thoughts are with the Obama family – I sincerely hope she can make some sort of recovery and see her grandson elected.
Yeah, I thought the choice of suspend (by the media yesterday) was unfortunate, too. He’s not stopping his campaign, he’s just altering two days so he can be with his grandmother. It’s not like they don’t have telephones, the Interwebs or that there fancy electricity in Hawaii…
I really want her to be here to see him elected…especially since his mother can’t be.
Amen. that would be great.
Let’s all send those thoughts to Hawaii.
The curative power of thoughts.