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Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign, 2007 MUNUC 32 TABLE OF CONTENTS ______________________________________________________ Letter from the Chair………………………………………………………….. 3 Letter from the Crisis Director…………………………………………………5 History of the Problem…………………………………………………………7 Barack Obama: Biography…………………………………………………11 Possible Controversies……………………………………………………….19 Economics – A Primer………………………………………………………..22 Major Candidates, Democratic Primary………………………………….33 The Democratic Primary: A Primer…………………………………………37 Questions to Consider………………………………………………………..44 Character Biographies………………………………………………………46 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………...61 2 Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign, 2007 | MUNUC 32 LETTER FROM THE CHAIR ______________________________________________________ Esteemed Campaign Advisors, Hello, and welcome to the Presidential Campaign of Barack Obama! Flashback to 2007: the iPhone is a technological miracle, the Black Eyed Peas are topping the charts, and a freshman Senator from Illinois is about to embark on a journey that will define the next century. My name is Carter and I’m thrilled to be your Chair as you all drive a campaign to take America by storm. A bit about myself: I’m a third year in the College at the University of Chicago, studying Political Science (and probably another major or a few minors, as long as I can keep a high GPA for law school)! I originally hail from Louisville, Kentucky (pronounced Loo-a-vul)--home of horse racing, fried chicken, and Muhammad Ali. Outside of coursework, I’m the Vice President of our competitive Model UN Team, and am a Crisis Director for a committee (The Virgin Group, 2020) at ChoMUN, our collegiate Model UN conference. This is my second year at MUNUC--last year I staffed the Cabinet of Uzbekistan, 1991. I also work at UChicago’s Community Programs Accelerator as a consultant for nonprofits on Chicago’s South Side, and spend my limited free time exploring this beautiful city and finding good food. Both Christian and myself are beyond excited to be running this truly unique committee. Barack Obama’s 2007 Campaign is a watershed moment in American politics as the United States lurched into the 21st Century. The campaign addressed brand new policy problems, made use of technology, dealt with myriad scandals, and got America’s first black president elected. The Crisis Committees typically offered at MUNUC are cabinets, councils, or other executive government bodies: our committee is none of those things. As a campaign, you will be tasked with using your resources in rapid-action responses to keep your candidate on top and in front. 3 Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign, 2007 | MUNUC 32 A few notes on what I look for as a Chair. First and foremost, respect is the name of the game. Overly aggressive tactics and generally poor-spirited actions will not be well received. That said, I trust you all to behave like adults! I hope to see energetic and constructive debate on solutions which creatively address the problems we throw at you. Want to do well? Come prepared with plenty of research under your belt on your character, the committee topic, and the time period. Then, use directives and speeches to prove to us that you have a firm grasp on the issues at stake! Christian and I are thrilled to see how you all steer this campaign, and have full faith that you’ll do an admirable job. When things get challenging and you don’t think you can overcome the problems, just remember: “Yes we can.” We’ll see you in February! All the best, Carter Squires [email protected] 4 Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign, 2007 | MUNUC 32 LETTER FROM THE CRISIS DIRECTOR ______________________________________________________ Dear Delegates, Welcome aboard. Carter and I are very enthused to have you all joining us at MUNUC 32. This committee is dynamic, interesting, relevant to the present, and has quite some room for imagination and creativity. Throughout the weekend, you will be interacting with foreign, political, economic, and social affairs issues that not only affected the presidential race of 2007-08 but continue to define the United States and the world in the present day. Furthermore, this is also the first time in recent memory that MUNUC has run a campaign as a continuous crisis, so I hope you are excited to join us in blazing a new trail for delegates to come. I will be your Crisis Director for this weekend. Essentially, my job, along with our team of Assistant Chairs, who will be responding to your notes, is to create and control the world outside of committee. A bit of background on me: I am a third year student at UChicago studying economics and chemistry. I am originally from Toronto and I was a CD for MUNUC last year. I am also an Under- Secretary-General for ChoMUN, our collegiate conference, have competed for our competitive team, and am a board member for an undergraduate financial society. I also enjoy baseball, hockey, and progressive rock music. You will interact with the outside world both through committee directives, which are passed by plurality, and by personal directives, commonly known as crisis notes or backroom notes. These are in-character messages to people your character would have contact with, i.e. family members or your admin assistant. Through the backroom (our term for the crisis room), you can and should use your portfolio powers to influence the world outside committee without passing directives. This is a valuable tool if you want to do something for your character’s own personal gain, or something internally in your department. I encourage you to use the backroom heavily and be creative and detailed in your requests. While realism in your requests is key, a big part of crisis is imagination, so if you have a reasonable, interesting, and well-thought out way to get a private army, buy Ontario, create a TV game show that gives your character a cult following, or rig an election, we will listen. 5 Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign, 2007 | MUNUC 32 I will also encourage you to work together when you feel it is necessary, and not just for the purposes of doing so. Your ideas for backroom do not have to be pre-planned and be developed in situ, but they should not be sporadic. Save reacting to updates for the frontroom; in the backroom, focus on building a storyline, or crisis arc as we call it, for your character. A good place to start is getting into character, looking at your bio, and thinking about what you as that person would want to accomplish, for the gain of France and/or yourself. Then, map out a way to get there, building up resources and using them, and considering who you will need to contact along the way (those people can be fictional; simply write to them and we will respond as them). We are eager to ‘break’ your backroom actions into front room crisis updates that affect the committee. Requests for feedback and assistance on how to use the incredible resource that is the backroom will be valued and welcomed at all times. You will not be judged by your level of experience, but rather by how you respond to stimuli using the tools that you have, and have been given by us. I look forward to combining MUNUC’s signature pedagogical experience with the mental athleticism that I love about Crisis. If you have any questions about best practices, expectations, rules, the background guide, or anything else, please feel free to email me at [email protected] I hope you’re as excited to shape history as I am. See you all in February. Regards, Christian 6 Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign, 2007 | MUNUC 32 History of the Problem The End of the 1990s, and the Rise of George Bush In order to understand the political environment in which we sit as a committee, we must travel back to the last presidential election in which the incumbent was ineligible: 2000. The late 1990s had seen a series of drastic changes to the American political landscape. The economy was doing strikingly well; for the first time in a very long time, the federal budget was balanced, and the recession that had begun the decade had given way to a long period of growth with fairly low inflation. Clinton’s economic policy was augmented by his partial repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933, enabling investment banks to intermingle with merchant and retain banks, consolidating the financial industry. Clinton had signed into law various tough-on-crime bills as part of an effort to work with a Republican congress, and mandatory minimum sentences had become a key piece in the war on drugs. During this time, the American prison population increased substantially. The downfall of the USSR meant that Bill Clinton’s foreign policy agenda was going to have to be dramatically different than many of his predecessors. Whereas they had had the ability to map everything in a more or less bipolar light, as most every significant international actor was either aligned with the capitalist west or the socialist east, the demise of Soviet hegemony brought about changes to those present on the world stage. Clinton had sought to maintain a good relationship with China, as they had become increasingly powerful, diplomatically (and militarily) and financially, notwithstanding the Asian currency crisis of 1997. The handover of Hong Kong to China had signaled that the era of empire was over for the British in the East. Furthermore, Japan had grown dramatically in the years since the US had restructured its economy and government following the Second World War, and Japan had rapidly ascended throughout the 1980s to become the world’s second largest economy. Japanese investment in the US had grown at a previously unimaginable rate, but a drop in asset prices at the start of the 90s decade had seen a rapid unravelling of the overleveraged and over generous Japanese banking system, which had given out far too many loans to undeserving borrowers.

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