May 10, 2008
May 8, 2008
May 4, 2008
Clinton Camp Considering Nuclear Option To Overtake Obama’s Delegate Lead
Thomas B. Edsall, The Huffington Post, May 4, 2008
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has a secret weapon to build its delegate count, but her top strategists say privately that any attempt to deploy it would require a sharp (and by no means inevitable) shift in the political climate within Democratic circles by the end of this month.
With at least 50 percent of the Democratic Party’s 30-member Rules and Bylaws Committee committed to Clinton, her backers could — when the committee meets at the end of this month — try to ram through a decision to seat the disputed 210-member Florida and 156-member Michigan delegations. Such a decision would give Clinton an estimated 55 or more delegates than Obama, according to Clinton campaign operatives. The Obama campaign has declined to give an estimate.
Using the Rules and Bylaws Committee to force the seating of two pro-Hillary delegations would provoke a massive outcry from Obama forces. Such a strategy would, additionally, face at least two other major hurdles, and could only be attempted, according to sources in the Clinton camp, under specific circumstances:
First, this coming Tuesday, Clinton would have to win Indiana and lose North Carolina by a very small margin – or better yet, win the Tar Heel state. She would also have to demonstrate continued strength in the contests before May 31.
Second, and equally important, her argument that she is a better general election candidate than Obama — that he has major weaknesses which have only been recently revealed — would have to rapidly gain traction, not only within the media, where she has experienced some success, but within the broad activist ranks of the Democratic Party.
Maureen Dowd: This Bud’s for You
Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 4, 2008
Barack Obama is going to get down if it kills him.
Bleeding white voters in North Carolina and Indiana, the Illinois senator headed Thursday evening to V.F.W. Post 1954 in North Liberty, Ind., consisting of a bar, a pool table, a Coors Light clock and a couple of dozen curious white guys.
Checking out what the vets were drinking, he announced, “I’m going to have a Bud.” Then, showing he’s a smart guy who can learn and assimilate, he took big swigs from his beer can, a marked improvement on the delicate sip he took at a brewery in Bethlehem, Pa.
Obama is also doing his best to impress hoop-crazed Hoosiers with his passion for basketball. On Thursday night, in shirt and tie, he took on an eighth grader named Aaron at a backyard picnic in Union Mills in an impromptu game of P-I-G. “You know, he’s tough,” Obama laughed about his 14-year-old opponent. “He’s like Hillary Clinton.”
The lioness of Chappaqua is hot on the trail of the Chicago gazelle, eager to gnaw him to pieces, like a harrowing scene out of a George Stubbs painting.
Proclaiming that the upcoming elections in Indiana and North Carolina would be “a game changer,” Hillary and her posse pressed hard on their noble twin themes of emasculation and elitism.
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Brayan Zepp Jamaison: Hillary: No
Bryan Zepp Jamaison, The Lonesome Mongoose, May 4, 2008
If there is one advantage to the protracted campaign of this strangest
of elections, it’s that we’ve gotten to see how either of the Democratic
candidates perform under fire.
This is particularly true of Barack Obama, who has had to face hostile
fire, not only from the far right, but from the sad joke that is known
as “the mainstream media” and the Clinton campaign. So far, it’s been
harsh, but not beyond the normal boundaries of roughhouse presidential
politics. Later this summer, when the right wing smear-and-hate machine
kicks in with the cheerful acquiescence of the mainstream media, acting
as an echo chamber, it will get far worse. But both Democratic
candidates have demonstrated that they can fight.
One sneer from the right that we’ve heard since the early days of the
Clinton presidency is that if they can’t handle the Republicans then
they can’t handle the demands of the presidency. Actually, the opposite
is true; Bill Clinton never had to endure as much animosity, treachery
and savagery from al Qaida, China, or North Korea as he did from the
Republican party.
It was during the Clinton years that we learned that Republicans will
cheerfully destroy their own country in the name of more power and
money. During the Putsch years, they’ve gone a long way toward doing
just that.
If Bill Clinton had one big mistake that hurt his presidency, it wasn’t
Monica Lewinsky or gays in the military. It was that he tried to
accommodate the far right in the first year of his presidency. He wanted
to reach out and embrace them, and pull them into his grand vision for
the country.
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May 2, 2008
What Orwell Can Teach Obama
Jeff Greenfield, Slate Magazine, May 2, 2008
Elitism has bedeviled American liberalism for the better part of four decades. It undermined the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry, and now it’s making mischief in the Obama campaign every bit as much as the omnipresence of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
The charge that liberal candidates don’t connect with or understand the values and beliefs of regular Americans is embedded in old epithets like “limousine liberal,” which I first heard aimed at New York Mayor John Lindsay in 1969. It was also at the core of “radical chic,” the phrase made famous by Tom Wolfe in his savage 1970 account in New York magazine of a fund-raising party for the Black Panthers thrown by Leonard Bernstein and his wife in their Park Avenue duplex. (Wolfe didn’t invent the term, but he gave it currency.)
There’s also an even older and more illuminating antecedent from across the Atlantic: the writings of George Orwell in England in the late 1930s, which describe a version of elitism that echoes powerfully in our current political battle.
Orwell’s 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier is an account of his travels to England’s industrial North, to the towns of Barnsley, Sheffield, and Wigan. Orwell—once a scholarship student at Eton—wrote of everything from conditions in the coal mines to the homes, diets, and health of desperately poor miners. He himself was a socialist who could also turn a critical eye on the British left, and in the middle of the book, he devoted a chapter to the failure of socialism to gain a foothold among the very citizens who would have seemed to benefit most from its rise. Substitute liberal or progressive for socialist, and the text often reads as though Orwell were covering American politics today.
“Everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, is a way out [of the worldwide depression,]” Orwell writes. “It would at least ensure our getting enough to eat, even if it deprived us of everything else. Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such an elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already.” And yet, he adds, “the average thinking person nowadays is merely not a Socialist, he is actively hostile to Socialism. … Socialism … has about it something inherently distasteful—something that drives away the very people who ought to be flocking it its support.”
March 12, 2008
David Sirota: The False Assumptions In the “Electability” Arguments
David Sirota, Credo Action, March 11, 2008
It seems the longer the presidential nominating contest goes on between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the more idiotic the pontificating and candidate spinning – especially when it comes to the so-called “electability” argument.
The Clinton campaign, as exemplified by surrogate Gov. Ed Rendell (D-PA) this morning on Meet the Press when he said:
“She’s clearly the strongest candidate in the states that Democrats must win to have a chance. Look, it’s great that Barack Obama is doing wonderfully well in Wyoming and Utah and, and places like that, but there’s no chance we’re going to carry those states. Whether he gets 44 percent as opposed to 39 percent doesn’t matter, but we’re not going to carry those states. We do have a chance to carry the big four. We’ve got to in three of the big four. Hillary Clinton’s the strongest candidate to do that. That’s been proven by the voters in the–those states and hopefully by Pennsylvania as well.”
Let’s put aside the fact that the Clinton campaign is insulting the importance of a huge swath of the American heartland – a talking point that has been repeated throughout this campaign by Clinton surrogates. Let’s just take a look at the two questionable assumptions inherent in this “electability” claim.
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March 9, 2008
House GOP Funk Worsens
John Bresnahan and Josh Kraushaar, Politico, March 9, 2008
For National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (Okla.), every week seems to bring a new set of problems. On Saturday night, things got even worse.
With Democrat Bill Foster’s victory in the Illinois 14th District special election, Democrats now hold the seats occupied only 21 months ago by former Speaker Dennis Hastert (Ill.) and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Texas) – the two GOP lawmakers who ran the House from 1998 to 2006.
Since September, Cole has faced a barrage of bad news:
* The NRCC lags behind the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee by nearly $30 million in cash on hand.
* GOP House leadership endured an embarrassing scuffle when Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) tried to fire Cole’s top two staffers, during which Cole threatened to resign.
* There has been a wave of retirement announcements by veteran Republican lawmakers that will force the NRCC to defend what were once seen as safe GOP seats.
* Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) was indicted on 35 federal corruption charges, which puts another Republican-controlled district in play.
* And the FBI continues its criminal investigation into a brewing accounting scandal that centers on the former NRCC treasurer’s activities.
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March 6, 2008
Ten Reasons Obama Didn’t Finish Off Hillary In Texas and Ohio
Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, March 5, 2008
As it became clear that Hillary Clinton was gaining ground on Obama, especially in the last week, his usually flawless campaign made several blunders. Here, in order of importance, are ten reasons why Obama slipped.
1. NAFTA Flap
When Obama’s leading economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, met with a Canadian official and allegedly told him that Obama’s stated views on NAFTA during the campaign amounted to “political posturing,” this was a huge blunder. It undercut Obama’s attack on Clinton for NAFTA, where she was vulnerable, especially in Ohio. It raised serious issues about Obama’s credibility with the American public, which is just getting to know him. (Especially since Obama first denied that the comment was ever made.) And the NAFTA flap called into question his leadership abilities. As I’ve been saying for days, and as Paul Begala said Tuesday night on CNN, as soon as this story surfaced, Obama should have said that Goolsbee was not speaking for the campaign and should have given Goolsbee the heave-ho. Instead, the Goolsbee comment keeps stinging him.
2. Rezko
It certainly didn’t help the Obama campaign that Tony Rezko’s trial began on Monday. The Rezko story has been lying around like a pulled hand grenade next to Obama’s headquarters for months now. Rezko is the Chicago wheeler-dealer who stands accused of money laundering and extorting bribes. He’s a longtime friend, funder, and supporter of Obama’s. And he helped Obama buy his house in Chicago. The Rezko ties, which the media finally began digging into, cast a shadow not only on Obama’s judgment but on his claim to want to clean up government.
3. A Blunder in the Last Debate
The Clinton camp wisely picked up on an Obama error in the Cleveland debate. Clinton had criticized him for never holding an oversight hearing on NATO’s role in Pakistan, even though he chairs a subcommittee on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that deals with NATO. All Obama could say to that was, “I became chairman of this committee at the beginning of this campaign, at the beginning of 2007. So it is true that we haven’t had oversight hearings on Afghanistan.” He all but admitted he shirked his duties to run for President! Clinton used this footage of Obama’s answer in an effective ad against him in the final week.
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March 3, 2008
Paul Krugman: Deliverance or Diversion?
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, March 3, 2008
After their victory in the 2006 Congressional elections, it seemed a given that Democrats would try to make this year’s presidential campaign another referendum on Republican policies. After all, the public appears fed up not just with President Bush, but with his party. For example, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center shows Democrats are preferred on every issue except terrorism. They even have a 10-point advantage on “morality.”
Add to this the fact that perceptions about the economy are worsening week by week, and one might have expected the central theme of the Democratic campaign to be “throw the bums out.”
But a funny thing happened on the way to the 2008 election.
Unless Hillary Clinton wins big on Tuesday, Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee. And he’s not at all the kind of candidate one might have expected to emerge out of the backlash against Republican governance.
Now, nobody would mistake Mr. Obama for a Republican — although contrary to claims by both supporters and opponents, his voting record places him, with Senator Clinton, more or less in the center of the Democratic Party, rather than in its progressive wing.
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March 2, 2008
Bob Herbert: A Democratic Nominee? Or a Debacle?
Bob Herbert, The New York Times, March 1, 2008
When does a dandy fight become an ugly brawl?
For the Democrats, perhaps on Tuesday.
If Barack Obama wins in either Texas or Ohio, the race for the nomination will effectively be over. At that point the Clintons, if they have any regard for the fortunes of the party, will be duty-bound to graciously fold their tents and try to rally their supporters behind a candidate who will be stepping into a firestorm of hostility from the other side.
If Hillary Clinton wins both Texas and Ohio, the Democrats will need a trainload of aspirin and a shrink.
The superdelegates currently sprinting toward Obama would suddenly look over their shoulders and wonder what happened to his O-mentum. The Clintons would declare themselves (yet again) the Comeback Kids, although they would still be behind in delegates. They would continue their push to have the Michigan and Florida delegations seated. They would step up their attacks on the Obama forces with understandable glee. And they would use whatever persuasive powers they could muster to push the idea with party regulars that Senator Obama is unelectable.
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February 23, 2008
Frank Rich: The Audacity of Hopelessness
Frank Rich, The New York Times, February 24, 2008
When people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.
It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.
The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.
That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.
Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.
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Obama Goes After GrandPa McCain
David Espo, The Associated Press, February 23, 2008
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – Sen. Barack Obama said Saturday that the Republican presidential nominee in waiting, Sen. John McCain, has lobbyists as top aides and “many of them have been running their business on the campaign bus while they’ve been helping him.”
The Democratic presidential hopeful also said McCain’s health care plans reflect “the agenda of the drug and insurance lobbyists, who back his campaign and use money and influence to block real health care reform.”
Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for McCain, said the Arizona senator “has been an agent for change for his entire career – he is the greatest change agent in our party – and we plan to highlight that record in this election.”
Obama has criticized McCain increasingly in recent weeks, while running off 11 straight primary and caucus victories over his Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Polls taken during the primary season show that independent voters are drawn in large numbers to both Obama and McCain, suggesting the two men would compete intensively for their support if they wind up opposing each other in the general election this fall.
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February 22, 2008
John McCain’s Response to Lobbyist Scandal is Refuted by… John McCain
Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, February 22, 2008
A sworn deposition that Sen. John McCain gave in a lawsuit more than five years ago appears to contradict one part of a sweeping denial that his campaign issued this week to rebut a New York Times story about his ties to a Washington lobbyist.
On Wednesday night the Times published a story suggesting that McCain might have done legislative favors for the clients of the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, who worked for the firm of Alcalde & Fay. One example it cited were two letters McCain wrote in late 1999 demanding that the Federal Communications Commission act on a long-stalled bid by one of Iseman’s clients, Florida-based Paxson Communications, to purchase a Pittsburgh television station.
Just hours after the Times’s story was posted, the McCain campaign issued a point-by-point response that depicted the letters as routine correspondence handled by his staff – and insisted that McCain had never even spoken with anybody from Paxson or Alcalde & Fay about the matter. “No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC,” the campaign said in a statement e-mailed to reporters.
But that flat claim seems to be contradicted by an impeccable source: McCain himself. “I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue,” McCain said in the Sept. 25, 2002, deposition obtained by NEWSWEEK. “He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint.”
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Rush Limbaugh Urges Dittobots to Vote for Obama in Remaining Democratic Primaries
Alexander Moody, CNN, May 8, 2008
WASHINGTON — He has publicly urged Republicans to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton to keep the divisive Democratic nomination fight alive, but talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday he really wants Sen. Barack Obama to be the party’s nominee.
Rush Limbaugh urged listeners in states with open primaries to cross party lines and support Hillary Clinton.
“I now believe he would be the weakest of the Democrat nominees,” Limbaugh, among the most powerful voices in conservative radio, said on his program. “I now urge the Democrat superdelegates to make your mind up and publicly go for Obama.”
“Barack Obama has shown he cannot get the votes Democrats need to win — blue-collar, working-class people,” Limbaugh said. “He can get effete snobs, he can get wealthy academics, he can get the young, and he can get the black vote, but Democrats do not win with that.”
But Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist and Obama supporter, disagreed, saying the Democratic Party has “the best coalition to go out and talk to people across racial lines, which are the unions.”
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