March 12, 2008
March 7, 2008
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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Gene Lyons: Political Awakening Could be Costly
Gene Lyons, The Arkansas Democrat Gazette, March 5, 2007
So it’s two days before the critical Texas and Ohio primaries, and how does the mighty Washington Post decorate its influential Outlook section? Well, the online headline kept changing: first, “Women Aren’t Very Bright,” followed by “Why Do Women Act So Dumb?” and finally, “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” Author Charlotte Allen’s thesis was that Sen. Barack Obama appeared to be winning the Democratic contest because irrational women fell for him like teenaged Beatles fans circa 1964. Also, because Hillary Clinton “has run one of the worst – and, yes, stupidest – presidential races in recent history, marred by every stereotypical flaw of the female sex.” Specifically, whining, weeping, relying too much on her husband, and worst, hiring women staffers “chosen for loyalty rather than, say, brains or political savvy.” Allen’s deepest thought, however, is that “Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true.” Fundamentally stupid, women can’t drive, do math, or much of anything really, apart from care for children and get off on dopey romance novels and TV shows like “Grey’s Anatomy,” allegedly one of Clinton’s favorites. Why, “even men’s brains are bigger than women’s.” Yeah, well, exit polls in 2000 and 2004 showed that women voted against that paragon of masculinity, George W. Bush, both times. So there’s that. Meanwhile, I’ve got a couple of big-brained fellows out in the barn who exchange significant glances whenever I bring them a carrot. Are horses secretly smarter than humans? Eighteenth century adventurer Lemuel Gulliver suspected so, but he was prone to exaggeration.
Chastened by reader reaction, Outlook editor John Pomfret alibied that Allen’s article was “tongue-in-cheek.” To paraphase Eric Altermann, what’s next at the Post? Satires about shiftless Negroes, greedy Jews, Irish drunks, Italian criminals and happy-go-lucky Mexicans?
Editorial advice: If you’ve got to tell people something’s funny, it ain’t.
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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
The Texas Star: Obama Campaign Keeps Rising
Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet, March 1, 2008
Like a good soldier, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) dutifully campaigned in Texas on Friday, delivering a gritty, determined and focused speech on her qualifications to be commander in chief to 1,000 people at a midday rally in Waco, a poor, small city in the state’s Bible Belt.
But while Clinton stood on a stage with retired top military officers and veterans from conflicts dating back to World War II, including ex-NATO commander Wesley Clark, her opponent Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) held what could only be described as a political rock concert Friday night in San Antonio, where perhaps 5,000 people turned out in a city whose large Latino population has been touted as one of Clinton’s strongholds.
Indeed, as Dorothy Dean, a longtime political organizer in Dallas who ran Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns in the southern part of that city and delivered historic Democratic turnouts in prior elections, said in an interview Thursday, the state seems poised for an Obama victory on Tuesday, March 4 — not because there is anything wrong with Clinton, but because Obama has touched a deeper, once-in-a-generation nerve.
“I know Hillary. I have talked to her personally,” Dean said. “I have nothing against her. She is knowledgeable. She’s smart. She knows what she’s doing. But this is a new wave. It’s a new day. It’s a new time. And the people have heard the same old promises. They don’t know if Obama can deliver. But at least they want to give him a try.”
Dean, who has worked in local politics for four-plus decades explained.
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February 26, 2008
Robert Parry: Why the War on Obama?
Robert Parry, Consortium News, February 26, 2008
While some cynics still view Barack Obama’s appeal for “change” as empty rhetoric, it’s starting to dawn on Washington insiders that his ability to raise vast sums of money from nearly one million mostly small donors could shake the grip that special-interest money has long held over the U.S. government.
This spreading realization that Obama’s political movement might represent a more revolutionary change than previously understood is sparking a deepening resistance among defenders of the status quo-and prompting harsher attacks on Obama.
Right now, the front line for the Washington Establishment is Hillary Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign, which has been stunned by Obama’s political skills as well as his extraordinary ability to raise money over the Internet. Obama’s grassroots donations have negated Clinton’s prodigious fundraising advantage with big donors.
Powerful lobbies-from AIPAC to representatives of military and other industries-also are recognizing the value of keeping their dominance over campaign cash from getting diluted by Obama’s deep reservoir of small donors. It’s in their direct interest to dent Obama’s momentum and demoralize his rank-and-file supporters as soon as possible.
So, neoconservatives and other ideological movements-heavily dependent on grants from the same special interests-are now joining with the Clinton campaign to tear down Obama by depicting him as unpatriotic, un-vetted, possibly a “closet Muslim.”
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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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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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