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Showing posts from January, 2008

Tracy Flick Victory Party in Florida Tonight!

Because elections aren't just popularity contests... ...and holding a victory party in Florida is just so Tracy Flick.

Toni Morrison endorses Barack Obama

-via MSNBC Dear Senator Obama, This letter represents a first for me--a public endorsement of a Presidential candidate. I feel driven to let you know why I am writing it. One reason is it may help gather other supporters; another is that this is one of those singular moments that nations ignore at their peril. I will not rehearse the multiple crises facing us, but of one thing I am certain: this opportunity for a national evolution (even revolution) will not come again soon, and I am convinced you are the person to capture it. May I describe to you my thoughts? I have admired Senator Clinton for years. Her knowledge always seemed to me exhaustive; her negotiation of politics expert. However I am more compelled by the quality of mind (as far as I can measure it) of a candidate. I cared little for her gender as a source of my admiration, and the little I did care was based on the fact that no liberal woman has ever ruled in America. Only conservative or "new-centrist" ones

the Kennedy endorsements

It's clear that there is one campaign that is driving turnout, building a winning coalition and enunciating the positive Democratic message this year and that is the campaign of Senator Barack Obama. The Kennedy endorsements are significant not because they will change a single vote, though they will move a few, but more because they highlight that the Clinton campaign can't simply get away with everything. The Clinton campaign's "pre-emptive delegate grab" for Michigan and Florida delegates is over, as is the notion that Senator Clinton will be able to drive super delegates off the fence behind the scenes. That won't happen in secret, not anymore. Finally, Caroline Kennedy's endorsement has not simply a "symbolic" value to Obama, but will also, on a pragmatic level, unleash a flurry of donations to Obama's campaign. The perception of power is itself powerful. The Clinton's squandered that perception in South Carolina. President Bill Clin

the big We

From TPM comes the text of this new radio ad from Bill Clinton. It makes you wonder if there wasn't a 22nd Amendment and Bill could run for a third term if this is what he'd sound like: This is Bill Clinton. These are tough economic times. There aren’t enough jobs, health care costs and gas prices are soaring, and now millions of people are worried about losing their homes. The question is what to do about it. You’ve got a great decision to make, but I believe it’s Hillary who can help solve these problems. I also know that African Americans have been hit the hardest these last seven years. Who can fix health care, who can fix our economy, who can create new jobs, who can reduce the price of gas at the pump? Hillary can. I’ve known her for 36 years. When it comes to seeing a problem and figuring out how to solve it, she’s the best I’ve ever seen. She’s always heard your voice and you’ll be heard in the White House. I want to thank you for twice giving m

President Bill Clinton suggests that some in his audience are "Obama plants"

What to make of this exchange highlighted at the end of an article in today's NYT? : “I liked seeing Barack and Hillary fight,” [Bill Clinton] said. “They’re real people. I’ve been waiting all my life to see this sort of thing.” From the crowd, one young man rose to question him. “A lot of us,” the man said, “believe Senator Obama eventually will be the first black president. Are you going to be O.K. with having stood in his way? Do you think that will affect your legacy among blacks in South Carolina?” “No,” Mr. Clinton replied. “Yes and no. Yes, I’m O.K., but I’m not standing in his way; I think Hillary would be a better president.” A bit later, Mr. Clinton suggested to the same crowd that his young questioner might have been planted by the Obama campaign .

Misleading Clinton Attacks leave divided local parties

Stories of the bitter consequences of misleading campaigning like this one from the Washington Post are getting passed around in emails between grassroots Democrats: Of the two dozen prominent women who signed the critical letter, e-mailed by the Clinton campaign to a list of supporters and undecided voters, three have now signed their names to another missive asking abortion rights supporters in the state to come together and take comfort in the fact that all of the Democratic presidential candidates are firmly pro-choice. One of the three Clinton supporters went even further, saying in an interview Thursday that signing the letter attacking Obama was a "mistake." Katie Wheeler, a former state senator, said the Clinton campaign had not given her background information about Obama's record on abortion rights when it asked her to sign the letter calling him weak on the issue, and said that, as a result, she did not understand the context of the votes that the letter was

A gentle reminder to Senator Clinton regarding slums

Senator Clinton might want to take a second and realize that all of us live in towns and neighborhoods and communities. Nobody likes it when someone calls their neighborhood a slum. There were ample other ways to make that misguided point. If Senator Clinton wants to summarize the career of Senator Obama using the "slum lord" angle that's her right. It's not, however, particularly accurate or fair : Obama worked in the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky, who made Chicago the birthplace of modern community organizing, as translated through the Gamaliel Foundation, one of several networks of faith-based organizing. Often by confronting officials with insistent citizens--rather than exploiting personal connections, as traditional black Democrats proposed--Obama and DCP protected community interests regarding landfills and helped win employment training services, playgrounds, after-school programs, school reforms and other public amenities. One day a resident at Altgel

Bill, Bill, Bill...and more Bill

Josh Marshall has made a great video compilation of the punditry waxing on Bill Clinton's overdrive efforts to insert himself into his third campaign for President (you've gotta love Howard Wolfson saying with a straight face " Bill Clinton is like any other spouse in this campaign "...right.): My point is not just that It's all about Bill , but that the strategy is deliberate. The Clintons have clearly decided that the only way to counter Barack Obama's star power and message is for Bill Clinton to suck the media oxygen out of Obama's sails. In their view, so long as the story is NOT about Barack Obama's charisma and message, they win....you see, the only way Clinton's core voters move to Obama is if they can hear and see Obama , if they can get his message. That's not happening when Bill makes himself the center of attention. Now, Barack Obama can't just fight back against Clinton's "distortions" ...that plays into the eff

It's all about Bill

With a bunch of reporters at a bar on Sunday, Bill made the problem hers. " We can't be a new story, I'm sorry. I can't make her younger, taller, male. '' - Bloomberg.com In an alternative universe President Bill Clinton might have used his retirement to survey the landscape of his journey through public life and made some fundamental changes in how he operates. After a political career that, whatever else you might say, was always more tacky than tactful, Clinton could have, knowing his wife and life partner aspired to the presidency, calibrated his public persona to fits those goals. Elder statesman, eminence grise, party arbiter and nurturer of new talent, supportive spouse..alas, it was never meant to be. In an alternative universe, of course, Senator Clinton would have won Iowa. She did not and what has followed now seems like it was inevitable. Bill Clinton is in the news . Bill Clinton has been in the news . And, for as long as Senator Clinton's run

Irony in Las Vegas

It looks like Bill Clinton supported a failed lawsuit to close down the very At Large Caucus sites that put Senator Hillary Clinton over the top . Barack Obama won "the rest of Nevada," and had the lawsuit to close those caucus sites succeeded, Nevada may well have been an Obama victory. But that's just the silver lining not the prize, Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote in Nevada (though, in a remarkable double irony, not its delegates ) with a strong showing among women, Latinos and seniors. And if that turns out to be a tide-forming moment in this primary campaign then the Story of the Strip could end up being the second part of a one-two punch. There are a couple quick observations I'd offer. First, this is a gut check moment for anyone in the Democratic Party who has reservations about whether a Clinton Restoration would be good for the Democratic Party or the nation as a whole. Will Barack Obama continue to receive endorsements from Democratic leaders showing

Clinton ad in Nevada

Apparently this AFSCME 527 ad is running heavily in Nevada. It reinforces a point I made in an essay I wrote on Clinton's core message: Clinton's campaign is personal . Clinton's campaign is about her relationship with the voters. Clinton's campaign is about unfinished business and unfinished battles. Clinton's message in the 2008 Presidential election is that the arc of her career in public service should return her to the White House . In essence, the 2008 election is about Clinton and her journey. Clearly, the ad also reveals the demographic Hillary is targeting in Nevada, women. And, on some level, it's interesting as much for what it says about what advocates for the Clinton campaign think of women voters in Nevada as what it tells us about the Clinton campaign itself. "I didn't know" is a fascinating, if somewhat headscratching, strategy for winning over caucus goers to vote for you for President. On one level the ad encourages voters to t

the Clinton campaign and the caucus dispute

You asked the question in an accusatory way so I'll ask you back. Do you really believe that all the Democrats understood that they had agreed to give everybody at the casino a vote worth five times as much people who voted in their own precinct? Did you know that? Their votes will be counted five times more powerfully in terms of delegates to the state convention who pick the delegates to the national convention? What happened is that nobody understood, what had happened is that they uncovered it...and now everybody is saying, " Oh, they don't want us to vote ." This hurts the Clinton campaign. This is a major story. ( NYT , USA Today , WSJ ) Clinton is doing two things here. He's coming out in support of a lawsuit to shut down caucus sites after an endorsement went against Senator Clinton. That's the core thing here. It's unbelievable that the campaign of Senator Clinton does not see how poorly this comes off. Second, he's playing politics in a co

the CW wave

One the perils of 24h spin cycle politics is that by the time the folks involved in the build up of what becomes "conventional wisdom" get tired of it, or bored, or just plain worn to the ground by it...the real cementing of Conventional Wisdom has only just begun. Clearly, the story coming out of Iowa and New Hampshire on the Democratic side has become some kind of campaign battle over "race." Democrats are sick of it, and quite a few within the party recognize the perils of this battle, including, apparently, the main players. (That didn't stop the Clinton side from getting numerous unfair digs in after the truce.) However that may be, the rest of the country has just begun to notice. Tim Russert holding up a sheaf of papers purporting to be "a controversial memo" prepared by the Obama campaign (it was no such thing, btw) might be the first the general public may have heard about this brouhaha. What I'd like to try to understand is that process

USA Today: Bill Clinton paints Obama as 'establishment candidate'

From the department of "give us a break," comes this must read from today's USA Today. Bill Clinton, who carried Nevada in two general elections, urged voters Tuesday to buck labor endorsements for Sen. Barack Obama and support his wife in Saturday's hotly contested presidential caucuses as the only Democratic candidate with the experience necessary to change the country. The former president trumpeted New York Sen. Hillary Clinton's accomplishments while painting Obama as the "establishment" candidate who would bring only the "feeling of change." " One candidate says you should vote for me because I've not been involved at all in the struggles of the past and therefore we need to turn over a new leaf and (try) something absolutely new. And if you want the feeling of change, then that is the person you should support ," Clinton said in a 75-minute speech to about 300 people in a YMCA gymnasium . "The other candidate says

Jim Clyburn, the Clintons and Race

Congressman Jim Clyburn is the House Majority Whip, the third-ranking member of the Democratic caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. Last Wednesday, the morning after the New Hampshire primary, Clyburn gave an interview to Carl Hulse in the New York Times where he questioned recent comments "distorting civil rights history" made by Bill and Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail: “We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics,” said Mr. Clyburn, who was shaped by his searing experiences as a youth in the segregated South and his own activism in those days. “It is one thing to run a campaign and be respectful of everyone’s motives and actions, and it is something else to denigrate those. That bothered me a great deal.” [Clyburn] also voiced frustration with former President Clinton, who described Mr. Obama’s campaign narrative as a fairy tale. While Mr. Clinton was not discussing civil rights at the time and seemed to be referri

James Carville is "shaken"

I will write more about this later but the Washington Post alerts us to an important development in the Presidential primary fight. James Carville is shaken: Someone said, 'You can't unring a bell'-- well, the biggest bell in American politics just got rung. I'm shaken by the whole thing. I don't know about you, but my bullshit detection meter just hit eleven. ::

choices pt. ii

ABC has a story up now. It's titled Woman Who Made Clinton Cry Voted for Obama . Worth a read. While you're at it, Josh Marshall proved once again today, why he's one of the key voices of our decade . This is a must read. ::

choices

I wrote a diary on DailyKos today that got a wide-ranging discussion started. It's called the heart and soul of the party and you might like it. A blogger challenged me in a comment on that thread and I wanted to share that challenge here and my response below. The commenter writes: I hadn't gone to check this out until you posted this ko, but I'm a little flustered. If the entire basis for the "Hillary is a sell-out insider who takes powerful people's money and so won't be open to participatory democracy", you should take another look at open secrets . I see all sorts of money from all sorts of industries washing all around our candidates. Honestly, the money frothe lobbyists (who do, as she says, include the likes of nurses), is swamped by the money coming directly from those in the industries themselves. For example, while HIllary gets the most from Pharma and Docs, take a look, Obama is #2 nipping at her heels. And here was my response: Thank you

Al Gore: the super super delegate

It is a brewing historical irony that the Democratic presidential primary in 2008 could shape up to mirror the election of 2000: one candidate could win the "popular vote" ie. the majority of the delegates selected by the voters and caucus goers, while another candidate could win the nomination by winning enough additional super delegates to put them over the threshold for victory. Nobody wants this. No one. But the reshaped Tsunami Tuesday and it's "all at once" delegate selection process might well lay the groundwork for this very situation to come to pass. (There are some very powerful forces of the status quo that are using the avoidance of this situation as an expedient excuse to rally behind Senator Clinton, mark me on that.) I look at the situation right now, however, and think that there's a very small number of "big mover" factors that haven't yet come into to play that could help swing things one way or another. One of those factors

Good stuff from Mark Schmitt at TAPPED

This is good: [Obama] is falling into the tendency that many "wine-track" candidates do of talking about his candidacy as if it were some sort of other-worldly cause: "something happening,"…"it's about you," etc. Howard Dean's "people-powered politics" had the same flaw. That kind of language is inspirational in the moment, but quickly makes a campaign seem vapid and vain even if it isn't. It leaves a listener open to the sense that you're the candidate of process, feeling, and personality, which allows the hard-work-and-experience candidate to claim the mantle of substance by comparison. But Obama didn't get through 15 debates without substance. (Which is why the Clinton claim that "he's gotten a free ride" is unpersuasive.) He's got an elegant, expansive pitch-perfect take on foreign policy that's markedly different from Clinton's; he has good proposals on poverty, climate change, and a defensible

idiocy

First John Edwards , who paid a price for it. And now, Senator Barack Obama's campaign co-chair , Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., has joined those who question Senator Clinton's emotions. For the record, I think talking about "tears" is idiocy. Sheer idiocy. I think paying attention to what Hillary and Bill have actually said over the last few days is the way to go. But, hey, what do I know?

New Hampshire

On February 1st, 2000 Al Gore defeated Bill Bradley in the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary 76,897 to 70,502 votes out of 154,639 cast. (source, wikipedia ). A remarkable thing happened tonight in New Hampshire eight years later: with 96% of precincts reporting, Hillary Clinton has won New Hampshire full out winning over 110,550 votes with Barack Obama taking 102,883 and John Edwards winning 47,803....that's a total of over 100,000 more total votes cast in the New Hampshire Democratic primary in 2008 than 2000. That's remarkable and cause for celebration whatever the outcome. Now, I've spent the last two posts expressing my disagreement with Clinton campaign strategy over the weekend. I'm not going to back down from that point of view. You could point to any of the stratagems and tactics the Clinton camp used over the weekend as "key" but I think the overall cumulative effect of all the strategies was the significant thing here and it gave the Cl

fairy tale

As if the Clinton camp weren't satisfied with how low and how fast they've sunk, President Bill Clinton has decided to add yet another perjorative phrase to the Clinton campaign's running rhetorical insults targeting Obama voters: today we learn that Barack Obama's campaign is the biggest " fairy tale " Bill Clinton's ever seen. I don't have much to say here other than to point out that the roots of Bill and Hillary's problem is that the voters are turning out in droves but those same voters are not, uh, actually voting for Hillary. How dare they! How dare you voters! Shame on you voters for having hope! For supporting Barack Obama! In the face of record setting attendance and turnout in Iowa and New Hampshire (which most Democrats would find to be a positive trend) the Clintons have engaged in a kind of rhetoric that is really shameless and counter productive: the Clintons are insulting the judgment of the very voters they need to come to their si

false hopes

Josh Marshall highlights this moment in last night's debate as significant for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire. What strikes me more than Senator Clinton's much-remarked demeanour is this sentence: We don't need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered, the best way to know what change I will produce is to look at the changes I've already made. False hopes, what a cynical turn of phrase when you get right down to it. You can be sure that the use of that phrase was the result of much private strategizing on the part of the Clinton team. As such, it can serve as an epitaph of all that has been wrong with Clintonism: the willingness to smear and distort when your power is challenged, the protective paternalism cloaking a not so subtle elitism, the claiming of sole credit for shared accomplishments, and, above all else, the savvy retailing of lowered expectations about what is possible. That is the downside of the Clinton legacy in a nutshe

Obama's win in Iowa

There are two big stories coming out of Iowa on the Democratic side. First, Barack Obama won the Iowa Caucus will almost 40% support with Edwards and Clinton both held to under 30% support . Whatever you think of the wisdom of giving Iowa their "first decider" status, Iowa is the proving ground where campaigns wrestle for the first big prize of the primary season and that result represents a big win for Senator Obama. You can rest assured that had Clinton won Iowa with those numbers the story today would be about her march to the nomination. That's not the story today. That's big news. All Clinton had to do was win Iowa, confirm her presumptive nominee status and the media train would have been rolling towards New Hampshire and South Carolina primed to give her the nomination. You can be very sure that the Clinton campaign knew this full well going in. They spent the time and money and gave Iowa their best shot. President Bill Clinton even took a number of jabs at Sen