A few things [bumped]
I dig
Obama. Loved
his speech on Wright and racial wrongs.
I feel like Hillary would make a
thoroughly capable president, in a political and organizational kind of way, but I feel that we need today the kind of inspirational president that we would have in
Obama to stimulate the
public's engagement in the coming years of
transformational projects.
I've been interested to see how much the people working on
Green Jobs initiatives entwine their
Green with so much of what they call
social justice and pathways out of poverty. They
lobby not only to create programs to put the skills needed to solve regional energy challenges into the hands of local workers, but to make sure that those would-be workers have the support they're going to need, given
their often troubled circumstances.
[RBE note - I added tags on Apr 1]Labels: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, economy, energy policy, engineering, ethanol, green, Hillary Clinton, peace, Spending
Hillary Clinton may not realize it yet, but she’s just endured one of the worst weeks of her campaign.
Barack Obama weathered the Rev. Jeremiah Wright affair without serious damage to his nomination prospects. Obama still holds a tiny lead among Democrats nationally in the Gallup tracking poll, just as he did before this whole affair blew up.
Second, Obama’s lawyers successfully prevented re-votes in Florida and Michigan. That means it would be virtually impossible for Clinton to take a lead in either elected delegates or total primary votes.
Third, as Noam Scheiber of The New Republic has reported, most superdelegates have accepted Nancy Pelosi’s judgment that the winner of the elected delegates should get the nomination. Instead of lining up behind Clinton, they’re drifting away. Her lead among them has shrunk by about 60 in the past month, according to Avi Zenilman of Politico.com.
In short, Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects continue to dim. The door is closing. Night is coming. The end, however, is not near.
Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she’s probably down to a 5 percent chance.
Five percent.
Let’s take a look at what she’s going to put her party through for the sake of that 5 percent chance: The Democratic Party is probably going to have to endure another three months of daily sniping. For another three months, we’ll have the Carvilles likening the Obamaites to Judas and former generals accusing Clintonites of McCarthyism. For three months, we’ll have the daily round of résumé padding and sulfurous conference calls. We’ll have campaign aides blurting “blue dress” and only-because-he’s-black references as they let slip their private contempt.
For three more months (maybe more!) the campaign will proceed along in its Verdun-like pattern. There will be a steady rifle fire of character assassination from the underlings, interrupted by the occasional firestorm of artillery when the contest touches upon race, gender or patriotism. The policy debates between the two have been long exhausted, so the only way to get the public really engaged is by poking some raw national wound.
For the sake of that 5 percent, this will be the sourest spring. About a fifth of Clinton and Obama supporters now say they wouldn’t vote for the other candidate in the general election. Meanwhile, on the other side, voters get an unobstructed view of the Republican nominee. John McCain’s approval ratings have soared 11 points. He is now viewed positively by 67 percent of Americans. A month ago, McCain was losing to Obama among independents by double digits in a general election matchup. Now McCain has a lead among this group.
For three more months, Clinton is likely to hurt Obama even more against McCain, without hurting him against herself. And all this is happening so she can preserve that 5 percent chance.
When you step back and think about it, she is amazing. She possesses the audacity of hopelessness.
Why does she go on like this? Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support? Is she simply selfish, and willing to put her party through agony for the sake of her slender chance? Are leading Democrats so narcissistic that they would create bitter stagnation even if they were granted one-party rule?
The better answer is that Clinton’s long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life.
For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.
No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It’s like a machine for the production of politics. It plows ahead from event to event following its own iron logic. The only question is whether Clinton herself can step outside the apparatus long enough to turn it off and withdraw voluntarily or whether she will force the rest of her party to intervene and jam the gears.
If she does the former, she would surprise everybody with a display of self-sacrifice. Her campaign would cruise along at a lower register until North Carolina, then use that as an occasion to withdraw. If she does not, she would soldier on doggedly, taking down as many allies as necessary.
Labels: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, NY Times
Bill Richardson for Obama
Interesting...links
here and
here...gives Obama a boost at the end of this week after last week's pummeling. Actually, past of a good uptick from the speech on Monday and his subsequent speeches on Iraq Wednesday and Thursday.
Labels: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton
Thursday Quick Hits
- Some good Obama press...oh, and he's on Larry King Live tonite and was on some Philly sports talk station this morning that got everybody aflutter at the station...
- Two pieces (here, here) on the Obama race speech fall out...and an editorial cartoon which sums it all up...
- I was listening to this on Sean Hannity's radio program on the way home last night regarding that "Obama links to the black panthers" junk...here's Obama's response...and here something else about Rupert Murdoch, owner of Myspace, hosting Hezbollah and Hamas official myspace webpages. Hello, kettle? Why does FOX love terrorists?
- Obama on the Iraq War and how it sunks the economy in more ways than one (1, 2, 3)
- More on the defense of Obama from Huckabee...
- Oh, and with more digesting of Hill's FLOTUS daily calendar, she really overstated, OK, pretty much lied, about her not liking NAFTA the whole time, playing a big role in getting the Federal Family Leave Act passed, and lied about getting intel about China prior to her big 1995 speech there...that about raps er up again...
Labels: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, China, economy, Fox News, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Sean Hannity, USA
Hillary's FLOTUS records
We start to see some kernel of truth:
As jounalists actually so their job and absorb 13,000+ pages of mind-numbing detail, more will be revealed...seems as tho on 1st glance, her
"FLOTUS-as-senior go get-er with all this experience" line of attack is overstating her resume.
Labels: 2008 Elections, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton
...it was apparently all
Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch that did the vast majority of legwork...here's the lead-in paragraph:
“Clinton, who has frequently described herself on the campaign trail as playing a pivotal role in forging a children's health insurance plan, had little to do with crafting the landmark legislation or ushering it through Congress, according to several lawmakers, staffers, and healthcare advocates involved in the issue.”
and I love this comment from the msnbc webpage:
FINALLY (!!) the media puts focus on the bogus and brazen and unsubstantiated claims of experience that have been put forth by the Clinton campaign...
So let's see now....
1) She failed in her secretive healthcare endeavor;
2) She didn't really do anything for SCHIP;
3) She didn't really bring peace to Northern Ireland;
4) She didn't really open the borders in Bosnia;
5) She didn't have any security clearances while first lady;
6) She didn'e even have a national security team on her staff while first lady;
7) She claims a speech in China as experience but at the same time disses Obama as merely giving speeches;
What EXACTLY does this campaign have to [claim] as experience?????
Labels: 2008 Elections, Boston Globe, health care, Hillary Clinton, NBC
Mark Penn, Please STFU
Whenever he
opens his
mouth, reality-divorced wingnuts
fall out...thanks for destroying the party! To think
he started this in 2007 before Iowa!!
[update] More on this Park Penn STFU topic...here's
Ed Rendell, Gov. of PA and uber supporter of Clinton, stating that either of the Democrats remaining will take PA, essentially a smackdown of Mr. Penn. Someone should just call him a
stupidhead.
And, there's this
Obama retort to a Penn-inspired Hillary memo that takes the cake.
And, regardless, tick, tick, tick
Obama gains more superdels...
Labels: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mark Penn
Friday Quick Hits
Labels: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, effluvia, energy policy, engineering, ethanol, global warming, green, Hillary Clinton, Jewish, science
Thursday Quick Hits
One post v. many today...just because...
* Great post by
Kos on Clinton's strategy of turning Obama into just another black man and discredit the caucus system. Could not agree more.
* A
great great post on the Burnt Orange Report about stopping with the stupid in what is supposed to be a humerous editorial, but really eviscerates the stupid Hillary talking points strategy in yet another way...one key point is that McCain won CA and NY, so does that mean Hillary and McCain will BOTH win them in a general election fight? Come on, end the stupid, Hills.
* AMERICABlog post on
Ferraro leaving the Hillary campaign now that she's done the dirty work - and we know that she's been race-baiting for several seeks now (see the
Olbermann Special Comment). Speaking of comment,
a comment on the Comment here...and how
Howard Ickes tells a group of supporters that she can only win thorugh SuperDelegates...
* Some
Mark Penn YouTube moment of him doing something Ferraro-ish...
* Two TPM posts about the ugly way that Clinton is slogging her way
through to losing the primaries by throwing all these
harsh bombs, including mailers about Obama's supposed support of Farrakhan because Farrrakhan came out in support of him...?
* A great
Robert Reich post about the coming recession and how it could spiral in to Depression and the coincident nature of our current situation to that of America in 1929-1932...
* the
Space Shuttle docks with the space station...
* Spitzer's , er,
ladyfriend, and Red Sox pitcher Clay Bucholz's
new special ladyfriend...
Labels: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, baseball, Bill Clinton, computer, Democrats, effluvia, engineering, Hillary Clinton, Keith Olbermann, science, space
Olbermann Special Comment On Hillary/Ferraro
Labels: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton
Big State Math For Obama
Two links - this one
about four Obama governor supporters striking back at the stupid "Hillary wins big states" frame...and this one from
dailykos about all the math, essentially showing the same thing. And for shits, here's Cenc Ugyar saying that
Hillary needs to throw in the towel because of the math...
Labels: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton
