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Barack Obama slams the Rev. Wright, Clinton's gas-tax plan receives
jeers, and Indiana is still a tossup, all of which brings Clinton down
0.3 points to 12.6 percent.
Obama's decision to
cut Wright loose Tuesday was an investment in the future: Let the story
dominate news for one more day, then hope it tapers off. In a press
conference, Obama said he's "outraged" at Wright's recent remarks about
Louis Farrakhan, the government inventing AIDS, and U.S. military
efforts being equivalent to terrorism. These comments "should be
denounced," Obama said, adding, "I do not see the relationship being
the same after this."
It's too early to say whether this move
defuses the Wright issue. Now that Wright got a taste of the
spotlight, he probably doesn't want to go away. (Obama had better hope
Wright's book tour happens after
Nov. 5.) But at least Obama can dissociate himself fully from his
pastor, as opposed to upholding the earlier wishy-washy (some would say
nuanced) disown-the-words-but-not-the-man stance he articulated in his
Philadelphia speech last month.
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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For those Democrats who worry that the protracted primary battle is exposing deep divides in the party’s base, Republican-style winner-take-all primaries are looking more attractive. For at least one Republican, the opposite is true: A Democratic-style primary that awards delegates proportially is looking pretty good right now. His name is Mitt Romney.
Several commentators have pointed out that, if the Democrats played by Republican rules, Hillary Clinton would hold a commanding lead in pledged delegates. (Democratic primaries mete out pledged delegates proportionally based on total votes, while most Republican primaries heap all their delegates on the winner.) Less attention has been given to the opposite question: What if the Republicans awarded their delegates like Democrats do?
To answer that question, Trailhead crunched the numbers from the earlier Republican primaries, back when Romney and Mike Huckabee were still in the race. We assumed that delegates are awarded in rough proportion to the candidates’ overall performance in the state. In reality, this is usually done on a district-by-district basis, but as we have noted on our Delegate Calculator, estimating delegates based on statewide results has a margin of error of only 3 percent.
Between Iowa and Super Tuesday, there were 17 Republican primaries that operated under winner-take-all rules (or something similar). In those states, John McCain won 649 delegates, while Huckabee won 110 and Romney won 105. Note that McCain averaged 36 percent of the popular vote, while Romney averaged 34 percent. The lopsidedness in delegates comes from the fact that McCain won big states like New York and California.
If we postulate a Democratic-style proportional system, McCain would have come out of Feb. 5 with an estimated 336 delegates to Romney’s 291 and Huckabee’s 164.
In the 12 caucuses during that same period, Romney considerably outperformed McCain, netting 188 delegates to McCain’s 55 and Huckabee’s 97.
So here’s the score through Feb. 5—two days before Romney threw in the towel:
|
McCain |
Romney |
Huckabee |
| Reality |
704 |
293 |
207 |
| Proportional |
391 |
479 |
261 |
If I were Romney, I’d be particularly bitter about California. He won 35 percent of the vote there to McCain’s 42 percent but got only 12 delegates to McCain’s 158. (The winner-take-all system is still done by district, so it appears Romney won at least a plurality in a small number of districts there.)
As the New York Times’ David Brooks wrote yesterday, the Democratic primary has exposed a deep divide in the party between urban, affluent liberals and more rural, working-class Democrats. It’s worth remembering that, just a few months ago, one of the guiding narratives in this election was how deeply divided the Republican party’s various factions were over who to support for their nominee. If the Republicans had a Democratic-style election process, those divides would be bitterly evident. It’s a strong testament to the role of election rules that we are now so focused on the other party’s identity crisis.
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Per The Hill, Hillary Clinton is requesting $2.3 billion in earmarks for 2009. That number alone doesn’t mean much unless you compare it to the combined $0 being requested by John McCain and Barack Obama.
Clinton has every reason to request a load of earmarks: She serves a big state with legitimate security needs. But as a general election candidate, a request that size—the most any senator received this year was $837 million—could be a real liability. Anytime Clinton mentions fiscal responsibility, a core part of her case against Bush, McCain could just drop the phrase “$2.3 billion.” Remember how he went to town on her Woodstock museum—and that cost only $1 million.
Against Obama, by contrast, McCain couldn’t say much. Obama has obtained earmarks in the past, but he released them earlier this year and pledged not to request more. (Obama's earmark requests for 2008 added up to more than $300,000.) The Arizona senator could always accuse Obama of opportunistically forgoing pork just during election season. But Obama could highlight exceptions to McCain’s blanket veto, such as aid to Israel, not to mention McCain’s own ethical slip-ups of yore. What might be a cudgel against Clinton would be a Nerf bat against Obama.
The Hill points out that the requests could be preparing a “soft landing” in case this whole presidency thing doesn’t work out. After all, it’s part of a senator’s job to obtain funding for local projects. But in softening her landing, she also makes her current opponent look stronger.
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Slate's Timothy Noah passes along this analysis:
“Right here, over 200 Hoosiers built parts that guided our military’s smart bombs to their targets,” Hillary Clinton says in a TV spot currently airing in Indiana. The camera zooms in on a shuttered factory in Valparaiso, Ind., formerly operated by a defense contractor called Magnequench—one of two Indiana facilities the company closed down after it was purchased by a Chinese consortium. Clinton’s voice-over continues:
They were good jobs. But now, they’re gone to China, and America’s defense relies on Chinese spare parts. George Bush could’ve stopped it, but he didn’t. As your president, I will fight to keep good jobs here and to turn this economy around. ... American workers should build America’s defense.
Just one little problem. As blogger David Sirota points out, the Chinese consortium’s acquisition of Magnequench occurred way back in 1995, when Hillary’s husband was president. Before the sale could go through, it had to be approved by an executive-branch panel called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Apparently it was, partly in deference to highly implausible promises by the Chinese that the weapons parts would continue to be built in the United States. (The takeover was also greased by participation in the deal by Archibald Cox Jr., son of the revered Watergate prosecutor and Common Cause chairman, now deceased.) In 2003 the Chinese welshed on its promises and moved production to China, prompting Sen. Evan Bayh, D.-Ind., to ask President Bush to intercede. Apparently Bush had some legal authority to force Magnequench’s return to U.S. ownership, but even Hillary seemed to concede, in a speech two weeks ago in Pennsylvania, that such a move was impractical at that late date. (“Couldn’t do it.”) The point is that no such divestiture would have been necessary had Hillary’s husband disallowed the deal eight years earlier.
Hillary’s chutzpah in flagging this issue is compounded by her criticism of the sale on national-security grounds (“They're building up their military. They want to compete with us every step of the way. And we're basically helping them.”) In the late 1990s, Republicans in Congress decided that U.S.-approved technology transfers to China under Clinton were creating a disastrous national-security breach, and conservatives tried to stir anxieties about imminent U.S. surrender to the Middle Kingdom to defeat presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000. Now, to win Indiana, Hillary Clinton seems to be saying that the wingers were right all along about that no-good husband of hers.
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In a press conference today, Barack Obama pronounced himself "outraged" and "saddened" at "the spectacle" of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s recent remarks alleging that the government invented AIDS, equating U.S. military efforts abroad with terrorism, and defending Louis Farrakhan’s denunciation of Zionism. "I do not see the relationship being the same after this," Obama said. On a personal level, it’s pretty sad—the presser looked painful. Politically, though, Wright may have done Obama an inadvertent favor. Obama won praise last month when he carved out a nuanced view of his relationship with Wright ("I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community"), but as time went on, this ambivalence dogged him. Hillary seized the moment to assure voters that Wright "wouldn’t have been my pastor," John McCain overcame an initial reluctance to attack Obama about Wright, and GOP state parties in North Carolina and Mississippi used the issue against down-ticket Dems endorsed by Obama.
Now Wright has forced Obama to put greater distance between the two men. If both the Rev. Wright and a bus had been on hand, Obama may well have physically thrown him under it. It will now be harder for Obama’s opponents to accuse him of making excuses for the excitable pastor. They’ll have to shift to asking why it took Obama so long to have this Sister Souljah moment. But that’s better than the alternative.
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The “gas-tax holiday” recommended by John McCain (and endorsed in part by Hillary Clinton) proposes a temporary reduction of the federal gas tax by 18.4 cents per gallon between Memorial Day and Labor Day. But how temporary would it likely be? Reimposing any tax once it’s been suspended is notoriously difficult politically, as McCain himself can attest. McCain opposed Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, but he subsequently voted to extend them because, he argued, failure to do so would constitute a tax hike. “I've never voted for a tax increase in twenty-four years,” McCain said, “… and I will never vote for a tax increase, nor support a tax increase.” If we accept this logic, then there is no such thing as a temporary tax cut. McCain, as a matter of principle, wouldn’t be able to reimpose the gas tax come Sept. 2. And it would be very difficult for Congress to do so, with Election Day just two months off.
But this discussion is probably academic. Yesterday, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Bush opposed the idea. Today, Bush moderated that stance, saying he was “open to any ideas.” But Congress wouldn’t likely support a gas-tax holiday, seeing as the gas tax supports road construction projects that are near and dear to the hearts of its members. Clinton's plan says she would make up that loss by raising taxes on windfall profits for oil companies, but that's no more politically palatable, either -- the phrase "windfall profits tax" brings back unwelcome memories of the Carter administration.
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A media frenzy over the Rev. Wright, a bump in matchup polls, and a key North Carolina endorsement buoy Clinton's chances 0.5 points to 12.9
percent.
The response to the Rev. Wright's speech at the National Press Club was so
negative, some papers must be prepping Barack Obama's obituary. "PASTOR
DISASTER," screamed the New York Post. The Washington Post's
Dana Milbank, under the headline "Could Rev. Wright Spell Doom for
Obama?," argues that Wright "added lighter fuel" to the
controversy by repeating some of his most inflammatory ideas. Indeed, Wright
criticized America's
foreign policy, praised Louis Farrakhan, and reiterated his conviction that the
government created AIDS as a method of population control. In Bob Herbert's
words, Wright went to Washington
"not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him."
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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After his speech today at the National Press Club, Jeremiah Wright was asked by the moderator whether he honestly believes, as he said in one of his sermons, that “the government lied about inventing the AIDS virus as a means of genocide against people of color.” That claim (which Bill Moyers inexplicably failed to ask Wright about in his April 25 interview) has been the weirdest of his various inflammatory claims.
Rather than address the substance of the question, Wright said, “Have you read [Leonard G.] Horowitz's book Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola”?
The Horowitz book, published in 1996, argues that the U.S. government created the AIDS and Ebola viruses in the course of performing cancer research on monkeys. Its author also wrote Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse, a book that purports to reveal “Bible codes hidden for 3,000 years that have major implications for personal and world healing,” according to his Web site. Horowitz doesn’t believe in Darwinian evolution, either, and he claims to be descended from Moses and King David.
Wright’s allegation about AIDS has no factual basis, of course, but medical experimentation on black Americans is well-documented. Wright today cited the Tuskegee experiment—a syphilis study in which the U.S. Public Health Service failed to treat 400 syphilitic black men in Alabama for 40 years—as an example. From there, he leapt to the conclusion that “our government is capable of doing anything.” Juliet Lapidos noted in a March 19 “Explainer” that nearly 27 percent of African-Americans believe that the AIDS virus was produced in a government lab, and 16 percent think it was created to control the black population.
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Last week we got all optimistic about John McCain’s decision to call off the cavalry in North Carolina, where the Republican Party was planning to run an ad attacking two Democratic gubernatorial candidates for their associations with Barack Obama using footage of the Rev. Wright’s sermons.
Alas, we spoke too soon.
Over the weekend, McCain walked back his suggestion that Wright was somehow off-limits. He gave two reasons: 1) He recently saw that Wright compared the Marines to, in McCain’s words, “Roman legionnaires who were responsible for the death of our Savior,” and 2) Obama said it was a “legitimate political issue.”
It doesn’t make much sense to assess McCain’s arguments using reason, since neither rationale is particularly rational. First off, Wright has said plenty of things equally or more offensive than the Marines line, never mind that Wright was himself a Marine. And secondly, what difference does it make that Obama called the issue “legitimate”? Was McCain just waiting for Obama’s say-so? If he was personally opposed before, it’s unclear why Obama’s words would suddenly change his mind.
From a political perspective, though, it makes perfect sense. Wright is political gold—the kind of ammunition that comes along rarely. So on the one hand, McCain wants people to know he’s upstanding and above the fray and all that. But on the other, he’d be a fool not to use Wright against Obama. This tension is likely to dog McCain through November. Then there’s always the possibility that harping on Wright could backfire. The moment it stops being about patriotism and starts being about race, McCain could get burned as badly if not worse than Obama.
Now there’s another GOP ad—this one in Mississippi—associating a local candidate with Obama while invoking Wright. What’s the word from McCain? So far, silence. McCain must realize he backed himself into a corner by asking the North Carolina GOP to retract the ad. When they refused, McCain looked silly, and Obama dinged him for it. He doesn’t want that story to replay itself, so better not to get involved. Hence the need to declare the issue “legitimate,” despite previous assertions.
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Barack Obama has been trying to keep the Rev. Jeremiah Wright out of the spotlight for a long time now. As far back as February 2007, he rescinded an invitation for Wright to deliver the invocation at his presidential announcement.
But now Wright is pushing back, closing his media tour today with a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Needless to say, this isn’t exactly the Obama campaign’s dream. From their perspective, any attention on Wright is bad. Obama has been struggling to win over working-class white voters—the last thing he needs is a media-driven refresher on his greatest liability. And indeed, Wright’s comeback may hurt Obama. But in the long run, it’s likely to help the candidate more than hurt him. Here’s how:
The YouTube ratio. Right now, Wright is defined as that guy you saw in that YouTube clip or looped on MSNBC. Naturally, it’s always his most heated remarks that get repeated. The more people see Wright in other contexts—on Bill Moyers, at the NAACP, at a conference of ministers—the less they’ll associate him with those initial images. It doesn’t hurt that when he tries, Wright can be charm itself.
Distance helps. In his interview with Moyers, Wright argued that Obama has to say certain things because he’s a politician. On the one hand, that argument makes the senator sound dishonest. But it also highlights that Obama and Wright are in different lines of work. As Wright said today, after Nov. 5, he’ll still be a pastor. He also challenged the idea that he’s Obama’s “spiritual mentor”—he uttered the phrase in a mockingly overdramatic voice. Rather, he said Obama is one of his members. That’s it. The more he distances himself from Obama, the more voters can see them as separate people with separate views.
The comeback kid. Wright may not be a politician, but he has a politician’s quickness—a quality that makes him remarkably entertaining to watch. When he was asked at today’s event how he feels about being an American, he diffused notions that he’s unpatriotic: “I served six years in the military,” he said. “How many years did Cheney serve?” When the moderator asked him to respond to Chris Rock’s joke that Wright is a “75-year-old black man who doesn't like white people—is there any other kind of 75-year-old black man?” Wright had the perfect retort: “That’s just like the media. I’m not 75.” (He’s 66.) It’s moments like these that could right Wright.
Changing the subject. Just as Obama turned the conversation away from Wright’s words with his race speech, Wright today tried to refocus the attacks on him as “attacks on the black church.” He discussed the evolution of black Christianity from the brush harbors where slaves convened to worship out of slaveholders’ sight through to the liberation theology of the 1960s. He reframed his own famous remarks as part of this tradition: “It is not bombastic, it is not controversial. It is just different.” This argument doesn’t excuse his most questionable comments—like, say, his claim that the AIDS virus was some government plot (which he utterly failed to address when asked about it at today's NPC event)—but it does explain the tradition from which he descends.
Better now than in October. The furor over Wright so far is nothing compared with what Republicans will drum up in the fall. John McCain announced yesterday that despite hinting that he’d leave the Wright issue alone—he asked the North Carolina GOP not to air an ad denouncing Obama and Wright—he now thinks Wright is fair game. So much for the civility race. Given that, it’s better for Wright to fight back and soften his image now than to allow his current image to calcify over the next six months. If he can go from Obama’s crazy minister to Obama’s controversial but thoughtful and witty minister, that will be a huge step in pre-empting the GOP onslaught.
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Hillary Clinton continues to have a logic problem. After her win in Pennsylvania, her campaign reiterated their claim that winning big, reliably Democratic states means she’s a more electable candidate in November. While that’s entirely possible, there’s no historical or logical evidence to back it up.
But just because it’s wrong doesn’t mean it’s easy to explain why it’s wrong. So we solicited Trailhead readers’ help to come up with the catchiest metaphors to help explain why Clinton’s logic is bunk.
You responded in record numbers and came up with some truly creative—and odd—responses. Our personal favorite one-line metaphor came from Trena Klohe, who wrote:
You may know how to saddle a donkey, but that doesn't mean you can tame an elephant!
The simplicity, yet coy vagueness of the particulars delighted Trailhead’s imagination. Have either Obama or Clinton truly saddled the donkey? Does beating McCain entail taming him or attacking him into submission? It’s the most existential metaphor we received, and we’re suckers for existential politics.
Other all-star oddballs came from Billy G. who sent in a lengthy, MadLibs-style post about FHM’s 100 Sexiest Women in the World list. It’s too lengthy to quote in full, but Billy G. was totally convincing in his assertion that Megan Fox is Barack Obama, Jessica Biel is Hillary Clinton, and Matthew McConaughey is John McCain. A snippet:
In FHM's survey [the democratic primary], a sizable minority supported Biel [clinton] over Fox [obama] because they find tattoos [reverend wright] repulsive, or because they prefer blondes [a candidate of the same race/gender], or because Fox [obama] recently made a prominent and profoundly stupid movie [comment] about vehicles that turn into crime-fighting robots [bitterness in small-town america], or because they rallied behind Biel's [clinton's] call for mandatory universal healthcare.
It gets better from there, but unfortunately doesn’t perfectly explain away Clinton’s faulty logic. Billy’s assertion was that straight men who preferred Fox would always choose Biel over McConaughey. Sure, but the differences between Fox-men and Biel-men weren’t fleshed out quite enough to take the crown.
Outside of the wildcards, the responses generally broke down into two categories—food and sports. The most common response involved a trip to a restaurant, grocery store, or pie shop that forced consumers to confront a painful decision—what to do when your favorite flavor of your favorite food is out of stock. In a nice allusion to McCain’s age, Ryan wrote:
Just because I choose green grapes over purple grapes now, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t choose purple grapes if the alternative was raisins.
True, but raisins have their own unique taste that you aren’t automatically opposed to. Plus, if raisins come out with a great ad campaign, there’s nothing stopping you from switching sides. The trouble with Clinton’s assertion is that almost all Democrats—even the ones who prefer her over Obama—aren’t going to jump ship just because of a flashy ad. The grape-raisin metaphor doesn’t pick at that weakness.
Instead, let’s turn to the bland world of sprouts, veggie burgers, and tofu. K. Richardson gets closer with his metaphor:
As a vegetarian, I may have a hard time choosing between the pasta primavera and the grilled veggie platter, but I’m still not ordering steak.
Much closer. Vegetarians have an automatic distaste and unwillingness to eat steak, which fills the void of the last metaphor. But this setup—choosing between two similar items at first, then being forced to choose the loser of the two over a totally unpalatable third item—ignores the big-state, little-state issue. For that, we’re forced to turn to the sporting arena.
The key knot we’re trying to unravel is why Clinton’s success among core, big-state Democrats in the primary doesn’t mean she’s the stronger candidate among all voters in the general election. Plenty of people tried a sports metaphor and missed the mark, but John Zepernick nailed it. I’ve edited his response down a tad.
Hillary has a good passing game (big states), but Obama has been grinding out yards on the ground all game (smaller states). … But it isn't clear that any particular game plan would be better or worse versus McCain. And even if Hillary has more passing yards in the championship game, there's no reason that Obama couldn't throw the ball well versus McCain. Especially since he has a weak secondary defense.
Spot on, but I’d posit that nobody knows what McCain’s defenses are yet. It may be his secondary, but it could just as easily be an injury-prone offensive line. As the great and clichéd sports aphorism goes, the only way to find that out is to play the game.
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On the last stop of John McCain’s umpteenth tour in recent memory—this one visitng “America’s forgotten places”—he swung through New Orleans for an opportunity to slam President Bush for his handling of Hurricane Katrine in front of the dilapidated houses of the Lower Ninth Ward. On its surface, the event was meant to look like the return of the maverick, unafraid to dis the current administration. When asked whether he blamed the country’s highest leadership, McCain replied, “Yes.” Sure, he has criticized Bush on Katrina, but never this harshly.
But come on—these days, saying Bush botched Katrina is like calling the sky blue. No one is going to challenge you. Heck, even Bush would upbraid himself if he were running again.
Since entering the race, McCain has been accused of abandoning bold stances and drifting in line with the administration. Back in 2001, McCain opposed Bush’s tax cuts; now he favors extending them. (Advisers say he’s “looking forward, not back.”) During his first run for the presidency, McCain opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade; since then, he has said he would support it. His feelings about ethanol have improved over the years, as has his relationship with Christian right leaders like Jerry Falwell, whom he once denounced as an “agent of intolerance.”
All this, combined with McCain’s unwavering support of the Iraq war, has allowed the Democratic candidates to paint McCain as Bush 3.0. So, McCain has to perform a balancing act—embracing the positive aspects of the Bush administration while distancing himself from the negative. It’s the distancing that’s supposed to earn him maverick points.
Unfortunately, slamming Bush on Katrina isn’t being a maverick—it’s common sense. Plus, it’s a subject on which McCain’s record is hardly pristine. In the wake of the hurricane in 2006, McCain said he was willing to commit “$4.2 billion, $10.5 billion, $50.5 billion” to recovery. Yet two months later, he voted against a bill that devoted $29 billion to Gulf Coast recovery, claiming the bill included unnecessary spending. Now McCain is hitting Bush without offering any specifics on how he’d rebuild the city.
Of course, this isn't really being discussed. Instead, critics are harping on McCain’s faux pas: After visiting the Lower Ninth, he said we need to “have a conversation about what to do—rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.” He later clarified that he meant the community should decide for itself. But the damage was done. If you’re trying to win over New Orleans, you don’t talk about tearing it down, whatever the merits.
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Clinton's
win in Pennsylvania changes the whole Deathwatch calculus. Back when
things were really dismal for her, no news was good news. As my
colleague Chris Beam aptly put it in early April,
her odds were like the health meter in Gears of War: It went up any
time it wasn't actively going down. Now that she's on the up-and-up
again, the adage about sharks applies: She has to stay in motion
constantly to stay alive. (Note: Apparently this is only true of some sharks.) So a new poll
that has Obama up 41 percent to Clinton's 38 percent in
Indiana—functionally a tie, given the margin of error—is a giant
inertia killer on the horizon. But continued attacks on Obama from
several fronts offset the damage, so we're only docking her 0.2 points,
bringing her to 11.9 percent.
Let's cover the bad news for Obama first: As Deathwatch mentioned yesterday, pastor-pariah the Rev. Jeremiah Wright recently gave an interview on PBS, which airs tonight. While some argue
that any humanization of Wright can help Obama in the long run, the
mere reminder that Wright exists cannot possibly help Obama today.
Wright continues to be a liability for Obama, as we are reminded by this ad that the North Carolina Republican Party claims it will run ahead of the state's May 6 primary.
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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Responding to our earlier post, Slate's James Ledbetter weighs in with a few more reasons Clinton shouldn't count on a 2012 win:
1)
HRC is not getting any younger; she
will turn 65 in 2012 and 69 in 2016. Multiple presidential bids are going to
take their toll on her;
2)
Let’s say Obama loses to McCain ’08.
Will Democratic voters really conclude that the problem is Obama (even if,
arguably, they should )? I don’t think they will. I think the standing
Democratic wisdom will be that Obama did a remarkable job on his first
presidential run, and another 4 years and he may be able to pull it
off.
3)
Leaving aside McCain’s age, in
general it is much harder to win an election against an incumbent president than
it is to win when the job is open. On this point, Bill Clinton’s election in ’92
was the exception that shows the rule – and remember, he won that year with only
42% of the vote, thanks to Mr. Perot.
Couple thoughts on #2: Obama has intimated that despite his
youth, this is his one shot at the presidency, as if to say he won't run
again. It’s a good ploy to disarm voters who argue that it’s "not his time" yet, but it’s
also hard to swallow. Even if Obama lost the 2008 election, he’d probably maintain
enough support to sustain another run.
But so would Hillary. If Obama lost to McCain, Clinton would find some
way to blame it on Obama, perhaps deservedly. In retrospect, she would be the Cassandra of 2008. Her 2012 campaign slogan would be, "Told You So." Think about the fallout after George McGovern's loss in 1972—party leaders
(and a lot of other Democrats) thought they'd taken too big a chance on the
guy, clearing the path for a low-risk establishment figure, Jimmy Carter. I
wouldn't be surprised if something similar happened after an Obama loss.
Hillary would return as the establishment savior.
Of course, it would all depend on McCain’s margin of victory.
McGovern got trounced by 23.2 points, pegging his candidacy as not
just a failure but a disaster. If Obama got beaten by a hair, the reaction
probably wouldn’t be so heated. But either way, I still think Hillary could
carve out a rationale for a re-run.
Update 3:11 p.m.: Whaddayaknow, Huffington Post has an interview with McGovern on this very subject. Turns out he does see parallels between his campaign and Obama's -- not that Obama will lose in the general, but that he'll be a victim of the same intramural warfare that dogged McGovern even after he won the nomination. There's also this fascinating parallel:
In '72, after he won the California primary and clinched the
nomination, McGovern's Democratic opponents argued that the delegation
should have been rewarded on a proportional basis, rather than
winner-take-all. It was, McGovern says, a changing of the rules in
mid-game that resulted both in the weakening of his campaign and his
limping into the convention. Thirty-six years later, he sees parallels
with the Clinton campaign's push to count the results of the
non-DNC-sanctioned Florida and Michigan primaries.
If Obama spent the summer fending off Florida and Michigan-related litigation, that's less time to focus on building a machine against McCain. Now that Clinton's case for winning the popular vote hinges on whether those two states "count," don't expect it to disappear anytime soon. As a matter of fact, they're ramping up the fight yet again.
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The Maximum Damage Theory has been floating around for some time now. It holds that Hillary Clinton knows she can’t win the nomination but wants to hurt Obama as much as possible so he’ll lose in November and she can run against McCain in 2012. So far, the theory hasn’t gotten much traction beyond blog comments.
But in an interview with the New York Times today, Rep. James Clyburn becomes one of the first leaders to articulate this view. Here’s the paraphrase:
Mr. Clyburn added that there appeared to be an almost unanimous view among African-Americans that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were committed to doing everything they possibly could to damage Mr. Obama to a point that he could never win in the general election.
Note that Clyburn doesn’t endorse the theory—he merely points out its existence.
But there’s a big problem with the notion, which is that both candidates have pledged to support the Democratic nominee in the general election. "I will do everything to make sure that the people who supported me will support the nominee," Clinton said this month. Obama also said that "the Democratic Party will come together" once the nominee is chosen. Even the spouses are onboard: Bill has said he would campaign for Obama were he to become the nominee, while Michelle Obama told ABC that "everyone in this party is going to work hard for whoever the nominee is."
So if that’s true—if the loser is going to campaign for the winner—it makes no sense that Clinton would simultaneously try to inflict damage on Obama. You can’t praise him and undermine him at the same time, at least not without the calculation looking awfully transparent. If anything, she'll have to do some serious atoning for her negative attacks on Obama in order to get back in the party's good graces.
I suppose it's not impossible that the primary will get so nasty that neither Clinton nor Obama will want to look at each other again, let alone campaign for each other. Or maybe Hillary secretly hopes Obama won't ask her to campaign for him, which would make the current negativity productive for a 2012 run. But in presidential races, unity is necessary, and necessity heals all wounds. Just ask Mitt Romney.
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Among the many assumptions swirling around the Democratic race, one has been that open primaries—elections in which independents and Republicans can also vote—benefit Obama. He’s been viewed as the bridge builder with broader appeal. But that appears to be changing. As John Judis points out in the New Republic,
[Obama] is now receiving his strongest support from voters who see themselves as "very liberal." In Pennsylvania, he defeated Clinton among "very liberal" voters by 55 to 45 percent, but lost "somewhat conservative" voters by 53 to 47 percent and moderates by 60 to 40 percent. In Wisconsin and Virginia, by contrast, he had done best against Clinton among voters who saw themselves as moderate or somewhat conservative.
It’s been generally accepted that Obama’s association with the Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers and his “bitter” comment didn’t hurt him much in Pennsylvania or nationally, because polls didn’t show any major backlash. (That is, if you’re willing to buy into the narrative that they mattered in the first place.) But those polls mostly involved likely Democratic voters. In Pennsylvania, which held a closed primary, that obviously doesn’t include independents and Republicans. So whereas those flaps may not have hurt Obama’s support among Democrats, it could turn out they hurt him quite a bit among other voters.
The test will be Indiana, which holds its open primary on May 6. If it’s true that Obama is now pegged as a liberal, Clinton may have a significant advantage. Obama currently holds a lead in the state, but again, those polls mostly deal with likely Democratic voters.
Clinton is even better off if you factor in the “Limbaugh effect”—the theory that Republicans pulled the lever for Hillary in Mississippi and Ohio in order to disrupt the Democratic race. Although again, things may have changed. According to the logic of the Limbaugh effect, Republicans voted for Hillary because they think she’s damaged goods. But now, after six weeks of WrightAyersBitterClingElitistgate, it could be Obama who they see as the more vulnerable candidate, which might lead them to vote for him. If I were Obama, I'd do as much as I can to tick off Rush Limbaugh between now and May 6.
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For the past few months, Hillary Clinton has emphasized that wins in big Democratic states like California, New York, and Pennsylvania make her more likely to beat John McCain in February. That, to say the least, has no factual grounds whatsoever. (Jeff Greenfield detailed why back in March.) The essential point: Just because women, the working class, and Catholics aren't voting for Obama now doesn't mean they won't vote for him come November. The same applies for Obama's base of African-Americans, educated voters, and young people: Just because they vote overwhelmingly against Hillary Clinton now doesn't mean they'll vote for John McCain in November. Sure, Clinton might be better suited for November because she won California, but there's simply no way to know.
A few friends and I were batting this idea around our inboxes this week, trying to come up with the best metaphor to explain why winning the primary doesn't guarantee success in the general. It was surprisingly hard. The best we could come up with:
Being a top flight relief pitcher doesn't make you the favorite to win the Cy Young Award.
Beating out all the other Idol wannabes down at the local karaoke one Saturday night doesn't mean Simon won't tear you a new one once you get to Hollywood.
Doing well in a qualifying heat for a NASCAR event doesn't mean you're going to win the race. You've got a different track, different weather, and different variables on the day of the real thing.
Needless to say, you can do better. E-mail TrailheadContest@gmail.com and submit your best metaphors debunking Clinton's logic. We'll publish the best ones later on.
UPDATE 5:32 p.m.: We're already getting some great entries, and I want to make one thing a bit clearer. We're not exactly looking for what the difference is between the primary and the general election, but rather a metaphor for why winning among Democrats in the primary doesn't mean you'll do better among all voters in the general election. A helpful hint that some readers have passed along, nicely summarized by Jack Davis:
Reverse the metaphor—it's not about the candidates, it's about the selection process of a voter/shopper/consumer—and what choice they will make given the alternative.
Feel free to keep sending the primary/general-election metaphors in, but try and tease out that other metaphorical conundrum if you're feeling up for a challenge. Also, all e-mail can be quoted unless requested otherwise.
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It must be nice to be Hillary Clinton right now. Adoring fans have
given her $10 million. The media have started to believe that she can
actually win. Jeremiah Wright is coming out of hibernation just in time
to derail Obama's candidacy once and for all. Sure, her chances of
winning the nomination are on the rise (by 1.4 points, to 12.1 percent). But you know what? She still can't win.
First, the good news: Raising $10 million in the 30 or so hours
after her win in Pennsylvania is a very good thing. It means people
still care about her, superdelegates can still trust her, and she can
still buy Star Trek pantsuits.
The money bomb is an impressive fiscal feat for Clinton. Even better,
it upstages Obama on his best political attribute—fundraising prowess...
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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We're hoping to start including more reader responses in our posts, so here's a good place to start. One reader, Mike, weighs in on yesterday's post about McCain's letter to the North Carolina GOP about its ad invoking Jeremiah Wright:
I think you've got it backwards with your interpretation of McCain's letter.
As the Boston Globe story you linked to with respect to Bush vs. McCain in 2000, it wasn't the Bush "campaign" that attacked McCain over the alleged out-of-wedlock daughter, it was "anonymous pollsters." Bush got the best of both worlds, as a result: McCain is damaged but Bush retains plausible deniability, since he could claim that he wasn't responsible for the attacks.
Obama's reaction seems on-target. If John McCain and the RNC really wanted the ad taken off the air, it would be. If they didn't want it aired, it wouldn't have been. As the party's presumptive new leader, the NC GOP wouldn't ignore with McCain said, unless it was said with a wink at the same time. Similarly, the NC GOP isn't going to want to piss off the RNC, especially since the RNC is the only Republican committee that has significantly outraised its Democratic counterpart (unlike the congressional and senate campaign committees), and the NC GOP will want some of those resources.
Rather, what you're going to see throughout the election is a replay of this over and over: non-McCain/RNC group uses racist/ xenophobic/ dishonest/ misleading/ fear-mongering ad > McCain and RNC demand that the ad be taken off the air and repudiate it > ad may or may not be taken off the air (really irrelevant at this point) > ad is replayed hundreds of times by Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, the Daily Show/Colbert Report, and any other outlet.
McCain then gets to take credit for taking the high route (which you gave in your post), bolsters his reputation as a maverick/"a different kind of Republican" and yet still benefits because the ad is still out there hurting Obama, and the best part is, now Republicans don't even have to pay for it to be aired, the media does it for them free of charge.
Its the model set by the famous LBJ ad showing a mushroom cloud with the phrase "In your heart, you know he might" referring to Goldwater using nukes in the cold war. It was only aired once by the Johnson campaign, but is the most famous political ad in history because it was so outrageous that even when it was pulled from the air, it was all anyone talked about. With today's mass media echo chamber, this kind of a strategy for getting a message out there is even more effective.
I think you're right, and I probably should have been a little more cautious about giving McCain the benefit of the doubt. Given what we've seen, there's every reason to be skeptical of candidates claiming to run clean campaigns. But I still think McCain could be an improvement. The whole "illegitimate black daughter" smear was so disgusting and hurtful that you'd think McCain would try to avoid sinking to that level. (Or I suppose you could argue he'd feel more justified doing it.) But there are other signs, too: He avoids publicly discussing his son in Iraq, even when it would be perfectly appropriate to do so. His stances on immigration and global warming are pretty nonopportunistic, too. Sure, he's a politician and will no doubt deliver plenty of low blows. And Obama could well bring out the worst in him, given his well-documented contempt for the junior senator. But on the spectrum of skeeviness, I think McCain leans toward the decent human being side. Of course, he has plenty of time to prove me wrong.
Got your own thoughts on recent items? Don't be shy.
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Hillary Clinton is screwed. Oh wait, she has a chance.
Actually, she’s screwed again. Hold up, she’s about to win!
The media can’t seem to make up its mind. Now, in the
post-Pennsylvania lull, journalists are deciding that in fact Clinton can
win. Over at The Fix, Chris Cillizza maps
out her path to the nomination. The
Wall Street Journal’s A1 proclaims,
“Clinton Win Stirs Doubts on Obama.” The New
York Times discusses
Obama’s “struggle to win over key blocs.”
Here’s what I don’t understand about all this: Clinton
was going to win Pennsylvania all along, just
as she was always going to win Ohio and Obama
is going to win North Carolina.
The only huge upset in this race has been New Hampshire. Otherwise, demographics have
decided everything. Sure, Obama is having trouble winning over “key voting blocs”
like seniors and the white working class. But that has been the story of this race
all along.
To be sure, the fact that voters aren’t coalescing around
Obama might worry some superdelegates. What
does it mean that he can’t “close the deal”? Democrats are used to having
the nominee decided early in the race, so the ongoing split is seen as a
weakness. The biggest concerns center on the fear that Clinton voters will ditch Obama for McCain. But
there’s evidence that abandonment cuts both ways. The Times piece points out that Pennsylvania
exit polls show “69 percent of white Democrats would vote for Mr. Obama in a
general election campaign over Mr. McCain; 73 percent of black Democrats said
they would vote for Mrs. Clinton over Mr. McCain.” That’s not a huge
difference.
But more importantly, the landscape is guaranteed to change
by November, and supers know this. McCain will make some dumb comments, as
would Clinton
were she to win the nomination. For superdelegates to shift to Clinton now on vague “electability”
grounds despite the delegate count would require a supreme lack of confidence in Obama, not to mention some serious
chutzpah.
Clinton’s
“path
to the nomination,” meanwhile, does exist. She could win Indiana,
raise truckloads of money, find some way to count Florida in the popular vote, and get Obama
to shoot himself repeatedly in both feet. All the while, she needs to run a
perfect campaign. But even then, superdelegates will have to look themselves in
the mirror and justify overturning the presidential victory of the first black
presidential nominee. If, after that, Clinton
somehow lost in November, would Obama’s base ever forgive them?
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Even as Hillary Clinton trails Barack Obama in pledged delegates, the popular vote, and number of states won, she has made it clear that she plans to stay in the race for the nomination. All of which brings me to this logical conclusion: It is time for Barack Obama to drop out.
If Clinton had the good of the Democratic Party in mind, she would have given up her bid the day after the Mississippi primary, which Obama won by 25 points. The delegate math was as dismal for her campaign then as it is now, even after Pennsylvania, and she was facing down a six-week gulf before the next election.
But Hillary Clinton isn’t going to drop out. There simply isn’t a function in her assembly code for throwing in the towel.
Obama, on the other hand, is fully capable of it. And if he’s really serious about representing a new kind of politics, now is the time for him to prove it in the only meaningful way left. Moreover, were he to play it right, dropping out now nearly guarantees that he’ll be elected president in 2012. Here’s the roadmap:
Obama drops out next week, stating that although he could almost certainly win the nomination by fighting it out until the convention in August, he is simply not willing to drag the party through a battle that will cripple its chances against John McCain. He then pledges to help support Sen. Clinton in her bid—with full knowledge that she will not take him up on the offer.
In one stroke, Obama will regain his messiah creds by making the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the party. His followers will be furious. The mere mention of Clinton’s name will provoke unspeakable acts. They will abandon Clinton in numbers sufficient to hand McCain the election in November.
Losing the presidency again after eight years of Bush will ruin the Democratic Party. It will become obvious that Clinton’s decision to stay in the race was the turning point in the election. The base will turn its wrath on party leaders like Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi, who failed to push Clinton out. Obama, as the de facto head of the party, will broker negotiations to install new leaders loyal to him.
McCain will be eminently more beatable in 2012. Demographics will continue to shift in Obama’s favor as his 14- to 17-year-old supporters come of voting age. Anyone foolish enough to challenge Obama for the nomination—and don’t rule out Clinton—will go nowhere. Obama’s utopian vision for a Democratic party unified around him will be complete. QED.
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I’m generally skeptical about suggestions that this general election will be more civil than most. Just look what happened to the Democratic race, which back in 2007 felt like an ice cream social compared with the GOP race. But there are signs of hope.
Today, the North Carolina Republican Party unveiled a new ad criticizing two gubernatorial candidates for endorsing Barack Obama, who, thanks to his association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is “just too extreme for North Carolina.” (Watch it here.) But before they even announced it, John McCain had sent a letter to the state GOP chair asking the party not to air it: “The television advertisement you are planning to air degrades our civics and distracts us from the very real differences we have with the Democrats. In the strongest terms, I implore you to not run this advertisement.”
It didn’t work. Despite pleas from both McCain and the RNC, the state party will still run the ad.
But the fact that McCain tried matters. One of the strongest of Hillary Clinton’s dwindling set of arguments is that Obama will be vulnerable to GOP attacks in the general election. Between Wright and “bitter” and the flag pin, he has already given them enough fodder for three elections’ worth of attack ads. So if McCain has decided not to make an issue of Wright, that’s a big deal. Presumably that means other, equally tenuous lines of attack would also be off limits, too.
Now keep in mind that McCain is no innocent when it comes to exploiting gaffes. He’s on the record calling Obama’s “bitter” comment “elitist.” (Although many would argue those comments are fair game.) And it’s possible McCain realizes he doesn’t have to exploit something like Wright—that the damage is done.
But if you’re willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, this could bode well for future campaign civility. Remember that McCain’s 2000 presidential bid suffered after rumors circulated that he had fathered an illegitimate black daughter.
Obama doesn’t seem quite ready to let McCain off the hook, though: “I assume that if John McCain thinks that it's an inappropriate ad that he can get them to pull it down since he's their nominee and standard bearer,” he said today. My guess: Take this series of events (attack, umbrage, apology, attack), put it on replay, and you’ve got yourself a general election.
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Tonight on Larry King Live: Bill Richardson. James Carville. The political showdown to end all political showdowns. A traitor versus a former compatriot. Benedict Arnold versus George Washington. Brutus versus Caesar. Anakin versus Obi-Wan. It all comes down to tonight.
Who will triumph? If the winner is judged by follicles, Richardson has the edge. These days, he's got more hair on his face than Carville has on his entire body. But never underestimate the man from the Beast of the Bayou. He's got Mary Matalin as a tag-team partner. Richardson better watch his back.
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So much for being broke.
The Clinton campaign is claiming they’re on course to raise $10 million in the wake of her Pennsylvania win. That’s a money bomb even Ron Paul would admire. According to the campaign, they’ve received money from more than 60,000 donors, of whom about 50,000 are new donors.
Of course, the Obama camp takes this as a challenge. They responded with an e-mail to supporters citing Clinton’s fundraising: “We can't afford to let that go unanswered.” The way this usually works is the Clinton campaign touts some big number, only to be eclipsed by the Obama machine a day later.
But $10 million is a lot to eclipse. That’s already half of what Clinton raised in March. It also erases her debt, which in early March was creeping past $9 million. (As Obama spokesman David Plouffe quipped on a call today, “I guess they can now begin to pay off some of their vendors.”) It puts her on her feet to compete with the inevitable Obama media blitz in Indiana.
And most important, it shows that people haven’t given up on her. They really think she can win. In Pennslyvania exit polls, 43 percent of voters said they believe Clinton will win. (Even some Obama voters think so, according to the polls.) If superdelegates are looking for an excuse to dally some more, this could be it.
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The Clinton campaign has always had its own way of doing things. When Clinton realized she couldn’t win the pledged-delegate count, it became about the popular vote. When that gap widened, it became about “big states.” Now it’s back to being about the popular vote—only the Clinton campaign isn’t counting like the rest of us. As predicted, they’re including Florida and Michigan.
There are so many problems with this, it’s hard to know where to begin.
First, the obvious: Florida and Michigan don’t count. If you’re talking about the overall tally, Obama still leads by about 500,000 votes. If you include Florida and Michigan, though, Clinton is ahead by 120,000. Nevermind that neither candidate campaigned in Florida (Clinton will tell you that Obama violated this agreement by airing an ad on CNN ad that appeared across the country, including Florida) and that Obama wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan. That’s why none of the networks—not NBC, not ABC, not CNN—are including those states in their popular-vote tallies without caveats.
Next, there’s the Clinton camp’s duplicity when it comes to reporting these numbers. ABC’s Jake Tapper reports this morning that Clinton’s Fact Hub twisted an ABC report on the popular vote. ABC News’ Rick Klein had written, "By one (rightly disputed) metric -- the popular vote, including Florida and Michigan -- Clinton has pulled ahead of Obama. But without the rogue states, Obama is still up by 500,000 -- and if you can find another objective measurement by which she’s in the lead, let us know.” Based on that report, the Fact Hub claimed that “ABC News reported this morning that ‘Clinton has pulled ahead of Obama’ in the popular vote.” That Tapper bothered to report the misrepresentation makes it pretty clear that the Clinton camp is going to get resistance on this one. If they want to twist the numbers, they’ll have to do it without the media’s help.
Lastly, there’s the fundamental problem with the popular vote: It’s wrong. As we’ve pointed out before, the popular-vote tally includes only the roughest estimates of caucus turnout, since many caucus states only report delegates, not individuals. Moreover, because caucus turnout is low relative to primaries, the popular vote ends up underestimating the candidates’ popularity in those states. So whoever does better in caucuses—in this case, Obama—ends up getting underrepresented. (You could argue that this is divine retribution for Obama’s skewed performance in caucuses, but hey, that’s the system the states chose—and the candidates agreed to.) So the “popular vote”—an authoritative-sounding phrase—is really just a shoddy estimate that underrepresents Obama’s caucus performance and therefore favors Clinton.
That’s not to say Clinton’s magical popular-vote math won’t sway a few superdelegates. No doubt it will. New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine said last month that he would reconsider his support for Clinton if Obama won the popular vote. If he’s looking for an excuse to stick with Clinton, this could be it. But most supers are likely to be extremely squeamish about disregarding the pledged-delegate count. Since the creation of superdelegates in 1984, no presidential candidate has won the Democratic nomination without winning pledged delegates, and no superdelegate wants to facilitate a historical first like that when it means potentially undermining the first black president. On the other hand, if that’s true, you wonder why they’re waiting so long to decide.
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The New York Times editorial page posted its post-Pennsylvania reaction last night, the gist of which suggests they may be regretting their previous endorsement of Hillary Clinton. They don’t quite urge her to drop out, but they do chide her for the campaign’s “negativity, for which she is mostly responsible.”
The timing on this feels odd. The consensus of late seems to be that both camps have been equally responsible for the campaign’s negative tone. The Times makes sure to note that “Mr. Obama is not blameless when it comes to the negative and vapid nature of this campaign,” but it pins the majority of the blame on Clinton. For them, the final straw (or maybe just the most recent) was Clinton’s last-minute ad invoking 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden coupled with her promise to “obliterate” Iran should they attack Israel.
There’s obviously no way to quantify negativity of ads or statements. And it gets even messier when they start attacking each other for attacking each other. Eventually the umbrage and counter-attacks and recriminations build to such a frenzy that you forget who threw the first punch. Given this, it’s easy to fall back on a “pox on both your houses” blanket condemnation. The fact that the Times didn’t do this—rather, they went out of their way to single out Clinton—suggests they’re trying to walk back their original endorsement.
Makes you wonder if they’re implicitly suggesting that Clinton’s superdelegates do the same.
Update 1:34 p.m.: I neglected to mention that the Times almost endorsed Obama.
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On a conference call this morning, Obama strategist David Plouffe rejects a Washington Post report that Obama will go supernegative over the coming weeks. From the Post:
In the two weeks leading up to the Indiana primary, a Democratic strategist familiar with the Obama campaign said aides are likely to turn to the controversies of Bill Clinton's White House years -- Hillary Clinton's trading cattle futures, Whitewater and possibly impeachment.
"Everyone knows the history of the Clintons," the strategist said.
In the piece, Plouffe seems to leave the door open to such attacks in the future. On the call, however, he closed the door: “We’re not going to do that. We’ve not talked about those issues in the campaign and won’t.”
It wouldn't be the first time the campaign hit Clinton while claiming they didn't. (See Obama feigning innocence on Tuzla in last week's debate.) But after an answer like that, it would be tough for Plouffe to walk this one back.
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On Monday, we predicted
Clinton's margin of victory in Pennsylvania: "Clinton will win by eight
points—just high enough for her to stick around, just low enough for
Obama supporters to claim she's done." As it turns out, we were off; it
was more like 10 points. But our conclusion still stands: Clinton now
has an excuse to drag her delegate-hemorrhaging candidacy around for a
few more weeks. But despite the gloomy prospects, we're hiking her
chances of winning the nomination up 0.8 points to 10.7 percent.
Why
the raise? Two words: popular vote. As we and everyone who can read
knows, Clinton has no shot of closing Obama's pledged-delegate lead.
Her candidacy therefore depends on convincing superdelegates to vote
for her despite that lead. But vague claims of "electability"
aren't enough. She needs numbers on her side, and the popular vote is
her last shot at beating Obama by a legitimate metric. With
Pennsylvania under her belt—the primary netted her a little more than
200,000 votes—Clinton now trails Obama by about 500,000, according to RealClearPolitics. And that's before
the spin. If you count Florida's and Michigan's votes, which she no
doubt will, Obama's popular-vote lead shrinks to about 100,000. Whether
or not she closes that gap, she's close enough to argue that they're
tied.
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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Watching the Obama speech right now ...
Speaking of people standing behind the candidates, has anyone else noticed the three guys behind Obama wearing Abercrombie & Fitch? What is this, product placement? A last-minute appeal to white voters?
A Trailhead analysis of individual donation patterns suggests that Obama could be subtly courting the Abercrombie vote. Since January 2007, employees of Abercrombie & Fitch gave $950 to Clinton, according to the FEC disclosure database. During the same period, Obama received only $500 from Abercrombie employees. (Keep in mind this only includes donations above $200.)
Whether or not this move will be enough to raise Obama's support among wearers of Abercrombie & Fitch clothing is unclear.
With analysis by Chris Wilson.
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We've written at length about Clinton's attachment to Rocky and her flawed belief that Balboa's plight mirrors her own. (Her devotion to the comparison has also inspired one of the greater YouTube political mashups of all time.) Tonight, Clinton has taken the metaphor to the next level. During her victory speech, two garishly red boxing gloves are floating behind her right shoulder, attached to somebody wearing a purple V-neck.
We know that campaigns orchestrate their human backdrops carefully, so it seems clear the Clinton campaign put the gloves behind Clinton on purpose. But the real question is whether they gave the gloves to the V-neck wearer or he brought them in by himself.
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With nearly half of precincts reporting, Trailhead is prepared to cautiously call the Republican primary for John McCain, who currently leads the state with 72 percent of the vote against one man who dropped out 49 days ago and another who rarely tops 6 percent in national polls.
Former candidate Mike Huckabee, who still appeared on the ballot even though he dropped out after McCain clinched a majority of delegates after the March 4 primaries, is pulling down 12 percent of the vote, while libertarian-minded candidate Ron Paul is drawing about 16 percent. For a few sweet moments, it appeared that Armstrong County would come through for Paul, whose small but ardent base has made him a significant presence on the Internet, if not in the polls. But that light-pink blip on CNN’s county-by-county map quickly evaporated as more results registered.
Candidates like McCain with no mathematical chance of losing the election are naturally less likely to draw hordes of supporters to the ballot booth, while Paul’s supporters are a determined bunch who seem indefatigable. The one in eight people who still showed up to vote for Huckabee are more puzzling and perhaps do not bode well for McCain’s odds in Pennsylvania in the general election. Then again, Pennsylvania, while not overwhelmingly blue, hasn’t elected a Republican since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
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Yesterday Politico’s
Roger Simon wondered
how much of the vote Obama would lose by virtue of his race alone. Simon cites
an AP poll in which eight percent of voters said they would not vote for a
black man, but guesses that figure is low—it’s really the number of people who admit they’re racist. He ballparks the number at around 15 percent.
Tonight's exit polls provide a lens, however blurry, through which to view the racist vote. CNN asked voters whether the race of the candidates was important to
them. Twenty percent of voters said “yes,” and of that group 59 percent broke
for Clinton.
Meanwhile, voters who said “no” split between Clinton and Obama 50-50. So if
you set aside the group that considers race important, the candidates tie.
To zoom in a little, CNN also breaks down the voters by race. Of the whites who said that race is important
to them, 75 percent broke for Clinton.
Keep in mind this group is pretty small—only 13 percent of voters overall. But think
about it: If you’re white, you tell pollsters that race helped determine who you voted for, and you
vote for the white candidate, it’s not a particularly huge stretch to conclude that you’re a
racist. (The corollary, of course--and this is where the argument gets messy--is that black voters who said they voted for Obama because of race are also racist. CNN doesn't have numbers on this.)
For a while now, more Clinton
voters have said they would not vote for Barack Obama in the general than Obama
voters said they would not vote for Clinton.
(Last month, a national poll showed that
one in four Clinton
voters would vote for McCain if Obama won, whereas one in five Obama voters would do the same if Clinton won.) It’s impossible to quantify exactly
how much of that disparity you can chalk up to racism—especially given that
many of the people Obama may have alienated in non-racial ways (the “bitter”
comment, for example) happen to be white. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it
contributes.
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We've got one hand on the remote and one on our Delegate Calculator as we try to suss out what different margins of victory mean for the two candidates. One thing, though, is certain: Hillary Clinton has already won 28 pledged delegates in Pennsylvania. The state has 158 pledged delegates in total, and it awards 55 proportionally by the statewide total and 103 proportionally by district. Since Clinton is projected to win the state's overall vote, she is guaranteed at least one more of those statewide-allocated delegates than Obama. Half of 55 is 27.5. Hence, the 28-delegate guarantee. Now we've got 130 left to divvy up.
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Surprise! Fox News and NBC and CNN are calling it for Clinton.
As we and everyone else with an Internet connection has been saying for weeks now, it just matters by how much. Earlier today, Chad Matlin gamed out the various victory margins and what they mean for Clinton. We also wrote up a to-do list for Obama to wrap this thing up.
Both camps have their respective spins: Clinton can win big states! But look how far Obama has come! But look how poorly he does among whites! But look how newly registered voters broke for Obama! (On that last one, 60 percent of voters who registered in January voted for Barack.)
But as you digest the primary night analysis, keep in mind what you might call the market fundamentals of this race:
Obama is still leading in the pledged delegate count, and Clinton isn't going to catch up. Clinton is leading among superdelegates by about 22, but her lead has been narrowing. Clinton is running out of money. Party elders are getting impatient. There are only nine contests left.
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When it comes to exit polls, I’ve taken it as a given that change and experience are just euphemisms for Obama and Clinton. If someone says they want change, chances are they’re an Obama voter; same with experience and Clinton voters.
But these exits show just how thoroughly change has infected the race, to the point that Obama no longer owns the term. (If he ever did.) Fifty-one percent of voters named it as the top quality they’re looking for in a candidate, according to CNN—more than any other quality. (Keith Olbermann says 73 percent of voters say they want to bring change.) Of those, 70 percent voted for Obama. Then take a look at the 26 percent of voters who say they value experience above everything. Ninety-three percent of them voted for Clinton. So while experience is still a signifier for Clinton, change is more ambiguous.
Also: Note that only 8 percent of voters named “electability” as the most important quality. Given that Clinton’s case for the nomination rests largely on electability—how else to convince superdelegates to reject the pledged delegate count?—this isn’t particularly encouraging. Then again, who would say “electability” when asked that question? Does anyone really see themselves as that calculating?
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The exit polls have arrived! All of the highlights below use CNN's numbers, which may change as the night goes on and they iron out their projections.
- The demographics heavily favor Clinton. Fifty-eight percent of voters were women; 38 percent were 60 years old or older. Clinton won 55 percent of women, 59 percent of 60-plus.
- Clinton seems to have won the ad wars. Among the 43 percent of voters who said ads weren't important, Clinton beats Obama, as she does among those who did say the ads mattered.
- More people think Clinton can fix the economy than think Obama can repair it. More than half the voters say the economy is the No. 1 issue.
- Forty-three percent of voters say Clinton isn't trustworthy. Twenty-one percent of those voters supported Clinton anyway.
- Outside Philadelphia, Obama did best in central and northern Pennsylvania while Clinton cleaned house in the Pittsburgh area, winning by 23 percent.
- Clinton won the white vote by 20 points while Obama won the African-American vote by 84 points. Whites made up 80 percent of the pool; black voters comprised 14 percent of the overall vote. Among white voters in Ohio, Obama's deficit was 30 points.
- Twenty percent of voters say race was important in their vote. Fifty-nine percent of them voted for Clinton. There was an even, 50-50 split among those who said race was not important.
UPDATE 8:38 p.m.: We've tweaked the numbers since the initial post because CNN changed theirs.
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During the past six weeks, Barack Obama has thrown everything and then some at Pennsylvania, outspending Hillary Clinton 3-to-1, traversing the state, and saturating its airwaves. The effort has pulled him out of his former 16-point ditch, but at the same time it has killed every shot he once had at pretending the Keystone State doesn’t matter to him. He admitted as much today, agreeing that a win is a win—and, implicitly, a loss is a loss.
But despite his best efforts, Obama doesn’t seem able to deliver the headshot. As Clinton herself asked today, “Why can’t he close the deal?”
The truth is, he can. No matter what happens tonight—well, barring an earth-shattering Clinton blowout—Obama will have an opportunity to snuff out Clinton’s candidacy over the coming weeks. Here’s how:
Drop a superdelegate bomb. Obama strategists say they have some superdelegates lined up to endorse after Pennsylvania votes. Time to line up some more. Obama has narrowed Clinton’s superdelegate lead to 22. If he were to erase that lead entirely in the day or two after Pennsylvania, the game would be over. Whether the trickle becomes a flood depends on the Pennsylvania margin. But either way, Clinton already needs about 80 percent of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates (not including add-ons) to catch up in the overall delegate count. The higher that number climbs, the bleaker the outlook.
Spend Hillary into the ground. Obama outspent Clinton threefold in Pennsylvania airtime. And the recent flurry of “response” ads has forced Clinton to spend when she would rather save. But he can afford it: In March, Obama raised twice as much cash as Clinton did and began April with $42 million in the bank for the primary, compared to her $9.3 million. With $10 million in debt, the Clinton camp is officially in the red. The more Obama can exploit this gap, the better for him. Clinton’s team can claim that it makes them the underdog, but expectations stop mattering toward the end of the race. After a certain point, the underdog just becomes the loser.
Go heavy on Indiana, light on North Carolina. If Clinton pulls off a narrow victory in Pennsylvania, all eyes will turn to Indiana as the next battleground. It looks to be a fair fight: Indiana has a large population of Clinton-friendly working-class whites, while Obama has a near-home court advantage. Recent polls show Obama leading there, but not irreversibly so. North Carolina, meanwhile, is a lock for Obama, which will only extend his pledged delegate lead. But right now the race is about superdelegates. And it’s Indiana where the remaining uncommitted supers will be looking for signs that Clinton lives.
Shift focus back to McCain. For a while there, Obama was dinging McCain as much as Clinton. (Albeit without much success—that “100 years” gambit didn’t go so well.) But a combination of Bitter-cling-elitist-gate and the looming Pennsylvania vote pulled him back into Primary-land. Over the next two weeks, Obama needs to strike a balance between knocking Clinton out and engaging McCain. But the two can also go hand in hand. Go after McCain’s economic plan flip-flop, hit him on the war, engage him on Iran. In other words, show that you can push McCain back on his heels. Because right now, Clinton’s entire candidacy rests on her claim that you can’t.
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UPDATE 8:58 p.m.: NBC and Fox News have called the Pennsylvania primary for Hillary Clinton. Once you get past your initial excitement, it's clear that a win by one point and a win in the double-digits mean very different things. Earlier today we predicted what the different scenarios would mean for the race moving forward.
The choice metaphor for the campaign season is that the candidates are on the road to the White House. If that’s the case, then Pennsylvania’s primary is a five-way intersection for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Behind them lies the wake of 45 primaries and caucuses, six former contenders, and hundreds of millions of dollars. In front of them are four branching paths, each of them leading to a new narrative that will determine when this whole shebang will end.
So, it is with only a pinch of tongue-in-cheek hyperbole that we suggest tonight’s results will change the course of this election. We tapped into our inner Nostradamus, rummaged around for our crystal ball, and read the tarot cards to predict what each path holds in store for the two candidates.
Hillary Clinton wins big (by 10 points or more): Emboldened by her victory, Clinton will certainly press on to Indiana and North Carolina. She almost certainly can’t win the Tarheel State, according to polls, so she’ll double-down on the Hoosiers and ignore Carolina, even though the latter has more pledged delegates.
Most important, this scenario justifies Clinton’s main plea to superdelegates: that Obama can’t win the big states needed for a November triumph. He’ll have lost Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey, Ohio, Florida (sort of), and Michigan (sort of). Granted, this argument is deeply flawed, but it’s still a convincing one on its surface, and it buys her some traction with the party elites.
Moreover, a double-digit victory implies that she cleaned house among white middle-class voters. That means she can spin the exit polls to suggest Obama’s “bitter” comments and the Rev. Wright flap have alienated him from middle-class voters that the party will need to beat John McCain in November. Again, this is an argument for superdelegates more than the average voter, but Clinton’s hopes rest primarily with supers at this point.
All of this means superdelegates will continue to refrain from forming a single-file line behind Obama and company. Plus, if turnout is high—which it’s reported to be—a big Clinton margin will help chip away at Obama’s popular vote lead. She needs to make up significant ground on that metric to convince supers to not vote for the guy with the lead in pledged delegates.
Clinton wins semi-impressively (by 5-10 points): She’s bought herself some time, but the end is still fast approaching. A win this size confirms that she’s still a force to be reckoned with in the party but that she still can’t bury Obama in contests that he singularly devotes his attention to. Obama has received 60 percent of the vote or more in 16 states; she has only done that once, in Arkansas. (Her biggest win outside of Arkansas and New York is in Oklahoma by 24 points, but Obama never campaigned in the state.)
She’ll stay in the race through Indiana and North Carolina, but superdelegates may start to slide toward Obama at an accelerating pace. An average-size victory in Pennsylvania makes the delegate math even more oppressive and makes Indiana a go-big-or-go-home affair. That’ll be tough to achieve if she has to do damage control in North Carolina and Obama feels secure enough in his Tarheel lead to double-down in Indiana.
The key drawback for Clinton is that a win of this size doesn’t change the narrative of the campaign. Pundits (guilty as charged) will still say that it’s just a matter of time before she drops out, and Obama will have batted away claims that his questionable comments and friendships have hurt his standing with the electorate.
Clinton wins narrowly (by .1-5 points): The Baja Men will re-emerge from anonymity to record a new smash hit: “Who Let the Superdelegates Out?” Expect uncommitted superdelegates to flock to Obama while a significant chunk of Clinton supers switch over to the other side. It’ll be like watching a fruit gradually go rotten over a series of weeks.
A Clinton win by a small margin means that the delegate math has completely buried her. She will be even deeper in pledged delegate debt, and now she’ll have no chance of catching Obama in the popular vote tally—even if Florida and Michigan are included. Couple that with a moral victory for Obama—even if he says he doesn’t believe in such things—and Clinton’s path to the nomination isn’t obstructed or blocked; it’s a dead end.
Making matters worse, a narrow victory means she can’t replenish her campaign’s wallet, which is feeling a little light lately. Without more money, she can’t air enough ads to combat the hefty amount of airtime Obama has been purchasing. If she can’t fight back over the air, then Obama’s allure becomes even more magnetizing.
Obama wins (by any amount): That’s it. It’s over. It’s just a matter of time. Expect a biblical exodus of superdelegates to Obama and mounting pressure for her to drop out. She probably won’t make it to Indiana and North Carolina. The deed is done.
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It's no coincidence that the two most-repeated Clinton quotes of the past day are:
1) "Who do you think has what it takes?"
2) "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran. ... In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”
The first quote comes from her closing argument ad, "Kitchen." The second she uttered during an interview yesterday with ABC News.
To be fair, the second bit is ripped from context. It’s meant to be a conditional—if Iran attacked Israel, then the U.S. would attack Iran. But Clinton uses much stronger language than ever before. And as Jake Tapper points out, she contradicts her own previous statement in an October debate that "I do not believe people running for president should engage in hypotheticals." When pushed on whether there are any conditions under which she would attack Iran, Clinton refused to answer. Now that caution is gone.
What accounts for the shift in rhetoric? It’s all part of her closing argument: Barack Obama is a wimp. That was the implication of the "Kitchen" ad—do you really want Obama dealing with Osama?—and it’s also the subtext of her Iran remarks. The reason she chose Iran, presumably, is that Iran is one foreign-policy issue on which you can’t look too hawkish. As Ben Smith puts it, she’s "almost daring Obama to criticize her as going overboard." Obama is already controversial among some Jewish leaders for what they see as a less-than-perfect stance on Israel (although many think he’s just fine) as well as his connections with Rev. Wright and pseudo-endorsement by Louis Farrakhan. This, like the Olympics boycott, is one issue on which Obama is not likely to challenge her aggressively.
It will be interesting to watch this debate play out in the general. John McCain would normally be delighted to hear that Clinton is willing to use nuclear deterrence to prevent an attack by Iran (and, yes, she's talking about nukes), except now that means he won't be able to paint her (or Obama) as a softie. So in a sense, Clinton might actually be doing Obama a favor here by pushing the Democratic debate rightward. If Obama can match her hawkishness on Iran—and right now, he really has no choice—he has a better shot at diffusing accusations of wimpery from McCain.
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All three candidates gave short speeches yesterday introducing World Wrestling Entertainment's "Monday Night Raw." Hillary called herself “Hill-Rod,” Obama asked if you can “smell what Barack is cooking,” and John McCain threatened to let his “McCainiacs run wild on ya.” They should really do this before debates.
But the main event was an extended brawl between wrestlers/actors playing Clinton and Obama, with a Bill Clinton character thrown in for fun. The guy playing Obama looked like Mike Tyson with big prosthetic ears, while the Clinton actress looks like a character on Golden Girls. But it worked marvelously.
Probably not worth 10 minutes of your time, but fast forward to 5:48, where Obama lifts Clinton off her feet and performs “the Barack Bottom.”
It ends when a giant tattooed oaf named Umaga barges in (Bill to Hillary: “Honey, he’s gonna vote for you!”) and knocks them both out. An Al Gore metaphor, perhaps?
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Here’s a fascinating historical parallel to the Pennsylvania primary, from Politico:
Political analysts point to the 2002 Democratic gubernatorial primary between Ed Rendell and Bob Casey Jr. as the closest comparison to the matchup between Obama and Clinton.
Rendell won that closely contested race with a coalition of African Americans and upscale, highly educated white voters—a coalition like the one assembled by Obama. Casey focused on blue collar workers, union households, lower-income individuals and ethnic white voters—strikingly similar to Clinton’s base in Pennsylvania.
Yet now each man is boosting the candidate of the opposite coalition. Rendell backs Clinton, even though Obama depends on the same combo of blacks and educated whites as Rendell did. And Casey backs Obama, even though Clinton appeals more to the working-class voters who put him in office.
It’s this kind of crossover that should make Democrats less concerned about party unity in the fall. If leaders with strong demographic associations like Casey and Rendell enthusiastically throw their weight behind the nominee, voters will follow.
On the other hand, Obama might be uncomfortable having Rendell pushing for him, now that this video has surfaced …
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The Barack-Obama-is-the-next-JFK theme
has basically vanished since Teddy K’s endorsement didn’t do Obama much
good in Massachusetts.
But, ever-so-subtly, Hillary Clinton could be reviving the comparison—only this
time, she’s invoking JFK’s naivete to hurt Obama.
Case
in point: Look at her latest Pennsylvania attack ad.
The narrator introduces the spot by growling, “It’s the toughest job in the
world.” Cue the hyper-fast montage of historic headlines and images: Black Thursday,
Pearl Harbor,
the Berlin
Crisis*, Fidel Castro,
the oil crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall,
Osama Bin Laden, and
Hurricane Katrina.
The ad wraps up with another montage of our modern-day plagues, a quote by
Harry Truman, and a rhetorical question—“Who do you think has what it
takes?”—that’s answered a split-second later with an image of Hillary. (The ad,
by the way, is the most watched News and Politics video on YouTube today. Ninth
most watched in France, 22nd
most viewed in Russia, and
66th most in Canada.
You may not realize it, but you need to know these things.)
It’s
in the initial montage—when it covers the Berlin Crisis*—that we see JFK.
*Corrections,
April 22, 2008: Originally, the post incorrectly stated that a
headline Hillary Clinton used in a recent ad hinted at JFK's handling of the
Vietnam War. It actually referred to the Berlin Crisis. The post made invalid
conclusions based on the error. Those conclusions have been removed from the
post.
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How’s this for rapid response:
11: 15 a.m.: Clinton campaign
e-mails: “NEW AD: Clinton Campaign Unveils New Ad Asking
Voters, ‘Who Do You Think Has What it Takes?’ ” [Watch it here.]
4:49 p.m.: Obama campaign e-mails: “AD RESPONSE TO CLINTON
FEAR AD” [Watch it here.]
Five-and-a-half hours: All it takes to digest, produce,
edit, and hit back with a counter-spot. So this is that 21st Century campaign I've been hearing all about. Obama spokesman Bill Burton says the ad will be airing in Pennsylvania.
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Via Ben Smith, here’s a great video of Gov. Ed Rendell berating talking to college students who support Obama.
It’s almost pointless to note Rendell going off-message—it happens every time he opens his mouth. But this time, he’s essentially repeating Obama’s line about all three candidates being pretty darned good. Here’s Rendell in the video:
John McCain is an exceptional person. I think we’ve got three exceptional people running for president. … Don’t be sad, be happy. This is a good field.
To be fair, Clinton critized Obama for saying McCain was "better than Bush," not for praising him. (She has had kind words for McCain in the past, too, but only to further emphasize Obama's impotence.) But Rendell isn't making her case any easier. In Democrat-land, McCain is Bush, period.
Update 5:20 p.m.: Forgot to mention two other instances of dangerous Rendellian honesty. Around the 1:30 mark, Rendell manages to praise both Gov. Deval Patrick and Ronald Reagan. Rendell says he believes Patrick's argument that "words can move people." Oops. Also, he thinks Reagan "was an effective president." Double oops! Of course, he's making the larger point that rhetoric isn't enough—you have to back it up with action. But as we've learned, context is no defense!
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In case you're curious, Pennsylvania polls close at 8 p.m. tomorrow. Just in time for American Idol.
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Last week we discussed how the case of Kentucky Rep. Geoff Davis, who referred to Barack Obama as “that boy,” might serve as a cautionary tale for John McCain. If McCain’s age becomes an issue in the general—and it no doubt will—we figure it’s not inconceivable that the word boy could inadvertently slip out.
Apparently we were onto something. Here’s McCain adviser and long-time confidant Mark Salter responding to Sunday’s Washington Post piece on McCain’s temperament:
… I told [the piece’s author, Michael Leahy] that McCain hadn't lost his temper at all. McCain routinely refers to people and colleagues as "boy." He does to me, to Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman, and almost everybody. It's like saying hey, buddy. He means nothing by it. Renzi was relatively new to Congress, and got upset when McCain refered to him in this completely innocuous way. … [Emphasis added]
I doubt the “buddy” defense would hold much water if Obama was on the receiving end.
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The Clinton campaign has released what it calls its "closing argument" ad: "Kitchen." The formula is familiar—a montage of scary images over an ominous drumbeat, followed by uplifting music and a picture of Hillary. The question: “Who do you think has what it takes?” Obama’s camp calls it a “fear ad” and cites a 2004 speech by Bill Clinton in which he said you should vote for the candidate who appeals to your hopes, not your fears. But Clinton spokesman Geoff Garin said in a conference call today that it’s “entirely a positive ad.”
So which is it, positive or negative?
Depends what dictionary you’re using. You could define a “negative” ad as one that 1) contrasts the two candidates on the issues, like health care, 2) impugns the opponent’s character, like charging that Clinton will “say anything to get elected,” or 3) just feels like a downer, like Clinton’s “Freefall” ad about the economy.
Both candidates have run all three types of ads (except for Obama, who hasn’t used the third type yet, but whose “bitter” comment pegged him for a week as Mr. Negative), and both have used all three definitions to characterize their opponents' ads as negative.
In fact, at this point in the race, it’s hard to imagine either candidate running an ad that can’t be viewed as negative. If Obama ran an ad rehashing the hope/change message of mid-2007, it would feel stale. If Clinton plugged her own health care plan without implicitly mentioning that Obama’s would not cover an estimated 15 million people, it would almost be neglectful. The race has reached the point where negativity—according to one definition or another—isn’t just inevitable, it’s necessary to help voters figure out which candidate they prefer. It also creates an arms-race situation where the first candidate to back down looks weak.
Hence the irony of each candidate slamming the other for being too negative. We’ve already reached the point where they’re attacking each other for attacking each other for attacking each other. At what point does the race become so meta that it collapses under the weight of its own internal logic, and Wolf Blitzer's head explodes?
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Despite a flurry of negative ads from both sides,
Hillary Clinton's Pennsylvania
lead holds steady. So with no clear ups or downs, we're leaving her chances of
winning the nomination at 9.9 percent.
If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything
at all. Both Clinton and Barack Obama chucked that philosophy out the window
long ago, but this weekend marked the nastiness apex, as Clinton
aired an attack
ad responding to an attack ad by Obama responding to an attack ad
by Clinton.
(Followed by Clinton's
"closing
argument" ad.) The ads mostly rehashed old battles over lobbyist money
and health care but with renewed vigor. Neither candidate comes out on top, but
the mudslinging hurts Obama more since it undermines his entire "new
politics" message. He claims Clinton's
attacks have forced him to throw elbows, but in our experience, "she hit
me first" stopped being a valid excuse after second grade. …
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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John McCain’s released
two years of tax returns today to little fanfare. We learn that he earned $405,000
in 2007. We learn that he’s giving his ex-wife $17,000 a year in alimony. What
we don’t learn, though, is how much he’s getting from his current wife. That’s
because the returns don’t include the assets of Cindy McCain, whose beer
fortune is estimated
at more than $100 million—a reminder that McCain would be the first
president to have signed a prenuptial agreement.
The decision not to combine their assets has had pros and
cons. On the one hand, McCain was able to distance himself from her money when
conflict-of-interest issues arose
during his first House campaign in 1982. (He took a salary from Hensley,
Cindy’s father’s company, for public relations work.) But these days, there’s a
major downside: He can’t spend her money on the campaign trail. Normally a
candidate can spend up to half of the assets from a joint account, if the
spouse agrees. Had the McCains decided to fully merge their assets three
decades ago, he would probably be having much less trouble on the
financial end.
Then there’s the moral aspect. In a race that has feature
the thrice-married Rudy Giuliani, McCain’s marital situation doesn’t seem particularly
controversial. But some Americans might look askance at a prenup, commonly
considered leaving the door open for divorce. McCain is already on rocky
footing with so-called values voters, given his stance on issues like embryonic
stem cell research. (James Dobson in particular is famously
displeased.) His marital arrangement isn’t likely to endear him either.
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As we've noted here before, Hillary Clinton must convince
voters—well, superdelegates actually—of two things: not only that she's
the best candidate, but that she's so the best candidate that
it's worth dragging this election out at least until June 3, the day of
the last primary. That's why the endorsement of Obama by Robert Reich,
a longtime Clinton family friend and labor secretary in Bill's
administration, is pretty bad news for her. Even if most people don't
give a damn who Reich personally favors for president, this kind of Bill Richardson-style betrayal reminds us that the establishment is slouching toward Obama. That, along with reports that superdelegates are unmoved by her attacks, forces us to dock Clinton 0.8 points, bringing her to 9.9 percent going into the weekend.
Clinton still knows how to slap on a smile, though. Her cameo on The Colbert Report
last night went over well, as she pretended to help Stephen fix the
video system. ("Try toggling the input.") The senator was outshined,
however, by a scene-stealing John Edwards, whose six-minute delivery of "the EdWORDs" almost made you wish he was still in the race.
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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Let’s stop pretending it’s about the voters. Hillary Clinton’s strategy right now rests on whether or not she can sway superdelegates, and it’s clear to anyone who can count that the strategy is not going well—Obama has narrowed Clinton’s superdelegate lead from 97 to 22 since Feb. 5. To make up Obama’s pledged-delegate lead, Clinton will need to win at least 70 percent of remaining uncommitted superdelegates.
That’s why the “bitter” comment was such a potential lifesaver. It gave Clinton one last chance to convince superdelegates that Obama is a walking crapshoot who just can’t win in the general. So she spent the past week pushing that argument. But a New York Times piece today suggests that superdelegates don’t really care. Which apparently makes them a lot like voters.
It’s hard to say whether Clinton missed an opportunity to exploit the “cling” thing, or whether no such opportunity existed in the first place. Obama formulated his words poorly, but the outrage felt manufactured from the start. Clinton’s “good people of Pennsylvania” ad came off as contrived and cynical. If anything, Clinton’s righteous response to the “bitter” comments may have hastened Obama’s recovery.
But the larger question is what Clinton can do now. Here’s the problem, per the Times piece:
Clinton advisers acknowledged that they had not seen short-term evidence that their attacks on Mr. Obama were winning over many superdelegates, and they acknowledged that he had picked up more in recent weeks—though she maintained a narrowing overall lead in them. They predicted, however, that the mounting scrutiny of Mr. Obama would lead superdelegates to cool to his candidacy and come to see her as more of a known quantity, battle tested, and shrewd about the best ways to beat the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, in the fall.
This strategy made sense two months ago, when Clinton still had a shot at 1) getting Florida and Michigan to count, 2) winning the popular vote, and 3) exploiting some unforgivable revelation about Obama. It doesn’t make any sense now. Obama has weathered Wright, Goolsbee, Power, “bitter,” and, for now, Bill Ayers. (Although watch for half of these to return in the general.) He also appears to have survived one of his worst debate performances ever. Consider Robert Reich, Sam Nunn, and David Boren exhibits A, B, and C. Now Howard Dean has re-emerged from the woodwork to reiterate his call for superdelegates to take sides.
This isn’t to say that Pennsylvania and Indiana and North Carolina don’t matter. Only that everything needs to go right for Clinton if she’s going to stay in the race. She needs to win so overwhelmingly that superdelegates will move her way in huge numbers—something that none of Obama’s supposedly damaging gaffes have been able to accomplish. With superdelegates unmoved by Obama's missteps over the past week, the idea that “mounting scrutiny” of Obama will save Clinton has expired.
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While watching the shoulder-brushing video we mentioned yesterday, some people had a different reaction. The Los Angeles Times’ Andrew Malcolm cites a “one-fingered gesture” Obama made while criticizing Clinton’s debate tactics and suggests it was a subtle way of flipping her off: “The presidential candidate raises his right hand to seemingly scratch his cheek. He doesn't use his whole hand though. Just one finger. Briefly. A couple of strokes.” Malcolm notes the “buzz” in the audience as evidence that “the crowd sure sees something.”
It’s almost too silly to mention, except that the suggestion seems to be getting some traction on YouTube and the blogs.
I’m gonna say no. If you look at the full video, you can see the audience was already pretty jazzed at that point, and Obama had just delivered the line that Clinton was “in her element” during Wednesday’s debate. The “mischievous smile” doesn’t come until his “twist the knife” line, and at that point hardly seems like a throwback to the questionable scratch. Plus, think about it: Flipping your opponent off, however subtly, is pretty freaking unwise. He may be young and inexperienced, but he’s not politically suicidal.
What we need is a video montage of how Obama scratches his face. Is the one-finger an anomaly or his standard scratching method? This is why God invented crowd-sourcing.
Update 3:08 p.m.: Alternate angles cast yet more doubt on the finger theory.
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Ben Smith points out a fantastic moment in Barack Obama’s speech in Raleigh today, in which he described what you have to do when confronted with negative attacks like the flap over his “bitter” comment: “You just gotta kind of let it—,” he said, before brushing some invisible dirt off his shoulders. “That’s what you gotta do.” The audience devours it.
It’s a pretty historic moment if you think about it—the first-ever Jay-Z reference by a presidential candidate. (Actually, Obama has name-checked the rapper before.) Smith calls it a "generational dogwhistle"—something only certain voters can hear (or in this case, see). It's also something Hillary Clinton (not to mention McCain) not only wouldn’t do but probably wouldn’t even understand.
But it’s also an example of how there’s nothing you can do the Internet hasn’t already done. Run a Google search for Jay Z and bitter and watch what comes up: a great mash-up of “Dirt Off Your Shoulders” and the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony.” Maybe that’s where Obama got the idea?
Next thing you know, he’ll start talking about how he’s got 99 problems but … Actually, never mind.
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Reason No. 423 why I can’t wait for the general election: No more tedious, transparent expectations gaming.
Right now we’re being told that Barack Obama doesn’t plan on coming close to winning the Pennsylvania primary. Heck, he’d be happy if he got a dozen Keystoners to turn out for him. At least that’s what his campaign wants us to think. Meanwhile, Clinton’s camp claims that Obama expects to win Pennsylvania, that he’s outspending them 4-to-1 in the state, and that any loss whatsoever is a “significant loss.” By next week, they’ll have us believe that anything less than 100 percent of the vote would be devastating for Obama.
In a general election, by contrast, there’s no advantage to pretending you’re going to lose. It doesn’t matter what media coverage is like coming out of the race, since there’s no need to produce “momentum. After Nov. 4, it’s over. There’s no advantage to being the underdog. And there’s no debate over what constitutes “a win.” (Well, there are exceptions.)
There’s still spin, of course, but it’s more straightforward. If your fundraising numbers are low, you pretend they’re high. You don’t use their lowness to tamp down expectations. You don’t pretend your lead in the polls is less than it really is. In the general, the lying is more … honest.
Just look at McCain’s campaign right now. They know they’re going to be outspent no matter who the Democratic nominee is. So, they’ve combined with the RNC to form one über-fundraising mechanism. That’s where the spin comes in: They’d have us believe there’s no difference between McCain’s campaign fund and the RNC fund. Reports Politico:
[T]o help counter their money deficit, McCain strategists now suggest that the proper comparison should be between the combined assets of the campaign and the RNC and that of their opponent and the far less flush DNC.
“The McCain camp is funded jointly,” is how one adviser describes it.
How refreshing! None of this “it’s good we’re down” crap. None of this reverse psychology expectations jujitsu. Just good, old-fashioned distortion.
If there's a spin battle over money, it will be waged over Obama's (likely) decision not to take public funds, despite (strong) suggestions that he would if his opponent did. But even then, the debate is more about keeping promises than who has more money. Can't wait.
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Remember all the mileage Clinton got out of the SNL bit that depicted the media as Obama-lovers? Obama finally has a comeback.
His campaign just fired off an e-mail to supporters complaining about the “gotcha politics and distractions” that dominated last night’s debate:
In fact, it took more than 45 minutes before Barack was asked about the economy, health care, or foreign policy. … Regrettably, Senator Clinton seemed all too comfortable with that type of debate.
It’s been a running subplot of this campaign that Clinton gets tougher coverage. She famously cited SNL in a debate, claiming that the moderators might want to give Obama a pillow. She also complained about having to answer too many questions first. Academic studies have confirmed that the media has been skewed. Both the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Center for Media and Public Affairs concluded that Obama received overwhelmingly favorable coverage. But that was in 2007—before most people had heard the words Wright, Goolsbee, Power, and bitter. Clinton has managed her own woes of late, Bosnia chief among them. But it’s hard to deny a leveling of the field. (Although Clinton now receives more coverage than Obama, according to PEJ.)
So that's another silver lining to last night’s ABC debate: It lets Obama join Clinton in hating on the media—and using it to raise cash. Plus, it's easy to pivot from that to Clinton's "negative attacks," as his campaign did in a conference call earlier today. But as much as Obama complains about negativity in this campaign, don't forget the ways in which he benefits from it. My guess: Last night's debate nets him so much cash he'll have to make Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos bundlers.
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The 21st debate has come and gone, and the general
consensus is that Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama behind the
lecterns. Her win barely outweighs the announcement of two more
superdelegates and a newspaper endorsement for Obama. As a result, her
chances of winning the nomination glide upward by 0.3 points to 10.7 percent.
The debate in Philadelphia—which was near-universally panned in the blogosphere—spent its first hour on process questions.
Usually, this would have hurt Clinton, whose mastery of policy details
has shone through in previous debates. But last night, Obama bore the
brunt of the process questions. It was like a guilt-by-association
greatest hits—we heard about former Weatherman Bill Ayers, Jeremiah
Wright, and the "cling" thing. The result, aside from getting people to
turn off their TVs, was to remind viewers that Obama could be
vulnerable to Republican attacks in the general election...
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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In last night’s spectacular orgy of anti-issues, many viewers were introduced to a new name: Bill Ayers. Barack Obama’s associations with the former Weather Underground member have been known for some time. Ben Smith reported in February that Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, now high-profile Chicago activists and professors, held a fundraiser for met with Obama at their home.* But the story failed to catch. Why is it coming back to life now?
Well, for one thing, no one raised the story in a debate. But more importantly, the Clinton camp never seized on it. And for good reason: As Obama pointed out last night in his rebuttal, President Clinton pardoned two Weather Underground members, Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg, while in office. (Even Chuck Schumer denounced the pardons.) Today in a conference call, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said it’s not fair to “conflate” Obama’s fundraiser and Clinton’s pardon: “I’m not aware of either of them hosting a political event for Sen. Clinton in their homes,” he said.
So voters (or—let’s be honest—pundits) are left to decide which is worse: attending a fundraiser held by visiting the home of two people who were once synonymous with violent radicalism in America and who were both involved in numerous bombings of government facilities but who have since become staple members of the liberal Chicago activist community; or commuting the sentences of two people who were convicted of crimes—in this case, the 1981 armed robbery of an armored car that left two police officers and a security guard dead. You can see why the Clinton camp wouldn’t want to push this story too hard.
The real threat to Obama, though, is not what Clinton will do with the story but what Republicans might cook up. It could do some damage, if only because it fits into a larger Obama narrative. Just as his “bitter” comment pegged Obama as “elitist,” his Terrorist Fundraiser—permission to use, John McCain—fits the narrative that Obama is more liberal than he claims. Combine the Ayers meeting with the questionnaire from 1996 in which Obama articulated liberal stances on gun control and abortion and the death penalty, plus his “most liberal voting record” status in the National Journal, and you’ve got a strong case that Obama would appoint Bill Ayers represent the White House in a meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
So maybe Obama’s lucky ABC raised the question. Clinton can push the story only so hard before it turns on her. And now it won’t come as a surprise to many voters when McCain’s team raises the issue in the fall. Better that the first Ayers jab be soft and early than late and fierce.
* Oops. Obama met Ayers at a small gathering at Ayers' house, but it wasn't a fundraiser. Ayers did, however, donate $200 to Obama's Illinois re-election campaign.
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Usually, it’s the process questions that produce sparks at
debates. Networks rely on questions about flag pins, VP picks, and radical
hippie friends, because they reveal differences in character rather than
policy. So in a primary like this one, where there aren’t many discernible policy
differences (besides social security payroll taxes, obviously), process
questions are the choice du jour if you want some made-for-TV fireworks.
The problem is, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton went for the bait. Unsurprisingly, both
candidates said the other could beat John McCain. Both said the Democratic Party
would unite around the nominee. Both delivered stump-speech pitches to
hypothetical superdelegates at the end of the debate.
Even when things had the potential to get dicey, they simmered down
quickly. Obama explained away his
“bitter” remarks, and Clinton said
she merely called his comments elitist—not Obama himself. Clinton
started to get huffy puffy about Rev. Wright, but Obama reiterated the same
defense that helped him wriggle out of the ordeal in the first place. On Clinton’s
Bosnia misspeak,
Obama was somnambulant while he hoped Clinton
tripped herself up trying to explain the gaffe away.
But after the first hour, ABC seemed to run out of process questions and had
to turn to (sigh) policy. It wasn’t until 9:04 p.m. that a question was asked about the economy—the
issue that half of all Pennsylvanians care about most (PDF). Once
we finally got around to hashing out the issues, we lingered on an obscure
stipulation involving old people, tax ceilings, and a bunch of stuff the
American people—and, to be honest, your humble blogger—doesn’t fully
understand. Iraq
was barely touched, and when it was, neither moderator pushed Obama on Samantha
Power’s comments that he wouldn’t actually pull out troops if the generals told
him not to. Fringe(ish) issues like gun control and affirmative action were raised instead of the heartier (and, frankly, more pressing) issues mentioned above. The
climate crisis once again took a back seat, even though a question was asked
on rising gas prices. Last time we checked, they’re sort of intertwined.
ABC should have realized its mistake before Charlie and
George sat down in front of those wooden lecterns. As they reminded us, it’s
been five weeks since the last primaries, six since the last debate. Since
then, all we’ve heard are process stories—Rev. Wright,
Bosnia, and small-town
embitterment. Those issues were hashed out beyond the debate floor, and it was
time to turn the attention back to policy. Debate after debate, the candidates
have shown they’re more comfortable debating policy than process. The moderators should have followed suit. Sure,
policy questions don't lead to fireworks—but
at least you don't get duds like tonight.
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Clinton’s getting all the laughs tonight. All two of them.
In an answer about the D.C. gun ban, she refers to Dick Cheney as “a fourth branch [of government] all to himself,” which gets yuks. Earlier, she made a crack about how it would be nice if the Republicans decided to not run a candidate at all.
Next to Sleepy over there, she’s killing.
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It’s more than an hour into the debate, and finally we get a question that’s not about a pastor, a surrogate, a gaffe, or a flag pin.
On Iraq: George and Charlie ask if Clinton would really pull out of Iraq even if military commanders said no. Her answer: Yes she would. Would Obama pull out no matter what after 16 months, as he has said? Yes he would, but he’d consult the brass first.
On Iran: Clinton knocks Obama for saying he would meet with Ahmadinejad, who today questioned whether 9/11 really happened, she says.
On taxes: You have to love the language of tax hikes. Clinton wouldn’t raise taxes for people with income above $200,000—she’d “let” them “go back” to what they were in the 1990s. Kind of like how Mitt Romney never raised taxes in Massachusetts , he just closed tax loopholes.
Obama says he would cut taxes for people with income under $75,000. I feel like every question should be a two-parter, with the second part being, ... and how would you pay for it?
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They approach the electability question sideways, via Obama’s association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers.
Clinton brings up the fact that Obama sat on a corporate board with Ayers, who she says refused to repent for the bombs he once planted—a statement she was says “deeply hurtful to people in New York” on 9/11 and after. She expands this into an argument that’s become one of my favorite campaign tropes: That Obama’s shortcomings make him vulnerable not to her attacks, but to those of Republicans in the fall. Evan Bayh said a similar thing about his “bitter” comment. Who knows what those dirty Republicans will do with this gaffe?
This time, Obama has a comeback: President Clinton pardoned two members of the Weather Underground.
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Charlie Gibson peels Obama's Rev. Jeremiah Wright scab and asks Obama why he rescinded an invitation for Wright to attend his announcement speech in February 2007, yet did not distance himself from Wright publicly. Obama responds by saying that Wright's comments in Rolling Stone prompted the disinvite, and that he was still unaware of the kind of talk that ended up on YouTube.
UPDATE 9:26 p.m: Originally, I had written that the story was posted on Feb. 22, so Obama's timing was off. I was incorrect. The story in question appeared in the Feb. 22 issue, and therefore was published weeks before. I've left the text I originally wrote in strikethrough below.
Here's the problem: From what we can tell, Reverend Wright's quotes showed up in Rolling Stone on February 22--12 days after Obama announced he was running for president. If that's the case, then Obama's clock is off. The only explanation is that Obama and company found out RS was going to run with a piece that questioned Obama's church. If that's true, then Obama's move was a shrewd one, as it distanced himself before the comments blew up and became an issue. But it still doesn't explain why he didn't do the same permanently, so the Rev. Wright flap that we've all become accustomed to could never take place.
Two choice cuts from what Wright was quoted as saying in the piece that ran on was in the Feb. 22 issue:
Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!
We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. ... We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. ... We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!
We're not at the debate, so we can't ask Axelrod and company about this in the spin room after the debate. Perhaps some of our blogger pals in Philly can help clarify the anachronism.
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We hear a video question from a good person of Pennsylvania named Tom, who says Clinton lost his vote because of her misleading Tuzla account. (This is like a greatest hits of the last seven weeks.)
Clinton responds: “I may be a lot of things, but I’m not dumb.” She described the incident in her book, she says, and more recently “said some things that just weren’t in keeping” with her original account. "Maybe I need to get more sleep, Tom." Never mind that she repeated the revisionist version over and over.
So really she's saying, I'm not dumb ... I'm calculating!
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As expected, an early question about Bitterclingelitistgate.
Obama rails against the tendency in campaigns to “take one comment that wasn’t properly phrased and beat it to death.” As an example, he cites Clinton’s “baking cookies” line from the early ‘90s. Reversal!
Clinton responds calmly, unhurriedly, that whatever his intentions, Obama managed to offend a large number of people.
If that’s that, then Obama got off fairly easy.
ALSO: Obama sounds so tired. Looks like he's about to nod off midsentence. Maybe they should give him a pillow.
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Gibson starts with a genius move. He asks, Why wouldn’t you pick each other as running mates? and throws it out to both candidates.
The silence, as the Hotline might say, was long enough you could knit a sweater.
Obama says it’s too premature to say. Clinton says the party is going to close ranks around the nominee no matter what happens. (Even though Obama hasn't crossed the commander-in-chief threshold, of course.) In other words: No comment.
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Welcome to the National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia. The camera pans around the room. It’s tiny! Looks kind of like a Disney ride—one of those magic motion machines. Hopefully the seats rock back and forth and water squirts on the audience.
The set is a lot less flashy than CNN’s. The whole scene is pretty formal, down to Clinton’s conservative gray jacket. Clinton and Obama are both standing at lecterns, instead of the desk meeting we had at the other mano-a-manos.
Also, note the “We the people” banner in the background. Kind of like a Ron Paul ad.
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It’s tempting to cast tonight’s Democratic debate—No. 21, for those counting—as an inevitable smackdown. Just look at what’s happened since the last debate: Jeremiah Wright, NAFTA, Austan Goolsbee, Samantha Power, the Bosnia sniper flap, and, most recently, Bitterclingelitistgate. But remember what happened last time we expected a bloodbath: The Los Angeles debate in January turned out to be remarkably civil. In fact, every one-on-one debate has been more tea party than sniper duel. Tonight could well be the same, with both candidates sticking to the issues and saving the attacks for the airwaves.
But Clinton can't afford to sit back. She’s winning the battle (Pennsylvania) but losing the war (the nomination). Here are a few ways she might be able to outmaneuver Obama:
Don’t be bitter: It’s becoming clear that whatever the long-term effects of Obama's “cling” thing, it’s not hurting him much in Pennsylvania or Indiana. (Plus, a recent national Gallup survey gave Obama his widest lead ever.) Nor have Clinton’s attempts to push the story gone over well. She therefore has a choice: Keep hammering Obama and risk looking desperate or let it go and risk everyone forgetting it ever happened. She’d be wise to choose the latter. Clinton has never won hearts and minds while on the attack—more often than not, her quips come off as cheap shots. (See her "change you can Xerox” remark.) She could luck out—Obama could say something to aggravate the elitism charge. But don’t count on it. He’ll be choosing his words with more care than usual. Better for Clinton to …
Focus on electability: To win the nomination, Clinton needs to convince superdelegates that Obama cannot beat McCain in the general election. That’s the only way they will override his pledged-delegate lead. Which is why, even if the moderators don’t mention electability, Clinton has to bring it up herself. That means hitting Obama on questions of character, like his iffy claim that he doesn’t take money from oil companies, or why he hasn’t released his tax returns from the late 1990s, or Rezko (again). It also means finding other ways to suggest he’s “out-of-touch” (shaky ground for Clinton, to be sure). She also needs to outgun him in the ineffable presidentiality department. That means not getting too riled.
Dominate on substance: Clinton is at her best when pummeling her opponent with lucid policy ideas, leaving him fumbling for a response. Tonight, that means nailing him on the economy and health care. The last two months have seen the maturation of the subprime-mortgage crisis, leading everyone from Alan Greenspan to Ben Bernanke to whisper the “R” word. Expect to hear a lot about stimulus packages, freezing home foreclosures, executive pay, and McCain’s one-eighty on “bailouts.” Clinton should tease out the differences in their economic plans—they’re both for government intervention, but Obama is slightly more cautious, while Clinton is aggressive. Health care is charted territory for Democratic debates, but Clinton has always shined. She’d be smart to steer the conversation health-ward.
Throw Bill under the bus: Or at the very least, do some serious distancing. Over the past weeks, Bill Clinton has managed to undermine his wife on the Colombia trade agreement (he’s for it), the China Olympics boycott (he opposes it), NAFTA (he signed it), and her Bosnia sniper flap (he resurrected it). Voters need to know that Bill will not have a voice in her administration. This is a hard case to make, given that her “experience” as first lady is a large part of her pitch. But for all his smarts, Bill has been a drag on Hillary. Saying “we disagree” isn’t enough. She needs to assure viewers that the next Clinton administration would not be a co-presidency.
Start to make amends: On the off-chance she doesn't win the nomination, Clinton is going to have a hell of a time backpedaling from her recent attacks. Tonight, in the blistering heat of the pre-Pennsylvania race, is her chance to turn on the charm. Lavish him with compliments, praise his campaign, heck, mention the Dream Ticket idea again. Just make it clear that the race isn't personal. In other words, leave room for a 2012 run.
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A morning endorsement from Bruce Springsteen will help Barack Obama
dominate the news cycle heading into tonight's debate. That, coupled
with some new poll numbers and a newspaper endorsement, helps drag
Clinton's ship down by two points to a 10.4 percent chance of winning the nomination.
Barack
Obama may have E Street to thank if he ever lives on Pennsylvania
Avenue. Bruce Springsteen endorsed Obama today, the first
mega-celebrity to endorse since Oprah, Babs, and the gang in January.
While Obama could've used the Boss' backing before New Jersey's primary
on Feb. 5 (Obama lost by 10 points), today's timing actually works well
for Obama. Springsteen is a perfect emissary for the campaign in the
wake of Obama's "cling" comments in San Francisco. The Boss
acknowledges as much and writes in his endorsement
that "[w]hile these matters are worthy of some discussion, they have
been ripped out of the context and fabric of the man's life and
vision." If Obama can coax Springsteen onto the trail in Pennsylvania,
that will start to nullify Clinton's and McCain's claims that he's an
elitist. The less traction Clinton gets on that issue, the more
desperate she looks. Desperate candidates don't become the nominee. ...
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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Obama racks up yet another endorsement in the music primary,
this one from small town poet laureate Bruce Springsteen. On his Web site, the
Boss implicitly defends
Obama’s “bitter” comment:
At the moment, critics have tried to diminish Senator Obama
through the exaggeration of certain of his comments and relationships. While
these matters are worthy of some discussion, they have been ripped out of the
context and fabric of the man's life and vision, so well described in his
excellent book, Dreams of My Father, often in order to distract us from
discussing the real issues: war and peace, the fight for economic and racial
justice, reaffirming our Constitution, and the protection and enhancement of
our environment.
The Boss may have read Obama’s book and liked it, but he must
have missed the title: It’s Dreams From My Father.
It’s actually a common
mistake.
But you’d think the Obama campaign would catch it in the vetting process.
In fact, they’ve made the same error before. In
a press
release responding to a Los Angeles
Times piece about exaggerations in the partially fictionalized book, the
campaign mentions “Yvonne Lloyd, a mother of 11 who was the basis for the
character “Shirley” in Dreams of My
Father …” [E.A.]
Granted, press releases are always riddled with copy errors,
but come on, forty million dollars a month should at least buy you an
editor.
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The last week has been a layer cake of outrages. First, Bill Clinton resurrected his wife’s Bosnia story. Then Obama called Pennsylvania voters “bitter,” which eclipsed Clinton’s flub. Then Kentucky Rep. Geoff Davis referred to Barack Obama as “that boy”—a gaffe that would have dominated headlines if it hadn’t been for the “bitter” furor.
Obama’s camp took quick and public umbrage, and Davis has since apologized. (Davis had meant is as a critique of Obama’s foreign-policy ideas, saying, “That boy's finger does not need to be on the button.”) But the most surprising thing wasn’t that he said it. It’s that no one had made the mistake before.
Think about it. The word boy has been tossed around plenty in this campaign. Back in November, Bill Clinton quipped that “those boys have been getting tough on her” in debates. More recently, Hillary Clinton told talk show host Ellen about how “boys” were always telling her to give up. Forget whether or not they were trying to play the “gender card.” It would have been a short rhetorical step from the plural to the singular. Given how many words have been exchanged over the past year, it’s amazing that no one slipped up earlier. (Joe Biden was in the mix, for God's sake.)
John McCain would be wise to take note. His age is likely to be a big issue in the general election, and the temptation to bust out a Reagan-like “youth and inexperience” line will be tempting. But he should be careful. One second you’re mocking your opponent’s political virginity, the next thing you know you’re a bigot. McCain likes to josh people, but he’s going to be on shaky ground. He’s already guaranteed to be painted as an old, out-of-touch white man who forget where he left his keys. Best not to add “racist” to the list.
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Pushing back against Hillary Clinton’s “Bitter” Tour 2008,
Barack Obama has a new
spot that uses her speech in Pittsburgh yesterday—the one with the
“boos”—as its hook.
First thing you see is Clinton
telling the audience that people were “disappointed by recent remarks that
[Obama] made.” Cue the digitally enhanced booing. “There’s a reason people are
rejecting Hillary Clinton’s attacks,” a friendly narrator tells you, and so on.
The problem is, as we pointed out yesterday, reports of
booing seem
exaggerated. There were audible murmurs, but she most certainly didn’t get
the Bill Buckner treatment the Obama spot suggests.
At least one group isn’t happy about the coverage, and that’s
the Alliance for
American Manufacturing, which hosted the event. They sent out this press
release, with a quote from AAM executive director Scott Paul:
“It is unfortunate that media coverage of AAM’s forum has
focused on determining whether Sen. Hillary Clinton received ‘boos’ for remarks
she made regarding her opponent, Sen. Barack Obama. AAM hopes that in the
future the press will provide voters with intelligent and meaningful coverage
of the issues and stop reporting to the lowest common denominator.”
Naturally, the group wants to maintain good relations with both candidates. That means making sure their events aren't portrayed as partisan circuses. But come on, "intelligent and meaningful coverage of the issues"? Has this guy watched cable news recently?
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When Hillary Clinton landed in our inboxes today announcing a new “wage-gap calculator,” Trailhead got a little giddy. We love all the interactive tools we can get our hands on (See: "Delegate Calculator"; "Map the Candidates"), so a Clinton-branded wage calc sounded more fun than arithmetic politics usually is. Educationally, the calculator is useless—it’s not fun, nor does it offer much personalized information—but politically, the tool sheds some insight into one of Clinton’s Achilles’ heels—young people (and the lack thereof).
The calculator offers five input fields: state, education level, race, annual salary, and age. The tool works for women only—enter all of that data and see how much less, on average, women make than men given your biographical info. All is swell until you hit the age box, where you get five options: 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, and 65+. Missing, of course, is the demographic Clinton has always struggled with, 18- to 25-year-olds.
In exit poll after exit poll, she underperforms in the 18-29 bracket compared with other age groups (even in states she wins). After she got walloped among the young’uns in Iowa (Barack Obama won 57 percent of the 17-to-29 vote; Clinton won 11 percent), she put a renewed emphasis on her Hillblazers and dispatched America Ferrera to convince the youth of America that she isn’t an old fart.
In the “methodology” section, the site explains that the Current Population Survey doesn’t provide salary data for 18- to 25-year-olds, but most young women won’t make it to the methodology if they’ve already been denied admission at the door. Moreover, because the age entered is used in only one of the metrics; they could have made an 18-to-25 option available but broken the bad news within the calculator. Instead, the Web team gave up at the first road block the rebellious youth threw at them. It may not have been purposeful, but it is indicative.
Granted, I may have issues with the calculator because I’m not the target audience. But that’s not because I’m a guy. It’s because I’m 21.
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Barack Obama's "bitter" comment gave Hillary Clinton an opening. But
the combination of hackneyed outrage and a fast counterpunch by Obama
suggests that the "scandal" may not last. Take Clinton down 1.8 points
to 12.4 percent.
On Day 4 of the controversy, journalists scramble to measure how much people care. So far, signs point to not really. A new Quinnipiac poll shows
Clinton's six-point lead in Pennsylvania holding steady. The poll
summary cites "no noticeable change" in the numbers on April 12-13,
when the "scandal" was entering full tilt. Then again, that was over
the weekend, when Pennsylvania voters were busy venting their
frustrations by shooting guns and going to church. Other surveys vary:
A SurveyUSA poll shows Clinton up 14 points in the state—less than her
18-point lead last week. A Rasmussen poll puts her ahead by nine
points, as opposed to five last week. An ARG poll shows Clinton jumping
from a tie to a 20-point lead but merits skepticism, given that it's a
robo-poll and a wild statistical outlier. Expect more thorough numbers
later this week.
Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence is mounting: Clinton gets shouted down when she brings up Obama's remarks at a forum; Pennsylvania booster in chief Gov. Ed Rendell downplays
the significance of the comments, saying it won't cost Obama more than
"a couple of points at the margin" (this could be more expectations
gaming, but still); undecided superdelegates seem largely nonplussed. ...
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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Clinton’s new Pennsylvania ad might be the most hilariously bad political spot since Ron Paul’s epic New Hampshire farce. But whereas Paul’s ad came off as charmingly cheesy, Clinton’s feels painfully forced. To call it cardboard would be an insult to the box.
Let’s start with the text. The ad quotes Obama’s remarks that some people "cling to guns or religion … as a way to explain their frustrations." That’s the exact excerpt. They leave out the part about immigration and xenophobia, which is arguably more offensive than the "guns and religion" part. We then hear from a few good citizens of Pennsylvania who are just outraged at Obama’s remarks. One woman says she was "very insulted" by Obama’s comments. Another intones, as flatly as possible, "I’m not clinging to my faith out of frustration and bitterness—I find that my faith is very uplifting." Then, the best part: "The good people of Pennsylvania deserve a lot better than what Barack Obama said." "Good people of Pennsylvania"? Who talks like that? It’s like a parody of a bad attack ad.
The ad represents everything that’s wrong with Clinton’s response to the "bitter" flap. For one thing, it violates the cardinal rule of gaffesploitation: Let other people pour the gasoline for you. That’s what surrogates are for. If the gaffe is bad enough, the offending candidate will hang himself with his own words. But to take this to the airwaves—and so clumsily, too—has the whiff of desperation. Secondly, Clinton is overplaying her hand. Obama’s comments were offensive to many, but they contained an undeniable kernel of truth—that people are bitter about economic conditions. Meanwhile, Clinton's response fairly reeks of cynicism even to the untrained nose. Whatever you think of Obama's condescending wording, Clinton’s manufactured outrage and the stilted delivery thereof should break the needle on anyone’s BS-meter.
It’s too early to say for sure, but early indicators suggest this line of attack is going nowhere. A new Quinnipiac poll shows Clinton’s lead in Pennsylvania unmoving. A national Gallup survey gives Obama his biggest lead ever, 50 percent to 41 percent. (Some robo-polls show him up from before; some down.) It’s hard to reconcile those numbers with what Clinton portrays as a national outcry over Obama’s comments. Maybe that’s why she felt the need to run this ad—because the tracking polls weren’t moving.
The timing is unfortunate, too—Clinton’s post-Penn ads were just starting to get good.
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There’s still no reliable data to show whether Obama’s "bitter" comments have taken a toll in Pennsylvania or anywhere else. But the first bit of highly tenuous, anecdotal evidence deserves a look.
Both Clinton and Obama spoke today at a forum sponsored by the American Alliance for Manufacturing in Pittsburgh. The group is a nonpartisan nonprofit that can’t legally endorse a candidate. It does include the United Steelworkers, though, which backed John Edwards’ bid but hasn’t thrown its weight behind either Clinton or Obama.
While Obama got cheers when he challenged Clinton’s assertion that he is "out of touch," Clinton’s suggestion that voters were "disappointed by recent remarks that [Obama] made" drew audible murmurs and at least one "No!" The Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins posts the two videos back-to-back and argues that the contrast should be "heartening for the Obama camp."
But someone who was in the room at the time (and doesn’t back either candidate) said the videos exaggerate the response. In the roomful of 1,600 people, only "a handful" were making noise. "I think it was a pocket of a few ladies near the microphone who happened to be very vocal," he said. Also, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reports, per the Clinton campaign, that the objectors were a group of pro-Obama SEIU members.
All that being a long way of saying, we'll wait for the polls.
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A month ago, Huffington Post promoted an article on its home page that led to this garishly bad YouTube video by the McCain Girls. Trailhead steered clear at the time—if we wanted to hear appalling, off-key crooning we’d go to a Kristy Lee Cook concert—for fear that we’d provoke a lawsuit from aggrieved readers if we linked to it. When it originally published a link to the video, HuffPost didn’t include any details about the video—who made it, how they found out about it, or why they thought it was remotely amusing.
Today, HuffPost offered answers to all three of those questions. The site promoted an article on their home page titled “McCain Girls Mystery Solved… See Who Made The Music Video.” Inside, there’s a paragraph of original text where HuffPost reveals the creator is comedy site 23/6—a site that they co-produce with IAC/InterActiveCorp. (They didn’t give a direct answer to why thought the video was chuckle-worthy, but we can assume their funny bones were numbed by corporate synergy.)
Huffington Post never mentions that they have a stake in 23/6’s success—only that the video and the singing trio “are the brain children of comedy site 236.com.” The piece then goes on to quote today’s New York Times piece that outs the video as a parody. The New York Times reporter says only that 23/6 is “owned by an affiliate of IAC/InterActiveCorp that parodies the news.” No mention of the Huffington Post. Mario Ruiz, a HuffPost spokesman confirmed to me that 23/6 is a “joint production between IAC and the Huffington Post” and that “the Times failed to mention HuffPost.” The Huffington Post also failed to mention the Huffington Post.
For the site to write that its subsidiary created the video, but hide the fact that 23/6 is its subsidiary violates journalistic ethics 101. It’s only compounded because the video wouldn’t have gone viral without the Huffington Post’s help in the first place. Nor would it have exploded in popularity if people knew it was a joke from the outset. The Washington Post writes that the clip languished on YouTube for a week without much fanfare until Huffington picked it up. A month later, it has more than 1.7 million views. Huffington has every right to advertise its own product—Slate does it with SlateV every day—but it needs to make clear where the content is coming from. (Huffington does this on a regular basis with 23/6’s written content.)
I asked HuffPost’s spokesman whether they had purposefully omitted a line about their stake in 23/6’s videos. He has yet to respond.
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Hillary Clinton’s strategy when it comes to wooing superdelegates seems to be aggressive courtship followed by equally aggressive rejection. They’re your best friend until the moment they endorse Obama, at which point you disown them. Bill "Judas" Richardson learned this firsthand.
That could explain why Clinton took a thinly veiled shot at Al Gore at last night’s “Compassion Forum":
We had two very good men, and men of faith, run for president in 2000 and 2004. Large segments of the electorate concluded that they did not really understand, or relate to, or respect their ways of life.
Honestly, if Clinton thought there was even a sliver of a chance that Al Gore would endorse her, she never would have said this. The dis isn’t quite explicit; she couches it as what other people think. But a little interlinear reading—“large segments of the electorate” represents the unassailable Will of the People, which is of course never wrong—makes it pretty clear that she’s endorsing the idea. Later in the evening, when Obama appeared on the program, he pointedly stood up for the former veep: “I thought Al Gore won.”
Meanwhile, the Scotsman (of Samantha Power fame) ran a thinly sourced piece yesterday reporting that Jimmy Carter and Al Gore are planning to endorse Obama any day now in a double-fisted death blow to Clinton’s campaign. Over at DailyKos, diarist "davefromqueens" thinks Clinton lashed out at Gore yesterday as a pre-emptive strike against an impending endorsement. Of course Gore would endorse Obama, the logic goes, they’re both out-of touch elitist males.
It could be that Gore has truly decided not to endorse, and that Obama was just defending Gore in order to defend himself. But then why would Clinton go out of her way to 1) attack Gore, 2) explicitly link Gore and Kerry, who has endorsed Obama, and 3) implicitly link Obama to both of their losses? There’s no reason to publicly insult a potential ally unless he has already switched to the other side. Neutrality wouldn’t merit scorn.
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The reasons Obama’s “bitter” gaffe could hurt him have been widely enumerated. In a nutshell: It creates the centerpiece of the Republicans’ general election case against him. Coupled with Rev. Wright, the lapel pin, the pledge of allegiance, the persistent Muslim rumors, and his race/name, the charge of elitism is a Swift Boat campaign waiting to happen.
But there’s another vulnerability in his remarks, and that’s the optimist/pessimist factor. In any election, pretty much no matter what the circumstances, voters are going to favor the optimist. Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech may have nailed a core truth about the state of the union, but come on, what a downer. As Joe Klein pointed out, “When Ronald Reagan touted ‘Morning in America’ in the 1980s, Dick Gephardt famously countered that it was near midnight ‘and getting darker all the time.’ ” Who wants to hear that? If Americans wanted to be depressed, they’d elect Eeyore.
That’s one reason Obama’s campaign has succeeded so far—“hope and change” is more compelling than “judgment and experience.” But “bitterness” could easily become the new byword of critics looking to undercut his message of (some would say misguided) optimism. Clinton says the Pennsylvanians she has met aren't bitter—they're hopeful. John McCain is already intimating that bitterness is somehow the opposite of patriotism. Of course, Obama would argue that bitterness and optimism—not to mention patriotism—aren’t mutually exclusive but that together they make change possible. It's been part of his message all along. Which is why the “bitterness” aspect isn’t likely to do much lasting damage to Obama—among a certain population slice, the man is synonymous with optimism.
If this episode manages to tar Obama, it won’t be for the “bitter” part. It will be for pairing “guns” and “religion” with xenophobia and racism. That’s where Clinton is hitting him now and where McCain will hit him in the fall.
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Barack Obama's "bitter" comment is just the gaffe Clinton needed to
woo superdelegates. Her chances of winning the nomination jump 4.5
points to 14.2 percent.
Hillary Clinton needed
a miracle. She's down in pledged delegates, likely to lose the popular
vote, and slipping on the superdelegate front. So, Barack Obama's comment
at a San Francisco fundraiser—that bitter Pennsylvanians "cling to guns
or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them" in response to
economic hardship—is as close to divine intervention as she could get.
With Pennsylvania a week off, Clinton has just enough time to foment
outrage and perhaps regain her formerly wide lead
in the polls. It's also as comprehensive a gaffe as Obama could have
mustered: It's got elitism, guns, religion, immigration, and trade—just
the controversy cocktail Clinton was waiting for.
The "bitter"
incident serves one real purpose for Clinton: It strengthens her case
to superdelegates. Clinton has already been painting a potential Obama
nomination as a disaster scenario.
This flap gives her fresh buckets and a new brush. Among her plausible
arguments: Obama just lost Pennsylvania in the general. He alienated
Reagan Democrats across the country. He squandered a major advantage
over the less-religious McCain. His "bitter" comments—and the attitudes
they represent—are just the tip of an iceberg of vulnerabilities. Clinton even compared
him to John Kerry and Al Gore (so much for that endorsement), who
voters thought "did not really understand, or relate to, or respect
their ways of life." An Obama nomination, she can now argue, would be
the worst kind of disaster—a repeat. ...
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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One advantage of the 2008 Primary: Director’s
Cut: Extended Edition is the opportunity to learn every last minutia
of the Democratic nomination process. What used to be a complex, impenetrable
system no one had time to examine has now become a complex, impenetrable system
we have way, way, too much time to examine.
Under the microscope today is a group of superdelegates
called add-on delegates. The 76 add-ons are unbound,
just like other superdelegates. The difference is that they’re not named until the
spring, when the states hold their conventions. Most states have just one
add-on delegate, but some bigger states have more. (Pennsylvania,
for example, has three; California
has five.) Each state has a different process for selecting add-ons—sometimes
the state party chair picks them, sometimes it’s a committee, sometimes an
entire convention. If you’re curious, DemConWatch lists
when and how each state picks.
So although you can’t predict their behavior perfectly,
there’s at least some logic behind
which way the add-ons swing. For example, California
state party chairman Art Torres says
he plans to pick the state’s five add-ons proportionally according to the
primary results—three for Clinton,
two for Obama. In Washington,
D.C., where Obama won
overwhelmingly, one add-on has declared
for Obama and one is still undecided. In states with only one add-on, the
delegate is likely to go to the candidate who won the state. That’s why Clinton won
Arkansas’ single
add-on delegate. In general, the add-ons seem to break down roughly according
to which candidate won where.
So here’s an experiment: What happens if each of the states
that haven’t yet selected their add-ons pick proportionally according to the
primary results? (For the sake of argument, we’ll go with ABC’s prediction
yesterday that Clinton wins Pennsylvania,
Indiana, West Virginia,
Kentucky, and Puerto Rico, and that Obama wins
Guam, North Carolina,
Oregon, Montana,
and South Dakota.)
In states that have more than one delegate, we split them roughly proportionally.
For example, each candidate gets one of South Carolina’s
two add-ons; likewise, each gets two of New
York’s four. In Pennsylvania,
we’ll give Clinton
two and Obama one.
In this scenario, of the 63 add-on delegates that have yet
to be selected, Obama gets 35 and Clinton
gets 28. Factor in the add-ons who have already declared their allegiances, and
Obama gets 41, Clinton
29. (Another five have been selected, but not yet announced whom they’re
backing.) In other words, it’s likely the add-ons will split in Obama’s favor,
or at worst roughly 50-50.
The takeaway point being that the superdelegate
wall we discussed yesterday is even
higher if you take the add-on situation into account. Seeing as the add-ons
are likely to favor Obama, Clinton
needs even more than 70 percent of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates
(our ballpark prediction) in order to reach 2025. One Frayster, “Independent Don,”
crunched the
numbers (an excellent post I encourage you to read) and concluded that if
the two candidates hypothetically split the remaining pledged delegates 50-50, then,
given the likely allocation of add-ons, Clinton would need to win a whopping 90 percent of the remaining 230 or so superdelegates
to get the nomination.
It’s not often we use the word
“impossible” around here. But it’s starting to look like there is no other way to describe Clinton's chances.
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So a Clinton campaign office in Terre Haute, Ind., goes up in flames last night, and reporters ask Bill Clinton, fresh off his Bosnia revival tour, whether he thinks it's a bad omen. He was ready for it:
“No, I think this is a good omen. We’ll rise from the ashes like the Phoenix.”
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Bill Clinton turns the conversation back to his wife's biggest
weakness, Obama ticks off the grass roots, and Hillary laughs
again—always bad news—sinking her back down 0.5 points to 9.7 percent.
Hillary Clinton's Bosnia wound was this close
to healing—the cast was off, the skin had closed, she was just starting
to walk again unassisted—when Bill decided to rip it open again. Twice! At a stop Thursday in Boonville, Ind., Clinton defended
his wife (unprompted, mind you) by saying, "There was a lot of
fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was
exhausted, misstated and immediately apologized for it, what happened
to her in Bosnia in 1995." Never mind that she repeated the story
several times, that the attention-getting March 17 speech occurred in the morning, and that she by no means "immediately apologized"—quite the opposite, it was a full week before she acknowledged that she "misspoke," which is not the same as apologizing. Oh, and the trip was in 1996, not 1995. ...
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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In this pre-Pennsylvania lull—a relative term—it sometimes feels like we’re just finding new ways to express how royally screwed Hillary Clinton is. Well, like it or not, the minds over at ABC have found yet another way. Their verdict: Clinton needs to win 80 percent of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates to secure the nomination.
The math is far from perfect (which they freely admit). It assumes that Clinton wins Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Puerto Rico, and that Obama wins Guam, North Carolina, Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota. In their model, they also put each victory at a 55-to-45 split.
But as an experiment, the numbers are instructive. For one thing, this is a fairly optimistic model for Clinton. Given current polls in Pennsylvania, a 10-point margin would be considered a huge win for her. In other states, it’s likely to be closer as well. In the past, Obama has been able to narrow her lead by logging face time in states that favor Clinton. (See California, Texas, and, to a lesser extent, Ohio.) Certain Obama wins, on the other hand, are likely to be wide. North Carolina could well be a blowout, as many polls put him up 20 points. Even when they factor in Florida and Michigan, Clinton still needs to win 237 of the remaining 300 delegates—or about 80 percent—to get to 2025.
Using Slate’s Delegate Calculator, we tried playing around with different scenarios to see how that number changes. Here’s the most interesting one:
Clinton wins big. Say Clinton wins all the remaining contests by a 10-point margin. (That's impossible, barring revelations that Obama does lines on the campaign bus, but bear with us.) Obama would still be ahead in pledged delegates, 1671 to 1563. Add on their current superdelegate tallies—226 for Obama and 251 for Clinton, according to Politico—and they’d be at 1897 and 1814, respectively. Even then, Clinton would need to win 211 of the still-uncommitted 300 delegates, or about 70 percent.
This is worth restating: Even if Hillary Clinton wins every single one of the remaining contests by 10 points, she still needs to win 70 percent of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates. Given that since Feb. 5, Obama has netted 69 superdelegates and Clinton has lost a net of five, it’s fair to say the pendulum is not swinging her way (although she did get a whopping two superdelegates today).
A caveat: Superdelegates are by definition not pledged. Those who have committed can change their minds. If Clinton wins the remaining contests by big margins, surely some Obama supers would swing her way. But they would still have to grapple with the fact that Obama will have won the pledged delegate count. (A fact that's also likely to swing some Clinton supers over to Obama.)
We’ve known for some time that Clinton is relying on superdelegates to win the nomination. (Obama needs them, too, but he will have the pledged delegate count on his side.) Only now is it becoming clear how overwhelmingly she needs to sway them. There's a point at which even Rocky would cut his losses.
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There's no other way to put it: Hillary Clinton is suffering from the
soft punditry of low expectations. We explained yesterday how Hillary's
chances improve if
she's not actively taking damage, kind of like a first-person shooter.
The corollary is that Barack Obama is like Google: He has to continually outperform expectations
to keep his stockholders onboard. Treading water is not an option. So
when both candidates pick up a superdelegate, the tie goes to Clinton.
Factor in the $2.5 million she picked up from last night's Elton John
concert, and we're giving her two-tenths of a point, bringing her to a 10.2 percent chance of winning the nomination.
Today's news: Obama snagged the endorsement of Wayne Holland, the chair
of the Democratic Party in Utah, while Clinton netted former Pittsburgh
Mayor Sophie Masloff, for a gain of one superdelegate apiece. Elton John's benefit concert for Clinton last night raised $2.5 million for her campaign, and Clinton went on the attack in Pennsylvania,
airing a 60-second radio ad calling out Obama for exaggerating his
refusal to take money from oil companies. The Puerto Rico newspaper El Nuevo Dia reports Clinton up in the polls by 13 percentage points in the territory, giving her some light at the end of the tunnel if she can hang on until June 1.
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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After Obama released an ad in Pennsylvania claiming not to take money from oil companies, Clinton unleashed her own ad challenging Obama by name and calling on him to withdraw the original ad. Her beef: No one takes money from oil companies. It’s illegal. Also, she calls out Obama for his vote in favor of the “Bush Cheney energy bill” of 2005. (Listen to it here.)
Clinton seems to be right on this one. FactCheck.org has a thorough analysis, which points out that Obama has taken more than $200,000 from people who work for oil companies and their spouses, plus tens of thousands more from two bundlers who are also oil execs. The energy bill vote is more complicated. While it was designed with Cheney’s guidance, and it did provide tax breaks for energy companies, it also offset those breaks with a tax hike for oil spills.
It’s fascinating to watch the Obama camp try to wriggle its way out of exaggerations like this. David Axelrod said there were no plans to revise the ad, saying, “I think it was accurate the way it was.” Well yes, it’s literally true that Obama takes no money from oil companies—that would be illegal. And yes, he’s within bounds when he says he doesn’t take money from PACs. But as FactCheck.org gamely points out, “We're not sure how a $5,000 contribution from, say, Chevron's PAC would have more influence on a candidate than, for example, the $9,500 Obama has received from Chevron employees giving money individually.”
Back in November, John Edwards accused Clinton of “parsing” the truth. The context was a debate where she appeared to waffle on whether she supported Eliot Spitzer’s proposed drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants. A day later, she came out and explicitly opposed it. Now Obama is doing the same thing: Slicing the truth down into tiny pieces, the result of which isn’t false, exactly, but highly misleading. It would be politically embarrassing for Obama to drop the ad at Clinton’s request. But if he expects to hold his opponents to the same standard—say, to challenge Clinton on her absurd claim that she opposed the Iraq war before he did starting in 2005—a clarification would be in order.
It's old news that Obama, by casting himself as the "change" candidate, has set his fans up for disappointment. No presidential candidate can succeed without some truth-twisting, and Obama is no different. But the oil ad isn't a white lie, nor is it a necessary one. Just as a candidate must pick his battles, he must also ration his untruths.
Update 3:37 p.m.: Obama hits back with another spot. (Listen here.) Looks like he's sticking with the true-in-fact-but-not-in-spirit claim that "he's the only candidate who doesn't take a dime from oil
company PACs or lobbyists."
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John Dickerson has a new piece up discussing John McCain’s unlikely new outreach tour through Democratic strongholds. The theory, writes Dickerson, is that “even if voters disagree with McCain, they come away with a favorable gut-level sense of his character when they get to see him up close.” In other words, he wants to develop a visceral connection with voters similar to Obama’s—the factor that may have been (and continues to be) Clinton’s undoing.
Part of that all-round good-guy image for McCain has always been transparency. He’s weirdly diligent about answering questions at press conferences. He’s so generous about letting journalists aboard his campaign bus that they call it the Straight Talk Express without a trace of irony. And now his campaign announces that as president, he would hold a presser at least every two weeks.
If the goal of the new tour is partly to provide contrasts with Obama, the transparency angle is smart. Obama says he would helm the most transparent White House ever, but access on the campaign trail has been anything but complete. (Just ask Lynn Sweet.) And whereas Hillary has developed a reputation for stonewalling the press, Obama gets away with it. McCain may have found a soft spot.
Not that voters are going to cast their ballots based on who holds more press conferences. Nor is transparency an obvious line of attack for the Republican side, where executive-privilege theories have been used to justify greater privacy. But after the eight years of a president whose first and only media instinct has been to bunker down, both nominees would likely benefit from a bit more openness.
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Now that Hillary Clinton has called for President Bush to boycott the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics—something British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced he will do—she’s pressuring her opponents to do the same.
Obama is resisting. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to look like he’s caving to her demand. Maybe it’s because Chicago is competing to host the games in 2016. Or maybe it’s that he doesn’t think the United States should jeopardize its economic relationship with China.
Whatever the reason, he does a pretty spanking job of turning the subject from a vulnerability—boycotting the Olympics—to an attack on deficit spending and foreign debt. Here’s the end of a long, circuitous answer he gave today in Malvern, Pennsylvania on the subject of the Olympics, as reported by First Read:
We have to take a stronger stance. We have to take a stronger stance and it's got to be more consistent over time. Let me make one last point about China: It's very hard to tell your banker that he's wrong, all right? And if we are running huge deficits and big national debts and we're borrowing money constantly from China, that gives us less leverage. It give us less leverage to talk about human rights, it also is giving us less leverage to talk about the uneven trading relationship that we have with China.
Impressive! This is the same guy thought to be slow on his feet in the first few debates. Now if only he can segue into a conversation about NAFTA, snipers, and Hillary's laugh, the nomination is his.
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You’d think that after an eight-hour testimony like Petraeus and Crocker's yesterday, the presidential candidates would now have a clear set of facts to debate. If only. The problem, as the Times puts it, is that Clinton/Obama and McCain “seemed to be talking about two different wars.” Clinton cited the war’s “tremendous cost to our national security.” Obama suggested our best hope might be a “messy, sloppy status quo” as long as there’s not “huge outbreaks of violence.” McCain seemed cheery by contrast: “We’re no longer staring into the abyss of defeat, and we can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success.”
Petraeus and Crocker, meanwhile, did little to clarify details. Clinton and Obama pushed them to describe progress that would justify a drawdown in troops. “These factors are fairly clear,” Petraeus told Clinton. “There’s obviously an enemy situation factor, there’s a friendly situation factor with respect to Iraqi forces, local governance, even economic and political dynamics, all of which are considered as the factors in making recommendations on further reductions.” In other words, We have no idea. As Fred Kaplan phrased it, “They laid out a Catch-22: If things in Iraq get worse, we can't cut back, lest things get worse still; if things get better, we can't cut back, lest we risk reversing all our gains.”
How does this change the debate? Not one bit. If anything, it gives both the Obama/Clinton side and the McCain side what they need to keep making their arguments louder than ever. McCain can focus on military progress, which Petraeus said is “significantly better” than before, while Obama/Clinton can focus on the lack of political progress, which is equally undeniable. For McCain, security is the benchmark of success. For Obama/Clinton, who stress that “there is no military solution,” success is a sustainable political structure (which, of course, presumes security). But as yesterday’s testimony showed, there’s no agreement on the state of the war. If the GOP and Democratic nominees were to debate Iraq right now, it would be like ships passing in the night.
Maybe that’s why the recent rhetorical battle over John McCain’s “100 years” remark has been so impenetrable: The candidates are imagining totally different scenarios. McCain insists he’s talking about a long-term occupation akin to that of postwar Japan and Korea, where tens of thousands of troops are still stationed. Americans would accept that sort of peacekeeping role, he says, “as long as our soldiers are not being wounded or maimed or killed.” Obama would dispute the premise. When Obama thinks of 100 years in Iraq, it’s not a peaceful occupation he imagines. It’s a protracted expenditure of money and blood that fails to reach the point where we can draw down troops. From that perspective, cutting our losses makes a lot of sense.
If Petraeus’ testimony clarified anything, it’s that the candidates perceive the war like alternate realities. As Hillary might say, for either candidate to accept the other’s premises requires a “willful suspension of disbelief.” All this should make the debate over the war this fall—like the war itself—protracted and ugly.
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If the presidential candidates have one goal, it’s to maximize face time. Get in front of as many voters as possible while expending the least amount of jet fuel and energy. Tonight, you’ll see the philosophy on display when all three candidates show up on American Idol for the show’s philanthropic extravaganza, Idol Gives Back. Twenty-four million people tuned in to last night’s show—only 3.5 million less than the populations of Indiana, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina combined. The candidates will ask Americans to donate to charity and—just guessing here—find a way to make a strained link between philanthropy and their platforms.
Clearly, this begs for an analogical match-up of the candidates to their Idol doppelgangers.
Hillary Clinton: Kristy Lee Cook
Cook is not going to win American Idol, but she continues to slip into the next round week after week after week. Sound familiar? After early stumbles, she’s been getting progressively stronger with every week—something the judges once thought was impossible. At this point, she has embraced her bottom-of-the-barrel status and knows that the only way to stay alive is to put a smile on her face and keep on fighting.
Last night’s performance of “Anyway” spoke to embittered female voters nationwide—this after her bald pander to American sensibilities with “God Bless the U.S.A.” kept her alive two weeks ago. Clinton, meanwhile, has been courting female voters from the get-go and turned to the Rocky metaphor last week to grovel at the feet of Pennsylvanians.
John McCain: Carly Smithson
McCain and Smithson are both grizzled vets in their respected fields. McCain has tried to be president once before but fell short in the 2000 Republican primary. Smithson has already had a record contract but failed to gain any traction on the airwaves. They both have quirky arms: Smithson’s tattoo and McCain’s inability to raise his hands above his head. Neither of them is a typical American—Smithson is a native Irishwoman and McCain was born on a U.S. military installation in Panama—yet they’re aspiring for the country’s most famous—and arguably most important—titles.
Smithson’s performance of Heart’s “Crazy on You” dovetails nicely with McCain’s widely reported temper, as does her spot-on croon of The Beatles’ “Come Together” with McCain’s campaign finance and environmental efforts. Simon Cowell often tells Smithson that she’s a great singer with a bad tendency to pick the wrong song to sing—just like McCain is a gifted politician who can’t seem to pander to enough fat-walleted donors. Last night’s “Show Must Go On” should’ve been McCain’s theme song last summer when he was out of money and on the brink of electoral death.
Barack Obama: David Archuleta
Archuleta is that baby-faced wunderkind that Idol has always been waiting for. He’s young yet poised beyond his years. His rendition of “Imagine” elevated Lennon’s words beyond the ‘60s and transcended the generation gap. His performance of “The Long and Winding Road” echoes Obama’s patience with Clinton’s sentry position in the battle for the nomination. Archuleta attracts a rabid, delirious group of screaming fans called the “Arch Angels” that vote without fail for the cherubic contender. Obama’s rabid, delirious fans are simply called “idealists.”
Archuleta, just like Obama, is presumed to be the front-runner—but he still has to knock off the remaining contenders first. Naturally gifted, uncharacteristic gaffes—like Archuleta’s brain fart during “We Can Work It Out” or Obama’s Rev. Wright imbroglio—are the only things that stand in both contenders’ ways of reaching the finals.
Spot comparisons we missed? Hit up our inbox.
UPDATE April 10, 8:30 a.m.: Looks like Hillary stands no chance against Fergie. Per the NYT, the candidates weren't important enough to make it into Wednesday night's show. They'll show up on tonight's elimination episode instead.
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In case you haven't noticed, the Hillary Deathwatch operates a lot like the health meter in Gears of War.
As long as you're not getting shot at, your health goes up. In
Hillary's case, nothing too crazy happened in the past 24 hours—a solid
performance at the Petraeus hearing, a slight post-Penn morale boost,
and a superdelegate regained. Which, in total, bumps Clinton up 0.1
points to a flat 10 percent chance of winning the nomination.
Clinton
and Obama showed off their grilling skills at yesterday's Senate
hearings with Gen. David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker but didn't offer
much more than their usual bleak assessments. Clinton drew contrasts
with John McCain, saying she "fundamentally" disagreed with his
assessment that troop withdrawals are irresponsible—but stopped short
of her "willing suspension of disbelief" remarks last time. Spoken like
a true future majority leader.
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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For all the talk about how Mark Penn undermined Clinton’s credibility on free trade by advising the Colombian government, there’s been less attention to how Bill could be doing the exact same thing.
Today, Ben Smith and Sam Stein fleshed out Bill Clinton’s longtime endorsement of the Colombia free trade deal. Short story, he gave several high-paid speeches throughout Latin America advocating for the agreement and accepted an award from Colombian president Uribe for his help.
Clinton spokesman Jay Carson dismissed the Bill/Hillary divide in a statement as old news:
"Senator Clinton is the candidate for president and she is a clear and firm opponent of the Colombian free trade agreement. Like other married couples who disagree on issues from time to time, she disagrees with her husband on this issue. President Clinton has been public about his support for Columbia's request for U.S. trade preferences since 2000,” Carson said. “Yawn.”
Not sure about you, but I’m wide awake. Given the degree to which Hillary participated in her husband’s administration, shouldn’t we expect Bill to be as (if not more) influential in hers? Also, there’s a difference between a wanton adviser and a contradictory spouse. You can’t fire your husband. As someone who would arguably be more powerful than any Cabinet member, shouldn’t Bill’s lobbying matter as much as Mark Penn’s?
Then there’s the China issue. Hillary made news yesterday by urging President Bush to boycott the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. She was smart to get out front on the issue—any chance to relive her 1995 “women’s rights are human rights” moment is worth taking. But if this issue grows as August approaches, her hawkishness will begin to clash with the Clinton administration’s soft China policy. After slamming China for human rights violations in his 1992 campaign, Bill removed human rights standards from China’s Most Favored Nation status requirements for the sake of economic relations. He later became the first president in the world to visit China since Tiananmen Square. (See Peter Baker’s write-up of Bill’s China reversal.)
No doubt Hillary disagreed with her husband’s policy toward China in the 1990s, as she claims to have done on NAFTA, and his actions on behalf of Colombia. But their divergence of opinion now suggests more than a little campaign posturing. No one really believes a President Clinton or a President Obama would be nearly as protectionist as they now claim. “Renegotiating” trade agreements is their blanket term for reform, but that could mean merely adding environmental and labor standards, with little effect on outsourcing. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine either one endangering our cozy relationship with China to make a symbolic statement about human rights, especially with the economy lagging. Once in office, Bill Clinton advocated a "principled, pragmatic approach" to China, which could just as well describe his stance on Colombia and NAFTA. The notion that Hillary or Obama would do anything different will likely vanish at their inauguration.
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Remember Hillary Clinton’s amazing
inter-stellar flight suit from the February debate in Austin? It's back!
Clinton
sported the same gold-trimmed aerodynamic collar on Morning Joe today, prompting host Joe Scarborough to declare his love for Hillary. We figured she would have retired it after our
withering separated-at-birth side-by-side with Star Trek’s Tasha Yar, but clearly she feels she hasn’t locked up
the white male vote as thoroughly as she’d like. We sincerely hope this remains a wardrobe staple. So, for old time’s sake:
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Hurray, everyone’s finally got their narrative! Hillary is untrustworthy—so every time she tells a story, critics will question it. Obama is inexperienced—so every time he does something naive, critics will jump on it. McCain is many things (ill-tempered, an economic dunce) but above all senile—so every time he appears to confuse Iraqi sects, critics start the retirement home drumbeat.
Well, McCain has just dished up some more fodder. While questioning Gen. Petraeus at today’s Senate armed services committee hearing, McCain appears to call al-Qaida in Iraq “a sect of the Shiites”—then catches himself and adds “or Sunnis or anybody else.” Nice recovery!
Sure, people are hypersensitive when it comes to McCain and the Sunni/Shiite divide ever since he confused the two sects during a press conference in Jordan. But then why does he keep doing it? He repeated the mistake on a radio show the same week as his Middle East trip. And now this. Shouldn’t someone from McCain campaign have forced him by now to write al-Qaida is Sunni on the chalkboard 100 times?
Obama has shown his willingness to twist McCain’s “100 years” comment. But McCain is just digging himself deeper with this one. While the "100 years" line is easily distorted, it's also easily refuted. McCain is right when he says it's absurd to suggest he doesn't know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites—and that's why he should really stop mucking it up.
Think Progress has video. Comedy gold, by Senate-hearing standards.
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Just yesterday we told you that Hillary Clinton was a serial spreader of misinformation—and we used the recent revelations that Clinton was using a false anecdote on the stump to prove our point. It turns out that we were as wrong as Hillary: Clinton’s story was partly true—but neither she nor we knew it. The story in question is about a woman who delivered a stillborn child and died shortly after in Ohio. But beyond those basic details, the rest becomes a bit hazy.
Essentially, this is a giant game of telephone. Just for you, we wiretapped the convos. Here’s a quick rundown of how the story began, and how it transformed from there.
First, someone tells the story to Meigs County Deputy Sheriff Bryan Holman. This was the conversation that started it all, but we don’t know when it took place or what was said. We only know that later, Holman told the AP that he had heard the story second-hand. The New York Times reports that he heard it from a close relative of the deceased.
Next, Holman tells Clinton about Trina Bachtel—an Ohio woman who died two weeks after the fetus she was carrying also passed away. Holman said that Bachtel had outstanding bills at a local hospital because she was uninsured, and when she returned while pregnant, the hospital refused to see her unless she could pay a $100 fee. Still uninsured, according to Holman, Bachtel went to another local hospital, where they “stopped her labor” and told her to come back in two days. Before that could happen, she delivered the stillborn child. Later, Bachtel was flown to Columbus, Ohio, where she died within 15 days.
Clinton runs with the story and starts relaying it in her stump speech as proof that the country needs universalized health care. In one instance, according to the AP, Clinton told an audience in Terre Haute, Ind., that Bachtel was uninsured and refused care at a hospital while she was pregnant. She did not mention Bachtel’s outstanding bills and implied that she delivered the stillborn child at the same hospital that initially refused to care for Bechtel. This is different from what Holman told Clinton. (Neither Holman nor Clinton named Bachtel or the hospital.)
The New York Times interviews representatives from the hospital—O’Bleness Memorial—where Bachtel delivered her stillborn child and discovers that they never refused to treat Bachtel. They also claim that she was insured at the time of treatment, a detail that directly contradicts Clinton’s version of the events.
The Clinton campaign admits to not fully vetting the story and says that they trust the hospital to tell the truth. They promise to stop telling the story in Clinton’s stump speech.
Bachtel’s aunt talks to the Washington Post and confirms that Bachtel did have insurance at the time of her death. But when she originally went to the first hospital (before she was pregnant), she was not insured and could not pay the $100 fee for treatment. The hospital sent her a letter that said she couln’t be treated there until she paid off her debt. Meanwhile, before she got pregnant, she acquired insurance but still didn’t go to the hospital closest to her because of her outstanding debt that she still couldn’t afford. (This, remember, contradicts what Holman originally told Clinton—that Bachtel went to the hospital she was indebted to while she was pregnant.) Instead, she went to O’Bleness, where she delivered a stillborn baby, and then died in the Columbus hospital a couple of weeks later. So, Clinton was right that Bachtel was uninsured—at one point she was—but wrong to say that she was uninsured during her pregnancy. Clinton also led voters to believe there was one repeat-offender hospital, when there was really a good-hospital, bad-hospital schema in play.
As of now, that’s where we stand. Clinton probably won’t be incorporating the anecdote into her stump speech anytime soon, but she still comes out of the mini-flap looking like she wasn't fully truthful with voters. The real issue is that nobody on her campaign called to confirm the story—both when it was first told and then when the hospital asserted its version of events. As the Times and Post have proven, it would have taken only two calls. But making two calls for every voter anecdote takes a long time, something that isn't always ensured on the trail.
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An opportunity to grill Gen. Petraeus in the Senate, a
favorable correction on her hospital story, and a bright new pollster bump
Clinton's electoral chances up 0.4 points to 9.9 percent.
The spotlight today is on Gen. David Petraeus and Ryan
Crocker, who return to the Senate after seven months to update senators on
progress in Iraq.
But just as much attention will be focused on the three presidential
candidates, who have no doubt been practicing their scowls in the mirror.
Expect intense skepticism from both Clinton and Obama, but nothing on par with Clinton's inflammatory
"willful
suspension of disbelief" comment. ...
Read more at the Hillary Clinton Deathwatch.
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The Daily News reports that McCain plans to convene his doctors next month to discuss the candidate’s health—probably the first such group assembled since JFK to determine whether a presidential candidate would survive his presidency. What McCain should really be doing, though, is giving “the Age speech.” You know—to finally, once and for all, address that blight on our nation’s history, the divide between old people and young. Here’s where he could take it.
Start with a joke: [Tap tap tap] Is this thing on? Just kidding. No really, is it? I don’t hear things.
Compare yourself to other great old people: My friends, I am old. But you know who else was old? Ronald Reagan. He was 69 when he took his first oath of office. Come January 2009, I will be 72 years old. That means I’ll be even more Reagan-like than Reagan, if you think about it.
Claim good health: All of my 47 doctors agree that I am in excellent health. I have been cancer-free for five years. I did today’s crossword puzzle in less than an hour, and today is a Wednesday. And look at the upside—I have a personal stake in making health care better.
Confront your weaknesses: Some people say I am already beginning to lose my mental faculties. They claim that when I said al-Qaida is helping arm Shiite militia, that it was a sign of my deteriorating mind. I assure you it is not. I believe that shit, honest to God. They also say I am forgetful, and that I don’t remember things about our economy. Well, I assure you, my friends, there’s nothing to forget.
Cite your gene pool: If you need proof that age isn’t a problem, look at my mother, Roberta. [Audience applauds.] Roberta is 95 years old, and she can still beat me at the 50 yard dash. Shot put, too. She may say things I disagree with, but that’s not because of her age. She’s always been one battalion short of a surge.
Connect with young people: Don’t forget that even though I am old, I consider myself an ambassador to the youth. I know all about your Britney Spears and Fleetwood Mac. I may have been tied up during Woodstock, but I did attend a Kennedy Center concert last year with my wife, Cindy. Sorry, my wife, Meghan.
Close with a joke: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m older than Frankenstein, and I’ve got more scars than—wait. I’m dirtier than oldenstein, and more Frank than—dammit! Where’d the teleprompter go? Oh, there.
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New York has published a genius teleplay
by Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr., a former West Wing writer-producer, that imagines what a
brokered convention would look like. It’s got everything—back-room deals, prostitution, a last-minute
Al Gore bid. It’s also got a great idea for a case Hillary Clinton can—should!—be
making to superdelegates:
Hillary’s car is
pulling away from the hotel. She spots Oregon
senator Ron Wyden getting into his car. She has her car chase Wyden’s car. At a
traffic light, she jumps out with a gang of Secret Service agents and they
surround Wyden’s car. She climbs into Wyden’s car and rides with him, working
on him to vote for her. When Wyden finally says he thinks only Obama can beat
McCain, Hillary is ready for that. She tells Wyden that McCain’s winning the
White House is the best thing that can happen for Wyden’s reelection in 2010,
because the president’s party always loses seats in midterm elections. A
Democratic president is going to make Wyden’s reelection that much tougher.
CUT TO:
Ron Wyden press conference. Wyden announces his support for Hillary, citing all
the usual reasons—health care, experience, ready on day one …
Memo to Clinton: Use it!
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Hillary Clinton catches a lot of flak for fudging facts. Sometimes it’s well-deserved, especially when she doubles down on untruths like the Bosnia sniper incident. Other times, her misstatements are innocent, but they get twisted into major offenses because they fit the Clintons-don’t-tell-the-truth narrative that’s been unspooling since the '90s.
A few recent instances fall in different places along the spectrum of misinformation:
Being wrong: Sometimes it’s an innocent mistake. In speeches across the country, Clinton has told a story about a pregnant woman in Ohio dying after being denied care that would have cost her $100. But it turns out to be untrue. The woman was not, in fact, uninsured, and she wasn’t denied care, either. Clinton had heard the story from an Ohio sheriff’s deputy last year but didn’t check before working it into her speech. Then again, it’s not a story you can easily check. Then again again, you might call it “too good to check.”
Fudging numbers: It’s official. Hillary Clinton is counting the votes in Florida and Michigan toward the popular vote tally. Everyone saw this coming; it’s a natural fit for her message that the two states’ primaries should count. But seeing as they don’t—and likely won’t in any significant way—it’s a stretch to factor those numbers into the popular-vote total, especially given that Obama wasn’t on the Michigan ballot. (The Clinton camp rebuts that Obama had ads up in Florida while she didn’t. In reality, Obama was airing a national ad on CNN that aired in Florida.) Either way, Obama’s popular-vote lead looks a lot different if you count Florida and Michigan (94,000) than if you don’t (717,000). Gov. Jon Corzine, who suggested he would vote for whomever wins the popular vote, wrote Sunday that he would include Florida and Michigan in the tally. Other instances of Clinton stat-juking include Bill Clinton claiming that Hillary can still win more primary delegates, as opposed to caucus delegates, as well as Evan Bayh pointing to her lead in Electoral College votes in the states each candidate has won.
Misleading: ABC’s Jake Tapper reports a fairly egregious new claim by Clinton that she opposed the Iraq war before Obama did starting in January 2005, when he became a senator. Not only is the metric preposterous—why not just start it one hour before some anti-war speech Hillary gave?—but Tapper also points out that even using that metric, Obama was first to criticize the war. (She made a statement on Jan. 26; Obama offered criticisms at a meeting on Jan. 18.) Parsing different statements on different days is an absurd exercise, but it only highlights the weirdness of Clinton’s claims in the first place.
Lying: Excuse me, politicians don’t lie—they misremember, fail to recall, or, in Clinton’s recent case, misspeak. But Clinton’s telling and retelling of the Bosnia sniper story qualifies as a good old-fashioned lie. Sure, the outrage that greeted the contradictions to her story was disproportionate to the offense. (And both sides have done their share of embellishing.) But Clinton’s decision to stick with her false account in the face of denials—albeit by Sinbad—sealed her fate. Now it looks like Bosnia hurt her more than Jeremiah Wright hurt Obama. (Still, she managed to joke about it on Leno last week.)
No doubt every candidate has wandered up and down the misinformation spectrum over the past year. Obama has “misspoken” about, among other things, his level of involvement in filling out a liberal survey as an Illinois state senator, his role in passing immigration legislation, the Kennedys’ role in helping his father come over from Kenya, and, most recently, his smoking habit. But those misrepresentations were spread out over many months. In the past few weeks, Clinton may have set a record.
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It might be tempting to cast Mark Penn's departure as the result of a dramatic internal struggle—the triumph of emotional, character-based messaging over Penn's numbers-based "strength and experience" mantra. But that's not what happened. He just screwed up one too many times.
Penn handed in his resignation as chief strategist early Sunday, after a Friday
Wall Street Journal article reported that Penn had met with the Colombian government to discuss a trade deal that Clinton herself opposed. (He was representing his PR firm, Burson-Marsteller Worldwide.) When news of the meeting first broke on Friday, Penn said he had made an "error in judgment." The Clintons were reportedly furious. Even the Colombian government
turned on Penn: His statement showed a "lack of respect" for the people of Colombia, they said before terminating his contract.
The list of Penn screw-ups is long but easily summarized: Many in the Clinton campaign blame him for Hillary's loss in Iowa; her decision not to compete in other caucus states, allowing Obama run up a string of victories in them; and her failure to match Obama's overarching message of inspiration with one of her own. (One of the few times Clinton
didn't stick with Penn's script—the famous Diner Sob—is widely credited for her stunning New Hampshire comeback.) Then there's the time
he told the L.A. Times that none of the problems in the Clinton camp were his fault, the time he repeated the word
cocaine on
Hardball while discussing Obama's youthful drug use, and the time he
told reporters that Obama "can't win" in a general election.
Given all this, it's a very good thing that Penn is out. Since joining the campaign, he and his firm billed more than $13 million. He sowed strife within the campaign's ranks. And whatever his brilliance, to critics watching CNN and MSNBC, he represented the breathless machinations of the Clinton camp. It was fitting that her man behind the curtain was this sweaty, haggard—most outlets use the word
rumpled—reedy-voiced man who seemed to believe everything and nothing all at once. If anything, Obama should be trying to get Penn to stay.
But Penn's biggest screw-up of all was not screwing up earlier. If the goal was to alienate working-class Pennsylvania voters who ferociously oppose free-trade deals and outsourcing, then his Colombia meeting could not have been better timed. Obama is narrowing the gap in the Keystone State.
Trade unions have already released statements slamming Penn—and Clinton, by association—for hypocrisy. The Obama camp may choose to slam her for it, too. But for now, they're sitting back and watching the show.
In a statement, Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams said that "Mark, and Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, Inc. will continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign." As long as it doesn't involve talking, they should be fine.
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John Edwards has finally given up on the presidency. Even as he was standing behind a podium in New Orleans announcing his withdrawal in late January, we didn’t really believe he was done. Remember, this is the same guy who mounted a failed campaign to be the Democratic nominee in 2004, went along for a failed vice presidential ride, and got back on the saddle for a failed campaign in 2008. Moreover, after he fell on his face in New Hampshire this year, he kept on begging for the country’s vote like a spurned teenage lover. When a politician that determined to become president claims he’s dropping out of the race, it’s hard to take his words at face value.
But now we’re sure that he’s ready to slink away from the bustle and grind of electoral politics. After months of not endorsing either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, Edwards said yesterday that he wouldn’t accept a vice presidential slot on either candidate’s ticket. After a rocky road with John Kerry in 2004, Edwards seems to have finally acknowledged what the American people have been trying to tell him all along: They don’t want him to be president.
This is the culmination of a rough few months for Edwards. He abstained from leveraging his superdelegate star power for either candidate; his Iowa delegates deserted him once he dropped out of the race; and neither of the candidates has paid much lip-service to his poverty agenda. Now he’s putting the kibosh on his last chance to get back in the game—before anyone even asked him to play. If he doesn’t reinject himself into the conversation now he’ll be as dated as an episode of Temptation Island.
While he rattled off moribund stump speeches between New Hampshire and his withdrawal, we sat Edwards down on the Freud sofa and psychoanalyzed his candidacy. At the time, there were five stages to his grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. His recent no-VP comments show that he’s finally reached the acceptance stage. He knows that the only way he’ll be in the Oval Office is as an invited guest.
But just because he’s done with the campaign trail doesn’t mean Edwards is done with politics. Hillary Clinton announced that she wants a Cabinet-level “poverty czar” in her administration—a position probably created with Edwards’ endorsement in mind. If Hillary doesn’t sweet-talk her way into the White House, Edwards can always emulate a certain former vice president and become a Poverty Gore rather than a poverty czar. What Al did for the environment John can do for the poor. Hell, if Gore’s current status is any indication, more people will want Edwards to be president when he isn’t trying to become one.
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There could have been worse moments for revelations to emerge that Mark Penn met with one client, the Colombian embassy, to discuss a free-trade agreement opposed by another client, Hillary Clinton. It could have happened on a slow news day, as opposed to the 40th anniversary of MLK’s assassination. Or a day when Clinton wasn’t releasing seven years of tax returns.
But because it didn't get much attention today, it remains to be seen how much impact this unwisest of unwise decisions—for Penn has made others—will have on the campaign. Obama spokesman Bill Burton reminded reporters of Clinton’s response to Austan Goolsbee’s meeting with Canadian officials: “I would ask you to look at this story and substitute my name for Sen. Obama’s name and see what you would do with this story. … Just ask yourself [what you would do] if some of my advisers had been having private meetings with foreign governments.”
Keep in mind that the situations are barely analogous. Goolsbee met with Canadian officials on behalf of the Obama campaign and allegedly said things that made Obama sound hypocritical. Penn, on the other hand, was representing his PR firm, Burston-Marsteller (although, oddly, a spokesman for Colombia’s president wasn’t sure). And while the meeting certainly makes Mark Penn sound hypocritical, it’s hard to extend the blame to Clinton herself.
Still, Penn is no doubt on the receiving end of a very large paddle right now. It’s not good enough for Penn to say, "I may be a hypocrite, but my client is not." For someone who sells a candidacy based largely on judgment, Penn displayed very little of it. As Josh Marshall put it, “[W]hen [Clinton’s] political future is on the line in a state like Pennsylvania, wracked by the loss of industrial jobs for decades, you think he could have waited a few more weeks before prancing off to help get a new free trade pact passed?” This campaign has seen unprecedented conflation of surrogate and candidate (Power, Ferraro, Shaheen)—it’s optimistic to think this crap won’t trickle up.
Penn has since apologized, but damned if Obama’s allies aren’t going to milk this like a Lancaster udder.
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Jason Horowitz has a great write-up of a Democratic fundraiser last night, featuring angry Clinton supporters and a testy Howard Dean. When donors raised the issue of seating Florida and Michigan delegations,
Dean said that in his view, the question could be settled only after the primaries had finished in June, and after the superdelegates had made their decision.
At that point Clinton campaign finance chair Hassan Nemazee spoke up. He said Dean's response sounded to him as if the DNC chairman were "essentially trying to kick the can down the road" and that the chairman was not exhibiting the type of leadership one would expect. Nemazee said that since the campaigns obviously could not reach a solution on their own before June, Dean's argument amounted to passing the buck.
Dean then responded, heatedly, that in his experience, those who sought the intervention of party leadership were motivated by their own particular agendas. And that was not the sort of leadership he intended to provide.
This illustrates the problem we talked about the other day: Dean thinks he can broker a “compromise” on the issue, without recognizing that the two campaigns have no common ground whatsoever. Either the states’ delegates get apportioned in a way that influences the election, or they don’t. So no matter what, if he forces a decision, it’s going to look like he’s taking sides.
You can see why he wants to stonewall. By waiting until after the primaries, Dean increases the chances that Florida/Michigan will be a nonissue. If one of the candidates may have dropped out by then, he or she will gladly seat the delegates.
You can also see how much this helps Obama. Not only does Clinton need their delegates, but Florida and Michigan are key to her case to superdelegates that she should win the nomination. Without official recognition that the two contests counted, she’ll have trouble arguing that her victories there mattered—not to mention lumping their votes into the popular vote tally. (It’s a tough case, anyway, seeing as Obama wasn’t on the Michigan ballot.)
So in that sense, “kicking the can down the road” isn’t a perfectly neutral stance—it ends up slightly favoring Obama.
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There’s plenty of juiciness in the latest New York Times/CBS poll. Obama’s national lead is shrinking and his favorability rating is dropping, yet more Americans identify with his values than those of his opponents.
But there’s another interesting tidbit I’d point out. When asked who they expect to win the Democratic nomination, regardless of whom they support, 67 percent of respondents named Obama, compared to Clinton’s 19 percent. (The split is almost exactly the same among Democratic primary voters and all voters.) Only 13 percent said they don’t know—a pretty low number, given that none of us truly know.
Some of this you could chalk up to media coverage (ahem). But it also suggests voters know a lot more about the obstacles facing Clinton than you’d expect. When her campaign points out that the American people are split, they’re right. Obama leads by less than 1 percent of the total number of delegates popular vote.* And that’s a hard argument to refute without getting into the mathematical weeds, which makes it easy for her campaign to dismiss claims that Clinton can’t catch up.
It’s surprising, therefore, that most voters don’t see it as "tied." Maybe we’re getting through after all.
More on this poll at Election Scorecard.
*Fraysters rightly point out that Obama leads by more than 1 percent of the delegates. Turns out the Clinton memo was talking about overall votes. Read it here.
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When Hillary Clinton allegedly told Bill Richardson that Barack Obama “cannot win” in November—an incident she now denies—she probably didn’t expect it to leak. But the timing couldn’t have been better.
With her shot at the nomination hinging on the whims of the superdelegates, the Clinton campaign is turning the “electability” argument up to 11. (That is, having exhausted the delegates argument, the popular vote argument, and the Florida-Michigan argument.) Their premise is that Clinton is more likely to win swing states than Obama is. In a conference call today, they pointed to a new Quinnipiac poll that puts Clinton two points ahead of John McCain in Florida, whereas Obama trails McCain there by nine points. The same poll also shows Clinton trouncing McCain in Ohio far more thoroughly than Obama would.
The Obama retort is that he would win swing states, too—just different ones—and that he would create new swing states. Today, NBC’s crack team of political oddsmakers drafted the first of many electoral maps, this time projecting that Obama could win the nomination without Florida and Ohio since he would put Colorado and Virginia in play. Blogger Josh Putnam reaches a similar conclusion using polling averages from the 50 states (via Ben Smith). His map shows Obama turning typically red states like Texas, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota into tossups.
Clinton could argue that there’s more risk involved in an Obama nomination, since his would be an atypical path to the presidency. But it’s that same risk—the prospect of the “reshaping of the electorate”—that excites a lot of Democrats (especially after Kerry’s traditional route failed so miserably in 2004). This is all a little premature, given that attitudes change the second you have a nominee, not to mention after months of general-election sparring. But if there’s a kernel of truth to Clinton’s statement that Obama “cannot win,” it’s that he can't win in the traditional way.
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The mortar in Clinton machine's bulwark, once thought to be
indestructible, continues to crumble as a once-faithful supporter hints
that he might defect. Plus, more good fundraising news for the Obama
camp brings Clinton to an even 9.0 percent chance of survival.
On the face of it, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine's statement this morning on CNBC
that he reserves the right to defect if Clinton loses the popular vote
sounds more inside baseball than headline news. But consider these
factors: Corzine endorsed Clinton
more than a year ago as part of Clinton's initial sweep of
superdelegates. (Yesterday was the anniversary of that announcement.) A
defection by Corzine would mean the foundation is crumbling. Also,
Clinton won the New Jersey primary
by 11 points on Feb. 5. Jersey is in her backyard, and the fact that
the governor would consider siding with the popular vote over the
overwhelming opinion of his constituents won't go overlooked by other
superdelegates from states she won. If Richardson is "Judas," what
would that make Corzine?
Read more at the Hillary Clinton Deathwatch.
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There’s a problem with all the superdelegate counts out there: They only include superdelegates who have officially declared their support for a candidate.
Now, granted, that’s the way any scientific tally should work. But it fails to count all the supers who have been hinting, leaning, or publicly praising one candidate or the other. Today, for example, Gov. Jon Corzine said he reserves the right to switch to Obama if he wins the popular vote. Which, if you’re like us in believing that a popular-vote win by Obama is all but mathematically inevitable, amounts to an Obama endorsement.
Or consider Jimmy Carter, who said this to a Nigerian newspaper: “My children and their spouses are pro- Obama. My grandchildren are also pro-Obama. As a superdelegate, I would not disclose who I am rooting for but I leave you to make that guess.” Not much room for interpretation there.
Or take Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Clinton supporter who said the other day that Obama would be the next president. It’s statements like these that suggest a lot of superdelegates out there are just looking for an opening—an excuse to jump in without looking as if they’re trying to swing the election.
Since March 4, Obama has picked up 12 superdelegates to Clinton's one. Since Feb. 5, he’s taken more than 50. But I’m guessing the numbers would be even more lopsided if you could somehow count the coy statements and other unsubtle hints of the uncommitted.
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Yesterday we noted how Obama’s recent gap-closing in Pennsylvania would force the Clinton campaign to adjust the goal posts a bit. Team Clinton held a conference call this morning, and, lo, it came to pass.
Communications director Howard Wolfson said during the call that contrary to media analysis, "a win is a win" for Clinton. In other words, there’s no point spread. Wolfson argued that Obama is campaigning hard in the state, outspending her 4-to-1, and that his campaign "expects to win Pennsylvania."
To understand the problem with that argument—aside from the fact, given Keystone demographics, that no one expects or ever expected Obama to win—you have to look at why people are saying Clinton needs to win big in Pennsylvania.
For one thing, she desperately needs the delegates. A mere win—as opposed to a big win—isn’t going to net her that many. She currently trails Obama by 164 pledged delegates, according to MSNBC. Even winning Pennsylvania by a 10-point margin, as in Ohio, would only net her about 18 delegates more than Obama. Meanwhile, Obama would still be far ahead in pledged delegates as well as total delegates.
Then there’s the popular vote. If Clinton doesn’t win the popular vote, she’s going to have a tough time convincing superdelegates to vote for her. Clinton backer and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine said today that he reserves the right to switch to Obama if Clinton doesn’t win the popular vote. (He also said she needs a “big win” in Pennsylvania to stay in the race.) Obama currently leads by 800,000 votes, according to Real Clear Politics. Nothing but a major victory in Pennsylvania is going to begin to close that gap. Of course, the popular vote is a messy number, and the Clinton camp will probably find its own way of counting. (Including Florida and Michigan, say, or disregarding caucuses.) But number-bending will only work for so long, especially if supers like Corzine are already getting antsy.
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Something we didn't mention in today's Deathwatch is a new Pennsylvania survey by Public Policy Polling that puts Obama barely ahead of Clinton, 45-43. (Read the PDF here.) That's within the 2.8 percent margin of error. What isn't statistically insignificant, however, is Obama's 28-point spike since the last PPP poll two and a half weeks ago.
As usual, remember that this is one poll, and could well be an outlier. But it re-raises the question of how much Clinton really needs to win by in order to "win" Pennsylvania. Mark Halperin puts the necessary margin at 10.5 percent. If true, then Obama's gap-closing is doing a lot more than tying it up. Normally the Clinton camp would be able to fix this with a little expectations management -- a simple shifting of the goal posts. But Pennsylvania was supposed to be Clinton country by a long shot, and it's going to be hard to make people forget that. Move the goal posts any further and you're in the bleachers.
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Hillary Clinton just released a new "3 a.m." ad, with a twist. This time, instead of some vaguely ominous national crisis, it's a vaguely ominous economic crisis. From the script:
But there’s a phone ringing in the White House and this time the crisis is economic. Home foreclosures mounting, markets teetering. John McCain just said the government shouldn’t take any real action on the housing crisis, he’d let the phone keep ringing. Hillary Clinton has a plan to protect our homes, create jobs. It’s 3 am, time for a president who’s ready.
At risk of sounding obnoxious, aren't the markets closed at 3 a.m.? Or maybe the crisis is happening in Japan?
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When it comes to seating Florida’s delegation, the DNC keeps saying
it’s going to come to a compromise that’s acceptable to both campaigns. “We all
agree that whatever the solution, it must have the support of both campaigns,”
said Howard Dean and Florida Democratic Chairwoman Karen Thurman in a joint
statement today. But is there really a scenario on which both campaigns are
going to agree?
I doubt it. The campaigns’ stances are simple. Everyone says
they want the delegations to be seated. But no one agrees on what that
means—how many delegates each candidate will get, whether to seat superdelegates
but not pledged delegates, or whether to treat Florida and Michigan equally. (Obama's absence from the Michigan ballot complicates things.) From Obama’s perspective, he won’t accept any scenario in which the
Florida and Michigan delegations affect the race.
Likewise, the Clinton
campaign won’t accept any scenario in which they don’t. That means the only way
they’ll come to a mutually acceptable compromise is if Obama’s delegate lead is
wide enough that seating the Florida and Michigan delegations
won’t help Hillary catch up. In other words, if Obama has his way, the
delegations will only get seated as long as they don’t matter. But then that
would tick Hillary off, taking the negotiations back to square one.
The DNC seems to think it can find a solution without taking
sides. I’m still not sure that’s possible. No one said Howard Dean’s job was
easy.
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One running theme of John McCain’s speeches is his youthful indiscretion. He made it the centerpiece of his speech today at Annapolis on day three of his autobiography tour:
In truth, my four years at the Naval Academy were not notable for exemplary virtue or academic achievement but, rather, for the impressive catalogue of demerits I managed to accumulate. By my reckoning, at the end of my second class year, I had marched enough extra duty to take me to Baltimore and back 17 times—which, if not a record, certainly ranks somewhere very near the top.
McCain has always been impressively candid about his youth. But in recent days, he hasn’t gone into detail. Speaking at his high school yesterday, he mentioned his “unruly passions” but left it at that. And no one has pushed him to reveal more.
Compare that to Barack Obama, whose admission in his memoir that he tried cocaine has produced reams of speculation. (The pinnacle would be the Times article accusing Obama of doing less drugs than he claims.) Why does Obama’s (relatively minor) youthful indiscretion merit so much more attention than McCain’s?
Two reasons: Because McCain's youth happened so long ago and because it’s been well-documented. On the first count, I’d guess this is one area where McCain’s age helps him. Whereas Obama’s youthful indiscretion occurred only 25 years ago, McCain’s wildest years are twice as far gone. (Then again, McCain's, er, indiscretions continued until he was Obama’s age.)
At the same time, plenty has been written on McCain’s past, often by McCain himself. Back in 1999, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg summarized the most colorful episodes in McCain’s campaign memoir, Faith of My Fathers:
There is, for instance the time McCain, on leave from the U.S. Naval Academy, went to visit his latest girlfriend in a classy suburb of Philadelphia. After knocking back a few too many at the train station, he collapsed drunk through the screen door of her parents' house. Or the time during his pilot training in Pensacola when he dated a stripper called "Marie, the Flame of Florida." Marie shocked the polite society of his married officer friends and their wives by pulling a switchblade out of her purse and cleaning her nails. Or, in a far more serious vein, the time when, as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, McCain attempted to hang himself with his shirt.
That last part highlights the third reason McCain’s misspent youth doesn’t dog him on the campaign trail: His redemption narrative. The years he spent as a POW in Hanoi—and the epiphanies he describes having had there—have not only supplanted his drinking habits and sex life as the key part of the McCain Story, they’ve made those earlier phases seem admirable. Everyone loves a redemption story, which is why McCain can be so honest about his past. Obama’s drug story is essentially, I did coke, then I stopped. For McCain, though, the early mess-ups are necessary to tell the story of his eventual self-discovery.
Indeed, McCain's screw-ups are central to his identity. He wouldn't cast himself as such an ethics hawk if it hadn't been for his involvement in the Keating Five scandal. The difficulty in admitting to more recent dalliances, however, is in convincing people that the past is really past.
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A high-profile Obama endorsement, a tightening race in Pennsylvania,
and a big March fundraising gap dock Hillary 0.4 points, taking her
down to 9.5 percent on the Clintometer.
The big news: Democratic national-security guru and former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton is endorsing
Barack Obama. Hamilton's backing isn't expected to invigorate voters,
Kennedy-style (though you saw how that worked out). But as a member of
the 9/11 commission and co-chair of the vaunted Iraq Study Group, he'll
burnish Obama's foreign-policy credentials. (And maybe his old-folk
cred, too—Hamilton is 76.) Too bad he's not a superdelegate. However,
Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal, who also endorsed Obama today, is. ...
Read more at the Hillary Clinton Deathwatch.
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In yesterday’s Washington
Post, Bill Richardson offered
his best retort yet to James Carville’s comparison of Richardson to “Judas”:
Carville and others say that I owe President Clinton's wife
my endorsement because he gave me two jobs. Would someone who worked for
Carville then owe his wife, Mary Matalin, similar loyalty in her professional
pursuits? Do the people now attacking me recall that I ran for president,
albeit unsuccessfully, against Sen. Clinton? Was that also an act of disloyalty?
Bill Clinton reportedly flew
off the handle in a meeting with superdelegates last weekend when the subject of Richardson came up. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
“Five times to my face [Richardson] said that he would never do that,” a
red-faced, finger-pointing Clinton
erupted.
He should have said three. Then he would have had the Peter parallel, too.
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When the Clinton campaign sent up a trial balloon
arguing that Democrats pushing for the race to end were trying to
“disenfranchise” the remaining states, we figured they’d be laughed out
of the room. (Would that mean Hillary’s initial plan to wrap up the
nomination on Super Tuesday would have disenfranchised half the states
in the Union?) We were young and foolish then.
Instead of backing off this line of argument, the campaign manager has now fleshed out an entire memo on the subject. Having all the states vote is “the American way,” writes campaign manager Maggie Williams:
The last time that we were told we’d better cut the process short or the sky would fall was when the Supreme Court stopped the Florida
recount in 2000. But Chicken Little was wrong. What was true then is
true now: there is nothing to fear—and everything to gain—from hearing
from all of the voters.
Curious that Williams chose the Florida
recount as an analogy. It's frighteningly apt. In 2000, the
presidential race was too close to call and therefore had to be decided
by an imperfect, undemocratic process—a Supreme Court vote. Clinton,
like all Democrats, would no doubt argue that the whole mess was an
affront to democracy. Fast forward to 2008. Again, we again have an
election that’s “too close to call,” according to the Clinton memo. But, in fact, they’re the ones who need the imperfect, undemocratic system—the superdelegates—to bail them out. Unless superdelegates push Clinton up and over Obama’s inevitable pledged delegate lead, she can’t win. (Do the math yourself.) So really, if the 2008 Democratic primaries are the 2000 Florida debacle, then Clinton is Bush.
It’s tough to make the lofty case for democracy
when winning relies on an inherently undemocratic page in the party
rule book. I suppose it’s admirable that they try.
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To commemorate April Fools' Day (and show off her “funny” side), Hillary Clinton today challenged Barack Obama to a “bowl off.” We’ll take you right to the painful wordplay:
“It’s time for [Obama’s] campaign to get out of the gutter and allow all of the pins to be counted. And I’m prepared to play this game all the way to the 10th frame. And when this game is over, the American people will know when that phone rings at 3 a.m. they’ll have a president who’s ready to bowl on day one. So let’s strike a deal and go bowling for delegates. We don’t have a moment to spare.”
With some digging, Trailhead managed to unearth some rejected lines from her speech:
“I was impressed by my opponent’s spin, but it’s time for him to split.”
“And anyway, I’m out of his league.”
“Sorry Barack, you’re over the line.”
“I didn’t major in math—I majored in bowling.”
"Hey Barack, lost your nerve? Maybe you need a ball return."
“Get off my lane.”
“Let’s roll.”
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Hillary Clinton must read Slate in her downtime. A
few weeks ago, John Dickerson concluded
that if pundits are going to compare the primary fight to sports, then boxing
is the best way to do it. The basic metaphorical gist: Two opponents fight
through multiple rounds (primaries), and if there’s no knockout, the final
decision rests with ringside judges who have watched every jab and uppercut
(superdelegates). Flash forward to today’s event in Philadelphia,
when Clinton unveiled
a brand new theme song: “Gonna Fly Now,” the famous theme song from Rocky.
On the surface, this new theme makes plenty of political sense.
Rocky is the pride of Philadelphia and made the front steps of the
Philadelphia Museum of Art as iconic as the Liberty Bell. Plus, Sly Stallone’s
character is a symbol of the American spirit—he may have been an underdog but
he never gave up, and he proved something to himself and the country in the
process.
Probe deeper, though, and the Clinton-as-Balboa metaphor is deeply flawed.
Hillary started out as the favorite, only becoming the underdog when she
started losing primaries and caucuses. If anything, she’s more like Apollo Creed,
the undisputed champ who didn’t take an upstart opponent seriously. (Plus, few
of us think of Clinton
as the “Italian Stallion.”)
You
would think that Hillary might also take pause considering that—spoiler alert!—Rocky
loses. Balboa puts up a great fight, but neither fighter knocks the other out
after 15 rounds. Instead, the fight’s outcome hinges on the superdelegate-like judges,
who declare a split-decision: Apollo is the winner. But three years later in Rocky II the fighters meet again. This
time Rocky wins. The takeaway: If Clinton
can’t win this go-around, maybe she can get off the mat in time for 2012. (And
perhaps, many years later, she can convince the Soviet
Union that “everybody can change.” But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.)
There’s one Rocky
scene in particular that gives us a window into Hillary “Balboa” Clinton’s psyche. The night before the big fight,
Rocky sits on the edge of his bed and tells his girl Adrian that he can’t beat
Creed. He gets in the ring the next day with one goal: He wants to go the
distance, to trade jabs with the champ for 15 rounds. He doesn’t care if he
wins—he only wants to prove that he can survive the onslaught and do some
damage in the process. He keeps on fighting for himself, his fans, and his
country. Even his closest advisers couldn’t convince him to get out of the
ring. Sound familiar?
One last possible parallel carries some salience: Those who are calling for Clinton’s
withdrawal say she should bail because she’s going to hurt Obama. During
the climactic fight in Rocky, Balboa
does serious damage to Creed. He dodges a Creed jab and punches him twice in the torso, breaking his rib in the process.
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When you've got a 1-in-10 shot of winning the Democratic nomination, a day
without any major screw-ups is a good one. After avoiding any major
pitfalls—but also failing to lure Obama into any traps—Clinton has buoyed her chances of winning the
nomination to 9.9 percent.
The good news first: Yesterday we
relayed that the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Obama was
going to snag seven North Carolina superdelegates in the
coming days. It turns out somebody jumped the gun. He'll get endorsements, but we don't know how many.
Meanwhile, in Mississippi, Obama picked up two unexpected delegates, which
tightens the vise on Clinton
yet again. …
Read more at the Hillary Clinton Deathwatch.
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You know when you say something, and the moment you say it, you know it was a bad idea? Democrats are trying to make John McCain’s “Make it 100 years” quote sound like that kind of moment—a gaffe of enormous proportions that he will never live down.
Barack Obama pushed this argument during a press conference yesterday, jousting with a reporter who pointed out that Obama planned to keep troops in Iraq to protect the embassy. “That’s very different from saying that we’re gonna have a permanent occupation in Iraq,” Obama responded. “And it’s certainly different from saying that we would have a high level of combat troops inside Iraq for a decade or two decades or as John McCain said, perhaps 100 years.”
Obama didn’t dispute that McCain’s ”100 years” reference was analogous to a long-term presence in South Korea—a fact that has made news. But he still disagreed that the United States would want to keep that many troops in Iraq for that long. (The U.S. still has 25,000 troops stationed in South Korea.)
To clear things up, here's video of Obama's initial "100 years" quote. And here’s what McCain said on Face the Nation, in his big-budget sequel to the “100 years” quote:
The point is, it’s [about] American casualties. We got to get Americans off the front lines, have Iraqis as part of the strategy to take over more and more of the responsibilities, and then I don’t think Americans are concerned if we’re there for 100 years or 1,000 years or 10,000 years. What they care about is the sacrifice of our most precious treasure, and that’s American blood.
In context, McCain’s statements seem clear: He doesn’t want the war to continue for 100 years. But he’s willing to keep a few brigades there as long as they’re not getting killed. Granted, he won’t say under what circumstances he would be willing to pull out of Iraq—a major hole in his analysis. But for Obama and others to paint McCain’s stance as a war without end doesn’t quite hold up. Plus, it gives McCain yet another chance to paint Obama as a neophyte.
Still, the opportunity to fudge the ”100 years” quote is almost too good to pass up. It’s one of those statements the nuances of which ultimately don’t matter—like Al Gore saying he invented the Internet or John Kerry’s joke about failing students getting “stuck in Iraq.” Whether or not Obama decides to seize on it, other Democrats no doubt will.
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Surrogates seem to think that telling something to a foreign news agency means that their words won’t get back to the United States. How else to explain Sam Powers’ “monster” comment to the Scotsman or a new statement on Canadian radio by Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Clinton superdelegate, that “Barack Obama is going to be the next president”?
To call Cleaver’s remarks off-message would be an understatement. Cleaver goes on to say with brutal, hilarious honesty that "[i]f I do the party line, I'm supposed to say—and maybe I'll say just so if anybody hears it they can say well, 'Cleaver did the party line before he told the truth,'—we believe that a contest going all the way to the convention is good for America," he said. But he calls that scenario a “tragedy of tragedies.” Cleaver then reveals that he knows he’s supporting the losing team: “Even though I don't expect the Kansas City Chiefs to beat the Indianapolis Colts, I cheer for the Kansas City Chiefs.” (Listen here.)
It makes you wonder how many of Clinton’s superdelegates are thinking the same way—sticking with her out of personal loyalty but ready to bolt if they see an opening. That could take the form of an insurmountable delegate lead by Obama (which he, er, already has), a swing of superdelegates, or big victories in North Carolina or Indiana.
To be fair, Cleaver is a special case. His district went for Obama, and he has expressed ambivalence about standing in the way of the first black president. He’s not quite ready to sever ties like John Lewis.* Rather, he’s trying to have it both ways—sticking with Clinton so as not to tick her off, while publicly praising Obama so as not to alienate constituents. It’s a dance that, while perhaps not damaging to Clinton, certainly doesn’t inspire confidence.
*Not Anthony Lewis. Our b.