2012 Presidential Election
Friday, February 29, 2008
Matt Drudge: The Most Important 'Journalist' in The World
The Internet has revolutionized the way news and information is disseminated. This is especially true with political information, and Matt Drudge's Drudge Report is the unquestioned king of the hill....
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Time Article on Bill: The Bitter Half
Bill Clinton has witnessed first hand that it's vastly different being a candidate than supporting a candidate. It has been a tortuous road of self discovery for him as this Time magazine article reports on. Put simply, Hillary Clinton is no Bill Clinton with regards to politics. This election proved that.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Military Wary of Obama
Barack Obama's lack of foreign policy experience and the fact that he never served in the United States military will be the main focus of Republican attacks against him in the upcoming general election. Indeed it is the one, and I repeat one, issue that Republican nominee John McCain would seem to have a clear advantage on him with. As this article points out, many in the military brass are worried about the prospect of an Obama presidency due mainly to their natural fear of the unknown. It is important to note that neither Bill Clinton or Dick Cheney--the latter widely regarded as a both a military expert as well as hawk, ever served a day in the military, either.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
The Audacity of Hopelessness
Frank Rich, The New York Times, February 24, 2008
WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of
It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.
The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.
That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.
Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.
But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.
The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.
In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.
This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.
Given that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama offer marginally different policy prescriptions — laid out in voluminous detail by both, by the way, on their Web sites — it’s not clear what her added-value message is. The “experience” mantra has been compromised not only by her failure on the signal issue of Iraq but also by the deadening lingua franca of her particular experience, Washingtonese. No matter what the problem, she keeps rolling out another commission to solve it: a commission for infrastructure, a Financial Product Safety Commission, a Corporate Subsidy Commission, a Katrina/Rita Commission and, to deal with drought, a water summit.
As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.
Bill Clinton knocked states that hold caucuses instead of primaries because “they disproportionately favor upper-income voters” who “don’t really need a president but feel like they need a change.” After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy.
The insults continued on Tuesday night when a surrogate preceding Mrs. Clinton onstage at an Ohio rally, Tom Buffenbarger of the machinists’ union, derided Obama supporters as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.” Even as he ranted, exit polls in Wisconsin were showing that Mr. Obama had in fact won that day among voters with the least education and the lowest incomes. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Obama received the endorsement of the latte-drinking Teamsters.
If the press were as prejudiced against Mrs. Clinton as her campaign constantly whines, debate moderators would have pushed for the Clinton tax returns and the full list of Clinton foundation donors to be made public with the same vigor it devoted to Mr. Obama’s “plagiarism.” And it would have showered her with the same ridicule that Rudy Giuliani received in his endgame. With 11 straight losses in nominating contests, Mrs. Clinton has now nearly doubled the Giuliani losing streak (six) by the time he reached his Florida graveyard. But we gamely pay lip service to the illusion that she can erect one more firewall.
The other persistent gripe among some Clinton supporters is that a hard-working older woman has been unjustly usurped by a cool young guy intrinsically favored by a sexist culture. Slate posted a devilish video mash-up of the classic 1999 movie “Election”: Mrs. Clinton is reduced to a stand-in for Tracy Flick, the diligent candidate for high school president played by Reese Witherspoon, and Mr. Obama is implicitly cast as the mindless jock who upsets her by dint of his sheer, unearned popularity.
There is undoubtedly some truth to this, however demeaning it may be to both candidates, but in reality, the more consequential ur-text for the Clinton 2008 campaign may be another Hollywood classic, the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy “Pat and Mike” of 1952. In that movie, the proto-feminist Hepburn plays a professional athlete who loses a tennis or golf championship every time her self-regarding fiancé turns up in the crowd, pulling her focus and undermining her confidence with his grandstanding presence.
In the 2008 real-life remake of “Pat and Mike,” it’s not the fiancé, of course, but the husband who has sabotaged the heroine. The single biggest factor in Hillary Clinton’s collapse is less sexism in general than one man in particular — the man who began the campaign as her biggest political asset. The moment Bill Clinton started trash-talking about Mr. Obama and raising the specter of a co-presidency, even to the point of giving his own televised speech ahead of his wife’s on the night she lost South Carolina, her candidacy started spiraling downward.
What’s next? Despite Mrs. Clinton’s valedictory tone at Thursday’s debate, there remains the fear in some quarters that whether through sleights of hand involving superdelegates or bogus delegates from Michigan or Florida, the Clintons might yet game or even steal the nomination. I’m starting to wonder. An operation that has waged political war as incompetently as the Bush administration waged war in Iraq is unlikely to suddenly become smart enough to pull off that duplicitous a “victory.” Besides, after spending $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts in January alone, this campaign simply may not have the cash on hand to mount a surge.
WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of
It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.
The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.
That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.
Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.
But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.
The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.
In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.
This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.
Given that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama offer marginally different policy prescriptions — laid out in voluminous detail by both, by the way, on their Web sites — it’s not clear what her added-value message is. The “experience” mantra has been compromised not only by her failure on the signal issue of Iraq but also by the deadening lingua franca of her particular experience, Washingtonese. No matter what the problem, she keeps rolling out another commission to solve it: a commission for infrastructure, a Financial Product Safety Commission, a Corporate Subsidy Commission, a Katrina/Rita Commission and, to deal with drought, a water summit.
As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.
Bill Clinton knocked states that hold caucuses instead of primaries because “they disproportionately favor upper-income voters” who “don’t really need a president but feel like they need a change.” After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy.
The insults continued on Tuesday night when a surrogate preceding Mrs. Clinton onstage at an Ohio rally, Tom Buffenbarger of the machinists’ union, derided Obama supporters as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.” Even as he ranted, exit polls in Wisconsin were showing that Mr. Obama had in fact won that day among voters with the least education and the lowest incomes. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Obama received the endorsement of the latte-drinking Teamsters.
If the press were as prejudiced against Mrs. Clinton as her campaign constantly whines, debate moderators would have pushed for the Clinton tax returns and the full list of Clinton foundation donors to be made public with the same vigor it devoted to Mr. Obama’s “plagiarism.” And it would have showered her with the same ridicule that Rudy Giuliani received in his endgame. With 11 straight losses in nominating contests, Mrs. Clinton has now nearly doubled the Giuliani losing streak (six) by the time he reached his Florida graveyard. But we gamely pay lip service to the illusion that she can erect one more firewall.
The other persistent gripe among some Clinton supporters is that a hard-working older woman has been unjustly usurped by a cool young guy intrinsically favored by a sexist culture. Slate posted a devilish video mash-up of the classic 1999 movie “Election”: Mrs. Clinton is reduced to a stand-in for Tracy Flick, the diligent candidate for high school president played by Reese Witherspoon, and Mr. Obama is implicitly cast as the mindless jock who upsets her by dint of his sheer, unearned popularity.
There is undoubtedly some truth to this, however demeaning it may be to both candidates, but in reality, the more consequential ur-text for the Clinton 2008 campaign may be another Hollywood classic, the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy “Pat and Mike” of 1952. In that movie, the proto-feminist Hepburn plays a professional athlete who loses a tennis or golf championship every time her self-regarding fiancé turns up in the crowd, pulling her focus and undermining her confidence with his grandstanding presence.
In the 2008 real-life remake of “Pat and Mike,” it’s not the fiancé, of course, but the husband who has sabotaged the heroine. The single biggest factor in Hillary Clinton’s collapse is less sexism in general than one man in particular — the man who began the campaign as her biggest political asset. The moment Bill Clinton started trash-talking about Mr. Obama and raising the specter of a co-presidency, even to the point of giving his own televised speech ahead of his wife’s on the night she lost South Carolina, her candidacy started spiraling downward.
What’s next? Despite Mrs. Clinton’s valedictory tone at Thursday’s debate, there remains the fear in some quarters that whether through sleights of hand involving superdelegates or bogus delegates from Michigan or Florida, the Clintons might yet game or even steal the nomination. I’m starting to wonder. An operation that has waged political war as incompetently as the Bush administration waged war in Iraq is unlikely to suddenly become smart enough to pull off that duplicitous a “victory.” Besides, after spending $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts in January alone, this campaign simply may not have the cash on hand to mount a surge.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Relationship With Female Lobbyist Rocks McCain Campaign
The New York Times reports on a potential bombshell to the McCain campaign, allegations of a potential illicit relationship with a much younger female lobbyist 8 years ago during his first run at the presidency. This would be particularly damaging to his effort, which is based largely on trust and integrity. One must remember, however, that he coldly dumped his first wife 30 plus years ago after coming home from Vietnam....
Right Wing Rag: It's Over for Hillary
Here's the view of the Democratic race with a specific emphasis on Hillary's current state of affairs from the ultra right wing National Review. How they see John McCain as the 'real winner' last night is beyond me: nearly everyone saw Hillary Clinton as being the easier candidate for him to face in the general election. In the image obsessed culture that is current day America the electorate will have a stark choice this time around: a decrepit, crippled, wrinkled, pasty and sickly white 71 going on 100yr old McCain versus a svelte, telegenic, 46yr old Obama.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Poll: Obama Closing in on Hillary in Ohio
Conventional wisdom has it that Hillary must win both Ohio and Texas, and that Obama will carry Wisconsin and Hawaii tonight. Wisconsin could surprise tonight and come in for Hillary, who has spent quite a bit of time and money there, and has neglected Ohio as a result, as this new poll shows...
Friday, February 15, 2008
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Hillary Going for Broke in Texas and Ohio
As reported in this morning's New York Times, team Clinton was expecting a tough February, but they weren't prepared for the huge, humiliating margins of defeat they have been getting at the hands of Obama, who has been winning by 2 to 1 margins in the most recent contests. Hillary now is faced with what seems to be a building tidal wave of Obama support, and her plan to build a 'firewall' in the big states of Ohio and Texas which vote in March seems increasingly tenuous.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Friday, February 08, 2008
Hart: Obama Won't Fade
Upon closer inspection, there are close similarities between Gary Hart's 1984 insurgent Democratic campaign against the establishment and presumed nominee Walter Mondale and Obama's campaign against Hillary this time around. Wise Democrats today would do well to study how the 1984 general election panned out: a 49 state humiliating landslide loss.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
5 Reasons Why Hillary Should be Worried
It's all laid out right here in The Politico....The bottom line is that the longer this drags out, the stronger the chances are for Obama.
Right Wingers Vow to Become "Suicide Voters"
The frothing at the mouth right wing of the Republican Party is threating to cast their votes in droves for Hillary Clinton in November instead of John McCain, thereby becoming 'suicide voters'. Extremism, it seems, is not solely a Muslim phenomenom...
Democratic Election Microcosm: New Mexico Still Too Close to Call
Both sides are claiming victory, but if one state could sum up the Democratic nomination, it's New Mexico, which as of this morning had Obama and Hillary separated by roughly 100 votes.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Both Hillary and Obama Can Claim Success on Muddled Super Tuesday
This was a trench warfare battle between Clinton and Obama, and neither candidate really gained an inch. If anything, from a psychological standpoint Obama can claim a victory in that Hillary is clearly no longer the inevitable nominee. As The Daily Kos notes, Obama will wind up winning more states than Hillary, and he's been gaining ground almost daily. So conventional wisdom says he wins by not losing and extending the contest. Plus, crucially, he now has a relatively sizable financial advantage over Hillary which will help him in the coming contests. Interestingly, the futures market have swung back towards Hillary's favor, but it has been wildly volatile. Finally, here's the real time delegate scoreboard....
Obama Blows By Hillary in Political Futures Market
This marketplace was eerily accurate in predicting both the 2004 and 2006 election results. There seems to be some tangential evidence that Obama is doing well at this early hour on Super Tuesday. Last week the odds on this very same marketplace were 60/40 in favor of Hillary. This morning it was about 54/46 Hillary....
Full Fledged Food Fight Erupts on Right Over Dole Letter
This certainly doesn't bode well for the Republican party come November, regardless of who McCain faces in the general election. The fire breathing fringe right wing, for whom Rush Limbaugh is a patron saint, simply refuses to fall in line for McCain due to his previous intransigence with the party line regarding the Bush tax cuts, campaign finance, the enviorment, etc. Now fellow war hero Bob Dole has been dragged into it on behalf of McCain against Rush, and Romney, who the fringe right is now supporting, proceeded to cruelly diss him.
Pessimism Abounds Regarding Proposed Microsoft/Yahoo Deal
The sum of two also-rans is almost never a winner.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Super Tuesday's Most Likely Outcome: McCain and A Muddle
John McCain will emerge from Super Tuesday as the Republican nominee, warts and all. On the Democratic side, it's far from clear what will happen. This blog argues that the party is headed for a Super Delegate litigation nightmare at their convention in Denver this summer if the current polling holds up and tomorrow's result between Hillary and Obama is indecisive. Will having a nominee in McCain decided perhaps months before the Democrats do be an advantage for the Republicans? Probably slightly. McCain would have a real shot against Hillary, but a potential matchup with Obama would provide voters with a stark choice: A crippled, crumpled McCain in his 70's or an attractive, svelte Obama in his 40's. As things stand at this very moment, advantage Obama, across the board.
Obama Surging
As this article indicates, Barack Obama's campaign is undergoing a huge surge in popularity, especially in California. The Intrade political prediction market know has Hillary and Obama virtually tied in terms of probability of getting the Democratic nomination--Hillary was favored 65-35 only a week ago.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Shock New Zogby Poll: Obama Ahead of Clinton in California
Hillary's main advantage at this point over Obama is simply her name recognition. As this poll indicates, the race is virtually tied, and indeed Obama is ahead in California, home of the most delegates needed to win the nomination. Obama is gaining on Hillary literally every single hour of every day, as the name recognition gap becomes reduced. It's clear that if Super Tuesday were on Tuesday Feb. 12 instead of this Tuesday, Obama would have the advantage. Hillary's best friend at this point is the clock and the calendar.
Friday, February 01, 2008
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