Hillary Clinton for President - 2008

My 25 year old daughter went to a caucus in Dallas on Tuesday night. She said the Obama people were extremely loud, pushy and white male college types, "prepies," she called them. My daughter is also a college type, but she said that the Hillary group would say, "we're here to support Hillary" and the Obama supporters would shout OBAMA OBAMA OBAMA so loud they couldn't say more. That's just her experience in one Dallas (big time North Dallas -- North Dallas being where the money is) caucus on Tuesday. I have no idea if it's representative.

We couldn't begin caucusing until everyone finished voting, so we had to wait a couple hours before we could get started. It wasn't hot. There was plenty of room and places to sit while we waited. There were adequate bathroom facilities and vending machines. Still, as time dragged on and the line of late voters got ever shorter, there were quite a few people who were no way shy about voicing their displeasure. Loudly. Like bratty children. And they continued throughout the entire process, until the time came to separate into groups of Obama supporters and Clinton supporters.

Some of them may have been Limbaugh operatives. I don't know. But it was striking how virtually every one of the idiot complainers ended up in the Hillary group. They were mostly older white men and women, lower income white people, and a few Hispanics.

The Obama group were not only more cooperative, but also much more diverse. Every group was represented. We seemed to be more interested in the process, itself, and more personally invested-- the Clinton group didn't even stick around for the final vote.

Still I suspect that caususes favor Obama because it takes a lot more time and most older Americans can't stand in line for hours, as many Wyoming voters are doing today, waiting to be allowed into the hall to participate.

I dunno. It must have to do with zeal/motivation. That Obama supporters are more driven and fired up, on the whole I mean and on average.

For Clinton's fans, 'This is our '68'

By Ronald Brownstein
March 7, 2008

SAN ANTONIO - When Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign found its back against the wall last week, Amy Rao headed straight for the Alamo.

On the Saturday before Tuesday's Texas primary, Rao spent much of her afternoon lugging Clinton yard signs and fliers down a long street of funky, stylish houses in a quiet suburb just north of downtown San Antonio and its fabled old mission.

Walking with a friend in the warm, hazy sunshine, Rao worked through a list of addresses provided by the campaign. If no one came to the door, she left a flier. Whenever someone answered the bell, she pursued conversions with a friendly but resolute persistence. "I have never worked this hard for a candidate," Rao said between stops. "I wake up in the middle of the night and say, 'What else can I do?' "
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Did I mention that Rao, a compact, energetic woman with five children, lives in Palo Alto, Calif.? Or that she was among 40 Bay Area women who flew to San Antonio on their own dime to volunteer for Clinton last weekend? Or that when Rao is not buttonholing strangers in Texas she is hard at work as the founder and CEO of a Silicon Valley computer storage company with $140 million in annual revenue?

There is a tendency to credit all of the energy in the Democratic presidential race to Barack Obama. And he has unquestionably inspired great passion. Fifteen hundred people turned out in February just to greet the aides opening his headquarters in nearby Austin. That office was so crowded last Sunday that some volunteers were dialing voters while standing in hallways because every desk was filled.

But Clinton's gritty wins in Ohio and Texas are a reminder that she has built deep, durable connections to Latinos, seniors, working-class whites, and, above all, women. In fact, although Clinton still trails Obama in the overall popular vote, she has now won more primary votes than any Democratic nominee in history, according to political analyst Rhodes Cook.

Clinton has sparked particular passion among women who have made their own difficult ascent in the workplace. Shortly before Rao started canvassing last Saturday, she sat among dozens of mostly female volunteers in Clinton's San Antonio office calling voters with a palpable sense of urgency. Determination, if not desperation, defined the mood.

Nancy Patterson, a 54-year-old communications technician from San Antonio, had taken a week's vacation to volunteer for Clinton. "I like Obama, but he needs to wait his turn," she said. "I feel if it was the opposite -- a more experienced man and a more eloquent woman, [the voters] would go with the man. But because she's a woman, [experience] is discounted."

Patterson remembered working in an office where her supervisor kept a copy of Playboy on his desk, and she saw in Clinton's rise an echo of her own struggles. "I know what she had to put up with," Patterson said intently. She pounded her fist on the table. "She's giving her all," Patterson said. "I want to give my all."

Even after Clinton's twin big-state victories on Tuesday, Obama retains a solid delegate lead and remains the likely, though not certain, nominee. But Clinton's resurgence reconfirmed that these two compelling candidates have divided their party almost in half, with mirror-image coalitions of stony stability. For months, analysts have asked how Clinton might reach out to Obama's supporters if she wins. Given the loyalty that Clinton's supporters demonstrated on Tuesday, it may be time to ask the opposite: If Obama wins, what suitable role can he offer her in the Democratic campaign or his administration? Each may need the other precisely because neither is likely to decisively beat the other.

Those are decisions for a later day. In the meantime, even those caught in this maelstrom are marveling at it. Making calls from Clinton's San Antonio office on Saturday, Maria Meier, a young Los Angeles-based political consultant, looked for comparisons to the epic competition 40 years ago between Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Eugene McCarthy. "At least in my lifetime, there's never been a presidential race like this," Meier said. "They say 1968 was like this..."

From across the table, another young volunteer cut in. "We were too young for '68," said Ingrid Duran, who had flown in from Washington, D.C., to help. "This is our '68."

So it is.

8% just plain don't care, could go either way with no agita, they're there for local stuff

empty suit

Very interesting insights, maporsche.

It is also interesting that the Democrat party, in defiance of its own past practice, chose a different system for the selection of its candidate than the one he/she will face in the general election. This plus the fiascos in Florida and Michigan don't speak well for the wisdom of the party leaders or the organized single interest groups that dominate the party.

Clinton v. "Uncommitted"

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell avoided saying anything inappropriate on Meet The Press this morning, which must have calmed nerves in Clinton-land. Still, this comment about Clinton's "win" in Michigan, where Obama was not even on the ballot, was pretty amusing:

I'm calling for a revote. But, Tim, you run against uncommitted, that's the toughest election to win. I'd rather run against an opponent anytime than against uncommitted, and Hillary Clinton got 55 percent of the vote against uncommitted.

Weekend Spin Patrol

A couple campaign statements caught my eye, and I wanted to point them out before the weekend. [..]

Second, Hillary Clinton's campaign says Barack Obama is "unable to make an affirmative case for his candidacy beyond ad hominem attacks." Meanwhile, her campaign is sending out a fundraising email saying "Stand Up to Attack Politics." Riiight... because if anybody is going to end attack politics, it's Hillary Clinton. If Clinton wins the nomination, the one lesson politicians everywhere will take from it is that attack politics don't work.

How do they say these things? All politicians, including Obama, spin. But the way the Clinton campaign says night is day is just especially audacious. It's as if they have internalized the attacks they suffered in the 1990s to such a degree that they believe to their core that the only way to win is to imitate their worst tormentors. I think Obama and his staff say things they at least believe to be essentially true. Working for Clinton has to be a soul-deadening experience.

...the organized single interest groups that dominate the party.

george, his playback button stuck on "repeat cliches endlessly", blessed us with:

Quote:

...the organized single interest groups that dominate the party.

I was going to slap you around a bit for that log in your eyes but decided I might just as well wait a few months until circumstances force you to rethink that which remains unrethunked or - and this will be just as good - when circumstances will necessitate reformulation to "the organized interest groups that dominate the country."

nimh

I just picked up Chait's "The Big Con". A quick peek suggests that it's rather good. I'll fill you in a bit more when I get done with it unless you have it already.

blatham wrote:

george, his playback button stuck on "repeat cliches endlessly", blessed us with:

Quote:

...the organized single interest groups that dominate the party.

I was going to slap you around a bit for that log in your eyes but decided I might just as well wait a few months until circumstances force you to rethink that which remains unrethunked or - and this will be just as good - when circumstances will necessitate reformulation to "the organized interest groups that dominate the country."

Some cliches are worth endless repitition - that one for example.

We can all speculate on the benefits to our economy of the Democrat program -- higher taxes, reopening NAFTA and other trade treaties for renegotiation, etc.

Clinton Campaign Takes Aim At Elected Delegates

Hillary Clinton in Newsweek:

[b]How can you win the nomination when the math looks so bleak for you?[/b] It doesn't look bleak at all. I have a very close race with Senator Obama. There are elected delegates, caucus delegates and superdelegates, all for different reasons, and they're all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose. Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to.

The strategy here seems completely mystifying. It's simply impossible to imagine that Clinton will get elected delegates to switch to her (the outcry would be enormous, obviously), and yet her campaign is intent on pushing the idea (Harold Ickes said something similar last week). All this ensures is that the media will run a lot stories about a dirty campaign intent on stealing the election. Given that the Clintonites are going to need some good will in July (if in fact they want to garner a delegate majority through superdelegates), the logic of this ploy eludes me.

--Isaac Chotiner

Posted: Sunday, March 09, 2008

The Clintons, a horror film that never ends
Andrew Sullivan

It's alive! We thought it might be over but some of us never dared fully believe it. Last week was like one of those moments in a horror movie when the worst terror recedes, the screen goes blank and then reopens on green fields or a lover's tender embrace. Drained but still naive audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief. The plot twists have all been resolved; the threat is gone; the quiet spreads. And then . . .

Put your own movie analogy in here. Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction - whoosh! she's back at your throat! - has often occurred to me when covering the Clintons these many years. The Oscars host Jon Stewart compares them to a Terminator: the kind that is splattered into a million tiny droplets of vaporised metal . . . only to pool together spontaneously and charge back at you unfazed.

The Clintons have always had a touch of the zombies about them: unkillable, they move relentlessly forward, propelled by a bloodlust for Republicans or uppity Democrats who dare to question their supremacy. You can't escape; you can't hide; and you can't win. And these days, in the kinetic pace of the YouTube campaign, they are like the new 28 Days Later zombies. They come at you really quickly, like bats out of hell. Or Ohio, anyway.

Now all this may seem a little melodramatic. Perhaps it is. Objectively, an accomplished senator won a couple of races - one by a mere 3% - against another senator in a presidential campaign. One senator is still mathematically unbeatable. But that will never capture the emotional toll that the Clintons continue to take on some of us. I'm not kidding. I woke up in a cold sweat early last Wednesday. There have been moments this past week when I have felt physically ill at the thought of that pair returning to power.

Why? I have had to write several columns in this space over the years acknowledging that the substantive legacy of the Clinton administration (with a lot of assist from Newt Gingrich) was a perfectly respectable one: welfare reform, fiscal sanity, prudent foreign policy, leaner government. But remembering the day-to-day psychodramas of those years still floods my frontal cortex with waves of loathing and anxiety. The further away you are from them, the easier it is to think they're fine. Up close they are an intolerable, endless, soul-sapping soap opera.

The media are marvelling at the Clintons' several near-death political experiences in this campaign. Hasn't it occurred to them how creepily familiar all this is? The Clintons live off psychodrama. They both love to push themselves to the brink of catastrophe and then accomplish the last-minute, nail-biting self-rescue. Before too long the entire story becomes about them, their ability to triumph through crisis, even though the crises are so often manufactured by themselves. That is what last week brought back for me. The 1990s - with a war on.

Remember: Bill Clinton could have easily settled the Paula Jones lawsuit years before he put the entire country through the wringer (Jones sued Clinton for sexual harassment alleged to have occurred while he was governor of Arkansas).

Recall: Hillary Clinton could have killed what turned out to be the White-water nonstory at the very outset by disclosing everything she could (the scandal centred on a controversial Arkansas property deal).

Consider: the Clintons could have prepared for primaries and caucuses after February 5 - so-called Super Tuesday, when 24 states held their presidential nomination vote - as any careful candidate would. They chose not to do any of these things. Not because they are incompetent. But because they live to risk.

Politics is also their life. They know nothing else. Most halfway normal people in politics could at some point walk away. Reagan seemed happy to. Not the Clintons. In the words of the American-based British writer Christo-pher Hitchens, these are the kind of people who never want the meeting to end. Hillary Clinton will never concede the race so long as there is even the faintest chance that she can somehow win.

They endure all sorts of humiliation - remember the taped Clinton deposition in the Ken Starr investigation (in which Clinton admitted to the inquiry headed by the far-right prosecutor that he had had an "improper physical relationship" with Monica Lewinsky)? Hillary's dismissal of the Lewinsky matter as an invention of the right-wing conspiracy? - because they know no other way to live. They have been thinking of this moment since they were in college and being a senator or an ex-president or having two terms in the White House are not sufficient to satiate their sense of entitlement. Even if they have to put their own party through a divisive, bitter, possibly fatal death match, they will never give up. Their country, their party . . . none of this matters compared with them.

The patterns are staggeringly unaltered. Last Thursday The Washing-ton Post ran an article reporting on the almost comic divisions within the Clinton camp: how chaotic the planning had been, how much chief pollster Mark Penn hated all the other advisers, how even in the wake of a sudden victory most of the Clintonites were eager to score rancid points off each other.

The secrecy and paranoia endure too. Releasing tax returns is routine for a presidential candidate. Barack Obama did it some time back. The Clintons still haven't - and say they won't for more than another month. Why? They have no explanation. They seem affronted by the question.

When you look at the electoral map if the Clintons run again, you also see a reversion to the old patterns of the 1990s - the patterns that cynical political strategists such as Karl Rove and Dick Morris have been exploiting for two decades. The country - scrambled by the post-baby-boomer pragmatism of Obama - snaps back into classic red-blue mode, with the blue areas denoting Democratic-leaning states around the edge and true red Republican states in the heartlands.

The Clintons are comfortable with this polarisation. They need it. Even when running against a fellow Democrat, they instinctively reach for it. Last week, in response to the Obama camp's request that they release their tax returns, Clinton's spokesman called Obama a new Ken Starr. For the Clintons, all Democrats who oppose them are . . . Republicans. And all Republicans are evil.

And evil means that anything the Clintons do in self-defence is excusable - even playing the race card, and the Muslim card, and the gender card, and every sleazy gambit that the politics of fear can come up with. This is how they have arrested the Obama juggernaut. It's the only game they know how to play.

One is reminded of the words of Bob Dylan: "And here I sit so patiently / Waiting to find out what price / You have to pay to get out of / Going through all these things twice."

Politics is also their life. They know nothing else. Most halfway normal people in politics could at some point walk away. [..] Not the Clintons.