Hillary Clinton for President - 2008

roger wrote:

It looks like the best thing McCain can do before the nominations is to just lay low. I think he's doing it.

While Hillary and Obama have been fighting each other, McCain was meeting with foreign leaders.
That will be a big advantage for him, as long as he stays out of the dems catfight.

WTF does that have to do with anything?

After all, the Clintons think of themselves as The Democratic Party. When Bill and Dick Morris triangulated during the first term, it was what was best for Bill, not the party. In 1996, when Bill turned the White House into Motel 1600 for fund-raisers, it was more about his re-election than the re-elections of his fellow Democrats in Congress; in 2000, the White House focused its energies more on Hillary's Senate win than Al Gore's presidential run.

And even Clinton supporters know that Bill does not want to be replaced as the first black president, especially by a black president with enough magic to possibly eclipse him in the history books.

Hillary's Just Making It Up As She Goes Along: Margaret Carlson[/size]

Commentary by Margaret Carlson

March 27 (Bloomberg) -- We all exaggerate. Life is mundane. Stories about it are usually more entertaining with just a bit of tweaking. That's how you can conflate George Clooney's once having gone to the same restaurant you ate at into a story about how you were both at Spago Saturday night.

So where does Senator Hillary Clinton's retelling of her 1996 trip to Bosnia fall on the scale from acceptable hyperbole -- ``I'm telling you that bass was two feet long if it was an inch'' -- to the unacceptable kind -- ``I did not have sex with that woman'' -- that gets you impeached and disbarred.

Let's try this: Al Gore was a lot closer to inventing the Internet than Clinton was to having a corkscrew-landing in Tuzla under sniper fire so frightening that a tarmac greeting had to be scrubbed.

Prior to the release of a CBS television tape, the only dissenting voice from Hillary's ``Perils of Pauline Meets Patton'' tale was fellow traveler Sinbad, along to entertain the troops. ``The only red-phone moment,'' he said, ``was `Do we eat here or the next place?'''

The video shows that almost everything Clinton said about her Bosnia landing -- which she recalled on several occasions, once in prepared remarks her staff reviewed -- was made up.

There were no military maneuvers or antiaircraft fire. Everyone, including daughter Chelsea, got off at a leisurely pace. The welcoming committee welcomed. The little girl read her poem and delivered her flowers, eliciting two air-kisses from Clinton.

Hyping Experience

Clinton, 60, has been hyping her foreign policy experience for weeks. She's conceded that Republican Senator John McCain is her equal in that department, but pointedly not Senator Barack Obama.

The exercise has gotten harder since the release of 11,000 pages of her highly redacted but still useful schedule, far heavier on first lady activities than on commander-in-chief duties.

After the health-care debacle in 1994, she was at pains to say she wasn't involved in anything much more than baking cookies, so as to quell complaints from Capitol Hill over her half of the ``two for the price of one'' presidency.

Now she needs to show she was a virtual vice president in the mode of Dick Cheney. Funerals and ceremonial tours are no help here, only meaty roles where she was a shadow chief executive.

Only Human?

Clinton pleaded that her memory of Bosnia was faulty because she's ``sleep deprived'' and only ``human.'' She said that exactly the way a human would, then quickly pivoted to asserting that it was ``the first time in 12 years or so, I misspoke.''

That's not close, even leaving aside the now-you-see-them, now-you-don't billing records, the cattle futures and the travel office firings.

Her schedule shows numerous meetings with business groups pushing the passage of Nafta back then; yet when campaigning nowadays in Ohio and Pennsylvania, she says she was always against the trade agreement.

Just this campaign she has ``misspoken'' more than once. Clinton, along with her husband, claimed that she ``was instrumental'' in ending the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Most of her visits were after the agreement was hammered out. Her two trips before were of the first lady sort with women's groups.

Lord David Trimble, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, called Clinton's claim a ``wee bit silly.'' ``I don't want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player,'' he said.

`Generally Accurate'

Those who tried to come to Clinton's defense did it with faint praise and carefully parsed words. Former Senator George Mitchell, a main negotiator of the peace agreement, characterized her statements as ``generally accurate to the extent that they have been relayed to me.'' He added, ``Her greatest focus was on encouraging women in Northern Ireland to get in and stay in the political process.''

John Hume, a Nobel Laureate and ardent advocate of Clinton for president, said, ``The people of Northern Ireland think very positively of Hillary Clinton's support for our peace process, due to her visits to Northern Ireland and her meetings with so many people.''

Two of Hume's less-partisan colleagues are more direct. Chief negotiator Conall McDevitt said she was active ``in a classic woman politicky sort of way...on the issue side, I think probably not.''

Another Road Entirely

Said Brian Feeney, ``the road to peace was carefully documented, and she wasn't on it.''

Clinton also claimed that on a visit to Macedonia in 1999 she ``negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo.'' Macedonia reopened its border to Kosovar refugees before her visit.

Obama has had his own brushes with fiction. He wasn't a professor of constitutional law but a senior lecturer. His health-care bill in the Illinois legislature only created a task force. He once said he'd never heard Reverend Jeremiah Wright say anything controversial and then admitted he did.

He credited the civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 with creating the atmosphere in which his black father and white mother could fall in love. They fell in love earlier.

We're accustomed to shadings of the truth when dealing with candidates. Among consultants the joke goes, ``Honesty is the best policy. Okay, fine. What's the second-best policy?''

Ronald Reagan claimed to have liberated a concentration camp when, at best, he saw film footage about it while serving stateside.

No one knows what a president will face in office, so it's important to know what their instincts are. A few more tall tales and voters may be less worried about Clinton's capacity to be commander-in-chief than her ability to tell the truth.

Uh-oh (Updated 2:05 p.m.)

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign says it "has complied with the law" surrounding a fundraising concert that Elton John is scheduled to perform on April 9 in New York City on behalf of the Democratic presidential candidate.

The statement came after Inside the Beltway earlier today questioned whether the New York senator and the British pop music star were violating the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), which seeks to "minimize foreign intervention" in U.S. elections by establishing a series of limitations on foreign nationals.

The FECA "prohibits any foreign national from contributing, donating or spending funds in connection with any federal, state, or local election in the United States, either directly or indirectly. It is also unlawful to help foreign nationals violate that ban or to solicit, receive or accept contributions or donations from them. Persons who knowingly and willfully engage in these activities may be subject to fines and/or imprisonment."........................

Where No Other Democratic Leader Has Dared Go
By Dan Balz
Sen. Patrick Leahy has gone where no Democratic leader has dared go. It's time, the Vermont senator said, for Hillary Clinton to get out of the presidential race. "She ought to withdraw and she ought to be backing Senator Obama," he told Vermont Public Radio.

Since the main beneficiary of Hillary's continued campaign is McCain, I certainly hope whe will ignore his advice.

McCain - you know, the candidate that actually was under fire when he went overseas.

The Cost Of Stalemate

By Ronald Brownstein, NationalJournal.com
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, March 28, 2008

John McCain will effectively begin his general election campaign next week. In the process, he will highlight the real cost of the Democrats' inability to end their primary campaign.

The question that Democrats ask most is whether their party will unite this fall after the bruising struggle between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. That's a legitimate concern but probably not the most urgent one for Democrats. The larger issue is whether the party can recover from squandering its opportunity to shape the general election debate before McCain does.

Next week, McCain will make his first systematic attempt to frame that debate. His campaign has arranged a weeklong tour to highlight arguably his greatest political asset: his compelling personal story as the son of a distinguished military family, a Navy flier, and a prisoner of war in Vietnam. On a sentimental journey, McCain will tour a Navy facility in Mississippi named for his grandfather, the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and naval bases in Pensacola and Jacksonville, where he trained as a flier, led a flight squadron, and returned after being freed from captivity in Hanoi.

At each stop, aides say, McCain will talk about a value that shaped him, such as service or education, and how he would incorporate that principle into his presidency. "At each place we will speak to a value that John McCain took away from his life experience revolving around that place," a senior campaign adviser said. "We will tie past to present to future."

Later this spring, McCain plans to fill in his economic agenda, partly by visiting troubled rural and inner-city communities where he will deliver a conservative empowerment message reminiscent of that of former Rep. Jack Kemp, R-N.Y., who is now advising him.

If the past month is any guide, while McCain lays down these markers, Obama and Clinton will be gouging each other. In the past few days, Democrats have witnessed one prominent Obama supporter liken former President Bill Clinton to Joseph McCarthy and one prominent Clintonite liken New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to Judas (for endorsing Obama). The Clinton campaign says that Obama can't be trusted as commander-in-chief, and the Obama campaign says that Hillary Clinton can't be trusted, period. Each Democratic candidate is now providing so many lacerating quotes about the other that Republican ad-writers may not need to do much more this fall than cut and paste. Even more important, by focusing so relentlessly inward, the Democrats are providing McCain an open field to re-introduce himself.

This spring might have looked very different, as a new study of the candidates' finances from George Washington University's Campaign Finance Institute suggests. In February alone, Obama and Clinton collected a combined $90 million, dwarfing McCain's $11 million. Through his entire campaign, McCain has raised $66 million compared with Clinton's $174 million and Obama's $197 million. The disparity is even greater among small donors, who are rapidly becoming the critical engine of presidential financing. Obama and Clinton last month collected nearly $48 million in donations of $200 or less. For McCain the tally was just over $2 million. Every 30 hours, the two Democrats raised as much from small donors as McCain did all month.

If Democrats were now training this financial advantage on McCain rather than each other, they could be bombarding swing states with ads challenging his open-ended commitment to maintaining American troops in Iraq, or his March 25 speech rejecting new federal assistance for homeowners facing foreclosure. Because McCain ended February with nearly as much debt as cash, he would have struggled to respond. Democrats might have defined McCain before he could define himself -- as Bill Clinton did so devastatingly to Bob Dole in 1996. Instead, as the Democratic conflict escalates, Gallup this week found that a strikingly high percentage of Clinton backers (28 percent) and Obama voters (19 percent) say they will support McCain if the other Democrat wins.

Obama supporters, with understandable frustration, say that Clinton should do the delegate math and concede. But Obama couldn't expand his coalition enough to win Texas or Ohio, where he might have forced Clinton out, and he's trailing again in Pennsylvania, where he could again slam the door. Each candidate is contributing to the spring stalemate that may loom as the decisive missed opportunity if the fall turns chillier than Democrats expect.

And believe it or not in the part of the country I live in the white people live just as poorly as most blacks with less help because we are a small community with no factories to supply jobs. We used to have work but they have all been moved to Mexico, India, and China.

Hillary's Just Making It Up As She Goes Along: Margaret Carlson[/size]

Commentary by Margaret Carlson

March 27 (Bloomberg)

The Cost Of Stalemate

By Ronald Brownstein, NationalJournal.com
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, March 28, 2008