Hillary Clinton for President - 2008

Obama meets with Bill Richardson to court his support against Hillary

Obama meets with John Edwards to get his support against Hillary.

politics.strange bedfellows. you know the drill.

Quote of the Day II

"Neither of us can win without superdelegates. Neither of us can possibly get to the nomination unless something totally unforeseen happens..." --Hillary Clinton to [i]Newsweek[/i]

Yes, because if Obama finishes with roughly his current delegate and popular vote lead and the superdelegates put him over the top, we'll all slap our foreheads and exclaim, "Wow! That was totally unforeseen!"

Clinton and the VRWC, Ct'd

When Clinton surrogate Ed Rendell went out of his way to praise Fox News's campaign coverage last month, it was possible to imagine it was just an off-message gaffe by a politician who has long proven himself prone to them.

But following longtime Clinton fundraiser Terry McAuliffe's comments in the wake of the Pennsylvania primary, it's abundantly clear that Fox News is just the latest beneficiary of the Clinton's campaign's ongoing outreach to the vast right-wing conspiracy (which, as Jason noted with regard to the North Carolina ads, goes both ways). For those who missed it, McAuliffe praised Fox so effusively--"Let me congratulate Fox because you were the first ones to call it for Hillary Clinton. Fair and balanced Fox. You beat them all"--that the network immediately built an entire station promo around his comments, pushing the idea that it has "no agenda".

This will, of course, be a prominent riposte to the inevitable (and no doubt accurate) charges of pro-GOP bias that Fox faces in the fall, regardless of who the Democratic nominee is. (It would, of course, be worse for Hillary in the unlikely event that she somehow snatched the nomination.) But that's a problem for another day and, in all likelihood, another candidate. The important thing now, of course, is to bring every possible weapon to bear--Richard Mellon Scaife, Rush Limbaugh, The Drudge Report, The American Spectator, Fox News--against the all-but-inevitable Democratic nominee. Keep fighting the good fight, guys.

Quote:

Quote of the Day II

"Neither of us can win without superdelegates. Neither of us can possibly get to the nomination unless something totally unforeseen happens..." --Hillary Clinton to [i]Newsweek[/i]

Yes, because if Obama finishes with roughly his current delegate and popular vote lead and the superdelegates put him over the top, we'll all slap our foreheads and exclaim, "Wow! That was totally unforeseen!"

link

the bull **** never ends ... mostly, i just feel like she's insulting our intelligence. does she think we're really that stupid?

It used to be about delegates
by kos
Thu Apr 24, 2008 at 02:01:26 PM PDT

Ahh, the good ol' days when the Clintons insisted that this election would be decided by the delegate count.

January 9, 2008:

WOLFSON: I guess one other thing I'd add is that, as you know, this is a race for delegates. And we currently enjoy a lead in delegates, thanks to the great -- some of the great super delegates that we have on this call and around the country.

See, it mattered because Clinton then led in delegates. Same day:

MCAULIFFE: [...] I've said from day one, and this is the point I tried to make yesterday on television when everybody was asking me questions about after Iowa and New Hampshire what happens, I've always viewed it sort of as a 27-state contest.

But, listen, I always said we're going to win some, we're going to lose some. And at the end of the day it's getting a basket of delegates.

January 25, 2008:

WOLFSON: Well, you know, as you know, all of the polls have Senator Obama ahead. I think he has run a strong campaign in South Carolina. He began there ahead; he remains ahead.

And we have said since Iowa that this is a race for delegates. It's a race that we are ahead in. We have more delegates than Senator Obama.

February 6, 2008:

CECIL: Well, our goal at the end of last night was to be ahead in super delegates and overall delegates. And, in fact, this morning, Hillary Clinton leads Barack Obama in delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

...[WOLFSON] We think that we are in the poll position because we have a lead, overall, in delegates. We think it is going to be very difficult for Senator Obama to make up that lead because of the way in which the party allocates its delegates proportionately.

So we feel very good about that. But this is going to be a neck-and-neck contest for the foreseeable future.

Senator Obama does enjoy some advantages in the contests in the rest of February, but not in a way that should permit him to overcome our lead in delegates.

WOLFSON: And overall, we have a significant lead among delegates, overall, which, obviously, at the end of the day is what is going to positively determine which Democrat is our party's nominee.

Ha ha, Wolfson said it was "obvious" that the delegate race would determine the nominee. But that was when the Clinton campaign still had the lead. Then the lead disappeared, and it became about the "popular vote", and about "electability", and about IF, IF, and IF.

Mark Nickolas, who compiled these quotes, says:

Maybe it's hard to blame Wolfson, McAuliffe and Cecil for pushing these story lines, as they know too well the media isn't going to spend a minute holding them accountable for anything they say.

Maybe. Sure, they get away with what the media lets them get away with. But regardless, note how the Obama campaign never disparaged the system or the role of the delegates while they trailed in those metrics. They knew the rules of the game, and decided to operate within their confines. They have never attempted to rewrite them for their own benefit. The Clinton campaign, on the other hand, appears to have as much respect for the rules (and reality, for that matter) as the Bush administration they are seeking to replace.

It is very distressing to have to admit that the right's hatred against the Clintons is justified.

continued after 9/11 and after his reported comments, which were deeply hurtful to people in New York, and I would hope to every American, because they were published on 9/11 and he said that he was just sorry they [the Weather Underground] hadn't done more [bombing].

My point is that Hillary Clinton has not, in fact, survived the worst that the Republican attack machine (and its pilotless drones online and on talk radio) can dish out. We will learn what the worst really means if she is nominated.

Not that anyone will be sleeping with the fishes with Hillary in the White House, but with the Clintons it's business and it's personal. Just think of all the scores to settle, the grievances to indulge. Bill Clinton provided a preview this week, blaming the Obama campaign for playing the race card against him. Tricky maneuver, but perhaps the only way the former president can come to grips with his loss of standing in the African-American community, once his strongest constituency. (South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, an undeclared superdelegate who is African-American, told the New York Times this week that the black community had supported Clinton during his impeachment and that "I think black folks feel strongly that this is a strange way [for him] to show his appreciation.")

[Hillary's] got negatives in the stratosphere, bankrupted her campaign both financially and spiritually, is the Republicans' best fundraiser, has been exposed as a serial fabulist, can't control her husband, has a entire closet of scandals and financial improprieties waiting to be exploited by the GOP and has made the entire rationale for her candidacy her "experience," which will look pathetic next to McCain's.

Clinton just announced she will be in town this evening! Don't these people plan even one day in advance? My wife and son are out of town and I'm watching the three kids not old enough to be left alone. With a little warning, I could have gotten a babysitter, etc. Arrghh!

<snip>

Clinton is airing this advertisement in Indiana, bemoaning the closure of a defense contractor Magnequench's manufacturing plant in Valparaiso (she is also echoing this line in her stump speeches). Looking at the camera, she tells us she's upset that the 200 jobs that were sent to China, and that "now America's defense relies on Chinese spare parts." And then comes the kicker: She tells viewers that "George Bush could have stopped it, but he didn't."

Clinton is certainly right that it is a tragedy that 200 American jobs were killed in a corporate deal that also exported sensitive military technology to China. But she forgets to mention that it wasn't George Bush who was in the key position to stop it -- it was Bill Clinton.

Back in 1995, a Chinese consortium, which included two Chinese state-owned companies, made a bid to take over Magnequench. Because the company makes key parts for smart bombs, the takeover had to be approved by the Clinton administration's Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States. Despite the national security and economic problems with selling off such critical manufacturing capacity to the Chinese -- and despite the knowledge that such a deal would likely end in a domestic mass layoff -- the Clinton administration approved the deal. This same deal -- not surprisingly -- paved the way for those 200 Indiana jobs and that sensitive military technology to be shipped to China.

<snip>

A Short History of Hillaryism

TNR The Stump
27.04.2008

April, 1993: "We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves."

April, 2008: [E]very speech she gave in Indiana on Friday and Saturday had the same topic sentence. "My campaign is about jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs," she said, always to thunderous applause.

--Michael Crowley

Overwrought Analogies

TNR The Stump
28.04.2008

From that Times piece Mike linked to a little earlier:

At the union hall in Gary she grew so animated in describing the plight of old-line industrial workers, in fact, that she described them in language from the oft-repeated poem, attributed to Martin Niemöller, about the victims of Nazism. "First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist," goes the version inscribed on a wall at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. "Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew," it continues. Mrs. Clinton's version went like this: "They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything," she intoned. "They came for the auto companies and nobody said anything. They came for the office companies, people who did white-collar service jobs, and no one said anything. And they came for the professional jobs that could be outsourced and nobody said anything. So this is not just about steel," she finished.

Don't get me wrong--Hillary has done a remarkable job transforming herself into a champion of the working class. But this, well, you know...

--Noam Scheiber

Hillary anno 1993 sounds a lot like Obama now, or at least Obama at his worst. Has she learned a lesson Obama should still be revising?