Hillary Clinton for President - 2008

Yep. Gotta love his reason:

Quote:

He cited Obama's support from an overwhelming majority of young voters as the major reason for his decision.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/02/21/superdelegate-schmoozed-by-chelsea-backs-obama/

What a sheep.

Can this poli sci major think for himself? It appears that he cannot.

Doncha just love the education system that churns out such Me Toos ?

I realize the superdelagate system has been around for a while, but I apparently didn't tune into it before this election. I can't wrap my brain around it - it seems like a ticket to disenfranchisement, that is, a deliberate stroke of "fear of the mob".

Then, according to this Democrat, Hillary should win. Maybe.

http://www.taylormarsh.com/archives_view.php?id=27036

An excited crowd of about 750 supporters waiting for President Clinton broke into chants-including one woman who lead a group in cheering, "We want a mama, not Obama!"

Team Clinton: Down, and Out of Touch

By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, February 26, 2008; Page A02

They are in the last throes, if you will.

As Vice President Cheney knows, such predictions can be perilous. Still, there was no mistaking a certain flailing, a lashing-out, as two Clinton advisers sat down for a bacon-and-eggs session yesterday at the St. Regis Hotel.

The Christian Science Monitor had assembled the éminences grises of the Washington press corps -- among them David Broder of The Post, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and columnist Mark Shields -- for what turned out to be a fascinating tour of an alternate universe.

First came Harold Ickes, who gave a presentation about Hillary Rodham Clinton's prospects that severed all ties with reality. "We're on the way to locking this nomination down," he said of a candidate who appears, if anything, headed in the other direction.

But before the breakfast crowd had a chance to digest that, they were served another, stranger course by Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer. Asked about an accusation on the Drudge Report that Clinton staffers had circulated a photo of Barack Obama wearing Somali tribal dress, Singer let 'er rip.

"I find it interesting that in a room of such esteemed journalists that Mr. Drudge has become your respected assignment editor," he lectured. "I find it to be a reflection of one of the problems that's gone on with the overall coverage of this campaign." He went on to chide the journalists for their "woefully inadequate" coverage of Obama, "a point that has been certainly backed up by the 'Saturday Night Live' skit that opened the show this past Saturday evening, which I would refer you all to."

The brief moment explained everything about the bitter relations between Clinton's campaign and the media: Singer taunting the likes of Broder, who began covering presidential politics two decades before Singer was born, with a comedy sketch that showed debate moderators fawning over Obama.

"That's your assignment editor?" responded Post columnist Ruth Marcus.

"That's my assignment editor," Singer affirmed.

That Clinton's spokesman is taking his cues from late-night comedy is as good an indication as any of where things stand in the onetime front-runner's campaign. To keep the press from declaring the race over before the voters of Ohio and Texas have their say next week, Clinton aides have resorted to a mixture of surreal happy talk and angry accusation.

Yesterday, Ickes played the good cop. "We think we are on the verge of our next up cycle," he reported, even suggesting the apparent impossibility that Clinton "may be running even" with Obama when all the contests are over. "This race is very close," he judged. "This is tight as a tick."

The reporters were dubious. The Monitor's Dave Cook mused about the consequences of Clinton "battling after there's not much chance."

"For the love of God, we can't say there's not much chance here," Ickes maintained.

David Chalian of ABC News reminded Ickes that Obama's lead in delegates is now of the size Ickes had said would be "significant."

"As we all know in this city, I have a very short memory," Ickes answered.

At one point, he warned of "a bitter and potentially very divisive credentials fight" at the Democratic convention. At another point, he compared the race to 1972, when a strong front-runner, Ed Muskie (now played by Clinton), was upended by an antiwar candidate, George McGovern (now played by Obama), who lost to the Republicans. "The fact is, he could not carry his weight in the general election," Ickes argued.

But Ickes could suspend reality for only so long. He referred to Clinton's opponent at one point as "Senator Barack," swapped 1992 for 1972 and Michigan for Vermont, and said of the Pennsylvania primary: "Um, what month is it?" Eventually, Carl Leubsdorf of the Dallas Morning News drew a confession out of Ickes: "I think if we lose in Texas and Ohio, Mrs. Clinton will have to make her decisions as to whether she goes forward or not."

Ickes's return to Earth seemed only to further outrage Singer.

When Amy Chozick of the Wall Street Journal asked about how combative Clinton would be in tonight's debate with Obama, Singer informed her that it was an "absurd" question. "I don't think . . . any of our senior people have the ESP skills that you all ascribe to us," he said.

When Time's Jay Newton-Small inquired about the Obama photo on Drudge, Singer used the occasion to complain about the press's failure to examine Obama's ties to violent radicals who were part of the Weathermen of the 1960s. "As far as I can tell, there was absolutely no follow-up on the part of the Obama traveling press corps," he said.

Even Broder, asking about why Clinton had abandoned the North American Free Trade Agreement, was informed by Singer that "elections are about the future."

Cook, the host, got similar treatment when he asked why Clinton hasn't released her tax returns. "When she's the general-election nominee, she'll release the tax returns," Singer said.

After the breakfast, one of the questioners asked Singer whether he could elaborate on the tax-return issue. He dismissed her with more hostility. When the reporter suggested that Singer was being antagonistic, the spokesman explained.

"Sixteen months into this," he said, "I'm just angry."

nappyheadedhohoho wrote:

Then, according to this Democrat, Hillary should win. Maybe.

http://www.taylormarsh.com/archives_view.php?id=27036

Yeah, let's refuse the Indys whose support the Democrats need in the general election any and all say in who the Democratic nominee will be. Sound plan.

Any less sound than refusing the votes of Michigan and Florida Democrats or the whole concept in general of superdelegates exercising a vote that no citizen gave them?

nappyheadedhohoho wrote:

Any less sound than refusing the votes of Michigan and Florida Democrats or the whole concept in general of superdelegates exercising a vote that no citizen gave them?

The Michigan and Florida Democrats pulled their own votes. The rules were in place and they chose to ignore them figuring there would be no real consequences. They were wrong. Next time around, the Republican primaries will be a mess with each state seeking advantage, but I doubt many Democratic state organizations will break the rules.

It seems that the right hates strong, independent, women, which explains the visceral hatred of Hillary..

Ickes: Blame Penn
by Jason Horowitz | February 28, 2008

Harold Ickes definitely doesn't buy the argument that Mark Penn isn't responsible for everything that has happened to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

"Mark Penn has run this campaign," said Ickes in a brief phone interview this morning. "Besides Hillary Clinton, he is the single most responsible person for this campaign.

"Now, he has been circumscribed to some extent by Maggie Williams," said Ickes, who then pointed out that that was only a recent development.

When asked about the assertion by one senior Clinton official the campaign was effectively run by committee, diluting Penn's authority, Ickes was incredulous.

"I don't know what campaign you're talking about," said Ickes. "I have been at meetings where he introduces himself as the campaign's chief strategist. I've heard him call himself that many times, say, ?'I am the chief strategist.'"

Asked if Penn preferred the title of chief strategist to pollster, Ickes said, "Prefer it? He insists on it!"

When asked if Penn was therefore responsible for the campaign's strategy, Ickes said, "It's pretty plain for anyone to see that he has shaped the strategy of the campaign. He has called the shots."

"Mark Penn," he said, "has dominated the message in this campaign. Dominated it."

Ickes also took umbrage at the suggestion of one Clinton campaign official that he had mismanaged the campaign's money and deprived Clinton the resources to compete in states after February 5.

"We invested a huge amount of money in February 5 states," said Ickes, arguing that anyone who suggested he had wasted the campaign's money was "talking with no knowledge."

"I don't know what they're basing this statement on but they have not one fact to stand on," he said.

The chief responsibility entrusted to Ickes now is wrangling superdelegates for Clinton, or at least persuading them not to commit until after the March 4 contests in Texas and Ohio.

Here's the case he's been making: "Mr. Obama has just become the frontrunner. He has not been subjected to any real degree of scrutiny by the press."

Then, he says, he tells superdelegates that "we have an obligation" to wait and pick the best candidate for the Democratic Party. "We can't nominate a candidate who can't withstand the withering attacks of the Republicans."

Asked about the defection of superdelegate and civil rights icon John Lewis to Obama, Ickes said, "You never like to lose a supporter. John Lewis is a great American hero."

But, he added, "He is one vote. He doesn't have many votes."

The Other Marriage

In her memorable post-mortem of the 2000 Gore campaign, "Scenes from a Marriage," the late Marjorie Williams explored the deep rift that had emerged between Al Gore and Bill Clinton and the bitter finger-pointing between their two camps regarding who was to blame for the loss. [..]

It's still early, of course, but in the Karen Tumulty piece [..] there are signs that an eerily similar cycle of blame may be emerging between Bill and some of those responsible for running Hillary's presidential campaign, with the Hillarylanders (like Gore) pointing at Bill's vanity and lack of self-restraint and Bill, in turn, questioning their political competence and failure to keep him involved.

The first half of this equation is not new--following his remarks after South Carolina, any number of observers accused Bill of being reckless and destructive--but Tumulty gets a couple of Clinton insiders to endorse this view rather forcefully (though, of course, off the record):

"I think he just did her such damage," says a friend and supporter, expressing a sentiment that many feel privately. "They'll never see it that way, because they can't. And he has no self-knowledge. This has magnified all his worst traits."... Nowhere did it get worse than in South Carolina. A Clinton campaign official says Bill "hijacked the candidacy in South Carolina. It was appalling to watch it."

And then there's Bill's counter-complaint that Hillary's campaign has been incompetent and has not taken appropriate advantage of his own political skills:

[H]e is appalled, friends and aides say, by what he has privately described as "political malpractice" by Hillary's campaign. It spent money with abandon in the earliest primaries and assumed that the race would not last past Super Tuesday, on Feb. 5 ?- and failed to prepare for any of the states that followed. Two weeks before the Texas primary, Bill Clinton telephoned Waco insurance mogul and philanthropist Bernard Rapoport, a friend and backer since the 1970s. Rapoport told Clinton that this was the first contact he had had from anyone on the campaign. "He was madder than mad," Rapoport says. "He was right. There was so much we could have done, but we never heard from anyone at headquarters."... [Bill] deferred to [Hillary's] team and its pseudo-incumbency strategy throughout the fall, friends say, even though his instincts told him that Obama was gaining steam and should be dealt with as a threat. When Bill visited Hillary's Des Moines campaign headquarters a few days before the Iowa caucuses to give a pep talk to her young volunteers, her then campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle didn't come out of her office. Those who were there saw it as an unmistakable snub and an assertion of who was in charge. [..]

They appreciate that Clinton followed what she was told were the rules of how to run for president, only to find that still may not be enough.

"She was told you need experience, toughness and the ability to raise money, and yet the system changed the rules again," said Joan McLean, a top adviser to Geraldine Ferraro in her 1984 vice presidential run and a professor of political science at Ohio Wesleyan University.

I think it's more empowering to vote for a woman who is also the best candidate than to vote for the second-best candidate simply because she's a woman.

They appreciate that Clinton followed what she was told were the rules of how to run for president, only to find that still may not be enough.

"She was told you need experience, toughness and the ability to raise money, and yet the system changed the rules again," said Joan McLean, a top adviser to Geraldine Ferraro in her 1984 vice presidential run and a professor of political science at Ohio Wesleyan University.