Obama's "bad" week

by KOS

So CW is that last week was the "week from hell" for Obama, and given that he could've closed this thing out and didn't, we can stipulate that it could've been better.

But let's see just how horrible the week was:

Per Obama's count (if Clinton had a similar count, I'll happily link to it), Obama started last week with 1,203 delegates, Clinton with 1,043. Since then:

Obama  Clinton
OH 66     75
RI 8     13
VT 9      6
TX 99     94
WY 7      5

Total 189    193

So that's a four-delegate gain for Clinton.

But that wasn't all. Obama also picked up three more super delegates last Tuesday -- Texas Democratic Party Vice Chair Roy Laverne Brooks, DNC member Mary Long of Georgia and South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Carol Fowler.

That pegs things at 192-193 for the week.

And then on Saturday, Obama provided material help in Bill Foster's dramatic upset victory in IL-14, filming an ad and sending hundreds of volunteers into the district. The Republicans had John McCain campaign for the Republican candidate, yet still lost proving that Obama 1) is more focused on party building and down-ballot races than the Clinton campaign (where was she?), 2) that he could out-battle McCain in the first proxy battle of the season, and 3) that he's got some serious coattails.

Oh, and Bill Foster is now a super delegate and repaid Obama's largesse by promising him his vote.

So yes, Obama has some serious message issues to deal with and a shaken campaign to right. But where it matters -- in the delegate race -- Obama ended his week from hell TIED with Clinton.

Furthermore, there's an "unpledged" Wyoming delegate still to be decided. He or she will be selected at Wyoming's state convention, and is selected by the elected delegates from Saturday's caucus. In other words, it's going to be another Obama delegate. So unofficially, Obama actually won the delegate race last week.

As Clinton gears up her efforts toward coup by super delegate, threatening civil war within the party, it bears nothing that in her best week of the campaign since her New Hampshire victory, she actually lost ground in the race.

Race tracker wiki: IL-14

Hillary Clinton, Monster... I'm with Samantha Power on this one...

Article by John Brown

Samantha Power earned a degree from Yale. Then, she snagged her J.D. from Harvard Law School. She spent several years as an "on the spot" journalist, reporting from some of the world's most dangerous places about issues relating to genocide, human rights and the conduct of foreign policy.

She wrote a book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. It was good enough to put a Pulitzer Prize on her mantle. She recently finished another book, a biography of the late UN special envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

She's the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and continues to write columns on areas of current interest in the realm of foreign affairs.

Samantha Power is the kind of person the rest of us should take seriously. We don't necessarily need to agree with every nuance of every position she takes on every single subject, but we should listen. She knows things. She takes the issues in her field very seriously. She researches them. She studies them. She is able to use the space for thinking afforded by ivory tower digs to create serious arguments about issues and places where she has personally spent time.

Samantha Power does like to talk. She gives the occasional commencement address. She shows up in panel discussions on genocide and human rights. She chats with Tavis Smiley. She does interviews with Charlie Rose. She occasionally shows up on Democracy Now. Overall, though, she's a lot less recognizable than you're average TV talking head and she seems to find a way to avoid the usual Fox/CNN/MSNBC circuit--probably because they aren't all that interested in serious discussion. Just a guess.

She also talks to Barack Obama. She's an adviser. Unpaid, but definitely part of the Obama camp. Samantha Power used to get phone calls from Wesley Clark when he was making his POTUS move, but she decided to join the Obama campaign. She liked his books. She liked his perspective on politics and foreign policy. She liked his pre-invasion stance on Iraq. She liked him.

Samantha Power is the kind of person Hillary Clinton's more gender-influenced supporters should absolutely love. Samantha Power plays in a traditional man's game--and wins. She's a former cross-country runner who can hold her own on a basketball court and who's also capable enough to have Harvard Professorship and a Pulitzer. She's articulate, successful and she even has good hair (at least Men's Vogue thinks so).

I doubt too many Clinton backers will be singing the praises of Ms. Power, though. You see, Samantha Power's intelligence and talkativity combined on the issue of Hillary Clinton to produce a very interesting statement. She may have thought she was off the record, but she wasn't. Thus, we now know that:
HILLARY CLINTON IS A MONSTER

That's what Samantha Power said. Remember, we're talking about a journalist who's seen unspeakable attrocities in Darfur. We're talking about a Harvard professor who wins Pulitzer prizes for her work on issues of genocide. And she's calling Hillary a monster.
According to the NY Daily News:

During an interview with The Scotsman, Samantha Power, one of Obama's unpaid advisers, said Clinton would stop at nothing in her zeal to seize the lead from Obama.

"She is a monster, too - that is off the record - she is stooping to anything," Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.
In addition to calling Clinton a monster, Power made other unflattering comments about the former First Lady.

"Interestingly, the people in her innermost circle seem to not mind her; I think they really love her," she said.

Power said Clinton has looked desperate in her recent TV appearances.
"You just look at her and think: ergh. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive," she said.

Of course, someone got her on the phone and she apologized for the step out of line. That's expected with the Obama campaign. As much as I sometimes wish Barack would be as mean and hateful as I am, he tends to hold himself and those around him to higher standards. In fact, Power assumes she'll get the boot from the campaign over her Monster remarks. It just cracks me up, though, that someone who really knows a sick fucking monster when she sees one would hang that tag on Hillary.

Samantha Power knows things. I'm going to trust her judgment on this one.

Hillary Clinton is a scummy politician who will stoop to anything in order to win an election. She is a one-dimensional freak who's only objective is hoarding power. Samantha got it right. She's a monster.

Who are you going to trust? The woman who hires Mark Penn, comes up with three new lies and seven new hypocrisies per day, schemes constantly and who eats positivity only to shit out fear-mongering and smarminess? How about the Harvard professor with the Yale degree, the Pulitzer, and a serious interest in solving some of the world's more pressing problems?
I'm with Samantha.

Monster

monster

Did Clinton Win Ohio on a Lie?

Article by Paul Loeb at the Huffington Post.

Suppose someone in the North Korean government released a false story that shifted a key American election. If Bush were negatively affected, we might be bombing Pyongyang by now. But this just happened with what Hillary Clinton called "NAFTAgate" Without it, she might never have won Ohio, or her margin would have been minuscule. But as a Canadian Broadcasting Company story reveals, practically the entire story was a lie, one that played so central a role in Clinton's Ohio victory as to thoroughly taint any claim she raises about a swing state mandate.

As the Ohio primary approached, Obama was steadily closing what a month earlier had been a 20-point lead in the polls. He pointed out that the NAFTA trade agreement was a centerpiece of Bill Clinton's term and that it cost massive numbers of industrial jobs. Instead of creating a trade-fueled boom, NAFTA helped hollow out America's industrial base, with over 200,000 manufacturing jobs disappearing in Ohio alone since the 2000 election. Even Republicans I talked with while calling the state just before the primary made clear that they thought it was a disaster.
Given these sentiments, Hillary chose not to defend her husband's actions, but instead claimed Obama was distorting her position because she'd privately opposed the agreement at the time, had "long been a critic" and now similarly supported stronger labor and environmental standards. Echoing her reinvention on the Iraq War, these claims were flat-out nonsense. As David Sirota points out, she'd praised NAFTA repeatedly in public settings from the time of its inception, even praising corporations for mounting "a very effective business effort" on behalf of its passage. And as Obama highlighted their contrasting positions and approaches on this and other issues, he was gaining in the polls.
Then, on Feb 27, the Canadian network CTV reported that even as Obama was publicly attacking Bill's role in NAFTA, and arguing for a drastic overhaul, he'd had key economic advisor Austin Goolsby arrange a meeting with the Canadian ambassador where Goolsby reassured them that this was all just "political positioning," pandering for campaign trail. The likely source of the anonymous Valerie Plame-style leak was Ian Brodie, Chief of Staff, to a key Bush ally, right-wing Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and the US media jumped all over it as proof of Obama's hypocrisy. The Canadian embassy denied the story and Obama also said it was false. A follow-up March 3rd leak then sent a supposed memo summarizing the meeting to the major US media outlets, quoting Goolsby as saying Obama's statements were more "political positioning than the clear articulation of policy plans." Clinton made the controversy a centerpiece of her home stretch speeches and ads, saying "You come to Ohio and you both give speeches that are very critical of NAFTA and you send out misleading and false information about my position regarding NAFTA and then we find out that your chief economic advisor has gone to a foreign government and basically done the old wink wink, don't pay any attention this is just political rhetoric." She even ran a radio ad that misleadingly presenting itself as a news story, which concluded, "As Senator Obama was telling one story to Ohio, his campaign was telling a very different story to Canada."

John McCain similarly attacked Obama for the presumed contradiction in his stand, saying "I don't think it's appropriate to go to Ohio and tell people one thing while your aide is calling the Canadian Ambassador and telling him something else. I certainly don't think that's straight talk." The week before, key Clinton ally, Machinist's Union head Tom Buffenbarger used recycled language from ads the right-wing Club For Growth ran against Howard Dean by dismissing Obama supporters as "latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies." He now attacked Obama again by saying, "Working families cannot trust a candidate who telegraphs his real position to a foreign government and then dissembles in a nationally televised debate."
These attacks unquestionably made a difference. They flipped voter perceptions on an issue where Obama should have had a key advantage. In 1994, union, environmental, and social justice activists were so angry at Clinton's staking all his political chips to pass NAFTA that many sat out that critical election, helping lead to Gingrich's win. Now Clinton ended up getting a majority the 55 percent of Ohio voters who expressed a sense "that trade takes jobs away," a majority of those worried about their family's economic situation, and a majority of union members, whom Obama won in his recent victories. She won a 10 percent plurality in a state where Ohioans overwhelmingly picked the economy as the top issue. And she won overwhelmingly with late-breaking voters, the opposite of practically all of Obama's other campaigns. Most important, by casting doubt on Obama's integrity, the cornerstone of his campaign, they made him seem like just another hack politician who'd say anything to win. This gave the supposed scandal a probable impact in Texas and Rhode Island as well, even though NAFTA was less of a central issue there.
But as the CBC report and others makes clear, the core of the story turned out to be false. The Canadian government contacted Goolsby to clarify Obama's position on trade, not the reverse. Although Goolsby did meet with Canada's Chicago consul general George Rioux (not, as was reported in the original leak, Ambassador Michael Wilson), there's no evidence that he ever described Obama's position as mere political posturing. Instead, Goolsby responded to Canadian questions by clarifying that Obama wasn't pushing to scrap the agreement entirely, but that labor and environmental safeguards were important to him. The memo was simply inaccurate, as even the Harper government now acknowledges after a firestorm of criticism by opposition parliament members, who've accused the Harper government of trying to help their Republican allies across the border by trying to take down the likely and stronger of the Democratic candidates. In response, Harper called the leak "blatantly unfair," pledged to get to the bottom of it, and said "there was no intention to convey, in any way, that Senator Obama and his campaign team were taking a different position in public from views expressed in private, including about NAFTA."
Ironically, the day before the story hit American TV, Brodie, told reporters questioning him on trade that "someone from (Hillary) Clinton's campaign is telling the embassy to take it with a grain of salt. . .That someone called us and told us not to worry." But that never made the headlines and no one raised it in the campaign.
As Matt Wallace writes in the Daily Kos, "this scandal was manufactured out of whole cloth. Goolsbee said something consistent with Obama's official position -- that he wanted protections added, but it wasn't going to be a fundamental change or revocation of NAFTA, and that Obama was not a protectionist. This was morphed somewhat going into the memo, and now the embassy admits they "may have misrepresented the Obama advisor." Even after the memo misrepresented Obama, the Harper government took it a step further and then leaked a completely fantastic version of the story to the press, in order to maximize the bloodletting."

The Harper government has now apologized for any interference in an American political campaign, but the damage is done. Clinton's victory also benefitted from some pretty questionable attack politics. Her 3:00 AM ad echoed the worst of Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani. When asked if she'd "take Senator Obama on his word that he's not a Muslim," she left the door open to the right wing lies by saying "there's nothing to base that on. As far as I know." She pretty much handed McCain his campaign script by saying, "I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."

Taken together with a week of media framing that the respected Project for Excellence in Journalism described as overwhelmingly critical of Obama, and initial twenty five-point margins based on name familiarity and insider connections, these attacks also contributed strongly to her Ohio victory. Back-to-back sympathetic Saturday Night Lives shows (the first after the strike) probably helped as well, as did support from popular governor Ted Strickland. Clinton may even have benefited from Rush Limbaugh's exhortation to his listeners to cross over and vote for her to keep the Democrats bloodying each other up. But "NAFTAgate" was key. Without it her victory would have been non-existent or minimal. The nine delegates Clinton netted from Ohio can't be changed, but the salience of this lie casts into doubt everything she says about the lessons of this victory.

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

Hillary’s New Math Problem

Tuesday's big wins? The delegate calculus just got worse.

Article by Jonathan Alter at Newsweek.

Hillary Clinton won big victories Tuesday night in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island. But she's now even further behind in the race for the Democratic nomination. How could that be? Math. It's relentless.

To beat Barack Obama among pledged delegates, Clinton now needs even bigger margins in the 12 remaining primaries than she needed when I ran the numbers on Monday--an average of 23 points, which is more than double what she received in Ohio.

Superdelegates won't help Clinton if she cannot erase Obama's lead among pledged delegates, which now stands at roughly 134. Caucus results from Texas aren't complete, but Clinton will probably net about 10 delegates out of March 4. That's 10 down, 134 to go. Good luck.

I've asked several prominent uncommitted superdelegates if there's any chance they would reverse the will of Democratic voters. They all say no. It would shatter young people and destroy the party.

Hillary's only hope lies in the popular vote-a yardstick on which she now trails Obama by about 600,000 votes. Should she end the primary season in June with a lead in popular votes, she could get a hearing from uncommitted superdelegates for all the other arguments that she would make a stronger nominee. (Wins the big states, etc.). If she loses both the pledged delegate count and the popular vote, no argument will cause the superdelegates to disenfranchise millions of Democratic voters. It will be over.

Projecting popular votes precisely is impossible because there's no way to calculate turnout. But Clinton would likely need do-overs in Michigan and Florida (whose January primaries didn't count because they broke Democratic Party rules). But even this probably wouldn't give her the necessary popular vote margins.

Remember, Obama's name wasn't even on the Michigan ballot when voters there went to the polls. Even if he's trounced there (and Michigan, won by Jesse Jackson in 1988, has a large African-American vote in its primary), Obama would still win hundreds of thousands of popular votes. This is also an argument for why Obama may end up preferring a primary to a caucus in Michigan. (Obama has done better in caucuses).

Florida, with its heavy population of elderly and Jewish voters, might be a better place for Hillary to close the popular vote gap. But even if you assume she does five points better than her double-digit win there in the meaningless February primary (where no one campaigned), she would still fall short.

I'm no good at math, but with the help of "Slate’s Delegate Calculator" I've once again scoped out the rest of the primaries. In order to show how deep a hole she's in, I've given her the benefit of the doubt every week. That's 12 victories in a row, bigger in total than Obama's run of 11 straight. And this time I've assigned her even larger margins than I did before in Wyoming, North Carolina, Indiana and Kentucky.

So here we go again:

Let's assume that on Saturday in Wyoming, Hillary's March 4 momentum gives her an Ohio-style 10-point win, confounding every expectation. Next Tuesday in Mississippi, where African-Americans play a big role in the Democratic primary, she shocks the political world by again winning 55-45.

Then on April 22, the big one-Pennsylvania-and it's a Hillary blow-out: 60-40, with Clinton picking up a whopping 32 delegates. She wins both of Guam's two delegates on May 3 and Indiana's proximity to Illinois does Obama no good on May 6. The Hoosiers go for Hillary 55-45 and the same day brings another huge upset in a heavily African-American state. Enough blacks desert Obama to give North Carolina to Hillary in another big win, 55-45, netting her seven more delegates.

May 13 in West Virginia is no kinder to Obama, and he loses by double digits, netting Clinton two delegates. Another 60-40 landslide on May 20 in Kentucky nets her 11 more. The same day brings Oregon, a classic Obama state. Ooops! He loses there 52-48. Hillary wins by 10 in Montana and South Dakota on June 3 and the scheduled primary season ends on June 7 in Puerto Rico with another big Viva Clinton! Hillary pulls off a 60-40 landslide, giving her another 11 delegates.

Given that I've put not a thumb but my whole fist on the scale, this fanciful calculation gives Hillary the lead, right? Actually, it makes the score 1,625 to 1,584 for Obama. A margin of 39 pledged delegates may not seem like much, but remember, the chances of Obama losing state after state by 20-point margins are slim to none.

So no matter how you cut it, Obama will almost certainly end the primaries with a pledged delegate lead, courtesy of all those landslides in February. What happens then? Will Democrats come together before the Denver Convention opens in late August?

We know that Hillary is unlikely to quit. This will leave it up to the superdelegates to figure out how to settle on a nominee. With 205 already committed to Obama, he would need another 200 uncommitted superdelegates to get to the magic number of 2025 delegates needed to nominate. But that's only under my crazy pro-Hillary projections. More likely, Obama would need about 50-100 of the approximately 500 uncommitted superdelegates, which shouldn't be too difficult.

But let's say all the weeks of negative feeling have taken a toll. Let's say that Clinton supporters are feeling embittered and inclined to sit on their hands. It's not too hard to imagine prominent superdelegates asking Obama to consider putting Hillary on the ticket.

This might be the wrong move for him. A national security choice like Sen. Jim Webb, former Sen. Sam Nunn or retired Gen. Anthony Zinni could make more sense. But if Obama did ask Clinton, don't assume she would say no just because she has, well, already served as de facto vice president for eight years under her husband. (Sorry, Al).

In fact, she would probably say yes. When there's a good chance to win, almost no one has ever said no. (Colin Powell is the exception). In 1960, when the vice-presidency was worth a lot less, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson gave up his powerful position to run with John F. Kennedy.

How about Clinton-Obama? Nope. The Clintonites can spin to their heart's content about how big March 4 was for them. How close the race is. How they've got the Big Mo now.

Tell it to Slate's Delegate Calculator. Again.

Hillary: The New Huckabee

Hillary's wins yesterday in Texas and Ohio breathed new life into her campaign. Basking in the glow of fresh momentum, Hillary did six morning show appearances today, and will continue to try to shape the story as a brand new race.

But Hillary's spin, and the media adoption of that spin, will do little to change an even starker reality this morning: Hillary Clinton cannot win the Democratic nomination. Barack Obama's pledged delegate lead was substantial before Texas and Ohio and will remain materially unchanged in its aftermath. He has cut Clinton's super delegate lead in half since February 5th, and is expected to roll-out as many as fifty more throughout the next few weeks.

Hillary needed to win about two thirds of the available delegates last night to begin to close the gap with Obama. Though we still don't have final vote counts, it appears that, at most, she picked up 10 delegates, a woefully insufficient amount. As counter-intuitive as the math may be, despite her wins last night, she actually made it more difficult for her to reach the nomination. There are now fewer delegates remaining and an even higher percentage she must win to reclaim the lead. After Ohio and Texas, she no longer has a path to the nomination.

In the coming week, we will see Barack Obama win Wyoming and Mississippi, likely by large enough margins to erase Clinton's net gains from last night. Six weeks later, Pennsylvania will become the next benchmark. Because her victories in Ohio and Texas were, at least in part, the result of a barrage of negative attacks, one can only expect those attacks to continue, and be amplified, in the days and weeks ahead.

Like Ohio and Texas, Pennsylvania's demographics favor Hillary. But a large victory in Pennsylvania is unlikely for a number of reasons, the most compelling of which is the length of time between its primary and previous primaries. Obama and Clinton will be able to dedicate the same kind of time, effort, resources, and organization to Pennsylvania that they did in the early contests. Despite Hillary's improved financial situation, she can still expect to be seriously outspent by Obama. With the amount of time and resources that Obama will put into the state, it is difficult to imagine her winning by a sizeable margin. Obama's trajectory has continued to rise as voters get to know him, while Hillary's numbers have remained high, but static. In the early contests, Hillary's most significant win was by a six point margin in Nevada (where she ultimately lost the delegate count). A massive win for Hillary in Pennsylvania, as a result, seems unrealistic.

Yet there is little evidence that Hillary will leave the race after Pennsylvania, even having failed to alter the delegate count. That she has decided to continue the race today despite truly impossible odds certainly implies that she intends to march all the way to June.

Up until now, the lengthening of the campaign calendar has benefitted Obama. He has had the opportunity to meet many more voters, build well-financed organizations in a number of key states, and improve the voter's view of his electability and readiness to lead. It is possible, therefore, that an additional seven weeks of primary campaigning could continue to strengthen the Obama candidacy.

But as Hillary continues to sharpen her attacks, she may slowly weaken Obama, raising questions gently about his religion and aggressively about his readiness. If his message is muted, and his candidacy weakened, it will not change the ultimate calculus. Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee. And if Hillary's lasting contribution to the party is hurting his chances for victory, she will have done nothing more than shown herself to be a selfish liability: the new Mike Huckabee.

Article courtesy of the Huffington Post by Dylan Loewe.

Lawrence Lessig: How Creativity Is Being Strangled By The Law (TED Conference)

Hillary Clinton's word: It's worth nothing

A New Hampshire newspaper tears into Hillary Clinton for breaking her pledge not to campaign in Florida: "Sen. Hillary Clinton signed a pledge not to "campaign or participate" in the Michigan or Florida Democratic primaries. She participated in both primaries and is campaigning in Florida. Which proves, again, that Hillary Clinton is a liar."

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