A fairly new website is intriguing for anyone following the byzantine nominating process the Democrats are living through. It’s mrsuper.org, self-described as, “an undeclared superdelegate debunks myths, offers insight and answers questions about the 2008 Democratic nomination process for President of the United States.”
Reputable journalists have vetted the guy (without, at his request, outing his identity), and the posts seem both credible and carry some insight. It’s worth checking out here.
As Pennsylvanians finally go to the polls, the name of the game today for the Clinton and Obama campaigns is managing expectations and cranking up the spin machine. Both sides have become adept at it, but for this primary, neither side is bothering to even wait for the polls to close.
Over the lunch hour, an e-mail went out from headquarters in Chicago, predicting a big win for Hillary Rodham Clinton — along with an elaborate explanation of why it won’t matter.
Some excerpts:
With all eyes on today’s contest, one thing is clear: Pennsylvania is considered a state tailor-made for Hillary Clinton, and by rights she should win big. She has family roots in the state, she has the support of the Democratic establishment-including Governor Rendell’s extensive
network-and former President Clinton is fondly remembered.
Clinton has been leading by large margins in Pennsylvania. In the weeks leading up to the primary, she led by as much as 25 points. They were so confident that their own Pennsylvania spokesman said Clinton would be “unbeatable” in Pennsylvania-regardless of spending by her opponent.
There has been much speculation about what each campaign needs coming out of tonight. The facts, however, are simple.
Behind in delegates and sporting a 14-30 primary record (not good enough even to make the playoffs in the NBA Eastern Conference), the Clinton campaign needs a blowout victory in Pennsylvania to get any closer to winning the nomination. Even President Clinton said that only a “big, big victory” will give her the boost she needs.
Tonight’s outcome is unlikely to change the dynamic of this lengthy primary. Fully three quarters of the remaining delegates will be selected in states other than Pennsylvania. While there are 158 delegates at stake in today’s primary, there are 157 up for grabs in the
Indiana and North Carolina primaries two weeks from today. We expect that by tomorrow morning, the overall structure of the race will remain unchanged-except for the fact that there will be 158 delegates off the table.
Two hours later came Clinton campaign’s rebuttal to Obama’s prebuttal. More excerpts:
The Obama campaign is attempting to pre-spin the results from tonight’s Pennsylvania primary by suggesting that Sen. Clinton should - and will - win.
But after the Obama campaign’s “go-for-broke” Pennsylvania strategy, after their avalanche of negative ads, negative mailers and negative attacks against Sen. Clinton, after their record-breaking spending in the state, a fundamental question must be asked: Why shouldn’t Sen. Obama win?
Sen. Obama’s supporters - and many pundits - have argued that the delegate “math” makes him the prohibitive frontrunner. They have argued that Sen. Clinton’s chances are slim to none. So if he’s already the frontrunner, if he’s had six weeks of unlimited resources to get his message out, shouldn’t he be the one expected to win tonight? If not, why not?
As the phrase goes, watch what they do not what they say.
There’s a reason Sen. Obama and his campaign have ratcheted up their year-long assault on Sen. Clinton’s character and ended the Pennsylvania campaign with a flurry of harsh negative attacks. It’s because they know that a loss in Pennsylvania will raise troubling questions about his candidacy and his ability to take on John McCain in the general election. And it’s because they know that the race is neck and neck and tonight’s contest is a measure of where the campaign stands.
With Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign continuing to batter Barack Obama over what’s being called “bittergate,” his campaign fired back today with an account of her less-than-charitable assessment of working-class voters. They did so by picking up a Huffington Post piece that recounts a long-ago Camp David meeting where the Clintons were trying to come to terms with the loss of the U.S. House to the GOP.
That darned phone in the White House keeps ringing off the hook.
Hillary Rodham Clinton released a new ad Wednesday that reprises her middle-of-the-night-phone-call-threatening-Armageddon, casting the crisis in economic terms. Unlike the original, which took pains to paint a bullseye on Barack Obama for his lack of experience, this one takes aim at John McCain as someone who do nothing to help struggling American families.
Fair enough. But McCain’s folks were quick enough on their feet to one-up Clinton within a few hours, cribbing her own video with an Internet ad (cheap, but guaranteed free media coverage) that blasted both her and Obama as typical Democrats who only want to raise taxes to fight crises.
Nothing — not yet, at least — from Obama on 3 a.m. phone calls.
After subsiding a bit early this week, the drumbeat continued, in drips and drabs, that the end may well be within sight of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s once-supposedly-unstoppable presidential bid.
The pundits continue to pile on, parsing the significance of such disparate news items as Vermont Sen. (and Barack Obama backer) Pat Leahy saying Friday she should get out of the race to Sen. Chris Dodd’s (also with Obama) saying much the same just the day before.
On and on it went, with Slate Magazine topping the exercise with “The Hillary Deathwatch,” a feature that will be regulary updated with the current odds of her winning the Democratic nomination. As of Friday, the odds stood at 12 percent.
Amid all this (and much more piling on), Clinton’s campaign sent out a letter Friday to fundraisers that read, in part: “Have you noticed a pattern?
“Every time our campaign demonstrates its strength and resilience, people start to suggest we should end our pursuit of the Democratic nomination.
“Those anxious to force us to the sidelines aren’t doing it because they think we’re going to lose the upcoming primaries. The fact is, they’re reading the same polls we are, and they know we are in a position to win … we aren’t going to simply step aside. You and I are going to keep fighting for what we believe in, and together, we’re going to win.”
Just in time for the campaign trail lull that will accompany Easter weekend, a new meme began catching hold today among some Hillary Clinton watchers. Short version: The end may be nigh.
It actually started Thursday, when the New York Times frontpaged an analysis blandly headlined, “Clinton Facing Narrower Path to Nomination.” Detailing the breaks she absolutely, positively needs to wrest the nomination away from Barack Obama, the story’s bottom line:
“[A]ll this has seemed something of a long shot since her defeats in February. But that shot seems to have grown a little longer.”
Slate Magazine quickly picked up on the new CW: “The question is, who is going to tell Hillary it’s over? Certainly not Bill. Certainly not her aides.”
The notion kept gaining traction. Time magazine’s Mark Halperin listed 14 “painful things Hillary Clinton knows — or should know.” Among them: “She can’t win the nomination without a bloody convention battle — after which, even if she won, history and many Democrats would cast her as a villain.”
Finally, Politico.com went kinda meta on the question, putting it in the context of the sausage machine that covering a campaign often becomes, explaining why Clinton “has virtually no chance of winning” — and why that bpottom line hasn’t taken hold more widely in the media.
Bottom line:
“Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote — which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle — and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else.
“People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet.
“As it happens, many people inside Clinton’s campaign live right here on Earth. One important Clinton adviser estimated to Politico privately that she has no more than a 10 percent chance of winning her race against Barack Obama, an appraisal that was echoed by other operatives.”
Sure, this CW may evaporate over the weekend, gather steam or be replaced by a 180-degree switcheroo, in which the pundits proclaim yet another Clinton comeback. But for now, it’s out there.
First Hillary Clinton, then husband Bill, have repeatedly floated the balloon that Barack Obama might make a great Number Two on a presidential ticket headed by none other than Hillary Clinton. Obama’s short answer so far: Thanks but no thanks.
Hillary Clinton’s most recent forumlation came over the weekend in Mississippi, when she told voters, “I’ve had people say, ‘Well, I wish I could vote for both of you’. That might be possible some day, but first I need your vote.”
Her husband chimed in the same day, calling a Clinton-Obama ticket “an unstoppable force.” As per NBC News: Clinton said that Hillary believes that if there was a way to “unite the energy and the new people” that Barack Obama has attracted with the appeal he said his wife has shown in “small town and rural America, they’d “be hard to beat.”
Over the weekend, the blogosphere and pundits went nuts, pointing out the obvious contradiction: A big chunk of Clinton’s kitchen sink barrage of Obama consists of her contention that he’s too green and unqualified to be Commander in Chief …. uh, but he’s perfectly acceptable to become the person one heartbeat away from the job?
The New York Daily News’ Michael Goodwin (no friend of the Clintons), put it this way: “It’s a dream team all right, as in dream on. It’s a fantasy because, in the Clintons’ pitch, naturally, she is on top of the ticket and Obama is her No. 2. That’s rich of her, considering that Obama leads in both the delegate race and the popular vote. Forget those pesky voters - Hillary has declared herself the winner!”
Time’s Karen Tumulty put it succinctly: “There’s one big problem with the Clinton campaign encouraging all this talk of a dream ticket: It undercuts their argument that Obama is not prepared to be Commander-in-Chief. If they really believe that to be the case, how could they justify putting him in a position where he is one tragedy away from the job?”
You get the idea. Even as his wife’s campaign was busily tearing down Obama, comparing him to none other than special prosecutor Kenneth Starr (who’d have thought in a million years the Clintons would be the first to invoke the memory of you-know-who), Bill Clinton airily dismissed the negative back-and-forth this way: “That’s politics.”
Monday afternoon update, via the New York Times:
Senator Barack Obama implored voters here today to discount the political chatter about him joining the Democratic presidential ticket with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, declaring: “I don’t know how somebody who’s in second place can offer the vice presidency to someone who’s in first place.”
“If I’m not ready, how is it that you think I should be such a great vice president?” Mr. Obama said. “Do you understand that?”
Sure the election is still a political light-year away, but the polling firm SurveyUSA has just taken a stab at gaming the Electoral College results, by way of a poll of 30,000 registered voters in all 50 states.
The result: With 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, Barack Obama beats John McCain, 280-258; Hillary Rodham Clinton beats McCain, 276-262.
In the matchup, Obama would carry 24 states and the District of Columbia; Clinton would carry 20. He would run more strongly in the Midwest, South West and West Coast. While Obama outperforms Clinton in 33 states, the opposite is true in 15 states.
Closer to home, SurveyUSA found that Clinton would win Minnesota by 4 percentage points, while Obama would take the state by 7.
The firm added a boatload of caveats to its polling: “There are specific limitations to this exercise. The winner’s margin in each state is not always outside of the survey’s margin of sampling error. Rather than show states where the results are inside of the margin of sampling error as “leaning” or “toss-ups,” SurveyUSA for this illustration assigned Electoral Votes to the candidate with the larger share of the vote, no matter how small the winner’s margin. The Democratic nominee is not yet known. Running mates on neither side are known. These are not surveys of likely voters, these are surveys of registered voters. Those caveats stated, the exercise is a remarkable foreshadowing of how contested, and how fiercely fought, the general election in November may be, regardless of who the Democratic nominee is.”
What has to be the single most bizarre political ad of this election cycle just surfaced and is virally making itself from computer to computer. It’s an endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy by Jack Nicholson (who in fact endorsed Clinton awhile back). It’s a compilation ofclips from his movies stitched together with pitches for Clinton. The video, alterately described as “bizarre” and “creepy” by a variety of blogs, was created by director Rob Reiner, a Democratic big shot in Hollywood, the Guardian reported today.
The paper continues: ”The usually press-shy actor has admitted that the Clinton campaign made a direct request for help and insists that Hillary is the right candidate for the White House. “She’s been there,” Nicholson told MTV News. “The only thing I can say is it’s obvious one person is more experienced.”
Take a look for yourself.
Perhaps inevitably, within a matter of hours, a parody was put up, presumably by Obama supporters.
Tonight could be the last time Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton debate.
The debate on MSNBC, which begins at 8 p.m. (CST), is the last one scheduled before next Tuesday’s primaries, which have the potential to knock Clinton out of the race.
NBC’s Brian Williams will moderate the event at Cleveland State University, and Tim Russert will join in the questioning.
If you don’t have cable, you can watch the debate on msnbc.com.
Obama campaigns is managing expectations and cranking up the spin machine. Both sides have become adept at it, but for this primary, neither side is bothering to even wait for the polls to close.
After subsiding a bit early this week, the drumbeat continued, in drips and drabs, that the end may well be within sight of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s once-supposedly-unstoppable presidential bid.
headlined, 