by: Phillip Martin
Mon Feb 18, 2008 at 08:30 AM CST
This is very strange:
According to a report in today's Washington Post (thanks to our
Kossack friends for the tip), Senator Clinton's campaign is worried about the Texas primary system, and apparently some are only now learning how it works. From the Washington Post article titled, "
System Worries Clinton Backers":
Several top Clinton strategists and fundraisers became alarmed after learning of the state's unusual provisions during a closed-door strategy meeting this month, according to one person who attended.
What Clinton aides discovered is that in certain targeted districts, such as Democratic state Sen. Juan Hinojosa's heavily Hispanic Senate district in the Rio Grande Valley, Clinton could win an overwhelming majority of votes but gain only a small edge in delegates. At the same time, a win in the more urban districts where Sen. Barack Obama expects to receive significant support -- could yield three or four times as many delegates.
They're only learning about this this month??? They must not be regular readers of BOR.
The night of Super Tuesday, I spent several hours reading up about the TX primary system. The next day, I looked at the incredibly useful
Lone Star Project report about the numbers, and asked a lot of questions about how it worked. On Thursday, I wrote these two long posts explaining the Texas primary and delegate system, and on Friday February 8 (ten days ago) these two posts were published on BOR:
*
Explaining the Delegate Process, Part 1 *
Explaining the Delegate Process, Part 2That was two weeks ago. Last week, both KT and I wrote about how Senator Obama will do well in TX:
*
How Barack Obama Can Win Texas *
Clinton Up 49-41 in Texas Poll; Obama May Win More DelegatesI'm a 23-year old grad student who is not even living in Texas right now. KT is younger than I am, and just moved back to Texas a few months ago. How is it that Senator Clinton's campaign was not prepared for Texas?
The truth is, Senator Clinton's campaign never planned on having to run after Super Tuesday. They chose a handful of key states to focus on, and thought that would put them over the top. Meanwhile, Senator Obama worked in every state, picked up lots of little states to blunt Senator Clinton's California momentum, and has been racking up wins ever since.
Many state elected officials are complaining that the Texas primary process isn't fair -- that the formulas unfairly hurt the Hispanic districts (a process that they voted to ratify at the 2006 state convention). Well, the truth is, the formula rewards the Democrats that have been showing up to the polls consistently over the past couple of years in the general election to support our presidential and statewide candidates. As TDP Chair Boyd Richie explained in the Post article:
moreBy Eric Kleefeld - February 18, 2008, 9:24AM
While the Hillary Clinton campaign has made the Ohio and Texas contests on March 4 into their new firewall, they have
only recently discovered the arcane rules of delegate selection in Texas, which could potentially mean that even a substantial popular win translates into only a slight edge in delegates.
The Washington Post reports that Hillary strategists learned in a closed-door meeting this month about the Texas contest, which splits delegates among the state Senate districts and also between the primary and a caucus held that night. It's ultimately a commentary on their lack of planning for a race lasting after Super Tuesday — when they thought they'd have the race locked up — that they have only just now learned of delegate rules that were of long-standing public knowledge.
Good lord, let’s see if I have this right. The Clinton campaign decides to cede every post-Super Tuesday state to Obama under the theory that Texas and Ohio will be strong firewalls. After –
after – implementing this Rudy-esque strategy, they “discovered” that the archaic Texas rules will almost certainly result in a split delegate count (at best).
While they were busy “discovering” the rules, however, the Obama campaign had people on the ground in Texas explaining the system, organizing precincts, and making Powerpoints. I know because I went to one of these meetings a week ago. I should have invited Mark Penn I suppose. (
ed. Maybe foresight is an obsolete macrotrend.)
In this respect, Texas is simply a microcosm of the larger campaign dynamics. In fact, if the Clinton campaign were a corporation, the shareholders would have pretty good grounds for a derivative suit for Texas alone.
linkHillary's campaign was confused by the rules in Nevada too:
By Tony Cook · January 17, 2008
Even at the 11th hour — and after this morning’s ruling that the at-large Strip caucus sites are OK — there’s still some confusion, at least within the Clinton camp, about who can participate in those caucuses.
New York Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign told the Sun this evening that only employees who work for companies with more than 4,000 workers can caucus at the nine at-large sites on the Strip.
That’s not true.
The issue came up after the Sun asked if any unions supporting Clinton would have members caucusing at those locations.
“If a construction company doesn’t have more than 4,000 people, they are out of luck,” said Hilarie Grey, Clinton’s Nevada spokeswoman. Clinton is endorsed by eight labor unions, some of whose members work for contractors on the Strip.
She said she learned of the 4,000 threshhold from the campaign’s political and labor directors.
State Democratic Party caucus rules, however, say the at-large sites will be created working with employers at locations where more than 4,000 employees will be working during Saturday’s caucus.
Any shift worker working within a 2.5-mile radius of an at-large location can caucus there.
We took that information back to Grey, who said she would double-check her facts with the campaign’s political director.
“Thank you for working with us on that,” she said. “I am not that literate on the rules.”
moreHer campaign has been making up the rules as they go along.
Ickes' Law or Calvinball, it's rules, what rules?
So what has Hillary's campaign been focused on as it suffers setback after setback: Making a stronger case for her campaign? No. Courting voters? No! They're busy distorting Obama's campaign and record.
Yesterday, there was a report that the right was
planning to smear Obama. So where did this originate?
Clinton briefly raised the question of Rezko, whom she described as a “slum landlord”, in a televised debate with Obama in California, but was silenced when a 1990s picture emerged of her with Rezko and President Bill Clinton. Obama has returned around $85,000 in campaign contributions from Rezko.
“Hillary put the issue into the bloodstream, but it didn’t get focused on,” said Norquist. He believes that well financed “527” attack groups – named after their tax-exempt status – will mercilessly pursue Obama over his ties to Rezko. It was a conservative “527” group, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who did grave damage to John Kerry’s reputation as a war hero in the 2004 White House race.
Mark McKinnon, a top adviser to John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said last week he would resign in the event of a contest against Obama as he did not want to participate in tearing him down.
But other members of McCain’s team have already gone for the jugular. A testy exchange last year between the two senators over the Iraq troop surge led a senior aide to take aim at Obama’s former drug use by claiming he “wouldn’t know the difference between an RPG (rock-et-propelled grenade) and a bong (smoking pipe)”.
Obama could run into further difficulties over his relationship with William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois and former member of the Weather Underground, a leftwing terrorist group that planted bombs in the Capitol and the Pentagon in the 1970s.
Ayers told The New York Times on the day of the September 11 attacks: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” It emerged last week that Ayers served with Obama on the board of the Woods Fund, an antipoverty group, from 1999 to 2002, and donated $200 towards his Illinois state Senate campaign in 2001.
Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of the conservative journal NewsMax and an arch tormentor of the Clintons over the Whitewater property scandal in the 1990s, believes Obama is “an old-style Chicago politician” who will nonetheless be difficult for Republicans to undermine.
NewsMax? You mean the Sciafe-funded wingnut rag that features a regular column by Hillary’s buddy
Suzanne Estrich:
Estrich appears frequently on Fox News as a legal and political analyst, giving the liberal perspective. She has also substituted for Alan Colmes on the debate show Hannity & Colmes. Estrich writes regular articles for NewsMax for which she is a pundit.<1> and is also on the Board of Editorial Contributors for USA Today. On January 10, 2008, she joined the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges law firm, a litigation powerhouse based in Los Angeles.
Hillary's precedent:
Hillary courted the wingnut media and they set her up good.
February 16, 2008
By Robert Novak
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Strategists for Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign believe it is imperative to identify her high-flying opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, with the "McGovern wing" of the Democratic Party -- but they want to keep their candidate's fingerprints off the attack.
During the two weeks remaining before the important Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4, Clinton insiders want to spread the message that Obama represents the radical left-wing politics of George McGovern's 1972 candidacy, which won only one state. But they don't know how to accomplish this. When Clinton herself has launched past attacks on Obama, it has hurt her with voters.
The Clinton campaign is confident of winning in Texas because of the state's Hispanic vote. But it sees the need in Ohio to identify Obama as a leftist in the eyes of lower-income white voters, who often have supported Republican candidates against Democratic opponents they consider too liberal.
Hispanics for Hillary
Reps. Hilda Solis and Lucille Roybal-Allard, Hispanic-American Democrats from California, have been busy on the House floor lobbying uncommitted Democratic super-delegates to support Hillary Clinton against Barack Obama.
link Hillary's campaign has, in fact, been pushing the
Rezko story.
The news this morning cries plagiarisms against Obama, pointing to the source as a "rival campaign," hmmm?
“Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” Mr. Obama said, to applause. “ ‘I have a dream’ — just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ — just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ — just words? Just speeches?”
Mr. Patrick employed similar language during his 2006 governor’s race when his Republican rival, Kerry Healey, criticized him as offering lofty rhetoric over specifics. Mr. Patrick has endorsed Mr. Obama, and the two men are close friends.
“ ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ — just words? Just words?” Mr. Patrick said one month before his election. “ ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ — just words? ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ Just words? ‘I have a dream’ — just words?”
In a telephone interview on Sunday, Mr. Patrick said that he and Mr. Obama first talked about the attacks from their respective rivals last summer, when Mrs. Clinton was raising questions about Mr. Obama’s experience, and that they discussed them again last week.
Both men had anticipated that Mr. Obama’s rhetorical strength would provide a point of criticism. Mr. Patrick said he told Mr. Obama that he should respond to the criticism, and he shared language from his campaign with Mr. Obama’s speechwriters.
Mr. Patrick said he did not believe Mr. Obama should give him credit.
“Who knows who I am? The point is more important than whose argument it is,” said Mr. Patrick, who telephoned The New York Times at the request of the Obama campaign. “It’s a transcendent argument.”
David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Mr. Obama who also advised Mr. Patrick, said Sunday that Mr. Obama adapted the words from Mr. Patrick. Mr. Axelrod said that he did not write the words for either candidate.
“They often riff off one another. They share a world view,” Mr. Axelrod said. “Both of them are effective speakers whose words tend to get requoted and arguments tend to be embraced widely.”
The similarities from a passage of Mr. Obama’s speech on Saturday and in remarks that Mr. Patrick delivered on Oct. 15, 2006, were highlighted by a rival campaign that did not want to be identified. Clips of both speeches are archived on the Web site YouTube.com.
linkA rival campaign? Run for the hills, the speeches sound similar!
On the
big chart, the fourth evidence of this ludicrous claim is that in 2006 Patrick used language similar to Obama's 2004 Senate nomination speech when he mentioned Obama. Wait: so this is about Patrick plagerizing Obama? Desperation!
So is this plagerism:
By Caren Bohan Sun Feb 17, 2:05 PM ET
MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (Reuters) - White House hopeful Hillary Clinton has a message for hairdressers in Wisconsin, postal workers in Ohio and autoworkers across the United States who are struggling financially: She cares.
The former first lady and New York senator is hoping blue collar workers will provide her with a crucial base of support as she tries to erode the lead her rival Barack Obama has opened in the tight race to become the Democratic nominee in the November presidential election.
Clinton is courting working-class voters with a new message of economic populism similar to the theme of John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator who dropped out of the Democratic race in January.
Edwards never gained enough momentum to be competitive with Obama and Clinton, but the New York and Illinois senators are trying to woo his followers, many of whom were passionate about his pledge to take on "corporate greed" and bring change to a government he said had sold out the middle class.
moreIs this plagerism:
Video:
Elizabeth Edward on Hillary's healthcare plan, she ripped off Edwards'Hillary is grasping for anything to knock Obama off his strategy, even if it means helping McCain. Hillary, as is McCain, is challenging Obama to commit to a GE strategy, never mind that Hillary and Obama will not be facing each other in the GE. So why is she going there?
The Hillary campaign has
joined the calls on Barack obama to commit to public financing for the general election, a challenge that the McCain camp has been pushing. Obama had previously indicated he would take public financing, but the campaign is now saying they will not fully commit to public funds until he has the nomination locked down, at which point an agreement can be negotiated with John McCain.
"Tough to see how Sen. Obama is going to have credibility to talk about 'change you can believe in' when he’s breaking pledges," said campaign deputy communications director Phil Singer. "Sen. McCain will attack Sen. Obama on this issue with independent voters if they square off in a general."
By: Mike Allen
Feb 17, 2008 12:44 PM EST
Clinton campaign officials said Sunday that heading into the climactic primaries on March 4, they will try to make a major issue of Sen. Barack Obama’s refusal to commit to spending limits in a general election.
“That’s not change you can believe in,” Howard Wolfson, the Clinton campaign’s communications director, said in a statement, playing off Obama’s campaign slogan.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has not committed to the spending limits, either.
Under the post-Watergate presidential public financing system, candidates from the major parties can receive a government grant to pay for their general election campaigns if they agree not to raise private funds.
Obama’s campaign is calling public financing an option. The campaign scoffs at the Clinton aide's complaint, saying it’s a moot point unless they’re conceding the election.
The Illinois senator said at a news conference in Milwaukee on Friday: “It would be presumptuous of me to say now that I’m locking myself into something when I don't even know if the other side is going to agree to it and I'm not the nominee yet.”
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the prospective Republican nominee, has agreed to the limits and last week began bashing Obama as a hedger.
linkMr. Obama did not rule out the possibility of accepting public financing, but declared on Friday, “I’m not the nominee yet.”
“If I am the nominee,” Mr. Obama told reporters at a news conference in Milwaukee, “I will make sure our people talk to John McCain’s people to find out if we are willing to abide by the same rules and regulations with respect to the general election going forward. It would be presumptuous of me to start saying now that I am locking into something when I don’t even know if the other side will agree to it.”
Last year, Mr. Obama sought an advisory ruling from the Federal Election Commission to see whether his campaign could opt out of public financing in the primary season and accept it in the general election.
It was merely an inquiry, he said, not a pledge to accept the financing.linkHillary and McCain both wrong. It's a little desperate and ridiculous!
Hillary and McCain both need to "
Show Us the Money," which is relevant to the primaries.
Then there is the Hillary campaign's mailer accusing Obama of
demagoguerySo why is Hillary's campaign spending so little time becoming familiar with the rules and adhering to them and so much time trying to distort Obama's campaign: the "
the arrogance of high expectations."
Video:
Hillary's miscalculationHillary: "It's not a very long run. It'll be over by Feb. 5."
edited to fix link.
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