When California’s Supreme Court decision nixed a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage the question immediately raised by some talk show radio hosts was: will this be back now as a big campaign 2008 wedge issue?
The likely answer: back…yes…….but not quite..because voters have a few teenie-weenie other things on their minds this year. The Associated Press has come to the same conclusion:
[NOTE: An earlier version of this story had this link attributed to the New York Times. That was an error, due to a reference from a Times story on the ruling that was cut in favor of using the more recent AP piece. We regret the error.]
Yesterday’s California Supreme Court decision striking down a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage reintroduces a hot-button social issue into the presidential campaign.
Republicans used same-sex marriage to great political effect in 2004, putting proposed bans on the ballot in Ohio and other states to get conservatives to the polls. But now it will have to compete for attention with the economy, the Iraq war, and other issues.
Indeed, there were already rumblings yesterday reflected in some news reports and on some talk shows of some thinking of trying to put a new measure on the ballot and of a court challenge to the California ruling.
But the dynamics are different this year:
And impact of the gay marriage issue could be muted, not just because neither the Democratic front-runner, Barack Obama, nor the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, support gay marriage, but because McCain’s opposition to a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage - on federalist grounds - makes it more difficult for the right to get a lot of traction out of it.
Still, the issue is likely to come up in some races (or be raised by the so-called “independent” groups that make commercials to support or negatively define candidates). And you can already see how even this clear-cut California court ruling can be spun.
“California Court Strips Children of Right to Mother and Father,” declares the headline of Cybercast News Service’s hot-button-pushing article which declares “the court does not recognize that children have any right whatsoever to a mother and a father. In the decision, the California court sees children primarily through the eyes of same-sex couples who want to secure custody and control of children. The court makes emphatically clear that it deems this to be a right of same-sex couples that is equal to–and identical to–the right of married mothers and fathers to adopt or conceive and raise their own children.”
Spin is spin is spin…
So will it become another wedge issue used against the Democrats as hot buttons are pushed and voters cast their votes on this issue? Read the rest of this entry »
ABC’s Jake Trapper, in a post on his blog almost written in dismay, notes how former President Bill Clinton is on now the hustings in rural West Virginia delivering a tough message that’s essentially divide-and-rule politics — the same he has delivered throughout much of the political season.
Trapper’s intro to the quotes nails the situation that is making the Clintons a political team that seemingly has decided to continue unabated to work to polarize their own party in order to generate poll turnout and then (presumably) plans to get in power and try to govern a unified country. Bill Clinton’s present campaigning and comments will likely seized upon as “proof” those who insist the Clintons (without proof) that the Clintons are really trying to lay the groundwork for a 2012 run, after a bruised Obama (largely bruised by the Clintons) flops at the polls.
Bill Clinton has the right to say whatever he wants, of course. But he’s a smart man. Brilliant, even.
He can do the math. He must know that it’s quite improbable that his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., will be the Democratic presidential nominee.
So what purpose does it serve for him to barnstorm a state like West Virginia and tell rural voters that Obama and his elitist political/media cabal allies are mocking Appalachia?
He’s using the kind of language Democrats typically use against Republicans — as in, stuff you say when you don’t want voters to vote for the other guy under any circumstance.
Whatever happened to the Melting Pot? Now we learn that “Barack Obama is faring better than might be expected among Jewish voters, beating John McCain in Gallup Poll Daily general-election matchups and trailing Hillary Clinton only slightly in Jewish Democrats’ preferences for the Democratic nomination.”
This crucial piece of information tells us what? That Jews don’t blame Obama for the anti-Semitic outbursts decades ago by Louis Farrakhan, who is admired by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright? Is this something we need to know? A wise old editor I worked with used to say about such useless information, “Uninteresting, if true.”
As pollsters and political “experts” turn this election year into a demographic nightmare, pinning labels on voters by race, gender, religious affiliation, age, income, education, everything but height and weight, the dominant theme of the campaign coverage has become parsing everything that divides Americans and deciding which politician profits from which.
Obama keeps talking about reaching across those divisions, but the media story line keeps magnifying them. All of this perpetuates the beliefs of Karl Rove and his ilk that the way to win elections is to divide and conquer.
Voters, who have seen how well that worked out for them in the past eight years, may be ready to defy the labels and surprise the experts. Now that would be interesting, if true.
So now that the North Carolina and Indiana primaries are over — ending in split decision wins — who are the winners and losers in Tuesday’s primaries? Is it just Senator Barack Obama (who won North Carolina) or Senator Hillary Clinton (who narrowly won Indiana)?
Is it that clearcut? Here’s our take:
WINNERS:
Senator Barack Obama for winning a victory in North Carolina that went beyond the conventional media wisdom that was building — that he could lose there.
Senator Hillary Clinton for surviving by winning Indiana and keeping her candidacy alive, although some insist it is now on life support..and the batteries are almost dead.
Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh for his reprehensible “Operation Chaos” campaign to convince voters to use their precious right to vote to sandbag another party that appears to have worked in Indiana. Data suggests it had an impact.
Senator Barack Obama for not being able to end Clinton’s candidacy with two solid wins (this could change if the final Indiana vote changes).
Senator Hillary Clinton for not just losing to Obama in North Carolina while aides talked about her gathering momentum, but for starting out Campaign 2008 with a good chunk of black voter support and ending the night with shockingly low black voter support (remember that at the beginning of the campaign Obama had a problem getting African Americans to vote for him and against a Clinton).
The Limbaugh “dittoheads” who felt the precious vote for which so many have died should be tossed away to sabotage another political party, as if democracy in a time of national crisis were some cutesy game (and we add in this category any Democrats who also played the same game crossing over in Republican primaries).
THE BIGGEST LOSERS:
The Superdelegates who will either have to act soon…or later…to put an end to the contest and face the possibility that, no matter what they decide, half of the committed Democrats won’t vote for the candidate they opposed (which some feel means they should be committed).
Political pandering: By most accounts of the talking heads and experts, Clinton’s embracing of the gas holiday tax and dismissive comment that she didn’t have to listen to economists didn’t do her much good and probably hurt her.
To read some excellent analytical live blogging on the night’s voting GO HERE.
What happens next? The media and weblogs are filled with tidbits about a night that could have been a “game changer,” but not what Clinton had in mind.
My own view is she should run her campaign against John McCain. She will win West Virginia and Kentucky by huge margins.
She might even challenge Obama in Oregon.
What she should not do, imo, is run against Barack Obama. If there is a path to the nomination for her, and I doubt there is, it won’t come from attacking Obama now.
April 20th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Is the Pennsylvania primary vote only about that primary? Or is more — even more than who gets the Democratic nomination — at stake? Andrew Sullivan writes in his latest newspaper column:
Even after all the hype, this week’s vote in Pennsylvania will be a watershed primary election.
This isn’t because it could determine whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign continues on its brutal, nihilistic path towards the destruction of the most promising figure in the Democratic Party since Kennedy.
It isn’t because it’s been an age since the last primary vote and every nasty toxin in American culture has been drawn to the surface by the Clinton poultice.
It isn’t even because Pennsylvania is an indisputably important and large state that any Democrat needs to win in November.
It is because the Clintons have turned Pennsylvania into a microcosm of what they think the general election will be in November.
And the Clintons are running as the Rove Republicans. If they fail to destroy Barack Obama as effectively as Karl Rove — George W. Bush’s master of the dark arts — destroyed Al Gore and John Kerry in 2000 and 2004, with tactics just as brutal but even more personal, then they will have driven American politics to a critical point. They will have shown that the paradigm that has reigned in US politics for at least two decades has been shattered.
That’s what is being tested this week. It may be the most important vote in America until the final one, in November.
Obama has been pummeled by a Democrat in ways never witnessed in a primary campaign.
April 19th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
It’s increasingly clear that the Clinton campaign’s negativity is so intense that it will eventually be compared to the infamous negative number Republicans George Bush and Karl Rove played on Senator John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary — but the Clinton campaign’s negativity is unrelenting….and now offers a new twist:
In the latest melody in the medley of personal attack politics, a Clinton supporter is putting out information alleging rival Senator Barack Obama is linked to 70s radicals…but saying this is how the REPUBLICANS will do it. It’s the perfect cover story for deniability. We’re not saying it, this is what the Republicans will say.
From The Huffington Post (which seems to be breaking campaign news that’s giving both sides headaches these days):
A high-ranking labor supporter of Hillary Clinton is distributing to union leaders and to Democratic strategists a document detailing the radical activities of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, two former members of the ’70s group the Weather Underground, who decades later, in Chicago, crossed paths with Barack Obama.
The document - a three-page emailed essay by Rick Sloan, communications director for the International Association of Machinists as Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) — takes both literary and political license to outline what Sloan believes would be the thrust of a hypothetical Republican campaign against Obama focusing on his tangential connection to Ayers and Dohrn.
The goal of the essay appears to be to discredit Obama as the prospective Democratic presidential nominee.
Indeed: seldom in the recent primary histories of either party has there been such a steady, unceasing campaign to raise the negatives of an opposing candidate (and one who is likely to get the nomination). All primaries have some of it. But the Clinton campaign is now seemingly COMPRISED of it. (Even Hillary Clinton’s argument to voters in Pennsylvania is negative today: she’s telling them not to “throw away your vote” on primary day…which is not exactly a long argument as to why voters should vote for her and what positive things she can do for the country).
But there is more to the HP piece:
The most damaging new material cited by Sloan appears in a link to an FBI Freedom of Information web site — where a viewer can examine hundreds of pages of a study of the Weather Underground and its leaders, written in 1976 by the Chicago FBI office, just at the group was disintegrating at the end of the Vietnam War.
Sloan contends that the purpose of his document is to outline what he conjectures will be the tactics of Republican operative Karl Rove, an informal adviser to John McCain’s campaign, if Obama is the nominee. The title of Sloan’s paper is: “What Is Rove Up To?”
Actually, there are no signs that Rove is up to to anything on this issue…yet.
But it’s clear the Clinton campaign is reducing his workload in months to come.
Rove may be able to take two weeks of vacation time in Palm Springs if they keep doing his legwork for him.
For the Republican perspective, be sure to read Ed Morrissey. Here’s a small part of what he writes:
We could see this coming for months, and the results should be delicious. Huffington Post writer Tom Edsall reveals that a union has developed an extensive and detailed attack on Barack Obama’s connection with William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, the former Weather Underground terrorists, while at the same time deriding it as “McCarthyism”. How do they square that circle? They wrap it into a cautionary message that asks, “What will Karl do?”:
Well, this is really convenient, isn’t it? Not only can they indulge in what they call McCarthyism, they can blame their bete noir Karl Rove for it before he even utters a word. This frees up both Democratic contenders to fling as much mud at each other under the WWKD concept. We can call it pre-emptive McCarthyism, another great concept in campaigning from the people who brought us the vast right-wing conspiracy.
Then Morrissey writes:
Meanwhile, the real Karl Rove can sit on the sidelines while the Democrats diminish themselves at the speed of light in an orgy of hypocrisy. That’s what this really is — a way to campaign hard while blaming others for the damage it causes, as hypocritical an effort as one will ever see in politics.
April 16th, 2008 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
Much talk recently about the administration wanting to block any number of measures in Congress that are rowing against the President’s mindset on what will and what work re the environment… The President has characterized all measures there as ‘a regulatory trainwreck.’
Today, in a news conference, the President said he had not signed the Kyoto agreement because
– it did not bring all players to the table
– it would have interfered with growing the USA economy, requiring the USA to do what others who were polluters were not doing.
He said he had hope for the future of ‘cellulosic’ fuels, and that the USA economy would grow as “a new generation of nuclear plants” were built with responsible putting away of dead fuels, and responsible oversight in running nuclear plants
and
that the economy would grow as a result of building infrastructure (roads and all attendant small businesses and jobs that come with new spurs, etc) to now narrowly or non-populated places, “sparse land” in the USA where such structures would be built and have to be connected with large city centers.
He said “the G8 has now embraced” bringing together all parties (meaning other nations such as India, China and certain African nations, in particular, who are thought to be growing the most economically –and also creating more greenhouse gases– to plan forward from Kyoto Treaty’s expiration in 2012– so that “none are given a free ride.”
President Bush also offered the idea of 35mpg for cars in the USA by 2020, (no specifics)
that we’re making progress as planned on reduction of greenhouse gases in the USA by 1212 (no specifics)
and billions of gallons of renewable fuel be available by then (a useful wish)
and to ’stop growth’ of greenhouse gas emissions 2025, (which is far beyond the deadline of many other countries)
and to capture carbon, to expand storage (good idea, but without funding or specifics)
and to “decrease dependency on foreign oil”…
Well.
And I don’t mean oil.
What does this all mean? Again.
WAR AND SCARCE RESOURCES
I don’t know all that it affects. But, one thing it means, is that the ties to warring endlessly about environmental resources is not well understood or meaningfully intervened in by our administration. The connection between oil and death. Ongoing oil. Ongoing death.
There are no doubt other meanings, and the pragmatics of not being able to stop by tonight the dependence on foreign oil. But is enough being done to develop any other ways and means? Is enough being done as priority? Is enough being done in a timely way? Is it writ large enough, clear enough in the sky for all to see yet, that death and dependence have married each other?
KING MIDAS
There is a connection between ongoing war and scarce domestic environmental resources, no matter where in the world those two polarities exist… a domestic scarcity such as oil, yes, ‘black gold’. It seems more and more apparent that the quest for ‘ever more of what we don’t have that we say we must have,’ puts endless numbers of innocent souls in the path of sure death.
That wake up call has apparently not yet dawned on various ones in charge. Or not knelled loudly and relentlessly enough.
King Midas wished for gold too; black gold, green gold, yellow gold, no matter which.
Maybe George Bush remembers the end of the story.
Midas’s wish was granted. And he was delirious that everything he touched turned to gold; golden chair, golden doors, golden carpets, the finest filigree of raindrops that fell onto his face turned to gold too, his footprints in the sand turned to gold …
he was awash in gold and happy until…
he touched something he loved more than anything;
he touched his own child, who immediately fell dead
and turned to gold.
Then Midas lay weeping with his child stiff in his arms.
He had only wanted gold, but instead, had killed the innocent Life Force of his own young.
Black gold, green gold, yellow gold, no matter which.
April 15th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Apparently the emergency case of duct tape hasn’t arrived at Clinton campaign headquarters yet. This certainly doesn’t seem to be a way to appeal to younger voters in the primaries (or the general election) — and it certainly is not consistent with what former President Bill Clinton said just last week:
Older voters gravitate to Hillary Clinton because they’re too wise to be fooled by Barack Obama’s rhetoric, former president Bill Clinton told Pennsylvania voters today.
Clinton’s comments, to a packed high school gym about an hour north of Philadelphia, were one part presidential politics and one part legacy protection. His beef was with Obama’s contention that many of the problems facing the country today were simmering long before President Bush took office seven-plus years ago.
“I think there is a big reason there’s an age difference in a lot of these polls,” he said. “Because once you’ve reached a certain age, you won’t sit there and listen to somebody tell you there’s really no difference between what happened in the Bush years and the Clinton years; that there’s not much difference in how small-town Pennsylvania fared when I was president, and in this decade.”
“So I think it’s important that we get to the truth of this,” Clinton continued, going on to compare his and Bush’s record on jobs, family incomes, and other measures.
As the Boston Globe goes on to note, just last week Clinton suggested that older people (such as his wife Hillary Clinton) sometimes have memory problems around 11 p.m. But that was when Clinton was defending his wife on the Bosnia flap, and this time he was in attack mode:
At various points in his nearly hour-long appearance at Quakertown Community High School, Clinton cautioned the hundreds gathered to hear him against voting on history. (His defense of his White House record notwithstanding, of course.) Despite press coverage about how historic a campaign this is, Clinton said, “the history doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. All that matters is the future. Who will make the best future for you?”
That’s a fair enough point to make: voters should NOT cast their votes to vote for an African-American because he is an African American — and they should NOT cast their votes to vote for a woman because she is a woman. They should vote for the one each voter judges to be the better person to occupy the Oval Office.
But the problem with Bill Clinton’s campaigning is that more and more it resembles the kind of name-calling associated in recent years with Karl Rove-type campaigns, or zingers culled from a talk radio or cable talking heads show. To wit:
And later, after he had run through, in great detail, the ins and outs of America’s foreign and domestic policy challenges, Clinton returned to the theme of substance versus abstraction. Hillary Clinton, he said, would be a “servant leader,” and voters had to decide whether that was more important than electing a “symbolic leader.” “You gotta decide,” he said, as if he had laid out even arguments for each.
So unless voters opt for Hillary Clinton, they will be selecting a “symbolic leader.”
Bill Clinton would fare much better in generating something more than “Clinton fatigue” if rather than denigrate his wife’s prime opponent he would instead wow the audiences with details about how Hillary Clinton could improve their lives in terms of specific policies — and how she would be preferable due to her policies to Obama and presumptive GOP nominee Senator John McCain….in positive versus negative terms.
But Clinton now seems like a politician who has lost his political savvy — and could be a reason why some voters will vote against Hillary Clinton if she does get the nomination.
Geez! I don’t blog for a day or so and all hell breaks loose out on the old campaign tail.
Many commentators have weighed in on Barack Obama’s “bitter” remarks, and as someone who has worked in, traveled through and is blogging this week from one of the most depressed areas of small town Pennsylvania with among the nation’s highest foreclosure, bankruptcy and unemployment rates, all I can say is:
Right on, brother.
Hillary Clinton, of course, takes voters for fools who will be so superficial as to relate to the hurt in what Obama said but ignore the larger truth. I happen to think that these folks are well outnumbered by voters who understand what Obama meant and that once again his candor and Clinton’s superciliousness will work for him and against her.
* * * * *
Look, I have a cool job, a wonderful woman, the love of my family, excellent health care benefits, a 30-speed trail bike with a titanium frame, a rich cultural existence that includes the latest books and best in music, ballet, opera and theater, and I yelled “Free Tibet!” when the local Chinese cultural association trooped by the other day in a parade celebrating the 250th anniversary of my own small town. (One guy gave me the finger in return.) I suppose all that makes me “elitist” as Clinton accuses Obama of being — and I too can’t bowl a lick.
But even I’m bitter.
I’m among the 80-plus percent of Americans who tell pollsters that the U.S. is going to hell in a hand basket, the majority who long ago broke faith with The Decider over the Mess in Mesopotamia (didja known that another 19 of our brothers were killed last week?) and one of the Haves who look at middle-class acquaintances with deep concern who are quickly becoming Have Nots as they fall further into debt and wonder how the hell they’re going to be able to keep their Uncle Leo in a managed care facility let alone send their kids to college.
Just as Bush-Rove have, Hillary and Bill Clinton want to drive us apart; as tone-deaf as the clingy aspects of Obama’s remarks were, he wants to bring us together.
Not a tough choice for many people and I believe many Pennsylvanians. That is why the results of my own informal poll show that there continues to be movement away from Clinton and toward Obama with eight days to go before the primary hereabouts and that the “bitter” flap has been less a bump in the road for Obama that a defining moment of a Clinton campaign in its own bitter final throes.
Photograph of abandoned Bethlehem steel mill by Tony Karp
April 13th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Andrew Sullivan on the quick and pointed response of Senator Hillary Clinton to the controversy over her rival for the Democratic nomination Senator Barack Obama’s comments that people in small towns are bitter:
The “bitter” spat is gold for Morris-Rove politics, which is why Clinton is exploiting it so baldly. It is exactly the kind of debate that has constructed American politics since Vietnam; it is exactly the kind of politics that Obama has been trying to transcend. Clinton will use anything at this point to destroy Obama’s candidacy and message; but by adopting Rovism at its reddest, the Clintons do risk looking too obvious. Check out the comments in CNN’s Politicker. At some point people will realize that the Clintons represent a continuation of the kind of politics that has made a serious engagement with this country’s profound problems impossible. Or is acknowledging profound problems now unpatriotic?
Is this election about how to salvage the least worst option in the Iraq disaster? Is it about restoring some kind of fiscal sanity? Is it about doing all we can to unite Americans in a war against Islamic terrorism? Is it about restoring America’s compliance with the Geneva Conventions? Or is it again about red-blue culture wars? We know what the professional political class is comfortable with. We know what Rove and Bush and Penn and Clinton believe. What we will find out soon is if Americans want more of the same. It’s a free country - and people can vote. Goodbye to all that? Or hello again - for yet another cycle?
Republican presumptive Presidential nominee Senator John McCain is now riding high in the polls and in his cross-country image building trip: he can watch the two Democratic Presidential wannabes bloody themselves (and their party) up. But he faces a ticking time bomb in November: he’s running a campaign deferential to President George Bush when polls and historian rankings show Bush to be one of the most poorly-ranked in American history.
Bush’s poll numbers aren’t the lowest in history (yet) but he is so far down that he can see a sign that says SOUTH POLE and he needs to be careful of relief-seeking sniffing dogs.
Even worse worse in terms of the long view and his legacy, just look at this historians’ poll:
A Pew Research Center poll released last week found that the share of the American public that approves of President George W. Bush has dropped to a new low of 28 percent.
An unscientific poll of professional historians completed the same week produced results far worse for a president clinging to the hope that history will someday take a kinder view of his presidency than does contemporary public opinion.
In an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network, 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success.
Can it get yet worse? Yes:
Asked to rank the presidency of George W. Bush in comparison to those of the other 41 American presidents, more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history. Another 35 percent of the historians surveyed rated the Bush presidency in the 31st to 41st category, while only four of the 109 respondents ranked the current presidency as even among the top two-thirds of American administrations.
If he had not been sidetracked in 2000 by the Bush-Rove smear machine, John McCain might have attracted enough Independents and so-called Reagan Democrats to win the White House without the help of the Supreme Court.
In that event, would we have been spared not only the Bush years but the far different McCain who is contending for the Presidency this year?
In power after 9/11, McCain would not have had a Dick Cheney and his Neo-Cons to torture intelligence into a case for invading Iraq and, even with his own quasi-religious faith in military force, might have presided over a saner response to the threat of Islamic extremism.
But that McCain, who charmed the media with his candor, is long gone, vaporized by bitterness over what Bush et al did to him back then, by his decision to court the Religious Right he once disdained, by tailoring his views on tax cuts for the very rich to win over the Grover Norquist gang in the primaries, by hooking up with the likes of Joe Lieberman to become the champion of a war he might never have started.
In the coming months, Democrats will have to work hard to make voters understand that this year’s Republican standard bearer is not the John McCain of 2000, who would not have needed Lieberman to whisper in his ear after confusing Iran and al Qaeda, who would not be entrusting his own professed ignorance about the economy to those who helped deregulate us into recession, who might have included Independents and Democrats in an administration back then but would be too compromised to do so now.
McCain has always had a romanticized picture of himself that an admiring media has helped perpetuate. His favorite movie, “Viva Zapata,” is about an uncompromising man of the people done in by petty politicians, an image that helps explain constant battles with members of his own party in the Senate and displays of temper when challenged.
As the rightmost Republicans who changed him over the past eight years try to sell McCain as the man he was then, it will be up to the Democratic candidate to bring down that Wizard of Oz façade without alienating voters who respect his lifetime of service to the country.
When all the primary garbage is cleared away, Barack Obama will be in a better position to do that than Hillary Clinton.
March 12th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Senator Hillary Clinton has apologized to black voters due to the controversy surrounding the widely-condemned comments of now-resigned unapologetic campaign official Geraldine Ferraro, who basically said Obama is where he is because he is black.
News reports say Clinton’s speech was an uncharacteristically long and heartfelt apology.
But some are bound to note that it once again shoves the issue of Obama as an African-American into the news cycle. There have been accusations that this is why there have been so many instances of Clinton campaign associates raising the issue, then apologizing and resigning: to raise the issue and keep it in the news cycle. Either that or it’s an issue they simply can’t help hinting at or– in Ferraro’s case — all but discussing it complete with Al Gore-style slide show.
The New York senator, who is in a tight race with Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, struck several sorry notes at an evening forum sponsored by the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a group of more than 200 black community newspapers across the country.
Her biggest apology came in response to a question about comments by her husband, Bill Clinton, after the South Carolina primary, which Obama won handily. Bill Clinton said Jesse Jackson also won South Carolina when he ran for president in 1984 and 1988, a comment many viewed as belittling Obama’s success.
“I want to put that in context. You know I am sorry if anyone was offended. It was certainly not meant in any way to be offensive,” Hillary Clinton said. “We can be proud of both Jesse Jackson and Senator Obama.”
“Anyone who has followed my husband’s public life or my public life know very well where we have stood and what we have stood for and who we have stood with,” she said, acknowledging that whoever wins the nomination will have to heal the wounds of a bruising, historic contest.
“Once one of us has the nomination there will be a great effort to unify the Democratic party and we will do so, because, remember I have a lot of supporters who have voted for me in very large numbers and I would expect them to support Senator Obama if he were the nominee,” she said.
“I said yesterday that I rejected what she said and I certainly do repudiate it. I regret deeply that it was said obviously she doesn’t speak for the campaign, she doesn’t speak for any of my positions. And she has resigned from being a member of my very large finance committee.”
Too little, too late? Perhaps.
Particularly because Clinton’s own initial response to Ferraro was not pleasing to those outraged by the former Vice Presidential candidate’s comments.
It has now gotten to the point the point where you want to ask:
What is IN their water?…Is foot and mouth disease going around?…First Bill Clinton, now Ferraro: are two key Democrats intent on destroying their legacies?…If it’s a mistake and this is how the campaign is managed, how would a Clinton White House look?…Wasn’t there a time when Democrats of all persuasions lambasted, rejected and condemned the divide-and-rule politics practiced effectively by Karl Rove– and said Democrats would never campaign that way?
Add the begrudging, I-don’t-take-back-a-syllable resignation of Geraldine Ferraro to the growing list of Clinton campaign related incidents of the race card coming up…lingering in the air…followed by perfunctory Clinton campaign denunciations…and then a resignation.
A resignation that occurs after the controversy has been all over the media, consumed the blogosphere, provided great stand up interviews for morning news and cable news networks. And lingered. Raised as an issue. Memorably.
The REAL QUESTION now is: if you don’t think there is at least the appearance now of either some kind of a pattern or a serious lack of control of the Clinton campaign (why was Ferraro defended and/or not immediately bounced for the campaign as Obama’s “monster” aide was?) then precisely from what turnip truck did you fall off?
The upside for the Clinton side: this controversy these controversies suggest Obama is a black guy running for President. Obama has campaigned as a guy running for President who happens to be black. That is the difference and many Americans accept it.
But not Ferraro. In an apparent legacy-destroying race with former President Bill Clinton so that her name is associated with raising the race card, she resigned from Clinton’s staff defending her comments and painting Hillary Clinton as the TRUE victim. Just read the New York Times:
Geraldine A. Ferraro resigned Wednesday from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign finance committee but remained unapologetic for citing Senator Barack Obama’s race as the decisive factor in his success.
“I feel terrible for the fact that Hillary is stuck in this thing,” Ms. Ferraro said in an interview Wednesday night. “Why put her in that position?”
Ms. Ferraro said that she was not asked by anyone in the Clinton campaign to leave the committee but that she did it on her own, sending an e-mail message to the senator’s campaign Wednesday afternoon, as the political dust-up over remarks she made last week went into its second day.
Words continued to fly back and forth as the Obama campaign called on Mrs. Clinton to repudiate the remarks, Ms. Ferraro said they had been distorted, and Mr. Obama said they were “absurd.”
Ms. Ferraro, who said she and Mrs. Clinton had not discussed the matter directly, will continue to support the senator.
“I am stepping down from your finance committee,” she wrote, “so I can speak for myself and you can continue to speak for yourself about what’s at stake in this campaign. The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you. I won’t let that happen.”
CORRECTION: She is talking about TWO victims.
And how was the Clinton team reacting through all of this? Newsbusters has this interesting tidbit from Newsweek’s Howard Fineman talking to Keith Olbermann on MSNBC:
HOWARD FINEMAN: It’s clear to me the Clinton people aren’t going to back down. As you saw, they sent Maggie Williams out with a statement to defend Geraldine Ferraro who’s defending herself. So this is the fight the Clintons want, the way they want to fight it.
(Olbermann for the first time did a Special Comment against a Democrat condemning Ferraro and the Clinton campaign, although MSNBC is now viewed by Clinton supporters as the Obama network so he is not perceived as a neutral observer and his outraged Special Comments are now a fixture. Video here and here. Here is the TEXT.)
Hillary Clinton’s initial response was one that is likely to displease not just Obama supporters, but any voters who believe the race card needs to be torn up when it’s raised and immediately condemned without political qualifiers or an attempt to switch the issue.
Mrs. Clinton, saying she did not agree with the comments, called it “regrettable that any of our supporters — on both sides because we both have this experience — say things that kind of veer off into the personal.”
The boldfaced words are what will scuttle the impact of her comments — as well as the use “regrettable” — which sounds like something written by a diplomat or a corporation trying to escape legal liability after people died using its products.
NOTE TO MRS. CLINTON: Many independent voters will either stay home, vote for a third party candidate for vote for John McCain rather than vote for a campaign that is an increasing medley of negativity, racial innuendo and personal attacks rather than a discussion of the serious issues. And if the nomination is won with tactics such as this, many Democrats wills stay home. If you win? With so many bitter feelings, count on a one term Presidency.
Here’s how the media is playing and reporting the resignation:
Does Hillary Clinton’s embrace of destructive, divisive and dirty politics matter?
If all you care about is her winning the Democratic nomination no matter what it takes, then I suppose not. But if you’re tired of the politics of the Age of Bush and Rove, including the secrecy and fear mongering, and are thirsting for leaders who take the high road, then it certainly does.
Some examples of where the win-at-all-costs Clinton campaign has chosen to go:
He goes to the White House today to be anointed by the man he detested four years ago to the point of considering John Kerry’s offer to be his running mate and, in the following year, leaving his party to become an independent.
As the newly minted nominee, John McCain last night offered his arguments against Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but at the core were reruns of his bitter battle with Bush eight years ago.
“Americans,” McCain declared, “aren’t interested in an election where they are just talked to and not listened to; an election that offers platitudes instead of principles and insults instead of ideas; an election that results…in four years of unkept promises and a government that is just a battleground for the next election.
“Their patience is at an end for politicians who value ambition over principle, and for partisanship that is less a contest of ideas than an uncivil brawl over the spoils of power.”
That sounds more like an indictment of Bush and Rove than a description of what is involved now in opposing either Clinton or Obama.
Whoever wins the Democratic nomination will have to hammer at the contradictions that John McCain faces in running as the successor of a President whose policies and practices he abhorred, who botched a war more badly than the one McCain suffered in and who attacked his family in 2000 with personal smears against his wife and child that still rankle.
February 28th, 2008 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
If the next president is a Democrat (and that is by no means a foregone conclusion) what if any investigations of Bush administration criminality and other misdeeds should be persued?
Or, should the Democratic president and Congress, in the spirit of a new era and an appeal to bipartisanship, wipe the slate clean?
The criminality and misdeeds include:
* The refusal of Alberto Gonzalez, Harriet Miers and other key adminstration officials to answer subpoenas in connection with the politically motivated firings of U.S. attorneys.
* The refusal to hand over to congressional investigators certain testimony from Vice President Cheney and other key administration officials in connection with the Wilson-Plame leak scandal.
* The official embrace of torture in contravention of the Constitution, treaties and conventions and common decency.
* The Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
* Pre-9/11 CIA and other intelligence failures.
* The willful destruction of millions of White House emails sought by congressional investigators.
* Voter supression efforts directed by the Justice Department.
* A full accounting of the costs of the Iraq war.
* No-bid contracts given Halliburton and other firms working in Iraq and Afghanistan with close administration ties.
* The consequences of the multiple Bush signing statements.
* Government and government-funded scientific research and studies skewed for political reasons.
* Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s legal conflicts of interest.
February 27th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
How far has American political culture and talk radio veered out of control? So much that Karl Rove — yes THE Karl Rove who has demonized more than all the installments of “The Exorcist” put together — has told GOPers to cut it out. Marc Ambinder has this:
No less an authority figure than Karl Rove has warned Republican operatives from demagoguing Barack Obama’s middle name.
At a closed door meeting of GOP state executive directors in late January, Rove said the safest way to refer to Obama would be to use his honorific, “Sen. Obama.”
“The context was, you’re not going to stigmatize this guy. You shouldn’t underestimate him,” one of the executive directors said. Rove said that the use of “Barack Hussein Obama” would perpetuate the notion that Republicans were bigoted and would hurt the party.
Rove also said that Republicans should refer to Hillary Clinton as “Sen. Clinton,” rather than “Hillary.”
It’s hard to break from not just an ingrained political culture, but demonization and casting aspersions seem to provide psychological release to some folks (across the political spectrum, by the way). The attack/demonization mode releases frustrations, slaps “high concept” definitions on those with whom you disagree, puts opponents on the defensive, and is considered by some to be enjoyable and intelligent political debate.
But in realistic, political terms, in 2008 it’s not smart since there is indeed a new generation that may not like the Baby Boomer-influenced style of confrontational, innuendo-peppered, name-calling politics. And just who is Obama attracting to the polls? Younger voters. McCain, too, has traditionally appealed to younger voters. And what segment of the electorate must a party wants to win need to at least partially capture? Independent voters who aren’t into demonization.
It could be argued Rove was talking strictly as a political realist, and wasn’t expressing some newly dominant gene that suddenly made him a nicer guy. But the bottom line is that he’s saying “tread lightly and in fact don’t tread on that area.”
Will they listen? If you believe that, I can sell you THIS for $200.
After years of Bush’s would-be and as-if leadership, American voters are choosing authenticity, albeit with a 24-year age gap and a world of difference in personal history and mindset.
Of all the accusations that could, and likely will, be made against John McCain and Barack Obama, the least plausible will involve calculation and deceit.
Last night’s victory speeches laid out the broad outlines of their confrontation.
Turning Obama’s central theme against him, McCain said, “My hope for our country resides in my faith in the American character, the character which proudly defends the right to think and do for ourselves, but perceives self-interest in accord with a kinship of ideals, which, when called upon, Americans will defend with their very lives.
“To encourage a country with only rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas that trust in the strength and courage of free people is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude.”
Against McCain’s message of traditional values, Obama offered a new approach: “This is what change looks like when it happens from the bottom up. And in this election, your voices will be heard.
“Because at a time when so many people are struggling to keep up with soaring costs in a sluggish economy, we know that the status quo in Washington just won’t do. Not this time. Not this year. We can’t keep playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expect a different result–because it’s a game that ordinary Americans are losing.”
This contest of new vs. old promises to feature civility and positive attitude from both candidates, although there will certainly be Rovian low blows from third-party fringes on both sides.
In stepping up to face each other, both candidates in passing repudiated those on their own side who opposed them.
Obama framed the Democratic outcome as a decision “about whether we choose to play the game, or whether we choose to end it…change that polls well, or change we can believe in. It’s the past versus the future. And when I’m the Democratic nominee for President, that will be the choice in November.”
On his part, McCain gave an oblique “kiss my grits” to the Religious Right by talking about faith in his supporters, the “American character” and “our country” without the obligatory bow to a Higher Power.
With Obama acknowledging McCain as “an American hero,” the ‘08 contest is definitely looking up.
Are the 2008 elections destined to be bereft of the kind of divisive politics characterized by the Karl Rove electoral machine? Bernd Pickert of the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung writes, ‘The conservative wing of the Republicans, the party’s driving force under Bush, is torn by the battle between Huckabee and Romney and this time around will not have a major role. Finally, differences can be settled without taboos – finally reason and common sense have made a comeback to the debate in the United States.’
Commentary by Bernd Pickert
Translated By Ulf Behncke
February 6, 2008
Germany - Die Tageszeitung - Original Article (German)
The only clear winner of the elections on Super-Tuesday is named John McCain. The 71-year-old senator from Arizona has succeeded in restoring to himself the position of frontrunner. And yet both of his competitors, Mick Huckabee and Mitt Romney, claim that they too have been resoundingly confirmed – but that’s nonsense. They haven’t a chance. The Republican candidate for 2008 will be John McCain.
Things are different in the Democrats side: Hillary Clinton does indeed lead the delegate count, yet both she and Barack Obama have shown that they both have solid support from certain groups of voters. Clinton mobilizes the poor, the elderly, White women and Latinos. Support for Obama comes from Read the rest of this entry »
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