Tag Archive for 'hillary clinton'

The Writing on the Wall

When even a Beltway wonk like Tim Russert can see things this clearly, it’s time to hang ‘em up and put ‘em out to pasture because the writing is on the wall and it’s so big that it can’t be ignored.

PS:

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Pyrrhic Victory

So after Hillary’s win in PA, the new spin from her supporters, bloggers and politicans alike, is that she’s winning in the popular vote and therefore, she should be the nomiee for president. Obviously, only she can win the big states. He’s faltered now that the pressure is on him. Blah, blah, blah. You know what I say? This is a Pyrrhic victory for Clinton. She may have won the battle, but she won’t win the war.

Let’s look at a few bits of analysis from around the tubes. First, this interesting theory from Kos:

It’s my theory that no endorsement matters except those that deliver a machine. Senators have no machine, so they’re pretty worthless (like Bob Casey). Mayors and machine-state governors, like Nutter and Rendell, matter. Gavin Newsom in San Francisco, who has no machine, didn’t matter, but Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles, who has one of the biggest machines in the planet, delivered strong for Clinton. Obama won Connecticut in large part thanks to New Haven’s mayor John Destefano’s efforts. In Pennsylvania, Clinton had the state’s machine working on her behalf, and it clearly helped cut Obama’s margins in the Philly metro area.

That will even work in a place like here in NJ, where the state government is one big giant machine, and we already know Jon Corzine is cuckoo for Hillary. I’m on his email list and he’s put out several emails in support of Hillary.

Then, we have the reality of the numbers, as explained by Charlie Cook:

But today, she is 133 delegates behind Obama, 1,728 to 1,595, according to NBC News. At this point last week, she trailed by 136 delegates. Since then Clinton has scored a net gain of 10 delegates in Pennsylvania, according to NBC, but has lost a few more superdelegates, so she has made little headway.

Let’s not forget that her projections of primary vote include Michigan and Florida, the two races that don’t count because they broke the DNC’s primary rules. Besides, it’s not about the votes that matters. It’s all about the delegates stupid! More from Cook:

But you can’t change how the game is played once it has begun. The Democrats have decided that the nominee will be determined by the number of delegates won, not by the popular vote, and that primaries held in direct violation of party rules (in this case, Florida’s and Michigan’s) don’t count. End of discussion.

So now that we have that down pat, let’s reexamine her victory. First off, she was projected to win the state by more than 20 points. She won it by 9. She netted 10 delegates from the victory, but hasn’t dented Obama’s lead. She’s not favored to win in North Carolina’s primary on May 6th, and Indiana is a tossup that can easily go Obama’s way if he campaigns strongly there. If she loses both of those, what then?

The most important thing is that this prolonged primary is souring a lot of people and is letting John McCain sit pretty and keep building his positive poll numbers. So yes, Clinton won PA, but at what cost to herself and the party in general? Sounds a lot like a Pyhrric victory to me.

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An Honest Question

By now we can pretty much tell that there’s a growing class divide between supporters of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. More college educated and upper class Democrats support the former while more lower and working class Democrats support the latter. This has led to some rather embarrassing attempts by Obama in an attempt to appeal to lower class voters (and in his defense, I believe it was said he hadn’t bowled in many years). This is all fine and good, but is it masking a bigger issue here?

The other thing to remember about the primaries so far is that black people have supported Obama by huge margins no matter where he’s been, and it’s been the white vote that’s split hard across class lines. The question is, with both candidates having policy platforms that are virtually identical, are lower class white people sticking behind Hillary solely because she is white?

I’m sure the answer to this question is far more complex, but you have to wonder sometimes…

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Scorched Earth

Clinton tells Obama: “Shame on you”

And now we’ve arrived at the thing that I was really afraid was going to happen. Faced with the fact that her once inevitable rise to the Democratic nomination is hanging by little more than a thread, HillCo has turned the slime machine on full-force.

Let’s critique a couple of things. First of all, whether it was out of showing solidarity with Bill or because she really believed it, Hillary used to support NAFTA. She has a valid complaint that Obama’s mailers may make her seem to still be in support of it, but you can’t change the fact that she stood behind it before. It’s political opportunism, since places like Ohio have been hardest hit by free trade agreements like NAFTA.

Secondly, on health care. Hillary mandates that every American gets insurance of some kind under her health plan. She promises to make it affordable under some vague tax credits, but do those really work well for people trying to make it pay check to pay check? I think she knows it, because the information on her campaign website about her plan doesn’t mention the fact that she’s making the care mandatory. I’m not saying Obama’s plan is necessarily going to be better (let’s be honest, we’ll never have real health care reform until we have a government run national single payer system where the government can leverage its ridiculous buying power to force prices to the floor), but how well can mandatory care that relies on private plans work? This was a big issue of HillaryCare ‘93. What’s really changed fifteen years later?

My real problem with this outburst is, well, the outburst itself. I was worried that if things started to look bad for Hillary, she would go completely negative and scorch the earth to try and win the nomination. Last week’s debate was the first warning of this. This outburst seems to be the first real opening salvo. This is not what Democrats need. We’ve had a race that thusfar has been a clean, spirited fight between two candidates that are far above average. It’s unfortunate that Hillary has chosen to take the Karl Rove route here (pot, meet kettle) and scorch the earth.

Besides, if this race has taught us one thing, keeping a positive tone helps a hell of a lot. Obama has attracted a huge following due in no smart part to his consistent message of hope, which is something many people have seriously lacked for years now. Plus, when Hillary had an actual human moment before the New Hampshire primary, it resonated with the voters and she did well there. You would think that with the polls tightening in both of her firewall states, she would do the same, but given how her campaign has managed everything else up to this point, can we be surprised?

No matter what comes of this next week, I guess the real indication will be what happens at the convention. If the pledged delegate count stays fairly close, will she pull some backdoor shenanigans to win enough superdelegates to win a brokered convention? I seriously hope not, for everyone’s sake.

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Crocodile Tears

Look, I’m sure deep down, Hillary Clinton is a woman who is passionate about her political views and the causes she champions and all that stuff. But, let’s be realistic here, people. Hillary Clinton is a political machine. Every single last thing she says or does is weighed to attempt to guarantee maximum political gain for herself. I mean, that’s cool, Bill did the same thing throughout his career. My point is that Hillary’s “emotional” episode from Monday? She might have been sincere about her desires to make a difference and all that, but the show of emotions? Well, let’s just say political machines don’t just let emotions show randomly.

And you know what? Even if Obama’s reliance on young people failed him in New Hampshire, or if women finally turned around and went for one of their own, you can’t deny that this didn’t help, at least a bit.

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