Clinton: All The Way to Denver
Sen. Clinton gave a pretty astonishing interview to the Washington Post in which she appears to say she will stay in the race till the convention in August, where she will take her fight to the credentials committee to have the delegates from the non-sanctioned Michigan and Florida primaries seated.
The convention of course starts on August 25th, roughly five months from now.
The key quote from the interview is this one: "I know there are some people who want to shut this down and I think they are wrong. I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started and until we see what happens in the next 10 contests and until we resolve Florida and Michigan. And if we don't resolve it, we'll resolve it at the convention -- that's what credentials committees are for."
So she's promising to remain in the race at least until June 3rd when the final contests are held in Montana and South Dakota and until Florida and Michigan are 'resolved'. Now, that can have no other meaning than resolved on terms the Clinton campaign finds acceptable. It can't mean anything else since, of course, at least officially, for the Democratic National Committee, it is resolved. The penalty was the resolution.
The Obama campaign has always been willing to 'resolve' the matter by splitting those states' delegates down the middle. But of course that's something the Clinton campaign can never accept since splitting them down the middle is the same as not counting them at all. It leaves both campaigns right where the started, i.e., with him ahead and her behind.
That leaves two real possibilities: seat the non-sanctioned January primary delegates or hold the primaries again, a revote.
I don't know many people who've ever thought possibility one was going to happen. And the consensus seems to be that the time window on possibility two has closed (though it's not completely clear to me why it couldn't be reopened if everyone agreed they wanted to do it.) So that really does sound like she's saying she wants to take this to the credentials committee at the convention at the end of August, regardless of the outcome of the next ten primaries and caucuses.
So there it is. Since neither side now seems to think revotes are likely and the Obama campaign and the DNC will never agree to seat the delegates from the non-sanctioned primaries, Sen. Clinton seems to be saying pretty clearly that she plans on taking her campaign all the way to Denver.
By saying she'll continue through the remaining ten contests, regardless of the outcome, and implicitly, I take it, regardless of any superdelegate declarations over the next two months, Sen. Clinton is saying it's no longer about pledged delegates, or superdelegates or popular votes. It's about Florida and Michigan. Period.
--Josh Marshall
Heckuva Job, Felipe
Presidential aide Felipe Sixto resigns over allegations involving the misuse of grant money from USAID at his previous job with the Center for a Free Cuba.
--David Kurtz
Rep. Sestak (D-PA): Support Me! Er, Him
I won't go so far as to say it's Freudian, but in the current climate, Sestak's slip-up is amusing:
--David Kurtz
Only So Far
Here's another example of what I was talking about below, with respect to the super delegate contest and the argument over how they should or will make their choice. Joe Andrew is a dyed-in-the-wool Clintonite. He was chair of the DNC, along with Ed Rendell, during Clinton's last two years in office. He's now a superdelegate from Indiana supporting Hillary Clinton.
From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette ...
Joe Andrew, like Parker, a Hoosier superdelegate to the Democrats’ nominating convention, says his commitment to Clinton is “profound.”Nevertheless, if Clinton and Obama head into the August convention with an equal number of delegates from state primaries and Obama has amassed more votes in those primaries, Andrew sounds less wedded to his commitment.
“I want to vote for Hillary Clinton, don’t get me wrong,” said Andrew, a former chairman of the national Democratic Party. “My commitment to her is profound, but I would be troubled if either she or Barack Obama actually became the nominee because superdelegates decided, opposed to actual voters going to the polls and pulling the lever.”
--Josh Marshall
Breaking Free
It appears that we may be seeing the first signs of the long predicted super delegate move against Sen. Clinton. Casey's endorsement today of Obama is a clear sign -- he'd been pledged to neutrality. Also of note is Dodd's call to bring the race to a close and Leahy's call for Sen. Clinton to get out of the race. On the one hand that's hardly surprising. They've both already endorsed Obama. So of course they want him to win it. But it's also a line they've been unwilling to cross to this point -- and a high hurdle for a fellow senator.
What's caught my eye even more (and we're putting together a piece on this) has been the trickle of comments -- often only noted in local papers -- from Clinton super-delegates who are maintaining their support for Hillary but also saying that that support either may or will change if Obama wins the majority of the pledged delegates.
There are clearly a number of forces in play here, not least of which is the clock and the math. But also playing a clear role are the initial signs that Obama has weathered the Wright controversy relatively unscathed. And perhaps more than anything the fact that in the last week or so the Clinton campaign has just descended into something like an all-night shark hop.
The letter from Hillary's top funders threatening to cut off funds to the DCCC if Pelosi wouldn't change her position on pledged delegates was clumsily goonish, but more than that just silly. As Atrios notes, about a third of the superdelegates are members of the DCCC, i.e., Democratic members of Congress. Presumably it's not a strong argument for them.
The Bosnia thing would be a couple days of embarrassment if it weren't for the fact that it was her speech line in an argument that is fundamentally bogus -- namely, her claim that she has significant foreign policy experience in the legislative and executive branches. Again, as I've said before, an argument she doesn't need to make. Many great commanders-in-chief have come to the presidency without such experience. But her campaign's arguments on this front have been an insult to one's intelligence.
And now there's this.
In a conference call with Texas supporters, as reported by ABC News ...
"Right now, among all the primary states, believe it or not, Hillary's only 16 votes behind in pledged delegates," said Bill Clinton, "and she's gonna wind up with the lead in the popular vote in the primary states. She's gonna wind up with the lead in the delegates [from primary states].""It's the caucuses that have been killing us," he added.
Support for Bill Clinton has been a foundational part of my political identity. But I just find this sad. Perhaps especially because of that. Newsflash: Mitt Romney is ahead in the popular vote among the states that he won. It's not quite that silly. But it's close. Hillary's ahead if you lop off half the nomination process. And that's the thing, she's not even ahead among primaries. As I've noted previously, I'm a bit of a caucus skeptic. But even among primaries she's not ahead. The only rationale for a dim view of caucuses is their relatively low turnout compared to primaries. But it's really not clear to me what the rationale is for writing off the votes of the people who actually participated.
But this is the essential silliness of this argument or perhaps its purpose, that it pulls you down into this rabbit hole of nonsense that momentarily distracts you from its essential ridiculousness. It's like the Patriots on their final drive against the Giants saying that if you went by just touchdowns they were actually tied.
--Josh Marshall
Today's Must Read
Chalk up another Bush Administration success in fighting efforts to fight global warming.
The latest remarkably brazen move: EPA chief Stephen Johnson says that he needs public input to consider a decision that he already made last December. Paul Kiel explains.
--David Kurtz
The Pitiful al Maliki
As you've probably heard, our local boss in Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki, sternly set forth a 72 hour deadline for members of the Mahdi Army to surrender their weapons or his government forces would take them by force, attack, whatever. Well, things haven't been going well and now he's extended the deadline until April 8th, according to this report from NPR. And to sweeten the deal, he's apparently added on what in this country we call a gun buy back program.
In other encouraging news, Iraqi police in Baghdad are apparently deserting en masse to the Mahdi Army, thus leaving city police checkpoints to be manned by Iraqi Army soldiers, who are conveniently available because the US military is getting pulled in to take over the fight with the Mahdi Army.
--Josh Marshall
Leahy Calls for Hillary To Quit
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), an Obama supporter, had this to say on Vermont Public Radio (via Tapper):
"There is no way that Senator Clinton is going to win enough delegates to get the nomination. She ought to withdraw and she ought to be backing Senator Obama. Now, obviously that's a decision that only she can make frankly I feel that she would have a tremendous career in the Senate."
Election Central has more.
--David Kurtz
Deconstruct This
The tag line for John McCain's first general election TV ad:
"John McCain: The American president Americans have been waiting for."
Late Update: TPM Reader SW feels the patriotism:
Is the Onion running McCain's slogan department?There's not enough "America" in his ad. I'm not sure - is he running for prime minister of Canada?
So to be crystal clear, he needs to up the ante in the slogan:
John McCain, American: The American President of America that Americans have been waiting for. America!
Later update: TPM Reader SG:
So we're "waiting for" an American president? Someone ought to ask McCain why he thinks George W. Bush isn't American enough. Setting aside the gratuitous verbal wrapping in the flag, this seems to be a calculated attempt to contrast McCain from that weirdly named, foreign sounding, "other" candidate named Barack Obama. Patriotism and fear will be the first, last and omnipresent refuge for the GOP this cycle. It's all they have -- they have nothing positive to run on.
--David Kurtz
Casey To Endorse Obama
A big pickup for Obama in the run-up to the Pennsylvania primary: U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, who had proclaimed his intention to remain neutral and help unite the party behind whoever the eventual nominee is, has changed course and will toss his support to Obama.
The Philly Inquirer has more:
The endorsement also comes at a crucial time for Obama, who has been trailing Clinton in Pennsylvania polls by double-digit margins but who also has bought at least $1.6 million worth of television advertising statewide in the last week, more than double Clinton's expenditure.Obama strategists hope that Casey can help their candidate make inroads with the white working-class men who are often referred to as "Casey Democrats." This group identifies with the brand of politics Casey and his late father, a former governor, practiced - liberal on economic issues but supportive of gun rights and opposed to abortion. (Obama favors some gun-control measures and backs abortion rights.)
Obama badly lost the white working-class vote to Clinton in Ohio and Texas on March 4, keeping the outcome of the fight in doubt amid questions about whether he could appeal to a group of voters that has often strayed from the party in presidential elections.
Since then, Obama has been stressing economic issues important to the middle class more often than his calls to reform politics. His campaign's recent TV ads in Pennsylvania also feature blue-collar imagery.
--David Kurtz
Teetering
To hear the Bush administration tell it, the current flare-up in Iraq is a sign of the success of the surge. In theory at least there's a certain logic to this argument. What administration officials claim is that the surge has allowed the al Maliki government to consolidate its power sufficiently that it can take on Sadr's militia, the outlaw but until recenlty quiescent Mahdi Army.
Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, that does not seem to be what's happening.
The clearest analysis I've read is Fred Kaplan's short piece in Slate, which explains that this is not so much the Iraqi 'government' standing down an outlaw 'militia' as a face off between two militias, one of which happens to control the government. Labels aside, this seems to be al Maliki's attempt to break the Mahdi Army, possibly because Iraq is soon to hold regional elections and Maliki's supporters fear the Sadrists will do too well in the southern port city of Basra.
Fred doesn't say this, but I wonder myself if this isn't also an effort of Maliki (now allied with what used to be SCIRI) to crush the Sadrists while he still has the power of the US military behind him. Most accounts I've seen suggest that Sadr actually has more popular support than Maliki and his supporters, at least among the Shia population. It must not be lost on Maliki and his supporters that a Democrat may succeed President Bush and that that new president may be much less likely to prop up his government with American money and military might. So perhaps best to crush opponents now, with the help of the US military, in advance of that less certain future.
As an aside, President Bush is saying that Iran is, in the words of the Times, "arming, training and financing the militias fighting against the Iraqi forces." Perhaps that's true. But it's hard not to note that the Badr Organization (formerly the Badr Corps), which Maliki has allied himself with, is the outfit that was actually created in Iran under the tutelage and financing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. So this at least seems like a rather partial take on what's occurring.
In any case, whatever it is and whoever is behind it, the crackdown does not appear to be going well. The Times has a muted run-down of where things stand. The government forces do not seem to be making much headway in Basra and protests and violence has broken out in a number of Iraqi cities. Baghdad itself is now under a curfew until Sunday. A more breathless piece in the Times of London says that Maliki's "operation to crush militia strongholds in Basra [has] stalled, members of his own security forces defected and district after district of his own capital fell to Shia militia gunmen."
Finally, this piece in tomorrow's Post suggests that while this effort may have begun with the Iraqi forces in the lead, US forces are quickly being drawn in to the thick of the fighting while the Iraqi government troops are in at least some cases receding into the background.
From the Post ...
U.S. forces in armored vehicles battled Mahdi Army fighters Thursday in Sadr City, the vast Shiite stronghold in eastern Baghdad, as an offensive to quell party-backed militias entered its third day. Iraqi army and police units appeared to be largely holding to the outskirts of the area as American troops took the lead in the fighting.Four U.S. Stryker armored vehicles were seen in Sadr City by a Washington Post correspondent, one of them engaging Mahdi Army militiamen with heavy fire. The din of American weapons, along with the Mahdi Army's AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, was heard through much of the day. U.S. helicopters and drones buzzed overhead.
The clashes suggested that American forces were being drawn more deeply into a broad offensive that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, launched in the southern city of Basra on Tuesday, saying death squads, criminal gangs and rogue militias were the targets.
Everything out there suggests that is another engagement between the handful of factions and warlords now controlling Iraq and a possible heat up of the incipient civil war that's been on the back burner for the last several months. And we're quickly getting drawn into the thick of the fighting. Because the Iraqi government forces who seem to have started this for their own reasons and, according to US government officials, without warning to the US, aren't up to the fight and now need the US military to bail them out.
One US official tells the Post that many in the US government believe this whole gambit was Maliki firing "the first salvo in upcoming elections," which probably sums up all we need to know about the state of Iraqi democracy and political reconciliation.
--Josh Marshall
BREAKING: Siegelman To Be Released
11th Circuit Court of Appeals orders former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman released from prison on bond pending the appeal of his conviction.
--David Kurtz
TPMtv: Summa Bosniatica
The Clinton-Bosnia-Sniper story seems to be peaking. And there have been a lot of snippets of video swirling around YouTube with this or that part of the story. But most of them are incomplete or rapid-fire-cut or edited to make Sen. Clinton look as foolish as possible. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld used to say. We do those kinds of videos too. But since you've probably seen a lot of those, we wanted to go back and put together all the key moments in roughly chronological order -- what Sen. Clinton said on different occasions, the key video from the trip, what other eyewitnesses say, what her spokespersons and aides say, etc. With the exception of Howard Wolfson, Sen. Clinton's Communications Director, we've tried only to include material from the senator, the trip and people who were actually there and witnesses to anything -- so no random ex-military folks or campaign spinners or Fox goons just there to trash her.
So if you want to see the whole story, from start to finish and make up your own mind (or just relive the trainwreck) behold ...
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
--Josh Marshall
Piece of the American Pie
Congress wants to know more about the 20-something arms dealers who landed $300 million in Pentagon contracts.
--David Kurtz
Over-Sampled, Not Over-Represented
Just a quick update on the oversampling of African-American voters in that NBC/WSJ poll, which Josh mentioned last night.
The pollster has released a memo explaining, as we suspected, that while blacks were oversampled to be able to get a statistically reliable subgroup for answers to questions specific to black voters, the horse race numbers were corrected for this oversampling and did not over-represent blacks.
Carry on.
--David Kurtz
Feinstein to Mukasey: What's up with shutting down the public corruption unit in L.A.?
--David Kurtz
Siegelman to Testify?
The House Judiciary Committee wants to spring former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman from the joint so he can testify about his prosecution.
--David Kurtz
The Headline Says It All
From the AP:
"Iraqi Civilian Spokesman for Baghdad Security Operation Kidnapped, 3 Guards Killed"
--David Kurtz
Stay Tuned …
We may yet get to the bottom of NAFTA-gate:
The federal government's top civil servant has pledged to make public the results of an investigation into Canadian leaks that damaged the presidential campaign of U.S. Senator Barack Obama.Prime Minister Stephen Harper handed responsibility for an internal inquiry to Kevin Lynch, the Clerk of the Privy Council, after it emerged that his chief of staff, Ian Brodie, sparked the so-called "NAFTA-gate" affair in a conversation with reporters from CTV News.
Mr. Lynch pledged in a letter to Liberal MP Navdeep Bains that the results of the internal probe will be made public, and will include the "verbal" leaks - not only the later leak of a diplomatic memo.
No indication on when such a report might be released. Presumably before the U.S. election?
--David Kurtz
Today's Must Read
Need a supply of mid-20th century Chinese ammo? Maybe some old Eastern Bloc munitions? Then has the Pentagon got a contractor for you: a couple of 20-something dudes in S. Florida who were the main supplier to Afghanistan’s army and police force -- until the NYT started asking questions.
--David Kurtz
Over-Sampled?
This evening everyone is chewing over the results of the latest sounding of the Democratic primary race provided by the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. A number of readers, questioning the results of the poll, have written in flagging this passage in NBC's Chuck Todd's analysis of the poll ...
In addition, we oversampled African-Americans in order to get a more reliable cross-tab on many of the questions we asked in this poll regarding Sen. Barack Obama's speech on race and overall response to last week's Rev. Jeremiah Wright dustup.
Given Obama's overwhelming support among African-American voters, if the poll had a disproportionately large number of African-Americans in its sample, that would definitely throw the results of the poll into question.
But I'm pretty sure that's not what Todd is saying. What I think he means is this: In order to get a statistically reliable subset of African-American voters, they over-sampled this category. (Remember, African-Americans account for only about 13% of the US population. So that subset of a regular poll doesn't really have a large enough sample to ensure a low margin of error.) They then re-weighted these results to come up with topline (everybody put together) numbers that adjusted for that oversampling.
Got that?
In any case, I don't know that. But from my experience I'm pretty sure that's what it means. I'd be very surprised if a major media outlet would release a poll like this without more clearly flagging that the numbers were skewed. In the meantime, we've shot off some emails to people involved with the poll to get confirmation one way or another. We'll let you know what we hear.
Late Update: A source at NBC confirms that this is correct. The results are weighted, as I described.
--Josh Marshall
They Trust What She Says
TPM Reader AK, a dear, dear old friend, sees a different explanation ...
Forgive me if I missed you saying this on your site, but there's any easier way than a structural argument to understand why many Clinton supporters say they'll vote for McCain instead of Obama: Clinton, whom they support, and, one assumes, trust, has told them to do so. She has made the case that the pecking order, particularly when it comes to CIC, is her, then McCain, and Obama failing the threshold test. She has said the same about judgment and experience. This is a case where considering a structural -- to use your word -- double move is too clever by half. All you need to do is look at what they're being told by the Clinton camp to understand the polling numbers.
--Josh Marshall
You Want the Money or Not?
In that letter to Speaker Pelosi from Sen. Clinton's top fundraisers, this, the last graf, is the real kicker ...
We have been strong supporters of the DCCC. We therefore urge you to clarify your position on super-delegates and reflect in your comments a more open view to the optional independent actions of each of the delegates at the National Convention in August. We appreciate your activities in support of the Democratic Party and your leadership role in the Party and hope you will be responsive to some of your major enthusiastic supporters.
The DCCC is of course the campaign committee that funds and coordinates the Democrats' House campaigns.
--Josh Marshall
On The Other Hand
TPM Reader DW, not so optimistic ...
Of course your readers are correct to point out that we are only in March and concern today about the Obama / Clinton fight will spoil November is very premature. Yes, the Clintons in 92 had to beat back Brown into June. But this misses the point.
The problem is, what happens in June? The Clintons have no intention of ever stopping until the delegates nominate them or reject them in Denver (feel free to make the case that I’m wrong about this). The proper analogy is not 92, but 80 when Teddy took his losing battle to the convention and broke the party. The Clintons are planning their floor fight and not really being very shy about it. It was as recently as this week that Hillary pointed out again that no delegate is pledged – how many times has Harold Ickes reminded us of this fact. Harold Ickes – Teddy Kennedy’s floor manager in 1980.
There is good reason to be very concerned. The biggest problem facing the Democratic party is a leadership vacuum exacerbated by the losers being the Clintons. Who is going to tell the former president come June to STFU and bow out gracefully?
To borrow the Bush/Cheney 2004 slogan, “be afraid, be very afraid”.
--Josh Marshall
You Stay Out of This
Top Clinton donors write letter chastising House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her statements about superdelegates.
--David Kurtz
Temper, Temper
TPM Reader HW appeals for calm (and a little common sense) ...
This talk of mortal peril for the Democrats is crazy. The idea that where the primary stands here in March jeopardizes the outcome of the election in November strikes me as wildly ahistorical. And I say that as an Obama supporter who believes that Hillary should have gotten out of the race a month ago when the central premise of her campaign became the proposition that superdelegates should overrule the outcome of contested primary elections.Didn't Bill Clinton have to fight primary battles well into May and June? He managed to beat an incumbent President a six months laters. Didn't George W. Bush have to contend with John McCain in 2000 even after Al Gore had basically finished off Bill Bradley early in New Hampshire? Didn't Jimmy Carter manage to beat Ford despite Jerry Brown winning a string of late primaries in 1976?
As for this latest Gallup poll, if 28% of Hillary Clinton supporters backed McCain, that would mean that roughly 14% of Democrats would back McCain. Given the events of the past week with Jeremiah Wright, McCain's ability to escape serious examination until the Democratic primary is over, and the heated nature of the primary, let's call that a worst case scenario. Guess what? Gore lost 14% of Democrats in 2000 and Kerry lost 11% of Democrats in 2004. As I recall, Gore won the popular vote anyway, and John Kerry came pretty close.
We are eight months away from November, we haven't had a chance to see McCain's record and statements get serious scrutiny, we haven't seen the parties choose their respective running mates, we haven't seen the conventions, we haven't even officially settled on the matchup (although I think we all know it). Gallup has Obama and McCain basically tied in the mid-forties, which means neither have locked down too many more people than the folks in their base, with everyone in the middle up for grabs. There is much to be written about the general election ahead, in fact, everything has yet to be written. We just all have to have the patience to let Hillary run out the string- and don't get me wrong, its trying mine, more sorely everyday (my hope is that Obama can stage a double win in North Carolina and Indiana and some party elders will approach Hillary and ask her to pack it in then and there).
Same message from TPM Reader TL (just with a little more edge for the proprietor) ...
Don't you find it incredibly myopic to adhere to the logic behind the figures you posted proporting that many Clinton and Obama voters would vote for McCain after the Dem nominee is chosen? We are in the midst of an incredibly strung out and close race for the Democratic nomination. The emotions running through the supporters of both candidates are near their peak. Of course they are going to claim that they are going to vote for McCain. By saying so they are attempting to make their own candidate seem like the only plausible choice. You know all to well that were Barack or Hillary to win, put beside McCain under the scrutiny of a presidential election, that there is no way in hell any of these people are voting for John McCain. If I want to read/hear this BS I'll go to CNN, but please not here.
--Josh Marshall
Can't Be True?
From TPM Reader PG ...
Josh, do you think the poll results you're flogging right now have much merit? I mean, I'm a hardcore Obama Democrat, and I'm so disgruntled about Hillary's tactics that if you were to ask me today, I'd say if she wins the nomination I might not vote. But I know not voting is not an option, and in the unlikely event she manages to win, I'll do what is in the best interests of myself and my party and vote for her. Don't you think it's pretty much the same with Clinton supporters? Really, how many people get behind Hilllary Clinton and then even think about voting for John McCain? Maybe Hillary is no flaming liberal, but McCain is very conservative.
We've gotten a number of emails like this from both sides. And basically I think the great majority of these people will come to their senses and return to the Democratic fold. Not that I think the Democratic party per se has some moral claim to anyone's vote. But if you actually care about the issues these candidates are running on then it's pretty hard to see where, with a few months to think it over, will vote for McCain.
How many Democrats really want to vote for a candidate committed to appointing Supreme Court Justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade and keeping US troops occupying Iraq for another generation? I think those facts and others will become far more salient as the heat of the current craziness subsides.
I also think there's at least a decent structural argument for why Hillary supporters are more likely, for the moment, to say they'll vote for McCain. I think everybody realizes -- whatever they'd prefer -- that Obama is a strong favorite for the nomination at this point. And I think the simple truth is that it's a lot easier to be magnanimous, take the high road about party unity or simply be less mad if you're confident that your candidate is going to win. That just strikes me as common sense.
--Josh Marshall
Big Trouble
The new Gallup poll says that 19% of Obama supporters would vote for McCain over Hillary and a whopping 28% of Hillary supporters would abandon Obama for McCain.
Whoever wins those numbers will flatten out considerably. But starting from such high numbers is a big, big problem.
--Josh Marshall
TPMtv: McCain's Achilles Heel
100 years? 1,000 years? 10,000 years!?! Think what you want about who's being unfair, who should drop and the like in the primary race. The Democrats are missing a big opportunity to strike early at John McCain's Achilles heel -- his lockstep support for an extremely unpopular war. We lay out the key points in today's episode of TPMtv ...
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
--Josh Marshall
Today's Must Read
Why the sudden up-tick in violence in Iraq -- and why now? Paul Kiel has the rundown.
--David Kurtz
Ya Think?
As you know, earlier today Hillary Clinton tried to stoke the Jeremiah Wright controversy by telling an editorial board meeting in Pittsburgh that Jeremiah Wright "would not have been my pastor" and then going on to note that she had denounced Don Imus in contrast to Obama's allegedly more tolerant attitude toward hate speech.
Later in the afternoon she repeated the same comments at a press conference and when asked why she had chosen to engage Obama on the Wright controversy she seemed to suggest that rather than being intentional she was only providing an answer to a direct question. "Well I answered a question in an ed board today that was very specific about what I would have done," Clinton told the reporter, "And you know I'm just speaking for myself, and i was answering a question that was posed to me."
Now obviously, Hillary's been in the political big leagues for a while. She knows how to deflect a question. But it's actually much richer than this. This afternoon Greg Sargent and I were talking this over and one of us realized that this wasn't just any Pittsburgh paper. It was the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the money-losing, vanity, fringe sheet of Richard Mellon Scaife, funder of the Arkansas Project, the American Spectator during its prime Clinton-hunting years and virtually every right-wing operation of note at one point or another over the last twenty years or more.
In fact, what I only discovered late this evening, when Eric Kleefeld sent me this link at National Review Online, is that not only was it Scaife's paper. Scaife himself was there sitting just to Clinton's right apparently taking part in the questioning.
This alone has to amount to some sort cosmic encounter like something out of a Wagner opera. Remember, this is the guy who spent millions of dollars puffing up wingnut fantasies about Hillary's having Vince Foster whacked and lots of other curdled and ugly nonsense. Scaife was the nerve center of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Those of us who spent years defending the Clintons from all that malarkey learned this point on day one.
But there's more.
Let's game this out. Hillary's saying this wasn't some planned thing. She just got hit with this question and she answered it. But here's my question. You think Richard Mellon Scaife might want to dig into the Jeremiah Wright story? This is sort of like, 'Hey, I go on Hannity and next thing you know he's asking me about Wright and Farrakhan. How was I supposed to see that coming?'
I don't know just how this went down. But the idea Sen. Clinton and her staff went into an editorial board meeting with Scaife and his lackey reporters without a clear sense that they were going to get at least one choice Jeremiah Wright question just somehow doesn't ring true to me.
--Josh Marshall
Proxy Wars
TPM Reader JW hits the breaking point:
Can there be a rule that neither campaign is allowed to have their surrogates give interviews with anyone, especially foreign press? By the time the convention rolls around, neither campaign will have any surrogates left, since they are "distancing" from ~2 per week.OMG make it stop. Who cares what these people say? Is it really Hillary's strategy to attack Obama through Irish radio? Or Obama's to attack Clinton through the Scottish press?
--David Kurtz
Litigation Season '08
Elections are becoming for lawyers what tax season is for accountants.
The Clinton campaign is urging its lawyer supporters to head to Texas this weekend, with a goal of having at least one lawyer present to monitor each county and state Senate convention site.
On the GOP side, TPMmuckraker has learned, vote-suppression guru Hans von Spakovsky, formerly of the U.S. Justice Department, will be giving a talk next week to the L.A. chapter of the Federalist Society titled "Litigating Elections: the Campaign Process in 2008."
--David Kurtz
That's Not Wright
You can always tell when a scandal story has peaked and is ebbing, almost down to the minute: when your political opponents start to raise it explicitly against you. That was the minute I knew Bill Clinton was going to weather the Monica story -- the moment when Republicans first started hitting him over it. It took a few days. And I remember rejoicing about it at the time. Same thing here with Wright. The Clinton camp can see that it's drifting. So they're deciding to stoke it. Also useful to get the Tuzla stuff off the front page.
Here's one other point I want to raise about Wright. Having watched the full sermons that his sound bites were grabbed out of, it's pretty clear to me that the snippets running on Youtube were taken out of context and heavily distorted. (But that's life, to a degree -- political hits don't usually come packaged with extenuating context) I'm also not going to get into the business of full-scale defenses of someone who has apparently suggested that the US government had some role in "inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color."
But in the debate about Wright, which Sen. Clinton has just reignited, it seems to be spoken of now as an unquestioned assumption that Wright traffics in racist rhetoric or hate speech. But is that really true? I've seen some stuff that strikes me as whacky. I've heard soundbites that critics would not have much trouble spinning as anti-American. But are there really quotes that justify the charge of racism? I'm not saying that purely as a rhetorical question. I have not made myself a full Wrightologist. But I do get the sense that a lot of people believe he's so radioactive that it makes no sense to point out when others are treating as granted claims that appear demonstrably false.
--Josh Marshall
Wright Revived
It's not just Hillary reigniting the Wright story. A member of Hillary's finance committee has been pushing it publicly, too, equating Wright with David Duke in a little-noticed Irish radio interview.
--David Kurtz
Yo-Yo
I suspect the earlier poll showing a tie was just an outlier. But one way or another, the latest poll shows Barack Obama with a 20+ margin over Clinton in North Carolina.
--Josh Marshall
TPMtv: King of Swing?
Sure you know about Eliot Spitzer's hooker-gate implosion. But did long-time Spitzer nemesis and GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone grease the skids for Spitzer's downfall with information he learned while chillin' at a Miami swingers club? In today's episode of TPMtv we bring you all the lurid details ...
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
--Josh Marshall
Today's Must Read
White House strategy on Iraq troop levels: Let's just play it vague and maybe no one will notice we're kicking this on to the next President.
--David Kurtz
Sweet Deal
You probably noticed that the JPMorgan buy out deal of Bear Stearns has now been renegotiated with JPMorgan now agreeing to pay $10 a share as opposed to the $2 preliminarily agreed last week. The fact that the dollar price could expand fivefold so easily gives some graphic sense of how arbitrary some of these dollar amounts are or perhaps how little real sense people have of the degree of risk and value tied to these enterprises. But when I saw this change the first thing that occurred to me was whether we were able to pull any our of our (i.e., the public) money off the table when the deal for the Bear Stearns shareholders got dramatically sweetened. It seems that the answer is yes, to some degree at least. But the terms still seem a little unclear to me.
From today's article in the Post comes this expanded detail ...
As part of the new Bear Stearns deal, the Fed's role was also renegotiated. The central bank originally had agreed to put public dollars on the line to guarantee $30 billion of risky mortgages owned by Bear Stearns. In the reworked deal, J.P. Morgan agreed to cover the first $1 billion in losses if the value of those securities falls, with the Fed responsible for any losses beyond that.
Presumably the idea here is that the substantial risk of loss is in that first $1 billion while the remaining liability is real but much less risky. So it becomes less a bail-out than a wisely deployed insurance policy on liabilities the Fed has some ability to gauge. But are they sure that's true? I don't have the financial knowledge to even begin to game out and answer. And even if I did I think I'd need some access to the company's records to have any sense of what's going on.
But let's remember, as far as Bear's shareholders are concerned, the company should have been allowed to fail and all those shareholders to be cleaned out. The logic of any level of bail out is that the collateral effects of the company's collapse would be too damaging to the country's financial sector. So any lifeline to the company's shareholders is a secondary effect of the achieving the public good of financial sector stability. So before the Bear shareholders start recouping any of their losses I would think that the risk the public is on the line for from this deal should be reduced to little or nothing.
--Josh Marshall
Maximize the Confusion
Will Bunch was at the Daily News editor board session with Hillary Clinton today. And in the process of asking her a delegate number crunching question she told him, "And also remember that pledged delegates in most states are not pledged. You know, there is no requirement that anybody vote for anybody. They’re just like superdelegates."
Technically this is true. In fact, I believe that all of the delegates at the Democratic Convention can do whatever they want. They may have been elected to be a Clinton or Obama delegate. And they're 'pledged' to vote for that candidate. But once they're on the floor of the hall they actually free to do whatever they want.
But it's basically a non-point because campaigns don't choose just anyone to serve as a delegate. They pick the absolute hardest core supporters of their candidate. So the odds of any delegate getting flipped are basically nil.
It's also another example of the fog of nonsense that has increasingly enveloped the Clinton campaign. Spin is one thing. And it's not a bad thing. But to have utility it must be tethered to some relevant facts, some kind of reality. Otherwise it just descends into ridiculousness. There's always some new clever but inane argument to twist 'up' into something at least somewhat resembling 'down'. Or if not that, enough to keep your head spinning long enough not to notice for a while that 2 and 2 still equals 4. It's like getting snowed by a precocious adolescent or maybe Jon Lovitz's Tommy Flanagan.
Usually this malarkey comes out of the mouth of Mark Penn. But it seems to be infectious.
--Josh Marshall
Unraveling?
McClatchy reports:
A cease-fire critical to the improved security situation in Iraq appeared to unravel Monday when a militia loyal to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr began shutting down neighborhoods in west Baghdad and issuing demands of the central government.Simultaneously, in the strategic southern port city of Basra, where Sadr's Mahdi militia is in control, the Iraqi government launched a crackdown in the face of warnings by Sadr's followers that they'll fight government forces if any Sadrists are detained. By 1 a.m. Arab satellite news channels reported clashes between the Mahdi Army and police in Basra.
--David Kurtz
More on Tuzla
As the Clinton campaign now concedes, Sen. Clinton's claims about running from their military aircraft to evade sniper fire are not borne out by the video of the events in question. Now still others have come forward to dispute her account. And there's even more. Sen. Clinton has said on a number of occasions that she was "the first, you know, high- profile American to go into Bosnia after the peace accords were signed because we wanted to show that the United States was 100 percent behind the agreement."
But this also seems to incorrect.
According to some quick research we did, it turns out that Madeleine Albright, then UN Ambassador, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs John Shalikashvili, then-Sec Def Bill Perry, various members of Congress and President Clinton himself had all visited Tuzla a few months earlier.
I think the real story here though is the big picture. People have faulty memories. Things get dramatized in people's recollections. And despite what happened on the ground, they did do one of those evasive 'cork-screw' descents [see update below] meant to guard against taking incoming fire, a relatively routine measure in conflict and post-conflict settings but one that I'm sure made everyone on board feel palpably that this wasn't some flight to Paris or Madrid. But this is an anecdote that's become something close to a staple of her foreign policy experience resume. And it's pretty clearly false. And it comes in the context of a whole slew of exaggerations -- some minor, some major -- that she's used to puff up her Commander-in-Chief resume.
As I noted a few weeks back, I don't think you need to be a veteran or someone who's done foreign policy work in the executive branch. Bill Clinton didn't have any. I think both Clinton and Obama are perfectly capable of being good presidents and able commanders-in-chief -- certainly they'd pursue wiser polices than John McCain. But in trying to push this argument that she and John McCain stand on one side of the foreign policy divide (aka, Commander-in-Chief threshold) and Obama on the other she's had to make a series of arguments that are just plain silly.
Late Update: Apparently the military aircraft did not make a 'corkscrew' landing but rather what the Post refers to as a 'very fast descent' (not sure if they mean a steep descent). In any case, as per what I said above, not sure this greatly changes things. Memories aren't perfect; maybe she doesn't know the difference, etc. But wanted to set the record straight.
--Josh Marshall
4,000 And Counting
In today's White House press briefing, pay particular attention to Dana Perino's not-so-subtle use of the sentiments of fallen soldiers' families (at least as they are relayed by the President himself) to reinforce support for his Iraq policy:
--David Kurtz
A Little Snark, But Not Much
Hillary: We need an economy warlord to match militarization of American foreign policy.
Actually on rereading the quote again, I'm not sure there's any snark at all.
--Josh Marshall
TPMtv: Sunday Show Roundup
Does McCain have al Qaeda on the brain? And which Democratic campaign is definitively evil? We run down the key questions raised on this weekends Sunday shows ...
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
--Josh Marshall
Fumes
Perhaps this is obvious. But it seems to me that the real reason the Democratic primary race has gone from heated to vicious (at least among the candidates' supporters, if not the candidates themselves) is precisely because we're in this awkward seven week hiatus in which there are no actual elections being held. Actual voting, rightly, has served as the closest thing to a referee this on-going contest has. So each side would have it at for a week or so. And then we'd have some voting. And despite all the efforts to spin the results on both sides they'd still have an undeniable effect. After South Carolina, Hillary seriously rejiggered her approach. After Ohio and Texas, Obama's camp decided that certain attacks against them had stuck. All the acrimony and spin notwithstanding, the regular input of voters had the effect of keeping the campaigns on something like a common narrative. Without them, we are stuck with the same, unchanging stubborn set of facts: Obama has a relatively narrow lead which, under the DNC's rules, is nevertheless extremely difficult to overcome. And each side is left cycling over into more and more heated iterations of the same arguments, like a cascade into mounting levels of mania, at least among supporters if not always the campaigns themselves.
That doesn't mean that both side's arguments have equal merit. For my part, I think the Obama campaign has far the better part of it. But I think it does explain why we're now in this self-escalating spiral.
--Josh Marshall
Reductio Ad Absurdum
I don't know where it was. It think it may have been a reader blog at TPMCafe. Wherever it was it was a post that ran down something like ten different ways of counting the popular vote, all to the end of showing that Barack's popular vote lead wasn't nearly so great and may not exist at all. There was the count with and without Michigan and Florida, with one but not the other, including caucuses and not including caucuses. There were other options that seemed to go even further down the rabbit hole. But it did lead me to have a kind of epiphany about just where the Clinton side is at this point -- gaming out different retroactive rule changes to see who would have won the popular vote if the nomination process were operating under a different set of rules. I imagine playing poker around a table with friends. Player A has a Straight Flush; Player B has four of a kind. Then B says well, sure, if you're counting straights, but if we were adding up the numbers rather than going by straights winning, I'd have won.
How well would that go over? I remember, when I was a little kid playing chess with my dad (who unlike some dads never saw the point of throwing games in my favor) and sometimes when I lost I'd toss out some version of ... well, but if my rook could move diagonally, then ... You get the idea.
Admittedly, there is a relative scale of ridiculousness. I can see the argument over the non-sanctioned Florida and Michigan primaries, though I don't agree with it. But ruling out caucuses? Or today's gambit from Evan Bayh arguing that we should be looking at who's winning by the electoral college vote, which yields a narrow win for Hillary? A few seconds of thought shows that this is just a back door way of getting rid of the proportional allocation of delegates the DNC system runs by and opting instead for the winner-take-all model followed by the Republicans.
Looking back over how this race has shaken out, I have serious questions whether the proportional system is the best way to go, at least if the other party is going the winner-take-all route. If you grant that there's an advantage in coming to a decision early, the proportional system really does make it terribly hard for either candidate in a close race to put it away.
But fundamentally, who cares? The system is based on pledged delegates and super-delegates. Period. There's a set of rules everyone agreed on. The wisdom of those rules is irrelevant at this point. The Clinton campaign is entitled to do whatever it wants to get superdelegates to come over to her side to even out the pledged delegate deficit. My take is that whatever the arguments, the superdelegates aren't going to go against a clear pledged delegate leader. And I think they'd be extremely ill-advised to do so. But the superdelegates do have this power under the rules. But these constant efforts to say the rules aren't fair are just silly, and truth be told I think they're more undermining of the Clinton campaign than they realize.
--Josh Marshall
Say It, Don't Spray It
I'm detecting a trend here:
A year’s worth of perceived slights poured out, as [Spitzer] recalled old political races gone bad and proposals that had died in the Legislature. Curse piled upon curse, spittle flying.
The governor was so angry, Mr. Dopp recalled, that he turned red and spit out coffee he was sipping as he directed him to release the records immediately. “As he was saying it, he was spitting a little bit,” Mr. Dopp said. “He was spitting mad.”
--David Kurtz
Politics As Sideshow
From TPM Reader PS:
Just a random and probably not very helpful observation... But isn't a big part of what's going on in this lumbering undead primary race that the media -- and even the voters at large -- are actually having a hard time letting go of the Clintons just because they're more fun? Love them or hate them -- and I've done both -- they always give us a good show.Barack gives you passion and inspiration and a sense of belonging to something important -- but there's a big problem. It's okay to love him, but what if you hate him? (I use "hate" here more in the sense of an audience's experience of a fictional character: simultaneous self recognition, contempt, judgment, catharsis). Can you hate Barack without feeling racist? It's not easy. But with Hillary it is. You can hate her without feeling sexist, because she's a Clinton.
It feels like Obama is stealing the "fun part" of politics from us. Every third attack on him triggers a new spasm of soul searching about the lingering stains of wretched racism on our national psyche. Which of course is important. But it's way less fun.
I'll be the first to admit: I'm a political junkie largely because I'm addicted to the show. And who doesn't crave the distraction in times like these, with wars and recession and whatnot. That's why television entertainment (where I work) is considered recession proof. We offer escape. Like politics used to. But the "sideshows" don't play like they used to. For that, we need characters we're free to love to hate.
--David Kurtz
See Krugman
Krugman has two very good points in tomorrow's column. 1) The eerie silence on the campaign trail about what financial crisis we're currently struggling to make our way through and 2) The fact that John McCain's primary economics advisor, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R), is probably as responsible for setting the stage for this crisis as anyone in the country through his legislative role in the deregulation of the financial services industry.
Also, highly inspiring is the fact that another of McCain's advisors is Kevin Hassett, he of "Dow 36,000" fame, sort of an avatar of boom market snake oil, if you will. More generally, as Kevin Drum notes, if you think McCain's foreign policy is 'Bush Redux, Just More Nuts', well, then wait till you see his economic policy.
--Josh Marshall