Hillary Cinton took to the Sunday show airwaves to defend her gas tax holiday against Senator Obama and all those elitist, out-of-touch economists …
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
According to retired Gen. Ric Sanchez, instead of trying to train the Iraq police Bernie Kerik spent most of his time in Baghdad “conducting raids and liberating prostitutes.”
Seems like we’ve got another Zogby v. SurveyUSA showdown on our hands. Zogby, improbably and I think unlike everyone else, has had Obama a couple points ahead of Hillary Clinton in Indiana. And SurveyUSA’s just-released survey has her a full 12 points out in front — Clinton 54%, Obama 42%.
The SurveyUSA poll itself is a bit of an outlier on the high end compared to other late polls. But SurveyUSA has been much more reliable than Zogby this cycle.
One way or another, there’s an egg on deck for someone’s face Wednesday morning.
Late Update: I guess a narrow Clinton victory could result in a seldom-seen co-egging. But I think that, like Bush’s theory of the executive, this is going to be a unitary affair.
Given its historically pro-military leanings, Indiana doesn’t seem like fertile ground for the argument that we should never have gotten into Iraq in the first place — but that’s the case a pro-Obama union is making in a new mailer implicitly hitting Hillary for her Iraq War vote.
We have an especially good line-up this week at the TPMCafe Book Club. Joining Fareed Zakaria to discuss his new book, The Post-American World, are The Atlantic‘s Matt Yglesias, Ann-Marie Slaughter of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, journalist David Rieff, and Michael Lind of the New America Foundation.
The discussion is underway, so stop by and join in.
TPM Reader H- sees what’s been a recurrent pattern that makes more sense of the Indiana polls …
I think if you read the polling results of the various Indiana polls carefully, they are not as variable and contradictory as they might first appear. Nearly every poll in the last week has put Obama’s number within one or two points of 43%. On the other hand, Clinton’s numbers have varied much more dramatically in the 42-54% range. That variation tends to correlate negatively with the number of undecideds. So it would seem that what’s going on is both candidates have solid bases of support in the low 40s, but when you start pushing less firm voters, they go overwhelmingly for Clinton (an indication that Zogby himself has also acknowledged). This still isn’t very good news for Obama, but it does mean that pushing his supporters out and changing a few minds gives him a decent shot at keeping Indiana close.
I want to make a totally separate point. I agree with your posts from about a month ago about how irrational it is for a Democratic voter supporting the losing primary candidate to defect to McCain in November, since Clinton and Obama are so close on the issues compared to McCain. But I have to say, as someone who was marching in New Hampshire in 1991 for Bill Clinton, who ran the campus Democrats for his ’92 campaign, who interned in his White House, who argued against impeachment at every turn, who even defended the pardons, who has been an enormous and unwavering admirer, and who has been disgusted with his own parents for their seemingly irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton, there is something about the way she has run this campaign. From having people on her campaign raise Obama’s drug use, to her jumping on the bandwagon for every right-wing cheap shot, to her new populist, “got no truck with economists” stance, its been craven. More craven than I could possibly imagine.
If somehow against all odds she got nominated, I’d vote for her, but I’d do so utterly unconvinced that the quality of her leadership wouldn’t bring about disastrous results no less than the disastrous results that McCain’s wrongheaded policies and own cravenness would bring about. Yes, her policy positions would be much better than McCain’s. But if she’s this divisive, this self-preserving, this craven, I think the results can still be horrible, even with policy positions that are much closer to mine. At this point I feel like it would be the hardest vote for a Democrat I’d ever cast.
Now, I’m a Democratic fundraiser. And as detailed above, a very long time Clinton supporter. If I’m this repulsed, if it seems this craven to me, and I’m this pessimistic about her leadership, can I be alone? That doesn’t even factor in the breach with younger voters, netroots activists, and African-American voters a Clinton nomination would bring about at this point.
Had to get that off my chest.
TPM Reader RP catches the meta-message …
I think what H and a lot of people are missing about Hillary Clinton might become head-smackingly obvious after this election is over. I’m an Obama supporter, and I’m offended by Hillary’s demagoguery. But I don’t think people get what she’s doing here.
By being a ‘fighter’ and playing to the lowest kind of populism (and wow do we hate it), Hillary is showing that if she were somehow to get nominated, she’ll run exactly the kind of stay-on-the-offensive campaign that will force mistakes from McCain and make it more likely that she’ll win in November. She’s also making it clear that Obama will never run that kind of campaign.
McCain is 71. Running for President will be an immense strain on anyone, let alone someone of that age. Even in the best of times, he’s prone to shocking outbursts. With Hillary running, for the first time in anyone’s memory, a Republican-toned campaign as a Democrat, she’s showing that she can force McCain to make a ‘macaca’-style gaffe. When Republicans grumble about McCain’s temper, they’re not worried about how he’ll behave as President (since when has actual job performance mattered to them?); they’re worried about how he’ll campaign. They’re frightened of a Phil Mickelson-esque implosion.
Obama, by contrast, will run a high-minded campaign and may well win on merit. And he’ll always be on the defensive. As I said, I favor him Obama a wide margin. But I favor a Democrat over a Republican by an even wider margin.
The upshot: I’ll happily support Hillary if she ‘steals’ the nomination. Aside from the benefits of not having a crop of incompetent government-haters running government, one of the benefits of a winning Hillary campaign would be to relieve a blight on our
country: the Atwater/Rove school of Republican campaign mudslinging. It’s not about fighting back. It’s about taking the first shot. She won’t let them get their Swift Boats in the water to start with. If both sides are Atwatering it, yes, it’ll be very very ugly, cue the
‘Unity12’ theme music and hand-wringing by the delicate. But I think we’re in for ugly no matter what, because they’re not going to stop. We may as well engage or get used to losing.
I’m not so sure it’s a positive, but the pattern is there. From TPM Reader SS …
H- makes an interesting point regarding the lack of variance in the polls–namely that each poll with approximately 43% of the voters who have decided, and “undecideds” break overwhelmingly for Clinton. The same was clearly true in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and I believe in a few other states as well.
Do you attribute this “late break undecided” votes to something other than the voters had not made up their minds? Specifically, given the states (strong blue-collar white vote), do you think that at the end of the day that there is either (a) a Wilder effect at play here, or (b) that the Wright controversy makes Obama a little too “risky” a vote for a generally fairly conservative voting base?
If so, this could be viewed as an overall positive for Obama in the General Election, if one presumes that these “undecideds” are more concerned about policy than they are about race or the “riskiness” of voting for Obama. Clinton is, in some ways, a relatively safe alternative for Democrats (her policies are virtually identical to Obama), making it easy to justify not voting for the “other” Democrat.
It seems like the Marc Dann scandal in Ohio is reaching almost Larry Craigian proportions — at least in terms of the near universal sentiment with his party (he’s a Dem) that he needs to leave and never be heard from again. Dann, you’ll remember, is the new Attorney General who came in in 2006 and is accused of more or less running the AG’s office like the fraternity house in Animal House. Now the state’s Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland and, from what I can tell, almost every other Democratic officeholder of note have signed a letter calling for Dann to resign or have state Dems introduce a House resolution to have him impeached.
Dann for his part says he’s stickin’. “I am in the office, have rolled up my sleeves and am working on behalf of the people of the state of Ohio,” he responded.
As a rule, TPM does not endorse candidates. But in this case, as Editor & Publisher of TPM and TPMmuckraker, I’m considering endorsing Dann’s decision to stay in office at least for a few weeks so that we have enough time to dig into this story and wrench as much schadenfreude from it as possible.