Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) tried to lean on a federal prosecutor, then tried to get him fired, and all he got for it was this letter of qualified admonition from the Senate Ethics Committee.
McCain today on Barack Obama …
I think it’s very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States. So apparently has Danny Ortega and several others. I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas’s worst nightmare….If senator Obama is favored by Hamas I think people can make judgments accordingly.
(ed.note: Thanks to TPM Reader BO for the catch.)
As you know the Weather Underground, the somewhat hapless but definitely violent 60s and 70s radical group, has bubbled up into the 2008 presidential campaign. It’s come up against Obama for his association with Bill Ayers and then Obama brought it up in response because Bill Clinton pardoned two former Weathermen in his end of presidency pardons.
Inside Edition of all places asked Hillary about the pardons and her response was that “Well, I didn’t know anything about it.”
Now, we’ve gotten a lot of emails from readers asking for us to follow up on this. And we ask for clarification from the Clinton campaign about just what she meant because I found her statement ambiguous. Did she mean she didn’t knowing anything about it at the time? Or that she didn’t know about it until Barack Obama brought it up in the debate. And Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson told Greg Sargent that she was “unaware before it was done,” which I take to mean that she wasn’t privy to any of the discussions about it before the pardon and basically only heard about it in the newspapers like the rest of us.
But as New York Newsday points out, the murders in question (the crime the two individuals were in prison for) took place in New York. And the campaign to get them pardons and the opposition to it got a lot of publicity in New York in the summer and fall of 2000, when Clinton was initially running for senate. Newsday’s blog has a chronology of who was doing what, including Sen. Schumer’s lobbying against the pardon. So take a look and let us know what you think. For my part I think it makes her claim not to have known anything about this seem a bit dubious.
I’ve gotten a sense of this looking over the exit polls over the last couple months. Now Jonathan Tilove of Newhouse News Service has put it together in an article. The issue of race and whether that is what has prevented Barack Obama from cutting into Hillary Clinton’s vote totals in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania has been a dicey and toxic question in this primary campaign — and one that’s not good (though in different ways) for either candidate.
But what Tilove points out is that at least a very substantial part of what’s going is not whites voting against Obama because of race but women, particularly white women, voting for Hillary because of gender. This is something that shows up not only in the breakdown of the white female vote but the turnout of female voters in this year’s primaries.
Tilove has various data points. But in Pennsylvania, for example, white women went for Clinton 68% – 33%. And they made up 46% of the electorate. Meanwhile, white men went for Clinton 57%-43% and made up only 33% of the electorate.
There are some questions the numbers themselves won’t tell you. Is Hillary’s still-strong showing among white men nonetheless an example of white resistance on the basis of Obama’s race? While I think race is and will continue (if Obama’s the nominee) to play a key role in this campaign, there’s simply no basis to infer this just on the basis of the number spread.
But I see no reasonable argument that white women are more resistant to voting for a black man than white men. So in this case, I think we can reasonably infer from the poll numbers what common sense would likely tell us is obvious: that a big factor in this contest is women voting for Hillary because of her gender — whether in the sense of identifying with her and her take on key issues or because of the historic nature of her candidacy.
This doesn’t rule out racial voting — but it does narrow the potential scope of it. And, as I alluded in the title of the post, it’s one of these facts that has the virtue, in addition to being true, of casting the whole process in a much less toxic, divisive light.
Following up on the post from earlier this morning about Sen. McCain’s claim that you can’t find Americans willing to do hard manual labor for $50 an hour, this from the TPM mailbag …
My name is Kevin Flynn, I am the legislative/political director for the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers. Our union is an affiliate of the BCTD. I was at the legislative conference when McCain lost his cool and began this tirade. Your readers are correct, his assertion was that no American would be willing to do this work for $50.00 an hour. There are those who will argue that offering such a wage to American workers would not be adequate incentive, but clearly to an audience of construction workers this is not the case. Our president was behind him on stage when he made this asinine comment in response to the public outcry he received because of his very vocal support of comprehensive immigration reform, Our president(and myself since I worked in the field as well) was struck dumb because our members(not unlike those of the other trades represented in the crowd) work 8-12 hours each day in the heat throughout the country bending over and laying 80 lb concrete blocks, heavy stone & marble, brick, and working in hellish conditions worse than the Arizona summer.
Your original point was correct, John McCain is clueless when it comes to the economy or the experiences of ordinary people who work for a living. His only working experiences were as a pilot in the Navy and as a member of the House of Representatives and the Senate. It should be very apparent from this ludicrous offer he made to people doing similar work and in a fair number of states for less. If you have any questions, please feel free to email or call me.
Eleanor Clift on how it’ll be retribution time a la Corleone if Hillary manages to wrestle the nomination from Barack.
A couple weeks ago Joe Klein wrote a column in Time, which provided an overview of the coming campaign wrapped around the question of what kind of campaign John McCain will run — whether he will he run a Bush-Drudge-style knock and sleaze campaign in which opponents are painted as crypto-terrorists and Hollywood-loving-pansies or embrace a “substantive debate.”
Though not without doubts
said he believes McCain will run an honorable campaign. “I suspect that he will. It’s McCain’s way. He sees the tawdry ceremonies of politics — the spin and hucksterism — as unworthy.” If he doesn’t “McCain will have to live with the knowledge that in the most important business of his life, he chose expediency over honor. That’s probably not the way he wants to be remembered.”
Well, the last two weeks haven’t been kind to that confidence. As we reported yesterday, McCain is now making clear that he plans to run his campaign on the basis of portraying Barack Obama as a dangerous outsider in league with foreign terrorists. The first topic of choice is the bogus ‘Obama endorsed by Hamas’ story that McCain has embraced with a vengeance.
So this is basically a question to Joe, who has actually been more critical of McCain on Iraq than many realize. How do you think McCain’s doing? Is this the kind of campaign you expected him to run? And when you see him pushing the line that Obama is the candidate of the Muslim terrorists and anti-American marxists, how confident do you feel that you actually know the guy?
Late Update: Klein responds here at Swampland. I will follow up in a subsequent post.