I've heard about the Hillary supporters who are pro-choice but just can't bring themselves to vote for Obama. As a matter of fact I met one this morning. She had a Ned Lamont sticker on her bumper. Tessa yelled to her, "Hey, Lamonst-er" as the woman walked into the drugstore. She turned and said, "Yea, Ned Lamont". Then Tessa said, "Do you want an Obama bumper sticker"? The woman hesitated. I've seen that hesitation before. I knew immediately she was a Hillary supporter, but was angry at Obama.
Slate put together an eight-minute video of basically everything that happened in the Democratic primar... Wait! It's an excellent video! See, the primary may have been near-eternal mental torture that ate away at our nation's soul, but it's all over, so now we can sit back and laugh at the lowlights, and forget that we ever thought about jamming ice picks into our ears. .......... Laugh and cry and, hopefully, forget, with the video after the jump.
Greg Sargent at TPM has a reprint of a Liberman email for John McCain.* In it, he tries to appeal to independents and Democrats, and makes a flailing attempt to suck up to Hillary supporters. Highlightslowlights:
As you know, I caucus with the Democrats as a United States Senator and was the Democrat Party's nominee for Vice-President of the United States against President Bush and Vice President Cheney.
But first and foremost, I am an American. I have an obligation to do what I think is best for our nation regardless of political party. My love for this country and strong belief in John McCain's character, judgment, and willingness to work with leaders of both parties has convinced me to support him for President.
...
The phones at the campaign headquarters have been ringing with disaffected Democrats calling to say they believe Senator McCain has the experience, judgment, and bipartisanship necessary to lead our country in these difficult times. Many of these supporters are former supporters of Senator Clinton.
Senator McCain has had a very good working relationship with Senator Clinton and will continue to do so in the future. In the same New Orleans speech he said:
"Senator Clinton has earned great respect for her tenacity and courage. The media often overlooked how compassionately she spoke to the concerns and dreams of millions of Americans, and she deserves a lot more appreciation than she sometimes received. As the father of three daughters, I owe her a debt for inspiring millions of women to believe there is no opportunity in this great country beyond their reach. I am proud to call her my friend."
Yeah... I'm sure the phones are just ringing off the hook, Joe. /sarcasm
* what's this link and the links in my signature about? If you're curious, click here
Vacation done, I finished reading Art Spiegelman's two-part masterpiece Maus on the flight to JFK from Burbank.
Maus describes the amazing survival of Vladek Spiegelman in Auschwitz. Art, his cartoonist son, penned the history, with chilling detail, like Vladek's nocturnal vision accurately foretelling the precise date of departure from a concentration camp.
It was a quick but heavy read, and I needed a walk after I finished. Wandering the airplane aisle, I spotted a headline on a seat back tv: "Edwards to Endorse Obama."
I hurried back to my seat for a camera close up of Obama announcing his guilt about the DNC punishing Michigan. As penance, he brought a surprise: John Edwards to drive another nail in Hillary's coffin.
Thought Zero: Funny how Clinton warns that Obama will not win the Wolverine State in November because of the Dean sanctions, but there Obama stood on stage, soaking in adulation from the crowds and Edwards.
Obama's speech on race invites the nation to a conversation. Where we want to take the dialogue he initiates is entirely up to us as a people.
Two gentlemen in West Hartford's Shield Street Post Office the other afternoon seemed attuned to Obama's call, as they stood in the front foyer discussing politics and the Iraq war. Best part was that one man was black, and one was white.
I marveled that 100 years ago, that moment in this country was close to impossible, but now it is commonplace, and expected.
Me, I respond to Obama's offer by marrying the war on drugs to his comment that "when [white Americans are] told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time." It's time for us to confront a major facet of race relations in this country: our massive non-white prison population.
Other folks apparently want to keep the dialogue at the lowest common denominator: reptilian hatred. In my email inbox this week, I received a photo of Chelsea Clinton holding a t-shirt proclaiming "My mom is getting her ass kicked by a Negro." Photoshopped tears in Chesea's eyes betray her happy grin to a look of surprising agony as she displays the small t-shirt like she is trying it on.
The only word missing that sounds like it should be there is "Help!" The message feels crafted to appeal to kinship of skin color kind. I see two plausible interpretations, both of which arrive at the same conclusion: "If you are white, then you should be supporting Clinton."
One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning.
Her own campaign acknowledges there is no way that she will finish ahead in pledged delegates. That means the only way she wins is if Democratic superdelegates are ready to risk a backlash of historic proportions from the party's most reliable constituency.
Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote - which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle - and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else.
People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet.
Clinton's likely reaction to being told this truth... Below the fold!
And this time he is the mouthpiece of Hillary McLieberman.
But many people, including Obama supporters, may still have two questions that Senator Obama's speech did not sufficiently answer, at least in my opinion. And, for any Democrat whose priority is to win back the White House in 2008, they need to be answered now -- because, if Senator Obama ends up the party's nominee (I am a supporter of Senator Clinton's) -- for sure Senator McCain will insist they be answered in the fall.
Oh, the oh so concerned Lanny Davis. Lieberman spokes liar and Clintonite right-hand smear artist.
What absolute BULLCRAP.
Lanny has about as much concern as the pimple on my ass. Lanny is nothing but a PR shill. Whether it be for Lieberman or Clinton, his job is to be insidious as he tries to undermine the "opponent" with slurs by insinuation.
Just one more strike against Clinton as she seeks to destroy the Democratic Party from within.
As many of you probably know, I've been politically active on the internet for only a few years now; and next month will be the second anniversary of my blog. It's been quite the education, that's for sure. I greatly appreciate that you take the time to read this stuff (in fact, it frequently amazes me that anyone reads my blog!)
One thing that I lately find astonishing within the lefty blogosphere is the not-entirely undeserved but still surprising animosity between the supporters of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
In a survey of 500 likely voters, Rasmussen Reports has Obama up by 12pts over McCain in a possible November match-up. Clinton would be up +3. It will be interesting to see what Quinnipiac's Doug Schwartz comes up with when they do matchup polling.
In Connecticut, Barack Obama currently leads John McCain by twelve percentage points, 50% to 38%. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey found that Hillary Clinton leads McCain by just three, 47% to 44%. Last November, a time when Clinton was still the Democratic frontrunner and McCain was an afterthought in the GOP race, the former First Lady held an eight point lead over the Arizona Senator.
McCain now trails both Democrats by nearly twenty percentage points among women in Connecticut. Among men, McCain leads Clinton by double digits but trails Obama by four.
Obama is viewed favorably by 67% of Connecticut voters, McCain by 58%, and Clinton by 54%. Connecticut is the only state surveyed in 2008 where all three candidates have favorable ratings over 50%.
As a remedy for this, I made the following map of the results:
Obama is green, and Clinton is red. The towns' sizes are in proportion to the combined number of votes that Obama and Clinton received on Tuesday. (Unfortunately, I couldn't find a good way to overlay county lines, congressional district lines, or town names.)
With so many competitive and exciting races in the 4th CD over the past decade, we have heard time and again, "This is the year!"
I do believe this is the year (again), but some lessons need to be learned from past elections and Super Tuesday and the 2006 Generals. Himes cannot win without being strongly competitive in the lower Valley (Trumbull, Shelton, Monroe, Oxford) and cannot lose if he wins there.
Having worked elections in all of these towns over the past decade, it is crystal clear to me that the Democratic base are moderate, pocket book voters. "Change" is not a buzzword that will go over well here at all.
Clinton supporters are continuing their GOTV efforts today and tomorrow, with phone calls, canvassing, visibility and events throughout the state. In particular of note is Chelsea Clinton at the CT Town Hall - Voices Across America - tonite - see Events for details.
CD HQs and contacts are:
Nick Panagopoulos, 1st CD Coordinator
35 Marshall Rd
Rocky Hill, CT
702-217-2296
npanagopoulos@hillaryclinton.com
Fredrik Bolinder, 2nd CD Coordinator
19 Hope St
Niantic, CT
515-664-1789
fbolinder@hillaryclinton.com
John Williams, 3rd CD Coordinator
3305 Dixwell Ave
Hamden, CT
319-654-6839
jwilliams@hillaryclinton.com
Sen. Joe Lieberman has crisscrossed the country this year urging Republicans to give Sen. John McCain the party's nomination for president.
But when Connecticut voters go to the polls on Tuesday, Lieberman will be staying home. Despite virtually all appearances these days, Joe Lieberman is still a Democrat.
The senator confirmed this week that he will sit out the voting on primary day, since Connecticut's closed primaries prohibit him from voting for McCain. And he believes it would be "hypocritical" to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton or Sen. Barack Obama.
"I can't vote," Lieberman said, adding that it "only struck me about a week ago" that he would not be able to vote for the candidate he's been campaigning for without registering as a Republican.
Asked if he considered switching his registration in order to vote for McCain, Lieberman demurred.
"You know, I never thought about that," he said. But he reiterated his pledge to remain with the Democrats despite their differences, at least for now.
"My choice for now is to stay in the Democratic Party and fight for the vision that I have of where the party should stand," he said.
SNIP
Thought you'd like this tidbit. Lieberman was Obama's mentor in the Senate. Wonder what Lieberman thinks of Obama now and vice-versa?
I've been wrestling with this diary for a day and a half... basically as Iraq has moved into the background, I've spent a bit less time thinking about it, but then I saw something on TV that I had to write about. Here goes...
The horserace narrative has swung back into full tweety ahead over the weekend. But more troubling to me than the Clinton/Obama back-and-forth (and let me say, pretty much all of the Democrats running for Prez are equally complicit in Iraq in my eyes) was what Clinton repeated over and over during her interview on Meet the Press on Sunday. Her rationalization for her vote on the 2002 AUMF was 1) it was her understanding that the vote was not for actual use of force but rather for the threat of force 2) she thought inspectors would go back in 3) she found out later Bush was deceiving Congress (and the American people) by going in unilaterally on an inflated / fabricated case for war. In this characterization, Bush is the one who bears the full responsibility for the war. Here's what she said on the transcript:
Well, I have said that obviously, I would never do again what George Bush did with that vote. He misused and abused the authority that was given to him, in my opinion. And we can't turn the clock back. I've taken responsibility for it.
...
I, I would not have given President Bush the authority if I knew he would deliberately misuse and abuse it.
...
It became clear in retrospect, Tim, once people started writing books and information came out of the administration, the president had no intention of letting the inspectors do their job. That's not what I was told by the Bush White House. That's not what we were told in constant briefings from high-level Bush administration officials. That's not what the president told the country in his speech in Cincinnati shortly before the vote. If you remember, he said this vote was the best chance to avoid some kind of confrontation.
Clinton is saying that Bush abused the power of war under false pretenses, and deliberately misled the country by lying about his intentions. Okay, I think we all can agree with that.
But this begs what should be a very obvious question, one that Russert did not ask.
Perhaps there is one thing worse than a voting system we cannot trust, outsourced, and unaudited. It is a media we cannot trust, downsized, outsourced, bent only on profits, oligarchical, and failing to actually do the work necessary to do the research and reporting necessary for democracy.
As I have written on Englehart's Comments at the Courant:
It seems from the Courant articles and editorial yesterday, and now this cartoon, that the machines are infallible and the past proven accuracy of polls is completely disregarded.
The cartoon should be showing the Crystal Ball as a Diebold optical scanner and a trusting media expressing complete faith in its unchecked results.
There are legitimate questions about the discrepancy between the polls and the machines. The way to resolve these questions is not through faith, but through science by actually counting the paper.
There is no proof the machines were inaccurate. There is no proof the polls are inaccurate. What there is, is an absence of solid investigation to give us confidence.
Yesterday we had a flurry in the Courant all focused on the idea that the polls were wrong. Two articles, the lead editorial, an op-ed, and four letters to the editor:
Big Loser In N.H. Race: The Pollsters<read> Where with no evidence arguments are developed to explain the discrepancies in the polls - except any acknowledgement of the possibility that the machines did not count accurately.
Clinton's 'Cry' Resounds in Presidential Campaign <read> Where the argument that it was Clinton's crying that moved the voters.
Editorial: Only Pollsters Are Upset<read> Confirming the case made in the earlier articles. Surprisingly the Courant ignores all the voting advocates that are concerned with the lack of auditing of the machines and the unanswered questions. I would say we are not surprised at the lack of investigation yet we are more than concerned with the state of election integrity <read><read> and the media's rush to judgement.
Letters to the Editor <read> Four letters to the editor, in their own box in the print edition serve to reinforce the same theme.
Op-Ed: Is U.S. Ready For Obama<read> An op-ed, more than hinting that the voters in N.H. are racist and lied to the pollsters to cover that up.
Remember that the Courant Editorial Board has a reputation to keep. They must stick to their earlier claim that "So far, no one appears to have figured out how to tamper with the machines". <read> Completely discrediting the vast majority of computer scientists, the Carter-Baker Commission, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Secretary of the State of California, and Dr. Shvartsman and his team at the UConn Voter Center.
Some of the most egregious corporate mergers, those most damaging to consumers, were perpetrated under the Clinton Administration. NAFTA was a Clinton creation and has been the most successful unemployment act in America beside the Great Depression. I mention this not to attack Bill Clinton, but to demonstrate where Hilary's campaign war chest comes from and the vested interests corporations have in her election to the presidency. As Bill famously pointed out, when you elect him you get Hilary as well, a two for one package. It would be difficult for anyone to deny her intimate involvement in her husband's administration, especially since she is now campaigning on her experience gained form that period.
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