Tuesday, March 25, 2008 - Posts
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Via the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Harry Reid assures us that he and Howard Dean have things under control.
Question: Do you still think the Democratic race can be resolved before the convention?
Reid: Easy.
Q: How is that?
Reid: It will be done.
Q: It just will?
Reid: Yep.
Q: Magically?
Reid: No, it will be done. I had a conversation with Governor Dean (Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean) today. Things are being done.
I thought the point of avoiding a convention was so that backroom deals didn't decide who the nominee would be.
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Barack Obama released his tax returns today for the years 2000-2006. (Check them out here, if combing through your own tax returns hasn't been torture enough.) But Obama held public office for three years before 2000 hit. Why not release those as well and get the whole thing done with?
Symbolism would be my guess. The years between 2000 and 2006 is the exact span of time from which Hillary Clinton has yet to release her (and her husband’s) tax returns. Releasing those specific years, as opposed to the entire batch, turns a capitulation (Clinton has been calling for him to release them) into a challenge.
The parallels here are rich. During her 2000 Senate campaign, Clinton opened up her own records as far back as 1980 and made a big deal about her opponent’s refusal to release his own. Now the roles are flipped, with Obama revealing his taxes and challenging Clinton to do the same. Her rebuttal: She has 20 years of taxes on the books, compared to Obama’s six. Not a bad way to call attention to Obama’s relatively meager time spent in the public eye, but he’s still got her beat on the past eight years.
Neither candidate is glasslike in his or her transparency. Obama hasn’t opened up his personal papers and schedules from his time as a state senator. (He claims they’re badly organized or thrown away.) But Clinton’s refusal to release her tax returns until April—she’ll do it at least three days before the Pennsylvania primary, her camp assures us—should raise eyebrows. At least, with her White House schedules, she could use the Presidential Library’s dinosaur pace as an excuse. There’s nothing stopping her from releasing her taxes today, tomorrow, or the next day. If there’s anything damaging in there, better to get it out of the way now than right before a key election. If there’s not, she gets points for openness.
So how about it?
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Over at Slate’s polling haven, "Election Scorecard," we’ve been poring over a new poll from PPP (PDF) that suggests an Edwards endorsement would actually hurt Hillary’s chances to win the state. A jarring 31 percent of North Carolina voters would be less likely to support Hillary if Edwards endorsed her. About one-third as many people (12 percent) say they would be more likely to vote for her after an Edwards endorsement. The poll didn't provide any numbers speculating what an Edwards endorsement would mean for Barack Obama.
These are really stunning numbers for a reasonably liked, homegrown senator who had a legitimate shot at becoming president. According to this poll, nearly one-third of North Carolina Democrats and unaffiliated voters dislike Edwards so much that he would taint Clinton’s candidacy. Barely one-tenth of voters like him enough to have it positively affect their opinion.
The cynic would suggest that Obama voters sabotaged the question by saying an endorsement would hurt Clinton, but the numbers don’t completely follow that logic. After crunching some cross-tabs, we discovered that 35 percent of those Clinton-Edwards sourpusses are currently Clinton supporters. We’ll reiterate: Edwards is so toxic that one-third of Hillary’s Carolinian base would think twice before voting for her. No wonder he and Kerry didn’t win North Carolina in 2004.
We should caution that Edwards isn’t planning on making an endorsement of Clinton or Obama. With polls like these, maybe it should stay that way.
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What do you get when you cross Hillary Clinton, Chilean comedy,
synth pop, and Aphex Twin?
This. It's SFW, but probably NSF people with dwarf phobia.
[Via Gawker]
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As long as we’re chronicling
the number of references Hillary Clinton has made to the Tuzla sniper incident, don’t
forget her crowd-pleaser of a line in Dubuque all the way back in December:
So, we landed in one of those corkscrew landings
and ran out because they said there might be sniper fire. I don't remember
anybody offering me tea on the tarmac.
Tea, no. Adorable eight-year-old girls with flowers, yes.
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When we said the Bosnia sniper flap was our favorite subplot of this campaign, we weren’t expecting it to become the actual plot. But thanks to Hillary Clinton’s wildly inexpert handling of the controversy, it’s now dominating the news to the point of obscuring her substantive policy speeches.
After Sinbad disputed Clinton’s account of landing amid sniper fire in war-torn Bosnia in 1996, Clinton could have acknowledged her mistake and changed the subject. But instead, she doubled down, dismissing Sinbad as “a comedian” and ratcheting up the detail in her accounts of the trip: “There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport,” she said at a March 17 campaign event, “but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” That’s when the noncomedians pounced. Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post, Michael Hirsh of Newsweek, and CBS News all presented evidence that Clinton’s story had gone from dubious to plainly untrue. The bloody weapon was video footage of Clinton cheerily greeting a small Bosnian girl on the tarmac.
Yesterday, Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson said that Hillary “misspoke” in her March 17 speech. Clinton herself used the same word yesterday in an interview with the Philadelphia Daily News. She elaborated: “I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but that there was this 8-year-old girl and, I can't, I can't rush by her, I've got to at least greet her -- so I greeted her, I took her stuff and then I left.”
One problem with the “misspoke” explanation is that she’s been repeating the same story for weeks. In fact, coupled with anecdotes about pushing for peace in Northern Ireland and women’s rights in China, it’s been a focal point of her claims to foreign-policy experience. The other problem is that she's been given ample opportunity to revise her story. When Sinbad challenged her account, she declined. When Dobbs ran a "Fact Checker" piece questioning her account, surrogates emerged to unconvincingly defend her. Only when the footage explicitly disproving her story emerged did she back off. And even then, it wasn’t that she embellished or misled people. It was that she "misspoke." If someone wanted to chronicle instances of Clinton refusing to acknowledge mistakes—starting, of course, with her Iraq war vote—the Bosnia flap could be its own chapter.
The Post had a great piece yesterday about how both candidates have exaggerated their records at times. But there’s a big difference between taking extra credit for a bill you didn’t really work on—something Obama is apparently known for in the Senate—and retelling a repeatedly discredited story. Plus, the rule for politicians is the same as for memoir fabulists: When confronted, fess up. By waiting for incontrovertible evidence to present itself, Clinton only dragged out her own flaying—and gave voters reason to suspect her other claims, as well.
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The media drumbeat for Hillary Clinton to drop out has been building over the past week, with some notable push-back. But now the zeitgeist-capturing Obama Girl has spoken: Hillary must go.
The music isn’t quite as catchy as in the past, and it feels like a weak excuse to show Amber Lee Ettinger rolling around on a white divan. But there’s something tender about the way she sits down with Hillary and gently explains, girl to girl, why she needs to get out.
If Obama Girl doesn't get a Cabinet post out of this ...
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