by Damozel | This is an AP article saying that Bill Clinton is ready and willing to do whatever Obama asks of him, including (maybe) speaking on his behalf at the convention. I won't quote from it, but I'm thinking it's bad news for PUMAs who want to believe that Hillary wants them to keep passing around their slam books and making plans to disrupt the convention. Bill sounds...conciliatory. Obama should probably consider it. (If you are thinking 'Doubtful,' read on.)
Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg is planning a fete for Hillary to welcome her back.
Want to see who is donating to the candidates? Check out this interactive map. Seriously, it's cool -- Deb's going to love it.
At The HuffPost, Jim Kuhnenn thinks Obama's decision not to use public financing makes him 'the financial underdog.' The piece suggests that the solution to his problems may lie in...yep, those still not-at-all conciliated Clinton donors, and -- one more time, with feeling -- naming Hillary as a running mate.
Here's the challenge:
Overall, the McCain campaign has estimated that it and Republican Party committees will have $400 million to spend on the presidential election in the months before the November election.
To surpass that level of spending, Obama and the Democratic Party will have to raise about $100 million a month.
That task is making some Democrats anxious....
McCain plans to accept $84 million in public money in the fall _ money he won't have to lift a finger to collect but which will limit his campaign's spending in the fall. The RNC and other party committees will foot the remainder of his campaign bills through coordinated and independent spending on his behalf....
"We have developed a strategy _ a very aggressive strategy _ that will only work if our millions of supporters continue to contribute their time and their money," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said in an e-mail to donors Thursday. (HuffPost)
Yes, it sounds like a great strategy in a shit economy with a pack of young donors who are now paying $4 + at the gas pumps. I wonder if they really thought this through.
Here's the potential solution to their problems:
How much the Obama campaign plans to rely on Clinton's former donors remains to be seen. Her fundraisers say it will be much easier for them to raise money for Obama if his donors contribute to Clinton to help reduce her vendor debts, which at the end of May stood at about $10 million and growing....
"The most readily available, identifiable pool of new people for the Obama campaign to access is unquestionably the Clinton donors," said [Hassan] Nemazee [who was Hillary Rodham Clinton's national financial co-chair], who personally raised $400,000 for Obama and the DNC in a matter of days recently...
Tad Devine, a political strategist who was a senior adviser in Democrat John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, says Obama could overcome many financial obstacles by selecting Clinton as his running mate.
"If you're planning the first general election that is not going to be financed by public money and you have the potential to pick someone who has already demonstrated the capacity to raise in excess of $200 million, I would think that would be an enormously consequential consideration," he said. (HuffPost)
Yes, you'd think so, wouldn't you?
Bob Cesca doesn't think McCain is funny -- yeah, no kidding -- and would like for him to take this in. .
The president should know the difference between funny and not funny, or else -- stay away from the comedy. A sense of humor doesn't literally mean "the ability to recite a joke." Anyone can repeat a joke. But politicians like Senator McCain have managed to accumulate a captive audience of reporters who have to laugh at his jokes or else be tossed out of the barbeque loop. Consequently, he can tell one of his awful jokes and everyone in the corp snarfs up their cole slaw. This reaction has thusly given the senator the false impression that he's funny, when he's really not.
The gorilla rape joke, for example, is only funny in the context of, say, a larger bit about unfunny jokes -- or bad comics who try way too hard to be funny.
I disagree. The gorilla rape joke would only be funny in the larger context of actual gorillas engaged in a discussion of gorilla jokes agreeing that McCain's joke was unacceptable even by the standards that they apply and deciding that no self-respecting gorilla could possibly vote for him. And even then, not all that funny.
But a good point about how reporters are enabling McCain. BONUS: The pictures of Bush's facial expressions during his discussion of our wretched economy which are included in the piece are a treat for those who relish further evidence of Bush's essential indifference to anyone else's bad news.
This may well develop into the most tedious 'controversies' of the entire campaign. John Cole is already really tired of it:
For the love of everything Holy, please find something useful for these people to do. They have been at this all damned day. Fix potholes, serve in Iraq, give blood. Anything. I have an old rubiks cube lying around somewhere if that will occupy them....
Any guess why they are finger pointing? Maybe because a certain band of idiots has devoted a large chunk of time and bandwidth covering the “finger pointing?” I dunno. Just a guess.
Which candidate slacked off most when his particular committee was dealing with Afghanistan? It turns out it was McCain, and the reason Biden and DeMint are passive-aggressiving back and forth about it is that McCain's campaign said that Obama only went to one hearing re: Afghanistan and therefore...what?
"He's never had a hearing," McCain said Tuesday, "so I am not surprised that all he has done is said, 'Well, we need more troops.'" (Political Punch)
Yep, Barack is just a big faker when it comes to Afghanistan, while McCain knows all about it. But then it turned out that McCain allegedly never went to any of his committee's Afghanistan related hearings, proving...what? They are both big ol' slackers? People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones?
Whatever. I started to try to understand it , but then I got bored. If you want to explain below, feel free, but don't wake me up.
Did you know that Obama has 300 people on his foreign policy team? That seems like a lot.
“It is unwieldy, no question,” said Denis McDonough, 38, Mr. Obama’s top foreign policy aide, speaking of an infrastructure that has been divided into 20 teams based on regions and issues, and that has recently absorbed, with some tensions, the top foreign policy advisers from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign. “But an administration is unwieldy, too. We also know that it’s messier when you don’t get as much information as you can.” (NYT)
There is a definite up side:
Unlike George W. Bush, who entered the presidential race in 2000 with scant exposure to national security issues, Mr. Obama has served since his election to the Senate in 2004 on the Foreign Relations Committee and has had a running tutorial from aides steeped in the issues. His campaign says that he is well prepared and that he often alters and expands on the talking points provided to him by his foreign policy advisers....(NYT)
The article provides a little insight into the positions of some key members:
Mr. Obama’s core team is led by Susan E. Rice, an assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Clinton administration, who has pushed for a tougher response to the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, and Anthony Lake, Mr. Clinton’s first national security adviser, who was criticized for the administration’s failure to confront the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and now acknowledges the inaction as a major mistake.
The core group also includes Gregory B. Craig, a former top official in the Clinton State Department who served as the president’s lawyer during his impeachment trial; Richard J. Danzig, a Navy secretary in the Clinton administration; Mark W. Lippert, Mr. Obama’s former Senate foreign policy adviser, who just returned from a Navy tour of duty in Iraq; and Mr. McDonough....
Mr. Obama’s infrastructure funnels hundreds of e-mail messages and reams of position papers and talking points each day to members of the core group, who in turn seek advice or make requests for more information to team members down the line. (NYT)
In addition to his own core team, he's adding 'senior figures from the Clinton era, like two former secretaries of state, Madeleine K. Albright and Warren Christopher.' (NYT) Don't worry though: Obama's whippersnappers remain in charge.
Samantha Power's still being called on for advice as well. (NYT)
Apparently John Kerry's campaign had a similarly enormous foreign policy team -- with his years of experience -- he didn't have to rely on them so much to tell him what to think.
Sigh.
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Did it ever occur to anybody that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has her own voice now and her own political power base (18,000,000 voters), and that her views about her political future may be just hers, as opposed to her just being an appendix of her husband, who happens to be a former president? People didn't vote for Bill Clinton, and Hillary better fight for her own turf. Otherwise, her victories during the primaries will become subsumed and obscured by the "conflict" and "grudges" between Bill and Obama.
Posted by: Pilar | July 18, 2008 at 06:48 PM
Will Obama have any choice but Hillary?
Induced panic by Hillary’s supporters and Barack’s enemies
Several people thought to be potential Democratic Vice-Presidential candidates have dropped off the list and there is an increasing tendency in the press to suggest they will all drop off and Barack will be forced to surrender to Hillary. A post in the generally conservative RealClearPolitics cites the withdrawals of Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed and Virginians Senator Jim Webb and Senate candidate Mark Warner to suggest Barack may have no choice but to pick Hillary. The post concludes by saying “[w]ith Obama's diminishing short list, let's make a prediction: Despite the denials all around, Hillary Clinton as VP is an idea that I think has weathered the tumultuous month following her defeat. Polls show Democratic voters still like the idea and Clinton's electoral strengths certainly haven't lessened any…an Obama/Clinton ticket is very much a possibility.”
This mostly nonsense. First, of the four contenders who dropped out, only one was ever a serious VP possibility. Ted Strickland and Jack Reed looked good on paper, but as Michael Barone suggested, Strickland’s resume is very thin and he apparently judged himself to be unqualified. Reed’s military background made him attractive to a few (including yours truly) but he was not being formally vetted by the Obama campaign, rather he was a temporary media celebrity after it was announced that he was going to accompany Obama on an upcoming trip to Iraq. The reality is the low key Reed doesn’t desire the job and it was never seriously in offing. Mark Warner is already a candidate for the Senate in Virginia. He is the prohibitive favorite to win the Senate race at the moment, a race that might be much more in doubt if he suddenly wasn’t the Democratic candidate. It is doubtful the Senate Democrats want to give up what looks like a sure pickup when Obama has plenty of other choices for VP. The one who was apparently going to be vetted but dropped out was Webb. Most of the speculation suggested Webb would not have wanted his many non-politically correct statements of the past open to re-examination. Webb, who changed parties to Democrat only a few years ago, at one time suggested women had no business in the military and made statements that some took as sympathy for the Confederate cause in the Civil War.
Even these eliminations still leave Biden, Edwards, Richardson, Bayh and a host of others. Of course, Hillary is on the list but only because some of her supporters and Obama’s enemies feel she is owed it or he is stuck with her, not because she is a good choice.
About those polls
Hillary’s supporters and Obama’s enemies continually read the polls incorrectly. Many typically use the same logic as the RealClearPolitics post, basically “most Democrats want Obama to select Hillary, therefore he should” as if that observation matters. What really matters is whether selecting Hillary would help the ticket and here the evidence runs against a selection of Hillary as VP.
The latest Quinnipiac poll finds Democrats favor Hillary’s selection by a margin of 56 to 33 percent. Democrats also plan to vote for Obama over McCain by a margin of 84 to 8 percent, in short, whatever Democrats may feel about Hillary as VP, they are voting for Obama anyway. Among independent voters, who could tilt the election, Obama and McCain are running evenly and this same group opposes Hillary as VP by a margin of 50 to 35 percent and all voters oppose the selection of Hillary by 49 to 36 percent. More importantly, 28 percent of independents and 24 percent of all voters say the selection of Hillary would make them less likely to support Obama while only 18 percent of independents and 19 percent of all voters said they would be more likely to support Obama. In other words, Hillary would be a drag on the ticket.
Posted by: Philip Meyer | July 18, 2008 at 10:13 PM