The 2008 Democratic Presidential primary is down to the short strokes today, and unless you have the luxury of hanging out in front of a laptop and cable news all day, you're likely to miss the rapidly evolving or devolving (depending on your perspective) conclusion of this fascinating race.
As I write this, Obama’s on the Hill meeting with "a swarm" of "completely star struck" Superdelegates and party insiders -- a hero’s welcome. Earlier today, Obama met with a group of “Blue Dog” Congressional Democrats – anti-progressives, every one, and not normally in the same camp as the “most liberal Senator,” but eager to associate with a winner and critical to a candidate who seriously intends to actually win Southern states that in the past have gone Republican but this year have registered recordbreaking Democratic turnouts. John Edwards’ campaign manager has just endorsed Obama, and Edwards himself – the last challenger to drop out of the race and an important voice – is appearing on “The Today Show” early tomorrow morning, possibly to finally pick a side. The new "Time" magazine cover shows Obama grinning, with the headline "And The Winner Is..."
In the last 24 hours, a probable deal has materialized that would resolve the Michigan primary debacle by giving Obama just ten delegates fewer than Clinton – an irrelevant dent in his huge delegate lead – instead of denying him any Michigan delegates whatsoever, as the Clinton campaign still insisted upon just yesterday. Obama has even appeared on his campaign jet in blue jeans for the first time – not cravenly reaching out to blue-collar voters, since he wore them on his own plane and not while standing in the bed of a pickup truck, but rather a sign that he’s relaxing a little before shifting into full-blown general election mode.
Obama’s chillin’.
Meanwhile, Clinton’s self-destructing. An unidentified campaign insider has admitted she can’t hold out past mid-June. One of her key supporters, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has started questioning her support. Yet another Clinton superdelegate has switched his allegiance to Obama. Former President Jimmy Carter has gone public with a call to wind things up. All the pundits – even George Stephanopolous, the longtime Clinton supporter who tilted the last debate so far her way that his own career as a legitimate journalist was endangered – are calling the race over. (On MSNBC, Chris Matthews just told Clinton's communications director Howard Wolfson, "you guys are like those Japanese soldiers, still fighting in 1953.... After the Battleship Missouri signing ceremony [ending WWII], you're still holding on.") Facing a campaign finance disclosure deadline, she has been forced to admit loaning her campaign over $6.4 million in the last month – bringing the total to over $11 million – and hasn’t ruled out more self-administered life support.
And yesterday, her campaign staff managed to undercut one of her few remaining liberal credentials by explaining her loss in North Carolina and her slender win in Indiana in expressly racial, almost racist, terms, repeatedly boasting of her performance among the “white electorate” and describing that electorate as the one most critical to Clinton’s “electability” and Obama’s supposed lack of it. If they were unsure whether their strategy of making Bill Clinton their official Ambassador to Bubba was enough to destroy any remaining fondness of the black community for the Clintons, or if they wanted to start driving non-black minorities out of their shrinking tent, this new express focus on “the white electorate” was it. This is not the kind of ham-fisted P.R. we expect of a Clinton. [UPDATE: Clinton herself amplified the mistake today, referring twice to how well she's doing with "white" voters in a single short clip playing repeatedly on cable news: “Senator Obama’s support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans is weakening again, and ... the whites in both states who had not attended college were supporting me....”]
And so earlier today, faced with the prospect of their Michigan card going away, and with indispensable Congressional superdelegates literally sitting in a meeting with Obama and deciding which way they'll swing, the Clinton campaign has scrambled – I’ll tell you how we know they scrambled in a sec – to release, very publicly, and in electronic form suitable for beaming to Superdelegates' Blackberries mid-meeting, an open letter to Obama, daring him to support the seating of Michigan’s and Florida’s delegates according to the results of those states' flawed primaries, which both candidates previously swore to discount.That letter is a picture window into the post-rational mind of Hillary Clinton in the waning days of her lifelong dream.
The letter was hastily prepared. We know this because, in a game where letters like this are planned and stockpiled weeks ahead of time and then magically appear in reporters' emails when the timing is exactly right like Athena springing full-armored from the head of Zeus, this key letter has not one, but two typographical errors. I can't remember any other Clinton press release, even the workaday ones reporting the candidate's schedule, containing a typo – but this one, intended for broad public consumption at a critical juncture, has two. It obviously was cranked out in a hurry, more like a pajama-clad blogger trying to scoop the Associated Press from his parents' basement than a well-planned chess move in a Presidential campaign. Athena's armor is on crooked.
The fact that it was hastily prepared means that it is a response to unforeseen events – specifically, the prospect that Michigan will be resolved sooner, and more evenly, than Clinton expected.
The possibility that the Clinton campaign hadn’t seriously considered the possibility of an uncontested resolution in Michigan is stunning, and suggests how deeply out of touch with political and mathematical reality the Clintons have become.
Every other significant party leader and respectable (!) pundit has said all along that Michigan and Florida’s delegations will be seated by August – just not in any way that would alter the outcome of the nominating contest. The DNC has even reserved hotel space in Denver for those delegations. But Clinton has been saying, with increasing fervor, that not only would Michigan and Florida be seated – but seated exactly as they voted in January, with Clinton receiving a large majority of Florida's delegates and Obama getting no Michigan delegates at all, since his name wasn't even on the ballot. (That disingenuous Michigan math, by the way, is how Clinton was able to claim, for a brief period, that she had won more popular votes than Obama had nationwide: she didn’t count caucuses, and she gave him no votes in Michigan since, technically, someone not on the ballot can get none.)
In the past, when Clinton stood firm on her “Obama gets no delegates from Michigan” stance, I assumed she was merely being tough and calculating. No sensible person reasonably expected the party’s elders to give Obama zero delegates if they seated Michigan. And Clinton’s own campaign staff seemed to admit yesterday that she could not win the race for elected delegates even if Michigan and Florida were counted the way she wanted them to be. Of course I didn’t believe that Hillary Clinton herself could believe her own press releases.
But now I think that maybe she did. If today’s desperate open letter to Obama reflects panic that Michigan may be seated in a fair rather than disproportionate way, then perhaps she actually has believed until now that Michigan would save her. Which means she actually has believed, until now, that the superdelegates will flock to her at the last minute. Which means she actually has believed, until now, that she really is the only electable candidate, and perhaps that fate has willed her to be President the same way George W. Bush believes God willed him to be President.
Remind me: which candidate has the Messiah complex, again?
It’s unreasonable to believe Clinton can still win in 2008. Given the political savvy she’s usually credited with, I’ve assumed she understood the math and the practical politics, and so have concluded that her recent actions were early groundwork for her 2012 campaign, not sincere efforts to salvage her 2008 campaign. But maybe I’ve been giving her too much credit. We’ve already seen that, as a campaigner, she’s no Bill Clinton; maybe she’s no Hillary Clinton, either. Maybe, just maybe, she’s sincerely deluded. Today’s flawed Hail Mary letter suggests she is.
Of course Clinton's letter isn't exactly accurate: for instance, last Fall Clinton herself said this about the Michigan primary: "It's clear: This election they're having is not going to count for anything. I personally did not think it made any difference whether or not my name was on the ballot." There was no revote in Michigan primarily because powerful Michigan Senator Carl Levin opposed it, not because Obama did. And, of course, Clinton campaigned stealthily in Florida after swearing -- literally signing a pledge -- not to compete there, yet later began insisting on recognizing the results of that election and even opposed a proposed caucus re-do in Florida to that end. Her hands aren't clean, and the intelligent, politically sophisticated Democrats in Michigan and Florida know full well that today's letter is simplistic and misleading. But it's the timing of the letter, and the otherwise-unremarkable mistakes it contains, that tell the real story here.
Here’s another way of understanding today’s letter, with its typos and factual misrepresentations and flat-footed play for the sentiments of Michiganders and Floridians who already understand the complexities of the issue in far more depth than Clinton’s letter assumes: football.
I know that sports cliches get old, but Clinton has portrayed herself as Rocky, battered but unbowed. (She forgets that after Rocky and Apollo Creed batter themselves insensible, Rocky loses.) Bill Clinton has said that if Obama didn’t want to get hit, he shouldn’t have suited up. They're right that sports are a good analogy; they've just got the game's situation wrong:
It’s late in the fourth quarter; maybe a minute to go. Obama is up by three touchdowns. All he really needs to do is drop to a knee four times to run the clock out, and he wins. The police are restraining the fans from coming onto the field; the announcers are naming the production staff. But Clinton doesn’t believe it’s over. She believes she still can win – after all, it’s not mathematically impossible for her to score on a Hail Mary, kick the extra point, successfully recover an onside kick, then do it all twice more, all in one minute. It’s never been done, but it theoretically could be.
And then she does what all inferior quarterbacks do under pressure: she tries that Hail Mary pass – today’s letter, trying to salvage a lopsided delegate count from Michigan – but, under pressure, she isn’t paying attention to fundamentals any more. She isn’t watching for the secondary receiver; she isn’t using her peripheral vision; she isn’t making a firm plant before releasing the ball; she throws away Latino and Asian and black votes by repeatedly emphasizing the importance of "the white electorate"; she isn’t even running SpellCheck on important documents. There’s not enough time! There’s not enough time! The candidate herself repeats her staffers' racist blunders; the important "open letter" is issued to thousands of media outlets with two typographical errors. The ball leaves the quarterback’s hand with a slight wobble ... the defender wants to end the game, and his eyes and his reflexes are sharp ....
Or we can return to Clinton's Rocky analogy. There's a reason fights have referees, and fighters have trainers who are authorized to throw in the towel: the boxer who's high on adrenaline and dizzy from being pummeled doesn't always realize how badly she's being beaten or how much she stands to lose by continuing. In some fights, when the fighter won't quit but should, it's completely proper -- humane for the fighter, and healthy for the sport itself -- for someone to stop the fight. Not because they're afraid of the fight continuing, but because they see, even if the fighter doesn't, that it's actually already over.
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Showing posts with label Indiana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Indiana. Show all posts
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Clinton Campaign Defines Victory In Racial Terms
In a telephone press conference Wednesday, the Clinton campaign firmly reiterated its intention to keep seeking the Democratic Presidential nomination, spinning both her striking loss in North Carolina and her slender win in Indiana yesterday as positive developments -- while also appearing to admit that she is not going to win a majority of elected delegates even if Michigan and Florida's delegations are counted -- and parsing yesterday's primary results in starkly racial terms that are likely to exacerbate her increasingly significant troubles reaching out to minority voters.
The conference, called by Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson to discuss "the state of the race," was also attended by Geoff Garin, chief Clinton strategist, and Phil Singer, the campaign's Deputy Communications Director.
Wolfson seemed to rule out any possibility of Clinton suspending her campaign in light of Tuesday's primaries. Asked whether there had been any internal discussions about not going forward, an unidentified voice loudly replied, "NO!" When a reporter asked who had just spoken, Wolfson replied, "That was my declarative self." Several times during the conference, campaign spokesmen reiterated their belief that the drawn-out primary was a good thing for the Democratic Party and that voters want the campaign to continue. Apparently moving not the finish line but the starting line, Wolfson also described next week's West Virginia primary as "the first key test" of the campaign's momentum.
Putting the best face on a day that nearly all commentators are calling a significant win for Obama, Garin described the results in Indiana and North Carolina as "an outcome about which we feel very, very good." Indiana, where Clinton won by a scant 51 percent - 49 percent margin, "represents significant progress for Senator Clinton and .... is a good victory under challenging circumstances" because her narrow victory there was "the first time ... that Senator Clinton has come from behind to victory," according to Garin. And North Carolina, where Clinton lost to Obama by 14 points, "represent[s] progress for us," he said, underlining the campaign's focus demographic, because Clinton improved her performance with "the white electorate" compared to polls taken two weeks before the election. Wolfson, too, put a positive spin on yesterday's results, saying that Indiana and North Carolina were "two states we were supposed to lose" but "we won one." According to Wolfson, although Indiana was a near-tie, "Senator Clinton [was] making up ground in Indiana, and Senator Obama losing ground."
The Clinton campaign's analysis of yesterday's results was largely based on exit polling and a careful parsing along demographic -- mainly racial -- lines that seemed to track the campaign's recent strategy of dispatching Bill Clinton to speak to small groups of rural, almost exclusively white, Southern voters. Wolfson emphasized Clinton's support among white voters, saying, "in North Carolina among the white electorate we started even... and ended up with a 24 point advantage with that part of the electorate." Comparing Clinton's relative performance among white voters in North Carolina yesterday with her weaker performance with white voters in Virginia earlier in the race, Garin said: "Virginia is the closest white electorate in the country to the electorate that participated in North Carolina. We lost the white electorate in Virginia... [but] ended up with a significant vote" among whites in North Carolina. Garin continued by emphasizing other demographic groups that Clinton is targeting, saying, "Taking the two states together, Senator Clinton continues to run very strongly among people who are likely to be the swing voters in the November election... non-college-educated voters, seniors, Catholics...."
At points, the Clinton representatives' demographic parsing bordered on surreal. Wolfson seemed to imply that gasoline prices are primarily a white issue, suggesting that Clinton's proposal for a gas tax "holiday" had helped her with white voters and promising that she would continue urging that proposal on the stump. In response to a pair of questions about whether African Americans would support Clinton in the general election, Wolfson repeatedly referred to Obama's "passionate supporters," seeming to conflate the two.
In terms of campaign strategy, the Clinton camp almost expressly admitted that her presidential aspirations now lie in the hands of Democratic Party operatives, including the party committees that will determine the fate of the currently disqualified Michigan and Florida delegations and the undeclared superdelegates who theoretically could still give the nomination to Clinton. Although he described Clinton as focused on the last few primaries, Wolfson -- in terms redolent of Bill Clinton's infamous "it all depends on what the definition of 'is' is" -- admitted that she likely would not win the majority of elected delegates: "We expect that when we get to June 3rd we'll have a close result. It raises the question of how close is close."
Phil Singer seemed to admit that even Michigan and Florida are not likely to alter her probable loss in both the elected-delegate and total-delegate races, saying that seating both states would at best bring Clinton to "fewer than a hundred elected delegates, excuse me, total delegates" of the nomination. Nevertheless, Clinton is urging not only that delegations from those two states be seated, but seated in full (and without Obama receiving any delegates at all from Michigan, where his name was not on the ballot). Wolfson described Clinton's performance in both states' primaries -- in which neither candidate overtly campaigned -- as "significant victories" and disagreed with suggestions that the delegations be seated at half-strength as a penalty for knowingly advancing their primaries earlier than Democratic Party rules allowed: "Our feeling is that the delegations should be seated in full, that they should have full votes" "commensurate with the results from those primaries." Clinton also plans to keep making an electability argument to superdelegates, including in a meeting with undeclared superdelegates planned for Wednesday night.
Wolfson also was asked about Clinton's financial ability to continue the campaign. He described Clinton as having raised "an awful lot of money" but admitted Obama is doing the same: "We had a very good fundraising month last month, but Senator Obama had a better fundraising month." He acknowledged that Clinton had loaned her own campaign $5 million in April, another $1 million on May 1, and $425,000 on May 5. He declined to rule out the possibility of Clinton making additional loans to keep her campaign afloat.
Wolfson declined to speculate about the possibility of a "unity" Obama-Clinton ticket, calling it premature and stating, "we have not had any conversations with the Obama campaign about such a ticket" and "I have not heard her evince any interest in such a ticket."
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The conference, called by Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson to discuss "the state of the race," was also attended by Geoff Garin, chief Clinton strategist, and Phil Singer, the campaign's Deputy Communications Director.
Wolfson seemed to rule out any possibility of Clinton suspending her campaign in light of Tuesday's primaries. Asked whether there had been any internal discussions about not going forward, an unidentified voice loudly replied, "NO!" When a reporter asked who had just spoken, Wolfson replied, "That was my declarative self." Several times during the conference, campaign spokesmen reiterated their belief that the drawn-out primary was a good thing for the Democratic Party and that voters want the campaign to continue. Apparently moving not the finish line but the starting line, Wolfson also described next week's West Virginia primary as "the first key test" of the campaign's momentum.
Putting the best face on a day that nearly all commentators are calling a significant win for Obama, Garin described the results in Indiana and North Carolina as "an outcome about which we feel very, very good." Indiana, where Clinton won by a scant 51 percent - 49 percent margin, "represents significant progress for Senator Clinton and .... is a good victory under challenging circumstances" because her narrow victory there was "the first time ... that Senator Clinton has come from behind to victory," according to Garin. And North Carolina, where Clinton lost to Obama by 14 points, "represent[s] progress for us," he said, underlining the campaign's focus demographic, because Clinton improved her performance with "the white electorate" compared to polls taken two weeks before the election. Wolfson, too, put a positive spin on yesterday's results, saying that Indiana and North Carolina were "two states we were supposed to lose" but "we won one." According to Wolfson, although Indiana was a near-tie, "Senator Clinton [was] making up ground in Indiana, and Senator Obama losing ground."
The Clinton campaign's analysis of yesterday's results was largely based on exit polling and a careful parsing along demographic -- mainly racial -- lines that seemed to track the campaign's recent strategy of dispatching Bill Clinton to speak to small groups of rural, almost exclusively white, Southern voters. Wolfson emphasized Clinton's support among white voters, saying, "in North Carolina among the white electorate we started even... and ended up with a 24 point advantage with that part of the electorate." Comparing Clinton's relative performance among white voters in North Carolina yesterday with her weaker performance with white voters in Virginia earlier in the race, Garin said: "Virginia is the closest white electorate in the country to the electorate that participated in North Carolina. We lost the white electorate in Virginia... [but] ended up with a significant vote" among whites in North Carolina. Garin continued by emphasizing other demographic groups that Clinton is targeting, saying, "Taking the two states together, Senator Clinton continues to run very strongly among people who are likely to be the swing voters in the November election... non-college-educated voters, seniors, Catholics...."
At points, the Clinton representatives' demographic parsing bordered on surreal. Wolfson seemed to imply that gasoline prices are primarily a white issue, suggesting that Clinton's proposal for a gas tax "holiday" had helped her with white voters and promising that she would continue urging that proposal on the stump. In response to a pair of questions about whether African Americans would support Clinton in the general election, Wolfson repeatedly referred to Obama's "passionate supporters," seeming to conflate the two.
In terms of campaign strategy, the Clinton camp almost expressly admitted that her presidential aspirations now lie in the hands of Democratic Party operatives, including the party committees that will determine the fate of the currently disqualified Michigan and Florida delegations and the undeclared superdelegates who theoretically could still give the nomination to Clinton. Although he described Clinton as focused on the last few primaries, Wolfson -- in terms redolent of Bill Clinton's infamous "it all depends on what the definition of 'is' is" -- admitted that she likely would not win the majority of elected delegates: "We expect that when we get to June 3rd we'll have a close result. It raises the question of how close is close."
Phil Singer seemed to admit that even Michigan and Florida are not likely to alter her probable loss in both the elected-delegate and total-delegate races, saying that seating both states would at best bring Clinton to "fewer than a hundred elected delegates, excuse me, total delegates" of the nomination. Nevertheless, Clinton is urging not only that delegations from those two states be seated, but seated in full (and without Obama receiving any delegates at all from Michigan, where his name was not on the ballot). Wolfson described Clinton's performance in both states' primaries -- in which neither candidate overtly campaigned -- as "significant victories" and disagreed with suggestions that the delegations be seated at half-strength as a penalty for knowingly advancing their primaries earlier than Democratic Party rules allowed: "Our feeling is that the delegations should be seated in full, that they should have full votes" "commensurate with the results from those primaries." Clinton also plans to keep making an electability argument to superdelegates, including in a meeting with undeclared superdelegates planned for Wednesday night.
Wolfson also was asked about Clinton's financial ability to continue the campaign. He described Clinton as having raised "an awful lot of money" but admitted Obama is doing the same: "We had a very good fundraising month last month, but Senator Obama had a better fundraising month." He acknowledged that Clinton had loaned her own campaign $5 million in April, another $1 million on May 1, and $425,000 on May 5. He declined to rule out the possibility of Clinton making additional loans to keep her campaign afloat.
Wolfson declined to speculate about the possibility of a "unity" Obama-Clinton ticket, calling it premature and stating, "we have not had any conversations with the Obama campaign about such a ticket" and "I have not heard her evince any interest in such a ticket."
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Saturday, May 3, 2008
Text of Obama Speech on Gas Prices and the Economy
Following a couple of weeks of media obsession about a man who's not his pastor, debates over debates (one that wasn't, and one that everyone wishes hadn't been), endless speculation over "banked" superdelegates, an 18-year-old mumble caught on film, and other distractions, Barack Obama gave a speech today at Lawrence High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, that returned attention to issues that matter, especially gas prices and the Main Street economy.
Before posting the text of that speech, I have a favor to ask, designed to maximize the level of discourse: before commenting, please read the speech. (Seems like that would be a good rule for all posts!)
Here's what Obama said in Indiana today:
"When I began this campaign for the presidency, I said I was running because I believed that the size of our challenges had outgrown the smallness of our politics in Washington – the pettiness and the game-playing and the influence-peddling that always prevents us from solving the problems we face year after year after year.
"I ran because I believed that this year – that this moment – was too important to let that happen again. And I had faith that you believed that too – that you were ready for something different; that you were hungry for something new.
"Fifteen months later, we’re already doing what none of the cynics in Washington thought we could do. In the face of a politics that’s tried to divide us and distract us and make this campaign about who’s up and who’s down and who-said-what-about-who, we’ve built a movement of Americans from every race and region and party who desperately want change in Washington.
"I have no illusions about how far we have to go. Our road is still long. Our climb is still steep. But fifteen months later, I also know that our mission is even more urgent because the challenges facing people across Indiana and the country are growing by the day.
"I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.
"You don’t have to turn on the news or follow the stock tickers or wait for all the economists and politicians to agree on what is or is not a recession to know that our economy is in serious trouble. You can feel it in your own lives. And I hear it everywhere I go. Like the young man I met in Pennsylvania who lost his job but can’t afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one. Or the woman from Anderson who just lost her job, and her pension, and her insurance when the Delphi plant closed down – even while the top executives walked away with multi-million-dollar bonuses. Or the families across this country who will sit around the kitchen table tonight and wonder whether next week’s paycheck will be enough to cover next month’s bills – who will look at their children without knowing if they’ll be able to give them the same chances that they had.
"But here’s what Washington and Wall Street don’t get:
"This economy doesn’t just jeopardize our financial well-being, it offends the most basic values that have made this country what it is: the idea that America is the place where you can make it if you try. That no matter how much money you start with or where you come from or who your parents are, opportunity is yours if you’re willing to reach for it and work for it. It’s the idea that while there are no guarantees in life, you should able to count on a job that pays the bills; health care for when you get sick; a pension for when you retire; an education for your children that will allow them to fulfill their God-given potential. That’s who we are as a country. That’s the America most of us here know. It’s the America our parents and our grandparents grew up knowing.
"This is the country that gave my grandfather a chance to go to college on the GI Bill when he came home from World War II; a country that gave him and my grandmother – a small-town couple from Kansas – the chance to buy their first home with a loan from the government.
"This is the country that made it possible for my mother – a single parent who had to go on food stamps at one point – to send my sister and me to the best schools in the country with the help of scholarships.
"This is the country that allowed my father-in-law – a city worker at a South Side water filtration plant – to provide for his wife and two children on a single salary. This is a man who was diagnosed at age thirty with multiple sclerosis – who relied on a walker to get himself to work. And yet, every day he went, and he labored, and he sent my wife and her brother to one of the best colleges in the nation.
"That job didn’t just give him a paycheck, it gave him dignity and self-worth. It was an America that didn’t just reward and honor wealth, but the work and the workers who helped create it.
"And we are here today looking for the answer to the same question:
"Where is that America today?
"How many veterans come home from this war without the care they need – how many wander the streets of the richest country on Earth without a roof over their heads? How many single parents can’t even afford to send their children to the doctor when they get sick, never mind to four years of college? How many workers have suffered the indignity of having to compete with their own children for a minimum wage job at McDonalds after they gave their lives to a company where the CEO just walked off with that multi-million dollar bonus?
"And most of all, how many years – how many decades – have we talked and talked and talked about these problems while Washington has done nothing, or tinkered, or made them worse.
"There is no doubt that many of these challenges have to do with fundamental shifts in our economy that began decades ago – changes that have torn down borders and barriers and allowed companies to send jobs wherever there’s a cheap source of labor. And today, with countries like China and India educating their children longer and better, and revolutions in communication and technology, they can send the jobs wherever there’s an internet connection.
"I saw the beginnings of these changes up close when I moved to the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago to help neighborhoods that were devastated when the local steel plant closed. I saw the indignity of joblessness and the hopelessness of lost opportunity.
"But I also saw that we are not powerless in the face of these challenges. We don’t have to sit here and watch our leaders do nothing. I learned that we don’t have to consign our children to a future of diminished dreams – a future of fewer opportunities. And that’s why I’m running for President today. Politics didn’t lead me to working people – working people led me to politics.
"I’m running because we can’t afford to settle for a Washington where John McCain gets the chance to give us four more years of the same Bush policies that have failed us for the last eight. More tax breaks for CEOs who make more in a day than some workers make in a year. More tax breaks for the same corporations that ship our jobs overseas. More of the trickle-down, on-your-own philosophy that says there’s nothing government can do about the problems we face – so we might as well just hand out a few tax breaks and tell people to buy their own health care, their own education, their own roads, their own bridges. That hasn’t worked in the past, and it won’t work for our future.
"We can’t afford to settle for a Washington where our energy policy, and our health care policy, and our tax policy is sold to the highest-bidding lobbyist. We can’t keep taking thousands of dollars of their money year after year, election after election. Senator Clinton says they represent real Americans, but you and I know who they really represent – the oil companies and the drug companies and the insurance companies who keep us from bringing down the cost of our premiums and our prescriptions and investing in renewable fuels.
"We can’t afford to settle for a Washington where politicians only focus on how to win instead of why we should; where they check the polls before they check their gut; where they only tell us whatever we want to hear whenever we want to hear it. That kind of politics may get them where they need to go, but it doesn’t get America where we need to go. And it won’t change anything.
"Some of you might have seen that Senator Clinton’s spending a lot of money on a television ad that attacks me for not supporting her and John McCain’s idea of a gas tax holiday for the summer. Now, this is an idea that will save you – altogether – half a tank of gas. That’s thirty cents a day. For three months. That’s if the oil companies don’t simply jack up their price to fill the gap, as they’ve done when this was tried before. Does anyone here really trust the oil companies to give you the savings when they could just pocket the money themselves?
"It’s a shell game. Literally.
"In a moment of candor, her advisors actually admitted that it wouldn’t have much of an effect on gas prices. But, they said, it’s a great political issue for Senator Clinton. So this is not about getting you through the summer, it’s about getting elected.
"And this is what passes for leadership in Washington-- phony ideas, calculated to win elections instead of actually solving problems.
"Now Senator Clinton’s been using this issue to make the argument that I’m somehow “out of touch.” Well let me tell you – only in Washington can you get away with calling someone out of touch when you’re the one who thinks that thirty cents a day is enough to help people who are struggling in this economy. I’ll tell you what I think – I think the American people are smarter than Washington gives us credit for.
"I wish I could stand up here and tell you that we could fix our energy problems with a holiday. I wish I could tell you that we can take a time-out from trade and bring back the jobs that have gone overseas. I wish I could promise that on day one of my presidency, I could pass every plan and proposal I’ve outlined in this campaign.
"But my guess is that you’ve heard those promises before. You hear them every year, in every election. And afterwards, when everyone goes back to Washington, the game-playing, and the influence-peddling, and the petty bickering continues. Nothing gets done. And four years later, we’re right back here making the very same promises about the very same problems.
"Well this year you have a choice. If you want to take another chance on the same kind of politics we’ve come to know in Washington, there are other candidates to choose from.
"But I still believe we need to fundamentally change Washington if we want change in America. I still believe this election is bigger than me, or Senator Clinton, or Senator McCain. It’s bigger than Democrats versus Republicans.
"It’s about who we are as Americans. It’s about whether this country, at this moment, will continue to stand by while the wealthy few prosper at the expense of the hardworking many, or whether we’ll stand up and reclaim the American dream for every American. It’s about whether we’ll watch the Chinas and the Indias of the world move past us, or whether we’ll decide that in the 21st century, the home of innovation, and discovery, and progress will still be the United States of America.
"Reclaiming this dream will take more than one election. It will take more than one person or one party. It will take the effort and sacrifice of a nation united. And that’s the truth.
"We can provide relief that’s more than a holiday to families who are struggling in this economy. I’m the only candidate who’s proposed a genuine middle-class tax cut that’s paid for in part by closing corporate loopholes and shutting down tax havens. It would save nearly every working family $1,000, eliminate income taxes for seniors making under $50,000, and provide a mortgage tax credit to struggling homeowners that would cover ten percent of their mortgage interest payment every year.
"I also have a health care plan that would save the average family $2,500 on their premiums and provide the uninsured with the same kind of health care Members of Congress give themselves. That’s real relief, but we can only pay for this if we finally rollback the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans who don’t need them and weren’t even asking for them.
"We may not be able to bring back all the jobs that we’ve lost to trade, but we can create tomorrow’s jobs in this country. I happen to believe in free trade. But we do the cause of trade no favors when we pass agreements that are filled with perks for every special interest under the sun and absolutely no protections for American workers. There’s absolutely no reason we should be giving tax breaks to corporations who ship jobs overseas. When I’m President, I will eliminate those tax breaks and give them to companies who create good jobs right here in America.
"We can also create jobs if we finally get serious about rebuilding our crumbling and decaying national infrastructure. A few years ago, one out of three urban bridges were classified as structurally deficient, and we all saw the tragic results of what that could mean in Minnesota last year. It’s unacceptable. That’s why I’m proposing a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years and generate nearly two million new jobs – many of them in the construction industry that’s been hard hit by this housing crisis. The repairs will be determined not by politics, but by what will maximize our safety. And we’ll fund this bank by ending this war in Iraq. It’s time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money on putting America back together instead.
"And if want to take a permanent holiday from our oil addiction, we can finally get serious about energy independence and create five million new green jobs in the process – jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced. We’ll do what I did when I went to Detroit and tell the automakers it’s time they raised fuel mileage standards in this country. We’ll make companies pay for the pollution they release into the air, we’ll tax the record profits of the oil companies, and we’ll use that money to invest in clean, affordable, renewable energy like solar power, and wind power, and biofuels.
"I’ll be honest – this transition to a green economy won’t come without costs that all of us will have to pay, but it’s the only way we’ll free ourselves from the whims of Middle East dictator; the only way we’ll make sure we’re not talking about high gas prices five years from now and ten years from now; the only way we can pass on a planet that’s still recognizable to our children and their children.
"And if we want our children to succeed in this global economy – if we want them to be able to compete with children in Beijing and Bangalore – then we need to make sure that every child, everywhere gets a world-class education, from the day they’re born until the day they graduate college. That means investing in early childhood education. It means that we need to recruit an army of new teachers by not just talking about how great teachers are, but rewarding them for their greatness with better pay and more support. And it means that in this country – in this global economy – we will not create a small class of the educated few by allowing thousands and thousands of young people to be priced out of college year after year. We are better than that. When I’m President, we’ll create a bargain with every American who wants to go to college: we will pay for your tuition if you serve your country in some way for two years after you graduate.
"Real relief for middle-class families, seniors, and homeowners. Lower premiums for those who have health care and coverage for everyone who wants it. Five million green jobs right here in America. A world-class education that will allow every American to reach their God-given potential and compete with any worker in the world.
"All of this is possible, but it’s just a list of policies until you decide that it’s time to make the Washington we have look like the America we know – one where the future is not determined by those with money and influence; where common sense and honesty are cherished values; where we are stronger than that which divides us because we realize that in the end, we rise or fall as one nation – as one people.
"It was forty years ago this May that Robert Kennedy took his unlikely campaign to create a new kind of politics to Indiana. And as he campaigned in Fort Wayne, he laid out a vision that America we know. He said, “Income and education and homes do not make a nation. Nor do land and borders. Shared ideals and principles, joined purposes and hopes – these make a nation. And that is our great task.”
"It is still our task today.
"We’ve always known this wouldn’t be easy. The change we’re looking for never is. Generations before us have fought wars and revolutions; they’ve struggled and they’ve sacrificed; they’ve stood up and spoke out and marched through the streets for the opportunities that we enjoy.
"And that’s why the only way a black guy named Barack Obama who was born in Hawaii, and started his career on the streets of Chicago, can win this race – if you decide that you’ve had enough of the way things are; if you decide that this election is bigger than flag pins and sniper fire and the comments of a former pastor – bigger than the differences between what we look like or where we come from or what party we belong to.
"And if you do – if you decide that this moment is about what kind of country we’ll be in the next year and the next century; about how we’ll provide jobs to the jobless and opportunity to those without it; about health care and good schools and a green planet; about giving our children a better world and a brighter future – then I ask you to enlist your neighbors, and knock on doors, and work your heart out from now until Tuesday. In the face of all cynicism, and doubt, and fear, I ask you to remember what makes a nation – and to believe that we can once again make this nation the land of limitless possibility and unyielding hope – the place where you can still make it if you try. Thank you, and may God Bless the United States of America."
*******
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Before posting the text of that speech, I have a favor to ask, designed to maximize the level of discourse: before commenting, please read the speech. (Seems like that would be a good rule for all posts!)
Here's what Obama said in Indiana today:
"When I began this campaign for the presidency, I said I was running because I believed that the size of our challenges had outgrown the smallness of our politics in Washington – the pettiness and the game-playing and the influence-peddling that always prevents us from solving the problems we face year after year after year.
"I ran because I believed that this year – that this moment – was too important to let that happen again. And I had faith that you believed that too – that you were ready for something different; that you were hungry for something new.
"Fifteen months later, we’re already doing what none of the cynics in Washington thought we could do. In the face of a politics that’s tried to divide us and distract us and make this campaign about who’s up and who’s down and who-said-what-about-who, we’ve built a movement of Americans from every race and region and party who desperately want change in Washington.
"I have no illusions about how far we have to go. Our road is still long. Our climb is still steep. But fifteen months later, I also know that our mission is even more urgent because the challenges facing people across Indiana and the country are growing by the day.
"I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.
"You don’t have to turn on the news or follow the stock tickers or wait for all the economists and politicians to agree on what is or is not a recession to know that our economy is in serious trouble. You can feel it in your own lives. And I hear it everywhere I go. Like the young man I met in Pennsylvania who lost his job but can’t afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one. Or the woman from Anderson who just lost her job, and her pension, and her insurance when the Delphi plant closed down – even while the top executives walked away with multi-million-dollar bonuses. Or the families across this country who will sit around the kitchen table tonight and wonder whether next week’s paycheck will be enough to cover next month’s bills – who will look at their children without knowing if they’ll be able to give them the same chances that they had.
"But here’s what Washington and Wall Street don’t get:
"This economy doesn’t just jeopardize our financial well-being, it offends the most basic values that have made this country what it is: the idea that America is the place where you can make it if you try. That no matter how much money you start with or where you come from or who your parents are, opportunity is yours if you’re willing to reach for it and work for it. It’s the idea that while there are no guarantees in life, you should able to count on a job that pays the bills; health care for when you get sick; a pension for when you retire; an education for your children that will allow them to fulfill their God-given potential. That’s who we are as a country. That’s the America most of us here know. It’s the America our parents and our grandparents grew up knowing.
"This is the country that gave my grandfather a chance to go to college on the GI Bill when he came home from World War II; a country that gave him and my grandmother – a small-town couple from Kansas – the chance to buy their first home with a loan from the government.
"This is the country that made it possible for my mother – a single parent who had to go on food stamps at one point – to send my sister and me to the best schools in the country with the help of scholarships.
"This is the country that allowed my father-in-law – a city worker at a South Side water filtration plant – to provide for his wife and two children on a single salary. This is a man who was diagnosed at age thirty with multiple sclerosis – who relied on a walker to get himself to work. And yet, every day he went, and he labored, and he sent my wife and her brother to one of the best colleges in the nation.
"That job didn’t just give him a paycheck, it gave him dignity and self-worth. It was an America that didn’t just reward and honor wealth, but the work and the workers who helped create it.
"And we are here today looking for the answer to the same question:
"Where is that America today?
"How many veterans come home from this war without the care they need – how many wander the streets of the richest country on Earth without a roof over their heads? How many single parents can’t even afford to send their children to the doctor when they get sick, never mind to four years of college? How many workers have suffered the indignity of having to compete with their own children for a minimum wage job at McDonalds after they gave their lives to a company where the CEO just walked off with that multi-million dollar bonus?
"And most of all, how many years – how many decades – have we talked and talked and talked about these problems while Washington has done nothing, or tinkered, or made them worse.
"There is no doubt that many of these challenges have to do with fundamental shifts in our economy that began decades ago – changes that have torn down borders and barriers and allowed companies to send jobs wherever there’s a cheap source of labor. And today, with countries like China and India educating their children longer and better, and revolutions in communication and technology, they can send the jobs wherever there’s an internet connection.
"I saw the beginnings of these changes up close when I moved to the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago to help neighborhoods that were devastated when the local steel plant closed. I saw the indignity of joblessness and the hopelessness of lost opportunity.
"But I also saw that we are not powerless in the face of these challenges. We don’t have to sit here and watch our leaders do nothing. I learned that we don’t have to consign our children to a future of diminished dreams – a future of fewer opportunities. And that’s why I’m running for President today. Politics didn’t lead me to working people – working people led me to politics.
"I’m running because we can’t afford to settle for a Washington where John McCain gets the chance to give us four more years of the same Bush policies that have failed us for the last eight. More tax breaks for CEOs who make more in a day than some workers make in a year. More tax breaks for the same corporations that ship our jobs overseas. More of the trickle-down, on-your-own philosophy that says there’s nothing government can do about the problems we face – so we might as well just hand out a few tax breaks and tell people to buy their own health care, their own education, their own roads, their own bridges. That hasn’t worked in the past, and it won’t work for our future.
"We can’t afford to settle for a Washington where our energy policy, and our health care policy, and our tax policy is sold to the highest-bidding lobbyist. We can’t keep taking thousands of dollars of their money year after year, election after election. Senator Clinton says they represent real Americans, but you and I know who they really represent – the oil companies and the drug companies and the insurance companies who keep us from bringing down the cost of our premiums and our prescriptions and investing in renewable fuels.
"We can’t afford to settle for a Washington where politicians only focus on how to win instead of why we should; where they check the polls before they check their gut; where they only tell us whatever we want to hear whenever we want to hear it. That kind of politics may get them where they need to go, but it doesn’t get America where we need to go. And it won’t change anything.
"Some of you might have seen that Senator Clinton’s spending a lot of money on a television ad that attacks me for not supporting her and John McCain’s idea of a gas tax holiday for the summer. Now, this is an idea that will save you – altogether – half a tank of gas. That’s thirty cents a day. For three months. That’s if the oil companies don’t simply jack up their price to fill the gap, as they’ve done when this was tried before. Does anyone here really trust the oil companies to give you the savings when they could just pocket the money themselves?
"It’s a shell game. Literally.
"In a moment of candor, her advisors actually admitted that it wouldn’t have much of an effect on gas prices. But, they said, it’s a great political issue for Senator Clinton. So this is not about getting you through the summer, it’s about getting elected.
"And this is what passes for leadership in Washington-- phony ideas, calculated to win elections instead of actually solving problems.
"Now Senator Clinton’s been using this issue to make the argument that I’m somehow “out of touch.” Well let me tell you – only in Washington can you get away with calling someone out of touch when you’re the one who thinks that thirty cents a day is enough to help people who are struggling in this economy. I’ll tell you what I think – I think the American people are smarter than Washington gives us credit for.
"I wish I could stand up here and tell you that we could fix our energy problems with a holiday. I wish I could tell you that we can take a time-out from trade and bring back the jobs that have gone overseas. I wish I could promise that on day one of my presidency, I could pass every plan and proposal I’ve outlined in this campaign.
"But my guess is that you’ve heard those promises before. You hear them every year, in every election. And afterwards, when everyone goes back to Washington, the game-playing, and the influence-peddling, and the petty bickering continues. Nothing gets done. And four years later, we’re right back here making the very same promises about the very same problems.
"Well this year you have a choice. If you want to take another chance on the same kind of politics we’ve come to know in Washington, there are other candidates to choose from.
"But I still believe we need to fundamentally change Washington if we want change in America. I still believe this election is bigger than me, or Senator Clinton, or Senator McCain. It’s bigger than Democrats versus Republicans.
"It’s about who we are as Americans. It’s about whether this country, at this moment, will continue to stand by while the wealthy few prosper at the expense of the hardworking many, or whether we’ll stand up and reclaim the American dream for every American. It’s about whether we’ll watch the Chinas and the Indias of the world move past us, or whether we’ll decide that in the 21st century, the home of innovation, and discovery, and progress will still be the United States of America.
"Reclaiming this dream will take more than one election. It will take more than one person or one party. It will take the effort and sacrifice of a nation united. And that’s the truth.
"We can provide relief that’s more than a holiday to families who are struggling in this economy. I’m the only candidate who’s proposed a genuine middle-class tax cut that’s paid for in part by closing corporate loopholes and shutting down tax havens. It would save nearly every working family $1,000, eliminate income taxes for seniors making under $50,000, and provide a mortgage tax credit to struggling homeowners that would cover ten percent of their mortgage interest payment every year.
"I also have a health care plan that would save the average family $2,500 on their premiums and provide the uninsured with the same kind of health care Members of Congress give themselves. That’s real relief, but we can only pay for this if we finally rollback the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans who don’t need them and weren’t even asking for them.
"We may not be able to bring back all the jobs that we’ve lost to trade, but we can create tomorrow’s jobs in this country. I happen to believe in free trade. But we do the cause of trade no favors when we pass agreements that are filled with perks for every special interest under the sun and absolutely no protections for American workers. There’s absolutely no reason we should be giving tax breaks to corporations who ship jobs overseas. When I’m President, I will eliminate those tax breaks and give them to companies who create good jobs right here in America.
"We can also create jobs if we finally get serious about rebuilding our crumbling and decaying national infrastructure. A few years ago, one out of three urban bridges were classified as structurally deficient, and we all saw the tragic results of what that could mean in Minnesota last year. It’s unacceptable. That’s why I’m proposing a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years and generate nearly two million new jobs – many of them in the construction industry that’s been hard hit by this housing crisis. The repairs will be determined not by politics, but by what will maximize our safety. And we’ll fund this bank by ending this war in Iraq. It’s time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money on putting America back together instead.
"And if want to take a permanent holiday from our oil addiction, we can finally get serious about energy independence and create five million new green jobs in the process – jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced. We’ll do what I did when I went to Detroit and tell the automakers it’s time they raised fuel mileage standards in this country. We’ll make companies pay for the pollution they release into the air, we’ll tax the record profits of the oil companies, and we’ll use that money to invest in clean, affordable, renewable energy like solar power, and wind power, and biofuels.
"I’ll be honest – this transition to a green economy won’t come without costs that all of us will have to pay, but it’s the only way we’ll free ourselves from the whims of Middle East dictator; the only way we’ll make sure we’re not talking about high gas prices five years from now and ten years from now; the only way we can pass on a planet that’s still recognizable to our children and their children.
"And if we want our children to succeed in this global economy – if we want them to be able to compete with children in Beijing and Bangalore – then we need to make sure that every child, everywhere gets a world-class education, from the day they’re born until the day they graduate college. That means investing in early childhood education. It means that we need to recruit an army of new teachers by not just talking about how great teachers are, but rewarding them for their greatness with better pay and more support. And it means that in this country – in this global economy – we will not create a small class of the educated few by allowing thousands and thousands of young people to be priced out of college year after year. We are better than that. When I’m President, we’ll create a bargain with every American who wants to go to college: we will pay for your tuition if you serve your country in some way for two years after you graduate.
"Real relief for middle-class families, seniors, and homeowners. Lower premiums for those who have health care and coverage for everyone who wants it. Five million green jobs right here in America. A world-class education that will allow every American to reach their God-given potential and compete with any worker in the world.
"All of this is possible, but it’s just a list of policies until you decide that it’s time to make the Washington we have look like the America we know – one where the future is not determined by those with money and influence; where common sense and honesty are cherished values; where we are stronger than that which divides us because we realize that in the end, we rise or fall as one nation – as one people.
"It was forty years ago this May that Robert Kennedy took his unlikely campaign to create a new kind of politics to Indiana. And as he campaigned in Fort Wayne, he laid out a vision that America we know. He said, “Income and education and homes do not make a nation. Nor do land and borders. Shared ideals and principles, joined purposes and hopes – these make a nation. And that is our great task.”
"It is still our task today.
"We’ve always known this wouldn’t be easy. The change we’re looking for never is. Generations before us have fought wars and revolutions; they’ve struggled and they’ve sacrificed; they’ve stood up and spoke out and marched through the streets for the opportunities that we enjoy.
"And that’s why the only way a black guy named Barack Obama who was born in Hawaii, and started his career on the streets of Chicago, can win this race – if you decide that you’ve had enough of the way things are; if you decide that this election is bigger than flag pins and sniper fire and the comments of a former pastor – bigger than the differences between what we look like or where we come from or what party we belong to.
"And if you do – if you decide that this moment is about what kind of country we’ll be in the next year and the next century; about how we’ll provide jobs to the jobless and opportunity to those without it; about health care and good schools and a green planet; about giving our children a better world and a brighter future – then I ask you to enlist your neighbors, and knock on doors, and work your heart out from now until Tuesday. In the face of all cynicism, and doubt, and fear, I ask you to remember what makes a nation – and to believe that we can once again make this nation the land of limitless possibility and unyielding hope – the place where you can still make it if you try. Thank you, and may God Bless the United States of America."
*******
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Donate to Barack Obama.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Obama Files F.E.C. Complaint Against Pro-Clinton "Swiftboat" Group
The Obama campaign has filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against the American Leadership Project, a “527" group that Obama campaign chief counsel Bob Bauer described this morning as a “Swiftboat wannabe” and suggested was affiliated with the Clinton campaign. The American Leadership Project, which reportedly is led by the son of one of Hillary Clinton’s Indiana state co-chairs, has been running what the Obama campaign described in a press release as “a misleading attack ad against Obama” on Indiana television.
In a press conference call this morning, Bauer explained the difference between what he called “normal political committees,” which are subject to limits on the amount and sources of campaign contributions and most regularly file reports with the Federal Elections Commission, and so-called “527s,” groups organized under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code and which are not subject to most election laws. According to Bauer, the FEC announced new rules in 2006 designed to reduce the impact of groups like the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, which fatally damaged John Kerry’s presidential hopes with widespread negative advertising impugning his military service. The new rules require any groups that are set up expressly to support or oppose a particular candidate, like the American Leadership Project, to follow the limits and reporting requirements of “normal political committees,” Bauer said, calling the American Leadership Project’s actions “flatly illegal” under federal law.
Bauer went on to explain that one of the campaign’s main purposes in filing the FEC complaint was to send a message that 527 groups were not free to ignore the law as the campaigns head into the general election. He also took a swipe at the Federal Elections Commission, which has not been as proactive as many would like, suggesting that the complaint against the ALP would be a test of whether the FEC intends to enforce its rules. Asked by a reporter whether the FEC has the resources to investigate the complaint, Bauer said it did – and that it had the ability to impose “very, very stiff penalties for knowing and wilful violations” of federal law, citing “fines of millions of dollars” imposed by the FEC against other 527 groups in 2006. Bauer also pointed out that the FEC also has authority to refer complaints to the Department of Justice for investigation.
The question of whether the FEC will pursue its investigation aggressively is an important one, given how little time is left before the last primary elections. Bauer believes the ALP is deliberately flaunting the law, saying, “this organization has made the decision that it will run this risk and try to run out the clock ... to give it the advantage of spending without having to shut down before the last penny is spent.” However, he suggested that even beginning an aggressive investigation would help mitigate that, suggesting that “[t]he FEC has a choice to make here ... of doing what they said they would do... immediately contacting the donors and the principals and bringing them in,” which he said would itself be a significant deterrent.
Indiana State Representative Matt Pierce, an Obama supporter, also participated in the conference call. He talked about seeing a negative ad by the ALP on local television yesterday, and said that such ads were "poisoning" the election process. Describing the high levels of public participation and excitement among Democrats this year, he added, "I think we lose that if we let these 527s run amok."
BACK TO VICHYDEMS HOME
In a press conference call this morning, Bauer explained the difference between what he called “normal political committees,” which are subject to limits on the amount and sources of campaign contributions and most regularly file reports with the Federal Elections Commission, and so-called “527s,” groups organized under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code and which are not subject to most election laws. According to Bauer, the FEC announced new rules in 2006 designed to reduce the impact of groups like the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, which fatally damaged John Kerry’s presidential hopes with widespread negative advertising impugning his military service. The new rules require any groups that are set up expressly to support or oppose a particular candidate, like the American Leadership Project, to follow the limits and reporting requirements of “normal political committees,” Bauer said, calling the American Leadership Project’s actions “flatly illegal” under federal law.
Bauer went on to explain that one of the campaign’s main purposes in filing the FEC complaint was to send a message that 527 groups were not free to ignore the law as the campaigns head into the general election. He also took a swipe at the Federal Elections Commission, which has not been as proactive as many would like, suggesting that the complaint against the ALP would be a test of whether the FEC intends to enforce its rules. Asked by a reporter whether the FEC has the resources to investigate the complaint, Bauer said it did – and that it had the ability to impose “very, very stiff penalties for knowing and wilful violations” of federal law, citing “fines of millions of dollars” imposed by the FEC against other 527 groups in 2006. Bauer also pointed out that the FEC also has authority to refer complaints to the Department of Justice for investigation.
The question of whether the FEC will pursue its investigation aggressively is an important one, given how little time is left before the last primary elections. Bauer believes the ALP is deliberately flaunting the law, saying, “this organization has made the decision that it will run this risk and try to run out the clock ... to give it the advantage of spending without having to shut down before the last penny is spent.” However, he suggested that even beginning an aggressive investigation would help mitigate that, suggesting that “[t]he FEC has a choice to make here ... of doing what they said they would do... immediately contacting the donors and the principals and bringing them in,” which he said would itself be a significant deterrent.
Indiana State Representative Matt Pierce, an Obama supporter, also participated in the conference call. He talked about seeing a negative ad by the ALP on local television yesterday, and said that such ads were "poisoning" the election process. Describing the high levels of public participation and excitement among Democrats this year, he added, "I think we lose that if we let these 527s run amok."
BACK TO VICHYDEMS HOME
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
A Big Win in Pennsylvania -- But Not Nearly Big Enough to Change the Math
Update, May 6: Obama wins North Carolina, squeezing Clinton mathematically even more than this post predicts. Big voter turnouts in both NC and Indiana, which bodes well for Obama (and the party's chances in November).
Americans, schizophrenically, love two things: winners, and quixotic heroes who do great things in a losing cause. Last night in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton was both: the winner of what in an ordinary election year would be a tremendous victory, and the protagonist of an unequivocally lost cause.
Clinton won Pennsylvania. But in the national Democratic primary election overall -- and by that I mean the go-to-a-polling-place-and-cast-a-ballot part of the nominee-selection process -- Pennsylvania put the last nail in Clinton's hopes of winning anything resembling the popular vote or popular delegate count nationwide.
Before I go further, please understand: this post isn’t about hating Hillary, but about math. It’s no secret that I support Obama, -- but I honestly can’t help but admire any candidate who can win Pennsylvania by ten points (which, as of the time I'm writing this with 99% of precincts reporting, appears to be Clinton's margin of victory). It’s a great victory in anyone’s book.
And yet mathematically, Pennsylvania didn’t move her forward; it actually put her further behind. That’s what makes her win there tragic.
In a post the day before the Pennsylvania primary, I explained in detail what margins Clinton needed in order to win the majority of elected delegates before the last primary election occurs on June 3. This election is like a footrace, I explained; with a relatively small handful of primaries left, and a finite number of delegates remaining to be won, she needs to gain ground with every primary if she wants to make up the ground she lost in the first 40-plus contests.
Before Pennsylvania voted, Clinton trailed Obama in the elected-delegate count by 162. With only 566 delegates left to be won in the remaining contests, some fairly simple math showed that to catch Obama, she needed to win everything from Pennsylvania forward by 28 points – i.e., to win 64% of the elected delegates to Obama’s 36% in all the remaining contests (with the exception of North Carolina, where she currently trails by 17 points; all my math asked her to do there was tie). Again, this isn’t pessimism or misogyny, it’s just a calculation. Here’s the algorithm: (Remaining delegates) - (Obama’s lead in delegates) ÷ 2 + (Obama’s lead in delegates). You can do the math yourself.
If she didn’t win Pennsylvania (or any other primary) by 28 points, she’d only fall farther behind. If she won Pennsylvania by ten points, Clinton would actually have lost ground. In my post before the vote in Pennsylvania, I explained it this way:
Think of it like a hundred yard dash. Catching up to Obama after a ten point “victory” in Pennsylvania would be like standing on the starting line and expecting to win the race – with your opponent having a 36 yard head start. And every step you take that doesn’t gain you ground puts you closer to defeat: every time Clinton falls short of the requisite 64% or 68% or even higher margin, the margin she needs in the remaining states goes up even more. Or, as Richard Durbin put it, Clinton is “running out of real estate.”
Hillary didn’t win 64% of the vote in Pennsylvania. She only won about 55% to Obama’s 45% – the ten-point spread I predicted, about two-thirds short of the 28 point spread she needed. Accordingly, she’ll only net about 16 delegates (87 for her, 71 for Obama) – not enough to stay on pace to win. After her win in Pennsylvania, Clinton now has to win 68% of the vote in all the remaining primaries -- up four points from the 64% she needed just two days ago.
In the real world, this is an insurmountable problem for Clinton. In some states, she may have had a little wiggle room; if she fell a little short in Indiana she might make it up by winning extra delegates in Puerto Rico. But Pennsylvania was Clinton’s best shot at a big win in a populous state – her “if you can’t make it there, you can’t make it anywhere” test (apologies to Sinatra). A month ago, a PPP poll showed Clinton leading in Pennsylvania by 26 points. Pennsylvania’s primary came after the Reverend Wright and “bitter” brouhahas. Clinton has family in Pennsylvania; her father and brother went to school and played ball in Pennsylvania; she spent vacations in Pennsylvania; her grandfather taught her to shoot in Pennsylvania. And Pennsylvania has one of the last great Democratic political machines – read this frustrated post by Chuck Pennacchio, a great Democratic candidate who lost a Pennsylvania primary because that machine was aligned against him, if you want a taste of how powerful the Pennsylvania machine is – and that machine was overwhelmingly in Clinton’s camp. If she couldn’t make the requisite margin there, she won’t be able to make it in state after state after state, without any major slips, from now til the end of the campaign. (In fact, even if Michigan and Florida were miraculously counted in Clinton’s favor, she still would have needed 12 point wins from here on out – but she fell short of even that lower standard. So not even Michigan and Florida could help her win the nomination democratically.)
No: Pennsylvania was her best shot, and she fell short. Hope is a wonderful thing, but no amount of blind optimism can change the reality: Clinton’s not going to win the majority of democratically-elected “pledged” or popular delegates. More broadly: no logical person can continue to argue that Clinton can win in any popular or democratic sense of the word; it’s inevitable that she will lose the popular vote and the popular delegate count.
That doesn’t mean she can’t win the nomination. It does mean that the only way she can win the nomination is if the unelected Superdelegates overwhelmingly and unexpectedly decide to disregard the wishes of their collective constituents and hand the nomination to the candidate who lost the popular delegate count (and the popular vote, and the majority of states).
Here’s the important thing to take away from Clinton’s win/loss in Pennsylvania: because she no longer has any realistic chance of winning the “election” phase of the nominating process, the rest of us need to insist that the politicians, pundits and prognosticators stop putting so much undeserved attention on the upcoming primaries, and focus instead on the single issue that could decide this election in Clinton’s favor: the likelihood, the moral right, and the wisdom of allowing the Democratic Party’s aristocrats to override the will of millions of Democratic voters.
Personally, I don’t think it’s likely, moral, or strategically wise for the Supers to exercise a veto of the voters’ choice. I think Obama has already won this election, and inevitably will win the nomination, and that Clinton’s just the last one to realize it. But I also understand that many of her supporters disagree, and feel strongly that it’s both meet and proper for the Supers to do whatever they want. I’m willing to agree to disagree on that question, at least for now; I don’t really want to have that argument today, because it, too, is a distraction at this point.
Instead, all I’d like, from Clintonites and Obamanuts alike, is an agreement, based on simple logic, that the issue is no longer whether Clinton can win the election – she can’t, even if we count Michigan and Florida – but rather whether she can, and should, win a contrary outcome via a Superdelegate override.
Polls and predictions no longer count. Michigan and Florida, and Indiana and Puerto Rico and North Carolina and my own Oregon, no longer count, simply because their primaries can’t realistically alter the outcome of the election. The only remaining issue is the propriety and wisdom of Superdelegates overriding the voters. So let’s talk about that from now on, instead of wasting time and energy on distractions that make money for CNN and MSNBC and play into the candidates’ spin but aren’t actually relevant to the decision that’s being made.
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Americans, schizophrenically, love two things: winners, and quixotic heroes who do great things in a losing cause. Last night in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton was both: the winner of what in an ordinary election year would be a tremendous victory, and the protagonist of an unequivocally lost cause.
Clinton won Pennsylvania. But in the national Democratic primary election overall -- and by that I mean the go-to-a-polling-place-and-cast-a-ballot part of the nominee-selection process -- Pennsylvania put the last nail in Clinton's hopes of winning anything resembling the popular vote or popular delegate count nationwide.
Before I go further, please understand: this post isn’t about hating Hillary, but about math. It’s no secret that I support Obama, -- but I honestly can’t help but admire any candidate who can win Pennsylvania by ten points (which, as of the time I'm writing this with 99% of precincts reporting, appears to be Clinton's margin of victory). It’s a great victory in anyone’s book.
And yet mathematically, Pennsylvania didn’t move her forward; it actually put her further behind. That’s what makes her win there tragic.
In a post the day before the Pennsylvania primary, I explained in detail what margins Clinton needed in order to win the majority of elected delegates before the last primary election occurs on June 3. This election is like a footrace, I explained; with a relatively small handful of primaries left, and a finite number of delegates remaining to be won, she needs to gain ground with every primary if she wants to make up the ground she lost in the first 40-plus contests.
Before Pennsylvania voted, Clinton trailed Obama in the elected-delegate count by 162. With only 566 delegates left to be won in the remaining contests, some fairly simple math showed that to catch Obama, she needed to win everything from Pennsylvania forward by 28 points – i.e., to win 64% of the elected delegates to Obama’s 36% in all the remaining contests (with the exception of North Carolina, where she currently trails by 17 points; all my math asked her to do there was tie). Again, this isn’t pessimism or misogyny, it’s just a calculation. Here’s the algorithm: (Remaining delegates) - (Obama’s lead in delegates) ÷ 2 + (Obama’s lead in delegates). You can do the math yourself.
If she didn’t win Pennsylvania (or any other primary) by 28 points, she’d only fall farther behind. If she won Pennsylvania by ten points, Clinton would actually have lost ground. In my post before the vote in Pennsylvania, I explained it this way:
Think of it like a hundred yard dash. Catching up to Obama after a ten point “victory” in Pennsylvania would be like standing on the starting line and expecting to win the race – with your opponent having a 36 yard head start. And every step you take that doesn’t gain you ground puts you closer to defeat: every time Clinton falls short of the requisite 64% or 68% or even higher margin, the margin she needs in the remaining states goes up even more. Or, as Richard Durbin put it, Clinton is “running out of real estate.”
Hillary didn’t win 64% of the vote in Pennsylvania. She only won about 55% to Obama’s 45% – the ten-point spread I predicted, about two-thirds short of the 28 point spread she needed. Accordingly, she’ll only net about 16 delegates (87 for her, 71 for Obama) – not enough to stay on pace to win. After her win in Pennsylvania, Clinton now has to win 68% of the vote in all the remaining primaries -- up four points from the 64% she needed just two days ago.
In the real world, this is an insurmountable problem for Clinton. In some states, she may have had a little wiggle room; if she fell a little short in Indiana she might make it up by winning extra delegates in Puerto Rico. But Pennsylvania was Clinton’s best shot at a big win in a populous state – her “if you can’t make it there, you can’t make it anywhere” test (apologies to Sinatra). A month ago, a PPP poll showed Clinton leading in Pennsylvania by 26 points. Pennsylvania’s primary came after the Reverend Wright and “bitter” brouhahas. Clinton has family in Pennsylvania; her father and brother went to school and played ball in Pennsylvania; she spent vacations in Pennsylvania; her grandfather taught her to shoot in Pennsylvania. And Pennsylvania has one of the last great Democratic political machines – read this frustrated post by Chuck Pennacchio, a great Democratic candidate who lost a Pennsylvania primary because that machine was aligned against him, if you want a taste of how powerful the Pennsylvania machine is – and that machine was overwhelmingly in Clinton’s camp. If she couldn’t make the requisite margin there, she won’t be able to make it in state after state after state, without any major slips, from now til the end of the campaign. (In fact, even if Michigan and Florida were miraculously counted in Clinton’s favor, she still would have needed 12 point wins from here on out – but she fell short of even that lower standard. So not even Michigan and Florida could help her win the nomination democratically.)
No: Pennsylvania was her best shot, and she fell short. Hope is a wonderful thing, but no amount of blind optimism can change the reality: Clinton’s not going to win the majority of democratically-elected “pledged” or popular delegates. More broadly: no logical person can continue to argue that Clinton can win in any popular or democratic sense of the word; it’s inevitable that she will lose the popular vote and the popular delegate count.
That doesn’t mean she can’t win the nomination. It does mean that the only way she can win the nomination is if the unelected Superdelegates overwhelmingly and unexpectedly decide to disregard the wishes of their collective constituents and hand the nomination to the candidate who lost the popular delegate count (and the popular vote, and the majority of states).
Here’s the important thing to take away from Clinton’s win/loss in Pennsylvania: because she no longer has any realistic chance of winning the “election” phase of the nominating process, the rest of us need to insist that the politicians, pundits and prognosticators stop putting so much undeserved attention on the upcoming primaries, and focus instead on the single issue that could decide this election in Clinton’s favor: the likelihood, the moral right, and the wisdom of allowing the Democratic Party’s aristocrats to override the will of millions of Democratic voters.
Personally, I don’t think it’s likely, moral, or strategically wise for the Supers to exercise a veto of the voters’ choice. I think Obama has already won this election, and inevitably will win the nomination, and that Clinton’s just the last one to realize it. But I also understand that many of her supporters disagree, and feel strongly that it’s both meet and proper for the Supers to do whatever they want. I’m willing to agree to disagree on that question, at least for now; I don’t really want to have that argument today, because it, too, is a distraction at this point.
Instead, all I’d like, from Clintonites and Obamanuts alike, is an agreement, based on simple logic, that the issue is no longer whether Clinton can win the election – she can’t, even if we count Michigan and Florida – but rather whether she can, and should, win a contrary outcome via a Superdelegate override.
Polls and predictions no longer count. Michigan and Florida, and Indiana and Puerto Rico and North Carolina and my own Oregon, no longer count, simply because their primaries can’t realistically alter the outcome of the election. The only remaining issue is the propriety and wisdom of Superdelegates overriding the voters. So let’s talk about that from now on, instead of wasting time and energy on distractions that make money for CNN and MSNBC and play into the candidates’ spin but aren’t actually relevant to the decision that’s being made.
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Monday, April 21, 2008
A Struggling American Distillery Breaks Its Silence on Hillary's Preference for Canadian Whisky
Bigwig multimillionaire politicians talk and talk about us regular folks – but do they ever really stop and think about the impact their actions have on the little guy?
For instance, when Hillary Clinton tried to establish street cred with the cool kids by tipping back a beer and a bump at Bronko’s Lounge in Crown Point, Indiana last week, did she realize the hardship her choice of an imported whisky made in Gimli, Manitoba might cause to the U.S. blended whiskey industry?
And when she picked Crown Royal as her “whisky” of choice, did she stop to consider how her elitist, big-city, pro-NAFTA favoritism for Canada might make the employees of small, rural, American whiskey distilleries feel?
Ever mindful of the little guy, I asked the employees of a small, rural, American whiskey distillery for their thoughts. Jeff Arnett, their Master Distiller himself, got back to me – and his story of a struggling American industry neglected by the free-trade Washington fat cats is so touching, I had to share it:
Dear Mr. Scott,
Your message from last week was sent to me, and I'm happy to respond. I'm sorry it has taken a few days to get back to you.
Down here in Lynchburg, Tennessee, we've been following the recent Whiskeygate story with interest. We're glad that Senator Clinton has a taste for whiskey. We're just puzzled as to why she's drinking a Canadian brand instead of a good American whiskey. Especially when there are nearly 200 registered voters here in Lynchburg proper, and, last time I checked, there won't be any Canadians voting in our Presidential election.
Sincerely,
Jeff Arnett
Jack Daniel's Master Distiller
Your friends at Jack Daniel's remind you to drink responsibly.
Sure, Crown Royal is so sweet and silky-smooth that even girls can drink it. Sure, it leaves the “e” out of the word “whiskey,” which is nifty in a Continental kind of way. Sure, it comes in a pretty, cushy-soft, purple velvet bag with fancy gold trim that’s fun to keep marbles in. And I'm not one of the many, many very smart thinkers who suspect that The Society of the Crown is an offshoot of Skull & Bones. But that doesn’t mean it’s OK to hate America! The next time she taps the bar and calls for a boilermaker, Senator Clinton needs to stop and think – think about the small, struggling Tennessee business she neglected, the American jobs she put in jeopardy – and those 200 American voters she turned her back on.
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For instance, when Hillary Clinton tried to establish street cred with the cool kids by tipping back a beer and a bump at Bronko’s Lounge in Crown Point, Indiana last week, did she realize the hardship her choice of an imported whisky made in Gimli, Manitoba might cause to the U.S. blended whiskey industry?
And when she picked Crown Royal as her “whisky” of choice, did she stop to consider how her elitist, big-city, pro-NAFTA favoritism for Canada might make the employees of small, rural, American whiskey distilleries feel?
Ever mindful of the little guy, I asked the employees of a small, rural, American whiskey distillery for their thoughts. Jeff Arnett, their Master Distiller himself, got back to me – and his story of a struggling American industry neglected by the free-trade Washington fat cats is so touching, I had to share it:
Dear Mr. Scott,
Your message from last week was sent to me, and I'm happy to respond. I'm sorry it has taken a few days to get back to you.
Down here in Lynchburg, Tennessee, we've been following the recent Whiskeygate story with interest. We're glad that Senator Clinton has a taste for whiskey. We're just puzzled as to why she's drinking a Canadian brand instead of a good American whiskey. Especially when there are nearly 200 registered voters here in Lynchburg proper, and, last time I checked, there won't be any Canadians voting in our Presidential election.
Sincerely,
Jeff Arnett
Jack Daniel's Master Distiller
Your friends at Jack Daniel's remind you to drink responsibly.
Sure, Crown Royal is so sweet and silky-smooth that even girls can drink it. Sure, it leaves the “e” out of the word “whiskey,” which is nifty in a Continental kind of way. Sure, it comes in a pretty, cushy-soft, purple velvet bag with fancy gold trim that’s fun to keep marbles in. And I'm not one of the many, many very smart thinkers who suspect that The Society of the Crown is an offshoot of Skull & Bones. But that doesn’t mean it’s OK to hate America! The next time she taps the bar and calls for a boilermaker, Senator Clinton needs to stop and think – think about the small, struggling Tennessee business she neglected, the American jobs she put in jeopardy – and those 200 American voters she turned her back on.
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Monday, April 14, 2008
Clinton Downs a Beer and a Bump to Impress the Cool Kids -- And This Dad's Not OK With It
As a father of daughters, I've got a big problem today with Hillary Clinton.
Let's be clear: I've got no problem with a President who occasionally chases down a slice of pizza with a cold brew or a shot of whiskey -- or both. Like most Oregonians, I'm particularly fond of our state's great microbrews and small wineries; I'm no prude about liquor (or much of anything else). And, of course, our current teetotaler President has been a disaster. (I'm put in mind of Lincoln during the Civil War: when an advisor complained that the North's most successful general was drinking too much, Abe ordered a barrel of the general's favorite whiskey sent to each of his other commanders.)
So if Clinton likes an (imported) Crown Royal, neat, back on the campaign plane at the end of the day, or -- without fanfare -- tips back a cool one with supporters at a pizza joint, I'm good. But that's not what she did Saturday night at Bronko’s Restaurant and Lounge in Crown Point, Indiana Saturday night. No: she bumped back a boilermaker to make a point about Barack Obama being "out of touch" with blue-collar voters, playing off his comment about some middle Americans being "bitter" at being ignored by Washington insiders.
Hillary Clinton is not normally a brew-and-a-bump kind of gal; she's just not. But she is a political animal, through and through -- and drinking boilermakers as a strategy for reaching Pennsylvania's working-class voters was even discussed jokingly in a segment of MSNBC's Hardball earlier this month, which Clinton's campaign staff wouldn't have missed. No: Clinton intentionally chose to do a particularly unhealthy kind of drinking -- chugging beer and whiskey at once, a combo designed to make you drunker, faster -- to increase her popularity with people she really has nothing in common with so that they'll vote for her.
Politics is politics, but it's not OK for Hillary Clinton or anyone else in public life to flaunt heavy public drinking in order to be more popular.
I'm the father of two beautiful, brilliant, creative, loving, sometimes gloriously self-confident, sometimes tragically insecure daughters, ages 12 and 14. Both are deeply engaged and opinionated about politics (at a John Kerry rally, my then-8-year-old tugged my arm and said, "hey, Dad, isn't that Peter DeFazio?"). And both, like everyone their age, are sometimes too concerned with popularity.
The older one will start high school next year -- where, I know full well, she'll start making delicate decisions about boys, alcohol, drugs, and the whole dangerous balance between exercising independence and experimenting with life, on the one hand, and remaining safe, on the other. I'm no fool: I know she'll make some decisions I won't agree with. My hope is that she'll be able to draw on varied sources of wisdom to help her make decisions that are still sound, still sensible, even if they aren't exactly the ones her dad would choose. And as she does that -- as she tries to figure out how to grow up and move beyond my paternalistic rules to become a wise and self-sufficient and complete woman -- I'd like her to be able to look to accomplished, self-confident, successful women like Hillary Clinton as role models.
If one of my daughters, trying to win Student Body President, showed up at a keg party and got drunk in order to score points with the "populars" (ask your kid if you don't know who they are), I'd be incredibly disappointed -- and angry, and concerned. Should I feel any differently when Hillary Clinton does it?
Fortunately, my daughters already know that what Clinton did is wrong. At a supposedly irresponsible age, they know it's not cool to misuse alcohol to "fit in." Even for adults, even to win a big election, it's just. not. cool.
But Hillary Clinton -- the candidate who trumpets her experience and worldliness as predictors of her supposed good judgment -- doesn't seem to have figured that out. She's drinking in public to look cool and win votes. For the first woman with a serious shot at the White House to trumpet an unhealthy kind of drinking in order to gain publicity points, is to display either an utter tone-deafness to her role as a model for America's girls (and even adults), or a culpable willingness to ignore her moral compass in order to win. She's either inexcusably foolish or inexcusably calculating; take your pick.
Either way, she deserves to be grounded by the responsible adults in the Democratic Party, not elected Student Body President.
***********************
(Photo credit: AP)
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