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 The White House now claims that President Bush's infamous remarks to the Israeli Knesset yesterday, likening those who propose direct talks with Iran and Islamist terrorist groups to the appeasers of Nazi Germany, were addressed not at Barack Obama but at Jimmy Carter.
This would be plausible, on its face, if it weren't for the fact that it's taken them a whole day to come up with it. President Bush may not be the world's most coherent speaker, but it's natural to be suspicious when it takes someone more than a day to figure out what he was talking about.
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Continue reading "Bush-Obama-McCain and Appeasement" »
Hillary Clinton stepped her efforts to heal the rift in the Democratic Party last night with a warning to her supporters that it would be a "grave error" if they chose to vote for Republican John McCain over her rival Barack Obama come November. In a tacit acknowledgement of her rapidly dwindling presidential hopes and the divisive nature of what has been one of the dirtiest Democratic primary fights in recent years, Clinton told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that she would lend her full weight to Obama's likely presidential campaign. Clinton made her remarks after being asked by a viewer why she thought so many of her supporters say they would vote for McCain if Obama was the Democratic nominee. It would be a "terrible mistake," she warned, if they decided to do so.
"Anybody who has ever voted for me or voted for Barack has much more in common in terms of what we want to see happen in our country and in the world with the other than they do with John McCain," she said.
"I'm going to work my heart out for whoever our nominee is. Obviously, I'm still hoping to be that nominee, but I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that anyone who supported me ... understands what a grave error it would be not to vote for Senator Obama."
Her response constitutes a marked departure from earlier comments on the campaign trail in which she has appeared to suggest her Republican rival would make a better president than Obama. She drew widespread criticism in March when she told reporters: "I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."
The comment triggered speculation that Clinton, known to be a "very close" friend of McCain (her husband's words) would in fact prefer the Republican in the White House, not least because he has already made clear he will only serve for four years due to his advanced age - meaning she would not have long to wait before she could launch another presidential bid.
But apparently this is not the case. (Or, if you're of a cynical persuasion, it is, but voicing it would be political suicide - there's no doubt she's already had more than a few verbal slaps from senior Democrats over her Rovian tactics against one of their own.)
Either way, she's got a lot more backpedalling to do if she's got any hope of convincing her supporters to back Obama, given that she's been pretty successful in painting him as an elitist, black supremacist, inexperienced and reckless pansy who may also be a secret Muslim. According to exit polls from West Virginia, 35 per cent of her supporters there say they would vote for John McCain if Obama is was the nominee, while a further 24 per cent said they would sit the election out.
The hope is, of course, that by election time the antagonism between the two camps will be a distant memory and that Democrats will fall in behind whoever ends up being their nominee. On November 5, Americans will find out whether that theory was correct.
 Nobody really won in West Virginia. Hillary Clinton's decisive victory failed to take her any closer to the Democratic nomination, while Obama's loss raised the spectre of deserting Reagan Democrats come his all-but-certain candidacy in November.
 Surveying the US press this morning, Clinton might have felt pretty deflated by its collective effort to find a hundred new ways to say the word "hollow." "Symbolic", "meaningless", "empty" - barely was a newspaper article or blog to be found that wasn't littered with unflattering adjectives.
Part of Clinton's difficulty - apart from a mathematical problem that only a pupil at Hogwarts could solve - was that a number of prominent figures in her campaign, notably Bill, had set the bar rather too high - about 15 per cent too high, in fact. It was never about winning in West Virginia - the demographics of which were always going to work in Clinton's favour - but about the size of the victory. And as numerous commentators have noted today, after the former president cited 80 per cent of a 600,000 turnout as the result required to alter the dynamics of the race, suddenly 67 per cent of 330,000 turnout looks a little weak. Her campaign is clearly starting to acknowledge the reality of her situation: not only are advisers "privately" assuring the press that an exit is approaching, but her victory speech in Charleston last night sounded much like a pitch for the VP spot on the ballot.
Clinton's win did in fact bolster her argument that Obama has problems pulling in the Reagan Democrats who dominate this region of America, but as it comes too late to change the dynamics of the race, it will serve only to make Democrats a little queasier about their all-but-certain choice of nominee. Critics excoriate her for playing dirty on issues of race - which the Republicans would no doubt have raised anyway, but perhaps with less credibility among conservative Democrats than when coming from one of the grande-dames of their own party.
Obama may be able to turn all this to his advantage, however. Putting his problems into stark focus this early in the election season gives him the time to tackle his problem areas - his schedule for today, filled with talks on the economy in Michigan factories, is a clear sign his campaign is about to go blue-collar crazy.
A selection of comment from the web:
Stumper, Newsweek:
" And the winner is... no one. Hillary Clinton may have received the most votes in today's West Virginia primary, taking 67 percent of the vote and netting 10 delegates. Barack Obama may have moved one step closer to clinching the Democratic nomination. But as the polls close, the odds of Clinton topping her party's ticket are still impossibly long, and the worries about Obama's potential weakness among white, working-class swing voters in November are more justified than ever. Thanks for nothing, West Virginia. You may want to consider changing your slogan from "Open for Business" to "Everybody Loses.""
Salon:
"Clinton dropped some of her recent, explicit arguments against Obama (in her victory speech), but the one she made implicitly -- that he's less electable than she is -- isn't likely to change the cold, hard truth of the numbers. Bill Clinton said last week that Hillary needed to win 80 percent of the vote with a turnout of 600,000 -- which would have surpassed even the wildest dreams of Democratic strategists here -- to "make the earth move" and change the dynamics of the race. Tuesday's win was an overwhelming one, yes, but not of the seismic-force variety. And considering that Obama has picked up more than two dozen superdelegates since last week's elections, including four on Tuesday alone, he's rapidly moving closer to claiming the nomination."
Maureen Dowd, New York Times:
"In grim times, a bitter Hillary clings to bitter voters who in grim times supposedly cling to guns, religion and antipathy to people who aren’t like them.
"Mining that antipathy, the New York senator has been working hard to get the hard-working white voters of hardscrabble Appalachia so she can show that a black man can’t yet be elected president."
Presidential Candidates:
"Although the Clinton campaign and her supporters will try to make a big deal out of her large margin of victory in West Virginia, the fact is that the state is perfectly tailored to Clinton’s demographic strengths and her large victory is not a surprise at all. ... What is interesting is that while Obama has won 22 contests by a margin of at least 20%, West Virginia is only Clinton’s 3rd 20%+ win! If you are a Clinton supporter who somehow thinks this WV win actually means something, read that again please. Obama has had 22 large wins, while West Virginia only Clinton’s 3rd such large victory. The other 2 contests Clinton won by 20+% were Oklahoma and Clinton’s home state of Arkansas."
Powerline:
"The fact that voters in a given Democratic primary favor Clinton over Obama doesn't mean that many of them will favor McCain over Obama; nor should we assume that Clinton voters who say they'll vote for McCain will actually follow through.
"Nonetheless, the margin in the West Virginia primary suggests real resistance to Obama among Democrats in that state. Now, Obama doesn't need to win West Virginia in November any more than he needs to win Kentucky, where he's scheduled to be trounced next week. But there are many Democratic voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania who fit the West Virginia and/or Kentucky profile. Obama may need to do reasonably well with such voters to carry these two crucial states."
McClatchy:
"Her argument about West Virginia's importance undercuts the value of winning the primary there. By noting that every Democratic nominee since 1976 has won the primary, she inadvertently links herself not only to candidates such as Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton who won the state in spring AND fall — but also to Walter Mondale, Al Gore and John Kerry, who went on to lose it in general elections. Second, Obama could carry many of the Democratic votes in November that went to Clinton in the spring."
(UPDATE) What to make of the exit polls? Another very large chunk of Hillary voters (as in Indiana and N Carolina) saying they won't vote for Obama in November. And, a detail but a disturbingly symbolic one for Obama, very large numbers saying they think Obama essentially shares the views of the fiery Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
I don't think these numbers are conclusive. Clearly there are going to be potential Democratic voters who will go for McCain over Obama in November. The question we can't really answer is how many - though we can be just about certain it won't be as many as said they will to the exit pollsters today. The other pertinent questions are: will the massive turnout for Obama we can expect from blacks and presumably young voters outweigh this anti-Obama vote? And will the overhelming advantage the Dems have in any case on the issues and direction of the country (see today's Washington Post poll) be enough to safeguard a wide Dem margin so that Obama can afford to lose a few million and still win? At this stage I'd say the answer to each of those last two questions is a very tentative "Yes" but really, who knows?
That's what it is. My rough calculation from the raw exit polls is about a 30-point landslide for Hillary. It's her second biggest primary victory (after Arkansas - one of her home states) of the whole campaign.
Does it change anything? No. Obama continues to close in on the number of delegates needed to win the nomination.
But it presumably means she keeps going. She has a chance - a long shot, but a chance - of having a majority of the popular vote (by some measures) when the primaries are over. That could give her a sliver of an argument that she, not he, has a claim to the Democratic nod.
 Rarely has a projected 36-point win been so inconsequential. With just 28 unpledged delegates up for grabs in the Mountain State, even such a decisive victory will have only a negligible effect on the mathematics of the primary race. Hillary Clinton's hopes rest on the slim possibility that a landslide win in a largely white, blue-collar state will convince the superdelegates of her sole remaining argument - that she is the only Democratic candidate who can win over "hard-working Americans, white Americans" who might otherwise vote for John McCain.
 Admittedly, the demographics of the state, and her projected margin of victory, might lend some weight to that argument. And it is likely that Kentucky, which votes next week, will show a similar trend. But privately - as the Huffington Post points out - her advisers acknowledge that both states probably offer too little, and come too late, to change the nature of the game. Articles predicting a Clinton victory in West Virginia now battle for space alongside analyses of how "Obama defeated Clinton for the nomination", a sure sign that there will be no Lazarus-like resurrection for Clinton this time, at least if the press have anything to do with it (and they do). Meanwhile senior Democratic party figures are sending ever starker warnings to the former first lady that while they will allow her the time to stage a dignified exit, a party-wrecking final shoot-out will not impact well on her political future.
In reality, Clinton's only real hope of snatching the nomination is the emergence of a scandal - one of such magnitude that Obama's presidential bid is completely derailed, leaving her as the party's saviour. But time is running out - increasingly an afterthought to the Obama campaign, aides to the Illinois senator say that he will win enough delegates next week in Oregon to give him a clear and unassailable majority - and that he will then make a unilateral declaration of victory.
Here's what the press has to say:
The Caucus - New York Times:
"It is not clear whether even a gigantic win here could reverse her fortunes, which took a turn for the worse last week when she lost North Carolina by a big margin and won Indiana by a small one. A big win here would certainly increase her overall popular vote, which her campaign hopes would help impress superdelegates that she would be a stronger candidate in November than Mr. Obama. But the state has too few delegates — 28 — to make much of a dent in Mr. Obama’s delegate lead."
Politico:
"If Clinton can rack up victories equal to or larger than the gaudy 30-point leads she holds in most polls of West Virginia and Kentucky voters, it would help her campaign press its central case to uncommitted superdelegates. Clinton aides argue that Obama has trouble with the working-class and elderly white voters who make up big chunks of the electorates in those states, and whose support Clinton contends will be key if Democrats are to defeat the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).
"The argument is unlikely to block Obama’s nomination, which is viewed as inevitable by an increasing number of pundits and superdelegates."
Salon:
"Tuesday's election might prove to be more important as a bellwether for November than as a prize in the fight for the Democratic nomination... The problem for Obama is that if any state is tailor-made for registered Democrats to abandon the ticket in droves if he's on it, it may be West Virginia. The state's population is older, whiter, poorer and worse educated than most of the rest of the nation -- all demographics that have flocked to Clinton in primaries so far. This may be the state where one of the Clinton campaign's arguments about electability -- if you don't win the state in the primary, you can't win it in the general election -- comes closest to being true."
ABC:
"Even if Sen. Clinton goes quickly and quietly when the voting is done, the damage until that point is real (it's not like the Republicans are taking this time off) -- and there's nothing quick or quiet about what's going on.
"Clinton is heavily favored to win West Virginia, and Sen. Barack Obama doesn't seem to care very much; in the week since Indiana and North Carolina, he makes his first and last campaign stop there on Monday. Unless the superdelegates change their minds -- and fast -- even wide Obama losses will matter approximately not at all -- except that they might, just not in the way Clinton hopes they will."
 US commentators might already be reading the last rites of the Clinton campaign, but in the mind of the former first lady, there is apparently no deathbed from which she cannot rise again. In the wake of her hairsbreadth Indiana win and resounding North Carolina loss on Tuesday, the Clinton camp has been busy pounding the few remaining paths which might lead her - albeit precariously - to the nomination.
 But even the most talented book-cooker would struggle to make these numbers add up. With no hope of catching rival Barack Obama in either the delegate count or the popular vote, Clinton has only two avenues left to pursue. The first, and most crucial, is to strike a deal which would see the disqualified delegates from the Florida and Michigan primaries seated at the convention. The Hillary For President website posted a petition this week demanding that Florida in particular be counted, and the campaign has included the state’s results in its own tallies. Clinton, meanwhile, continues to refer to them in her stump speeches. Determined to portray Obama’s resistance to such a move as undemocratic, the former first lady sent an open letter to her rival denouncing him for obstructing a solution. Obama meanwhile has spoken of a need to seat the delegates in some way – but his newfound willingness to do so reflects his confidence that his lead is now unassailable.
Michigan is a harder sell, however. Whereas in Florida, Obama was a candidate but did not campaign – in accordance with party rules penalizing states for holding primaries early – in Michigan, he was absent from the ballot entirely. Clinton, however, defied party rules to remain on the ballot – and is now hoping her maneuvers will pay off. But, as a pro-Hillary superdelegate quoted by the Huffington Post indicates, she is failing to gain much traction. Says Mame Reiley, a member of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee, "it's a whole different ballgame with Michigan. My decision there might make Hillary not happy with me."
Her second strategy - one that relies heavily on the success of the first - is to convince the superdelegates that only she can win against John McCain come November. According to congressional aides and lawmakers quoted by Politico - during a visit to Capitol Hill on Wednesday Clinton simply ambled into the offices of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and asked for any uncommitted superdelegates that happened to be around. This scattergun approach does not appear to be working too well so far - in the three days since the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, Obama has picked up six superdelegates, while Clinton has taken one and lost one, for a net gain of zero.
Her increasingly desperate attempt to convince superdelegates that Obama is unelectable has also backfired rather spectacularly in recent days. In an interview with USA Today, she finally voiced what she has long been implying - that Obama cannot win because of his skin colour. "Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again," she said, adding: "There's a pattern emerging here."
Her comments prompted a trenchant editorial by the New York Times, which formerly endorsed the New York senator, calling on her to conduct herself with dignity if she insisted on remaining in the race.
"Mrs. Clinton will be making a terrible mistake — for herself, her party and for the nation — if she continues to press her candidacy through negative campaigning with disturbing racial undertones. We believe it would also be a terrible mistake if she launches a fight over the disqualified delegations from Florida and Michigan," the paper said. Referring to her remarks, it added: "Yes, there is a pattern — a familiar and unpleasant one. It is up to Mrs. Clinton to change it if she hopes to have any shot at winning the nomination or preserving her integrity and her influence if she loses."
But bowing out with dignity does not appear to be a concept with which "Rocky" Clinton is familiar. She continues to insist she will battle it out to the last - though there are signs that privately, her campaign knows it is in its death throes. Lawrence O'Donnell writes on the Huffington Post of a conversation he recently had with a senior campaign official, who spoke of an end to the race by June 15 - after the last remaining primaries but a full two months ahead of the convention. This official could not bring himself to say that Clinton would drop out, saying only that she was a reasonable person, but the meaning was clear, O' Donnell writes. "The Clinton campaign has not lost its grip on reality," he says. "Yes, Clinton spokespersons publicly seem to be lost on gravity-free planet Clinton, but privately they know the end is near."
Very late update Indiana is too close to call at shortly after midnight eastern time. There are going to be lots of questions asked about the curious vote counting in Obama-heavy Lake County which seems to be closing the gap right at the close. But whoever eventually winds up with his/her nose in front in Indiana is now largely irrelevant. This is Obama's night . It is the beginning of the end for Hillary.
8.45 Somebody will soon have to tell Hillary that this is, for all intents and purposes, over.
Even though she has won Indiana and will claim a split decision on the night, it's not enough. The numbers were so adverse for her before tonight that she needed a string of big victories even to have a chance now. But tonight she has won Indiana by a smaller margin than Obama has won N Carolina. That means Obama has increased his lead in delegates (there were many more at stake in NC than in Indiana) and, by a sizeable margin in the popular vote.
Hillary's only hope is a complete and improbable sweep in the remaining primaries between now and Jun 3. And that still won't be enough. She will also need to win an unholy fight over the issue of seating Michigan and Florida Democratic delegates in a way that will absolutely confirm to Obama supporters that she has, in effect, stolen the nomination from him. That way lies catastrophe for her and the party.
8.13pm Eastern Time Guess what? Another status quo primary night. Obama wins N Carolina comfortably and Hillary seems to have a secure lead in Indiana. The race goes on.
But the basic arithmetic favouring Obama doesn't change. If they roughly split the delegates tonight, he still has a solid lead with a rapidly diminishing number of delegates still to win. And his big N Carolina win erases Hilary's popular vote margin in Pennsylvania two weeks ago. Hillary is left still hoping for an Obama implosion to give her a chance.
This week we'll be counting down the top five Hillary Clinton
parodies - some made by YouTube users, others by US comedians. Check in
daily to see each entry.
Clinton supporters, never fear - we'll be taking on Barack Obama and John McCain next month.
This week we'll be counting down the top five Hillary Clinton parodies - some made by YouTube users, others by US comedians. Check in daily to see each entry.
Clinton supporters, never fear - we'll be taking on Barack Obama and John McCain next month.
At number 2:
Hattie Garlick writes:
"It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt". Thus spake Dana Milbank (offering a paraphrase from Proverbs before him), summarising the bulk of angry blogs that appeared in the aftermath of Jeremhiah Wright's speech at the National Press Club on Monday.
Beofre 30 television cameras, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended his view than Zionism is a form of racism and that the government created the AIDS virus to eradicate racial minorities, accused the States of terrorism and - according to Victor Davis Hanson his biggest mistake - insulted the liberal corps of reporters who had amassed to record his rantings.
This is one of many reasons that his speech marked a serious turning point in the danger posed by Wright to Obama's candidacy. The rev has made it personal with the press, shifting things up a gear. Expecting a media storm that would inevitably have embarrassed Obama and probably have attempted to reimplicate him in Wright's skewed world-view, Obama was forced to call a press conference to finally denounce his former pastor: "There wasn't anything constructive out of yesterday. All it was was a bunch of rants that aren't grounded in truth." All of which could have been avoided had Obama set an example of moral outrage from the outset.
But the ghost of a moral link with Wright didn't only set Obama up for a fall with the press. "The white poor and middle class Hispanics" writes Hanson - or in other words, the exact demographic with whom Obama needs desperately to make inroads "look at Wright's middle-class upbringing, his mansion and perks, and wonder why he is... so venomous towards the society by which he has done so well." Wright's rants encourage the ordinary voter to turn his gaze away from race and towards class and, perhaps ironically, this could work against Obama's interests. Because here, another ghost of a moral link is forged between Obama and Wright in the shape of Michelle Obama, who's twin-sets and pearls and $1.65 million home grate against her statement that for "the first time in [her] adult life" she is proud of her country. And it only another short leap from her to Obama's own statement about the bitterness of small town America.
Continue reading "Righting Wright's Wrongs" »
This week we'll be counting down the top five Hillary Clinton
parodies - some made by YouTube users, others by US comedians. Check in
daily to see each entry.
Clinton supporters, never fear - we'll be taking on Barack Obama and John McCain next month.
At number 3:
This week we'll be counting down the top five Hillary Clinton
parodies - some made by YouTube users, others by US comedians. Check in
daily to see each entry.
Clinton supporters, never fear - we'll be taking on Barack Obama and John McCain next month.
At number 4:
This week we'll be counting down the top five Hillary Clinton parodies - some made by YouTube users, others by US comedians. Check in daily to see each entry.
Clinton supporters, never fear - we'll be taking on Barack Obama and John McCain next month.
At number 5:
Has last night's win for Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania altered the dynamics of the Democratic race? The media consensus appears to be that while there has been no substantive change, her solid 10-point victory has raised some awkward questions for Barack Obama.
 Why, after a string of phenomenal successes, is he struggling to land a knock out blow on his rival? Is Clinton correct in her assertion that he is unable to carry the big states crucial to a Democratic victory in the autumn? The Obama camp has some strong answers, arguing that the former point could equally be applied to Clinton, the one time presumptive nominee. On the latter, it asserts that there are in fact not three or four battleground states but 10 or 11, a large swathe of which the Illinois senator has won. Nevertheless, it is a case that the campaign is going to have to argue very forcefully over the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, concerns over the destructive nature of the campaign are reaching stratospheric levels. The New York Times today appeared to be backtracking on its initial endorsement of Clinton with a scathing editorial urging her to drop her "mean, vacuous, desperate" tactics now for the sake of the party and calling on superdelegates to end the bloodbath as soon as possible. The Washington Post cited exit polls suggesting that seven out of 10 voters thought Hillary had been unfair in her attacks, while half said the same of Obama. In another article, it appeared to query the utility of Hillary staying in the race, noting that it was almost impossible for her to catch her rival in the delegate count or popular vote. It quoted loyal Clinton supporters privately expressing doubts about her ability to prevail, even in the wake of her Pennsylvania win.
A selection of comment from the web:
Top of the Ticket, LA Times:
"Psychologically, it's a significant result -- one that should cause many leading Democrats to listen a little more intently to her case that she still represents the party's best chance for victory in November."
New York Times editorial:
"Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.
If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race.
"It is getting to be time for the superdelegates to do what the Democrats had in mind when they created superdelegates: settle a bloody race that cannot be won at the ballot box."
Real Clear Politics, TIME:
"If the superdelegates had grown concerned after Ohio about Obama's ability to win lower income whites in the general election - these results will not alleviate their worries. Pittsburgh, Scranton, and Erie all swung decisively for Clinton. If Ohio had them worried, so will these results.
"As for whether it will serve Clinton's short-term goal of spinning herself as still having a chance to capture the nomination - that remains to be seen."
Salon.com:
"There are no verities, just various forms of spin-dried argumentation. Does Pennsylvania prove that -- like the March 4 Ohio and Texas primaries -- Obama cannot close the deal when he is one big-state victory away from being bathed in triumphal confetti at the Denver Convention? Or does Pennsylvania underscore for Democrats the dangers of scorched-earth politics...?
"Given his delegate lead, Democratic rules divvying up the primary vote proportionally, and the fact that there are only seven states left on the political calendar, Obama might survive a near-wipeout in the remaining delegate contests. But watching Obama stumble across the finish line as the presumptive nominee is not a formula to inspire the Democrats with confidence heading into the fall elections."
Huffington Post:
"How proud the Clintonistas must be. They have learned how to rival what Hillary once termed the "vast right-wing conspiracy" in the effort to destroy a viable Democratic leader who dares to stand in the way of their ambitions. The tactics used to kneecap Barack Obama are the same as had been turned on Bill Clinton in earlier times, from radical-baiting associates to challenging his resolve in protecting the nation from foreign enemies. Sen. Clinton's eminently sensible and centrist -- to a fault -- opponent is now viewed as weak and even vaguely unpatriotic because he is thoughtful. Neither Karl Rove nor Dick Morris could have done a better job."
By Gerard Baker, US Editor
11.05pm That was a strikingly different speech by Obama. Where Hillary promised to fight, he promised to heal; where she was pugnacious and partisan, he was soothing and consensual. You can see why the media falls for him so helplessly. He can turn a phrase and lift the spirits and certainly he promises something different.
Of course, whether it amounts to anything is another matter. But the two speeches did rather neatly capture the two campaign messages heading into the final days of this primary election. The Fighter versus The Healer.
10.32pm Well Hillary's spoken and I think we've got the message. She's a fighter. A Fighter. A FIGHTER. She's going to fight for you and fight for me and fight against them. She's going to fight them in the shopping malls and in the bowling alleys and in the pool halls. She'll fight until the last dog dies. And then she'll get up and start fighting again. FIGHT!
That, I guess is her appeal. You can't deny it. They keep writing her off and she keeps coming back - displaying the fight you need to win the presidency in November (unlike that elitist, latte-drinking, arugula-buying, bowling-incompetent other guy).,
It was, to be fair, a gracious victory speech, with a couple of nice nods to her opponent. One of her best speeches, I think. And so. On she goes. With just enough of a win , and just enough of a doubt in voters' minds about Obama's electability, to keep this race going for a few weeks yet.
9.40pm Awaiting victory and concession speeches, a couple of thoughts: First, clearly, Pennsylvania has resolved nothing. Hillary did not win by enough to dispel the strong doubts about her viability (she can't win the popular vote; she can't win on delegates; even in Pennsylvania, solid home turf for her in demographic terms, she only ekes out a single-digit victory). But she won by enough to make a plausible case that she should carry on (Obama keeps losing big states, he couldn't convert his huge financial advantage; the doubts about his electability keep growing).
Second, McCain again looks like a winner tonight. The simple truth of the Democratic campaign is that neither candidate has done enough to remove the doubts hanging over them. And we've got at least another month of this.
8.51pm MSNBC, now the semi-official cable channel of left wing Democrats, has called it for Hillary. Less interesting than meets the eye, one thinks, because all depends on the margin.
8.45pm Still very few real results but some slight tweaking of the exits means the margin is a little narrower than an hour ago - 52-48 for Hillary. If that's right it would be the most pyrrhic of victories - nothing like enough to change the fundamental arithmetic of the race that favours Obama. If (that word again) the exits are right, Obama will have done better than in Ohio - a similar state regarded as a kind of benchmark for Pennsylvania. He owes this improvement, according to those iffy exits, to a much better result among white voters than he got in Ohio. Very interesting, after all that's happened in the last few weeks (Jeremiah Wright, the bitter clinging of white working class voters etc.) Still, did I say those exits were not necessarily reliable?
8.15pm Coy as ever, the networks are not offically releasing the headlines from their exit poll results but a quick calculation from the cross-tabulations suggests Hillary has won by about 53-47. In amost all previous primaries these exits have tended to overstate Obama's support. If that pattern is repeated it means Hillary's margin could be anywhere between 8 and 15 per cent, which is an intriguing range. If the result is at the bottom end of that range it'll be a status quo result - not a big enough win to change fundamentally the dynamic of the race or significantly dent Obama's advantage. If it's at the top end, it could be a game-changer, a big enough Hillary win to breathe some serious life into the remaining contests. Stay tuned.
 I don't imagine many bets have been placed on Hillary Clinton pulling out of the Democratic race tomorrow. Whether a supporter or not, you've got to admire the former first lady's tenacity - she has the grip of Spiderman on steroids. But a particularly bad result - which at her stage in the game means either a loss or a narrow win - could put her under enormous pressure from senior Democrats to withdraw for the good of the party.
 As I explained in my post yesterday, it's not the win but the size of the victory that matters for Clinton in Pennsylvania. She needs to win by some 25 points to have any hope of catching Barack Obama in the popular vote, without which it will be difficult to convince superdelegates to ignore her rival's higher delegate count and pick her as the most electable candidate.
A double-digit victory has been widely touted as the result that would justify her remaining in the race - though surrogates were today suggesting a five or six point win would allow her to claim a success in the face of her rival's much higher spending in the state. While this would still leave her flailing in the mathmatical wilderness, her campaign may well have managed expectations down to a point where this inconvenient fact could be glossed over.
In that case, she would no doubt continue at least until Indiana and North Carolina on May 6th. In both states, she would need to at least hold Obama to a tie or her continued campaign would start to resemble a bad David Lynch movie. With the Illinois senator polling strongly in both states, at present the Obamaite prediction of a May 7 finish to the campaign seems the most likely scenario.
Should her Pennsylvania win be much narrower, however, say two or three points, it would be almost impossible for her to claim any justification for staying in the race. But given Hillary "Rocky" Clinton's almost superhuman ability to keep on getting up off the mat, even that might not be enough to count her out.
 Hillary Clinton's threat to "obliterate" Iran, in an ABC interview broadcast just as the voters of Pennsylvania prepared to head to the polls this morning, doesn't appear to have been particularly well received by anyone other than the hard right, which is somewhat telling as to where the former first lady is pitching her policies - or at least campaign pledges - these days. While one assumes that her campaign must have known what she was planning, it too seemed a little taken aback at just how belligerent and absolute her language was: it spent a large part of last night and this morning frantically backpeddling away from her apparent commitment to nuke a large swathe of the Middle East.
The ABC clip can be seen here:
A few key points were repeatedly raised by pundits. First, in exactly what scenario would this obliteration take place? Would a proxy attack, for example by Lebanese Hezbollah, justify the obliteration of which she speaks? Or would a retaliatory attack by Tehran, for example if Israel had launched strikes against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities (a reasonably likely prospect) be sufficient cause? Or, as her statement might be interpreted, would a suspicion that Iran was considering such an attack be met with a preemptive strike? Some also noted that while the second part of her answer (below) made a strike conditional on Iranian aggression, the first part seemed to suggest the only condition was a Clinton presidency.
“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” Clinton said. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”
Further queries were raised as to exactly what she meant by "total obliteration." Though campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson insisted that she was not alluding to a nuclear strike, the candidate herself appeared to reaffirm the reference during a later interview with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.
"We used (deterrence) very well during the Cold War when we had a bipolar world and what I think the president should do and what our policy should be is to make it very clear to the Iranians that they would be risking massive retaliation were they to launch a nuclear attack on Israel," she said.
If so, what kind of aggression against Israel does she think would justify an obliteration of entire country and its 71 million innocent citizens? Not to mention the deadly nuclear fallout across much of the Middle East and quite possibly Europe? Given that the US intelligence community doesn't believe that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, perhaps employing genocidal phraseology of the kind that usually gets President Ahmadinejad referred to the United Nations might not be the best way to defuse Mid East tensions? Interestingly enough, her husband doesn't seem to think it's that good a move either.
The interview with Olbermann can be seen here.
Comment from the web:
Daily Kos:
"To obliterate Iran using nuclear weapons would make the entire Middle East uninhabitable! What Middle Eastern country or any NATO country would agree to this idea????? ...
"Since when is it ok to threaten to kill 70 million innocent people because of what a psychotic government does???? If I assume that Hillary just hadn't considered the effect on all the other Middle Eastern and neighboring countries, why is she ok with the idea of killing even one entire country? What is wrong with her head and her heart?"
Outside the Beltway:
"For one thing, I’m a little disappointed that Clinton didn’t take GMA to task for the premise of the question. Namely, the fact that Iran doesn’t actually possess any nuclear weapons to attack Israel with.
"Secondly, I find it a little problematic that Clinton offered an unequivocal commitment to “obliterate” Iran in the event that Iran attacked Israel. What if Israel attacked Iran first? Would we back them unequivocally then? No matter what the cause or reason for Israel’s attack?"
AMERICAblog:
"This is an incredibly dangerous topic. And she made a mess of it, repeatedly, to the point where her staff had to get involved to try to make amends, so that now our enemies and our allies have no idea what Hillary's position is on war with Iran, the defense of Israel, and the possible use of US nuclear weapons. Even more disturbing is the possibility that Hillary made these comments, this apparent flip-flop on US nuclear policy, in order to curry favor with voters in Pennsylvania on the eve of that state's primary. ... It's a possible nuclear war scenario, and Hillary, in an effort to act all tough, win a few votes, and take a jab at Obama, played politics with our national security and sent the wrong message to the world, the wrong message to our enemies. It's 3am, folks, and the phone just rang. And Hillary got it wrong."
Political Byline:
"This nation, for the last 5 years, has been in quagmire called Iraq... The tough reality is, that involving this country in another military escalation of this sort would do nothing more than further strain and possibly destroy what military we have left. This is outside of the scope of instituting a military draft. Not to mention, any sort of military action, outside of the approval of the United Nations, would result in further destabilization of that very region. Not to mention the United States' relations with our allies in the region."
Instapundit:
"I've often echoed the prediction that Hillary Clinton would make the most uncompromising wartime President in United States history, but here's some evidence that it just might be true...
"If the Iranians are smart, they'll believe her. I think she'd kinda like obliterating somebody.
"I like Hillary best when she shows her hawkishness."
Hattie Garlick writes: As Obama and Clinton begin squaring up (to the sound of the Rocky theme tune) for tomorrow's primary, today's campaign finance reports bare their Achilles heels to the public.
Obama raised $41 million in March and Clinton $20 million. This might sound like good news for Obama, if it didn't represent a roughly $10 million drop from the previous month's figures. Kyle E. Moore puts the dip down to the Wright effect, but as the petulant pastor did little to dent Obama's performance in the polls it seems likely to represent a less phenomena-lead, more long-term trend: general donating fatigue. Demoracts, who have so far reached into their pockets and pulled out a collective $371 million in donations, are contemplating the dregs of their funds and their generosity, even towards the golden boy.
Yet while Obama's Midas touch might be fading, he still has around $51 million in the pot. For Clinton, the sums are far grimmer. The $20 million hauled in by her team in March is offset by reported debts of $10.3 million. If the downturn continues, the pressure to stay down for the count won't only be voiced in terms of risked party cohesion, but of economics too.
Obama has been able to pour $8.6 million into airing 11,788 adverts on Pennsylvanian televisions this month, a figure Clinton has been unable even to halve. By Tuesday, the New York Times estimates that the Democrats between them will have spent $20 million: making this the most expensive primary in state history.
If today's polls and all those preceding them are to be believed, Clinton will win the Keystone State tomorrow. But even here in Clinton's family home the margin has narrowed significantly since the Obama advertising machine kick started on March 25, showing the power of Obama's multiplied funds. And with the polls not looking good for May 6th's primary in North Carolina, Clinton may simply begin to look like a very bad investment: much like a seventh Rocky film.
 With under 24 hours to go until the last major contest in the primary season, polls indicate that Barack Obama has little hope of catching rival Hillary Clinton, for whom the state’s large blue collar population is a natural constituency. But certain figures suggest that he has every chance of eating so far into her margin of victory that she can no longer justify continuing in the Democratic race.
 Most late polls put Clinton with a 5-7 point lead in Pennsylvania, the only remaining primary state with a healthy crop of delegates – 158 - up for grabs. But with no prospect of catching Obama in the overall delegate count, the Clinton camp knows that winning will not be enough. In order to convince the all-important super-delegates who will decide the nomination that she is the most electable candidate, she must win big.
Today’s Zogby poll – the most recent survey available - shows Clinton leading Obama 48 to 42 per cent, while a poll of polls by Real Clear Politics gives Clinton a 5.3 point margin over her rival. However this is a considerably narrower lead than Clinton commanded at the start of the state campaign and suggests Obama could yet erode her support to a point that a win would be of little consequence.
There is, of course, potential for an upset. One survey conducted over the weekend by Public Policy Polling gives Obama a 3 point lead over the former first lady, and notes his strength in cities such as Philadelphia, where a strong turnout could boost his chances.
Meanwhile an analysis by Politico cites a Democratic voter registration surge that appears to be working in Obama’s favour.
According to the Pennsylvanian Secretary of State’s office, around 217,000 new voters have registered for tomorrow’s primary, an overwhelming majority of whom declared themselves Democrats.
In the state’s largest city, Philadelphia, over 12,000 new Democrats signed up in the final week of registration, compared to just 509 Republicans. Meanwhile across the state over 178,000 voters have changed their party affiliations since January – with 92 per cent switching to the Democrats.
This is excellent news for the Democratic Party and could severely dent John McCain’s hope of taking the state in November. But a closer look reveals a bonus for Obama too.
A poll of the party switchers and new registrants released last week by Franklin & Marshall College found that Obama was the candidate of choice for 62 per cent. Clinton insiders cited by Politico said they were also anticipating a similar split.
Terry Madonna, a political scientist and the poll’s director, said that depending on turnout, those new voters could keep Clinton from the double digit win that is widely thought to be needed to keep her in the race.
If Zogby’s latest poll is to be believed, however, Clinton is scoring highly among late deciders, a trend that if it continues could see her extend her edge in tomorrow’s vote. It shows her widening her margin by 3 points in the space of just 24 hours, with a corresponding 2 point drop in undecideds.
The popular belief is that Clinton needs to win by at least 10 points in order to justify continuing in the Democratic race. Any less, and she would have no chance of winning the popular vote, which even supporters acknowledge is her only hope of convincing superdelegates to ignore Obama’s greater delegate count and award her the nomination at the August convention.
Today, some analysts suggested that even if she scored a landslide win of 25 points or more she would struggle to catch her rival in the popular vote. An analysis by Bloomberg found that even with such a hefty victory she would need to win by over 20 points in later contests such as West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico. That is assuming she can break even in Indiana, North Carolina, South Dakota, Montana and Oregon, states where she is currently struggling in the polls.
To catch him now, Clinton needed “blowout numbers,” Peter Fenn, a Democratic consultant who isn't affiliated with either campaign, was quoted as saying. “The wheels would have to come off the Obama bus, and the engine would have to blow.”
For those hoping to avoid a messy showdown at the convention, the worst outcome would be that Clinton wins by a margin in single digits but yet significant enough to claim a mandate for staying in the race.
Says Andrew Sullivan on the Atlantic’s Daily Dish: “Given the way the campaign has unfolded so far, you can see the looming nightmare scenario: Clinton wins by nine points. Not enough to alter the dynamics of the race in her favour, but enough to keep the agony going. For all our sakes, I hope we get a real decision soon.”
 If John McCain triumphs in the coming US election, he will become, at the age of 72, the oldest president in the country’s history. It is a sore point for the Republican nominee, who has accordingly dragged his sprightly nonagenarian mother Roberta around the campaign trail to impress voters with his family’s longevity and good health.
Now, despite the recent pledge of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean not to use his advanced years as ammunition, a senior Democratic operative has gone on the offensive over the issue.
Steve Rosenthal, who has been involved in every Democratic presidential effort since 1972 and was an advisor to Bill Clinton’s campaign, has created the website Younger Than McCain, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek look at old things that are nevertheless - you've guessed it - younger than McCain.
Says Rosenthal: “John McCain comes from another time, an old war-horse stuck in the past with an old-world view of things. Just for fun and to put into some perspective just how old McCain is, we started compiling lists of things that to most Americans seem really old, but they're still younger than good 'ole John McCain."
Here's the video, then scroll down for our short quiz:
Younger than McCain?
Decide whether following things are younger than McCain, then click "continue reading" to see the answers.
1) The state of Alaska
2) The jet engine
3) The contact lens
4) Daffy Duck
5) The tape recorder
6) Polystyrene
7) Thailand
8) The vacuum cleaner
9) The bikini
10) Mickey Mouse
Continue reading "Younger than McCain" »
 All in all, it wasn't the best night for either Democrat. Barack Obama was forced to defend himself - with varying degrees of success - against a barrage of questions on his patriotism and personal associations. Hillary Clinton, while at times appearing commandingly presidential, struggled to explain her Bosnia "misspeak" and often seemed all too willing to dive into the fray with answers straight off John McCain's talking points. Plumbing the blogosphere today, the consensus appears to be that this was a fairly uneventful debate unlikely to drastically alter the contours of the race either way.
But there was one conclusion on which the overwhelming majority of commentators - and viewers - were united. That the biggest loser from last night's debate was the host - the news network ABC. At the time of posting, the ABC website had attracted over 10,000 comments, all but a few savaging the network for abandoning substantive policy discussions in favour of a relentless rehashing of the campaign's gotcha moments and smears. Some of which, such as why Barack Obama did not wear an American flag pin on his lapel, not only pandered to the lowest common denominator but exhumed squabbles long dead and buried.
The line of questioning appeared at times so shamelessly skewed against Obama that you began to wonder if the moderators were on Clinton's payroll. Not so far from the truth, actually, as one of the moderators was George Stephanopoulos, formerly a senior advisor in Bill Clinton's White House and a key architect of his 1992 election campaign. Some leading blogs were so incensed by the perceived bias that they posted contact numbers for ABC, urging readers to ring up and complain. And while the outrage was dismissed by some as the ramblings of Obamamaniacs, ungracious in defeat, the audience - who presumably included some Clinton supporters - were none too happy either. Click here to watch the moment that the hosts found themselves the target of the audience's ire. The same post also samples the comments on ABC's website.
A selection of comments from the press:
Washington Post:
"It was another step downward for network news -- in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.
"For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with."
Daily Kos:
"To anyone with a functioning brain, the performance by ABC's Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos at last night's Democratic debate was nothing less than an embarrassment. Gibson and Stephanopoulos spent more than half of their time playing "gotcha" on subjects that only the idiot pundit class obsess over. But Gibson and Stephanopoulos weren't the only two participants playing the game, because Hillary Clinton was right down in the mud with them."
Talking Points Memo:
"On the questions that touched in some way on policy -- taxes for instance -- Obama looked weary and had what I can only think to compare to the look of a staggering boxer. The discussion of the capital gains tax was a painful example. Most of what Charlie Gibson said was complete nonsense and there were fairly clear, good responses. But Obama stumbled through them.
"On the policy questions, on the other hand, Hillary had what she almost always does in these settings which is a series of well prepared and clear answers which hit on the political points she's trying to make. In this sense I don't think there's much of any way to say that Clinton wasn't the winner on points."
Politico:
"The questions essentially constituted the Republican case against Obama in a general election. He appeared tense, and dispensed with the questions in way that was unlikely to inflict any more damage as he heads into next week's voting. But the tone of the questioning also reflected that Obama has yet to put the controversies that have dogged him over the past few weeks to rest.
"Clinton, who holds a modest lead in most Pennsylvania polls, did not seem to emerge with a game-changing performance, but the intensity of the questioning of Obama could aid her long-term goal of casting doubt among superdelegates about his candidacy."
Dave Weigel, Reason:
I don't think the 40-minute early Obama pile-on was bad for him. I think the following round, where he seemed rattled and reliant on his script, was bad for him. To believe it's worth junking the Clintons and giving him the nomination, a Democrat needs to think Obama is at least as resilient as Hillary. And he can take the attacks, but he can't get past them.
Clinton's game hasn't changed since February: It's to win enough delegates to close the gap before the convention, then convince superdelegates that Obama is unelectable. She utilized and validated a boatload of Republican attacks on Obama (Ben Smith noticed that she mentioned 9/11 three times while attacking him). She's watched with obvious surprise as Obama survived every attack, as Democrats cling tighter to him. So she's trying to convince them that Republicans will be more successful than her. It's all very meta and I'm unsure if it'll work.
The Daily Dish, Atlantic.com:
"A former Clinton staffer - someone who owes his entire career to the Clintons - asks her opponent questions devised by Sean Hannity: "Stephy said he was writing down all the info Sean gave him."
I think Fox News would have done a better job. But then I cannot imagine anyone doing a worse job."
Conclusions
If you want to know who lost most from this debate you need only look at the ranting reaction of Obama supporters everywhere. Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan, all absolutely furious with the debate's moderators for asking supposedly cheap questions, largely directed at Obama. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, whose cable channel is increasingly a sort of church choir for the Obama campaign, angrily derided the questioning as the most "tabloid" of the campaign so far.
So you can rest assured that Obama had a tough night. Almost all the questions in the first hour were directed at him: The "bitter-clinging" controversy; Jeremiah Wright; his relations with the man from the Weather Underground, a left wing terrorist organisation of the 1960s; why he doesn't wear a flag lapel pin. All this designed to test the proposition that Obama is big trouble for the Democrats in the general election. easily skewered by the Republicans as unpatriotic, elitist and way too left-wing for most Americans.
Pace the denunciations of the Obamaniacs, I think this sort of testing is exactly what Obama needs. The Obama supporters are furious that there weren't more questions on policy. But we know why there weren't. The two candidates don't fundamentally disagree on any of the big issues. And ask yourself this. Has Obama become the Democratic frontrunner because he has persuaded Democrats his policies would be better than Hillary's? No, I don't think so. He has persuaded them that he is the more electable and the better equipped to put the Democratic case in November. As he becomes the presumptive nominee it seems reasonable to me that he should be ruthlessly examined on all these questions. Tonight he was, and as it happens, though he looked defensive at times, he handled most of the pressure well. He will get a lot more of this from the Republicans in the next six months.
***
Don't think the tax questions elicited anything memorable from either candidate. Or the energy question. Or the guns question.
The lefty blogosphere is furious with what it regards as the endless "process" questions in this debate and is wondering where the substantive policy questions are.
But once we get onto the heavy subjects - Iraq, Iran, the economy, we immediately see how exiguous the differences are between the two candidates. We know by now where the Demncrats stand on these issues. Why simply let them use a debate to reissue predictable Democratic party talking points which reveal not a cigarette paper's distinction between them?
A little bit of tension arises over the issue of Obama's patriotism. He gives a good answer defending his decision not to wear a flag lapel pin. But he's not so strong and looks a bit shifty on the subject of his relationship with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground terrorist. Hillary correctly says he will be attacked for this by Republicans in the general election.
We're 40 minutes into this and I have to say both candidates have clearly decided to pull their punches - Hillary's only gently pushing the Elitist Obama line and Obama's only gently pushing pack.
One other observation: the fact that this is the first debate for more than a month is making it significantly more absorbing. So many issues that haven't had a proper hearing in the last six weeks are getting discussed tonight. It was absurd that they were having one debate a week earlier in the campaign. Also, full marks to Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos for the best questions of any debate so far.
Now Hillary on the defensive over her Bosnia gaffe (astonishing isn;t it, how this Democratic primary nomination is down to duelling gaffes). Another straight admission: "I'm very sorry that I said it." That honesty is somewhat dulled by her later claim that she got her Tuzla story wrong because she was tired. Since she repeated it again and again on the campaign trail until it was finally exposed as false suggests that's a little hard to believe.
Onto Obama's other recent Achilles' Heel - Rev Jeremiah Wright. Obama repeats his barely credible claim that he never heard Wright make the infamous inflammatory remarks in his sermons. Otherwise, he insists, also somewhat implausibly, that Wright is proud to be an American, despite his observations that the US somehow deserved 9/11.
Crucial soundbite from Hillary. Can Obama win in November: "Yes. Yes. Yes." Not apparently what she said to Bill Richardson, but who's to know the truth?
Straight into "Bitter-Cling-gate". Obama tries to neutralise it. First by rephrasing his remarks to say he meant people were "frustrated" by economic hardship. Then by making kind-of-nice with Hillary by reminding her gently of her infamous "stay home and bake cookies" remark in the 1992 campaign and defending her, saying she had been misrepresented in the same way he has been in the last week.
Clever. Remind people that Hillary has said unpalatable "elitist" things in the past as well and then forgiv her for it in the way he expects to be forgiven.
 The rampantly-used media construction has come a long way since its origins in the Watergate Scandal of the Nixon Administration. Derived from the name of the building in which that genuinely scandalous affair first came to light, these days it is unsparingly applied to every minor gaffe and scrape with the potential to be spun into a furore of earth-shattering scale. In the 36 years since its coinage, the phrase has brought us such sensations as “Pizzagate” – an incident involving a wayward slice of hot ‘n’spicy and the freshly-pressed shirt of dour Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson – and more recently Fiascogate – when the flubbing of lines by rapper Lupe Fiasco at a VH1 awards ceremony rocked the hip-hop world.
Over the course of the current US election campaign, however, the American media seems to have fallen victim to some kind of mass gating contagion.
Here are my favourites:
1. Passport-gate. The revelation that three snooping State Department contractors had accessed Barack Obama’s passport file without authorisation. It later emerged that John McCain and Hillary Clinton had also been targeted.
2. NAFTA-gate. A gating boomerang. First it was reported that an Obama adviser had assured Canadian officials that his hardline rhetoric on NAFTA was for political show. Clinton immediately seized upon it as evidence that her rival was all style and no substance. Then it emerged that her advisers had done exactly the same thing.
3. Monster-gate. Samantha Power’s time as a foreign policy advisor to the Obama campaign came to an abrupt end after she let slip her frustrations with the campaign tactics of Hillary Clinton – and the word “Monster” was duly splashed across front pages the world over.
4. Pastor-gate, aka Jeremiah-gate. Obama’s former preacher, Jeremiah Wright, was vilified for controversial comments during sermons, raising questions about his own views. But the candidate managed to slam it shut with a stirring speech on race in America.
5. Sniper-gate, aka Bosnia-gate. Hillary Clinton employed the political euphemism of the year when she attempted to explain why she had told of running from sniper fire at a Bosnian airfield when in fact she had ambled across the tarmac chatting with a schoolgirl. She “misspoke,” apparently.
6. Bowling-gate. The shocking disclosure that Barack Obama isn’t too good with a bowling ball, as discovered at a recent campaign stop. How can a man who scores an appalling 37 out of 300 hope to make a decent 3am judgment call, we wonder?
7. Bitter-gate, alternatively the snappily-named small-town-gate. Obama’s latest troubles began when he spoke of impoverished small-town Americans expressing their frustrations through “guns and religion.” Known to some as pretty-close-to-the-truth-gate.
8. Farfalle-gate. A personal favourite of mine, this one erupted after John McCain posted recipes on his campaign website supposedly from the kitchen of Cindy McCain. Then it turned out they were from the kitchen of the cable channel The Food Network.
 Obama's now infamous remarks to the San Francisco fundraiser last week are likely to get another go-round at Wednesday's Pennsylvania debate with Hillary. How the Big O handles it will be critical in limiting the damage.
You always know someone's in trouble for something he said when he simultaneously claims there was nothing wrong with it and that he regrets having said it.
The pro-Obama line - typified by this from the increasingly idolatrous coverage of the candidate by Andrew Sullivan - is that he has been misinterpreted, and that there was nothing condescending or elitist about saying that people in their bitterness cleave to religion But there is no reasonable interpretation of what Obama said - or the fact that he said it to the cosmopolitan smart-alecks who people San Franscisco salons - that does not lead you to conclude he shares the intellectual liberal elite's view of contemptible ordinary Americans.
I'm with John Judis of the New Republic on this. I think it is deeply damaging for Obama and the Democrats. If he gets the nomination, as still looks likely, it will haunt him again and again in the autumn.
 Barack Obama today fought back against accusations of elitism following comments that "bitter" small-town Americans cling to "guns or religion."
Speaking at a rally for steelworkers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Democratic frontrunner accused rival Hillary Clinton of political opportunism in portraying him as "out of touch" and disdainful of middle America. And in a new ad for Pennsylvania that appeared designed to defuse the row, the state's popular Democratic senator, Bob Casey, explained to voters why he thought Obama was the candidate who could best tackle the concerns of working Americans.
The Clinton camp had pounced upon remarks by Mr Obama, made to a San Francisco audience on Friday, in which he had tried to explain his difficulties in wooing white, working class voters. Mr Obama made what some commentators are describing as his worst campaign blunder yet when he said: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Mrs Clinton is trailing Mr Obama in the delegate count and can now only win the nomination by persuading super-delegates - elected officials and senior Democrats who will have a free vote on the nominee in August - that she is the best candidate to beat Republican John McCain come November.
Yesterday, a reinvigorated Mrs Clinton sought to capitalise on her opponent's comments to do just that. She denounced the remarks as “demeaning”, “elitist” and “out of touch," while campaign aides mounted a full-scale offensive, distributing “I’m not bitter” stickers and wheeling out supporters to fan the flames on television and radio shows.
One poll today suggested that the strategy was taking effect. A survey by the American Research Group gave Mrs Clinton a 20 point lead over Mr Obama in Pennsylvania, which holds its crucial primary on April 22. However ARG polls can be inaccurate and another poll, by Philadelphia's Temple University, saw Mr Obama trailing by a more probably nine points.
Seeking to limit the damage, Mr Obama accused his opponent of mounting a cynical and dishonest attack.
“Now it may be that I chose my words badly. It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last. But when I hear my opponents, both of whom have spent decades in Washington, saying I’m out of touch, it’s time to cut through their rhetoric and look at the reality,” he said.
He mocked at her performance at a campaign stop in Indiana yesterday, when, in a clear attempt to boost her appeal among working-class voters, she downed a shot of whiskey and a beer.
“Around election time, the candidates can’t do enough for you. They’ll promise you anything, give you a long list of proposals and they’ll even come around, with TV crews in tow, to throw back a shot and a beer,” he said.
The pundits say...:
Instapundit:
"Barack Obama broke the first rule of Democratic presidential politics: never let on that you believe rural American voters are hicks straight out of Deliverance. . . . he could not have picked a worse time to reveal his contempt for average Americans."
Huffington Post:
"Barack Obama told it mostly correctly last week when he said that workers in many towns in America were angry and bitter. For coming closer to telling the unfiltered truth than most politicians, he was lambasted by his political opponents. That he put religious faith in the mix was admittedly an exaggeration and therefore an error. But it shouldn't draw attention from the facts and it is yet another example of how much surer his sense of what has happened to America is that the views of his opponents, Democrat or Republican."
Newsbusters:
"If media really are in the tank for Obama, and want to help him navigate this minefield he's created for himself, maybe they should look at some speeches Gov. Bill Clinton made in 1991 and 1992 that typically involved some form of the phrase "economically insecure white people."
"Although Clinton was typically talking about how, in his view, Republicans tried to use race to gin up votes amongst financially struggling Caucasians, the similarities would certainly be enough to deflect attention away from Obama, assuming this was the press's modus operandi."
The Daily Dish:
"The "bitter" spat is gold for Morris-Rove politics, which is why Clinton is exploiting it so baldly. It is exactly the kind of debate that has constructed American politics since Vietnam; it is exactly the kind of politics that Obama has been trying to transcend. Clinton will use anything at this point to destroy Obama's candidacy and message; but by adopting Rovism at its reddest, the Clintons do risk looking too obvious... At some point people will realize that the Clintons represent a continuation of the kind of politics that has made a serious engagement with this country's profound problems impossible. Or is acknowledging profound problems now unpatriotic?"
 I'd almost forgotten about Hillary Clinton's sniper fire "misspeak". I imagine much of America had too, the episode long eclipsed by the latest campaign slip-up under the merciless, yet mercifully forgetful, microscope of 24 hour news.
That was until Bill Clinton decided to revive the whole sorry affair by mounting a "defence" of his wife - and, true to form, added a few "misspeaks" of his own for good measure. His account was leapt upon by the US media, who delighted in pointing the several inconsistencies in round-the-clock replays beamed across the nation.
Numerous commentators questioned whether Mr Clinton - who seems have been suffering from a recurring case of foot-in-mouth disease since the start of the campaign - actually wanted his wife in the White House. Joe Scarborough, an MSNBC host, played the Bill Clinton clip several times on Friday morning, including once as he opened an interview with David Axelrod, Barack Obama's campaign strategist.
"I'm going to ask you exactly how the Obama campaign is funneling money to Bill Clinton," Scarborough jibed. "Whether it's in cash deposits below $10,000 or whether it's a barter system like you let him golf at Augusta National in return for statements like this."
Watch the video below, then scroll down for the list of inaccuracies as reported by ABC's Jake Tapper, who has a thorough analysis of the various explanations (oh yes, he repeated it - several times) the former president put forward. You can also read the full news story here.
The "misspeaks":
(1) Her most glaringly wrong telling of the tale, on March 17, 2008, was in the morning.
(2) She actually told versions of the story several times. (And none was at night.)
(3) The then-acting Bosnian President, Ejup Ganic, did not say there were snipers in the hills. In an e-mail to journalist Eric Jansson, he said "we didn't expect snipers," though, "we still believed that some positions on the hills were occupied by radical Serbs, so I was worried about the overall safety."
(4) The passengers were not directed to sit on their flak jackets, according to the pilot, Colonel William "Goose" Changose (Ret.), who said, "nobody under my watch has ever directed anyone to sit on their flak jackets. ... We do not direct people to sit on their flak jackets."
(5) Her acknowledgment wasn't immediate at all - it was 11 days later, first in an editorial board meeting with the Philadelphia Inquirer/Philadelphia Daily News, then later in a press availability.
(6) She never apologised.
(7) Her trip was in 1996 - after the war had ended - not 1995.
(8) He qualified it with "I think," Mrs Clinton was not the first lady to go to a war zone. Then-first lady Pat Nixon went to a combat zone in Saigon, Vietnam, in July 1969.
 The testimony of the top US officials in Iraq to the Senate yesterday provided a rare opportunity for voters to see how their remaining presidential candidates might handle the conflict once in office. With all three sitting on the committees which questioned General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the occasion was hailed by the US media as a dress rehearsal for the role of commander-in-chief.
Ambling through the blogosphere today, the general consensus appears to be that all three acquitted themselves well, but not necessarily to the degree that might convince voters to swap camps.
The exception in liberal eyes was John McCain, whose confusion - again - about the religious affiliation of al-Qaeda was seized upon as evidence that he does not possess the necessary foreign policy acumen to be commander-in-chief. Fresh from a thrice-repeated gaffe |
