BY GLENN THRUSH | glenn.thrush@newsday.com 9:29 PM EST, February 13, 2008
After eight coast-to-coast blowout losses since Super Tuesday, Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign is hastily retooling and adjusting to the unpleasant reality that it now needs to run a nearly flawless race to overcome Barack Obama's lead among "pledged" delegates allocated through primaries and caucuses.
"The only way she could do it is by winning most of the rest of the contests by 25 to 30 points," said Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. "Even the most creative math really does not get her, ever, back to even in terms of pledged delegates."
Clinton's road ahead is a hard one, but insiders say there's still hope if Clinton regains her mojo with women and working-class whites; sweeps Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania; keeps a grip on her super delegates; contests a handful of small states and goes negative -- carefully -- on Obama.
"At this point you really have to walk people through the logic that there really is a path to victory for her," said Hassan Nemazee, Clinton's national finance chairman, who says fundraising is brisk despite a trio of humiliating defeats on Tuesday in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. "But the truth is that she can still win."
The problem is that Obama's momentum is no longer being measured by the size or enthusiasm of his crowds -- but by his advantage in overall delegates and in dollars.
Clinton aides and donors say the candidate herself never expected Obama to be so competitive, so her staff never created a backup plan when she failed to put him away on Feb. 5. "It just came down to arrogance -- arrogance got in their way," says Steve Hildebrand, who led Obama's field operation.
more The reality is Hillary's campaign viewed these states, all 23 of them, as
insignificant.
‘We Didn’t Put Any Resources In Small States,’ Says Finance Chair Hassan Nemazeeby Jason Horowitz | February 12, 2008
“What’s gone wrong is very simple,” said Hassan Nemazee, a national finance chair for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
“If we had won Iowa and New Hampshire, as we had anticipated, projected, et cetera, you would not have been in a situation in which you are losing all of these small states—because we didn’t put any resources in those small states,” he said. “
Obama, on the other hand, put resources in these small states.”
Compounding the damage of the bad defeats in Iowa, and then South Carolina, Mr. Nemazee explained, was the lack of the necessary foresight to invest the campaign’s resources in the states that Mrs. Clinton’s rival, Barack Obama, is now gobbling up as fuel for his ever more threatening momentum.
“You needed to have a Plan B, and Plan B was just doing what we are doing right now rather than having resources in the small states,” he said. “We basically ceded every one of these small red states that he has racked up victories in. And the reason that he has racked up victories at this level isn’t because he was so much more well received, or because his message was any better; it was because we didn’t put any resources in there. We weren’t campaigning there. We didn’t have anybody in Utah, in Idaho, in the Dakotas. In Alaska.”
On Feb. 12, the picture got even worse, as the voters of Maryland, the District of Columbia and Virginia all appeared set to hand lopsided wins to Mr. Obama. With a cold and bleak February calendar staring straight at them—other states set to vote this month are Wisconsin and Mr. Obama’s former home, Hawaii—some of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are wondering how long she can keep losing without her support collapsing in the remaining contests.
Mrs. Clinton has made a show of addressing those concerns by replacing her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, with another loyalist, Maggie Williams. (Several donors interviewed for this story said, in retrospect, that they thought Ms. Doyle was in over her head.) But at this point, no change in personnel alters the campaign’s prescription for recovering its position: win Ohio and Texas on March 4, and Pennsylvania on April 22.
“If she doesn’t do well in these states,” said Mr. Nemazee, “it’s a completely different matter, and the momentum swings completely over to the other side.”
The Clinton campaign’s other scenario—Mrs. Clinton loses a majority of elected delegates but is protected by a buffer of party-appointed superdelegates to make up the difference—looks increasingly unlikely.
“The superdelegates are going to by and large mirror the popular vote,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, himself a superdelegate.
Schumer said he was “committed” to Mrs. Clinton no matter what. Asked if there wouldn’t be a revolt in the party if superdelegates undid the results of the state primaries and caucuses, he suggested that there was some wiggle room. “If the election is that close that 10 superdelegates going one way rather than the other way (decides it)? No. People will say it was a very close election.”
But, he said, “I don’t see a massive move of superdelegates different than how their states voted.”
The states may well end up voting for Mrs. Clinton in the end. But the realization that seems to have set in, somewhat jarringly, among her supporters is that there’s no safety net if they don’t.
“Everybody is taken aback—nobody expected it,” said John Catsimatidis, a supermarket magnate and prominent donor to Mrs. Clinton. (He was bestowed with the title of “Hillraiser” by the Clinton campaign, signifying that he had raised more than $100,000.) “Nobody expected Obama to be so strong. And at the end of the day, I think the Clintons will win out. But I have been saying that all along and it is getting harder to keep saying that.”
“Here’s the thing,” said Yashar Hedayat, a prominent fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton in Los Angeles. “I have a lot of donors who are nervous, who are looking at the calendar like you are and saying, ‘How is this possible?’ But I feel very good about Ohio and Texas and Pennsylvania.”
more Sen. Schumer stopped by Daily Kos yesterday to endear himself to the netroots by trying to appear impartial:
Winning the presidency isn't enough. Whether it's President Obama or President Clinton, they are going to need a Democratic Senate that can pass, instead of obstruct, a progressive agenda.
linkSchumer is worried about obstructing a progressive agenda? “
I'm sorry, Senator Schumer, but...”
Even you, Senator, must have known about the dangerous precedent that you helped set when you
allowed Michael Mukasey to be appointed as Attorney General despite his disgusting stance on torture. Quite ironic how far the bar has moved since Kimba Wood and Zoe Baird’s nominations were withdrawn over household employment taxes.
By PATRICK HEALY and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE Published: February 14, 2008
SAN ANTONIO — The Texas and Ohio presidential primaries, on March 4, have become must-win contests for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, her advisers say. So why is she just opening campaign field offices across those states?
The primary in Pennsylvania, on April 22, is also a crucial battleground. So why is her campaign telling its most prominent supporter there, Gov. Edward G. Rendell, that there is not enough money now for his proposed piece of direct mail to voters?
And the Maine caucuses on Sunday were the one recent contest that Mrs. Clinton had hoped to win. So why did the campaign of her rival, Senator Barack Obama, have better political and Internet operations to energize its supporters there? (Mr. Obama won Maine.)
The answers go to the heart of Mrs. Clinton’s current political challenge. She and her team showered so much money, attention and other resources on Iowa, New Hampshire and some of the 22-state nominating contests on Feb. 5 that they have been caught flat-footed — or worse — in the critical contests that followed, her political advisers said.
She also made a strategic decision to skip several small states holding caucuses, states where Mr. Obama scored big victories, accumulating delegates and, possibly, momentum.
Her heavy spending and relatively modest fund-raising in January compounded the problems, leaving the campaign ill-equipped to plan after Feb. 5, advisers and donors say.
“It sure didn’t look like they had a game plan after Super Tuesday,” Mr. Rendell said in an interview on Wednesday. “What I would have done, knowing the line-up, I would’ve picked one or two states to make an all-out effort, whether Maine or Washington State or you name it, to really try to stop the Obama momentum.”
While Clinton fund-raising has rebounded, to about $1 million a day, her advisers acknowledge that Mr. Obama has been taking money in at a faster clip since January. They say his recent money advantage is one reason he was able to build stronger organizations and spend more on advertising than she did in several states this winter.
<…>
If the Clinton organization appears a little improvisational, a review of its recent performances suggests that Mrs. Clinton was outmaneuvered by Mr. Obama, who won some of his victories by margins of two to one.
In Idaho, for example, Mr. Obama’s campaign started setting up nearly a year before the Feb. 5 caucus. By the day of the caucus, he had five offices in the state and 20 paid staff members. A few days before, Mr. Obama himself showed up in Boise, drawing 14,000 people to the Taco Bell Arena, the biggest in the state.
Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, sent one of her supporters, Senator Maria Cantwell of neighboring Washington State, to drop by just before the caucuses.
<…>
In Minnesota, “the Clinton campaign was in triage mode,” said Lawrence Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. He said Mrs. Clinton appeared to have allocated her dwindling resources to New York and California, the biggest prizes in the Feb. 5 contests (and which she won), investing almost nothing in media advertising in Minnesota and leaving her campaign there “like a M.A.S.H. unit.”
link The campaign will be spinning a comeback, but it may be too little too late, especially if they have to go even more negative than they
already have. Another vile post from Larry Johnson,
Taylor Marsh's friend, in support of Hillary:
In the meantime,
we have to watch the equivalent of a papal coronation, as the media and fans exhult in the Obama Messiah, the black Jesus come to save us. But sometime in the next four months, the excitement will fade as the reality of who Obama is comes out.
<...>
Now I know
Obamaphiles will simply bend over and stick their head in their neighbor's ass and proclaim the putrid aroma as the heaven-sent breath of God. They will say this means nothing and is just carping.
linkI guess this is a sign of things to come if Hillary falls further behind.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
