Obama blames the media, in part, for Tuesday losses

[winterlight]

Obama is seen in this video telling members of the press corps that they were "persuaded" to believe they were being too tough on Hillary, and that this strategy "worked".
But anyway, Obama says something that makes no sense. He says he hopes things have "evened out" and the media could now start reported things correctly. No, Mr. Obama. 1 week of good coverage doesn't "even out" months of worship.

The correspondent opens up saying Obama's strategists said they "blame the media in part" for yesterday's losses
I thought Obama didn't whine. What happened?

[rwheeler31]

1. snl

[winterlight]

2. 1 week of bad coverage vs. months of great coverage

I wouldn't complain. Would you?

[anonymous171]

4. Just before an important primary.

I don't mean to whine, but there were a lot of undecideds who made up their minds the day before or the day of the primaries.

[FrenchieCat]

6. You mean 2 years worth of favorable coverage for Hillary......

and at some point having to recognize the 10,000-20,000 crowds and the millions of dollars raised by Obama.

Oh and, when they start asking Hillary about her 35 years, I won't complaint.

HILLARY’S Commander In Chief Experience - The Red Phone Test

LISTING HILLARY CLINTON'S RED PHONE EXPERIENCE
ON NATIONAL SECURITY CRISIS

Tracing Hillary Clinton's '35 Years' of Experience

All Things Considered, January 24, 2008  When Hillary Clinton makes a campaign appearance, she almost certainly will highlight her experience — 35 years, she says — as one of her qualifications for president.

But Clinton is a little less specific when it comes to describing what exactly she was doing in the years before she became a U.S. senator in 2001.

Suzanne Goldenberg is author of a new book about Clinton, Madam President, and a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Guardian.

Goldenberg says it's difficult to see how Clinton calculates her 35 years of public service, since her fulltime job for many years was working for a corporate law firm in Arkansas.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18391632

After earning her JD from Yale, Clinton worked as a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in DC. In 1974 she failed the DC Bar Exam and decided to move to Arkansas where Bill was running for congress. He did not succeed in this campaign. Both of them took jobs with the Arkansas University, Fayetteville Law School. By 1977, Bill had won the Arkansas Attorney General campaign and Hillary had earned a job with the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. She continued to be involved politically, urging new laws to recognize children's rights, but her law practice focused on Patent Infringement and Intellectual Property law, though she rarely set foot in a court room. http://doubledemon.newsvine.com/_news/2008/02/06/1282777-obamas-experience-vs-clintons-experience?groupId=1675

Children’s Defense Fund -

Hillary Clinton & the Children's Defense Fund
http://www.peterglenshaw.com/peter_glenshaw_weblog/2008/01/hillary-clinton.html

How Hillary Clinton Betrayed the Children's Defense Fund for Political Gain:
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorblog/034

While Clinton touts her decision to come out of law school and work not for Wall Street but rather for the Children's Defense Fund, the truth is that she spent only a year there. (And then omitted her mentor Marian Wright Edelman from among the 400 others she mentions in the acknowledgemets of her autobiography because Edelman had broken with her when Bill Clinton abolished the federal welfare saftey net in 1996).
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marc-cooper/hillarys-5-million-dump_b_85534.html

She was twice named to the list of “The 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America.” She also represented and later served on the board of Arkansas businesses including TCBY ("Too Good to Be Yoghurt"), and Wal-Mart. As First Lady of Arkansas for twelve years, she chaired the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee, co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, and served on the boards of the Arkansas Children's Hospital, Legal Services, and the Children's Defense Fund. Mrs. Clinton wrote a weekly newspaper column entitled "Talking It Over."
http://www.firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=43

Wal-Mart

Hillary Clinton and Wal-Mart: A Love Story
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0207-34.htm

Wal-Mart’s First Lady
Hillary’s Past Belies Her Support of Labor
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0021,harkavy,15052,5.html

WalMart Board - 1990

Clinton campaign downplays a large part of her career
By MATT STEARNS
McClatchy-Tribune

WASHINGTON — To hear Hillary Clinton talk, she's spent her entire career putting her Yale Law School degree to work for the common good.

She routinely tells voters that she's "been working to bring positive change to people's lives for 35 years." She told a voter in New Hampshire: "I've spent so much of my life in the nonprofit sector."

The overall portrait is of a lifelong, selfless do-gooder. The whole story is more complicated — and less flattering.
Clinton worked at the Children's Defense Fund for less than a year, and that's the only full-time job in the nonprofit sector she's ever had. She also worked briefly as a law professor.

Clinton spent the bulk of her career — 15 of those 35 years — at one of Arkansas' most prestigious corporate law firms, where she represented big companies and served on corporate boards....
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/politics/5510369.html

Rose Law Firm

Clinton joined Rose in 1976, becoming the venerable firm's first full female partner in 1979, and she continued to work for Rose after husband Bill became governor of Arkansas.

Rose Law Firm focuses primarily on corporate litigation and transactions. She worked primarily on patent infringement and intellectual property litigation, though she did not do much court work. Rose Law Firm is well entrenched in Arkansas' business and political institutions.
http://doubledemon.newsvine.com/_news/2008/02/06/1282777-obamas-experience-vs-clintons-experience?groupId=1675

the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, headed by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was charged with coming up with a comprehensive plan to provide universal health care for all Americans, which was to be a cornerstone of the administration's first-term agenda.

Hillary Clinton's leading role in this project was unprecedented for a presidential spouse.<11><12> This unusual decision by President Clinton to put his wife in charge of the project has been attributed to several factors, including the President's desire to emphasize his personal commitment to the enterprise.<12>

The First Lady's role in the secret proceedings of the Health Care Task Force also sparked litigation in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in relation to the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) which requires openness in government. The Clinton White House argued that the Recommendation Clause in Article II of the U.S. Constitution would make it unconstitutional to apply the procedural requirements of FACA to Hillary's participation in the meetings of the Task Force. Some constitutional experts argued to the court that such a legal theory was not supported by the text, history, or structure of the Constitution.<13>Ultimately, Hillary Clinton won the litigation when the D.C. Circuit ruled narrowly that the First Lady of the United States can be deemed a government official (and not a mere private citizen) for purposes of not having to comply with the procedural requirements of FACA.<14>

In 1993, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, along with several other groups, filed a lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and Donna Shalala? over closed-door meetings related to the health care plan. The AAPS sued to gain access to the list of members of the task force. Judge Royce C. Lamberth found in favor of the plaintiffs and awarded $285,864 to the AAPS for legal costs; Lamberth also harshly criticized the Clinton administration and Clinton aide Ira Magaziner in his ruling.<15> Subsequently, a federal appeals court overturned the award and the initial findings on the basis that Magaziner and the administration had not acted in bad faith.<16>

Starting on September 28, 1993, Hillary Clinton appeared for several days of testimony before five congressional committees on health care.<9> Opponents of the bill organized against it before it was presented to the Democratic-controlled Congress on November 20, 1993.<9> The bill was a complex proposal running more than 1,000 pages, the core element of which was an enforced mandate for employers to provide health insurance coverage to all of their employees through competitive but closely-regulated health maintenance organizations (HMOs).

The 1994 mid-term election became a "referendum on big government — Hillary Clinton had launched a massive health-care reform plan that wound up strangled by its own red tape."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Clinton_health_care_plan

Ireland

The Facts
Chris Thornton, a political reporter for the Belfast Telegraph, said that Hillary Clinton's visits to northern Ireland contributed to the "mood music" that made an eventual settlement possible, but were hardly key to reaching an agreement. "Would we have reached a settlement without that kind of stuff? Yes. Would we have got one without the intervention of Bill Clinton and George Mitchell? No."

Hillary is making a lot more of her Northern Ireland role on the campaign trail than she did in her memoir "Living History." As the Boston Globe recently noted, her stories of bringing Protestant and Catholic women together have become more dramatic with each retelling. The claim that she brought Catholics and Protestants together "for the first time" seems dubious. This would not be the first time that she has mixed up her chronology.

The Pinocchio Test
Hillary Clinton seems to be overstating her significance as a catalyst in the Northern Ireland peace process, which was more symbolic than substantive. On the other hand, she did play a helpful role at the margins, by encouraging organizations like Vital Voices, a women's group that takes a stand against extremism. One Pinocchio for exaggeration.


http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/01/clinton_and_northern_ireland.html

China

During a 1995 visit to Beijing, at a time when her husband's administration was trying to press China on human rights, Sen. Clinton made a speech condemning abuses.

Kosovo

In May of 1999, she was in Macedonia visiting refugee camps near the Kosovo border and meeting with Macedonia's president and prime minister.

Sources with knowledge of her visit say she discussed the refugees' plight with those leaders. It's not clear how much she helped since CNN reported at the time that Macedonia reopened its border to Kosovar refugees before Clinton's visit.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/06/clinton.foreign.fact/

Senator From New York

Upon entering the United States Senate, Clinton maintained a low public profile, built relationships with senators from both parties and forged alliances with religiously-inclined senators by becoming a regular participant in the Senate Prayer Breakfast.

Clinton has served on five Senate committees: Committee on Budget (2001–2002), Committee on Armed Services (since 2003), Committee on Environment and Public Works (since 2001),<207> Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (since 2001) and Special Committee on Aging.
She is also a Commissioner of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (since 2001).

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Clinton sought to obtain funding for the recovery efforts in New York City and security improvements in her state. Working with New York's senior senator, Charles Schumer, she was instrumental in quickly securing $21 billion in funding for the World Trade Center site's redevelopment. She subsequently took a leading role in investigating the health issues faced by 9/11 first responders.

Clinton voted for the USA Patriot Act in October 2001. In 2005, when the act was up for renewal, she worked to address some of the civil liberties concerns with it, before voting in favor of a compromise renewed act in March 2006 that gained large majority support.

Clinton strongly supported the 2001 U.S. military action in Afghanistan, saying it was a chance to combat terrorism while improving the lives of Afghan women who suffered under the Taliban government.

Clinton voted in favor of the October 2002 Iraq War Resolution.

In September 2007 she voted in favor of a Senate resolution calling on the State Department to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps "a foreign terrorist organization", which passed 76-22.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton

she opposes the international treaty to ban land mines.

She voted against the Feinstein-Leahy amendment last September restricting U.S. exports of cluster bombs to countries that use them against civilian-populated areas.

She opposes restrictions on U.S. arms transfers and police training to governments that engage in gross and systematic human rights abuses, such as Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Israel, Pakistan, Cameroon and Chad, to name only a few.

She has challenged the credibility of Amnesty International and other human rights groups that criticize policies of the United States and its allies.
Mrs. Clinton has been one of the Senate’s most outspoken critics of the United Nations, even serving as the featured speaker at rallies outside U.N. headquarters in July 2004 and last summer to denounce the world body.

She was one of the most prominent critics of the International Court of Justice for its landmark 2004 advisory ruling that the Fourth Geneva Conventions on the Laws of War is legally binding on all signatory nations.

She condemned the United Nations’ judicial arm for challenging the legality of Israel’s separation barrier in the occupied West Bank and sponsored a Senate resolution “urging no further action by the United Nations to delay or prevent the construction of the security fence.”

Mrs. Clinton has shown little regard for the danger from proliferation of nuclear weapons, not only opposing the enforcement of U.N. Security Council resolutions challenging Pakistan, Israel and India’s nuclear weapons programs but supporting the delivery of nuclear-capable missiles and jet fighters to these countries. This past fall she voted to suspend important restrictions on U.S. nuclear cooperation with countries that violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

At the same time, she insists that the prospect of Iran’s developing nuclear weapons “must be unacceptable to the entire world,” since challenging the nuclear monopoly of the United States and its allies in the region would somehow “shake the foundation of global security to its very core.”

She accused the Bush administration of not taking the threat of a nuclear Iran seriously enough, criticized the administration for allowing European nations to take the lead in pursuing a diplomatic solution and insisted that the United States should make it clear that military options were still being actively considered.
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0309-23.htm

[FrenchieCat]

3. And so he should tell it like it is.......

Hillary Clinton has convinced the media that it is biased against her, one of the great (and rare) successes of her presidential campaign, akin to her creation of the vast right-wing conspiracy responsible for conceiving a string of sexual and other disgraces in her husband's White House.
With classic chutzpah, Clinton would have us believe that in a campaign in which she has escaped the most basic scrutiny of her finances, her husband's business relationships and her claims of experience, she is hurting because of the media's favorable treatment of Barack Obama.

On the race itself, the media has time and again let itself be manipulated by a Clinton campaign deftly managing expectations, albeit in increasingly surreal ways. Only two weeks ago the consensus was that Clinton had to win Texas or Ohio by 20 point margins to have a shot at the nomination (at the time these margins still seemed plausible). In recent days, her campaign has put out the word that if Obama doesn't win all four contests this Tuesday, it will be a sign of trouble for him. Of course journalists, no matter how lazy or gullible, know this is stupid, but nonetheless, maybe in a failed effort at fairness, they now seem to accept that Clinton needs to win either Texas and Ohio by any margin. Suddenly gone is the original assessment that Clinton has to win big on March 4, despite the fact that it is mathematically verifiable that there will be too few contests after Tuesday for her to make up the delegate count if she doesn't put a big dent in Obama's lead now. This judgment has become more accurate daily as Clinton's superdelegate lead melts away.

Losing eleven contests in a row, mostly by far wider margins than anyone had anticipated, would doom any campaign (in fact, can anyone think of one major primary contender who has survived such a string of defeats?). Yet the media continue to portray Clinton as strongly viable, if not quite the frontrunner. Again, this is a remarkable feat by her campaign, and an utter failure by most journalists to accurately portray the state of the race.

Clinton has been able to twist these expectations because so many are still in awe of her and her husband, attributing near-mystical powers to their ability to come back from the dead (the latest example, we are told, was her narrow New Hampshire win two months ago). At the same time, she has set up the media as sexist and easily wooed by Obama. This may be true, but, if anything, this has lead the guilt-ridden mainstream press to soften its negative coverage of the Clintons. Nowhere is this more visible than in the complete lack of recent interest in the couple's finances: far more has been written about Obama and Rezko, despite the relative benignity of the charge, than about how Bill and Hillary have amassed the tens of millions of dollars that make up their fortune, starting with her Arkansas cattle futures deal and ending with his Kazakhstan connections. There is a rich vein of potential conflict of interest, corruption and misuse of power that the media should relish covering in great detail, but much of the discussion has been relegated to a few bloggers. A particularly opportune time for coverage should have been when Clinton pulled out $5 million seemingly out of nowhere, to finance her campaign, but we're still left to wonder how these long-time public servants have instant access to such sums, especially since no tax returns are available.

In the meanwhile, journalists have been covering the cackle, the misty eyes and the pantsuit; Clinton should be eternally grateful for this, as it has distracted us from far bigger sins, made her look like a victim of the predominantly male political media's sexism, and rendered journalists insecure about their ability to cover her campaign objectively...

more http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-jenkins/clinton-and-the-vast-medi_b_89465.html

I foretold that the Media would scratch Hillary's back starting 3 days before the Ohio/Texas Primaries-
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=4756128

[Asia Expat]

12. Time for a catnap I think.

[The_Casual_Observer]

5. Obama runs right to ABC & does the morning show. Complains about

how mean the Clintons are to him and all the blacks.

[FrenchieCat]

11. I thought that was Hillary schitck!

seems to work for her. Might as well Obama use it too.....shit.

I mean, when CNN has the fucking nerves to put up a poll like this
you know the game is rigged!

[ExtraGriz]

7. he should get over it

move on, hunker down and come up with a new plan....but stop the whining.

[Milo_Bloom]

8. Its as nonsensical coming from him as it was from Clinton

[doc03]

9. That's a good one he blames the Media

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[Jamastiene]

10. What'sa matter? My Coronation can't handle a couple of

defeats? Ridiculous. I'm glad one of our candidates in this primary has some balls. It sure the fuck ain't him.

[RememberWellstone]

13. Bless his heart

the pressure is mounting, will he crack and let the Chi-town back doorsman out?

[NHIndy]

14. The media?

If he wants to be President, he should get used to scrutiny, the media and being under a microscope. He has had it easy, very easy, until recently. Walking out of that press conference showed he couldn't handle the heat in the kitchen. Do we really want a president like that? When talks with another leader of another country heat up, do we want our President just walking out of the room like that? I think not. Very un-classy and it shows he can't handle the battlefield. Good job to the media for finally grilling him the way they grill the rest of the candidates. They ALL deserve it. They ALL need to be tested. We can't elect someone who isn't put through the media mill. If they can't make it through that, they can't make it through foreign relations and other high pressure situations. It showed that he an collapse under pressure. I don't expect a person like that to lead a country. It would scare me.

[grasswire]

15. PLUS....

...there's no better way to guarantee bad press than to scold the media for being unfair. They really don't like it.

[Beaverhausen]

16. I agree completely. Welcome to DU

:hi:

Obama better get used to it.

[JackORoses]

17. I wish there was a required post number before you could start a thread.

It would weed out alot of tripe.