April 24, 2008 5:23 PM
"The good news for Hillary Rodham Clinton is that she’s winning a lot of battles," the essay writes. "The bad news is that the war is pretty much lost."
The column is from well-respected Beltway prognosticator Charlie Cook.
"If this contest were still at the point where momentum, symbolism, and reading tea leaves mattered, Clinton would be in pretty good shape," he writes. "Everything she has needed to happen is happening now. Obama is getting tougher press coverage and critical examination. He’s also getting rattled a bit, and he didn’t perform well in the recent debate in Philadelphia. Clinton is winning in big, important places."
But, Cook notes, "it's happening about three months too late."
Cook says that in some ways "Clinton has spent the past six weeks in a horrible situation. How do you quit a race when you’re still winning primaries? ...But even in victory, she isn’t getting any closer to securing the nomination. This political purgatory will continue if she manages to win Indiana but loses North Carolina — hard to drop out but harder to see winning the nomination. If she loses in both states, then her campaign’s donors and creditors, as well as superdelegates and party leaders, are likely to intervene. But that can’t happen as long as she continues to win."
moreThe media would have you believe Hillary has been on a six-week winning streak. Let's look at wins since Super Tuesday:
February 9Obama wins Louisiana and Nebraska
February 10Obama wins Maine
February 12Obama wins District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia
February 19Obama wins Hawaii
March 4 Hillary wins Ohio and Rhode Island
Obama wins Texas and Vermont
March 8Obama wins Wyoming
March 11 Obama wins Mississippi
April 22Hillary wins PA
April 24, 2008
(
Listen)
David LaMotte, the Obama backer who
got, and didn't like, a Clinton polling call, has generously emailed over the audio of the call, which you can listen to above.
Along with the amusement factor of the paid pollster and the well-informed Obama supporter doing their best to be polite to one another, these calls are interesting because they offer a glimpse at the lines of attack Clinton is considering.
Here, on top of the trade issue, the poll tests familiar attacks based on Obama's Foreign Relations Subcommittee's not holding hearings on Al Qaeda; on healthcare; and on credit card votes.
The most interesting question to me, though, was based on gauging another issue: Whether voters still think Clinton can win.
The question asked the respondent for his view on "the chance that Hillary Clinton can still will the Democratic nomination."
moreBy PATRICK HEALY
Published: April 24, 2008
Reflecting on her victory in the Pennsylvania primary, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday neatly summed up the chief political rationale of her enduring candidacy.
“I won the states that we have to win — Ohio, now Pennsylvania,” Mrs. Clinton said on CNN about her successes over Senator Barack Obama, in one of her six appearances on morning news shows. “It’s very hard to imagine a Democrat getting to the White House without winning those states.”
Mrs. Clinton says her popularity among blue-collar workers, women and Hispanics makes her the candidate to beat Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, in the swing states that decide presidential races. Along with Ohio and Pennsylvania, she also cites her success in Michigan and Florida — even though the Democratic Party disqualified those contests, and Mr. Obama was not on the Michigan ballot — to claim an edge in crucial battlegrounds.
Yet for all of her primary night celebrations in the populous states, exit polling and independent political analysts offer evidence that Mr. Obama could do just as well as Mrs. Clinton among blocs of voters with whom he now runs behind. Obama advisers say he also appears well-positioned to win swing states and believe he would have a strong shot at winning traditional Republican states like Virginia.
According to surveys of Pennsylvania voters leaving the polls on Tuesday, Mr. Obama would draw majorities of support from lower-income voters and less-educated ones — just as Mrs. Clinton would against Mr. McCain, even though those voters have favored her over Mr. Obama in the primaries.
And national polls suggest Mr. Obama would also do slightly better among groups that have gravitated to Republican in the past, like men, the more affluent and independents, while she would do slightly better among women.
moreApril 24, 2008, 7:53 pm
The third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives and one of the country’s most influential African-America leaders sharply criticized former President Bill Clinton this afternoon for what he called the former president’s “bizarre” conduct during the Democratic primary campaign.
Representative James Clyburn, an undeclared superdelegate from South Carolina who is the Democratic whip in the House, said that “black people are incensed over all of this,” referring to a series of statements that Mr. Clinton has made in the course of the heated race between his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, and Senator Barack Obama.
Mr. Clinton was widely criticized by black leaders after he equated the eventual victory of Mr. Obama in South Carolina in January to that of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in 1988 – a parallel that many took as an attempt to diminish Mr. Obama’s success in the campaign. In a radio interview in Philadelphia Monday, Mr. Clinton defended his remarks and said the Obama campaign had “played the race card on me” by making an issue of those comments.
In an interview with The Times late Thursday, Mr. Clyburn said that Mr. Clinton’s conduct in this campaign has caused what might be an irreparable breach between Mr. Clinton and an African-American constituency that once revered him. “When he was going through his impeachment problems, it was the black community that bellied up to the bar,” Mr. Clyburn said. “I think black folks feel strongly that that this is a strange way for President Clinton to show his appreciation.”
Mr. Clyburn added that there appears to be an almost “unanimous” view among African-Americans that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton “are committed to doing everything they possibly can to damage Obama to a point that he could never win.”
linkThe notion was that blacks are loyal to the Clintons. That's why they decided
it was okay to make hints about drugs and play up associations Farrakhan and ties to terrorists, etc.
The Clintons figured it would play well with a certain segment of the Democratic Party, and that black voters would come back around to Hillary in the GE. A win was worth throwing black support under a bus.
If they're going to keep using the blue-collar white voters to make the electability argument for Hillary, then does anyone believe Hillary can win by disenfranchising black voters?
This is the divisiness that has resulted from Hillary's campaign. This is the Dem primary and we have a candidate trying to link the other to terrorists. I don't care who supports Hillary, no one can tell me this crap is "just politics," and as such it should be accepted.
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