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Democrats and Obama Should Not Try to Force Hillary Clinton Out of the Race
Tweet Share on Facebook May 30, 2008 Comment (95)So Democratic leaders have read the new Pew poll showing Sen. Barack Obama to be the favorite among Democratic voters, and their decision is to ramp up the pressure on Sen. Hillary Clinton to drop out of the presidential nomination race next week. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada will be joined by Democratic Party leader Howard Dean next week in asking uncommitted superdelegates to make up their minds and commit to a candidate. That, so the messy nomination process can be cleaned up and their candidate can proceed into the general election phase unhindered. Is this a wise move or not?
If the Pew poll is right and if its results hold until November (the former less certain than the latter), such a move could alienate Clinton supporters even further from the Democratic Party. The Pew poll shows Obama's negatives are way higher than they were earlier in the campaign, particularly among white women and independents:
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Obama and Brzezinski—Ill-Suited and Sending a Mixed Message to Jews
Tweet Share on Facebook May 28, 2008 Comment (32)If Sen. Barack Obama wants to make nice-nice with the Jewish community, the last person he should be allowing to make public proclamations about Jews, no matter how tenuous that person's connection to the Obama presidential campaign, is Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, has long been viewed suspiciously by American Jews.
And yet the week after Obama flew to Florida to woo a Jewish audience by extolling Israel's 60th anniversary, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has endorsed Obama and advised him on foreign policy, accused members of the American Jewish establishment of "McCarthyism" in their attitude toward critics of Israel. Why go nuclear when Brzezinski could have blazed with less destructive weapons?
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Women Tell Dems to Slow Down While McCain Ponders Vice Presidential Step
Tweet Share on Facebook May 23, 2008 Comment (5)"Not so fast." That's the message the political action committee WomenCount is sending to the Democratic Party. The PAC ran full-page ads in major U.S. newspapers this week urging Sen. Hillary Clinton to stay in the race until "every vote is counted."
Many of these and other Democratic women blame misogyny in the media and by Democratic Party leaders for tanking Clinton's campaign and say they'll vote Republican in November in retaliation if they do not believe Clinton's supporters are treated fairly. The PAC is also organizing a Washington, D.C., rally for May 31—the date the Democratic National Committee convenes its Rules and Bylaws Committee to make a final decision on how or whether to count the 2.4 million votes cast by Florida and Michigan voters. Meanwhile, this weekend, Sen. John McCain meets with three potential vice presidential nominees, including 36-year-old Indian-American Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who could inoculate the McCain campaign against questions of age and lack of diversity and appeal to Christian conservatives. Jindal is playing coy and saying he won't be offered the VP position and that he "has the job" he wants, anyway. Republicans, according to politico.com, do not have a single candidate of color who has a chance of winning the office of governor, U.S. representative, or senator this fall.
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Can Obama Win White Voters?
Tweet Share on Facebook May 21, 2008 Comment (13)A victory in Oregon, yes, but presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama also got a thrashing in Kentucky. Although both states are populated predominantly by white voters, together they prove there are strikingly different shades of white. Oregonians are progressive to a fare-thee-well (I know, I spent two years at Reed College in Portland, Ore., in the 1970s.) Kentucky voters are less affluent, less well educated, and considerably more conservative.
The Kentucky results and the state's impact on the Obama campaign were summed up most succinctly by this L.A. Times blog entry:
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Hillary Clinton's Post-Mortem: Not Enough Money, Too Soon to Quit
Tweet Share on Facebook May 19, 2008 Comment (43)The preview post-mortems for Clinton have begun.
Did her gender hurt or help her? Did she run a lousy campaign? Did she assume front-runner status too blithely and therefore doom her own chances?
Although I have blogged on many of these issues throughout the past few months, I have a few more thoughts. First, in response to the question whether Hillary Clinton ran a lousy campaign, I gained a snippet of information on Friday that changes my view of things. At first blush the answer is yes, she did run a weak campaign, for two reasons. She seemed to ignore the caucus states and focus almost exclusively on the bigger primary states, where she did quite well. And she and her husband made wacky remarks about race issues that seemed to come from nowhere and did nothing but damage her image.
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Can a 1960s-Style Liberal Like Obama Win?
Tweet Share on Facebook May 16, 2008 Comment (28)This week in politics, the House rejected an Iraq (and Afghanistan) war funding bill, the two remaining contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination sparked a dust-up over an endorsement from the nation's pre-eminent pro-choice lobbying group, and a Democrat picked up the last of three once reliably Republican House seats that were contested this year's special elections.
All that, and California's Supreme Court stamped a big "OK" on the right to gay marriage. Are we back in the 1960s, or am I having a flashback? Is the American public moving left, and, if so, does that boost election chances for almost-nominee and extremely liberal Sen. Barack Obama to win the White House in November?
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Racism in the Presidential Race
Tweet Share on Facebook May 14, 2008 Comment (47)Corrected on 5/15/08: An earlier version of this blog post incorrectly reported the number of citizens who voted in the 2008 presidential elections both total and by ethnic group. Overall, 125,736,000 Americans voted, 99.5 million of them being "white non-Hispanic," 14 million African-American, 7.5 million Hispanic and 2.7 million Asian-American.
Terry McAuliffe, Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, was all over the cable news channels last night claiming Clinton's 2-to-1 win in West Virginia is proof that she and only she can win the White House for the Democratic Party in November—because of her support from white, working-class voters.
But an even more telling point about white, working-class voters and how some of them will vote when (and it looks like when, not if) Sen. Barack Obama becomes the Democratic nominee was made in an article in Tuesday's Washington Post. The monster lurking behind the curtain in the Democratic presidential contest is racism. Up to now, Obama's supporters in the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party have tried to ignore its existence. This article is proof that it not only exists; it is unfortunately alive and well, particularly in factory towns:
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Another Horse-Sports Tragedy
Tweet Share on Facebook May 12, 2008 Comment (45)An atrocious string of thoroughly unnecessary and completely man-made (or man-caused) equine deaths lengthened this weekend with the Saturday death of a horse named Tigger Too in New Jersey at the Jersey Fresh horse trials.
I've written in this space about the "euthanization" of two horses at Florida's Red Hills cross-country trial in March. Two more were "euthanized" at Kentucky's Rolex competition last month. And, of course, one week ago, before a worldwide TV audience, filly Eight Belles was sacrificed on the altar of human ego, after "running her heart out" at the Kentucky Derby.
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McCain-Obama Race Leaves No Candidate for Mainstream Voters or the Socially-Conscious Entrepreneurial Class
Tweet Share on Facebook May 9, 2008 Comment (14)A Barack Obama presidency would cost America's entrepreneurial class dearly. Obama has pledged to lift the current cap on Social Security taxes if he becomes president. He'd get support in that venture from a Democratic-controlled Congress. According to the Social Security Administration's website, this means an additional 15.3 percent tax for self-employed people making more than $102,000 annually.
"The Social Security tax rate for 2008 is 15.3 percent on self-employment income up to $102,000," the site notes. "If your net earnings exceed $102,000, you continue to pay only the Medicare portion of the Social Security tax, which is 2.9 percent, on the rest of your earnings."
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The Democratic Turning Point
Tweet Share on Facebook May 7, 2008 Comment (2)The May 6 primaries might go down in history as the deciding factor in why America failed to nominate its first female major-party presidential candidate in 2008. It's hard to see after Tuesday's election results how Sen. Hillary Clinton makes the case that she should be the Democratic nominee.
Her campaign pledged to carry on through May races in West Virginia and Kentucky. But in order to woo more superdelegates into her camp—and superdelegates are now the decisive factor in the Democratic nomination race—she had to score a more decisive victory than her narrow 2-point margin in Indiana. And she had to foil Sen. Barack Obama's attempt to score a double-digit lead in North Carolina, which she did not.
