Campaign 2008

Clinton supporters have tried to make this point in recent weeks, winning language in the party’s convention platform that acknowledged Mrs. Clinton’s history-making candidacy, and praising her as a smart, seasoned policy wonk who could add ballast to Mr. Obama’s message of hope and change.

Indeed, a recent New York Times/CBS News poll of convention delegates found that 28 percent preferred Mrs. Clinton for vice president — by far the largest bloc supporting a candidate. (More than a third offered no opinion; 6 in 10 of Clinton-pledged delegates wanted her, but only 3 percent of Obama delegates named her.)

The John McCain campaign fired off an angry letter to NBC News criticizing Andrea Mitchell’s comments regarding the “cone of silence” at Saturday night’s presidential candidates’ forum at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California.

Campaign manager Rick Davis cited Mitchell’s comments on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the Barack Obama campaign had said privately that they believed McCain “may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well prepared.

Pastor Rick Warren on Saturday sat down first with Obama and asked him the same questions he would later ask McCain.

(Via Politics on The Huffington Post.)

To: Senator Barack Obama
From: Charles Warner

My wife, Julia Bradford, and I have both ardently supported you since the beginning of your campaign when we attended your March, 2007, fundraiser in New York. We are maxed out in our contributions to your primary campaign to become the Democratic Party’s nominee and have given over $1,000 to your presidential campaign because we are convinced that you will be the nominee. I co-hosted a party that raised over $10,000 for your candidacy. We took a bus from New York to Philadelphia the Sunday before the Pennsylvania primary to canvas door to door for you in South Philadelphia.

We believe in you and are convinced you will be a president who America and the world will be proud of. We are convinced you will be a president who will tell the truth to the American people and begin to make some necessary changes that will help to repair America’s reputation internationally and help to save our precious environment.

We did not give Hillary Clinton a penny. Her mendacious, destructive, poorly managed, and pandering campaign has demonstrated how unfit she is to be president. We did not give your campaign money to see it go to her. If your campaign agrees to pay off any of her campaign’s debt in order to bribe her to get out of the race, you will have betrayed our trust in you and you will plummet to her unprincipled level in the gutter.

You have promised to change the ways of Washington politics. Stick to your promise. Don’t bribe her. Don’t give her a dollar - not a penny of our money. If you do, you will not only break your promise of change, you will also not get any more money from us or millions of other people, and, most importantly, you will lose the mantle of idealism and hope that attracted us to you in the first place.

Finally, idealism is nice, but realistically, you don’t need to bail her out. You’re going to win the nomination without bribing her. Save the money and invest it in beating McCain. We’ll help if you keep our faith and the money we’ve already given you.

(Via RealClearPolitics.)

OK, so Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is staying in the presidential race despite losing among elected delegates, facing a slimming lead among superdelegates, losing the popular vote and behind by 2-to-1 in the number of states carried. She slogs on, hoping against hope for a sudden turnaround in the race.

Apart from the psychological reasons for her stubbornness, is there a more subtle political calculation going on?

Is she continuing her race so as to have a platform from which to continue to bash Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in the hopes of so damaging him that he can’t win the general election? Is she doing this to keep her options alive for the 2012 presidential race?

Hillary is obviously entitled to keep running until Obama has secured the votes necessary for the nomination, and it is certainly understandable that she would want to run until the last popular vote is counted. But must she run a negative, slash-and-burn campaign? Must she use her time on the platform and on television to belittle, mock, deride and try to destroy the man who will eventually be the candidate of her own party?

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) felt similarly justified in staying in the race for the Republican nomination until Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) reached the majority threshold required for nomination. He contested the Texas primary vigorously, even though his earlier losses in South Carolina and Florida made it most unlikely that he could win the nomination. But he chose to run a positive campaign. He didn’t knock McCain. He just articulated the case for his own candidacy.

But Hillary won’t avail herself of that option because it does not serve her long-term fallback position: a shot at the nomination in 2012. If Obama is elected this year, he will seek reelection in 2012 and Hillary would have to face taking on an incumbent in a primary in her own party if she wanted to run, a daunting task. But if McCain wins, the nomination in 2012 will be open. And it might be worth having. McCain will be 76 years old and the Republican Party will have been in power for 12 years. Not since FDR and Truman has a party lasted that long in power. When the Republicans tried to do so, in 1980 and 1992, they fell flat on their face.

Hillary is using white, blue-collar fears of Barack Obama to try to stop him from getting nominated or elected.

Full story here.

(Via Los Angeles Times.)

Barack Obama hasn’t managed after months of political combat to force Hillary Rodham Clinton out of the presidential race, so he’s about to try another approach: ignoring her.

Confident that he has built a near-impregnable lead, his campaign aides said Wednesday that Obama would begin shifting his focus toward the general election.

Obama still plans to campaign in states that remain on the primary calendar — he is to appear in Oregon over the weekend — but he may also start showing up in states that are considered important in the November contest: Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. (All three have held their Democratic primaries.)

With Clinton’s hopes of capturing the Democratic nomination dimming, Obama needs to prepare for the prospect of a general election matchup with the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, aides said.

“Everyone is eager to get on with this,” said David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s lead strategist.

“We’ve got to multi-task here . . . Sen. McCain has basically run free for some time now,” Axelrod added.

Clinton’s campaign cast Obama’s strategy as a show of hubris. Clinton has given no signal she is dropping out of the race after Tuesday’s split results, when she lost decisively in North Carolina and won narrowly in Indiana.

Showing she still believes she can win, the New York senator hastily arranged a campaign stop Wednesday in West Virginia, which will hold its primary Tuesday. “We’ve seen the perils of saying ‘mission accomplished’ too early,” said Phil Singer, a Clinton campaign spokesman.

The phrase “mission accomplished” was famously displayed on an aircraft carrier in 2003, when President Bush came aboard and declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended.

Full story here.

(Via CNN.com.)

The drawn out Democratic presidential race is producing “negative dividends in terms of strife within the party,” said a key Senate supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s White House bid.

A day after the Indiana and North Carolina primaries bolstered Sen. Barack Obama’s candidacy, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California and a superdelegate, said she wants to talk to Clinton to “see what her view is on the rest of the race. What the strategy is.”

Feinstein, who described herself as “very loyal” to Clinton, said “the question comes whether she can get the delegates that she needs and I’d like to know what the strategy is to do that.”

Superdelegates — made up of governors, senators, House members and various other party officials or members — are also known as unpledged delegates. They are free to choose the candidate they like, while pledged delegates are assigned in primaries and caucuses.

Full story here.

(Via New York Times.)

Top Democratic officials said privately that Congressional leaders were content to have the race play out as long as it did not take on a negative tone. Attacks on Mr. Obama by the Clinton campaign or its surrogates could lead to a leadership push for superdelegates to show their hand and bring the race to a close, said aides, who did not want be identified discussing internal strategy.

Full story here

(Via Open Left.)

With 1.5 million donors, this campaign has blown away anything we’ve ever seen in terms of grassroots fundraising. The technology is all centralized, so Obama knows the name, address, giving patterns, and occupation of every donor out there, as well as social networking information, like who the best raisers are. He has bypassed Actblue, and will probably end up building in a Congressional slate feature to further party build while keeping control of the data.

One email from Moveon to their full list can bring in between $100k to $1M for a candidate, with $1M being the very top end of the range. With one good email to his list, in a few months, Obama will probably be able to bring in $1-3M for a Senate candidate under attack or split that among several. 10-20% of the money going to Senate candidates this cycle might come from Barack Obama’s internet operation. Stunning.

Full story here.

(Via msnbc.com.)

During a speech on human trafficking and human rights at Oakland University this morning McCain vowed to create an “Inter-Agency Task Force on Human Trafficking” that would be focused “exclusively on the prosecution of human traffickers and the rescue of their victims.”

“I will require the Task Force agencies to report directly to me on the status of the problem and the progress we are making to defeat this stain on the reputation and character of the United States,” McCain said, comparing the need to eliminate human trafficking to the abolition movement of the early 19th century.

Showing one way in which his campaign will be different from either of George Bush’s controlled runs for the White House, after his speech McCain took questions from the audience, several of which were fairly contentious. The topics ranged from his support for the war in Iraq to his failure to vote on a bill addressing equal pay for women, and his first question even came from a 14-year old girl wearing a shirt that read, “McCain doesn’t care about our future.”

In response to a question from a self-described Republican about the issue of his temper, McCain first joked, “How dare you ask that question? Get that microphone away from him.” But then he confessed to being angry about governmental failures.”

“I will confess to you my friend that I get angry,” McCain began. “I get angry when I saw a guy named Abramoff that ripped off Native Americans for millions and millions and millions of dollars and people ended up — including him — in federal prison. I get angry when I see $233 million of your tax dollars going to an island, to a bridge to an island with 50 people on it. And that’s your dollars.

“I get angry when I see corruption to the point where we have former members of Congress residing in federal prison, and you know something, the American people are angry too, and they’re not going to take it anymore, and that’s why they want change. And they’re mad, and they’ve lost their temper.”

The crowd quickly agreed, responding with cheers and applause as McCain challenged his questioner to “ask’em if they’re not mad.”

(Via msnbc.com.)

Hillary Clinton wasted little time reaffirming her intention to see the Democratic contest through, telling reporters that she is “staying in this race until there’s a nominee.”

“And I obviously am going to work as hard as I can to become that nominee,” she said. “That is what I’ve done; that’s what I’m continuing to do.”

The statement, made barely 12 hours after most news organizations finally called Indiana for Clinton, comes despite increasing pressure for her to step aside, given the shrinking mathematical window to reach the delegate threshold (whichever it is) and the perception that a prolonged fight will hurt the party’s standard bearer.

“I just don’t believe that,” Clinton said of the latter view. “We’ve had a historic, record turnout by both of us bringing people into the Democratic Party. … And I think we can build on that going forward.”

She added that her husband didn’t secure the nomination in 1992 until June and was successful, while John Kerry, an Obama supporter, was the nominee by March 2004 and lost to George Bush. She also said that under Republican Party rules, she’d have won the nomination by now.

“So this is a dynamic electoral environment,” she said. “What matters is what strength you have going into the general election, who you’re going to be able to bring to your side, and what the electoral map will look like.”

To drive that point home, campaign aides pointed out to reporters that no Democratic candidate has won the White House without winning West Virginia since Woodrow Wilson.

Full story here.