Speaking this morning, Hillary hits Obama for not ruling out continuing to use armed private contractors in Iraq. She wants to ban such contractors.

Those contractors are protecting Iraqi government officials. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, as Hillary once called for threatening to take away Iraqi lawmakers’ security if they didn’t reach a deal. And at least one Democrat didn’t find that to be a wise move:

Addressing Mrs. Clinton’s latest proposal to cap American troops and to threaten Iraqi leaders with cuts in funding, Mr. Biden lowered his voice and leaned in close over the table.

“From the part of Hillary’s proposal, the part that really baffles me is, ‘We’re going to teach the Iraqis a lesson.’ We’re not going to equip them? O.K. Cap our troops and withdraw support from the Iraqis? That’s a real good idea.”

The result of Mrs. Clinton’s position on Iraq, Mr. Biden says, would be “nothing but disaster.”

She goes on to talk about how she’ll go after the favorite Democratic bogeyman, the infamous "no-bid" contracts.

"There’s been a lot of talk about earmarks in this town (and she hasn’t released her lists; credit Obama for going that far) but no-bid contracts are ten times more costly than earmarks. When I introduced my legislation, I could not get, as of this moment, Senator McCain’s support for that."

Source: NRO

A majority of Democratic voters say it would be unfair for Hillary Rodham Clinton to win the presidential nomination through the support of "super delegates" if she lags among the convention delegates elected in primaries and caucuses, according to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll.

If that happens, one in five say they wouldn’t vote for the New York senator in the general election.

The findings in the survey, taken Friday through Sunday, underscore some of the perils ahead for Democrats as the closely fought nomination battle between Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama continues.

By 55%-37%, Democrats and independents who "lean" Democratic say an outcome in which Clinton lost among pledged delegates but prevailed with the help of super delegates would be "flawed" and unfair" — including 77% of Obama supporters and 28% of Clinton supporters.

Super delegates are party leaders and elected officials who can vote at the national convention and aren’t bound by the results of their state’s primary or caucus.

Most at risk is Democratic support from independents. Nearly two-thirds of those voters call that result unfair, and one-third say they would then vote for the Republican or stay home in November.

"It goes back to this notion: As this race winds down, it’s not how we started the campaign, it’s how we end it," says Donna Brazile, campaign manager for Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, expressing concern that divisions in the party will present "obstacles" to a Democratic victory in November.

"I feel the emotions on both sides," says Brazile, herself an uncommitted super delegate. "I feel the pain and I feel the bruising."

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As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled to Bosnia in March 1996 with her daughter and several celebrities to boost troop morale and thank soldiers stationed there.

Clinton cites the goodwill trip as a part of her foreign policy experience, describing a dangerous landing where she was ordered to the armored front of the plane because of possible ground fire. She also now reports landing under sniper fire and contradicts her previous written account of a shortened welcoming ceremony at the airport.

But according to accounts at the time, she was placed under no extraordinary risks on that trip. And one of her companions on it said he has no recollection either of the threat or reality of gunfire.

___

THE SPIN

Clinton described her trip to Bosnia on Monday during a speech about Iraq in Washington. She said: "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

Questioned about it later at a news conference, Clinton said she was moved into the cockpit of the C-17 cargo plane as they were flying into Tuzla Air Base, Bosnia-Herzegovina. "Everyone else was told to sit on their bulletproof vests," she said. "And we came in, in an evasive maneuver. … There was no greeting ceremony, and we basically were told to run to our cars. Now, that is what happened."

She gave a somewhat different account in her book, "Living History."

In it, she said there were reports of fire but does not mention hearing or seeing it on her way to Tuzla.

"Due to reports of snipers in the hills around the airstrip, we were forced to cut short an event on the tarmac with local children, though we did have time to meet them and their teachers and to learn how hard they had worked during the war to continue classes in any safe spot they could find," she wrote.

She also described in the book how the plane was kept high, "above the reach of surface-to-air missiles and sniper fire." She wrote, "Above the airstrip, the captain dipped a wing and made a near-perpendicular landing to evade possible ground fire."

Former Army Secretary Togo West, who was also on the trip, said the military needed to take safety precautions with Clinton given that it was a combat zone.

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Monday’s decision by Florida Democrats to abandon their efforts to hold a new primary, in order to get their delegation seated at the national party’s August convention, is another blow to Hillary Clinton’s attempt to close the small but near-impregnable delegate gap on her rival, Barack Obama. And she’s having little more luck in Michigan.

Clinton won January primaries in both states. But since both were held in violation of national party rules, the state parties were told their delegates would not be seated and the races were not officially contested. (Obama even pulled his name off the Michigan ballot.) Now, however, Clinton sees the two states as key to her flickering hopes of catching Obama. The Illinois senator, unsurprisingly, has opposed any revote or reconsideration of the January results in either state, though his campaign is open to a neutral solution that would give each candidate half of the states’ delegates — a solution that would effectively have no impact on the outcome.

With just a handful of contests left on the nominating calendar, Clinton needs all the opportunities she can get to pick up delegates, and thus she has supported either counting the initial results or, alternatively, holding new votes. She is also hoping that her clean wins in the two important states would buttress her argument that her victories over Obama in most of the nation’s largest states suggests she would be a stronger opponent against the Republicans’ presumed nominee, Arizona Senator John McCain.

Last week, there were signs Florida might provide an opening for Clinton. Florida’s Democratic chairwoman Karen Thurman floated the notion of holding a new election that would meet the national rules by having the re-vote primarily through mail-in ballots. But many key state leaders opposed the method as unfair and impossible to pull off by a June deadline. Thurman herself acknowledged as much when she introduced the plan and on Monday she pulled the plug.

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The Obama campaign Sunday called Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton a "veteran of non-disclosure" and, opening a new front, challenged her to release information about her income taxes, Bill Clinton’s foundation and library donors, earmark requests and first lady records. The Clinton team said raising questions about her integrity is a "personal attack."

While Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama were cordial when they met on the Senate floor Thursday — Clinton said they talked about keeping their hotly contested primary fight on the issues — the top strategists and spokesmen for their respective campaigns in conference calls Sunday were anxious to deal with more contentious matters of ethics and transparency.

As I wrote in my Sunday column, Obama’s team is finally free to launch an ethics offensive against Clinton because after declining for more than a year, he granted extensive interviews with the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune on Friday to discuss his relationship with fund-raiser Tony Rezko, who is on trial in Chicago on federal corruption charges.

The Obama team is trying to dilute Clinton’s claim that because she and former President Bill Clinton have been investigated through the years — from Whitewater to impeachment to campaign finance scandals — she is "fully vetted."

David Axelrod, Obama’s top strategist, said, "Sen. Clinton and her campaign says she is fully vetted, but the truth is that she is a veteran of non-disclosure. In this campaign, we have set a standard. Sen. Obama has released his tax returns, he has released his earmark requests, and he has been forthcoming on these and other issues."

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African Americans liked Bill Clinton so much that he was once dubbed "the first black president," but perceptions that his wife’s campaigning has been racially tinged have taken a toll on Hillary Clinton’s White House bid.

Some accuse Clinton’s campaign of trying to cast her rival Barack Obama as a candidate of limited appeal in order to marginalize his candidacy and enhance her chances of winning the Democratic Party nomination.

Sen. Obama would be the first black president if he won the nomination and then defeated Republican John McCain in the November 4 national election. Obama is leading Sen. Clinton in the fight for delegates to the August convention.

Clinton would be the first woman president. But some black Americans have grown mistrustful of her campaign because of statements by her, her husband and other surrogates. African Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population.

Her suggestion of a "dream" ticket with Obama as her vice presidential running mate reminded some of the days when blacks, regarded as second-class citizens, were ordered to sit at the back of buses.

"No offense, but that is typical of a white person to offer you second place and say they’ll take first place," trucker Jasper Clark, 53, said at a recent Obama rally in Jackson, Mississippi.

The mere mention of Clinton’s name drew boos from that mostly black audience.

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In politics, honesty is not always the easiest policy. Barack Obama got a reminder of that when he released a list of "earmark" expenditures he has proposed — including a $1 million request for the University of Chicago Medical Center, where his wife, Michelle, is a vice president. In his meeting Friday with the Tribune editorial board, Obama indicated that he should have left that item to fellow Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, but he’s willing to disclose it and be held accountable.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, often seems to operate by the maxim that silence is golden. When asked whether she would release a list of her earmarks, her spokesman dodged the question, while declaring that she is "proud of the investments in New York that she has secured." But for now, at least, not proud enough to let voters know what they are.

This exercise in secrecy is part of a Clinton pattern that grows more worrisome all the time. The former first lady often says that she, unlike Obama, has been thoroughly vetted, rendering her impervious to Republican attacks. In fact, there are some important things unknown about her — and her conduct suggests she wants to keep it that way. Which raises a question for voters: What is she hiding, and why?

There is, for example, the matter of the Clinton tax returns. Obama has released his, but she has stalled on following suit. ( John McCain also has balked.) When asked about them in a February debate, she insisted she would make the returns public. But when asked if she would do so before the March 4 primaries, she replied, unconvincingly, "Well, I can’t get it together by then, but I will certainly work to get it together. I’m a little busy right now; I hardly have time to sleep."

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Try this thought experiment. Senator Barack Obama makes it through the final Democratic primary in Puerto Rico with (a) a majority of "pledged" delegates, not including Super Delegates, and (b) a majority of the popular vote.

For purposes of this exercise, you may even assume that Senator Obama’s margins over Senator Hillary Clinton, in both categories, are exceedingly narrow. Assume also that he has not fully resolved, or put behind him, his problems with his Chicago pastor’s extremist statements from the pulpit.

Given the above scenario, a highly plausible one, will the Democratic Party, through the instrumentality of their Super Delegates, its ostensible leaders, diss black American voters, the most loyal of Democratic constituencies for over forty years? In other words, will it deny Senator Obama the nomination in the face of his electoral and popular success in the primary elections?

Will the party elders do a very un-Democratic thing and hand over the nomination to a candidate who did not win a majority of either delegates or the popular vote, fair and square, according to the rules of the game then controlling? Discuss.

AS INCREDIBLE AS this scenario may seem, this is precisely the proposition that Senator Clinton is proposing to the party of Jefferson and Jackson. (Given the sketchy records both of these great Americans on matters of race and slavery, maybe there is more irony here than one might realize.)

Call it the Divine Right of Clintons. Or maybe it is a Clintonian version of the Jedi mind trick. But no matter how you view this proposition, the thought of the Democratic Party overturning the first, historic presidential nomination of an African American at its Denver convention is truly stupefying.

Slavery has been described as America’s Original Sin, bringing with it generations of racial discord. It distorted the original Constitution, which was only purged of this toxin by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Civil War. The civil rights movement of the 1960s moved the nation closer to the goal of equality under the law. Now Senator Obama has become the embodiment of the nation’s belated triumph over past injustice. This is a powerful reality that is recognized even by those who will not vote for him in the general election.

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Bill Clinton’s reentry into the political arena appears to have come at some cost to his legacy. New polling now suggests that Clinton’s involvement in the Democratic nomination battle between his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Barack Obama, has significantly tarnished the former president’s image.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Thursday found that more Americans view Bill Clinton negatively than positively, 45 to 42 percent. It marked the first time since January 2002 that a plurality of Americans disapproved of the former president. One month earlier, The Gallup Poll found that nearly as many Americans had an unfavorable as favorable view of Bill Clinton—for the first time in nearly five years.

Presidential historians said Clinton’s return to partisan politics made it likely that public perception of the former president would suffer. 

"There is a certain historical glow that surrounds a president as some of his historical battles become more distant. Clinton getting back in the mud again makes him a much more partisan figure,” said Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University. "And it’s not like it’s been an acclaimed experience for him."

After leaving the White House in January 2001 amidst controversy surrounding his last-minute pardons, Clinton reconstituted his public persona with a return to the world stage. He traveled to Gujarat, India, after a devastating earthquake, and in later years barnstormed Africa as an advocate for lower AIDS drug prices. He also began hosting an annual pre-United Nations General Assembly meeting for world leaders and tycoons.

America came to know a newer, less self-centered Clinton, an energetic statesman working to better the world. Public opinion polls showed about six in ten Americans held a positive view of the former president, reminiscent of the apex of his support in the White House.

His return to elected politics changed all that. In New Hampshire, he referred to Obama’s early opposition to the Iraq war as the “biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,” a remark that would come to be seen by many as an attempt to belittle Obama. He later accused Obama’s staff of voter suppression in Nevada—a sensitive charge in Democratic circles.

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For a party that loves to hate the Clintons, Republican voters have cast an awful lot of ballots lately for Senator Hillary Clinton: About 100,000 GOP loyalists voted for her in Ohio, 119,000 in Texas, and about 38,000 in Mississippi, exit polls show.

A sudden change of heart? Hardly.

Since Senator John McCain effectively sewed up the GOP nomination last month, Republicans have begun participating in Democratic primaries specifically to vote for Clinton, a tactic that some voters and local Republican activists think will help their party in November. With every delegate important in the tight Democratic race, this trend could help shape the outcome if it continues in the remaining Democratic primaries open to all voters.

Spurred by conservative talk radio, GOP voters who say they would never back Clinton in a general election are voting for her now for strategic reasons: Some want to prolong her bitter nomination battle with Barack Obama, others believe she would be easier to beat than Obama in the fall, or they simply want to register objections to Obama.

"It’s as simple as, I don’t think McCain can beat Obama if Obama is the Democratic choice," said Kyle Britt, 49, a Republican-leaning independent from Huntsville, Texas, who voted for Clinton in the March 4 primary. "I do believe Hillary can mobilize enough [anti-Clinton] people to keep her out of office."

Britt, who works in financial services, said he is certain he will vote for McCain in November.

About 1,100 miles north, in Granville, Ohio, Ben Rader, a 66-year-old retired entrepreneur, said he voted for Clinton in Ohio’s primary to further confuse the Democratic race. "I’m pretty much tired of the Clintons, and to see her squirm for three or four months with Obama beating her up, it’s great, it’s wonderful," he said. "It broke my heart, but I had to."

Local Republican activists say stories like these abound in Texas, Ohio, and Mississippi, the three states where the recent surge in Republicans voting for Clinton was evident.

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