In the WSJ, Peggy Noonan begins thus:

I think we’ve reached a signal point in the campaign. This is the point where, with Hillary Clinton, either you get it or you don’t. There’s no dodging now. You either understand the problem with her candidacy, or you don’t. You either understand who she is, or not. And if you don’t, after 16 years of watching Clintonian dramas, you probably never will.

Read the whole thing, which I think sums it all up.

White House documents reveal that Hillary Clinton lied to voters about her opposition to a trade pact blamed in industrial states for killing jobs, Barack Obama’s campaign said Thursday.

A trawl through more than 11,000 pages of schedules from Clinton’s time as first lady fueled friction between the two Democratic White House contenders, as they also brawled over holding new contests in Florida and Michigan.

Republican nominee-elect John McCain meanwhile raked in campaign funds during a trip to London, and assailed Obama after the Illinois senator said the Iraq war could cost as much as three trillion dollars.

Obama aides said the schedules, which were released Wednesday after much back and forth between Clinton lawyers and the National Archives, undermined the New York senator’s most contentious claims of foreign policy experience.

Seizing on the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement, they highlighted an ABC News report which cited participants at one White House meeting in 1993 as saying Clinton was "fully supportive" of NAFTA.

"It does make you wonder if this was one of the reasons why there was such a reluctance to get those records out there on a timely basis," Obama strategist David Axelrod said on a conference call.

Before the March 4 primary in Ohio, Clinton had savaged the Obama campaign for its alleged inconsistency on NAFTA and asserted her own opposition to the pact, which her husband Bill had fought hard to get through Congress.

The New York senator carried the economically depressed state, along with Texas, to breathe new life into her faltering campaign.

"There was only one problem: she wasn’t telling the truth to Ohio voters," Axelrod said.

"Misrepresenting your position and carefully parsing your words when you don’t think you’ll get caught are the hallmarks of the kind of politics that Barack Obama is running to change."

Heading into the next Democratic clash on April 22 in another rust-belt state, Pennsylvania, the Clinton campaign denied any mendacity over the trade agreement grouping the United States, Canada and Mexico.

"It is no secret that passing NAFTA was a priority of the Clinton administration, but numerous contemporary accounts make clear that Hillary Clinton was personally opposed to NAFTA, and her position on NAFTA was and remains consistent," it said.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hmm I wonder if the morning of the Waco Branch Davidian Fire will be accounted for? Many people have concluded that Hillary might have been the one to force the confrontation - and Reno took the wrap.

The National Archives announced on Tuesday that 11,046 pages of Senator Hillary Rodham’s White House schedules will be released on Wednesday.

The records were the subject of a legal fight between Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, and the National Archives, which has been slow to comply with a request to release the records, arguing that the vetting process takes time.

Mrs. Clinton’s schedules have attracted close attention throughout the campaign, partly because Mrs. Clinton has frequently held up her eight years as first lady as evidence of her experience.

Judicial Watch announced on March 4 that the National Archives promised to release at least 10,000 pages of the records by March 20.

The Archives said in a statement on Tuesday that the schedules are from the staff files of Patti Solis Doyle, Mrs. Clinton’s former campaign manager who was her chief scheduler in the White House.

“Arranged chronologically, these records document in detail the activities of the First Lady, including meetings, trips, speaking engagements and social activities for the eight years of the Clinton Administration,” the statement said.

Of the more than 11,000 pages to be released, 4,746 pages have redactions, mostly relating to “the privacy interests of third parties,” including Social Security numbers, telephone numbers and home addresses, the Archives said.

Source: Times

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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."

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

This was the rejoinder offered by our commenters to my “who cares about Florida and Michigan” post on Monday, you’ll recall. It’s not the delegates, stupid, it’s the moral claim to the nomination that a popular-vote lead would give her with Democrats still smarting over the Goracle’s loss to Bush in 2000.

Read it all at Hot Air

it was a double whammy of a day for Hillary Clinton, who got pounded at the polls in Mississippi as Gov. Spitzer’s mushrooming sex scandal brought ugly headlines reminiscent of her husband’s philandering.

Barack Obama cleaned up in the Magnolia State, 60% to 38%, with 95% of precincts reporting. He was declared the winner by TV networks moments after the polls closed, likely giving him the majority of the state’s 33 delegates to extend his lead.

"It’s just another win in our column, and we are getting more delegates," Obama told CNN.

The win was the latest in a string of racially divided matches, with Obama grabbing about 90% of the black vote, according to exit polls.

"I’m confident that once we decide on a nominee and we go through the convention, that, in fact, the party’s going to be unified," Obama added.

Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams issued a statement congratulating Obama, saying, "Now we look forward to campaigning in Pennsylvania" - which votes next on April 22.

Back in the loss column after big wins in Texas and Ohio on March 4, the cloud over her home-state governor seemed to hang over Clinton’s campaign as she stumped earlier yesterday in Pennsylvania.

Clinton already had to sidestep questions about Spitzer Monday. "Let’s wait and see what comes out of the next few days," she said. "Right now I don’t have any comment."

Read the rest of this entry »