Her Governor’s In Trouble, But Clinton’s Not Talking

Aussie feminist Greer brands Hillary ‘cold, bossy’

Obama backer revives Clinton sex scandals

Clinton-backer Ferraro: Obama Where He Is Because He’s Black

Greg Craig Former Clinton Loyalist: Don’t Believe Hillary’s Claims - OUCH!

Clinton link in Brazil ethanol probe

Team Obama Hits Clinton on Experience Claims

Hillary Clinton’s Spitzer Problem

Hide and Seek - Bill and Hillary

The Red Phone in Black and White - Oh Brother! The 3 a.m. ad is racist?

SHE’LL NEVER RELENT

Will Obama Blink?

Lisa Miller defends Hillary Clinton against critics of her marriage in the latest from Newsweek. Although admitting that Hillary has brought the focus onto the marriage herself because of the nature of her claims to “experience”, Miller scolds people for speculating on the nature of the relationship. However, Miller doesn’t explain how to separate that from the nature of Hillary’s experience:

Cindy McCain is a grown-up woman who has suffered her share of personal and marital setbacks—including an addiction to prescription painkillers that she hid from her husband—but she knows that what America wants in a First Marriage is something more mythic than real. Like my 4-year-old daughter, deep into the second year of her infatuation with the Disney princesses, people want to believe that “husband” and “prince” are synonyms.

Hillary suffers at the hands of her critics, in part, because we all know her husband is no prince and her marriage is no fairy tale. Bill is a reckless philanderer who disrespected his wife, his daughter and the people who elected him because he couldn’t control his libido—and then lied about it. Much of the hesitance I hear about Hillary in my (admittedly small) circles is a hesitance over seeing that marriage (say it in irritated italics) back in the White House for four or eight more years. …

To be fair, Hillary has encouraged this endless dissection of her marriage because she seems to want it both ways: she wants to run and win as her own woman and she wants to offer her years as First Spouse as “experience.” She wants her impossible husband to be always an asset but never a liability. At the same time, I confess to a certain amount of unease when I hear that party game starting up yet again.

Hillary invites the criticism because she has essential run on her husband’s record. She has little experience of her own to produce: just an undistinguished seven years in the Senate. She has spent most of her life supporting Bill Clinton’s political career, only freeing herself from his shadow when he could not realistically run for another office.

Furthermore, neither Hillary nor Bill has exactly made it a secret that Hillary’s bid for the Senate was a mechanism they hoped to use to return both of them to the White House. Some speculated that she would run in 2004, essentially becoming the Barack Obama of that cycle — and against John Kerry, she may have succeeded in being just that. Hillary’s personal ascent in national politics has always been tied to Bill. John McCain didn’t have to run on Cindy McCain’s record, which is why the public treats their relationship differently.

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Hours after reports first said that New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) solicited a prostitute, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) campaign had yet to comment on its New York surrogate’s involvement and afternoon statement.

Clinton later in the day reportedly said she did not want to comment on the situation except to offer her "best wishes" for Spitzer and his family. Clinton twice said she did not have a comment when asked directly for one, according to reports, saying she wanted to "see how things develop."

Spitzer publicly apologized to his family Monday after The New York Times reported that the governor was caught on a federal wiretap “arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month.”

Spitzer did not take questions at an afternoon press conference, and he did not resign.

He endorsed Clinton last year, and, as recently as Feb. 26, the campaign hosted a conference call featuring Spitzer along with Govs. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) and Ted Strickland (D-Ohio).

On the call, Spitzer said he might campaign on Clinton’s behalf in Ohio in the days leading up to Clinton’s victory in the state. In response to several requests for comment, one Clinton campaign aide would say only that Spitzer did not ever make the trip to the Buckeye State as a surrogate for the former first lady.

Spitzer had not been a high-profile Clinton surrogate, and his lack of involvement was a topic during last month’s conference call. Several reporters on the call asked Spitzer if his controversial plan to allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses — a move that caused Clinton headaches when she was asked about it at a debate — was the reason for his distance from the campaign.

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The Nation — New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had to be dragged onboard the Hillary Clinton for President campaign.

Now, he’s another headache for Clinton.

Spitzer, who earned a national reputation as a crime buster, was busy apologizing Monday after having been linked–via a federal investigation–to a prostitution ring. The governor reportedly reportedly paid $4,300 to spend the night before Valentine’s Day with a young lady at Washington’s swank Mayflower Hotel.

"I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family… [and] my sense of right and wrong," admitted Spitzer, in a brief statement delivered at his Manhattan office. "I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust to my family."

Ouch.

Ouch for Spitzer.

Ouch for all New York Democrats, including a certain New York senator.

The first question is an ugly one: Will Spitzer, one of Clinton’s highest profile backers and the man who was going to lead the New York delegation at this summer’s Democratic National Convention, quit politics?

The Governor’s not saying. But the calls for a quit are already being voiced. New York State Assembly Republican leader James Tedisco declared that "[Spitzer] has disgraced his office and the entire state of New York. He should resign his office immediately."

If Spitzer quits — and the betting is that, as details of the scandal come out, he will — the governorship will go to his able lieutenant governor, David A. Paterson.

Paterson, also a Democrat and also a Democratic National Convention super-delegate, has always been a good deal more enthusiastic about the Clinton campaign than Spitzer.

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With the two Democratic presidential candidates seemingly poised for a duel to the death, and one of the two being Sen. Hillary Clinton, you can be sure of one thing: The stage is set for some world-class skullduggery.

Indeed, the procedural funny stuff is no doubt already under way.

Take last Thursday’s decision in Puerto Rico to switch from a caucus - a format that so far has favored Sen Barack Obama - to an outright primary, Clinton’s stronger suit.

And wouldn’t you just know it? The party chairman in Puerto Rico is an ardent Clinton backer. Hmm . . .

Now, that contest won’t be held until June 1. Meanwhile, the next big battleground is Pennsylvania, with some 188 delegates (including superdelegates) up for grabs. It’s slated for April 22.

And it’s ripe for shenanigans.

Indeed, Gov. Ed Rendell - a diehard Hillary loyalist whose wife owes her job as a federal appellate judge to Bill Clinton - is the kind of guy who, as Carrie Budoff Brown wrote on Politico.com, "knows where to find votes."

Rendell has ardently opposed all efforts to fight voter fraud.

Last month, citing bad weather, he extended the deadline for filing delegate slates. That unilaterally helped Hillary, whose delegates hadn’t all filed yet; Obama’s folks, by contrast, completed all their filings on time.

Then, of course, there’s the monster fight over whether to redo the primaries in Michigan and Florida. The Dems’ national bosses banned delegates from those states because they broke party rules and held their primaries too early. But then (as we noted last week), rules don’t really mean much to Democrats, particularly those like Clinton.

As these - and other - matters are hammered out, Obama would be wise to beware of ceding any advantage.

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By Dan Sargis, dansargis.org

Hillary Clinton’s ambition to be the next President has more to do with her DNA coming from Walter Mitty and Don Quixote than being “ready on day one”. 

Let’s face it…Hillary lives in a dream world and she wants the American electorate to pay for it.

As a Presidential candidate, Hillary has been touting the “35” years of “leadership” experience that makes her ready to “lead on day one”.

When referring to this magical 35 years of leadership experience is she talking about: her work on the Madison Guaranty scandal; the two years she spent “looking” for billing records that were sitting in her own reading room; her failed socialized healthcare scheme; her time “managing” the White House travel office; her “vetting” of the disastrous Janet Reno or…is she recanting her years as a gumshoe tracking her forever-unfaithful husband’s whereabouts?

Even if we forgave all of these shortcomings, there is still a central point…if Hillary plans on running the nation the same way she is ru(i)nning her campaign, we are in deep doo-doo.

Even that bastion of liberalism, the Washington Post, has said that Clinton’s leadership experience has produced a “combustible environment…an operation where internal strife and warring camps have undercut a candidate once seemingly destined for the Democratic nomination”.

Running against a virtual nobody (at the time), Hillary has managed to take a pre hoc nomination certainty and run it into the ground. 

The woman who says she can save the U.S. economy because “she knows how to run it” managed to raise $134,536,488 in campaign funds as of January 31.

And how did she care for this $134,536,488 of “other peoples’ money”?

When her “advisors” told her the campaign was financially insolvent shortly before the February 5th primaries she responded in true CEO fashion, “God, I’ve raised all this money.  What have you guys done with it?"

How do you spell “Clueless”?

From the “experienced” Senator who can save America when the White House phone rings at 3 A.M. we get such a state of preparedness that when her staff was repeatedly warned about Teddy Kennedy’s pending defection to Obama, her lieutenants were “slow to react”.

And, after the Kennedy bomb exploded, the Clinton wiz kids went prostrate as they gasped, “’Oh, my God, this can’t be happening”.

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The real message of Tuesday’s primaries is not that Hillary won. It’s that she didn’t win by enough.

The race is over.

The results are already clear. Obama will go to the Democratic Convention with a lead of between 100 and 200 elected delegates. The remaining question is: What will the superdelegates do then? But is that really a question? Will the leaders of the Democratic Party be complicit in its destruction? Will they really kindle a civil war by denying the nomination to the man who won the most elected delegates? No way. They well understand that to do so would be to throw away the party’s chances of victory and to stigmatize it among African-Americans and young people for the rest of their lives. The Democratic Party took 20 years to recover from the traumas of 1968 and it is not about to trigger a similar bloodletting this year.

John McCain’s nomination guarantees that the superdelegates wouldn’t dare. A perfectly acceptable alternative for most Democrats, McCain would harvest so large a proportion of Obama’s votes if Hillary steals the nomination that he would probably win. Even putting Obama on the ticket would not allay the anger of his supporters; it would just make him complicit in the robbery.

Will Hillary win Pennsylvania? Who cares? Even if she were to sweep the remaining primaries and caucuses by 10 points, she would move just 60 votes closer to Obama’s total of elected delegates. And she won’t sweep them all. Even if Hillary wins Pennsylvania, the largest prize up for grabs, Obama will probably win North Carolina, which is almost as large. He’s likely to win Mississippi and Wyoming and has a good shot in Oregon and Indiana. The most likely result of these coming contests is that Obama will be roughly where he is now, about 140 elected delegates ahead of Hillary.

Suppose that Hillary will carry those states by enough to offset Obama’s delegate lead. The proportional representation system makes a knockout impossible and so mutes relatively narrow victories as to make them almost inconsequential. Little Vermont, with 600,000 people, gave Obama a net gain of four delegates, half of what Hillary won from the Texas primary, a state with 20 million residents. Even after Hillary won big-state victories in Ohio and Texas, she drew only 20 closer to Obama’s total of elected delegates.

Hillary won’t withdraw. That much is for sure. The tantalizing notion that 800 insiders can offset a season of primaries and caucuses will drive both Clintons to ever-escalating rhetoric. Will their attacks hurt Obama? Likely all they will achieve is to give him needed experience in the cut and thrust of media politics.

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Feuding between aides shines spotlight on candidate’s management style

The morning after Senator Barack Obama shook the Clinton campaign by winning five states in one weekend, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new campaign manager — Maggie Williams, who had taken over in a shake-up the night before — assembled the curious if demoralized staff.

“You may not like the person next to you,” Ms. Williams told dozens of aides who ringed the conference room at the campaign’s Virginia headquarters last month, according to participants. “But you’re going to respect them. And we’re going to work together.”

Ms. Williams’s demand was dismissed as wishful thinking by some in her weary audience. But in the view of many Clinton supporters, it accurately reflected the urgent need to overhaul a campaign that at that point had set itself apart for its level of disorder and dysfunction.

The divisions in her campaign over strategy and communications — and the dislike many of her advisers had for one another — poured out into public as Mrs. Clinton struggled in February to hold off Mr. Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But even as Mrs. Clinton revived her fortunes last week with victories in Ohio, Rhode Island and Texas, the questions lingered about how she managed her campaign, with the internal sniping and second-guessing undermining her well-cultivated image as a steady-at-the-wheel chief executive surrounded by a phalanx of loyal and efficient aides.

“She hasn’t managed anything as complex as this before; that’s the problem with senators,” said James A. Thurber, a professor of government at American University who is an expert on presidential management. “She wasn’t as decisive as she should have been. And it’s a legitimate question to ask: Under great pressure from two different factions, can she make some hard decisions and move ahead? It seems to just fester. She doesn’t seem to know how to stop it or want to stop it.”

Insular management style
Over the last month, Mrs. Clinton, of New York, has become much more involved in the day-to-day operation of her campaign. In addition to Ms. Williams, she brought in two experienced political hands from her husband’s White House — Doug Sosnik, who was a political director, and Steve Ricchetti, a deputy chief of staff.

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It’s alive! We thought it might be over but some of us never dared fully believe it. Last week was like one of those moments in a horror movie when the worst terror recedes, the screen goes blank and then reopens on green fields or a lover’s tender embrace. Drained but still naive audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief. The plot twists have all been resolved; the threat is gone; the quiet spreads. And then . . .

Put your own movie analogy in here. Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction – whoosh! she’s back at your throat! – has often occurred to me when covering the Clintons these many years. The Oscars host Jon Stewart compares them to a Terminator: the kind that is splattered into a million tiny droplets of vaporised metal . . . only to pool together spontaneously and charge back at you unfazed.

The Clintons have always had a touch of the zombies about them: unkillable, they move relentlessly forward, propelled by a bloodlust for Republicans or uppity Democrats who dare to question their supremacy. You can’t escape; you can’t hide; and you can’t win. And these days, in the kinetic pace of the YouTube campaign, they are like the new 28 Days Later zombies. They come at you really quickly, like bats out of hell. Or Ohio, anyway.

Now all this may seem a little melodramatic. Perhaps it is. Objectively, an accomplished senator won a couple of races – one by a mere 3% – against another senator in a presidential campaign. One senator is still mathematically unbeatable. But that will never capture the emotional toll that the Clintons continue to take on some of us. I’m not kidding. I woke up in a cold sweat early last Wednesday. There have been moments this past week when I have felt physically ill at the thought of that pair returning to power.

Why? I have had to write several columns in this space over the years acknowledging that the substantive legacy of the Clinton administration (with a lot of assist from Newt Gingrich) was a perfectly respectable one: welfare reform, fiscal sanity, prudent foreign policy, leaner government. But remembering the day-to-day psychodramas of those years still floods my frontal cortex with waves of loathing and anxiety. The further away you are from them, the easier it is to think they’re fine. Up close they are an intolerable, endless, soul-sapping soap opera.

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Hillary’s yap, when she opens it, can be a fine thing.

To wit:

“I think that since we now know Sen. (John) McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Of course, nothing about her makes her fit to be a commander in chief, but she has told us that Republican John McCain is ready. She did insist that she thinks she might be ready, although she knows better — but not so much so with Barry. (Of course, as has been said, neither are ready.)

Who has won that exchange? Someone not directly involved, the senior Senator from Arizona.

AND btw, what can Barry say to that? That – nyaah, nyaah – he’s made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine? Maan?

I trust things will get better for the Dems. I mean, even Fritz won one State (and the District).

Source: Red State