Hillary Clinton plays the victim card

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8718.html
By: Roger Simon
February 27, 2008 05:43 AM EST

Hillary Clinton as the inevitable Democratic nominee didn’t work. Hillary Clinton as the front-runner didn’t work. So how about Hillary Clinton as the victim?

That was her theme at the Democratic debate with Barack Obama in Cleveland Tuesday night.

She complained that she always got the first question. She complained that she wasn’t getting enough time to discuss health care (a discussion that had gone on for 16 minutes, which is several lifetimes in terms of a televised debate).

And, then, demonstrating how presidential campaigns can repeat their mistakes rather than learn from them, she said: “If anybody saw ‘Saturday Night Live,’ maybe we should ask Barack if he’s comfortable and needs another pillow.�

The audience mumbled at this scripted and snarky line, just as an audience booed her in the last debate when she accused Obama of wanting “change you can Xerox.�

Overall, however, victimhood is not a bad theme for Clinton. It seemed to work in New Hampshire, where voters may have believed that a male-dominated media “commentariat� was already counting her out of the race.

And Clinton drove home her point when she defended her recent sharp attacks on Obama by saying, “It is important you stand up for yourself� and “I’m going to stand up for that.�

But it is also possible, especially in a debate, to stand up too far, which Clinton seemed to be doing when she decided to nitpick on whether Barack Obama had said he would merely “reject� anti-Semitic support rather than “denounce� it.

It seemed a somewhat bewildering distinction considering Obama had just pointed out that at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, “in front of a large African-American audience, I specifically spoke out against anti-Semitism within the African-American community.�

Obama then went on: “But if the word ‘reject’ Senator Clinton feels is stronger than the word ‘denounce,’ then I’m happy to concede the point, and I would reject and denounce.�

“Good, good, excellent,� Clinton said, as if she had just won a blue ribbon.

There was nothing wrong with Obama’s reply, or his whole debate performance, but I am once again left wondering whether he lacks an instinct for the jugular.

As in some past debates, he took every opportunity — including those that did not really present themselves — to heap praise on Clinton, including the assessment that she has campaigned “magnificently.�

Though I suppose if I had won 11 contests in a row, I, too, might think my opponent was magnificent.

While the two wrangled to a draw on the intricacies of their health care plans, when it came to a subject most people can actually understand — releasing tax returns — Clinton knocked a chink in her own stone wall.

While Obama has released his returns, Clinton has refused to do so until she becomes the nominee. But why? She has no real answer and NBC’s Tim Russert hammered her on it.

And she gave a little. “Well, I will do it as others have done it, upon becoming the nominee or even earlier, Tim,� she said.

Russert asked her if she would do it before the four primaries that are being held next Tuesday.

“Well, I can’t get it together by then,� she said, sounding a little flustered. “But I will certainly work to get it together. I’m a little busy right now; I hardly have time to sleep.�

And speaking of the upcoming primaries, Obama did deliver a subtle, but extremely pointed, line.

“There is still a lot of fight going on in this contest,� he said. “We’ve got four coming up and maybe more after that.�

Maybe. Or maybe, if Hillary loses Texas and Ohio, she will have to drop out, considering that Bill Clinton announced the other day that without those two wins she could not get the nomination.

And at the end of the debate, Clinton sounded a somewhat wistful note: “I still intend to do everything I can to win, but it has been an honor, because it has been a campaign that is history making. You know, obviously I am thrilled to be running to be the first woman president, which I think would be a sea change in our country.�

The audience applauded, which it barely had done all evening, and she added: “So I feel that either one of us will make history.�

But only one of them will actually get a chance to.

Clinton and Obama spar in Ohio Debate

http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2008/02/20.html
February 27, 2008 #20

Last night we witnessed a 90-minute confirmation of this coming Tuesday’s superfluousness; that, and the culmination of months of strategic impotence, tactical confusion and manifest frustration.

The only creative challenge successfully surmounted by the Clinton campaign these days lies in the number of ways it is finding to spell, “I-t’-s o-v-e-r.” One of its strategists busies himself with public fantasies about the imminence of “locking this nomination down,” its communications director has taken to screaming at rather than communicating to reporters, and other spokesmen are finally and openly sharing their pain and venting their “anger.”

Then comes the big night—the big 20th debate night—and the candidate herself adds to the already superfluous confirmation of organizational meltdown.

“Can I just point out that in the last several debates, I seem to get the first question all the time?” And that was the coherent part of Hillary’s paranoid oddity. Poor Dennis Kucinich had to elbow his way to questions, which were once universally believed to be opportunities in a debate, but oh how unremitting fire can change one’s outlook about the glory of battle.

Mrs. Clinton fared reasonably well on the healthcare and Nafta controversies, but those committed 30 minutes among the 90 just weren’t enough to smother the strikingly intrusive impotence, confusion and frustration. Her other responses did far more harm—and on occasion even raised more questions—than good.

The camera wasn’t panning the audience when Tim Russert asked Hillary about releasing her tax returns, so that voters could learn if that $5 million loan to herself was or was not a backdoor breach of campaign finance laws, but every viewer could feel the audience’s tension and incredulity. “The American people who support me are bankrolling my campaign. That’s obvious,” she said, in defiance of the profoundly obvious.

Tim continued, perhaps by Tuesday? Just to put this matter to bed? “Well, I can’t get it together by then,” said Mrs. Clinton, to what I thought were audible groans. And regarding the doppelganger question of releasing all her first-lady records, which are, after all, public records? Oh dear, that’s such a “cumbersome process,” she said. But sure, Tim, you got it—another empty pledge to try.

As for the thrusts, pokes and distractions of her attacks, they fizzled and soured the second Obama opened his mouth in polite but formidable defense. Encountering her charge of his having disseminated “false, misleading and discredited information” on her healthcare plan, Obama calmly countered that “Senator Clinton has, in her campaign at least, has constantly sent out negative attacks on us ... and we haven’t whined about it, because I understand that’s the nature of this campaign.” More than a smackdown, it was a shutdown, weighted with stones and the first casting thereof.

On the matter of Louis Farrakhan’s unsolicited endorsement of Obama, things became downright comical. Here, Mrs. Clinton decided to play not the politician, but Peter Mark Roget. She would “reject” the scoundrel, whereas Obama would merely “denounce” him. And, for you word mavens out there, let it be known there’s a vast and prodigious “difference between denouncing and rejecting,” Clinton instructed.

Hopelessly inarticulate as he is, Obama amusedly protested that he failed to “see a difference between denouncing and rejecting,” but hey, he was happy to couple his denunciation with a little rejection, if that, indeed, would make Mrs. Clinton happy. (It did not.)

On the broader issue raised of speeches over specific solutions—hence executive judgment—Hillary’s impotence boomeranged almost violently.

“My objections to the war in Iraq were not simply a speech,” retorted Obama in his most—in fact only—animated moment. “I was one of the most vocal opponents of the war, and I was very specific as to why.”

“The fact was,” he continued with withering, debate-ending vehemence, “this was a big strategic blunder.” And another “fact is that Senator Clinton often says that she is ready on Day One, but, in [further] fact, she was ready to give in to George Bush on Day One on this critical issue—in [yet further] fact, she facilitated and enabled this individual to make a decision that has been strategically damaging to the United States of America.”

To that, there was and remains simply no rational comeback. Political historians will someday write, I am certain, that that rational absence was what vacated Hillary’s nomination hopes from the beginning. The seedling virus was always there; it just needed time to grow and take malignant root throughout the base.

We will of course see you again in Texas and Ohio, Hillary, but till then and forever after, goodbye.

By end of MSNBC debate, little evidence of a shift in course of campaigns

The New York Times
By Adam Nagourney
Wed., Feb. 27, 2008

WASHINGTON - Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton entered the final debate before Tuesday’s critical primaries with two imperative goals: Challenge Senator Barack Obama’s qualifications to lead the country and raise doubts about his ability to defeat a Republican opponent as experienced as Senator John McCain.

For most of 90 minutes, Mrs. Clinton grabbed at every opportunity to accomplish those goals. She questioned Mr. Obama’s foreign policy credentials. She attacked campaign mailings he had sent out about her as “misleading.� She criticized him as failing to reject explicitly the endorsement of his candidacy by Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader.

Yet by the end of the night, there was little evidence that Mrs. Clinton had produced the kind of ground-moving moment she needed that might shift the course of a campaign that polls suggest has been moving inexorably in Mr. Obama’s direction for weeks.

Instead, in contrast to other debates — where she mixed a warm smile with a sharp attack — she was stern and tense through most of the evening, speaking in an almost fatigued monotone as she recounted her criticisms of Mr. Obama, some of them new but many of them familiar. She often sat staring unsmiling at Mr. Obama and at Tim Russert of NBC News, who, yet again, presented himself as a tougher challenge to Mrs. Clinton’s credentials than Mr. Obama himself.

Her most memorable moment — the one that seemed destined to be replayed in the days ahead — was not, say, a sharp rejoinder to Mr. Obama that might undermine his credentials and tilt undecided voters toward her. Rather, it was when she invoked a “Saturday Night Live� skit from last Saturday that showed television journalists fawning over Mr. Obama, another example of her campaign’s increasing frustration over what it considers unbalanced coverage of the Democratic race.

Complicated for Clinton

From the start, Mrs. Clinton’s task going into this debate, broadcast on MSNBC, was far more complicated than the one confronting Mr. Obama. National polls as well as surveys in Ohio and Texas suggest that her position is eroding; even former President Bill Clinton said the other day that he could not see Mrs. Clinton staying in the race if she lost one of those two states. For days, she had zigged and zagged between attacking Mr. Obama and celebrating the promise of his candidacy. With a week left, the debate provided what might have been her final opportunity to find an effective line of attack against Mr. Obama.

By contrast, Mr. Obama’s only task was making certain that the campaign did not stray from the road it was on. If he too was low-key and often unsmiling, he sat calm and unruffled, hands crossed, as Mr. Russert pressed her again and again. At a point when Mrs. Clinton apparently saw an opportunity — when she said it was not enough for Mr. Obama to simply denounce Mr. Farrakhan; he needed to reject his support — Mr. Obama did not take the bait.

‘Reject and denounce’

“I would reject and denounce,� he said.

Mr. Obama had the advantage of being the candidate with relatively little to prove. The past few weeks have offered increasing evidence that Democratic voters have considered the arguments Mrs. Clinton and others have made against Mr. Obama’s candidacy — not ready to lead the country in a time of war; unexamined and subject to an array of attacks by Republicans in the fall; not substantive enough on the issues — and have, for the most part, rejected them.

He was helped by the aggressive questioning of Mr. Russert, who made a better case about Mrs. Clinton’s shifting views on trade policy than Mr. Obama did. But he also has gotten more self-assured with each debate. And while he did not sit by and take Mrs. Clinton’s attacks — rejecting her assertion that his mailing about her trade and heath care views was dishonest, or that his health care plan would be less effective than hers — he barely bothered to stake out any lines of attack on Mrs. Clinton, as much a comment on her political strength as anything else he did.

In many ways, he was the foil to her tight and grim demeanor.

Since the debate last week in Texas, and with national polls suggesting that the Democratic party may be rallying around Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton had seemed befuddled about what, if anything, she could do to knock Mr. Obama off his pedestal. It has been a continued source of frustration for her and her campaign

That did not change Tuesday night in Ohio. Mr. Obama, if anything, seemed an even more elusive target. Whether Mrs. Clinton can unravel this mystery over the next seven days may well determine whether her candidacy will continue beyond the voting in Ohio and Texas.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23363410/

Poll: Obama now seen as most electable

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-02-25-poll-prez_N.htm
02/26/08 By Susan Page, USA TODAY

The sense that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is more electable than Hillary Rodham Clinton has trumped concerns about whether he has the experience necessary to be a good president, a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.
The air of inevitability that once surrounded Clinton has shifted to the Illinois senator, now seen by seven in 10 Americans as the likely Democratic nominee.

POLL: Full results: Views of Republicans, Democrats and undecideds

POPULARITY:Favorable ratings of Clinton, McCain, Obama and Castro
In a poll taken Thursday through Sunday, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say by 2-1 that Obama has the better chance of beating the Republican in November. Republicans agree: By more than 3-1, they say likely GOP nominee John McCain has a better chance of beating Clinton than Obama.

That’s true even though Americans are split, 46%-46%, over whether Obama, a first-term senator, has the experience to be president. In contrast, Clinton is seen as having enough experience by 2-1, McCain by 3-1.

Still, 29% of those who say Obama doesn’t have enough experience support him against McCain. Other priorities determine their votes. Those surveyed rank “leadership and vision” and positions on issues as more important than experience.

“Obama has transitioned from a movement leader to a presidential leader,” says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, saying he has “crossed the threshold” to being judged able to handle the job.

However, Clinton could rebound by winning the Texas and Ohio primaries next week, Lake says. And Obama’s lead could make Clinton the underdog, perhaps prompting some voters, particularly baby boomer women, to “give her a second look.”

Obama and Clinton face off at 9 ET tonight at Cleveland State University for a debate televised on MSNBC.

In a general-election matchup among registered voters, Obama leads McCain by 4 percentage points, 49%-45%; McCain leads Clinton 49%-47%.

McCain does better among likely voters, edging Clinton by 4 points, Obama by 1.

The Arizona senator seems to have the Republican nomination in hand, crushing former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee 61%-23% among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

Among Democrats, Obama has surged to a double-digit lead, thumping Clinton 51%-39%. It is the first time Obama has topped 50% and the first time he has led Clinton outside the survey’s margin of error.

However, the 12-point lead is at odds with a separate Gallup tracking poll, taken Friday through Sunday, that gave Obama a 47%-45% edge.

Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll, attributed the disparity to sampling error and the contest’s volatility. “There’s just a lot of movement,” he says. “Democrats are not yet totally honed in on exactly who they’re going to vote for.”

Clinton strategist Mark Penn concurs. Obama’s wide lead “is reflective of momentum from the last series of primaries,” he says. “We expect the polls to snap back to Hillary if we are successful in Ohio and Texas.”

The telephone poll of 2,021 adults has a margin of error of +/—2 percentage points. The margin of error for the subsample of 1,009 Democrats is +/—3 points; for the Republican sample of 829, it is +/—4 points.

On eve of debate, Gennifer Flowers says she’ll auction tapes of President Clinton

http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=9436
02/26/2008 @ 8:47 am

As if Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) didn’t have enough to worry about.

Gennifer Flowers, who accused then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton of having a twelve-year relationship with her in 1992, announced Monday she is auctioning tapes of conversations she had with the former president.

“I don’t need to hurt Hillary,” a jilted Flowers announced in the Las Vegas Review Journal Tuesday. “She is doing a fine job of that herself, along with her idiot husband. Karma is an interesting thing. If these two don’t get elected, and they are a team, it will be karma coming back to visit them. It’s about time.”

Clinton admitted having sexual relations with Flowers, once, in his autobiography, My Life.

Major media panned Flowers’ timing, and the tapes’ suspected content.

Bemoans the Los Angeles Times: “One can only imagine what else is on those tapes about shopping lists, the stock market and the dry cleaners. Those preserved phone conversations all came before Monica and what’s-her-name and the other one with the big hair.”

Flowers doesn’t deny she’s looking for money. She told the Journal she’s “kept the tapes ‘very safe all these years, and when I just recently received more interest, I said, ‘Why not?’”

Writing about the announcement, the Times’ Andrew Malcolm opined that the market for such recordings may be ebbing, and questions why Flowers picked Monday, of all days, to float the announcement.

“Somehow she says she detected renewed interest in the recordings recently and, thinking of her financial security, figured why not sell now?” Malcolm wrote. “Why not indeed? If Mrs. Clinton doesn’t do very well in some states next week, the couple may not be around in the political news much anymore. And there goes the market for secretly-made telephone tapes.”

“I certainly would enjoy the money for my future security,” Flowers remarked. “I don’t have any guarantee what might be coming.”

Her publicist, Bruce Merrin, said she’s ‘exploring a new book with “explosive story additions to the Clinton affair.’”