Poll: California Democrats lining up for Obama

San Jose Mercury News
By Ken McLaughlin, 05/30/08

Hillary Clinton might have won California’s Democratic primary in February, but the state’s Democrats now prefer rival Barack Obama by a huge margin. And both Obama and Clinton would crush Republican John McCain if the November election were held today.

Those are the results of a Field Poll released today that boosts the hopes of Democratic operatives who want to avoid spending tens of millions of dollars to make sure the Golden State’s 55 electoral votes end up in the Democratic column in November.

According to the new poll, both Clinton and Obama beat McCain in 17-point landslides - seemingly jettisoning the notion from the McCain campaign that California is “in play.”

“The poll is really good news for the Democratic Party,” said Barbara O’Connor, director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and the Media at California State University-Sacramento.

Though Clinton beat Obama by 8 percentage points in February, the most recent poll has a majority of California Democrats preferring her rival - 51 percent to 38 percent.

The poll indicated the rivalry between the Obama and Clinton camps is still intense. Twenty-two percent of Clinton voters said they wouldn’t vote for Obama - compared with 17 percent of Obama voters who said they wouldn’t vote for Clinton.

But both O’Connor and Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll, said the results of the general-election matchups show that the Democrats don’t have much to worry about

“It really does fly in the face of the talking-head punditry” that Clinton voters will move in mass to McCain rather than vote for Obama, O’Connor said.

Still, many rank-and-file Democrats remain worried.

“It’s been such a contentious and emotional race that a lot of people just feel they can’t vote for the other person,” said Victoria Scott of San Jose’s Willow Glen area, an Obama supporter who was one of the 914 likely voters interviewed by Field. “I very much hope that doesn’t prove to be the case because it would strengthen McCain’s base, and that would be terrible.”

California is a huge electoral prize. Assuming the state does go Democratic, the 55 electoral votes represent about 20 percent of the 270 the Democrats need to win.

“We’re like a basketball team starting the game with a 20-point lead,” said Bob Mulholland, campaign adviser for the California Democratic Party.

If the state were competitive, he said, the Democrats would have to spend between $20 million and $30 million to win California. Now a lot of that money can be spent instead in battleground states like Ohio, he and other Democratic operatives say.

Despite the lopsided results of the poll, Republicans said Thursday: Not so fast.

Thomas Del Beccaro of Lafayette, vice chairman of the state Republican Party, assumes Obama will soon emerge as the nominee. And once Republicans make Californians aware of Obama’s proposals to boost taxes on capital gains and dividends, he predicted, the GOP-Democratic gap will close.

“As amazing as this sounds, we’re still early in this process of pitting a Republican against a Democrat,” Del Beccaro said.

Obama supporters seemed ecstatic about the results of the Field Poll.

“It shows that California voters have now come to the conclusion that Barack is a serious candidate who is likely to be the next president of the United States,” said Wade Randlett of San Francisco, a member of the Obama campaign’s national finance committee.

Reaction from the Clinton campaign was more muted.

http://origin.mercurynews.com/localnewsheadlines/ci_9424932

Exclusive: McClellan whacks Bush, White House

Politico.com, 05/28/08
Mike Allen

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.

Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”

• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

A few reporters were offered advance copies of the book, with the restriction that their stories not appear until Sunday, the day before the official publication date. Politico declined and purchased “What Happened” at a Washington bookstore.

The eagerly awaited book, while recounting many fond memories of Bush and describing him as “authentic” and “sincere,” is harsher than reporters and White House officials had expected.

McClellan was one of the president’s earliest and most loyal political aides, and most of his friends had expected him to take a few swipes at his former colleague in order to sell books but also to paint a largely affectionate portrait.

Instead, McClellan’s tone is often harsh. He writes, for example, that after Hurricane Katrina, the White House “spent most of the first week in a state of denial,” and he blames Rove for suggesting the photo of the president comfortably observing the disaster during an Air Force One flyover. McClellan says he and counselor to the president Dan Bartlett had opposed the idea and thought it had been scrapped.

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But he writes that he later was told that “Karl was convinced we needed to do it — and the president agreed.”

“One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term,” he writes. “And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”

McClellan, who turned 40 in February, was press secretary from July 2003 to April 2006. An Austin native from a political family, he began working as a gubernatorial spokesman for then-Gov. Bush in early 1999, was traveling press secretary for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign and was chief deputy to Press Secretary Ari Fleischer at the beginning of Bush’s first term.

“I still like and admire President Bush,” McClellan writes. “But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.”

In a small sign of how thoroughly McClellan has adopted the outsider’s role, he refers at times to his former boss as “Bush,” when he is universally referred to by insiders as “the president.”

McClellan lost some of his friends in the administration last November when his publisher released an excerpt from the book that appeared to accuse Bush of participating in the cover-up of the Plame leak. The book, however, makes clear that McClellan believes Bush was also a victim of misinformation.

The book begins with McClellan’s statement to the press that he had talked with Rove and Libby and that they had assured him they “were not involved in … the leaking of classified information.”

At Libby’s trial, testimony showed the two had talked with reporters about the officer, however elliptically.

“I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood,” McClellan writes. “It would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the president effectively. I didn’t learn that what I’d said was untrue until the media began to figure it out almost two years later.

“Neither, I believe, did President Bush. He, too, had been deceived and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

McClellan also suggests that Libby and Rove secretly colluded to get their stories straight at a time when federal investigators were hot on the Plame case.

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“There is only one moment during the leak episode that I am reluctant to discuss,” he writes. “It was in 2005, during a time when attention was focusing on Rove and Libby, and it sticks vividly in my mind. … Following [a meeting in Chief of Staff Andy Card’s office], … Scooter Libby was walking to the entryway as he prepared to depart when Karl turned to get his attention. ‘You have time to visit?’ Karl asked. ‘Yeah,’ replied Libby.

“I have no idea what they discussed, but it seemed suspicious for these two, whom I had never noticed spending any one-on-one time together, to go behind closed doors and visit privately. … At least one of them, Rove, it was publicly known at the time, had at best misled me by not sharing relevant information, and credible rumors were spreading that the other, Libby, had done at least as much. …

“The confidential meeting also occurred at a moment when I was being battered by the press for publicly vouching for the two by claiming they were not involved in leaking Plame’s identity, when recently revealed information was now indicating otherwise. … I don’t know what they discussed, but what would any knowledgeable person reasonably and logically conclude was the topic? Like the whole truth of people’s involvement, we will likely never know with any degree of confidence.”

McClellan repeatedly embraces the rhetoric of Bush’s liberal critics and even charges: “If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

Decrying the Bush administration’s “excessive embrace of the permanent campaign approach to governance,” McClellan recommends that future presidents appoint a “deputy chief of staff for governing” who “would be responsible for making sure the president is continually and consistently committed to a high level of openness and forthrightness and transcending partisanship to achieve unity.

“I frequently stumbled along the way,” McClellan acknowledges in the book’s preface. “My own story, however, is of small importance in the broad historical picture. More significant is the larger story in which I played a minor role: the story of how the presidency of George W. Bush veered terribly off course.”

Even some of the chapter titles are brutal: “The Permanent Campaign,” “Deniability,” “Triumph and Illusion,” “Revelation and Humiliation” and “Out of Touch.”

“I think the concern about liberal bias helps to explain the tendency of the Bush team to build walls against the media,” McClellan writes in a chapter in which he says he dealt “happily enough” with liberal reporters. “Unfortunately, the press secretary at times found himself outside those walls as well.”

The book’s center has eight slick pages with 19 photos, eight of them depicting McClellan with the president. Those making cameos include Cheney, Rove, Bartlett, Mark Knoller of CBS News, former Assistant Press Secretary Reed Dickens and, aboard Air Force One, former press office official Peter Watkins and former White House stenographer Greg North.

In the acknowledgments, McClellan thanks each member of his former staff by name.

Among other notable passages:

• Steve Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, said about the erroneous assertion about Saddam Hussein seeking uranium, included in the State of the Union address of 2003: “Signing off on these facts is my responsibility. … And in this case, I blew it. I think the only solution is for me to resign.” The offer “was rejected almost out of hand by others present,” McClellan writes.

• Bush was “clearly irritated, … steamed,” when McClellan informed him that chief economic adviser Larry Lindsey had told The Wall Street Journal that a possible war in Iraq could cost from $100 billion to $200 billion: “‘It’s unacceptable,’ Bush continued, his voice rising. ‘He shouldn’t be talking about that.’”

• “As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided.”

• “History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”

• McClellan describes his preparation for briefing reporters during the Plame frenzy: “I could feel the adrenaline flowing as I gave the go-ahead for Josh Deckard, one of my hard-working, underpaid press office staff, … to give the two-minute warning so the networks could prepare to switch to live coverage the moment I stepped into the briefing room.”

• “‘Matrix’ was the code name the Secret Service used for the White House press secretary.”

McClellan is on the lecture circuit and remains in the Washington area with his wife, Jill.

© 2007 Capitol News Company, LLC

Olbermann lambasts Senator Clinton over RFK assassination comments

Hillary Brings Up Bobby’s Assassination In Saying Why She Stays In The Race

Washingtonpost.com, 05/23/08
By Anne E. Kornblut

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton invoked the memory of slain Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy as she explained her persistence in the Democratic race on Friday, saying that although the media and the Barack Obama campaign have been trying to usher her from the race, “historically, that makes no sense.”

“We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California,” Clinton said in a meeting with the editorial board of the Argus Leader, a newspaper in South Dakota.

Her advisers later said she was using the historical reference to note that campaigns have stretched until the summer before, not to suggest that Obama might be assassinated. In the previous sentence, she had also noted that her husband’s campaign in 1992 lasted until June as well.

But in a campaign in which voters have voiced concerns about the safety of the first African American front-runner in history, it was a surprising choice of words by Clinton, whose best hope for seizing the nomination now would be a major setback for Obama. Clinton has already faced harsh criticism for allegedly exacerbating racial divisions in the nominating process.

“Senator Clinton’s statement before the Argus Leader editorial board was unfortunate and has no place in this campaign,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

Clinton clarified her remarks in a statement from Brandon, S.D.

“Earlier today I was discussing the Democratic primary history and in the course of that discussion mentioned the campaigns that both my husband and Senator Kennedy waged in California in June 1992 and 1968 and I was referencing those to make the point that we have had nomination primary contests that go into June. That’s a historic fact.” she said. “The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy and I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Kennedy family was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that, whatsoever.”

She continued:"My view is that we have to look to the past and to our leaders who have inspired us and give us a lot to live up to, and I’m honored to hold Senator Kennedy’s seat in the United States Senate from the state of New York and have the highest regard for the entire Kennedy family.”

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/05/23/clinton_invokes_rfk_assassinat.html

McCain Sells Out Vets

By Brian Beutler, June 2, 2008 edition
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080602/beutler/print

The way John McCain tells it, the injuries he suffered at the hands of his captors in Vietnam would have ended his career as a Navy pilot were it not for the help of physical therapist Diane Rauch. And that’s basically true: after months of painful treatment, he was well enough to pass his medical screening. But that leaves out an interesting part of the story. In his biography of McCain, Robert Timberg details the treatment McCain received at two naval hospitals. Navy doctors in Maryland were, in fact, McCain’s first physical therapists, but they offered a bleak prognosis. Fortunately for McCain, the story of his imprisonment and torture was so widely known that strangers from across the country offered assistance. One of those strangers was Rauch, who provided her services at no charge.

As a vignette, it’s charming--a POW, just released from a long and brutal stretch in captivity, finally stumbling upon some good fortune. But it’s hardly a working model for veterans’ health services. Most vets, after all, need government-provided treatment for the rest of their lives--first, like McCain, at military hospitals and then, unlike McCain, at VA facilities.

Thirty-five years after McCain’s return to the United States, the Veterans Health Administration has undergone a sea change. Once a national embarrassment, it is now among the highest-functioning public bureaucracies. In fact, it’s the best health system, public or private, in the country. (Military hospitals are a different story altogether, managed not by the Veterans Administration but by the armed services. To many, the words “military hospital” evoke images of the Soviet-style decay uncovered by journalists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.)

Times have changed since McCain needed veterans services so urgently. And for many of those thirty-five years, McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, the candidate who talks the best talk on veterans issues, has demonstrated a tendency to work against veterans’ interests, voting time after time against funding and in favor of privatizing services--in other words, of rolling back the VA’s improvements by supporting some of the same policies that wrecked Walter Reed.

During a March 2005 Senate budget debate, McCain voted to kill an amendment that would have “increase[d] veterans medical care by $2.8 billion in 2006.” That amendment lacked an assured funding stream, but lest one mistake this incident for a maverick’s stance against budget-busting, there’s more. Just a year later McCain voted against an amendment that would have “increase[d] Veterans medical services funding by $1.5 billion in FY 2007 to be paid for by closing corporate tax loopholes.” Two days after it failed, he voted to kill “an assured stream of funding for veterans’ health care that [would] take into account the annual changes in the veterans’ population and inflation to be paid for by restoring the pre-2001 top rate for income over $1 million, closing corporate tax loopholes and delaying tax cuts for the wealthy.” That amendment died quietly, forty-six to fifty-four.

In September 2006 McCain voted to table an amendment to a Defense appropriations bill that would have prevented the department from contracting out support services at Walter Reed. The amendment was indeed tabled--by a vote of fifty to forty-eight, the sort of margin a true veterans’ senator might have been able to flip if he really cared about veterans’ healthcare.

“John McCain voted against veterans in 2004, ‘05, ‘06 and ‘07,” says Jeffrey David Cox, who spent twenty-two years as a VA nurse before moving to the American Federation of Government Employees, where he serves as secretary-treasurer (AFGE represents employees of several federal agencies, including the VA). Cox is right. Under Bush, McCain has voted for measures that target so-called Priority-7 and Priority-8 veterans (those whose injuries are not service-related and whose incomes are above a low minimum threshold) for annual fees, higher co-pays and even suspended enrollment. Priority-7 veterans without dependents earn more than $24,644 annually. Priority-8 veterans without dependents earn an annual minimum of $27,790.

Cox and AFGE are also concerned about McCain’s pet plan to issue all veterans a “plastic card,” which they could take “to the doctor or the provider of their choice and...get the treatment they need.”

“We should give them freedom to choose to carry their VA dollars to a provider that gives them the timely care at high quality and in the best location,” McCain has said. AFGE sees it as a backdoor attempt to undermine, or even destroy, the VA. According to Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and an expert on the VA, such ideas aren’t always inappropriate (disclosure: in 2006 I worked at NAF, where I provided research assistance to Longman and others). Private services, he says, can in some cases be essential to veterans in underserved communities. “But his idea shows just how uninformed [McCain] is about veterans and the VA. Veterans who are already in the system don’t want to get out,” Longman says. “Every veteran who moves from the VA system into the private system will find it more dangerous and more costly.” And there are additional concerns. AFGE points to incidents like the ones in Hayward and Rice Lake, Wisconsin. Last summer veterans facilities in those cities outsourced the operation of their clinics to a private firm, Corporate Health & Wellness. Within a few months the company, citing major financial losses, jumped ship, leaving veterans in search of care locked out for weeks.

Cox adds that the privatization of other, nontreatment services--laundry and janitorial, for instance--aren’t without costs of their own. Approximately 80 percent of VA jobs--and therefore an enormous percentage of the jobs that are outsourced to private firms--are (or were) held by veterans themselves.

These are the natural consequences of policies McCain and the Republican Party have supported. Despite the recent onslaught from the right, though, and despite the many incidents in which GOP cronyism has resulted in veterans’ suffering, the VA is still providing the best care in the country. “It’s endured seven years of hostile treatment from the Bush Administration, and it’s still standing...it’s still a bright star,” says Longman. “I think the VA could probably withstand a McCain administration.” But could it? If recent trends continue--outsourcing in particular--they could eventually erode the elements most crucial to the VA’s success, and at the deadly expense of its quality of care. In November the Department of Veterans Affairs announced it would begin using the Cerner Corporation’s proprietary laboratory information system “in more than 150 hospitals and 800 clinics in the Veterans Health Administration system” for the next nine years, ousting an open-source information system that was developed by VA programmers years ago. That system, VistA, has outperformed every comparable privately developed system on the market. It helped transform the VA from the country’s most scandal-ridden health provider into its finest, and has become the envy of treatment facilities around the world.

In other words, VistA is critical to the VA’s ability to provide quality care. In bringing an outsourcing culture into the VA, Longman says, Bush appointees are “destroying the open-source culture that turned the VA into what it is.” Based on McCain’s record, there’s little reason to believe that as President he would stanch that bleeding. And that could portend a disaster for veterans--one that makes the problems McCain and the GOP have already created pale in comparison.