Primary Thread 3: Race to Denver

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Donegeal
Tuesday is the Wisconsin Primary. I can vote for any candidate, however, I will NOT vote for Obama (because he wants to set a withdrawl timeline against military recomendation and because he want to cut the Space budget. Both of these issues are important enough to me to eliminate him as a candidate for me) or Huckabee (wants an amendment to ban gay marriage and I just can't say his name without laughing), so I guess you have to convince me betweem Hillary and John.

You have till Tuesday.

Of course the main difference is that McCain is winning the Republican primary. Clinton is still locked in a battle with Obama which can really go either way.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
To be honest, when we have facilities bulit (like my lab) that don't run for months because of not having enough money to power the beam... that is a far greater loss of opportunity and resources then the space program.

JM
(so we can't run experiments because of lacking money to run the beam, but our science is important so we have full funding to expand the facility for the next couple decades)

That's administrative stupidity, not a large-scale error of priorities.

[MarkG]

clinton

Clinton Camp Says Obama Plagiarized in Speech
By JEFF ZELENY

NILES, Ohio — With the next round of voters set to weigh in on the Democratic presidential race, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign on Monday accused Senator Barack Obama of committing plagiarism in a weekend speech. Mr. Obama dismissed the charge as absurd and desperate.

Mr. Obama told reporters he should have credited Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, a friend, for a passage in a speech he delivered on Saturday in Milwaukee. But Mr. Obama said his rival was “carrying it too far.”

“Let’s see,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ve written two books. I wrote most of my speeches. I would add that I noticed Senator Clinton, on occasion, has used words of mine as well.”

The exchange injected a fresh dose of contention into the bitter fight for the Democratic nomination. Mr. Obama said two of his standard lines — “It’s time to turn the page” and “Fired up and ready to go” — have made their way into Mrs. Clinton’s remarks in recent weeks.

As Mrs. Clinton campaigned in Wisconsin in advance of the primary there on Tuesday, one of her top advisers, Howard Wolfson, convened a conference call with reporters to accuse Mr. Obama of plagiarizing Mr. Patrick’s remarks from a 2006 campaign appearance.

Mr. Wolfson said it was important for voters to know that Mr. Obama’s rhetoric, at least in this instance, was not original.

During a news conference here, Mr. Obama said he and Mr. Patrick “trade ideas all the time.” Asked if he should have given credit to Mr. Patrick, he said, “I’m sure I should have,” but he said he doubted that voters were concerned by the dust-up.

“I’m happy to give Deval credit, as I give to a lot of people for spurring all kinds of ideas,” he said. “But I think it’s fair to say that everything we’ve been doing and generating excitement and the interest that people have had in the elections is based on the core belief in me that we need change in America.”

The controversy arose after Mr. Obama, of Illinois, delivered a speech at a Democratic Party dinner in Wisconsin. He responded to criticism from Mrs. Clinton, of New York, who argued that Mr. Obama might deliver smooth speeches, but that she was better prepared to solve problems.

“Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” he said in his remarks. “ ‘I have a dream.’ Just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’ Just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words? Just speeches?”

The passage was similar to one used by Mr. Patrick in response to similar criticism.

Mr. Patrick said he and Mr. Obama discussed the argument in advance and he encouraged his friend to defend himself the same way he did during his race in 2006.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/us/politics/19campaign.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=us&adxnnlx=1203392420-MKXnRUDenQf%20JtXJ%20W962A&pagewanted=print

[MarkG]

oh no, Obama went back in time and admitted of stealing quotes so he now gets get-out-of-jail card!

"But you know in the end, don’t vote your fears. I’m stealing this line from my buddy (Massachusetts Gov.) Deval Patrick who stole a whole bunch of lines from me when he ran for the governorship, but it’s the right one, don’t vote your fears, vote your aspirations. Vote what you believe."

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2007/12/obama-scoffs-th.html

[SlowwHand]

They're throwing so much dirt on each other, McCain is going to kate into the White House.

[Admiral]

This particular incident will be buried by the weekend. The Clinton campaign is not trying to make a substantive attack on Obama. They know that once all the facts come out, this will turn into a non-story, that Patrick and Obama share lines (Patrick borrowed a number of Obama's lines in his 2006 gubernatorial campaign). That isn't the issue here. This is really just a short-term strategy to steal Obama's news-cycle, and put him on the defensive.

There are two levels at work here. First, Clinton argued that Obama speeches are fine, but that what really matters is policy. Obama countered, and as Patrick's 2006 race showed, his counter is pretty effective. So, by introducing the plagiarism attack, Clinton shifts the news story from the difference between words and policy, a substantive story that might give Obama an advantage, to a process story about whether or not Obama has been stealing speeches. Second, especially with the primary lasting as long as it seems to be lasting, the network news and the newspapers are only going to devote so much space/time to the Obama campaign. By bringing this up, they make most of the Obama coverage be about this, with little of the usual pre-election Obama coverage ("Obama draws large crowds in Madison rally," one could imagine as a possible headline). Finally, if Clinton does better than expected tomorrow, this gives the story legs, because the headline suddenly is 'Clinton wins Wisconsin, plagiarism story dims enthusiasm for Obama.'

So, when it comes to the media, no one should accuse the Clinton campaign of not being good. But at least this particular spat will likely not effect the primary or the general beyond immediate post-Wisconsin coverage.

[Dinner]

That was a response to Obama supporters saying Clinton plagiarized from him two days ago.

[Bosh]

And Hillary has gotten above 40% for the first time in weeks! Now that's some momentum

[Dinner]

Big win for Obama tonight. Just a couple weeks ago Wisconsin was supposedly firmly in Hillary's camp (blue caller workers and all that) but now it looks like he won the state.

That's good news for Obama supporters given that Ohio has a very similar demographic so if he can surge in Wisconsin then it just might be surging in Ohio too.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7252205.stm

[-Jrabbit]

"blue collar"

[asleepathewheel]

Just got back from a Clinton rally in Houston where Bill was the speaker. Not a full house, but probably a couple thousand on hand. rainy weeknight, bill didn't start until ~10:30. can still give a rousing speech.

got the feeling it was a dead campaign walking though.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Coincidently, I just read this great analysis of the failure of the Clinton campaign:

The Underperformer

Ezra Klein | February 20, 2008 | web only

With a population that is more than 91 percent white, Wisconsin isn't African American enough for Bill Clinton to hint that it didn't count. As one of the 20 most populous states in the union, it's not small enough for Clinton's chief strategist, Mark Penn, to suggest it didn't rate. Because Wisconsin uses a primary, the Clinton campaign can't pretend it was noncompetitive because of a mysterious allergy to caucuses.

And so Wisconsin—which gave Barack Obama a resounding, double-digit victory last night—counted. It was Obama's ninth straight victory. With no excuses readily available, the Clinton campaign made none. Indeed, in the space the networks reserved for her concession speech, Clinton said nothing about Wisconsin at all, taking advantage of the media's tradition of televising the runner-up's congratulatory address to bait-and-switch them into covering an attack-laden "contrast" speech that never once mentioned the night’s results. Noticing this, the Obama campaign pushed up their speech. The networks promptly dropped Clinton to give uninterrupted airtime to the night’s winner. It was Clinton’s second loss of the evening.

But give her this: The Clinton campaign genuinely is the story coming out of Wisconsin. About Obama, there is little left to say. His victories have grown almost commonplace, his demographic disadvantages progressively slimmer. According to the exit polls, he fought Clinton to a draw among women, won among whites, and outpaced her among every income group. His was an across-the-board victory, startling in its completeness. But he has not become a much better candidate. His advantages—charisma, eloquence, a crackling aura of potentiality—have remained constant, as have his weaknesses. Without doubt, he's gaining some strength from simple momentum, but with Clinton still favored in Texas and Ohio, momentum is, at best, a partial explanation for his sudden strength.

These results, in fact, have less to say about Obama than they do about Clinton, and in particular, the collapse of her campaign. Her aura of inevitability has given way to a fight for relevance. She is no longer the default candidate—her losses are not confined to demographically unfriendly electorates or surprise upsets. They have become the norm for her campaign and are damaging the foundations of her candidacy.

Before this campaign, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama had been tested in a tough electoral contest. Obama's path to the Senate largely required him to step over the bodies of establishment candidates who self-destructed in scandal. Clinton's 2000 victory over Rick Lazio and her 2006 triumph over the forgettable John Spencer demonstrated little about her readiness for combat. Thus, unlike John Kerry in 2004, we've not heard much about them as "closers" nor heard tell of their stunning triumphs in tough campaigns (it's easy to forget how much of the Kerry myth was built around his upset victory of William Weld in Massachusetts). Instead, there's been a lot of meta-campaigning—campaigns about what good campaigns they would run.

Obama's argument, of course, was that his staggering charisma would activate whole new constituencies and overwhelm the political process with new voters. Clinton's claim was that her years in the trenches of national politics and her long experience battling Republicans had left her battle-tested and technically skilled—hers would be a disciplined operation that allowed no mistakes, made no missteps, permitted no leaks, and could be trusted to grind out a victory against whomever the Republicans nominated.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the nomination. Obama's campaign, in Iowa, South Carolina, and elsewhere, made good on their promises to excite new voters. Additionally, the Obama campaign ran a disciplined, forward-looking operation. It methodically organized—and, as a result, dominated—the caucus states; it predicted early on that the contest would drag beyond Feb. 5 and was thus better prepared in the recent primaries; the campaign ran a tight ship with little dissension, few gaffes, and no damaging leaks.

Clinton's campaign has done exactly the opposite. Aside from an important win in New Hampshire, she has not overperformed in any state. Tactically, her strategists have made a series of massive errors: They were so stung by their loss in Iowa that they largely turned away from caucuses, a disastrous mistake as the race became more dependent on delegates; they thought the election would be over early on and were unprepared to go past Feb. 5, which is why her organizing in post-Super Tuesday states has been so poor; they appear, only now, to be thinking through the implications of Texas' hybrid primary/caucus system—and Texas is a must-win. No one thought to dispatch an intern to ask the state's Democratic Party, how would March 5 work? How savvy of a campaign operation could this be?

Politically, the Clinton campaign has been, if anything, worse. The campaign repeatedly squandered advantages by overreaching on the attack and presenting surrogates it proved unable to control. Bill Clinton's frequent outbursts did not bespeak a disciplined campaign operation. Nor did Mark Penn's increasingly desperate spin, as when he suggested, in what Markos Zunigas called the "insult-40-states-strategy," that the true test of a campaign was its ability to win primaries in massive, heavily Democratic states like New York and California. The constant reports of campaign infighting didn't help, nor did the ceaseless leaks, like the one powering yesterday's (rapidly denied) Roger Simon story in which a "Senior Clinton Official" suggested that the campaign would try to poach pledged delegates.

For all Clinton's talk of bureaucratic mastery, a startling number of her Senate colleagues seem to be endorsing Obama, as are an impressive number of congressional Democrats (including Texas' Chet Edwards, who represents Texas' 17th Congressional District, the reddest district in America held by a Democrat). The campaign's talk of reseating the Michigan and Florida delegations, convincing superdelegates to go against the voters, and winning the nomination through other applications of convention skullduggery has elicited condemnation from no less a force than Nancy Pelosi, who will chair the convention.

Some of these mistakes, some of these leaks, some of this infighting, and some of this desperation are the inevitable outcome of a campaign behind the eight ball. Clinton's operation looked a lot more disciplined when she was the prohibitive front-runner. But explanations are not excuses, and it's growing increasingly hard for Clinton to argue that her experience and electoral discipline set her apart when the largest organization she's ever run—this campaign—is listing so badly and exhibiting a reality so far from the rhetoric. In her speech tonight, Clinton launched her broadside against Obama by saying that "while words matter, the best words in the world aren't enough unless you match them with action." The problem for her is that Obama has matched his words with actions, fulfilled his promises with votes. It's her campaign that rests on an increasingly precarious foundation of words and that needs to demonstrate results to match its rhetoric.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_underperformer

Summary for the ADD crowd: Clinton has campaigned entirely on her abilities as a pragmatist and a problem-solver. But her campaign has been neither pragmatic nor able to solve the problems that beset it; instead it revealed that Hillary doesn't know what to do when things aren't handed to her on a platter, as the nomination was supposed to be.

I'm still leaning toward Clinton -- just barely -- but it's a persuasive and damning analysis.

[Ramo]

Yep, Ezra Klein does good work ('specially on health care). As I wrote after IA, Obama is proving the central premise of his campaign. That he can bring in large numbers of people to vote, to organize, and to donate to progressive ends. There was a hickup in NH, but everything fell into place for him afterwards.

I was hard on Obama's campaign a few months ago, but damn does he look like a competent manager now that that people are voting. Clinton looks a lot worse in comparison...

Just got back from a Clinton rally in Houston where Bill was the speaker. Not a full house, but probably a couple thousand on hand. rainy weeknight, bill didn't start until ~10:30. can still give a rousing speech.

got the feeling it was a dead campaign walking though.

I was thinking of going there, but it was too hard to work up the motivation (and I didn't want to get spammed by her campaign).

I, along with almost 20,000 other people, went to Obama's speech yesterday. The content was disappointing, though; he usually tries out new language and themes during victory speeches, but instead went with a standard stump speech - one I've already seen a number of times. The "Crab Cake" victory speech was a lot better.

[Impaler[WrG]]

Live rallies are not the place to hear fresh speeches, their for screaming yourself horse and seeing them with your own eyes so you can say you did that 20 years later. In the case of Obama, he is rumored to give off pharaemones that infect your brain and turn you into a mind-less follower

[Bosh]

Also we have McCain taking getting in bed with lobbyists a little too literally. First good sex scandal of the campaign *grabs popcorn*