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March 2008 - Posts
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As the Democratic race drags on, expect to see more and more hypothetical scenarios emerge as journalists dig deep into party literature, scouring for clues to how this mess will turn out. Chances are you'll hear about the “minority report” scenario. Read More...
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The contrast between the Democratic and Republican races would be funny if it weren’t so depressing. While Obama and Clinton bruise each other over Iraq, delegates, and Florida and Michigan, John McCain takes a grand tour of the Middle East and Europe, Read More...
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Lots of Clinton news over the weekend, not all bad—but bad enough to dock her another 0.6 points in the Rodhameter, bringing her chances of winning to 9.7 percent . Roughest of all is the latest national Gallup poll, which gives Obama a margin-of-error-busting Read More...
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In an interview with the Washington Post on Saturday, Hillary Clinton declared that she will take her presidential bid all the way to the August convention, if necessary. "I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started and until we see Read More...
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After Mitt Romney endorsed McCain last month, we figured Romney would crawl into a cave, never to return until 2012. The strained smiles, the too-tight handshakes—it felt like a testy family reunion. But since then, Romney has said repeatedly that he Read More...
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Earlier this week, the Clinton campaign challenged Barack Obama’s claims that he was a University of Chicago law professor. So, we phoned up U Chicago for their take. The school’s press office indicated that he was technically a senior lecturer but not Read More...
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Sen. Bob Casey’s endorsement of Barack Obama is big for several reasons—he represents the battleground state of Pennsylvania, he appeals to working-class Dems, and he had said he would remain neutral in the race, making his decision to take sides a potential Read More...
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The main criticism of Howard Dean since he took over as head of the DNC has been his silence . (First he was too loud , now he’s too quiet.) So now anything he says, however off-the-cuff, gets amplified to 300 decibels. Sirens wailed, therefore, when Read More...
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The Clinton campaign is starting to remind us of that immortal scene from Dumb and Dumber, in which Lloyd, played by Jim Carrey, asks his crush what the chances are that she’d marry him. She gives him blunt odds: one in 1 million. After a moment of thinking, Read More...
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It’s fascinating that candidates are allowed to acknowledge contingencies when talking about the economy but not in the case of Iraq. Here’s Barack Obama’s response Maria Bartiromo on whether he would raise taxes: Well, look, there's no doubt that anything Read More...
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- Barely Political does Tuzla . - A trailer for Recession: The Movie . - If Sarah Silverman met Hillary Clinton: “ I’m F*cking Obama .” Read More...
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It’s hard to remember, but the manic bickering between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton does have an end in sight: the Democratic National Convention. One of them will ascend the stage in Denver in late August, about 18 months after he or she started Read More...
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We’re used to spintastic e-mails, but one from the Clinton campaign yesterday seemed especially dizzy. In an e-mail titled “Just Embellished Words,” the campaign wrote that "Sen. Obama consistently and falsely claims that he was a law professor” ( which Read More...
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In our constant pursuit for the most inspired piece of election art, this Pokemon homage is our latest obsession. It's too bad Fred Thompson wasn't the GOP nominee—then the creators could have just used Snorlax . Read More...
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Ever notice how politicians taunt each other with the exact same insults of which they themselves stand accused? Case in point: From a McCain email today: STATEMENT BY MCCAIN CAMPAIGN ON BARACK OBAMA'S OLD-STYLE POLITICAL ATTACKS [Emphasis Added] And Read More...
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Everyone has weighed in on Hillary Clinton’s fantastic voyage to Bosnia— Sinbad , Clinton’s former speechwriter , military men , and reporters who were there at the time . Everyone! Except, that is, for Sheryl Crow . Crow, who accompanied Hillary, Chelsea, Read More...
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When the National Archives released Hillary Clinton’s White House schedules last week, reporters quickly sifted the entire 11,000-page doorstop for clues to her record on NAFTA , her foreign-policy experience , and her whereabouts during the "blue dress" Read More...
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Forlorn over the Democrats’ delegate scrap, Gov.—and therefore superdelegate—Philip Bredesen came up with a modestly novel proposal : After all the voters have fun at their primaries and caucuses, the superdelegates should stage their own fiesta in June—complete Read More...
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She wasn’t misspeaking this time. Hillary Clinton truly, honestly believes that pledged delegates are going to change their minds and this will help her win the nomination. When she said this in her Philadelphia Daily News interview the other day, I figured Read More...
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Via the Las Vegas Review-Journal , Harry Reid assures us that he and Howard Dean have things under control. Question: Do you still think the Democratic race can be resolved before the convention? Reid: Easy. Q: How is that? Reid: It will be done. Q: It Read More...
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Barack Obama released his tax returns today for the years 2000-2006. (Check them out here , if combing through your own tax returns hasn't been torture enough.) But Obama held public office for three years before 2000 hit. Why not release those as well Read More...
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Over at Slate ’s polling haven, " Election Scorecard ," we’ve been poring over a new poll from PPP (PDF) that suggests an Edwards endorsement would actually hurt Hillary’s chances to win the state. A jarring 31 percent of North Carolina voters would be Read More...
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What do you get when you cross Hillary Clinton, Chilean comedy, synth pop, and Aphex Twin ? This . It's SFW, but probably NSF people with dwarf phobia. [Via Gawker ] Read More...
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As long as we’re chronicling the number of references Hillary Clinton has made to the Tuzla sniper incident, don’t forget her crowd-pleaser of a line in Dubuque all the way back in December: So, we landed in one of those corkscrew landings and ran out Read More...
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When we said the Bosnia sniper flap was our favorite subplot of this campaign, we weren’t expecting it to become the actual plot. But thanks to Hillary Clinton’s wildly inexpert handling of the controversy, it’s now dominating the news to the point of Read More...
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The media drumbeat for Hillary Clinton to drop out has been building over the past week, with some notable push-back . But now the zeitgeist-capturing Obama Girl has spoken : Hillary must go. The music isn’t quite as catchy as in the past , and it feels Read More...
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Perhaps the most shocking thing about Gordon Fischer’s Monica joke is that it didn’t happen until now. A key Obama organizer and adviser in Iowa, Fischer posted an item on his blog over the weekend slamming Bill Clinton for his comment late Friday that Read More...
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In the beginning, it was about momentum. When she lost momentum, it was about pledged delegates. When she lost pledged delegates, it was about the popular vote. And now that she’s on her way to losing the popular vote, it’s about the number of electoral Read More...
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You may remember Fred Thompson from such unmemorable primary films as You’re the GOP’s Only Hope , I Love You, You’re Lazy, Now Change , and his breakthrough role Failure to Launch . After the primary-going public didn’t buy Thompson’s presidential character, Read More...
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Yesterday marked possibly our favorite chapter in possibly our favorite subplot of the 2008 election—the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s 1996 trip to Bosnia. Clinton’s story, in which she describes being hustled off the tarmac because of warnings of Read More...
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Remember how during the Democratic debates, Bill Richardson was always the can’t-we-all-just-get-along candidate? Whenever things got too heated, that's when Richardson would start intoning (to the point of irritation) about ending divisions, bringing Read More...
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In a scathing memo today , the Obama campaign describes Clinton’s “history of misleading voters” on issues like—deep breath—NAFTA, the Family Medical Leave Act, her Iraq vote, her foreign-policy experience, Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s religion, and her “35 Read More...
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The other day we discussed how both Clinton and Obama have stepped up their "disenfranchisement" rhetoric to tweak each other over revotes in Michigan and Florida. Now Clinton has taken it a step further. Here's a clip from her campaign's latest e-mail Read More...
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Of all the explanations floated as to why three State Department employees were snooping around Barack Obama's passport files—and, it now turns out , Hillary Clinton's and John McCain's—the most plausible one is also the simplest: "imprudent curiosity." Read More...
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A: To get superdelegates to the other side. Two months and dozens of primaries after dropping out of the race, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson finally went public with his undying love for Barack Obama. He’ll be in Oregon with Obama today to officially Read More...
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This election cycle has seen its share of kooky endorsers whose support the candidates would rather not have. But the latest celebrity to support Obama makes Louis Farrakhan look like Ted Kennedy. The hugely popular Egyptian pop singer Shaaban Abdel Rahim Read More...
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Today's the New York Times A1 piece on Hillary Clinton, “Clinton Facing Narrower Path to Nomination,” is an exercise in understatement. It nudges the candidate ever closer to the cliff but, maybe because of politeness, or business savvy, or maybe even Read More...
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In his continued attempts to move beyond smear campaigns and convince the American people that he’s a true patriot, Barack Obama has submitted to the ultimate American tradition: March Madness. While Anderson Cooper was interviewing him on his press plane Read More...
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Note that now both Clinton and Obama are using the word disenfranchise to describe the other’s plans for Michigan. Clinton has long insisted that failing to seat Michigan’s delegates would be equal to disenfranchising voters. (That is, after initially Read More...
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With much fanfare, the National Archives today released 11,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s schedules from her eight years as first lady. Mark Halperin instantly reported that there was no “smoking gun” among the papers. (What would constitute a smoking Read More...
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For a campaign whose unofficial motto is “Yes, We Can,” Barack Obama’s operation is acting awfully defeatist when it comes to a revote in Michigan. A day after Michigan Democratic leaders deemed a revote unlikely, Hillary Clinton traveled to Detroit to Read More...
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Normally, we’d give John McCain the benefit of the doubt if he flubbed an obscure foreign policy factoid and hastened to correct himself. But in the past two days, McCain has managed to botch a piece of information central to the conflict in Iraq not Read More...
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Unable to go through a day without holding a conference call, the Clinton campaign put Deputy Communications Director Phil Singer and Senior Adviser Harold Ickes on the phone to talk about Florida and Michigan today. Right off the bat, Ickes asserted Read More...
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It’s become the accepted logic of this race that if a surrogate says the wrong thing, you "denounce and reject" them, fire them from your campaign, return their money, and toss your drink in their face at parties. Until today. Don’t get me wrong, Obama Read More...
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In today’s big-deal Obama speech , he offered a smattering of memorable quotes on how he was going to unify a country that is deeply split along regional, racial, and religious fault lines. But for all that talk of unity, he never discussed how he planned Read More...
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Just a thought as we’re waiting for Obama to deliver his much-anticipated speech on race. NBC's First Read says that this speech is make-or-break for Obama: “If Obama can't hit a homerun on this speech today, then he won’t be president.” Sorry, what?? Read More...
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Last week we surveyed the proposed scenarios for fixing the Michigan/Florida mess. Two of the four solutions involved costly Florida revotes. But now the chairman of the state Democratic Party tells us they’ve decided not to hold a revote. With that, Read More...
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This morning, the New York Times ran a Bill Kristol column whose entire bloated argument balanced on a tenuous, factually incorrect fulcrum. Kristol claims that Obama can’t pretend he didn’t know his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was a controversial firebrand Read More...
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In a race where identity politics is everywhere, you’d think Barack Obama would put more emphasis on his Irish heritage today. See above. ( Update 12:45 a.m.: Obama's campaign sends word that he wore a green tie to a dinner with the Irish Women's Society Read More...
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In her Iraq speech today in Washington, D.C., Hillary Clinton told the same story that comedian Sinbad mocked last week: [T]here was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't go, Read More...
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Today the Boston Globe seems to confirm rumors that Republicans voted for Hillary Clinton in Ohio, Texas, and Mississippi to undermine Barack Obama’s candidacy. In Ohio and Texas on March 4, Republicans comprised 9 percent of the Democratic primary electorate, Read More...
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For Barack Obama, Iowa just keeps on giving. First they handed him a decisive victory in the Democratic caucus in January. Then at this weekend’s district conventions, they gave him a second win in which he netted another nine pledged delegates, bringing Read More...
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It’s not going to happen. But here’s a hypothetical scenario that, however unlikely, could make John Edwards a kingmaker. Saturday, Iowa Democrats will vote in the state’s county conventions . It’s a lot like the caucuses last January, only on a smaller Read More...
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Here’s a question: Who doesn’t have a crazy, wingnut, off-message preacher supporting their campaign? Right now, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is getting the most attention for, among other things, his statements that the U.S. government caused the AIDS virus; Read More...
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There’s no written rule about what you’re supposed to say when asked if Barack Obama is a Muslim. But manners, respect for the truth, and disdain for the ugly rumors still circulating about his religion would suggest that you’d say something like, “No, Read More...
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Over the last two weeks, pressure has been building to get both Michigan and Florida’s delegations seated at the Democratic National Convention. Florida has set a self-imposed deadline of Monday to sort itself out, while Michigan has to reach a resolution Read More...
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So much for taking the day off. All three presidential candidates returned to Washington, D.C., today to vote on a Senate bill that would put a moratorium on earmarks for a year. John McCain drafted the bill, and both Clinton and Obama have been trying Read More...
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So this is why he refused to fully commit to a withdrawal. Let the Ron Paul comeback begin! Read More...
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… And goes for it . On a day when McCain is highlighting his own ethical cleanliness by trying to abolish earmarks for a year , Obama dings McCain for perhaps his most egregious policy reversal: Bush’s tax cuts. The logic of why he first voted against Read More...
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Is Jeremiah Wright untouchable? Barack Obama’s minister, who leads the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and who coined the phrase "the audacity of hope," has said some controversial things over the years. But new videos of his sermons, purchased Read More...
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