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Hardly a moment after news broke of Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s ties to a prostitution ring, speculation began about two women. One was the 5-foot-5, 105-pound, $1,000-an-hour prostitute named Kristen. The other was Hillary Clinton.
Spitzer initially endorsed Clinton back in May, but since then he has been a less-than-enthusiastic supporter. He talked her up on The Colbert Report last month but failed to appear at any campaign stops. During one conference call he held with reporters, he was weirdly off-message, arguing that Obama, of all people, supported his driver's licenses program. He promised to stump for her “maybe later in the week, or next week, if this continues,” but he didn’t elaborate on what he meant by “this.” He never ended up going.
The governor also caused perhaps the biggest headache of Clinton’s campaign so far: the flap over driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. After waffling during a debate in October on whether she supported the measure, Clinton came out against it. (Spitzer later backed away from the plan, as well.) But the damage was done.
That ugly experience turned Spitzer into a pariah on the campaign trail—Hillary didn’t want audience members raising questions about licenses any more than he did—but ultimately it may have helped her. By distancing herself from Spitzer early on, she now avoids the fallout from what could become this year’s Larry Craig scandal. (It lacks some of the juicy details, but just wait.) Still, after Clinton pushed so hard for Obama to not just “denounce” but also “reject” Louis Farrakhan’s kind words about him, Obama could ding her for a weak response. So far she has declined to comment.
One problem, though: Addressing the Spitzer flap raises the ghosts of scandals past, namely Monica Lewinsky. Clinton has so far managed during this campaign to avoid public mention of her husband’s diddling. If the Spitzer controversy drags out, it could become a painful reminder of the final White House years. (Of course, you could argue that it would make people sympathize with her all over again.)
But in the end, the Spitzer fallout is more likely to damage the party than Hillary’s candidacy. For the past eight years, most of the lying, cheating, child molestation, and public sex has been the proud reserve of Republicans (or at least they excel at getting caught). The Spitzer scandal could flip that story line toward Democrats. Just as voters recoiled from Mark Foley’s indiscretions in 2006, they could easily cast Spitzer as the incarnation of Democratic hypocrisy. (Just watch this ad to get a sense of Spitzer’s sermonizing.) In which case, come November, the party could have more to worry about than Clinton’s election.
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Gov. Eliot Spitzer apologized to his family and the people of New York today after the New York Times linked him with a prostitution ring. If Spitzer resigns, does he lose his status as a superdelegate?
Yes. Governors are automatically given a vote at the Democratic National Convention in August, but the moment Spitzer resigns, he gives up that vote to the next governor. The New York State Constitution says that if a governor leaves office early, the lieutenant governor—in this case, Lt. Gov. David Paterson—takes over for the rest of the term. Like Spitzer, Paterson has thrown his weight behind Hillary Clinton.
The thing is, Paterson is already a superdelegate. As a member of the DNC, he was selected as one of the party’s at-large delegates. That leaves two scenarios: If he takes over as governor and gives up his DNC member status, the party will hand if off to someone else, preserving the total superdelegate number at 795. But if he decides to hold on to the DNC vote, the overall number of superdelegates would drop to 794. In other words, Paterson can’t vote twice. There’s a twist, though: If the DNC wanted, it could always give Paterson’s at-large vote to Spitzer, thus maintaining the equilibrium. But odds are the Dems don’t want the controversy mucking up their convention. (Rest assured Larry Craig will be far from Minneapolis during the RNC.)
Will this affect Clinton's delegate count? Not much, if at all. If Paterson does keep his DNC status and the delegate count drops, Clinton will lose one superdelegate. But if Paterson throws it back to the party, they’ll probably pick another person who supports Hillary. (Of the 43 New York superdelegates who endorsed, 42 went Clinton.) If anything, Clinton should be more worried about having his support than not having it. Spitzer has been an enthusiastic supporter, pushing for her on The Colbert Report and volunteering to stump for her in Ohio. Clinton upbraided Obama in a debate for hesitating to “reject” the praise of Louis Farrakhan. Obama could always ask Clinton to do the same for Spitzer.
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Hillary Clinton’s simultaneous claims that Barack Obama is not prepared to be commander in chief, yet she would consider him for vice president, has drawn all the requisite scorn.
“I don’t understand,” Obama mused at a rally in Mississippi today. “If I am not ready, why do you think I would be such a great vice president?”
Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson explained on a conference call: “We do not believe that Senator Obama has passed the commander in chief test. But there is a long way between now and Denver.”
Setting aside the question of what could happen between now and August to prepare Obama for answering the phone at 3 a.m.—a terrorist attack? a flurry of security legislation?—it’s worth exploring why Hillary is working the VP angle so hard. The obvious reason is to convey inevitability—a logical stretch, given that she’s currently losing the popular vote, the delegate count, and the state count. But the real goal here is to sway superdelegates.
Clinton knows she can’t win the pledged delegate count. (To learn why, see here.) So if she’s going to clinch the nomination, she will have to persuade superdelegates to vote for her—and overturn the pledged delegate outcome. Naturally, many superdelegates are uncomfortable with this scenario. But by floating the possibility of Obama as VP, she’s trying to ease their consciences. They could still vote for him, she’s saying—just as vice president instead of president!
The problem is, Clinton’s hypothetical scenario isn’t worth anything unless it’s an actual promise to take Obama as her VP. Until that happens, it’s hard to see superdelegates factoring the veepstakes into their decision. And seeing as a Clinton-Obama ticket is next to impossible (he couldn’t seem less interested, for starters), she doesn’t gain much from hinting at it.
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Strained metaphor of the day goes to Lt. Gen. Joe Ballard, who on a conference call today compared the ability to be commander in chief to milking a cow:
“Just because you recognize the cow doesn’t mean you know how to milk it. … No one can tell you how to milk the cow. You have to know how to do that yourself. … There’s no doubt in my mind that Obama can recognize the cow. But his body of experience doesn’t necessarily make him know how to milk one.”
So whereas Obama would have to call in a team of cow-milking consultants (or just Google it), Clinton would go right for the udder.
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Saturday Night Live thinks it has a good thing in the Obama-Clinton brawl. Over the weekend, they aired a parody of Clinton’s "3 a.m." ad. The ad shows Clinton receiving a late-night phone call from President Obama, who is panicked about the Russians obtaining a nuclear device. The ad portrays Obama as an immature, whiny, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed baby. “Don’t you see that I’m in a panic?” he blubbers. “A blind, unreasoning, inexperienced panic?”
NBC’s First Read seems to think the sketch show sides with Clinton: “This last opening skit might actually have been written by the Clinton campaign; it was striking in how on-message the skit was for Clinton.”
But isn’t the sketch actually mocking Clinton? It’s lampooning her suggestions that Obama would be lost at sea in the Oval Office. The fake ad is bookended by Amy Poehler’s Hillary Clinton, who assures us that this is “a dramatization based on facts—not facts, but what we call specious campaign talking points.”
The last time SNL took on Obama, parodying the media’s love for the candidate, Clinton raised it at the Cleveland debate as evidence of bias. Tina Fey's all-but-endorsement of Hillary indicated pro-Clinton sympathies inside 30 Rock. But this skit, if read correctly, is unlikely to make it into any Clinton campaign memos.
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In Newsweek, Hillary Clinton answers the question that’s on all our minds:
How can you win the nomination when the math looks so bleak for you?
It doesn't look bleak at all. I have a very close race with Senator Obama. There are elected delegates, caucus delegates and superdelegates, all for different reasons, and they're all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose. Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to. This is a very carefully constructed process that goes back years, and we're going to follow the process.
Most striking is her suggestion that pledged delegates don’t have to stick with whomever they’re pledged to. While it’s true that they can change their minds, her campaign has denied putting pressure on pledged delegates to switch sides. Clinton spokesman Phil Singer reassured Politico’s Ben Smith that there was “no change” to the campaign’s stance on this front, despite reports that they were pursuing them.
Also, note Clinton’s use of the word elected rather than pledged delegates. This suggests yet another rhetorical shift, as if to emphasize her point that they aren’t actually forced to vote for the candidate they’re pledged to. A few weeks ago, the campaign suddenly started referring to superdelegates as “automatic delegates” (Hillary apparently dropped the phrasing in this interview), presumably to downplay the notion that there’s anything “super” or superior about the party leaders and elected officials who could decide the nomination. The “elected” switch seems to spring from the same logic—that renaming delegates will change perception of them.
Even weirder is Clinton’s distinction between “elected delegates” and “caucus delegates.” Both types of delegate are effectively the same—they get one vote to help decide the nomination. (One difference: Some caucus delegates won’t be selected until state conventions this summer.) But Clinton’s wording implies that “caucus delegates” are not “elected”—a clear jab at Obama’s strength in the caucus states. Plus, it makes room for the campaign to separate the two numbers. If Clinton started referring to the “pledged delegate” count without counting caucuses, she would be ahead of Obama by that count. That, if it happens, would be a crazy reversal: First, Clinton was insisting on conflating pledged and superdelegates. Now she wants to parse them out as finely as possible. Watch "linguistics consultant" become a full-time campaign position.