Friday, May 30, 2008 - Posts
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A lawyer for the Clinton campaign fired off a letter today to the co-chairs of the DNC rules committee, outlining the argument they plan to make tomorrow. Their case hinges largely on whether Florida and Michigan have been sufficiently punished. We all agree they’ve been very bad states, the argument goes. Get over it.
The letter rejects the argument made by DNC lawyers that the committee can’t reinstate more than half of the delegations. “This conclusion is incorrect,” the Clinton letter states. “The RBC has broad power to fully reinstate the Florida and Michigan delegations” as long as the state parties “have taken provable, positive steps and acted in good faith to bring the state into compliance” with party rules. Attempts to hold re-votes count as such good-faith steps, even though they failed, according to the campaign. If the RBC buys this argument—that the states genuinely tried to comply with the rules but failed—then the Clinton camp might have a shot at reinstating all the delegates. (In Florida, at least; Michigan is messier by a long shot.)
But there’s another rule the Clinton campaign doesn’t mention. In the same part of the Delegate Selection Rules (PDF) cited by the Clinton team [Rule 20(C)(7)], it says that “other relevant Democratic party leaders and elected officials took all provable, positive steps and acted in good faith in attempting to prevent the legislative changes which resulted in state law that fails to comply with the pertinent provisions of these rules.” In other words, Florida Dems have to prove they fought tooth and nail to keep the Republican state legislature from moving the primary date up.
As we’ve pointed out before, that didn’t really happen. The effort to move the date up was initially spearheaded by a state senate Democrat, and tacitly supported by other Dems. In 2006, a spokesman for the Florida Democratic Party said that “Florida Democrats are all for it.” Likewise, Michigan Democrats knew full well what they were doing when they moved their primary to Jan. 15.
So even if the Clinton camp is able to prove that Democrats made good-faith effort to hold re-votes, they’ll have a lot more trouble arguing they did everything in their power to prevent the original sin.
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The high-stakes drama of Saturday's rules committee meeting appears
illusory. Meanwhile, Obama rakes in more superdelegates, putting him
40.5 away from the nomination. According to our formula, that sinks
Clinton to 0.4 percent.
T minus one day and counting to the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting. Can you feel the suspense? Clinton supporters are busing up from Florida. Obama fans are being encouraged to stay home. Tout le média
will hang on Howard Dean's every word, as well as those uttered by the
Obama and Clinton campaign surrogates sent to argue their cases.
But the drama is largely phony. DNC lawyers have said that seating any more than half of the Michigan and Florida delegations would violate party rules. The proposed solutions are well-known. And every likely compromise fails to put Clinton within range of catching Obama, who now leads by 200 delegates. ...
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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One big question lingers over the inflammatory comments made by Father Michael Pfleger, a Chicago priest who said some not-very-nice things about Hillary Clinton at Obama’s church last Sunday: Didn’t he know he’d get in trouble?
Pfleger was fully aware of the guilt-by-association theme of this presidential campaign. In a May 4 op-ed he wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times, Pfleger mourned the fact that Obama and Wright “are suddenly being held accountable and responsible for whatever the other says. This is not being done in either of the campaigns of Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John McCain.”
Since the beginning, Pfleger has urged Obama not to distance himself from Rev. Wright. The night before he announced his candidacy, Obama withdrew his invitation to Wright, who was planning to give the public invocation. Pfleger disagreed. "I told him I thought it was the wrong decision," he told the Christian Science Monitor.
And most recently, Pfleger defended Wright during Wright’s April media tour. Pfleger told CNN: “I think any human being that for three weeks has been demonized and trivialized and put into a caricature around the world, there's no place he can go that people have not seen him, you know, I don't think it's narcissistic to say, wait a minute, this is not me.”
For someone who was so aware of the ins and outs of the Wright controversy—and who knows that sermons at the United Church of Christ are taped—it’s hard to understand why he would launch attacks on Hillary Clinton from that same pulpit. He even uttered an apology toward the end of his remarks: "Sorry ... don't want to get you into any more trouble," he said. Lynn Sweet reports that folks in Obama’s camp are baffled.
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The Obama campaign has been quick to scrub its Web site of all things Michael Pfleger after the Chicago priest said some not-very-nice things about Hillary Clinton at Obama’s church last Sunday.
The campaign’s "faith testimonials" page contains more than 30 endorsements by religious leaders and supporters, but Pfleger is not included (nor is Jeremiah Wright, obviously).
But a cached version of the page reveals this endorsement:
Father Michael Pfleger
Senior Pastor, St. Sabina Church, Chicago, IL
I’m concerned by issues of poverty and issues of justice and equal access and opportunity especially when dealing with children and education and healthcare. Also, the war in Iraq is non-negotiable: end it! The faith community has to be a prophetic voice to bring us to where we ought to be as a country. Its voice should call every individual to be their best and not assimilate into anything less. Obama is calling back those who have given up and lost hope in the political system both young and old in the belief that we can fix it. He has the intellect for the job and I haven’t heard anyone since Robert F. Kennedy who is causing such an emotional and spiritual awakening to the political possibilities.
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Yesterday we pointed out a major flaw in the debate over the new GI Bill. In fact, the CBO analysis cited by both McCain (in opposing the bill) and Obama (in supporting it) shows that the bounce in recruitment would outweigh the decline in re-enlistment. But as many have pointed out, that view doesn’t take "experience" into account. Who’s to say whether 30,000 new recruits will be better for the military than 7,000 noncommissioned officers who’ve been around the block?
A friend in the Marines who is currently stationed in Iraq (and prefers to remain anonymous) argues that it’s even more complicated than that:
I have to agree with your update in that experience is worth its weight in gold. Everyone dreads the ‘boot drop’ when PFCs and lance corporals straight from MOS school show up knowing ... very little. It's the same with 2nd Lieutenants who show up to a unit—there's a reason they're called boot lieutenants. What's really valuable is retaining someone who's spent years of his life training and actually deploying and working in this war because they have knowledge and experience in both their jobs and in just dealing with military life that you can't create overnight.
Of course, the downside to good retention is that in the military, you can't stay in a job for 20 years no matter how good you are at it. You have to be promoted and move up the ladder until you're promoted to your lowest level of incompetence. So while we say we want a force full of experienced captains and NCOs who have been around the block a few times, we're lying to ourselves if we think retention is the solution. With the current promotion rates (something like 98 percent make it to captain in the USMC, and I think it's the same if not higher in the army) and the accelerated pipeline (I've heard the time from commissioning to captain is 39 months in the Army, with 18 to 1st Lieutenant) it's only a matter of time before that captain, if he's motivated and a performer, will become a major and then a lieutenant colonel, or that shit hot sergeant becomes a staff NCO. So under that system you need a constant input to ensure that at the ranks you want people you can continue to have experienced officers and NCOs while still promoting people out of those ranks. The force structure is very very dynamic and maintaining an equilibrium, or even approaching a desired end state, is very difficult and very temporary. [Emphasis added.]
So while "experience" is important, it means nothing if you don’t have a steady flow of new recruits.
John McCain has the advantage of understanding the chaotic structure of the military—he logged more than 20 years in the Navy and has two sons in uniform. But the GI bill debate inevitably gets squished into the narrow terms of who is "supporting the troops" more. It’s easier to argue that more education benefits are automatically better than to analyze the complexities of the military hierarchy. Which is why, at least on this issue, McCain has failed to persuade his fellow senators.
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