The End of Hillary Clinton

[Flagg]

At some point, people are going to have to start putting pressure on Clinton to drop out for the good of the party, aren't they? At this point, there is no realistic scenario where Clinton wins and the Democratic party comes out looking good.

You would hope they are already doing so. The problem is that the Clinton machine is very powerful within the party. You had people comparing the bitch to fucking Moses looking upon the promised land after the debate last night. You know, where she accused Obama of plagiarism, and then ripped off one of John Edwards lines to try and appear conciliatory.

She's pretty much going to stay in until after March 4, though. If she and her advisers have any fucking sense they will drop out following those unless she wins by a 30% margin. Even then she'd have to win every other state by about that amount.

I think the real doomsday scenario is that she pushes for Florida and Michigan delegates to be legitimized at the convention and keeps lobbing mud at him. Even though she would still likely lose, it gives old man McCain free ammunition to use against him and sours Obama supporters on Hillary even further should she actually pull of getting the nomination.

[RedImperator]

The problem is that she has a pretty good chance of winning Ohio. At that point, I think she may have a harder time actually getting out of the race than if she did it now. Because right now is the time to get out if she wants to appear as a gracious elder statesman, not after losing Texas and/or Ohio. Hell, if she managed to pull off a 1 or 2% win in Texas and carry Ohio, she'll not be in any better position and it will be even more difficult to get out at that point.

That's nonsense. Pulling out now wouldn't make her look like a gracious elder statesman, it would make her look like a cowardly quitter who bailed on a campaign she could still win (if everything goes exactly right, starting with a huge Obama fuckup in the next week and a half) before her last "firewall" was tested. Everyone in the campaign, from Bill down, has already tacitly signaled she will quit if she does badly in Texas and Ohio, and "doing badly" has been pretty much defined as "anything less than solid wins in both states, preferably with at least one big blowout". She even gave what sounded like a concession speech as a debate answer the other night. The "Graceful Exit Escape Hatch" has already been installed; she'll jump if she loses next Tuesday.

At some point, people are going to have to start putting pressure on Clinton to drop out for the good of the party, aren't they? At this point, there is no realistic scenario where Clinton wins and the Democratic party comes out looking good.

The only one I see goes like this: Obama fucks up big time in the next week and a half, or someone breaks a story about him doing coke in his Senate office, or something like that. She wins Ohio and Texas big. Obama wins Mississippi, Clinton wins Wyoming, and then she wins big in Pennsylvania in April. She runs the table in May and June, Obama's campaign collapses, and she goes into the convention arguing, plausibly, that she was right all along, Obama wasn't ready, and she's the best candidate to beat John McCain. The superdelegates agree, Obama sees the writing on the wall, cuts a deal, and throws his delegates to Clinton.

The pressure for Clinton to drop out will come if she doesn't win big next Tuesday, and it's going to come in the form of superdelegates bailing on her, money drying up, and her own campaign organization starting to unravel. By the time Howard Dean comes by to have a chat with her, the decision will be made already. My guess is if she loses on the 4th, she'll wait a day or two, then drop out before the Wyoming primary on the 8th.

I think the real doomsday scenario is that she pushes for Florida and Michigan delegates to be legitimized at the convention and keeps lobbing mud at him. Even though she would still likely lose, it gives old man McCain free ammunition to use against him and sours Obama supporters on Hillary even further should she actually pull of getting the nomination.

If Hillary loses March 4--and you can define losing as anything less than resounding victories--, Michigan and Florida won't matter worth a hoot in hell. Obama will run the table and the supers will line up behind him. There's no doomsday scenario anymore. Obama negated that possibility by winning 11 straight primaries. The only way she can win is if she has so much momentum going into the convention nobody wants Obama anymore anyway.

[xerex]

something like 400 super delagates have not endorsed either candidate. ...if they havent endorsed by now it means they're waiting to back the pledged delagate winner.

the ONLY way for Clinton the be that winner is to collect more than 65% of the delagates in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania AND win more than 50% in places like Indiana and West Virginia and Kentucky AND win winner take all Puerto Rico. if she does any worse than this she loses.

Obama has a lead of 150 delagets or so and will win Miss and NC by more than 2/3 rds. He'll also take the great plains Montana, SOuth Dakota, Wyoming by big margins. if he does any better than this he wins.

[xerex]

continued.

one of the big errors made by Hillary '08 (and one which I cant understand) is that strategically they ran thier camoaign as if it was winner take all states (like the GOP) but they're not. they're proportional representation. you only get as many delages as you have votes.

Mccain wins NY, NJ ,Cali by 55-60% he takes all thier delagates. Clinton does the same she only gets 55-60% of the dels. Obama gets the rest. the result is that whereas in GOP primaries you focus on the big states in DEM you have to run everywhere like Obama did.

the oft cited eg is that obama campaigned in IDAHO. Clinton didnt even have an office there.

[RedImperator]

The Clinton strategy makes sense if you won three or four of the early contested primaries and are cruising into Super Tuesday with a 20 point lead over all your rivals. You campaign in the big states because accidentally losing one of them could give someone else some momentum, and you ignore the others because you'll win at least some anyway and the rest don't have enough throw weight to make a difference. You come out of Super Tuesday with a huge delegate lead and enough momentum obliterate everyone else, you run the table in the rest of February, and you're the nominee on 1 March.

The Clinton problem was, of course, that she wasn't the overwhelming frontrunner on Super Tuesday. They campaigned that way anyway for three reasons:

1. If she scores big wins in the big states, she still might get a huge delegate lead and a lot of momentum.

2. Their ground game was pathetic compared to Obama's, and a good ground game is essential to doing well in caucus states, which many of the smaller states were.

3. They're idiots. Really, I would say the majority of Clinton's problems have been caused by the ineptitude of her own advisors. They believed their own PR about inevitability and planned accordingly last year, and they weren't smart enough to come up with a new strategy on the fly.

As bad as their Super Tuesday plan was, everything that's come later is worse. Super Tuesday is a tie, so presumably you fight state by state and keep it a tie until you get into states where the demographics favor you, right? Well, apparently not if you're on the Clinton campaign. If you work for Hillary Clinton, what you do is concede Washington, Nebraska, Louisiana, Maine, and the Virgin Islands, claim they don't matter because they're caucuses or full of negroes or the moon is rising in Aquarius or something, then try to stop Obama in states that favor him when he has a head of steam. Now when you get clobbered using that strategy, what do you do? Well, if you work for Clinton, the answer is easy: the same thing all over again. Concede Wisconsin (even though the polls show it's close and Wisconsin's demographics favor you), start campaigning in your "firewall" states (based on the theory that blue collars and Hispanics will never abandon you, which of course is true, because Obama hasn't poached any of "your" voters, right?), let Obama win two more (three if you count Democrats Abroad), and then give him two weeks to use his enormous momentum, campaigning skill, and personal charm to erode your lead there, too.

[CmdrWilkens]

its even worse that that Red because she did campaign in Maine and then Virginia and then Wisconsin (as soon as she was accussed, and rightly, of ignoring states she thought she might lose). In every single case her team did its level best to keep moving the goal posts. They spent a lot of time after Super Tuesday talking about how Maine with its strong links to New Hampshire was going to break the idea of Obama invincibility coming out of the Feb 9th primaries (in which she did put money into Washington State). As soon as she lost that we got more of the small states and caucus states don't matter before she began campaigning in Virginia. Her national headquarters is in Northern Virginia and she spent the entire time between Feb 9th and Feb 12th campagining in that state (I think she set foot in Maryland for about 15 minutes). After she lost that one in a landslide her campaign talked about nothing other than Ohio and Texas until they realzied they should have a shot in Wisconsin and tried desperate bids to get traction there.


Now that that strategy has blown up in her face she's acting like something akin to a patient suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder. On one hand she has an incredibly placid debate in Texas, where the polls are already showing the two even and Obama has an edge with the delegate allocation math, then on the other she starts attacking Obama in Ohio as using "Karl Rove" tactics. I mean seriously you need to either play the tough as nails come-from-behind strategy of taking your opponent down a notch at a time in the hopes that you can get enough momeuntum to actually carry the nomination OR you play it placid and calm, mention policy differences but not in a rowdy way and set yourself up either as the default Senate Majority Leader when everyone else gets tired of Harry "no balls" Reid or as the logical candidate for 2016 (or 2012 if Obama loses). You can't have it both ways.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Repoast from 'RAR CLINTON THIRD PARTY!1!1' spasticity on Yogi's part:

Oh, and it appears Clinton's goose is not only cooked but in danger of setting the house on fire!

EDIT: Whoops, I now see a grease fire belching out of the oven! Someone get some goddamn fire extinguishers, quick!

Texas AND Ohio are trending to Obama, she just called Obama 'Karl Rove' in politically convoluted language, and, WHOOPSY! Superdelegates are abandoning the good ship Clinton en masse!

Superdelegates Are Flocking to Obama
Email this Story

Feb 23, 6:27 AM (ET)

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER

(AP) Supporters reach out for Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., during a rally...
Full Image

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Democratic superdelegates are starting to follow the voters - straight to Barack Obama.

In just the past two weeks, more than two dozen of them have climbed aboard his presidential campaign, according to a survey by The Associated Press. At the same time, Hillary Rodham Clinton's are beginning to jump ship, abandoning her for Obama or deciding they now are undecided.

The result: He's narrowing her once-commanding lead among these "superdelegates," the Democratic office holders and party officials who automatically attend the national convention and can vote for whomever they choose.

As Obama has reeled off 11 straight primary victories, some of the superdelegates are having second - or third - thoughts about their public commitments.

Take John Perez, a Californian who first endorsed John Edwards and then backed Clinton. Now, he says, he is undecided.

"Given where the race is at right now, I think it's very important for us to play a role around bringing the party together around the candidate that people have chosen, as opposed to advocating for our own choice," he said in an interview.

Clinton still leads among superdelegates - 241 to 181, according to the AP survey. But her total is down two in the past two weeks, while Obama's is up 25. Since the primaries started, at least three Clinton superdelegates have switched to Obama, including Rep. David Scott of Georgia, who changed his endorsement after Obama won 80 percent of the primary vote in Scott's district. At least two other Clinton backers have switched to undecided.

None of Obama's have publicly strayed, according to the AP tally.

There are nearly 800 Democratic superdelegates, making them an important force in a nomination race as close as this one. Both campaigns are furiously lobbying them.

"Holy buckets!" exclaimed Audra Ostergard of Nebraska. "Michelle Obama and I are playing phone tag."

Billi Gosh, a Vermont superdelegate who backs Clinton, got a phone call from the candidate herself this week.

"As superdelegates, we have the opportunity to change our mind, so she's just connecting with me," Gosh said. "I couldn't believe she was able to fit in calls like that to her incredibly busy schedule."

In Utah, two Clinton superdelegates said they continue to support the New York senator - for now.

"We'll see what happens," said Karen Hale. Likewise, fellow superdelegate Helen Langan said, "We'll see."

Other supporters are more steadfast.

"She's still in the race, isn't she? So I'm still supporting her," said Belinda Biafore, a superdelegate from West Virginia.

Obama has piled up the most victories in primaries and caucuses, giving him the overall lead in delegates, 1,362 to 1,266.5. Clinton's half delegate came from the global primary sponsored by the Democrats Abroad.

It will take 2,025 delegates to secure the nomination at this summer's national convention in Denver. If Clinton and Obama continue to split delegates in elections, neither will reach the mark without support from the superdelegates.

That has the campaigns fighting over the proper role for superdelegates, who can support any candidate they want. Obama argues it would be unfair for them to go against the outcome of the primaries and caucuses.

"I think it is important, given how hard Senator Clinton and I have been working, that these primaries and caucuses count for something," Obama said during Thursday night's debate in Austin, Texas.

Clinton argues that superdelegates should exercise independent judgment.

"These are the rules that are followed, and you know, I think that it will sort itself out," she said during the debate. "We will have a nominee, and we will have a unified Democratic Party, and we will go on to victory in November."

Behind the scenes, things can get sticky.

David Cicilline, the mayor of Providence, R.I., indicated this week that his support for Clinton might be wavering after - he contended - members of her campaign urged him to cave to the demands of a local firefighters union ahead of her weekend appearance there. The firefighters, in a long-running contract dispute with Cicilline, have said they would disrupt any Clinton event the mayor attends. A Clinton spokeswoman said the campaign would never interfere in the mayor's city decisions.

Obama has been helped by recent endorsements from several labor unions, including the Teamsters on Wednesday.

"He's our guy," said Sonny Nardi, an Ohio superdelegate and the president of Teamsters Local 416 in Cleveland.

The Democratic Party has named about 720 of its 795 superdelegates. The remainder will be chosen at state party conventions in the spring. AP reporters have interviewed 95 percent of the named delegates, with the most recent round of interviews taking place this week.

The superdelegates make up about a fifth of the overall delegates. As Democratic senators, both Clinton and Obama are superdelegates.

So is Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory, which is one reason his phone rings often.

He is a black mayor, and Obama has been winning about 90 percent of black votes. His state has a March 4 primary with 141 delegates at stake. The Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, is stumping hard for Clinton - and perhaps a spot on the national ticket.

A phone call from former President Clinton interrupted Mallory's dinner on a recent Saturday.

"I continue to get calls from mayors, congresspeople, governors, urging me one way or another," said Mallory, who is still mulling his decision. "The celebrities will be next. I guess Oprah will call me."

---

Associated Press Writers Ace Stryker in Salt Lake City, Laura Kurtzman in Sacramento, Tom Breen in Charleston, W.Va., John Curran in Montpelier, Vt., Joe Milicia in Cleveland, Dan Sewell in Cincinnati and Anna Jo Bratton in Omaha contributed to this report.

(This version UPDATES delegate count; Democrats Abroad issued corrected allocation)

[/url]

[Fire Fly]

Just when I was beginning to get soft on Hillary after the Texas debate, she reminds me again why I don't like her. She's either lying about her reconciliatory moment in Texas or she's lying about her fake outrage over the mailers, which have been out for weeks now. Its time the superdelegates put an end to this primary season for the good of the party.

[Flagg]

Just when I was beginning to get soft on Hillary after the Texas debate, she reminds me again why I don't like her. She's either lying about her reconciliatory moment in Texas or she's lying about her fake outrage over the mailers, which have been out for weeks now. Its time the superdelegates put an end to this primary season for the good of the party.

Why were you softening on her? Because she stole a John Edwards line less than an hour after accusing Obama of plagiarism?

[Fire Fly]

Frank Rich just wrote a scathing critique of the failures of the Clinton campaign and its quite eye opening just to see how many strategic blunders the Clinton camp made: inability to address the Iraq war resolution, inability to raise money bottom up instead of top down, ceding away the small states, insulting small and red states, inability to shuffle the necessary resources around...the list goes on and on.

Its crystal clear now which Democratic candidate deserves the nomination more: the one who actually worked for it.

Link

The Audacity of Hopelessness

By FRANK RICH
Published: February 24, 2008

WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.

It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.

The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.

That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.

Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.

But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.

In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.

This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.

Given that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama offer marginally different policy prescriptions — laid out in voluminous detail by both, by the way, on their Web sites — it’s not clear what her added-value message is. The “experience” mantra has been compromised not only by her failure on the signal issue of Iraq but also by the deadening lingua franca of her particular experience, Washingtonese. No matter what the problem, she keeps rolling out another commission to solve it: a commission for infrastructure, a Financial Product Safety Commission, a Corporate Subsidy Commission, a Katrina/Rita Commission and, to deal with drought, a water summit.

As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.

Bill Clinton knocked states that hold caucuses instead of primaries because “they disproportionately favor upper-income voters” who “don’t really need a president but feel like they need a change.” After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy.

The insults continued on Tuesday night when a surrogate preceding Mrs. Clinton onstage at an Ohio rally, Tom Buffenbarger of the machinists’ union, derided Obama supporters as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.” Even as he ranted, exit polls in Wisconsin were showing that Mr. Obama had in fact won that day among voters with the least education and the lowest incomes. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Obama received the endorsement of the latte-drinking Teamsters.

If the press were as prejudiced against Mrs. Clinton as her campaign constantly whines, debate moderators would have pushed for the Clinton tax returns and the full list of Clinton foundation donors to be made public with the same vigor it devoted to Mr. Obama’s “plagiarism.” And it would have showered her with the same ridicule that Rudy Giuliani received in his endgame. With 11 straight losses in nominating contests, Mrs. Clinton has now nearly doubled the Giuliani losing streak (six) by the time he reached his Florida graveyard. But we gamely pay lip service to the illusion that she can erect one more firewall.

The other persistent gripe among some Clinton supporters is that a hard-working older woman has been unjustly usurped by a cool young guy intrinsically favored by a sexist culture. Slate posted a devilish video mash-up of the classic 1999 movie “Election”: Mrs. Clinton is reduced to a stand-in for Tracy Flick, the diligent candidate for high school president played by Reese Witherspoon, and Mr. Obama is implicitly cast as the mindless jock who upsets her by dint of his sheer, unearned popularity.

There is undoubtedly some truth to this, however demeaning it may be to both candidates, but in reality, the more consequential ur-text for the Clinton 2008 campaign may be another Hollywood classic, the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy “Pat and Mike” of 1952. In that movie, the proto-feminist Hepburn plays a professional athlete who loses a tennis or golf championship every time her self-regarding fiancé turns up in the crowd, pulling her focus and undermining her confidence with his grandstanding presence.

In the 2008 real-life remake of “Pat and Mike,” it’s not the fiancé, of course, but the husband who has sabotaged the heroine. The single biggest factor in Hillary Clinton’s collapse is less sexism in general than one man in particular — the man who began the campaign as her biggest political asset. The moment Bill Clinton started trash-talking about Mr. Obama and raising the specter of a co-presidency, even to the point of giving his own televised speech ahead of his wife’s on the night she lost South Carolina, her candidacy started spiraling downward.

What’s next? Despite Mrs. Clinton’s valedictory tone at Thursday’s debate, there remains the fear in some quarters that whether through sleights of hand involving superdelegates or bogus delegates from Michigan or Florida, the Clintons might yet game or even steal the nomination. I’m starting to wonder. An operation that has waged political war as incompetently as the Bush administration waged war in Iraq is unlikely to suddenly become smart enough to pull off that duplicitous a “victory.” Besides, after spending $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts in January alone, this campaign simply may not have the cash on hand to mount a surge.