Hillary Is 44

Friday, May 9th, 2008

Barack Obama: Mission Accomplished

Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics’ HorseRaceBlog has a question:

So, here’s my question. What happens to “It’s Over” if Clinton pulls a 40-point victory in West Virginia on Tuesday, then follows it up a week later with a 30-point victory in Kentucky? If these states turn out in the same margins that states since March 4th have averaged, that would imply a net of about 290,000 votes for Clinton. That puts her within striking distance of a reasonable popular vote victory. “Over” will be over as we turn our attention to Puerto Rico.

There are good reasons not to take Puerto Rico lightly, even though the press has continued to do exactly that. I would note: (a) Puerto Ricans vote in large numbers (2 million in the last gubernatorial election); (b) Puerto Ricans have never had this important a role in United States presidential politics; (c) Puerto Rico’s politics is focused at least partially on how (if at all) to adjust its relationship with the United States; (d) Puerto Rico’s is an open primary, and the residents of the Commonwealth, who are United States citizens, do not see themselves as Republicans or Democrats.

The inference I draw is that Puerto Ricans could turn out in huge numbers. If they do, and they swing for Clinton in a sizeable way, the popular vote lead could swing, too. Add 290,000 votes from West Virginia and Kentucky to 250,000 votes from Puerto Rico, account for expected losses in Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota, and you get Clinton leading in many popular vote counts, some of which are really quite valid. If she has one of those leads when the final votes are counted on June 3rd, the race will go on to the convention.

[Jay also provides an updated toy to play with.]

Swing State Democrats Have An Answer:

The decision about who to support to be our Party’s nominee is not one that any of us should take lightly. We haven’t. But, after giving this important decision a great deal of thought, we are convinced that Hillary Clinton has the vision, skills and commitment to make the changes our country needs. As Democrats who have run and won in competitive Congressional districts and battleground states, we believe that Hillary is best positioned to successfully lead the Democratic ticket in districts and states like ours around the country.

As you know, Hillary has racked up victories in bellwether states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and now Indiana that are absolutely vital to winning the White House and maintaining our Congressional majority in the fall. Hillary has won the big battleground states by connecting with voters whose support we must have to win the general election. Her victories in Pennsylvania and Indiana were all the more impressive after being outspent by as much as two or three to one.

Pennsylvania was not just a victory for Hillary Clinton. It was also a wake- up call for superdelegates, forcing us to ask ourselves two essential questions: 1) Which candidate can carry the magic 270 electoral votes to win in the fall? 2) Which candidate is most likely to help our fellow Democrats in down-ballot races? We believe the answer to both of these questions is Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton has a request and a promise:

Today, in every way that I know how, I am expressing my personal determination to keep forging forward in this campaign.

After our come-from-behind victory in Indiana, there are just 28 days of voting left. But we’ve never campaigned with the stakes as high or the time as short as they will be over the next four weeks.

And with you by my side, I’m going to keep fighting for what I believe in until every voter has had his or her say.

From the very beginning, you and I have counted on one another, working through every challenge and seizing every opportunity. That’s not just the way our campaign works. That’s the way America works.

As we enter the final four weeks of this contest, let’s keep working our hearts out.

Contribute now to keep moving our campaign forward.

In six days, we have the chance to show our strength in West Virginia. If you’ll stand with me, it’s an opportunity I intend to make the most of.

There’s no question about it — we’ve got to make every one of these next 28 days count — starting with today.

Contribute now, and let’s keep winning together.

As we’ve told each other time and time again. There will be good days and not so good days in the course of this campaign. But there will never be a day that we can’t count on one another.

As we enter the final 28 days of voting, I know you’ll give it everything you’ve got. And you know I will do the same.

Thanks for being such a wonderful friend and ally,

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Barack Obama, as usual, has a Bushism:

Not long after the polls close in the May 20 Kentucky and Oregon primaries, Barack Obama plans to declare victory in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

And, until at least May 31 and perhaps longer, Hillary Clinton’s campaign plans to dispute it.

It’s a train wreck waiting to happen, with one candidate claiming to be the nominee while the other vigorously denies it, all predicated on an argument over what exactly constitutes the finish line of the primary race.

The Obama campaign agrees with the Democratic National Committee, which pegs a winning majority at 2,025 pledged delegates and superdelegates–a figure that excludes the penalized Florida and Michigan delegations. The Clinton campaign, on the other hand, insists the winner will need 2,209 to cinch the nomination–a tally that includes Florida and Michigan.

“We don’t accept 2,025. It is not the real number because that does not include Florida and Michigan,” said Howard Wolfson, one of Clinton’s two chief strategists. “It’s a phony number.”

Wolfson said they intend to contest the DNC’s 2,025 number “every day,” as well as any declaration of victory made by Obama based upon that number, because it does not include Florida and Michigan. [snip]

Obama will not reach the 2,025 magic number on May 20. Rather, on that date he is all but certain to hit a different threshold–1,627 pledged delegates, which would constitute a winning majority among the 3,253 total pledged delegates if Florida and Michigan are not included.

“On May 20 we’re going to declare victory,” said an Obama senior advisor who asked that his name be withheld to speak candidly, adding that after those contests they will be “the ones with the most pledged delegates and the most popular votes.”

The DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee will meet in Washington on May 31, 2008 to try to resolve the mess Howard Dean and they have made. The meeting is supposed to be open to the public.

Howard Wolfson, of the Hillary Campaign, has the last word:

“You can declare mission accomplished but that doesn’t mean that the mission has actually been accomplished,” Wolfson said.

169 Comments » - Posted in Hillary, Obama by Staff

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Thursday, May 8th, 2008

Hillary Clinton’s People Politics vs. Barack Obama’s Thug Politics

Barack Obama’s “New Politics” are really quite extraordinary. Obama’s “new politics” can be summarized as ‘get votes for free which you did not earn’.

The latest Chicago thuggery is a plan for Obama to get delegates in Michigan - a state in which Obama removed his name from the ballot!

Imagine that. A candidate does not run for election but gets votes. This surely is new - and dangerous, and undemocratic, and unwanted.

No doubt Obama violated the “no campaign” pledge in Michigan when he aired advertisments via surrogates asking voters to vote “uncommitted”. Obama also violated the “no campaign” pledge in Florida when he aired advertisments in Florida. But to get delegates from an election in which you did not run is well… thuggery. We are tempted to describe such odd election counting as Bush-like. But we can’t - Bush actually ran for office. Bush was actually on the ballot.

So now, by the art of thuggery, Obama is demanding delegates from an election in which he received ZERO votes. John Edwards, still an official candidate, gets no delegates.

In this new age of electronic voting machines (horrid things) voters have a clear way to express their preferences. If the candidate of their choice is not on the ballot - voters can easily WRITE-IN the name of the candidate they prefer.

Electronic voting machines make it very easy to WRITE-IN a candidate name. Even old non-electronic voting machines make it easy to WRITE-IN a candidate name. Yet few in Michigan wrote-in Obama’s name.

To repeat, Obama wants votes added to his tally, which he did not earn. The voters of Michigan did not WRITE-IN Obama’s name. So why then is Obama asking for delegates from Michigan?

In the age of electronic voting machines and communications tools such as the internet and email a WRITE-IN campaign is simple and affordable and can be very effective. It would be very new but certainly doable. Why didn’t Obama partisans run a write-in campaign in Michigan? Absent actual votes Obama should get zero delegates from Michigan.

Hillary will earn her nomination the old fashioned way - by getting votes.

Meet the Clinton clan — once more today across West Virginia — and be prepared for some return visits before next Tuesday’s primary.

Although she holds a commanding lead in the polls over fellow Democrat Barack Obama in West Virginia, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Co. are leaving nothing to chance by blanketing the state.

Clinton the candidate is staging a Capitol lawn rally in Charleston, Clinton the ex-president is barnstorming in a five-town blitz and Clinton the onetime first daughter is campaigning in Shepherdstown.

By the time polls open across the state Tuesday, you might see more of the Clintons, campaign leader Jessica Santillo suggested.

In Washington, Hillary spoke to “Generations of Women for Hillary”:

A crowd of 1,500 gathered at the “Generations of Women for Hillary” fundraiser at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, paying at least $250 a plate and helping to raise about $1 million for the campaign. Campaign Chairman Terry McAuliffe, addressing attendees, offered no indication that Clinton would be slowing down in her bid for the White House. “She is going to Denver as the nominee of the Democratic Party of the United States of America. And then she’s going to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as the president of the United States of America,” he told the cheering audience.

Clinton worked her way through the crowd as speakers blared Chaka Khan and Whitney Houston versions of “I’m Every Woman.” People stood on chairs waving napkins. When the music was abruptly cut off, the clapping audience chanted: “Hill-ar-y, Hill-ar-y!”

“I’ve been counted out more than once. But thanks to all of you I’ve come back,” Clinton said, earning a thunderous, extended ovation. She later added, “When I was counted out in New Hampshire, it was the women of New Hampshire who came back and said, ‘No, she’s not finished yet.’ When I was counted out before Super Tuesday it was women from California to Massachusetts who came and said ‘No, we’re not finished yet.’ When I was counted out before Ohio, before Indiana, we have always come back.”

530 Comments » - Posted in Hillary, Obama by Staff

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Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

Tiebreaker Indiana: Make Hillary 44

Update: Hillary is showing the way:

Sen. Hillary Clinton added a previously unscheduled campaign stop Wednesday in West Virginia, soldiering on after a split decision in Tuesday’s voting in Indiana and North Carolina, her aides said.

The senator plans to appear at 11:45 a.m. at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, Clinton aides told reporters about 3 a.m. Wednesday.

Her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, had already been scheduled to speak at the university.

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While internet Hopium dens filled with incense and chanting, hoping slumlord Antoin “Tony” Rezko does not “flip” on long time friend Barack “Waffles” Obama - Hillary Clinton was busy winning “tiebreaker” Indiana.

Hillary’s victory was accomplished in the face of a fierce fight put forth by Obama’s strongest supporter - Big Media.

There were two unexpected moments in the course of a very long evening. The first was the outing of Donna Brazile, as a badly disguised Obama supporter, by Campbell Brown at CNN. The outing occurred as Democrats witnessed the full threat posed by the McGovern Dukakis egghead Obama wing of what was the Democratic Party.

Campbell Brown vs. Donna Brazile:

BROWN: Hold on. I want to ask Donna something. Hold on.

I want to ask Donna something because you have been on these panels time and time again with us as an undecided voter, and you sound very much –

BRAZILE: I’m not undecided.

BROWN: Uncommitted?

BRAZILE: I’m undeclared.

BROWN: Undeclared. There you go. Well it sounds very much – Hey, no –

BRAZILE: Words matter.

BROWN: Words matter. It sounds very much to me tonight like you have made up your mind.

Outing Donna as an Obama supporter is not really news. What is news is that Donna was called on her fake neutrality while paymaster CNN was broadcasting. Maybe CNN will now remove Donna from commenting on CNN in the same manner they removed Paul Begala and James Carville.

The really big news of the night however was Donna expressing the Obama vision of the Democratic Party they wish to create after Paul Begala made this unremarkable statement:

BEGALA: But I think Hillary is still going to make the case that she can win those blue-collar white voters that Barack still can’t, that may very well along with Latinos be the key to this general election. That’s what’s so interesting about this primary, why I think it’s good for my party, because the voters who are in play in this primary are the exact voters who are going to decide the general election as well, working-class white folks and Latin Americans.

Donna reared at Begala’s statement and provided the full Obama vision of their Democratic Party:

BRAZILE: Well, Lou, I have worked on a lot of Democratic campaigns, and I respect Paul. But, Paul, you’re looking at the old coalition. A new Democratic coalition is younger. It is more urban, as well as suburban, and we don’t have to just rely on white blue-collar voters and Hispanics. We need to look at the Democratic Party, expand the party, expand the base and not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

[David Axelrod of the Obama circus has also said The white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections, going back even to the Clinton years. This is not new that Democratic candidates don’t rely solely on those votes. Eriposte does a good job dismantling Axelrod’s argument and correcting the historical record.]

Perhaps Donna missed the 2004 election. Perhaps Donna missed the lessons of the 2004 election. Perhaps Donna is not reading the 2008 election returns. Vague promises to “expand the party, expand the base” ring hollow from Donna the Obama supporter. John Judis explains:

Indeed, if you look at Obama’s vote in Pennsylvania, you begin to see the outlines of the old George McGovern coalition that haunted the Democrats during the ’70s and ’80s, led by college students and minorities. In Pennsylvania, Obama did best in college towns (60 to 40 percent in Penn State’s Centre County) and in heavily black areas like Philadelphia.

Replace “Pennsylvania” with Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina and the results remain the same.

Obama lost whites in North Carolina (61% to 37%) and Indiana (60% to 40%). Obama’s vote in both states among African-Americans was 91% in North Carolina and 92% in Indiana.

Donna Brazile might want to wish away the importance of the white vote due to her lackluster campaign history. Perhaps Donna blames her failures on whites not voting for her candidates and is taken in by the audacity of hope. Pershaps Donna does not realize that Obama is not expanding his base but rather shrinking it. Whereas Obama won white male votes in California (55% to 35%) Obama mainly lost them in subsequent primaries (North Carolina 36%).

Donna also does not understand the fastest growing demographic - Latinos - and Obama’s inability to garner Latino votes (especially against a latino friendly McCain). Obama will not be accepted simply because Donna is so beguiling on CNN. Obama will be rejected.

Donna also seems oblivious to the divisions Obama has injected into the Democratic Party:

Forget the horse race numbers for a moment: if the surveys are accurate, the polarization within the Democratic Party has reached critical levels. Nearly six in ten Obama supporters in Indiana say they would be dissatisfied if Clinton were the nominee — that’s (I believe) the high percentage of Obama supporters who have ever said that.

In both IN and NC, two thirds of Clinton supporters say they’d be dissatisfied if Obama were the nominee — I believe that’s the highest number recorded for that question, too.

The percentage of Clinton voters who say they’d choose McCain over Obama in a general election is approaching 40% in Indiana. Put it another way: in North Carolina, less than HALF of folks who voted today for Hillary Clinton are ready to say today that they’d definitely vote for Obama in a general election.

We’ve had enough of fake “uniters not dividers”. We’ve had enough of “reformers” without results.

The nation cannot afford another indigestible waffle.

915 Comments » - Posted in Hillary, Obama, Scum by Staff

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Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

Onward To West Virginia

It’s not to early to start getting ready for the West Virginia primary on May 13, 2008.

Tonight however, is election night in Indiana and North Carolina.

Some good election result maps:

Indiana election results map.

North Carolina election results map.

Here we go!

904 Comments » - Posted in Hillary, Obama, Scum by Staff

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Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

A Time To Work - For Hillary Clinton

[All polls close at 7:00 p.m. (ET) in Indiana (a great many polls close at 6:00 p.m. (ET) in Indiana due to much of the state being in the eastern time zone). All polls close at 7:30 (ET) in North Carolina. Join us when the poll close.]

As demonstrated by the comments from the earlier post, today is a day to work for Hillary Clinton.

Hillary is working.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton had been campaigning for more than 16 hours when she strode onto the stage at Evansville Central High School just before 11 p.m. Monday.

She had started her day at a community college in eastern North Carolina. There were rallies at a train depot, a firehouse in northwest Indiana and another across the state on the Ohio River.

But Clinton betrayed barely a hint of fatigue as she beamed at a crowd of screaming supporters at the high school. “This campaign has been a joy,” she said before launching into a full-throated attack on the Bush administration.

Hillary Clinton is working to great effect.

Many voters at these events marvel at Mrs. Clinton’s understanding. After 16 months of hearing hard-luck stories, she has developed a special radar. Delivering her speech on Sunday in Fort Wayne, Mrs. Clinton’s gaze fell upon a man in fatigues. “I see someone in uniform that I’m especially concerned about,” she said. “While our troops are serving, their homes are being foreclosed on.”

Sure enough, the man, Lance Recht, a National Guard member who served in the first Iraq war, is struggling to save his home. He works at a muffler shop and may join the border patrol in Arizona, leaving his wife and children so he can pay a mortgage whose interest rates have shot up.

“We are that close to foreclosure,” Mr. Recht said in an interview, joining his thumb and forefinger.

When Mrs. Clinton singled him out, his wife, Marissa Recht, said, Mrs. Clinton had no way of knowing their story.

Hillary Clinton is working. The voters are voting. Let’s help get the vote out for Hillary.

191 Comments » - Posted in Hillary by Staff

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Monday, May 5th, 2008

The Checkered Flag

[Tonight - Hillary Clinton on David Letterman to do the Top Ten list (prepare for Obama whining - the topic is “top ten reasons for loving the USA.”]

* * *

As we all make our last phones calls for Hillary Clinton this day before voting starts in Indiana and North Carolina let’s remember what Barack Obama said a very short while ago.

Just before Barack Obama suffered his humiliating loss in Pennsylvania, Obama said Indiana would be the “tiebreaker”.

“I think Indiana is very important,” Obama said. “We’ve got three contests coming up in pretty big states — Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana. They all have significant numbers of delegates, and they are states where Sen. Clinton and I are actively campaigning.”

“You know, Sen. Clinton is more favored in Pennsylvania,” he added, “and I’m right now a little more favored in North Carolina, so Indiana right now may end up being the tiebreaker. So we want to work very hard in Indiana. While Sen. Clinton has some advantages here, I benefit coming from an adjoining state.”

Of course Obama also thought he would win Guam by 11%.

* * *

One of the big reasons why Obama will lose a general election is that Obama has focused his pillow talk appeal to editorial board economic elites. Obama believes that “bitter” Americans cling to their gasoline, god and guns.

Hillary has focused her policies on the needs of working class Americans.

* * *

Economic elites disdain gasoline consuming NASCAR voters - which is why Democrats lose so many elections. Today Hillary Clinton made headlines in the Auto Racing Daily when Sarah Fisher endorsed Hillary Clinton.

We need a president who will stand up for us and be a fighter for Hoosiers and all Americans,” said Fisher, who will attempt to qualify for her seventh Indianapolis 500 this May 2008. “Senator Clinton will be a president who steers our country in the right direction and puts our economy back on track. Something Senator Clinton and I have in common is our commitment to achieving our goals, leaving roadblocks behind, refusing to be knocked down. Senator Clinton is a doer and a fighter who keeps getting out there, going for the checkered flag.”

294 Comments » - Posted in Hillary, Obama by Staff

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Sunday, May 4th, 2008

Pillows For Barack Obama; People For Hillary Clinton

This morning, Hillary Clinton will appear on the ABC network’s This Week program. Barack Obama will appear on the NBC network’s Meet The Press program.

Hillary Clinton will answer questions from George Stephanopoulous and from voters in North Carolina and Indiana. Barack Obama declined to appear on the program.

If Obama persists in not debating and answering the many questions there are about his almost unknown history (his books are barely disguised fiction) news outlets should take a cue from ABC - hold a forum, invite both candidates. If one of the candidates refuses to answer questions then persist with the forum and have the fearless candidate appear.

Besides Hillary Clinton on ABC, this morning we will witness Tim Russert once again fluff pillows to make Obama comfortable. Will Russert interview Obama with the same ferocity Russert interviews Hillary? Will Russert show past Obama videotapes to force Obama to finally provide honest answers? Will Russert follow-up his questions with further inquiries or will Russert once again allow Obama to say what he wishes without fear of contradiction by the historical record? Will Russert ask Obama why he mouthed a speech on race instead of answering question about Obama’s judgement these past 20 years?

We will all have the answers to the above questions later today. We are not expecting much from the Russert interview of Obama. We will, as usual, have our already high expectations exceeded by Hillary Clinton’s answers in the townhall forum on ABC.

883 Comments » - Posted in Hillary, Obama, Scum by Staff

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Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on Kentucky Derby Day

It’s Kentucky Derby Day!

Here at Big Pink we are all excited. The race, the people, the horses, the silks, the hats - all are exciting!

First, the horses in the race:

Cool Coal Man, Tale of Ekati, Anak Nakal, Court Vision, Eight Belles, Z Fortune, Big Truck, Visionaire, Pyro, colonel John, Z Humor, Smooth Air, Bob Black Jack, Monba, Adriano, Denis of Cork, Cowboy Cal, Recapturetheglory, Gayego, and Big Brown.

The Kentucky Derby is not just about the horse running in the race:

It takes a team to produce a Derby winner - from the breeders’ initial mating, through the foaling on the farm, and then finally to the racetrack. Once every spring, one team made up of jockey, owner, trainer and breeder realizes its dream in the Kentucky Derby Winner’s Circle at Churchill Downs.

The Kentucky Derby official song is the great Stephen Foster classic My Old Kentucky Home. The official drink is the Mint Julep.

What exactly is the Kentucky Derby?

The Kentucky Derby is a Grade I stakes race for three-year-old thoroughbred horses, held annually in Louisville, Kentucky, on the first Saturday in May, capping the two-week-long Kentucky Derby Festival. The race is one and a quarter miles (2 km) at Churchill Downs. Colts and geldings carry 126 pounds (57.2 kg) and fillies 121 pounds (54.9 kg).[1] The race is known in the United States as “The Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports” for its approximate duration, and is also called “The Run for the Roses” for the blanket of roses draped over the winner. It is the first leg of the Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing in the US and typically draws around 155,000 fans.

The Kentucky Derby bills itself as “The Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports”. This is not exactly true. The Kentucky Derby is the final 2 minutes in a very long process. The horses in the Kentucky Derby are the best of the best having proven their merit for years.

By now many readers of Big Pink are wondering “Why are we reading so much about a blasted horse race?”

Aside from a naked, shameless, pander to the voters in that great and wonderful state of Kentucky there are lessons to be learned from the Kentucky Derby in this 2008 Presidential race.

First of all let’s take notice that all the horses running for this big prize in Kentucky - have experience.

The horses running in the Kentucky Derby have proven their mettle and worth for years. These are champions. A horse can’t just come in from carting vegetables and run for the Roses.

Second, although there are 20 horses in the lineup, its possible not all of them will run. One or several horses might be “scratched”. For whatever reasons, strategic, health of horse, injury, some horses get pulled from the race by the owners. Some horses get “scratched” from the race by officials.

But guess what, just because a horse gets “scratched” the race is still run. The horses still run.

The owners of the horse that got “scratched” voluntarily cannot state that the race does not count. The owners of the horse that got “scratched” voluntarily cannot demand a share in the purse. The owners of the horse that got “scratched” voluntarily cannot say that race is invalid because “I did not participate”. The owners of the horse that got “scratched” voluntarily cannot ask millions of viewers of the race and bettors and historians to erase the race results from history.

Dean/Obama/Brazille/Pelosi must have the respect for Michigan (and Florida) voters that horse racing officials have for their participants.

Happy Derby!

292 Comments » - Posted in Hillary, Obama by Staff

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Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Step Aside Woman!

[Please join Senator Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton for a Mother’s Day Celebration with family and friends in support of Hillary Clinton for President - Saturday, May 10, 2008, 1:30 PM (Doors open at 1:00 PM), Sheraton New York, 811 Seventh Avenue at 53rd Street, New York City.For more information, e-mail NYC@hillaryclinton.com or call 212-213-3717. Contribution Levels: $100 per person, $1,000 per person (premium seating) Attend with your Family: $500 (admission for 2 adults + kids under 18) $2,300 (premium seating for 2 adults + kids under 18)]

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PLEASE NOTE: Desperate Obama supporters have doctored a YouTube video to create the impression that Indiana voters were insulted in 1992 by the 1992 Clinton campaign. Again, the YouTube is altered and a Chicago thug hit job made out of desperation. Dishonest Obama thugs are circulating the video in a desperate attempt to hurt the heroic Hillary in next week’s elections. An expletive is “entirely fabricated, with new audio dubbed onto the original movie.“

* * *

The get Hillary out of the race attempts by Big Media and the Obama campaign have been going on for months now.

Debra Starks has heard the calls for Hillary Rodham Clinton to quit the presidential race, and she’s not happy about it.

The 53-year old Wal-Mart clerk, so bedecked with Clinton campaign buttons most days that friends call her “Button Lady,” thinks sexism is playing a role in efforts to push the New York senator from the race. Starks wants Clinton to push back.

“The way I look at it, she’s a strong woman and she needs to stay in there. She needs to fight,” Starks said at a Clinton campaign rally. “If you want to be president, you have to fight for what you want. If she stays in there and does what she’s supposed to do, I think she’ll be on her way.”

Misogyny is triumphant these days in the Obama campaign and with Big Media. There will be consequences for the woman hating.

Amid mounting calls from top Democrats for Clinton to step aside and clear the path for rival Barack Obama, strategists are warning of damage to the party’s chances in November if women — who make up the majority of Democratic voters nationwide, but especially the older, white working-class women who’ve long formed the former first lady’s base — sense a mostly male party establishment is unfairly muscling Clinton out of the race.

Free labor from women will end now that the misogyny is exposed and fanned by Obama.

“My e-mail is bursting with women who are furious, and it’s grown in the last week,” said Ann Lewis, Clinton’s director of women’s outreach and a longtime Democratic activist.

“These women are the volunteer infrastructure of the Democratic Party who’ve been proud to support Democratic officials for what they believe and stand for,” Lewis said. “They are very angry that people they’ve worked for so hard would be so dismissive of Hillary and, by extension, of them and what they value.” [snip]

Campaigning across the state Saturday, Clinton was greeted by large, heavily female crowds that shouted “You go, sister!” and “We’ve got your back!” in support of her pioneering candidacy. Indiana votes May 6.

Step aside woman!

“Women have always been asked to step aside if it was somehow for the greater good. In this case, Clinton, and a lot of her female supporters, clearly feel that she would make the better president and that it would not be for the greater good for her to step aside,” Wilson said.

Eric Bohlert has written a good short history which clearly lays out the case that the campaign against Hillary is unprecedented and the high tide of misogyny. Read the whole article. We have some excerpts here:

Here’s another first: the press’s unique push to get a competitive White House hopeful to drop out of the race. It’s unprecedented.

Looking back through modern U.S. campaigns, there’s simply no media model for so many members of the press to try to drive a competitive candidate from the field while the primary season is still unfolding.

Until this election cycle, journalists simply did not consider it to be their job to tell a contender when he or she should stop campaigning. That was always dictated by how much money the campaign still had in the bank, how many votes the candidate was still getting, and what very senior members of the candidate’s own party were advising.

In this case, Howard Dean, the head of the Democratic National Committee, said he was “dumbfounded” by public demands for Clinton to drop out last month. (He now wants one of the candidates to quit after the final June 3 primary.) Yet lots of pundits have suggested that in a neck-and-neck campaign in which neither candidate will likely secure the nomination based on pledged delegates, Sen. Hillary Clinton must drop out before all the states have had a chance to vote.

The Hate Hillary Big Media misogyny campaign is unprecedented and unparalleled.

And the fact is, the media’s get-out-now push is unparalleled. Strong second-place candidates such as Ronald Reagan (1976), Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson, and Jerry Brown, all of whom campaigned through the entire primary season, and most of whom took their fights all the way to their party’s nominating conventions, were never tagged by the press and told to go home.

“Clinton is being held to a different standard than virtually any other candidate in history,” wrote Steven Stark in the Boston Phoenix. “When Clinton is simply doing what everyone else has always done, she’s constantly attacked as an obsessed and crazed egomaniac, bent on self-aggrandizement at the expense of her party.”

Big Media is working to force feed their tool, Barack Obama, down the American voters’ throats. American voters are fighting back and next week Big Media will suffer another defeat.

Indeed, even after Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary convincingly last week, she awoke the next morning to read an angry New York Times editorial, “beseeching her to get the hell out of the race,” as Howard Kurtz put it at washingtonpost.com. On the Times opinion page that day same, Maureen Dowd actually turned to Dr. Seuss rhymes to make her point: “The time is now. Just go. … I don’t care how.”

And across town at the New York Daily News, a bitter Mike Lupica was steamed over the fact that Clinton “won’t quit” the race.

Weeks earlier, New York magazine fretted about which senior Democrats would be able to “step in” and “usher Clinton from the race.” Or if Clinton, obsessed with her own “long-range self-aggrandizement,” would finally figure it out herself.

Meanwhile, Slate.com’s snarky Hillary Deathwatch was created to document, day-by-day, the demise of her campaign, complete with a damsel-in-distress cartoon drawing of Clinton atop a sinking ship.

That represented just a fraction of the often offensive get-out-now proclamations that have become a staple of this campaign.

Eric does not want to spell it completely out however. We did. Big Media is not composed of journalists or interested in reporting the news. Big Media is a political party in everything but name. (Read our article The Big Media Party).

No longer content to be observers of the campaign, journalists now see themselves as active players in the unfolding drama, and they show no hesitation trying to dictate the basics of the contest, like who should run and who should quit. It’s as if journalists are auditioning for the role of the old party bosses.

It’s a new brand of political commentary that leaves some veteran journalists perplexed. “The idea that it’s your job to tell candidates when to get out, and really trying to control the whole process – putting it in the hands of the journalists or the reporters or the columnists — I find that to be new and different,” Haynes Johnson told me last week. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Johnson has covered more than a dozen presidential campaigns and is currently working on a book about the unfolding 2008 contest.

Johnson says he was astonished to read some early calls in March from the media for Clinton to get out of the race. He was stunned by “the pomposity and the arrogance of it.”

Naming names. The Big Media Party bosses:

More often than not, the analysis ends up resembling poorly argued temper tantrums. For instance, The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait has written three essays about why Clinton must abandon her race for the White House, each increasingly petulant in tone. (We learned the “rationalizations” for Clinton’s “kamikaze campaign” are “wretched.”) Last month Chait wrote that Clinton’s chance of winning the Democratic nomination this year were closer to Ralph Nader’s than they were Barack Obama’s or John McCain’s. It’s a reasonable comparison, if you ignore the nearly 1,600 delegates Clinton has amassed, compared with Nader’s zero.

Chait also compared Clinton to former presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Biden, suggesting that if Biden could figure out when it was time to quit the race, why can’t she?

Searching for candidates who did the right thing and went “gentle into that good night,” Chait compared Clinton, whose campaign has secured nearly 14 million votes, to Biden, whose campaign ended abruptly in January after he received roughly 2,000 votes in the Iowa caucuses. That’s who Clinton is supposed to emulate when ending her campaign run.

Misogyny, pure and ugly from Big Media.

In the past there was always an assumption among journalists that candidates had earned the right to decide when they should quit. Journalists also respected the fact that candidates represented a sizable portion of the primary voting public and that the candidates owed it to their supporters to fight on, that there was a symbolic significance for the candidates — and their supporters — to persevere.

With Clinton, though, the press seems to have almost complete disregard for the 14 million voters who have backed her candidacy, as well as the idea that she is their representative in this race. Instead, they treat her entire campaign as some sort of vanity exercise in which voters do not exist.

And if pundits do acknowledge the Clinton voters, it’s often with baffling ignorance, the way Time’s Mark Halperin claimed many of Clinton’s supporters would be “relieved” and “even delighted” if she dropped out. Really? Delighted? Halperin offered no proof to back up the peculiar notion.

These calls to “step aside” are unprecedented because Hillary is the first woman to get this close to becoming president. This is all brand new and stinky.

Looking back at history, it’s hard to find evidence of the same media response to Ronald Reagan’s failed 1976 presidential campaign. Taking on President Gerald Ford, Reagan lost more primaries than he won, and Ford won a plurality of the popular vote, but neither man had enough delegates to secure the nomination. So the campaign went to the GOP convention, where Ford prevailed. The bitter battle did nothing to damage Reagan’s reputation (in fact, it did quite the opposite), in part because the media did not collectively suggest the candidate was acting selfishly or irrationally. Instead, Reagan walked away with a reputation as a resilient fighter who stood up for his conservative values.

And what about Sen. Ted Kennedy’s doomed run in 1980? He trailed President Jimmy Carter by more than 750 delegates at the end of the primary season and insisted on fighting all the way to the convention, where he tried to get committed Carter delegates to switch their allegiance. The press did not spend months during the primary season ridiculing Kennedy, in a deeply personal tone, for remaining in the race.

And what about Gary Hart in 1984? He and Walter Mondale split the season’s primaries and caucuses evenly, and neither had the 2,023 delegates needed to secure the nomination. Superdelegates eventually determined the winner. (Sound familiar?) Mondale had many of them locked up even before the campaign season began, so after the final primary between Mondale and Hart was complete, it was obvious that Mondale was going to be the nominee because Hart could not persuade enough superdelegates to change their mind and support him.

When Hart took his crusade all the way to the convention, the media did not form a posse and decide it was their job to get Hart to quit for the good of the party. (And the press certainly didn’t form a posse in March to start pushing Hart out of the race.) Nor did the press collectively suggest that Hart had an oversized ego that had turned him into a political monster.

That new media standard has been created exclusively for Hillary Clinton.

Jesse and Jerry too

And where were the catcalls in 1988 for Jesse Jackson to ditch his quixotic run before all the primary votes had been tallied? He finished with 1,200 delegates, nearly 1,400 behind Michael Dukakis, yet soldiered on all the way to the convention without having a prayer of winning the nomination. There were few if any media drum sections trying to pound him out of the race.

Or Jerry Brown in 1992? He continued his campaign against Bill Clinton through June despite the fact he tallied fewer than 600 delegates. (By contrast, Hillary Clinton has won approximately 1,600 delegates so far.) Brown’s attacks at the time were far more personal and bruising than anything we’ve seen this cycle. As The New York Times reported on June 2, 1992, Brown “put his party on notice that he intends to carry his politics-is-corrupt, Clinton-is-unelectable message to the Democratic National Convention in New York in July, and beyond.” Brown also told the Times that voting for Clinton was like buying a ticket on the Titanic.

Hillary Clinton will not step aside.

491 Comments » - Posted in Hillary, Scum by Staff

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Thursday, May 1st, 2008

Hillary Clinton - Still Foxy

The Hillary Clinton interview by Bill O’Reilly last night was a big viewer favorite.

Tonight’s Part II of the interview is sure to be a favorite too.

402 Comments » - Posted in Hillary by Staff

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