Legion of Angels News Archive

WASHINGTON - Just how close did Hillary Clinton come to getting the Democratic nomination?

The way a Democratic strategist, an activist or a donor answers that question can reveal his or her Clinton bias.

With the Democratic convention just days away, we’re about to be inundated with a number of retrospectives on the primary.

And many of these will include several “what ifs,” thanks in part to two new pieces of information:

* The Atlantic Monthly’s release of internal memos and emails from Team Hillary
* John Edwards’ admission of an extramarital affair with Rielle Hunter

Let’s start with the second item first. Already, one of Clinton’s senior advisers has wondered aloud if Edwards cost her a win in Iowa.

There are so many reasons why this theory is off, I don’t know where to begin.

As network entrance polls pointed out, Barack Obama topped Clinton nearly two-to-one when it came to second choice picks by Edwards backers.

Crunching the numbers
Assuming this is the actual breakdown of how things would have split among Edwards’ thirty percent, this scenario would have given a little more than 50 percent to Obama and a little less than 40 percent to Clinton, guaranteeing him a double-digit Iowa win.

It’s also likely that Obama may have snatched somewhere closer to 60 percent, given that Iowa had already turned into a two-person contest. But maybe Joe Biden or Bill Richardson would have popped up on the radar in an Edwards-less field.

The idea that Clinton’s standing would have somehow improved in Iowa without Edwards is just not supported by data or observation.

Both Edwards and Obama were running as populist change agents. They pigeon-holed Clinton as the status quo politician.

If anything, Edwards’ relative strength with labor unions kept Obama from getting key early endorsements — backing that could have secured an Iowa blowout and possibly a victory in New Hampshire.

If anything, Edwards was the reason why Obama didn’t rule the roost pre-Super Tuesday.

But I want to touch on another aspect of the Edwards story that no one seems to be paying attention to in Clintonland.

Had this affair come to light during the Democratic primary process, it could have potentially destroyed Hillary’s candidacy.

Why? A smooth-talking Southern politician getting caught having an affair with an eccentric “blonde” woman? Sound familiar? Exactly.

An Edwards revelation in late 2007 or early 2008 would have forced Hillary and her campaign to relive all things Monica and Gennifer and Paula.

How helpful would that have been? You think the cable pundits were tough on Hillary because of her gender? Imagine a world where Bill’s paramours were front and center once again.

Talk about feeding into Obama’s “turn the page” message, wow…This would have been a Rev. Wright-level issue for Hillary. In order to save her candidacy, she would have been forced to give the “Bill speech” or sit down with Dr. Phil and explain why she stayed.

Of course, count me as someone who always thought she should have given this speech anyway.

A number of Obama’s key supporters were with him simply because of Clinton’s baggage. If these folks could have heard Hillary explain how she planned to distance herself from Bill on these issues, they might have been won over.

We can go on and on about these Edwards “what ifs,” but it seems there are more anti-Hillary scenarios than pro-Hillary ones in an Edwards-less race.

Memo controversy
Moving on to those campaign memos and emails published in The Atlantic Monthly — not only are they painting a devastating picture of a candidate not ready to be president, but they’re giving backseat campaign drivers more ammunition.

Apparently, Clinton followed only half of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s historical advice. She hired a “team of rivals” just like Abraham Lincoln, but didn’t assert any authority over them.

If anything, these folks were screaming for decisions to be made, only to be thwarted by every organization’s potential Achilles’ Heel: paralysis.

There are a number of ways to interpret these Mark Penn memos or the ones from Harold Ickes.

I could sit here and argue that Penn was wrong about “X” or that Ickes misread “Y,” but ultimately, Hillary appears to be the bad actor here.

All she knew was she didn’t want to lose — but didn’t know why.

Hillary never made that “why” speech. In fact, she found a message only in response to Obama’s juggernaut.

It’s as if she only developed a message appealing to voters who hadn’t been won over by Obama. Hers was a defensive and reactive campaign from the beginning.

Read the Penn memos and it’s clear that the entire campaign was consumed with responding to Obama rather than redefining the race on their terms.

The release of these memos will end up doing one of two things:

* Put an end to Clinton’s presidential aspirations because they potentially paint a picture of someone not ready to lead
* Provide a blueprint for Clinton not to follow, encouraging her to surround herself with a new team of folks, specifically those whose entire professional political existence wasn’t born of her husband

One other point on the Clinton campaign…it’s been interesting for me to hear so many of her supporters claim she came *this* close to winning the Democratic nomination.

Her chances
By the numbers, you can make that case and certainly she always had a “chance” at the nomination after Super Tuesday.

But what were those chances? Were they 50-50 or were they 10 percent?

By my calculation, her chances at the nomination were less than 25 percent. And after Feb. 19, those odds dropped to around 10 percent.

But the media never challenged the idea that Clinton had a real shot at the nomination, and in the end, that’s been a disservice to her supporters.

Many of them bought into that idea of victory, and now, they’re feeling mistreated by Obama’s camp ahead of the convention.

The last 75 days of this primary campaign were a gift to Clinton. She had an opponent who didn’t want to fully engage with her, trying his best to have one foot in the general and one foot in the primary.

He stopped fully engaging Clinton, attacking only when necessary.

This allowed Clinton to revitalize her own profile a bit, which in turn helped her win more votes than she would have if Obama campaigned as hard as he did in November, January and February.

It’s tough to war game “what if ” scenarios without fully living through them. So be careful when you hear folks trying to rewrite the history of the primary campaign.

Campaigns are rooted in the science of physics. Every action forces a reaction — one that can sometimes open a new host of unexpected questions and possible scenarios.

It may have been that this Democratic nomination was never Clinton’s to lose but Obama’s to win.

And depending on how things turn out in November, don’t be surprised if history is rewritten again.

Source — MSNBC

Whether Sen. Hillary Clinton stands at the side of Sen. Barack Obama during his bid for the U.S. presidency or not, her exit from the race could give him the boost he needs, a new marketing study suggests.

The research supports an assumption often discussed by pundits: that undecided voters are likely to go with the candidate most similar to the one that drops out.

The study found that if two options vie for a consumer’s or voter’s preference, and a third option enters and leaves the market, the remaining option most similar to the exiting one benefits. The similar features get more attention, and consumers think, “Oh, that must be important,” the researchers say.

“This is exactly what happened in the Democratic primaries this year,” said researcher Akshay Rao of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. “We have Obama and Clinton going at it for months after the Republican primary has been decided. John McCain couldn’t buy media attention at that time because everybody is focused on the attributes that Obama and Clinton were arguing about.”

He added that by withdrawing after the primaries, Clinton left in her wake an impression that the shared Obama-Clinton attributes and issue stances were important. With Clinton out of the picture, Obama could take all of that popular appeal.

Rao and his colleagues tested this phenomenon by having groups of undergraduate students complete questionnaires in which they had to choose between three options, one of which subsequently became unavailable.

These sets of options included unnamed political candidates, beer, healthcare plans, cars and cruise lines.

In one scenario, participants were asked to respond to a newspaper poll about unnamed presidential candidates who had been rated on economic and international policy. One candidate performed well on economic policy, the other on international policy, and the third candidate either dominated the other two on both attributes or outperformed the so-called target candidate on one type of policy.

When the third candidate stayed in this virtual race, 72 percent of the participants chose that person, while nobody chose the target candidate. When the third option dropped out, more than 50 percent of those who originally selected that third option chose the target. None of the participants who had chosen the rival were swayed toward the target.

Asked if staunch “Hillary supporters” would sway toward Obama, Rao said his results can’t answer that question. But the findings do speak to swing voters, which make up about 20 percent of U.S. voters, according to recent Gallup poll estimates.

“The presence or absence of the third option influences people whose attribute preferences are labile — they don’t know which attribute is important,” Rao told LiveScience. “Is energy policy more important than foreign policy? … The fact that you’ve got two candidates talking ad nauseam about energy policy makes them turn their heads and say that must be important.”

The results will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Marketing Research.

Source — MSNBC

(CNN) — Is the so-called Democratic ‘dream ticket’ off the table?

Despite speculation that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is seriously considering Hillary Clinton for the No. 2 spot on the Democratic presidential ticket, a former senior advisor to Clinton said Thursday he doesn’t think the New York senator is being formally considered for the job.

Howard Wolfson, the former Clinton campaign communications director, told Fox News Thursday he isn’t aware of any official effort on behalf of the Obama campaign that suggests the Illinois senator is considering his former rival for his running mate.

“Not as far as I know,” Wolfson said when asked if Clinton had been “asked to participate in the vetting process for VP.”

But the longtime Clinton confidante quickly added there is more information available in the public record about the former presidential candidate “than just about any public figure in America.”

“She’s been vetted now for a long time — she’s got thirty years of taxes in the public record and financial disclosure forms. She ran for president for 18 months and every news organization in America had multiple teams of reporters look at all aspects at her career and her biography,” he said. “So there’s a lot of information out about her that I know Senator Obama is privy too, that may be sufficient for him to make whatever decision he wants to make.”

The comments come amid reports the Obama campaign has asked other public officials to hand over information about themselves as part of a formal vice presidential vetting process, including former presidential candidate Chris Dodd.

The five-term Connecticut senator said Thursday that he has been asked to provide “a lot of stuff.”

“There’s been some inquiries, yeah,” he told the Associated Press. “They ask for a lot of stuff. I’ll leave it there.” The Obama campaign and Dodd’s Senate office have yet to comment on the report, though the Republican National Committee has already leveled attacks on Obama for considering the Connecticut senator, in light of accusations he received preferred loans from Countrywide Financial – the same attack that led to the resignation of the original head of the Illinois senator’s vice presidential search team.

The Obama campaign also reportedly approached Virginia Sen. Jim Webb about the job, followed by an announcement from the freshman senator that he had officially taken himself out of the running.

Other potential candidates for the position are remaining far more circumspect about their interaction with the Obama campaign.

“The decision and timetable for the best person to help Sen. Obama lead the country is entirely up to him. All of us who support Sen. Obama have been asked to direct questions about his choice for vice president to the campaign,” Kathleen Sebelius, the popular Kansas governor said in a Thursday statement.

“I’m not going to talk about it,” longtime Obama supporter and freshman Missouri senator Claire McCaskill said Wednesday.

UPDATE: Adam Parkhomenko, the founder of Voteboth.com, said Friday it’s time Clinton is asked directly if she is being vetted for VP.

“It’s time to ask Hillary if she is being vetted. It’s not responsible to assume she is not being vetted because a former campaign adviser said he does not know,” he said.

Source — CNN

(CNN) – Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton team up again Wednesday, but not all Clinton’s supporters are jumping on the Obama bandwagon despite her calls for unity.

Two fundraisers are scheduled Wednesday in New York and a third on Thursday, making it five times the two have appeared together since Clinton ended her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination last month.

Two of the events are aimed at raising money for Obama’s campaign, and one is to help Clinton retire the debt from her failed run.

The joint appearances have been choreographed carefully to produce pictures of the former rivals standing side by side in an effort to help move beyond the bitterness of the hard-fought Democratic primary.

But for some of Clinton’s top supporters, it’s going to take more than just encouragement from the former first lady to get them to open their wallets and hearts to Obama.

Some of Clinton’s fundraisers are pressuring the Obama campaign to support her policy positions — and help pay off her campaign debt.

Clinton was more than $22 million in the red when she bowed out last month, and half of it was personal loans she made to the campaign to keeping it running.

With that debt yet to be paid off, some of Clinton’s supporters are balking at the idea of forking over donations for Obama — especially if he does not choose her to be his running mate.

Businesswoman Lynn Forester de Rothschild launched a Web site bringing Clinton supporters together to put the pressure on Obama.

“We are being asked to embrace party unity without the fair representation of Hillary Clinton and her 18 million voters,” she says on her Web site. “Party unity requires bilateral action. We ask Barack Obama and the [Democratic National Committee] to respond.”

De Rothschild is one of the so-called “Hillraisers” — supporters who raised at least $100,000 for Clinton. She’s yet to fork over any cash for Obama, and she doesn’t know if she will.

“I certainly know there are lots of people who are withholding their money,” she said.

“This is a hard decision for me personally because frankly I don’t like him. I feel like he is an elitist. I feel like he has not given me reason to trust him.”

That sentiment may be sending some Clinton fans into Sen. John McCain’s court.

According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released last week, Clinton supporters who say they plan to defect to McCain’s camp is down from a month ago, but those who say they plan to vote for Obama is also down, and a growing number say they may not vote at all.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Florida, spent two days in New York this week with disaffected Clinton supporters.

“It’s not unexpected that they wouldn’t just automatically shift over to Obama, because they’re not the typical Democratic supporters that just automatically shift over,” she said. “They need to be wooed. They need to be won over.”

The Obama campaign said it expects the “Hillraisers” to come around, but in the meantime, the presumptive GOP nominee is appealing to Clinton fans and trying to make inroads where he can.

Source — CNN

INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana (AP) — As Chelsea Clinton continues to hit the campaign trail for her mother’s presidential bid, there’s one subject that won’t seem to go away: Monica Lewinsky.

At least three times in the past two weeks, the former and possible future first daughter has been asked about the Monica Lewinsky scandal’s influence on the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The answer has evolved each time.

When a student at Butler University in Indianapolis first asked the question on March 25, she drew applause and gave a short response that ended with: “I do not think that is any of your business.”

Clinton, 28, since has been less blunt, though the message is much the same.

“I think that is something that is personal to my family, I’m sure there are things that are personal to your family that you don’t think are anyone else’s business, either,” she said last week when asked during a visit to North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

“But also on a larger point, I don’t think you should vote for or against my mother because of my father.”

Many in the crowd at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, booed Monday when a question about the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton came up.

Chelsea Clinton quickly summed up her position: “If that’s what you want to vote on, that’s what you should vote on. But I think there are other people (who are) going to vote on things like health care and economics,” she said.

Amanda Morris, president of Purdue’s Students for Hillary chapter, said Tuesday that she approved of the audience reaction and how Clinton is responding. She also expects the question might keep coming up.

“I really think it has gotten to the point where it is the attention thing,” said Morris, a sophomore from Kokomo, Indiana. “At first, maybe that student really wanted to know what she thought about it. But by now it’s ‘Oh, that person got attention for it, I’m going to keep asking.”‘

Philippe Reines, a Clinton campaign spokesman, said Chelsea Clinton has made 99 campus appearances through Tuesday, and typically has taken 10 to 20 questions at each stop.

He said the Lewinsky matter was not a burning issue among the people who have attended.

“She has been asked less than a handful of times, and she has been clear on where her lines of privacy are,” Reines said. “She has the right as everyone does to define their own zone of privacy.”

Reines said her campaign stops would continue unchanged. She does not take questions from reporters, but devotes all but the first few minutes of her appearances to questions from the audience.

Strict in her ban on reporters’ questions, Chelsea Clinton even rebuffed a 9-year-old “kid reporter” for Scholastic News, who tried to question her last December in Iowa.

“Do you think your dad would be a good ‘first man’ in the White House?” asked Sydney Rieckhoff.

“I’m sorry, I don’t talk to the press and that applies to you, unfortunately. Even though I think you’re cute,” Clinton told the pint-sized journalist.

On Tuesday, Chelsea Clinton visited three more college campuses in Indiana, where her mother and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama are actively campaigning to win the May 6 presidential primary. She was wrapping up her second campaign swing across the state.

“She really has gotten more questions on whether or not her mother believes the U.S. dollar should be tied to the gold standard,” Reines said. “That’s a question she’s gotten probably 10 times.”

Morris, the Purdue student, said she doesn’t think Chelsea Clinton should have to face Lewinsky questions.

“That is something that has to do with their family life,” Morris said. “I don’t think it is something that we as a nation need to know how they handled as a family.”

Source — CNN