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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (77826)	6/2/2008 1:15:26 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 89467

Clinton's Win in Puerto Rico Fails to Revive Her Nomination Bid By Catherine Dodge June 2 (Bloomberg) -- Hillary Clinton's uphill bid for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination suffered further blows after a compromise in a dispute over Michigan and Florida delegates barely enabled her to chip into Barack Obama's commanding lead -- and low turnout in Puerto Rico ended any chance of winning the popular vote overall. With just two primaries remaining tomorrow, Obama is almost certain to win the nomination even with Clinton's 2-to-1 victory in Puerto Rico yesterday. The Obama camp said it expects this week to get the 2,118 delegates needed to clinch the nomination at the Democrats' August convention, and many experts agree. ``It's more than likely that within a week or two that Senator Obama will have enough votes to claim that he's going to be the nominee,'' Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, who is neutral in the race, said on CBS's ``Face the Nation'' yesterday. ``Her candidacy is dead,'' said Julian Zelizer, a public- affairs professor at Princeton University in New Jersey. Coming into the weekend, Clinton trailed Obama by 200 delegates. A party compromise on seating delegates from the uncontested races in Michigan and Florida, which were stripped of their delegates for holding early primaries, netted Clinton little more than two-dozen pledged delegates. Under the ruling, each delegate from the two states will get a half a vote. New York Senator Clinton's win in Puerto Rico put her on track to pick up about two-thirds of the 55 delegates at stake there. Delegate Count Overall, she may have netted as many as 50 delegates over the weekend, leaving her at least 150 behind Obama, an Illinois senator. There are just 31 pledged delegates at stake in tomorrow's contests in South Dakota and Montana, making Clinton's task next to impossible. Moreover, all of the movement of so- called superdelegates -- who are drawn from party leaders and lawmakers and aren't bound by voters' preferences -- is toward Obama. After the weekend results, Obama has at least 2,070 delegates, less than 50 shy of the number needed for the nomination; Clinton has at least 1,914. There are fewer than 200 uncommitted superdelegates, and most are likely to go to Obama, along with the majority of those from Montana and South Dakota. Popular Vote Clinton's supporters argue that she is winning the popular vote. Yet going into Puerto Rico, she trailed Obama by more than 275,000 votes. Those figures include the votes in Florida, where the candidates agreed not to campaign. They don't include the results from Michigan, where the candidates didn't campaign and Obama took his name off the ballot. In Puerto Rico, Clinton scored a net gain of less than 150,000 votes, leaving Obama with an overall lead of 125,000, more than enough to offset any gains she may make in South Dakota or Montana. Clinton yesterday continued to predict she would win the most popular votes, though such assertions aren't likely to carry much weight after this weekend. ``I will lead in the popular vote; he will maintain a slight lead in the delegates,'' she said at a rally in San Juan, Puerto Rico, adding that the race would come down to the superdelegates. Unity Pledge Obama, 46, has taken on the air of a general-election candidate. Speaking at a rally in Mitchell, South Dakota, he said he called Clinton, 60, to congratulate her. He said the Democrats would be able to put their differences aside in time to take on the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona. Clinton ``is going to be a great asset when we go on to November to make sure we defeat the Republicans,'' Obama said. The Democratic Party committee's ruling May 31 to give the Florida and Michigan delegations half a vote was a disappointment for the Clinton campaign. Clinton supporters said they were satisfied with the Florida decision. They raised the prospect of a floor fight at the convention over the way the Michigan dispute was resolved, saying Obama was awarded too many delegates. Clinton's campaign chairman, Terence McAuliffe, left open the possibility that the senator would ask the convention credentials committee to overturn the decision on the Michigan delegates. ``We are going to keep our options open,'' he said yesterday on ABC's ``This Week'' program. McAuliffe wouldn't say whether Clinton would concede if Obama wins enough delegates this week to reach the 2,118 threshold. Last 2 Primaries Obama's communications director, Robert Gibbs, predicted the contest may soon be over. ``Sometime this week, we'll probably have a nominee for the Democratic Party,'' Gibbs said on ``This Week.'' Obama has picked up more than three times as many superdelegate endorsements as Clinton in the past three months. At the start of the nominating contests Jan. 3, Clinton had 169 superdelegate endorsements to Obama's 63, according to the Associated Press. ``It's pretty clear that once we get past the primaries, Obama will be very close to the new magic number,'' said David Redlawsk, a political-science professor at the University of Iowa. ``The pressure is on superdelegates to announce.'' To contact the reporter on this story: Catherine Dodge in Washington, at Cdodge1@bloomberg.net Last Updated: June 2, 2008 00:01 EDT

To: American Spirit who wrote (77826)	6/3/2008 8:09:53 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

A Gift to the G.O.P. _______________________________________________________________ By BOB HERBERT Columnist The New York Times Published: June 3, 2008 Talk about self-inflicted wounds. The Democrats may finally be stepping away from their circular firing squad. It took them long enough. There are so many things that the Democrats need to do to have any chance of winning the White House in November, and it’s awfully late in the game to begin doing them. Only now is the party starting to rally around Senator Barack Obama, who has been the likely nominee for the longest time. No one knows how long it will take to move beyond the fratricidal conflict that was made unnecessarily bitter by Bill and Hillary Clinton. The cry of “McCain in ’08!” at the Democratic rules committee meeting in Washington over the weekend came from a supporter of Senator Hillary Clinton. It reminded me of Bill Clinton’s comment that “it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country.” He was talking about Hillary Clinton and John McCain. The former president’s comment played right into the sustained effort by opponents of Barack Obama to portray the senator as some kind of alien figure, less than patriotic, not fully American, too strange by half to be handed the reins of government. Senator Obama’s effort to counter that line of attack has been all-but-completely undermined by the incredible shrieking pastors from the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a place that might be good for the soul but is potentially ruinous for a presidential aspirant. First came the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. with his videotaped, over-the-top sermons. He didn’t just criticize the United States, but damned it. The Wright controversy was a body blow to the Obama campaign, and it hasn’t fully recovered yet. I made a crack in a column last week that Senator Clinton, who had no discernible route to her party’s nomination, was waiting for a Rev. Wright on steroids to burst into view. Within days, we had the astounding video of the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest who put on a grotesque performance in the church that could hardly have been more racially offensive toward white people or more personally offensive toward Senator Clinton. His rant, cheered by the audience, was one of the worst I’ve seen in many years. Senator Obama announced on Saturday that he had quit the church. This was supposed to have been the Democrats’ year. But instead of marching to victory, the party has been at war with itself in some of the ugliest ways imaginable. There was a time, not that long ago, when Democratic voters were crowing about how happy they were with all (or almost all) of the potential nominees. But the Clinton and Obama partisans spent months fighting bitterly on the toxic terrain of misogyny, racism and religion. It can only make you wonder about the vaunted Democratic claims of moral superiority when it comes to tolerance. This should have been the year when the Democrats just hammered the Republicans over the economy, the war, energy policy, health care, appointments to the Supreme Court, the failure to rebuild New Orleans, and so on. The list of important issues on which the Republicans are vulnerable is endless. Instead of running for cover, the G.O.P. is growing ever more confident that it will be tossing inaugural balls for John and Cindy McCain come January. There is no end of blame to be apportioned among the Democrats. The Clintons have behaved execrably. But weak-willed party leaders showed neither the courage nor the inclination to stop them from fracturing the party along gender and ethnic lines. As for Senator Obama, he’s been mired in a series of problems of his own — problems that have done serious damage to the very idea that brought him to national prominence in the first place: that he was a new breed of political leader, a unifying candidate who could begin to narrow the partisan divides of race, class and even, to some extent, political persuasion. Can the Democrats still get their act together? Only if they hurry. The party will have to exhibit extraordinary unity, coming together quickly to heal the wounds of this long and bitter primary. Senator Obama will have to develop (again, quickly) an exceptionally compelling economic program while trying to strengthen his appeal across ethnic and class lines. The Democrats have done far more damage to themselves than the G.O.P. could ever have inflicted.

To: American Spirit who wrote (77826)	6/6/2008 3:47:40 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Barack Obama is JFK's 'inspirational' heir, says former Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen telegraph.co.uk By Philip Sherwell 01/06/2008 As the speechwriter and closest adviser of President Kennedy, Ted Sorensen penned some of the most famous and inspiring phrases in modern American politics. Nearly five decades after he helped to craft the celebrated "ask not what your country can do for you" address, the 80-year-old has again been deploying his mastery of language to shape the American political landscape. Despite being left almost blind by a stroke in 2001, Mr Sorensen has actively campaigned in several states for Barack Obama – a candidate whose youth, charisma and above all stirring oratory remind him so closely of his old boss. He has sent occasional notes and thoughts suggesting themes and topics to his friends on the senator's team. But undoubtedly his greatest personal input to the Obama campaign was recommending a young acolyte as a speechwriter, passing the torch of Kennedy eloquence down the generations. The so-called "poet of Camelot" – as the Kennedy administration was known – has predictably little patience with Hillary Clinton's dismissal of Mr Obama's rhetorical flair as "just words" or her "action not words" platform. "Words are incredibly important for a candidate because they are incredibly important for a president," he told The Sunday Telegraph. "They can mobilise, inspire and galvanise support. Words are how JFK mobilised support at the time of the worst crisis the world has ever seen and solved the Cuban Missile Crisis without a shot being fired. Words are how he transformed the country's attitude to its black citizens. "Barack Obama shares JFK's command of words and recognises their power. I am very excited to see how he has inspired young people who have been so cynical about politics for so long." Mr Sorensen is on a book tour to promote his 576-page memoir Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History. He wrote the book with the help of a youthful collaborator, Adam Frankel, his "right hand and eyes" who spent six years immersed in the world of Kennedy-Sorensen rhetoric. And thanks to a recommendation from Mr Sorensen, the 26-year-old Princeton graduate is now Mr Obama's deputy chief speechwriter. "Adam worked with me for six years and got to know all about the speeches I wrote for Kennedy," he said. "So when people hear touches of Kennedy and Sorensen in Obama, they are hearing the contribution of Adam." Mr Sorensen has always been careful not to claim direct credit for the words spoken by President Kennedy, who described his young aide as his "intellectual blood bank". But it is no secret that he played a major role in drafting such phrases as "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" and "What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war". He also wrote the personal letter from Kennedy to the Soviet leader, Nikita Krushchev, that is widely believed to have averted the threat of nuclear conflagration at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. After the bruising and protracted primary contest with Mrs Clinton, the veteran observer is ever more convinced that Mr Obama is a rightful heir to John F Kennedy, assassinated in 1963, and his brother Robert, shot dead on the campaign trail 40 years ago this week. And he notes striking parallels between the tactical acumen deployed by Kennedy to win the Democratic nomination over the more experienced Lyndon Johnson in 1960 and Mr Obama's success against his more experienced adversary. "Both men pursued extremely successful grassroots strategies after recognising it was all about the delegates. Obama has focused his resources on that ground war, just as Kennedy's strategy was to win the mayors, local leaders and party county chairmen. We left the senators to Johnson. "Obama has also collected a superb team around him, just as Kennedy picked quality people as his advisers. This is the first and most important decision that a candidate and a president has to make – the choice of their team. By contrast, Mrs Clinton has had great trouble putting together a team that can even get along together." He also dismissed suggestions that Mr Obama might be persuaded to choose Mrs Clinton as his vice-presidential running mate in an echo of Kennedy's selection of Johnson. "Mrs Clinton is commonly viewed as one of the most divisive members of the party. LBJ was a big man in terms of leadership and vision. I don't think anyone has ever suggested that Mrs Clinton has those capabilities."

To: American Spirit who wrote (77826)	6/13/2008 3:46:27 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Tim Russert dies of heart attack, family says buffalonews.com

To: American Spirit who wrote (77826)	6/14/2008 2:03:30 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

Obama Leans on Team Daschle in Key States blog.washingtonpost.com One of the secret ingredients to Barack Obama's change-centric presidential campaign is his reliance on a stable of longtime political operatives with ties to former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (S.D.). Witness two recent hires to run key general election states for Obama: Mindy Myers as New Hampshire state director and Mitch Stewart as the Virginia state director. Myers, who had been serving as chief of staff to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), has a long history with Daschle, having worked in his Senate office and serving as political director of DASHPAC -- Dedicated Americans for Senate and House Political Action Committee (ugh!). Stewart, too, goes way back with Daschle and his political operation. He was a field organizer on Sen. Tim Johnson's (S.D.) 2002 reelection victory over then-Rep. John Thune (R) and served as field director for Daschle in the senator's own unsuccessful reelection bid in 2004 (a race lost to Thune). Stewart served as Obama's Iowa caucus director earlier this year. Myers and Stewart are part of a huge contingent of former Daschle aides now in senior positions with Obama. Among them: * Steve Hildebrand: The reclusive Hildebrand is a senior adviser to the Obama campaign and directed the early state strategy that helped deliver the Illinois senator the Democratic presidential nomination. Hildebrand, a South Dakota native, managed the Johnson and Daschle races in 2002 and 2004, respectively. * Julianna Smoot: The woman at the head of Obama's massive finance team cut her teeth raising money for Daschle -- heading up DASHPAC's fundraising efforts and serving as finance director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2006. * Dan Pfeiffer: Pfeiffer, a Georgetown graduate, oversaw communications for Johnson's 2002 reelection contest before serving as deputy campaign manager for Daschle in 2004. After doing a stint promoting Sen. Evan Bayh's (Ind.) presidential explorations, Pfeiffer now serves as Obama's communications director. * Christina Reynolds: Reynolds oversaw the research wing of Johnson's 2002 campaign and then served as communications director during Daschle's 2004 race. In between her Daschle jobs, she has worked in senior roles in both of former Sen. John Edwards's (N.C.) presidential campaigns but has now rejoined her old counterparts by taking a job with Obama's communications shop. Obama's reliance on old hands who know each other and have worked together in the past is a reflection of his understanding that even the most change-oriented candidate needs people with past political experience in the nitty gritty of campaign politics to guide his effort.

To: American Spirit who wrote (77826)	6/20/2008 7:31:15 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

Hagel says he'd consider VP offer from Obama _____________________________________________________________ June 20, 2008 4:43 PM EDT OMAHA, Neb. - Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel said Friday he would consider serving as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's running mate if asked, but he doesn't expect to be on any ticket. Hagel's vocal criticism of the Bush administration since the 2003 invasion of Iraq has touched off speculation that if Obama were to pick a Republican running mate, it might be Hagel. Hagel said in an interview with The Associated Press that after devoting much of his life to his country - in the Senate and the U.S. Army - he would have to consider any offer. "If it would occur, I would have to think about it," Hagel said. "I think anybody, anybody would have to consider it. Doesn't mean you'd do it, doesn't mean you'd accept it, could be too many gaps there, but you'd have to consider it, I mean, it's the only thing you could do. Why wouldn't you?" In a book published this year, Hagel said that despite holding one of the Senate's strongest records of support for President Bush, his standing as a Republican has been called into question because of his opposition to what he deems "a reckless foreign policy ... that is divorced from a strategic context." Hagel wrote in "America: Our Next Chapter" that the invasion of Iraq was "the triumph of the so-called neoconservative ideology, as well as Bush administration arrogance and incompetence." He said Friday that he and Obama also have differences. "But what this country is going to have to do is come together next year, and the next president is going to have to bring this country together to govern with some consensus," Hagel said. He hasn't endorsed Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presumed Republican nominee, whom he calls a friend. Hagel said Friday he hadn't thought about who to vote for in November. In a March appearance on ABC's "This Week, he said he and McCain have "some pretty fundamental disagreements on the future of foreign policy," including the Iraq war. McCain has said his goal is to reduce U.S. casualties, shift security missions to Iraqis and, ultimately, have a noncombat U.S. troop presence in Iraq similar to that in South Korea. He has said that such a presence could last 100 years or more. Ted Sorensen, a former speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, said Thursday that Obama should consider Hagel. Sorensen, a Nebraska native, said Obama should pick a running mate who can help where he's weakest, and Hagel's national security experience makes him a logical candidate. Obama has a team managing the vetting process that includes former first daughter Caroline Kennedy, and Sorensen said he has spoken to her about the selection. Hagel served as an Army sergeant in Vietnam and was twice wounded in 1968, earning two Purple Hearts. He was the only member of his party on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to support a nonbinding measure critical of Bush's decision to dispatch an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq. "There is no strategy. This is a pingpong game with American lives," Hagel said at the time. The rhetoric drew the public ire of Vice President Dick Cheney, who told Newsweek in January 2007 that Ronald Reagan's mantra to not speak ill of another Republican was sometimes hard to follow "where Chuck Hagel is involved." ---