Barack Obama Elected President!

[Roman]

Toni Morrison, not Maya Angelou, called him "a man who has been treated like a black man."

The media started reffering to that as him being the first black president.

[Roman]

As Clinton chances wane, old slights come due

Some prominent Democrats recall past grievances

Globe Staff / May 18, 2008

WASHINGTON - When Democratic superdelegate Jim Cooper, a Tennessee congressman, pondered the choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, his thoughts wandered back to 1993. That year, Clinton was trying to change the nation's health system, and Cooper, a moderate Democrat, had a bipartisan healthcare bill of his own that, unlike Clinton's proposal, did not require employers to provide health coverage.

The president's wife, Cooper recalled, was determined to stop her fellow Democrat. "She set up a war room in the White House to defeat me," he said.

Like many superdelegates, Cooper insists that his endorsement of Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination was driven by Obama's inspiring message. But the Tennessee lawmaker's past disputes with Clinton and her husband certainly made the decision easier.

For Clinton, holding one of the most famous names in Democratic politics has had both advantages and disadvantages as she has sought to persuade superdelegates to make her the nominee. Much of the Democratic establishment jumped to Clinton's side early, rewarding her and her husband for years of friendship and shared political struggles, giving the New York senator a large lead in superdelegates at the beginning of the campaign.

But the reality of the Clintons' relationship with fellow Democrats was always more complicated. As even some Clinton supporters concede, there are many superdelegates who have had issues with the Clintons. And now, when the New York senator most needs the loyalties of her Democratic colleagues, the checkered history of relations between the Clintons and Democratic officials is making the task tougher, say lawmakers and political analysts.

"The Clintons have a lot of enemies, even in the same Democratic establishment that embraced them," said Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. "Now that it looks like she's done . . . there's not a lot of reason [for them] to stick their necks out for her."

While Bill Clinton launched an upstart campaign in 1992 with his loyal team of FOBs, Friends of Bill, Senator Clinton is now dealing with the fallout from years of disagreements and perceived slights lawmakers have felt over the years.

"This is part of the problem with being in politics for so long: You not only make friends; you make enemies," said Jon Delano, a political analyst at Carnegie Mellon University.

Some superdelegates who have past grievances against the Clintons and have endorsed Obama or remain undeclared insist that they made their decisions irrespective of past issues with the Clintons; Obama supporters insist theirs are pro-Obama votes and not anti-Clinton statements, while those who have yet to announce a decision say they want the primary season to play out first.

But privately, some members of Congress said the Clintons' history on Capitol Hill has hurt them in their time of need. Cooper, whose history with Clinton was described in a book years ago, said he was worried when the matter was revived in a newspaper column in February that his Democratic colleagues would chastise him for criticizing one of the party's leading contenders.Continued...

"Instead, I was treated to a hero's reception out there," Cooper said, gesturing toward the House chamber. "People from all over said, 'I'm so glad you told that story about Hillary. She did the same thing to me' . . . on education or some other issue," Cooper said.

Clinton's backers are quick to cite episodes in which she was an enormous help, either on a personal or a professional level. Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, recalled how the busy New York senator took the time to call to check on an ailing family member.

US Representative Joseph Crowley, Democrat of New York, recalled Clinton's kindness to his father and how she once interceded to protect Irish activists who faced deportation and certain danger if they were forced to leave.

But others point to a list of leading Democrats who have had run-ins with one or both of the Clintons and have either not endorsed her or have backed her opponent.

They include Senator Robert Casey Jr., a Pennsylvania Democrat whose father, Governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, was prevented from speaking at the 1992 Democratic National Convention after a dispute with Bill Clinton over abortion. The elder Casey said at the time that he was being punished for his antiabortion stance, but he also refused to endorse the Clinton-Gore ticket at the time.

Former vice president Al Gore, who sometimes sparred with the president's wife during the Clinton administration, has remained silent.

Senator John F. Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat whom Hillary Clinton criticized after he made a botched joke about Bush that was perceived as an attack on US troops in Iraq, has endorsed Obama.

Senator Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat who disagreed with Hillary Clinton on healthcare changes when he was Nebraska governor and her husband was in the White House, has endorsed Obama.

Representative Niki Tsongas, a Lowell Democrat whose late husband, former senator Paul Tsongas, endured negative attacks by Bill Clinton in the 1992 campaign, has not yet endorsed a candidate.

"The past doesn't matter," Tsongas said of her husband's 1992 experience. "I don't think about that anymore."

Nelson, too, said that it was Obama's message, not prior issues with Clinton, that led him to endorse the Illinois senator.

But others find it difficult to believe that past disputes with the Clintons are not weighing on the superdelegates' minds.

G. Terry Madonna - director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. - said the Clintons have "worn out their welcome" among many superdelegates, in part because of old grievances ranging from personal squabbles to broader issues such as the impeachment fight.

"I do think there's some score-settling on this," Madonna said. "Politics is a very personal activity. It's not easy to remove the personal side of decision-making when it comes to a candidate."

Now that Clinton's chances for the nomination are dimming, party insiders are feeling freer to criticize Clinton and her husband. But Democrats must also be cautious in how they treat the couple, said Charles Manning, a GOP consultant based in Massachusetts.

If Obama sews up the nomination, he will need both Clintons to help heal wounds among some female voters and others who had worked so hard for Clinton's historic candidacy, Manning said.

"There almost seems to be a glee among a lot of people to throw Bill and Hillary Clinton overboard," Manning said. "My guess is [the Clintons] are going to have long memories about this."

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

[DevotedToAMC]

I thought it was Maya. I will take your word for it and say it was Toni Morrison who gave him that nickname

[David_Vickers]

I saw Hillary Clinton today at a campaign rally in Bowling Green, KY. Approximately 4000 people showed up. She's shorter than what she appears on tv. Great speech( approximately 30 minutes+), she shook hands, gave autographs & took pics with a few people. Didn't get to get close enough to get an up close pic or shake hands or get her autograph, but I'm so glad I went to the rally. My mom and (get this) Republican dad went with me (My dad likes Hillary). I could've gone and seen Bill Clinton in Owensboro Friday, but I went to work (if I had it to do over, I'd called in, lol---it said in the newspaper that Bill gave around 500 autographs and shook about that many people's hands as well).

[DevotedToAMC]

She does appear shorter in person, Mulder. I saw her in Oakland back in September and, while she is quite tall (around 5'9), she seems to be small.

Glad you saw her. Be sure to vote this Tuesday

[Roman]

Whether you cared or ddn't care for how she ran her campiagn, this is a fascinating read.

From The New Republic:

The New Republic

What Went Wrong? by Michelle Cottle

The exclusive story of Hillary's fall, as told by the high-level advisors, staffers, fundraisers, and on-the-ground organizers who lived it.

Post Date Friday, May 16, 2008

Endings are rarely as joyous as beginnings--and in the case of a long, wearing, and ultimately disappointing campaign, they can be downright brutal. But they also have the potential to be educational, for participants and gawkers alike. So it is that we asked (begged, really) a range of Hillarylanders for their up-close and personal lists of "What Went Wrong?" Not everyone wanted to play. Many stubbornly pointed out that their candidate is not yet dead. But, on the condition of total anonymity, a fairly broad cross-section of her staff responded--more than a dozen members all told, from high-level advisors to grunt-level assistants, from money men to on-the-ground organizers.

Many answers fell into a handful of broad themes we've been hearing for months now. (She shouldn't have run as an incumbent. She should have paid more attention to caucus states. She should have kept Bill chained in the basement at Whitehaven with a case of cheese curls and a stack of dirty movies.) Others had a distinct score-settling flavor. One respondent sent in a list of Top 25 screw ups, the first three being:

1. Patti

2. Solis

3. Doyle

While from another corner came another list, reading:

1. Mark Penn

2. Mark Penn

3. Mark Penn

But whether personal or clinical, new or familiar, the critiques are all the more striking for having come directly from those neck-deep in the action. So, here it is, an elegy for Hillary '08, written by some of those who have worked tirelessly to keep it alive.

PROBLEMS AT THE OUTSET

"Bottom line: I just don't think she was hungry enough for it in the beginning. It wasn't really until the ten-in-a-row loss that she started doing stuff like Saturday Night Live and Jon Stewart. In the beginning, it was hard to get her to do those things. Early in the campaign, she spent much more time in the Senate than the campaign would have liked. It took the threat of a real loss to get her hungry enough for it. But time was lost. If you ask the Iowa folks, I'm sure they would tell you she wasn't there enough."

"Clearly [Obama] was a phenomenon. He was tapping something really different than anyone had ever seen before. ... Months and months before Iowa, he was getting record crowds. I just think they should have really gone after him back in the summer and in the fall. I know it would have been a difficult decision to make back then. She's the leader of the party, the standard bearer, the big dog. Everyone thinks she's gonna win and walk away with it. Why go picking on Barack Obama? But that's just something the campaign should have done sooner."

"We didn't lay a serious glove on him until the fall. We tried to a little bit, but we weren't successful. We did silly stuff, like talk about David Geffen. It wasn't the substantive contrast we needed to make."

"Devastating vulnerabilities such as Obama's associations with Wright and Ayers were not unearthed by the campaign's vaunted research team in time to be fully taken advantage of--despite being readily available in the public domain."

"Running as an incumbent, as the inevitable candidate, was probably our biggest mistake, particularly in a time when the country is really hungry for change."

"We ran a frontrunner campaign in a party that punishes frontrunners. There was no attention to history: Ed Muskie--knocked off; threat to Mondale; etc. The best thing that could have happened is falling behind in the polls to Obama and then a shake-up ala Gore 2000--maybe even a move out of D.C. like he did it."

"Not learning from the mistakes of Kerry and Gore, the campaign was based in the D.C. area, rooting its perspective in the fishbowl and echo chamber nature of the capital. And [the campaign] was overstaffed with hired guns with no real allegiance to HRC; she was the safest and easiest bet, no sacrifice necessary."

"There was not any plan in place from beginning to end on how to win the nomination. It was, 'Win Iowa.' There was not the experience level, and, frankly, the management ability, to create a whole plan to get to the magical delegate number. That to me is the number one thing. It's starting from that point that every subsequent decision resulted. The decision to spend x amount in Iowa versus be prepared for February 5 and beyond. Or how much money to spend in South Carolina--where it was highly unlikely we were going to win--versus the decision not to fund certain other states. ... It was not as simple as, 'Oh, that's a caucus state, we're not going to play there.' That suggests a more serious thought process. It suggests a meeting where we went through all that."

"Harold Ickes's encyclopedic understanding of the proportional delegate system was never operationalized into a field plan. The campaign inexplicably wrote off many states entirely, allowing Obama to create the lead of 100+ delegates that he has today. Most notably, we claimed the race would be over by February 5, but didn't devote any resources to the smaller states that day and in the weeks that followed, allowing Obama to easily run up margins and delegate counts on the cheap--the delegate margin he will win by."

PROBLEMS WITH THE PERSONNEL

"Hillary assembled a team thin on presidential campaign experience that confused discipline with insularity; they didn't know what they didn't know and were too arrogant to ask at a time early enough in the process when it could have made a difference, effectively shutting out even some long-time Hillaryland loyalists. Her innermost circle of [Patti Solis] Doyle, [Mark] Penn, [Mandy] Grunwald, [Neera] Tanden and [Howard] Wolfson formed a Board of Directors with no single Chairman or CEO; nobody was truly in charge, nobody held truly accountable."

"[Original campaign manager] Patti and [her deputy] Mike [Henry] sat up there in their offices and no one knew what they did all day. Patti's a nice person who was put in a job way over head. She was out of her element. Mike Henry was hired because he was the flavor of day, the catch everyone wanted. I'm sure he was really great, but presidential politics require a unique skill set and knowledge."

"[Policy Director] Tanden and [Communications Director] Wolfson, the HQ's most senior department heads, had no real presidential campaign experience, and no primary experience whatsoever. Notoriously bad managers, they filled key posts with newcomers loyal to them but unknown to and unfamiliar with the candidate, her style, her history, her preferences."

"Probably our second biggest mistake was much more operational: Making our chief strategist our one and only pollster. It is impossible to disagree and have a counter view on message when the person creating the message is also the person testing the message."

"We would just cringe. Ugh. Such an out-of-touch corporate run kind of campaign--exactly what you'd expect from Mark Penn. He did fine during his time in the Clinton White House. But running a campaign to capture the nomination in a change environment is something he had never done. Just look at what he did for Joe Lieberman!"

"She never embraced the mantle from the beginning of being a different kind of candidate. Why did the campaign not do that? Because Mark Penn wanted to do it a different way. Read his book. He thought that you have a list of policy prescriptions. Voters are into that, and that's how you win. This came at the expense of--and it's a decision he really pushed for--saying to folks, 'Yes, she's a pretty inspiring figure herself.' ... There's no reason why she's not a change agent also. But once the CW is set, it just doesn't change."

"There were so many consultants, instead of full-time staff who would have spent their entire time focusing on this. I love some of these people, but it just seems ridiculous. Cheryl Mills spends time doing NYU stuff. Mark Penn, Mandy Grunwald, Minyon Moore, and so on. There were too many people that had too much else going on on the side."

"[bill's] behavior that started off in Iowa, carried on in New Hampshire, and culminated in South Carolina really was the beginning of the end. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, he just kind of imploded. I think, if I had to look back on it, it became more about him than about her. It really was destructive overall."

PROBLEMS WITH EXECUTION

"There were more themes in this campaign than anything I've ever seen."

"Our message in fact was working very well through September. What we failed to do is pivot when we needed to. We stuck on the same thing. ... We didn't say, 'OK, everybody gets that she can do this job.' We never pivoted to what kind of change she could bring. We repackaged the old message and sent it back out. Instead of 'Ready on Day One,' we changed to 'Solutions.' It was a very IBM approach."

"Keeping the same team in place [after New Hampshire] meant that pre-Iowa planning and strategic errors continued nearly unabated, were not corrected. ... Too much damage had been done by the time Maggie Williams took the helm."

"There were a number of people who advised the Clinton campaign back in the spring of '07 that this could easily become a longer battle--a war of attrition. She needed to build a broad base of supporters beyond the virtually limitless number of Clinton friends and supporters who they counted on to not only max out, but to use their not inconsiderable Rolodexes to help her. That would have been fine if this thing had ended Super Tuesday. It didn't, and she ran out of money."

"There was financial mismanagement bordering on fraud. A candidate who raised more than a quarter of a billion dollars over the years had to pump in millions more of her own money to stave off bankruptcy."

"If you have no cash because you totally mismanaged the budget, you have no money to go up on TV; you're getting crushed on TV and in direct mail because Obama has so much more money--that is a huge problem. Who was looking at the money? The financial situation was a disaster. That's the reason [Howard] Paster had to come in and clean [!@#$%^&*] up."

PROBLEMS WITH THE CANDIDATE

"I don't think anybody in America doesn't think she can do the job. What they're dying for is to know a little bit more about her. And we were unable to present that side of her."

"If you look at this campaign as a 15- or 16-month gambit, the public turning point was the Philadelphia debate. Her non-answer on the driver's license issue. Again, it spoke to the character issue: The sense that she will say anything and do anything to get elected. It drove the Obama narrative of her home."

"Her dense and wonky speaking style was compounded by her speechwriting team's reporting to Policy Director Tanden rather than Communications Director Wolfson."

"The Senator is as loyal as she is smart. And I think that removing Patti is where those two things came into conflict. She knew the right thing to do. At same time, she was very loyal to Patti, who had been very loyal to her."

PROBLEMS IN IOWA

"We placed a huge financial bet on Iowa and raised its importance by sending senior staff there. And because we didn't plan for a national campaign, we couldn't point to an operation that could withstand an Iowa blow the way Obama could after New Hampshire."

"It was obvious talking to people on the ground there that they simply did not get the Iowa caucus from a field perspective. That's where the thing was lost. They didn't have a good idea of the horse-trading that makes caucuses work for you."

"Mark Penn and Mandy Grunwald dismissed the possibility of youth turning out heavily in Iowa for Obama, saying on the record after the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, 'They don't look like caucus-goers.'"

"Penn was preoccupied with the national polls. We were up in the national polls, but Iowa was always a challenging thing for us. Early, early on, our internals showed us a significant number of points behind. ... In Iowa, Penn consistently would show polls that were of the eight-way. That was basically meaningless because it wasn't going to be an eight-way race. The candidates that were the second-tier candidates were not going to reach the threshold [of 15%]. The real race was the three-way. But he always focused on the eight-way when we'd start going over the numbers in Iowa. It was frustrating to the state staff and other people as well. It just showed a lack of understanding and a disconnect."

PROBLEMS WITH THE PRESS

"The way we handled you guys was a mistake on our part. What we're hearing is that we truly treated people badly and weren't accessible enough or open enough. We had bad relationships with reporters, and it probably bit us on the ass."

"We ran a press operation that lost all credibility with the press through endless and pointless memos like, 'Where's the Bounce?' and polling memos that cherry-picked only positive polls when we were up and ignored polling when we were down."

"Even among Clinton spokespeople long known for their heavy-handed ways, Phil Singer stood out for his all-too-common and accepted profanity-laced tirades and abusive behavior--both at colleagues and the media, who were all too happy to direct his comeuppance toward Hillary at a time she needed them most."

AND, FINALLY...

"Her people spent all of 2008 making lists blaming each other (but never themselves) rather than lists of solutions."

[Wales2004]

As Roman already stated it was Toni Morrison that made a reference to his being treated like a black man in terms of how he was being treated over Monica Lewinsky. When this issue came up before and I asked you the first time around about it, I mistakenly attributed the reference to Nikki Giovanni instead of Toni Morrison.

So now you know that the reference has nothing whatsoever to do with his passion towards civil rights ans everything to do with someone's (who happens to be black) compassion towards him regarding his sex scandal.

The fact that there are black people that may have or have had respect for him doesn't mean that he did any more for them than he did for the country on whole. All I mean to point out is that people have been compassionate towards him. Black Americans as a whole don't owe him a thing and so are under no obligation to give him a second chance. The illusion that he did something grand for black people while president is just that, an illusion.

I don't expect that not being able to substantiate your statement that he did anything special for black Americans will cause you to stop saying he did but at least you'll know that a sex scandal is what resulted in the outpouring of compassion towards him.

[Wales2004]

I like this:

But ABC is still a safe haven so it's not altogether accurate. I don't think I buy that her heart wasn't in it early in the game. Maybe taking the inevitability of the nomination for granted is more likely. If everyone says it's yours then there's no real reason to exert yourself when it's a sure thing.

[Southofnowhere]

Clinton could have wiped Obama off the map last fall but chose not to. They could also ofered him VP which is what some say he really wanted to start with but the Clintons wouldn't offer so went out and kicked her butt.

[Wales2004]

Are you saying that Obama's candidacy has been all about getting to be VP and because Clinton wouldn't offer it to him, he continued to campaign for the Presidency out of revenge?

[EricaKane70]

That was talked about earlier in this campaign, and Toni Morrison backs obama.

I'm a little puzzled by that post as well, you don't run for president just to be VP. Obama wouldn't of taken that offer, even if they gave him that, his goal is to be president not VP.

I buy it a little that her heart wasn't in it after she came in third in Iowa, her campaign would of been over if she wouldn't of won that next race. With everyone saying its yours and then you come in third, your confidence goes waaaaaaay down.

[Ryan]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080519/ap_on_el_pr/clinton

Clinton to Obama: There's no nominee yet

By SARA KUGLER, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 31 minutes ago

Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday said her opponent Barack Obama may be getting a little ahead of himself in acting like the party's nominee before the final contests of the primary season are over.

Clinton and Obama are still set to face off in several more primaries, including two in Kentucky and Oregon on Tuesday, but Obama has been increasingly portraying himself as the nominee already facing Republican John McCain. Obama has scheduled appearances later this week in Iowa and Florida as he looks ahead to the swing states in the general election.

"You can declare yourself anything, but if you don't have the votes, it doesn't matter," Clinton said Monday in a satellite interview with an Oregon television station before a campaign appearance in Kentucky.

The former first lady trails Obama in the delegate count by such a margin that it is mathematically unlikely for her to overtake him in the remaining primaries, which end June 3 with Montana and South Dakota.

But both candidates have been angling to win over the party leaders and elected officials known as superdelegates, whose support will likely determine the nominee.

Clinton has been making her case to the superdelegates by casting herself as the more tested and experienced Democrat with a better chance of beating McCain in November.

She said Monday that she is the "more progressive candidate" and dismissed the hype surrounding Obama that results in the large crowds like the record rally of an estimated 65,000 he drew in Portland on Sunday afternoon.

Clinton said Obama, who has refused to debate her since they last faced off just before the Pennsylvania primary last month, would "rather just talk to giant crowds than have questions asked."

Later, while speaking to several hundred people in a high school gymnasium, Clinton picked up her campaign's argument that Obama's victories in states that had caucuses instead of primaries are somehow less significant because turnout was lower.

Clinton also revived her pitch that many of the states where he has beaten her, like Alaska, Idaho and Utah, matter less because they would not be competitive for Democrats in November. Anybody "who's really analyzing this" should come to the same conclusions, she said.

"So I'm going to make my case and I'm going to make it until we have a nominee, but we're not going to have one today and we're not going to have one tomorrow and we're not going to have one the next day," Clinton said. "And if Kentucky turns out tomorrow, I will be closer to that nomination because of you."

[EricaKane70]

^^^Ryan I love your rex, adrianna, and Gigi banner.

[Ryan]

Thank you EK70 My friend Dee made it for me. She's great with these things.

[Wales2004]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080519/ap_on_...md05Qd3oSxh24cA

Sen. Robert C. Byrd endorses Obama

39 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Sen. Robert C. Byrd, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan and a one-time opponent of civil rights legislation, endorsed Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination on Monday.

Obama is vying to be the nation's first black president.

Byrd's support comes almost a week after the Illinois senator's 41-point loss to Hillary Rodham Clinton in the longtime lawmaker's home state of West Virginia.

Byrd said he had no intention of getting involved while his state was in the midst of a primary. "But the stakes this November could not be higher," he said in a written statement.

Byrd said Obama has the qualities to end the Iraq war, which he has strongly opposed.

"I believe that Barack Obama is a shining young statesman, who possesses the personal temperament and courage necessary to extricate our country from this costly misadventure in Iraq, and to lead our nation at this challenging time in history," Byrd said.

Byrd has repeatedly apologized for his time in the Ku Klux Klan, which he joined as a young man in the 1940s to fight communism. He also opposed integrating the military, and filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Byrd is the longest-serving senator in history. As Senate president pro tempore, he is in line for the presidency after the vice president and House speaker.