Hillary says she's not going to drop out because Obama might still be assassinated before the convention...

[metta 0]

Absolutely, now she's trying to "whack" the competition.

Yeah, cuz (obviously) no one hates the idea of a black president.

Evidently mob bosses like Sen. Clinton believe that or she would not be ordering the whack job on Sen. Obama. The KKK isn't even that bold to get on TV and let people know that they have a hit out on Sen. Obama. She's got balls. They say she's tough but that a whole new level of tough politic. You can't explain away or dismiss her comment. Sen. Obama should fear for his life.

Racking up a body count is nothing new for the Clintons ...

I don't know about the Clintons' mob connection but Baruch's(the Jewish equivalent of Barack according to Obama though he did not give the equivalent for Hussein ) does seem to be well-connected with the Chicago mob

NYPOst

September 5, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - A man who has long been dogged by charges that the bank his family owns helped finance a Chicago crime figure will host a Windy City fund-raiser tonight for Sen. Barack Obama.

Alexi Giannoulias, who became Illinois state treasurer last year after Obama vouched for him, has pledged to raise $100,000 for the senator's Oval Office bid.

Before he promised to raise funds for Obama, Giannoulias bankrolled Michael "Jaws" Giorango, a Chicagoan twice convicted of bookmaking and promoting prostitution.

Giannoulias is so tainted by reputed mob links that several top Illinois Dems, including the state's speaker of the House and party chairman, refused to endorse him even after he won the Democratic nomination with Obama's help.

Giannoulias was the bank's vice president and chief loan officer for most of the more than $15 million in loans.

He was not charged with breaking any laws. The Obama campaign disputed any suggestion that Obama is tarnished by the association.

"Barack Obama has a long record of fighting for ethics reform from his days as a state senator," a campaign rep said.

[rebeccajo 14]

Several weeks ago I saw Jabberwacky post a statement something in the order of "Republicans like to take statements our of context and blow them into something else" and my jaw just about dropped while I read it. This here is why.

Why I...I'd never make such a claim. Seriously, this was a gaffe, a Freudian slip perhaps, but she's apologized and Obama accepts her explanation that it was a poor choice of words. It was a much needed relief for many Democrats, from all the tension over the long drawn out race, especially to those of us who wish that Hillary would accept her defeat and throw her support behind Obama so we can focus on the general election....that is, unless she's worried about Obama's safety.

Explain the 'relief' to me. I don't get that bit.

For myself, my reaction was more a relief than an outrage. What she said was outrageous, but I was trying to explain to Dale that at least for me, I'm reacting to what she said as a release, believing that this was a huge gaffe for Hillary, especially after so many things have been brought up in the media in an attempt to discredit Obama's character. I agree with Obama's response to this, that going through such a long campaign, candidates are bound to to say some things that they later wished they had worded differently. As outrageous as the statement alone is, like Obama, I'll give Hillary the benefit of the doubt that she truly is sorry for saying it and didn't mean it to be taken the way people here have reacted.

Well, I felt the same way when I saw the vid - sort of like, well this ought to show just how utterly ridiculous this whole thing has become.

But what I really don't understand goes back to my original comment on the subject. Hillary lived through RFK's assassination - I did too. I can still remember hearing it all on the radio and the news. Although Obama has done the gracious thing by 'forgiving it', I truly can't understand Clinton's comment coming out of anyone's mouth especially when they've 'been there done that' - ie actually experienced the horror of someone being gunned down in cold blood in the name of politics.

It's not much different too me (as far as my personal feelings go) as GaryC saying the other day that it was crass to jump on some sort of 'karma' bandwagon insofar as Ted Kennedy's cancer. I just think there's a line in the sand that decent people don't cross - it's hard for me to get past what Hillary said.

Edited May 25, 2008 by rebeccajo

[Peikko 1,575]

I genuinely don't understand this supersensitivity. Is it really so awful to reference historical events however unpleasant those events were? Sure, if there was some malicious intent, some wish to bring physical harm to Barack, well that is beyond crass but this I just don't see it as such a big deal.

[dalegg 143]

My thing is I don't get her point anyway. Lets say she does concede tomorrow. All the supers go to Obama and he gets the required delegates and becomes the presumptive nominee waiting for the convention in August to be named. Then lets say he gets assasinated in July. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say the Dems give her the nomination- in fact she probably gets it regardless of what month he would get shot. Its not like they will say "No, you conceded already. The nomination goes to his wife".

Under her logic she shouldn't drop out until November.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

My thing is I don't get her point anyway. Lets say she does concede tomorrow. All the supers go to Obama and he gets the required delegates and becomes the presumptive nominee waiting for the convention in August to be named. Then lets say he gets assasinated in July. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say the Dems give her the nomination- in fact she probably gets it regardless of what month he would get shot. Its not like they will say "No, you conceded already. The nomination goes to his wife".

Under her logic she shouldn't drop out until November.

LOL...I don't even think she was thinking if Obama were to get knocked off but trying to compare the Primaries in 1992 and in 1968, when California didn't have it's Primary until June, but nevertheless, it's faulty argument since there are no more Primaries left beside three rather insignificant ones...at least in terms of not changing the inevitable.

Edited May 26, 2008 by Jabberwocky

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

My thing is I don't get her point anyway. Lets say she does concede tomorrow. All the supers go to Obama and he gets the required delegates and becomes the presumptive nominee waiting for the convention in August to be named. Then lets say he gets assasinated in July. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say the Dems give her the nomination- in fact she probably gets it regardless of what month he would get shot. Its not like they will say "No, you conceded already. The nomination goes to his wife".

Under her logic she shouldn't drop out until November.

LOL...I don't even think she was thinking if Obama were to get knocked off but trying to compare the Primaries in 1992 and in 1968, when California didn't have it's Primary until June, but nevertheless, it's faulty argument since there are no more Primaries left beside three rather insignificant ones...at least in terms of not changing the inevitable.

Exactly. In 1968 there were 37 primaries left when RFK was shot in June. Only 13 had taken place at that point. Obviously, the situation is entirely different in 2008 where come June, the whole thing is settled in terms of who got the majority of the delegates. Her comparison is nonsense. As is the one with 1992 as her hubby had this thing in the pocket by March or April - depending on whether one considered it done with the win of IL or the wins in NY and WI. The latter most definitely put Brown's lights out. Yes, Brown carried on until the June primary in California and gave up after he lost his home state. However, it is worth noting that the uy facing the long odds ended up losing in 1992 and it is worth noting that there's no comparable contest left in 2008 - unless Hillary really wants to try and elevate Puerto Rico to the importance of California. An odd proposition seeing that PR doesn't even get to vote in November. So, she might just go for that stretch.

[dalegg 143]

LOL...I don't even think she was thinking if Obama were to get knocked off but trying to compare the Primaries in 1992 and in 1968, when California didn't have it's Primary until June, but nevertheless, it's faulty argument since there are no more Primaries left beside three rather insignificant ones...at least in terms of not changing the inevitable.

I'm not so sure I agree that the remaining primaries are so insignificant. If Puerto Rico swings very heavily her way, she will have her argument that she will end up with the popular vote- if it includes Florida, but even excluding Michigan.

Or course she won't have the delagate count and I think you're right that Obama will, but you have to admit this would put a knot in things if her supporters know they outvoted him and she doesn't win.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

LOL...I don't even think she was thinking if Obama were to get knocked off but trying to compare the Primaries in 1992 and in 1968, when California didn't have it's Primary until June, but nevertheless, it's faulty argument since there are no more Primaries left beside three rather insignificant ones...at least in terms of not changing the inevitable.

I'm not so sure I agree that the remaining primaries are so insignificant. If Puerto Rico swings very heavily her way, she will have her argument that she will end up with the popular vote- if it includes Florida, but even excluding Michigan.

Or course she won't have the delagate count and I think you're right that Obama will, but you have to admit this would put a knot in things if her supporters know they outvoted him and she doesn't win.

The popular vote is not a measure that matters. Not now and not in November. As for now, what popular vote count are you referring to? The popular vote in PR matters even less seeing that PR doesn't get to vote for the President. Either way, the remaining primaries won't tip the scales to her. She's too far behind at this point. Too far to catch up.

Edited May 26, 2008 by Mr. Big Dog

[dalegg 143]

LOL...I don't even think she was thinking if Obama were to get knocked off but trying to compare the Primaries in 1992 and in 1968, when California didn't have it's Primary until June, but nevertheless, it's faulty argument since there are no more Primaries left beside three rather insignificant ones...at least in terms of not changing the inevitable.

I'm not so sure I agree that the remaining primaries are so insignificant. If Puerto Rico swings very heavily her way, she will have her argument that she will end up with the popular vote- if it includes Florida, but even excluding Michigan.

Or course she won't have the delagate count and I think you're right that Obama will, but you have to admit this would put a knot in things if her supporters know they outvoted him and she doesn't win.

The popular vote is not a measure that matters. Not now and not in November. The popular vote in PR matters even less seeing that PR doesn't get to vote for the President. Either way, the remaining primaries won't tip the scales to her. She's too far behind at this point. Too far to catch up.

Just out of curiosity, Puerto Rico is a caucus, so how do they know what the popular vote in states that have caucuses is, since there is no popular vote?

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

LOL...I don't even think she was thinking if Obama were to get knocked off but trying to compare the Primaries in 1992 and in 1968, when California didn't have it's Primary until June, but nevertheless, it's faulty argument since there are no more Primaries left beside three rather insignificant ones...at least in terms of not changing the inevitable.

I'm not so sure I agree that the remaining primaries are so insignificant. If Puerto Rico swings very heavily her way, she will have her argument that she will end up with the popular vote- if it includes Florida, but even excluding Michigan.

Or course she won't have the delagate count and I think you're right that Obama will, but you have to admit this would put a knot in things if her supporters know they outvoted him and she doesn't win.

The popular vote is not a measure that matters. Not now and not in November. The popular vote in PR matters even less seeing that PR doesn't get to vote for the President. Either way, the remaining primaries won't tip the scales to her. She's too far behind at this point. Too far to catch up.

Just out of curiosity, Puerto Rico is a caucus, so how do they know what the popular vote in states that have caucuses is, since there is no popular vote?

This is one of the reasons this entire popular vote count argument is nonsense.

[dalegg 143]

As for now, what popular vote count are you referring to? The popular vote in PR matters even less seeing that PR doesn't get to vote for the President. Either way, the remaining primaries won't tip the scales to her. She's too far behind at this point. Too far to catch up.

According to RealClearPolitics, with Florida Obama is only up by +163,655, Thats a margin Hillary could pick up in PR.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

As for now, what popular vote count are you referring to? The popular vote in PR matters even less seeing that PR doesn't get to vote for the President. Either way, the remaining primaries won't tip the scales to her. She's too far behind at this point. Too far to catch up.

According to RealClearPolitics, with Florida Obama is only up by +163,655, Thats a margin Hillary could pick up in PR.

The nominee is determined by delegates not by popular vote counts. In terms of elected (pledged) delegates, the scales can't be tipped no more.

[metta 0]

Yeah, Obama's on verge of a landslide win in Montana and here's

A friendly reminder to those afflicted with unmitigated HUBRIS

Barack Obama and the unmaking of the Democratic Party

With her overwhelming victory in Kentucky on May 20, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has completed her sweep of the crucial primary states adjoining the Ohio River -- and the fight for the Democratic nomination has entered its final phases. Having picked up a net gain of nearly 140,000 votes between Kentucky and Oregon, Clinton is now well poised to win the Puerto Rico primary on June 1 - and clinch a majority in this year's popular vote, even if the disputed returns from Michigan are discounted. Under those pressures, the Barack Obama campaign and its sympathizers have begun to articulate much more clearly what they mean by their vague slogan of "change" - nothing less than usurping the historic Democratic Party, dating back to the age of Andrew Jackson, by rejecting its historic electoral core: white workers and rural dwellers in the Middle Atlantic and border states.

Without a majority of those voters, the Democrats have, since the party's inception in the 1820s, been incapable of winning the presidency. The Obama advocates declare, though, that we have entered an entirely new political era. It is not only possible but also desirable, they say, for Democrats to win by turning away from those whom "progressive" pundits and bloggers disdain variously as "Nascar man," "uneducated," "low information" whites, "rubes, fools, and hate-mongers" who live in the nation's "shitholes."

Having attempted, with the aid of a complicit news media, to brand Hillary Clinton as a racist -- by flinging charges that, as the historian Michael Lind has shown, belong "in black helicopter/grassy knoll territory," Obama's supporters now fiercely claim that Clinton's white working class following is also essentially racist. Favoring the buzzword language of the academic left, tinged by persistent, discredited New Left and black nationalist theories about working-class "white skin privilege," a vote against Obama has become, according to his fervent followers, "a vote for whiteness."

Talk about transformative post-racial politics.

In fact, all of the evidence demonstrates that white racism has not been a principal or even secondary motivation in any of this year's Democratic primaries. Every poll shows that economics, health care, and national security are the leading issues for white working class voters - and for Latino working class voters as well. These constituencies have cast positive ballots for Hillary Clinton not because she is white, but because they regard her as better on these issues. Obama's campaign and its passionate supporters refuse to acknowledge that these voters consider him weaker -- and that Clinton's positions, different from his, as well as her experience actually attract support. Instead they impute racism to working class Democrats who, the polls also show, happen to be liberal on every leading issue. The effort to taint anyone who does not support Obama as motivated by racism has now become a major factor in alienating core Democrats from Obama's campaign. Out with the Democratic Party of Jefferson, Jackson, F.D.R., Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, and in with the bright, shiny party of Obama - or what the formally "undeclared" Donna Brazile, a member of the Democratic National Committee and of the party's rules committee, has hailed as a "new Democratic coalition" swelled by affluent white leftists and liberals, college students, and African-Americans.

The Democratic Party, as a modern political party, dates back to 1828, when Andrew Jackson crushed John Quincy Adams to win the presidency. Yet without the votes of workers and small farmers in Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as a strong Democratic turnout in New York City, Jackson would have lost the Electoral College in a landslide. Over the 180 years since then, only one Democrat has gained the presidency without winning either Ohio or Pennsylvania, with their large white working-class vote. (The exception, Grover Cleveland, managed the feat in 1892, and only barely lost Ohio - but he was dependent on the post-Reconstruction solid South.) Beginning in 1964, when the Democratic solid South dissolved, every successful Democratic presidential candidate has had to carry both Ohio and Pennsylvania, even when Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton picked up southern states.

Northern white working-class defections to the Republicans grew steadily in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Republican's Watergate debacle temporarily halted the trend, but the disasters of the Carter presidency, especially its mishandling of economic woes and foreign policy, accelerated the defections in 1980. In his two successful races, Ronald Reagan won the support, on average, of 61 percent of white working class voters, compared to 35 percent for his opponents, Carter and Walter Mondale. (Both times, Reagan carried Ohio and Pennsylvania handily.) As the caricature of "Reagan Democrats" as racist militarists hardened among "new politics" advocates, they strove to make up the difference by creating an expanded base among African-Americans, college-age, and college educated voters. The result was yet another humiliating defeat for the Democrats in 1988.

Bill Clinton's shift to a centrist liberalism stressing lunch-pail issues--"Putting People First"--won back a large number of Reagan Democrats in 1992, enough so that, by the time Clinton won his second term in 1996, Democrats could claim parity with Republicans by winning a slim plurality among non-college educated working class white voters. But the perceived elitists Al Gore and John Kerry lost what Clinton had gained, as George W. Bush carried the white working-class vote by a margin of 17 percent in 2000 and a whopping 23 percent in 2004.

This year's primary results show no sign that Obama will reverse this trend should he win the nomination. In West Virginia and Kentucky, as well as Ohio and Pennsylvania, blue collar white voters sent him down to defeat by overwhelming margins. A recent Gallup poll report has argued that claims about Obama's weaknesses among white voters and blue collar voters have been exaggerated - yet its indisputable figures showed Obama running four percentage points below Kerry's anemic support among whites four years ago.

Given that Obama's vote in the primaries, apart from African-Americans, has generally come from affluent white suburbs and university towns, the Gallup figures presage a Democratic disaster among working-class white voters in November should Obama be the nominee.

Yet Obama's handlers profess indifference - and, at times, even pride -- about these trends. Asked about the white working-class vote following Obama's ten-point loss in Pennsylvania, chief campaign strategist David Axelrod confidently told an National Public Radio interviewer that, after all, "the white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections going back even to the Clinton years" and that Obama's winning strength lay in his ability to offset that trend and "attract independent voters... younger voters" and "expand the Democratic base."

Apart from its basic inaccuracy about Clinton's blue-collar support in 1992 and 1996, Axelrod's statement was a virtual reprise of the Democratic doomed strategy from the 1972 McGovern campaign that the party revamped in 1988. The main difference between now and then is the openness of the condescension with which many of Obama's supporters - and, apparently, the candidate himself - hold the crude "low information" types whom they believe dominate the white working class. The sympathetic media coverage of Obama's efforts to explain away his remarks in San Francisco about "bitter," economically-strapped voters who, clinging to their guns, religion, and racism, misdirect their rage and do not see the light, only reinforced his campaign's dismissive attitude. Obama's efforts at rectification were reluctant and half-hearted at best - and he undercut them completely a few days later when he referred derisively, on the stump in Indiana, to a sudden "political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true."

Culturally as well as politically, Obama's dismissal of white working people represents a sea-change in the Democrats' basic identity as the workingman's party - one that has been coming since the late 1960s, when large portions of the Left began regarding white workers as hopeless and hateful reactionaries. Faced with the revolt of the "Reagan Democrats" - whose politics they interpreted in the narrowest of racial terms - "new politics" Democrats dreamed of a coalition built around an alliance of right-thinking affluent liberals and downtrodden minorities, especially African-Americans. It all came to nothing. But after Bill Clinton failed to consolidate a new version of the old Democratic coalition in the 1990s, the dreaming began again - first, with disastrous results, in the schismatic Ralph Nader campaign of 2000 and now (with the support of vehement ex-Naderites including Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel West) in the Obama campaign.

Obama must assume that the demographics of American politics have changed dramatically in recent years so that the electorate as a whole is little more than a larger version of the combined Democratic primary constituencies of Oregon and South Carolina. While recent studies purport to show that the white working class has, indeed, shrunk over the past fifty years, as a political matter its significance remains salient, especially in the battleground and swing states--states like Ohio and West Virginia where Obama currently trails Senator John McCain in the polls. One of the studies that affirms the diminishing proportion of blue collar whites in the electorate, written for the Brookings Institution by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abamowitz, concludes [pdf], nevertheless, that "the voting proclivities of the white working class will make a huge difference and could well determine who the next president will be."

Teixeira and Abramowitz estimate that the Democratic candidate will need to cut Kerry's deficit of 23 percent in 2004 to around 10 percent if he or she is "to achieve a solid popular vote victory." By those lights, Obama, if nominated, is almost certainly destined to lose unless he can suddenly reverse the trend that his own dismissive language and his supporters' contemptuous tone has accelerated during the primaries.

In every presidential election they have won, the Democrats have solidified their historic link to white workers, not dismissed them. Obama and the champions of a new party coalition appear to think that everything has suddenly changed, simply because of the force of their own desires. In any event, Obama had shown no ability thus far to attract the one constituency that has always spelled the difference between victory and defeat for the Democratic Party. The party must now decide whether to go along with Obama and renounce its own heritage -- and tempt the political fates.

[dalegg 143]

As for now, what popular vote count are you referring to? The popular vote in PR matters even less seeing that PR doesn't get to vote for the President. Either way, the remaining primaries won't tip the scales to her. She's too far behind at this point. Too far to catch up.

According to RealClearPolitics, with Florida Obama is only up by +163,655, Thats a margin Hillary could pick up in PR.

The nominee is determined by delegates not by popular vote counts. In terms of elected (pledged) delegates, the scales can't be tipped no more.

That's true, as well as it should be. I'm just saying that one of her arguments will be correct. Until now most of what she's been saying has been fuzzy math.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

As for now, what popular vote count are you referring to? The popular vote in PR matters even less seeing that PR doesn't get to vote for the President. Either way, the remaining primaries won't tip the scales to her. She's too far behind at this point. Too far to catch up.

According to RealClearPolitics, with Florida Obama is only up by +163,655, Thats a margin Hillary could pick up in PR.

The nominee is determined by delegates not by popular vote counts. In terms of elected (pledged) delegates, the scales can't be tipped no more.

That's true, as well as it should be. I'm just saying that one of her arguments will be correct. Until now most of what she's been saying has been fuzzy math.

It still is. The way the primaries are designed, there's no way to do an actual count of the popular vote. An estimate at best.