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7 Days with Arianna: This Week's Political Scandals Don't Touch a "Clean" Obama
This week three below-the-fold scandals threatened three politicians while Sen. Obama stayed "clean," in the good meaning of Sen. Biden's adjective of a year ago. Because Barack Houdini easily escaped the chains of Rev. Wright and because of "the math" after the North Carolina romp, it certainly looks like it's too late for Clinton to stop him- just like when the Phillies couldn't make up seven games with only 14 to play in the National League East race in 2007. Remember?
First came Vito Fossella, as of this writing a five-term congressman from Staten Island-Brooklyn. A good-looking, buff Republican with a reputation, said a colleague, of being "the Paris Hilton of Congressmen," he lived down to his reputation when, driving drunk, he made the mistake of spilling the beans to cops at 3 am where his mistress and previously unknown love-child were sleeping. If you're a public figure urging that the 10 Commandments be posted in public places, it's probably a good idea to live up to #7 about coveting other women. And "if you're going to be in the party of family values," said commentator Doug Muzzio, "you shouldn't have more than one."
Second was Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who appears likely to soon join Fossella in the ex-category. It was widely reported this week that a Long Island businessman, Morris Talansky, personally gave Olmert hundreds of thousands of dollars while he was mayor of Jerusalem and running against Ariel Sharon for leadership of the Likud Party. Olmert, suffering his fifth financial investigation in recent years, denied the money was a bribe but said that he'd quit his position if indicted.
(And if he leaves office, it appears likely that he'd be succeeded by a former Labor PM, Ehud Barak, which would delight tabloid headline writers when the likely leaders of the U.S. and Israel meet in 2009.)
Third, President Bush is refusing to reappoint the Republican chair of the Federal Elections Commission, David Mason, apparently because he previously indicated that Senator McCain may have violated the law by first saying that he'd participate in the public financing system in order to get a loan to salvage his campaign, and then getting out of the system. Bad enough that Bush says that he'll do whatever his generals ask of him in Iraq, while conveniently firing generals who don't agree with him. Here he's corruptly firing judges who don't agree with how his nominee is gaming the campaign money system. Since McCain's hypocrisy is as obvious as Fossella's -- admittedly less sexy but far more consequential -- let's see if the mainstream media lets their favored McCain off the hook when he violates the campaign finance system he brags about.
Which brings us to a politician this week who rose above his predicament - viz., a big loss in Pennsylvania, Rev. Wright's notorious pronouncements and his "bittergate" gaffe lead many observers to question Barack Obama's prospects. And these signs of weakness were occurring at the very moment that most pundits were kvelling at Hillary Clinton's newfound energy, confidence and luster as a candidate on the offensive in Indiana and North Carolina. Yet her balloon popped when he outperformed polls by 7 points in each state, allowing Obama to go from near-toast to toast of the town, as discussed by our 7 Days in America panel of Joe Klein, Arianna Huffington, Ron Reagan and me. (Listen to the show here.)
The near unanimous view was that "we know who the nominee's going to be," according to Tim Russert of NBC Tuesday night. Indeed her fault-lines and his trend-lines were impossible to deny. Clinton needs two-thirds of the remaining 460 or so elected and super delegates to be the nominee, just as the tide among supers is flowing entirely Obama's way - for example, he surpassed her in super-delegates this week, for the first time ever. It sure appears to be over.
But.
Beyond the phenomenon of her base rallying whenever she's counted out and beyond her likely upcoming big wins in West Virginia and Kentucky, she's down to arguing, clumsily and racially, that she can more easily win white Reagan Democrats. There are plenty of answers to that: he can make up for lost white blue-collar votes by enlarging his young and black base (as Huffington argues); losing such Democrats to her doesn't mean that he'll lose them to McCain (as Reagan argues); it should be inconceivable for the party of Jefferson and FDR and Kennedy to snatch the nomination away from the first black man to have won the most pledged delegates (as nearly all talking heads argue).
Yet it's also inconceivable that a party wanting to avoid Bush III at all costs would nominate the weaker candidate by the math of the (alas, undemocratic) Electoral College. Can Clinton at this 11th hour convince remaining delegates that based on a poll of polls, she's winning the presidency, say, 330-230 electorally while Obama is only tying McCain 270-270? In fact, this week on RealClearPolitics, Clinton is running 8-10 points better against McCain in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
What if that's true after all the primaries are concluded June 3? All pundits tell us that it's too late for such speculation, that he's reached the tipping point, that she can't get 67% of remaining delegates. And so far Obama's IQ, EQ and tone have risen to and surmounted every test. Hence a level of political unanimity that hasn't been seen since, well, since a Newsweek poll in the Fall of 1948 found that national commentators by 50-0 agreed that the math was impossible for Truman.
They call it political science, but it ain't science.
Excerpts for 7 Days in America, May 10th, with Joe Klein, Huffington, Green & Reagan
To listen to the whole show please go here.
KLEIN: Q: Why was the media so wrong before North Carolina and Indiana by writing that Clinton was climbing and connecting while Obama was faltering? "Well, I think that she overreached, in retrospect. I copped to having made a mistake privately in my own mind in the days before those two primaries because she did seem like she was on fire, and the gas tax holiday is the kind of issue that has worked before in general elections. But what I wasn't doing, and what many of us in the media weren't doing, was separating out the fact that this was a Democratic primary and Democrats tend to take policy pretty seriously. In this case it was clear that the gas tax holiday was a scam."
KLEIN: Q: Was it being factually honest or racially clumsy for Hillary Clinton to state that Obama was doing poorly with 'hard-working white voters'? "I think it's a mistake to say it, but I'll give her the right to make mistakes, especially at this point. I think the Clintons need grief counseling at this point more than anything else. When you're in a kind of state of shock and denial, you'll say foolish things although in this case it was a classic Michael Kinsley gaffe, meaning that she was just saying the truth."
KLEIN: Q: Any doubt the two Clintons wouldn't go all out to help Obama this fall, if he's the nominee? "No, I don't think there's any question at all. And in fact I think that the Democratic Party is going to be totally united."
HUFFINGTON: Q: Why does Clinton appear to be on the brink of defeat -- his strategically smart campaign or her campaign miscues? "I think it is a combination of the moment that is really favoring Barack more than Hillary in terms of the absolute extraordinary longing for real change. The outrage over the last, almost eight years has meant that people want to really close this chapter and move on, and Obama embodied that. On the Hillary Clinton side, I think Mark Penn miscalculated. I think the idea of running her as the inevitable candidate was simply faulty and in the end she could not recover from that."
GREEN: "Let me just say, this will probably be the last time a presidential campaign's key strategist will also hold another job. Mark Penn was simultaneously running a major public relations firm: he was on a book tour. Perhaps he wouldn't have made the mistakes attributed to him if the candidate had said, [as Bush did to Rove, 'I want to be your only client'."
REAGAN: Q: Is it legitimate to worry that Obama may not carry 'Reagan Democrats' this fall? "Just because someone doesn't vote for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in a primary doesn't mean that they're not going to vote for him instead of John McCain. On the other hand, we all know that there are pockets of white voters in this country who simply are not going to vote for the black guy. Now what Obama has to do is convince them not to vote for McCain either."
HUFFINGTON: "There are obviously racists in this country, but Obama's appeal is to go beyond the traditional likely voters in an election. And if you think of it, we normally forget about the 50% of eligible voters who don't vote, and if he can appeal to 5%, 7%, a percentage of them, that's going to make up for any number of racists in America."
REAGAN: Q: Has this long primary contest helped or hurt the Democrats? "I think so far it has been a net gain for them. There have been some down moments, no doubt about that. But by and large it's energized the base of the Democratic party, it's brought new voters into the Democratic party, and there's just an excitement and a buzz around the, let's just say, the Obama candidacy that doesn't exist around McCain's candidacy."
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Sounds like you are starting to mourn the Clinton campaign deflation.
More likely, instead of a Houdini act, the truth is that the Clinton camp's desperate ploys to stain Obama in various ways has ceased to work.
Perhaps we, the voters, are taking note of this in ways the Clinton camp did not expect.
There will always be smear tactics used to win elections. There will always be mistruths and misstatements.
It doesn't mean that Obama is teflon. It means the thinking voters are paying attention and disputing the tactics that have ceased to work.
Maybe that signals change. Get with it. Get over it. Accept that the Obama game plan may just be working in its transparency and simplicity.
Mark Green is reviled in New York. Talk about someone who is even more inauthenic than Hillary Clinton. He has lost just about every elective office that he's run for, mostly because people can't stand him and he stands for nothing except his own promotion. He should sell used cars for a living.
I voted in the Minnesota Democratic caucus on February 5th in South Minneapolis. This was my first caucus experience and as far as I was concerned, the caucus could have been run by the Obama campaign. The caucus workers wore Obama t-shirts, carried clip boards with Obama stickers, and had Obama signs outside the caucus site. One of the caucus workers actually asked me if I was going to vote for Obama. The voting was the most unusual and unprofessional process I’ve ever experienced. I wrote my name and address on a sheet of paper and was then given a slip of paper to write my candidate on. The slip of paper was tossed into a bucket. It felt like I was voting for class president in kindergarten. I was little surprised then to learn later on in the evening that the Minnesota caucus went overwhelmingly for Obama.
Was this process played out across the country on February 5th? Does this help to explain why Obama generally wins caucus states but loses primary states where the process is more rigorous? I don’t know but sometimes I wonder just how broad the Obama support is.
See the popular vote, and all the states won. This should give you a good insight into just how broad his support is.
I didn't much care for the caucus format either but your veiled implication that Obama can't win betrays your loyalties.
The only thing I know is that if Obama is not the Dem nominee, and in light of our politics of 2000 and 2004, we are no better politcally than a so-called third world military dictatorship.
You Clinton conservatives (who like to call yourselves progressives) don't understand why you rail against the conservative right, and yet behave so much like them. When can I expect to hear Limbaugh broadcast on Air America? I mean, if Bill 'hands' Clinton can show up on the Limbaugh show in support of Operation Chaos, surely YOU will make room for him on your network (which I no longer listen to, btw).
You Clintonistas give the Clintons leeway for their 'grief'. Their race baiting 'grief' has real world implications for people like me, and my son, and every member of my family who has to suffer a racial backlash beause they're in a 'state' about not winning the White House.
Why should people like me matter, you have Clinton, right? People have sold their soul and principles in order to support her. (I'm assuming, and maybe I shouldn't, that race was not an issue for you before). At some point, rather than blaming 'blacks' for overwhelmingly supporting Obama (as we've always overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party), you're going to have to fault the Clinton team for their lousy campaign. Clinton should have known better. She should have been able to toss aside the deadweight in her camp. Nope, she showed her Bush bonafides and valued loyalty over competence and now you'd like to see Obama faulted.
Will you be joining Bill Clinton in W.Virginia and Kentucky telling the voters that Obama is laughing at them!??!
Polls this far out from the national election mean very little.
Obama is going to win the nomination. Hillary must find a way to move on gracefully. But until she does, she may very well hurt the cause that she claims to hold dear, feminism, as well as the Democratic Party.
It is time that feminists who have supported Clinton for the right reasons step up to the plate and criticize her for unacceptable remarks and practices. The women’s movement has been deeply divided over the Clinton candidacy. Yet what started out as a legitimate disagreement about the merits of the candidates and their agendas has turned into a test of one’s feminist credentials. But the test is perverse. It is not a test of feminist principles and values. It has become a test of loyalty to Clinton, in spite of the fact that she is undermining basic feminist values....
See, "Hillary is NOW Damaging Feminism" http://msa4.wordpress.com/
Your Articles about Hillary are absolutely right!
Hillary is NOW DAMAGING females and everything our forebearers fought to gain! We need to take the time to reach out to those female who toil daily at low or mid level jobs. Off they go to jobs that they don't like just to stay alive. They are too tired when they get home to worry about whether they are being told the truth by the major media.
They believe that the yapping heads of TV land tell the truth, which, we know, do not..
They are too tired when they get home to worry about the election truths.
I am a Senior Citizen who KNOWS because I was once there! She is just using everyone to gain a position of big money and power. She will do nothing to raise the bar for low income females because she will be too busy playing dirty tricks on the men of the white house. WE NEED to share our humble observations with our fellow LOW income females which number the millions.
This is NOT about Obama, the race, the election directly. This is about choosing a leader, man or women, who has the integrity, wisdom & soul to run a country. Someone we can Trust!
She absolutely does not speak for the millions of honest working females of the world! and we will not be duped and sit back quietly while she takes us back 60 or 70 years.
Submitted with respect
What could possibly be motivating Hillary Clinton to keep going to the end? Today Terry McAullife (or however he spells his name) tried to give the impression she is waiting for a scandal of some kind to hit Obama. The Rev. Wright thing, in retrospect, must seem totally insane to alot of people, at least I hope so. Like, who cares? What puzzles me is the lack of any mention of the Clinton's indiscretions. The people NEED to be reminded of them intotal. Who are they that the "Clinton illegal behavior, including accusations and convictions" file should escape timely scrutiny?
If the situation was reversed the media would be into it. Fair play people, fair play. Of course Obama doesn't want any negativity, but sometimes it is necessary to cast a stone into the bush to flush out the prey.
These so called Reagan democrats. Do they still exist in significant numbers? Reagan was elected in 1980, 28 years and a whole generation ago. Or is this term being used as code for people who won't vote for a man who is not completely white?
Yes, the Phillies were able to make it into the postseason, and then got routed 3-0 in the NLDS.
What Hillary is doing is insisting on playing Game 4 even though she has no chance of winning the pennant, and the only result would be that the Rockies will lose precious time that they should be using to train against the Diamondbacks.
"Yet it's also inconceivable that a party wanting to avoid Bush III at all costs would nominate the weaker candidate by the math of the (alas, undemocratic) Electoral College."
Nonsense.
America has always been a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. To write that the Electoral College is undemocratic is wrong and purposefully misleading.
When an author purposefully misleads about one point, what else is (s)he lying about?
The electoral college is undemocratic because it requires the discounting of votes. Follow the logic: If California has 1 million people, and 500,001 voted for McCain and 499,999 voted for Obama, McCain takes all 54 electoral votes and the 499,999 Obama votes are effectively thrown in the garbage. Also, the formula used to determine how many electors each state gets is undemocratic. One vote in Wyoming has far more weight than one vote in Texas, for example.
Not only is the electoral college undemocratic, it is totally wrongheaded. It was created to force candidates to give attention to small states. As we know, the reverse is true. Small states are totally ignored in current presidential elections while Michigan, Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania get all the attention. I don't know where you live, but I am fucking sick of being held hostage by four states.
Almost everything that is done or proposed with regard to strategy in elections would not be necessary if we would just get rid of the electoral college and count each vote and give each vote the same weight. Wow, what a concept! He or she with the most votes wins. And this would not result in small states being ignored, but just the opposite. When Al Gore beat George Bush in 2000, he did it by fewer than 600,000 votes. Without the EC, every vote will have to be fought for, not just the ones in the precious four states.
Amen! I live in NY, which is bluer than blue. I'm a Democrat, so this shouldn't be a problem for me, except it is, because we are totally IGNORED during the election. Democratic candidates assume they will win all our electoral votes and don't bother to campaign here at all. Republicans assume they won't get the electoral votes, and also don't bother to campaign here. My observation is that this is also true of Texas and California. What does it say about an electoral process that has three of the largest states being completely ignored? Dysfunctional is the word that comes to mind.
Bitter, are we Mark? Promises made by Hillary will not be hapening for you, or for Paul Krugman. That's the way the cookie crumbles.
Like their God figure- Hillary- they cannot understand that they don't have all of the answers nor do they know best. If Hillary couldn't beat a freshman senator with a middle name of Hussein and a crazy ex-pastor, what makes anyone think they she with a 50% hate rate could do any better.
These polls are just about the moment when Obama has beaten back the Clinton onslaught, McCain, Bush, etc. onslaught. I for one thought he came through it all great. He won't win West Virginia or Kentucky but they really don't matter- they won't vote democratic if their lives depended on it.
Their children's lives depend on it. If they DONT vote Democratic, I hope they are prepared to sacrifice their children at the alter of Bush-McCain-Iraq-hubris.
Do they know this?
Not sure what assumptions are being used in the polls that supposedly show Clinton beating McCain in the electoral college math, while Obama's only tying him. One thing that's probably NOT being accounted for is how Hillary Clinton would win an electoral college majority without a large African-American vote. Although her comments on Wednesday show that she's taking it for granted that AAs will vote for her, I think someone needs to start polling actual AA voters to see what they think of Ms. "Only Whites Are Hardworking Americans."
While I don't expect Hill Shills like Mark Green to admit it, there is a price to be paid for Hillary's racist campaign. I saw a report of a Newsweek poll recently (long before her Wednesday comments) that showed her getting only 57% of the AA vote against McCain. So she's about 30% below where any Democrat needs to be to win a national election. Oh, and just to be clear, AA voters provide the Democratic margin in Hillary's vaunted "big states," like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Maybe she plans a big "I'm so sorry" to AA voters if she gets the nom, but being Hillary Clinton, I wouldn't bet on it.
Mark, I know you love Hillary so much you would suspend Randi Rhodes for "insulting" her at a SF standup club, but the fact is that you need to stop with the electoral college argument. If you take a look at how vastly the polls change during a general election campaign, you will see that the selective polling snapshots you're bolstering your argument are susceptible to wide fluctuations. The sooner Hillary concedes, the sooner our nominee will have to execute a general election strategy against a feable, mistake prone opponent. We also need time to allow the party to heal and reunite.
And if we would just get rid of the electoral college, her electability arguments evaporate because she would never beat McCain in a contest wherein we simply count each vote, and whoever has the most votes (regardless of the state from which they were cast) wins. I know, I know...it's novel. Just counting the votes and all.
LOL
Clinton is way out in front in the state of Denial, to paraphrase Letterman. I see she's got her surrogates with her.
Obama won the "hard working white vote" in plenty of states. This is Clinton's latest slice-em and dice-em with misleading statistics strategy. She is the ugliest campaigner I've ever seen. Dirty and ugly. Thank god her dirty tactics have failed, and Democrats are waking up to the reality of the Clintons.
Why can't Hillary win the educated white folk? Why do high information voters go to Obama in droves? Why can't she win young people in ANY STATE? And what would Democrats do without the African Americans who have been instrumental in every general election Democrats have won?
Keep harping on how Clinton's base are the racist ones and therefore the ones that Democrats should listen to. If the Democrats cave to a teeny tiny minority of racists in the party, then both parties will be pandering to the lowest common denominator in this country. What would there be to choose between them?
Obamaphiles accuse Hillary Clinton of racism for stating a simple fact that a majority of white blue collar workers support her. But the media and Obamaphiles ignore such travesties that occurred during the vote counting after the polls closed in the Indiana primary. That's when Obama supporter, Mayor Rudy Clay of Gary, sat on the votes from his city until after midnight making one excuse after another until the CNN crew finally shamed him into releasing the votes in three large chunks. The CNN crew only had to mention the old Chicago style politics a couple of times. (Gary, Indiana is about 15 minutes from Obama's backyard in Chicago.)
This incident of course was not considered racist. And the media has also ignored all of the sexist and violent language used by Obamaphiles on the internet in their attacks on Hillary Clinton. Clinton hit the nail on the head when she said, "Obama says one thing, but his campaign does the opposite."
Incidentally, why isn't it considered racist when the Obamaphiles or the media matter of factly state that Obama is expected to win such and such a primary because of the heavy black population?
Why do you keep posting this same nonsense everywhere today.
You seem to have a problem about race, as long as it's not the white race. There are too many veiled references and implied statements about uneducated white voters being floated around to scare people.
Or maybe you are just too pro Hillary and very anti-Obama.
In any case if you are looking for fairness, check the facts. Obama, nor his followers, have played the race card. There has been so many innuendos about race coming from the Clinton camp that I changed my vote, my affection and moved on.
Suggest you try it.
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