OpenLeft, Chris Bowers:

Obama has won North Carolina’s pledged delegates 63-52, according to Green Papers. Their estimates are usually accurate to within one delegate either way, so I trust them. Obama also appears to have won the North Carolina popular vote by 226,500 or so, which is almost identical to Clinton’s margin in Pennsylvania and Indiana combined.

The delegate count in Indiana is murkier, largely because the votes are coming in slower. In the extremes we have Democratic Convention Watch, which currently projects Clinton 35-33 Obama with four undecided, and CBS, which projects Clinton 38-29 Obama with five undecided. While these are not incompatible projections I am strongly prone to lean toward the DIY independent site, since such sites have shown, time and time again, to be way ahead of established news sites in delegate counts. In terms of the popular vote, Clinton is currently ahead by 20,000 and dropping with 92% reporting. I don’t regret declaring her the popular vote winner at all, since I’ll still be proven correct and since only one delegate is decided by the popular vote. I’ve been wrong about individual delegates before, and really that is all that is at stake in the popular vote.

Still, a very, very big night for Obama. The media has been giving him stupid rules to follow (pierce your nipples with flag pins or we will run Rev. Wright 24 / 7!), and he beat those rules tonight. I don’t like those rules, but Obama played them, and won. The narrative will reward him as a result.

Trivia and biased questions dominate Democrats’ debate

ACTION:
Ask ABC why debate moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson so often derailed the debate away from issues of concern to voters and, in a debate that was supposed to help Democratic voters choose their party’s candidate, framed so many questions from a right wing perspective.

CONTACT:
ABC News
Email: netaudr@abc.com
212-456-7777

The ABC sponsored Democratic debate in Philadelphia on April 16 emphasized trivial matters of little concern to voters, while the actual policy questions were often based on misleading right-wing spin.

During the first half of the debate, ABC moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson avoided any mention of policy issues. As the Los Angeles Times noted (4/17/08), “With the moderators and Clinton raising assorted questions about Obama’s past for the first half of the debate, issues received relatively short shrift. Not until 50 minutes in was a policy issue– Iraq–asked about by the moderators.”

The trivial line of questioning touched on well-worn campaign non-issues: Clinton’s gaffe about Bosnia, Obama’s recent characterizations about “bitter” small-town voters, the rhetoric of his former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the fact that Obama rarely wears an American flag pin on his lapel. (This is not the first time ABC has seemed unusually interested in this distraction–see FAIR Media Advisory, 10/10/07.)

Perhaps the most irrelevant line of questioning came when Stephanopoulos asked about Obama’s contacts with University of Illinois at Chicago professor William Ayers, who was once a member of the radical Weather Underground group. Obama’s “ties” to Ayers have been an obsession of Fox News host Sean Hannity, who reportedly pressed Stephanopoulos to ask about Ayers at the debate (Salon.com, 4/17/08; MSNBC 4/16/08).

Framing the question as a “follow up” on “the general theme of patriotism,” Stephanopoulos challenged Obama to “explain to Democrats why it won’t be a problem,” given that Ayers had never apologized for the bombings the group carried out in the 1970s. “In fact,” said Stephanopoulos, “on 9/11 he was quoted in the New York Times saying, ‘I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough.’” (Actually, that quote appeared in the Times on September 11, 2001; it was not, as Stephanopoulos seemed to imply, made on the day of the attacks.)

But even when the questions turned to issues of actual substance, things hardly improved. It was not until a full three quarters of an hour into the debate that the candidates were asked the question about what Stephanopoulos
acknowledged was “the No. 1 issue on Americans’ minds”– the
economy.

Stephanopoulos’ first question to Clinton, though, was clearly pitched from the right:

“Can you make an absolute, read-my-lips pledge that there will be no tax increases of any kind for anyone earning under $200,000 a year? And if the economy is as weak a year from now as it is today, will you persist in your plans to roll back President Bush’s tax cuts for wealthier Americans?”

The assumption would seem to be that there’s something economically or politically dangerous about raising taxes, particularly on the wealthy. Charles Gibson picked up on that theme, pressing Obama about his plan to raise capital gains tax rates to levels of the early 1990s—a position that struck Gibson as bizarre, since lowering these taxes increases government revenue:

“In each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased. The government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down. So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?”

This question rests on two false assumptions. The capital gains tax is paid by a small percentage of the population. As Citizens for Tax Justice pointed out (3/16/06), “The wealthiest 10 percent of taxpayers enjoyed 90 percent of the capital gains eligible for this special tax break.” Gibson’s reference to the 100 million Americans who own stock is irrelevant, since this tax is applied to the sales of stocks and real estate—not the act of having a retirement account.

Gibson’s other point–”History shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up”–might be popular in certain conservative circles, but the evidence to support it is thin. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out (7/12/07), there is little causal relationship between the capital gains tax cuts and increased federal tax revenue. Economist Jason Furman of the Brookings Institute pointed out the the “Joint Committee on Taxation and Treasury both score raising capital gains taxes as raising revenues” (New Republic, 4/16/08).

In addition, both candidates were pressed by Stephanopoulos about whether they would “treat an Iranian attack on Israel as if it were an attack on the United States.” Stephanopoulos opened this question with a flagrantly misleading statement, saying to Obama: “Iran continues to pursue a nuclear option. Those weapons, if they got them, would probably pose the greatest threat to Israel.” According to the latest National Intelligence Estimate, Iran discontinued its alleged nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Pundits often justify their decision to exclude “second-tier” candidates from debates on the grounds that they distract attention away from the real issues. If presenting a distraction from the real issues is really the problem, perhaps moderators such as Stephanopoulos and Gibson should seriously think of excusing themselves from future debates.

ACTION:
Ask ABC why debate moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson so often derailed the debate away from issues of concern to voters and, in a debate that was supposed to help Democratic voters choose their party’s candidate, framed so many questions from a right wing perspective.

CONTACT:
ABC News
Email: netaudr@abc.com
212-456-7777

TPM:

The new poll of Pennsylvania by Franklin and Marshall College, one of the state’s most prominent pollsters, confirms that the Democratic race is a close one. There’s been significant movement since their last poll from just under a month ago:

Clinton 46% (-5)
Obama 41% (+6)

Pollster Terry Madonna thinks the “small town” flap has yet to fully play out with the voters: “With the new commercial and the San Francisco statements, can she push the lead back to double digits?”

Rasmussen:

Senator Hillary Clinton’s lead in the Pennsylvania Primary is shrinking.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in Pennsylvania shows Clinton leading Barack Obama by just five percentage points, 47% to 42%. For Clinton, that five-point edge is down from a ten-point lead a week ago, a thirteen-point lead in mid-March and a fifteen-point advantage in early March.

Support for Clinton slipped from 52% early in March, to 51% in mid-month, 49% a week ago, and 47% today. During that same time frame, support for Obama has increased from 37% to 42%.

Obama recently received a key endorsement from Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey and has also spent more on television ads than Clinton. If Obama is able to pull off an upset in the Keystone State, it would effectively end the race for the Democratic Presidential Nomination. Obama currently leads Clinton nationally in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll. However, while an Obama victory could end the nomination battle, Clinton remains ahead in the state and recently demonstrated her ability to finish strong in the Ohio and Texas Primaries.

Tensions clearly remain in the contest. If Obama is nominated, just 56% of Clinton supporters say they are likely to vote for him against John McCain. Forty percent (40%) of Clinton voters in Pennsylvania say they are not likely to vote for Obama.

On the other hand, if Clinton is nominated, just 67% of Obama supporters say they are likely to vote for her against McCain. Twenty-nine percent (29%) are not.
Continue Reading »

Chris Bowers, Open Left:

The reason Hillary Clinton has never apologized for her Iraq war vote is because she clearly believes in the American “mission” in Iraq.

Here is a statement from her campaign today on the deaths of 4,000 American soldiers in Iraq:

“In the last five years, our soldiers have done everything we asked of them and more. They were asked to remove Saddam Hussein from power and bring him to justice and they did. They were asked to give the Iraqi people the opportunity for free and fair elections and they did. They were asked to give the Iraqi government the space and time for political reconciliation, and they did. So for every American soldier who has made the ultimate sacrifice for this mission, we should imagine carved in stone: ‘They gave their life for the greatest gift one can give to a fellow human being, the gift of freedom.’

Clinton presents Iraq as a resounding success where a tyrannical regime was removed from power, and freedom was brought to the Iraqi people. From this perspective, withdrawal is justified because the major missions have been accomplished, not because the war itself was a mistake. Also, as has been repeatedly made clear over the past twelve months, a sizable residual force will be left behind to continue some of the secondary missions of the war.

Compare this to Obama’s statement on 4,000:

Each death is a tragedy, and we honor every fallen American and send our thoughts and prayers to their families. It is past time to end this war that should never have been waged by bringing our troops home, and finally pushing Iraq’s leaders to take responsibility for their future. As we do, we must serve the memory of all who have died as well as they served our country, by providing support for their families, caring for our troops and veterans, and upholding the American values which our fallen heroes exemplified through their service.”

For all the supposed lack of policy differences between Obama and Clinton, even on their Iraq withdrawal plans, this remains a fundamental, deeply ideological discrepancy. As I wrote earlier today, the Iraq war has ended America’s brief tenure as the world’s only superpower, and effectively instigated a genocide in Iraq. If you still think this was a good idea that was worth the costs, even if it was badly managed, then you simply have a fundamentally different view of the world and America’s role in the world than someone who thinks the war was a mistake and not worth the costs. Even though I know it is something no presidential candidate can ever directly say and still hope to remain viable, the fact is that our soldiers in Iraq did not die for a good cause. Quite the opposite has occurred: they died as part of an effort that has eroded America’s power faster than any other event since the Civil War, and which has created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the past fifty years. It was a mistake of colossal proportions, not “the greatest gift one can give to a fellow human being.” A candidate’s ability or inability to recognize that mistake remains the best pos

Jonathan Chait, The New Republic:

Mark Penn declared today that Barack Obama “really can’t win the general [election].” Of course, it’s silly to say that Obama or Clinton “can’t” win the general. There’s not even good evidence to suggest that Obama is less likely than Clinton to win the general. Currently, the RCP poll average has both defeating John McCain by an average of 1.5%. Before the last couple weeks, when McCain and Clinton have both been making mutually-reinforcing attacks on Obama nearly every day, Obama was running well ahead of Clinton in those head-to-head matchups.

Both Obama and Clinton have significant drawbacks as general election candidates. I think Obama’s potential — that is, in situations when a high-profile Democrats is not reinforcing the GOP message every night — is much greater than Clinton’s The basic fundamentals are best captured by the Gallup Poll’s favorable/unfavorable rating, which is the basic measure of a politician’s popularity, for Clinton and Obama. Here’s Clinton:

And here’s Obama:

That’s an enormous difference — a thirty-point gap. Obama has plenty of flaws as a general election candidate, but they’re not as deeply-rooted as Clinton’s.

As I said, Obama was running well ahead of Clinton in head-to-head matchups a few weeks ago, and now they’re tied. After several more weeks of Clinton reinforcing McCain’s message against Obama, Clinton will probably be performing better than Obama against McCain. This is the point I made in my TRB column. She needs to convince the remaining uncommitted superdelegates to split for her by about a 2-to-1 margin. The only way she can get a split like that is if she can persuasively argue that Obama is unelectable. And the only way she can do that is to make him unelectable. Some people have treated this as an unfortunate byproduct of Clinton’s decision to continue her campaign. It’s actually a central element of the strategy. Penn is already saying he’s unelectable. It’s not true, but by the time the convention rolls around, it may well be.

–Jonathan Chait

Huffington Post | Rachel Sklar

Tonight, as promised, Keith Olbermann attacked Senator Hillary Clinton in a ten-minute “Special Comment,” saying that he was not endorsing Barack Obama but that “events insist” that he speak and stand against her “tepid response” to the controversial remarks of Geraldine Ferraro wherein she said that Obama wouldn’t have been as successful if he were not black. Last night Olbermann decried the statements as “clearly racist”; tonight, he followed up with a doozy in which he accused her of “campaigning as if Barack Obama were the Democrat and you were the Republican.” In so doing, said Olbermann — in letting the opportunity to forcefully oppose Ferraro’s comments pass her by — Olbermann said that Clinton had “missed a critical opportunity to do what was right.”

Geraldine Ferraro has stood by her comments and denied that they were racist, saying on “NBC Nightly News” tonight that they were response to a specific question about why this election was special, and saying that it was the Obama campaign that was playing “this type of a race card.” (See related video here.)

Olbermann chose to frame his comment in terms of bad choices on the part of Senator Clinton, stopping short of calling her inherently racist, instead casting the matter in terms of her receiving bad advice from the “tone deaf” and “arrogant” members of her campaign (”they are killing your chances of becoming president…[and] slowly killing the chances for any democrat to become president”). He characterized Ferraro’s remarks as “a blind accusation of sexism and dismissing Senator Obama’s campaign as some equal opportunity stunt,” and decried her comments both in this instance and historically, pointing to the “cheap, ignorant vile racism that underlines them.”

He also blamed her advisers for not pushing her to repudiate those comments immediately — unlike the remark by Obama advisor Samantha Power, who had called Clinton a “monster” and who was “gone by sunrise” from the Obama campaign. Olbermann specifically fingered (but did not name) Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams, saying that instead of repudiating Ferraro’s words — “words that should make any Democrat retch” — she was instead “letting her campaign manager bend them beyond all recognition into Sentaor Obama’s fault…thus giving Ferraro nearly a week to [send the dialogue] back into the vocabulary of David Duke.”

“Do you not see, Senator?” Olbermann asked. “Senator Clinton, this is not a campaign strategy. This is a suicide pact.”

Olbermann took the opportunity to mention a number of other matters (or, in recent campaign parlance, to ‘throw the kitchen sink’ at Clinton), criticizing her also for the “shell-game about choosing Obama as Vice-President,” as well as her husband Bill Clinton’s comments about Jesse Jackson after the South Carolina primary, the “racial undertone of the 3 a.m. ad” and the “moment’s hesitation” in her much-parsed answer on 60 minutes and said that after all the accrued episodes in which race had been implicated, people now “see a pattern” of racially-tinged remarks and associations with Clinton — though he carefully stopped short of definitively asserting its existence: “False or true, they see it,” said Olbermann.

He was far more definitive about Ferraro, and that’s where the comment returned in its final few minutes as Olbermann implored Clinton not to allow herself “to be perceived as standing next to — and standing by — racial divisiveness,” and once again brought it back to her campaign members and what they had wrought. “Grab the reins back from whoever has led you to this precipice before it is too late,” said Olbermann. “Voluntarily or inadvertently, you are still awash in this filth….your only reaction has been to disagree and call it “regrettable.” Unless senator you say something definitive, the former congresswoman is speaking with your approval.”

Said Olbermann, in a callback to Clinton’s own stand taken at the last Democratic debate: “You must reject and denounce Geraldine Ferraro.”

He finished with “Good night and good luck.” OUCH.

Gerry Ferraro is catching a lot of flak these days. But here at TPM we want to thank her. It’s been an exhausting primary season. And we’ve needed some comic relief in a big way. Saying Barack Obama was lucky to be black may only have been one more ‘unfortunate’ statement in a string of beauts this election cycle. But going on every show currently on the air to express her outrage at the response to her comments has simply been comedy gold. Check out some of the best moments in today’s episode of TPMtv …

–Josh Marshall

This video is from CNN’s Newsroom, broadcast March 10, 2008.

Raw Story:

Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign advisers have engaged in a concerted attempt over the last few weeks to convince voters that Barack Obama has not passed the “commander in chief test” and is unfit to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue come January. At the same time, Clinton and her team have been floating the idea of making the young Illinois senator her running mate if she manages to secure the Democratic presidential nomination.

So which is it? Is Clinton the only one ready to be president “from day one,” or would Obama be the best person for Clinton to pick to secure that role should anything happen to her? The dueling lines of argument coming from the Clinton camp seem to create an intractable paradox, and skeptical reporters quizzed Clinton’s teams as to how both contentions could exist simultaneously during a campaign conference call Monday.

“It’s not something she would rule out at this point,” Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson told reporters during the call. He reiterated the campaign’s argument that Obama still has not convinced voters he’s qualified to be Commander in Chief, but he noted “there’s a long way between now and Denver.”

Wolfson hedged when he was asked what could change between now and the Democratic National Convention at the end of August; he simply reiterated that the idea of an Obama VP nod was still on the table.

Obama himself responded to the vice presidential speculation during a speech in Mississippi Monday. He accused Clinton of trying to “hoodwink” voters by floating the idea that he could be her running mate while he continues to lead in delegates, votes and states won.

“I don’t know how somebody who’s in second place is offering the vice presidency to the person who’s in first place,” Obama told the cheering crowd.

He went on to note the apparent double standard created by Clinton’s “commander in chief” attacks and her musing on sharing a Democratic ticket with the first-term senator. He noted that former President Bill Clinton said in 1992 his only criteria for picking a running mate was selecting someone who would be immediately ready to take over in the Oval Office.

“If I’m not ready, how is it that you think I would be such a great vice president. Do you understand that? … They are trying to hoodwink you,” he said. “You can’t say he’s not ready on day one, unless he’d be your vice president, then he’s ready on day one.”

Clinton revived her White House campaign after scoring decisive wins last week in Ohio and Texas, but analysts still see virtually no way she could overtake Obama’s lead in pledged delegates. Voters selected those delegates during primaries and caucuses in the 30-odd states that already have voted. Pretty much every path to the nomination for Clinton requires her to convince enough super-delegates — mostly elected and party officials — to overturn Obama’s pledged delegate lead and hand her the 2,025-delegate majority necessary to snag the nomination.

As Clinton and her husband have stoked speculation about a Clinton-Obama ticket, observers say it is an attempt to broker a compromise that would allow those superdelegates to overturn the pledged delegate or popular vote advantages if Obama holds on to them.

“That’s her game. Get it close in delegates and maybe win the popular vote, then turn to the supers for a majority,” writes Michael Goodwin in the New York Daily News. “Meanwhile, she wants to get the party faithful salivating about a happy ending where they can have both Obama and her, as long as she’s on top.”

Obama address that speculation too, telling supporters Monday that they could not have it both ways.

“I don’t want anybody here thinking that somehow, ‘Well, I can get both,’” he said. “Don’t think that way. You have to make a choice in this election: Are you going to go along with the past, or are you going to go toward the future?”

Video Update: Crooks and Liars

Update: I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Ben Smith, at The Politico, flags that today CNN’s running a ‘online poll’ asking if Barack Obama has enough patriotism to be president

By Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo:

Does Obama have a patriotism problem?

The AP’s Nedra Pickler asks disgraced Republican dirty-trickster Roger Stone for his opinion. Stone you’ll remember is the guy who got caught making threatening phone calls to New York Gov. Spitzer’s (D-NY) elderly father and last month set up an anti-Hillary group with the acronym C-U-N-T.

Surprisingly enough, Stone thinks the answer is yes.

Republican Congressman Embraces Obama Hoax Email

Overtime, and pretty quickly now, it’ll make sense to keep a list of stuff like this. On Friday night’s Bill Maher show, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) claimed that Barack Obama refuses to say the pledge of allegiance to the American flag. This along with other bogus claims about Obama come from the hoax emails circulating on the internet.

If you see any local or national media outlets asking Kingston about this or if you get a word out of him, please let us know.

Of course, last night, the Associated Press signed on to the Obama hoax email train.

–Josh Marshall