Christopher Arellano and Yosi Sergant both gained 61 votes in the 31st Congressional District Obama Caucus and the tie was broken by a coin toss.
Congratulations Chris Arellano the winner of the coin toss. I believe there were 167 total votes and John Gallogly showed a strong third place finish.
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.
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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
Two contract employees of the State Department were fired and a third person was disciplined for accessing passport records of Sen. Barack Obama “without a need to do so,” State Department officials confirmed to NBC News.
The three people who had access to Obama’s passport records were contract employees of the department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, NBC News has learned. The unauthorized activity concerning Obama’s passport information occurred in January.
“A monitoring system was tripped when an employee accessed the records of a high-profile individual,” a department official told NBC News. “When the monitoring system is tripped, we immediately seek an explanation for the records access. If the explanation is not satisfactory, the supervisor is notified.”
Explaining why the contractors had access to the files, the official said: “The State Department uses cleared contractors to design, build and maintain our systems and cleared contract employees provide support to government employees and several steps of passport processing including data entry, file searches, customer service and quality control.
“Each time an employee logs on, he or she acknowledges the records are protected by the privacy act and that they are only available on a need-to-know basis,” the official added.
This breaking news story will be updated.
‘A More Perfect Union’
Highlights
Full Speech
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.”
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.
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?”
by Eric Boehler, Media Matters:
The Associated Press last week got a preview of how this presidential season is going to unfold, and how online liberal activists aren’t going to stand down when the press takes cheap shots at Democratic front-runners.
After AP reporter Nedra Pickler wrote a news story highlighting how some fringe Republican operatives were raising questions about Sen. Barack Obama’s patriotism, angry readers dispatched nearly 15,000 electronic letters protesting the piece. Why? Because instead of providing balance and context, which is what good journalism does, the article simply offered a platform for Obama’s opponents to roll out their smears, to broadcast their dark doubts about the senator’s character.
That kind of media shortcoming has become predictable; reporters love to quote partisan Republicans about how deficient Democrats are. And in the past it would have likely produced angry denunciations online within the liberal blogosphere — a blog swarm, perhaps. In fact, within hours of the article being posted on the wires, John Aravosis at Americablog condemned the news agency for the way it regurgitated “right-wing lies about Obama lacking patriotism.” (Aravosis was simultaneously irked by an interactive poll posted at CNN.com that asked readers if Obama was sufficiently patriotic.) Even without an organized effort, it’s likely the Pickler article would have prompted scores of blog readers to send off a fistful of angry missives to the AP.
But nearly 15,000 letters sent in just a matter of days in response to a single news wire article? That’s something else entirely and could mark the dawn of a new era in progressive media activism. The phenomenon has received very little mainstream media attention (journalists probably don’t want to encourage this sort of thing), but make no mistake: It was a very big deal.
In part because it’s become clear that if there’s going to be an effective media pushback during this White House run, it’s going to have to come from online. Even progressive pundits within the mainstream press corps remain reluctant to step out and criticize their colleagues in any meaningful way. That is still very much a closed Beltway club.
Also, this White House campaign is going to be the test case to see whether the more fully matured liberal blogosphere is able to alter the mainstream media landscape at all, whether it’s going to be able to knock the press off some of its favorite, predisposed biases against Democrats. From the looks of the eruption the AP created, progressives have already made enormous strides since the 2004 campaign.
Indeed, Sen. John Kerry’s former campaign aides must see this kind of rapid response and think about what might have been if they had an army of online activists ready to battle the press when reporters and pundits took cheap shots trying to defame the Democratic front-runner back in 2004. And poor Al Gore. Imagine if 15,000 letters to newspaper were dashed off the week the inventing-the-Internet fairy tale first began to take root in the press?
What prompted the organized outpouring of angst last week against the AP was when the website Firedoglake took action, embraced a new organizing tool, tapped into a wellspring of enthusiasm for Obama, and pointed angry readers not in the direction of the AP itself, but toward their local newspaper clients. Why? Because newspapers are more responsive to complaints filed by nearby readers, and because the newspapers pay the AP’s bills as newswire customers.
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