January 2008 Archives

He's not even in the debate, but they sure are pandering to him! Great.

1. Wolf Blitzer? Oh boy, worst moderator ever?

2. Mike Allen says to judge the debate on which one shows more confidence.

3. CNN is promoting a show later tonight called "Broken Government." Might I suggest "Broken Media"?
   

Get me a parachute!

By the end of next week, Hillary Clinton will have withdrawn from the Presidential race.

I think Barack Obama will win a majority of delegates on Tuesday, and if that happens, I think Hillary will see that she has no path to the nomination

I think she'd want to quit this race on her own terms.

Moreover, at the end of the day, the fighting over the legacy of the Clinton Administration does us no good as a party.

We need to never forget how much better the Clinton years were than the Bush years years and the Reagan years, not just for the country but for the world.

This is an important part of the story we have as a party to explain to the American public why we should be once again entrusted with the White House.

Last night, the Republicans debated at the Reagan Presidential library. They understand the importance of preserving Reagan's legacy.

For all our misgivings about things undone during the Clinton years, we would also be foolish to abandon the legacy of the 1990s: strong economy, more efficient government, and world peace.

It's Bush and the Republicans -- not the Clintons -- who have mismanaged the 2000s.

Barack Obama raised more money in January alone ($32 million) than John Edwards did in the first nine months of 2007.

Sen. Arlen Specter and AG Michael Mukasey discuss whether Bush violated FISA (from yesterday's Judiciary Committee):

SPECTER: [President Bush] acted in violation of statutes, didn’t he?

MUKASEY: I don’t know whether he acted in violation of statutes.

::

What is there to say about this?

Maybe it's progress -- we've gone from an AG who couldn't remember anything to one who doesn't seem to think it's important to figure out whether or not his boss has broken the law.

I know it's unlikely that Bush or Cheney will get impeached, but isn't letting them walk a moral failure?

Aren't we telling the next generation of Americans that the law has no meaning?

::

Full transcript (h/t Think Progress):

SPECTER: Is there a legitimate argument that the President has Article II powers to undertake such conduct?

MUKASEY: There are a number of concepts in your question, including whether he has authority to undertake torture. Torture as you know is now unlawful under American law. I can’t contemplate any situation where this president would assert Article II authority to do something that the law forbids.

SPECTER: Well, he did just that in violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He did just that in disregarding the express mandate of the National Security Act to notify the intelligence committees, didn’t he?

MUKASEY:I think we are now in a situation where [that issue] had been brought within statutes, and that’s the procedure going forward.

SPECTER: That’s not the point. The point is that he acted in violation of statutes, didn’t he?

MUKASEY: I don’t know whether he acted in violation of statutes.

SPECTER: Well, didn’t he act in violation of FISA? Expressly mandates you have to go to a court to get an order for wiretapping. There’s really no dispute about that, is there?

MUKASEY: It required an order with regard to wire communications, when that was a surrogate for foreign communications — for domestic communications. When foreign communications became something that traveled by wire.

SPECTER: I’m not talking about foreign communications. I’m talking about wiretapping U.S. citizens in the United States. Terrorist Surveillance Program undertook to do that. Well, not getting very far there, let me move on to…

From the National Review:

So it is over. Finished. In November, we'll be sending out our most liberal, least trustworthy candidate vs. to take on Hillary Clinton—perhaps not more liberal than Barack Obama, but certainly far less trustworthy.

And the worst part for the Right is that McCain will have won the nomination while ignoring, insulting and, as of this weekend, shamelessly lying about conservatives and conservatism.

Something tells me this fool is wrong about at least one thing.

...but this is pretty amazing:

Montel Williams Loses Job after Defending Troops on Fox News by Brandon Friedman Wed Jan 30, 2008 at 11:39:14 PM PST

For just over three minutes on Saturday morning, TV talk show host Montel Williams owned the hosts of Fox and Friends. A former Marine and Naval officer, Montel lectured the stunned hosts on the stupidity of spending air time on the death of Heath Ledger, rather than covering the war in Iraq. It was a spectacle rarely seen on live cable television, as Montel exposed and condemned both tabloid "news" shows and much of American culture for what they have each become: shallow and greedy.

Three minutes into this awkward segment on Fox, one host cut off Montel in order to go to a commercial. Montel did not return after the break. Four days later, after 17 years as a television host, Montel lost his job. Variety reported on Wednesday that the

Fate of "The Montel Williams Show" was sealed when key Fox-owned stations opted not to renew it for the 2008-09 season.

This isn't how I hoped the campaign would end, but at least the campaign ends with most of the issues Edwards has been fighting for on the agenda of both Obama and Hillary.

Now we just need to keep their feet to the fire.

Tomorrow's debate will be the first big test to see if they can handle it.

Update: My thoughts on Edwards decision over here at Daily Kos.

Update II: Obama is surging. I wonder whether he'll now pick up Edwards supporters thanks to Teddy Kennedy's endorsement. If Obama beats Hillary on Tuesday, I can't imagine she'll stay in the campaign.

Despite the media blackout of John Edwards, voters are moving towards his campaign.

Of the 10% of all voters who decided today:

Hillary - 34%
Obama - 30%
Edwards - 29%

Here's a breakdown of the Edwards surge:

Edwards support among voters who decided...

...more than one month ago (33% of voters): 9% supported Edwards
...last month, but less than one week (16% of voters): 12% supported Edwards
...within last week (24% of voters): 24% supported Edwards

And again, of the 10% of voters who decided today, Edwards won 29%.

(source: CNN exit poll)

A lot of people were understandably excited by David Brooks' seemingly gushing column heaping praise upon Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama.

Without taking anything away from the magnitude of Ted Kennedy's endorsement and the meaning it will have -- not just for Barack Obama but also for the nation -- allow me to offer you a reminder.

You trust David Brooks at your peril. Assuming that Obama gets the nomination -- which I think is more likely than not -- Brooks will screw you so hard you won't know what hit you. When he does, Paul Krugman will be there for you. Bob Herbert will be there for you. They'll both have your back.

Brooks, on the other hand, will be sticking a knife in it. Consider the caveat Brooks threw up at the end of his column:

It’s not clear how far this altered public mood will carry Obama in this election.

Translation?

At the right time, David Brooks will declare his dalliance with Obama over. I'll explain what I think he'll say down below.

::

If you've read any of my posts here or elsewhere, you know that I'm a John Edwards supporters, and that I continue to have concerns about Barack Obama.

This is not the time to highlight those concerns; as I have also stated, I think Barack Obama is qualified to be President from day one. I think he is a brilliant man. He's a great speaker but he's much more than a great speaker.

The Clintons have sought to reduce Barack Obama to nothing more than a shell of a human being, marked only by his race. They've tried to boil his essence down to the color of his skin.

The Clintons' strategy is to argue that the only reason Obama is a candidate is because he's black, and that there is nothing else about him that qualifies him to be President.

That's why President Clinton called Obama's Iraq story a "fairy tale"; it was part of the concerted campaign to demolish the substantive rationales for Obama's candidacy.

Doubt me? Listen to Clinton on the Charlie Rose show in December:

::

Now, I want you to keep that in mind while you read David Brooks' explanation for why Barack Obama's candidacy is generating renewed interest:

Something fundamental has shifted in the Democratic Party.

Last week there was the widespread revulsion at the Clintons’ toxic attempts to ghettoize Barack Obama.

At best, Brooks is offering a different type of reductionism. Instead of explaining the rise of Obama as a consequence of his skin color, Brooks explains the rise of Obama as a consequence of revulsion at the Clintons.

Of course, he uses explicitly racial language to explain that revulsion.

Like all good propaganda artists, Brooks never really specifies exactly who the Clintons' "toxic attempts" revolted, but it's pretty clear he's talking about white liberals.

The hidden subtext? White liberals are supporting Barack Obama because they are rejecting racism -- not because they support Barack Obama.

Ironically, David Brooks is making the same argument about Barack Obama that are the Clintons.

He's just wrapping it up in faint praise.

::

I started off this post saying that David Brooks will at some point turn on Barack Obama. I promised to venture a guess as to what he'll say.

Here goes:

I think that if (perhaps when), Obama gets the nomination, David Brooks will explain the victory as a rejection of Clintonism.

Over the course the campaign, he'll lament that Democrats nominated someone purely on the basis of opposition to Clintonism.

He'll focus on what he says are the cultural flaws of Obama. He'll claim that Obama is elitist, and can't relate to "working" people. He'll probably even mention arugula and belgian endive.

::

Now, it should be obvious just how wrong I think those arguments would be.

It is ludicrous it is to reduce Barack Obama's essence down to his race, or to a mere expression revulsion at the Clintons.

I'll spend just a few words describing some of the reasons why.

As I've said, Obama's not just inspirational, he's also brilliant. He is an incredible communicator, and I don't mean that he is a good speaker, although he is.

His communication skills come from an understanding the media and his extraordinary ability to synthesize different ideological approaches. He's got a great sense of timing.

He's built a phenomenal campaign team.

He has improved on the campaign trail; he knows how to fight without appearing nasty.

He knows how to deal with Republicans, and in Illinois, he managed to get difficult and important legislation passed.

He has extraordinary poise and I would trust him to lead the country through a crisis.

He's not my first choice; I won't dwell on reasons why in this post. (For a hint, read this article and this oped by his top economic adviser.)

John Edwards is and will remain my first choice.

This much, however, is true: Barack Obama is every bit as qualified to be President as Hillary Clinton or John Edwards.

David Brooks' did not directly acknowledge this fact; the closest he came was to note that Ted Kennedy was vouching for Barack Obama's fitness for office.

::

I'm writing this because I'm disturbed at the visceral distaste so many Obama supporters have developed for Krugman.

I understand that feeling, in the midst of a primary. But please, remember that when the primary is over, if Obama gets the nod, Krugman will be there for him, and David Brooks won't.

The Clinton dynasty will have been defeated; Brooks will return back to the right-wing trenches and launch attack after attack on Obama and the political left.

There's a flip-side to this, of course.

Those of us who don't support Obama should remember that David Brooks' arguments for or against an Obama candidacy are fundamentally attempts to manipulate the political left.

We shouldn't listen to what he says either.

I've certainly fallen into the trap in the past, and I will seek to avoid it in the future.

::

I want to conclude by linking to a few articles written in the past by Brooks and also by his colleagues, Herbert and Krugman.

First, let's look at three columns about Ronald Reagan, Republicans, and race -- written long before Reagan became an issue in this primary.

11/9/07 - Brooks: History and Calumny
11/13/07 - Herbert: Righting Reagan's Wrongs?
11/19/07 - Krugman: Republicans and Race

These three articles should illustrate to you the fundamental divide between the left -- Herbert and Krugman -- and the right -- Brooks.

::

Now look at four recent articles about the Presidential campaign:

Herbert: Questions for the Clintons
In this article, Herbert confronts the Clintons divisiveness head-on. Rather than spinning a grand narrative to support a conservative vision of America (as Brooks did), Herbert takes a fact-based approach.

Krugman: Lessons of 1992
Krugman explores the failures of the Clinton presidency, concluding that while the government was effectively run, it was a second-rate presidency in the sense that it was not transformative, a point which he explicitly concedes to Barack Obama.

Brooks: The Identity Trap
In this article, Brooks presents identity politics as a trap from which Democrats (specifically Hillary Clinton) cannot escape. In other words, Democrats are destined to be divided.

Brooks: Faith vs. the Faithless
In this article, Brooks explores the divisions amongst conservatives on religion. He sees Romney as being a potentially unifying force. In other words, Republicans can all get along. Of course, after Nevada I never once saw Brooks note that one-quarter of GOP caucus goers were Mormon, and 95% voted for Romney. But when a sizeable but smaller share of Democrats affiliated with some group or another vote for a certain candidate, it somehow shows the sky is falling? Puhlease.

::

Short version of this post:

David Brooks is a right-wing hack. He always has been and he always will be.

Even as he praises Obama, he's setting up a narrative to explain Obama's fall from grace.

Even though Paul Krugman is being tough on Obama, when Brooks goes south on us, Krugman will be there to defend Obama -- and, more importantly, us.

I've averaged results from the daily Gallup and Rasmussen national tracking polls, which should be a decent barometer of trends heading into Super Tuesday.

Looking at the poll, you can see that people are taking perceptions of viability into account when they decide who to support. After Iowa, when Edwards finished second, he was doing much better than he was after New Hampshire, when he finished third. In the run-up to Nevada, his numbers once again climbed, but when he did poorly there, his numbers dropped.

Meanwhile, Obama, who started climbing after Iowa, leveled off after his narrow defeat in New Hampshire.

Hillary dipped after Iowa, and climbed after New Hampshire.

It's not all viability assessments, however. Hillary's national numbers started dropping after her rancorous debate performance.

Now that Ted Kennedy has endorsed Obama and it's clear that Obama can put together a winning coalition, I suspect -- but can't guarantee -- that Hillary's numbers will slip further.

The question now is whether he can overtake Hillary and win a plurality of delegates by Super Tuesday. If that happens, I would be surprised if she didn't withdraw from the race.

As an Edwards partisan, I have to point out that over the past few days, he's climbed -- along with Obama -- as Hillary has slipped.

That according to Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn. (h/t georgia10 at Daily Kos)

Jake Tapper debunks a big one:

False Pushback from Clinton Allies

January 28, 2008 1:19 PM

Some supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, are inaccurately saying that her husband's comparison of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, to Rev. Jesse Jackson came only because a reporter had asked the former president whether a black candidate can win South Carolina, thus raising the subject.

The larger charge is that reporters were falsely painting the president as race-baiting.

It's not true. Clinton brought up Jackson with no mention of Jackson by reporters, and with no mention of the subject of whether an African-American can win by reporters.

Here's the whole transcript:

It's crazy for the Clintons to argue they haven't been engaged in race-baiting.

The only thing they can do is apologize, and hope people accept their apology.

Five weeks after Bill Clinton's interview on The Charlie Rose show, it's useful to look back at what he said then. I think you can pretty clearly see that he outlined the strategy we are seeing today, starting with his dismissive claim that Barack Obama, "by his very nature," was just a symbol.

Bush Mostly Down in Polls Mon Jan 28, 2008 3:46 AM EST The Associated Press, AP Writer

In February 2001, President Bush delivered an economic address to a joint session of Congress; in subsequent years he presented his annual State of the Union address. A look at his approval rating in the Gallup Poll around the time of each speech.

_February 2001: 62 percent approval.

_January 2002: 84 percent.

_January 2003: 60 percent.

_January 2004: 53 percent.

_February 2005: 51 percent.

_January 2006: 43 percent.

_January 2007: 36 percent.

_January 2008: 32 percent.

I just posted three new videos, which you can link to below, or play from the video spotlight bar.

How can we trust Hillary Clinton on Iran?

Hillary Clinton attack Barack Obama...again. John Edwards responds.

Hillary Clinton and the rush to war with Iran.

The fact that race and gender are playing important roles in this campaign should surprise no one. After all, this is the first time ever that the Democratic Party has had a black man and a white woman as the two leading candidates to win the presidential nomination.

For the most part, race and gender have played a positive role in the campaign, but since December, bit by bit, drip by drip, thing have moved towards ugly.

It all started with Bob Kerrey and Billy Shaheen, but Obama didn't bite. After New Hampshire, things worsened, and it wasn't entirely one-sided.

For example, just after Hillary made her dismissive assessment of MLK, Jesse Jackson, Jr. all but accused her not only of shedding crocodile tears in Portsmouth, but also of not caring about blacks in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. Two days before Bob Johnson took the stage to attack Barack Obama in Charleston, one of Obama's press aides distributed a list of supposedly racially-insensitive statements uttered by the Clintons.

As a Nevadan, the protests that the Clintons were trying to disenfranchise minority voters on the Strip rang hollow, and apparently the workers there agreed. Meanwhile, the Culinary Union aired an incredibly divisive ad, accusing Hillary Clinton of having no respect for Hispanics. Moreover, the accusuations that the Clintons cheated the Nevada caucus seemed more like a talking point to mobilize blacks in South Carolina than anything grounded in reality.

Be that all as it may, I also thought it was just the back and forth of politics. A bit rough, yeah, but that's politics. Deal with it.

::

Over the past week, however, the Clinton campaign has taken the racial element of this campaign to an entirely new -- and entirely unacceptable -- level, openly discussing a strategy to label Barack Obama as "the black candidate."

On Friday, they succeeded in getting AP political correspondent Ron Fournier to declare them victors in South Carolina before a single vote had been cast. Why? Because, according to Fournier, they were convinced they'd turned Barack Obama into, in their words, "the black candidate."

Yesterday, Bill Clinton added an exclamation point to the Clinton campaign message when -- unprompted -- he compared Barack Obama to Jesse Jackson.

What a sad and pathetic moment for President Clinton. If Hillary Clinton loses this campaign, it's a moment many of us will never forget.

Undoubtedly, Clinton will say he was just giving an example of Democrat who won South Carolina but lost the nomination.

But if that was the point our Rhodes scholar former president was trying to make, then a much better example would have been John Edwards who won the primary, but lost the nomination. When Jackson won, South Carolina was a caucus state.

Clinton's meaning was clear; there can be no doubt.

I don't know the intricacies of the Clintons' strategy, but this much is clear: they think that by polarizing the electorate along racial lines, they can win this election.

It wasn't just about making Barack Obama "the black candidate." They wanted to make him "the candidate of blacks" -- in the process making Hillary Clinton "the candidate of whites."

In short, the Clintons sought to divide us, the American people, to satisfy their agenda.

Divide and conquer.

Win at all costs.

I love winners. I love politicians who will fight with every part of their being, who are willing to savage their opponent to win.

But I can't abide by politicians who, in the name of achieving power, sacrifice the very people they are supposed serve.

No.

No way.

We can't let them do this to our country.

Of the votes cast so far (imputing caucus participant preferences from state delegate allocation, a method that punishes Edwards because of Nevada), Obama has won 47% of votes, Hillary 32%, and Edwards 19%.

In other words, the gap between Obama and Hillary -- 15% is larger than the gap between Hillary and Edwards -- 12%.

Simply put, Barack Obama has utterly dominated the nomination process so far.

Of course, the delegate situation is slightly different. Of pledged delegates, Obama has received 46%, Hillary 35%, and Edwards 19%.

So even though Obama "stole" a victory in Nevada, Hillary is the one who has benefited most from allocation quirks.

President Clinton may try to argue Obama only won this election because of black voters, but his argument doesn't ring true: Hillary lost 2 out 3 white voters tonight.

Simply put, Obama put together a broad enough coalition to thoroughly trounce her. I have a feeling President Clinton's going to come to regret his strategy of divide and conquer.

I wish Edwards had gotten to 20%, but he did better than I thought he would after Nevada and he picked up delegates.

However, I am thrilled that Barack Obama won a clear majority. I am glad that South Carolina gave not just him that victory, but America that victory. I'm glad that he won just about every county, and I'm glad that whites voted for him in similar numbers as voted for Hillary or Edwards.

It is impossible now to argue that Barack Obama is the black candidate, or the candidate of blacks.

Barack Obama, simply put, is the candidate who has now won 47% of all votes cast thus far.

Hillary has won 32%, and Edwards 19%.

He is dominating this election, and while I have substantive questions about his policy framework, it is clear that he is demonstrating that America is moving past the racial and ethnic divisions of the past.

It's equally clear that Bill and Hillary Clinton have not.

I'm not calling them racist -- I'm saying that if they have any hope of winning this nomination, they need to come to grips with the fact that America has changed.

So Bill Clinton is making the rounds, trying to pidgeonhole Barack Obama, arguing that Jesse Jackson won the Democratic primary in South Carolina twice, in 1984 and 1988.

The implication, of course, is that Obama is nothing more than the candidate of black voters, who only vote for blacks.

It's an idiotic argument.

Al Sharpton was slaughtered in 2004 by both John Edwards and John Kerry, not just by white voters, but also by black voters.

From early exit poll returns, it looks like Obama got about a quarter of white votes, within shouting distance of Hillary Clinton.

Obama did particularly well with young whites.

I'm not thrilled with Obama as a candidate, but as far as his electability goes, his race -- if anything -- is a small net positive.

Bill Clinton meanwhile, increasingly overshadows Hillary.

If Obama's victory tonight had been close, I'm not sure how much momentum he'd have gotten. With his huge victory, I suspect he'll catch on fire, catching up to Hillary, and at least splitting Super Tuesday.

If they do split Super Tuesday, and if Edwards can continue to collect delegates, a brokered convention is looking more and more likely.

Wouldn't that be fun?

Post-partisanship is nonsense. Mitt Romney nails John McCain is this web ad:

So I've created some new YouTube videos to poke fun at Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. It should be obvious they are parodies, but some Rethugs are taking them seriously and generating hilarious comments like these:

liberals are pro-choice, mike isn't liberals don't talk about jihadists, mike does liberals want to pull out of iraq, mike doesnt

Your video on the Morning After Pill, are you saying that Mitt Romney supports the use of this pill? I think a lot of Conservatives would really be interested in hearing that.

Barack hearts Jesus.

Today's numbers, with change from yesterday:

Obama: 39 (-6), Hillary 36 (unch.), Edwards 22 (+10)

Update: ARG's final GOP primary numbers had Huckabee with 33 and McCain with 26; McCain won, 33-30.

Mostly, I think it's just confirmation of Edwards' surge.

...delivering this message.

Hillary Pollster Mark Penn: Bill Did Fundamentally Change The Country

...or not:

"[Hillary] and John McCain are very close,” he said. “They always laugh that if they wound up being the nominees of their party, it would be the most civilized election in American history and they’re afraid they’d put the voters to sleep because they like and respect each other." -- Bill Clinton

Watching channel 8 here in Vegas as the Monte Carlo burns. Turns out Fox was claiming that Bellagio and New York, New York were being evacuated. Local news anchor comes on: we want to report that Fox's story is wrong. There are no evacuations.

Hilarious. Fox can't even cover a fire without lying.

Totally bizarre. Now I wish I'd taped the GOP debate last night.

Zogby's first full three-day sample since Monday night's debate shows that John Edwards is now within 4 points of Hillary Clinton and second place -- inside the poll's margin of error.

Since Zogby's first tracking poll (released on Wednesday), Edwards has climbed from 15% to 21%, erasing six points from Hillary's ten-point lead. According to John Zogby, Edwards' growing support is coming from African American voters and from undecided voters. Meanwhile, Barack Obama has dropped five points, down to 38%

Only a fool would predict what's going to happen on Saturday, but this much is clear: South Carolina has an opportunity to be a part of something big.

According to pollster John Zogby (emphasis added):

The real movement here is by John Edwards, who is the only one who continues to gain ground in our three-day tracking poll. His increase appears to be coming from African American voters who are slowly making up their minds – he is up to 7%.

Whether motivated by a desire to stay in second place, or taking a shot at first place, Hillary did return to South Carolina yesterday. The Zogby poll's internal daily numbers hinted at the possibility of a late surge by Hillary, such as the one that happened in New Hampshire, but with the high margin of error for daily numbers (for example, Edwards has ranged from anywhere from 13% to 27% over the past 4 days), it could just as easily be noise.

The important point is that in just two days, Edwards has climbed six points.

Every vote Edwards wins on Saturday will be hard-earned, and the only thing we can be sure of is that after the squabble in Myrtle Beach, South Carolinians are taking another look at him.

He now seems to have a realistic shot at hitting 20%, which would be a far better performance than I thought possible after the letdown in Las Vegas.

Finishing second, however, would be a freaking earthquake. I don't think it's likely, but it's possible, and it would be huge.

::

Edwards excluded from two new general election polls (LAT/Bloom & NBC/WSJ)

Last night, Keith Olbermann reminded viewers of John Edwards' argument that John McCain is the Republican to beat in November.

Olbermann presented results from two new public opinion surveys -- Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll, the other the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

Of course, as you would expect, John Edwards was excluded from the general election matchups in both polls.

As this chart shows, the available polling data shows that John Edwards is the most electable Democrat.

Edwards' electability isn't just demonstrated by polling data, however.

It's also the fact that Edwards is the only candidate who has faced a tough general election opponent. He's also the only candidate who has beaten a Republican in a red state. (He beat incumbent Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth in 1998.)

Meanwhile, neither Hillary nor Obama have ever faced a tough general election opponent.

They say they know how to beat Republicans in red states. Edwards has actually done it.

After this week's debate, you don't need polling data to know that John Edwards is the only Democrat ready to take on whoever the Republicans nominate, but it sure would be nice to be able to make apples-to-apples comparisons using fresh polling data.

There is a reason that FOX News has never once -- not one single time -- included Edwards in a general election poll: Rupert Murdoch doesn't want want to let Democrats know that the most progressive candidate in the race is also the most electable.

About half of Democrats say electability is their top priority, yet only six percent think Edwards is the most electable Democrat. By excluding him from polls, the corporate media is deliberately starving the public of useful information.

By the way, can I mention what a refreshing alternative Olbermann is to hacks like Mrs. Alan Greenspan (aka Andrea Mitchell), who this week actually referred to Bill Clinton as the third candidate in the Democratic race. Just imagine if every member of the media were as open-minded as he is.

::

Finishing second would be a political earthquake

As I said above, a second-place finish by Edwards on Saturday would be an absolute political earthquake.

I don't want to raise false hopes or expectations; in fact, I think a second-place finish would be such a big deal in part because I think it is not likely to happen.

It would show that despite what all the pundits believe, you can't count the votes until they are cast.

A second-place finish would allow John Edwards to spend the next two weeks berating the media for having ignored him; he could say that he prevailed despite the media, not because of the media, and he'd be right.

If the media continued to ignore his campaign, they would have no credible explanation for excluding him.

Even if he finishes around 20%, I think he has a strong case to make to the media; but if he finishes second, they have no easy comebacks.

Edwards has won about one-fifth of the votes cast so far (Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada), but it seems like he gets about 1% of the attention.

There's a lot of reasons we're all rooting for him to finish second, not the least of which is exposing the media for being the corrupt bastards that they are.

Zogby's latest poll shows that the Edwards surge is real.

The numbers: Obama 39, Hillary 24, Edwards 19.

Although Edwards is still in third, he may be tied or even ahead of Hillary at this point.

Zogby now says Edwards was at 19 on Tuesday (yesterday, he said it was 18).

Wednesday, he says Edwards is at 27.

Keep in mind that single-day samples have larger margins of error, but it sure looks like some positive movement.

It would be enormous if Edwards were to finish second, because there isn't another primary or caucus (other than Florida, which the candidates are not campaigning in) until Super Tuesday.

If Edwards finishes second, he is in a much better position from which to attack the media if the media doesn't cover him.

Barack Obama took time off from the campaign trail this week to sit down for an interview with the Christian Broadcast Network's David Brody.

They discussed a wide range of topics, but for the politically inclined, the most important part of the interview was this statement:

"Once the nomination contest is over, I will get the people who voted for her. Now, the question is, can she get the people who voted for me?" -- Barack Obama, interviewed by CBN's David Brody

This seems to be a warning shot fired at the Hillary campaign, telling them to back off their attacks on Obama.

Implicit in his comment is a threat that he won't campaign for Hillary in the fall, helping turn out the young people and Republicans he brought into the party in Iowa and New Hampshire.

If I go down, she's going down with me, he seems to be saying.

Obama's most recent radio ad supports this theory. If it were to air in any competitive state, it would almost certainly hurt Hillary's chances of winning the general election.

"Hillary Clinton will say anything to get elected...she'll say anything, and change nothing. It's time to turn the page." -- Obama campaign ad

Fortunately, South Carolina isn't a competitive state in the general election, so this ad won't impact much of anything but the primary.

Still, by demonstrating his willingness to fight back with every bit the nastiness of his opponents, Obama is reminding the Clintons -- who have attacked him with impunity, oftentimes using misleading and offensive tactics -- that he is still a force to be reckoned with.

Barack Obama has become a very powerful force in Democratic Party politics. When he signals his willingness to play hardball, it's important to listen.

That being said, although I'm impressed by the comfort with which Obama is exerting his influence, I find it disconcerting that with every passing day, this election becomes more and more about the candidates and their personalities, and less and less about the issues that matter.

(Updated, 8.40am)

(h/t sarahlane)

Zogby is out with a poll showing signs of a post-debate bump for John Edwards.

According to Zogby's numbers, on Tuesday alone, Obama had 39%, Clinton 22%, and Edwards 18%, with 21% undecided or supporting other candidates.

Based on Zogby's numbers for Sunday through Tuesday, we can figure out what kind of bump Edwards got on Tuesday compared to Sunday and Monday. Here they are:

Undecided/other: +6%
Edwards : +4.5%
Clinton: -4.5%
Obama: -6%

We'll have to wait until tomorrow to know if this is just a random blip or a real trend, but I have to think that between Edwards' debate performance on Monday, and the ensuing press coverage which has continued through today, his numbers will just get better and better.

I'd be thrilled if Edwards did better than 20%, and ecstatic if he actually came in second, but that might be asking for too much.

Remember when Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney mixed it up in late November during the YouTube debate?

It made Mike Huckabee and John McCain smile.

Hopefully Democrats will wake up in time to realize they need to take another look at John Edwards.

"I hope Democrats don't take another look at John Edwards"
--- The unspoken words of every political operative in the GOP

::

If the squabble in Myrtle Beach made just one thing clear, it is this:

John Edwards is the only Democrat ready to take on the Republican Party this fall.

Edwards jabs Clinton for leaving S.C. By SUSANNE M. SCHAFER - Associated Press Writer

BENNETTSVILLE, S.C. --
Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards criticized rival Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday for leaving South Carolina in the run-up to the state's primary, saying residents should question whether the New York senator would return if she became president.

"After the debate she flew out and she's been gone and she won't be back until I don't know - later in the week or until primary day," Edwards told a crowd of about 150 people in this small city. "What are the chances she's coming back when she's president of the United States?"

:: snip ::

"I will not forget where I came from," Edwards told the crowd during one of three campaign events he was to hold Wednesday alongside a bluegrass band. He said he's not a candidate who "thinks of Bennettsville as some place you fly over on the way from New York to Miami."

New Edwards ad:

Pretty good video from somebody out there in the Internet...

Barack Obama's got a lot of good things going for him, but it's really dangerous for politicians to claim that they are above politics, that they somehow transcend the weaknesses of typical politicians. Why?

Because from time to time, all politicians are full of crap, even the best ones. Even John Edwards.

The thing that allows us to forgive them is that we knew they were flawed before they proved it to us.

When you set the bar as high as Obama has, however, you are forcing yourself to be perfect. When you lie, you pretty much destroy the entire rationale for your political existence.

Here's what's happening right now in the campaign: Clinton is starting the process of demolishing Barack Obama. She's finally doing it now because she think John Edwards is no longer viable. Until this point, she thought it was a three-way game of chicken, but because she's discounting Edwards, she's starting the process of eliminating Obama as an opponent.

Her goal? To sweep the Super Tuesday states and end the primary on February 5.

Today Hillary put out a brutal web advertisement (see below). It is brutal because it's honest -- one hundred percent honest. There's really no recovery from it.

During Monday's debate, Obama forcefully denied ever having advocated single-payer. He said that he supported it in theory, but only if he were designing a health care system for scratch.

As this web ad shows, Obama was lying -- completely, totally, unequivocally.

Now that he's been caught in a full-throated lie, he moves from being St. Barack to just another politician.

If he'd run on a progressive economic platform, liberals like me might have been willing to defend him, but I see no reason to. He's made his own bed.

As I said, this ad is completely, devastatingly honest. Here is the raw footage from which it was made:

Now, if Hillary -- or even Edwards -- were caught in such a lie (they've probably uttered them) it wouldn't be quite as big a deal.

Why not?

Because neither of them have made honesty or a new kind of politics the cornerstone of their campaign.

Obama has.

This ad also shows him flip-flopping. He's claimed never to have flip-flopped, making him more electable than either Hillary or Edwards. Well, now that argument is toast.

This comes on the heels of the effective assault on his opposition to the Iraq war. The basic Clinton strategy there was to concede that Obama was in fact against the war in 2002, but that he'd subsequently waffled (which he did), and voted to fund the war (which he also did).

I'm going to predict that as of February 5, it will be clear that Obama will not be the Democratic Party's nominee.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Updated at 12:30

Howard Fineman agrees that John Edwards one the debate on Monday. He also raises an important question: was the Republican Party also a winner? Perhaps voters should take another look at John Edwards before it's too late.

Here's reactions from a panel of voters from around the country assembled by the New York Times. In general, pretty positive reception for Edwards. Makes you wonder, when will people start voting for the guy they really support?

...Republicans are worse. By a lot.

Making coded appeals to white racism is nothing new for Huckabee. Indeed, well before he was a nationally known political star, Huckabee nurtured a relationship with America's largest white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens. The extent of Huckabee's interaction with the racist group is unclear, but this much is known: he accepted an invitation to speak at the group's annual conference in 1993 and ultimately delivered a videotaped address that was "extremely well received by the audience."

Descended from the White Citizens Councils that battled integration in the Jim Crow South, including at Arkansas' Little Rock High School, the Council (or CofCC) has been designated a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In its "Statement of Principles," the CofCC declares, "We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called "affirmative action" and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races."

5 million people watched last night's debate, a record audience according to CNN.

I hope most of them were in South Carolina, because anyone who watched that debate who wasn't 100% committed to Hillary or Obama should be voting for Edwards on Saturday -- unless they want more WWE-style debates.

Are there three people in this debate, not two? This kind of squabbling...how many children is this going to give health care, how many people are going to get an education from this, how many kids are going to be able to go to college because of this. We have got to understand, this is not about us personally. It is about what we are trying to do for this country, and what we believe in. -- John Edwards, during last night's debate

Last night, while Barack Obama was going Wal-Mart on Hillary Clinton, and while Hillary was going Rezko on Obama, and while they were both looking for more ammunition to use in yet another personal attack, John Edwards did something extraordinary.

John Edwards stepped up and showed some leadership. He reminded his opponents that this campaign isn't about their personal lives; it's about the future of our country, and what we should do to make it a better place.

Edwards talked about the issues, and in the process he took a debate that was descending into meaninglessness and made it meaningful.

He probably gave a some of his opponents' supporters a serious case of buyer's remorse...and he showed why he still belongs in the game.

Watch for yourself:

::::::

The good news is that even though the media has decided it's a two-person race, the media doesn't get to decide a single damn thing.

We can see where this campaign is going. There's no doubt. And for now, the only person keeping the entire campaign from going thermonuclear is John Edwards.

At the very least, voting for Edwards will help him stay in the race, not only keeping the race focussed on issues, but also earning enough delegates to exert considerable sway over the the nomination process and allowing him to keep progressive issues at the center of the debate.

At best, he could win the nomination. Just because the pundits say it's impossible doesn't mean it can't happen. There are still 47 states left to go.

:::::::

If you're reading this, you're probably an Edwards partisan, or perhaps undecided. (If you're an Obamacan or a Hillaryite, you've probably just too much time on your hands.)

We are perilously close to this campaign becoming nothing more than a personality contest. And if voters in South Carolina and other states don't support John Edwards, the campaign will become a personality contest.

If that happens, the issues we care about -- the issues America cares about -- will get pushed to the side.

For that reason, please help spread this video across the net.

People need to see with their own eyes what will happen if John Edwards gets erased from this campaign. I think if they see what the stakes are, we can begin to wake them up.

How to share this video (for non-geeks):

1. Click the button labeled "Menu" on the video player.
2. Underneath URL, click the button labeled "Copy to Clipboard".
3. Open your favorite e-mail program. In the body of a new e-mail message paste the URL which you just copied. You'll see something like this: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-OuoLlds9o)

That's it! If you want to embed the video onto web pages or comments, simply click the copy to clipboard button underneath embed and then select paste when writing a post or diary or comment.

Campaigns have their highs and their lows. So far, Iowa has been our high point, and last weekend in Nevada was our lower point.

The vote next weekend is our next big opportunity.

I think that if Edwards does well, we'll look back at last night as the moment that put John Edwards back in the game.

Update: The front page of the Charlotte Observer captured the moment!

Update 2: I posted this diary at about 6am, a bit over 2.5 hours ago. Since that time, this video has been played almost 1,000 times. That's a damn good start to getting the word out about Edwards' debate moment!

Update 3: Now 9 hours after the diary posted, the video has been played almost 4,500 times, along with about 1,500 for an earlier first version! Given that there are many other more prominent sources of information about the moment (take, for example, the Charlotte Observer front page in the first update), I'm pretty confident this moment is going to sink in with the Democratic primary electorate!

Update 4: CNN people meter shows voters preferred Edwards as Clinton and Obama squabbled

Without John Edwards in the race, the Democratic primary would very quickly descend into a nasty, scorched earth campaign. If you think it's bad now, you haven't seen anything. Hillary and Obama stepped up to the brink, and I think the main reason why they pulled back was the presence of John Edwards.

Although Edwards has been marginalized as a candidate, he's still a serious candidate, and if Hillary and Obama were to engage in all out political warfare, there's a chance Edwards could actually win the nomination. Certainly, he could win enough delegates to effectively control the convention.

Obama slams mandating families to get health care once again. Why didn't anyone call him out on the fact that his plan mandates health care coverage for children?

Edwards still has a role in nominating process

Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, January 21, 2008

(snip)

The mystery as to why Edwards' campaign hasn't drawn more support is simultaneously baffling and simple to explain. His positions on most major issues are similar to Clinton's and Obama's; often he has been the first to state a position only to have them follow with a similar policy.

His health care plan offers universal coverage where Obama's doesn't. Clinton's plan is similar to Edwards', and was released seven months after his.

This month, Edwards called for a quicker and more complete pullout of U.S. troops and training forces from Iraq than either Clinton or Obama. In 2002, then-Sen. Edwards voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, as did Clinton. Obama publicly opposed it.

Lost in Clinton's boasting of her political experience is that Edwards is the most experienced and vetted national candidate; he was the Democratic vice presidential nominee four years ago. Clinton has been pulling in strong numbers of working-class voters thus far, despite Edwards counting on the support of many major unions throughout the country - the folks experienced at doing the thankless grunt work of a political campaign.

He was among the first candidates to fully embrace online campaigning - even experimenting with new social networking tools like Twitter - yet he has only a fraction of Obama's presence on Facebook, the online tool that proved valuable in organizing young voters in Iowa.

Edwards has talked most aggressively about removing the power of corporate influence from politics, but voters have been telling exit pollsters that Obama is the candidate most likely to bring the amorphous concept of "change" to Washington.

Even Edwards' supporters admit that his problems have less to do with policy differences than with Edwards getting overlooked in the media's focus on the historic candidacies of Clinton and Obama, the best-funded woman and African American to run for president. Even after Edwards finished second in the Iowa caucus this month, he received only a fraction of the media coverage that Obama and Clinton did in the following days, and slightly more than former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican who barely competed there, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's campaign coverage index.

It's not just corporate media blackout of John Edwards.

It's also a big money blackout, and it's just as bad.

Maybe even worse.

(Note: The figures in this diary are somewhat out-of-date because the last Federal Elections Commission filing was on September 30. We'll have updated numbers in the next couple of of weeks. When they come in, expect the gap to widen significantly.)

In the 2008 fundraising battle, Hillary Clinton has outpaced John Edwards by $60 million and Barack Obama has outraised him by $50 million.

Edwards' fundraising disadvantage has served as a muzzle, depriving him of the dollars he needs to compete throughout the country. In Iowa and New Hampshire he was heavily outspent; in Nevada, where Hillary and Obama took over the airwaves (with an assist from Ron Paul) it was as if John Edwards didn't even exist.

In short, it's the big money blackout of John Edwards.

It's not just Hillary. It's Obama, too.

Edwards trails Obama by $50 million.

As with Hillary, most of the gap is from big money donors, even though Obama has raised more than twice as much as Edwards from small donors.

Combined, Hillary and Obama have a $110 million fundraising advantage over John Edwards.

$90 million of that comes from big donors.

Among small donors, just $789,000 separates John Edwards from Hillary Clinton. Yet among big donors, the gap is $57 million.

In effect, a relative handful of big donors has drowned out the voices of small donors who simply cannot afford to donate one thousand or two thousand -- let alone $4,600 -- to a Presidential campaign.

Out of all the presidential candidates, John Edwards ranks sixth in fundraising. Three Republicans -- McCain, Giuliani, and Romney -- have outraised him.

Despite the fact that these three Republicans have collectively outraised John Edwards by about $50 million, Edwards has raised more money than each of them from small donors.

It's the big donors that give them a bigger voice than Edwards.

Even though I might be jealous, I don't begrudge Hillary or Obama for having the support that they do amongst big donors.

I'm not asking them to tie their hands behind their backs.

Given their access to financial resources, they would have been crazy to participate in the hopelessly inadequate pubic financing system, which is proving itself to be even less useful than originally promised.

Even though Edwards and Clinton raised about the same amount of money from small donors, big donors have overwhelmingly favored her.

That's hardly surprising. She's a sitting United States Senator and as such, has more power than John Edwards. She's got a better fundraising network.

The same is true for Barack Obama.

As a result, Clinton and Obama have received 88% of big dollar donations. Just 12% have gone to John Edwards.

A lot of you who will be reading this have already donated money to John Edwards, just as I have. Perhaps you are one of the relatively few big donors to John Edwards.

Whatever the case, it's become very clear that is that there are precious few big donors who are enamored of a populist message.

Meanwhile, there are are plenty of big donors that like corporate-friendly messages, and to those candidates they offer their support aggressively and often.

As a result, my voice is has been blacked out.

Your voice is been blacked out.

It makes me angry.

We've still got freedom of speech.

We've still got the first amendment.

But even if we have all the freedom in the world, if we don't have a voice -- it's not enough.

Matt Stoler offers a good explanation of why Obama's Reagan comments we're wrong. Imagine if Bush said this:

We're still having the same arguments. It's all around regulations and smaller government and it's all ... even when you discuss traditional values the frame of reference is all around abortion. Well, that's not my frame of reference. My frame of reference is "what works." When I first came out against abortion, my first line was I don't oppose all abortions, specifically, to make clear that this is not a theocratic, you know, snake-handling prayer vigil kind of approach."

I think Lyndon Johnson changed the trajectory of the country in a way that JFK did not and Nixon did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of racism and anti-communism and government refusing to raise taxes to care for the poor and the elderly, I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, we want a return to that sense of community and compassion that had been missing."

If you're a pro-choice Democrat, you'd probably be somewhat happy. If you're a pro-life Republican, you'd probably never vote for Bush in a primary.

(h/t TheShoveler)

AP is countering John Edwards' claim to be the Democrat most capable of beating John McCain by citing a poll which excluded Edwards.

Edwards has made the electability claim against McCain in campaign ads that are based on a CNN poll taken before Iowa's caucuses that had him as the only Democrat with more support than Republicans in head-to-head match ups. But since then Obama won Iowa and Clinton won New Hampshire. After the New Hampshire contest, CNN's polling showed Clinton and Obama lead GOP contenders in head-to-head matchups.

The problem? A month earlier in that same poll, Edwards beat McCain by 8 points in the same poll while Obama tied.

In fact, if you look at every poll (there's eleven) taken since July 1 testing Edwards, Clinton, and Obama versus McCain, John Edwards is the most electable.

Here's the numbers:

I think I'd better forgive Obama for this one. From ObamaBlog:

I haven't seen it, but I just read it, and it was fantastic. He rejected many of the things that I was worried his recent commentary in Reno had embraced, suggesting to me that he's just doing what politicians do best.

Now the only thing that I want to be reassured on is that he recognizes the limits of the libertarian approach towards dealing with social injustice.

The best recent example that pops to my mind of the limitations of this approach is typified in this NYT oped by his economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee.

Goolsbee's take is massively, terribly wrong, and obviously so, even at the time.

‘Irresponsible’ Mortgages Have Opened Doors to Many of the Excluded By AUSTAN GOOLSBEE

Almost every new form of mortgage lending — from adjustable-rate mortgages to home equity lines of credit to no-money-down mortgages — has tended to expand the pool of people who qualify but has also been greeted by a large number of people saying that it harms consumers and will fool people into thinking they can afford homes that they cannot.

Congress is contemplating a serious tightening of regulations to make the new forms of lending more difficult. New research from some of the leading housing economists in the country, however, examines the long history of mortgage market innovations and suggests that regulators should be mindful of the potential downside in tightening too much.

(snip)

...the mortgage market has become more perfect, not more irresponsible. People tend to make good decisions about their own economic prospects. As Professor Rosen said in an interview, “Our findings suggest that people make sensible housing decisions in that the size of house they buy today relates to their future income, not just their current income and that the innovations in mortgages over 30 years gave many people the opportunity to own a home that they would not have otherwise had, just because they didn’t have enough assets in the bank at the moment they needed the house.”

(snip)

For be it ever so humble, there really is no place like home, even if it does come with a balloon payment mortgage.

This was wrong in so many ways. To wit:

While homeownership rates for whites has gone up under George W. Bush, homeownership for blacks has barely increased.

As the mortage meltdown continues, I'd be surprised if it doesn't become a net decrease, further.

Ideas like the one embraced above are dangerous. They not only raise false hopes, they make an unjust situation even worse, while pricks like Angelo Mozilo make out like bandits.

Rather than focusing on exotic mortgage products as a way to achieve social justice, what about taking the real problem head-on -- rising income inequality, particularly by race.

One of Obama's current proposals is allowing non-itemizers to deduct interest payments from their income taxes.

That will be a nice little tax bonus to people who don't usually get them, but it strikes me as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

What we need to do is protect people from manipulative insurance brokers, mortage companies, and real estate agents with reasonable but strong regulations.

Just as importantly, we need to deal with the underlying issues driving economic inequality: poor education, poverty, the criminal justice system, and both sexism and racism.

Today, Barack Obama's speech suggested he recognizes that fundamental truth. I hope to see more of that from him in the years to come.

Senator Obama, congratulations on your big victory. It was hard-fought, and richly-deserved.

You've talked the talk about the importance of winning a mandate, and yesterday you walked the walk, winning a clear and resounding victory in the state of Nevada.

Although your opponent won 51% of the delegates, and was supported by 48% of caucus-goers, you pulled off a stunning win-while-behind victory with just 45% of the delegates and 41% of caucus-goers.

All week long, you've been battling for the important principle of one-person, one-vote, but today you celebrate, because winning is awesome, and screw what you said the day before yesterday.

Some people call it hypocrisy, but it's not. It's change we can believe in.

Senator Obama, the best part of your victory today is it reminds us of your bipartisan spirit. You won the support of rural Nevada by mythologizing Ronald Reagan, and today you take advantage of a delegate tallying system that would make George W. Bush blush.

The media has been treating you horribly unfairly by ignoring this historic win. In fact, it's part of a broader pattern of media bias.

For some time now, it's been clear that the media users state delegates to determine the order of finish in caucus states.

For example, in Iowa, the media declared John Edwards to be the second-place winner, because he got more state delegates than Hillary Clinton, the third-place loser.

Of course, the media ignored the fact that Hillary Clinton actually got more national delegates than John Edwards.

The fact is that Hillary was the true second-place winner in Iowa, and you defended her right to claim second-place as her own, speaking out her behalf, your voice ringing clear as a bell in the wilderness.

The same thing happened in New Hampshire.

On November 8, the biased media reported that Hillary Clinton had beaten you, but the fact is that you tied her.

It was outrageous then that they reported Hillary had won New Hampshire, and it's outrageous now that that are reporting she won Nevada.

Just like you spoke up passionately then to defend her second-place finish in Iowa, and to assert the fact that you tied in New Hampshire, today I passionately defend your crushing victory, in the face of great odds.

You won, fair and square, and deserve all the congratulations in the entire world, and you get them, from me.

I will stand with you, and demand the media recognize your awesomeness, even if that makes you the laughingstock of the world.

There is nothing more important than defending your right to claim victory here, at all costs, for if Hillary were to win a majority of national convention delegates, it would be nothing more than a tyranny of the majority.

Tee hee. Ha ha ha.

He's outdoing himself now.

Losing. Respect. Fast.

The UNITE HERE leadership got what they deserved -- a big fat donut.

If they had endorsed John Edwards, Edwards would have had a shot in this state, proving the union's relevancy.

Instead, they endorsed the Glibertarian Candidate, and failed to deliver. Only 2 of 9 caucus sites on the Strip went for the Culinary Candidate.

Effectively, they made themselves irrelevant because they endorsed a neoliberal glibertarian. I'm glad. When will progressives learn? Stick together!

H/T to Salo for this turn of phrase: Obama, Glibertarian.

It dawned on me today while driving to have lunch with a friend in town to visit her boyfriend that Obama is a libertarian. A Democratic libertarian, but a libertarian nonetheless.

I mentioned it to some folks at DailyKos, and they responded with these awesome links.

This article makes the case for Obama, arguing that his economic guru, Austan Goolsbee, offers a policy formulation that is orthogonal to the liberal conservative axis. Make sure to read the comments on this one. Massive hilarity.

A screed or two from eriposte. Yes.

Finally, the orthogonalution article linked to an NYT piece penned last March by Goolsbee.

I read it. More massive hilarity ensued.

And this study shows that measured this way, the mortgage market has become more perfect, not more irresponsible. People tend to make good decisions about their own economic prospects. As Professor Rosen said in an interview, “Our findings suggest that people make sensible housing decisions in that the size of house they buy today relates to their future income, not just their current income and that the innovations in mortgages over 30 years gave many people the opportunity to own a home that they would not have otherwise had, just because they didn’t have enough assets in the bank at the moment they needed the house.”

I have to be diplomatic here, because I think that Goolsbee is a good friend of a good friend of mine.

So here's what I'll say. I'm not an economist. I know nothing about economics. Still, I would have laughed my ass off had I read that article in March.

Even as dumb as I am, it was clear the shitpile was bound to implode. In 2000, our residential debt was about half our GDP. By 2006, the number had risen to 83%.

That's a recipe for shitty things, and we haven't seen the half of them yet.

I'm only 34. I wish people my age (or a few years older as in Goolsbee's and Obama's cases) would stop trying to reinvent the fucking wheel.

Update: In this article George Will heeps some lovin' onto Austan Goolsbee.

Obama supporter: We won the caucus even though Hillary won a majority of delegates!

Their argument: when the dust settles, because of a few quirks in caucus procedures which cause rural areas to be overrepresented, Obama will win 13 delegates and Hillary just 12 even though more caucusgoers supporter Hillary.

I've got no way to evaluate the veracity of this claim, however the state party chairwoman did say this:

“I don’t know why they’re saying that,” said Jill Derby, president of the Nevada State Democratic Party, referring to the Obama campaign. “We don’t select our national delegates the way they’re saying. We won’t select national delegates for a few more months.”

This all does sound like the kind of thing James Baker would have said on George W. Bush's behalf in Florida, circa 2000.

Funny stuff, coming from a campaign that claims to pride itself on one person, one vote.

Update: Other Obama supporters are going Dennis Kucinich (of the NH recount) on us. I saw nothing untoward; indeed in my precinct, Hillary lost a delegate to us so that we could be viable.

Update 2: Obama's campaign manager is joining in on the asshattery.

Any doubts I had about whether or not Edwards' candidacy hurts Hillary more than Obama were erased today at my precinct caucus.

As you know, Edwards lost handily statewide, mostly because of the 15% viability threshold.

In my precinct we had 83 caucusers and 5 delegates.

We started out 42 for Hillary, 29 for Obama, 9 for Edwards, 3 undecided.

I gave a short one minute speech asking for supporters to make us viable -- we needed 4.

We ended up getting 6 additional supporters -- 3 from Hillary, and the 3 from undecided.

If it weren't for those Hillary supporters, we wouldn't have hit the 15 that we needed -- we would have been stuck at 12.

Since most of us would have either supported Hillary or (in my case) remained uncommitted, Hillary would have ended up with 3 delegates and Obama 2.

Instead, we got 1, Hillary got 2 and Obama got 2.

So Hillary supporters -- in my precinct -- gave up a 3:2 victory in order to help John Edwards remain viable.

For that, I owe them -- and all Hillary supporters -- my thanks. Unlike the Obama supporters, they stayed after the caucus voting ended to take care of the nitty gritty party details. They care about the party. All the Obama supporters just left.

I won't forget.

Barack Obama should have repudiated the divisive attack ad suggesting that Hillary Clinton is anti-Hispanic.

One month ago he attacked Edwards for receiving support from a positive ad. He said that he walked the walk.

Obama missed his chance. He's nothing more than a typical politician. A good one, but a typical one.

After winning in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton proudly proclaimed that she had rediscovered her voice. There was actually some meat to her statement; unlike in Iowa, in New Hampshire, Hillary took questions and answered them. During the debate, she wasn't afraid of showing a measured, appropriate dose of anger when challenged.

After New Hampshire, for a few days at least, everything seemed to be going in her direction. The only problem she faced was blowback from the drip-drip-drip pattern of racially tinged statements made by her and her campaign, most notably her dismissive view of MLK.

The real problem for Hillary came in Charleston on Sunday when she appeared with Bob Johnson, and he directly raised the race issue, taking a swipe at Obama's teenage years in the process. Things turned south for her after that moment, and badly.

I don't think the problem was anything in particular that Bob Johnson said, however.

I think it was that Hillary Clinton seemed to think the only way she could reach out to black voters was by having a black man speak on her behalf. It didn't help things that she picked a surrogate who was singularly unfit for the task.

Instead of choosing Bob Johnson to speak for her, she could have addressed the controversy on her own, confronting the suspicions about her campaign in her own voice.

This whole episode should put to rest the offensive notion that there are "gatekeepers" to the black vote, and that white politicians can do or say whatever they want as long as they appear with a prominent black person from time to time.

There's no doubt that Hillary Clinton would have been better off speaking from her own mouth -- white though she may be -- instead of relying on a surrogate merely for the color of his skin.

But she didn't, and now the question for her campaign is whether she will be able to regain her voice yet another time.

From Hillary Clinton's web site:

Eleven Salmon Press Weekly Newspapers Endorse Hillary Clinton for President

She must break recent tradition, cast cronyism aside and fill her cabinet with the best people, not only the best Democrats, but the best Republicans as well.. We’re confident she will do that. Her list of favorite presidents - Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Truman, George H.W. Bush and Reagan - demonstrates how she thinks.

Now her research team is splitting hairs, arguing with the choice of the word "favorite" which they included in their own press release.

In an effort to divert attention from Senator Obama’s comments about President Reagan and his assertion that the GOP has been the "party of ideas," the Obama campaign circulated an item this evening from the Salmon Press in New Hampshire that asserts that Senator Clinton listed the former President as one of her favorite presidents. In fact, Senator Clinton only complimented President Reagan’s communications skills – an attribute of his that has been widely praised by Americans of all ideological stripes – and did not list him as one of her favorite presidents. She also noted that she respected George H.W. Bush.

David Cutler, the co-owner of Salmon Press Newspapers, released the following statement:

"The question posed was originally what portraits would you hang in the White House if you were President and as the dialogue progressed, who are the presidents you admire most?

She listed several presidents that she admired and mentioned she liked Reagan’s communication skills. She did not say Reagan was her favorite President. She didn’t say anything close to that."

This does not excluse Barack Obama in the slightest, but it does serve as a reminder that John Edwards is the single best choice as the Democratic nominee in 2008.

(Earlier, I posted a version including video clips from Iowa. This version focuses on just the ad.)

In the final debate of the 1980 presidential election, Jimmy Carter addressed the need for national health insurance, taking Ronald Reagan to task for opposing universal coverage.

Reagan dismissed Carter's criticism with one the most memorable lines in presidential campaign history: "There you go again," he said.

Twelve years later, in 1992, Bill Clinton became the Democratic nominee for president. He delivered a stirring acceptance speech, ending with a reference to his birthplace, Hope, Arkansas.

"I end tonight where it all began for me," he said.

"I still believe in place called Hope."

His speech was followed by a rousing celebration, the mood captured by the signature anthem of his campaign, Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)".

Over the next few months, Clinton campaigned on a simple message, developed by James Carville. George Stephanopoulos called it a haiku, and it stayed on the campaign's white board, pictured above, for the duration of the contest.

Change versus more of the same

It's the economy, stupid

Don't forget health care

In the final staff meeting of the campaign, a wide-eyed Stephanopoulos, brimming with confidence that Clinton was would win the election, told the assembled staffers that because of their work, more people would have better health care for less money. They had brought change to America.

Despite Stephanopoulos's optimism and good intentions, things didn't work out as he -- and we -- had planned and hoped.

In 1992, 15.0% of the population had no health coverage. Today, 15.8% are without care.

In 1992, we spent 13.8% of our GDP on health care. Today, we spend 16.0%.

It wasn't supposed to happen that way. But it did.

We were supposed to get universal health care. But we didn't.

Why not?

Did Bill Clinton fail to inspire us?

Did he not offer us hope?

Was it because the American public did not want universal health care?

If Hillary Clinton had televised the task force meetings on C-SPAN, would Congress have enacted her proposal?

Was Bill Clinton too divisive?

Was it because powerful, entrenched interests stopped us?

What does that mean for today?

What are the biggest challenges we face now?

Is it a lack of inspiration?

Is it that we've lost all hope?

Is the problem with the American people, or is it with the structure of our political system?

What do we need to do to overcome those obstacles?

These are the questions to ask yourself.

Barack Obama is directly encouraging Republicans to cross party lines and vote for him in the Democratic caucus here in Nevada on Saturday.

It's a not-so-transparent ploy to attract anti-Hillary Republicans who have no intention of voting Democratic in the general election.

In his ad, Obama touts the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a right-wing newspaper which endorsed Obama and compared Hillary Clinton to a "horror movie" rerun, invoking the specter of Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones.

Apparently, Obama wants to keep his pitch to Republicans under the radar because his television ads make no reference to the Review-Journal.

In the endorsement, the newspaper's editorial board harshly criticized Obama's rivals:

Suffice it to say there are dozens of issues that Americans happily dismissed as "water under the bridge" as the Clinton era came to a close, but which would quickly ensnare Sen. Clinton and her party in a presidential race that would soon look like a struggle to escape the La Brea tar pits.

For starters, imagine Sen. Clinton and "co-president" Bill Clinton invited onto a "This is Your Life" talk show where they're joined by Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky.

And that's before we even get around to a HillaryCare plan that could have sent you to jail for offering to pay your doctor in cash to "get to the head of the line."

Meanwhile, John Edwards' anti-capitalist populism is not in this country's long-term best interests.

The irony is that the Review-Journal wasn't too kind to Obama, either:

Is Barack Obama, then, the ideal Democratic candidate for president? Hardly. His policy recommendations -- when he can be convinced to get any more specific than "I represent change" -- are the opposite of "change." They're old-line, welfare-state solutions that haven't spent enough time in the microwave to appear even superficially appetizing.

Obama keeps on telling us that he's the only Democrat who knows how to appeal to Republicans.

No thanks. Not this way.

I won't be caucusing for Hillary Clinton on Saturday (I support John Edwards), but I don't want Hillary-hating Republicans selecting our party's nominee.

Republicans have driven our party's agenda for far too long.

No more. This must stop.

The ad speaks for itself. I can't believe Obama would associate himself with something like this.

Hat tips: Ben Smith and Taylor Marsh.

Washington Post:

Labor Group to Air Radio Ads for Obama in Nevada

By Matthew Mosk
While labor unions have played a heavy role supporting Hillary Clinton and John Edwards during the early state contests this month, Barack Obama has largely had to fend for himself.

No longer. The group UNITE HERE, which represents 440,000 textile and hotel and restaurant workers, gave Obama his first national labor endorsement last week. And this morning, the group filed reports with the Federal Election Commission that disclosed it was producing more than $34,000 in radio ads to air in Nevada in advance of the caucus there.

Remember when Obama said outside groups were evil?

Good for him for taking the money now, but what a fucking hypocrite!

Funny, edgy new site out from the Edwards campaign about the abysmal job done by the media in covering John Edwards.

The best part? This video:

According to Barack Obama, Republicans have been "the party of ideas" over the last ten to fifteen years because they were "challenging conventional wisdom." He made the claim during the same interview in which he called Ronald Reagan's presidency transformative.

Obama conceded that at present, the Republicans are no longer the party of ideas.

JedReport was unable to reach Newt Gingrich, the chief intellectual of the Republican Party for comment. JedReport was able to confirm that Albert Gore, has had an idea or two over the last fifteen years, however.

During the interview, Obama also expressed pride in having changed the political dialog of America, and cited Mitt Romney as his prime example.

He was talking about the very same Mitt Romney who has spent more money on attack ads than all the other presidential candidates combined. Just over two weeks ago, CNN reported:

Two negative ads recently launched by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who has spent more on advertising than any other candidate, either misrepresent his rival's records or include distortions, according to a CNN analysis of the commercials. (emphasis added)

This is the man who Barack Obama proudly cites as evidence he has brought about a shift in political paradigms?

Here's what Obama said:

One of the things I’m very proud of about this campaign is that I think we’ve already changed the political dialogue...when Mitt Romney starts talking like me...you have somebody like Huckabee who is doing very well basically taking a similar tone...I think we are shifting the political paradigm here.

Here's video of Obama's claim:

Confused? So am I. I honestly have no idea what in the hell Obama is talking about.

It’s either another one of Obama's completely meaningless bloviations or a political analysis conducted on a geometric plane I've never heard of before (perhaps for those times when triangulation just won't do).

Mind you, I'm not saying that Obama didn't put on a fine display of triangulation in the video. In addition to his comments about Republicans being the party of ideas, he said this about earmarks:

We are not blameless. In fairness, the Democrats have reduced the earmarks process..but there is no doubt that it’s still the predominant way in which infrastructure and projects get determined in Washington, and that’s part of the reason why I worked on a bipartisan basis with a Republican, Tom Coburn...we’ve set up what we call Google for Government.

On whether he considers himself a fiscal conservative:

You know, I do, although I think the Republicans would scoff at that. ... We can’t waste money, I don’t care whether it’s wasting it in the Pentagon or we’re wasting it on social programs that have outlived their usefulness.

On partisan gridlock:

The general attitude of whoever’s the minority party is we’re just going to block things from happening. The majority party is typically pushing a highly ideological agenda. Now, I confess, I’m a Democrat, so I don’t think it’s completely even...but we’re not blameless in this.

On his bipartisan appeal:

In 2006...I was the most requested surrogate to come in and campaign for people in districts that were swing districts, Republican districts where they wouldn’t have any other Democrat.

Here's video:

In the interests of fairness to the Senator, I've managed to unearth video of him effusively singing Kennedy's praises (sic) after his commentary on Ronald Reagan.

My finder's reward for that video is the right to highlight these two quotes one more time:

The country was ready for it...with all the excesses of the 60s and 70s, and government had grown and grown.

He [Reagan] tapped into what people were already feeling which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

Video of Obama on Reagan, including the "lost" JFK tapes:

Okay, I admit it. Ronald Reagan’s presidency was transformational. And Obama did mention JFK.

Score two for the Gipper.

But let's turn back to the issue at hand: Obama's narrative about Ronald Reagan's presidency.

The narrative stars a government grown out of control, and a populace eager to emerge from two decades of social unrest. Against that backdrop, Reagan rose to victory by uniting the country behind his optimism and delivering transformative change.

Bleh. What planet does Obama live on?

His narrative completely excludes stagflation, high gas prices, and the hostage crisis in Iran. Think they might have been factors in the 1980 election?

He also fails to reconcile the fact that Reagan won just 50.7% of the vote in 1980 (his landslide was in 1984) with his theory that there was a unified national mood.

He also fails to explain why, if the nation was so unified, 1980 saw one of the strongest third-party campaigns in 20th century American history.

Moreover, Obama ignores the racism that was fundamental to Ronald Reagan's campaign. Recall that Reagan began his campaign with a call for state's rights in Philadelphia, MS.

One of the reasons that Reagan won is that he was so good on television.

He utterly devastated Carter in the last debate.

Here are his two most famous moments. First, when Reagan said "there you go again" in response to Jimmy Carter's call for a national health care system. Second, when Reagan asked the ultimate "me" question: "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"

Finally, Obama's narrative leaves out the fact that fear of the USSR dominated the 1980s. Watch this ad from Reagan’s 1984 campaign:

Put aside the issues of whether or not Obama’s words were praise of Ronald Reagan, or whether Reagan’s presidency was transformational.

That’s not the important issue: the important issue is that Barack Obama has a deeply flawed view of history. He's entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.

In the same interview, Obama proffered a second peculiar narrative, this one about the 1960s and 1970s, casting their legacy of cultural division as one of the biggest obstacles we face in getting things done in Washington, DC.

I know -- it doesn't make any sense to me either.

In the Senator's words:

People feel like we're bogged down in the same arguments we have been having and they’re not useful.

I didn’t come of age in the battles of the 60s...so I think I talk differently about issues and I think I talk differently about values, and that’s why I think we’ve been resonating.

Even when you discuss war, the frame of reference is all Vietnam. That’s not my frame of reference, my frame of reference is what works.

Even when I opposed the war in Iraq, my first line was I don’t oppose all wars – specifically to make clear that this is not just a anti-military seventies love-in kind of approach.

Anti-military seventies love-in kind of approach? Sounds cool to me.

Although we remember Ronald Reagan as the Great Communicator, the political backdrop of the 1980s was fear of the USSR and nuclear annihilation. Here is one of Ronald Reagan's most famous political advertisements:

That just isn't the politics of hope. Not even close. It's the politics of fear.

Even on domestic politics, Reagan's policies were reactionary. Here he is at a debate in 1980, challenging President Carter's proposal for national health insurance.

In the same clip, Reagan poses the rhetorical question he made famous:

"Are YOU better off today than YOU were four years ago?"

That's the politics of me, not the politics of we.

Obama also clearly forgot about this shitty moment in presidential campaign history:

Full video of Obama at RGJ

Klein thought Edwards seemed "unusually subdued" in last night's debate.

He's probably unware that Edwards was -- to put it bluntly -- muzzled by General Electric's television company. While Obama spoke for 34 minutes, and Hillary for 27, Edwards spoke for just under 22. Edwards was asked 19 questions, compared to 28 for Obama and 23 for Hillary.

Media bias is powerful stuff. Even the good guys get snookered.

Clinton post-debate spinner is a top Washington, DC lobbyist.

Six degrees of Burson-Marsteller

Remember those sovereign wealth funds that Hillary talked about cracking down on last night?

Yes, the firm of which her Mark Penn is worldwide CEO represents the Abu Dhabi fund that bought a 5% stake in CitiGroup this fall.

(via JedReport)

During Tuesday night's Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton renewed her call for "aggressive" measures to reign in sovereign wealth funds, the investment funds owned by oil-producing states like the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. She said she was "very concerned" about the multi-trillion dollar funds which are now buying substantial shares of American enterprises such as Citigroup and Merill Lynch.

Clinton, who first raised this issue six weeks ago, said the funds "need to be more transparent," adding "we need to have a lot more control over what they do and how they do it."

Despite Clinton's tough talk about transparency, she failed to disclose that her chief campaign strategist has close business connections with sovereign wealth funds owned by Abu Dhabi and Dubai, two small -- but oil-rich -- emirates located on the Persian Gulf coast.

The Clinton strategist, Mark Penn, is worldwide CEO of Burson-Marsteller, one of the most powerful lobbying and public relations firms in the world.

Burson-Marsteller represents sovereign wealth funds in at least two emirates

Last August, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth fund, hired Burson-Marsteller to represent its global interests.

Three months later the fund invested $7.5 billion in Citigroup, giving it a 4.9% stake in Citigroup and making it the firm's largest shareholder.

Before Abu Dhabi's investment, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal was Citigroup's largest shareholder, a title he will likely reclaim after Tuesday's announcement that he will expand his 4.4% stake in the company.

In addition to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Burson-Marsteller also represents at least two other Dubai-based sovereign wealth funds. In late 2006, Penn's firm formed an exclusive partnership with JiWin Public Relations, a Dubai-based public relations firm representing more than twenty firms, including several sovereign wealth funds owned by the government of Dubai.

According to the partnership agreement, "JiWin will work with Burson-Marsteller clients across the United Arab Emirates, Gulf Cooperation Council States (GCC) and the Levant."

In return, "Burson-Marsteller will support JiWin clients as they seek to expand to global markets."

At the time, Penn welcomed the deal enthusiastically. "We are excited about our new partnership with JiWin and welcome them into our global network," he said. "The UAE, GCC and the Levant all hold compelling prospects for our business and our clients and we look forward to further expanding our broad range of public relations services into this region."

In Dubai, Burson-Marsteller and JiWin now share office space. Their clients include Dubai Group and Dubai International Capital, which owns 3% stakes in both Airbus and Sony, among other companies. After completing the acquisition of a British company with U.S. factories, Dubai International Capital announced plans to open an office in the United States.

Sovereign wealth funds are a $1.6 trillion component of a "petrodollar investment cache" that has reached $4 trillion globally, fueled by skyrocketing oil prices and expected to continue growing rapidly. From 2002-2006, oil producing states from the Persian Gulf invested $300 billion in the United States, according to published reports. The pace of investment is accelerating. In Las Vegas, for example, Dubai World recently aquired half of MGM Grand's CityCenter project.

Penn: Working for Hillary "good for business"

In addition to his work as head of a lobbying and polling firm, Penn has been a senior political adviser to both Bill and Hillary Clinton since the mid-1990s. He was the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton's senate campaigns in 2000 and 2006 and is currently the chief strategist of her presidential campaign.

According to Bloomberg, last year Penn discussed "Workin With Hillary" with his colleagues.

"I have found the mixing of corporate and political work to be stimulating, enormously helpful in attracting talent, and helpful in cross-pollinating new ideas and skills," he said.

"I have found it good for business."

Video from the debate

Clinton's comments came in response to a question from NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. During her answer, Clinton made no mention of Penn's ties to the Dubai-based sovereign wealth fund despite her demand for transparency.

(Update 2:54am: This is a complete update of the original story, with additional details and information.)

Al From's worst nightmare is John Edwards in the White House.

It's already bad enough that Edwards is driving much of the policy debate, pushing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama towards a more progressive agenda.

But if Edwards were to win the Democratic nomination and ride his populist message to the presidency, his campaign would betray the false premise of From's Democratic Leadership Council: that only centrist, pro-business Democrats can win.

In late November, From made his case against John Edwards and populism:

The Clinton-New Democrat formula is the only formula with a track record of winning both the nomination and the general election. The track record in recent elections shows that the populist formula doesn't really deliver the very voters it's aimed at - white male, working-class voters - probably because they are the most skeptical of government delivering on its promises. ... The Edwards campaign is this year's attempt to restore the populist constituency in the Democratic Party. Certainly, his rhetoric is a test of the populist message.

Key voters in recent elections have been moderates, independents, and middle-income families. We lost them in 2004, won them in 2006. And, it's not clear that the populist message wins them over.

The implication of From's argument is logical fallacy. President Clinton won as a New Democrat, but that does not mean his formula is the only one than can win. Moreover, From's characterization of populism as a strategy to win white male, working class voters is a strawman. Populism, especially Edwards' brand, offers a coherent message about corporate greed and excess. It is designed to win a majority of the electorate -- an accomplishment President Clinton cannot claim.

From's assertion about Kerry losing moderates and independents is of questionable relevance. It also isn't reality-based. His claim about middle-income families is murkier; it depends whether you define middle-income relative to Americans in general, or relative to American voters in particular.

None of this is meant to malign President Clinton's political skills. He won two three-way contests, both by healthy margins, and nearly claimed a majority in 1996.

Clinton's victories did not remake the electoral universe for Democrats, however. They certainly didn't prove anything about the prospects for populism in 2008. Indeed, in 1992, Ross Perot won 19% of the vote as a third-party candidate with a populist message. We will never know if Clinton could have won over enough Perotistas with a different message to win a majority of the vote.

We do know that if Clinton had been able to win a majority, he would have been in a better position to govern.

Whatever the case, it's clear that Clinton's campaign wasn't a reaction against populism. Despite their liberal histories, the Democrats who lost before him didn't have populist platforms. Mondale ran on balancing the budget. Dukakis ran on competence over ideology. They were both demolished.

Indeed, in 2000, Gore offered a partisan version of populism and not only beat George W. Bush in the popular vote, but also won a higher percentage of the voting age population than did Clinton in either 1992 or 1996.

Unfortunately, in retrospect, members of the United States Supreme Court circa 2000 don't appear to have been populists.

Gore was of course pilloried by his former friends in the DLC for his winning strategy, chief among them Hillary Clinton's guru, Mark Penn.

Mr. Penn branded Mr. Gore's campaign one of "lost opportunity," saying Mr. Gore reverted to an old-style populism that alienated independent suburban white men. He did well among upper-income women, Mr. Penn said, largely because he supported abortion rights. But, he said, Mr. Gore "abandoned the fight for smaller government," losing "new economy" men who favored "smaller government, fiscal discipline and personal responsibility."

I'd like to remind Mark Penn: Gore won.

Were it not for SCOTUS, we would not be discussing this topic today.

There's no question any Democratic nominee must have a coherent message. Edwards brand of populism offers just that, and in 2008 it seems to be the right one.

Based on all public polls since July 1 featuring all three candidates tested against the same Republicans, John Edwards is clearly the most electable Democrat.

Even against the Republican's best candidate, Edwards leads the Democratic field.

Something wonderful is happening in 2008: our party's most progressive candidate is also the most electable.

If he wins the nomination, he'll win the presidency.

A John Edwards victory in November would literally destroy the entire rationale for the Democratic Leadership Council's existence.

This fact is clearly not lost on Al From, who capped off his argument with a scathingly negative personal attack:

Edwards personal actions - the $400 haircuts, the big house, and running a campaign much different than four years ago - also undercut his populist message

Call it the JedReport Rule: the first person to seriously bring up John Edwards' haircut or his residence automatically loses the debate.

Game over.

Just a few days ago, From continued his campaign against John Edwards.

D.L.C. Leaders Cut Edwards Out

By Ariel Alexovich

As would be expected, the two gentlemen from the Democratic Leadership Council on a conference call today told reporters they’re very confident in their party’s chances of reclaiming the White House, they’re happy that substantive issues are being discussed…

And then Al From, the D.L.C. founder, said he was “very happy about the two candidates” Americans are considering.

Only two candidates?

...

But what about John Edwards? He beat Mrs. Clinton in Iowa, as one reporter pointed out, but Mr. From still doesn’t think Mr. Edwards is viable.

From went on to misrepresent Edwards and launch another personal attack: he trotted out the notion that Edwards is a pessimist, not an optimist.

Edwards may be pessimistic that Bushonomics and crony capitalism will lead us to a better place, but don't most Americans agree with him?

It's obvious that Edwards is fundamentally optimistic that America can build a better future for itself.

Call it the second JedReport Rule: anyone who claims John Edwards is an enternal pessimist is full of crap.

Recently, I've documented how the corporate media is excluding John Edwards from its campaign coverage.

Part of the blame for this goes to corporate Democrats like Al From and Mark Penn have waged a war all year against John Edwards, pushing negative personal attacks and openly writing off Edwards' viability.

Al From can survive a loss by Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. He'll thrive if they win. But he will be utterly devastated if John Edwards wins.

And that's one more good reason to fight for John Edwards.

Please don't forget to donate another $10 to John Edwards and don't forget to help make history on January 18th.

Before William "iQ" Saletan became the world's dumbest man, he was already pretty fucking stupid. Said he in 2002:

Gore is wrong. His angry populism helped cost him the 2000 election. He doesn't understand this because he can't see the differences between Clinton's populism and his own. He's still arguing about it because he thinks fighting is noble. And he's doing it in such a pious way, quoting himself and selectively quoting others, because, as the 2000 presidential debates demonstrated, his driving imperative is to prove that he's right and his opponents are wrong. Any one of these flaws would be sufficient to justify denying him the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. Take your pick.

So funny, dude. So funny. I can see exploring the question: "Why didn't Al Gore win by a large enough margin to overcome SCOTUS and voter disenfranchisement?" But starting with the premise that he outright lost is hilarious.

Arguing that the reason he lost the contest because of his desire to "prove that he's right and his opponents are wrong" will keep me laughing the rest of the evening.

Meet Bob Johnson. He's the billionaire founder of BET. Bob is good friends with George W. Bush. Like Bush, Bob wants to eliminate the estate tax, which he says is racist. Bob also wants to eliminate Social Security. He says that's racist too. Now Bob is friends with Hillary Clinton, and he's attacking Barack Obama. Bob says Obama is insulting black people. Get real.

The thing you have to remember is how Bob made his money: by putting misogynistic videos on TV. Why is Hillary Clinton sitting with this man? Is this what she means when she says she found her voice?

p.s.: I came up with this response on my own, but not surprisingly it nearly mirrors the approach suggested by dnA at Too Sense. That's reassuring because I think dnA is one of the best -- and most original -- bloggers out there.

It's good hearing stuff like this, and even some in the media are paying attention.

Also, a new Nevada poll came out showing Edwards has dramatically narrowed the gap. Obama has 32, Hillary 30, and Edwards 27.

The Times is out with another primary survey, showing Edwards in third and Hillary in first, with Obama right between them, sixteen points ahead of Edwards and fifteen points behind Hillary.

One interesting thing in the survey was that while 24% of whites were supporting Obama, 34% of blacks were supporting Hillary Clinton.

The Times also once again demonstrated the media's bias against John Edwards. They mentioned him just one time in the article (to say he was a distant third), and even though the headline said Democrats focused on electability, they didn't bother to point out that every objective measure shows that John Edwards is the most electable Democrat.

I'm watching NBC News from tonight, and they are doing a piece about brewing conflict between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on race issues. (Actually, it would be more accurate to say the conflict that Hillary Clinton is attempting to brew.)

Anyway, last week she made some unfortunate comments in which she seemed to suggest that while MLK was inspiring, LBJ was the real hero of the civil rights movement.

So the NBC reporter says that her comment "unleashed a flood of angry responses."

Guess who he cuts to?

John Edwards.

What did John Edwards have to say about it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Edwards said that Hillary Clinton was living in a fairy tale if she thought she could bring change to Washington, a reference to a comment made by Bill Clinton about Barack Obama's positions on Iraq. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton have all said that comment had nothing to do with race.

Of course, the only time NBC ever reports on John Edwards it's to make him look "angry." Moreover, all to often it's "factually challenged."

Ridiculous.

Here's video:

One of the biggest myths spread by the corporate media and corporate Democrats about the 2008 election is that John Edwards' populist platform makes him the least electable Democrat. They claim that Edwards' rhetoric is a fiery, divisive brand of class warfare, and that Americans want a uniter like Barack Obama, or an experienced insider like Hillary Clinton -- not an "angry" outsider who will fight against the system.

This myth couldn't be more false. The reality is that John Edwards has a positive, progressive agenda. He wants to unify the country around rolling back three decades of unbridled corporate greed and excess. As a result, John Edwards is actually the most electable Democrat, despite what the corporate media wants us and our neighbors to believe.

Take John McCain, the most likely -- and the toughest -- Republican nominee. Polls consistently show that John Edwards does better than either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton against John McCain.

Since July 1, 2007, there have been ten public polls testing Edwards and McCain in a general election match-up. Edwards wins 7 of these, losing once and tying twice. His average margin of victory is 5.5 points.

No Democrat does better.

In those same polls, Barack Obama wins 6, tying and losing twice with an average margin of 2.5 points.

Hillary Clinton wins 5, losing four times and tying once. Her average margin is 0.2 points.

Edwards does best despite having been through the Republican attack machine not just in 2004, but also in 1998 when he defeated an incumbent Republican U.S. Senator in North Carolina.

Let me repeat that.

John Edwards defeated an incumbent Republican U.S. Senator in a red state.

Neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton has ever faced a tough Republican opponent. Ever.

Each of the potential Democratic nominees is favored to win this fall, but none are more likely than John Edwards. Moreover, because John Edwards starts out with the biggest lead, with him as our nominee, we would be able to focus more of our energy on winning congressional races than would the Republicans.

A bigger Democratic majority in Congress means we can get more done in 2009 and 2010. It matters.

Still, electability shouldn't be the most important factor in selecting a nominee. Many Democrats disagree. According to a recent Gallup survey, 45% of Democrats say it is more important to have a nominee who can beat the Republican candidate in November than to have a nominee who agrees with them on most issues.

Yet most Democrats think Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are more electable than John Edwards.

As I've shown, this just isn't true.

Why have they reached this judgment? I think the most basic answer is fear: we have been trained to believe that only moderates can win. We have been taught that politicians who take left-of-center positions do so at their own electoral risk.

Moreover, the corporate media has engaged in a relentless pattern of marginalizing John Edwards from their coverage of the 2008 election. When they have covered Edwards, much of the coverage has been negative, particularly in the second half of the year as criticisms of his progressive campaign have intensified.

Now the corporate media's exclusion of Edwards is reaching a crescendo. As jamess diaried, CNN has stopped including John Edwards in its general election polls. In CNN's most recent poll that actually included Edwards, Edwards beat McCain by by eight points. In that same poll, McCain beat Clinton by two points, and tied Obama.

Fox News has never once -- not once, not a single time -- done a general election poll featuring John Edwards, despite doing several with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

By now it should be obvious to you that the corporate media doesn't want you or your neighbor to vote for John Edwards.

Are you going to follow their instructions?

For once, the most progressive Democrat still in the race is also the most electable.

How could we pass up this opportunity to challenge the system?

Barack Obama talks so eloquently about turning down the temperature and all this stuff, but some of his supporters don't seem to get it.

There's a recommended diary over at DK calling Hillary out for "dirty politics" in NH because she played hardball with a pro-choice mailer. Yeah, it was a little misleading, but not dirty politics.

How conveniently they forget the sins of their own candidate, to wit:

At least Hillary was attacking from a liberal frame, not a reactionary one.

The diary also calls a squabble about Obama's GOTV operation in Nashua's ward 9 "voter suppression." That's not a fair characterization.

For the record, 2,137 people voted in ward 9, 881 for Hillary and 786 for Obama, so she took a net win of 95 votes. Obama lost by about 8,000.

Turnout in ward 9 was up 23% over 2004. It was up 27% citywide for all of Nashua. Hillary won every single ward in Nashua. It's not clear at all to me that even more turnout in ward 9 would have helped Obama.

Even if it had, it wouldn't have helped by much.

If Hillary is elected President, I hear that he's going to be the first openly cross-dressing First Lady in the history of the United States.

He's going to dress like a man.

There's also a rumor about Obama running around the internet -- supposedly, he fathered not one but two African-American children.

Scandalous.

As Clinton and Obama supporters in the blogosphere go to war on identity politics, it's useful to step back and remember who the real bad guys are.

On the night of the Iowa Caucus, Bill “abort black babies” Bennett said:

Well, I think it’s, again, a wonder of America here. A remarkable breakthrough this year. As the other group said, 97 percent, in fact, Iowa rural, white, farming — farming state. Barack Hussein Obama, a black man, wins this for the Democrats. I have been watching him. I watched him on “Meet the Press,” I’ve watched him on your show, watched him on all the CNN shows — he never brings race into it. He never plays the race card. Talk about the black community — he has taught the black community you don’t have to act like Jesse Jackson, you don’t have to act like Al Sharpton. You can talk about the issues. Great dignity. And this is a breakthrough. And good for the people of Iowa.

What a complete jackass. I love walking past the Bill Bennett memorial high roller slot room here at in Vegas at the Bellagio. What a cowardly, opportunistic asshole this man is.

dnA, guest blogging at Carpetbagger, reminds us that black people don’t vote solely based on race.

What are the odds that more whites in SC will vote for Obama than blacks in SC will vote for Hillary and Edwards combined? Not that the results will prove anything, either way, it’s just illustrative. More blacks vote for white Democrats on a % basis than evangelicals vote for white non-evangelical Republicans. (Just ask Mitt Romney.)

The Seahawks-Packers game was one of the most disappointing football games I've ever seen.

There was nothing good to take away from it. Nothing.

At least the Patriots-Jaguars game is a good one. Hopefully the Patriots will win it so I can salvage something from this shitty football day!

My previous post (on John Edwards) made the recommended list at Daily Kos, so at least the day wasn't all bad!

"...if anyone's in doubt: yes, Edwards is pissing off the right people." -- grannyhelen

#

As the primary process continues, amidst the daily barrage of broadsides fired from one campaign onto another, it's worth remembering that John Edwards is still talking about real issues.

John Edwards' campaign isn't about him. It's about us. It's about taking back power from the wealthy elites who want to run this country and putting it in our hands. It's about finally taking on the corporations that dominate more and more of the American economy. It's about challenging the system.

And it's pissing off the all right people.

Let's start with Rupert Murdoch. My, how John Edwards has pissed that man off.

Sure, Murdoch hates John Edwards because Edwards led the way amongst presidential candidates in pulling out of the Faux-news debates, helping expose his propaganda network for what it is.

But he hates John Edwards even more because John Edwards has spoken out publicly against the monopolization of America's media outlets into the hands of a small number of plutocrats like Murdoch. Murdoch's media empire fired back, calling Edwards a hypocrite, leaking confidential information, all in an attempt to smear John Edwards to avoid talking about the real issues.

Just look at the bile and vitriol spilling from these New York Post headlines. Two of the most savage attacks were directed as much as Nataline Sarkisyan and Elizabeth Edwards' as they were at Edwards.

Of course, Rupert Murdoch isn't the only right-wing corporatist to go after John Edwards with personal attacks.

Take the far-right Washington Times, for example. In the view of the editorial pages, Edwards is a “widely scorned” “sanctimonius hypocrite.” All in all, the Times says, “Mr. Edwards's rank hypocrisy is boundless.” On the bright side, he's "well-coifed" but "not ready for prime time."

Then there's that corporate wet dream, Mitt Romney, who apparently has quite a violent streak.

Every time I listen to someone like John Edwards get on TV and say there are two Americas I just want to throw something at the TV. -- Willard

You see, the problem isn't that there actually are two Americas -- one populated by wealthy elites like Mitt Romney, the other by just about everybody else. The problem is that people like John Edwards talk about the inequity of it all, and some day, the American public might decide to shove a big fat FU right in Mitt Romney's face.

Hell, even the Republican party can't stand Mitt Romney, the corporate swine.

As jamess diaried, big business is putting John Edwards on notice.

With the nation's economy increasingly becoming a volatile issue in the presidential campaign, the president of the United States Chamber of Commerce is about to issue one very tough promise to spend millions of dollars against candidates deemed to be anti-business. (Are you listening John Edwards?)

National Review, the rag read by the nation's conservative elite, just absolutely can't stand John Edwards. Byron York asks the probing question: “Is Edwards a phony?” Talk about expensive haircuts -- York knows a thing or two about those, I might guess. Rich Lowry affectionately (sic) calls John Edwards "The Hater" and accuses him of "unbridled hostility."

The grand-daddy of the entire crew of corporate warriors, one William F. Buckley, actually is an exception to the "if you fear, smear" rule of thumb. He understands that populism is a grave and serious danger to the plutocracy. So he does something almost unimaginable amongst these reactionaries: he actually engages Edwards on the issues. Sort of.

John Edwards Will Give You Free Health Care

By William F. Buckley Jr.

The word among professional Democrats is that John Edwards has set the stakes on the matter of health care, and no one who wants to be president can offer less than he is offering, which is — of course — guaranteed health. That is to say, guaranteed free health care.
...
Therefore, Mr. Edwards is doing nothing more than to call for increased taxes on the wealthy. They used to call that socialized medicine, when it was instituted by Great Britain after the war. It crossed the Atlantic into Canada, which is a tidy country in which to get sick, provided you can afford to travel across the border to an American doctor.

Perhaps a tad dishonest, but you've got to give Buckley this: the man is genuinely scared of populism.

George Will, the bow-tied pugilist, blathers on passionately about John Edwards, calling him "synthetic," a “histrionic huckster” who is "delusional." Edwards:

overflows with and wallows in the pugnacity of the self-righteous who discern contemptible motives behind all disagreements with them and who therefore think that opponents are enemies and differences are unsplittable.

Will sees Barack Obama as the antidote to Edwards:

Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee -- an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic "fights" against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.

In a bizarre article, The Weekly Standard picks up the same theme:

John Edwards and the Damsel in Distress By William Tucker

IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND trial lawyers like John Edwards, you have to recognize their one enduring fantasy. They are knights in shining armor rescuing damsels in distress.

They'll tell you they're "standing up for the little guy" or "enforcing the Constitution" or "sending a message" or "teaching the big guys a lesson." But at bottom there's always that one image--a lonely woman, young, attractive, helpless, waiting to be rescued by some hero with a law degree.

The strange thing? The first half of the article focuses on John O'Quinn, a Houston attorney. Seems they had to work extra-hard to come up with material to fill out their laughably silly personall attack.

David Brooks plays the role of the whispering polemicist in contrast to George Will, the bow-tied pugilist. Like Will, Brooks hates John Edwards. Edwards is “old-fashioned” and thanks to Obama's victory in Iowa, “Edwards’s political career is probably over.” (Don't you wish, David, don't you wish.)

David Brooks has disliked John Edwards for a long time.

In 2004, Brooks raged (emphasis added)

The problem is that he talks about poverty in an obsolete way, which suggests he has learned nothing from the past 40 years. ... Edwards talks about poverty in economic terms.

This kind of talk is descended from Marxist theory, which holds that we live in the thrall of economic conditions. What the poor primarily need is more money, the theory goes.

We are moving toward a consensus on how to address the diverse problems that cause poverty. But when you go out on the campaign trail, you find politicians spreading polarizing disinformation. Edwards is right to talk about poverty, but by resorting to crude, populist rhetoric, he is leading in the wrong direction.

In 2007, David Brooks was still attacking John Edwards. When Hillary Clinton released her health care plan, Brooks questioned Edwards' temperament:

the plan seems to have driven John Edwards around the bend. The statement he issued yesterday qualifies as the shrillest statement issued by a major presidential candidate this year.

And finally, my favorite example of John Edwards pissing of the right people: corporate lobbyists.

(A big h/t to TheShoveler for this one.)

U.S. corporate elite fear candidate Edwards By Kevin Drawbaugh

WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Ask corporate lobbyists which presidential contender is most feared by their clients and the answer is almost always the same -- Democrat John Edwards.

...

"My sense is that Obama would govern as a reasonably pragmatic Democrat ... I think Hillary is approachable. She knows where a lot of her funding has come from, to be blunt," said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Stanford Group Co., a market and policy analysis group.

But Edwards, Valliere said, is seen as "an anti-business populist" and "a trade protectionist who is quite unabashed about raising taxes."

"I think his regulatory policies, as well as his tax policies, would be viewed as a threat to business," he said.

"The next scariest for business would be Huckabee because of his rhetoric and because he's an unknown."

He's got them scared -- not so much about him personally, but about the ideas he's talking about.

That's why we fight.

I heard something on NBC News a couple of days ago -- Barack Obama raised $8 million the 8 days after Iowa.

I'm sure Hillary Clinton is on the same pace.

Al Gore spent $10 million total from February - August of 2000.

He won the popular vote.

John Kerry spent over $100 million.

He lost.

Democrats are spending an awful lot of money to beat each other up.

There's three of them left in the race. He'll end up raising no more than $50 million or so for the primary, while his opponents will probably raise $300 million -- or more -- between them.

All this on a primary.

Someone is getting rich.

I'm sure it's not the people who the candidates profess to serve.

Perhaps Democrats ought to be contribution to Congressional candidates?

Put simply, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama don't need your money.

They'll do just fine without it.

(John Edwards, on the other hand, does need your money. Go ahead and pony up another $10!)

I'm borrowing the headline for this post from dnA at Too Sense.

TPM is highlighting an interview with Jesse Jackson Jr on MSNBC in which he contrasted Hillary's tears about her campaign to her lack of tears on Hurricane Katrina and other issues.

TPM is highlighting this exchange using the headline: "Obama co-chair questions Hillary's tears."

The clear implication is that Jackson was questioning the authenticity of her tears, but he wasn't.

At best, this is a vague headline, but the truth is that it's powerfully misleading, further trivializing an already trivial issue.

Shame on TPM.

Update: Here's the Slate article. I also just reviewed the poll data for pre-NH and pre-IA. In Iowa, Clinton led the pre-caucus polls by a point but came in third; in NH, Obama led by 8 and lost by 2.

There's been a lot of commentary on whether Hillary Clinton's victory can be explained by the Bradley Effect, in which whites tell pollsters they will vote for a black candidate, but when they head to the polls, they don't.

It's very hard to determine the extent to which this took place. Intuitively, it would seem that it did take place.

However, it didn't seem to happen with the exit poll.

According to my analysis of the exit poll data, 38.2% of respondents said they would vote for Hillary, and 36.6% said they would vote for Obama. 16.2% said they would vote for Edwards.

The exit poll therefore underpredicted the vote of each of the candidates.

Apparently, Slate has an argument for why the phone polls may have had a Bradley effect while exit polls didn't: exit poll workers in NH tend to be white, while polling firms are located around the country and employ a higher percentage of black workers. Since racial identity isn't just about skin color, sometimes people perceive some voices to be more "black" than others, and perhaps this where the Bradley effect creeped in.

I haven't looked at data to test this, but I do know that some of the polling firms use automated machines. If those firms had more accurate results, it would support Slate's theory.

Note: I haven't read the Slate article, which was referred to me by dnA at Too Sense.

I arrived at this number by going through all 69 different cross-tabs in the exit poll. For each of the cross-tabs, there are segments. The exit poll shows the portion of the Dem electorate comprised for each those segments and then the portion of that segment that voted for each candidate. By multiplying the percentage of the electorate represented by that segment with the percentage of that segment voting for the candidate in question, and then adding up the totals for each category, and then averaging the results of all 69 categories, I can arrive at pretty good estimate of what their actual reported numbers were.

I downloaded the raw data after polls closed but before (or perhaps just after) the race was called for Hillary.

Net/net -- the exit polls appear to have been right, which raises the question -- why were telephone polls less accurate than exit polls?

We don’t want to talk about tears, or haircuts, or talk shows.

This is the debate we want to be having.

This is why we want John Edwards to keep on fighting.

We want to talk about record corporate profits.

We want to talk about Exxon Mobil earning $40 billion while taking government handouts.

We want to talk about 47 million Americans without health care.

We want to talk about 37 million American parents who worry each night about feeding and clothing their children in the morning.

We want to talk about the 200,000 veterans who served their country and now go to sleep each night under bridges and on grates.

We want to talk about finishing a war that has been going on for five years and keeps growing and growing.

We want to talk about developing independent, renewable, and clean sources of energy.

We want to talk about the utter concentration of wealth in a tiny elite of Americans.

We want to talk about fixing the trade and economic policies that have been eroding the economic standing of the bottom 80% of Americans for the past three decades.

We want to talk about a reversing tax policy that allows 0.5% of all Americans to ‘earn’ 13.8% of the nation’s after-tax income.

We want to talk about reigning in corporate greed and ending poverty.

We want to talk about a reckless financial system that puts our national economy at risk.

We want to talk about finally eliminating the economic gap between African-Americans and non-Hispanic white Americans.

We want to talk about the need for tolerance.

We want to talk about healing the religious, political, racial, and sexual divisions in America.

We want to talk about the rule of law.

We want to talk about treating the United States Constitution as if it were a document that actually matters.

We want to talk about eliminating the influence of corporate special interests in Washington, DC.

We want to talk about restoring America’s confidence in their government.

We want to talk about challenging the system.

We want to talk about all this and more.

We want to talk about what really matters.

Please help us. $10, $25, or whatever you can afford.

I've seen the debate about the meaning of Hillary's "moment" today at that diner in Portsmouth.

There's nothing to debate. It was political theater, and fine political theater at that.

I don't mean that as a criticism: for the first time in a long time, Hillary Clinton proved to electronic journalists that she could put on as good a show as Barack Obama, and they ate it up.

I used to put together these kinds of media events for a living -- I've got a pretty good feel for what they look like and how they work. This wasn't some informal meet and greet with undecided voters. It was a staged event, organized for the mass media. It was 100% made-for-TV.

Look at this picture of the event:

I'd be stunned if there were more undecided voters in that room as there were journalists, yet most consumers of the mass media have no idea that this was a staged event. Why? Almost all of the images from the event were tight shots of Hillary, designed to make the event look as "real" as possible.

To the extent that I'm being critical of anything, the media is the target of my barbs. I'm certainly not being critical of Hillary -- quite the contrary. She and her team did an excellent job of exploiting mass media's weakness. This is a textbook example of earned media.

Hillary didn't come unglued. She was in control -- of everything.

Within seconds of her marginally close bout with tears (let's be honest, it wasn't that close), she had delivered a scathing attack on Barack Obama and appropriated one of John Edwards signature refrains from the debate on Saturday night ("this is personal to me").

Hillary's savvy act of political theater dominated the media today. It wasn't just the corporate MSM -- it was blogs, even this diary.

Today, she was the center of the Democratic political universe, back where she wants to be after several days in the shadow of Barack Obama.

With Hillary back in the middle, Monday was the first political newscycle that Obama has lost since Iowa. He didn't lose it by making a mistake, and he certainly didn't lose it by doing anything wrong.

Obama lost it because Hillary Clinton stole the spotlight. Everything revolved around her. She was the issue. She was the center of attention, and it was on her terms.

At the very least, she denied oxygen to Barack Obama. (Edwards has already been so desperately starved for air that there wasn't anything that she could have done to further exclude Edwards from the media's frame.) At the very best, she may have picked up a couple of undecided voters, most likely female.

Although I suspect she'll get a slight boost from the event, her move won't change the results tomorrow by much.

Even though it's all but certain she will lose tomorrow, Hillary's "moment" will form a part of the "comeback" narrative she hopes to tell. Hillary's message will be that she's going to continue the campaign because of her personal commitment to America. Her "comeback" speech will mirror the words she delivered after her "near tears," in some cases, word for word. She will use her 'moment' to symbolize her "low spot" and unless Edwards somehow sneaks past her into second place, which is not very likely, the media will buy it.

Those of us who support John Edwards or Barack Obama are probably not going to be convinced by her argument, but her supporters certainly will.

The media won't complain that she's continuing her campaign because she demonstrated once again that she can put on at least as good a show for the evening news as Barack Obama.

Today, Hillary Clinton's campaign changed gears. I don't know if it's too little too late, but I do think it was definitely smart and should remind every Democrat that this ballgame isn't over yet. The fight continues, and after Tuesday, it's going to be a new round and a new dynamic.

As much as I was impressed by Hillary's media savvy, I was depressed and angered by the utter vapidity of our system.

This evening, ABC News was my main news source. Here's my weak imitation of Atrios:

Shorter ABC News: Hillary was emotional, but will voter's respond? Obama wants politics of addition. Romney thinks he'll lose to McCain. Iran semi-attacked the a U.S. Navy vessel, which showed great restraint by not starting a war.

The only story that resembled anything close to something with true meaning was the one about Iran, but given that it was reported from deep inside the Pentagon by Jonathan Karl, I don't trust a damn word I heard.

John Edwards was once again marginalized from the broadcast, even though national polling shows that he's gotten almost as big an Iowa bounce as has Obama (+5 for Edwards, +6 for Obama).

ABC gave Edwards a few moments to comment on Hillary's media event, clearly hoping to create a little controversy to boost their ratings.

An innocent explanation is that they've just decided that nobody in a America gives a hoot about the stuff that John Edwards is trying to talk about.

Well, if that's what they're thinking, then they're wrong.

I'll end this diary with a little "candidate video" I just put together. These are the kinds of issues we need to be talking about. This is the reason why it's worth keeping up the fight.

Team Hillary's attack on John Edwards' town hall event with the Sarkisyans is heartless.

(Emphasis added.)

“Senator Clinton’s speeches are about people she has actually helped and changes she has actually made, not stories she’s pulled from the newspaper and included in her stump,” Mr. Carson wrote in an E-mail message.

Mr. Carson’s comment was in reference to an emotional town hall event Mr. Edwards held in Manchester early Sunday afternoon, featuring an appearance by the parents of Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old leukemia patient who died in December after her insurance company denied her a liver transplant.

Stone cold heartless.

Edwards' response:

Speaking at a news conference after the Manchester event, Mr. Edwards responded to Mr. Carson’s comment when a reporter read it to him.

“The Sarkisyans contacted me because they believe I’m the kind of president who will actually fight for their daughter,” Mr. Edwards said. “People who have been through these difficult times against entrenched, powerful moneyed interests – they get it. They get it in a serious way. They’re not looking for somebody who’ll make deals.”

Then after spending an hour on his campaign bus, en route to his next event in Keene, Mr. Edwards called another news conference – before his next event had even started.

“This campaign doesn’t seem to have a conscience,” he said, adding that he had been thinking about the comment from the Clinton campaign. “The more I thought about it, the idea that somehow everything is about them, I mean, it’s an indication that they have no conscience about what’s at stake here. These families are who this is about. It’s not about them, nor is it about me. It’s about whether we’re going to actually stand up and fight for these people and how much we care about them.”

John Edwards is right.

Update: Here's video from the town hall
(h/ts: TomP, NCDem Amy, Edgery)

Nataline's mother and brother:

John Edwards with Nataline's father:

It has been clear for some time now that the corporate media is actively excluding John Edwards from its coverage of the 2008 race.

After Iowa, there was every reason for the corporate media to have started including John Edwards in its narrative. After all, even though Edwards had been third place since the summer, trailing Hillary by double-digits in several polls, he erased that gap completely, and he did so on a relative shoestring budget. As BruinKid has shown, Hillary and Obama each spent twice as much per vote as Edwards.

But instead of paying more intention to Edwards, since Iowa the corporate media is paying less attention. The corporate media blackout of John Edwards continues, and it's getting worse.

One way of measuring the corporate media's systematic exclusion of Edwards is to look at the frequency his name is mentioned during news broadcasts. CNN publishes a transcript of its programming, so I was able to run a quick analysis comparing how frequently they mentioned his name on caucus night to the day after caucus.

Here's the night of the caucus:

Here's the next day:

It's no surprise that Barack Obama got the most attention; he won the Iowa caucus, and as much as I wish he hadn't won it, I can't begrudge the fact that CNN told its viewers about it.

But there's no good reason for Edwards' coverage to fall the day AFTER the caucus. It should have gone UP not down; the news of Obama's victory had already been told, and Edwards' strong showing in Iowa should indicate a strong reservoir of support.

Even relative to Hillary, Edwards' coverage declined: on the day of the caucus, Edwards received 41% of the mentions of either Edwards or Hillary; they day after the caucus, he received just 36%, despite narrowly edging Hillary out, even though she'd led Edwards in nearly every poll for the preceding five months.

NBC News, er, General Electric News, provided perhaps the most shocking example of the corporate media blackout of John Edwards. They gave him just four seconds out of nearly nine minutes of political coverage last night, and said that Edwards had finished BEHIND Hillary.

Another way of looking at the corporate media blackout is analyzing the frequency with which Edwards is mentioned in multi-candidate headlines.

According to a search of the Google News archive, in 2007 Edwards was systematically excluded from coverage of the 2008 race, which the corporate media portrayed as a choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama:

Amazingly, since Iowa, this exclusion has gotten WORSE.

As you can see, Obama's share of coverage increased relative to Hillary's, but Edwards fell relative to both of them.

The growing corporate media blackout of John Edwards is really a rather extraordinary development.

Edwards spent $2.7 million on TV ads in Iowa, compared to $8.3 million for Obama and $6.5 million for Hillary.

Edwards had 175 paid staffers in Iowa compared to 300 for Obama and 400 for Hillary.

Edwards had been in third place since August, trailing both Hillary and Obama in nearly every poll.

Obama's victory was clearly the "news of the day," but Edwards' surprise second-place showing should have put him back in the discussion, just like Bill Clinton's eight point loss in New Hampshire in 1992 sent him on his way to the White House.

Instead, the corporate media stepped up its campaign of exclusion.

Here's an example of Chris Matthews from caucus night. In this video he praises Hillary's campaign for plotting a brilliant comeback strategy, yet browbeats Edwards.

Here's a longer clip from last night's General Electric news, including a report from Andrea Mitchell aka Mrs. Alan Greenspan. NBC doesn't pull any punches: their systematic exclusion of John Edwards is extraordinary. Edwards was mentioned once in their entire broadcast, and in that one mention, they said that he had finished behind Hillary.

The choice in this election is clear.

We've got a field of three strong candidates. There are good reasons to vote for any of them.

If you think that corporate greed and corporate power are at the heart of America's problems, however, there's really only one choice: John Edwards.

It is John Edwards' voice that has been systematically excluded from the debate. It's been excluded by the propaganda arm of the corporate elites who stand to lose the most if his campaign is successful.

John Edwards isn't being excluded because people aren't interested in his message. The Iowa results prove that. He came in second despite being outspent and despite being shut out by the corporate media.

John Edwards is being excluded because he is talking about something that makes the corporate media truly uncomfortable: the growing concentration of power and wealth in the corporate elite.

We aren't powerless in the face of corporate power. We can start the peaceful revolution; we can start stripping the corporate giants of their authority.

We can donate, volunteer, and vote. We can tell our friends and family and neighbors about what is going.

We can tell them: you have a choice. You don't have to vote for who the corporate media chooses. You can vote for real change. You can vote to change the system.

It's in your hands. It's in our hands.

I'm working on a longer post with some new numbers, but for now I'm going to post these videos which convey what I'm talking about in this post's headline.

Here's something you might not know about Mike Huckabee: he wants to ban some forms of contraception, including the birth control pill, Plan B (aka "the morning after pill"), and RU-486.

This isn't a position he privately whispered into somebody's ear.

He has said it publicly, and there's video.

Here's a transcript of the video, which is from Huckabee's April 13, 2007 interview with The Des Moines Register editorial board.

HUCKABEE: There are some forms of birth control that really are the destruction of a fertilized egg.

QUESTIONER (male voice): Should the government ban that sort of birth control?

QUESTIONER (female voice): RU-486? The morning after pill? Birth control pills?

HUCKABEE: Yeah, I, I personally think there are better ways to deal with contraception than destroying a human life. So, again I’m going to say that I’m always going to make my position on the side of protecting human life.

Mike Huckabee may be an affable religious extremist, but he's still a religious extremist.

We already knew he wants to take away a woman's right to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy.

Now we know he also wants to limit a woman's ability to choose whether or not to get pregnant in the first place.

Mike Huckabee is the modern Republican Party, and he's scary.

Tonight really was a victory for change. Edwards finished second, despite being heavily outspent and largely ignored by the mainstream media.

He heads to New Hampshire with momentum. Obama, who depended on Republican women and independent men for his victory will run into a problem in New Hampshire, where John McCain is resurgent. Because of Mike Huckabee's victory, Mitt Romney has lost momentum.

John McCain is the new flavor of the day, and he'll pull Obama supporters. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is going to go nuclear on Obama.

While Clinton and Obama fight it out, Edwards simply needs to continue with his message about the need to stand up to powerful interests and take back our country.

Here's his speech from tonight:

I wish I could tell you that John Edwards were unflawed, but I can't. He, like every other living politician I've ever known, proves the axiom: no politician is a perfect hero. They all make mistakes, and some of those mistakes are devastating.

Not all politicians admit or learn from their mistakes. The ones who do learn are the ones who can become transcendent leaders, for to understand the path forward to progress one must also understand the road traveled to failure.

The biggest mistake of John Edwards' political career is well-known: his vote for the Iraq War Resolution. John Edwards owned up to that mistake in 2005 and in doing so began the process of learning from his failure.

Today, I want to focus on Joe Lieberman as a symbol of the Democratic Party's failure -- and rebirth -- because Joe Lieberman is at the heart of what ails the Democratic Party.

In a very real way, overcoming the false promise represented by Joe Lieberman is what stands between our party continuing as an institution slavishly devoted to the establishment, or as one that can actually deliver a new distribution of power in America.

Most of us on Daily Kos are firmly on the "new" side of that equation, but unfortunately, many of our leaders are not.

But thing do change.

Al Gore is as close to a living political hero as I've got, and that's probably only because he has had the wisdom to not seek office.

What does Al Gore have to do with John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, and the theme of this post?

It's simple: Al Gore overcame Joe Lieberman.

In 2000, Al Gore made the worst mistake of his political career: he selected Joe Lieberman as his running mate. (If SCOTUS hadn't stopped the recount and Gore had won his rightful victory, perhaps Gore could have muzzled Joe after 9/11; we'll never know, but it's not something I like to ponder.)

Since Lieberman's vice presidential run, he has done more to hurt the Democratic Party than any other current or former Democrat. By comparison, turncoats like Zell Miller are irrelevant sideshows.

It wasn't long after the 2000 election before Al Gore realized what a horrible mistake he had made in selecting Lieberman. After Lieberman authored the Iraq War Resolution, Gore spoke out against Lieberman, and in 2003 he endorsed Howard Dean. Together, Gore and Dean in different ways are the national politicians leaders most responsible for the resurgence of progressivism in American public life.

In 2006, when Joe Lieberman sought renomination as the Democratic Party's candidate for U.S. Senate, Democrats in Connecticut stood together and said enough is enough. They denied Lieberman The Democratic Party's nomination.

Al Gore, despite his long history with Lieberman and despite having selected Lieberman as his vice president, refused to endorse Lieberman.

Some might want to criticize Gore for not endorsing Lamont, but I don't. Lieberman was an incumbent, and Gore's refusal to endorse Lieberman said everything that one needed to know about where he stood on the race.

Compare and contrast Gore's involvement (or lack thereof) in the 2006 battle between Lieberman and Lamont with that of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards.

Both Obama and Hillary endorsed Lieberman in the primary and contributed to his campaign. Obama actually called Lieberman his mentor and personally campaigned on his behalf. Shortly before the election, Bill Clinton went on the campaign trail with Joe Lieberman.

It won't surprise any supporter of John Edwards to learn that like Al Gore, he didn't lift a finger to help Lieberman's re-nomination battle. Indeed, Edwards was the first party leader to congratulate Ned Lamont after winning, and actually went on the campaign trail with Lamont within days of the primary.

Edwards rallies for Lamont crowd

Aug 18, 2006 2:09 PM
Mary E. O’Leary
New Haven Register
Aug 18, 2006

NEW HAVEN — Former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards rallied several hundred people Thursday in a rousing populist speech for U.S. Democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont, telling the crowd Americans are eager for change and real leaders.

...

Last week, Lamont won the Democratic primary against three-term incumbent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman by 10,000 votes in what was seen as a referendum on the war on Iraq and Lieberman’s support for that and other policies supported by the Bush administration.

Edwards, who was the Democratic candidate for vice president in 2004, while Lieberman served that role in 2000, said he thinks Lieberman should drop his independent candidacy. Edwards is one of some 27 current and past senators backing Lamont in the race.

With a huge American flag as a backdrop, Lamont said "one of the first calls that Joe Lieberman got (after the primary) was from Karl Rove (Bush’s senior adviser). The first call I got was from John Edwards," Lamont said as example of Lieberman’s popularity with Republicans, which a poll Thursday said gives him an edge in the November election.

In addition to the rally, Edwards also headlined a fundraiser for Lamont and e-mailed his supporters to contribute to Lamont's campaign.

Sure, there's no doubt he could have done more. You can always do more.

The essential point is that Edwards made the right political decision. He didn't lift a finger for Lieberman, and after the primary, he showed up in person to help Ned Lamont. Even if the only reason he did so was self-interest, it shows that John Edwards thinks his self-interest is aligned with Democrats like Ned Lamont, not turncoats like Joe Lieberman.

It's well-known that Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton offered Joe Lieberman their support during the primary. Frankly, I don't understand how they could support Lieberman after what Lieberman did to Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal, but politics is to a large degree personal, and as wrong as the Clintons were to support Lieberman, at least they had strong personal ties developed over several decades, starting when Bill and Hillary were at Yale Law and Lieberman was a young pol in New Haven.

(I should note that while Chris Dodd supported Lieberman in the primary, it's hard to hold that against him; incumbent Senators of opposing parties frequently don't get involved in each other's races, let alone ones from the same party, at least nominally. It's telling that Ned Lamont has endorsed Chris Dodd's presidential campaign is has worked the trail in Iowa on Dodd's behalf.)

Barack Obama's role in the Lieberman-Lamont primary stands out in stark contrast to that of John Edwards.

Obama, as he tells us on the trail, has very little Washington experience.

To compensate for that, after Obama's election, he turned to Joe Lieberman for help in learning the ways of Washington. Soon, Obama was calling Joe Lieberman his "mentor" in the Senate. As Joe Conason wrote:

Should Obama hope to continue to enjoy his free ride, he should consult his old mentor Joe Lieberman, the senator from Connecticut who used to be a Democrat. Conservative commentators and right-wing media outlets always loved Lieberman for his willingness to echo their talking points on subjects such as school vouchers and Social Security privatization. When he agreed to join the Democratic ticket as Al Gore's running mate in 2000, the Weekly Standard and the National Review, among others, suddenly discovered how despicable Lieberman actually was. Having abandoned the Democrats altogether, he is now fully rehabilitated.

Obama didn't stop at calling the author of the Iraq War Resolution his "mentor," however.

Obama not only contributed money to Lieberman's primary campaign, he joined Lieberman on the campaign trail.

Obama rallies state Democrats, throws support behind Lieberman

By Stephanie Reitz, Associated Press Writer | March 31, 2006

HARTFORD, Conn. --U.S. Sen. Barack Obama rallied Connecticut Democrats at their annual dinner Thursday night, throwing his support behind mentor and Senate colleague Joe Lieberman.

Obama, an Illinois Democrat who is considered a rising star in the party, was the keynote speaker at the annual Jefferson Jackson Bailey Dinner.

Lieberman, Connecticut's junior senator, is under fire from some liberal Democrats for his support of the Iraq War. He was key in booking Obama, who routinely receives more than 200 speaking invitations each week.

...

Lieberman became Obama's mentor when Obama was sworn into the Senate in 2005. They stayed close at Thursday night's event, too, entering the room together and working the crowd in tandem.

Put simply, Barack Obama personally worked to defeat Ned Lamont.

That's change, but it's change in the wrong direction.

After the primary, Obama endorsed Lamont, but he (like Hillary) never campaigned with Lamont, despite requests.

In 2002, Obama bravely opposed the Iraq War. Since then, his record hasn't been pure:

Obama did hedge his Iraq war opposition at times

Barack Obama has made a lot about his outspoken opposition to the Iraq war, even before it started. And he has used his opponents' initial votes in support of the war against them frequently as proof that he has the judgment to be president.

On Sunday's "Meet the Press" interrogation, host Tim Russert quizzed the Illinois senator closely on a number of apparent inconsistencies between his actions and stated positions -- taking state lobbyists' contributions while criticizing federal lobbyists' contributions to his opponents, and not releasing documents, schedules, memos, etc., from his days as an Illinois state senator while criticizing Hillary Clinton for not releasing papers from her White House years.

Russert also inquired about inconsistent quotes by Obama about the Iraq war, leading to this exchange:

RUSSERT: You were not in the Senate in October of 2002. You did give a speech opposing the war. But Sen. Clinton’s campaign will say since you’ve been a senator there’s been no difference in your record. And other critics will say that you’ve not been a leader against the war, and they point to this: In July of '04, Barack Obama, “I’m not privy to Senate intelligence reports. What would I have done? I don’t know,” in terms of how you would have voted on the war. And then this: “There’s not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush’s position at this stage.” That was July of '04. And this: “I think” there’s “some room for disagreement in that initial decision to vote for authorization of the war.” It doesn’t seem that you are firmly wedded against the war, and that you left some wiggle room that, if you had been in the Senate, you may have voted for it.

Simply put, though the Weekly Standard calls him Saint Barack of Iowa, Barack Obama is every bit as imperfect as any other politician.

Over the years, Barack Obama has changed and John Edwards has changed.

They have both changed, but Edwards changed in the right direction. Despite his many accomplishments as a U.S. Senator, Obama has been less consistent. I'm not slamming Obama; he's gotten some important things done. I'm just offering a reminder that he, like John Edwards, is imperfect.

Most importantly, what most clearly separates John Edwards and Barack Obama is their different theories of change.

Edwards advocates an aggressive, combative approach to political change.

Obama favors a more conciliatory, post-partisan approach to political change.

I think the example of Joe Lieberman is a pretty good example showing that Obama's strategy is doomed to fail.

There's no question that Lieberman was a Democratic turncoat, but there's also no question that Lieberman was an important source of power in Washington, DC. He was the kind of guy you needed on your side to get things done from within.

So Obama teamed up with Lieberman, becoming his mentor, and working for his renomination, trying to change from within. That doesn't mean Obama agreed with Lieberman on Iraq; in fact, Obama pointed out that he disagreed with Lieberman on Iraq.

However, Obama felt that working with Joe Lieberman was an important way to accomplish positive change. Although Obama was unsuccessful in the primary, Lieberman did win re-election, thanks in part to the support of Democrats like Clinton and Obama and their decision to effectively stand on the sidelines during the general.

In short, Barack Obama stuck his neck out for Joe Lieberman.

What has Lieberman done to repay him?

It's true that Lieberman helped Obama passed his lobbying reform measures, but if the cost of those reforms was acceptance of Joe Lieberman's continued cheerleading for Iraq, I don't think any of us would have made that bargain.

More recently, Lieberman stuck a knife in Obama's back when he endorsed John McCain. Now, a Lieberman endorsement of Obama would obviously do Obama no good, but Lieberman's endorsement of McCain is actually going to hurt Obama in New Hampshire, where independents and perhaps even some conservative Democrats who would have supported Obama are now more likely to support John McCain.

The obvious moral of this story is that placating bad people like Joe Lieberman just doesn't work.

Barack Obama is a good guy, and the hopeful attitude he displayed in his support for Lieberman is almost endearingly naive, but it has got him -- and more importantly, us -- absolutely nowhere. In fact, it is probably taken us backwards.

It's time that we as a party shifted gears; it's time that we embrace a new approach, one that the establishment and governing regime will no doubt oppose, but one that will actually get us some positive results.

If we as Democrats ignore the lesson taught to us by Al Gore when he overcame Joe Lieberman, we will struggle.

We need to find our own voice, and to speak with it.

Our goal can't be to have the ruling elites listen to our voices, or to hear us out.

Our goal is it change the dominant power structure. For too long, tiny group of people has grown more and more powerful. This is our country, too. It's time we take it back, not just for us, but for all Americans.