McCain Will Use Rivals' Feud

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR | Washington Post
March 9, 2008

WASHINGTON — - Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has sketched out an ambitious plan to exploit the ongoing bickering between Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., through weeks of heavy fundraising, a trip abroad, policy speeches and a biography tour aimed at broadening his appeal beyond traditional Republican voters.

As his rivals clash over who is qualified to answer a 3 a.m. phone call in the White House, McCain will meet with foreign leaders in Europe and the Middle East. While Obama and Clinton argue about do-over primaries in Florida and Michigan, McCain will be free to roam the country, giving speeches, holding town-hall meetings and raking in cash.

The strategy is being launched as some in the Republican Party worry that McCain will be forgotten amid the news media's intense focus on the Democratic presidential race. "Understandably," McCain quipped to reporters on his plane last week. "I'll be watching, too."

The evolving plan also calls for the Republican National Committee to use the time to seed the conservative echo chamber — blogs, talk radio and independent groups — with red-meat rhetoric and ammunition about the lack of Democratic qualifications.

"You'd rather be the definer than the defined," said Jill Hazelbaker, McCain's communications director.

http://www.courant.com/news/nationworld/hc-mccain0309.artmar09,0,917768.story

Focus Must Be On McCain – And The Issues

Bill Curry
March 9, 2008

Is this the best election ever? John McCain and Barack Obama are interesting enough, but how about that Hillary Clinton? She makes Rocky, John Paul Jones and Freddy Krueger look like a bunch of quitters. If she has one more reincarnation I'm converting to Hinduism.

There's debate among Hillary's advisers as to how she pulled it off, and what to do next. Obama's team is no doubt deep into the same discussion. Each side may be reaching the same errant conclusion: It's time to get tough.

Party insiders say it courts disaster for Democrats to fight on after John McCain has consolidated his nomination. Rubbish. Due to their intense conflict aversion, these same insiders front-loaded the nominating process so badly they almost robbed the party of its rightful chance for constructive buyer's remorse.

Obama and Clinton will now engage in a contest for the ages. What will John McCain be up to? Raising money from special-interest groups and groveling to his party's far right wing, two activities so distasteful to the public they must be conducted almost entirely in private.

Meanwhile, a rapt nation will be weighing whether Hillary or Barack would make a better president and which one is best able to dispose of McCain; not exactly McCain's best story line. The one way Democrats can land themselves in trouble is by giving in to their baser instinct for combat. Sadly if unsurprisingly, it's just what they seem bent on doing.

Even in victory there's turmoil in Clinton's campaign regarding her chief message consultant, Mark Penn. Penn has stressed Clinton's strength and readiness to lead while hacking away at Obama with whatever sharp or dull blade he can find: early childhood ambition, teenage drug use, adult Reagan worship.

Penn's many detractors within the campaign want to stress Clinton's human side and ease up on the negatives. I know Penn from Bill Clinton's 1996 campaign. He's exceedingly bright but with the social skills of a mollusk and less self-awareness.

If Clinton lets Penn go on setting the campaign's tone she'll regret it. That she made it this far is due not to attack ads or to any slur on her opponent but to the handful of moments when she allowed a little of herself to shine through. That and sheer willpower.

Obama has consultant and message problems of his own, and more important, policy problems that have somehow eluded detection by the Clinton campaign and the press.

Obama's chief strategist is David Axelrod. A flattering profile of him that ran last April in the New York Times depicts him as a believer in a "politics of personality," who thinks past Democratic campaigns were rooted too much in issues and not enough in biography.

The Democrats are too issue-oriented? And John "reporting for duty" Kerry — his problem was he didn't peddle his life story enough? It was news to me. Put off by the analysis, I dismissed it.

My mistake. Obama has run a campaign of biography and inspiration — along with a second track of subtle negativity — nearly to a nomination. He may get there yet. His current plan, one gathers, is to amp up the second track. If he does that, he won't.

In the days before Texas and Ohio, Obama's cool, dismissive tone cost him votes. More negativity from the candidate of hope and change could sink him.

Obama must wade all the way into the mire of issues. Both candidates must. Each faces problems in doing so. Obama's is that his actual opinions on domestic issues may be hard to translate to Democratic primary voters.

Obama policy adviser Austan Goolsbee, a centrist who draws praise from George Will, has ideas some Democrats might not applaud. Obama has run to Clinton's left on foreign policy and to her right on domestic policy. Knowing Goolsbee's views helps explain that, shedding light for instance on Obama's opposition to health care mandates.

Imagine if candidates and press resolved to explore those matters and dispense with such "issues" as Barack's donors, Hillary's tax returns and what the superdelegates will do if the convention turns into something more than just another networking Mardi Gras.

Barack bet it all on his story. How ironic that Hillary's story of doggedness in the face of derision may prove more powerful, in part for being played out before our eyes.

No personal story is enough. Voters want a leader, but also some sort of blueprint. These two are among the finest candidates Democrats have ever fielded. Let issues show them to their best advantage.

Bill Curry, former counselor to President Bill Clinton, was the Democratic nominee for governor twice. His column appears Sundays on the Other Opinion page. He can be reached at billcurryct@gmail.com.

Insults and Tender Sensibilities

* AP foreign
* , Thursday March 13 2008

By CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - If the presidential campaign were kindergarten, rude people could be sent for a time-out or made to write ``hope and change'' on the blackboard until they are nice.

In kindergarten, you're not allowed to call anyone a monster or make fun of someone's middle name.

But this is politics, in a land where freedom of speech is carved into the rock of the republic. And these are grown-ups with thick skins stretched over awesome amounts of self-esteem.

It's a land that has known and survived the scorched earth politics of the late Republican Lee Atwater, the shark grin of Democratic strategist James Carville, the ``rhymes with witch'' and ``Ozone man'' wisecracks of recent years, and the ghosts of distant ages who knew what nasty campaigning was really about.

It's America. You got a problem with that?

A cycle of insult and puffy indignation has taken hold in the contest between Democratic Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, with supporters of Republican Sen. John McCain gleefully pitching in.

It's been a time to denounce, dissociate, distance and regret, to nurse tender sensitivities, and to see the occasional offender cut from a campaign. Geraldine Ferraro, who resigned a Clinton post Wednesday, was the latest to go.

Obama is generally sanguine about fur flying around him and claws coming at him. But he pays people to get angry on his behalf.

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, for one, was outraged when Ferraro declared that Obama has only come this far because he's black. That left Ferraro outraged at Axelrod's outrage.

She stepped down as an unpaid Clinton fundraiser after a second day of sniping between the two camps over her remarks.

Everyone was on tiptoes about the episode Thursday as the play-nice ethic came on strong.

The scrappy Ferraro, who quit ``so I can speak for myself,'' refused to speak about it at all during and after a speech to women in Rhode Island. In Washington, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said gingerly ``that the Clinton campaign moving to, shall we say, put some distance, was very important.''

Samantha Power is a feisty Pulitzer Prize-winning author who calls herself ``genocide chick'' because of her area of study and passion. The unpaid Obama foreign policy adviser told a Scottish newspaper she thought Clinton was a monster.

She was gone before the Clinton campaign's indignation machine could get fully into motion, although it was not to be stopped. Clinton's aides quickly turned the insult into a money-raising opportunity, campaign cash salving their wounds.

The sensitive tripwire of race has been set off repeatedly, with religion and ethnicity not far behind.

Obama was moved this week to defend a stark ad from Clinton, the one about the 3 a.m. crisis phone call. He assured everyone he did not consider it racist.

The ad merely implied he was incompetent.

Clinton had the temerity to pronounce with insufficient zeal that her rival is Christian. That upset some Obama supporters who apparently thought it was her responsibility and within her power to end false Internet rumors that he's Islamic.

Clinton has been a Republican fundraising magnet for years and taken everything the GOP could throw at her. She repackages attacks against her and puts them to her use.

But Wednesday night, she struck a different tone with several unusual mea culpas.

She fully disowned Ferraro's remarks, expressed regret they were spoken and apologized to those who were offended when her husband seemed to belittle Obama by comparing his achievements to those of Jesse Jackson.

more

Circular firing squad

US elections 2008: Ill-considered remarks from supporters of Clinton and Obama threaten to leave both campaigns in tatters
Sarah Wildman

March 12, 2008 9:00 PM

It's become a campaign of spitting and venom, tattlers and tattle-tales. But between this week's blood-letting and last - a trail littered by secondary spokesmen and women who have been dropped like dead weight from the good ships Obama and Clinton - it's hard to know who will be left to run a general campaign once the Democrats drag themselves into the next electoral ports of call.

Pennsylvania is still six weeks away. And if the Michigan and Florida primaries are re-tried, as promised - or, really, threatened - in June? McCain will hardly have to run a campaign advertisement. By August Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will have torn each hair from the other's head, strand by strand, until they are both so bald as to be hopelessly unattractive to the greater American voting public. It's as though Britney Spears were an adviser to the party, shearing the candidates in manic fits of rage and turning them back onto the stage, all bloodied and scarred and smiling demonically.

Geraldine Ferraro, long a feminist icon, her own political resume a marvellously botched effort to appeal to women (plucked as she was a near total political neophyte from the House of Representatives to run for vice-president with Walter Mondale in 1984 and fighting, hourly, to be seen as more than the Female VP Candidate), last week expressed her weariness with the campaign with a badly conceived riff on race and Barack Obama that, picked up by bloodhounds yesterday, ran around the blogosphere as fast as you can hit "send".

"I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama's campaign - to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against," the eminence grise told a small California paper, the Daily Breeze, in an interview anticipating an upcoming visit to California. "For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It's been a very sexist media. Some just don't like her."

Oh, the Clintonians are thinking right now, if only she had stopped here! It would have sounded whiney, but fine, hard to quibble with. But no, she continued. "The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign. If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," she said, "And if he was a woman (of any colour) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

There is a great deal wrong with Ferraro's comments - there is the obviously racist overtone, the condescending poo-pooing reminiscent of conservative arguments against affirmative action made over the years by white people who suspect people of colour get ahead out of tokenism rather than ability. There is the niggling fact that Ferraro herself was the product of a campaign that much more closely mirrored her own comment (simply replace "white man" with "woman"). And there is the fact that far less experienced white men have run and done very nicely, thank you very much (see also, at most recent, senator John Edwards in 2004).

But overall? Overall it's just another self-inflicted wound in campaigns marked by more problems of friendly fire. Too many surrogates are spending too much time in front of microphones trying to create difference between two remarkably similar, progressive candidates caught in an increasingly fratricidal conflict. It was ugly and mean-spirited. With moments like these - set against the backdrop of Clinton supporter Eliot Spitzer's fiery denouement in a sex scandal (mon dieu! The worse for Hillary - because, as I've said before, nothing says sex scandal so much as "Clinton") - who needs Republican strategists?

As every paper and blog in the country picked up Ferraro's gaffe, we cast our eyes back to last week when brilliant Samantha Power - Harvard professor, Pulitzer Prize winner, human rights activist - stupidly called Hillary a "monster", before an over-eager journalist who seized her moment of fame and appeared on every single American newscast before the day was out. Power, of course, quickly resigned as foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign. Ferraro fought on. "I will not be discriminated against because I'm white," she told the New York Times yesterday. "If they think they are going to shut up Geraldine Ferraro with that kind of stuff, they don't know me."

As early as this morning, even, Ferraro still refused to step back from her position as fundraiser on the Clinton campaign, claiming to exercise her "first amendment" right to speak. But speaking for herself and speaking for a campaign are two very different things, and, like it or not, she was speaking for the campaign. This reality finally took hold this evening, and Ferraro announced that she was severing her ties to the Clinton campaign.

At the current rate no one will be working at either campaign.

Some of this is fatigue. These guys have been running too long and too hard. They are fried from talking, they have overspoken, they have stopped monitoring their speech. They have lost all sense and measure of decency in light of the insane pressure. There has been resignation after resignation, and some who should have resigned but can't (Clinton, president that is, on Jesse Jackson anyone?).

And we in the media are partly to blame. Our 24/7 political coverage from YouTube and blogs (and I admit blame!) broadcasts every slip up to the endless number of political programmes on our televisions that hunger for more and more tangential reporters commenting on the candidates. We have begun courting these mistakes, and then we cover them, endlessly, eagerly asking each other: how did it go so wrong?

But in so doing, the campaigns have been hobbled. It is as though, one by one, every star player has been injured by another player, on his or her own team, during spring training. Problem is, when the season begins, who will be left to play?

http://www.mydd.com/story/2008/3/14/124144/198

Friday March 14 2008
By NEDRA PICKLER
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - On this presidential rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton can agree: They sometimes disagree with their trash-talking supporters and will try to cool it. Advisers to the Democratic candidates shed some light Friday on the private chat the two candidates had Thursday on the Senate floor.

The talk lasted three or four minutes in full view of reporters watching on the balcony above who could see them talking, but not hear what they said.

``They approached one another and spoke about how supporters for both campaigns have said things they reject,'' said Clinton spokesman Phil Singer. ``They agreed that the contrasts between their respective records, qualifications and issues should be what drives this campaign, and nothing else.''

An Obama adviser, speaking on a condition of anonymity about the private conversation, gave a similar account, while stressing that it was Obama who approached Clinton on the subject. They committed to making sure that their supporters don't get overheated in the future, the adviser said.

With Clinton and Obama in such a close race for the nomination, the campaign has grown increasingly acrimonious. Surrogates and aides to the candidates have stirred racial and gender divisions that Democrats fear will leave the eventual nominee badly damaged and battered heading into the general election.

more ~ as she whitewashes McCain

h/t skippy

By Ellen Wulfhorst Mon Mar 10, 3:54 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A majority of Americans do not read political blogs, the online commentaries that have proliferated in the race for the U.S. presidency, according to a poll released on Monday.

Only 22 percent of people responding to the poll said they read blogs regularly, meaning several times a month or more, according to the survey conducted by Harris Interactive.

Political blogs, in which writers, pundits and other participants voice opinions in online forums, burst into the spotlight in the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns. Some of the most high-profile blogs are influential on campaign strategies, media coverage and public perception of the candidates and issues.

Unlike traditional, mainstream media, blogs often adopt a specific point of view. Critics complain they can contain unchecked facts, are poorly edited and use unreliable sources.

Despite the attention blogs can get, the poll said 56 percent of Americans say they never read blogs that discuss politics. Another 23 percent read them several times a year, the survey showed.

While blogs are largely considered the realm of young people who are most Internet-savvy, only 19 percent of people ages 18 to 31, and 17 percent of those ages 32 to 43, regularly read a political blog, the poll said.

The generation most likely to read such blogs are those age 63 or older, 26 percent of whom said they do so. Also, 23 percent of those ages 44 to 62 read them, the poll said.

Roughly an even number -- 22 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats -- regularly read blogs, while 26 percent of independents do the same, the poll showed.

The poll was conducted online from January 15 to January 22 among 2,302 adults. Harris said it does not calculate or provide a margin of error because it finds such figures can be misleading.

skippy

Think Left has video

no one died