Republicans have a 3 page list up of all the destuctive things (most beyond the pale) that Clinton used to try to destroy Obama irreversibly. They will of course be played along with the mentally challenged references to Wright, Ayres, and the most primitively stupid false statements trashing Muslims with no sane rationale. These will pave the way for Republicans to be defeated. I believe a sufficient number of Americans are smart enough to be fed up with being regarded as stupid by Bush and the Republicans in the House and the Senate.

The two worst themes or memes Clinton pushed that were Unforgivable Sins:

Experience she didn’t have

I’m qualified; McCain qualified; Obama just has a speech.

Hillary Clinton’s 5 mistakes

It remains to be seen whether she can be an “effective surrogate for Obama”.

I think she could be extremely effective and so could Bill if they want to.

If Hillary doesn’t come to Ohio, this state will go to McBush. No question. It might go to McBush anyway, I’m not encouraged by the attitude of the independent minded in Ohio.

“I’ve spent my entire life fighting socalism and communism and I’m not going to vote either into office”

“McCain seems to understand where I’m coming from better than Obama”

“I’m worried he’s going to take 150 years of racism out on us”

“We can’t let the democrats run everything, there’s got to be someone to stop them when they go too far”

We have work to do.

Boxturtle (I think the GOP here will hate him as much as they hate Hillary in a month or so)

I think she could be extremely effective and so could Bill if they want to.

Thanks Pete. I completely agree.

Agree.

I think you could add Pennsylvania and some other states.

Per Pete above, she and Bill could do so much to help so many Democratic candidates, Rick Noriega running against Corwyn in TX.

I’m thinking she can really help in the entire midwest. KY and MI especially.

I dunno what the vital middle attitude in those states are thinking, but it’s probably similar to Ohio.

Boxturtle (Tough to get a midwestern farmer comfortable with a Harvard Lawyer)

Thanks Box.

I’ll also repeat what I’ve said before, she and Bill can be an effective counter on the fundraising front to JoLie in the NE and Florida.

Holy Joe is amazing popular with the middle of the roaders here in Ohio. He’s seen as someone who can work both sides of the asle. I kid you not!

A McBush/Holy Joe ticket would be dangerous. They could play the “independant” card and have it believed by a majority of the vital middle voters.

Boxturtle (Ignorance will be their best friend)

Jim Martin running against Saxby Chambliss in Georgia. Jim would be tremendous in the Senate and on SJC and Georgia is in play. Georgia has over a half million black voters who need to be registered soon. Black voters in the South are one way to make up the large hurdle Obama has with the thought vein that Boxturtle captured very well with those quotes @5 that are very representative.

To her credit, Clinton did what she needed to do. Now it’s time to see how her supporters react. It’s going to get interesting

Its so nice when a man implies that Clinton is a ‘credit to her gender’, and decides that what HE needed her to do is what “she needed to do.” Hillary Clinton didn’t need to do anything…. she chose to do what she she did.

As to what happens to her supporters, it depends on which “supporters” you’re talking about.

The men who started out supporting Clinton from the git-go will probably go with Obama. The women — its going to be a very hard sell for them, and as McCain moves toward the middle (and especially if he picks a woman as VP) I think a lot of them could be peeled off.

The people who looked at the choice of Clinton and Obama, and chose Clinton, will either vote for McCain, or go B.O.W.L.ing (Barack Obama Will Lose) and not vote in November.

Sorry, lukasiak, but the anger that defines your life is shunned by 90% of Clinton’s, and anyone else’s, admittedly fervent supporters.

Yours is a personal problem, not a political stratum.

Yours is a personal problem, not a political stratum.

that explain’s why in a year in which the ‘Republican’ brand is about as popular as “Chicken al a Dysentary”, Obama can barely breat even agaisnt McCain — and the right-wing smear machine has even revved up yet.

unfortunately for Obama, there are no superdelegates to the Electoral College who can be bought off.

I really don’t think you rarguments are productive.The problem with Hillary’s campaign is that she didn’t have the structure that Obama did and didn’t campaigned on change. He has a lot going for him. All of those 18 mil votes are not all going to go and stay at home. Yo forget what Obama voters are white, black, asian, all of the stuff that makes him electable.

Yo forget what Obama voters are white, black, asian, all of the stuff that makes him electable.

as someone who has written a whole lof about polls and the various constituencies that Obama and Clinton do well with, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell me that I ‘forget’ something.

In the primaries since february - may (those where it was just Clinton v Obama — haven’t gotten around to including info from puerto rico, SD, and MT yet) Obama got only 40.4 of the ‘white’ vote — and there really no reliable data from exit polls concerning asian voters . In the primaries held from March through May, the percentage of the White vote declined to 37.6%. In fact, Obama’s appeal to most segments of the white demographic is abysmal — pretty much limited to wealthy white democrats and “hillary haters”.

The ONLY thing that might save Obama is the “D” next to his name.

The people who looked at the choice of Clinton and Obama, and chose Clinton, will either vote for McCain, or go B.O.W.L.ing (Barack Obama Will Lose) and not vote in November.

Only if most of them have severe head trauma that has damaged their ability to think or if they are shipped from another planet in November will this happen.

McCain’s 85-97% voting record with Bush in 2007 and his 100% voting record with Bush in 2008 will be defined so

Wthat the voters can understand it. We are going door to door in Southern states where there are still 500,000 + blacks to register.

And I thought you were a guy named Paul but maybe you are a woman whose perception of gender wrongs real or imagined was being fulfilled in some fantasy world that involved Clinton’s candidacy.

Paul’s comment on Clinton in this headline had nothing to do with her being a cedit to her gender. It had to do with her pivoting and trying to pivot people who voted for her to vote for Obama.

I’m going to spring just one reason not to vote for McCain that has nothing to do with IraPq. BTW are you draft eligible? If we get the draft going that will really end this war fast, can we send you?

Psstt–there is this little court in Washington called the D.C. Circuit and another one called the Supreme Court. 18/21 in the D.C. Circuit are little Federalist Society martinets or little Bushie robots. The Supremes are dominated right now by Scalia, his puppy Thomas, Alito, Roberts and their swing vote puppy dog Tony Kennedy.

McCain’s 95-97% voting record in 2007 with the piece of shit Bush the chickenhawk that should have read.

I meant Cliff’scomment and you have absolutely no idea of how McCain is about to look campaigning against Obama. Obama hasn’t been able to center on McCain–he’s had the fight of his life on his hands.

He’s centered on him now and so are we.

The ONLY thing that might save Obama is the “D” next to his name.

Well duh.

We are also 40 years from 1968 (I’m reminded by a CNN panel now comparing the two elections and the context of their time).

We have a fiasco going on but there is no draft–only a draft will stop the Dover coffin parade. It impacts the families of Senators and Congress people and the rest of the US so little that almost all of them forget it’s going on.

We have the same degree of racial prejudice and ignorance. We haven’t made much significant progress at all– educational progress throughout Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia with relatively poorly educated white bigots have we?

The Dems have only elected 3 presidents since Ford served 1874-1977. That’s 31 years. The Nixon pardon probably caused Ford to lose to Jimmy Carter by a very small margin or it could have been only the two Bill Clinton terms.

We have the best chance due to circumstances–mainly that Bush, the Republican Congress and their dysfunctional co-family members the spineless Democratic Congress have run this country completely into the ground on a panoply of fronts.

Put your eyeballs on this–it’s Hillary Clinton and one reason she gave the last speech of her life that is anywhere near a Presdiential race. It’s over. Obama needs her, and we need the supporters of Hillary and we’ll get most of them. It’d be a group of very stupid people who vote McCain.

I can tell you this straight up. Ever since I stumbled onto the FDL family of blogs, I began comparing financially successful “staunch” Republicans that I know including a number of attorneys, physicians, etc. with the average FDL commenter. As to prescience, historical context, and knowledge about day to day government affairs and foreign affairs there is no comparison. FDL commenters are a paradigm shift above the other group that have grad school educations and financial success. I feel sorry for them that they are so systemically ignorant in a number of current events and historical areas, but that’s the way it is.

They are content with platitudes like “the surge is working” but they can’t begin to tell you why. When I point out to them that if they were making a federal appellate motion or brief, or doing a medical workup they’d have to come up with a lot of specificity they didn’t give me they don’t like it.

This is a straight up sketch of your candidate Clinton. If you want to see her do some good email her some suggestions for some issues she didn’t notice the last seven years in the Senate or else chose not to do a damn thing about.

What’s Hillary’s MO to secure a good FISA solution in place of the clusterfuckup that Syl Reyes and the Republican morons are crafting? The Senate is in session Monday. Is she planning to now engage with her expensive staff that we pay completely for and get to work fighting for all those women who whirled their fists in the air?

How many of those women can give you a discussion of national affairs or foreign affairs at the level of the average FDL tab commenter? Not many but they want some of the same things.

That’s what I thought. As I’ve been saying all along, the real Hillary Clinton would have made a nice fit for McCain as a running mate and depending on her future conduct, there’s still time. Frank Rich makes the exact same point I’ve made for months, and I consider him one of the best writers in the history of the NYT during his ten years as the theater critic and thankfully after his years as a theater critic.

Modo Nails Hillary Clinton Yet Again

FRank Rich Nails Clinton and McCain Yet Again

June 8, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Watch Out, Meryl Streep! She’s a Master Thespian.
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

How much Hillary Clinton can help Barack Obama will depend on how good an actress she is.

And I bet she is a very good actress indeed.

Not only because, as first lady, she played the diverse roles of someone interested in China and someone interested in china. Not only because, as a presidential candidate, she morphed from Queen Elizabeth I to Norma Rae, as Newsweek put it.

But because, through humiliation and pain, she has shown herself to be a skilled survivor. She said she embraces the old saying, “Fake it till you make it.”

After the roiling rollout of the Clinton administration, a sad and unnerved Hillary sought answers from self-help gurus like Jean Houston.

“Houston felt at one point that being Hillary was like being Mozart with his hands cut off, unable to play,” Bob Woodward wrote. “She felt that the first lady was going through a female crucifixion.”

At critical junctures of her life, Hillary makes the same mistake. She comes on strong, showing an arrogant, abrasive side, gets brushed back, and then repackages herself in a more appealing way.

It happened when she began as Arkansas’ first lady; when she campaigned with Bill in ’92; when she started as a “two for the price of one” first lady; when she did health care; and when she started her presidential campaign wearing an off-putting ermine robe of entitlement and presumption. And it happened when she lost the nomination, refused to admit it and, instead of congratulating Obama, wielded her female fan base as a bludgeon over him so she could once more share a presidency.

Now, as she transforms herself into a team player, she must again fake it till she makes it. She still doesn’t believe Obama can win, but she knows she can move ahead only as a beguiler, not a begrudger.

Meanwhile, she wants another power-sharing arrangement. She will help Obama be king, if he lets her be queen of the women.

As The Times’s Jodi Kantor wrote Saturday, Hillary’s “grieving” voters “say that she will remain their leader, that she has created a lasting female constituency, a women’s electoral movement unlike any other.”

So, you may wonder: Will Hillary’s historic bid turn out to be good or bad for women?

The Wall Street Journal reported back in March that some women were worried that “the resistance to Senator Clinton may embolden some men to resist women’s efforts to share power with them in business, politics and elsewhere.”

It’s a reasonable fear. Every fizzy triumph of feminism I have covered — Geraldine Ferraro’s selection, the Anita Hill hearings, Hillary’s co-presidency — ended up triggering awful backlashes. In the end, feminism sputtered out as a force.

Hillary has brought back that old feminist religion, at least for now.

She should not have pitted the women against the men. She did it to her detriment within her own campaign, where Patti Solis Doyle, the tyro campaign manager and self-styled “queen bee” of Hillaryland, battled with Bill’s “White Boys,” as they were known, and often left Bill feeling dissed.

And Hillary did it to Obama’s detriment with her female fan base, stirring up such fury that some women are still vowing to jump to John McCain, even if it means voting against their self-interest.

She should not have repeated the mistake she made after her health-care plan failed. Instead of simply admitting her own mistakes in judgment, she played the victim and blamed sexism.

Of course, powerful women evoke sexism, and the attacks are more personal and slights can be grating. But it’s counterproductive to dwell on it, magnify it and exploit it during a campaign — especially when you’re getting all that love from Joe Sixpack.

I don’t believe Hillary’s campaign will cause a backlash. As long as her Denver Liberation Army doesn’t cause Obama to lose, it may well be good for women.

When I interviewed scores of women after Ronald Reagan won the women’s vote in ’84, I was stunned at what I heard. Many working-class women said they didn’t vote for Ferraro because they didn’t feel capable of running the country, so how could she?

Maybe women have seen enough male boo-boos in the last eight years to give them more confidence. Or maybe Hillary’s grit and gall allowed them to easily envision her cuffing generals and dictators.

While studies continue to say that being taller and having a deeper voice can make you seem like a more credible leader, Hillary thrillingly proved herself the best debater and the toughest candidate while being shorter and having the higher voice.

She didn’t lose because she was a woman. She didn’t lose because America isn’t ready for a woman as president. She lost because of her own — and her husband’s and Mark Penn’s — fatal missteps.

June 8, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
One Historic Night, Two Americas
By FRANK RICH
WHEN Barack Obama achieved his historic victory on Tuesday night, the battle was joined between two Americas. Not John Edwards’s two Americas, divided between rich and poor. Not the Americas split by race, gender, party or ideology. What looms instead is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country, from the ground up.

On one side stands Mr. Obama’s resolutely cheerful embrace of the future. His vision is inseparable from his identity, both as a rookie with a slim Washington résumé and as a black American whose triumph was regarded as improbable by voters of all races only months ago. On the other is John McCain’s promise of a wise warrior’s vigilant conservation of the past. His vision, too, is inseparable from his identity — as a government lifer who has spent his entire career in service, whether in the Navy or Washington.

Given the dividing line separating the two Americas of 2008, a ticket uniting Mr. McCain and Hillary Clinton might actually be a better fit than the Obama-Clinton “dream ticket,” despite their differences on the issues. Never was this more evident than Tuesday night, when Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain both completely misread a one-of-a-kind historical moment as they tried to cling to the prerogatives of the 20th century’s old guard.

All presidential candidates, Mr. Obama certainly included, are egomaniacs. But Washington’s faith in hierarchical status adds a thick layer of pomposity to politicians who linger there too long. Mrs. Clinton referred to herself by the first-person pronoun 64 times in her speech, and Mr. McCain did so 60 times in his. Mr. Obama settled for 30.

Remarkably, neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. McCain had the grace to offer a salute to Mr. Obama’s epochal political breakthrough, which reverberated so powerfully across the country and throughout the world. By being so small and ungenerous, they made him look taller. Their inability to pivot even briefly from partisan self-interest could not be a more telling symptom of the dysfunctional Washington culture Mr. Obama aspires to mend.

Yet even as the two establishment candidates huffed and puffed to assert their authority, they seemed terrified by Mr. Obama’s insurgency, as if it were the plague in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” Mrs. Clinton held her nonconcession speech in a Manhattan bunker, banishing cellphone reception and television monitors carrying the news of Mr. Obama’s clinching of the nomination. Mr. McCain, laboring under the misapprehension that he was wittily skewering his opponent, compulsively invoked the Obama-patented mantra of “change” 33 times in his speech.

Mr. McCain only reminded voters that he, like Mrs. Clinton, thinks that change is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. He has no idea what it means. “No matter who wins this election, the direction of this country is going to change dramatically,” he said on Tuesday. He then grimly regurgitated Goldwater and Reagan government-bashing talking points from the 1960s and ’70s even as he presumed to accuse Mr. Obama of looking “to the 1960s and ’70s for answers.”

Mr. Obama is a liberal, but it’s not your boomer parents’ liberalism that is at the heart of his appeal. He never rattles off a Clinton laundry list of big federal programs; he supports abortion rights and gay civil rights with a sunny bonhomie that makes the right’s cultural scolds look like rabid mastodons. He is not refighting either side of the domestic civil war over Vietnam that exploded in his hometown of Chicago 40 years ago this summer, long before he arrived there.

He has never deviated from his much-quoted formulation in “The Audacity of Hope,” where he described himself as aloof from “the psychodrama of the baby boom generation” with its “old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.” His vocabulary is so different from that of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain that they often find it as baffling as a foreign language, even as they try to rip it off.

The selling point of Mr. Obama’s vision of change is not doctrinaire liberalism or Bush-bashing but an inclusiveness that he believes can start to relieve Washington’s gridlock much as it animated his campaign. Some of that inclusiveness is racial, ethnic and generational, in the casual, what’s-the-big-deal manner of post-boomer Americans already swimming in our country’s rapidly expanding demographic pool. Some of it is post-partisan: he acknowledges that Republicans, Ronald Reagan included, can have ideas.

Opponents who dismiss this as wussy naïveté do so at their own risk. They at once call attention to the expiring shelf life of their own Clinton-Bush-vintage panaceas and lull themselves into underestimating Mr. Obama’s political killer instincts.

The Obama forces out-organized the most ruthless machine in Democratic politics because the medium of their campaign mirrored its inclusive message. They empowered adherents in every state rather than depending on a Beltway campaign hierarchy whose mercenary chief strategist kept his day job as chief executive for a corporate P.R. giant. Such viral organization and fund-raising is a seamless fit with bottom-up democracy as it is increasingly practiced in the Facebook-YouTube era, not merely by Americans and not merely by the young.

You could learn a ton about the Clinton campaign’s cultural tone-deafness from its stodgy generic Web site. A similar torpor afflicts JohnMcCain.com, which last week gave its graphics a face-lift that unabashedly mimics BarackObama.com and devoted prime home page real estate to hawking “McCain Golf Gear.” (No joke.) The blogs, video and social networking are static and sparse, the apt reflection of a candidate who repeatedly invokes “I” as he boasts of his humility.

Mr. Obama’s deep-rooted worldliness — in philosophy as well as itinerant background — is his other crucial departure from the McCain template. As more and more Americans feel the pain of spiraling gas prices and lost jobs, they are also coming to recognize, as Mr. Obama does, that the globally reviled American image forged by an endless war in Iraq and its accompanying torture scandals is inflicting economic as well as foreign-policy havoc.

Six out of 10 Americans do want their president to talk to Iran’s president, according to the most-recent Gallup poll. Americans are sick of a national identity defined by arrogant saber-rattling abroad and manipulative fear-mongering at home. Mr. Obama closed his speech on Tuesday by telling Americans they “don’t deserve” another election “that’s governed by fear.” Of the three candidates, he was the only one who did not mention 9/11 that night.

Mr. Obama isn’t flawless. But it’s hard to see him hitching up with Mrs. Clinton, who would contradict his message, unite the right, and pass along her husband’s still unpacked post-presidency baggage. A larger trap for Mr. Obama is his cockiness. His own tendency to preen and to coast could be encouraged by recent events rocking the Straight Talk Express: Mr. McCain is so far proving an exceptionally clumsy candidate prone to accentuating everything that’s out-of-touch about his American vision.

Mr. McCain’s speech in a New Orleans suburb on Tuesday night spawned a cottage industry of ridicule, even among Republicans. The halting delivery, sickly green backdrop and spastic, inappropriate smiles, presumably mandated by some consultant hoping to mask his anger, left the impression that Mr. McCain isn’t yet ready for prime-time radio.

But the substance was even worse than the theatrics. Incredibly, Mr. McCain attacked Mr. Obama for being insufficiently bipartisan while speaking to the most conspicuously partisan audience you can assemble in today’s America: a small, nearly all-white crowd that seconded his attack lines with boorish choruses of boos. On TV, the audience came across as a country-club membership riled by a change in the Sunday brunch menu.

Equally curious was Mr. McCain’s decision to stage this event in Louisiana, a state that is truly safe for the G.O.P. and that he’d last visited less than six weeks earlier. Perhaps he did so because Louisiana’s governor, the 36-year-old Indian-American Bobby Jindal, is the only highly placed nonwhite Republican he could find to lend his campaign an ersatz dash of diversity and youth.

Or perhaps he thought that if he once more returned to the scene of President Bush’s Katrina crime to (belatedly) slam that federal failure, it would fool voters into forgetting his cheerleading for Mr. Bush’s Iraq obsession and economic policies. This time it proved a levee too far. The day after his speech Mr. McCain was caught on the stump misstating and exaggerating his own do-little record after Katrina. Soon the Internet was alight with documentation of what he actually did on the day the hurricane hit land: a let-us-eat-cake photo op with Mr. Bush celebrating his birthday in Arizona.

Anything can happen in politics, and there are five months to go. But Tuesday night’s McCain pratfall — three weeks in the planning by his campaign, according to Fox News — should be a clear indication that Mr. Obama must accept Mr. McCain’s invitation to weekly debates at once. Tomorrow if possible, and, yes, bring on the green!

Mr. Obama must also heed Mr. McCain’s directive that he visit Iraq — as long as he avoids Baghdad markets and hits other foreign capitals on route. When the world gets a firsthand look at the new America Mr. Obama offers as an alternative to Mr. McCain’s truculent stay-the-course, the public pandemonium may make J.F.K.’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” visit to the Berlin Wall look like a warm-up act.

The Clinton bloc of women I referred to are these ones:

Clinton Bloc Becomes the Prize for Election Day

I’m thinking she can really help in the entire midwest. KY and MI especially.

I dunno what the vital middle attitude in those states are thinking, but it’s probably similar to Ohio.

Boxturtle (Tough to get a midwestern farmer comfortable with a Harvard Lawyer)

The art of getting them comfortable is explaining things that you are so familiar with on many levels in terms with which they are comfortable. That’s one of the reasons the Clintons and people who are extraordinary communicators via speeches and town halls can be invaluable.