Obama wasted no time getting out a contribution request. Putting that aside for a moment, check out the numbers quoted in the email.
More than 400,000 people have donated to this campaign in 2008, and we are on course to reach half-a-million donors before the crucial March 4th primaries and caucuses.
I just read this analysis of Hillary Clinton’s campaign by the AP. Rather similar to the one I did earlier. See if you agree.
Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has found a lot of ways to explain her string of losses to Sen. Barack Obama.
Caucus states, the former first lady says, are undemocratic and cater only to party activists…
By this logic, only certain states really matter, such as New Hampshire and New Jersey, states that Clinton has won. Or Texas and Ohio, states she must capture to stay in the race.
The list of excuses is long, but the justifications are wearing thin as Obama was expected to win primaries in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia on Tuesday after a four-state sweep last weekend plus the Virgin Islands. All the contests Clinton has suggested don’t count are proving in size and scope that they do.
"Every day the numbers show the true state of the race," Democratic strategist Jenny Backus said. "Obama is moving and gathering a bigger coalition, and Hillary’s coalition is diminishing."…
…But to do so is to ignore all the other measures of campaign success — all of which now favor Obama. His campaign has brought in more than $1 million per day from more than 650,000 contributors, allowing him to flood the primary states with television ads and staff. Clinton, meanwhile, is still climbing out of a financial hole that forced her to make a $5 million personal loan to the campaign.
Obama also continues to draw arena-sized crowds to his rallies, dwarfing Clinton’s smaller but still enthusiastic gatherings.
In the face of such numbers, Clinton strategists have taken a risk — all but pinning her candidacy to the outcome of primaries in Texas and Ohio on March 4…
…To be sure, Clinton’s strength among traditional Democratic constituencies has proven durable and has effectively prevented Obama from running away with the contest so far. And Clinton has rightly said that a Democrat would be hard pressed to win a general election without the support of the party’s base.
…Obama has begun to make inroads in [traditional Democratic constituencies ] — winning a caucus in Maine on Sunday that was dominated by white, working-class voters. He has prevailed with blacks…while creating a new alliance of voters not always associated with the party, including independents, affluent voters, young people and men.
In addition to the staff loss previously mentioned, Hillary lost two more staff members tonight — Kevin Thurman and Crystal Patterson, key players on her Internet team.
It’s starting to look like Barack Obama is overtaking Hillary Clinton to the point where a brokered convention or super delegates will not be a consideration, much less her capturing the nomination before the convention. There are just too many signs that cumulatively indicate anything but a potential winner.
Her previously favorable demographics have slipped.
According to exit polling, Obama scored a resounding, across-the-board triumph in Virginia even among demographic groups that have favored Clinton before. Obama won women by double digits. Among Latino voters, who make up five percent of the electorate in the commonwealth, Obama held a 10-point margin.
She lost all primaries and caucuses this past weekend. Furthermore, those loses were all double-digit loses, with some approaching or surpassing 30 points.
At the most atypical time for a presidential campaign, her campaign manager and deputy campaign manager “resigned.”
Her campaign almost went broke and she did not even know it. Although Clinton received substantial donations after the campaign’s financial status was made public, Obama’s fundraising is outpacing her by at least 2 to 1.
Obama fund-raisers say he is taking in roughly $1 million a day, while Clinton fund-raisers say she is taking in about half of that, mostly online.
Hillary pre-maturely abandoned campaigning in the states where primaries were held today and this past weekend to implement a “Rudy-Hold-’Em” strategy in Texas. She sent Bill Clinton to Ohio to develop her last possible firewall in Ohio.
She is now behind in national polling after enjoying 20+ point leads for more than a year, Furthermore, she loses or ties, at best, in head-to-head polls with John McCain, whereas Obama beats McCain.
When all those factors are combined it doesn’t look promising for Clinton, but in my opinion, the most telling is the substantial change in the voter’s demographics. If that remains constant or worsens, it rapidly eliminates Obama’s campaign as a demographic anomaly. It’s no longer about ethnicity, gender, or age group.
Simply stated, Hillary seems to have lost her ‘Mo.
Time will tell. Maybe Hillary’s Rudy-Hold-’Em strategy will prove Rudy and me wrong.
MSNBC projects McCain to win Washington, D.C. with a total vote of "approximately 4000."
MSNBC projects that Barack Obama will win Maryland by a “significant margin,” and that John McCain will win by a "substantial margin."
Slippery slope.
Mike Henry, Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Campaign Manager, resigned yesterday morning, “but worked the last two days as a volunteer,” according to The Fix.
In an e-mail sent to staff and obtained by The Fix, Henry writes: “As someone who has managed campaigns, I share the unique understanding of the challenges that the campaign will face over the next several weeks. Our campaign needs to move quickly to build a new leadership team, support them and their decisions and make the necessary adjustments to achieve the winning outcome for which we have all worked so hard for over a year now.”
MSNBC projects John McCain to win Virginia.
|
Virginia Republican Primary
|
|
| John McCain | 48% |
| Mike Huckabee | 43% |
Precincts Reporting: 68%
MSNBC is reporting that Maryland has extended poll closing time to 9:30 PM ET due to weather.
MSNBC projects Barack Obama to win Virginia (some pundits are saying by landslide).
| CANDIDATE | PERCENT |
| Barack Obama | 62% |
| Hillary Clinton | 37% |
Precincts reporting: 7%
A comment made at TPM by one if its readers.
I actually like the idea of a unitary executive, because it implies that there could be a unitary citizen. I have begun to consider myself a unitary citizen. I am allowed (by virtue of the definition of a unitary executive) to pick and choose the laws I would like to follow, kind of Thoreau like.
I also like the idea of retroactive immunity paired with the unitary citizen. I could decide not to follow a stupid law and then forgive myself afterwards.
Indeed!
Far too many in Congress are heavy on rhetoric and light — to put it mildly — on action. Sen Chris Dodd (D-CT) cannot be characterized as such. He has fought giving amnesty to Bush and his band of crooks through every step of the FISA revision process.
In spite of the heavy losses suffered today, Dodd intends to launch a counterattack to the extent possible, albeit against virtually all odds.
The following is from a press conference Dodd had with reporters today. TPM has the full story.
“We’ve lost every single battle we had on this bill [in the Senate]…. We’re not getting anywhere at all” he said. “The question now is can the House do better.” After the bill passes in the Senate, as is expected late today or tomorrow, the bill would head to a conference. There, conferees from both houses will try to hash out the significant differences between the House and Senate versions, the issue of retroactive immunity chief among them.
However, Dodd said, if the final bill emerging from that powwow does contain retroactive immunity, he said he’d “absolutely” filibuster that bill; he’d use “whatever vehicles we can” to stop it.
The Senate had “just sanctioned” the “single largest invasion of privacy in the history of the country,” he said.
Some questioned the motives of Dodd’s outspokenness against granting amnesty to the telecoms during his bid for the presidency. Suffice it to say, those questions cannot be raised today and were obviously without merit before. Unfortunately, they were just shining examples of too much rhetoric accompanied by no action.
The Democratic Senators — Jay Rockefeller, Dianne Feinstein, Evan Bayh, Claire McCaskill, Mary Landrieu, and Bill Nelson, too name a few — that gave aid and comfort to George Bush and the telecoms today, should strongly consider attending a Dodd-presented lecture on patriotism.
Krugman posts a response on his blog to all the email he received about his piece yesterday slamming Obama supporters.
I’m starting to get emails from angry people who tell me that I’m ignoring all the terrible race-baiting the Clintons have done. I think I’ll just outsource my response to Clive Crook — who is, by the way, an Obama supporter.
Some commentators accused Bill of playing the race card when he called Obama’s account of his position on the Iraq war a “fairy tale”. How so? What did that have to do with race? And does Hillary’s comment about King, the only instance Morris bothers to offer, even qualify? She merely said that getting the job done required a can-do president as well as an inspiring and visionary champion. And so it did. I cannot see that this subtracts anything from King’s stature, or that it was intended to. Whatever its merits, this is the Clintons’ old theme, not a sinister new one: if elected, she would hit the ground running, whereas the inexperienced Obama would be out of his depth. It took a hyper-sensitive press to turn that comment into a racial slur.
….
I think the press played the race card, not the Clintons.
It really makes me sad to see so many people get played by the media on this. If you prefer Obama, fine — but the evil, race-card-playing Clinton campaign is no more real than Al Gore’s claim that he invented the Internet.
And to Obama supporters, just remember: these people are not your friends. After they take down Hillary Clinton, if they can, your man will be next.
Add: If you want to see what playing the race card looks like, watch the Willie Horton ad. What do we have here? MLK/LBJ — but that was totally innocent. Jesse Jackson — a stupid way to spin a big loss, but hardly part of a coordinated campaign. Cocaine — stupid and crass, but only race-based if you want to see it that way. Pretty thin gruel.
Folks, you’ve been played like a fiddle by people in the media who just plain hate the Clintons. They tried to take Hillary down over her clothes, her voice, her tears. When none of that worked, they invented a race war.
There are some perfectly good arguments against Hillary — Iraq, the presence of people like Mark Penn, the big-money Dems in her circle. But this really is Al-Gore-says-he-invented-the-Internet stuff. And it’s deeply depressing to see so many progressives fall for it.
Krugman misses the point and has apparently been slammed for it. In his original piece, he rants and raves about Obama supporters collectively, but cites negligible evidence to support his generalized and ambiguous accusations. Moreover,, in his blog post, he falls back to 1988 when Bush 41 ran the racist Willie Horton ad, which was very successful. And why was it successful? At least in part because there was no real outrage expressed. Think about it. That was 20 years ago! People are not going to accept those kinds of tactics today as evidenced by the current protests Krugman criticizes.
I said the argument on the LBJ-MLK matter was debatable and subject to interpretation, but nevertheless, at minimum it demonstrates Hillary engaging her mouth absent her cerebrum. But to take that one step further, Hillary, I don’t believe, is that stupid. She is very calculating and academically trained as a lawyer to carefully choose her words. One would have a hard time arguing that Hillary’s public statements are not well thought before making them, if not scripted in advance.
Negative remarks and ads are considerably more successful when ignored, and I see little evidence that Krugman’s assertion — and that’s all it is, an assertion — that his theory for negative attacks will be met with 20-year-old responses, much less acceptance.
With respect to the balance issue, or as Krugman puts it, “angry people who tell me that I’m ignoring all the terrible race-baiting the Clintons have done,” he simply dismisses it. Instead he quotes Clive Crook’s argument on the validity (or absence of) of the Clinton’s alleged racist remarks. Duh! Think he missed the point — hypocrisy?
Krugman chose to slam Obama supporters (largely unsubstantiated and ambiguous) but failed to even consider, much less cite, what His Glorious Hillary Clinton Supporters may have been doing. Nope, he just takes a broad swipe at Obama Supporters. Unbalanced and stereotyping at its best. And he failed to mention in his original piece or his response, Bill Clinton’s egregious “Jesse Jackson” remark, amongst others, which he publicly apologized for.
It is patently obvious Krugman does not like Barack Obama and that’s within his rights. It is no different than Frank Rich’s distaste for Hillary Clinton, although if memory serves me correctly, I believe Rich does a far better job at substantiating his criticism. I don’t care if Krugman hates Mike Huckabee; just make a valid argument and don’t declare that all Huckabee supporters are Evil Intended as he did with Obama Supporters.
Speaking of Frank Rich, Greg Sargent posits that Krugman’s use of Obama Supporters is code for Frank Rich et al. at the Times, rather than Obama Supporters in general.
Whatever the case, Krugman’s piece and his response are simply pathetic.
The Senate’s overwhelming decision today to provide retroactive immunity to telecom companies for illegally wiretapping Americans clearly demonstrates the level of influence lobbyists and special interests have in Washington. Lawmakers decided it was more important to protect companies, such as AT&T and Verizon, from criminal prosecution and numerous lawsuits worth billions of dollars than it was to protect American citizens from terrorist threats and uphold their Fourth Amendment rights. (Bush promised to veto FISA bill if it did not include amnesty.)
Quite simply, Congress dismissed the Rule of Law, acquiesced to the authoritarian rule of George Bush, and sanctioned lining their pockets with substantial contributions from the telecom companies.
The lawmakers’ decision today goes to the very core of what former presidential candidate John Edwards fought so hard against in his unsuccessful bid for the White House this year. Following Edwards’ lead, Barack Obama adopted the same platform for his campaign – accept no campaign funds from Washington lobbyists and special interests, and ban them from holding White House positions. Hillary Clinton has chosen to continue accepting campaign contributions from lobbyists and special interests.
The amendment [S.Amdt. 3907 to S.Amdt. 3911 to S. 2248 (FISA Amendments Act of 2007)], sponsored by Sen. Chris Dodd, failed on a 31 to 67 vote. (Official results here.)
Democrats siding with Republicans were: Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Evan Bayh (D-IA), Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Tim Johnson (D-SD), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Mark Pryor (D-AR), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Ken Salazar (D-CO), Tom Carper (D-DE), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Jim Webb (D-VA), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Kent Conrad (D-ND), and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI).
Presidential candidates Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain were present and voted Yea and Nay, respectively. Hillary Clinton was not present for voting.
Glenn Greenwald has a very good analysis on the amnesty bill today, which I highly recommend. In addition, Glenn notes that he, FDL et al. have a petition, “directed at House members, demanding that they reject this lawless, authoritarian Senate bill and defend their own, previously passed bill (the RESTORE Act). I encourage everyone to sign it. You can do so here.”
Related post: Dodd to continue FISA amnesty fight
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