OBAMA DAILY NEWS THREAD Sunday Feb-24-08

In R.I., Clinton Adopts a Mocking Tone
By Perry Bacon Jr.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- A day after she angrily criticized Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton delighted a crowd of supporters here by playfully mocking her opponent.

"I could stand up here and say, let's just get everybody together, let's get unified, the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing, and the world will be perfect," she told a crowd that laughed at and cheered the jab at Obama's hopeful rhetoric. "... You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear."

...
Rhode Island is one of four states that will vote March 4, although Clinton is spending much more of her time on delegate-rich Texas and Ohio.

While she is essentially ceding Vermont to Obama, Clinton told reporters on the flight here that she is "really positive" about her chances in the other states. She said she had not read a New York Times story that reported dipping enthusiasm among supporters who worried about the possible end of her campaign if she does not win in Texas and Ohio. And she lamented that Ralph Nader will undertake a third run for the presidency, arguing that in 2000 Nader "prevented Al Gore from being the greenest president we've ever had."

"Obviously, it's not helpful to whoever our Democratic nominee is," Clinton said of Nader's bid. "But it's a free country."

Along with two campaign events in Rhode Island today, she was planning to attend fundraisers here and in Boston, along with one in the District on Monday. Obama aides said the Illinois senator, awash with cash raised over the Internet, has held one fundraising event this month.

Nader enters in boon to GOP
By: Mike Allen and Ben Smith
Feb 24, 2008 09:48 AM EST
Updated: February 24

Ralph Nader announced on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he'll run as a third-party, anti-corporate candidate for president this fall, which would be likely to drain votes from the Democratic nominee and provide a huge boon to Republicans.

Democrats say they will work behind the scenes — and use court challenges, if necessary — to try to thwart his access to ballots.

...The immediate question for Democrats is whether they'll be as ruthless as they were in 2004 in throwing procedural obstacles in the way of Nader's access to the ballot in key states.

Nader has a pending lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee on the issue and recently told Politico that he would make ballot access a central cause of a presidential campaign, which he restated on television Sunday morning.

The Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, speaking shortly before Nader's announcement, said Nader's past runs have shown that he usually pulls votes from the Democratic nominee. "So naturally, Republicans would welcome his entry into the race," the former Arkansas governor said on CNN

Nader's "illegal" GOP backers - Salon.com

Jun 29, 2004 | A Washington watchdog group is charging that Ralph Nader's presidential campaign benefited from "illegal" assistance provided by right-wing organizations -- at the behest of his supposed opponents in the Bush-Cheney campaign.

....In recent weeks, the Oregon conservative groups deployed their phone banks to contact Republican voters, urging them to attend a Nader rally in Portland on Saturday, where the candidate's organizers sought to gather enough signatures to place him on the ballot.

....he has accepted help from Republicans not only this year, when they have contributed thousands of dollars to his war chest, but in 2000, when the Republican Leadership Council sponsored television ads on his behalf in Wisconsin, Washington and Oregon. ..

"Nader's Republican Pipe Dream" Jun 10, 2004 | Ralph Nader's latest presidential campaign does not have an official slogan. It does, however, have a kind of official rationalization. "I think I'm going to take more votes away from Republicans than from Democrats," Nader says, almost every time he speaks.

Nader has run for President 5 times (in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008).
In 1992 he ran as a write-in in both the New Hampshire Republican and Democratic primaries, and other primaries. In 1996 and 2000, he was the nominee of the Green Party; in 2004, he ran as an independent, but was also endorsed by the Reform Party.

Hillary Clinton Campaign Launches Sleaze Attack on Barack Obama and Two Dedicated Child Advocates

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

Mark Karlin Editor and Publisher
February 24, 2008

In the last debate – the 20th or so – in Texas, Senator Clinton got booed for claiming that Barack Obama “xeroxed” his speeches. It was a demeaning cheap shot – and we mean particularly demeaning to Senator Clinton.

...No, what got us in a lather were little noticed e-mails by a Clinton staffer goading the press to follow-up on an allegation that Obama had ties to “radical groups.”

The Clinton spokesperson, Phil Singer, was in gutter mode when he pushed a story -- which was either placed in the New York Sun and Politico by the Clinton or McCain campaigns – that tried to connect Obama to the radical “Weather Underground” that was in its heyday when Obama wasn’t even a teenager.

What was the connection? Well, Obama, many years ago, had an Illinois Senate fundraiser and accepted a small donation from William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Were they both in the violent “Weather Underground” when Obama was in elementary school? Yes. But trying to connect a ten-year-old Obama, living in Indonesia and Hawaii, with a radical, long-ago defunct movement is inexcusable.

It is another sleazy attack that Senator Clinton supporters will have to compromise their souls to support.

Why? Because William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in their adult lives have devoted themselves to improving the lives and prospects for children. Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and Dohrn – who became a lawyer – heads a highly regarded program at Northwestern University that is dedicated to the rights and welfare of children. Obama served on the Board of Directors of a prestigious foundation in Chicago with Ayers -- and they all live in the Hyde Park (University of Chicago) neighborhood.


more at the link

Hillary Should Get Out Now
Clinton has only one shot—for Obama to trip up so badly that he disqualifies himself.

Mar 3, 2008

If Hillary Clinton wanted a graceful exit, she'd drop out now—before the March 4 Texas and Ohio primaries—and endorse Barack Obama.
This would be terrible for people like me who have been dreaming of a brokered convention for decades. For selfish reasons, I want the story to stay compelling for as long as possible, which means I'm hoping for a battle into June for every last delegate and a bloody floor fight in late August in Denver. But to withdraw this week would be the best thing imaginable for Hillary's political career. She won't, of course, and for reasons that help explain why she's in so much trouble in the first place.

Withdrawing would be stupid if Hillary had a reasonable chance to win the nomination, but she doesn't. To win, she would have to do more than reverse the tide in Texas and Ohio, where polls show Obama already even or closing fast. She would have to hold off his surge, then establish her own powerful momentum within three or four days. Without a victory of 20 points or more in both states, the delegate math is forbidding. In Pennsylvania, which votes on April 22, the Clinton campaign did not even file full delegate slates. That's how sure they were of putting Obama away on Super Tuesday.

...

The conventional view is that the Clintons approach power the way hard-core gun owners approach a weapon—they'll give it up only when it's wrenched from their cold, dead fingers. When I floated this idea of her quitting, Hillary aides scoffed that it would never happen. Their Pollyanna-ish assessment of the race offered a glimpse inside the bunker. These are the same loyalists who told Hillary that she was inevitable, that experience was a winning theme, that going negative in a nice state like Iowa would work, that all Super Tuesday caucus states could be written off. The Hillary who swallowed all that will never withdraw.

But in her beautiful closing answer in the Austin debate, I glimpsed a different, more genuine, almost valedictory Hillary Clinton. She talked about the real suffering of Americans and, echoing John Edwards, said, "Whatever happens, we'll be fine." She described what "an honor" it was to be in a campaign with Barack Obama, and seemed to mean it. The choice before her is to go down ugly with a serious risk of humiliation at the polls, or to go down classy, with a real chance of redemption. Why not the latter? Besides, it would wreck the spring of all her critics in the press. If she thinks of it that way, maybe it's not such an outlandish idea after all.

Obama, not Clinton, favored over McCain
Whether Iowa turns red or blue in the fall presidential election may have a lot to do with which Democrat is on the ballot against Republican John McCain, according to a new Iowa Poll by The Des Moines Register.

Barack Obama would carry Iowa if he were the Democratic nominee running against McCain, if voters feel in November the way they do now.

But McCain would carry Iowa in an election matchup with Democrat Hillary Clinton if the election were held now, according to the new poll.

Obama, an Illinois senator and his party's frontrunner, was the choice of 53 percent of Iowans who plan to vote in November. McCain, an Arizona senator, was the choice of 36 percent of Iowans in an Obama-McCain contest.
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Newly Engaged in a Three-Front War
By Alec MacGillis
TOLEDO -- So this is what being a front-runner deep in primary season looks like: taking flak on three sides.

Sen. Barack Obama found himself today facing insinuations from Republicans that he lacks patriotism, charges from Hillary Clinton that he is a hypocrite on campaign ethics, and put-downs from Ralph Nader, who in announcing his third-party candidacy this morning dismissed Obama as well-intentioned but in hock to the corporate agenda.

So far, at least, Obama is showing that he can stand his ground and return fire on all fronts.

At a gypsum manufacturing plant in Lorain, Ohio, today, he was asked about indications that Republicans are preparing a line of attack impugning his patriotism, pulling together several things: a photograph that showed him singing the national anthem without putting his hand over his heart; his decision not to wear an American flag pin on his lapel; his (tenuous) connection with a former Weatherman; and his wife's recent comment about not being proud of America until this campaign.

"The way I will respond to it is with the truth. I owe everything I am to this country. The reason I came to national attention was a speech in which I spoke of my love for this country," he said. "The notion that I am disqualified because at one event I was singing the national anthem but failed to put my hand over my heart -- if that were the case, that must disqualify half the people who've ever gone to a football game."

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