The camps have tossed out a few stinkers lately, and some seem to have stuck in the mainstream for the news-cycle. Here's a few that I find interesting and my short take on them.

1. Clinton Camp: Obama told the Canadians that he wasn't serious about his NAFTA policies.
   After she and her cutthroat band of handlers spewed this across the media pages for a day or two, it finally comes out from the Canadian government that it was HER campaign all along that slipped this little crap-nugget outta the hole. This is despicable politics and reeks of Rovian-style swift-boating.
   


2. Obama Camp: Clinton "is a monster".
   You know, right after vilifying Hillary's master, Howard Wolfson, for calling his tactics Ken Starr-like, one of Obama's own political strategists fired off this line. The best thing that happened in this story was the almost immediate apology and resignation of the offender. This could have been handled better in the onset, but the reaction from the Obama campaign was right on the money here. In this tight of a primary fight, against one of the most mechanical and diabolical political teams since Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, Barack needs to nip this kind of stuff in the bud before it hits the airwaves.
   


3. Clinton Camp: "As far as I know, [Obama's not a muslim]".
   This is one of the worst offenders here. This horrible rumor has been disproved time and time and TIME again by Obama and his entire entourage. The guy's a Christian, straight-up. No question about it. For Clinton to even HINT that she isn't certain of it with this kind of political skirting is despicable to impossible degrees. She should have come flat out with a vehement "No" and stopped all lines of questioning on the matter and not entertained the subject again. She didn't, and it shows just what she'll do to try and win this nomination.
   


4. Obama Camp: Clinton is as being as secretive as Bush and Cheney.
   Seriously now. You don't invoke the Unholy and his puppet without due diligence. Sure, she seems to be hiding something in her past and won't release her returns until this nomination is all but sealed up with her in the throne, but this is going a little far. The past 7 years have seen the greatest amount of Constitutional side-stepping, unauthorized surveillance, torture and more secret backroom pud-pulling than the last six decades of White House residents. I don't think hiding your taxes (which she shouldn't be doing) equates to the horrors of this current administration. This is an unfair comparison and shouldn't have been made in the first place. But even though it's out there, I still don't think it's bad enough to demand a public apology.
   

Dear Senators Clinton and Obama,

Surely, you must know that this long, drawn-out primary campaign is doing nothing but hurting the Democratic Party and diminishing our chances in the November general election. Not only are the personal attacks childish and pointless, but they are providing the Republican Party with ammunition to use against the ultimate nominee. (It is true that they would likely use the same ammunition regardless of the content of this primary contest, but they will now have the implicit backing of the losing Democratic candidate.)

Supporters on both sides want the other side to back down and drop out of the race, and that would be the easiest way to close this primary season. It does appear, at this point, that Senator Obama does have an advantage in pledged delegates and the popular vote. However, there are still races to go and the people in the remaining states deserve to have their voices heard. So, barring one candidate dropping out of the race, it becomes important to finish this race with a different tone and with different tactics. There must be a way to elevate the contest so that it helps the eventual nominee, rather than hurt him or her.

I am not the first to suggest that the rest of this race should be about substantive issues, rather than silly attacks about whose supporters said what. First, it is important to recognize that in terms of these issues, both candidates’ views are similar. There are substantial differences, but overall, these differences are trivial when compared to John McCain’s ideas. What it boils down to, is that this campaign is about which candidate is liked and trusted more. And personal attacks on the other do nothing to settle that question. What needs to happen is an honest and frank policy discussion that highlights the substantive differences and similarities between the two candidates and how best to beat the Republicans in November. Let the voters decide based on that.

Senator Obama’s speech last week was monumental and should serve as a model for the rest of the campaign. If both candidates continued the race with the same honest and nuanced tone, it would not only put an end to the childish personal attacks, but would prepare the winner for the general election campaign and help to reunite the party behind the Democratic nominee.

Or the campaign can continue the way it is going now. We will go to Denver and have a brokered convention on our hands. Almost exactly half of the party will be disenfranchised. And the nominee, legitimate or otherwise, will have less than three months to pull it together and try to beat McCain in November.

I like my idea better.

Sincerely,
Toby.

David Brooks on Meet the Press this morning:

I think she should slow down the campaign, run what Mike Huckabee ran, a dignified campaign, not attacking her opponents, go through North Carolina and then get out. She really has very little opportunity to win. The Jeremiah Wright thing was big, the big scandal, the biggest thing Barack Obama's faced really in months. It didn't hurt him. We now have the polling results from poll after poll. It's clear it didn't hurt him. The voters were not shaken off him. The--Michigan and Florida are not going to revote, the superdelegates are never going to overrule the pledge delegates, so her chances are really small.

Why is this a good idea? First off, it would engender some good will toward Senator Clinton within the party and among Obama's supporters. Second, it would leave a better taste in the mouths of those who might consider backing Clinton in 2012 should Obama lose to McCain. And most importantly, it allows her to stay in the game in case something catastrophic occurs. Brooks and Peter Beinart, Tim Russert's other guest today, both agreed that Clinton's chances were no more than 5%. That seems about right. And a lot of that 5% can be explained by the possibility of a huge scandal--never out of the question in politics. Since she is not going to win without a giant event, what does she gain by an ugly, divisive contest?

NPR has a story up about the gay vote in PA.

Mark Segal, editor of the Philadelphia Gay News, says he has never seen an election in which the Democratic Party fielded better choices. Segal says Obama and Clinton have each sought his paper's endorsement.

Segal remains undecided. He says that to win the Gay News endorsement, Clinton and Obama need to speak very directly to issues affecting gay and lesbian voters.

"We want to hear what's going on with their positions on 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,'" the editor says. "We just don't want hear a very simple, 'Yeah, I want to get rid of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."' We would like to hear a plan."

The issues related to homosexuality are all pretty big political landmines, even for those on the left. It's not just the military thing as the article does go on to touch on employment and same sex marriage.

The interesting thing to me is how powerfuil such a small minority is thanks to the current Democratic hoopla.

By one count, those voters makes up five percent of the city's Democratic electorate. In a tight race, even such a small demographic could make a big difference.

And as for this:

Segal says he believes the lesbian community in particular strongly supports Clinton, who would be the first woman to hold the office of president. He calls it a matter of "identity pride."

I'm too mature to go there.

Don't really have a whole lot to post today, so here's a glimpse at a couple things I've read so far today.

Politico: Obama's happy, drama-free campaign:

In the days and weeks ahead, the Barack Obama campaign is going to pose a simple question to the undecided voters and undeclared superdelegates who will decide the Democratic nomination for president: If Hillary Clinton can’t run a good primary campaign, how is she ever going to run a good campaign against the Republicans?

And while she says she is ready from Day One to be president, she is at something like Day 430 into being a presidential candidate and her campaign seems to be going from bad to worse to train wreck.
...

And this is the pitch the Obama campaign is going to make in the weeks ahead, especially to those superdelegates who are still on the fence: Obama has run a good primary campaign, which is a sign that he will run a good general election campaign, and then a good presidency. Clinton, the Obama campaign will say, cannot make the same argument.

Sean Wilentz argues in Salon that if the Democratic primary operated on a winner-take-all basis -- "one of the central principles of American electoral politics" -- Hillary Clinton would be ahead. "In a popular-vote winner-take-all system, Clinton would now have 1,743 pledged delegates to Obama's 1,257," he concludes. Instead, Obama has a lead that is "reliant on certain eccentricities in the current Democratic nominating process."

This is a bizarre proposition. It's true that the Democratic delegate-apportioning process is eccentric. But since when is winner-take-all considered a more democratic process than proportional allotment? Indeed, in this case, winner-take-all would have made the Democratic primary less democratic. Obama is winning the popular vote. He's even winning if you count the vote in Florida, where neither candidate campaigned or organized their voters. (A restriction that benefitted Clinton enormously, as greater familiarity has boosted Obama's standing virtually everywhere -- witness the withering away of Clinton's once-massive lead in Pennsylvania.)
...

Clinton supporters are spending an inordinate amount of time devising scenarios where Clinton would be winning if the rules of the primary were changed retroactively. Yet all the rules were understood and agreed to by both candidates in advance. The rules are not perfect, but the hypothetical alternatives proposed by Clinton's side -- imposing a winner-take-all system, counting the votes in states with no campaigning or only one candidate on the ballot -- would make the race less fair, not more fair. So, yes, it's possible to imagine different, less-fair rules where the losing candidate would have prevailed. But so what?

show the race tightening in Pennsylvania. The CNN "poll of polls" (You know it's good because they polled the polls! How about that?) has Clinton up by only seven points, while the RCP Average has her up by only just over six points. No telling what the MoE is. Also, it should be noted that, according to CNN, nine percent of likely voters in Pennsylvania are undecided.

I don't put a whole lot of stock in polls, especially in this race, but any polls that show my guy doing well are encouraging! (In true American political style, I dismiss polls that reflect poorly on my candidate and tout the good ones!)

This might become a regular thing...

Politico: Where did the tables turn?

Where did the Hillary Clinton campaign first go wrong? How did she go from inevitable to in trouble?

I think it all began with the very first contest: Iowa.

Iowa is where Clinton needed to strangle the Barack Obama campaign in its crib. [Gotta love that imagery, hm?]

She needed to do him in at the very beginning, while her inevitability argument still had credibility.

Hillary Rodham Clinton wants voters to decide the nomination based on who can coolly and competently run the country. She had better hope they don’t study her recent campaign too closely for the answer.

Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday.

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling — if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign.

I was checking out the Compassion Forum, particularly the sections on abortion and euthanasia and I quite liked Obama's answers (shock and surprise). Rather than limit this (what I hope to be a debate) to that one issue though, I'd like to know what your "one issue" is, if you have one. What is your deal breaker for a candidate. Mine is, if they don't like Bruce Willis movies and possibly support for the war in Iraq.

All other things being equal what would keep you from voting for someone?

So I was listening to talk radio this morning and doggone if I don't feel blessed for having a great couple of guys to listen to on my morning drive. This morning they were talking about the "elite" tag and how stupid it is. These people all make boocoodles more money than I do or probably ever will. They all went to prestigious academic institutions. They've all served this country (and/or desire to do so) more than I do. They are all by definition part of the "elite", the best of the best, the cream of the crop, etc. To turn this into some sort of pejorative is just plain silly. I want the elite to be up there. I want Ivy League gradutes, people that have risen to the top of the business, academic, and/or military worlds to be elected to the highest offices in the land. Don't you?

So having said that I have to tell the three folks in that picture up there to stop acting the fool. A river of Crown Royal, a 300 game, shooting at clay pigeons, none of the games that you're playing are going to make you look like regular folk. They will only come across (to anyone paying attention) as pandering. You are the elite. Sometimes (looking at you junior Senator from Illinois) you will say things that sound arrogant, because of that. That's okay by me. Often you will say things that seem to make no sense to me. I chalk that up to the fact that you are giving (essentially) the same speeches ten times a day for what, fifteen months now, and you have cameras stalking your every move waiting for that verbal misstep. None of that will convince me that you aren't Top Guns in a way.

Here's what will take you down a peg or twelve. Keep smacking each other around. Keep calling one another knuckleheads. Forget that you're up there on that stage letting me know how much you want to serve the American people. Believe your own press releases. You do these things and all you are is King Stooge.

ht to TSK for photo

Happy Friday!

Tom Hanks is endorsing Barack Obama.

At this moment, only two counties remain to be counted in Indiana. NBC has been holding out on calling the election for Clinton because of those two counties, Lake and Union. Union county, a rural, white county with just over 7,000 people. Lake county, however, has an 25% black population of over 485,000 people (including Gary, IN, a predominantly black city with 85%).

Hillary just addressed her people claiming victory in Indiana, thanking the people for giving her the "opportunity" to continue on to the convention.

Fingers are crossed that Lake county can pull up the 4% points needed for Obama to break her and ruin her "victory" speech.

Update:
NBC just called Indiana for Clinton by a razor-thin margin (likely under 15K votes). The interesting thing about tonight is that she seems to have canceled all of her public events for Wednesday. Didn't Romney do that right before he pulled out?

I don't know how I feel about this, if it's true, of course. I guess it depends on the tone of the campaign between now and then. If, as seems to be the general consensus, Hillary continues the dirty tactics, this will be a good idea. It will be a symbolic step to starting the general election. But, if Hillary takes the Huckabee route, it seems that declaring victory will come across as presumptuous, which could turn voters off in November.

If on the off chance, the rest of the campaign is about the issues and is fought fairly and cleanly (unless that's not a word), I think Obama should hold off on declaring victory until after the Rules Committee meets on the 31st and until after the last of the primaries on June 3rd. Obama has the nomination, whether or not he declares victory.

A pledged delegate for Clinton switches his vote to Obama. Great. We got the vote, but what does that mean? There has been talk from the Clinton camp about getting pledged delegates to switch. This could legitimize her position. Methinks the Obama camp would be smart to discourage delegate switching.

Update: Christopher Orr at The Plank weighs in:

But there is, or ought to be, a moral [obligation]. There may be extraordinary cases in which it is reasonable for a pledged delegate to defy the will of the citizens whose votes he's representing, but this isn't one of them. There have been plenty of procedural absurdities that have been brought to light in this year's extended primary. But none come close to comparing with the undemocratic chaos that would ensue if other delegates took their pledges as lightly as Johnson does his.

My initial prediction for Hillary to drop out of the race was June 10th. I'll still stand by that prediction, as I think that after tomorrow, she'll give a little time for the superdelegates to make their decisions. But, Marc Ambinder presents a good case for her dropping out (or at least suspending her campaign) tomorrow:

(1) She's going to speak Tuesday night from New York, not from South Dakota or Montana.

(2) The Politico reports that members of her advance staff are being recalled to New York and being given hints that their employment is over; yes, Clinton won't have any more states to campaign in, but the Obama campaign is not shedding its advance staff after Tuesday

(3) Cheryl Mills, a very senior Clinton adviser, intends to return, full-time, to her job as senior vice president at New York University. (Note: aides say I am making way too much out of this news; Mills would surely stay on board Clinton's campaign if Clinton continues. And truth be told, I did not contact Mills before I wrote this item, something I should have done.)

(4) Junior members of the staff are making plans for vacation, and they're not receiving any push-back from their bosses.

What do you think?

AP: Obama has delegates to clinch nomination

Tonight's speeches will be interesting to watch.

But this commercial put out by the RNC is still pretty painful to watch.

ht: Marc Ambinder

I honestly heard with my own two lovely shell-like perfect ears a Hillary supporter say (after Hill's latest speech) that he would wait until she told him who to vote for, before he would make a decision.

Now I know that there are sheep like this on all sides. I know that Hillary supporters are upset, almost as upset as I would probably be were the tables turned. Question is, how big a percentage are there?

Also, didn't she tell him to support Obama? What does that mean to them?

Also also, what the blue lazes does "suspending" your campaign mean other than "I'm secretly hoping that something very, very wrong happens to teh Senator from IL?

An interesting article on Keith Olbermann.

This is too awesome! Sean Tevis, an Information Architect in Kansas, decided to run for his state Representative's office. Problem? He needed money, at least $26,000. The comic spells out what happened. He reached his goal in 24 hours.

According to the LA Times:

As of Saturday, 5,703 people had made online donations to Tevis' campaign. The majority live outside of the state. Fans from other countries even sent more than $1,700 -- which Tevis refunded, in compliance with federal election rules.

Staffers for two political candidates in Kansas and eight out-of-state campaigns -- Democrats and independents running for state or congressional seats -- have contacted Tevis in recent days to ask for help and advice. And the money has continued to pour into Tevis' campaign, along with fan e-mails cheering on his campaign platform of boosting teacher pay, eliminating food taxes and protecting an individual's right to privacy.

Whether or not he wins I applaud him for his wit. This and Obama'a use of the net for fund raising tell me that politicians are finally figuring out this interwebs thing. Now is that good? Well I guess we'll see.

If you don't read XKCD and you're a geek of ANY strip, you should remedy that.

An interesting independently-made anti-McCain commercial:

I think it would be a very effective ad, if professionally produced and it's not like it's untrue, but should Obama put some money into this type of advertising? Has he already?