RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Hillary in 2008

Hmmm...I wonder if Nader really will be a spoiler in 2008, chipping votes away from McCain (as opposed to whoever the Democratic nominee is).

I guess it'll just be a question of how de-vote-ed anyone is to Nader (or McCain, for that matter).

As noted before, Hillary seems to have more gay support than Obama. You and MEM are examples of that.

This is sort of interesting. If "Will and Grace" has taught us anything, one would think that gay men would be flocking to the handsome African-American male, not the dieselish old lady.

Please don't ever tell us the other things you learned from "Will and Grace".

Fortunately, the only other thing I learned was that Megan Mullally has a great rack.

way to backpeddle, g-man. at this point you're basically paul lynde, everyone knows you're gay and no one cares.

Paul Lynde was GAY?!?!?



But...but...Uncle Arthur was always getting hot chicks on "Bewitched."

My god, Ray, next you'll be telling me that Liberace, Charles Nelson Reilley and Rip Taylor all played for the other team also.

As I recall, early on in the campaign, Obama had a strained relationship with the gay community over statements made from one of his key supporters which he took a long time to repudiate.

EDIT: It was his campaign manager, another one of those so called "ex gays". Donnie McClurkin, a gospel singer (and Bush supporter) who advocates that gays can (and should) be "cured" emceed an Obama fundraiser. The Obama campaign spokesman blasted gays at Gospel concert; a white preacher and Obama said nothing for a long time afterwards.

Per the NYT, the anti-gay activist turned the entire final half hour of the concert into an anti-gay harangue:



That was one of his early gaffes which he's since corrected. Obama's relations with the gay community were off to a great start in January. Obama had just addressed the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, MLK's own church (text of the speech and video here), and Obama went out of his way in the speech to call the black community to task for having "scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them."

Not bad, considering candidates don't usually admonish their own in order to get votes.

Ah... another day, another dirty trick revealed from the Clinton campaign...




As for the right wing, they're more than happy to sit this one out as Hillary does the grunt work for them.



It's really shameful that Hillary has turned into a right wing slime surrogate in her scorched Earth petulant campaign to get her due.

MEM, I still want to know why it's OK in your book for Hillary Clinton to weaken the Democratic Party for the Republicans. What makes her shameful behavior and ultimately on behalf of John McCain and the republicans, OK in your book? Do you, like Hillary think it's her "right" to win the nomination and Obama is just some interloper fucking things up?

What makes her TWO votes authorizing the Iraq war excusable? Here’s the short course:



Y'know, with that vote record and rhetoric, we could be talking about any garden variety REPUBLICAN. I think the Levin vote speaks a lot more than the one vote she actually does take credit for and now wishes she could re-vote.

And what makes THIS vote palatable to you?




Eh?

And that has been the hallmark of her career in the Senate. Just a series of maneuvers calculatedly designed to make her the safe centrist Presidential candidate INSTEAD of actually HAVING something called conviction and courage.

I do agree with Obama that we should look for ways to cure gays.

Hillary never said it was her right to win or that Obama was some interloper fucking things up. I'm not a mindreader but I doubt she feels it's her "right" & out of the two of them she's been alot better at saying that whoever wins, the party will come together to back that candidate.

Hillary has every right to stay & fight to win though. She's a scrapper & I admire her for it. Right now she's hitting him hard but it's not anywhere as hard as he'll get hit in the general election against McCain if he wins the nomination.

CBS has projected Hillary Clinton the winner of Rhode Island!

As I said about Obama's win in Vermont: not particularly dispositive.

CBS has called Ohio for Hillary & it looks like she will win that by double digits. She's also leading in Texas but just barely. I'm going to guess she isn't going to be ending the campaign anytime soon.

CBS should keep such racist comments to themselves. Fear mongering.

Stop it, your going to upset Michelle & Oprah.

Hillary won Texas making for 3 wins in a row. It's safe to say she will be staying in the race & Obama no longer has momentum. I also believe he can no longer win without the help of superdelegates now.

please keep your politics of fear to yourself.

we have no politics to fear except the politics of fear itself.
think about it, bsams

;P lols

She defintitely slowed down his momentum. However:

• Democratic strategist Bob Beckel warned against overstating the importance of Clinton’s victories, predicting the New York senator would only pick up about 20 net delegates, and still trail Obama.
  
  “It still is a delegate game, and the momentum she has generated has no place to go,” he said.

Also, according to Tim Russert, Obama's campaign predicted he would lose Texas and Ohio. They mapped out the states Obama would win and lose some time ago, and every prediction came true except for Obama winning Maine - they hadn't expected that. Even the numbers matched up. And they still predict an Obama victory.

So we'll see if our political delegatessen gets Obama's order right.

Beckel's wrong. If it becomes a case of Obama losing support at the end & a statistically insignificant lead in pledged delegates, Hillary will probably win. She's already regained the lead in the Rasmussen national poll.
Rasmussen

I agree, MEM.

The inevitability of Obama being the candidate is just another case of the media making clear who their choice is, and pushing for him over Hillary.

That's just nonsense.

The right wing media is pushing for Hillary as is the so called "left wing" media. The only place that is mostly pro Obama is on the blogosphere and they routinely tally up CNN, ABC, NBC etc. etc's preferential coverage of Hillary.

The SNL clip you linked up is a case of Tina Fey's clear preference as a "femenist..

In her own words from Sunday's LA Times article about feminists being upset that women in general are drifting towards Obama.



that's kind of a bullshit sentiment IMO. Voting for Hillary simply because she's a fellow female like Fey.

Yeah, Tina's cute and plays funny on "30 Rock." But this whole "women gotta vote for women, blacks for blacks" stuff is b.s. Imagine if someone said "white men gotta vote for McCain."

People should vote for who they think is the best candidate. End of story.

Well I think the press has been harder on Hillary than Obama but I know Obama supporters complain that it's really the other way. As WB said about the pundit talking about "nowhere for the momentum to go". This guy was basically parrotting Obama's spin. He wasn't alone either. I saw Obama's talking points as "news" everywhere I looked.

As for SNL, Obama made an appearence like Hillary did earlier on. While the skit was funny it was really nasty towards Hillary. She dressed as a princess for a costume party & everyone commented on what a nice witch costume she had. Everyone that is except for the hero of the skit. He shows up wearing an Obama mask (because he doesn't need to pretend to be someone else) He tells her what a nice princess costume! I'll admit it was funny but way biased towards Obama. At least when Hillary was on they didn't have to make her the good guy. She was willing to do some self depracating humor where Obama was not.

I actually agree with you that SNL was harder on Hillary...at least at first. But after the strike Tina Fey was allegedly able to assert some control and seemed to turn the show pro-Hillary.

I've only seen the two skits where the candidates made appearences. Hillary's was a little bit self deprecating. It did lampoon Tim Russert's questions at that last debate so in that sense it was pro-Hillary but it didn't equal the bias present when Obama appeared on the show IMHO.

Also it wasn't a problem when they made fun of Hillary but I seem to remember that there was some criticism when SNL hired somebody to play Obama. I would be fine if they settled on making fun of both of them personally.

Yeah. I agree wholeheartedly with that. Working in Compton, I see a LOT of people who are now engaged in the political process on account of Obama's candidacy. Now while that may in the long run be a GOOD thing, I've been disappointed in the fact that a lot of people I question are single issue voters. And the issue is that Obama is a fellow black. If not for that, they'd be back where they were a year ago. Completely disinterested in ANYTHING political.

Yeah, I suppose one could argue that Obama represents to them a new hope for true equality and all that but the awesome thing about Martin Luther King's " I have a dream Speech" is in the way it challenges ALL people to see past skin color. It's not simply a challenge aimed at and designed to morally convict white people. It's for all of use to rise to.

Same with Hillary and the women vote

I was wondering if that skunk Mark Penn, who if you recall the article I quoted from, was trying to distance himself away from Hillary before her wins Tuesday and saying he was just an outside advisor, even though before that he would insist on being acknowledged as the head of her campaign. So after her wins, I just assumed he'd try to go for the glory, sho'nuff.

This will likely be all the news on Thursday. It's not the kind of thing she'll want to be talking about, how all her top staffers hate each other.



And then Clinton's advisers turned to their other goal: denying Mark Penn credit.



An interesting find buried in the article: It was Penn who gave Bill Clinton the "Jesse Jackson" line that started the never-ending string of racially-tinged bimbo eruptions from the campaign:



Another fascinating tidbit: DLC head Bruce Reed gave Hillary her "change your can Xerox" line.



Nice to know that the right tilting DLC wing of the Democratic party has the inside track on Hillary's talking points. No wonder it's sounding increasingly like Karl Rove is writing her anti-Obama talking points.

Heh. In a certain bit or irony, Hillary is claiming that Obama is the one engaging in "right wing style" attacks.

That Rove must be really busy secretly working for both sides like this.

Not that I love Karl Rove but I'm pretty sure he didn't invent the negative attack. It's also funny seeing Obama go from politics of hope to being willing to sling the mud like any other politician. So what do we have left besides inexperience & being the first black president? Hillary needs to finish the rookie off. He can always run again anyway.

MEM, at this point, the only way she "finish(es) the rookie off" is with super delegates, correct?

Both of them now require super delegates to finish the other off.

i'm sorry but i find it racist to suggest obama's attacks are negative. he does positive attacks.

FOX

I wonder how Obama would argue that a tiny lead in pledged delegates would be more important than Hillary having the popular vote?

Wow.

I have to start agreeing with G-Man in your single mindedness towards Hillary Clinton.

OK -- so before this week's primaries, Obama had 1,192 pledged delegates, and she had 1,036. On Tuesday, she won in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island, and MSNBC estimates that after the results have been fully tabulated, she'll have eroded Obama's original 156-delegate lead by ... somewhere between seven and 13 pledged delegates.

Whoop-de-do.

And the fact that all week, she's heaped more praise on John McCain while trying her best to destroy obama suggests that she'd be happier if McCain became president than if Obama beat her. It's her as the Democratic candidate or NO ONE. Is that the candidate you support?

The whisper campaign that she used to win Ohio has now turned completely on it's ear. It turns out that in fact it was the Clinton campaign that reassured Canada that the anti-NAFTA talk was just that, talk. Not the Obama campaign. I wonder if Ohio wishes they could re-vote since it was suggestions of Obama being secretly PRO-NAFTA that helped torpedo him there. Of course this sort of duplicity and outright lies doesn't seem to matter to Clinton I'm sure. The ends justify the means and talk of change is just that, talk. Just like any Republican. Is this the Democrat you support?



On that point about Hillary acting like a Republican. It makes perfect sense to me. If you recall, I questioned James Carville's Democratic credentials over his hissy fit over the outrage of the Democrats doing so well in the '06 election. He was absolutely livid. A Democratic pundit and strategist incensed that the Democrats beat the snot out of the GOP in the election, despite his years of bad counsel and bad strategies. This is a guy that is tied to the Clinton's. This is a DLC Democrat (like Clinton, Rahm Emmanuel, Joe Liebrman & Harold Ford)

Y'know. I don't trust these people. I don't trust them to have any sort of substantive change on their agendas, I don't trust them to have what is best for the nation and certainly for the Democratic Party in mind and I certainly don't see them as rooting for Democratic Party success. Hillary, in her high praise for the OPPONENT OVER THAT OF HER FELLOW DEMOCRAT, certainly displays that crystal clear. If anything, I've always seen these DLC types as either sly saboteurs or else just the tools that the monied elite and their lobbyists guarantee that their interests will win out no matter who wins.

As with Nixon, just follow the money...



But MEM, does that not matter to you? That Obama represents a REAL substantive THREAT to these people? THIS is exactly the reason he electrifies people and inspires a LOT of people in the first place. And Hilary is willing to help the Republicans bloody up Obama to paraphrase F*&ING RUSH LIMBAUGH!

Look, half the country already hates Hillary. But nobody hates Obama yet. Hillary is going to be the one to have to bloody him up politically."

You may have been right all along, Hillary: There is a vast right-wing conspiracy. The thing is, you've just become their not-so-secret weapon.

Your the one being single minded towards Obama Whomod. We know Obama lied about talking to Canada (memo). The substance of the Clinton accusation is based on an anymous person who said they overheard a conversation. That's poorly sourced & at best both of them talked to Canada.

Obama just had his foriegn policy advisor claim that neither he or Hillary were ready for that 3am phone call. Who's talking about scorched earth & helping McCain?

He's just borrowed words & copied most of Hillary's positions, who tried to downplay his friendship with Rezco the fixer. He's nothing special, sorry.

I don't think that's a fair assessment of Obama. And it definitely gives Hillary more credit than she deserves.

Obama and Clinton obviously share a fair number of positions but that's the case in any party primary. But let's not kid ourselves: Hillary didn't originate those positions. If anything, Edwards originated the class war rhetoric and the bulk of the other shared positions are standard issue DNC talking points that go back to the George McGovern or even FDR.

(And, to avoid an indignant off topic response, much of the same could be said for the GOP and, for example, talking points that go back to Reagan).

Basically, the only way that Hillary could claim ownership of any of these ideas over Obama is because she's older. And that's hardly a valid basis.