Spin Cycle

Obama goes up in Texas with his final response in a day dominated by Clinton's national security ad: When the phone rings at 3 am, the guy who spoke against Iraq should answer.

Just when you thought it was safe to call the mayor, well, Mr. Mayor, one of his key aides reveals that Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama gave Mike Bloomberg a ring yesterday.

Just, you know, to say hi.

Oh, and maybe to talk about being his vice-president.

Or maybe not.

Wink. Wink.

“Certainly you could joke that Obama’s call was a fundraising call yesterday,” Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey quipped on New York One’s Inside City Hall tonight. “The man (Bloomberg) has the ability to finance a campaign. I don’t think that’s why you choose a vice president.”

Sheekey spent months and a lot of the billionaire mayor’s money laying the groundwork for a possible presidential campaign. And since Bloomberg announced in an op-ed in the New York Times this week that he’s not going to run, Sheekey and former mayoral pollster Douglas Schoen have been trying to sell the vice-president scenario to anyone who will listen.

"I think it was a reasonably short call, you know, I was briefed,” Sheekey said the conversation between Obama and Bloomberg. “I was told they had a nice call and I spoke to the mayor after they had breakfast a few months ago.”

Karla Schuster

Continue reading "And the beat goes on....Bloomberg and the bubble" »

Ed Lurie, a longtime player on the Capitol scene, has quit as executive director of the Senate Republican Campaign Committee, a post he has held since 1990, it was announced.

The basic "time to move on" message was released late today -- four days after the GOP lost another Senate seat to narrow its majority, held since the 1960's, to 32-30, with all state legislative seats up for election in November.

Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno said in his announcement that Neil Newhouse, a partner and co-founder of the Public Opinion Strategies firm, has "agreed to assist the committee on an interim basis" and "review our political operations from top to bottom."

Liz Benjamin has some more details here.

Nassau Democratic chairman Jay Jacobs is jetting off at 7:15 a.m. Saturday to take two dozen party activists to Dallas to help Hillary Clinton make a stand at what could be her political Alamo — the Texas primary and caucuses on Tuesday.

“I’m spoiled,” said Jacobs before taking off Friday. “We went up to New Hampshire expecting bad results and ended up suprising everyone.”

Jacobs said that he epects his crew, paying their own way with flights, will help organize a Saturday rally, carry signs, at high visibility areas, work neighborhoods, and help getting out the vote in both the primary, carry signs at hiigh visibility areas and and the caucuses that will follow. They will fly back Wednesday.

Originally, Jacobs said hed planned to take 35 volunteers but had to cut 15 when he learned they would be doing phone work -- which they could do without traveling to Texas. “I didn’t want it to be an imposition,” he said, adding that he had to keep reconfiguring the list. “I was getting in trouble because people were offended that I did not want them to go, and some begged to make the trip.”

Just listened to a recording of today's Clinton conference call, where assorted aides were asked exactly when Hillary was tested by a crisis in foreign policy, in light of her ad suggesting that she's best equipped to protect our children in times of 3 am crises.

Mark Penn: "She has been tested throughout her life on so many matters." The only specific example he came up with was her address as First Lady in China lashing the leadership for mistreatement of women and asserting that women's rights are human rights.

He then turned it over to foreign policy adviser Lee Feinstein. The best he could come up with: A lot of generals have endorsed Hillary, and praised her work on the Armed Services Committee. "Sen. Clinton has the trust of our uniformed military because they know she has the strength and experience to be our commander in chief."

Not quite the red phone ringing, eh?

Meantime, Obama was endorsed by West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee:

"What matters most in the Oval Office is sound judgment and decisive action. It’s about getting it right on crucial national security questions the first time – and every time. The indisputable fact is Barack Obama was right about Iraq when many of us were wrong.

"It was a tough call and the single greatest national security question, and mistake, of our time. Today, we remain a country at war, and countless mistakes over the last six and a half years have made us less safe. The stakes have never been higher, and that is why we must take a stand."

Yesterday, Canadian TV reported that an advisor to Obama and (a little more loosely) a Clinton contact had assured the Canadian embassy that all the NAFTA-bashing in Ohio was just campaign hoo-ha. Obama and Clinton both denied it, as did the Canadian embassy.

Today, a revision: CTV reports that the Obama contact involved economic advisor Austin Goolsbee and the Canadian consul's office in Chicago.

It reported that there was a "conversation on this matter." Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson today demanded answers: Has Austin Goolsbee had "any contact" with the consul's office saying Obama's stance was insincere?

Obama's campaign: "This story is not true. There was no one at any level of our campaign, at any point, anywhere, who said or otherwise implied Obama was backing away from his consistent position on trade."

Goolsbee denies it too: “It is a totally inaccurate story. I did not call these people and I direct you to the press office.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a big proponent of environmental causes – right down to recycling some of the answers he served up during his long – and now finally ended – presidential flirtation.

Check out this exchange on the mayor’s radio show this morning:

Host John Gambling: "So vice-president? Would you be interested?"

Bloomberg: “Um, vice-president of my mother’s shul in Medford, Massachussets might be an attractive thing to focus on. Nobody’s going to ask me, John. I’ve got 671 days left to go in this job. I think being the mayor of New York City is one of the most exciting things you can do.”

Sound familiar? Yep, we thought so too. It’s the second time in as many days that Bloomberg has played coy when asked about the Veep spot. Not that we think Bloomberg is interested in being second banana on anybody’s ticket – in fact, months ago in a television interview, he definitively dismissed the idea.

But give the newly buzz-less billionaire mayor credit for coming up with a new strategy to boost his national profile faster than you can say: “I will not be a candidate for president.”

Former Bloomberg pollster Douglas Schoen appeared on New York One’s Inside City Hall last night, pushing the “he would make a great vice-president or treasury secretary” riff. Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey is scheduled to appear on the show tonight. One guess what he’s going to say.

Ah, just like old times….

Karla Schuster

The conventional wisdom on March 4th for Hillary Clinton is that if she loses Texas and Ohio, she's toast.

But her brain trust faintly hinted at a Third Way -- perhaps contingent on a split of the Lone Star State's weird primary-caucus hybrid -- during their 75-minute conference call today. Assuming she wins Ohio (a monumental "if"), the Clinton camp might be able to withstand a Texas loss provided she wins the primary part -- and loses the oddball caucus.

Obama has dominated caucus states (with the exception of Nevada) and Clinton has railed against them as being undemocratic. Her people in Texas today put out the word she might sue to stop the caucus -- just now denied by spokesman Phil Singer.

This strategy of threatening a suit without following through might rationalize a loss in the caucus. It echoes a phantom lawsuit tactic they used in Nevada to highlight complaints they had with that state's caucus process.

What does all this mean?

The Clinton folks ain't too confident about winning down south.

-- Glenn Thrush in Columbus, OH

Well, this took only a half day. RedState does a re-mix of Hillary's children-sleeping ad, with a new hero at the end:

In the shadow of Hillary's children sleeping ad, this quote from Bill Clinton on CNN in 2004 is being recalled:

"One of Clinton's laws of politics is this. If one candidate is trying to scare you and the other one is try get you to think, if one candidate is appealing to your fears and the other one is appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope. "

Obama, in Texas, on the new Clinton ad, pretty similar to what his campaign said:

"We've seen these ads before, trying to play on people's fears, trying to scare up votes. But I don't think they'll work this time. The question is not about who will be picking up the phone. The question is what kind of judgment will you exercise when you answer the phone."

Also: "We've had a red-phone moment. It was the decision to invade Iraq. Senator Clinton gave the wrong answer. George Bush gave the wrong answer. John McCain gave the wrong answer."

This part is a slightly new twist, contrasting the ad to his bring-us-together message and reminding Democrats of the ad's resemblance to tactics the GOP has used against them:

"I’ll never see the threat of terrorism as a way to scare up votes, because it’s a threat that should rally this country around our common enemies. That’s the judgment we need at 3 a.m. And that’s the judgment that I am running for president to provide."

Update: Here's some video, via TPM:

Howard Wolfson and Mark Penn don't think their new TV ad -- which portrays sleeping children menaced by a world crisis -- is ANYTHING like LBJ's famous 1964 spot showing a mushroom cloud menacing a little girl plucking a daisy.

[NOTE: We screwed up by asking them if their commercial reminded them of Johnson's "Dandelion Ad."]

"This is not at all like the Dandelion Ad -- it envisions basically the apocalypse, that is not what the ad does," said Wolfson.

"This is a positive ad it has very soft images not at all like that ad," Penn said.

Obama says it's fear-mongering, silly and glosses over Clinton's 2002 vote for the Iraq invasion.

Wolfson -- contradicting Bill Clinton, campaign aides and virtually every pundit with a non-flatline EEG who believe she needs to sweep Ohio and Texas -- claims the pressure is on Obama to win all four March 4th contests because "the press is treating him like the nominee."

--Glenn Thrush in Columbus Ohio

Hillary's dark, fearful children-sleeping spot has forerunners in the annals of political advertising that will no doubt be much discussed. Here's one of them, LBJ's"Daisy" spot, used against Goldwater in 1964. Wow!!! In comparison, Hillary's seems almost tame:

Then, probably a closer model: Walter Mondale's "Red Phone" ad that he used to beat Gary Hart in the 1984 Democratic primary. We're reading in some places that this spot was done by Roy Spence, a Texas ad man who joined up with Hillary's campaign after Iowa, which we didn't know. Even this spot is harsher than the one Hillary put up today:

Via The Observer.

Some Democrats will no doubt view this as an unfortunate, negative turn. The flip side: Obama would eventually face this issue with the Republicans and McCain, so he may as well try to deal with it now.

The difference is that McCain has real national security and military credentials; Hillary has kind of faux credentials as a First Lady and a member of the Armed Services committee for a couple of years. Are they strong enough to carry this off?

She's also a woman. On the one hand it's amazing that the first serious female candidate is playing a strong, decisive military card, on the other hand you wonder how voters will react to the closing image of a woman taking the call at 3 am. If there are any sexist stereotypes lurking out there in Texas, this will draw them to the surface.

Obama is now juggling three balls at once: He's arguing with George Bush and John McCain about Iraq and the economy, and now faces an assault from Hillary on his national security experience.

For a candidate whose rise has been fueled by an argument for rejecting the status quo, maybe the multiple attacks prove his point. His campaign responds sharply on a conference call to Hillary's new ad suggesting he couldn't protect our kids, by blending all three of the critics together:

"We don't think the ad is going to be effective at all. Senator Clinton already had her red phone moment -- to decide whether to allow George Bush to invade Iraq. She answered affirmatively. She did not read the National Intelligence Estimate. She still, curiously, tries to suggest that it wasn't a vote for war, but it most assuredly was...

"This is about what you say when you answer that phone. What judgment you show...She, John McCain and George Bush gave the wrong answer."

The Texas Democratic Party according to this story is saying the Clinton campaign has threatened a lawsuit over caucus procedures next Tuesday, and cautions in a letter that "such action could prove to be a tragedy for a reinvigorated Democratic process'' and "could cripple the momentum of a resurging Texas Democratic Party."

The Clinton campaign is denying it, and the actual likelihood of a lawsuit sounds low. It's based on what Texas party officials are describing as "veiled threats" from a top Clinton aide during telephone discussions this week of procedures during the caucuses next week.

But, as we have noted before, there's getting to be a history here. The Clinton campaign is already pushing to change rules on seating Michigan and Florida delegates. It's arguing that superdelegates should feel free to override the will of pledged delegates chosen by voters. It supported litigation about the caucuses in Nevada. Now, this story out of Texas.

The risk: At some point, these tactical gambits may themselves become an issue.

Obama, apparently ready for something like this, releases his own national security ad. It features Gen. Merrill McPeak: "The old Washington hands have let us down. We need a new leader, who will lift America."

Here's video of the new Hillary ad.

The question of whether Hillary Clinton would go hard at Barack Obama's readiness to be commander in chief is now answered.

She has a new ad that plays hard on national security. It depicts children sleeping with this narration:

“It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in the White House, and it’s ringing. Something’s happened in the world.

"Your vote will decide who answers the call. Whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military. Someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world.

"It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?”

Of course, it has never been clear what in Hillary's resume qualifies her as a crisis manager. But polling has shown that voters consistently rank her as more experienced and tested. An ad like this is designed to raise the importance of that characteristic, which has generally been ranked well below the ability to make change in importance.

The Clinton campaign, in its first bit of good news in awhile, announced today that it has raised $35 million this month. Making reports of its demise seem premature.

But Obama says he's raised more -- $50 million, according to one report.

The amounts are staggering. The implications: Hillary's resources and the enthusiasm of her base had been a little in doubt. But unless next Tuesday is somehow decisive, both campaigns would seem to have the resources to keep going.

Eight congressmen who opposed NAFTA in 1993 say Bill pushed it hard and they could have used Hillary's help -- but it's news to them if she ever opposed it. Report here.

Harold Ickes now joins the camp of somewhat sour Clinton operatives who seem to have concluded that the way to win Ohio and Texas is to talk about each other in New York publications.

It's all been Mark Penn, Ickes says to the NY Observer: “It’s pretty plain for anyone to see that he has shaped the strategy of the campaign. He has called the shots....Mark Penn has dominated the message in this campaign. Dominated it.”

Except, in a possibly telling addendum: “Mark Penn has run this campaign. Besides Hillary Clinton, he is the single most responsible person for this campaign."

The Clinton campaign has released a new ad for Ohio, featuring Gov. Ted Strickland. He says she's a "fighter" (twice) and mentions -- for the first time we can recall in an ad -- her "faith." Southern Ohio is a little-known evangelical hotbed. Change and experience, once the watchwords of this campaign, make no appearance.

Gov. Spitzer, at the Association for a Better New York, takes an Eliot Obama approach, instead of gloating over the 48th SD Democratic win.

He stresses "the need to transcend what he described as 'geographic and interest-driven sectionalism' for the sake of a budget that addresses the needs of all New Yorkers," according to his press release. He says:

“History has shown us and present circumstances dictate that we must cast aside division and come together as One New York.... We are one State with one future, and we will rise and fall together.”

But then you read on, and you find out that this anti-sectional, anti-geographic approach actually means "a school aid formula driven by education need instead of regionalism" -- in other words, Spitzer's approach of using state school aid as a redistributional mechanism to transfer money from the better off to the less well off and, overall, from the suburbs to the city where the Democratic and Spitzer bases happen to reside.

Not to oversimplify a complicated issue, but where did the notion arise that a "needs" based approach to school aid somehow "transcends" sectionalism, even though its effect is to tilt aid toward some sections and away from others, whereas a "population" based approach that provides the same aid per kid everywhere doesn't?

The pretense is designed to sugar-coat a political reality: Spitzer wants to reallocate aid from Westchester and Long Island to the city. But he needs Democratic control of the Senate to remove a source of resistance. And if he admits the stakes, it becomes harder to win suburban seats. So he pretends he's just implementing some big, unassailable principle.

Full release after the jump.

Continue reading "Spitzer: All for one, that being me" »

Canadian TV reports that Obama and (a little softer) Hillary sent messages to the Canadian government that it shouldn't take NAFTA bashing too seriously. Just campaign rhetoric. Via TPM

Update: The Canadian Embassy is denying this story, as are Obama and Clinton. One Hillary labor backer, Machinists president Tom Buffenbarger, is attacking Obama and apparently ignoring the part of the report having to do with Hillary.

The Constitution says you have to be a "natural born citizen" to be president, and John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Does he qualify?

He would be the first president born outside the 50 states. The NYT looks at the issue here. The conclusion seems to be: It's not a problem.

But with all the fixation on the right about Obama's middle name, it's kind of funny that McCain would be the one with "foreign" origins....

One of the most surreal aspects of this year's campaign is the way retrospectives of what went wrong in the Clinton campaign keep popping up a week before the key primaries in Ohio and Texas.

The pollster.com charts for both states appear below. Momentum is clearly moving in Obama's direction, but they're both totally competitive, totally winnable. Clinton's support has in no way collapsed. Whatever happened in Wisconsin hasn't happened in the big states yet.

The theory that she's out of luck is based on the idea that even if she wins these two states, she can't catch up to Obama's lead in pledged delegates, and that lead will drive superdelegates. But isn't it more likely that the superdelegates and the party will move to the candidate with momentum -- just like the BCS favors recent quality wins over old quality wins?

Obviously, Obama has a buzz. Obama has money, and is outspending Clinton heavily. Obama is collecting endorsements. Clinton didn't change the conversation or force an error in the debates. But so far, those things haven't translated into a solid lead in either state. And isn't it pretty clear that If Clinton wins both, she'll have the momentum?

Was Bloomberg ever serious?

The pitch we're hearing this morning was that if it was Hillary vs. Romney or, say, Huckabee, there might have been a big lane right up the center of the field that he could have run in. And that in a three-way race where you can win states with 40 percent of the vote, his positions on issues like gun control would not have been fatal.

Maybe so. But it always seemed like a tease. Hillary -- and it may still be Hillary -- wasn't McGovern, and she was always leaning to the center. And Romney wasn't Barry Goldwater.

Now, there's speculation about vice-president. But it's not in his DNA. And a pro-gun-control guy is too dangerous to the electoral math of both parties.

His money has always been the reason you had to think about him. Now he says he won't necessarily stay neutral. Will he form the Bloomberg 527? That could certainly even the playing field for McCain if Obama decides not to go the public financing route....

From Tuesday night, Clinton's Penn and Obama's LaBolt on the difference between denouncing and rejecting. Has anybody considered "renouncing" as a compromise?

It was the same in the beginning. Michael Bloomberg announced his mayoral run in 2001 in a television commercial and even refused to be interviewed by a New York City reporter who caught up with him the same day it was airing. Today, he uses the Op Ed page of the New York Times as his platform to say definitively that he won't run for president.

There's talk of his role in national affairs and national candidates. How about the day job? Political trajectories tend to decline after announcements like this one. Look at Gov. Mario Cuomo. Bloomberg still has two years left to do things like straighten out whichever bus schedules and budgets the school chancellor has most recently screwed up, find out why a shell company was doing the demolition at the Deutsche Bank building, explore some of the oddities of the building inspection process, like that....Not as sexy, filled with public-relations hazards. What will Deputy Mayor for Political Promotions Kevin Sheekey be doing?

Dan Janison

Nearly 24 hours after his party suffered one of its worst defeats under his leadership, Republican State Committee chairman Joseph Mondello released a statement last night vowing to fight on.

"New York Republicans will be working harder than ever in the coming months on the issues that matter most to Empire State residents," said Mondello, who also heads Nassau Republicans. "Common sense policies that create jobs, spur economic growth, limit the size and cost of state government, and reduce the tax burden on middle class New Yorkers remain the core vision of state Republicans.

"While our party’s narrow defeat in the 48th senate district special election is disappointing, it does not deter the Republican Senate majority from fulfilling its most critical role in Albany’s prevailing political environment: providing a vigorous, fair, and thoughtful counterbalance to Democratic hegemony over state government," he added.

Mondello concluded, "The Governor and his allies should not read yesterday’s results as an affirmation of his policies or as public approbation of one-party rule dominated by an authoritarian executive…The outcome in the 48th senate district was an isolated result determined by regional issues and local personalities. Our friends on the other side of the aisle would be ill advised to draw any statewide conclusions from yesterday’s vote tally."

James T. Madore

Litigious real estate investor Robert Toussie took his biggest step yet toward returning as Suffolk's largest buyer of surplus land.

The Suffolk Legislature's Ways and Means committee approved the sale of $8.9-million from the county's Oct. 15-16 sale where Toussie was the highest bidder on 32 separate lots bidding a total of $2.47-million. A vote authorzing the county to close could come at next Tuesday's county legislature meeting.

Several lawmakers said after the unanimous committee vote that the county has toughened its rules -- and Toussie complied with all those rules and there was no legal way the county coulld bar him from participating in the sale.

"There was no rational basis not to approve the bill," said Legis. Louis D'Amaro (D-Deer Park) chairman of the Ways and Means committee.
Toussie last year tested the waters buying a Riverhead property described as a brownfield for $79,000 in a special sale of tainted properties.

Rick Brand

Continue reading "Committee approves $2.47-million in Toussie land sales" »

Gov. Eliot Spitzer so far has been restrained in his comments about Democrats’ big victory in the special senatorial election in Northern New York.

Asked about Darrel Aubertine’s upset win over Republican Will Barclay (swearing in, left), the governor said Wednesday that "today we have work to do. My message to the State Senate to the Assembly, those on both sides of the aisle, let’s get to work. We have a budget that it is due in about 5 weeks."

Spitzer also praised Aubertine. "Darrel’s a great guy. I think everyone knows he’s been a friend for a number of years and a great assemblyman. I think the fact that he won the race is a testament to his standing in the community. People like him, they respect him, they think he’s genuine. So I congratulate him. I also congratulate Will Barclay on a race that was a tough race, as politics can be. They’re both good individuals."

The governor said the outcome of the special election in the 48th District wasn’t a referendum on his job performance. "I see these elections as campaigns about individual candidates in districts," he said after a news conference in Manhattan held to announce a major donation to Stony Brook University.

Olivia Winslow and James T. Madore

At last night's debate, Obama denounced the anti-Semitic statements of Louis Farrakhan. Hillary said that wasn't enough, that she rejected support from anti-Semites as well as denouncing them. So Obama went along, and said he denounced and rejected Farrakhan.

Today, on a TV interview in Dallas, Clinton was told about a prominent local Latina supporter who said blacks in power don't help Hispanics and noted, the interviewer said, "Obama's problem is that he happens to be black."

Would Hillary denounce and reject that support, the interviewer asked.

Clinton: “People have every reason to express their opinions. I just don’t agree with that. I think that we should be looking at the individuals who are running.”

She was then asked about the position she took on Farrakhan -- why not denounce and reject:

“I don’t see any comparison at all with what you’re referring to and I don’t know the facts of what you’re telling me over the TV. So I’m just going to repeat that I want people to judge us on the merits.”

For the second day in a row, Obama's middle name is the center of controversy.

The focus is a Tennessee Republican Party press release that throws everything together -- Barack Hussein Obama, Louis Farrakhan, the picture in native-regalia in Kenya -- and is headed, "Anti-Semites for Obama:"

"The Tennessee Republican Party today joins a growing chorus of Americans concerned about the future of the nation of Israel, the only stable democracy in the Middle East, if Sen. Barack Hussein Obama is elected president of the United States."

McCain, as yesterday with a Cincinnati talk-show host, renounces it. Eventually the Tennessee GOP revises the release, taking out the picture and the "Hussein" to "diffuse" attacks. Four things:

1. This will continue as long as the right thinks Obama and the Democrats -- and even McCain -- are sensitive to it. Does Obama attack it, or make fun of it and demystify it? Can he win an argument that people can't use his middle name.?

2. The right will say he's being hyper-fussy. Here's the blog of Bill Hobbs, the Tenn. GOP flack who wrote the release:

"Run a Lexis-Nexis search for the number of times the media has used Hillary Rodham Clinton's middle name, often to underscore her feminist leanings and independence from her husband. Do a search for how many times during the 1988 and 1992 campaigns the media called the first George Bush 'George Herbert Walker Bush,' to underscore the media's protrayal of Bush as a preppie elitist. Ditto the media's reference to Dan Quayle as 'J. Danforth Quayle.' "

3. Along with McCain, Karl Rove reportedly thinks it's a mistake for the GOP.

4. Actually, Barack is a Semitic word that means "to bless" or "blessing" that appears throughout the Bible, including the beginning of Genesis, and Hussein, a very common name of Semitic origin, means "good" or "handsome." Read more than you want to know about Obama's name, as well as the similar roots of Omar Bradley's name, Kareen Abdul Jabbar, and various Benjamins here.

Environmental big James Tripp, who is looking to return to the Suffolk Water Authority board, was grilled earlier this week under heated questioning from Legis. Louis D'Amaro (D-Deer Park) over his dual residency and his record as chairman of the city water board.

Tripp, general counsel for the nationally known Environmental Defense Fund, conceded under D'Amaro's questioning he spent 75 percent of his time living in New York City and 25 percent in a Bellport home which is his legal residence where he is registered to vote.

D'Amaro also peppered Tripp's time committment to the water authority noting his resume lists 11 other boards, including the city water agency where he is now chairman, He also asked for legislative counsel to investigate whether there are residency rules that would bar him from serving on both boards at the same time.

Tripp later said while the Suffolk Water Authority has a residency requirement, the city board does not.

Rick Brand

Continue reading "Tripp grilled on Suffolk water post" »

Hillary Clinton complained last night that she was being treated unfairly because she got asked the first question more often than Obama. Setting aside the issue of whether it's better or worse to go first, here's some numbers:

In the last ten Dem debates, Hillary has gotten the first question 6 times, Obama 4 times. But in four out of the last five debates, she's gotten the first question.

The NYT this morning went even further with the number obsession: In the last three debates, the only one-on-one confrontations with Obama, Hillary has gotten the first question every time. And, the Times says, in last week's debate she not only got the first question of the debate, she was asked to respond first to various questions "twice as often" as Obama.

So, she's right.

Unfortunately, the consensus seems to be that a complaint about the order of answering did not seem to be the most confident and presidential element of her performance, and using a reference to a Saturday Night Live skit to prove her point was a little unexpected. AP:

"...Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton resorted to a new tactic in Tuesday night's debate: self-pity.

" 'In the last several debates, I seem to get the first question all the time,' the New York senator said, sounding more like a put-upon third-grader than a presidential candidate."

Sam Zell, real estate mogul and boss of employee-owned Tribune Corp., which owns Newsday, has apparently come up with a provocative new theory of what ails the US economy:

Democrats. Specifically, Hillary and Obama.

According to a release from CNBC:

"Speaking on 'Squawk Box' this morning, Zell attributed much of the current economic troubles to fear-mongering and politicking by Democratic presidential contenders Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

" 'Obviously what we have going on is an attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy,' said Zell, chairman of Equity Investments Group and owner of the Chicago Cubs, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other companies. 'We have two Democratic candidates who are vying with each other to describe the economic situation worse.' "

Not to put words in the boss's mouth, but doesn't it sound like he's actually saying that the two leading Democratic contenders are intentionally trying to tank the U.S. economy for political gain?

Naively, we'd been thinking that Bush might have some responsibility for it.

A Capitol Hill newspaper says that despite pressure from Speaker Nancy Pelosi to go with whoever wins the most elected delegates, most House superdelegates backing Hillary Clinton say they're sticking with the NY senator. The Hill:

“ 'I am a delegate, I’m a supporter of Hillary, I’m supporting who I’m supporting,' said Rep. Diane Watson (D-Calif.), even though 62 percent of the Democratic voters in her district backed Obama."

Also: "Several Clinton supporters, such as Reps. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Watson said they were entirely committed to voting for Clinton at the convention unless she drops out of the race. Pascrell and Meeks said they were '100 percent' for Clinton through the convention, and Cleaver said he would vote for her unless he died first."

But Clinton nonetheless suffered a couple of setbacks in the superdelegate fight today. North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan went with Obama, giving him a 14-12 lead among senators who have endorsed. And, as long rumored, civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis of Georgia announced a switch from Hillary to Obama.

He actually says it was harder to desert Clinton, an old friend, than it was to march across the bridge in Selma in the 1960s:

Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, after meeting with his conference in the wake of the loss of the 48th SD seat, said at a presser today that he's still the boss: ”We lost the battle, now we are going to win the war.”

He also sketched out a two-pronged fall campaign to try to hold on to the thin 32-30 advantage in the Senate. From Capitol Confidential:

"Bruno also telegraphed how the Republican Senate plans to strategize November’s upcoming campaigns: by running against 'Steamroller' Eliot Spitzer and stressing, especially upstate and in the suburbs, that people would be ill served by a Manhattan-dominated coterie of lawmakers such as the Senate Dems. 'It represents diversity. I represents checks and balances.' ”

It seems like they tried those arguments a little bit for Will Barclay in the 48th, and they didn't work. The current GOP spin is to dismiss the result yesterday as a "popularity contest" that Barclay lost to Democrat Darrel Aubertine, but it's hard to think that's a complete explanation for losing a seat in a district with a huge Republican registration advantage.

Bruno was flanked by his top deputies -- Nassau Sen. Dean Skelos, and upstater Tom Libous. In a narrow sense, the defeat was probably good for Skelos, because it was Libous' job as upstate coordinator to secure the seat, and his failure improved Skelos' chances of being Bruno's successor. But the way things are looking now, the only thing to succeed may be leadership of a minority caucus, so everyone was hanging together behind Bruno.

Skelos echoed the plan to use regionalism as a wedge, and said he was optimistic about retaking Craig Johnson's seat in Nassau: "It’s about making sure every part of the state is treated fairly.”

In a new video for Texas consumption, the Clinton campaign communes with the late Texas Gov. Ann Richards, and gets her support. You can view it below.

The only problem: AP reports that while the campaign got clearance from one of Richards' kids, two others are objecting:

"But sons Dan and Clark Richards, partners at an Austin law firm, say nobody can know who the outspoken and opinionated former governor would have supported in the race between Clinton and Barack Obama.

" 'As her children, we never presumed to know her mind when alive and we are not prepared to make a claim as to who she would endorse or what she would do if she were still with us,' they wrote in an e-mail last week. 'We are not granting permission for her name to be used in advertisements on behalf of either candidate.' "

But why let family harmony get in the way of Hillary's need to win? We hear Eleanor Roosevelt and Carrie Nation are about to authorize spots too, but Jackie Robinson may go for Obama. Full story after the jump, or here and here. Discussion on a Texas blog here.

Continue reading "Dead speak! Hillary claims late Ann Richards backs her" »

Jon Tasini, the one-time rival of Hillary Rodham Clinton trounced in the Democratic primary contest for her 2006 re-election, said he passed on watching the debate last night because it was too dull. (One colleague of ours even harshly called it "Life Imitating Death"). Tasini had been a John Edwards supporter.

But when Tasini heard that NAFTA -- an issue he'd tried to raise in the Senate primary -- took up so much debate time on NBC he went to the transcript and decided that neither of them seem to understand or embrace the most essential objections to the Bill Clinton-championed investment deal. His commentary is posted here. In part, he says:

"Neither Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama understand the issue of trade, or they will be unwilling to make the break from so-called 'free trade' that we need.
"...On a positive note, it is extraordinary, in one sense, that the debate over NAFTA took up so much time. After all these years, NAFTA just can't get any respect. All of a sudden, it's the whipping post in politics--at least, on the Democratic side. If anything is true it is that politicians respond to what they think voters want to hear--and the real people out there understand, at a pocketbook and life experience level, that so-called 'free trade' is a disaster."

Dan Janison

Obama's website announces his 1 millionth donor. Is this kind of mass outpouring a principled argument for not taking public financing and its limits, as he seemed to pledge to do last year? Read the argument here.

Last night, asked about NAFTA at the debate, Clinton said: "You know, I have been a critic of NAFTA from the very beginning. I didn't have a public position on it, because I was part of the administration, but when I started running for the Senate, I have been a critic."

But here's some video of comments she made in 1996:

Read here an excellent AP fact check on how both Obama and Clinton are distorting their past ambivalence to make themselves seem consistent and their opponent seem deceptive.

Here's a transcript of last night's debate.

Airing in Texas:

Talk-show guy Bill Cunningham, who loves to use Obama's middle name but nobody else's, says he was told to give the crowd red-meat at a rally yesterday, and he's pretty mad at McCain for repudiating the comments.

Cunningham: "I'm going to endorse Hillary Rodham Clinton."

Joe Bruno was defiant after the GOP lost a 48th SD seat in the north country for the first time in a century:

“We remain the majority party in the State Senate and will continue to fight for the issues that we believe most New Yorkers support. The November election is little more than eight months away, and we intend to redouble our efforts to regain seats and fight for those issues, including lower taxes, more jobs, a better quality of life and a government that is responsive and accountable to the people we serve.”

But 32-30 is pretty thin. June O'Neill, state Dem chair:

“The Democratic Party can meet and beat the Republican machine anywhere. If we can do it here, we can do it anywhere.”