By BETH FOUHY
Associated Press Writer
Hillary Rodham Clinton will concede Tuesday night that Barack Obama has the delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, campaign officials said, effectively ending her bid to be the nation’s first female president. The former first lady will stop short of formally suspending or ending her race in her speech in New York City. She will pledge to continue to speak out on issues like health care. But for all intents and purposes, the two senior officials said, the campaign is over. More
Photo azrainman Wall Street Journal
“One thing about superdelegates is they can change their minds,” Clinton told a gaggle of reporters in the aisle of the plane. “With us in the front of the cabin is a superdelegate who went from me to Sen. Obama and now is back with me, in the course of, you know, a matter of weeks.” A campaign spokeswoman later informed the cabin that the superdelegate she was referring to is Kevin Rodriguez, a DNC member from the Virgin Islands, who was accompanying her on the flight from San Juan. The campaign had previously announced his support. “I think it’s only now that we’re finishing these contests that people are going to actually reflect on who is our stronger candidate. And I believe I am. And I’m going to make that case,” Clinton said. More
There were no warm-up chants, no triumphalist campaign songs, no celebrity supporters, just five local women awkwardly flapping blue Hillary signs.
Suzanne Goldenberg in South Dakota
The audience at this Indian reservation - about 200 counting 14 students on a class trip from Massachusetts and their teacher, who said they were all Barack Obama supporters - was so small Clinton did not even attempt the politician’s hoax of pointing to faces in fake delight.
This is what it looks like for Clinton at the end, the last gasps of a dying presidential campaign. When she launched her campaign in January last year, she cast herself as the inevitable Democratic nominee. “I’m in it to win it,” she said.
Now Obama looks like the inevitable candidate. Clinton’s chances of a miracle recovery evaporated on Saturday when the Democratic party decided to recognise primaries in Michigan and Florida, but halve their voting power at the party’s nominating convention. More
Washington Post
For Clinton, the win provides a quick bounce-back from her campaign’s resounding setback on Saturday at the hands of the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, which ruled in Obama’s favor in a dispute over the seating of the Florida and Michigan delegations, but does little to change the overarching dynamic of the primary fight.
While Clinton will win a clear majority of Puerto Rico’s 55 delegates, she will still stand well behind Obama in the overall count. Coming into today’s vote, Obama had 2,052 delegates, 66 short of clinching the nomination. Clinton had a total of 1,877 delegates.
Clinton launched new ads in South Dakota and Montana on Sunday asserting that she is the popular vote leader, securing more votes than any previous primary candidate. “Some say there isn’t a single reason for Hillary to be the Democratic nominee,” says the ad’s narrator. “They’re right. There are over 17 million of them.” More
[Unfortunately for Clinton, the popular vote is meaningless; it’s the delegate count that determines the nominee.]
CLINTON’S chief delegate hunter Harold Ickes angrily informed the committee that Clinton had instructed him to reserve her right to appeal the matter to the Democrats’ credentials committee, which could potentially drag the matter to the party’s convention in August.
“There’s been a lot of talk about party unity — let’s all come together, and put our arms around each other,” said Ickes, who is also a member of the Rules Committee that approved the deal. “I submit to you ladies and gentlemen, hijacking four delegates … is not a good way to start down the path of party unity.”
The deal was reached after committee members met privately for more than three hours, trying to hammer out a deal, and announced in a raucous hearing that reflected deep divisions within the party. The sticking point was Michigan, where Obama’s name was not on the ballot. More
JENNIFER McKEE
Gazette State Bureau
HELENA - Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton told Montana reporters Friday that she no longer favors national handgun registration and licensing, even as she supports such measures in her adopted state of New York. “What I came out for was the New York law,” the U.S. senator said in a noon conference call Friday. “I don’t think there is any contradiction between defending Second Amendment rights and trying to keep guns out of the hands of” criminals and the mentally ill.
In 2000, as she was beginning her campaign for senator from New York, Clinton came out as first lady in favor of licensing and registering of all new handguns sold in the United States. She also supported a bill that would create a registry of all guns sold in the U.S., along with requiring buyers to get a license and undergo a background check. More
Hillary Clinton supporters are gathering for what could be her last big stand Saturday, as the Democratic Party’s rules committee meets to decide how to resolve a dispute over Florida’s and Michigan’s 368 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
With only three primaries remaining, in Puerto Rico on Sunday and Montana and South Dakota next Tuesday, the Saturday meeting could be Clinton’s final major effort to overtake Obama. She needs a big victory from the 30-member panel, which is expected to meet all day, and her supporters plan a rally to help press her case.
The math and the process confronting the rules committee are complex, but it boils down to this:
Photo Jay Inslee sfgate.com
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Friday warned supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who are threatening to take the delegate fight as far as the Democratic National Convention, that they are pursuing “a scorched earth philosophy” that would seriously damage the chances of electing a Democratic president in November.
“There is too much at stake in our country for us to be thinking that we can afford the luxury of intra-party battles eight weeks before the election,” said Pelosi, in her strongest words yet on the battle over seating delegates from Florida and Michigan. “We’ve had many months to have a debate, to come to a conclusion. And one way or another … we have to come together.”
Pelosi’s warnings - issued during a visit to a San Francisco food bank - came a day before the Democratic Party’s rules committee meets in Washington Saturday to decide the controversy over seating delegates from Michigan and Florida, which held early primaries in defiance of party rules.
Chicago Catholic pastor Dr. Rev. Michael Pfleger, speaking Sunday at Barack Obama’s Trinity United Church of Christ, implied Clinton was a white supremacist who believed she would win the nomination because of “white entitlement.” Flegler has been a noted spiritual adviser for Barack Obama for decades while he has lived in Chicago.
JOE GANDELMAN
If the latest Gallup Daily tracking poll indicates a trend, Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton will stop pointing to Gallup when she makes her pitch this weekend to a Democratic party committee in Washington in an effort to get the Michigan and Florida delegations seated.
In recent days, Clinton got into political hotwater by claiming “every” poll showed her beating John McCain in a matchup which was not true. She was mostly pointing to Gallup polls, and her later comments were more accurately focused.
But the latest Gallup Daily tracking poll shows rival-for-the-Democratic nomination Senator Barack Obama now regaining his double-digit lead over her among Democrats and statistically tied with Clinton in the votes a Democrat would get against Republican presumptive nominee Senator John McCain. More
Photo bobster1985 The Associated Press
THE NUMBERS: Barack Obama, 54 percent. Hillary Rodham Clinton, 41 percent. Obama has developed a clear lead compared to last month, when he and Clinton were about even in the Pew Research Center poll. Three in 10 Democrats think the party will be divided if Obama wins the nomination, up slightly since March, with Clinton supporters twice as likely as Obama’s to say so.
When matched against Republican John McCain, Obama is now running about even among all voters; he’s had a narrow advantage over McCain most of the year. Obama and McCain are about evenly splitting independents, a pivotal group for the general election. Both men are viewed less positively than earlier. Obama is seen as better able to improve the economy and energy problems, he and McCain are seen as about equally likely to make wise decisions on Iraq, and McCain has an advantage for taxes and immigration.
The Pew Research Center poll was conducted from May 21-25 and involved telephone interviews with 1,242 registered voters, for whom the margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. It included interviews with 618 Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 points.
Photo sskennel Paul Rogat Loeb
Look at Mrs. Clinton’s math. She leads only if you give her 328,000 votes for the Michigan primary election, while giving Mr. Obama zero for not being on the ballot. But you also have to ignore the caucuses of Iowa, Nevada, Maine and my state of Washington - where a record quarter-million people turned out to participate. Our votes don’t count under Mrs. Clinton’s math.
Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on popular vote totals also ignores that this isn’t how the party’s rules are set up, and that if they had been, Mr. Obama would have made time, after the Iowa victory that made voters take him seriously, to have visited California and New York more than he did, given the size of those states.
Every time Mrs. Clinton claims she has a popular majority, she’s shattering whatever cease-fire exists and making it that much more likely that her supporters will stay home in November. If she really wants a united party, she needs to stop, and the superdelegates need to hold her accountable. More
Mark Liberman
The news is full of headlines about Senator Clinton’s “apology” for her tone-deaf comment about the RFK assassination: “Clinton apologizes for citing RFK killing”; “Clinton apologizes for gaffe”; “Clinton apologizes for Kennedy comment”; “Clinton Sorry for Remark about RFK Assassination”; “Clinton sorry for Kennedy remark”; and hundreds of others.
But from a linguistic point of view, these headlines are wrong. Here’s the evidence: Geoff Pullum’s classic post “Pete Rose and sorry statements of the third kind” (1/13/2004) offered a taxonomy of apologies, based on a pairing of syntactic structures and communicative content: The word sorry is used in three ways. First, sorry can be used with a complement having the form of what The Cambridge Grammar calls a content clause: More
Former US President Jimmy Carter said Sunday that Hillary Clinton should abandon her battle for Democratic presidential nomination by early June. Carter told Sky News television that most Democratic party leaders known as superdelegates will have announced whether they support Clinton or her Democratic opponent Barack Obama soon after the last round of primaries finishes early next month. Like about 200 or so other superdelegates, Carter is officially uncommitted. But he suggested the outcome of the race was a foregone conclusion.
“I’m a superdelegate, having been president before, and I think that a lot of us superdelegates will make a decision … quite rapidly, after the final primary on June 3,” Carter told Sky News. “I think at that point it will be time for her to give it up.” Clinton and Obama need 2,026 delegates to secure their party’s presidential nomination. Obama has a total of 1,974 delegates, giving him an almost insurmountable lead over Clinton, who has 1,779. But Clinton has so far refused to bow out of the race.
Photo azrainman Suzanne Malveaux
CNN
Several close friends and supporters of Hillary Clinton tell CNN they are pushing for a “graceful exit strategy” that would allow the Clinton and Obama camps to come together, and for the New York senator to save face should she fail to become the Democratic nominee for president.
The discussions are not taking place between the campaigns, but rather among informal campaign advisers on both sides who are trying to actively influence and shape the debate as the competition nears a close June 3.
Read more
Photo Jon Dissed
BRENDAN FARRINGTON/AP chron.com
In an interview with The Associated Press, Clinton said she is willing to take her fight to seat Florida and Michigan delegates to the convention if the two states want to go that far. Asked whether she would support the states if they appeal an unfavorable rules committee decision to the convention floor, the former first lady replied: “Yes I will. I will, because I feel very strongly about this.”
“I will consult with Floridians and the voters in Michigan because it’s really their voices that are being ignored and their votes that are being discounted, and I’ll support whatever the elected officials and the voters in those two states want to do.” Taking her battle to the convention would fly in the face of an increasing number of party leaders who say the contest needs to be wrapped up shortly after the last primary on June 3 to prepare adequately for the fall election. Read more
DAVID ESPO and SARA KUGLER Associated Press
Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Kentucky primary Tuesday, a victory of scant political value in a Democratic presidential race moving inexorably in Barack Obama’s direction. The two rivals also collided in Oregon’s unique vote-by-mail contest, and Obama predicted he would finish the night with a majority of all delegates at stake in the 56 primaries and caucuses on the campaign calendar.
With votes counted from 41 percent of the Kentucky precincts, Clinton was gaining 57 percent support, compared with 40 percent for Obama. Interviews with Kentucky voters leaving their polling places showed Clinton’s victory was roughly as sweeping as the rout she fashioned last week in West Virginia. Almost nine in 10 ballots were cast by whites, and the former first lady was winning their support overwhelmingly. She defeated her rival among voters of all age groups and incomes, the college educated and non-college educated, self-described liberals, moderates and conservatives. Read more
How quickly things change in this season’s presidential politics.
Today, Clinton began citing Rove as the ultimate expert on who was the strongest Democratic candidate in the Nov. 4 general. And we’ve got the exclusive maps below to prove it, all four confidential pages.
No, really!
Campaigning in Kentucky today for tomorrow’s….
…primary vote, Clinton sought to justify why she’s staying in a race it’s virtually impossible for her to win mathematically. She said, as she often does, “There has been a lot of analysis about which of us is stronger to win against Sen. McCain, and I believe I am the stronger candidate.” Fine. Very familiar.
Then, she veered off into new territory. “Just today,” Clinton said, “I found some curious support for that position when one of the TV networks released an analysis done by — of all people — Karl Rove, saying that I was the stronger candidate. Somebody got a hold of his analysis and there it is.”
Prince George’s County Executive Jack B. Johnson, a Democratic convention delegate pledged to support Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, said yesterday that he thinks Sen. Barack Obama has “in a real sense” won the Democratic nomination and that he now plans to support Obama at the August convention.
Johnson, who endorsed Clinton nine days before Maryland’s February primary, said he will urge Gov. Martin O’Malley and Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, who co-chair Clinton’s Maryland campaign, to bring all of her delegates to Obama’s camp for the sake of party unity.
“I cannot in good conscience go to the convention and not support Barack,” Johnson said in an interview. “She ran a great campaign, but she fell short of the line.” Read more
Has another name been added to the long list of government-sponsored murders, with possible chief suspects belonging to the Bush-Clinton crime cabal? And, although police Captain Jeffrey P. Young revealed that at least two apparent suicide notes were discovered, suspicions are running high that foul play was involved in Palfrey’s hanging.
For starters, less than 10 percent of all female suicides are by hanging. According to journalist Mick Gregory, “of all female suicides, very few are by hanging. It’s been out of fashion for 100 years.”
What propelled this story into the national headlines was a client list of 10,000 to 15,000 names that included Washington’s political and business elite, including officials from the IMF and World Bank, corporate CEOs, White House and Pentagon employees and lobbyists.
Palfrey’s “little black book” of telephone numbers weighed 46 pounds and had already caused the resignation of Randall L. Tobias, deputy secretary of state to Condoleezza Rice. Others named in these phone logs were Bill Clinton’s former advisor Dick Morris, along with Harlan K. Ullman, the man who came up with “shock and awe.” Read more
More than 200 economists, including four Nobel prize winners, signed a letter rejecting proposals by presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain to offer a summertime gas-tax holiday. The moratorium would mostly benefit oil companies while increasing the federal budget deficit and reducing funding for the government highway maintenance trust fund, the economists said.
The gas-tax suspension has become a flashpoint in the race for the Democrat presidential nomination between Clinton and Obama. Obama estimated it would save the average driver less than $30, calls the idea a “gimmick,” rejecting it on similar grounds as the economists. More
Hillary won in Pennsylvania propped up essentially by old (second only to Florida) Catholic (40% of the vote) women (almost 60% of the vote). Blue-collar white men - “bitter” or not - also helped. Pennsylvania - even more rural than Ohio - is a state where the majority of voters (55%) have not even finished high school. What the throng outside Hillary’s victory rally made clear is what’s being confirmed by most polls. At least one in four Hillary voters are that stubborn; they will never vote for Obama if he clinches the nomination. Not only happy to use all the tricks in the Karl Rove slash and burn political playbook, thus committing a potential disaster inside the Democratic Party, Hillary had to extend her slash and burn approach to the Middle East.
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For the Democratic Party it was the worst possible result. If Hillary Clinton had won by 20 points, which was her lead in Pennsylvania around the time the Rev Jeremiah Wright’s sermon jumped from Youtube to cable news, then there would have a case for arguing that yes, Obama had taken too much damage from Wright, from his ill-considered remarks about small-town bitterness at a California fundraiser and his tenuous ties to a former leader of the Weather Underground. One of Hillary Clinton’s big achievements has been to seriously, maybe fatally, wound Obama among her own supporters.
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Hillary Clinton’s final PA ad features images of FDR and JFK, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Osama bin Laden, and Hurricane Katrina. The New York Post coins the ad:“Bama-geddon.”
Photoazrainman Fair.org writes: The ABC-sponsored Democratic debate in Philadelphia on April 16 emphasized trivial matters of little concern to voters, while the actual policy questions were often based on misleading right-wing spin.
During the first half of the debate, ABC moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson avoided any mention of policy issues. As the Los Angeles Times noted (4/17/08), “With the moderators and Clinton raising assorted questions about Obama’s past for the first half of the debate, issues received relatively short shrift.
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CNN.com–Listening to the punditry today, you would think folks who revel in the comedy of Larry the Cable Guy or Katt Williams really would have a shot at the White House.
It’s totally absurd.
So, Sen. Barack Obama is all of a sudden an elitist because he went to Columbia and Harvard? And Sen. Hillary Clinton is an elitist because she went to Yale? Do you actually think Sen. John McCain isn’t an elitist? He went to an exclusive college — the Naval Academy, and that is one of the hardest places to get into. Bottom line: The narrative about our presidential candidates being just regular folks is a tired myth that gets repeated each and every day. And their efforts to show that they are “just like us” are really pathetic. Read more
