by Joe Sudbay (DC) • 3/12/2008
You know how the traditional media took awhile to fully grasp that Bush lied about going to war? I think many Democrats have had the same problem trying to grasp the reality of the Clinton's race-baiting campaign. We've seen example after example -- starting with
Billy Shaheen in New Hampshire,
Bill Clinton in South Carolina, even
Hillary's weird answers on "60 Minutes" to name a few. People kept thinking, these are the Clintons, it can't be true. Anyone who broached it was slapped down. In December, even after the Shaheen incident and comments by Mark Penn, pundit (and former Clinton staffer)
David Gergen said on CNN "I think it is unfair to say that they're playing the race card." Still unfair? Because it's true. And, it's sickening.
The Ferraro episode is just the latest and clearest evidence. Ferraro has been in the game for a long time. She gets it. She knows how the media operates. She knows the impact of her words. She is, after all, a Fox News consultant with her own
Fox News bio. The Clinton campaign also knew exactly what was happening. They didn't stop it. And, it's hard to imagine Howard Wolfson and his crew couldn't rein in Ferraro.
This afternoon,
Ferraro told Clinton she is "stepping down" from the campaign.
Markos explains the reality:
This is what the Clinton campaign is reduced to. Taking a candidate who has inspired hope and passion, and working overtime to turn him into the "black candidate" even though she has no hope of winning the nomination absent a coup by super delegate. Now there's a legacy for Clinton. Congrats to her on pulling that one off.
And it's clear as day, given their refusal to ask for Ferraro's resignation, that the Clinton campaign is as complicit and pleased with Ferraro's words as they are with her media strategy.
He's right. And, it's so disturbing, I'm sure many Democrats still can't comprehend it.
Before the announcement that Ferraro quit, Cafferty weighed in, too. He also noted the complicity of the Clinton campaign:
more Gergen acknowledges reality:
Ex-WH adviser
David Gergen: "I think Barack Obama had every reason to go after these comments, because they're so reminiscent of what we are hearing just after New Hampshire and going into the South Carolina primary and just after the South Carolina primary. And those remarks by the Clintons and by some of their surrogates, trying to sort of marginalize him as simply a black and diminishing him in that sense, trying to put him in a box, you know, I think backfired on the Clinton team. And I think it was one of the turning points in his campaign that helped Barack Obama" ("AC 360," CNN, 3/12).
linkWhile some are making excuses for Hillary, complaining about media unfairness, her media pundit network, including her Fox Noise connention, has been doing her dirty work.
In additon to Ferraro, there is
Suzanne Estrich on
Fox:
Estrich appears frequently on Fox News as a legal and political analyst, giving the liberal perspective. She has also substituted for Alan Colmes on the debate show Hannity & Colmes. Estrich writes regular articles for NewsMax for which she is a pundit.<1> and is also on the Board of Editorial Contributors for USA Today. On January 10, 2008, she joined the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges law firm, a litigation powerhouse based in Los Angeles.
<...>
When people called me in a panic about the exits showing California too close to call, showing Obama with leads in primary states that Hillary was supposed to win, I took a deep breath and suggested they do the same.
I had a two word answer for all the folks who said it was over, that Hillary was dead, that all the money and momentum for Obama meant he would walk on water come the time for the polls to close.
<…>
New York was a romp. New Jersey was easy. Even Massachusetts — the most liberal state in the nation, where Obama won the endorsements of both Senators, Kennedy and Kerry, not to mention the newly elected African American Governor, Deval Patrick, even Massachusetts was Clinton country.
What is going on?
If you paid attention to the gushers in the press and punditry in the days leading up to Super Tuesday, Hillary was on her way to the morgue, murdered by her crazy husband’s loose talk, abandoned by young voters and women and anti-war Democrats, and anyone else they could think of.
Not so.
Partly, it’s a measure of Hillary’s strength. But it’s also a sign of Obama’s weakness which, it seems, we who chatter for a living have been reluctant to speak about, lest we be tarred with having raised the “race card.”
But, the fact is that there is a long pattern of what we in California call the “Bradley problem” in polling, after the former Los Angeles mayor who was elected governor in every poll, including the exits, except that he lost at the ballot box. Did I mention that he was African-American?
That was, according to the pollsters, the problem: about 10 percent of the electorate claimed that they were going to vote for him, and in many cases even told pollsters that they did, but they lied.
Shocking. Racism in America. Who’d a thunk it?
more Hillary's media ties run the spectrum left to right. Until late January, James Carville, Paul Begala, and Robert Zimmerman on CNN:
Okay, this is interesting. I've just learned that CNN has told top Dem strategists James Carville, Paul Begala, and Robert Zimmerman -- who are CNN mainstays but are all Hillary supporters -- that they will not be doing any more political analysis on the network until the Democratic primary has reached a conclusion.
linkby Peter Overby
<...>
Info U.S.A.'s CEO is Vinod Gupta, a close ally of both Clintons. Gupta's empire also includes the Opinion Research Corporation, which conducts the political polling for the television network CNN.
Vin Gupta has a long history of giving and raising campaign money for the Clintons, and gave $1 million for the 2000 Millennium Celebration, a New Year's Party thrown by the Clintons.
<...>
Last fall, ABC News reported that the library rented out a portion of its donor list to a list broker — the same one that rented Hillary Clinton's campaign lists.
Gupta spent $900,000 of corporate money flying the Clintons to various destinations. The Clinton campaign said in May that Info U.S.A. had been reimbursed to comply with federal campaigning and ethics rules.
After the Clintons left the White House, Gupta hired Bill Clinton as a consultant. It's one of two continuing business relationships he has had since leaving office, and it has been worth $3.3 million, in addition to the options on 100,000 shares of stock.
more • Campaign staff use Drudge Report against poll rivals
• Internet journalist gentle with Democrat candidate
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
The Guardian,
Tuesday October 23 2007
A decade ago, the internet journalist Matt Drudge was very nearly Bill Clinton's ruin, after leaking the story of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. These days, Drudge is one of Hillary Clinton's best kept secrets.
During the presidential campaign, the Drudge Report, once known as the scourge of Democrats, has betrayed a surprisingly soft side for the woman previously viewed by diehard Republicans as the mother of all that is liberal and permissive in America. When Ms Clinton had a coughing fit during a speech in New Orleans last summer, Drudge reacted with genuine concern, telling listeners to his Miami radio show: "Hillary dear, take care of yourself. We need you," according to New York magazine.
On another occasion, he confessed: "I need Hillary Clinton. I need to be part of her world. That's my bank."
Yesterday, it emerged that the caring went two ways. The New York Times reported that the Clinton campaign had grown adept at using the Drudge Report to leak news that could steal the thunder from rivals, or to solidify her position as the frontrunner for the Democratic party's presidential nomination for next year.
Earlier this month, Ms Clinton's staff leaked campaign fundraising data to the website just as her rival for the nomination, Barack Obama, was to deliver a policy speech on Iraq - and a crucial 20 minutes before the official release of the information. The story on Ms Clinton's fundraising prowess dominated the news cycle.
The New York Times reported that the Clinton campaign had opened a direct line of communication to Drudge through a former Democratic national committee official, Tracy Sefl. Ms Sefl refused to comment yesterday, but the revelation was widely seen as a sign of Drudge's importance in the US media, despite his reclusive nature and a history of getting some stories spectacularly wrong.
more There's no public record linking Rodriguez to Clinton's campaign, and he's not part of her New York political universe. The one of my two sources who had more detailed knowledge of his connection to the site, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity, had no evidence linking him to the campaign.
However, there's some suggestion that some close to the campaign were at least aware of his existence.
When I learned of his identity,
I emailed Tracy Sefl, a Clinton consultant who is perhaps best known as the campaign's liaison to Drudge, and whom reporters and insiders have long speculated -- without evidence -- was behind the site. She was amused to learn that I'd finally linked someone to the site.
"I know very little about this. But I have been tremendously flattered by your opinion of my Web skills and assumptions about my free time," she emailed.
But she did seem, at least, to know Rodriguez's name.
I'd asked her if she knew "Alex." She then made a joke about the Yankee third baseman, also named Alex Rodriguez. But I hadn't supplied the full name of subject of my story, so I asked how she knew his last name.
"I don't know him. I just heard his name somewhere," she said, denying again any role in the site. "I haven't sent this person anything, ever."linkGiven those facts and
Hillary's weak, last-minute attempts to quell the race controversy, the excuses from her apologists are astounding.
Hillary’s campaign continues to employ
Rovian tactics. When Obama said she made
supportive statements about NAFTA, she despicably accused him of
demagoguery,
when she had in fact done so.
When Obama pressed Hillary to release, her spokeman Howard Wolfson
compared Obama to Ken Starr.
At this point, a fair-minded person trying to give Hillary the benefit of the doubt can only assume that she is not in control:
There are those “see an intent,” I’m just not sure if it’s there or not. The problem, at least for me, is that genuinely offensive examples have been juxtaposed with unpersuasive examples, and both have been treated with nearly equal weight.
I found Ferraro’s comments repugnant, but I found talk about the Clinton campaign “darkening” Obama in an ad unpersuasive. I found the racially-charged comments around the South Carolina primary to be insulting and odious, but I found the racial analysis of the “3 a.m.” ad unconvincing. Some of the controversies have been real and unworthy of a fine senator’s campaign, and some of the controversies feel manufactured and exaggerated. Given this, it’s difficult to automatically make the leap that Clinton has a real desire to “hear the kind of casual prejudice that still haunts this society voiced,” presumably for electoral gain. Not impossible, but difficult.
That said, Olbermann’s charge from the outset — that Clinton is now “campaigning as if Barack Obama were the Democrat and you were the Republican” — strikes me as far more persuasive.Towards the end of his commentary, Olbermann said, “This, Sen. Clinton, is your campaign, and it is your name.
Grab the reins back from whoever has led you to this precipice, before it is too late.”
Putting aside Ferraro and whether the racial component of the race is intentional or not, that may be sound advice.
I frequently get the sense that there’s a growing number of Democrats who admire and respect Clinton far more than they admire and respect the Clinton campaign. That’s not a healthy development, but it is one that can still be remedied.
moreSome examples of how Hillary got to this point from being a front runner---enjoying near royalty status as a former First Lady, campaigning with Bill, a former two-term President, and being labeled inevitable---to slinging dirt, engaging in divisive politics and looking the other way:
The question is
who is in charge?
The MSM has played along, extending the life of Hillary's campaign by
gaming America about Hillary, just as they did with Bush.
Hillary has survived on spin.
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