March 26, 2008

3/26: Pinned Down By Blogger Fire

Hillary Clinton's rough stretch in the political blogosphere continues, as she is now under assault from both liberal and conservative bloggers for falsely claiming that her plane came "under sniper fire" during a '96 trip to Bosnia. Liberal bloggers think this controversy illustrates the flimsiness of Clinton's claim that she possesses significantly more foreign policy experience than Barack Obama. Conservative bloggers agree that the difference between Clinton and Obama's foreign policy experience is minimal, but they also think that this incident reflects Clinton's lack of veracity. Should Clinton emerge as the Dem nominee, it seems likely that conservatives will seek to paint her as a "serial fabulist" with a "life-long adversarial relationship with the truth", in the same way that conservatives portrayed Al Gore as a serial exaggerator during the 2000 campaign.

Liberal bloggers are also criticizing Clinton for her decision to weigh in on the Jeremiah Wright controversy, which they see as a transparent attempt to change the subject from her Bosnia misstatements. It is becoming increasingly clear that most (but not all) liberal bloggers believe that Obama will be the Dem nominee, and they want Clinton to leave the race before she inflicts too much damage on the IL senator. Unfortunately for them, Clinton does not appear willing to comply.

DEM FIELD: Where Do We Go Now?

Open Left's Chris Bowers summarizes the state of the Dem race: "A consensus seems to be forming that Hillary Clinton has only a very slim chance to win the nomination. Recent articles in The New York Times and The Politico are examples of this. Further, the consensus is not only that Clinton has a very small chance, but that what chance she does have requires creating a civil war in the Democratic Party by suing superdelegates to overturn the popular vote, deny the nomination to the candidate with the most grassroots support in the history of the party, and cancel out the overwhelming choice who are the most loyal Democratic voting group of all. In other words, Clinton's only longshot hope is to win the nomination while creating an intra-Democratic civil war that could drive a wedge down the coalition for years."

Bowers continues: "While I agree with this perspective, I also think it would be bad for Clinton to drop out when she holds an average lead of 16% in the upcoming, major primary of Pennsylvania. Momentum in the general election is often determined by momentum in the primary campaign, and as such it is essential that Obama is not seen as 'backing in' to the nomination. [...] Between now and June 4th, there are four chances for Obama to earn the sort of victory that would knock Clinton out of the campaign, and provide him with the momentum he needs for the general election. [...] An absolutely slam dunk scenario for Obama to clinch the nomination on May 7th would be to put up a decent showing in Pennsylvania, sweep Indiana and North Carolina, reach 1,627 pledged delegates on May 6th, and at least draw even with Clinton in superdelegates by May 6th. If he can pull off all four, be will become the presumptive nominee in just six weeks time."

The Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias likes Bowers' scenario: "Chris Bowers sketches out a plausible and appealing scenario in which Barack Obama wraps up the nomination on May 6. Among other things that would be good about such a scenario, it's worth noting that at this point the main obstacle to a satisfactory resolution of the Florida/Michigan situation is that Clinton continues to be in the race. If she drops out and endorses Obama on May 7 or shortly thereafter, it'll be easy for Michigan and Florida to be 'forgiven' in late May and allowed to fully participate in a rubber stamp convention in exchange for promising to never do it again."

Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas agrees that Obama could end the race by winning NC and IN: "This may be were it all comes down -- two weeks after Pennsylvania on May 6. Both Indiana and North Carolina should favor Obama. If he can't close the race out there, then it gives Clinton an excuse to fight on, no matter what the math (and accordant reality) have to say."

MyDD's Todd Beeton thinks NC will be crucial for Clinton: "The other day I saw Chuck Todd on TV speaking about a Bill Clinton event in North Carolina during which the former president told North Carolina voters, as he had done to Texas voters weeks before, that it's in their hands, that if Hillary Clinton wins North Carolina she'll be the nominee. Chuck Todd's assessment of that statement: 'and you know what, he'd be right.' [...This] is why the Clinton campaign has dispatched Ace Smith, who spear-headed Clinton's California and Texas victories, to North Carolina and not Pennsylvania. While PA is touted as must-win for Clinton, it's actually become a will-win and [NC] is becoming Clinton's latest must-win."

DEM FIELD II: Can We Wrap This Up Already?

Meanwhile, liberal bloggers are growing increasingly impatient to take on John McCain:

• Crooks and Liars' SilentPatriot: "The longer we allow John McCain to run unopposed -- while at the same time bashing each other over the head with petty insults and attacks -- the worse our chances are in the fall. I sincerely hope the Democratic leadership realizes this."
• AMERICAblog's Joe Sudbay: "We really need to be focusing our energies on John McCain. That guy is getting a free ride -- and he's dangerous. [...] Let's figure out a way to wrap up the Democratic nomination now so we can get to work."
• The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum: "[Clinton]'s been voted off the island. It's time for her to go."

CLINTON: Netroots Wars

Yesterday we linked to Jerome Armstrong's and Big Tent Democrat's reactions to Moulitsas' claim that Clinton seeks to win the nomination via "a coup by superdelegate." Yesterday afternoon, Moulitsas posted a follow-up response:

"Given that Clinton cannot win the pledged delegate count, and that it would essentially require Obama to quit the race to lose the popular vote count, the only route to the nomination for Clinton would be one that would have [Big Tent Democrat] 'up in arms'. Nowhere have I said that this would violate the rules...All I have said is that it would be a coup by super delegate -- the overturning of the popular results by the party elite.

The rules state that Michigan and Florida don't count. The rules state that all other states -- even the small ones, the ones with blacks, and the ones which have coffee drinkers -- matter. The rules state that this is a delegate race, with voters directly electing pledged delegates at (mostly) the congressional district level. None of this helps Clinton out, so she and her surrogates have set out to make arguments that seek to minimize and belittle the system we have now, whether it's the caucuses, or 'small states', or 'black people', or whatever.

While a coup by super delegate wouldn't violate the rules, the arguments that the Clinton campaign are advancing to those super delegates, the media, and their supporters make a mockery of them. Makes sense. When your only path to victory requires making a mockery of the rules, I suppose you have nothing left but to mock the rules."

Big Tent Democrat responds: "If Obama is the pledged delegate leader and the popular vote leader (as me, Kos and a cast of a thousand bloggers, NBC, etc, expect), then any action by the super delegates to subvert such a result would be outrageous and wrong...but as Kos acknowledges, NOT against the rules. [...However,] revotes were planned for Michigan and Florida -- revotes that were completely within the rules and more importantly, completely in the interest of the Democratic Party (but NOT in the interest of Barack Obama's chance to win the nomination, though certainly in his interest in winning the general election.) Barack Obama blocked the proposed revotes in Florida and Michigan. To my way of thinking, this means Obama needs to have a margin in the popular vote that exceeds 500k, the amount of margin one could reasonably argue Clinton may have gotten from revotes in Florida and Michigan."

BooMan agrees with Moulitsas that the consequences would be disastrous if Obama won both the popular vote and the pledged delegate race and superdelegates gave the nomination to Clinton: "Provided that Obama receives the nomination after winning the pledged delegate count, there is no reason for 'Latinos, perhaps part of the Jewish and Catholic vote, certain women and working-class Democrats' to lose confidence in the process. Their preferred candidate simply lost. It happens. But if Obama wins the pledged delegate count and still does not gain the nomination, his supporters (most especially but certainly not limited to African-Americans) will be deeply, deeply disillusioned with the process. [...] If Jerome Armstrong cannot anticipate the rift such an outcome would create in the Democratic Party, then he isn't qualified to opine on American politics. African-American turnout in the general election will be severely depressed, and the damage will be lasting."

CLINTON II: Duck And Cover

Liberal bloggers are mocking Clinton's claim that she was "sleep-deprived" and "misspoke" when she falsely claimed last week that she landed under sniper fire during a '96 trip to Bosnia:

• Moulitsas: "If Hillary Clinton lied about snipers in Bosnia because of sleep deprivation (doubtful, given it's a lie she's said at least four times), then what will she do when she gets that call at 3 a.m.? Remember, she's clothed and wearing makeup at that hour, so chances are, she's not getting much sleep."
• Yglesias: "So apparently Hillary Clinton was 'sleep-deprived' when she forgot that she'd never dodged sniper fire while running from a plane in Tuzla. All 'misspoke' theories of the case seem to me to founder on the fact that the version of the story that got her caught was only the most extreme version of a narrative of danger she's mentioned repeatedly throughout the campaign."
• AMERICAblog's John Aravosis: "[Clinton] said it four times over four months. She sent out scores of aides to defend the comments -- comments she said FOUR TIMES. And now expects us to believe that she only said it once a week ago, so it was a slip of the tongue (mind you, it was a minute long slip of the tongue)?"

Meanwhile, The Carpetbagger Report's Steve Benen explains why this controversy is a problem for Clinton: "The point about [Clinton] 'inflating' her foreign policy experience is a genuine problem. Clinton's claims about playing key policy roles in conflicts in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and Rwanda also appear to have been exaggerated, in some instances, quite a bit. But it's this Bosnia anecdote that's likely to cause the most trouble, in large part because there's a video of her talking about the danger she overcame, and another video showing very little danger at all. [...She] exaggerated one of the underpinnings of her entire candidacy."

CLINTON III: Pants On Fire

Conservative bloggers are also mocking Clinton for her Bosnia story:

• Michelle Malkin: "This is how a Clinton -- take your pick: Hillary, Bill, or Chelsea -- makes it through the day. Better living through self-delusion. Seeking to burnish her foreign policy leadership credentials, Sen. Clinton has repeatedly peddled a harrowing anecdote about dodging sniper fire during a trip to Tuzla, Bosnia in 1996. [...] When Sinbad, the Washington Post, and every fact-checker on the Internet and under the sun debunked her tall tale, Sen. Clinton doubled down. She dissed Sinbad as a mere 'comedian'. (He just tells jokes. She is a joke.) She asserted that she and her compatriots ran for safety with 'our heads down'. She clung to her story that she 'had to be moved inside because of sniper fire'. And she embellished further [...] Behold the Democrat choices for president: One candidate whose twenty-year spiritual guru has an adversarial relationship with America -- and another who has a life-long adversarial relationship with the truth."
• RedState's absentee: "Could there be a more clear-cut case of lying? [...] There's no way she simply got mixed up. This was a description of an event that never occured. Could you honestly mix up being told about being shot at and actually being shot at? I know I couldn't. Could you mix up 'no ceremony' with 'they moved the ceremony'? I couldn't. She didn't merely exaggerate a threat, she described literal events that never occurred. I know a word that perfectly describes such an act: LIE. Hillary lied about Bosnia."
• Commentary's Jennifer Rubin: "The Clintons are, after all, accomplished 'embellishers,' and it should come as no surprise that reality does not match her tales of grandeur."
• AmSpec Blog's Philip Klein: "The NY Times headline today on the series of lies Hillary Clinton has told about her trip to Bosnia reads, 'Hillary Seeks To Soften Impact of Misstatement.' By not even putting 'misstatement' in quotes, and by making it singular when Clinton told multiple lies, the Times is buying into the Clinton spin that it was just an innocent mistake. As these priceless videos show, that's just not very credible."
• Hot Air's Ed Morrissey wonders if Clinton is a "serial fabulist": "Has Hillary Clinton's Tuzla fantasy opened a bigger can of worms for the presidential aspirant? [...] The collapse of her credibility this week, after repeating the story at least four times during the campaign, calls into question her personal anecdotes, especially those that paint her in the kind of crusading light as this does. Hillary can expect greater scrutiny of her claims, especially since the media got burned by its credulity on Tuzla."

CLINTON IV: Hillary Goes There

Liberal bloggers were very critical of Clinton's decision to weigh in on the Wright controversy. Many saw it as a transparent attempt to change the subject from the Bosnia controversy:

• Benen: "It's hard to overstate how disappointing this is. Clinton waited until the story had died down and then decided to make her first public comments on the controversy, going after Obama for staying with his church. I know Clinton is willing to fight as hard as possible for his nomination, but tactics like these are pretty low. This may sound cynical, but my guess is that media interest in Clinton's debunked Bosnia story had become too great a distraction. [...] What's more, we now have a situation in which John McCain defended Obama against Wright-related charges, and Mike Huckabee defended Obama, but Hillary Clinton sat down with editors of a conservative newspaper to reignite a fire that had already largely gone out."
• Sudbay: "Clinton [is trying] desperately -- and I mean desperately -- to change the subject from her lies about the Bosnia trip. [...] But what they don't get is that it just looks extremely desperate and pathetic for Hillary to evoke Rev. Wright now. The Bosnia trip scandal isn't going away. Clinton made that trip a centerpiece of her campaign. There's too much video and too many lies told by the candidate herself."
• The Huffington Post's Greg Saunders: "Here we are, in the tail end of a primary season in which the losing challenger for the Democratic nomination has sunk to reinforcing right-wing smears against her party's likely nominee in a transparent attempt to distract the media from the fact that she's been caught in multiple lies about her experience."
• TPM's Josh Marshall: "You can always tell when a scandal story has peaked and is ebbing, almost down to the minute: when your political opponents start to raise it explicitly against you. That was the minute I knew Bill Clinton was going to weather the Monica [Lewinsky] story -- the moment when Republicans first started hitting him over it. It took a few days. And I remember rejoicing about it at the time. Same thing here with Wright. The Clinton camp can see that it's drifting. So they're deciding to stoke it. Also useful to get the Tuzla stuff off the front page."

Other bloggers thought it was foolish and divisive of Clinton to question Obama's religious choices:

• Bowers: "Do we really need to be telling other people where they are praying? Is that a pandora's box we really want to open in this country? Does a country built on religious freedom need one of the three people vying to lead the country comment on where one of the other two candidates should be praying? Really? That's a good thing for the country? That's a good thing for Democrats?"
• BooMan: "[Clinton] should be defending Barack Obama against unfair attacks, and defending and contextualizing the tradition of black sermonizing. In his speech, Barack Obama sought to educate and bring reconciliation. Clinton's response is to throw it all back in his face and suggest that there is something wrong with him for attending his church. If Clinton succeeds in pushing this racial polarization to the point that white people will not vote for Obama, the black community will never, ever, forgive her. This is especially true because she can only win on the backs of the superdelegates."
• Ezra Klein: "If Clinton is to have any chance, any chance at all, African-American voters need to feel comfortable with her ascension. If they don't, and if Obama is rendered unelectable, than the convention will sooner choose a third candidate ([John] Edwards, Gore, etc) than elevate Clinton and risk a schism with one of the party's key voting blocs. Clinton, for her part, could have scored some points with this group by forcefully defending Obama on Wright. But every time she takes a shot at one of these racially-charged controversies, she makes her own nomination less likely."

OBAMA: Not Kosher?

Conservative bloggers are buzzing about The American Spectator's Robert M. Goldberg's article about Obama foreign policy advisor Merrill McPeak, whom Goldberg describes as "anti-Israel and anti-Jewish":

• Power Line's Paul Mirengoff: "Why does Barack Obama have so many foreign policy and national security advisers whose statements about Israel and American Jews are problematic? We've written at length about Samantha Power, perhaps his closest foreign policy adviser until she was forced to resign for insulting Hillary Clinton. We've also touched on Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Malley. And by now everyone who follows these things realizes that Obama's long-time spiritual adviser Rev. Wright hates Israel passionately. Now comes evidence that Gen. Merrill 'Tony' McPeak...is also hostile towards Israel, viewing its positions as preventing peace from breaking out in the region."
• Morrissey: "The animus towards Israel among Obama advisers has begun to form a distinct pattern, one that shrugs and wan, partial denials cannot hide."
• Philip Klein: "I do not think that everybody who is critical of Israel is an anti-Semite, nor do I think that Obama should be considered an anti-Semite because of McPeak's derisive remarks toward Jews in New York City and Miami. However, I do think there are plenty of reasons for anybody who is a supporter of Israel -- Jewish or not -- to be concerned about Obama based on hispublic statements and the companyhekeeps ."

Speaking of Samantha Power, The Huffington Post's Sam Stein reports that Power defended some of her past statements during a speech at the Columbia Univ. School of Law: "Former Obama aide Samantha Power may be repentant for calling Sen. Hillary Clinton a political monster, but on the other issue that marked her resignation, she is not conceding an inch. [...] Power called Obama's willingness to meet, without preconditions, world leaders with whom America did not always see eye-to-eye, one of the turning points of the Democratic primary [...] She emphasized that, unlike President [George W.] Bush, Obama would put greater focus on the general welfare of the Iraqi people (looking at population displacements, health conditions, economic insecurities), when considering U.S. policy in that country. She also drew a picture of an Obama administration that was filled with different viewpoints and congenial debate."

MCCAIN: Come On And Take A Free Ride

Liberal bloggers, who are convinced that the media takes it easy on McCain, are praising Free Ride: John McCain and the Media by Media Matters' David Brock and Paul Waldman:

• Atrios: "While we all have a general sense of the degree to which the national press will bend over backwards to excuse anything St. McCain does, Free Ride documents this history with horrifying but entertaining detail. More than that, it shows how at odds the national media, who worship Saint McCain, are with the local media in Arizona, who know a bit more a bit the real senator. [...] Even more than other campaigns, this presidential race will pit the Democrat against McCain and his 'base,' the mainstream media. Combatting and shaming the media into covering McCain and his past accurately will be the job all of us have."
• MyDD's Natasha Chart: "You had always known, more or less, that John McCain's natural constituency was the Beltway media. With press darling Joe Lieberman, it's been the buddy movie that never ended. Did you know how extensive it was, though, or did you sort of wonder if it was just you and your liberal friends imagining things? Wonder no longer. Media Matters' David Brock and Paul Waldman decided to investigate McCain's relationship with the press, cataloging just how much slack our Gotcha! journalistas have cut the Smooth Talk Expressionist."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: To Err Is Human, To Forgive Is Divine

NRO's Byron York:

"It caught my eye as a flash on Brit Hume a few moments ago, but here is a photo from Hillary Clinton's visit today to the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In this picture, she is seen talking to none other than Richard Mellon Scaife, the owner of the paper and the man who once said that the death of Vincent Foster was the 'Rosetta stone' of the Bill Clinton administration. (He also funded the so-called 'Arkansas Project' at The American Spectator.) We've heard reports of a rapprochement between Scaife and the Clintons of late, and the Pennsylvania primary is fast approaching, but this is still a pretty striking picture."

LEST WE FORGET: Hillary Says She 'Misspoke' About Wrestling Bin Laden

The Huffington Post's Andy Borowitz:

"...In an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, Sen. Clinton told host Tim Russert, 'I wrestled bin Laden in his cave in 1998 and had him pinned to the ground before the bastard got away.'

But a review of Sen. Clinton's official White House schedule from that period revealed that the then-First Lady was nowhere in the vicinity of Mr. bin Laden on that day, but was instead greeting a group of honor roll students at Disney World in Orlando.

'I may have misspoke about what went on that particular day,' Sen. Clinton said today. 'But it was a very busy time for me, what with having that knife-fight with Kim Jong-Il and all.' [...]

'Everything Hillary Clinton says is true,' said her new spokesman, the author James Frey."

Posted by Ian Faerstein at March 26, 2008 12:45 PM