August 12, 2008

8/12: Pilloryland

The Atlantic's Josh Green on 8/11 published an expose (which was teased by Politico the day before) detailing the dramatic inner-workings of Hillary Clinton's failed presidential campaign. Green's article was buttressed by nearly 200 emails and memos he obtained from various campaign staffers. As one of the foremost experts on "Hillaryland," Green wrote:

"Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence -- on her capacity.... In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles' heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton's loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. ... What follows is the inside account of how the campaign for the seemingly unstoppable Democratic nominee came into being, and then came apart."

The most talked-about document obtained by Green was a March 2007 memo written by top Clinton strategist Mark Penn, who advised his boss to subtly portray Barack Obama as un-American. Penn wrote:

"All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050. It also exposes a very strong weakness for him -- his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values."

CLINTON: Ruing The Day One

Bloggers from the left and right condemned Penn's memo as cynical and conniving. Overall, many saw Green's article as confirmation that Clinton had lost to Obama because of the back-biting, lack of preparation, and mismanagement within her campaign staff.

• Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum: "My guess is that Penn's career as a A-list political consultant was probably over anyway, but hopefully this drives a final nail into his coffin. What a sleaze."


• Prairie Weather: "Hillary Clinton's campaign revealed (as many of us noticed) someone who did not have basic leadership skills. A lot of hope, an admix of self-righteousness and a good deal of anger, but not the ability to make decisions. She couldn't control her own staff and didn't seem to make an effort to exert leadership."


• Robert Stacy McCain: "'Personnel is policy,' the old saying goes, and Hillary's campaign had assembled a cadre of second-raters in top positions. But this is entirely the candidate's fault. The candidate is always ultimately in charge of his own campaign, and if Hillary put the wrong people in charge, she has no one to blame but herself."


• New Republic's Eve Fairbanks: "What with Team Hillary's old melodrama and Team Edwards's new one, those 'No Drama With Obama' signs the Obama staff hung all over their Chicago office are starting to look like just the right mantra."


• Wonkette's Jim Newell: "These people aren't all nuts, though, it seems after reading this. Hillary was just such a frontrunner, with so many advantages, that each of her top advisers was going out of his or her mind 24 hours a day not wanting to be the one that blew it. As a result they just fought all the time, these very smart individuals, and ended up blowing it as a team. And that's quite an achievement."

Atlantic Monthly's Ta-Nehisi Coates, an Obama supporter, offered an interesting contrarian take: "I'm not particularly outraged by this. Let Mark be Mark. The fact is, if anything, it looks like Clinton ultimately held back, no? I was pretty pissed about that hard-working white voters remark, but for some reason, I've come to think of it as a slip. Let me expound on that. Not a slip, like Clinton didn't mean it. But a slip like, it's exactly what she meant. It just wasn't supposed to be a dog-whistle. It was the un-pc truth. At least from her twisted perspective."

Many conservative bloggers viewed Penn's "Other" strategy as proof that Republicans are victims of an unfair double standard when it comes to playing patriot games. RedState's Pejman Yousefzadeh: "I trust that after this, we won't hear all that much more about how the evil Republicanses are working to make Barack Obama look un-American. Let history record that it was the Clinton campaign that sought to beat everyone to the punch on that issue. And it was a strategy they followed with a surprising degree of devotion as well; recall the picture of Barack Obama dressed up in Somali tribal wear that the Clintons released to the public by leaking it to the Drudge Report. Recall as well Hillary Clinton's statement that Barack Obama was not and is not a Muslim 'as far as I know.' The Clinton campaign went out on the warpath to make Obama look like The Other very early in the game. These tactics are, of course, despicable. The only mildly amusing thing about them is that the Clinton campaign--and all of the Democrats associated with it--acted more like their conception and caricature of Karl Rove than the real Karl Rove ever did."

Adding a racial layer to that argument, Hot Air's Ed Morrissey: "Barack Obama has twiced smeared John McCain and the Republican Party as racist and fearmongering — but perhaps that may be better explained as projection. ... Politico reports that a campaign strategy of xenophobia didn't come from the GOP. ... It will also have one other effect, and that's to put the race card out of reach for Barack Obama. He can't call McCain a racist and a fearmonger again without first pointing the finger publicly to the Clintons, who obviously went a lot farther than McCain would ever countenance along those lines. (McCain all but forbid the mention of Jeremiah Wright by his campaign or surrogates.) This could also rip the veneer of inclusionism off of identity politics and expose it for the tribalism that it is. These memos and the Democratic infighting demonstrate the corrosiveness of identity politics and its eventual outcome — division, bitterness, and loss. That will help improve American politics in the long run as we focus on ideas and philosophy, and not the color of skin, internal plumbing, or ethnicity of our great-grandparents."

Nate Silver suggests that Penn-like tactics largely led to Clinton's defeat, specifically by alienating once-loyal black voters: "Overall, Clinton lost 100 points of support among black voters in about 120 days: a truly remarkable achievement. Since black voters make up about 20 percent of the Democratic primary electorate, a 100-point swing among black voters translates to a 20-point swing among all voters. And that, essentially, was how the primary was lost. ... It is clear from reading the Penn Memos that the Clinton campaign had very little idea this was coming. There is abundant discussion about how to squeeze every last nanometer of a vote out of groups like 'waitress moms', but very little substance about how to build or retain their support among African-Americans. ... Clinton, to her credit, declined to press many of Penn's more venomous lines of attack, although they came out occasionally through surrogates, including Clinton's husband. More fundamentally, though, one senses that the Clinton campaign simply took the black community for granted, and didn't understand how certain of their core lines of argument might go over with African-Americans. In particular, Clinton's claims to being experienced were always fairly specious, considering that she had spent barely more time in elected office than Obama (less, if you count his years in the Illinois State Senate) and had relatively few accomplishments to her name...."

Several bloggers discussed the implications that the memos may have on Democrats this fall:

• Patterico: "The article and leaks hurt Hillary and the timing of the release, right before the Democratic Convention, is especially damaging. It helps Obama to portray Hillary in the worst light possible...."


• Taylor Marsh: "No doubt the Clinton hating Obama blogs will cluck, cluck, cluck with satisfaction over this one. Seen as validation, the internal memos hinted at in Allen's piece and dished about recently, the subject of which has been whispered about among political junkies for months, will also likely spur people on to asking more about Hillary's campaign and what, exactly, went wrong and who's to blame. However, many will simply not write this tale until after November. Most Democrats don't want to do anything to distract from winning."


• Marsh: "First Edwards, now this stuff. Are the stars converging to sabotage the Democrats? Or are we doing it to ourselves. Remarkable."

CLINTON II: Get Rielle!

In an effort to debunk the Clinton camp's latest excuse for losing the election, Silver: "Not to re-litigate the Primary Wars ... but [Clinton spokesperson] Howard Wolfson tells ABC News that, were it not for John Edwards, Hillary Clinton would have beaten Barack Obama in Iowa:"

"Our voters and Edwards' voters were the same people," Wolfson said the Clinton polls showed. "They were older, pro-union. Not all, but maybe two-thirds of them would have been for us and we would have barely beaten Obama."

"Iowa actually didn't turn out to be that close, with Obama defeating Edwards by 7.9 points and Hillary Clinton by 8.1 points. For Clinton to have beaten Obama, she would have needed (as Wolfson correctly points out) about two-thirds of those Edwards voters. The thing about Iowa, however, is that unlike virtually any other electoral contest, second choices matter, since Democratic caucus rules dictate that a voter may caucus for her second-choice candidate if her first choice does not achieve the 15 percent of the vote required for viability. As such, Iowa pollsters did a lot of work in trying to determine voters' second choices. And in virtually every survey, Clinton did rather poorly as a second choice: an average of several surveys in December showed that she was the second choice of about 20 percent of voters, as compared with 25 percent for Obama and Edwards.... So the odds are that, if John Edwards had dropped out on the morning before the Iowa caucus, Obama would have won by more points rather than fewer. It was also the case that Barack Obama appeared to get the lion's share of Edwards supporters once Edwards dropped from the race. ... [Wolfson] is making a much cruder sort of argument based on the polls, and the evidence cuts against him."

Markos Moulitsas uses similar data to debunk Wolfson's claim, concluding: "So if Clinton was truly the second choice of Edwards voters, they sure had a funny way of showing it -- voting for Obama in huge numbers."

In a scathing post entitled "These people are disgusting," Coates: "Here was excuse-mongering as art: If you count only the primary states we're winning. If you count Florida and Michigan we're winning. If you count the states with the most electoral votes, we're winning. Now it's, If the John Edwards story had broke we would have won. ... In its specifics, this claim is preposterous. Recall that Clinton lost Iowa by almost ten points. Recall that the Clinton campaign's biggest weakness was an utter ignorance of caucuses. Recall that after Edwards dropped out, Clinton lost eleven straight primaries. But in broader terms, the worst thing about the Clinton campaign is/was their complete inability to come to terms with the fact that they were supposed to lose. Not because Barack Obama is more of a liberal, not because he'd make a better president, not because Clinton supported the war, not because Bill Clinton is amoral, but because they ran a losing campaign. ... Accountability does not exist with these guys, and in that, they really are Bush-lite. They had millions of dollars, front-runner status and, allegedly, the greatest politician of our era stomping for them--and they got their asses handed to them. But they can't come to terms with it."

But TalkLeft's Big Tent Democrat thought Wolson's argument had some substance: "I have no idea what would have happened the night of January 3, 2008 if Edwards had not been in the race, but to ignore the fact that John Edwards served as Obama's attack dog in Iowa ... when discussing his effect on the race, is absurd."

Many bloggers commented on the irony that the Clinton camp was essentially saying that she was yet again the victim of adultery:

• Jill Stanek: "Do her people really want to go there? If so they'll incite comments like mine: It appears Hillary is repeatedly doomed by men who can't keep their pants zipped."


• National Review's Jonah Goldberg: "Look, the Clintons have their understandable, if not always legitimate, gripes about losing the nomination. But there is just one thing the Clinton camp can't ever, ever, ever complain about. Can you guess what it is? No? Well, here it is: You can't whine about smooth-talking southern politicians who cheat on their wives and then brazenly lie about it. Howard Wolfson is floating the idea that Hillary lost the Iowa caucuses — and by extension the nomination — because that no good John Edwards didn't 'fess up to the American people. What a scoundrel that John Edwards is!"

MCCAIN: Well At Least He's Using The Internet Now

Liberal bloggers on 8/11 widely circulated a post by Congressional Quarterly's Taegan Goddard, who wrote: "A Wikipedia editor emailed Political Wire to point out some similarities between Sen. John McCain's speech today on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia. Given the closeness of the words and sentence structure, most would consider parts of McCain's speech to be derived directly from Wikipedia."

McCain opponents piled on:

• OpenLeft's Chris Bowers: "Now, I love wikipedia, and think it is a great resource. However, lifting your report on a subject directly from an encylopedia is something most people are encouraged to stop doing in, oh, about the sixth grade. If you, your policy team, and your speech writing team are still doing it when commenting on an international crisis while running for President of the United States, that's both pathetic and scary."


• MyDD's Jonathan Singer: "It's never a good sign when a presidential candidate is caught cribbing foreign policy notes from Wikipedia -- particularly when that candidate is trying to put himself forward as the more serious and experienced choice in the realm of foreign policy. ... But taking a step back, it's always interesting to think about these stories from the perspective of the shoe being on the other foot -- what would the reaction have been had this story come out in relation to the other candidate. In this case, what would have happened had Barack Obama, not John McCain, been caught cheating on the 3 AM test by appropriating from Wikipedia? ... This is a major league embarrassment, one that goes a long way towards undercutting the meme that McCain is untouchable on foreign policy."


• Steve Benen: "[The alleged plagiarizing] strikes me as something of a gaffe, which when added to the list, points to an embarrassing situation. McCain thinks Czechoslovakia is still a countrybetween Sudan and Somalia; he's confused about how many U.S. troops are in Iraq; he's confused about Iran's relationship with al Qaeda; and he doesn't understand the difference between Sunni and Shi'ia. And now, McCain can't give a speech about the war in Georgia without relying on an online encyclopedia for content."

Conservative bloggers rushed to McCain's defense:

• Powerline's Paul Mirengoff: "CQ's suggestion of wrongdoing by McCain strikes me as ridiculous. The information that the McCain campaign apparently obtained from Wikipedia is simple factual background material. ... The idea that he should have cited Wikipedia as his source for basic factual information about Georgia is absurd. ... CQ's Taegan Goddard wonders 'whether a presidential candidate should base policy speeches on material from Wikipedia.' But McCain was not basing any policy prescription on the (apparently accurate) background information contained in Wikipedia -- e.g., the fact that Georgia adopted Christianity early on or that it gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Rather it is clear from the face of the speech that McCain has first hand knowledge of the current situation in Georgia, having met, he says, with President Saakashvili 'many times, including during several trips to Georgia.' CQ elects to omit this fact. This story, then, looks like much ado about nothing, and I'm surprised that CQ decided to run it."


• Outside The Beltway's James Joyner: "I agree that it's probable that McCain's speechwriter(s) looked at the Wikipedia entry for basic facts when crafting the historical portion. But that's hardly 'plagiarism.' Or, frankly, even noteworthy. It's hardly a novel finding that there was a Russian Revolution, that Georgia was annexed in 1922, that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and that Georgia struggled mightily in its early years of independence. ... More importantly, a political speech isn't a term paper. For one thing, candidates seldom write them, so they're almost always passing off others' work as their own."


• RedState's Erick Erickson: "Amazing how dismissive the left was when bloggers accused Obama of lifting whole passages from other people's speeches and yet the left is perfectly willing to accuse John McCain of plagiarism by accurately recounting Georgia's history. Here again is the take away point: McCain has gotten so much good press for his statements and speeches on Georgia, clearly contrasting his experience with Barack Obama's inexperience, the left must discredit McCain. They cannot build up Obama. They must tear down McCain -- even if it means they'll grasp at straws to do it."

Blog P.I's William Beutler offered a nonpartisan critique: "But as a writer and former professional journalist, I know from plagiarism, and I think McCain's detractors are jumping on this one a little too quickly. I think the only reason there is any controversy is because the first quoted passages, about Georgia and Christianity, are obviously very similar. They are also very short. And in all three examples, the text is purely expository: none of it expresses any thoughts, feelings, emotions or other content that would be an obvious case of intentional plagiarism. Additionally, it's worth noting that historical facts cannot be plagiarized, only their expression. If there is any here, it's probably inadvertent. ... Of course, if the campaign did plagiarize it, at least Wikipedia is released under a free public license."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Keeping Dr. King's Dream Alive (Forever?)

Responding to the ongoing refusal by the Congressional Black Caucus to allow white Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) to join the group because his skin color, American Prospect's Adam Serwer: "Cohen's district is mostly black. If the priority is to address the needs and concerns of black Americans, then I assume that means the black folks in TN-09, who voted for Cohen as their representative. Unlike in 2006, where his mandate was questionable because he won with a small percentage of the vote in a crowded field, Cohen's victory this year [79% to 18%] represents a conclusive rejection of the presumption that he needs to be black to best represent them. ... This isn't about giving Cohen honorary black status, it's about making sure the needs of his constituents are better served. As it stands, Clay has essentially said addressing the needs of the black community in Memphis is less important than making Cohen understand that he isn't black. I'm pretty sure he's figured that out by now."

LEST WE FORGET: So That's Why He Supports Stem-Cell Research

Reason's Dave Weigel: "It's been a while since I suited up and dumpster-dived in the Obama conspiracyverse. In my absence, I reckon that the average IQ there has dipped by 20-25 points. Take this latest revelation from Larry 'Whitey Tape' Johnson: "Republican operatives ... have unearthed critical information on Obama and are just biding their time until after the convention to drop it on him. Such as? Having a birth certificate that lists you as Barry Soetoro.' Incredible! Ann Dunham met her second husband, Lolo Soetoro in 1966, in Hawaii. 'Barry' Obama was, at this time, five years old. The only reasonable explanation is that Dunham and Soetoro built (or purchased) a Genesis Device to clone a new son, using DNA from Barack Obama Sr. that Dunham had pulled off one of his combs."

Posted by Chris Bodenner at August 12, 2008 01:24 PM