Clinton to drop out, say associates

NY Times reports unnamed Clinton associates say she’s resigned to losing and will drop out and endorse Obama next week. Which is no big surprise. All the current storm and fury signifies nothing except that she expects (and probably should get) a plum post in the Obama Administration or maybe be VP.

The Telegraph UK is reporting Clinton will be offered a “dignified exit“, a place in Obama’s cabinet as Health secretary or a major role in steering health care legislation through Congress, but that she will not be offering the VP post.

In a few weeks, the current supposed irreparable split will be forgotten, the Democratic Party unified, and Obama will continue to be ahead in the polls for the general election.

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Clinton cites R.F.K. assassination as reason to continue, then apologizes

Senator Hillary Clinton apologized for referring to the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 as a reason she should continue her battle with Senator Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination.

Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, reacting to Mrs. Clinton’s comment through a spokeswoman, said only, “This is beyond the pale.”

She’s passed into the realm of the demented, hasn’t she? The elder gray beards of the party need to take her aside, as one might a mentally ill child, gently but firmly explaining that the game is over and she’s lost. And that she needs concede before she does herself and her husband irreparable damage.

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Race-baiting is not a winning strategy

Call DNC Chair Howard Dean and Tell Him to Stop the Clinton Campaign’s race-baiting

In the last few days, a desperate Clinton campaign has turned to race-baiting as its primary strategy. Tell DNC Chair Howard Dean to insist that if she plans to continue her campaign, Sen. Clinton must end her strategy of racial division.

Color of Change has more information and a suggested calling script.

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So, when will Hillary get it?

By any measure the race is over. She can’t win and has to know it. It’s time for her to concede gracefully then back Obama.

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Superdelegates must follow the will of voters

ColorofChange.org

Demand that the Democratic Party defend democracy

Leaders of the Democratic Party are playing a dangerous game — risking the credibility of the party to hand Hillary Clinton the nomination against the will of voters. Heading down this path means disenfranchising millions of voters and legitimizing a campaign strategy that has displayed a clear pattern of race baiting and divisive politics.

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ABC Democratic Debate



WaPo
: Debate hosts Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos “turned in shoddy, despicable performances.”

Clinton needed a knockout to get back in the race, but came nowhere close as this shoddy excuse for a debate instead showed the inane and vapid state of too much of US journalism with few questions of substance being asked.

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Obama’s experience

“He didn’t have a lot of experience in running a presidential campaign, did he?”

– Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, interviewed on Good Morning America, when asked if Sen. Barack Obama had enough experience to be president.

Obama has run a brilliant campaign while Clinton, by virtually any measure, has badly mismanaged her campaign, with the latest polls showing Obama now down just six points in Pennsylvania, a state where Clinton used to enjoy a massive double-digit lead.

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Penn purged

Mark Penn has stepped aside as chief strategist in the wake of revelations that he lobbied on behalf of a trade treaty with Colombia that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton opposes.

Except he’ll still be giving advice. So how gone is he really?

Given his extraordinary incompetence in running her campaign coupled with an apparent massive ability to turn supporters into opponents, they should have dumped him long ago. To do so in the middle of a campaign shows them, one more time, to be flailing and falling apart.

And of course they knew about the trade treaty. How could they have not known?

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How did Clintons ‘earn’ $15m from Burkle firm?

Is this why the Clinton’s delayed as long as they did on releasing their tax returns? Because this does not pass the smell test.
Bloomberg

“Most people who make that much money work for it,” said Yale University tax law professor Michael Graetz, a former Treasury Department official in President George H.W. Bush’s administration. “What are they being paid for, and if it’s the Sheikh of Dubai paying the husband of somebody who might be the next president of the United States, what do they think they’re paying for?”

HuffPo is equally blunt.

What did Bill Clinton do to get $15m from Ron Burkle?

A Polizeros prediction: This marks the beginning of the end for the Clinton candidacy. She will not recover from this.

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Obama retakes lead over Hillary

He took major hits these past several days and rebounded quickly. This guy is scary good. And Clinton is apparently in the red financially too.

That Politco bombshell yesterday citing Clinton aides who said they realize she has no chance of winning has gone viral and been quoted everywhere, including mainstream media.

My guess: She’ll drop out sometime in the next several weeks, will do so graciously, and support Obama.

An Obama - Richardson ticket could be a winner, with Richardson helping big time in the West and among Hispanics too.

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Clinton aides: She has no chance of winning

One important Clinton adviser estimated to Politico privately that she has no more than a 10 percent chance of winning her race against Barack Obama, an appraisal that was echoed by other operatives.

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Issues, anyone?

I don’t care about Rev. Wright, or what McCain did or didn’t say, or snooping into Obama’s passport record, or Hillary’s White House schedule when Bill was prez, or any of the other banal trivialities being passed off as news..

All of it is almost totally irrelevant. The presidential campaign is already disintegrating into a swamp of attacks, innuendo, and we still have seven more months to go. Imagine the crazed levels of hysterical attacks we’ll be hearing come October. Might be a good time to leave the country or unplug from the Net.

The economy has huge problems, the country is fighting and losing two wars, millions may get foreclosed - and none of the candidates are addressing any of this in a serious way. We need to know from all of them what their plans of action are, not sound bites or feel-good phrases, but real, workable solutions.

But we probably won’t get that. Attack ads and sliming are so much easier to do.

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DailyKos declares war against Clinton

Kos at DailyKos says Hillary knows she can only win “via coup by super delegate”

Yet a coup by super delegate would sunder the party in civil war. Clinton knows this, it’s her only path to victory, and she doesn’t care. She is willing — nay, eager to split the party apart in her mad pursuit of power.

People like me have two choices — look the other way while Clinton attempts to ignite her civil war, or fight back now, before we cross that dangerous line.

And the more super delegates see what is happening, and what Clinton has in store, the more imperative it is that they line up behind Obama and put an end to it before it’s too late.

DailyKos gets 150,000-250,000 visits a day and is influential. This post by Kos is in part a response to a Clinton-supporters “strike” at DailyKos and is getting huge traction in the blogosphere.

One basic rule of politics is that it’s best not to kill your opponents because you might need their support sometime down the line.

(The other) Connecticut Bob has an impassioned post about this. A fratricidal internal war among the Dems would be disastrous because come November whoever the candidate is will need votes and support from everyone in the party.

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Obama and Clinton

Folks, the increasingly nasty disputes and disagreements between and Obama and Clinton need to end, and end now. Never underestimate the ability of the Democratic Party to shoot itself in the foot and turn a sure win into a defeat. A divisive primary that ruptures the party would be a swell way to accomplish that. Sure, I favor Obama over Clinton, but for the Democrats to win, they need a unified party. Now.

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Superdelegates breaking towards Obama

If Obama maintains his current 150 lead in pledged delegates through the end of the primary season, Clinton “would have to snag more than 70 percent of the remaining 334 or so superdelegates.”

But TPM wonders if Rev. Wright could be a death blow to Obama.

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Obama and those 50 undecided superdelegates

Rep. Lacy Clay (D-MO), Sen. Barack Obama’s Missouri co-chairman and pledged Obama superdelegate, said Obama will gain the support of 50 undecided Democratic superdelegates later this week, according to the Columbia Missourian.

Said Clay: “She (Sen. Clinton) will not make up those numbers. This race is over.”

We shall see. I do find it strange that just after Clinton’s wins in TX and OH that her campaign staff is snarling at each other, according to WaPo, hardly the sign of a winning campaign.

Update: Obama spokesperson denies it.

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Obama may beat Clinton in TX delegates

Obama could pick up a net gain of three delegates [in Texas], after all the dust settles.

Hey, I favor Obama over Clinton but this is nuts. Primaries should be on straight votes on the people. Nothing more, nothing less. If you get 52% of the votes, you should get 52% of the delegates. Period.

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Tom Brokaw: Obama has 50 superdelegates waiting to endorse

Factor in those fifty delegates on top on Clinton needing huge victories tonight to stay competitive (which I doubt she will get), then the party greybeards may soon come to explain to her that she will withdraw gracefully or messily, her choice.

But watch the delegate count. If Clinton doesn’t make substantive gains on the race that matters — the delegate race (remember, the Clinton campaign said it was all about delegates after Iowa) — then there will be a major push from Obama and the party to shut this thing down.

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Obama slams it back at Clinton

Obama is good, almost scary good. This is political jui jitsu, really. Turning attacks back against the opponent.
< Tip: Intoxination

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All over but the shouting?

Clinton doesn’t vow to go on beyond March 4

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Obama campaign as “disruptive innovation”

The Left Coaster comments on a recent MSNBC survey showing 53% said Clinton’s attacks were unfair while only 33% thought that of Obama.

Hillary’s campaign strategists have proved consistently inept, so it’s impossible to guess what they will try in what could be the final two weeks of her candidacy, but it’s clear that she’s not going to win by tearing Obama down.

You hear this quite a lot, that Clinton’s campaign suffers from bad advice. But she hired them, didn’t she? And has determinedly stuck with them regardless of criticism. So, the only possible conclusion that she approves of what they are doing. Even if it is leading her campaign off a cliff.

This isn’t because they are dumb. It’s because the landscape changed and they haven’t or can’t change with it. Maybe they don’t even realize what happened.

A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a technological innovation, product, or service that uses a “disruptive” strategy, rather than a “sustaining” strategy, to overturn the existing dominant technologies or status quo products in a market.

Clinton is the status quo product, Obama the disruptive innovation. He understands that people genuinely want politicians that represent change and new ways of dealing with the world, and has tailored his campaign to that. Clinton meanwhile, remains mired in using tired old tactics like dumb attack ads and transparently gearing her speeches to whatever pollsters tell her is important that day, even if if contradicts what she said yesterday. Her attack ads might well have worked 4 or 8 years ago. But they are backfiring now.

Obama is riding the disruptive innovation wave while Clinton is getting swamped by it. Whether Obama is just another Slick Willie is something I’m undecided on, but like mp3s replacing music CDs, something has shfted at the grassroots level and people want something new. Politicians who fail to realize this will swept aside, and quickly too.

The key point about disruptive innovations is that they do not co-exist with what came before it, but rather that they replace it.

PS. From Intoxination

According to a new Reuters/Zogby poll released this morning, Obama now has a 14% lead over Clinton nationally. In a general match up, Obama beats McCain 47% to 40%, however a match up of Clinton/McCain has McCain winning 50% to 38%.

I don’t care how much the Clinton campaign tries to spin it today, they are about done.

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Juggernaut?

Exit polls in Wisconsin showed Obama leading among white voters and splitting women’s vote with Clinton, which is quite astounding when you think about it.

And McCain, upon winning in Wisconsin, immediately attacked Obama…

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Kos has a question

My memory is hazy. Was the Dean campaign as pathetic during its “implosion” stage as the Clinton campaign has behaved the last week or two?

I’m trying to figure out if this is normal behavior for a desperate campaign or if the Clintons are reaching new heights of idiocy.

Update: To add, how long before we have a YouTube of Hillary “plagiarizing” words and phrases from other places? I say 36 hours.

If the implosion continues and her campaign self-destructs, then many a book will be written and tea leaves analyzed to discern precisely how it happened and what the root causes were. Given that this appears to be the season for supposed frontrunners getting dethroned (as witness Guliani and Romney and maybe Clinton soon) then maybe we’re seeing the political version of disruptive technologies.

The music CD destroyed the market for the LP. Sure, some collectors and purists squealed, but it never was a fight. The CD was smaller, held more information, and within a few years, hardly any new LPs were being made. They’ve couldn’t compete. The disruptive technology of the CD eliminated LPs from the marketplace. (Just like what mp3s are doing to the CD now.)

Obama, Huckabee, Ron Paul, and maybe even McCain are not the “standard” breed of politician. They are the disruptive technology that the established old guard of Clinton, Guliani, and Romney do not understand and clearly have trouble coping with.

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The perils of sprinting in a marathon

It’s pretty clear now that the Hillary campaign wasn’t prepared with a Plan B if its strategy for a Super Tuesday knockout punch didn’t work. Now comes a report that the campaign only recently learned that her “firewall” state of Texas allocates delegates in such a way that even a big popular vote win might not yield a decided edge in state delegates.

One wonders how the Clinton campaign could not have known. Is their announcement an attempt at manipulation and spin or yet another sign of an incompetently run campaign?

To use an analogy from business, Obama seems to be the disruptive technology that changes the rules while Clinton is the established dinosaur that can’t or doesn’t know how to change.

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The lines meet

Obama pulls ahead on Pollster’s poll of polls for the first time.

The sniping between the Obama and Clinton is definitely getting a bit pitched. But then, the hard right and libertarians seriously dislike McCain. So there’s plenty of internal squabbling in both parties now. Will both parties unite behind whoever their candidate ends up being? Probably. But predictions and hopes that the general campaign won’t be a mud-slinging barrage of negative attack ads will prove illusory.

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