Friday’s campaign round-up

April 4, 2008

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:

* The polls in Pennsylvania are all over the place, but taken together, it looks like an increasingly competitive contest. The latest InsiderAdvantage poll shows Hillary Clinton leading Barack Obama by just two, 45% to 43%. The Morning Call newspaper finds Clinton up by 11 (49-38), down from 14. Strategic Vision shows Clinton with an eight-point lead (49-41), though the margin is down from an 18-point lead a few weeks ago. However, the Strategic Vision poll has one key piece of good news for Clinton — she leads McCain in Pennsylvania by six, while the Republican pollster shows McCain beating Obama by five.

* Speaking of polls and primaries, a new poll in Indiana shows another tight race, with Clinton leading Obama by just three points, 49% to 46%.

* Former President Jimmy Carter seems to have a preference in the Dems’ nomination fight: “Don’t forget that Obama won in my state of Georgia,” Carter said. “My town, which is home to 625 people, is for Obama, my children and their spouses are pro-Obama. My grandchildren are also pro-Obama. As a superdelegate, I would not disclose who I am rooting for but I leave you to make that guess.”

* The good news for Clinton is that her $20 million haul in March was her second best monthly showing to date. The bad news for Clinton is that she only raised about half of Obama’s total for the month.

* John Edwards was a running mate once, and he doesn’t want to be one again: “After his keynote speech at CTIA, the annual U.S. wireless industry showcase, Edwards was asked in a question-and-answer session if he would accept the nomination for vice president. ‘No,’ said Edwards, who also declined to say whether he would endorse Clinton or Obama.”

* New Jersey Sen. Jon Corzine and Pennsylvania Rep. Jack Murtha, two prominent Clinton backers, both said independently yesterday that they believe Clinton needs to win the Democratic popular vote to have a chance at the nomination.

* Self-deprecating humor is always welcome, as was the case with Clinton’s appearance on “The Tonight Show” last night: “[S]he used her entrance to try to defuse the recent unpleasantness about her fictional account of flying into Tuzla, Bosnia, under sniper fire in 1996, a tale that was discredited by witnesses and news footage. ‘I was worried I wasn’t going to make it,’ she said as she walked onto the set (to the theme from ‘Rocky’). ‘ was pinned down by sniper fire at the Burbank airport.'”

* The LAT takes a closer look at the race for superdelegates and finds a narrowing contest: “In December, according to an Associated Press tally, Clinton led Obama by 106 superdelegates. In February, her lead had been cut to 87. As of Thursday, it was 30.”

* CBS had scheduled a Democratic debate in North Carolina for April 19, which Obama agreed to but Clinton did not. Yesterday, the Clinton campaign agreed to an April 27 debate in North Carolina, but the Obama campaign has not yet signed on.

* And House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), for reasons that are unclear, is feeling pretty good about his caucus’ chances in November: “I think we are going to gain seats this year. Period.” We’ll see.

I wonder if Boehner is gonna cry like a baby when those seats are lost in a big way. He has most definitely achieved the highest level of accomplishment in the new art form of political watersports.

  • I’m glad Boehner is feeling good. Keep those happy thoughts going, John! After all, your favorite president is teh best evah, so sayeth at least 1% of the people in America, and fortunately they are manning the bubble you’re sitting in.

  • Self-deprecating humor is always welcome

    Oh yeah, like Bush looking for WMD behind a curtain. The problem is that if the issue isn’t minor, the humor is offensive. If Hillary had dodged sniper fire somewhere other than Tuzla, I would say OK. If she had been ducking and running, but there was no actual gunfire, fine. Had she been merely bragging to a bunch of friends at a coctail party, no problem. But she was trying to make a case for having been in a crisis situation. To then say this merely proves she’s human is offensive. And laughing it off suggests that she doesn’t have a problem with a little lie here and there. After seven years of Bush, I do!

  • #5. And laughing it off suggests that she doesn’t have a problem with a little lie here and there. After seven years of Bush, I do!

    It didn’t take Bush for me to have a problem with lying. That is a part of who and what I am. Bush just took it to an exponential level which any normal person would repudiate (not just the lie but the person) should that many lies come from anyone they knew.

    That Clinton apparently wants to follow down that path really does put her closer to McCain than to Obama in thought, action, and words.

  • Self-deprecating humor is always welcome, as was the case with Clinton’s appearance on “The Tonight Show” last night….

    Followed by prevarications…. “I had a lapse.”
    Quit playing the American people for suckers and jokers.
    You lied. You puffed. And you got caught.
    Just like your husband got caught.

    Disgustingly tacky and disgustingly insincere…

  • bohner just asked Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, and they all told him that with their ‘proprietary’ software that counts the votes (that we can’t let you see), and their ‘internal’ procedures, the election results were in the bag.

    Check out this partial update from BBV:

    BALLOT RIGGING UPDATE

    In September 2007, head of memory-card-programming subcontractor LHS Associates, John Silvestro, stated that he doesn’t mind having an audit bill. This was during Harri Hursti’s testimony in front of New Hampshire legislators about the risks of using the Diebold optical scanner. Does this mean that Silvestro is a straight-up guy, or does this mean he knows how to make hand counts match rigged machine counts? I can’t answer that, but I can tell you this: What we have now learned in New Hampshire shows how to game a recount, cheat an audit, rig a mail-in election, tamper in a transport vehicle.

    This is of national importance. We have several states that still have DREs and no paper trail, and that fight needs to continue. But the trend is toward optical scan vote-counting computers with tiny hand-counted samples, erroneously called “audits” — and never yoked to chain of custody. We are also seeing trends toward forced mail-in voting (Washington state) and we had some unfortunate central counting going on in the primary (Ohio).

    Black Box Voting has proved this now: The right chemical and a paper towel enables an insider to alter ballots to flip votes on paper ballots, to rig mail-in votes, spot checks (“audits”), and recounts. It will not be detected.

    Get more. See:

    Black Box Voting
    330 SW 43rd St Suite K
    PMB 547
    Renton WA 98057

    Black Box Voting is supported entirely by individual citizen donations.

  • “Quit playing the American people for suckers and jokers.
    You lied. You puffed. And you got caught.
    Just like your husband got caught.”

    Amen. The way she handled that was so much like the way McSame handles his major gaffes and hypocritical acts. I hope the American people, particulary those about to vote in the Dem primaries, don’t let her get off with that feeble gesture. Her lies went to the heart of her argument that she “passes the Commander-in -Chief Test”. She lied about that, puffed about that and now she is caught.

  • That’s a bad taste comment coming from Hillary in L.A. during an upswing of shootings in the city. Hey Hillary, instead of joking about getting shot at in L.A., why don’t you tell us what you’re going to do to reduce gun violence on our city streets? Stop ignoring urban issues!

  • Obama now has his “perfect storm” talking point against the uber-secretive Clintonian imperialists:

    Why is Hillary afraid to debate on April 19th? Why won’t she debate the issues before the Pennsylvania primary? What is it that she needs to hide from the voters?

  • Black Box Voting has proved this now: The right chemical and a paper towel enables an insider to alter ballots to flip votes on paper ballots, to rig mail-in votes, spot checks (”audits”), and recounts. It will not be detected.

    Jeez. Paranoid much?

    I live in Washington. I’ve been voting by mail since long before it was “forced” (I voted absentee for 20 years.) I notice you’ve provided no link to a verifiable instance of how using the “right chemical and a paper towel” has ever been proved to have flipped a mail-in vote in Washington.

    And not that Dino Rossi crap from ’04, either. There was never any credible evidence of fraud, just a bunch of GOP crybabies who wouldn’t accept a loss.

  • I don’t see how that ‘chemical and towel’ will do it for fraud with mail in ballots. Here in Oregon, we’ve been voting by mail for many years now and no such things have happened.

    Sure since there is no proof of misdeeds, according to conspiracy theories, that also proves that the system works because the chemicals work so well that you can’t see it….

    The so called ‘insider’ who’d be doing that…. Give me a break… There are multiple people looking at the ballots at the same time… Unless they are all in cahoots and want to do hundreds of ballots….

    I don’t think so… Nice fantasy….. Republican fantasy as well as Paranoia ..

  • It’s crazy to be afraid of fraud with mail-in voting, it’s so easy to make it fraud-proof. Just have all the still-unopened ballots routed to a central location for counting. Then have observers on hand from all parties involved who oversee the entire process from opening them to counting them. What is so tough about that? Oregon’s been doing it for years without a hitch. If you want to be paranoid, be paranoid about the other systems.

    • Comments are closed.