Hillary Clinton's vp push is now in full swing.  Yesterday she volunteered to a group of NY legislators that she'd be on the ticket and now both Lanny Davis and Bob Johnson are working on it as well, Davis with a petition and Johnson with an effort with get the Congressional Black Caucus to promote the idea.
[see http://thepage.time.com/2008/06/04/they- want-you/ ]

What's going on?

Well, first of all, as has been reported in various places, the Obama folks have already told Clinton that she won't be on the ticket. I heard it myself from someone who works for the national campaign.  So, I doubt that she will get the call.  

What she did yesterday made a vp slot much less likely -- stepping on his day of triumph with all sorts of manufactured stories, like a) the leak she was going to concede, b) the campaign pulling that story back, and c) Clinton herself telling state legislators that she would be vp. She then went out and made the same tired, discredited claims about how she could win and used flawed numbers on the vote, even claimed that SD was the last primary. She also claimed that she was in it for the "18 million," as if Obama won't work for those folks, too, pursuing nearly identical policies. All that meant that last night the pundits were talking about her nearly as much as him. That night could have been a huge use of free tv for the general election, with packages about Obama's life story and discussions of how he won the nomination.  

Second, what Clinton is doing is working for 2012. It used to be that saying that was so appalling that no one wanted to do it. But now we know it's so acceptable that a prominent diarist here makes it a key part of her diary.  The Clintons and a subset of her supporters (I believe they are a minority) say that they will be working for Clinton for president in 2012. So they are fine with an Obama loss - and all this vice-presidential talk is a way to make this happen.

If Obama doesn't pick Clinton, and as I said in point one, I doubt he will, the outrage machine will crank up.  They will claim that the "18 million" won't vote for him, which is pretty unlikely.  (I know many Clinton supporters, mostly women over 50, and there's only one who said she might not vote for him and I think she'll change her mind.) So the small number of Clinton supporters who are most committed based on personal loyalty will make a lot of noise, distracting the campaign. And, who know, in a close state, their votes could matter.

Another point: Were Obama to pick Clinton under these circumstances, it undermines him. I would ask, and I think a lot of others would, too, if he can't stand up to the Clinton machine, how can he stand up to dictators and national security threats? And it undermines his message of change.

Frankly, I don't think the Clintons want the vp for Hillary that much. They would face quite a lot more scrutiny, from the sorts of things raised in the Todd Purdham article about Bill's relationships with women to a whole lot of vetting on finances. You may not think that they should face that vetting, but it will happen. They would have to deal with that and so would the rest of us.

So, this is more than a kabuki dance. It's power politics and it's aimed at undermining the Democratic nominee so that Hillary can run in 2012.

I'm a former Clinton supporter who switched to Obama after the Iowa caucuses. I argued for her on many occasions. But now our country's future is at stake. If the nominee is undermined and the Republicans hold the WH, our country and indeed our world is in greater peril.  And I don't like it a bit.  

In what looks like a big change, Hillary Clinton's campaign is shedding staff.  Politico reports:

Members of Hillary Clinton's advance staff received calls and emails this evening from headquarters summoning them to New York City Tuesday night, and telling them their roles on the campaign are ending, two Clinton staffers tell my colleague Amie Parnes.

With the future of her campaign in doubt, Clinton hasn't announced her plans for the final election night of the primary cycle or beyond, but the aides said she would stage her election night event in New York City. Her entourage is currently expected to wake up Tuesday in New York and to arrive in Washington, D.C. Tuesday night.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0 608/Clinton_camp_converging_on_New_York_ Tuesday_and_shedding_staff.html

I don't think it's clear what this means.  These are advance staff.  So it could be that Senator Clinton is not planning on having events around the country for which she would need advance staff.  

Not traveling will save a lot of money. And Clinton could still speak in places like think tanks or the National Press Club, places that would handle the event planning and much of the logistics.

This step is consistent with

1. Ending the campaign
   
2. Suspending the campaign
   
3. Taking a breather for a week or so to see what the remaining superdelegates do.

What do you think is going on?

Everything you need to know is in these two pieces of information:

1. Hillary Clinton will be in NY on Tuesday night. (Politico)

2. Barack Obama will be in St. Paul, at the site of the Republican convention on Tuesday night. (The Page)

Obama's choice will signal that he is poised to be the nominee and to challenge McCain.

Clinton will have come home after a spirited and competitive nominating campaign.

Sorry, but this is a short one. I'm off to volunteer for the Obama campaign today.

Before I left, I just had to share this piece which predicts a blowout in November -- for Obama.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/article s/2008/05/the_mccain_blowout_fallacy.htm l

It goes through a number of key states and explains, based on demographics, voting trends, and turnout, how they are likely to go. I hope someone can write a more detailed analysis of it later, but my ride is coming soon.

Best wishes, everyone, for a lovely Friday and Saturday.  

James Carville, one of Bill Clinton's top strategists in 1992, an election where Clinton was in third behind Perot and Bush for awhile, says that Obama will win the election.  

In an interview with Greg Sargent
http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsm emo.com/2008/05/carville_on_obama_i_thin k_he_w.php

Asked if he thought Obama would beat McCain, Carville said: "I think he will. I think Democrats will win in November...There's a crushing desire for change in this country. No one has seen a party or brand held in such low esteem" than the Republicans.

And what about those working class whites?  Well, for one thing, the composition of the electorate won't be the same as it was in 2004.

Asked about claims that Obama has a problem with non-college whites that could hamper his electability, Carville said that thanks to changes in the electorate, to win Obama merely has to match the performance of Kerry, who underperformed with that group.

"I would argue that if he gets what Kerry got he will still win the election, because the dynamics have changed," Carville said, pointing to likely larger turnout among young voters, African Americans and other demographic changes. Carville joked, however, that he'd be loath to see Obama fall below Kerry's performance.

Carville's analysis of the voting preferences of working class whites dovetails with another analysis of that bloc published today.

As Mark Mellman pointed out
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/opinio n/29mellman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&am p;oref=slogin

Democrats running for president have been losing white, non-college-educated voters since before Mr. Obama was elected to the Illinois legislature. Al Gore and Mr. Kerry each failed to win a majority of this bloc in the general election. With these voters, the size of the losing margin is what matters.

In other words, Mr. Obama is faring better today with the white working class than did either Mr. Gore or Mr. Kerry.

And what about the argument that losing a state in the primary matters in November?  Mellman says

There is no relationship between how candidates perform among any particular group of voters in primaries and how they do with that segment in the general election. In 1992, Bill Clinton lost college-educated voters to Paul Tsongas in the early competitive primaries, but he went on to win that group in November by the largest margin any Democrat ever had. Similarly, John Kerry lost young voters in the competitive primaries in 2004 before going on to win them by a record margin in the general election.

Personally, I think that once Hillary Clinton endorses Obama, his numbers will go up.  And with Obama's phenomenal field operation, the turnout will be high among those who want to turn the page on the Bush administration and want to put a Democrat in the White House.

Senator Obama mixed up the names of two concentration camps. He said his relative liberated Auschwitz when instead it was a part of Buchenwald.

Information about Buchenwald, including personal testimonies, photos, maps, and overview information is available from the Holocaust museum here http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lan g=en&ModuleId=10006131

Some on this site have claimed that this was no mix-up, that somehow it was calculated since, the argument goes, Jews would have been more sympathetic to Obama if the camp was Auschwitz, purportedly because that camp is more well-known.

I am a Jew who has relatives who were killed in the Holocaust, with a cousin who was born in a displaced person's camp following the time her parents spent hiding in the woods of Poland, and with an uncle who fled Germany but could not convince the rest of his family to leave; they were murdered by the Nazi regime.

As a Jew, I have to say that no one in the Jewish community would find Obama more sympathetic if they thought Auschwitz was liberated by his great uncle than if they thought it was Buchenwald instead.

It's not like we only know about one of them.  Their names are burned into our memories, along with so many more.  

We know which parts of our family tree were literally burned to a crisp.

We know who hid in the forest or with rescuers.

We know who rose up and resisted.

We know who survived.

We know the many places where it happened. Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Treblinka, Birkenau, Mauthausen, the list goes on and on.

We know which were work camps and which were death camps.

We know where the culling and medical experiments took place.

And we don't give a good G-d damn if someone mixed up a name.

We are grateful of that the camp Obama's great uncle was in was liberated by American troops.

We are grateful that Eisenhower and Patton visited that camp to see it for themselves.

We are grateful that Obama remembers.

As an HOMAGE to a diarist who loves to call upon the superdelegates to LISTEN UP and as a means of updating everyone about what the superdelegates have done lately, here's some information:

This weekend's delegate choices
Obama 7
Clinton 0

Obama's superdelegate % over time
29%     January 13
40%     February 17
46%     March 16
48%     April 27
53%     May 25

Number of delegates needed to clinch
[under the rules adopted by the DNC, including Clinton staffer Harold Ickes]
Obama     49
Clinton   246

Look's like there's been a whole lot of deciding going on!

All data from: http://demconwatch.blogspot.com/

Want to understand the last month or so of the nomination campaign? Well, one lens into it is provided by what the candidates did, as compared to two Politico articles about What They Wish They Could Say that were published in APRIL.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/040 8/9564.html
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?u uid=A4B83756-3048-5C12-0041E3B83E0D4634

As a diary on the rec list, citing a Politico story What She Wishes She could Say points out, in April, Clinton wished she could raise questions about Obama's electability.  In particular, Clinton might claim that Obama had problems with blue-collar whites, Hispanics and Jews and that these would persist into the general election.

Guess what? Clinton did that.  What Politico said -- on April 13 -- she could do, but was holding back doing, she went ahead and did it.

And Obama?  What was the strategic path not yet taken Politico described?

Well, it was laying bare all the "baggage" of the Clintons, all the issues about their associations that the Republicans would certainly raise.

This includes old issues, like Hillary Clinton's legal career, which includes lots of cases that never got much public attention even during the Whitewater era.

It also includes new ones, like recent stories raising questions about the web of personal and financial associations around Bill Clinton.

There was a January New York Times story, which did not get the attention the reporting deserved, highlighting how this Canadian tycoon and major Bill Clinton benefactor was using his ties to the ex-president to win business with a ruthless dictatorship in Khazakstan.)

There's the Marc Rich situation, who was pardoned by Bill Clinton and who gave money to Hillary's Senate campaign.

And there's family issues.

He has never mentioned her brothers, even though Hugh and Tony Rodham once defied Bill Clinton's own top foreign policy advisers by entering into a strange investment in hazelnuts in the former Soviet republic of Georgia (they later dropped the deal) and Hugh Rodham took large cash payments for trying to broker presidential pardons.

There are political issues as well, such as the disaster the Clinton years were for Democrats in Congress, and the very real problems associated with Hillary's inability to work with others to get health care reform.

The article GOES ON AND ON WITH A LARGE RANGE OF POTENTIAL ISSUES OBAMA COULD HAVE BROUGHT UP.

And guess what -- He's never done it.

Obama has treated Hillary Clinton with kid gloves, by and large.  A certain diarist takes the Clinton approach -- to go there as a sign she's a real fighter.  Personally, I'm glad I'm supporting the candidate who knows that in a fight among friends, an intra-party contest, there are limits.  

I know he's going to after McCain hard -- He's already doing it. And so I'm proud that in January I switched from supporting Clinton to supporting Obama and that soon, unless sometimes very odd happens, he will be our nominee.