I Know You Are But What Am I?

Judge not lest thee be judged: Two articles in the New Yorker and the Nation take a look at Hillary's own past and find that it is far from having been thoroughly "vetted" for attack material and how vulnerable she would be to similar attacks as she has made on Obama's association with William Ayers or Reverend Wright.

Also, below, regarding Hillary's electability: the Boston Globe criticizes the reckless, Bush like saber rattling of her "obliterate Iran" statements (let us not forget she was a HAWK on this war before she was against it), and I do an object lesson on how difficult/impossible it is for Hillary to win this race with CNN's fun little Delegate Calculator (try it!). 

Tom Hayden of the Nation:

...She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an "unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged." She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn't get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.

Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm's partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others "tolerated communists". Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein's sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)

All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn't she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn't the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn't the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?

It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.

From the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg,

My point is that Hillary Clinton has not, in fact, survived the worst that the Republican attack machine (and its pilotless drones online and on talk radio) can dish out. We will learn what the worst really means if she is nominated. The Commie law firm will be only the beginning. Many tempting targets—from Bill’s little-examined fund-raising and business activities during the past seven years to the prospect of his hanging around the White House in some as yet undefined role for another four or eight years to whatever leftovers from the Clinton “scandals” of the nineteen-nineties can be retrieved from the dumpster and reheated—remain to be machine-gunned. The whole Clinton marital soap opera, obviously off limits within the Democratic fold, will offer ample material for what Obama calls “distractions.” To take the most obvious example, the former President’s social life since leaving the White House will become, if not “fair game,” big game—and some of these right-wing dirtbags are already hiring bearers and trying on pith helmets for the safari. Is this a “there” where the Democratic Party really wants to go?

MORE AFTER THE LINK!
Let alone the fact that if Clinton is the nominee the Republicans will have us going over every aspect of the Clinton presidency a la Fox News (why didnt you stop Osama Bin Laden when you could?) over and over.

In other issues regarding Hillary's electability:

The Boston Globe slams her comments about "obliterating Iran" (they dub her "Hillary Strangelove!"):

...Rambo rhetoric like Clinton's only plays into the hands of Iranian hard-liners who want to plow ahead with efforts to attain a nuclear weapons capability. They argue that Iran must have that capability in order to deter the United States from doing what Clinton threatened to do.

While Clinton has hammered Obama for supporting military strikes in Pakistan, her comments on Iran are much more far-reaching. She seems not to realize that she undermined Iranian reformists and pragmatists. The Iranian people have been more favorable to America than any other in the Gulf region or the Middle East.

A presidential candidate who lightly commits to obliterating Iran - and, presumably, all the children, parents, and grandparents in Iran - should not be answering the White House phone at any time of day or night

And finally, take a look at this. CNN has a fun little Delegate Calculator. I did an experiment allotting the final few races: I gave Hillary HUGE margins in states she's expected to win (Kentucky and West Virginia - turns out Appalachia is the most resistant to the idea of a black preisdent), I gave her a big victory in the current battleground of Indiana, I gave Obama a smaller than expected margin in North Carolina, and, split the remaining super delegates 50-50.

So even with all that: Obama hits the 2025 delegates needed (though the Clinton campaign is pushing to move that bar to 2200 by including MI and FL). Hard to see how she can win without Obama just dropping out.

In other words, possibly by early June this will all be moot.

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Here We Go Round & Round

After all this hype, this:
(from Congressional Quarterly, crunching the numbers):

How many delegates might each candidate win in Pennsylvania, which is the most populous of the states and territories that have yet to vote?

...a CQ Politics analysis of the political circumstances in Pennsylvania’s congressional districts, detailed below, projects an edge to Clinton — but by just 53 district-level delegates to 50 for Obama under the Democratic Party’s proportional distribution rules.

These numbers suggest that Clinton, even with a victory in Pennsylvania, would make only a small incremental gain against Obama’s overall lead in the delegate race.

Yup that's right: a net of 3 delegates for Clinton from Pennsylvania, that's it.Trimming Obama's lead by....barely nothing (especially when we hit North Carolina the next week).

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Let's Pretend

Washington Post's Eugene Robinson has a a hilarious-if-it-weren't-so-true take on Hillary's ridiculous all out push to capitalize on Obama's "bitter" comments. (poll numbers are showing the media - surprise- are blowing the significance of this whole thing out of proportion, see what Robert Reich said about that yesterday.)

The Daily Show covered the entire "controversy" last night (bits about Hillary start at 3:20 or so):



And here's a taste of Robinson's column:

Hillary "Shot-and-a-Beer" Clinton has given us the perfect illustration of what's so insane about American politics: the philosophical dictum that could be summed up (with apologies to Descartes) as "I seem, therefore I am."

Clinton spent the weekend bashing Barack Obama for not seeming to be enough of a regular guy -- not for any actual deficit of regular-guyness, mind you, but for giving the impression that such a deficit might exist.

The former first lady, whose family has made $109 million since her husband left the White House, then made a show of demonstrating that she's actually just a regular gal. The point wasn't really to convince anyone that she, Bill and Chelsea commute between their two lavish mansions in a five-year-old Ford F-150 pickup with a gun rack and a "Jesus Rocks!" bumper sticker. Her aim was to prove to the nation -- or at least to Democratic primary voters in Pennsylvania and Indiana -- that she's better at feigning regularness than Obama.

This is how we pick a president?

(His kicker after the link!)

Clinton's argument assumes that "regular" is a synonym for "unsophisticated" -- that to communicate with voters who have not attained a certain income or education level, a candidate has to put on an elaborate disguise and speak in words of one syllable.

So tell me: Who's being patronizing?

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Clinger

Been a while since my last post (heck, this election is running out of states) but I have to talk up a bit about this so called "Bitter-gate" brouhaha. Clearly Obama made a clumsy statement, but his central point is still a valid one. More to come, but check out what Bill Clinton's friend and former Cabinet member, Robert Rubin has to say about Obama's comments and his own background in rural Pennsylvania:

I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 61 years ago. My father sold $1.98 cotton blouses to blue-collar women and women whose husbands worked in factories. Years later, I was secretary of labor of the United States, and I tried the best I could – which wasn’t nearly good enough – to help reverse one of the most troublesome trends America has faced: The stagnation of middle-class wages and the expansion of povety. Male hourly wages began to drop in the early 1970s, adjusted for inflation. The average man in his 30s is earning less than his father did thirty years ago. Yet America is far richer. Where did the money go? To the top.

Are Americans who have been left behind frustrated? Of course. And their frustrations, their anger and, yes, sometimes their bitterness, have been used since then -- by demagogues, by nationalists and xenophobes, by radical conservatives, by political nuts and fanatical fruitcakes – to blame immigrants and foreign traders, to blame blacks and the poor, to blame "liberal elites," to blame anyone and anything.

Rather than counter all this, the American media have wallowed in it.

Check the whole article here Keep Reading (if there's more)...