The fact that they specify that this all-out battle they intend to avoid would be an "expensive" one is interesting. I wonder if Primary Fatigue, along with the thought of one's donations being deployed not in the cause against McCain, but more immediately in the production of attack ads bloodying a potential Democratic Nominee will have the effect of depressing these record-high fundraising hauls from here on out...? In the longer term, of course, it's all about putting the strongest, most resilient contender forward, but in the short term, it sure is uncomfortable to think of how our money is being spent...

Posted at March 5, 2008 7:27 AM in response to Sometimes You Cannot Do What You Want to Do

Edwards supposedly didn't endorse Barack because he thought he was "a [wimp]." Edwards' read appears to be correct right now.

This is another reason why Obama needs to can Goolsbee post haste. He has some serious damage control he needs to do on the trade front, because I'm sensing that people voting on the economy don't trust him (note that all those Union endorsements in Ohio didn't help him one bit when it came time for union members to actually cast their votes).

If Hillary can carve out a place for herself as the Lou Dobbsy voice defending middle-american working families against NAFTA, and Obama concedes that distinction, he'll not only become immediately dead-in-the-water in PA and WV, but I suspect Edwards will find it impossible to resist endorsing the candidate he sees as taking up his torch of fighting income inequality (and, in doing so, getting to boost his own profile by possibly making the decisive difference in the race)

Posted at March 5, 2008 6:55 AM in response to Obama -- Fighting Game Plan

John Fine (of Businessweek) and Anne Marie Cox (of Wonkette) talked in greater detail about the Clinton campaign pipelining stuff to Drudge a few weeks ago on Bloggingheads.tv

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/8879

My point is that your assertion that HRC would never cooperate with Drudge rests on a misapprehension of how campaigns work. If somebody can help you somehow today (such as by laundering a leak that hurts your opponent, rendering the source anonymous but still launching the information into heavy circulation), you're not going to not do it because of some old Drudge-grudge from years ago. Time horizons in these drawn out campaigns are very short, rarely past the next few primaries, because momentum is so dynamic and things change on a dime that its hard to plan further out. You certainly don't add more obstacles and further limit your options by conditioning your plans for the immediate future on stuff that happened in the distant past.

Think about it. McCain is currently employing some of the very same slime-slingers who slandered him with breathtaking indecency in 2000, when they worked for GWB. As soon as someone drops out of the race, all acrimony disappears and the endorse, with a big grin, the guy they couldn't stand just yesterday.

Posted at March 5, 2008 6:47 AM in response to Obama -- Fighting Game Plan

The Hsu thing is a good point but the problem is that it's old news. To bring it back up now looks desperate, like he's reaching to find anything at all to use against her. It gives her a chance to shrug it off and say "yeah, that was settled months ago, can we maybe talk about pressing issues of today here?" Advantage: Clinton. This is doubly the case for the Hsi Lai Temple issue.

That's the problem with these fundraiser behind-the-scenes pseudo-scandals. They don't seem to hold the public attention very long because they are complex ("this guy laundered some money this way and then made a donation to this place which gave a sweetheart loan to this politician" etc). It all seems like abstruse palace-intrigue to the average voter. Obama just has the bad luck of having his skeleton come out of the closet and have a highly publicized court date at the moment, which catapults the whole mess into the newscycle.

Obama needs fresh dirt, and it can't be petty nitpickery. HRC's refusal to return donations from the sexual-harassment-tainted corporation International Profit Associiates could fit the bill, and it might make some of her most loyal supporters (middle-aged women) take a second look, but it's a gamble. He could use it as another data-point showing her pattern of poor judgement. He runs the risk, though, of having the story flop, and catching blowback for a weak and transparent attempt at "scaring up votes." Obama needs some first-rate opposition researchers.

Posted at March 5, 2008 6:30 AM in response to Guilt by Rezkociation? Two Can Play That

You're wrong about the Drudge/HRC alliance. Salon published an article by Michael Scherer called "the Matt Drudge Primary" on May 14, 2007 (I'm too dumb to make an HTML link, hopefully that's enough info for a googlesearch). It detailed how multiple campaigns (namely Clinton and Romney) had opened channels of communication with Drudge and even assigned semi-kinda-hush-hush liasons the responsibility of feeding him leaks.

Posted at March 5, 2008 6:04 AM in response to Obama -- Fighting Game Plan

I think this idea is flawed. The people you are talking about targeting don't follow politics for a reason, and it's not that they don't have a handy DVD. These are the people who change the channel when a political ad comes on the TV; they're not about to watch a bunch of speeches on their own time (isn't the knock against Obama that all he does is speechify anyway?). A big reason they're voting for HRC, as I see it, is out of a lack of interest in the New, and a general, complacent risk-aversion.

I like that you're looking for new, less-glossy angles to reach people, but I don't think this one is the Slam Dunk you're seeking. Stump speeches bore these voters, policy addresses even more so. Music videos and celebrity endorsements? It sounds too "unserious", IMO. Plays into the "Obama's all fluff" idea. Can you imagine a laid-off Rustbelt factory-worker facing eviction from his subprime mortaged home putting in a DVD, seeing Jessica Alba or some other insulated-from-real-life-problems celebrity talk about how great Obama is and reacting well to it?

In short, this is asking too much of people. If they were already for Obama, they might be interested in taking the time to watch this, but for most undecideds, I fear it'd go right in the trashcan with the rest of the junkmail. We gotta find a way to engage these people on their own turf.

Posted at March 5, 2008 5:55 AM in response to Obama's Path to Victory is a Slam Dunk--Here's how....

While I like where your head is at Wade, I'm not sure about some of your recs.

#1 makes him look like a sore loser, as it's too "on the nose." Barack Obama suddenly complaining about unfairly harsh treatment by the press is frankly laughable. It'd come off as extremely thin-skinned.

#2a. I like a lot. He kind of did this in his speech tonight, with the line about how his "Yes We Can" rhetoric came not from him, but from the people. By positioning himself as a conduit for the public, he earns (small "r") republican points and shows McCain and HRC to be attacking Americans who support someone other than them. It's a good move.

#2b. Your Revko prescription doesn't work for me. He cannot be seen as defending the guy, especially because he's already disowned him (returning the $$, calling his dealings with him a "boneheaded mistake"). Taking a "principled" stand on behalf of someone who has already been found guilty in the court of public opinion looks lawyerly and like Obama's got something to hide ("so why's he defending this crook anyway?" etc). After the way the campaign bungled the aftermath of Goolsbee talking to Canada, with a rapid stream of slightly different, mealy-mouthed press releases that each fell short of full denial, Obama needs to regain the ethical high ground. To do that he needs to earn it. He needs to hammer Transparency and Accountability (a good angle for getting Clinton's tax returns into play) and get more moments like that one in the debate, when Clinton tried to foist a gotcha on him with the "reject"/"denounce" distinction and he basically told her, "fine, if you want to get all Clintonian about parsing, I both reject and denounce. Happy?" Situations like that show both grit and character.

#3. Again, strikes me as too negative and smeary. He needs to frame HRC's flaws as being about Transparency, rather than resurrecting slash-and-burn character attacks (We don't want him reading from Gingrich's playbook). If cornered on Revko, don't resort to Lewinsky, bring up Hillary's irregular windfall cattle future profits or her own real-estate-related judgement lapses.

#4. Is my favorite. Bill in attack mode was great for Obama because it reminded everyone what they dislike about the Clintons, marginalized Hillary, and gave Obama a way to attack the HRC campaign without beating up on her directly. Since then BIll has wisened up and kept quiet, but if there is one thing we know about him, he is totally without impulse control and can be baited into going off-script and saying stupid stuff (which is Bill Clinton at his least attractive).

#5. Definitely do this. Here is where he can be most aggressive and pay the least for it. He needs to be careful not to sully his post-partisanship schtick though, so he should keep specific and targetted at the GOP's gross mismanagement and out-of-whack priorities, rather than attacking the GOP for being the GOP.

#6. I hate to say it, because I'm a less a Free Trade skeptic than many liberals, and because Paul Begala was yakking about exactly this move all night, but yes, Obama needs to throw Goolsbee under the bus on this one. That's what a good leader does when a subordinate goes renegade in a high stakes situation. It would have been much better to be proactive and fire him before all this $#!7 hit the fan, as now he risks looking like Bush waiting till after the midterms to fire Rumsfeld, but Goolsbee has to be gone before anti-NAFTA Pennsylvania heats up. His very presence undermines Obama's authority, and opens questions as to where the buck stops.

Posted at March 5, 2008 5:36 AM in response to Obama -- Fighting Game Plan

Obama does need to get more aggressive, but he's gotta be careful not to lose those who back him for his new-age "change" message. He's about to take a dip in support among bandwagoners and lo-info, 6 o'clock newscycle-dependant types, so he can't afford to alienate anyone.

That's why, instead of him doing the heavy lifting of cutting her down, he needs some hardcore, bit-chomping attack-dog surrogates to do the dirty work. Thereafter he can just deftly allude to some anti-Hillary memes already circulating without being seen as the source. He appears tough, but not like bully (which in his case is a doubly bad look because it paints him as a hypocrite).

For all the praise being heaped on his campaign organization and ground-game, there does seem to be a worrying lack of leadership at the top and message-discipline. Goolsbeegate is a product of this. Obama needs some shady, pipe-weilding, hatchet-men and some 527s. That's the way leadership in a knock-down campaign is done nowadays; just look at the way McCain has been able to reap the benefits of people like Cunningham, while keeping his hands clean by throwing them under the bus as soon as their objective has been fulfilled. At this point, he doesn't need more precinct captains or canvassers, he needs some kamikazes.

Is this cynical and anti-Obama? Yes, yes it is. But he needs to prove he can swim in the same shark infested-waters that all other politicians do, and he needs to show he can do this while keeping his aura of integrity intact.

Posted at March 5, 2008 5:03 AM in response to Now its time Obama go negative

As of 4:30 am Eastern Time, there are still a handful of TX congressional districts with (possibly) significant amounts of votes unreported. Namely, districts 3, 19, 25 and 26 have less than 90% of the count up on the TX SecState website (~25% outstanding in the case of those last two). Does anybody know where these districts are, and how populous they are? Is there potential for any more movement in the 51/48 breakdown?

Posted at March 5, 2008 4:38 AM in response to Interpreting Texas Election Returns

gotta love the typo in "speechwriting" :D

Posted at February 5, 2008 5:46 PM in response to Convention Chaos Theory