Barack Obama

Representative Anthony Weiner, a devout Hillary Clinton supporter, recalls for News Forum host Jay DeDapper what it was like meeting Barack Obama on the floor of Congress the other day:

From a transcript of sent over by the studio:  read more »

Two weeks ago, I examined the officially meaningless but symbolically crucial popular-vote tally on the Democratic side.

At the time, Hillary Clinton had just won Pennsylvania by nine points and was claiming to be the popular-vote leader, positioning herself – in theory—to assert a moral claim on the loyalties of uncommitted superdelegates.  read more »

Hillary Clinton just sent a formal public letter to Barack Obama calling on him to work to find a resolution to the Florida and Michigan question that reflects the votes in those states and seats their delegations at the convention. She also attempts to shame him for what she calls his failure to "support those efforts" in Michigan, and for the Obama campaign's opposition to revotes in Florida. "In Florida a number of revote options were proposed. I am not aware of any that you supported," she writes.

As pointed out in a conference call yesterday, it is not clear that the Clinton campaign picks up enough support to change their dire position even if both states are counted. But as long as the Obama campaign doesn't budge, it's a talking point for the Clinton campaign.

Here's the letter:  read more »

I just asked Hillary Clinton's finance chair Hassan Nemazee about accounts from other Clinton donors of Obama bundlers contacting them about the possibility of coming over to the campaign.

"There is only one instance that I know of in which a Clinton donor went over to the Obama campaign," said Nemazee. "I remain convinced, until shown otherwise, that donors, be they in New York or elsewhere, are sticking with Hillary and the campaign."

He added, "I would like, in my role, to hopefully be welcoming the Obama people over to Hillary Clinton's campaign. But obviously, we're at a point in the campaign where both common sense and the political reality is indicating that that's not one of my priorities at the moment. What I can say is, if I were the national finance chair of the presumed nominee, I would do everything in my power to welcome supporters of the opposing side into the campaign as much as possible."

He said that he had in fact done as much when he was in a similar position.  read more »

One aspect of the Clinton campaign's post-Indiana/North Carolina spin involves the suggestion that it would be perfectly normal, from a historical perspective, for them to carry on their fight through the remaining primaries in June.

"I will remind everyone that Bill Clinton didn't win the nomination until June in 1992," Terry McAuliffe just said on MSNBC, "and we all came together and had a great Democratic victory then."  read more »

John Olsen, a Connecticut superdelegate who announced his support for Hillary Clinton just a few days before the Indiana primary, says he is not switching his allegiance. It's not because he's an optimist, though.

"She'd need to get 69 percent of all the pledged delegates that are left," said Olsen, a veteran union leader. "The people who are going to vote from here on in can end it. If I were a woman in Kentucky I might say, 'I love Hillary, but we have seen enough; we need to end it and so I'm going to vote from Obama.' Those people need to speak.  read more »

The Obama campaign has started reaching out to Hillary Clinton's top fund-raisers, said one major donor to Clinton, who also said that despite the courtship, none of the most prominent donors were likely to move over as long as she kept running.

"People in my circle are not going to publicly knife Hillary," said the fund-raiser. "We are all going to let her go through this, we are going to stand by her proudly, let the process work forward and no one is going to flinch. And there will be time if the Obama people want to reach out."  read more »

Now that the remaining suspense has been drained from the actual race for the Democratic nomination, we’re on to the next great guessing game: Will Barack Obama be compelled to offer Hillary Clinton the number-two slot?

There’s certainly a strong and highly logical case to be made. Between the two of them, Obama and Clinton will have attracted upward of 36 million votes when all of the primaries are over, with only a few hundred thousand votes separating them. That’s nearly 60 percent of the total number of votes George W. Bush received in the 2004 general election.  read more »

John McCain is having a major fund-raiser at New York's Sheraton hotel tonight with Rudy Giuliani that is expected to raise around $7 million or the candidate, a figure one of tonight's attendees and a major fund-raiser to the candidate admitted amounted to peanuts compared to what Barack Obama is capable of raising.

"How do you deal with that?" said the nationally influential fund-raiser.  read more »

Bob Kerrey, the onetime Clinton family antagonist who now supports Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, believes that “if things stay the way they are now” his candidate will withdraw from the race sometime between now and June 3, when the primary season concludes in Montana and South Dakota.

He did say that there was no reason for Clinton to yield to pressure to get out of the race before then, even as a famous South Dakotan, George McGovern, renounced his support of Clinton and called on her to quit.  read more »

It's all but over, according to the Obama campaign.

"We can see the finish line," said Obama campaign manager David Plouffe on a conference call just now. Plouffe said the net of last night's primaries was 13 delegates in the candidate's favor, making Obama's advantage "the biggest it has been in the entire race." Plouffe said that the campaign had also been "making great progress in the superdelegate world."

He then introduced the campaign's top supporters, each carrying a nail to hammer into Clinton's coffin.

John Kerry said, "In my judgment, last night, Barack Obama took a giant and decisive step towards the nomination." He added, "He clearly did more than he had to and she did not achieve what she had to."

He argued that Obama scored impressive results "despite the toughest weeks of his campaign and the most thorough testing that could be imagined," and said, "If it hadn't been for Republicans taking Democratic ballots," at the bidding of Rush Limbaugh he would have won Indiana too. "There is no masquerade now."  read more »

Asked point-blank by the Post's Anne Kornblut if there had been any discussions about Hillary Clinton dropping out of the race, Howard Wolfson said, "No -- no discussions."

He then did his best to put yesterday's results in a positive light.

"These were two states that Senator Obama predicted victory in," he said, and, "These were two states we were supposed to lose. We won one of them."

"It was Senator Clinton making up ground and Senator Obama losing ground," he said.

Difficult.  read more »

Howard Wolfson is arguing that Hillary Clinton "would be the stronger nominee against John McCain" because she had proven an ability to attract blue-collar Democrats and win swing states. "Senator Obama, on the other hand, has not yet proven that he can win key swing states, has not proven that he can win blue-collar voters," Wolfson said. He called that "the crux of the argument" the campaign would make going forward.

When asked in a question-and-answer period whether media declarations of Clinton's electoral demise would hurt their effort to court superdelegates, Wolfson said, "Obviously superdelegates watch TV and read the newspapers," but they are more influenced by electoral results.

He confirmed that the campaign gave more than $6 million in loans to the campaign in April and May, which he described as a demonstration of the candidate's commitment.

In contrast to the boasting about online fund-raising that followed her Pennsylvania victory, Wolfson said he did not know how much money had come in since last night's results became clear.

He also confirmed a meeting with uncommitted superdelegates on the Hill this afternoon.  read more »

RALEIGH, N.C. – Barack Obama, propelled to within touching distance of the Democratic nomination by an emphatic win in North Carolina and a stronger-than-expected showing in Indiana, made light of Hillary Clinton’s hopes for a “game-changing” result during his victory speech here last night.

“Today, what North Carolina decided is that the only game that needs changing is the one in Washington, D.C.,” Obama told a large crowd at NCSU’s Reynolds Coliseum.  read more »

Tuesday was a decisive night for Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton won Indiana, barely, giving her as many states on the day as Obama got.

But the result made clear one thing: It doesn't matter anymore.

Ever since she fell hopelessly behind Obama in the pledged-delegate and popular-vote counts during a string of February defeats, Clinton has clung to a long-shot nomination strategy. She would not be able to overtake him in delegates or popular votes in the late primaries, but she could use them to shake Democrats’ confidence in Obama as a general-election candidate.

This would mean winning overwhelmingly in the late states where she was favored and picking off some or all of those that he had been expected to win. Only then, with Clinton making a compelling case that Obama’s supporters were abandoning him in droves, would superdelegates—loath to overturn “the will of the people” and to risk the devastating intraparty warfare that would come from thwarting an African-American who won a pledged-delegate majority in the primaries—be receptive to lining up with her en masse.

To Clinton’s credit, she strung this all out longer than many thought she could. She won in Ohio and Texas on March 4, when defeat would have meant the end for her. Then she pulled out Pennsylvania on April 22, and suddenly the wind seemed to be at her back. She began receiving a hearing from some opinion-makers on her specious “big state” argument and her questions about Obama’s seeming inability to connect with white working-class voters (something that made the coverage of Jeremiah Wright’s untimely reemergence all the more devastating for him). For the first time since January, Clinton picked up a new batch of superdelegate endorsements and when she latched onto a gas-tax-holiday plan and began bashing “elitists,” game-changing wins in Indiana and North Carolina suddenly became plausible.  read more »

Barack Obama's campaign just released the remarks he's prepared for tonight's primary night rally in Raleigh, N.C., in which he said his campaign stands "less than two hundred delegates away from securing the Democratic nomination ...."

He called Hillary Clinton a "formidable opponent," and congratulated her for her victory in Indiana, and expressed confidence that the party would be united come November.

The full speech follows:  read more »

Barack Obama is winning. North Carolina is his, comfortably, and his delegate-count continues to climb ever closer to a requisite primary-ending majority.

So why has his campaign felt like a long march over broken glass?

“It is painful to watch,” said an influential Obama supporter and delegate in an interview the day before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. “It’s exhausting for everyone involved. It’s exhausting for Barack and Michelle. It’s exhausting for all the campaign staff, and I know it’s exhausting for the supporters.”  read more »

AUDITION
by Barbara Walters
Alfred A. Knopf, 624 pages, $29.95

Journalists are, by necessity, chameleons, or, as Janet Malcolm famously put it, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”  read more »

The Obama campaign couldn't have been thrilled with Drudge's expectation-warping headline this morning: "DANGER DAY: HILLARY FACES '15-POINT DEFEAT' IN NC."

I asked Obama spokesperson Jen Psaki about the report, which was attributed to a top Clinton campaign staffer. She wouldn't respond directly, but offered this admirable effort at counter-spin:  read more »

On Tuesday, April 29, Chad Hurley, the pup-faced 30-year-old CEO of YouTube, popped up on the Internet along with the mayor of New Orleans, the governor of Louisiana and an executive from Google to invite the 2008 presidential candidates to participate in a “town hall meeting” to be held on Sept. 18 at the convention center in New Orleans, where, 32 months ago, thousands sought refuge from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.  read more »

To view the North Carolina Democratic primary from outside the state is to view an ascendant Hillary Clinton and a Barack Obama mired in "bitter" and Jeremiah Wright. To view the primary from inside North Carolina is to see almost the exact opposite.

I traveled back and forth from Charlotte, the largest city in North Carolina, this past weekend. I grew up there.

All the anecdotal evidence suggested that it's Obama country.  read more »

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – In a long, impassioned speech last night, Michelle Obama tried one last time before the primary here to combat the idea that she and her husband were elitists, and excoriated Hillary Clinton for her gas-tax “holiday” proposal and her 2002 vote on Iraq.

The personal slights aimed at her family seemed to irk Ms. Obama most of all.

“See, there’s a whole lot of talk in this race about elitism and people being out of touch,” she told a crowd of approximately 1,500 in the Ovens auditorium.  read more »

A pair of outright wins by Hillary Clinton on Tuesday could prompt immediate chaos, with already-jittery Democrats questioning anew Barack Obama’s general election viability and Clinton potentially moving into position to run the table in the remaining contests and to reverse some of the crucial metrics that have favored Obama and sustained his perceived inevitability for nearly three months.

Conversely, a pair of outright Obama wins would almost instantly end the Democratic fight, with previously uncommitted superdelegates interpreting an Obama victory on Clinton turf as cause to step in  read more »

Ed Turlington, a former national chair for the John Edwards campaign who endorsed Obama last month, said that he always expected the contest in his home state of North Carolina to be close.

"The Clintons have basically thrown the kitchen sink at North Carolina and Bill Clinton has basically lived here," he said.

Plus, he said, people really only started paying attention after Pennsylvania, and it hasn't been a particularly flattering time for the Obama campaign since then.  read more »

Most polls have been showing Indiana tipping in Hillary Clinton's favor and Obama's lead narrowing in North Carolina. But North Carolina-based Congressman and Obama surrogate G.K. Butterfield isn't having any of it.

"He is going to win North Carolina and possibly Indiana. He won Guam the other day."

Also: "If he wins Indiana and North Carolina then we will have more momentum and I think we can make a better case that it needs to conclude by July 1."

When we ran into Susan Sarandon over the weekend at the TFF premiere of Speed Racer, we wondered if the actress still stood by her endorsement of Barack Obama given all the talk of the senator's dropping numbers.

And she does! Here's what the actress had to say about the current state of the democratic candidacy:  read more »

HIGH POINT, N.C.—Sounding a sharply populist note the day before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Hillary Clinton tore into China, OPEC, oil companies, "Wall Street bankers" and predatory lenders during a 35-minute speech at the train station in this town of 100,000 around noon today.

In the process, she sought once again to portray Barack Obama as less knowledgeable about the problems of the less fortunate.  read more »

The economists are out of touch too.

That was the argument Clinton campaign pollster and strategist Geoff Garin made on a conference call this morning when he addressed a question about whether a gas tax holiday would prompt more gasoline use.  read more »

GREENSBORO, N.C. – Bill Clinton, making a late plea for votes on his wife's behalf here yesterday, asserted that "academic study after academic study" had shown the former first lady to be the victim of "the most slanted press coverage in American history" during this campaign.

Though it was not clear exactly what studies he was referring to, Clinton appeared especially irked by criticism of the senator's proposal to offer consumers a summer 'holiday' from gasoline taxes.  read more »

In her embrace of a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax – an idea that virtually every credible economist agrees is a gimmick – Hillary Clinton is making the same bet that delivered her husband to the Democratic nomination 16 years ago: that voters prefer promises of free candy to the truth.

In 1992, with the country mired in an economic slump, Bill Clinton made a middle-class tax cut the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.  read more »

INDIANAPOLIS—Barack Obama has become a family values candidate.

Wracked by questions over his beliefs, patriotism and values following the most tumultuous passage of his campaign, Mr. Obama has sought solace – and a new story line – in family.

Over the past few days, Mr. Obama steeped his speeches in talk about his grandparents and parents and physically evoked the imagery of idyllic Americana by campaigning with his wife and two daughters around picnic tables and playgrounds.  read more »

INDIANAPOLIS—Barack Obama continued his assault on John McCain and Hillary Clinton over their proposed gas tax holiday today during a speech his campaign billed as his plan to fight for working families and against special interests. Responding to a new advertisement from Clinton about the gas tax, Obama, speaking in a high school here, said,“Keep in mind that this is an idea that will save you all together, half a tank of gas.”

He argued that no experts or editorials had supported Clinton’s plan.  read more »

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the pandering Presidential politics of Clinton, McCain and Obama. McCain pandered on the gas tax and Hillary and Barack pandered on trade.  read more »

INDIANAPOLIS—Indiana’s Republican Party has its headquarters across the street from the office building where Obama held his press conference this morning, and where Obama supporters and campaign staff are still meeting and looking at charts of poll data.

   read more »

INDIANAPOLIS—In a question-and-answer session following his remarks about the gas tax holiday supported by Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Barack Obama acknowledged that the last week has been a bad one for his campaign, filled with what he said was “an awful lot of noise.”

When asked how upset he’d be if he lost in Indiana because of the controversy created by his former reverend, Jeremiah Wright, who he said he has not spoken with since the pastor’s poorly received media tour, he smiled and said, “I’m always mad when I lose.”

He seemed resigned to the damage done by the Wright story.

“We’ve had a rough couple of weeks, I won’t deny that,” Obama said when asked about how the controversy had hurt his chances in Indiana. He added, “I don’t think what happened with Reverend Wright was helpful,” that voters in the two states were “legitimately upset by it,” and that he didn’t doubt the controversy would be “factoring into the mix” of concerns weighed by voters.

“I have no doubt that these are going to be tight races—they have been tight throughout,” he added.  read more »

Because of his status as a former national party chairman, Paul Kirk's endorsement of Barack Obama highlights a mini-trend: he’s the second former chairman in as many days to throw his support behind Obama. (Joe Andrew went yesterday).

Kirk's move is hardly surprising when you consider that his closest ally in politics is Ted Kennedy, one of Obama's top supporters. In fact, although the Obama campaign announced the endorsement today, the Clinton campaign’s tally of superdelegates already had Kirk in the Obama column.

The 70-year-old Kirk is a Massachusetts native (his father was a justice on the state Supreme Judicial Court) and he still has a home in Marstons Mills, not much more than a stone's throw from the Kennedy family estate in Hyannisport. He got his start in politics with Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign, then joined Ted Kennedy's Senate staff, working as his special assistant for most of the 1970's. In 1980, Kirk chaired Kennedy's unsuccessful presidential campaign.

In 1985, with crucial support from Kennedy and his organized labor allies, Kirk was elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a post he held through the 1988 election. The highlight of his tenure was the 1986 midterm elections, when his party ended the G.O.P.'s six-year hold on the Senate.  read more »

INDIANAPOLIS--Barack Obama just held a conference here in Indianapolis to talk about the struggling economy and the failure of his opponents to responsibly address problems like rising gas prices. Before taking questions, he gave a brief opening statement.

“Senator Clinton demanded that everyone go on the record on this issue," referring to her push for a gas-tax holiday.  read more »

So far, 2008 has been the year of artificial momentum and warped expectations, and Hillary Clinton has been the beneficiary.

In contest after contest this primary season, we have seen the illusion of momentum, created by the spillover effect from recent results and whatever the dominant media narrative of the moment happens to be. So, for instance, when Barack Obama scored a clear win in Iowa and Hillary Clinton finished in third place, the Clinton Collapse instantly became the media’s obsession and Obama overtook Clinton in New Hampshire polls almost overnight.  read more »

SOUTH BEND -- Barack Obama could probably use some levity, apparently.

Here's a Daily Show correspondent taping segments with some more traditional correspondents at an event here.

Also, tonight the candidate will read a top 10 list on David Letterman (a native Hoosier!).

Here it is, as released by the campaign:  read more »

SOUTH BEND, Ind.—Barack Obama is doing his own listening tour in Indiana.

“What I want to do is spend more time listening than talking,” said Obama at a small event at the fairgrounds here, where he discussed farming policies, subsidies and crop-dumping with a few dozen voters sitting around on bales of hay. Obama reminded them that he could also draw a crowd, listing his major events over the last few days, before saying, “It’s wonderful to see these big crowds but the problem is you don’t really learn a lot when you are listening to yourself talk. “  read more »

SOUTH BEND -- Here's the scene in a barn at a fairgrounds where Barack Obama will be speaking this afternoon--another example of his more intimate approach to campaigning he has favored of late.

A few dozen voters are sitting in a ring around bales of hay, in the middle of which is a small white stool for the candidate. Behind a medal guard rail a few feet back there are seats reserved for at least twice as many reporters as there are Indiana voters.

Not surprisingly, the first words out of Howard Wolfson’s mouth on the Clinton campaign conference call today were about “some recent public polling” that show Hillary Clinton’s strength against John McCain in the general election.

Pollster Geoff Garin then gave a lengthy statement, which began: “The point here is simple. Over the course of the past two weeks, particular since our Pennsylvania victory, there’s been real movement in the polls.”  read more »

In a poll just released by Quinnipiac University, Hillary Clinton is running ahead of John McCain in Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio—three swing states that, according to electoral lore, are necessary to win the presidency.

The poll also shows McCain would beat Barack Obama in both Florida and Ohio:  read more »

Jimmy Carter is still on his book tour, and still hinting at support for Barack Obama without saying it directly.

In an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer taped for The Situation Room, Carter said that if superdelegates overturn what is nearly certain to be a majority of pledged delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Denver (the only way Hillary Clinton can win at this point), it would be "uncomfortable." Carter, while admitting to having a favorite, still refuses to say who he voted for in the primary, or who he plans to support at the convention.

Carter is one of the Democratic Party elders, along with Al Gore, who could conceivably play a role in tipping the nominating process towards one candidate by weighing in at some point. In Carter's case, at least, that candidate would probably be Obama. (Carter previously told a Nigerian newspaper, "My children and their spouses are pro-Obama. My grandchildren are also pro-Obama.")

Here's the transcript of the exchange, sent over by the CNN:  read more »

Independents and Republicans are free to vote in next Tuesday’s Indiana Democratic primary – the latest do-or-die test for Hillary Clinton. And Independents and Republicans – along with a healthy dose of Archie Bunker Democrats and a scattering of masochistic liberals – also constitute the core of Bill O’Reilly audience. So, in a way, her appearance on his show Wednesday night was a logical exercise in voter outreach.

But that’s only if you ignore history.  read more »

Superdelegates are generally seen as seasoned elected officials or as the kind of party apparatchiks whose natural habitat is the figurative smoke-filled room.

Not everyone fits the stereotype. Among those who will help decide the Democratic contest is a 51-year-old office administrator and piano teacher in Dublin, Ireland, who has not lived in the U.S. for more than two decades and follows the race in large part through coverage in the Irish and British media.
Liv Gibbons, a native of Los Angeles, will cast her vote at her party’s convention in Denver for Barack Obama.  read more »

 

City Councilman and Obama supporter Charles Barron thinks Barack Obama was wrong to denounce Jeremiah Wright.  read more »

 

After speaking to reporters in Manhattan about the protests he’s organizing in response to the Sean Bell verdict, Al Sharpton was asked about a separate issue: Barack Obama’s denunciation of Jeremiah Wright.

Sharpton, a politician and reverend, said, “What Barack Obama did was a profile in courage,” and said it demonstrated the kind of leadership “I not only respect, but support.”

This, a day after Sharpton blasted Obama for "grandstand[ing] in front of white people." Go figure.

A reader sent along a link to this newly launched site urging Barack Obama supporters to vote for John McCain if the superdelegates throw the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton.  read more »

There is, obviously, no exact precedent at the presidential level for the nightmare Barack Obama is now living thanks to his former minister’s all-too-eager embrace of the spotlight.

At a basic level, Mr. Obama’s opponents can and will note that the inflammatory rhetoric that has come to define the Rev. Jeremiah Wright—a caricature that the preacher rather willingly reinforced during his smugly defiant National Press Club appearance on Monday—raises questions about Mr. Obama’s judgment and values. Why would he spend 20 years in such a man’s church, presumably listening to variations of what the rest of America heard on Monday?  read more »