Democrats are salivating at the prospect of Michael Bloomberg being asked to join Obama as his running mate. Much of the chatter is about Obama's need to shore up the Jewish vote - deeply unhappy over the Reverend Wright business - if he is to take the White House. Bloomberg introduced Obama without endorsing him before the candidates speech on economic policy
at Cooper Union in New York, reviving memories of their breakfast meeting at a NY diner four
months ago.
Interest in Bloomberg's future is at fever pitch among the chatterati but Stu
Loeser, his press secretary, hosed down the idea of
the vice presidency, saying, "He's trying to shape and influence the
campaigns, he's not trying to join one."
Talking Points Memo has performed an invaluable service knitting together key
moments of Hillary's cv enhancing Bosnia sniper story. They have assembled tape of Hillary speaking on the subject on
different occasions, the key video from the trip, what
eyewitnesses have to say and what her aides said. Here in one place you have Hillary, people who were actually there and no Republicans or Obama types lining up to deliver a gratutious kick or two. Sit back and enjoy.
Hillary is pumping
the Jeremiah Wright business as much all she can, while husband Bill puts it about that only she and McCain are patriotic enough to run for president. But as consistently brilliant Talkingpointsmemo.com points out, her latest remarks that Wright "would not have been my pastor" were disingenuous at best.
It has taken a former Democratic nominee, George McGovern,to pose - and dare to answer - the question that has been hovering above countless dinner parties for months now. Is it more of a handicap when running to be US President to be black or to be a woman?
Get ready for a nasty presidential fight when Obama snags the nomination. A McCain staffer has been fired for Twittering a link to the Obama Wright video seen below. Soren Dayton was kicked off the campaign after texting a link to the “Is Obama Wright” video on the Twitter micro blog site.
Bill Maher is back on form. Listen to him demolish John McCain for his "senior moment" when he confused Sunni an Shia. He tells us that most Americans know John McCain is the one who should answer that phone ringing at 3am because they know he’ll be up trying to pee...
Remember Hillary's really effective "3am ad", about the phone ringing in the White House with some crisis or other and needing somebody already "tested" to answer it. Well here's Casey Knowles the little girl in the video, now all grown up, who it turns out is an Obama volunteer. She has made her own video rejecting what she calls "the politics of fear".
John Edwards
has been lying low since dropping out of the race in late January after a dismal showing in his native South Carolina. Here he tells Jay Leno that he has been using his tractor to clear brush and small trees off his land (what is it about American politicians that they love "clearing brush"? Ronald Reagan used to do it at his Santa Barbara ranch, Bush does it in Crawford and now Edwards is at it in Posh Chapel Hill North Carolina), home-schooling his kids and playing hoops with Obama. But he's still not ready to say who he intends to endorse, Obama or Clinton.
Obama called for a dialogue on race to begin. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart and his “Senior Black Correspondent” Larry Wilmore give a flavour of how that discussion might go
"I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base." --Hillary Clinton, speech at George Washington University, March 17, 2008.
Hillary has been desperately burnishing her credentials as world leader in waiting boasting that she endured "sniper fire" after landing at an airport in Tuzla in 1996. She said, "We just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles" she miss-recalled. The truth is easier to discern in this photo, taken on the airstrip that date. The Washington post's fact checker gives her four pinocchios for telling this whopper.
The Fox News favourite, Pastor James Manning of Atlah World Missionary
Church in Harlem is also a big fan of Bill Clinton who has his office nearby. Here Manning is laying it on the line, calling Obama a “long-legged mack daddy” and much, much worse.
Here in Philadelphia Barack Obama has just given an extraordinarily brave and personal account of the legacy of slavery in contemporary America. No American politician in living memory - least of all a presidential candidate fighting for his political life - has ever had the audacity to open up a discussion on racial divisions in this manner. Its a subject that is normally guaranteed to clear a room or destroy a political career.
Look at that, an email this morning from Elton John no less. And he is inviting me to a party. This is a turn-up because there was a time when I sort of knew Sir Elton.
Obama is reeling from the growing controversy over his relationship to the firebrand preacher Rev Jeremiah Wright. Videos
from Wright sermons condemning United States foreign
policy and treatment of blacks are exploding on the internet. The backstory to the controversy is that in the 1980s after Obama moved from New York to Chicago to work as a community organiser in poor black neighbourhoods he "found Christ" through Wright at the Trinity United Church of Christ.
Here is the leader of the free world in a cowboy hat singing his farewell song at the annual Gridiron dinner for selected American journalists. He mocks the lack of WMDs in Iraq, his response to Hurricane Katrina and the efforts to protect his pal Scooter Libby from obstruction of justice charges.
Obama doesn't need Hillary to destroy his image among wavering white voters, his own pastor the Rev Jeremiah Wright (who provided the inspiration for the title of Obama's book Audacity of Hope and presided over his marriage to Michelle) is doing it all for him. Its offensive and paranoid stuff, shocking even, to those Americans who don't leave the suburbs much. Now Rupert Murdoch's media empire is leading starting with this rant in the Wall Street Journal. What the commentators generally miss is is that black churches have their own unique cultural style and Obama explains in his book that he became a member of this church to get a closer understanding of inner city black America.
The audio and video of this tub-thumping sermon at his South Side Chicago church, complete with cutaways of cheering parishioners, is doing the rounds on the cable news channels. It is damaging and embarrassing to Obama who has campaigned under a banner of racial and political unity in which saying the battle is about the past and the future. Oh Yeah? says Bubba.
Here is Mark Penn, a highly paid lobbyist and chief strategist for Hillary saying that Obama "really can't win the general election". Listen to the gall of the man who is on the payroll of public relations firm Burson Marsteller (owned by the UK giant WPP) saying that "if Barack Obama can't win" in
Pennsylvania, "how could he win the general election?"
The Clinton campaign is still smarting from the remarks by Irish author Brian Feeney in Time magazine that despite
her Pinocchio-like claims to have played a role in the peace talks of
the 1990s, "The road to peace was carefully documented, and she wasn’t
on it." Chief witness for the defence is Gerry
Adams, president of Sinn Féin.
Geraldine Ferraro has abruptly quit Hillary's campaign after her outburst about race threatened to cause superdelegates to upsticks for the Obama camp. There follows her resignation letter (obtained by CNN) in which she threatens to keep sounding off:
The Clinton and Obama campaigns are locking horns in an increasingly
bitter fight over Geraldine Ferraro’s racially denigrating remarks that
Obama gets preferential treatment from the media and the public because
he is black.
Ferraro behaves like
a fishwife from Queens worried about the changing neighbourhood when it comes race. She made similar remarks in
1988 saying if "Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the
race."
Now a prominent member of the Clinton campaign (she is on the finance committee) she nonchalantly threw
more petrol on the flames today saying on morning TV that she was
"absolutely not" sorry for saying that Obama is getting an unfair
affirmative action boost. Her remarks were not racist and had been
taken out of context she protested. This is rich coming from Ferraro who was chosen to be Walter Mondale’s
running mate in 1984 because she was a woman.
For those wishful thinking Democrats who naively believe a
Clinton-Obama ticket might come to pass, Speaker of the House
Nancy Pelosi of
California has the following home truths: "I think that ticket either
way is impossible."
John McCain's new video panders to the hokiest American stereotypes about Britain in the Second World War. He dredges up footage of Winston Churchill's stiff-upper-lip sound-bites matching him word for word.
Churchill: "We shall never surrender."
McCain: "We're Americans and we’ll never surrender. They will."
Quite what the flickering black and whites propaganda images of Churchill are meant to do for McCain is anybody's guess.
Hillary’s 3am phone call ad may be the most effective thing her strategist Mark Penn has done in the entire campaign. But it turns out that that scene with the sleeping children is eight-year-old stock footage. The lovely blond child sleeping peacefully in the ad is now 17 and she’s a militant Obama
supporter.
Hillary continues to make a big deal about her foreign policy expertise and conversely Obama's inadequacy in an arena that seems to terrify many Americans, just because it is so, well, foreign.
Surrounded by military brass and sounding as though she has just been accepted into her local Masonic lodge she bragged that she had "crossed the threshold" of foreign policy experience to serve as commander in chief. Then on Friday, after the sacking of Obama's friend and loose cannon foreign policy advisor Samantha Power, Hillary was asked to react. Here is what she said:
Barack Obama has made the cover of Rolling Stone. Unfortunately his ascent to iconic rock star status coincides with one of the most difficult weeks in his still unlikely bid for the presidency. Rolling Stone's editor Jan Wenner compares Obama to Abe Lincoln.
The story The Machinery of Hope: Inside the grass-roots field operation of Barack Obama, who is transforming the way political campaigns are run was obviously timed to go to press just as Obama snatched the nomination from Hillary. As with many of the best laid political (and editorial plans) it was not to be.
The Clinton campaign has been complaining for a couple of weeks that the media is biased in favour of Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton herself vocalised the complaint at last week's televised debate in Cleveland when, about 20 minutes in, she took umbrage at always getting the first question from the two NBC journalists acting as moderators.
Strangely, though, the media has done nothing but echo those complaints, raising questions about just which way the bias runs.
Never mind straw polls, or caucuses, or opinion polls. If you want to know how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are doing in their battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, the real proof of the pudding is in the eating – literally.
In Austin, the Texas state capital, two different food outlets have been offering rival Hillary and Barack menu items ahead of Tuesday’s big vote and keeping count of the score.
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