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.
Maybe George Bush is feeling a little left out. After all, the guy is still president, and will be for another 11 months, but nobody seems to be paying him much attention as the race for his succession takes up all the oxygen in the room.
Well, not quite all the oxygen. Last night, Bush boldly predicted at a fundraiser that his party would hold on to the White House in November. And why, pray tell?
Barack Obama may be looking forward to the looming showdown with Hillary Clinton in Texas, but he probably won't be calling on the services of the Lone Star State Senator Kirk Watson too much more often. Watson, whose constituents in grungy, studenty, music scene-y Austin - the state capital - are natural Obama supporters, made a complete idiot of himself on the night of the Wisconsin primary when he went on the cable news station MSNBC and proved himself incapable of naming a single legislative achievement he could attribute to the surging Democratic presidential frontrunner.
Again and again, Chris Matthews, the hard-knuckle host of a show
suitably called Hardball, asked him to name something Obama had
actually done in his four years in the Senate. Watson stuttered,
stumbled, tried to change the subject, stuttered some more and just
stared into space, looking bewildered and lost. On the other side of
the split screen, Ohio congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, an ardent
Clinton backer, looked like Christmas had come all over again.
Hillary Clinton may not have quite the human touch and crowd-pleasing oomph of her rival, Barack Obama. Still, she has been busy trying to make friends - if not with live human voters, then with America's cows and, by extension, with the consumers who end up eating those cows.
Mark McKinnon is as close to the heart of the Republican political machine as it gets. He's a friend of George Bush's, worked as a media adviser to propel Bush into the White House the first time in 2000 and, via his media consultancy company, raked in a stunning $170m of Bush's re-election campaign chest in 2004. (It was money well spent: one of Bush's McKinnon-crafted adverts zeroed in on John Kerry windsurfing and successfully painted the Democratic challenger as an elitist, out-of-touch liberal.)
Now, though, he's balking at the idea of working for John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee who he has supported through both thick and a lot of thin these past couple of years. How come? Well, if the Democratic nominee this time is Barack Obama, McKinnon wants no part of the Republican attack machine.
Stunning. Unbelievable. In a campaign full of extraordinary twists and turns, this was a moment nobody could have predicted: the wife of California's Republican governor showing up at a Barack Obama rally and offering her endorsement. Or something very close to an endorsement.
Maria Shriver (pictured), a member of the Kennedy clan who has never given up her Democratic Party registration despite being Arnold Schwarzenegger's First Lady, sent an already ecstatic crowd at the UCLA basketball arena into paroxysms of delight as she showed up as an unannounced final speaker - following on from her cousin Caroline Kennedy, Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder and the candidate's wife, Michelle Obama.
Hillary Clinton just got endorsed by the most unlikely of figures - the hate-spewing, factually-challenged, best-selling, ultra-conservative, rabble-rousing talking head Ann Coulter (pictured). Coulter, whose latest book is called, typically, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans, left her favourite conservative host on Fox News utterly gobsmacked as she told him she'd not only vote for Hillary over John McCain, the most likely Republican nominee at this point - she'd even campaign for her.
"If he's our candidate," she said, "then Hillary is going to be our girl..., because she's more conservative than he is... I think she would be stronger on the war on terrorism."
The Nevada Democratic Party has now sheepishly admitted that Obama did indeed earn one more national delegate than Clinton. So his campaign is not wrong, but it is disingenuous (or rather, reaching for whatever it can). Hillary won almost two-thirds of the Latino vote and edged Obama even for the union vote. She has all the momentum going forward. Delegate counts are close to irrelevant - they have played no role in any Democratic nominating contest since 1968. So the broader point remains. Obama lost, and any attempt to pretend otherwise is just spinning in the wind.
So Hillary Clinton won the Nevada caucus, right? Not if you ask the Obama campaign. Sure, the former First Lady got more votes - 51 per cent to 45, according to the official returns. But the Obama camp claimed last night that, thanks to the arcane mathematics of the caucus process, they had picked up one more delegate to the national nominating convention - 13 to Clinton's 12.
As political spin goes, this is as outrageous as anything to come out of the woodwork, in a campaign rife with outrage. (Earlier in the day, just to give one other example, Bill Clinton was virtually foaming at the mouth about Obama supporters intimidating his wife's voters, even as he stood inside a caucus site at a Las Vegas casino and urged everyone coming in - without a shred of intimidation, naturally - to vote for Hillary.)
A strange thing happened to Hillary Clinton on the way to the Forum (the Forum in Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, naturally). Even as her surrogates - starting with her husband - were crowing last night about her 5-10 point lead in the last polls ahead of today's Nevada caucus, her chief strategist, rather weirdly, started laying out talking points in the event of her possible defeat.
Mark Penn's memo to the media was entitled "Will the polls be predictive in Nevada?" and oozed both resentment and paranoia in thick abundance. Essentially, he argued that the final polls were surely correct but that the Culinary Workers' Union backing Barack Obama would tip the playing field by packing special caucus sites along the Las Vegas Strip with casino workers they have mobilised.
Penn characterised the nine casino sites as "self-contained precincts" under union control and suggested they would, on their own, give Obama a 5 per cent edge across the entire state.
The argument is both mathematically incorrect and staggeringly dishonest.
It's the oldest trick in the foreign correspondent's book: arrive somewhere new, talk to the taxi driver, think you know it all. Except sometimes it really works.
Here's what my driver told me - free association style - as we zipped down the freeway from Las Vegas airport to a Bill Clinton event in the unlovely sprawling suburb of Henderson:
Here’s an interesting juxtaposition of circumstances. Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio congressman and outspoken darling of the American left, was excluded from last night’s Democratic candidates’ debate in Las Vegas, ostensibly because he does not enjoy enough voter support to merit a place at the podium. At the same time, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who is never excluded from the Republican debates, went down in flames in the Michigan primary, finishing sixth with just 3 per cent of the vote.
The closer you look, the more absurd the logic of this gets, especially in a country that prides itself as a bastion of democratic values and free speech. Giuliani has now been beaten at the polls twice by Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman running for president as a Republican. And yet Paul has been excluded from televised debates at least as often as he has been invited. Most notably, Paul was told to take a running jump by Fox News on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, even though he had won more votes than Giuliani in Iowa just days earlier.
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