Bipartisanship? Hell No!

Franklin Roosevelt didn't get it or want it! Then as now Republican obstructionists and zealots were willing to sacrifice the middle class to serve their corporatist masters. President Obama needs to learn to use his power and that of a Democratic Congress to enact his mandate.

If George Bush could impose a 6 year one party Dictatorship of the plutocracy despite failing to win the popular vote in 2000, Barrack Obama can certainly claim MANDATE and tell the Republicans,,
Go away and eat your young its ALL YOUR GOOD FOR!
DH

Bipartisanship No, Working Majority Yes

From the Intrepid Liberal Journal
14 Feb 2009 12:05 PM CST

In the grown up world, honorable and reasonable people may initially disagree but eventually compromise upon a collective review of empirical evidence. It was in this spirit, that the nascent Obama administration reached out to Republicans with respect to their proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which finally passed both houses of congress yesterday.

Unfortunately, most Republican politicians are neither honorable nor reasonable. Instead, most Republican politicians are predatory conservatives dedicated to establishing a permanent corporate theocratic plutocracy. As far as they’re concerned, the 2008 election is merely a temporary setback and attempting bipartisanship with this crowd resulted in legislation far less bold than most economists hoped for.

Hence, it is in the spirit of admiration and support that I urge this new administration to absorb the following lesson: Bipartisanship No, Working Majority Yes. President Obama is a quick study and has likely absorbed this lesson for himself. Indeed, I recall him often using the phrase “working majority” during the campaign. Nonetheless, it is instructive for both liberal activists as well his administration to always keep this simple phrase on the front lobes of our brains. Repeat after me: Bipartisanship No, Working Majority Yes.

This phrase is especially pertinent to the United States Senate. Senators are divas with parochial interests, outsized ambitions and a Constitution that empowers their narcissism. Hence, the only language these people truly understand is leverage with a proper dosage of ego massage. They know that any one of them has the power to hold any piece of proposed legislation hostage to their whims.

Indeed, senators sometimes behave as if they have the power of little Anthony Freemont in the classic Twilight Zone episode “It’s A Good Life.” Like that little boy, one can just imagine Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell, fantasizing about wishing supporters of universal healthcare into a cornfield never to be seen or heard from again. That is the mentality we’re dealing with.

The upside however is there will always be enough politicians prepared to bargain in order to elevate their own importance, demonstrate independence and serve the interests of their constituents. With respect to the stimulus legislation the three so-called Republican moderate senators were Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter and Maine’s Olympia Snow and Susan Collins. Connecticut’s “Independent” Republican patsy Joe Lieberman and conservative Nebraska Democrat, Ben Nelson, also joined those three in bargaining with the Obama administration, the Senate majority and the House of Representatives.

Had President Obama initially proposed legislation far bolder they still would have bargained, a filibuster majority still would have been achieved and the end result would have been far superior to the legislation that ultimately passed. Next time around it may be a different group of Republican senators and recalcitrant Democrats doing the bargaining, perhaps related to geographic interests. As long as President Obama’s political standing remains high, it will always be possible to cut deals on favorable terms with a rotating group of senators because their relevance depends upon it.

Hence, a working majority will always be ripe for plucking even without a filibuster proof majority. And even if we had sixty Democratic senators a few of them would threaten denying a filibuster proof majority to promote their independence and get what they want. At the end of the day, bipartisanship has nothing to with it. Leverage, enlightened self-interest, service to constituents or contributors and political survival are everything. There is no love in politics. Only leverage, respect and fear.

The appropriate posture is to treat reluctant politicians with symbolic respect, bargain hard for every penny and compromise from a position of strength. That is the best way to maximize potential of a working majority going forward while simultaneously maintaining broad public support. Sometimes, operating a working majority will require President Obama to demonstrate toughness, walk away and threaten vetoes if a few senators opt to behave like Anthony Freemont in the name of bipartisanship.

Barack Obama is an impressive human being with many admirable qualities. Indeed, Obama represents an ennobling change of pace after George W. Bush’s insipid indecency. He is learning however that governing is delicate balance requiring the dual personalities of Mahtatma Ghandi and Don Vito Corleone. If anyone can achieve that delicate balance it’s this president. Nonetheless, we must remain vigilant and toughen his hide.

Bipartisanship No, Working Majority Yes.

Repost from Robert Ellman

Rewriting History- A Primer on how to Whitewash Failure

Perle Washes His Hands Of Iraq: I Was Not An ‘Architect Of That War,’ Neocons Had No Influence»

Over the past few weeks, many Bush administration officials have begun rewriting history in an effort to burnish President Bush’s legacy. Following suit, neoconservative war hawk Richard Perle has taken the opportunity to polish his own record during the Bush years — mainly on Iraq.

In the latest issue of The National Interest, Perle devotes 4,600 words — not to congratulate President Bush for invading Iraq — but to wipe his, and the whole neoconservative movement’s, hands clean of the whole affair. In the essay, he categorically denies that both he — and neoconservative ideology in general — had any influence on the Bush administration in its decision to go to war:

I have been widely but wrongly depicted as deeply involved in the making of administration policy, especially with respect to Iraq. Facts notwithstanding, there are some fifty thousand entries on Google in which I am described as an “architect,” and often as “the architect,” of the Iraq War. I certainly supported and argued publicly for the decision to remove Saddam, as I do in what follows. But had I been the architect of that war, our policy would have been very different. […]

But about the many mistakes made in Iraq, one thing is certain: they had nothing to do with ideology. They did not draw inspiration from or reflect neoconservative ideas and they were not the product of philosophical or ideological influences outside the government.

Perle is right. He strongly advocated publicly for the invasion of Iraq, especially after 9/11, even making claims that Saddam Hussein had links to Osama bin Laden (an assertion he later claimed he never said). But in fact, Perle had direct access to top administration officials during the run up to the war. Former CIA director George Tenet recalled that shortly after 9/11, Perle told him that “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday, they bear responsibility.”

Moreover, the neoconservative influence on the Bush administration, particularly regarding Iraq, has been well documented. For Perle to claim otherwise is beyond absurd.

Seeing that Perle cannot deny he supported the invasion, he then offers two separate justifications for both outcomes of the WMD argument. First, he says the belief that Saddam had WMD was “widely accepted” at the time of the invasion. But, noting that no WMD were found, Perle then says the “salient issue” was not that Saddam had WMD but that he “could produce them” someday. Nevertheless, Perle concludes, “no one should take seriously the facile conclusion that invading Iraq was mistaken because we now know Saddam did not possess stockpiles of WMD.”

Except this statement is a direct contradiction of what Perle wrote earlier this year in an article for The American Interest. Then, he claimed if we knew Saddam had no WMD in March 2003, the U.S. shouldn’t have invaded:

If Saddam had provided solid, confirmable evidence of the destruction of the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction he was believed to possess, we would not have invaded.

Indeed, no matter how many incoherent, contradictory and misleading essays Perle concocts trying to absolve himself from the Iraq debacle, like his fellow Iraq war architects, it’s clear he has no leg to stand on.

Historys Judgment wait 50 years

We all have our current views on the 43 American President with many pronouncing George Bush easily one our nations Worst Presidents. What with 2 wars and the collapse of the Western Worlds economy all on his watch! I graduated High School the year Jimmy Carter's presidency seem to implode on the shoals of the Iranian Hostage Crises and his crises of confidence. I witnessed Richard Nixons abdication and subsequent self imposed internal exile form public life. Both men have seen a rehabilitation of sorts in recent years.

Will George Bush?

While we may hard pressed to recall even one Bush Administration "Accomplishment",
History's judgment is always deferred by 40 or 50 years. Much will depend on the world economy, if the Collapse of 2008 segues into the World Depression of 2009 then surely George Bush will be this generations Herbert Hoover! (To be fair to Hoover he took office just scant months before the Crash of 1929 Calvin Coolidge shares the blame for the Great Depression) DH

from the BBC...

How does the Bush presidency rate?

By Paul Reynolds World affairs correspondent, BBC News website

I suppose the underlying question here is whether George W Bush has been one of the worst US presidents.

Many people have already made up their minds.

For them, the invasion of Iraq was enough to put Mr Bush high on the list. And that was compounded by his lack of action elsewhere - with global warming and Hurricane Katrina as examples.

Others will want to wait a bit and see what history decides. History can improve the image of a presidency.

Follow Bush's downward slide

Harry Truman is the great example. His approval rating dipped even lower than Mr Bush's (though Mr Bush has registered a higher disapproval rating - a discrepancy due to a decline in the number of "don't knows").

The Truman years were full of epic events, from the dropping of the first atomic bomb, to the start of the Cold War, to the actual Korean War, to his dismissal of the popular Gen Douglas MacArthur.

The Chicago Tribune called for Truman to be impeached.

He appeared at times to be overwhelmed and he went down, but history has brought him up again and he is now generally seen as a gutsy president who took the right decisions.

Mr Bush is hoping for a similar vindication.

In the meantime, here are some of the candidates in the race for the bottom, in chronological order.

1. James Buchanan (President 1857-1861)

Buchanan failed to head off the Civil War. His position was weak, arguing on the one hand that the South should not secede and on the other that the North should not use force. It led to inaction and vacillation. Maybe he could not have succeeded, but he was not even seen to try.

2. Andrew Johnson (President 1865-1869)

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Johnson had a policy of punishing the Confederate leaders but letting off their followers. However, he is reckoned to have given too many concessions to the South, thereby laying the groundwork for the racial problems the United States subsequently experienced. He and Bill Clinton are the only two presidents to have been impeached. In Johnson's case it was over the power of presidents to dismiss cabinet members. Both were acquitted.

3. Warren Harding (President 1921-1923)

Harding was mired in scandal, because he appointed incompetent and corrupt cronies. His secretary of the interior, Albert Fall, was convicted of taking bribes in exchange for handing out oil leases on publicly-owned land and went to prison. Harding said he had less trouble from his political enemies than from his friends.

4. Herbert Hoover (President 1929-1933)

Hoover had done magnificent work during World War I, getting food into starving Belgium and later into a defeated Germany and even the Soviet Union. But his failure to combat the great depression when he became president led to his downfall - and to the interventionist approach of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

5. Richard Nixon (President 1969-1974)

The only president to have resigned the office has to be on the list. His offence was obstruction of justice, arising from his attempt to cover up the Watergate break-in. He left office in disgrace.

There is also another way of looking at presidential reputations. This is to look at specific decisions they have taken. On this list appear some presidents whose historical place is otherwise strong. In 2006, historians gathered by the University of Louisville listed the "top 10 presidential errors".

They were:

1. James Buchanan's failure to stop the Civil War.

2. Andrew Johnson's decision to favour Southern whites after the Civil War.

3. Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War.

4. Woodrow Wilson's inability to get the United States into the League of Nations after the First World War.

5. Richard Nixon's role in the Watergate cover-up.

6. James Madison's war with Britain in 1812.

7. Thomas Jefferson's embargo on trade with Europe during the Napoleonic Wars.

8. John Kennedy's attempt to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

9. Ronald Reagan's sale of arms to Iran in the Iran-Contra scandal.

10. Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Will George Bush's invasion of Iraq get on to a similar list in 20 or 50 years' time?

A British historian of American politics, Professor John Philip Davies of de Montfort University, says: "George Bush's problem is that he hasn't had many successes and he has made mistakes. Iraq and Afghanistan have not come out well and his hopes of becoming another Harry Truman must be in doubt."

Truman's approval rating once dipped to 22%

Every failing president looks to Truman, he notes. Gerald Ford moved a bust of him into the White House.

In Professor Davies' view, Warren Harding was "one of the worst".

"He chose genuinely seedy characters for his cabinet and was deeply gullible. He looked the part, like an emperor whose face should be on coins, but he was dreadful at choosing his team," he says.

He also notes that Truman is not the only former president whose stock has risen over time.

"Richard Nixon is undergoing something of a rehabilitation in terms of policy - his opening to China, for example, and his decision to end the Vietnam War," he says.

"Jimmy Carter was seen as weak at the time but has been an excellent former president.

"Eisenhower is now seen by some as less of a 'do-nothing' president than a 'hidden hand', thanks to a favourable biography, which all presidents need.

"History can move a president up or down the table but I think its judgment is not hugely different from that of contemporaries."

Legacy of Shame

20 Forgotten Bush Scandals

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, George H.W. Bush congratulated his son on running a “clean operation." (Daddy Bush) apparently wasn’t paying very close attention. Everyone remembers weapons of mass destruction, the US attorney firings. But historians will note that those are only the beginning of the Bush administration scandals…

The Bush administration will leave the annals of presidential disrepute several times thicker than it found them. There’s Iraq, the hospital visit to John Ashcroft, the US attorney firings. But historians will note that those are only the beginning of the Bush administration scandals. Does the name Jeff Gannon ring a bell? Boxgate? What about the anti-prostitution AIDS Tsar who purchased the services of—wait for it—the D.C. Madam?

The Daily Beast has put together 20 of Bush’s greatest forgotten scandals.

Sex and Shoplifting

1) In March 2006, Claude Allen, Bush's top domestic policy aide, was arrested when he tried to return items he had shoplifted from Target for cash refunds. Allen, who made $161,000 a year, blamed stress from Hurricane Katrina.

2) In 2005, bloggers pricked up their ears when a reporter named Jeff Gannon asked a softball question at a Bush press conference. Some sleuthing turned up nude photos of Gannon—real name: James Guckert—on male escort websites.

3) Randall Tobias, Bush’s AIDS tsar, mandated that organizations must oppose prostitution in order to receive American aid. It later emerged that Tobias purchased services through the notorious D.C. Madam, though Tobias maintained he only bought “massages.”

4) The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service would not seem to be the sexiest government agency. But a departmental investigation last year found that officials had “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”

Where’d the Money Go?

5) When testifying before Congress in 2007, L. Paul Bremer, the former head of reconstruction in Iraq, was unable to account for as much as $12 billion—about half of his budget—as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority between May 2003 and June 2004. According to a report by Rep. Henry Waxman, contractors brought bags to meetings in order to collect shrink-wrapped bundles of money.

6) In 2004, Pentagon auditors found that Halliburton had not adequately accounted for $1.8 billion of the bill it sent to the United States government for its work in Iraq and Kuwait.

7) Also that year, Bunnatine Greenhouse, the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting officer, charged that KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary, unfairly received billions of dollars worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq. Greenhouse was demoted in 2005.

Disappearances

8) In 2002, Canadian citizen Maher Arar was detained at an airport in New York and spirited away to Syria, where he was tortured and held for 10 months by his captors before being returned home. Canadian officials investigated Arar's case, declared he was innocent, and paid him $9 million in compensation. American officials refused to admit the mistake and instead kept Arar on a terrorist watch list.

9) Army Captain James Yee, a Muslim chaplain in Guantanamo Bay, was hooded, shackled, and detained in solitary confinement for 76 days on charges of espionage. Within a year the case against Yee had collapsed and the Army tried to save face by charging him with hoarding pornography.

All the President’s Wordsmiths

10) In an email to friends, Danielle Crittenden, the wife of White House speechwriter David Frum, bragged that her husband had written Bush’s famous “Axis of Evil” line. The e-mail leaked to Slate, causing a minor scandal.

11) Part of the self-created mythology of White House speechwriter Michael Gerson was that he composed his speeches in longhand. But as fellow scribe Matthew Scully later noted: “At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John [McConnell] and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.”

Ron Edmonds/AP

No Administration Friend Left Behind

12) First there was Columnist Gate: In 2005, USA Today reported that conservative commentator Armstrong Williams received a $240,000 contract from the Department of Education to promote No Child Left Behind on his television show and to sell other African-American journalists on the legislation. Later, The Washington Post uncovered a similar deal with columnist Maggie Gallagher to promote a marriage initiative for the Department of Health.

13) A Defense Department report in 2006 urged the military to end its practice of paying Iraqi journalists to publish pro-American stories in their newspapers, arguing the tactic would "undermine the concept of a free press."

14) According to The New York Times, Karl Rove scored lobbyist Ralph Reed a lucrative contract with Enron in 1997 to gain his support in the 2000 presidential race.

15) David Safavian, the former chief of staff of the General Services Administration, was convicted of helping Jack Abramoff on a shady land deal as well as concealing a "lavish weeklong golf trip" paid for by Abramoff.

16) As head of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz was forced to resign in disgrace after he helped his "female companion," Shaha Riza, score a $60,000 pay raise and promotion—and then tried to cover it up.

Down the Memory Hole

17) Bush fundraiser Lurita Doan's gig as chair of the General Services Administration went down in flames when she was accused of asking agency staff to help Republican candidates win elections. Doan denied any wrongdoing. When witnesses said she asked her staff at a meeting, "How can we use GSA to help our candidates in the next election?" Doan claimed she had no memory of the presentation.

18) Though Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, was suspected of being the anthrax mailer, that didn't keep Bush and Cheney from openly speculating that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks and even going so far as to pressure FBI officials to come up with a bin Laden connection, according to the New York Daily News.

Mission Accomplished

19) In 2003, Bush went to a warehouse in St. Louis to give a speech titled “Strengthening America’s Economy.” But the boxes laid out before the presidential podium bore the label "Made in China." The labels were then obscured with white paper. The White House blamed an "overzealous advance volunteer.”

The Last Word

20) The administration ethos was nicely summarized during the investigation in the firing of US attorneys, in a testy exchange between former White House Political Director Sara Taylor and Sen. Patrick Leahy. Taylor: "I took an oath to the president…And I believe that taking that oath means that I need to respect, and do respect, my service to the president."

Leahy: "No, the oath says that you take an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States. That is your paramount duty. I know that the president refers to the government being his government—it's not."

Source The Daily Beast

1 Trillion Price Tag for Bush's War on Terror

By Mark Thompson / Washington Friday, Dec. 26, 2008

U.S. soldiers arrive at the Kandahar Air Field in southern Afghanistan in March

John Moore / Getty

The news that President Bush's war on terrorism soon will have cost the U.S. taxpayers $1 trillion — and counting — is unlikely to spread much Christmas cheer in these tough economic times. A trio of recent reports — none by the Bush Administration — suggests that sometime early in the Obama presidency, spending on the wars started since 9/11 will pass the trillion-dollar mark. Even after adjusting for inflation, that's four times more than America spent fighting World War I, and more than 10 times the cost of 1991's Persian Gulf War (90% of which was paid for by U.S. allies). The war on terrorism looks set to surpass the costs the Korean and Vietnam wars combined, topped only by World War II's price tag of $3.5 trillion.

Related

Stories

• The Ongoing Cost of the War
• A Dark Christmas for the Republicans

The cost of sending a single soldier to fight for a year in Afghanistan or Iraq is about $775,000 — three times more than in other recent wars, says a new report from the private but authoritative Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA). A large chunk of the increase is a result of the Administration's cramming new military hardware into the emergency budget bills it has been using to pay for the wars. (See pictures of U.S. troops in Iraq.)

These costs, of course, pale alongside the price paid by the nearly 5,000 U.S. troops who have lost their lives in the conflicts — not to mention the wounded — and the families of all the casualties. And President Bush insists that their sacrifice and the expenditure on the wars have helped prevent a repeat of 9/11. "We could not afford to wait for the terrorists to attack again," he said last week at the Army War College. "So we launched a global campaign to take the fight to the terrorists abroad, to dismantle their networks, to dry up their financing and find their leaders and bring them to justice."

But many Americans may suffer a moment of sticker shock from the conclusions of the CSBA report and similar assessments from the Government Accounting Office (GAO) and Congressional Research Service (CRS), which make clear that the nearly $1 trillion already spent is only a down payment on the war's long-term costs. The trillion-dollare figure does not, for example, include long-term health care for veterans, thousands of whom have suffered crippling wounds, or the interest payments on the money borrowed by the Federal Government to fund the war. The bottom lines of the three assessments vary: the CSBA study says $904 billion has been spent so far, while the GAO says the Pentagon alone has spent $808 billion through last September. The CRS study says the wars have cost $864 billion, but CRS didn't factor inflation into its calculations.

Sifting through Pentagon data, the CSBA study breaks down the total costs of the war on terrorism as $687 billion for Iraq, $184 billion for Afghanistan and $33 billion for homeland security. By 2018, depending on how many U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan and Iraq, the total cost is projected to likely be between $1.3 trillion and $1.7 trillion. On the safe assumption that the wars are being waged with borrowed money, interest payments raise the cost by an additional $600 billion through 2018.

Shortly before the Iraq war began, White House economic adviser Larry Lindsey earned a rebuke from within the Administration when he said the war could cost as much as $200 billion. "It's not knowable what a war or conflict like that would cost," Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld said. "You don't know if it's going to last two days or two weeks or two months. It certainly isn't going to last two years."

According to the CSBA study, the Administration has fudged the war's true costs in two ways. Borrowing money to fund the wars is one way of conducting them on the cheap, at least in the short term. But just as pernicious has been the Administration's novel way of budgeting for them. Previous wars were funded through the annual appropriations process, with emergency spending — which gets far less congressional scrutiny — used only for the initial stages of a conflict. But the Bush Administration relied on such supplemental appropriations to fund the wars until 2008, seven years after invading Afghanistan and five years after storming Iraq.

"For these wars, we have relied on supplemental appropriations for far longer than in the case of past conflicts," says Steven Kosiak of the CSBA, one of Washington's top defense-budget analysts. "Likewise, we have relied on borrowing to cover more of these costs than we have in earlier wars — which will likely increase the ultimate price we have to pay." That refusal to spell out the full cost can lead to unwise spending increases elsewhere in the federal budget or unwarranted tax cuts. "A sound budgeting process forces policymakers to recognize the true costs of their policy choices," Kosiak adds. "Not only did we not raise taxes, we cut taxes and significantly expanded spending."

The bottom line: Bush's projections of future defense spending "substantially understate" just how much money it will take to run Obama's Pentagon, the CSBA says in its report. Luckily, Defense Secretary Robert Gates plans to hang around to try to iron out the problem.

Hillary Is losing the race and The Obama Factor

UPDATE; Sunday Feb 10,2008.
Obama adds Maine to his Saturday wins in Washington, Louisiana and Nebraska, Clinton campaign manager out!
Story at the bottom of this post.

I said I would follow up on Super Tuesday with a post on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, here it is and I am making a prediction right now,,I think Hillary has lost this race for the Presidency.

It has taken a few days from Super Tuesday to make sense of just what Barack Obama has accomplished. After nearly a year of spirited battle in the biggest contest so far, 24 states voting nearly 10 and a half million Democratic votes cast and Hillary Clinton managed a tie!

That is a crushing defeat, she should have been able to seal her triumph Tuesday, instead the young upstart from Chicago matched Clinton nearly vote for vote (less than a 100,000 votes difference) and Obama in the end beat her in the Delegate count by 796 to 794. Sen. Obama won the popular vote in 13 states Tuesday, while Clinton won in eight states and American Samoa. In the overall race for the nomination, Clinton has 1,055 delegates, including separately chosen party and elected officials known as super delegates. Obama has 998. More about the super delegates in a moment, they are going to decide this race.

No mistake folks this is a defeat for Clinton by Wednesday Hillary had to loan her campaign 5 million( and her staff is unpaid) while Obama raised 7.1 million on Tuesday in addition to 30 million in January!

Bill Clinton's polarizing presence in South Carolina (a state she was fated to lose) caused untold damage to the Clinton's reputation among Black voters.
Her attitude has not helped either, she has practically called Blacks disloyal for supporting the first serious black Presidential challenger! Implying after all we have done for you people you Owe me!

How sickeningly condescending can you be!

Black voters are not buying it and neither are the under age 40 voters of all races flocking to the Obama campaign.

Hilliary is even losing the white male vote while retaining women of her generation. More important even some of her Tuesday victory's are suspect. She won in California based on absentee votes (they started sending in ballots Jan 6) but at the polls in California on election day she lost, indicating a late surge for Obama.

Bill Clinton has been muzzled and now sounds apologetic about South Carolina and one thing we know about Bill is he NEVER apologizes! The dust up by the Hillary camp over David Shuster at MSNBC and his comments about Chelsea Clinton (out of line but the Clintons have been too protective the "girl" is now 27) show a campaign staff on the razors edge, grasping at straws, anything that might deflect the press from the real story from the Clinton Camp.
And what is that story?

Fear

Fear that she will lose this race.

Once inevitability flows to a candidate a wave builds, Obama has stalemated Clinton and the next two states are swinging rapidly in Barack Obamas favor!

Super delegates 20% of delegates to the convention are given to Democratic politicos,Governors,Senators,Congressmen,Legislators Mayors people who have won elected office. Most years they vote for the clear winner or the inevitable canidate. Well into January most were leaning as you would expect Clinton's way. Here is the problem for Hillary since Tuesday they are starting to hedge and they are being courted by Obama's people with the line.

Obama is the inevitable candidate.

Is it working?

Obama and Clinton, are competing for 161 delegates Saturday in Washington state, Louisiana, Nebraska and the Virgin Islands, followed by Maine caucuses with 24 delegates on Sunday.
Obama won the last-minute endorsement Friday of Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, the female governor of the state. Both candidates had courted her, Obama speaking with her four times.

"He is leading us toward a positive feeling of hope in our country and I love seeing that happen," she said. Washington's senators, both women, back Clinton.

In strongly Republican and sparsely populated Nebraska, Obama spoke to the huge crowd at an Omaha arena Thursday, exhorting: "You're here because you don't want to just be against something. You want to be for something.

Chris Slaughter, 20, heard the speech and said: "He's a once-in-a-generation candidate."

Obama was the only candidate campaigning in all four states.

Clinton told a spirited rally of 5,000 supporters at a Seattle cruise ship terminal Thursday night that she's "a fighter and a doer and a champion for the American people." She also planned to campaign in Maine.

Clinton and Obama both have an eye on the round that follows - the trio of races Tuesday in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia - and the New York senator in particular was gearing her campaign toward the high stakes primaries in Ohio and Texas on March 4.

Obama is expected to win in Louisiana and Maryland and D.C. and fight Clinton to parity in Washington state. That leaves Ohio and Texas, Hillary may not do well in Texas except among Latinos who don't particularly care for Obama. The Clinton's have high negatives in Texas among white democrats. Ohio like 2000 & 04 will be a battleground, racially polarized it may be again at best a draw for Clinton.

My Conclusion, there is no way the party establishment wants a brokered backroom convention, not in the 21st century! The super delegates will be under extreme pressure to end this race now and award their votes to Senator Obama.

The next few primary's are very critical, pulling even again will surly finish Hillary Clinton's presidential race.

Can she lose gracefully, a women who has been thinking of this run since Bill was in the White House?

That is the question the always perceptive Peggy Noonan (former Reagan speech writer)
asks. If you are a Clinton supporter you won't like the answer.

I firmly believe Senator Barack Obama will be the Democratic candidate for President.

And the Next President of the United States.

It is Inevitable!

Would Hilliary accept a Vice Presidential slot?
Hillary swallow her pride and accept second place? Obama would likely accept her so it will be her call.
If not John Edwards will be the likely V.P.

DeWayne H

Can Mrs. Clinton Lose?
By PEGGY NOONAN
February 8, 2008;

If Hillary Clinton loses, does she know how to lose? What will that be, if she loses? Will she just say, "I concede" and go on vacation at a friend's house on an island, and then go back to the Senate and wait?

Is it possible she could be so normal? Politicians lose battles, it's part of what they do, win and lose. But she does not know how to lose. Can she lose with grace? But she does grace the way George W. Bush does nuance.

She often talks about how tough she is. She has fought "the Republican attack machine" that has tried to "stop" her, "end" her, and she knows "how to fight them." She is preoccupied to an unusual degree with toughness. A man so preoccupied would seem weak. But a woman obsessed with how tough she is just may be lethal.

Does her sense of toughness mean that every battle in which she engages must be fought tooth and claw, door to door? Can she recognize the line between burly combat and destructive, never-say-die warfare? I wonder if she is thinking: What will it mean if I win ugly? What if I lose ugly? What will be the implications for my future, the party's future? What will black America, having seen what we did in South Carolina, think forever of me and the party if I do low things to stop this guy on the way to victory? Can I stop, see the lay of the land, imitate grace, withdraw, wait, come back with a roar down the road? Life is long. I am not old.
Or is that a reverie she could never have? What does it mean if she could never have it?

We know she is smart. Is she wise? If it comes to it, down the road, can she give a nice speech, thank her supporters, wish Barack Obama well, and vow to campaign for him?

It either gets very ugly now, or we will see unanticipated--and I suspect professionally saving--grace.

I ruminate in this way because something is happening. Mrs. Clinton is losing this thing. It's not one big primary, it's a rolling loss, a daily one, an inch-by-inch deflation. The trends and indices are not in her favor. She is having trouble raising big money, she's funding her campaign with her own wealth, her moral standing within her own party and among her own followers has been dragged down, and the legacy of Clintonism tarnished by what Bill Clinton did in South Carolina. Unfavorable primaries lie ahead. She doesn't have the excitement, the great whoosh of feeling that accompanies a winning campaign. The guy from Chicago who was unknown a year ago continues to gain purchase, to move forward. For a soft little innocent, he's played a tough and knowing inside/outside game.

The day she admitted she'd written herself a check for $5 million, Obama's people crowed they'd just raised $3 million. But then his staff is happy. They're all getting paid.

Political professionals are leery of saying, publicly, that she is losing, because they said it before New Hampshire and turned out to be wrong. Some of them signaled their personal weariness with Clintonism at that time, and fear now, as they report, to look as if they are carrying an agenda. One part of the Clinton mystique maintains: Deep down journalists think she's a political Rasputin who will not be dispatched. Prince Yusupov served him cupcakes laced with cyanide, emptied a revolver, clubbed him, tied him up and threw him in a frozen river. When he floated to the surface they found he'd tried to claw his way from under the ice. That is how reporters see Hillary.

And that is a grim and over-the-top analogy, which I must withdraw. What I really mean is they see her as the Glenn Close character in "Fatal Attraction": "I won't be ignored, Dan!"

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Mr. Obama's achievement on Super Tuesday was solid and reinforced trend lines. The popular vote was a draw, the delegate count a rough draw, but he won 13 states, and when you look at the map he captured the middle of the country from Illinois straight across to Idaho, with a second band, in the northern Midwest, of Minnesota and North Dakota. He won Missouri and Connecticut, in Mrs. Clinton's backyard. He won the Democrats of the red states.

On the wires Wednesday her staff was all but conceding she is not going to win the next primaries. Her superdelegates are coming under pressure that is about to become unrelenting. It was easy for party hacks to cleave to Mrs Clinton when she was inevitable. Now Mr. Obama's people are reportedly calling them saying, Your state voted for me and so did your congressional district. Are you going to jeopardize your career and buck the wishes of the people back home?

Mrs. Clinton is stoking the idea that Mr. Obama is too soft to withstand the dread Republican attack machine. (I nod in tribute to all Democrats who have succeeded in removing the phrase "Republican and Democratic attack machines" from the political lexicon. Both parties have them.)

But Mr. Obama will not be easy for Republicans to attack. He will be hard to get at, hard to address. There are many reasons, but a primary one is that the fact of his race will freeze them. No one, no candidate, no party, no heavy-breathing consultant, will want to cross any line--lines that have never been drawn, that are sure to be shifting and not always visible--in approaching the first major-party African-American nominee for president of the United States.

He is the brilliant young black man as American dream. No consultant, no matter how opportunistic and hungry, will think it easy--or professionally desirable--to take him down in a low manner. If anything, they've learned from the Clintons in South Carolina what that gets you. (I add that yes, there are always freelance mental cases, who exist on both sides and are empowered by modern technology. They'll make their YouTubes. But the mad are ever with us, and this year their work will likely stay subterranean.)

With Mr. Obama the campaign will be about issues. "He'll raise your taxes." He will, and I suspect Americans may vote for him anyway. But the race won't go low.

Mrs. Clinton would be easier for Republicans. With her cavalcade of scandals, they'd be delighted to go at her. They'd get medals for it. Consultants would get rich on it.

The Democrats have it exactly wrong. Hillary is the easier candidate, Mr. Obama the tougher. Hillary brings negative; it's fair to hit her back with negative. Mr. Obama brings hope, and speaks of a better way. He's not Bambi, he's bulletproof.

The biggest problem for the Republicans will be that no matter what they say that is not issue oriented--"He's too young, he's never run anything, he's not fully baked"--the mainstream media will tag them as dealing in racial overtones, or undertones. You can bet on this. Go to the bank on it.

The Democrats continue not to recognize what they have in this guy. Believe me, Republican professionals know. They can tell.

DeWayne here above I was talking about Fear and Inevitability, look below and tell me what you think. The Republicans have a lot to worry about this November and Karl Roves dirty tricks bag will prove useless against Obama. McCain can beat Hillary Clinton but he cannot win against Barack Obama!

We have met the next Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy and he is Black and a Democrat!

The New Kennedy

The Noble Patriot

After Losing New Hampshire(he had won Iowa) Barack Obama gave a concession speech.
Only this was not a "concession" but a call to arms! A Masterful performance and any Republican that says this is all flash and no substance, nothing to worry about, well the voters will not care anymore than the last time we had such a stark choice!



Remember the last time Flash,Youth and Inexperience won out over the Establishment guy? 1960 48 years ago.



Update; Sunday February 10

Maine caps Obama Weekend Sweep
Obama Takes Delegate Lead With Wins In 4 States; Clinton Manager Steps Down

(AP/CBS) Illinois senator Barack Obama finished a series of weekend primary and caucus contests undefeated as he bested Hillary Clinton in Maine today, according to CBS News estimates.

Obama’s victory in the Maine caucuses follow on the heels of his Saturday sweep in which he won Louisiana’s primary contest as well as caucuses in the states of Washington and Nebraska.

His winning margins ranged from substantial to crushing. In Maine, he led 59 percent to 41 percent with 87 percent of the precints reporting. In Louisiana, Obama defeated Clinton, 57 percent to 36 percent. He won in Nebraska by a 68 percent to 32 percent margin and in Washington 68 percent to 31 percent.

Obama's victory in Maine -- and the ease with which it came -- actually exceeded expectations, even though he swept the caucuses held on Super Tuesday. Clinton had the backing of the state's governor, John Baldacci, and its proximity to New Hamsphire and Massachusetts, both of which Clinton has already won this year, led some analysts to expect a close race.

Even Obama's own campaign said they didn't expect to win Maine, according to a document the campaign said was accidentally leaked earlier in the week.

In the delegate chase, Obama has pulled ahead of Clinton, even when the support of uncommitted super delegates is figured in. According to CBS News estimates, Obama holds a razor-thin lead with 1,134 delegates overall to 1,131 for Clinton.

The results in Maine came in the wake of a shake-up on the Clinton campaign. Sunday afternoon, Clinton campaign manager Patti Patti Solis announced she was stepping down from that post. She will be replaced by senior advisor and longtime Clinton confidant Maggie Williams.

Campaign spokesman Mo Elleithee said Solis Doyle was "not asked to step down," reports CBS News' Fernando Suarez. Elleithee said the change in leadership was not due to this weekend's losses.