Running Primaries Thread

Sure. But the original reports weren't based on FEC filings. Everyone just took their word for it.

It's the FEC filings that show how much they were lying. They filed those straight.

 

Oh, ok, gotcha. I thought they had gotten the 35 mil from the FEC reports.
Thanks for clarifying.

 

Someone at Politico, apparently, is paying attention.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0308/9149.html

The nuts?

One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning.

Her own campaign acknowledges there is no way that she will finish ahead in pledged delegates. That means the only way she wins is if Democratic superdelegates are ready to risk a backlash of historic proportions from the party’s most reliable constituency.

Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote — which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle — and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else.

People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet.

As it happens, many people inside Clinton’s campaign live right here on Earth. One important Clinton adviser estimated to Politico privately that she has no more than a 10 percent chance of winning her race against Barack Obama, an appraisal that was echoed by other operatives.

In other words: The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe.

The real question is why so many people are playing. The answer has more to do with media psychology than with practical politics.

Journalists, for instance, have become partners with the Clinton campaign in pretending that the contest is closer than it really is. Most coverage breathlessly portrays the race as a down-to-the-wire sprint between two well-matched candidates, one only slightly better situated than the other to win in August at the national convention in Denver.

Emphasis mine.

 

Anybody who thinks the press has been enabling the HRC camapign is dumb enough to work for The Politico.

 

The press is the only thing keeping her alive.

 

Which is it? Virtually no chance, or a 10 percent chance?

There is not enough bandwidth for me to recount all the things that have happened (or almost happened) that had "no better than a 10 percent chance" of happening. Duke 71, Belmont 70, for starters.

And I do not think that fact has been lost. I have seen "the math simply does not add up for Hillary Clinton" about 23,000 times in coverage of the Democratic race.

 

I think virtually no chance are the author's words, and 10 percent chance is the number from a Clinton adviser.

And, all you have to do is compare coverage of Huckabee from the point he had been all but mathematically eliminated and coverage of HRC from roughly the same point.

The Huckster won some states after he was pretty much beat, too. The national TV folks sure didn't act like he was still in the game, though.

I don't read a pro-Clinton bias here, BTW, so much as a good story bias. A brokered convention is a lot of these folks' wet dream. They want it to be that close. The Clinton press folks do a good job of exploiting that.

 

That's because most GOP primaries are winner-take-all, meaning that McCain was able to pile up a lead much bigger than Obama . . . results from Florida and Michigan counted and are not disputed . . . and there are no superdelagates. Add to that the fact that Huckabee was never a serious contender, and Hillary was the frontrunner before the primaries began.

Democratic variables are too different to make a parallel with Huckabee.

 

Proportional allocation also means it's much harder to come from behind. Also, we're a lot further down the road.

And the super delegates have most surely been moving in one direction. Toward Obama.

 

Oops...can't wait to hear the spin from the HRC camp on this one.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/03/hillarys_balkan_adventures_par.html

 

According to HRC's spokespeople, she misspoke. Not misremembered, but misspoke.

http://alternet.org/blogs/video/80500/

I just get the feeling that she's surrounded herself with the wrong people — Wolfson and Ickes are prime examples — and that she's just not in tune with the national mood, the modern media environment and how national electoral politicking works in the face of the two previously-mentioned factors. It's not 1992 any longer, but the Clintons aren't able to reset their mindsets to adjust to that fact.

 

War is hell.