Bits & Pieces, April 5, 2008
Final exams have finished this semester, but I still have quite a lot of grading left to do by Monday. Didn’t get much done today because of a doctor’s appointment and a school event–a local fair where the college could put up a table and try to sign people up for our evening classes. It was free for us because we advertise in the local newsletter, and we got about a dozen bites and maybe a chance at better publicity for the school after talking to a local filming team. But I was tasked to put together a 5-minute movie showcasing the school, and that took up all of yesterday evening and night. So tomorrow and Monday will be mostly for getting those grades done. After that, there are various events, but I’ll have much of the month off.
That said, let’s look at some bits & pieces from today’s political news.
Clinton finally released her tax records, and with them revealed the reason she’s likely been reluctant to have them out there: the Clintons have gotten stinking rich since leaving the White House. $109 million in eight years. Makes it a bit harder to make blue-collar workers in Pennsylvania believe that you feel their pain. And the tax records are not even complete–they filed for an extension for 2007, so much of what happened in that year will likely remain a mystery.
The papers mention that the Clintons gave more than the Obamas to charity as a percent of their overall income, but it’s a lot easier to give 9.5% of $14 million per year and enjoy the remaining $12 million-plus, than it is to give the same from an income of half a million per year while you’re still paying off massive college loans. The Clinton’s $109 million makes the Obama’s $3.9 million seem paltry in comparison.
Another thing that could give Clinton a harder time in Pennsylvania: Mark Penn, her chief campaign strategist, has been lobbying for the Columbians to get them a trade deal Clinton says she opposes. Penn called it an “error in judgment,” an was successfully able to spin the story to prominently mention that Hillary opposes what he was trying to lobby for.
Remember, Obama got slammed in the media for a good week or so when a low-level advisor was characterized in notes taken by a conservative foreign government as saying that Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric on the trail should not be taken so seriously. This was successfully spun by Clinton and the media to mean “Obama lied on NAFTA and will screw all you hard-workng Ohioans.” This despite the fact that the context of the whole memo more or less followed exactly what Obama had been promising publicly and indicated no contradiction–and then there was the fact that Hillary was the first one reported by Canadians as saying she was not really against NAFTA.
And let’s not forget what Hillary said back then:
I would ask you to look at this story and substitute my name for Sen. Obama’s name and see what you would do with this story… Just ask yourself [what you would do] if some of my advisers had been having private meetings with foreign governments.
Um… yeah, what would we do, Hillary?
However, Clinton seems to be getting yet another break in the media (they don’t want her campaign to die, it would be less interesting and would not sell as many ads that way), as her chief advisor, a major player in her campaign, lobbies for a trade deal beneficial to a foreign government–and the MSM barely pays notice. This should be twice the embarrassment for Clinton that the Canadian thing was for Obama, but so far, not much is being said that’s going to hurt her too much. Most stories bear headlines that stress Penn’s “apology” and Clinton’s opposition to such a deal. Strange Obama did not get the same break when something far less troubling happened to him before a big blue-collar primary.
Not that this will help Clinton in Pennsylvania, of course.
More and more, it seems like Clinton supporters are catching on to the fact that Hillary’s chances of winning are close to zero, and that her campaign style is killing Democratic chances in the general election. More and more Democrats are edging away from her campaign, some even calling outright for fellow Clinton supporters to get behind Obama and show a unified front. Meanwhile, Obama is steadily chipping away at Clinton’s once-formidable 20-point lead in Pennsylvania; most polls have Obama behind by only single digits, a few have him almost in a statistical dead heat, and one even puts Obama ahead in the Keystone state.
Already Obama is seeing more support–Jimmy Carter, for example, left little doubt that he will pledge his superdelegate vote for Obama. And Hillary is starting to hurt even more in the pocketbook, as she raises less relative to Obama than before, and is said to be in serious debt while Obama’s coffers overflow.
If Obama even comes within a few points in Pennsylvania, Clinton’s support will probably begin to collapse–and if Obama wins there, more people will probably forego their reticence in calling for Hillary to step down.
McCain, meanwhile, is returning about $3 million in donations, as the media reports that he is “considering” public funding. But this does not mean that he has realized he cannot withdraw from public financing for the primary season and is making sure he stays within the law–no, he’s still in violation of federal law in that regard, and the media is still giving him a gargantuan break on that.
What McCain is doing is returning money donated for the general election period, and he’s returning it with a request to re-donate it to a different fund he’ll use for other purposes. The biggest impact of this news seems to be that McCain is thinking seriously of going the public-finance route for the general election–he seems to think this will be something he can use against Obama, and with the media’s willingness to give McCain a break for his past public-financing legislation, it could even work. Despite the fact that Obama does not take any money from federal lobbyists or PACs, and that the vast majority of his donations are small ones by private persons–the antithesis of campaign finance corruption. Meanwhile, McCain continues to surround himself with swarms of lobbyists, and again, the MSM fails to notice.
McCain has little to lose here, considering that Obama has been out-raising him by something like five-to-one. And Obama could potentially use McCain’s lobbyist swarm and his violation of campaign finance law to blunt McCain’s strategy, while outspending McCain even more than Republicans have outspent Democrats in the past.