Strange Comments on Obama's Ohio Chances by Ex Director of Franklin County Dem Party

The McClatchy Washington Bureau had a story on its website dated Monday, August 11, 2008, about the difficulties that both McCain and Obama have in carrying Ohio. What attracted our attention is this quote at the end of the article:

"McCain's made some moves. Their commercials have been pretty good. They've dug into the Obama advantage," said Zach Manifold, the executive director of the Democratic Party in Franklin County, where Columbus is.

In Ohio's Democratic primary March 4, Obama did well in the Columbus area, with its highly educated, upper-income voters. He even did well in once solidly Republican suburbs such as Upper Arlington, which appear to be trending toward the Democrats. But he lost the state to Hillary Clinton by 10 points.

What's Obama's outlook statewide in November?

"Statewide it's going to be a tough race," Manifold said. "There are other swing states where he has a better shot than Ohio. I don't know how well he fits. . . . So far, he's been outspent heavily on TV. I'm waiting to see how it turns after the conventions."

Now, we don't know Mr. Manifold, but here's our suggestion: When a national news bureau reporter calls you up for some comments about Obama carrying Ohio, you either give positive comments or you don't say anything. To say the least, the above comments are not helpful in recruiting volunteers for Obama's Ohio campaign.

Now, to be charitable to Mr. Manifold, he may be trying to get the attention of the Obama campaign to what he sees as a problem in Ohio in general, and in Franklin County in particular. Notice that he mentions the fact that Obama is being outspent heavily in Ohio on television ads.

Still, though, there are better ways to get that message to the Obama campaign than disparaging Obama's chances of carrying Ohio. To carry Ohio, we have to think and act as if we can carry Ohio. As any good coach will tell you, a team that thinks it can be beaten greatly increases its chances of being beaten. Conversely, a team that thinks and acts as if it can win greatly increases its chances of winning.

Did Democratic Take Over of Congress Stop War with Iran?

The McClatchy News Service has an article out dated December 3, 2007, about the National Intelligence Estimate concerning Iran's nuclear ambitions. In the article the following quote appears:

The Democratic-controlled Congress ordered the production of the NIE amid concerns that the Bush administration was hyping the threat as it had in Iraq.
The report was to have been completed last spring, but senior intelligence officials had said they wouldn't declassify the key judgments. Administration officials held internal discussions about whether or not to release unclassified portions of the intelligence estimate, said a State Department official familiar with the issue.

In the end, said the official, it was decided that if the unclassified summary wasn't made public, that would increase the chances that classified parts of the document might leak. If that were to happen, the administration would be accused of suppressing intelligence that found that Iran's nuclear program wasn't as immediate a threat as the White House had suggested.

Take away the Democratic take over of Congress and chances are that the NIE about Iran's nuclear ambitions doesn't get produced. If the NIE doesn't get produced, then Bubble-Boy and his band of crazed neo-cons never have to confront the issue of whether to release the report to avoid it being leaked to the media. If the NIE report doesn't get made public, Bush and Cheney can continue to go around and make statements about how, if Iran gets nuclear weapons, WWIII is just around the corner.

Absent the NIE release this past week, and the conditions for a war with Iran exist, just like the conditions in 2002-2003 that gave us the war in Iraq. None of the above happens without a Democratic take over of Congress.

Will Hillary Clinton be a Drag on Local Dems?

A reader sent us an article that appeared in the New York Times dated December 4, 2007, about how certain freshman House Democrats are concerned that a Clinton nomination will hurt them in their re-election races. Although the article's headline was entitled "Vulnerable Democrats See Fate Tied to Clinton's", the writer only mentioned five Democrats by name. They were Nancy Boyda of Kansas, Zack Space of Ohio, Nick Lampson of Texas, Heath Shuler of North Carolina and Brad Ellsworth of Indiana.

The article focuses on Nancy Boyda of Kansas and what she is doing to make sure she distances herself from Clinton. The article has a great quote by Boyda:

Ms. Boyda, who is trying to establish a political identity as independent, said her intent was simply to show the voters of both parties in her district that she was delivering for them. Of the presidential race, she said: “It is something I have no control over, quite honestly. They will demonize any Democrat who becomes the nominee. I just put my head down and work.”

The Clinton campaign, of course, downplays this concern. The article quotes Harold Wolfson, Communications Director of the Clinton campaign, in the following excerpt:

Advisers to Mrs. Clinton, who has long sought to parry concerns within her party that she is too polarizing, dispute the idea that she could hinder Democratic candidates in Republican districts. They note that New York Democrats gained a net of four House seats in her two Senate elections and that she campaigned actively for House contenders in both.

“Anyone can speculate, but there are a set of facts that tell a very different story,” said Howard Wolfson, communications director for the Clinton campaign. “The actual evidence makes clear that she is an asset in tough districts."

The problem may not be in 2008, but in 2010. In 1992, Bill Clinton won election but didn't get over 50% of the popular vote. The Republicans, led by Bob Dole in the Senate, declared on election night that since he didn't win over 50% of the vote, his election wasn't really legitimate. They then proceeded to block his most popular intiative on health care. The result was that the Democatic turn-out fell in 1994, and the Republicans took control of Congress for 12 years.

The same thing could happen in 2008 and 2010. Clinton could win in 2008 and the Democrats could retain and even increase their majority in Congress. If, however, there wasn't 60 reliable votes in the Senate, the Republicans could block legislation. The result might be a depressed turn-out in 2010 and a Republican come-back in the mid-term elections.

Right now the Republican minority in the Senate is set on a course to force a record number of cloture votes, votes that are designed to end filibusters. When Democrats were in the Senate minority from 2003-2007, the highest number of cloture votes was 58 in both the 1998 and 2000 terms of Congress. At the rate cloture votes were being scheduled in July of 2007, the number for the 2006 term of Congress is projected to be 153.

There is one big difference,though, between then and now and that is that the political make-over of the former states of the Old Confederacy has pretty much been completed at the Federal level. It will be hard for the Republicans to find enough Congressional seats to take back the House in 2010 if they haven't done so in 2008.

Another possibility is that the Democrats could, if they hold on to their Senate majority, force a vote to amend the Senate rules and do away with the filibuster. The Republicans threatened to do so after the 2002 mid-term elections to get more of Bush's radical, right-wing judicial nominees confirmed. The argument was that it would only take 50 votes to change the Senate rules because the Vice-President could break a tie.

Whatever happens, Representative Boyda is correct. Down-ticket Democratic candidates can't control what Republicans do, they can only control what they do and how hard they work. No matter who is the nominee, Republicans will demonize any Democrat who gets the presidential nomination. They have to, because Bubble-Boy has failed to achieve anything other than get the U.S. involved in an endless war in the Middle-East, and run up huge budget deficits.

Health Care Moving Up as Concern of Voters

The Washington Bureau of the McClatchy Newspapers has an interesting article dated September 23, 2007, about health care. The article notes that health care is moving up as an issue for voters. While all voters are concerned about health care, there is a marked difference between the concerns that Republicans have and the concern that independents and Democrats share.

According to the article, 50% of Republicans are concerned about the cost of health care, while for both Democrats and independents it is 36%. The article also points out that while only 16% of Republicans are concerned about insuring the uninsured, the figure for Democrats is 40% and for independents it is 37%. When asked about reducing medical errors, 17% of Republicans saw that as a concern, while 14% of Democrats saw that as a concern as did 11% of independents.

The same divide exists regarding what candidates should propose as health care reform. When asked what candidates should talk about, 35% of Republicans mention increasing spending and insuring nearly all the uninsured, while the percentage for Democrats on that question was 67% and for independents it was 54%.

Click here to see a graph with the percentage breakdown.

Petraeus's Plan Kicks Iraq Over into 2008

McClatchey News Service has a story up on its website about how Petraeus is kicking Iraq into the 2008 campaign. This has both good and bad points for both political parties. The good for the Democrats is that the issue of the Iraq War will probably be the number one issue in the 2008 campaign for control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. The bad news is that if Republicans can get Bush to withdraw a significant amount of troops before the 2008 election, the Republicans can try to portray themselves as the Party who actually got us out of Iraq. Of course, for Republicans, the situation is just the opposite.

This is a quote from the article linked to above:

That's where Petraeus creates both opportunity and challenge for the Democrats as well.

His plan would leave 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq until next August at least, as many as were there in January, three months after Democrats won control of Congress largely on an end-the-war platform. That could stamp the Republican brand name even more emphatically on sustaining a woefully unpopular war. And that could be enough to persuade war-weary voters to give Democrats victory next year.

But if Dowd is right about voters wanting some party — either party — to get the troops out, then the Democrats have a problem: They must reconcile their followers' urge to set a deadline now for quick withdrawal with their congressional leaders' calculation that they can't enact a deadline over Bush's veto power without first getting some Republicans to sign on.

That conflict is building strains in the Democratic Party. And Petraeus' presentation put more pressure on that fault line.

The presidential campaign of Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., for example, hit rival Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., on Tuesday for not committing to vote for a fixed, enforceable timetable for withdrawal.

GOP Speak: "Voter Fraud" is Code for Let's Stop Black & Poor Folk from Voting

If you click on the link in this entry's title, you can read a great piece from the McClatchy Newspapers about the GOP efforts to stop minorities and poor people from casting ballots. They did this by having politically appointed lawyers at the Department of Justice bring charges of "voter fraud" against organizations trying to register minorities and poor people as voters; by pushing for adoption of voter identification requirements such as photo ids; by trying to influence the Federal Election Assistance Commission in conclusions it reached about such registeration requirements; and by trying to get rid of one of the Republican commissioners.

This article is interesting for two reasons. The first is that the article comes right out and states that the Republican operatives in the Justice Department were interested in suppressing voting by minorities and the poor. Usually mainstream media outlets are two scared of the right-wing noise machine to be so straight up in their reporting. The second is that it illustrates that progressive complaining about these tactics is beginning to influence how the media reports this story. Both are significant developments and long overdue.

Media Starts Talking About Cost of War

McClatchy News Bureau in Washington has a story out today about how the war is soon going to cost over 500 billion. According to the story this is about 10 times what Bubble-Boy and his band of idiots predicated this war would cost when he began it. In fact, again according to the article, he got rid of an economic advisor, Lawrence Lindsay, after Lindsay said that the war would cost around 200 billion.

What Democrats should start pointing out to people is that Bush and his radical right-wing followers would never spend that much money to help Americans. They would never spend it for health care, or for education, or to fight poverty, or for mass transit so we aren't dependent on foreign oil, no, not for things that help Americans. But they will gladly spend money to fight a a war to supposedly help the Iraqis build a democratic government.

Three thousand lives, 500 billion dollars, and no end in sight. If you know any Bush supporters, ask them if this war has been worth it.

Bush Administration Doesn't Count Car Bombings in Promoting Surge Success

Okay, we shouldn't be surprised anymore. After all, this is the Bush Administration and when it comes to Iraq, it is simply incapable of telling the truth. Even given that standard, however, this is one for the books. The McClatchy News service is reporting that when the Bush administration claims that its Iraq surge is working because civilian deaths are going down, it turns out that they are not counting fatalities resulting from car bombs. Unfortunately for Iraqi civilans in Baghdad, and for the administration's credibility, car bombs are one of the main reasons why Iraqi civilians die.

Rove Wants a Partisan Justice Department

McClatchy News ran a story that pointed out that the replacement attorneys for the fired U.S. Attorneys have partisan records and were part of a Karl Rove plan to politicize the Justice Department. His plan was to use so-called "voter fraud" cases to intimidate groups that were registering poor people and minorities as voters. The following is a quote from the story that you can read by clicking on the link in this entry's title:

Last April, while the Justice Department and the White House were planning the firings, Rove gave a speech in Washington to the Republican National Lawyers Association. He ticked off 11 states that he said could be pivotal in 2008. Bush has appointed new U.S. attorneys in nine of them since 2005: Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico. U.S. attorneys in the latter four were among those fired.

Since the black-robed coup of 2000 the Bush Justice Department, (and isn't that an oxymoron), has pushed such things as voter identification laws, redistricting, and has worked to push out experienced civil rights attorneys and replaced them with conservative ideologues. Our suspicion is that Rove was scared by the closeness of the vote in Florida, realized that his candidate didn't win that election honestly, and wanted to make sure it never happened again. His tool was going to be the U.S. Justice Department. His aim was to make sure that a Republican president was elected in 2008.

Right now, Karl Rove needs a Republican victory in 2008 or else he is going to be remembered as the man who lost the Congress and the Presidency for the GOP. This is not how he wants to be remembered when he leaves politics. Of course, like with everything else this gang touches, the plan to replace the U.S. Attorneys failed because of incompetence.