Not much impressing going on today...
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/03/26/the-power-of-hillary-s-purse.aspx The Power of Hillary's Purse
Tons has been written about how Obama's legion of small donors have trumped Hillary's comparably small coterie of max contributors. But Hillary's old-style method of fundraising does have one advantage: let's call it buckraking blackmail.
A few weeks ago, the NYT reported that Hillary fundraisers from Michigan and Florida were pressuring the DNC to seat their state's delegations or they'd stop giving big bucks to the DNC. Now, a bunch of Hillary fundraisers have written a letter to Nancy Pelosi criticizing her for saying that superdelegates should support the pledged delegates winner and threatening:
We have been strong supporters of the DCCC. We therefore urge you to clarify your position on super-delegates and reflect in your comments a more open view to the optional independent actions of each of the delegates at the National Convention in August. We appreciate your activities in support of the Democratic Party and your leadership role in the Party and
hope you will be responsive to some of your major enthusiastic supporters.
Or, to put it in less stilted terms: That's a nice little campaign committee you've got there, Pelosi. It'd be a shame if something happened to it. I have a hard time imagining the little old lady who sent Obama the money order for $3.01 along with a verse of scripture making that sort of threat.
--Jason Zengerle
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http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/03/this_is_disgusting_clintons_mc.php
This is disgusting (Clintons, McPeak, American Spectator)
26 Mar 2008 01:21 am
Watching from 12 time zones away, I've tried to stay out of campaign blow-by-blow.
But if, as I assume is true based on Marc Ambinder's report, the Hillary Clinton campaign is circulating a hit job from the American Spectator, this is simply disgusting. (Marc has just confirmed to me that indeed the article came in an on-the-record email from Phil Singer, the Clinton campaign spokesman.)
That the Clinton family would dignify the American Spectator, of all publications, is astonishing to anyone who was alive in the 1990s.
That they would bless this attempt to paint Merrill McPeak as an anti-Semite is grotesque.
I doubt that the author of the hit job ever bothered to speak with or interview McPeak. I have done so many times, during and after his days as Air Force chief of staff (which he was during the first Gulf War). People can agree or disagree with McPeak's foreign policy or his record at the Pentagon -- but that's not what we're talking about here. Any attempt to fish out a quote that will banish him as a bigot is exactly as fair and accurate as depicting Bill Clinton as being personally a racist based on his "fairy tale" and "Jesse Jackson" comments around the time of the South Carolina primary. I say this having heard McPeak lay out his views, starting while the Gulf War was underway 17 years ago, about how to maintain general stability, US interests, and Israeli security in the Middle East.
McPeak may have gone too far in saying that Bill Clinton's earlier comments (that it would be "a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country" -- namely, Hillary Clinton and John McCain) amounted to "McCarthyism." But that's a pretty fair description of this latest round. I don't like attempts to stifle argument when they occur in China, and I don't like this in the United States.
I can easily believe that the Spectator would publish such an article. That the Clinton team would circulate it I'm still trying to deal with.
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