Hillary Clinton is employing some of the best campaign strategists in the country, and they're no fools. They can do math, and they know for a fact, just like anyone else who's paying attention, that the only way Hillary can possibly win the Democratic nomination is by winning the super delegates.

So right now, Hillary's target voter is the super delegate, not the average joe schmoe in Indiana or North Carolina (although she has people targeting them as well, she's just not spending as much time or money on them) And her strategists know that the primary concern of the super delegates is to beat the Republicans.

So her message right now is that she has a better chance of beating McCain than Obama does. That's why the whole thing about reverend Evil came to light, and that's why suddenly there are a few national polls that put her ahead of McCain.

Anybody who thinks Obama is "unelectable" has fallen for Hillary's trick, as has anybody who thinks she can beat McCain. The fact of the matter is that Obama has a lot more supporters than Hillary does.

Oh and remember when Hillary ran the 3 AM phone call ad? She was trying to paint herself as an experience leader. How do you think that will play out against McCain? He's a Viet Nam veteran! I have no doubt that the vast majority of Americans would rather have him answering the 3 AM phone call than her. And if she tried to paint McCain as a warmonger, that wouldn't work either, because she voted in favor of all the same warmongering bills that he did. Plus McCain would have a huge advantage in the contest simply because 50% of Americans already believe Hilary is Satan incarnate, whereas the other 50% believe Obama is the second coming of Jesus (except he doesn't cling to religion)

Hillary doesn't have as many supporters as Obama and she won't win the general election against McCain. She's paying the hand she's been dealt as well as it could be played, but ultimately it's just a pair of fours.

Hillary Clinton is employing some of the best campaign strategists in the country, and they're no fools. They can do math, and they know for a fact, just like anyone else who's paying attention, that the only way Hillary can possibly win the Democratic nomination is by winning the super delegates.

So right now, Hillary's target voter is the super delegate, not the average joe schmoe in Indiana or North Carolina (although she has people targeting them as well, she's just not spending as much time or money on them) And her strategists know that the primary concern of the super delegates is to beat the Republicans.

So her message right now is that she has a better chance of beating McCain than Obama does. That's why the whole thing about reverend Evil came to light, and that's why suddenly there are a few national polls that put her ahead of McCain.

Anybody who thinks Obama is "unelectable" has fallen for Hillary's trick, as has anybody who thinks she can beat McCain. The fact of the matter is that Obama has a lot more supporters than Hillary does.

Oh and remember when Hillary ran the 3 AM phone call ad? She was trying to paint herself as an experience leader. How do you think that will play out against McCain? He's a Viet Nam veteran! I have no doubt that the vast majority of Americans would rather have him answering the 3 AM phone call than her. And if she tried to paint McCain as a warmonger, that wouldn't work either, because she voted in favor of all the same warmongering bills that he did. Plus McCain would have a huge advantage in the contest simply because 50% of Americans already believe Hilary is Satan incarnate, whereas the other 50% believe Obama is the second coming of Jesus (except he doesn't cling to religion)

Hillary doesn't have as many supporters as Obama and she won't win the general election against McCain.

Nobody ever claimed the Clintons were stupid political animals. They are devious, sneaky, and never quit, ever.

The Daily Show mentioned that she financed Reverend Wright's next 5 trips to Africa or some such nonsense before he went on his media circus weekend.

Former journalist Sidney Blumenthal has been widely credited with coining the term "vast right-wing conspiracy" used by Hillary Clinton in 1998 to describe the alliance of conservative media, think tanks, and political operatives that sought to destroy the Clinton White House where he worked as a high-level aide. A decade later, and now acting as a senior campaign advisor to Senator Clinton, Blumenthal is exploiting that same right-wing network to attack and discredit Barack Obama. And he's not hesitating to use the same sort of guilt-by-association tactics that have been the hallmark of the political right dating back to the McCarthy era.

Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obama's character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications. But they aren't being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address. Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers -- including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers -- in what is an obvious attempt to create an echo chamber that reverberates among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists.

But, rather remarkably for such a self-professed liberal operative like Blumenthal, a staggering number of the anti-Obama attacks he circulates derive from highly-ideological and militant right-wing sources such as the misnamed Accuracy in Media (AIM), The Weekly Standard, City Journal, The American Conservative, and The National Review.

To cite just one recent example, Blumenthal circulated an article taken from the fervently hard-right AIM website on February 18 entitled, "Obama's Communist Mentor" by Cliff Kincaid. Kincaid is a right-wing writer and activist, a longtime critic of the United Nations, whose group, America's Survival, has been funded by foundations controlled by conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife, the same millionaire who helped fund attacks on the Clintons during their White House years. Scaife also funds AIM, the right-wing media "watchdog" group.

The Kincaid article that Blumenthal circulated sought to discredit Obama by linking him to an African-American poet and writer whom Obama knew while he was in high school in Hawaii. That writer, Frank Marshall Davis, was, Kincaid wrote, a member of the Communist Party. Supported by no tangible evidence, Kincaid claimed that Obama considered his relationship to Davis to be "almost like a son." In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote about meeting, during his teenage years, a writer named "Frank" who "had some modest notoriety once" and with whom he occasionally discussed poetry and politics. From this snippet, Kincaid weaves an incredulous tale that turns Davis into Obama's "mentor."

Kincaid's piece had been previously circulating within the right-wing blogosphere, but Blumenthal sought to inject the story into more respectable opinion circles by amplifying it in his email blast.

In the same piece, Kincaid, expanding his guilt-by-association tactics, also wrote that Obama "came into contact with more far-left political forces," including former Weather Underground member William Ayers. Until a few weeks ago, Obama's tangential connection with Ayers -- whose 1960s anti-war terrorism occurred when Obama was in grade school -- was echoing among right-wing bloggers.

Some Clinton supporters who also knew about Ayers have been discreetly trying to catapult the story out of the right-wing sandbox into the wider mainstream media. On April 9, Fox News' Sean Hannity interviewed fellow right-winger Karl Rove, who raised the Ayers-Obama connection. The next day, ABC News reporter Jake Tapper wrote about Ayers in his Political Punch blog. The following week, on his radio show, Hannity suggested to his guest, George Stephanopoulos, that he ask Obama about his relationship with Ayers at the upcoming Philadelphia presidential debate. Stephanopoulos, who was Bill Clinton's press secretary, replied, "Well, I'm taking notes." The following night during the April 16 nationally televised Presidential debate, Stephanopoulos dutifully asked Obama about Ayers, who is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/sidney-blumenthal-uses-fo_b_99695.html

Comment on Hillary's disgusting tactics:

The War Party (i.e., McCain/Clinton) has a reliable strategy when faced with a rising political figure who threatens their monopoly on American politics, one that is time-tested and invariably successful: when all else fails, they bring out the Smear Bund.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright is really a piece of work, and one is at a loss of what else to say about him, except that anyone who believes that the US government is responsible for the AIDS epidemic is certifiable, period. It matters not that some of his statements about US foreign policy being the moral equivalent of terrorism are undeniably true: because, in short, he doesn't matter. After all, he isn't running for the highest office in the land: Obama is. And if anyone on God's green earth is the complete antipode of Obama – in his temperament and demeanor, as well as his politics – then surely it is Wright.

This fact underscores the essence of the Smear Bund's methodology: the politics of distraction. Look over here, not over there! Forget about the war that is killing our soldiers, and threatening to start multiple conflicts with Iran, Syria, and various Lebanese factions – just remember that Rev. Wright once said "Goddamn America."

The really artful aspect of all this is the method of substitution occurring right before our eyes: they can't run against Obama, so they're running against Wright. Sure, they aren't the same person, but, you know, all those black people look – and think – alike. That, at any rate, is the crude racist assumption at the heart of the Smear Bund's strategy. The anti-Obama cabal is hoping the American people will look at these two wildly disparate individuals and perceive them as melting into each other.

Divert, distract, demonize – that's the strategic vision of the War Party. As long as we're talking about the Rev. Wright, we don't get to talk about the war, including the one to come with Iran. Let there be no doubt: it's Obama's foreign policy "deviationism" that has the Establishment running scared, and it's the neocons who are in the vanguard of the smear campaign.

They want desperately to engage Obama on this issue, because their whole strategy is meant to culminate in raising the specter of black anti-Semitism. That's what all this Wright-Farrakhan-"black extremist" brouhaha is about: they don't dare say that Obama is an anti-Semite, at this point. What they do say, however, is that he hangs out with anti-Semites. As Atlantic blogger Matt Yglesias put it:

"First Obama was an anti-Semite because Zbigniew Brzezinski is an anti-Semite. Then Obama was an anti-semite because Robert Malley is an anti-semite. And now according to [Commentary's Noah] Pollak it's Samantha Power who's tainted by Jew-hatred."


With these folks, it always comes back to charges of "racism" and "extremism." Ron Paul = David Duke, and Obama = Farrakhan. And it always, always, always comes back to Israel.

Hillary Clinton, as far as the War Party is concerned, is the "safe" candidate: she came through for them with her recent remark that Iran ought to be "obliterated," while we must cover Israel – and unnamed other countries in the region – with our nuclear shield. She doesn't care what she has to do in order to win, and if that means making Obama unelectable – well then, so be it. Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol, Richard Mellon Scaife, Sean Hannity – these are her new allies. Who's next – Norman Podhoretz? What more confirmation do we need of my contention that both political parties in America are merely the "left" and "right" wings of the War Party?

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12769

Excellent post, Guido :nice:

My faith in Democracy is fading even more than it was before... we'll see how this all plays out.

Brilliant article. I'm spamming it out today.