You misunderstand. I am not calling Obama a thug. He is not that style of “player.” Hillary is.
Obama, I see more as the smooth swing player with a sweet jump shot and a quick step to the basket. 
Oops, sorry.
Nice!
And, I agree.
We understand that Clinton has a lot of character flaws and we accept the fact that she’s not perfect. The question we have is why Obama supporters can’t see the same things are true about Barack Obama.
We keep hearing how Obama is a wonderful person who would never stoop to character assassination. Well somebody is stooping to it - and Obama has come out on top. Six months ago, there were plenty of Democrats who admired both Obama and Clinton. Now she’s considered the epitome of evil. That didn’t just happen; somebody’s been running a whispering campaign for the last six months to destroy Clinton’s public image. And as Clinton has fallen, Obama has risen.
I’d like to see a cite for a single example of “character assassination” from Obama that comes close to the crud from Clinton.
Hillary Clinton is the Bill Laimbeer of politics. :eek:
Most of Hillary’s wounds are self-inflicted. Any damage he did to her pales in comparison to what she did to herself.
For me, it was many things. None by themselves made me despise her, but taken together and over time I’ve gone from ambivalence to outright scorn for her. There was the way she carpetbagged her way into the Senate, her first elected office. There was the vote to authorize Bush’s war, and I’ll never believe her presidential ambitions did not play a part. There was throwing Kerry under the bus for his blown joke about being stuck in Iraq. There’s her smugness in the early debates and The Cackle. There was her statements about race and gender should not play a part in the campaign, even though she frequently spices her campaign speeches about some old bat that tells her that they wanted to live long enough to vote for a woman president. There was her statement “this is the fun part” when she kicked off the negative campaign. There was Bill trying to paint Obama as Jesse Jackson. There was the “as far as I know” coyness when asked if Obama was a Muslim. There was her claiming that everything that she did since law school was presidential-qualifying experience, and that she played a part in everything good that her husband did in office. There was her stating that she and McCain have “passed the commander in chief threshold” and perhaps not Obama. There was her bringing up Obama’s Weathermen acquaintance (but not the three Weathermen that her husband pardoned). When someone in her campaign does something she needs to apologize for, she tempers it by saying that neither side should be doing it. And now here she is, doing her best to torpedo Obama’s chances in 2008 to increase her own in 2012. I’m sure I left plenty out, but that’s what comes to mind first.
Is it that hard to believe that shes done this to herself? Watching her run her campaign straight out of the Rove playbook is what took her from admired to despised, i don’t need anyone whispering to me what i can plainly see.
Have you even looked at the facts? Clinton’s campaign is deeply, deeply in debt. She’s borrowing like the current administration is borrowing to keep Iraq afloat. Meanwhile Obama’s campaign is financially rock solid with only a few unpaid debts, if any at this point.
Setting aside character traits, I don’t see how you can look at the two campaigns and conclude that they’re the same. Even had Clinton been nothing but positive, pleasant, and inspiring ever since the primaries started, I still don’t want her in a position where she can squander that kind of money. At least in the legislation, she’s got other Senators to balance her.
All of which is my point. If Hillary Clinton is the thug of this campaign why is she looking so bruised and beaten up and Barack Obama doesn’t have a mark on him? If Clinton is the character assassin, why is it her character that’s lying dead on the floor with all the bullet holes in it?
The Karl Rove handbook doesn’t say the candidate attacks his or her opponent. It says the candidate has plausibly deniable surrogates attack his or her opponent while the candidate claims to deplore the rancor.
I won’t deny that Clinton’s campaign is in a much worse financial situation. But I don’t see what that has to do with this debate. Obama’s the front runner and the smart money follows the numbers.
That would only hold true if he only had the money after he had the numbers. That’s not what happened. Hillary had the money in the beginning and squandered it, leaving herself nothing to work with after Super Tuesday, thinking (more evidence of her arrogance) that she’d have the whole thing wrapped up by then. But even when she was still considered the front runner, he out-raised her by more than 2:1. Cite.
Obama was in a better financial position before he became the frontrunner. He has a better ground game and a better organization.
No, it has everything to do with why I don’t like her now. It’s not that she has less money, but she’s using it less efficiently. She’s going deep into debt. Many people probably won’t get paid for their work for her campaign. And why is she continuing to borrow nonexistent cash? To stay in the race, because she feels she has to.
Other candidates, not just for the Democrats but in general, usually have to bow out because they can’t raise the money needed to continue. If Obama hadn’t been able to raise the money he did, he’d most likely have stopped his campaign just like Edwards did. If he’d continued borrowing money and going into debt to stay in the race, he’d be pretty thoroughly lambasted for it, and probably rightly so. But since Clinton’s bought into this notion that she is the star of the Democratic party, she’s making extremely poor financial choices in order to keep going.
It’s her right, of course. She can do what she wants. I just think it reflects poorly on her.
The interesting thing is that if Obama had dropped out early like the other candidates, most of his donations probably would have gone to Clinton and she wouldn’t be in the mess she is now. Of course, she wouldn’t have to be fighting as hard, either. I think a lot of Democrats would still be behind her for the general, because the flaws in her campaign against a strong opponent would never have come to light.
But that isn’t evidence of a whisper campaign. With such a campaign you’d expect a lot of damning surprises: her past dredged up; ‘scandals’ like Whitewater, Swift Boat Veterans, or the Texas Air Guard; or anonymous rumors. The things that have bruised her reputation are around recent campaign events: the Bosnia memory, unpublic tax returns, NAFTA, gun policy, her anecdotes about growing up, her chugging Crown Royal, etc. These are the bruises she has and they’re all from the campaign trail.
A bunch of idiots on the internet yelling and screaming about everything that Clinton does is not a whisper campaign. That’s just the ugly-side of a grassroots campaign, emphasized by the internet.
Sometimes the thug overplays his hand, falls victim to believing his own propaganda. Ceaucescu, Mussolini, etc. Sometimes the bully picks on Clark Kent.
By the way, she would not be the first political “evil genius” to prove short of, well, actual genius. Karl Rove himself presided over – what – the loss of both Houses of Congress and a very unpopular Presidency.
I have been watching the contest with a certain cynical amusement and detachment, but now I take it much more seriously. There is, after all, a real chance Hilary might actually make it to the White House. When I see that that this woman is willing to shred her party to ribbons rather than give up her ambition, I feel cold all over. I can’t help wondering if she’d do the same to the country.
To step back for a moment – while I do think her delusions of destiny could lead her to some pretty party-immolating tactics, and may already have done so – I question whether just the fact of forcing this issue to the Convention is illegitimate or shreds the party. Until fairly recently, Conventions were actually meant to, well, choose the candidate, not anoint one who’s been chosen months ago. I don’t have a dog in the fight of internal Dem-party politics, but the rules are technically (and in their original implementation, were actually) set up to have the Convention be a duke-it-out internal battle, not just a four day pep rally.
I feel honor bound to serve notice that at some indefinite future point, I’m not sure when and I’m not sure what the context will be, I am probably going to steal this quote. 
Good point. Also, superdelegates are part of the vote. This “overturning voters” nonsense would be fine if they went Obama, it seems, to Obama folks if she (as she likely will) has the **lead **in the **popular **vote at that time. Talk about overturning the ‘will’ of the voters. :rolleyes:
The popular vote in North Carolina may well wipe out all her gains in Pennsylvania and then some.
The thing is that Hillary Clinton doesn’t see herself as destroying the Democratic Party. In her view, she’s the one thing that can save the Democrats from defeat.
Here’s the history:
2004 - George Bush beat John Kerry
2000 - George Bush beat Al Gore
1996 - Bill Clinton beat Robert Dole
1992 - Bill Clinton beat George Bush
1988 - George Bush beat Michael Dukakis
1984 - Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale
1980 - Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter
1976 - Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford (a post-Watergate fluke)
1972 - Richard Nixon beat George McGovern
1968 - Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey
1964 - Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater
Hillary Clinton looks back at this record and says “Here’s the ugly truth you have to face. You’ve only got two choices. You can nominate somebody like me or Bill or Lyndon Johnson who will do what it takes to get a Democrat in the Oval Office. Or you can nominate a “nice” Democrat that the Republicans are going to beat. If you nominate Obama he’ll be just another name on the list of Democrats who didn’t get elected President. Democrats need to decide if they want a perfect Democratic nominee or a less-than-perfect Democratic President.”