Hillary Disparages Democratic Activism
A week after Obama's "Bittergate" and in the spirit of equanimity, it is now Hillary's turn.
A previously unrevelaed audio tape secured by our friend, colleague, journalist and blogger Celeste Fremon, captures Clinton telling a small group of funders that her real problem is... Democrats! You know, that pesky "activist base" who are relentless in taking their rights seriously and who actually show up to caucus!
Read and listen to the whole thing here.
April 18th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
It is nice to see in the reporting of this story that Ms. Fremon contacted the Clinton camp for a response.
April 18th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
John Edwards must be wondering what he would be doing right now if Iowans knew that Barack Obama was a member and huge donor to a flaky, paranoid, racist church, and that he counted that church’s demented pastor as his mentor and friend.
April 18th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Way to go Rosedog!
April 18th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Keep trying bob. McCain’s going down. Your boys have totally screwed up REAL SHIT !!!! People are dead because of their delusions and incompetence. But keep blowing smoke out of your ass. It’s all you chumps have left.
April 18th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Hillary was bullshitting us and pandering to grassroots Democratic activists to secure the nomination while saying “Screw ‘em!” behind their backs ??? Who knew ??? Everything about her campaign – from Mark Penn at the head to her ongoing involvement with the DLC suggested otherwise.
April 18th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
!!!
I think I touched another nerve.
A month ago I thought Obama would be a formidable candidate. Probably unbeatable.
What a difference a month makes. Now I’m thankful HRC is so far in the hole she can’t recover without destroying her Party.
April 18th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Bob – you’re lame. It’s really that simple. Don’t flatter yourself.
April 18th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
I’m going to post Bill Bradley’s comment on this before he even has a chance to:
“Incidentally, it is not my impression that Obama has been winning most of the caucuses because of MoveOn.org, much less folks who didn’t want to go into Afghanistan to take down the Taliban after 9/11. Texas, for example, where Obama won big, had a record 1.1 million people participating in the Democratic caucuses.”
‘Cuz I’m “catholic” (small c.)
April 18th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Sure I’m lame. But I am relieved and happy that the opposition has is opting for disater.
April 18th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
I’m relieved and happy about this electoral cycle as well. And I see myself getting a lot happier we go after McSame. Happiness is busting out all over.
April 18th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Barrack would make a much better candidate in 2012, with more political experience and distance from some of these characters in his past. and their influence on his political perspective.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, there is no viable alternative at this point. Shooting, chugging, conniving and unauthentic Hillary has pretty much snipered herself.
April 18th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
And McCain would have made a much better candidate in 2000. Unfortunately for the GOP – and fortunately for Obama – it’s 2008. And Obama’s the guy who’s speaking to what people are “bitter” about.
April 18th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Ironically, he’s also the best at speaking to what folks are “hopeful” about.
April 18th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
I guess it’s Celeste’s turn to be attacked for a “secret” audio tape on a candidate as was Mayhill Fowler.
April 18th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Oh, this is wonderful. Celeste Fremon did what I was thinking about back on the “bittergate” thread: instead of getting testy and ugly with Ms. Fowler, verify what Obama said and if it was true, and then turn the question back on Clinton and find out what she might be saying in front of her donors.
That Fremon, what a smart person!
April 18th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Here is a summary (though not exactly a fair one) of the evidence for the claim of MoveOn being opposed to the invasion of Afghanistan:
http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york200506241146.asp
The general tone of the petition and its predecessors was, Focus on justice, not revenge. These petitions turned out to be weirdly prophetic, didn’t they? Perhaps more than anything else, it was the indiscriminately vindictive reactions that backfired. Hapless goatherds got corralled into Guantanamo courtesy of U.S.-paid bounty hunters; but bin Laden and Zawahiri got away. And that started us on a road that led to Abu Ghraib. America ended up looking like a vengeful, blundering idiot.
Not exactly our finest hour as a nation. And this hour is dragging on — U.S. “enemy combatant” prisoners being repatriated to Afghanistan or in U.S. prisons in Afghanistan, never having gone up to a military tribunal while incarcerated by the U.S., are being tried on charges that are simply handed to the Afghanistan courts by the U.S., are found guilty (sometimes within hours, and with no examination of evidence, where there is any), and sentenced to long prison terms — very possibly in prisons that make Guantanamo look like a Sunday afternoon picnic.
From this
http://tinyurl.com/2e8dyh
it appears that it wasn’t just hapless goatherds who got swept up, but also a guy who actually fought the Taliban. He died of cancer at Guantanamo, still out of contact with his family, still not exonerated, still under charges that could quite easily have been dropped, if there had been something like due process.
“In Guantánamo, Mujahid persistently maintained that he had been working for the government of Hamid Karzai, and the authorities’ alleged inability to find witnesses requested by him was demonstrated as a sham in June 2006, when, in the space of 72 hours, the journalist Declan Walsh located three witnesses whom the authorities claimed to have been unable to contact: one was working in Washington DC, another was working for the Karzai government in Kabul, and the third was working for the provincial government in Gardez. All three were able to verify his story.”
Justice. Moderation. Hillary’s bashing people who called for this?
April 19th, 2008 at 4:57 am
“Our leaders are under tremendous pressure to act in the aftermath of the terrible events of Sept. 11th. We the undersigned support justice, not escalating violence, which would only play into the terrorists’ hands.”
-Wes Boyd and Joan Blades
It depends what the definition of “escalating violence” means.
April 19th, 2008 at 6:42 am
Did Wes and Joan issue a similar statement after the first attack on the Towers?
Well, if they did or didn’t, the Clintons seemed to take their approach in any case. How did that work out for us?
April 19th, 2008 at 7:19 am
Then of course one has to understand “We the undersigned” and “We who believe America deserved it” are, for the most part, one and the same.
On a similar note, what is an admitted terrorist, William Ayers, doing in one of our ‘Higher Education’ Institutes instructing our children? Why is he not in one of our “Lower Institutions’ called death row?
Oh, I forgot. This would be cruel and unusual punishment……..just like war. Freaking insane. Us and him, but mostly us.
April 19th, 2008 at 7:23 am
I’m an Obama partisan and not terribly fond of Clinton. Now that I have that bias out of the way, there is a huge substantive difference between these two statements.
On the one hand Obama was attempting to diagnose the political and economic ills of the working class, at the hands, by implication, of the elite.
Clinton instead disparages democracy by disparaging the “activist” base, which in translation here, just means people getting involved: Filthy, chaotic, and, worst of all, uncontrollable, people She’s a royalist by nature.
In her defense, this is an old argument, that isn’t totally off base, but she is misapplying it. Normally the “activist” base represents a sliver of the left (or right) who are highly motivated in support of very ideological candidates. Ok, fine. But this is not the case here. Obama is a slightly left-of-center (maybe not even that) candidate who refuses to respect some of our more insipid political practices.
But people are turning out for him because they are excited, not because he is an ideologue. Like I have said before, it’s the Ventura effect. People are dying for someone who has real independence and real backbone.
That’s Obama, and Hillary’s comments are just more Clinton half-lying.
April 19th, 2008 at 7:26 am
That’s William Ayers, the weater’person’.
Want more of this madness? Vote for a democrat.
April 19th, 2008 at 7:28 am
I dreamed last night that Al Gore and John Edwards called a joint press conference on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary and endorsed Obama.
Not too late to make it come true.
April 19th, 2008 at 7:33 am
Easy lessons in trolling:
1) Make provocative claim, wrapped in silliness obvious to everyone
2) Elicit annoyed reaction from another participant on the thread, telling you to get lost
3) Claim that this vindicates 1) by saying “I think I touched a nerve there!”
4) Repeat steps 1-3
5) Do not ever reconsider the actual content of 1) in light of other arguments or universal rejection of 1)
6) Whine about censorship if someone tells you where to go, revealing previously undiscovered depths of self-pity
This tutorial has been brought to you by Easy Lessons in Trolling Inc.
April 19th, 2008 at 7:39 am
I have never whined about censorship.
Lesson Seven in trolling. Post creepy comments by the favored candidate’s wife.
“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”
Jcummings had thoughts on the previous thread about wacko Left cults.
April 19th, 2008 at 7:44 am
That would be “weather’person’, to be grammatically, not airheaded politically, correct of course.
April 19th, 2008 at 7:46 am
I prefer “persons of weather.”
April 19th, 2008 at 8:12 am
Excellent work, bob, but you are still showing some self-awareness. Removing this will be part of a future tutorial.
April 19th, 2008 at 9:05 am
“but you are still showing some self-awareness”
Unlike, of course, your companion wingnut.
I will say bob, I’ve always appreciated your ability to create ironic distance between the sum of your parts.
April 19th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Damn Bob, I thought we had the playground all to ourselves this morning. Time to pick up our balls and go home I guess.
I don’t know about you, but reg’s articulate response to my inquiry of terrorist rehabilitation experiments going on in our schools, has bloodied me.
April 19th, 2008 at 9:43 am
I wasn’t responding to your “inquiry of terrorist rehab experiments going on in our schools” because that’s nutty stuff I’m not interested in. For the record, I don’t have much respect for academia, so you’re not hitting at anything close to my heart here. I was responding to your apparently earnest weirdness. Although that last attempt at humor is definitely an encouraging step in the direction of something approximating mental health.
April 19th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Rick Sloan, communications director for the International Association of Machinists as Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) has issued a briefing book on the significance of the Weather Underground to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. This according to HuffPo (which has clearly become the most fabulous, ginormous and impactful source of popcorn news in the entire cosmos at this juncture in human history – not to disparage space aliens, who I’m looking forward to reading about there sooner rather than later.) The only thing one can say is to echo Barack, in that Hillary and her campaign have clearly learned lessons from the incessant right-wing attack machine that she has, in fact, faced. And that they’ve been all of the wrong ones. In the light of this and of Hillary’s “Weather Underground” moment Wednesday night, I want to officially apologize to Michael Balter for any tepidly kind things I’ve ever said about the woman. I’d still rather have her as President than George Bush, but at this point I detest her almost as much. Mostly because I guess I expected a little more and because she, if anyone, should know better.
April 19th, 2008 at 10:26 am
“I will say bob, I’ve always appreciated your ability to create ironic distance between the sum of your parts.”
Wow. Thank you, reg. You make me sound complex and — dare I say it? — nuanced.
April 19th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Saturday morning wanking.
April 19th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Go have a latte, bob and enjoy the day…
April 19th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Sergio – some of us like chatting about these things, even if it’s a bit silly sometimes. You seem to not like it. So, um, go do something else.
April 19th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Dan O,
Actually I think Sérgio was telling us what he is doing . . .
TMI
April 19th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Why don’t you want to play with us Serge? We want hurt you………physically anyway?
April 19th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Randy, don’t get excited by this story on a CNN reporter.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Obviously it’s given you a case of the vapors. As for me the only CNN reportes who excite are Monita Rajpaul, Jennifer Eccleston, Isha Sesay and Zain Verjee.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
“CNN personality Richard Quest was busted in Central Park early yesterday with some drugs in his pocket, a rope around his neck that was tied to his genitals, and a sex toy in his boot, law-enforcement sources said.”
Looks like the giraffe, the midget and the gerbil escaped, taking the large mirror, the video recorder and the matzo balls with them.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Wow, I don’t know that all that other stuff is exactly, well, ON-POINT here. In fact, it totally is not. As I would have pointed out by now had it occurred on New West Notes.
Let me repurpose this post from an earlier thread on the origins of what I call “Bittergate,” as regards NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen expressing significant surprise that Time Magazine thinks that private fundraisers are off the record. To credentialed journalists, that is. Obviously not supporters who record the private musings of pols and release them on the Internet per their whims.
We are emerging into the era of Pirate Media. As Agent Fox Mulder put it many times on The X-Files: “Trust no one.”
Bill Bradley Says:
April 19th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Yes, oddly enough, haha, another journalist who covers politicians all the time thinks the private fundraisers are off the record to journalists.
Which, in fact, is the case.
We are now in the age of Pirate Media. People taking advantage of access accorded them as ACTIVIST and FINANCIAL supporters of politicians, who then turn around and produce their private musings for the public to see on the Internet.
As my role model Fox Mulder put it: “Trust no one.â€
>Jay Rosen Says:
April 16th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Hi everyone. I asked Time Magazine’s Jay Newton-Small why she called Mayhill Fowler’s report a “leak. †To me it’s a report from someone who was there. I just thought it was a strange way to talk about the post. Today she wrote about it at Swampland…
Traditionally fundraisers have been closed to press and off the record.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Things change. There was a time when Americans, in overwhelming numbers, had never even heard a speech by the President. Go figure.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Yes, things change when people take advantage of their access and burn campaigns.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
The campaigns will obviously adjust. And that will be a decidedly mixed bag, like most “progress.”
April 19th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
The campaigns will obvious adjust.
To the egregious behavior of their supporters.
Real or otherwise.
April 19th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Damn.
“Gallup Poll Daily tracking shows that Hillary Clinton now receives 46% of the support of Democrats nationally, compared to 45% for Barack Obama, marking the first time Obama has not led in Gallup’s daily tracking since March 18-20.”
“These results are based on interviewing conducted April 16-18, including two days of interviewing after the contentious Wednesday night debate in Philadelphia and the media focus that followed. Support for Hillary Clinton has been significantly higher in both of these post-debate nights of interviewing than in recent weeks.”
Damn that George Stephanopolous.
April 19th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Bill – I think that there’s a contradiction in your objections. While a candidate or campaign consultants can put a conversation with a reporter, or quotes at an event, “off the record” for professional reporters, there’s no way that citizens in general can be prevented from reporting what they hear. If Fowler were not an “OTB” amateur journalist of some sort but had simply come to you with a recording, made with no attempt to conceal it, that contained some newsworthy comments (which, frankly, I’m not sure these were, but what do I know) would you refuse to report them. I’m not sure what’s “egregious” other than a subjective judgement about manners. Personally, I don’t consider a fundraising event to be some sort of moment like, say, a private comment among friends that shouldn’t be subject to intense public scrutiny as indicative of deep and serious thoughts. Presumably with funders, the candidate is in their “public” mode and shouldn’t be saying things that might be interpreted as disparaging anymore than they would want stuff like that recorded in a debate. I don’t think what Obama said is a big deal, although it was obviously very off-the-cuff shorthand, and apparently neither do most Rust Belt types who aren’t being prodded by media or campaign strategists. Hillary’s comments are, in fact, more of a deliberate put-down – and accusation of intimidation – of a core Democratic constituency. I think it’s more damaging to her candidacy. It’s as though Obama were making remarks dismissing angry women supporting Hillary, or some such. His analysis of voters who are torn between Democrats and Republicans over social issues is probably arguable in it’s overgeneralization, but it was clear he was empathizing and wanting to connect, not treatiing them like they were the enemy and destroying his hopes for the Presidency. Certainly nothing like Hillary’s ’95 “Screw them!” remark.
April 19th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Rick Sloan’s memo, via ABC News (“We Distort, You Decide”). He helps Rove tie Obama all the way back to … “Nikita Kruchev”. Which I think lends a charmingly sophomoric tone to the whole thing.
http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/What_Is_Rove_Up_To.pdf
April 19th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Sloan’s memo has a dead-end link for McCarthy’s NRO piece. Here’s a more useful one:
http://tinyurl.com/6yaf6q
McCarthy writes “[Michelle Obama's] college thesis, which Princeton tried to keep under lock and key, testifies to a race-obsessed worldview….”
Ah, that leftist Ivory Tower, so hypocritical — always shielding “terrorists” like Ayers under the “ethic” of academic freedom, while engaging in partisan censorship whenever it feels like it. Yeah, except … maybe Princeton is just trying to protect a manuscript?
This article
“Michelle Obama thesis was on racial divide”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8642.html
provides pointers to the full text of Michelle Obama’s senior thesis. Did Ressner have to smuggle out a photocopy, bribe a Princeton librarian? No. If you read the first lines of both page 1 and page 2 of Ressner’s article, you learn that he got the thesis copy from OBAMA’S CAMPAIGN. And not as a leak, either.
For a fuller story on this “censorship”:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/thesis.asp
As for the racial attitudes supposedly conveyed in Michelle Obama’s thesis (which some rightwing bloggers are calling “militant racism”), well … how about this,
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/stories/2008/04/12/roommate_0413.html
for balance: when the mother of one of Michelle Obama’s roommates at Princeton discovered Michelle was black, she tried to get her daughter moved. (Yes, this was in the mid-80s!) Gee, I guess Michelle was just delusional or something, imagining prejudice among the students and faculty that couldn’t possible have existed. Always pulling the race card, those blacks. Even after all WE did for them with AA.
This mother has since had to deal with her daughter being a lesbian. God, I feel so mean chuckling over that. She still draws the line at interracial marriage.
April 20th, 2008 at 3:11 am
When Obama explains the cultural, religious, and ideological traits of the working classes as epiphenomena of material conditions, it doesn’t sound Marxian at all.
Nope.
April 20th, 2008 at 6:03 am
So now its a vast left wing conspiracy!
And as for Quests ropetrick..more about that in this clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aevIOF4UKKg
April 20th, 2008 at 9:06 am
I’m grateful that Marc made a post on Rodham-Clinton without including another picture of her.
April 20th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Jim R asks: “How did that work out for us?”
As regards the successful prosecution of the fist WTC bombers in U.S. courts.
Spectacularly.
There were no attacks on the U.S. for another eight years. That’s longer than the Bush team’s record, so far.
More important, it didn’t require invading countries–creating countless new terrorists and handing the region to Iran.
Plus, it didn’t break the bank. We paid for it out of pocket…
April 21st, 2008 at 6:12 am
“Two years ago a 3,000-word political statement, the Euston manifesto, argued that much of the left had suffered a theoretical collapse and a collapse of sensibility. In the words of Nick Cohen’s bestseller, the left had “lost its way”. We called for a realignment of progressive politics.”
Thought you folks might be interested in this.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/alan_johnson/2008/04/the_euston_moment.html
April 22nd, 2008 at 5:30 am
Hmm. Guess not.
April 22nd, 2008 at 9:29 am
The Euston Manifesto was like the cliché about urinating in a blue serge suit: it leaves you with a warm feeling, but no one notices.
April 22nd, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Not the red menace!
Boy someone had to dig and dust that one off.
And if we’re gonna talk about wives, let’s not talk about the pill popping or looting from a non-profit. because
Or let’s not have an intellegent conversation about being black in a America, because those
ungrateful, lazy, violent thugs have nothing to be angry about when we’ve done so much for them. Like voting against MLK Day, why celebrate that Commie? J Edgar Hoover was right, now look at the country filled with angry black preachers!
You don’t have to care about class issues and equality and be a Marxist. Really Bob, I’d like to introduce you to the 21st century.
April 22nd, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Okay. Let’s not.