Author: KcM

Nardi for Obama. | And More.

“Barack Obama began his career in public service helping to restore opportunity to a community that was devastated by a steel plant closing, and he has been fighting for economic fairness ever since.” Sen. Obama picks up another superdelegate endorsement in Ohio Teamsters president Sonny Nardi. According to Ohio’s Buckeye State Blog: “This is a huge deal. Sure, it’s a superdelegate pickup for Barack, but more importantly, it will open the flood gates. Ohio superdelegates leaning for Clinton or Obama are going to be more likely to come out now, because Nardi just gave them cover.“

Update: According to DemConWatch, Sen. Obama also picked up a few more: Overseas superdelegate Connie Borde, PA super Leon Lynch, and Rep. Steve Kagen of WI. And, most importantly (as you’ll see if you scroll down), Sen. Feingold moved further towards Obama, and voted for him last Tuesday. Update 2: AP counts a super switch of +27 for Obama over the past two weeks.

The Court of King James.

Senators Obama and Clinton aren’t the only people sending reinforcements to Ohio. At the trade deadline, Lebron James gets some much-needed help in Ben Wallace, Wally Szczerbiak, Joe Smith, and Delonte West, giving up Drew Gooden and the underperforming Larry Hughes to Chicago and Donyell Marshall to Seattle. Elsewhere in the league, Bonzi Wells and Mike James went to N’Orleans, and former Knick Kurt Thomas ended up in San Antonio (which will help take the sting out of the Spurs winning another championship, if that’s in the cards, around these parts.)

Speaking of the 16-38 Knicks, they…stood pat. I must say, it’s been a tough season to be a Knicks fan. My TiVo conscientiously tapes all of their losses for me, so I caught the second half of Wednesday’s 40-point stinker against the lowly Sixers, 124-84. Look away! It is hideous.

My friends (are lobbyists), my friends. | FEC: Nope.

While the NYT’s botched bombshell involving Maverick and Iseman has thus far only seemed to help Sen. McCain to make nice with his unreconstructed right flank, the WP posts an A1 follow-up showing how the story may bite McCain yet. To wit, his campaign is completely dominated by lobbyists. “[W]hen McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried.“

Meanwhile, concerning the “other” McCain scandal at the moment, the Republican head of the FEC, David Mason, comes down against McCain’s attempted gaming of the public financing system, and argues he can’t duck out of public financing now. “‘This is serious,’ agreed Republican election lawyer Jan Baran. Ignoring the matter on the grounds that the FEC lacks a quorum, Baran said, ‘is like saying you’re going to break into houses because the sheriff is out of town.’”

Update: Newsweek‘s Mike Isikoff, one of the also-rans for the Iseman scoop, pokes a hole in McCain’s denial. Regarding the Paxson letters to the FCC, McCain said yesterday that ““No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC.” The problem? This contradicts a sworn deposition by McCain taken in 2002, when McCain said: “I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue.” D’oh!

Update 2: Now, Paxson says he met with the Senator, despite McCain’s statement to the contrary. “Paxson also recalled that his lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, attended the meeting in McCain’s office and that Iseman helped arrange the meeting. ‘Was Vicki there? Probably,’ Paxson said in an interview with The Washington Post today. ‘The woman was a professional. She was good. She could get us meetings.’“

The Axe Falls on Renzi.

Speaking of Arizona Republicans in hot water, Rep. Rick Renzi is indicted on 35 counts of “conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering, extortion and insurance fraud.” Kicked off the House Intelligence Committee when news of his shadiness emerged in 2005, Renzi also played a role in the persecuted prosecutors scandal, when it came out that both he and former AG Alberto Gonzales had pressured the US attorney to hold fire on him.

Back to Reality | A Peek at the Ground Game.

“I’d love to carry Texas, but it’s usually not in the electoral calculation for the Democratic nominee. Florida and Michigan are.” Uh, Texas doesn’t matter? And, just like that, Sen. Clinton dispels all the warm fuzzies she attempted to earn with her reverse Muskie nostalgia moment last night. Sadly, it seems the evidence of a “reality check” among Sen Clinton and her campaign was misleading, and they’re instead indulging in the “false hope” they can still steal this thing, vis a vis Michigan and Florida.

Well, if these (admittedly anecdotal) peeks at the Texas ground game are any indication, one can see why that screw-Texas spin is already starting to kick up now. First, Sen. Obama’s team, by way of dKos: “Today I talked to a reporter working on a piece on the Obama movement, who had just returned from Texas to see the Obama ground game close up. I asked if it lived up to the hype. He said that he had gone down there cynical, not expecting much, but had been utterly blown away…[H]is volunteer-driven ground game is blowing whatever meager operation Clinton has completely out of the water.” Update: Here’s another positive testimonial about Obama’s TX organization.

And for Clinton? Read this sad tale: “Although the Clinton Campaign has been telling the press that they have the ground operations to pull off a win in Texas, those ground operations have not been in evidence when I’ve traveled to small towns to see how Bill Clinton is doing on the Texas stump. Wednesday evening in Victoria, down in the southeastern part of the state, incipient chaos threatened to overwhelm the ‘Early Vote’ Rally precisely because there was no ground operation…’It’s a clusterf**k! Just a clusterf**k!’ the Corpus Christi producer for a local news affiliate shouts into his cell phone.“

Update: A Clinton endorser in the Rio Grande Valley confirms trouble in Texas: “I made a commitment to Hillary Clinton and I must maintain it. I gave my word. However, as an observer, it appears to be increasingly evident who is going to win.“

Update 2: Someone with Texas skillz has made a revised delegate projection for the Lone Star State based on recent polling. It’s not good for Sen. Clinton.

Deep in the Heart of Texas.

In case you missed it, debate No. 19, held in Austin, TX, came and went this evening. (Transcript.) My quick take: Not all that much news made here, and, as a tie goes to the defender, that’s a win for Barack Obama.

The big question coming in tonight was whether, after losing eleven contests in a row, Sen. Clinton would go into relentless-attack-mode (as desired by Mark Penn) or instead try to reassert her positives and perhaps prepare for a dignified exit to the race (as advised by Mandy Grunwald.) Well, the answer turned out to be yes. The first forty-five minutes or so were civil, agreeable, and thoroughly stultifying, basically a duller continuation of the LA debate of three weeks ago. Then, in the middle going, Sen. Clinton began trying to score some points, for example, by (once again) calling Obama a plagiarist and saying the Senator represented “change you can xerox.” (That canned line backfired rather badly, and drew the only boos of the night. I hope this is because most people realize the plagiarism charge is absolutely moronic.)

For his part, Sen. Obama — looking ever more presidential, as is the frontrunner’s wont — took the high road, correctly calling such maneuvers part of the “silly season” of politics and keeping the conversation mostly about substantive differences, such, as, once again, the interminable mandate question. (He had a particularly good response to the “cult” charge: “The implication has been that the people who have been voting for me or involved in my campaign are somehow delusional…The thinking is that somehow they’re being duped…and that eventually they’re going to see the reality of things. I think they perceive the reality of what’s going on in Washington very clearly.” Touche.)

The moment that’s getting a lot of the buzz right now is Sen. Clinton’s closing statement, which (Xerox alert!) borrowed heavily from both John Edwards and Bill Clinton in 1992. (I actually don’t care at all about that, but if you’re going to throw around spurious claims of plagiarism, you’d best be careful about that glass house.) More troublingly, in her close Sen. Clinton explicitly invoked her surprisingly game-changing Reverse Muskie back in New Hampshire. (She began this particular lip-quavering moment by asking herself the same goofy question she got in the diner: “How do you do it?”)

Now, I don’t want to claim Sen. Clinton is a fraud, even if she’s seemed considerably less than “absolutely honored to be here with Barack Obama” over the past three weeks of scurrilious charges and no concession speeches. If anything, I agree with CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, who was much less enthralled by the moment than that venerable Establishment Davos-boogier, David Gergen. I think she got genuinely choked up for exactly the same reasons as she did back in NH. With the writing on the wall for her candidacy, this was a valedictory moment of sorts. Fine, she’s earned it, and I applaud her for seemingly choosing, at least for a few moments, a graceful exit that will help bring the party back together. That being said, I wouldn’t get such a guilty twinge of Bernie Birnbaum-ish grandstanding about it all if she hadn’t explicitly invoked the diner tear, and/or if Clinton flunky Howard Wolfson hadn’t immediately try to tell us afterward that this was “the moment she retook the reins of this race and showed women and men why she is the best choice.” Um, no, not really.

Some More State of the States.

Electability update: In case you missed the recent state poll findings showing that at least nine swing states choose Obama over McCain and McCain over Clinton (totalling 100 electoral votes, if you throw in Michigan below), the polling firms have crunched some more numbers. Here are a few more where the party winner doesn’t change, but the margin of victory/defeat is considerably better for Sen. Obama:

  • Kansas: McCain beats Obama by 6 (50%-44%), McCain beats Clinton by 24 (59%-34%).

  • Michigan: Obama beats McCain by 8 (47%-39%), McCain and Clinton are tied (44%).

  • New York (yes, Sen. Clinton’s home state): Obama beats McCain by 21 (57%-36%), Clinton beats McCain by 11 (52%-41%).

    The only state examined thus far where Sen. Clinton outpolls Sen. Obama by a significant margin is Florida. (McCain beats Clinton by 6 (49%-43%), McCain beats Obama by 16% (53%-37%)) That margin seems to have a bit to do with the Florida delegate fiasco, however: “Most notably, just 55% of Sunshine State Democrats say they would vote for Obama over McCain.” One would presume that figure would change after the convention, and after Sen. Obama has a chance to campaign in the Sunshine State.

    • Feingold leans Obama, as does Rae.

    “‘His mind is as sharp as anybody’s I’ve ever met,’ Feingold said of Obama. ‘He’s done extremely well for somebody with his level of experience.’” While he’s apparently not ready to officially endorse, Sen. Russ Feingold tells a Wisconsin paper he’s “highly inclined” to vote for Obama. Meanwhile, Obama has picked up the vote of another Wisconsan, superedelegate Jason Rae, 21, who was recently wined and dined by Chelsea. “He cited Obama’s support from an overwhelming majority of young voters as the major reason for his decision.” Update: Another super, Margaret Xifaras of MA, backs Obama. So that’s 2 today…3 if we count Sen. Feingold.

    Update: Count him. Sen. Feingold tells The Nation he voted for Barack Obama in Wisconsin. “‘I really do think that, at the gut level, this is a chance to do something special,’ Feingold said of the Obama campaign and the potential of an Obama presidency, which he said has ‘enormous historical opportunities for America and for our relationship with the world.’“

    Clinton: It’ll be your fault.

    “‘If she wins Texas and Ohio I think she will be the nominee. If you don’t deliver for her, I don’t think she can be. It’s all on you,’ the former president told the audience at the beginning of his speech.” Well, some of it at least is on Mark Penn. Echoing remarks by James Carville after Super Tuesday, Bill Clinton underscores the importance of Ohio and Texas (and conveniently ignores the fact that Sen. Clinton must not only win but win by 20.)

    Ex-Pats United.

    It’s not just here at home. Sen. Obama takes the Americans Abroad primary 2-1 (65%-32%), winning most of the countries around the world (Ex-pats in Israel and the Philippines opted for Clinton.) Thanks, Kris, and all the other Obama voters out there across the seas. Update: Clinton did well in the DR as well.