Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are battling not just over the working-class voters of Pennsylvania but over the legacy of the Democratic Party.
Mark Schmitt
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PENN’S ANTI-LABOR WORK: A FEATURE, NOT A BUG.
While the main story today is the piling on poor Mark Penn, it turns out that it is possible to start a sentence, “Penn’s defenders say…” Michelle Cottle of The New Republic conveys the case for Penn, or at least the explanation for why the Clintons keep him around, as best it can be done. […]
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RUTHLESS BIPARTISANSHIP
In a post last week about the excellent letter that the revitalized reform group Common Cause sent John McCain, I made what might have seemed a cryptic reference: A few years ago, McCain and his allies made life very difficult for Common Cause, for not following their line on 527 committees and other regulations. So […]
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Goodbye, Mr. Penn
Mark Penn’s ultimate conflict of interest was not between his role in the Clinton campaign and his private interests. It was between his roles as the pollster and the PR guy. It’s a shame that didn’t oust him from the campaign months ago.
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THE REFORM GROUP THAT CAME IN FROM THE COLD.
At last, one campaign finance reform organization has stepped up to its obligation to the public interest, with regard to Senator McCain‘s machinations. And it’s a big one: Common Cause, under the welcome new leadership of Bob Edgar, formerly head of the National Council of Churches and earlier a member of Congress from Pennsylvania, one […]
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SUPERDELEGATES AND THE STRONG PARTY.
Who would imagine that there was more to say on the subject of the Democratic Party’s superdelegates? Yet posts this week on The Democratic Strategist and PolitickerNJ add some important context to the historical role of superdelegates and make clear that their role amounts to a lot more than avoiding an unelectable candidate. On the […]
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PUBLIC JUSTICE FOR MCCAIN, THANKS TO BLOGGERS.
Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake, along with Joe Sudbay of Americablog and the Rev. Lennox Yearwood have done a great service by putting together a well-argued complaint to the Federal Election Commission over John McCain‘s violation of the campaign finance law. While the Democratic National Committee filed a complaint earlier raising all the complex issues posed […]
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OPEN THE BOX.
The news last week about a number of Democratic superdelegates moving toward Barack Obama or, even if ardent Clinton supporters like Joe Andrews of Indiana, admitting they would hesitate to be responsible for the superdelegates overruling the pledged delegates, reaffirms a point I’ve been making for weeks: All this talk about what the superdelegates “ought” […]
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Obama-ism Without Obama
Obama’s campaign shows how a democracy-minded reform movement and community organizing have transformed the Democratic Party. Like Reagan, Obama is as much a product of a movement as the creator of one.
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WHY CLINTON DOESN’T WANT A RE-VOTE.
There aren’t many windows into a strongly pro- There aren’t many windows into a strongly pro-Clinton/anti-Obama view in the blogosphere, making TalkLeft invaluable, where “Big Tent Democrat” (the former Armando of DailyKos) has been focused like a laser on the issue of how to deal with the Michigan and Florida Democratic delegations. The claim made […]