But since this is a political blog we don't really care about sports, except as a metaphor.
The real impact of the National Football League's newly announced decision to launch the 2008 season on Thursday night, Sept. 4 is....
That's the same night as the climax of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul when Sen. John McCain is to be the highlight with his crucial acceptance speech that traditionally sets the tone for a candidate's campaign before a national audience.
Let's see, who'd win that TV ratings scrimmage, a New York team playing the very first game of a fresh NFL football season or the second major political acceptance speech on national TV in a week?
Plus we'd miss all the colorful balloons falling from the convention center ceiling on cue.
As a reluctant concession to the process of picking the nation's next commander in chief and the leader of the free world except on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights and sometimes Thursday nights too, the league decided to start the Giants-Redskins game 90 minutes early.
But there better not be overtime or McCain'll get stomped on Sept. 4 instead of on Nov. 4.
He may be lagging in Pennsylvania polls, but Sen. Barack Obama is outspending Sen. Hillary Clinton by about three-to-one in the statewide television advertising campaign, according to an independent analyst. Even if Obama can't overcome Clinton’s apparent voter advantage in that April 22 primary, Obama plans to make Clinton pay for the fight and draw down her more limited resources for the ongoing struggle elsewhere.
"He has dropped a couple million bucks in his first week on the air there," says Evan Tracey, chief operating officer for Campaign Media Analysis, a TNS company, an independent analyst of campaign media advertising. "If you judged it against Clinton’s, in a basketball game, it would be a rout."
The Obama campaign is spending about $150,000 a day now on TV advertising in Pennsylvania, Tracey said in an interview, compared to about $50,000 for the Clinton camp.
Since Obama turned on his TV campaign in the Keystone State on March 21, Tracey said, he's spent about $2 million. Since Clinton started her ads there on the 25th, she's spent about $440,000.
"Part of it is putting his fundraising advantage to work," Tracey said. “If he spends a lot there, she has to spend a lot to keep up with him…. He is buying at high levels, a strategy to bring her into a war of attrition she can’t afford.''
"Strategically there is no downside to it," Tracey added. Obama "is not going to burn through his cash… He floods the state with a couple weeks of ads… If he doesn’t see any noticeable tick in the polls he might pull back… But any dollar she spends in Pennsylvania is a dollar she can’t spend in Indiana or North Carolina…Tactically, you're forcing her to get into a fight."
With a half-dozen media markets in Pennsylvania, the biggest and costliest are Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
By one media account, Obama is purchasing close to 2,000 "gross ratings points" of advertising in these markets – enough for the typical viewer to see an an ad 20 times during a cycle of ads. But the quality of those points is also critical –- with news programs and prime-time TV costing more money. He's also bought a lot of prime-time TV, putting close to 40 percent of his money there, Tracey says. That’s a good way to "expand your coalition," he notes.
-- Mark Silva
Mark Silva writes for the Swamp of the Chicago Tribune's Washington bureau.
Just when you thought we might be whittling down the number of presidential candidates, there's a new one about to jump in.
According to a political website, Fitsnews.com, former Republican Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia is about to announce his candidacy with the Libertarian Party.
The same site predicts tonight that GOP Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who has refused to endorse the presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain and continues his own vain campaign, will endorse Barr's bid.
That would indeed make for an unusual sight, an active candidate in one party endorsing a new one in another party.
Paul actually ran as the Libertarian Party's candidate for president in 1988, but has consistently rejected a third-party bid throughout this campaign.
The 72-year-old Paul's campaign -- he's the only survivor beyond McCain of 11 Republicans from last year -- surprised many political observers with its financial potency. Some 800,000 eager and energetic voters, many of them new to politics, have given him in excess of $32 million in the last year, nearly $20 million of it in the last quarter of 2007, to make him the largest GOP fundraiser then. They developed a whole range of creative ideas to arouse political support, including a pinup calendar of nearly naked Hotties4Ron Paul.
Barr, who represented Georgia's 7th District for eight years until 2003, like Paul has made no secret of his dissatisfaction with current Republican Party leadership. He's praised Paul for....
Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, who has made universal healthcare one of the centerpieces of her campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, was more than a quarter-million dollars behind in payments for her own campaign staff's healthcare premiums, according to financial records.
The unpaid health insurance bills had been accumulating for months, according to Politico.com, which examined her latest campaign financial filings with the Federal Election Commission. They ended 2007 with $213,000 owed to Aetna Healthcare for "employee benefits." During January and February of this year, the debt rose another $16,000.
A Clinton campaign spokesman, Jay Carson, said at no time did employee insurance coverage lapse for campaign staff, spouses, partners and children because of the unpaid bills. He said that during March the campaign paid all outstanding healthcare bills and the balance would be zero in upcoming reports covering March.
By comparison, neither Sen. John McCain nor Sen. Barack Obama's campaign reported any substantial healthcare debts. In terms of overall debts, Obama's effort reported only $625,000 in debts. McCain's reported $3 million owed on a bank loan and only $1.3 million owned to vendors.
Clinton's overall debt on Feb. 29 was reported as $8.7 million, including $3,161 owned to her old high school, as reported in a previous item today. After its publication, Carson said the check had been written to Maine South High School in Park Ridge, Ill.
James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a conservative, nonprofit organization that wields widespread influence among Christian Republicans, has come, oh, so close to endorsing the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain.
For the past year Dobson, who endorsed George W. Bush in 2004, has been mainly saying which Republican he would not endorse--Rudy Giuliani because he was pro-choice, Fred Thompson because he opposed the marriage amendment and, at one point, McCain because of restrictions that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms put on nonprofit communications with members about political issues.
At one time Dobson even suggested he might not vote for the first time in his adult life if the candidates didn't meet his standards of being antiabortion and for family values. That could have caused millions of religious conservatives to stay home on Nov. 4.
Dobson once said Mitt Romney would qualify as a pro-family candidate. But when he dropped out of the GOP race, Dobson endorsed Mike Huckabee for his "unwavering positions on social issues."
From their mountainside headquarters in Colorado Springs, Dobson and Focus reach millions of conservative evangelicals daily through their website, newsletters and his radio broadcasts. The concern among Republican operatives has not been that conservatives with some lingering doubts about McCain's, say, initial opposition to the Bush tax cuts would vote for Sens. Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, whose Democratic party members have turned out in large numbers all election season.
The GOP concern has been instead that a lack of enthusiasm among....
50 Cent -- he's a rapper, for you political junkies who never turn on anything but talk radio -- tells MTV that he's getting bored with the whole presidential campaign. Last fall he was backing Hillary Clinton but after the race speech he says he's now backing Barack Obama.
But 50 Cent said the whole thing had gone on too long and now he might not even vote.
"To be honest, I haven't been following that anymore. I lost my interest," the rapper told MTV (the clip is below). "I listened to some of the debate and things that they were saying, and I just got lost in everything that was going on. ... Don't look for my vote, for me to determine nothing on that. Just say, '50 Cent, he don't know, so don't ask Fiddy.'"
There's your political bumper sticker of the day: "Don't ask Fiddy." For some reason that reminds us of Alice Cooper's 1988 slogan when the shock-rocker "ran" for governor of Arizona: "A troubled man for troubled times" -- which has been resurrected here for the current presidential cycle.
And when we figure out which poll "Fiddy's" endorsement switch might influence, we'll let you know.
The potential power of John McCain's appeal to those who've directly experienced the sacrifices inherent in military service -- including the ultimate loss -- was on display today as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee kicked off his much-touted "biography tour."
After a visit to Meridian, Miss., where many of his forebears grew up and where his grandfather and namesake, John Sidney "Popeye" McCain, served at an air base, the candidate spent the 20-minute ride to the airport talking on his Straight Talk Express with Rachel Lee. Her son, Dustin Lee, 20, was killed in Iraq a year ago while attached to a Marine reconnaissance unit in Anbar province.
The Times' Maeve Reston was the designated pool reporter, and she relates that Rachel Lee told McCain that after her son's death, the military allowed the family to adopt Lex, an explosives-detecting dog that trained with his unit and was with him the day he died. The dog had been wounded and was later given an honorary Purple Heart, according to a spokeswoman for the McCain campaign.
During the ride, Lex stretched across the red faux velvet couch at the back of the campaign bus, resting against Lee’s thigh as she told McCain and his wife, Cindy, about her son’s service. Her two other children, Madyson, 16, and Camryn, 13, sat silently on the other side of Lex, petting his fur.
Lee told McCain she was "very honored" to meet him, "not because ...
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been in the news several times this election season for being, shall we say, somewhat tardy in paying its bills. New York and Des Moines companies complained to the media. And when a New Hampshire landlord went public with his Clinton debt of $500, other companies cried out. (He eventually got paid his $500 and publicly donated it right away to Barack Obama's campaign.)
Now, it looks from new Federal Election Commission filings that Clinton's campaign had $8.7 million in outstanding debt at the end of last month. Ouch! And that included $3,361 owed to Maine South High School in Park Ridge, Ill., for renting the Watson Auditorium and for catering.
Hillary Rodham graduated from there in 1965.
On the eve of Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, Clinton staged a big town hall meeting from the Maine South High School auditorium that was broadcast nationally on the Hallmark Channel, allowing supporters across the country to ask questions live. Maybe you saw it. Millions did.
But campaigns move on. And her alma mater is still awaiting its money.
The FEC form lists only a “Dr. Rose” as the school contact. A switchboard operator at Maine South said no one was available to discuss the debt, and that the only Dr. Rose at the school was Dr. Rose Garlasco, who is assistant principal. Voice-mail messages for her and the Clinton campaign have gone unanswered.
(UPDATE: This just in. What a coincidence. According to Jay Carson, a spokesman for Clinton's campaign, the invoice from Maine South High School was paid today.)
-- Rick Pearson
Rick Pearson writes for the Swamp of the Chicago Tribune's Washington Bureau.
At the least, the ongoing Democratic presidential race is giving activists in states where the party usually is hopelessly outmatched in White House elections a chance to rally their forces -- and raise some cold, hard cash.
In Indiana, site of a now-crucial primary on May 6, the state Democratic chairman adroitly re-scheduled the date of the party's annual spring dinner from April 18 to May 4 -- and made a point of inviting both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to attend.
No Democratic presidential candidate has won Indiana (which now has 11 electoral votes) since Lyndon Johnson did so in his 1964 landslide. And the odds should be against either Obama or Clinton this fall. But their nomination battle almost assuredly will make the state party's banquet a much livelier, and far more lucrative, affair than in the past.
Carrying North Dakota's three electoral votes will be an even stiffer challenge for the Democratic ticket in November -- George Bush garnered 63% of the vote there in 2004 and, again, Johnson was the last Democrat to carry it. But the state party is taking advantage of Obama's appeal (he easily won the state's caucuses on Feb. 5) to build up ...
That's what Barack Obama is endorsing: A national holiday in honor of the late, legendary activist for farmworker rights (pictured below).
Today is Chavez's birthday -- and Hillary Clinton's campaign was the first to draw attention to that this morning, issuing a statement celebrating the 81st anniversary of Chavez's birth (he died on April 23, 1993).
But Obama, who has struggled to overcome Clinton's significant advantage among Latino voters in state after state, sought to one-up his rival for the Democratic presidential nod by joining the call for creating a national holiday to commemorate the father of the United Farm Workers.
"As farmworkers and laborers across America continue to struggle for fair treatment and fair wages, we find strength in what Cesar Chavez accomplished so many years ago,'' Obama said in a statement from his campaign. "And we should honor him for what he's taught us about making America a stronger, more just, and more prosperous nation.
"That's why I support the call to make Cesar Chavez's birthday a national holiday. It's time to recognize the contributions of this American icon to the ongoing efforts to perfect our union."
Clinton, in her statement, said: “Today, I join millions of Americans in commemorating the life of one of our great civil rights leaders, Cesar Chavez. Driven by his strong desire to ensure better quality of life for migrant farmworkers across the country, Chavez helped found -– along with Dolores Huerta –- the United Farm Workers of America, arguably one of the first effective farmworkers unions in the United States.''
Pennsylvania, the next important Democratic primary state, is a lot like the very first primary state of New Hampshire except that Pennsylvania has millions more people, thousands more square miles, live members of minority groups, actual cities, big-league sports teams, a sizable number of electoral votes, streets not named for trees and an economy based on more than knickknacks and apres-ski lounges.
Everyone in New Hampshire is on a first-name basis with every candidate of every party in recent memory, or says they are. But Pennsylvania is large enough that every candidate could be in the state at once, even the Green Party guy, and hardly anyone would notice. Except the giddy local TV reporters.
So it's a very exciting thing in the Keystone State when you run into an actual candidate or, almost as good, someone famous who's married to an actual candidate.
That's what happened to Ceena Ford the other day when she ...
Barack Obama begins the new week like he ended the last one -- with an endorsement of his presidential bid from a Democrat serving in the Senate alongside him and Hillary Clinton.
A Wall Street Journal story broke the news Sunday night that Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, elected in 2006, planned to announce her backing of Obama on Monday. Klobuchar later confirmed the report, telling the Associated Press that Obama "has inspired an enthusiasm and idealism that we have not seen in this country in a long time."
Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania used much the same language when he declared his allegiance to Obama -- and campaigned with him -- on Friday.
Casey had intended to stay neutral as Obama and Clinton slugged it out for votes in his state's April 22 primary, But, as detailed in a New York Times story on Saturday, he changed his mind while rain kept him indoors during a recent Florida vacation.
Although Klobuchar's move is the attention-getter, the Journal story also offers another nugget of news that will bring smiles to Obama backers -- North Carolina's seven Democratic House members are planning to endorse him en masse at some point before that state's May 6 primary.
Aside from upping Obama's tally among the party's ever-so-important superdelegates, the bloc embrace clearly would boost his chances of relying on North Carolina to stem Clinton's prospects of embarking on a hot streak if, as expected, she wins the Pennsylvania primary.
Campaigns, like athletic contests or even chess games, comprise millions of small decisions made by individual staffers or committees, shaping a series of messages into events, speeches, ads and so much more that communicate a consistent positive message about the candidate that accumulates in the minds of voters.
There will be good days and bad days, but generally the message must have sufficient Teflon to resist attacks from competing campaigns, and the staff needs to avoid the "Hey, batter batter" distractions that inevitably arise in political competitions with no written rules or league commissioners and they must maintain a clear vision to objectively judge their own work.
At the time these decisions seem little. But they are telltale for political watchers. Take, for example, Sen. Hillary Clinton's concession speech in....
Maggie Williams, the new campaign manager for Sen. Hillary Clinton, earned about $200,000 on the board of a Long Island, N.Y., subprime lender that charged prepayment penalties — a practice that Clinton, as a candidate and critic of the subprime industry, now seeks to eliminate.
Williams, who took over the reins of Clinton’s campaign in early February, served as a director on the board of the Woodbury, N.Y.-based Delta Financial Corp. from April 2000 until the firm declared bankruptcy in December last year, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records.
She was originally recruited by former New York City Deputy Mayor Bill Lynch, a Delta consultant. Her assignments were to create a new code of “best practices,” and to improve the company’s crisis management operation in the wake of state and federal predatory lending probes that resulted in a $12-million company payout to borrowers.
Her hiring coincided with stepped-up Delta outreach efforts in minority communities, where the company made a large number of its loans, an initiative that included parties for homeless children and mortgage seminars in Brooklyn and Queens.
The 53-year-old Williams isn't the only Clinton campaign insider who made money from an industry that their candidate boss demonizes on the political trail. A month ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Clinton ally and former secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros grossed more than $5 million in stock sales and board compensation from Countrywide Financial, one of the nation’s largest subprime lenders.
-- Glenn Thrush
Glenn Thrush writes for the Swamp of the Chicago Tribune's Washington Bureau.
Let's sit back and get a little less comfortable on a Sunday morning.
Nothing can cause a collective national squirm quite like a little racial tension. All those sentiments that are usually the stuff of private conversation, if spoken at all, are playing out in the harsh light of the campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. That black thing-white thing, thing. We are dealing with race -- again -- whether we want to or not.
It is hard to believe that a mere three months ago, the good and overwhelmingly white people of Iowa started the whole process of the presidential race, delivering a powerful verdict on the Democratic side that Barack Obama's race was no impediment to his pursuit of the White House.
How quaint.
Now we are in the ultimate where-you-stand-depends-on-where-you-sit moment. It's never easy being a first, and perhaps the only surprising thing about the role race is now playing in the Democratic primary is that it took this long to boil. Meanwhile, beneath the same surface, the gender issue simmers.
From the outset, Obama faced questions that no other candidate had to face, ranging from "is he black enough?" to "is he maybe 'too black'?"
Or, as a white colleague pointed out, maybe the real question among whites was whether he was white enough. Who wants to start that conversation?
Then came questions about his faith. Was Barack Hussein Obama really a closet....
Sen. Barack Obama seems to have changed his mind about the need for his opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton, to accept defeat and exit the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Campaigning in Pennsylvania today for that state's April 22 primary, the Illinois senator brushed aside suggestions from political allies like Sen. Patrick Leahy that Clinton should withdraw soon. Obama said the New York senator should "run as long as she wants."
At least, that is, until the last state primary in early June.
"At that point there are no more contests," Obama told reporters after a campaign event in Johnstown, Pa. "And I think it is important to pivot as completely as possible, for the superdelegates or others, to make a decision as quickly as possible so that we can settle on a nominee."
In the meantime, Obama said, he and his rival should have at it.
"My attitude is that Senator Clinton can run as long as she wants," Obama said. "Her name’s on the ballot, and she is a fierce and formidable competitor, and she obviously believes that she would make the best nominee and the best president, and I think that, you know, she should be able to compete and her supporters should be able to support her, for as long as they are willing or able."
Obama said he'd not spoken in advance with Leahy about the Vermont senator's remarks earlier this week suggesting Clinton should withdraw soon to avoid damaging the party's nominee in the general election.
Obama's comments differed from what he said as recently as Friday, which was yesterday. At a Pittsburgh rally, he likened the ongoing Democratic primary campaign to “a good movie that lasted about a half an hour too long.”
--Mike Dorning
Mike Dorning writes for the Swamp of the Chicago Tribune's Washington Bureau.
Here's one thing that the two remaining Democratic candidates for president have not yet argued over -- nipple rings.
We haven't heard a peep out of either Sen. Hillary Clinton or Sen. Barack Obama about this pointed issue that's been all over the news in recent days. Maybe then, the nation can move along in this seemingly endless political stalemate over their party's nomination.
In the five years this Democratic presidential campaign seems to have been underway, the two presidential wannabes have debated pretty much everything else of real significance for the nation's future -- whether Obama's grandmother is a typical white person, whether Clinton prefers diamonds or pearls, what someone once wrote in a kindergarten paper.
California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown spoke at the state Democratic Party convention today and, boy, did he sound an awful lot like a candidate for Golden State governor -– again.
Eerie.
Brown, who served two terms as governor from 1975 to 1983 before term limits took effect, reminded his Democratic audience assembled in San Jose of some of his "highlights," like getting rid of former Gov. Ronald Reagan’s bulletproof limousine and using a blue Plymouth from the state motor pool.
Brown said he kept the Plymouth for eight years and put 240,000 miles on it, adding: “Now that’s sustainability.”
He acknowledged his reputation for coming up with unconventional ideas as governor. “They didn’t call me Moonbeam for nothing,” said Moonbeam. “I worked hard to get that.”
Even so, Brown said, he accomplished more than his Republican successors. “I tried hard not to build freeways, but we built three times more than [Pete] Wilson and [George] Deukmejian combined,” he said of his Republican successors. “Even without trying we did more than those idiots.”
After blasting the Bush administration for its record on education and the environment, the current state attorney general and former Oakland mayor hinted to his partisan audience that he might run for governor again in 2010.
“I don’t do much these days except sue people,” he said. “But maybe one of these days I’ll get around to doing more than that, and maybe you’ll help me.”
Maybe.
(UPDATE: Sunday's speakers include San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, speaking on behalf of Sen. Barack Obama, and ex-president Bill Clinton, speaking on behalf of you might be able to guess who.)
Next time you run into President Bush, don't be asking him for any phone numbers. He seems to have a problem at times with some digits.
Friday in New Jersey after one of his forums on housing, he was giving out the toll-free number for a mortgage relief hot line -- 1 (88) 995-HOPE. Anyone dialing that number, of course, gets one of those annoying whistling alarms and is informed that the call cannot be completed as dialed.
On a nearby wall the correct number was displayed -- 1 (888) 995-HOPE. And the president corrected himself.
But it wasn't 3 a.m. and the president wasn't in the White House at the time. So everything is OK.
Condoleezza Rice says she isn't running for any political office. Not yet, skeptical observers might add.
But the candid secretary of State and former national security advisor and onetime top Stanford University administrator says it was a good time for the nation to hear that speech on race that Democratic Sen. Barack Obama delivered the other day in Philadelphia.
Rice, who is the top-ranking African American in the Bush administration and viewed by many as a potential Republican candidate for vice president, tells the Washington Times that she watched Obama's speech with interest.
While saying she did not want to discuss the election campaign -- "I don't do politics," she repeated, although she was intimately involved in policy development for Bush's 1999-2000 presidential campaign -- she also reiterated her lack of interest in the vice presidential slot.
She said the United States had a hard time dealing with racial issues. She called it a "birth defect."
"There is a paradox for this country and a contradiction of this country and we still haven't resolved it," she said in a detailed reply to questions about Obama and race issues as a whole. "But what I would like understood as a black American ...
All political campaigns have schedules, meticulously designed about two weeks out and refined day by day. These printed booklets are each workday's bible. They are helpful and valid until the first event of the morning. When everything starts running behind.
No candidate seeking votes, obviously, can pass up 20 more eager hands in the rope line waiting to be shaken. And autographs to be signed. And photos to be taken so someone can prove someday they were once, however briefly, in the presence of fame.
Every candidate also has a designated "bad cop," a staff person whose job it is to tear the candidate away, seemingly reluctantly, from yet another group of supporters so that it's not the candidate walking away to keep the campaign caravan at least within shouting distance of the day's planned timetable.
As a candidate, George W. Bush was so strict about punctuality for every event that his caravan many times left behind his staffers who were even two minutes tardy. They were on their own to catch up somehow. Other campaigns have been known to run hours late.
Today, Sen. Hillary Clinton, like her husband in campaign days of....
A growing number of people, mostly her opponents, are publicly calling for Sen. Hillary Clinton to withdraw from the Democratic presidential contest and cede victory to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. He leads in both total delegates and the popular votes of past primaries but has yet to gain the number required to win nomination.
This would, of course, essentially render meaningless the votes of Democrats in a bundle of upcoming primary states including Indiana, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Clinton has vowed to continue her struggle, which is her right but could produce a long-term damaging stalemate with accumulating bitterness among Obama supporters, even if she did somehow ultimately win. She's recently talked about taking the fight over disallowed primaries and their delegates in Florida and Michigan to a credentials committee fight in Denver at the national convention.
This strategy effectively consumes valuable general election preparation time and financial resources from whichever Democrat ultimately wins, as the Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, is already campaigning to unify his party, raise money (he's way behind) and set the scope of his personal campaign narrative.
Or put it this way: If the New York Giants had given up well before the....
Rep. Joe Sestak is in his first House term from Pennsylvania's 7th Congressional District. Before that, the Democrat spent 31 years in the U.S. Navy, ending up as a three-star admiral. So he's a little new at this live TV interview stuff.
Andrea Mitchell was talking with him on MSNBC a little while ago and naturally focused on his party's ongoing, increasingly bitter and divisive political struggle to capture the presidential nomination in what started out to be a very positive looking year for the Democratic Party's recapturing of the White House.
Mitchell wondered out loud to Sestak if the fight between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continued all the way up until the Democratic National Convention in Denver in late August, might this rip the fractious party apart with little time left for healing before the Nov. 4 general election?
Sestak, who's endorsed Clinton in his state's April 22 party primary, said no, he really didn't think so.
He thought if Clinton won the nomination, Obama would turn right around and loyally tell his people, "Support her." Whereas if Obama won the nomination, Clinton would turn right around and say, "Support me."
First they had the primary. Then they had the caucuses. And on Saturday, Texas Democrats will meet in local conventions to cast yet another round of votes for the Democratic presidential contenders, which we guess makes this the Texas Three Step -- with more steps to come.
All of which brings us to Bill Clinton, who called Hillary Clinton's Texas delegates Thursday night to shore them up ahead of Saturday's conventions. Bill Clinton, legendary for his flexible approach to definitions, sought to count Democratic national delegates another way -- delegates won in primary states, versus caucus states. As we saw beginning in Iowa, Barack Obama's focus on grassroots organizing has helped him win caucus states. But in the big primary states -- we'll leave out Illinois and New York, for obvious reasons -- Clinton has prevailed.
Bill Clinton sought to persuade the Texas delegates that means something, according to ABC News' Political Radar blog, which sat in on the call:
"Right now, among all the primary states, believe it or not, Hillary's only 16 votes behind in pledged delegates and she's gonna wind up with the lead in the popular vote in the primary states. She's gonna wind up with the lead in the delegates [from primary states]....It's the caucuses that have been killing us."
Never mind the obvious point that caucuses matter, too. The focus on Texas is interesting because things remain unsettled there. Clinton won the primary vote but at the moment Obama appears to have more Texas delegates after winning the caucuses that came that same election night.
None of those delegates, though, are committed, as Political Radar points out. They can change their minds, and candidates. The final results aren't, well, final, until June 7, and the state convention. And depending on how the national delegates -- won in primaries and caucuses -- are lined up then, Texas could prove to be a crucial and last-minute battleground.
Imagine the lobbying then if one or the other candidate is riding a groundswell.
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, sidelined superdelegate and supporter of Hillary Clinton, still sees a path for Clinton to claim the party's presidential nomination -- if she runs the tables of major primary elections in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana and beyond.
"Then the momentum is with her... and at that point it's a jump ball,'' Nelson said in a program to air Sunday on C-SPAN's Newsmakers. Yet Nelson, whose vote as a superdelegate has been frozen as part of the penalty on Florida and Michigan for holding early primaries, suggests that his fellow superdelegates will be hard-pressed to ignore the candidate who claims the most votes when the primaries end in June.
"If I had a vote as a superdelegate, I'd want to know who won the states that are going to be critical in November,'' says Nelson, pressed on what his advice for fellow senators and other party superdelegates will be if Barack Obama can claim the most support in June. Nelson also sees little likelihood of resolution of the campaign ...
And, it should be pointed out, avoid federal spending limits.
The folks at VoterVoter.com have gone live with a website that lets you upload your own ad for a candidate or a cause, or to chip in money to buy airtime to place an already existing ad. You can even target where it will air, giving you a chance to break into that Jamestown, N.D., market.
VoterVoter.com is nonpartisan and for-profit. It's a subsidiary of WideOrbit Inc., whose investors include the Hearst Corp., which means a media company has a stake in a web company that
lets people buy air time through media companies. Which is vaguely reminiscent of all those X and Y physical characteristics charts from high school biology.
But we digress. VoterVoter.com takes a 15% cut of the air time purchase for placing the ads, so getting your voice heard out there in the chorus of democracy isn't cheap. But then, you knew that.
The real impact of the National Football League's newly announced decision to launch the 2008 season on Thursday night, Sept. 4 is....
MTV
