Memo to Hillary Clinton's Camp Followers: Let Reason, and Realism, Prevail

WASHINGTON — For all the success that Democratic presidential candidates have had in raising money — taking in a combined total of over $500 million in the current race — the Republicans are beating them in one crucial area of fund-raising: the money being raised by the parties themselves. Toby Talbot/Associated Press Howard Dean is leading Democrats’ fund-raising strategy. The Caucus The Democratic National Committee ended 2007 nearly flat broke, with cash of $2.9 million and debts of $2.2 million. Since then it has raised some money, paid down debt and managed to put $3.7 million in its piggy bank. This compares, however, with $25 million that the Republican National Committee has in cash on hand, after having raised $97 million since the beginning of 2007. And with Senator John McCain now the presumptive Republican nominee, party officials started plotting with his campaign this week on deploying those resources against the well-financed Democratic candidacies of Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. Already, President Bush, who spoke at 29 Republican fund-raisers and is credited with raising $63.5 million last year, is lined up for more R.N.C. fund-raising in the weeks ahead. This money is likely to provide the financial muscle for Mr. McCain to continue his attacks on both Democratic candidates. “The Republican National Committee’s strength is an important indicator,” said Alex Conant, the R.N.C. spokesman. “The D.N.C. has had trouble raising money, and the R.N.C. is well-positioned to help our nominee financially. It is our mission to get McCain elected president, and that is our focus. Fund-raising is a priority.” Such party money can play a vital role in presidential campaigns because candidates are barred from using money they raise for the general election until they are nominated at the conventions. So the party money is often used before then — as well as after — to finance advertisements, direct mail and, ultimately, get-out-the-vote efforts. Democrats say their limited party fund-raising is a result of several factors, including the competition for dollars from the presidential candidates and the party’s Congressional fund-raising committees. And they also say the D.N.C. is hamstrung by its inability to raise money in any serious way without a presidential nominee to rally around. Since the beginning of 2007, the Democrats have raised $60.5 million, and have spent most of it. Not only does the D.N.C. have far less cash on hand than does the R.N.C., but in this election cycle the R.N.C. has also outraised the D.N.C. by $37 million. Party officials maintain that the D.N.C. is cash poor partly by design, reflecting a strategy by Howard Dean, the party’s chairman, to invest in building a party infrastructure rather than amassing a huge war chest. Since he became chairman after the 2004 election, Mr. Dean has begun what he called the 50-state strategy, opening offices and hiring staff members in every state, even ones that are traditional Republican strongholds. He has also invested in a huge voter database — one that is designed to rival the Republican Party’s sophisticated voter file — that he hopes will pay off this year and allow Democratic candidates to find likely voters and make specific pitches to them. How the costly 50-state strategy — and the cash shortfall that it has created — play out over the coming election will be a referendum on the tenure of Mr. Dean, who has had a prickly relationship with many of the party’s top officials. Under Mr. Dean’s tenure, D.N.C. fund-raising has steadily climbed, along with its expenses. So far, Mr. Dean has spent $170 million since the last presidential election to turn his vision for the party into a reality, with nearly $60 million of that raised in the last year alone. “He’s doing the job of the party chairman in a very different way,” said Elaine C. Kamarck, a D.N.C. member and lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “And people don’t like that,” added Ms. Kamarck, who wrote a paper “Howard Dean’s Fifty-State Strategy and the 2006 Midterm Elections.” Democratic officials say they believe that once a nominee is in place, donors will switch from supporting the candidates to supporting the party. In 2004, for instance, the D.N.C. raised $344 million, most of it coming in after it was clear that Senator John Kerry would be the nominee. “The D.N.C. has tremendous fund-raising capacity this year,” said Don Fowler, a former chairman of the committee, who supports Mr. Dean’s strategy. “The mood of the country, the satisfaction with our candidates and the optimism about our party suggest that we can raise the money for 2008. We don’t need to have as much money in the bank under these circumstances.” But already, the Republicans are preparing to put their resources to use on behalf of Mr. McCain. Not only did the candidate visit the R.N.C. headquarters on Wednesday, but Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, sat down this week with Robert M. Duncan, the party chairman, to review resources that will be available to the McCain campaign, including research, communications staff and positions that the McCain campaign can now help fill. The lost of members from the Democratic Party also means that all those progressives will have to replace the money lost by the former members of the Democratic Party!

The interactions between supporters of Hillary and Barack have gotten a bit testy of late, but let us try to understand why. As P.M. correctly states, the fundamental reason that Hillary's campaign did not catch on with many progressives was her support of the Iraq war, and I would add that this includes not only her initial vote on the "Use of Force" resolution, but her continued drum-beating for the war up until the spring of 2007. For many Democrats, that was an inexusable transgression. Still, Obama's supporters generally treated Hillary with deference and respect until the moment in time when she saw the nomination slipping from her grasp, and she began, in desperation, to run John McCain's campaign. It was her (and Bill's) overt praise of McCain as being more qualified than Obama to be president that upset the Obama camp more than anything else. Such behavior in a nomination contest was unprecedented, and it revealed Hillary to be entirely self-serving and disloyal to the party. And underhanded tactics on the part of the Clinton campaign have continued, including the blatant appeals to racial resentment. Seen in this context, it should be no surprise that Obama's supporters are bitter towards Hillary, whom they see as deliberately seeking to harm Barack's chance of winning in the general election. So, please, Hillary backers, step back and try to see how things got so nasty between us.

Campaigns aren't about solutions. Campaigns are about winning. How the campaigner goes about it is what speaks to me.

I appreciate Obama not firmly defining what his policy is going to be. There will be a lot less accusations of broken campaign promises, which is pretty much par for the course.

Presidencies are made by the people the man surrounds himself with, the advice and information he gets and how active the electorate is in letting him know what they want.

That's where policy should come from.

That last is key. If everyone goes back to sleep after the inauguration, we deserve what we get.

The dirt and smear jobs done by this side of the Democratic Party has lost many long time members! Too late to encourage anyone to come back to vote for anyone they support! It isn't about sexism or racism! It is about what this party stands for now and for many that is attacking and destroying anyone standing in the way of their selected candidate. The future of the Democratic Party is on the verge of falling off the cliff and destroying it forever. Obama may be getting donations but the Democratic Party is not. The Republicans are easily taking in contributions by the millions, while the Democrats are way behind. The Republicans will use that money to attack Obama, just as his supporters are attacking one of their own.

In this case - it's pertinent, because it explains why she continues to run. It is not about this election, necessarily -- it is about 20 years of "remaking" the Democratic Party, which is slipping away. From the UK Independent - Sunday, May 11, 2008; Rupert Cornwell writes: "But this is more than just other political defeat. In their 2007 biography "Her Way," Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta claim that even before their marriage, Bill and Hillary devised a 20-year plan that would see them reshaping the Democratic party and Bill ascending to the presidency. No sooner was that mission accomplished in 1993, the authors write, than "the project" was extended. Eight years of Bill in the White House would be followed by eight years of Hillary. The evidence assembled by Gerth and Van Natta, two reporters for The New York Times who had long been on the Hillary case, is tenuous in the extreme. But the "project" theory has a psychological ring of truth. As candidate and president, Bill Clinton did indeed remake the Democratic party in a more moderate image. The strategy was akin to the Blair/Brown "New Labour" project in Britain, a move towards the centre that was the only option if Democrats were to contend in an era of conservative and Republican dominance. As senator for New York, with an unmistakable eye on the White House almost from the moment she arrived on Capitol Hill in 2001, Clinton continued on that course. She took great care to burnish her credentials as a hard-nosed national security expert. Nowhere was this concern clearer than in her vote in favour of the Iraq war in October 2002. Today that vote – and her refusal to admit it was a mistake – may have doomed her to defeat by Obama. For the Iraq debacle has hastened a sea change in American politics, of which Obama is the beneficiary and the embodiment. A generational and ideological shift is taking place, in which the country is moving to the left. No longer are Democrats a threatened species, forced to trim and compromise to stay electable. Intellectually bankrupt US conservatism has run into the buffers. On almost every big issue, from foreign policy to the economy, from health care to education, Democratic ideas prevail. At 60, Clinton is 14 years older than Obama, in political terms a generation. He is the upstart. She belongs to the establishment, ready to reinvent herself as many times as necessary to win the day. Hillary the inevitable has mutated into Hillary the experienced into Hillary the beer-swilling people's gal, ready to indulge in a crowd-pleasing gimmick like a summer-long suspension of the federal petrol tax. Except that for once the crowds were not pleased. Voters saw the arrant nonsense for what it was and last week they said so. More subtly, they also said that the Clintons were the past. For 15 years, half of them spent in the White House, half in well-heeled exile on Capitol Hill and on the international speaking circuit, the Clintons have dominated the Democratic party. Some in its upper echelons resented them. But they had the machine and the money. Now they have been bested by the Obama machine, with its ability to galvanise younger voters, and by Obama's money, raised via the internet in quantities that dwarfed the efforts of the old-style Clinton fundraising barons. If defeat does come, an old guard is on the way out – from Terry McAuliffe, keeper of the Clinton flame from 2001 to 2005 as Democratic party chairman, and now chairman of Hillary Clinton for President, to a Clinton foreign policy establishment featuring the likes of Madeleine Albright, Wes Clark and Richard Holbrooke. Democratic heavyweights are moving into the Obama camp. The Clintons will always retain a considerable base in the party but no longer, surely, the pre-eminent one. So what now, as the supreme prize seems destined to elude her? Maybe she'll be content with the vice-presidency. Others say that she will not run for elective office again once her senate term ends in 2012. Still others see her as future Senate majority leader. It would be no mean position in a likely era of Democratic supremacy in Congress – but not quite the project the House of Clinton had in mind." It's 20 years of planning, plotting, triangulation, and scheming - slipping away.

so there's still 3 or 4 ppl who believe it's possible for hillary to win the nomination. please stop whining, it's unbecoming. hillary is a war-hawk non progressive and she picked the wrong year to run. big deal. maybe if she had run in 2004? maybe if she hadnt voted for war or against the ban on cluster bombs, maybe she'd still have a chance. as it is, the math is near impossible for her. maybe if she hadn't shot her mouth off about made-up sniper fire... maybe. those of us who voted for and continue to vote for obama dont hate women, whites, the working class, etc, in fact many of us are from those very demographics. we dont hate you or your candidate. we're just voting for someone we believe in.

The core issue is well stated here. The warmongers must be stopped. Hillary's vote for war and her "I believed Bush about Iraqi WMD" is a nonstarter for me, just as was Kerry's disingenuousness. But despite Obama's stated opposition pre -war, he has voted for funding, and frankly, he has given decidedly mixed messages about WAR. I happen to think that he is the least bad of the three imperial stooges. I would ask Clinton supporters how they would feel if someone threatened in plain English to obliterate the US, how they would feel about it. Such rhetoric is beyond undiplomatic. It actually violated UN rules for behavior between countries. Yet Obama has said re Iran that "all options" (AKA nuclear war) are on the table. PM is right that this partisan bickering is really counterproductive. If you want to stop war, stop fighting amongst yourselves. Obama is correct when he says it is not about him. It is about real change--an end to war as the preferred solution to our problems. And that means, stay cool, be polite and respectful to each other, and focus on demanding of all the candidates, an end to the Iraq war and the bogus war on terror.

I've had it with the fanaticism and lack of respect for the Hillary voter. Obama has supporters, but Hillary has "camp followers," according to the headline. When Obama wins with a large number of independent and former Republican voters, it's a victory for his wise bipartisanship. When Hillary wins, it's proof that her voters are racists, or that she manipulated the voting machines, or that she cried on cue, or that some perfectly innocent comment got distorted by the Random Remark Police into something that George Wallace would say. I've had it with the sneering disrespect on Buzzflash and a large number of other "progressive" websites. Here's a clue: she's lost, for all practical purposes. So now you can stop the vilification and the superiority. Now you've got half the party to be nice to. They didn't vote for the guy who makes you all warm and fuzzy. Diff'rent strokes, you know? But we're together on 99% of things. Maybe someday Obama will grow up and get a real medical plan -- whoops, now I'm sounding like Buzzflash. Don't scream that she's worse that Bush. Don't yell at her to get out of the race. Don't say that anything she says in opposition to Obama is giving McCain the election. Let's be grownups and keep our eyes on the prize. Who knows, after a year or two or three, I might buy an item on the Buzzflash store again.

she has just about as many supporters as Obama, if you and the other internet politicians want those voters' support you better change your tone, we don't like it. bill from ct