Any Haim Saban quotes anyone?

Huh - How so? Geffen is a Obama donor, not part of his campaign strategy!

Hillary's team is grasping at straws. Obama could drag out any nutter comments from Hillary donors, but what's the point. She's more interested in trying to smear supporters than debating issues and policies. Poor show on Hillary's part IMHO.

This is too funny. Hillary poodle James Carville is pulling some strings and hoping Obama gets sidetracked. Camp Hillary is beginning to see the writing on the wall with all these Hollywood money folks giving Barack Obama a close look and some cash. It must hurt them real bad.

Obama is too smart to fall for Hillary Clinton's sideshow.

A key Obama talking point is the need for the country to move beyond 'tactical,' 'slash-and-burn' politics. Dueling attack press releases, especially ones that bring up past scandals are the very definition of tactical slash-and-burn politics. You know, the old bromide about getting in the mud with a pig?

Depends if this attack came from Obama or Geffen... If I understood Geffen's reference correctly in Dowd's article about smoke-filled rooms, it wasn't even a Clinton attack it was about Clinton's Carville mafia tactics which I think by its exposure helps all Democratic candidates...

He's not going to campaign with one hand tied behind his back. If you don't fight, you lose.

He's right to say that this is between the Clintons and Geffen. If the Clinton team wants to pretend to be all pious and turn all of the criticism of her record into attacks on other candidates, that's their prerogative.

You expect the Obama campaign not to respond? This isn't about "play". Its about defining your territory and letting the Clintonites know Obama won't take their bs.

C'mon. be real.

This early nonsense suggests Hillary Clinton is playing a weak hand. As someone who is supporting other candidates in the primary and fear Sen. Clinton as an opponent the performance of her campaign during this recent spat gives me great confidence that HRC will fade as these tactics are entirely predictible and thus easily countered.

The faux outrage on display by the Clinton campaign is so transparently false as to be ridiculous. So much to talk about today - Iran, habeas corpus, Libby, Walter Reed - and the Clinton campaign picks David Geffen? It's pathetic.

Neil, you could not be more wrong. You do not win by getting the other side to "play," when you are the front runner and when you go around proclaiming your inevitability. The only thing that we can definitively state at this point as to who has "won" this cycle is that Hillary is scared out of her mind about Obama. They must have internal poll numbers that look like the Rasmussen numbers, according to which Obama has shaved 14 points off of Hillary's lead in two weeks and is now down only by 4.

As a guess, I'd say Obama won, because (a) now more people are aware of Geffen's criticism of Hillary, (b) Geffen's criticisms are pretty darn accurate if expressed a bit too bluntly, (c) more attention will be paid to Obama's coup in cutting into a major historic support of financing Clinton campaigns, and (d) we now know (and I as a political junkie did not) that Hillary praised that jerk Ford from South Carolina who said that putting a Black on the head of the ticket would drag down the Democratic party.

Hillary is playing this just right.

1) She is using this as an opportunity to define Obama who has portrayed himself as someone who wants to elevate political discourse. Hillary is using this to portray Obama as a hypocrite, saying one thing, doing another.

2) She is also framing this as an attack on her husband. Obama, or anyone else, is not going to win the Democratic nomination trashing President Clinton.

"Playing" eh?

1) Obama did not do or say anything. Nothing to be a hypocrite about.

2) See #1. Obama didn't trash anyone.

Aw geez, where do we begin? Geffen's statement was merely blunt; it was not all that vicious; it just seemed harsh because it came from a former supporter. If anyone in the press has some initiative, they could track down blunt things said about third parties by Hillary supporters, including Terry McAuliffe, James Carville, and probably even David Geffen himself in the 1992-2000 period, when he was in Bill and Hillary's thrall. I have zero doubt that neither Hillary nor Bill disavowed them, humiliated them or sent back their money. The obvious retort to what I've said is that Obama is talking about elevating politics, so the real charge is hypocrisy. That does not cut it. Hillary has been on record for years as opposing "the politics of personal destruction." Yet no one has said she has a duty to act as a civility cop and police every statement made by one of her prominent supporters. While it's hard to predict who wins individual spin cycles, I think Hillary has lost this one. Remember the broader subtext: Candidate with Gazillions of Dollars (Hillary) blows gasket when new, underfunded competitor with surprisingly high poll numbers (Obama) actually scores a decent sum of money through the result of efforts by prominent fundraiser who used to support Candidate with Gazillions of Dollars. It looks like resentment, pure and simple to me. I think that's how it will play broadly, but who knows?

Everybody comes out poorly here IMO. I thought, well I hoped that this primary would be aboveboard and respectful rather than vicious. Candidates can easily criticize the negatives of their opponents while sounding respectful.

Where does Geffen come off echoing GOP talking points! For instance, whether Clinton is any more "ambitious" than any other presidential candidate is NOT a fact, it is an opinion. I guarantee that if HRC is the nominee, you'll here time and again from the GOP: "Even the long-time Clinton fundraiser admits that Hillary Clinton is the most ambitious politician in the US."

Then the Clinton campaign responded with demands Obama certainly would not meet, making it into a candidate fight. Why not just ask that Obama disavow Geffen's comments?

Then the Obama one-upped the fight. For instance why mention the "Lincoln bedroom" at all, it was a repeated slander of the GOP against Bill Clinton, having besmirched the White House for fund-raising purposes. If HRC becomes the nominee she could easily reply to similar GOP attacks quoting some similar act of Bush.

Yes. Senator Clinton said she appreciated his apology.

Yeah, right, that was probably their whole plan, to just get it out there, the notion that African-Americans shouldn't vote for Barack because he can't win in a general election.

It was an obviously ridiculous comment on its face. Isn't that guy a paid Hillary consultant anyway? To the tune of $200k or so?

Nedra Pickler/AP is out with a story (on the front page of Yahoo News)

Clinton, Obama trade barbs over donor

Well, I am certain..that if and when Geffen apologizes..Obama will express his appreciation as well.  One thing for sure, Obama is not paying Geffen, so he can't threaten him with a monetary loss, if he has a 'lack' of appreciation for his remarks.

Geffen also had a long standing relationship of 16 years with the Clintons, so he was speaking from personal experience, not based on fees  being to him to be a 'sellout'

Your link goes to the home page of Election Central, is that an error?

You got to read Bob Somerby's take on this. Some hilights:

Simply put, Maureen Dowd despises the Clintons. In case her readers were too dumb to catch it, she arranges to cite the Lincoln Bedroom three separate times in this morning’s column ...

And what does it mean when Geffen says that Clinton is “incredibly polarizing?” It means this: Right-wing nut jobs invented a string of ugly tales about Clinton —and Geffen is tired of fighting the fight. ...

Meanwhile, Geffen is too stupid to understand a basic fact about Obama, his own (perfectly reasonable) choice for the White House. Here’s that fact: Obama will turn out to be “incredibly polarizing” himself, as soon as he gets the nomination. ... The same Hate Machine which made Clinton so “polarizing” will make this brilliant man a big punch-line too. ...

Dowd is a walking nightmare on matters of gender, and she’s not much better on race. Don’t worry—she’s going to sneer at Obama endlessly, just as she did with the “lactating” Gore.

Make no mistake: This will continue until liberals get smart—until we say that this must stop, until we go after these tortured souls whenever they slander any one of our candidates. First, she’s coming for Hillary Clinton. If we sit around and stare, she’ll be coming for Obama next.

I found the apology from state Senator Robert Ford of South Carolina (D-Charleston)

"If I caused anybody, including myself, any pain about the comments I made earlier, then I want to apologize to myself and to Senator Obama and any of his supporters."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/realclearpolitics/20070215/cm_rcp/the_worst_apology_in_history

The headline caption?
The Worst Apology In History
Tom Bevan

Money quote:

The former president, who is pictured on the letter with his arms wrapped lovingly around his wife, also warns that "with Republicans using everything in their arsenal to stop her campaign, Hillary is going to need every one of us to do everything that we can for her. "

Yes, cause while he was in the WH his arsenal of support for Hillary was engulfed by Lewinsky. .

All most non-junkies will hear, if anything, out of this is typical "politics-as-usual" bickering. They both probably lose, but him more so because he's presenting himself as something different. Nobody thinks she's going to be anything different.

marcf said:
Make no mistake: This will continue until liberals get smart
First, she’s coming for Hillary Clinton. If we sit around and stare, she’ll be coming for Obama next

In this case, Dowd got a twofer, both Clinton and Obama are involved as she prepares material for her next meaningless column.
The bigger picture is that Dowd (NYT), Mathews(MSNBC), Tucker(MSNBC), Beck(CNNHNN), Broder(WaPo), Kornblut(NYT now WaPo), Imus(MSNBC), and FauxNews throw bombs at Democratic Party members on a daily basis. Hillary is calculating, while flip-floppers McCain and Romney are not ridiculed to the same degree. Adulterer Guiliani is "America's mayor", while Chris Mathews repeatedly asks: "Can Hillary get Bill to behave?"
The MSM bias is so ingrained it's difficult to see a solution.
MSM pundits ask "Is Obama Black Enough For Black America?", while when Eugene Robinson, a Black WaPo columnist, asks members of the 95% Black audience attending a SC speech given by Obama, they have no clue what he's talking about. The MSM sets up the question, with the answer already prepared. Obama will have a problem gaining votes within his own "race". How do you break the cycle?
Glenn Beck and Bill O'Rielly can have an on-air discussion where they openly state they have problems talking to Black people and have no Black friends. No repercussions at all. That's MSM admitting they don't communicate with 10-15% of the population.
Aren't those airwaves supposed to belong to everyone.
(End of tirade)
But you have touched on an important point marcf, Progressives/Liberals/various ethnic groups need not apply for MSM punditry jobs.

All most non-junkies will hear, if anything, out of this is typical "politics-as-usual" bickering.

Agree, but Obama has been marketing himself as the "not politics as usual" candidate. He promised to elevate political discourse. And here he is lumped with slash and burn campaign tactics.

Hillary has little to lose. She is already perceived as a fighter. If she can bring Obama down to politics as usual level she benefits.

Just because he's going to work to bring people together doesn't mean his campaign can't respond to something silly that Hillary's team puts out there.

Most primary voters aren't going to pay any attention to this tit-for-tat back-and-forth anyway.

I would have said things a little differently, perhaps, but not much.

"Sen. Obama has nothing to apologize for and is not involved in this dispute. Sen. Clinton seems upset that a former major donor to her and her husband has chosen to support Sen. Obama for president and thinks that Sen. Clinton should apologize for her vote on the Iraq War, but it is the prerogative of each person to make up their own mind as to who they are going to support and why."

Don't believe everything you read, especially if it is written by Chris Cillizza who constantly tries to tear down Hillary Clinton. The "." quote is accurate, but the context is not. She was replying to a challenge from a young man in the audience who wanted to know why she thought she could deal with terrorists. She didn't mention "Democratic rivals," that's Cillizza's contribution, and there is NO evidence that she was referring to any Democrat. Since Ralph Nader had just announced that he "may" run if Clinton is nominated, I can only assume she was referring to him.

That is a major Republican slime trick, to quote Democratic candidates without mentioning the context. It is easy to make anybody sound bad. We shouldn't do it here.

What is your problem with Obama?

I think long term he is a weak candidate.

Yes, I would support Al Gore.