Just one more example of how long her odds are and how she's placing her before party. There was a real opportunity for her to look magnanimous(sp) AND look like a leader (and a uniter)--she could have come out and defended Obama. Instead, she's taken the low road.

Every day I say that she can't surprise me any more. And it seems everyday, she proves me wrong. Whatever goodwill was lingering from the Clinton Presidency is now gone. Clinton is dead to me.

I'm shocked, SHOCKED to find that the Clinton camp would be so cynical.

Hillary would be better off showing some leadership on this issue and coming to Obama's defense. The fact the she is willing to play politics with this issue is one more reason she should not be president.

I suggest we call the Clinton campaign and ask them why they're obviously race-baiting. Why their only hope of winning is relying on America to be racist?

Do the Clintons know ANY other way but the low road?

Right.

Meanwhile, Mica on MSNBC is playing the YouTube anti-Obama videos, with speech/Wright mashups. Politico had an article on this yesterday.

Clinton is trying to win the nomination, Obama is trying to lose the election.

Tad Devine, a Democratic consultant not aligned with either camp, said Obama's speech on Tuesday went a long way in fixing the situation.

As firm a statement as that is, it is still an understatement.

To "cheat" the election over to Hillary after Barack's speech, would be so cowardly and spineless a move, that there is nothing in the historical past we might compare it to.

They, and she, are making a perverted and insane argument here. It is totally self-serving in the context of history, politics, and the Democratic party.

Obviously, it would rend the party. Destroy it completely. I realize she desperately wants to be president, but this argument is so atrociously immoral and mean, that one can't condemn her enough for it.

Disgusting.

But, but, I thought that she would be pushing all her clinton I white house experience now that her schedules were released. Orr, how about her wonderful economic plans due to the recession. I for the life of me don't understand why voters would so overwhelmingly trust her on the economy. Obviously, they are voting for a third term of mr. bill which is pathetic. Orrr, how about pushing her foreign policy experience with sinbad at her side.

Nah, she's not pushing herself, she is just tearing down the presumptive nominee. What leadership!! What integrity!!!! How clintonian! Every day this clintonian nonsense goes on I now see why people actually hated them in the 90's and still do. Pathetic.

i have to blame the DNC for all this hate ....the primary system they have is a horror story ... all these months of campaigning ...and strippimg the the fourth and eighth largest states of their delagates.... .caucus's where 2 percent of voters pick the winner.....open primaries where outsiders can pick the winner.......super delagates where the winner is picked for political reasons...proportional distribution of delagates ....this set up is geared for no one to win 2025 delagates ....HRC wins 3 states obama wins one state and she only gains 7 delagates....what kind of genius came up with this math .....the more candidates are on the road the more they have to attack to try to separate themselves ...the more their electorate gets hateful and start saying things that are outrageous...15 months and still going ...thay cant keep saying the same thing so they resort to throwing things against the wall to see what sticks.....DNC created this mess and deserve to be laughed at....maybe this should go to the convention and tear this dem party apart so it can be rebuilt with some sanity and common sense

I think the speech on Tuesday had a big impact on the party insiders.

Obama has shown the super delegates that there is a path out of the darkness that the party has been in.

Stand up for you convictions. Speak honestly. Show courage. People will respond to that.

Sometimes it just takes someone to show you the way.

The Clinton "argument" has all the charm of ripping a bandage off a healing wound and probing it with a stick. "See how deep it is? See how it bleeds?"

Ah, she's an angle of mercy, that Hillary is! Bless her kind heart!

Has anyone else found it weird that Hillary hasn't been kicking Obama while he is down (in public, apparently she is doing it behind the scenes)? She has NEVER missed an opportunity to take a cheap shot at Obama, yet she has been strangely silent throughout this whole thing...has anyone else noticed that?

Turns out there is a reason for it, apparently Hillary has her own church problem:

http://www.thepersonalispolitical.com/2008/03/hillarys-own-church-problem-plot.html

Obviously, HRC's only hope of winning the nomination is the destruction of Obama so that the superdelegates will reject him. I hoped she would draw a line at that straetgy, but obviously, she has not. What a cowardly tactic -- allowing surrogates to pitch the case to the superdelegates while publicly voicing faint praise for Obama's speech. I am glad the NYT surfaced what HRC's campaign is doing behind the scenes.

I can only shake my head at the utter folly and destructiveness of these desperate tactics.

At least the Hillary campaign isn't trying to hide their true strategy anymore....rather than trying to sell us on the notion that they can somehow win the nomination by talking about issues, or offering a positive plan for the future, they are now coming right out and saying that from here on in, "vetting and testing" of Obama is what this campaign is all about.

Cynical, yes, but her only chance at the nomination under the DNC rules. I agree with ZUMPER that the DNC has created a giant mess with this absurdly huge block of Superdelegates....

How is it that 800 Superdelegates have the same delegate power in this election for example, as 10 Wisconsins, or 8 New Jerseys or more than 4 Texases? Pelosi, Dean, and the lot of them should be ashamed for creating such an undemocratic process where 800 individuals have the same power as millions of average American voters.

Why else would you create this class of Superdelegates if you didn't envision a scenario where they were used to go against the popular will of primary voters? This is typical of the Democratic party...talk a big game on inclusiveness, democracy, counting every vote, etc., then keep all the decisionmaking power in the hands of a few elites, in case the plebes make the "wrong" choice.

What a joke. I can only hope that the Superdelegates keep their wits, and follow the will of the voters. If you win more states, more delegates and get more votes, you 're the nominee...End of f'in story

Where is Edwards, indeed? And Richardson, Pelosi, Gore...? They are leaving Obama out there fighting this smear on all fronts. He's tough enough and good enough to take it, but if Hillary grabs this nomination by capitalizing on our country's racial divide that will be sickening. Just sickening.

People need to see Rev. Wright being uplifting and positive...

To this point, all anybody’s seen of Rev. Wright are these awful (YouTube) clips of him...Into an empty vessel, has dropped all of his negative/divisive ramblings...This is the problem: it is ALL anybody has seen of him...Someone (I can’t do it) needs to make a clip of him saying some up-lifting stuff, and get it on YouTube, fast, so people can at least SEE THE OTHER SIDE of the guy...No-one knows what the other side of this guy is --- people need to see it....Until this happens, these awful clips of him are the only thing people know --- it is 100% of him....

Geez, the Republicans would counter this in a second ---- Karen Hughes (Barbara Comstock, who-ever) would go on GMA with a full library of uplifting clips of him, with a list of great things his done, and say America isn’t getting the full story, etc. etc...

How tough is it to do this?

As has been pointed out by several people in this thread already, Clinton is clearly seeking to deliberately destroy Obama's electability, in order to swing the superdelegates.

What gets picked up less often is that she's also destroying herself in the process. By polarizing along racial lines, she dooms her chances in the general election if she does get nominated by the superdelegates. I think overturning the elected delegates would doom her anyway, but this is the nail in the coffin.

Some people seem to be waiting to see how Obama will weather her attacks, with the presumption that if he goes under, Hillary is in the wings as a safe choice for the party nomination. That's not going to happen. Everyone who's questioning Obama's electability needs to turn around and look hard at how Hillary would have to unite the party, starting in August.

The only good choice if we want a Democratic president is to stop this bloodletting now.

Yes, where are Gore, Pelosi, Edwards, Richardson?

They should be slamming the TV and radio stations that play endless loops of selected parts of Jeremiah Wright sermons with the obvious intent of creating racial turmoil. Why are they questioning McCain's new allegiance to Parsley (all muslims are evil and their religion is evil) and Hagee (Mr. Anti-Catholicism). Guilt by association works both ways.

They should be endorsing Obama and acknowledging the fact that Obama's whole being is about uniting this country so we can get rid of corporatocracy, racism, and provide health care and a decent education for all people.

We know where The Clintons and their surrogates are: they are out celebrating and making calls to super delegates.

And I wonder if Congresswoman Tubbs is still vigorously campaigning for Clinton. If she is, will she survive another election cycle?

And I wonder how Hillary Clinton is going to win a general election without the black vote? She may believe everyone will just fall in line if she gets the nomination, but believe me, that won't happen.

In a general election Hillary vs McCain third party candidates will do very well. If either McCain or Clinton win, we all lose.

Obama's 20 year connection to racism and anti-American hate by his church, community, now-retired Rev. Wright, who he still holds dear, is Obama's doom. It shows his poor judgement and unsuitability. Any superdelegate trusted with the party's best interests will ahve to vote against Obama. That is, unless they too buy into the hatred and racism that Obama shares by association.

As long as she can keep this a secret between her and the superdelegates, I guess that this could work. The fact, however, that we are reading about it in the NYT indicates that it is no longer a secret. The cat is out of the bag - Clinton is trying to turn a popular black minister into an albatross around Obama's neck.

Fair enough, of course. There are probably more whites scared of men like Wright in this country than there are blacks who like men like Wright, so from a statistical standpoint one is better off condemning Wright than embracing him. The problem for Clinton, however, is that she needs the votes of those blacks who like Wright (and other pastors like him in black churches across this nation). Black voters may be a minority, but they are minority which is absolutely crucial to democratic chances for victory. If black voters feel disaffected and simply stay home in November, not only will we lose swing states like OH and PA and FL, we will lose even usually blue states like IL and CA and MA.

It is not as if there are no Republicans in those states; they are simply (usually) outnumbered by the democratic coalition of working class whites, racial minorities and "latte liberals." Take away black voters from the racial minority portion of that coalition and leave a sizable chunk of "latte liberals" feeling sour and all of a sudden the usual coalition is no longer larger than the republican coalition.

In other words, Clinton is playing with fire here. If she is publically perceived by black voters to be pillorying Wright (and those like him) in order to beat Obama, and perceived by "latte" types to be playing dirty in the process, she will be unable to carry even the 2004 blue states. 2008 will be Reagan vs Mondale all over again. Here's hoping that she wakes up to that reality and backs away quickly from this strategy. Nobody here wants to see President John McCain taking the oath of office next January.

Good point.

How about equal opportunity religious investigations that should be brought up by the MSM? How come Billary hasn't been asked to answer over and over again on the below article from The Nation?

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/ehrenreich

ARTICLE | posted March 19, 2008 (web only)
Hillary's Nasty Pastorate

BARBARA EHRENREICH

This article first appeared on Barbara Ehrenreich's blog.
There's a reason Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that "through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as "The "Fellowship," also known as The Family. But it won't be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet's shocking exposé The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published in May.

Sean Hannity has called Obama's church a "cult," but that term applies far more aptly to Clinton's "Family," which is organized into "cells"--their term--and operates sex-segregated group homes for young people in northern Virginia. In 2002, Sharlet joined The Family's home for young men, forswearing sex, drugs and alcohol, and participating in endless discussions of Jesus and power. He wasn't undercover; he used his own name and admitted to being a writer. But he wasn't completely out of danger either. When he went outdoors one night to make a cell phone call, he was followed. He still gets calls from Family associates asking him to meet them in diners--alone.

The Family's most visible activity is its blandly innocuous National Prayer Breakfast, held every February in Washington. But almost all its real work goes on behind the scenes--knitting together international networks of right-wing leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian. In the 1940s, The Family reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that exemplary leader, Adolf Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole bestiary of murderous thugs. As Sharlet reported in Harper's in 2003:

During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise.

At the heart of The Family's American branch is a collection of powerful right-wing politicos, who include, or have included, Sam Brownback, Ed Meese, John Ashcroft, James Inhofe and Rick Santorum. They get to use The Family's spacious estate on the Potomac, The Cedars, which is maintained by young men in Family group homes and where meals are served by The Family's young women's group. And, at The Family's frequent prayer gatherings, they get powerful jolts of spiritual refreshment, tailored to the already powerful.

Clinton fell in with The Family in 1993, when she joined a Bible study group composed of wives of conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James Baker. When she ascended to the Senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's "most elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his downfall, Virginia's notoriously racist Senator George Allen. This has not been a casual connection for Clinton. She has written ofDoug Coe, The Family's publicity-averse leader, that he is "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."

Furthermore, The Family takes credit for some of Clinton's rightward legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing "religious freedom" in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics.

What drew Clinton into the sinister heart of the international right? Maybe it was just a phase in her tormented search for identity, marked by ever-changing hairstyles and names: Hillary Rodham, Mrs. Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton and now Hillary Clinton. She reached out to many potential spiritual mentors during her White House days, including New Age guru Marianne Williamson and the liberal rabbi Michael Lerner. But it was the Family association that stuck.

Sharlet generously attributes Clinton's involvement to the under-appreciated depth of her religiosity, but he himself struggles to define The Family's theological underpinnings. The Family avoids the word Christian but worships Jesus, though not the Jesus who promised the earth to the "meek." They believe that, in mass societies, it's only the elites who matter, the political leaders who can build God's "dominion" on earth. Insofar as The Family has a consistent philosophy, it's all about power--cultivating it, building it and networking it together into ever-stronger units, or "cells." "We work with power where we can," Doug Coe has said, and "build new power where we can't."

Obama has given a beautiful speech on race and his affiliation with the Trinity Unity Church of Christ. Now it's up to Clinton to explain--or, better yet, renounce--her long-standing connection with the fascist-leaning Family.