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Obama Grabs Another Super-Del

Obama gets another one: Congressman Dan Lipinski of Illinois.

That means the only remaining member of the Congressional delegation in Obama's state not backing him is Rahm Emanuel.


Comments (22)

Good deal. One down, three hundred thirty eight to go.

Sorry to say it, Greg, but no--this is not a good deal except in the most cynical sense of Obama gaining another delegate.

Lipinski is a poor excuse of a Democrat. Sadly he managed to hold on to his seat against Pera. DailyKos has been pretty active against Lipinski if you want to research the fellow.

Honestly, why does any sense other than the cynical one matter at this point? Obama needs superdelegates. If Beelzebub were a superdelegate I would be glad to get his endorsement at this point. After all, Claire McCaskill is supporting Obama, and while I grant that I know very little about Lipinski, I am all but certain that he is no worse than McCaskill. Beggers cannot be choosers, and both candidates are beggars where the superdelegates are concerned.

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Rahm Emanuel will side with the former president of the DLC (Republican-Lite); Sen Clinton.

That means the only remaining member of the Congressional delegation in Obama's state not backing him is Rahm Emanuel.

If he does come out and back Obama, I hope the 24/7 teevee people will be on hand to give us the pictorials of Carville blowing his gasket.

F Emanuel if he does. There is no point coming out in favor of the monster at this point in the campaign.

From MSNBC:

NBC-WSJ poll: New Clinton lows

From NBC's Chuck Todd

As expected, one of the two major Democratic candidates saw a downturn in the latest NBC/WSJ poll, but it's not the candidate that you think. Hillary Clinton is sporting the lowest personal ratings of the campaign. Moreover, her 37% positive rating is the lowest the NBC/WSJ poll has recorded since March 2001, two months after she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York.

The poll was conducted Monday and Tuesday this week by Hart-McInturff and surveyed 700 registered voters, which gives the poll a margin of error of +/- 3.7%. In addition, we oversampled African-Americans in order to get a more reliable cross-tab on many of the questions we asked in this poll regarding Sen. Barack Obama's speech on race and overall response to last week's Rev. Jeremiah Wright dustup.

On that issue specifically, 32% of folks said he "sufficiently addressed the issue," while 26% of those folks believe he needs to address the Wright controversy further; 31% of voters surveyed did not see the speech or had no opinion. Interestingly, of those voters who said they saw the speech, 47% said Obama sufficiently addressed the Wright issue while 37% said he needs to address it further. Among whites, 45% were satisfied with Obama's explanation, 38% were not; Among blacks, 67% said the speech was sufficient while 25% want him to address it further.

Overall, 55% of voters told us that they were "disturbed" by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright videos that circulated so widely on cable TV and the Internet.

As for the damage this controversy did or didn't do to Obama, it's a mixed bag. Yes, Obama saw some of his numbers go down slightly among certain voting groups, most notably Republicans. But he's still much more competitive with independent voters when matched up against John McCain than Hillary Clinton. And he still sports a net-positive personal rating of 49-32, which is down only slightly from two weeks ago when it was 51-28. Again, the biggest shift in those negative numbers were among Republicans.

On one of the most critical questions we've been tracking for a few months, Obama showed resilience. When asked if the three presidential candidates could be successful in uniting the country if they were elected president, 60% of all voters believed Obama could be successful at doing this, 58% of all voters said McCain could unite the country while only 46% of voters said the same about Clinton. All three candidates saw dips on this issue, by the way. In January, 67% thought Obama could unite the country; 68% thought McCain could do it; and 55% said Clinton would be able to pull it off.

The fact they all three dropped equally in the last three months is a sign that the campaign is becoming more ideological and partisan.

In the head-to-head matchups, there weren't huge shifts in the numbers with Obama and Clinton dead even at 45% in the national Democratic primary matchup (a slight increase for Obama from early March). In the general-election matchups, Obama led McCain by 2 points and McCain led Clinton by 2 points; all margin of error results and nothing to get too excited over.

One thing about these head-to-head matchups: our pollsters found that for the second poll in a row, more than 20% of Clinton and Obama supporters say they would support McCain when he's matched up against the other Democrat. There is clearly some hardening of feelings among some of the most core supporters of both Democrats, though it may be Obama voters, who are more bitter in the long run.

Why? Because among Obama voters, Clinton has a net-negative personal rating (35-43) while Clinton voters have a net-positive view of Obama (50-29). Taken together, this appears to be evidence that Obama, intially, should have the easier time uniting the party than Clinton.

Considering the doom-and-gloom some predicted for Obama with regard to the Wright controversy, the overall tenor of the electorate appears to still be favorable for him. He's mortal, but he's survived... for now. It's not clear whether he'd be this resilient if another controversy exploded as big as Wright, but it appears that voters are giving him the benefit of doubt. There's lots of evidence inside these numbers that voters still would like to know more about Obama, and that is both an opportunity and a potential obstacle.

Paging idiotic…

this is a good get for obama, but i must point out that lipinski is a pro-war, anti-choice DLC POS (and from a solidly blue district)

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Lipinsky himself is pretty right-wing; The folks at Kos and Open Left were trying to knock him off because he's a nepotism-elected corrupt scumbag who has no business calling himself a progressive. The only reason he got reelected was because the Chicago machine was propping him up.

I mean, I'm an Obama supporter, but if Obama wasn't from Illinois, Lipinsky would have jumped on the Hillary bandwagon months ago. He's an establishment guy through and through.

a nepotism-elected corrupt scumbag

what i meant to say.

Greg, don't you mean the only *undecided* member of the Congressional delegation from Illinois is Rahm Emanuel? You seem to want to point out that he's not backing Obama, but you fail to point out that he's not backing Clinton yet, either. Rahm probably hasn't decided because, even though he's a friend of the Clinton's, he also wants to get re-elected and Illinois is Obama country.

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Poll results show that Hillary Rambo Clinton's positive ratings have fallen by 8% in just the past two weeks.

Those poll results "shed light on impact" Sinbad is having on Hillary!!!!!!

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I really like the idea of a Superdelegate primary, especially if it is conducted out in the open, where everyone can see the betrayal in action. I'd love to see my congresswoman, Dianna Degette, who has endorsed Hillary depite a 70/30 split for Obama in Denver, squirm over that vote.

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Rahm Emanuel is a Neocon of the Neocons like Hillary and Joe Lieberman. The Democrats will be stronger when that whole bunch has migrated to their real party of choice.

But Hillary will bounce back. Count on Fox for that. And the little Fox-lite MSM freaks will do their disgusting thing too.

It ain't over til it's over, and maybe not even then! (Check with Connecticut on that!)

Dan Lipinski is irrelevant, just like Judas Richardson.

;-)

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Rahmie DLC of course wants to get out there with an endorsement for Hillary. But being the spineless Rahmie that he is, he won't do it until/unless there's the faintest glimmer that she has a shot at the nomination. The important thing to always remember about Rahmie is that it's all about Rahmie first and last.

Wow, did you guys check out that Intrade prediction on the right of this page?

It's got Obama with 80.5% chance of the nom
with Hillary at only 18.9%

Go with the Gamblers!

Emanuel in January:

And Rahm Emanuel said back in January:

[quote]He insists his quandary is less about political calculation than personal considerations.

`It's a human thing'

[quote]"Everybody knows I worked for the Clintons. I'm very close to the Clintons. And I'm very close to Barack. Let's be honest, does anybody want to pick among friends? It's a human thing, not a political thing," Emanuel said.

He added that he hoped to delay the inevitable choice

]"At some point, if I have to make a decision, I will. But I prefer, you know, they've got to go on and develop their campaigns," he said.

Obama, for his part, has had little to say.

Asked about Emanuel's posture at a recent Tribune editorial board meeting, Obama smiled.

"Rahm knows the right thing to do," he said.


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He is SO DYING to bail on the Clintons and go with Barack!

I think you have the lay of the land pretty well in this case. He likes the Clintons, but his district is Chicago's north side. Obama may have represented the south side of Chicago in the legislature, but he won the primary by more than 60% in Cook county and all the contiguous counties.

Politically, it's a no-brainer (unless he's hoping for a Clinton cabinet spot). If he has Senate aspirations, Obama is the clear choice. Also, having recently headed the DCCC and still being the chair of the Democratic Caucus Leadership, he may feel it's inappropriate to declare just yet.

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Hah, nice one.

Irrelevent superdelegates.

Kind of a natural progression, first there were the unimportant states, now the irrelevent supers.

I like your thinking. If only Mark Penn could tell us who the important supers were.

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Rahm Emanuel raised $120 million dollars for our congressional candidates in 2006 as head of the DCCC. He expanded the number of candidates getting that funding out to four tiers. He spent so much time on the road hounding donors to pony up and recruiting candidates to run and browbeating them to run hard and smart in 05-06 one of his kids refused to talk to him anymore when he called home.

Emanuel's policy positions haven't always been cutting edge progressive on issues like foreign policy, afterall he's representing a predominantly working class Polish Catholic district in Chicago. He's been more of a trailing indicator on Iraq than at the forefront for instance. But he's far from a bluedog and you can't argue with his success helping to build our majority in the House.

He's a dick, but he's our dick and we need a few dicks in this party.

And there's this from a September 2006 FORTUNE article:

On a wretchedly hot August day outside the Caterpillar tractor plant in Montgomery, Ill., President Bush and the state's congressional delegation gather for the signing of the massive transportation bill. This is 2005, the calm before the Katrina storm, and a rigorous mountain-biking schedule has the President in top shape.
In off-camera chitchat with the shirt-sleeved lawmakers, Bush takes note of Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel's deep tan, prompting the 46-year-old Emanuel to boast about the miles of swimming and biking in his triathlon training schedule. Testosterone oozes into the humid air space between the two men. Bush invites Emanuel down to Texas to do some real biking. "So I said, 'I'll make you a deal, Mr. President. I'll bike if you swim.' Now he didn't exactly say swimming was a wussy sport, but you could tell.... So I said, 'Mr. President, Laura can put your water wings next to the lake. You can have your water wings.'"
At that point you might think this graduate of the Evanston School of Ballet-a man whose office features sunset photos and who has the mellow chords of David Gray playing on his iPod-would leave well enough alone. But Emanuel is hard-wired to go for the jugular: Politics Chicago-style are part of his DNA. So he sharpens his drill bit on the leader of the free world. "I said to him, 'You're not one of those tribathletes, are you, Mr. President? You know-steam, sauna, shower?'
"And Bush goes, 'That's g-o-o-d.'"


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