Hillary is clinging on

Hillary knows that Obama’s comments about small town mid-Westerners being bitter and clinging to their faith and guns is probably her last best chance to make the Democratic party pause before nominating Obama so she is playing it for all its worth. This new, hastily cut ad is her latest effort to keep the controversy front and center.

The problem for Hillary is that making this kind of case in a Democratic primary probably hurts her almost as much as it helps her. The real beneficiary from this whole flap: John McCain.

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Obama, fired up

Obama has decided that the best form of defence is offence and is ripping into Hillary Clinton in highly personal terms for her attempt to make political capital out of his comments about small town mid-Westerners clinging to their faith and guns in an uncertain world. The tactic of decrying all criticism of him as politics as usual works when up against someone like Hillary Clinton, who is seen by so many voters as a say anything, do anything politician. Whether it will be so effective in a general election campaign against John McCain is quite another question. 

There’s...

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Hillary's last best chance

The Clinton campaign is eager to keep the storm over Obama’s comments about small town Pennsylvanians being bitter and clinging to their faiths and guns alive. At Bill Clinton rallies in North Carolina they’re handing out stickers saying 'I’m not bitter', while Hillary is hitting it hard on the stump.

Both candidates are at a forum tonight where we can expect the issue to come up, the forum will give Obama a chance to try and put them into context for the Monday morning news cycle. But it does appear that...

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Obama patronises Pennsylvania

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to

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Penned up frustration

Mark Penn is still receiving an almighty kicking. Today, Paul Begala, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s campaigns, said ‘I have nothing but contempt for Mr. Penn.’ Begala went on to compare Penn to two of the things most despised by Democrats, Don Rumsfeld and Exxon Mobil.

Undoubtedly, some of the criticism of Penn is justified. He should have stepped down from his consultancy job on taking the job of Hillary’s chief strategist, he shouldn’t have tried to slice and dice the electorate so thin, he should have worked out a strategy...

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Let the Bloomberg VP speculation begin again

The other week, Mike Bloomberg’s warm introduction of Barack Obama sparked all sorts of chatter about whether or not Obama might ask the Democrat turned Republican turned Independent mayor of New York to be his VP. Today, Bloomberg is the warm-up act for John McCain at an event in Brooklyn and we can expect everyone to start chattering again.

It is even more unlikely that McCain would pick Bloomberg than Obama. The right would have an absolute fit if McCain picked the socially liberal Bloomberg. But McCain must be at least a little bit tempted by the fact that the billionaire Bloomberg could finance the ticket, making up for Obama’s huge fundraising advantage. 

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Has the McCain campaign neutralised the 100 years quote?

One of the main attack lines in the general election against John McCain is going to be the idea that he is prepared to keep the war in Iraq going for 100 year. This all comes back to a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, where McCain said that he’d be prepared to see US troops in Iraq for 100 years which is obviously quite different.

The McCain camp has to be pleased that its pushback on this point is succeeding, as the video below shows. If it can have this attack ruled out of order, then it will have successfully dealt with one of McCain’s biggest vulnerabilities for the general.

Hat tip: Jonathan Martin

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McCain spells out his line on Iraq

John McCain’s opening statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, at which General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker are testifying, gives us the clearest idea yet of how McCain intends to make his Iraq case in the general election. First, McCain is brutally frank about how poorly the war was conducted from the fall of the statue of Saddam Hussein to the announcement of the surge. As McCain put it today, “Four years of mismanaged wars had almost brought us to the point of no return”. He went on to...

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Penn is a thing of the past

Mark Penn is not a popular chap and for the next few days Washington will engage in its favourite sport: kicking a man when he’s down. What will get lost in all this is that Penn was good at what he did: slicing and dicing the electorate into ever finer pieces. But what the troubles of the Clinton campaign have shown, among other things, is that this is not longer enough.

What remains to be seen is whether Penn’s strategy failed because his candidate was up against an exceptional politician...

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Mark Penn quits as Clinton's chief strategist

Mark Penn, the controversial pollster blamed for many of the missteps of the Clinton campaign, is stepping down from his role as chief strategist. A brief statement from campaign manager Maggie Williams reads:

“After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as Chief Strategist of the Clinton Campaign; Mark, and Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, Inc. will continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign. 

Geoff Garin and Howard Wolfson will coordinate the campaign's strategic message team going forward.”

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