The blogosphere is atwitter because Hillary Clinton slammed MoveOn.org at a private fundraiser back in February. Specifically, she falsely alleged that the organization that was created to tell people it was time to “move on” from the Lewinsky scandal had opposed the war in Afghanistan.
“MoveOn didn’t even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that’s what we’re dealing with. And you know they turn out in great numbers. And they are very driven by their view of our positions, and it’s primarily national security and foreign policy that drives them. I don’t agree with them. They know I don’t agree with them. So they flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support me.”
I thought that Hillary Clinton agreed with MoveOn.org about the need to end the war in Iraq. But, either way, the focus on MoveOn misses the larger point. She didn’t just attack MoveOn.
“We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party.”
A more exact analysis would be that she does worse in caucuses because, to bring out the casual low-information voter to a caucus, organization is required. Obama has superior organization.
About Clinton’s remarks suggesting dismay over high Democratic activist turnout, [communications director Howard] Wolfson said, “I’ll let my statement stand as is.”
We all know that Obama has built a small donor database the size of Montana. This has also dismayed Hillary Clinton.
“Moveon.org endorsed [Sen. Barack Obama] — which is like a gusher of money that never seems to slow down,” Clinton said to a meeting of donors. “
But it’s a mistake to equate this resource with MoveOn; Obama’s movement is so much broader than than that one organization of 3.2 million Americans. It includes, in a general sense, the progressive blogosphere and the whole new social networking-powered generation of young voters. It isn’t even accurate to call this the ‘activist base’ because ‘base’ indicates something solid that is always there. But Obama’s activists include more than reliable Democrats, many of whom have stuck with Clinton. Much of Obama’s ‘base’ is brand spanking new to politics and to the party. And there is nothing solid about them. If Clinton is the nominee, they will drift back into apathy. Or, if Obama is the nominee, they will form a new base, creating a durable governing majority for the left for a couple of generations.
A long time ago I said that Team Clinton hates us and that, if nominated, they will marginalize us and undo all the hard work we’ve put in and that Howard Dean has put in, to make the Democrats more progressive and more competitive all across the country. The Clinton campaign has fully vindicated my view. They hate and vilify Howard Dean, they criticize the 50-state strategy, they dislike the ‘activist base’ and consider its will to be illegitimate. They disagree with us on foreign policy and national security.
This is exactly what I have always said. My initial opposition to Clinton’s campaign was actually about self-preservation for our movement. Early on, I was dismayed at how many of my fellow bloggers seemed to be marching like lambs to the slaughter, even as their readers showed in poll after poll, less than 10% support for Clinton.
Fortunately, the readers took actions into their own hands and linked up with a nation of young people to organize Obama’s massive network.
Now the writing is on the wall for even the most myopic of pundits.
My guess is that the superdelegate tidal wave is about to begin.- Joke Line.
Obama’s victory is a victory for the activist base that stood up, when no else would, against the invasion of Iraq, against the Patriot Act, against outing our own spies, against Guantanamo Bay, against censoring the Downing Street Minutes, against illegal warrantless electronic surveillance, and against torture. Woe unto us, if we had not prevailed.
She has now entered the realm of self-parody.
Well, I’m not to dang sure I don’t hate her now. Maybe she needs to be primaried when she comes up for reelection for the Senate. Her sense of entitlement has reached an all time low and I am totally sick of it and her but she did inspire two new designs.
Democratic Activist for Obama
Bloggers for Obama
Re : Maybe she needs to be primaried when she comes up for reelection for the Senate.
No, she really needs to be primaried.
Getting Obama elected is just the beginning. My worst fear is that he gets in and reverts to business as usual. That is what will destroy a whole generation of potential activists for us.
Once he is in we will have to work hard to hold his feet to the fire and make him do the right thing. We will be fighting against a very strong tidal force in the beltway. Getting him elected will be the easy part compared with what will need to follow.
One step at a time.
Half the battle is proving that a people-powered candidate can win against all odds and obstacles.
Here’s something that bothers me. At the top of the Daily Kos reclist is a diary from a Clinton supporter that has finally had enough.
Everyone has their breaking point, I suppose, but when they attacked by black brothers and sisters I had enough. I didn’t need to wait for them to attack me and my fellow ‘activists’. I wish more people would stand on principle, even when they are not directly affected.
Glad you front paged this with fuller analysis.
I chuckled last night over the prospects of this report being helpful to pushing undecideds off the fence. As well confirming Clinton is unprincipled and progressives are the obstacle to full party control.
my diary header followed all others, including the original source, She did attack MoveOn. I seldom disagree with you but here’s what I worked with in the structure of the report at Huffpost:
btw, the site displayed internal server error for at least 90-mins last evening just when the Huffpost piece broke. The problem may have been with forefox and explorer
Really, it’s been step-by-step. The activists couldn’t get Dean last time, but it showed how that base was becoming more powerful. Didn’t quite get Kerry over the finish line. But four years later we see the roots having enough to get Obama past Clinton. It’s building, it’s maturing. I’d wondered if we were quite there in this primary, and I’m happy to see we are.
Massive props to the grassroots going after ABC, too. They did a hell of a job, completely changing the narrative. The netroots seems to have finally arrived.
Exactly Rev,
Obama has taken some positons that trouble me but I’m still going to support him in the hope that we can sway him once he’s in office.
that is infuriating.
My folks are moveon members who supported clinton in the NJ primary. they won’t like this…
I just don’t get some of the folks in the progressive blogosphere who still support Clinton.
Here’s my comment after Joan Walsh’s pathetic column yesterday criticizing Obama and praising Clinton, in which she continually used Republican talking points:
“Some of us seem to be trying to perform an intervention here. Your candidate has just thrown a good percentage of your readership under the bus. There are more than 3,000,000 in MoveOne.org, for Christ’s sake, and Hillary just repudiated all of us.
“… Without hope of taking the lead in the popular vote, or the pledged delegate count, she is running a sour-grapes, mean-spirited campaign to ensure four more years of Bushism, channeled through her friend, John McCain.
“Are you not a progressive; are you not a liberal? If you are still a committed Democrat and a progressive, please have the decency to call Clinton out for her final and fatal outrage.
“Salon is not even a shadow of what it used to be. Without Glenn Greenwald it would be an unqualified disaster.
“It’s okay to abandon your support for Clinton. Her candidacy is dying from self-inflicted wounds anyway. A lot of people are changing their choice of candidate today, and they are wise to do so. I would be thrilled to see you join them.”
I doubt if my letter has any effect. This is Clinton-Derangement-Syndrome and it appears to be near fatal.
I was a long-time subscriber to salon.com, and I let my subscription lapse while I was job-hunting for a FT position, on the thought that I’d pick it up again once I found something permanent.
But after seeing what it has become, absolutely not. It was bad enough with Debra Dickerson and Camille Paglia. And some of the navel-gazing tripe…geeze. I mean, you had some guy writing about his “anger” toward his parents because he was circumcised and how “damaged” he was. Seriously? I just couldn’t believe it. And I really miss Michelle Goldberg.
But the passive-aggressive Joan Walsh is just cringe worthy. I’ve gone from reading it on occasion to the decision that I just won’t visit at all.
And it goes without saying–I haven’t given them a dime. Without some changes, I never will.
Farhad has been pretty bad, too.
Oh–how could I forget. But Gary Kamiya can be OK. Not enough for me to care, though.
As Quentin noted, the only thing they have going for them is Gleen Greenwald, and I now only read him when someone links to him.
But they’ve got Glenn Greenwald. He’s worth the price even if the rest of them bite.
Glenn Greenwald is the only writer who keeps Salon afloat.
Maybe Hillary only repudiated over 2 million of us — the 2/3 of MoveOn members who voted to support Obama in the poll MoveOn took before it decided to endorse a candidate.
Good time to send a little cash in MoveOn’s direction, I figure.
Well, the wheels are coming off the Clintonmobile. Notice how her campaign is becoming even more disorganized as she flails out at the progressive left, as she uses the tactic of guilt by association at the debate in Philly, as she becomes closer and closer to McCain the Insane, as she continues to get her facts mixed up to her political advantage – accusing Move On of being against the war in Afghanistan. My God! The woman is delusional. Plus, Hillary continues to show a dark and sinister side, particularly, when she castigates an opponent for something that is not true. She is really viscious.
I thinks if she continues on in this vein she will have a tough primary fight in 2012. It seems like she is on the ultimate power trip and her fragile ego cannot bear it when defeat rears its ugly head. Maybe, she will leave Bill and hook up with Joe Lieberman. now, that’s a relatioship made in hell.
Don’t say this didn’t happen because it can’t happen. Ask, rather, what happened?
Whatever. She’s an idiot, a complete fool–and she brought this on herself.
Only a damned fool would dismiss voter engagement and turnout within a political party. That is the point, is it not? Well, her idiocy was on full display after Iowa, when she seemed to BLAME increased voter turnout for her defeat. It also showed when she and her campaign complained about the caucuses.
And why? Because her campaign is made up of BS artists who will do what they need to do to get to 51%. It is a fundamentally risky and frankly lazy way of doing business: it’s like the student who screwed around, crammed for 2 days and scored a B- when a bit of preparation and steady studying would have earned an A.
So this is what I’d like someone to say to her out loud:
Hillary, you got your hind parts handed to you.
I know she isn’t fond of this, but let’s roll tape:
-Her campaign clung to doing the same thing the same way in rejecting the 50 state strategy, which strikes me as foolish: rejecting the strategy is rejecting votes, donations, party-building and the goodwill to inspire people to volunteer and remain engaged. And it frankly strikes me as quite unpatriotic: 10 states “matter” while 40 don’t.
-They ignored the mood of the country.
-They ignored the technologies that can be used as powerful voter engagement, organization and turnout tools, CHOOSING to rely solely on local machines.
-They dismissed the need for a small donor strategy, and they have for years. Everybody knows it. They shouldn’t blame Barack Obama, Howard Dean or MoveOn for being smarter and more effective.
-They were arrogant and entitled, and in that arrogance and entitlement, failed to plan. So they didn’t bother learning the rules, training their paid ops and then organizing. And they got caught–repeatedly–with their pants down.
She has no one to blame but herself.
Bill Clinton once said that the difference between the parties is that Democrats fall in love while repubs fall in line. And that’s what they want us to…fall in line.
But guess what, Billary? This ain’t that kind of party.
One minor quibble. You said Obama has built a donor base the size of Montana. If you’re talking about number of contributors, he passed Montana a while back. I think his donor base is about the size of Idaho and on its way to Nebraska.
Just guessing but I know it’s more than a million people (Montana has just under that) and Idaho has about 1.4 million. Nebraska, something like 1.7.
Either way that’s a lot of dues-paying supporters.
I meant big as in physical size (square miles) not in terms of population.
Oh, but according to Clinton, those sorts of states don’t matter. You could just use Rhode Island as a unit of measurement, as in: Obama’s support is now 3000 Rhode Islands strong. Or whatever it is, I am too tired to do the math.
states anyway. I love how the Clintons like to write off those states because they were caucuses…it’s pretty convenient for them considering Obama would have probably won them all even if they were primaries. Look what he did in similar primaries in those regions (Utah, Wisconsin, etc.), his margins were just as big as the caucuses in Minnesota, Idaho, Washington, etc.
The only one I think might have been closer if a primary is Maine, but Obama was on a roll then so I wouldn’t even count on that.
Yes it is a victory but be careful about how much credit you give to the progressive blogosphere.
First, he is simply a fantastically inspirational candidate. By himself he mobilizes people
Next, he’s got a lot of smart people working for him who have given him great advice and organized very well. That bodes well for his administration. The most important job a president has is surrounding him/herself with great people
Third, much of the progressive blogosophere did not support him.
Finally, I’m pretty sure the majority of Americans are not part of the blogosphere. MSM still tells most people, even young people, which way the wind is blowing, even if they are getting their news off the net (through MSM sites) and visiting some non MSM sites.
For most American IMO there are things hugely more important (or at least things they are more invested/engaged in) than the next President. Obama’s strength is that he has brought them into the conversation at least enough to vote, caucus and contribute… and in record numbers
Stoller:
The people, the readers, of the progressive blogosphere were split between Edwards and Obama, but soundly rejected Clinton. And when Edwards lost, the vast majority of Edwards supporters went to Obama despite a months long blood feud with Obama supporters. Where we fell down was with the leading bloggers, who were hedging their bets.
But, you’re right, the progressive blogosphere deserves much less credit than the broader activist community, including MoveOn. Yet, we can all be loosely lumped together because we share a commonality of outlook, even if we use different tools.
As a group, we are responsible for Clinton losing, and she knows it, and she hates us for it.
Obama wrote off Daily Kos after one of his initial posts got mixed reception, calling it boring — the old politics of division. Edwards wooed the blogosphere, especially Daily Kos; even though he never posted there, his wife and key staffers have. Obama only got a lot of love from the netroots after Edwards dropped out.
Hillary frontloaded with mostly large donors, ran into financial trouble when the campaign ran longer than she had anticipated. Edwards, backed mostly by unions and small donors, had enthusiasm, but was not able to build enough on that base. Obama’s campaign benefitted from big money donors up front (which was part of the reason many in the netroots distrusted him as a corporate candidate initially); but then once his campaign got rolling, the small donors have sustained it.
As far as Clinton losing, the netroots have contributed much more: By undermining the DLC, an organization that Bill was instrumental in founding. By campaigning to dump Terry McAuliffe and elect Howard Dean as DNC chair and supporting the 50 state strategy. By identifying and cultivating several House candidates in districts that the DNC had written off in the past (even though Rahm tried to take credit for them after the fact). By helping to find and then actively supporting Ned Lamont against Joe Lieberman (and humiliating joementum in the process). By getting all of the Democratic candidates to attend Yearly Kos rather than the DLC gathering.
The netroots has been chipping away at the infrastructure the Clintons have been building since the 80’s. She has good reason to hate us.
I agree here, but I would take this a lot further:
Yes. I’m a Moveon member, but my mother and grandmother are not; both are supporting Obama (the former much more actively). But this distinction you’re making highlights how wrong and in my opinion how manipulative Sen. Clinton is…
When I supported her primary challenger last time (I think the much-respected Stoller and others felt Tasini was a total longshot… someone gave him credit for lowest $$ spent to get over 10% of the vote), it was “merely” over the war and the flag-burning ban.
When she wants to go all, “voting against me is anti-feminist” while using her husband as a resume-padder (not to mention those crickets chirping when the media started in on Mrs. Obama), when her campaign fans the flames of racism, that apparently sent other not-so-“progressive” people over the edge, too. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Obama won across the board in Virginia. “left-leaning” by VA standards often means to the right of Romney…
I cannot understand for the life of me why Joe Wilson endorsed HRC, because she was just as deaf to progressives and sane conservatives about the war. (BTW Glenn Greenwald would be an example of the latter.) Some of the progress that progressives has made has come because of not-very-left people of firm conscience (e.g. whistleblowers in the CIA). The progressive blogosphere deserves credit, some courageous military folks deserve credit… and tons of different kinds of people are indeed flocking to Obama’s campaign, because of his track record and because of his work before and in the campaign.
IMNSHO, Obama as rock star (i.e. saying his supporters are not looking at substance or issues) is Clinton’s most successful lie of the campaign. I hope we can keep fighting it.
http://ruralvotes.com/thefield/?p=1090#comment-20372
Check out this post from Al Giordano about the Rush Limbaugh effect in Pennsylvania. The Republicans are making it clear that they would much rather face Hillary in the general election.
They did the same thing in Ohio and Texas, and the exit polls show that she picked up 4-8 points as a result of GOP voters registering as Democrats simply for the purpose of thwarting Obama. They view him as the tougher candidate to beat in November. The fact that Clinton has drawn a fair number of Republican votes also undercuts her ‘popular vote’ argument to some extent.
If I was a superdelegate, I’d be mighty reluctant to cast my vote for the Democrat who the Republicans would prefer to run against.
I know of one Republican who changed her registration to Dem for the PA primary. Interestingly, her reason was she really does want Clinton to win the presidency.
I am in a very Republican area where the primary is the real election. There are contested state seats, so I doubt if serious GOP members would toss away their vote by changing parties.
It may be possible to find the number who switched party affiliation by contacting each county’s commissioner’s office.
I know two Republican women (mother, next-door neighbor; not just an acquaintance) who’ve changed their registrations because they really, really like Hillary. My mother wrote in “Casey” on her primary ballot when Santorum was up for reelection; I think she may be realizing her party left her behind in their rush to the right. (And Clinton makes a pretty good moderate Republican, actually.) My neighbor has the only Clinton yard sign I’ve seen.
WEll …. since Obama wants us to abide by the golden rule …. do unto others as you would have them do unto you … it’s time for ALL of US to flip HIM off:
Obama & (“Middle-Finger-Gate”) …. & WHY the MEDIA isn’t covering it:
Originally posted on: The Swamp website:
Just watch the videos. He did it twice, in the same day, at two separate events. He made the gesture at the same point in his speeches – the crowd understood what he meant. Actions speak louder than words. This man is not fit to be a US Senator.
First speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DygBj4Zw6No
Second speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhkq11UExcw
Posted by: james | April 18, 2008 3:47 PM
If Obama gets the nod it will be due solely to Black hypocrisy and White guilt. Great way to get a president! You think the last 8 years were a mess…just wait!
Posted by: Sandee Enriquez | April 18, 2008 5:30 PM
________P.S. If you are FOR Obama …. its because you’re EASILY brainwashed & don’t bother to CHECK the FACTS….. You just BELIEVE whatever the BOOBTUBE spews at you.
“middle-finger-gate”…l got your middle finger…smeared with the blood of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocents.
take your sorry act on the road troll.
rated accordingly.
MMMMMM – cheesecake!
Olives Marinated in Thyme and Garlic
5 cups raw olives
Water
1 tablespoon salt
8 cloves garlic (separated but not peeled or crushed)
Handful fresh thyme
3 bay leaves
Handful wild fennel, flowers included, optional
Crack the raw olives with a hammer or rolling pin against a wooden chopping board and place in a large bowl or bucket.
Soak the olives in water to cover for at least 1 week. Make sure you change the water everyday. This is to remove the bitterness of the olives.
Once the olives have soaked for a week, strain the water and add clean fresh water to the bowl.
Add the salt, garlic cloves, thyme, bay leaves and optional wild fennel. Mix well.
Place all the solid ingredients (herbs and olives) into an airtight glass or ceramic jar. Pour in enough of the salted water to cover the olives. Close the jar and ensure it is airtight.
Store in a cool dry place for at least 2 weeks before eating your first olive.
Serve with drinks. Preferably Kool-Aide.
and a delightfully apropos dessert…’cause it’s gonna be on the menu soon:
bon appetit!