Firestarter

Hoo, boy!

If Hillary Clinton announces that if she has to win ugly, if it's backroom, party-splitting politics, she'll do it:

With every delegate precious, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers also made it clear that they were prepared to take a number of potentially incendiary steps to build up Mrs. Clinton’s count. Top among these, her aides said, is pressing for Democrats to seat the disputed delegations from Florida and Michigan, who held their primaries in January in defiance of a Democratic Party rules.

She's now not only mathematically incapable of winning the nomination through the popularly-elected delegate count, it's nearly impossible to beat his final popular total. So this is how she decides to play it, sending out her multi-million dollar campaign consultants:

"We don't make distinctions between delegates chosen by million of voters in a primary and those chosen between tens of thousands in caucuses,'' Wolfson said. "And we don't make distinctions when it comes to elected officials'' who vote as superdelegates at the convention.

"We are interested in acquiring delegates, period,'' he added.

Clinton advisers rejected the notion that the candidate -- and the party -- would be badly wounded in the general election if the nominee were essentially selected by a group of party insiders.

"This is a nomination system that exists of caucuses, primaries, superdelegates and also the issue of voters in Florida and Michigan,'' states whose delegates currently will not be seated at the convention because they broke party rules by moving up their primaries to January, said Mark Penn, senior strategist for the Clinton campaign. But "whoever the nominee is, the party will come together behind that nominee,'' he said.

They are under a bunkered delusion. They don't understand the lay of the land. Dems are racking up huge vote totals because independents and some Republicans, lifelong ones, are coming over to vote for a man of character. If she's successful, she will not only lose all those voters to Sen. John McCain, she will not only lose the youth vote that's just joined the party, but she will lose an arctic ice floe of longtime Democrats. And if she still manages to squeak out 51% of the vote, she can kiss her mandate goodbye.

On the other hand, if she wins through these back channel manipulative means, doesn't prove she's tough, bending whatever scruples to get the job done -- and if we want her to do what she's promising, that'll be what it takes. She'll have recovered from a full-blown campaign disaster -- it only takes one more nudge ahead in the polls for the media to give her the "Comeback Kid" moniker, regaining front-runner status after having been down, deserving of a win any way she can, that's the real world, that's proof.

So is that what's going to happen?

Even given the replacement of longtime confidante Patty Solis Doyle with longtime confidante Maggie Williams as Campaign Manager, the stories emerging from her campaign, if true, suggest that Sen. Clinton has neither the judgment nor the management skills to be President of the United States of America:

The Texas and Ohio presidential primaries, on March 4, have become must-win contests for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, her advisers say. So why is she just opening campaign field offices across those states?...

...She and her team showered so much money, attention and other resources on Iowa, New Hampshire and some of the 22-state nominating contests on Feb. 5 that they have been caught flat-footed — or worse — in the critical contests that followed, her political advisers said.

She also made a strategic decision to skip several small states holding caucuses, states where Mr. Obama scored big victories, accumulating delegates and, possibly, momentum.

Her heavy spending and relatively modest fund-raising in January compounded the problems, leaving the campaign ill-equipped to plan after Feb. 5, advisers and donors say.

“It sure didn’t look like they had a game plan after Super Tuesday,” Mr. Rendell said in an interview on Wednesday.

That's from the PA Governor who supports her. No plan for success. Sound familiar?

Why does her younger opponent seem more experienced than her:

In Maine, Arden Manning, chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, attributed Mr. Obama’s victory by almost 20 percentage points in Sunday’s caucuses to his superior organization, despite Mrs. Clinton’s apparent advantages with the state’s demographics of older, blue-collar, lower-income voters.

“A lot of the credit for what happened here goes to the Obama campaign, a grass-roots campaign, that was very well organized, with precinct captains and precinct leaders getting people out,” Mr. Manning said.

In addition, the Obama campaign was more adept at using the Internet.

“I got very little from the Clinton side,” said Amy Fried, a political scientist at the University of Maine, who signed up on both campaigns’ Web sites to compare them. “But I got a lot from Obama, urging me to come in and work and telling me about events, just giving me lots more.”

Can her campaign, called (no joke) "Hillaryland", recover from its disastrous start (sound familiar? sound familiar?) where it blew through trainloads of cash ($175 million) and didn't tell each other internally that they had bled the place dry:

Even after grasping the magnitude of the threat, the Clinton campaign didn’t react quickly and stuck to the strategy of trying to project an aura of inevitability. Here, too, Solis Doyle was disastrous; her lack of skill in areas other than playing the loyal heavy began to show. The first public sign of this came just after Clinton’s reelection to the Senate. Even though Clinton had faced no serious opponent, it turned out that Solis Doyle, as campaign manager, had burned through more than $30 million. As this New York Times story makes clear, the donor base was incensed. Toward the end of the Senate campaign, Solis Doyle did her best to bolster the impression of the inevitability of Hillary’s nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate, spreading word that Clinton’s Senate reelection fund-raising had gone so exceptionally well that $40 million to $50 million would be left after Election Day to transfer to the incipient presidential campaign. But this turned out to be a wild exaggeration—and Solis Doyle must have known it was. Disclosure filings revealed a paltry $10 million in cash on hand; far from conveying Hillary’s inevitability, this had precisely the opposite effect, encouraging, rather than frightening off, potential challengers.

From the nakedly corrupt assumption of a coronation:

Such arrogance led directly to the idea that Clinton could simply project an air of inevitability and be assured her party’s nomination. If she wins—as she very well might—it will be in spite of her original approach. As one former Clinton staffer put it to me last spring: “There was an assumption that if you were a major donor and wanted to be an ambassador, go to state dinners with the queen—unless you were an outright fool, you were going to go with Hillary, whether you liked her or not. The attitude was ‘Where else are they going to go?’”

And then there's this just emerging, a potential scandal simmering to blow -- the Clintons selling her campaign mailing lists to a brokerage house part of the large Info U.S.A. corporation. Sold at what appears to be a 99% discount. Sold to an old Clinton friend:

Info U.S.A.'s CEO is Vinod Gupta, a close ally of both Clintons. Gupta's empire also includes the Opinion Research Corporation, which conducts the political polling for the television network CNN.

Vin Gupta has a long history of giving and raising campaign money for the Clintons, and gave $1 million for the 2000 Millennium Celebration, a New Year's Party thrown by the Clintons.

When he was president, Bill Clinton named Gupta to the Kennedy Center board of directors. Gupta also got to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. He gave another million to the Clinton Presidential Library.

The library is run by the National Archives, but Bill Clinton raised the money for its construction and always refused to identify his major donors.

Last fall, ABC News reported that the library rented out a portion of its donor list to a list broker — the same one that rented Hillary Clinton's campaign lists.

Now that's Presidential...sharing personal data for political profit. That's what'll make citizens vote for her in the fall.

What's worse, here's her answer to the user-generated Obama video(s):



And she's test-posting nasty, weak-sauce, unpertinent attack ad like his with astroturf comments from her staff filling up the YouTube page.

Meanwhile:



And he's already proving to have coattails, another core element of his argument, with newcomer Donna Edwards winning a Congressional Primary over corrupt incumbent Al Wynn:

The difference this time around was the enthusiastic and broad support that Barack Obama’s candidacy brought about, driving younger and more informed voters to the polls simply by appearing on the ballot. This new support was the key to Donna Edwards’ victory against what had become an entrenched establishment candidate.

Again, nine months before the general election is held, and there is already clear evidence of the effect that having Obama on the ballot will have on down-ticket elections come November.

It's possible that at this point it wouldn't be Hillary that beats Barack, it'd have to be himself. dloewe on Open Left lays out the now uncharacteristic missteps that would have to happen for Obama to lose (click for full description version):

1. He has to lose Ohio and Texas by significant margins
2. He has to lose Pennsylvania by significant margins
3. He has to lose the Edwards Endorsement
4. He has to lose Wisconsin
5. He has to lose the Florida/Michigan PR battle
6. He has to have a "Macaca" moment
7. He has to lose the super delegate PR fight
8. He has to lose the debate about debates

Any of this could conceivably happen, and it's a good warning for the contender to keep him and his supporters on their toes. Many or most of these would have to happen for him to lose -- the worst being a "Macaca" moment since it's the only one that can set all the others in motion.

So what is the Obama campaign doing right now? Resting on their laurels? Taking it easy, assuming it's all in the bag, meet the new boss, same as the old boss?

Check out his team's upcoming day's 18 participatory events for Texas, listed on his website.

Oh, and read to the bottom to find out about the one for hers.

One more thing: substance.