what's really sad, is that this kind of campaigning works, but that's the reality, and it doesn't speak highly to the attitudes and prejudices of americans in general. granted, obama's message of hope and unity won the day, but it was close.

there's a lot of hard work to be done in order to put obama in the house at 1600 pennsylvania ave, and get a solid democratic congress elected.

it's time to move forward and put hillary behind us.

the revolution will not be televised...

Strangely her campaign appeared to me to not just pit blacks against Jews but blacks against Hispanics, young vs old - whether she was compartmentalizing us or segregating us, them vs us mentality. Then during the caucus's she started that strange meme that it was unfair to 'her' supporters because they were working class/shift workers that couldn't attend. I always got the feeling her strategy of divide and conquer was reminiscent of Bush's 'you're either for us or against us'. Obama's 'together we can do it' was a welcoming challenge that simply reminded of how powerful we can be together. I kinda like together.

Granted the Clintons leave a lot to be desired on the scales of human decency and political and moral responsibility, but I don't think Rep Andrews is a beacon of hope when it comes to rectitude and honesty itself.  Why did he wait so long before blowing the whistle? He kind of give politicians a bad name.  

Maybe, they deserve it.

Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines, but inside there is no music, then what? Kabir

The permanent campaign was a term I remember being coined  during the Clinton administration. Stephanopolis IIRC and it wasn't considered a bad thing.

It is now seen as a poor substitute for leadership and vision.

Anyway, here in Jersey Andrews is no saint. No one is except maybe Newark Mayor Booker and he's on a short leash.

Still I have little doubt Andrews is telling the truth. I just wish he would name names. Produce the memo. Is this stink on Clinton or some higher up or higher ups in the Jersey DC? Makes a difference. Seems he is doing this more to his gain than anything else.

I think she and Bill both were terribly injured by the constant stream of vicious attacks on them, culminating in the impeachment, but lasting after the election when Bill was banned from pleading before the Supreme Court.  Every now and then one would get a peak of her earlier character, but the ride toughened her in ways that are unlikeable.  She has a tin ear for the American psyche, and had she been elected -- as I am sure she would have be if nominated -- her presidency would have been deeply flawed.

We are heading into extremely troubled economic waters.  The sharp rise in the unemployment rate, the crash today on the NYSE, the surge of oil prices, the falling dollar, the housing debacle -- everything happening at once, and none of it good.  We haven't been in this territory since the early 1930s.  It will take more persuasiveness than she can muster to tide us through the terrible times that are about to fall on us.

Sorry to be so negative about the current state of the US, but that was always in my mind when I considered the candidates.  Both Edwards and Obama had the rhetorical skills and capacity for learning and adjustment that Clinton lacks.

It is incredibly sad.  The Clintons did a good job of raising their daughter in that maelstrom, which says something about their basic decency.

Knut

I thought the charges of the Clintons exploiting race were overblown (except for Ferraro, who I didn't blame Clinton for), right up until the point just after North Carolina and just before West Virginia where Clinton and her surrogates suddenly started making the argument she was more electable because she appealed to white working class voters, and that was the demographic we needed to win. Even I couldn't miss that; I was shocked. After that, something like this is sad, but I don't need it to confirm my impressions. What the campaign said in public unapologetically was plain enough.

This is simply more proof that the tale being told among Clinton supporters that Obama was the one who played the "race card" was as false as every other spurious charge they have slung at him and Michelle.

How is this proof that Obama did not play the race card?
It's proof that CLINTON played the race card.

I don't think Obama played the race card. But this statement does nothing to prove or disprove that he did or didn't. It does say alot about the Clinton team though.

A subset of voters was identified in the WVa primary who considered race to be important when casting a vote. In WVa that subset was 22% of the voters.

I suspect that subset exists in all states with varying percentages which brings me to FL.

Fl down to almost Orlando is very similar to GA and voters of the subset will be higher there than in Southern Florida.

Southern FL, Orlando and below, have a large number of 65 or older citizens and history has shown they turn out to vote.

Obama has not been able to connect with these voters and I don't know if it is a question of race or not addressing issues important to seniors.

Additionally there are a large number of Jewish voters in lower FL and Joe Liberman will be very successful in his efforts to sway their votes.

My take is that if Obama loses FL, he will be in big trouble and that subset of race voters will make a difference in battleground states where previous elections have turned on thousands of votes not whole percentages.

I don't have a lot of confidence in Generation Y turning out to vote in big numbers because many think the Fall election is just a formality since Clinton has been defeated and history has shown they do not turn out in numbers.

Just my two cents....

we have a disgruntled politician with no source

how many times are we going to let anonymous sources jerk our chain?

Let's not forget that Hillary was president of the Wellesley Young Republicans during her freshman year. Anyone coming from a Republican family with any brains or a soul stops being a Republican when they enter puberty, that is, when they begin thinking for themselves. So Hillary Clinton was never an authentic Democrat.

Thus, there is nothing to be sad about.

oooohhhhhhh my head is going to explode....this man is a lying sack of shit...hes a total whack job....i know him personally and worked on his first campaign.....please god will this ever end?  seriously please dont feed this fire.....its over.....we have a nominee.....he is the unity candidate.....there are tons of crazy people out there who have all kinds of motives and agendas.....we really need to focus now on the future and the fight against the republicans....i dont care if its true/......i think as much of anything rob andrews says as i think of anything i read at no quarter....its all the same crap....please for the love of god can we please move on.

and all the pretty people
They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you'd better lift your diamond ring,
you'd better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

How does it feel?

I'm part of a ClintonAttacksObama Wiki that's up to 50 incidents. They've been racebaiting since Billy Shaheen.

Black against White
Black against Hispanic

OF COURSE it's Black against Jew

Just WHO do you think has been spreading the ' Obama has problems with The Jews' memo every 10 - 14 days during this campaign season.

Here's a commentary from an American Prospect article:

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=seven_ways_hillary_clinton_changed_our_politics

She Made Us Reconsider Whether Progressives Understand Race

I don't know if Hillary Clinton and her running-mate spouse are racists, cynical opportunists, or just plain deluded egotists. Nor do I care. I've stopped trying to figure out what makes nominally progressive white people act out around race, because the only way to navigate America's racial house of mirrors is to ignore motives and focus on outcomes. And when it comes to the Clintons' desperate campaign to get back into the Oval Office, the results are clear: From Iowa forward, the former first couple and their surrogates have stirred up one regressive race debate after another.

The sad litany requires little recounting at this point -- diminishing Martin Luther King Jr.'s role in securing voting rights, stoking distrust between blacks and Latinos, insinuating that Barack Obama is an affirmative-action candidate, and on and on. Clinton provided laughable symmetry to it all when she equated the historically massive voting-rights movement with her petty crusade to count uncontested Michigan and Florida wins.

At the campaign's end, Clinton re-styled herself from inevitable powerhouse to progressive populist. But her camp's ongoing effort to pit working-class whites against blacks and liberal elites is actually reactionary conservatism at its worst. From Andrew Johnson to George Wallace, American political history is littered with demagogues peddling this unnatural divide; the effect has always been to undermine a progressive coalition that could finally create equal opportunity for hard-working whites and blacks alike.

It's fitting, then, that the spectacle began with Bill Clinton dismissing Obama's South Carolina win by comparing it to Jesse Jackson's. Set aside the implication that black voters' choices don't matter. The crucial point the former president missed is that Jesse's Rainbow Coalition suggested a formula for successful progressive politics: Unite working-class whites and people of color.

It strains credulity to suppose the Clinton camp -- masters of reading the right-wing conspiracy's coded language -- haven't known what vein of American culture they're tapping with the race-baiting they, at minimum, have tacitly condoned. And it doesn't matter whether they believed it or just trafficked in it for political gain. Either way, they've lit fires that Barack Obama now must put out if he has any hope of winning, much less governing.

Perversely, maybe that's the greatest contribution Hillary Clinton's run has made to progressive politics. She's cemented -- or at least demonstrated -- an unavoidable truth: The future turns on our ability to connect the interests of working-class whites, blacks, and immigrants. The first step is tossing the divisive politics of Clinton's campaign into the rubbish heap of history.

--Kai Wright, freelance writer, author of the new book, Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York (Beacon Press)

   

"..the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. .. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked.." - Goering

I thought one more excerpt would be in order. This one is from an article in the New Yorker by George Packer called "The Fall of Conservatism." Packer cites Rick Perlstein on the subject of a memo produced by Patrick Buchanan for Nixon outlining what would now be known as "triangulation" (Clinton) or "splitter" strategy (Rove).

It may be alarming, as well it should be, that the strategy used by the Clinton campaign is the same one used by the Nixon campaign to divide the country and win the Presidency for Nixon. It's better known as the "Southern strategy," but there's much more to it than race politics.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/26/080526fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all

"-Nixon was coldly mixing and pouring volatile passions. Although he was careful to renounce the extreme fringe of Birchites and racists, his means to power eventually became the end. Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum--"A little raw for today," he warned--that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading "Dividing the Democrats." Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in "the Old Roosevelt Coalition," it recommended that the White House "exacerbate the ideological division" between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon's policies; highlight "the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party"; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. "Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country," Buchanan wrote. "We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention." Such gambits, he added, could "cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."

The Nixon White House didn't enact all of these recommendations, but it would be hard to find a more succinct and unapologetic blueprint for Republican success in the conservative era. "Positive polarization" helped the Republicans win one election after another--and insured that American politics would be an ugly, unredeemed business for decades to come.-"

"..the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. .. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked.." - Goering

Operation Chaos is still in full swing, and the rejoicing Dems are not even noticing. Most of the folks who are claiming to be "Clinton Supporters for Obama" are not even Democrats. Most have never given a dime to Clinton. Some are certifiably Republican rabble rousers. Yet MSM (including HuffPo) are publishing stories about their efforts.

How much of Clinton's support was Republican wishful thinking? I do know that the movie they worked so hard on, about the Clinton financial scandals, is not going to get much play this fall.

Michaela