About a month ago I went through the fundraising numbers for every congressional district to try to get a sense for how many districts are going to be competitive in November. And one of the biggest surprises was the stunning amount of money raised by Michael Skelly in Texas’ seventh district. This morning the Politico has picked up on the suburban Houston race, and if you’re a House junkie it is must reading. But I found something of more general interest in the article.
Texas Democrats point to a state legislative race within the district, where a Democratic state legislator unseated a two-term Republican by 10 points. And they are encouraged by the roughly 88,000 districtwide Democrats (out of 410,000 registered voters) who participated in the Democratic presidential primary in March, with one Democratic operative calling the voter information a “gold mine.”
“The information we got from the primary, there is no other way we get that information. I can’t even put a financial figure on it,” said the operative.
The long and competitive primary on the Democratic side is going to prove extremely valuable for the Get Out the Vote effort this November, and it will also provide a wealth of data on a county-by-county basis for the Democratic nominee. Barack Obama will be able to see exactly where he is strong and weak in every state, while John McCain will be flying blind in most of them.
Many Clinton supporters cite things like this to defend her continued presence in the race, and they have a good point. Yet, I want to make an additional point. Of the remaining states after Pennsylvania, none are critical to a Democratic win in November. It’s possible that in a blow-out election that Obama could win North Carolina, Indiana, and Montana, but there just isn’t that much upside to getting more organization and information out of those states when you compare it to the potential downside of negative campaigning and lost time and resources.
Some have pointed out that the downside would be largely removed if Clinton were to stick to substance and run a positive campaign. First, that’s not really true. Obama would rather campaign in Colorado and Nevada than South Dakota and Puerto Rico. Second, Clinton’s surrogates are going around saying that they don’t think a black man can win. That’s not positive, and it’s not helpful. And it’s not likely to stop until her campaign quits.
Asking her to be positive is all well and good, but it’s basically like spitting in the wind. And all you have to ask is: who has a better chance? The black man, or Hillary Clinton after taking the nomination away from the black man in a brokered convention in late August? The question answers itself.
Calling for Clinton to quit her campaign isn’t a case of the Big Boys trying to push the woman around, or denying people the right to express their opinion and cast their votes (she will remain on the ballots). It’s just a nod to reality. The better Clinton does the weaker our nominee will be. The weakest nominee possible would be a Hillary Clinton after wresting the nomination away from the candidate with more pledged delegates. She should end it because the benefits of a continued campaign (even for her) and far outweighed by the risks.
As a Texan who has been involved with the entire process here in the state, I will say that Texas being in play will have far reaching results(hopefully) for us in November. I know many of us here plan to use information from the primary and the precinct caucuses and county conventions to turn out the vote in November and take Texas back if we can. As a new precinct chair for Travis County, I plan to work with both sides to elect Rick Noriega as our next US Senator and take back the majority in the Texas Legislature.
I agree that Hillary needs to stop her campaign now as she has done a great job of turning out Democrats especially the ones supporting Obama but her negativity and that of her campaign staff does nothing for Democrats or America. She has become a liability to us all and only makes us weaker in November. It is time for her to remember this is about America and not Hillary.
county chair, eh? That’s a lot of responsibility.
Precinct chair. LOL Not the same as county chair
Texas is splint into Senate Districts, Counts and precincts. Precincts are what a lot of other states call wards. I am know the Democratic Precinct chair for precinct 424 in Travis County and am a member of the Travis County Democratic Executive Committee. I am also planning on running for Senate District 14(Travis County) Committee Man at the state Convention in June. If I win, I will be a member of the Texas State Democratic Party Executive Committee. LOL A lot of extra work for no pay.
Whether this is an outlier or a harbinger, I’ll take it. New PA poll out, Obama up2 pts over HRC
http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2008/04/obama-takes-lead-in-pennsylvania.html
Rssmussen Poll had Obama only 5 pts down chipping away at Clinton’s 12 points lead , other polls showed him closing the gap.
I expected he would, once he showed up in the state.
Hope these polls hold up after the HRC cry.
Question: How many female politicians openly complain about “big boy bullies?”
People in minorities or groups not treated equally (women) don’t project strength by playing the victim card. Now that many barriers have crumbled, if not fallen, merit-based achievement is within reach when it wasn’t a generation or two ago. I think (would hope) that most people want to get ahead on merit rather than sympathy. And I certainly don’t want a president who has a victim self image. Nothing good can come of that.
I actually think it’s worse. I don’t think she has a victim self-image, I think she knows that many women do and she’s using it as part of her campaign strategy.
Up until NH she tried to be seen as a strong woman. I thought she won EVERY debate before NH. I didn’t want her to win the nomination but I was OK if she did.
I have no idea if that tearing up in NH was planned or happened spontaneously, but I do know that the media (quite predictably) blew the whole event out of proportion and infuriated a lot of women including me. Even though I didn’t want Hillary to win the nomination I suddenly wanted her to do OK in NH because I didn’t want the media to bring her down for “being a girl”.
So Hillary benefitted in NH when she was seen as a victim. From then on it seems to have become a campaign strategy. And it’s really getting old.
Can I give you a thousand 4s for this comment?
I haven’t seen anyone suggest that she can’t do the job because she’s a woman, but you’d never know it from how well the woman-a-victim strategy plays among certain groups of women. And it seems to tap into and unleash a disproportional emotional response from some.
And I’m sick of it too. Where was the sexism outrage when Hillary’s Big Money Boys tried to intimidate Nancy Pelosi last week?
That is an excellent point about Nancy Pelosi.
Where is it indeed?
But even if anyone wanted to get outraged on her behalf, I doubt Nancy Pelosi would allow it. She’s not big into victimhood from what I can see – even as a strategy. Good for her.
The wonderful thing about Nancy Pelosi coming to power was that it happened exactly as it should have happened. There didn’t have to be any fight about it. She worked her way up and when it was her time, it happened. There was brief moment of celebration for her “first” and then we all moved on and evaluated her on the job she was doing. THAT’S what women have been fighting for all these years.
She worked her way up and when it was her time, it happened. There was brief moment of celebration for her “first” and then we all moved on and evaluated her on the job she was doing. THAT’S what women have been fighting for all these years.
And that’s what I find offensive about the victimhood campaign strategy. I feel like it takes away from the achievements of women who have worked their way to where they are without crying victim at every step. And that’s what made me so annoyed with Hillary when she messed up at the Philly debate last fall and then tried to blame it on the boys ganging up on her.
I also have a sense that the people most responsive to it (the victim-of-sexism strategy) are on the lower middle end of the socioeconomic scale, which kind of makes sense to me because I think that’s where we see the greatest effects of that 28% pay differential between men and women for doing equivalent jobs. If you don’t feel like you’re a victim yourself, it doesn’t work as well.
Well, historically the feminist movement had as much trouble convincing women to go along with change as it did convincing men. So they developed strategies for convincing women who didn’t want to be identified as an evil feminist to support policies and issues.
One very effective way was to put a face on the problem. Instead of talking about an issue from a theoretical point of view, they would pick a woman who was an example and put her front and center. These women could then say “oh I’m not a FEMINIST but did you see how that poor woman is affected by that policy. I just had to help her and women like her.” The woman didn’t even have to say that SHE was a woman ‘like her’ if she didn’t want to – but it helped if she was. Especially when it came to wage and hour discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace etc.
I think it became second nature to the movement over the years because, let’s face it, it is an effective strategy. The movement was working to get important legislation passed and that needed a lot of different strategies. This wasn’t a misleading strategy but it definitely was a strategy that played off of emotion rather than intellect.
That generation of feminist might not even consciously know that they are doing this with Hillary’s campaign. It probably is second nature to them by now.
But I see a big difference between a campaign to get legislation passed or overturned by a court and a campaign for some individual woman’s personal power. In this case I think they are blatantly using these women on whose emotions they are preying.
I’ve been working the phones in PA…. I’m surprised at how many women “don’t want Hillary there in the White House”
today Obama picked up a significant endorsement from former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton. Hamilton is also the former vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission and co-chair of the Irag Study Group.
check out the link above. Poll puts Obama up 2 pts over Hillary in PA