Ya'll know you've got a BLACK Pres nominee when...

The Obama's "dap" each other on stage. Times have CHANGED!!!

From tressiemc, obama_daily and blackfolk

Stealing from Daily Kos

More pics here

What brought down Hillary Clinton?

Strategy Was Based On Winning Delegates, Not Battlegrounds

By Jonathan Weisman, Shailagh Murray and Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 4, 2008; A01

Almost from the beginning, Hillary Rodham Clinton's superior name recognition and her sway with state party organizations convinced Barack Obama's brain trust that a junior senator from Illinois was not going to be able to challenge the Clinton political machine head-on.

The insurgent strategy the group devised instead was to virtually cede the most important battlegrounds of the Democratic nomination fight to Clinton, using precision targeting to minimize her delegate hauls, while going all out to crush her in states where Democratic candidates rarely ventured.

The result may have lacked the glamour of a sweep, but last night, with the delegates he picked up in Montana and South Dakota and a flood of superdelegate endorsements, Obama sealed one of the biggest upsets in U.S. political history and became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to wrest his party's nomination from the candidate of the party establishment. The surprise was how well his strategy held up -- and how little resistance it met.

"We kept waiting for the Clinton people to send people into the caucus states," marveled Jon Carson, one of Obama's top ground-game strategists.

"It's the big mystery of the campaign," said campaign manager David Plouffe, "because every delegate counts."

The Obama strategy had its limits. Like a basketball team entering halftime with a 30-point lead, the campaign played a less-than-inspired second half. Obama managed only a split yesterday, losing South Dakota and winning Montana, meaning that he lost nine of the last 14 primaries. Before last night, that erratic finish translated into losing 458 of the 867 pledged delegates available since Wisconsin voted on Feb. 19, and 53.2 percent of the popular vote.

His inability to capture battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania may be a portent of what could await him in November against Sen. John McCain. But victory did come -- not in a rush of momentum but in what his own staff calls a "slog."

"Here's a person who nobody had heard of. The nomination was Hillary Clinton's. She was being coronated 16 months ago," said former congressman Timothy J. Roemer, who helped turn Indiana into a narrow defeat that worked to Obama's favor. "He's gone through a long, gut-wrenching, difficult process and emerged as a very talented, tough candidate."

When Obama began his campaign in early 2007, the road ahead was a fairly conventional one, not unlike the one followed by Gary Hart or Bill Bradley before him: Battle for the first three or four states and momentum steamrolls the opponent.

"We had to disrupt her early," Plouffe said of Clinton.

Super Tuesday on Feb. 5 loomed like a mountain. Obama's campaign had budgeted a mere $5 million for that day, and the Democrats had 22 states at stake, including prohibitively expensive prizes such as California and New York.

But by last summer, after Obama's wildly successful book tour led to an even more wildly successful fundraising blitz, members of his inner circle began thinking differently. They began building a new strategy based on message, money and, above all, organization.

The message -- of unity and hope -- did not come out of nowhere. David Axelrod, a Chicago campaign consultant, long ago hatched the idea that Democrats' campaigns should revolve more around personality than policy.

The money turned a seat-of-the-pants enterprise into a vast operation that occupied the 11th floor of a skyscraper on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, where 20-somethings tossed footballs, computer whizzes designed interactive Web sites and older volunteers filled an entire call center, not to place calls but to receive them from Democrats who were eager to help.

Then, while the public battle played out in Iowa's farm towns, cities and at its colleges, the senator's staff huddled in Chicago to map out a strategy that would counter Clinton's strength, by blunting her advantage in states such as California, Ohio and Pennsylvania, then beating her where she wasn't.

Read On

This was to be the year of Hillary Clinton

Until that uppity black man and his voters (sexist misogynists all) stole it from her. Cause Obama was apparently responsible for all the media bullshit. And race-baiting had not a fucking thing to do with it. Cause so many commenters on that blog seem to think that it is incumbent on Obama to take responsibility for every. single. word. uttered from the mouths of his supporters, but Clinton, well, not so much. Cause apparently black people are very stupid, and had to wait on the media to convince us that Sen. Clinton and her husband were race-baiting, cause Lord knows black people are easily led and ignorant (while else would black people vote for Obama, after all, inadequate black man that he is? Ahhh, Obama and his sexist minions!!!

Oh fuck it all. Black Amazon is back, and she lays it down in Broken Record



And as for Sen. Clinton being Vice Pres.? Bearing in mind the LOVELY ad material that she handed the Republicans:

NEW YORK (CNN) – Hours before the polls closed Tuesday in the final two Democratic presidential primaries, the Republican National Committee began circulating a video of Hillary Clinton questioning Barack Obama’s qualifications to be commander-in-chief, and acknowledging John McCain has this important presidential credentials.
“Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign, I will bring a lifetime of experience and Senator Obama will bring a speech that he gave in 2002,” Clinton says in the one-minute video of CNN’s coverage of a news conference she held on March 8 – the day Obama won the Wyoming caucuses. “I think that is a significant difference. I think that since we now know Senator McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that.

"And I think it is imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold. And I believe I have done that. Certainly, Senator McCain has done that. And you will have to ask Senator Obama with respect to his candidacy.”

The RNC posted the video on YouTube early Tuesday afternoon, just as Obama was on the verge of locking up the Democratic nomination and speculation heated up about Clinton being his running mate.

Tonight, South Dakota and Montana Democrats hold the final two contests of the primary season. Obama is expected to secure the support of enough delegates to claim the party’s presidential nomination as early as tonight, and but no later than the end of this week.

An RNC official tells CNN to expect to see more of Republicans highlighting Clinton’s critical comments of Obama as the campaign now turns to the general election phase.

Never in a fucking million years.


asim sends me to a blog that further lays it down. A sample:

Melissa mentions farther on in that quote that she was dissatisfied that Obama simply disavowed the statements of the priest, but didn't explicitly address the misogyny of the comments. And you know, I absolutely agree there's a helluvan argument to be made here that Senatar Obama should address misogyny in the same way, to the same degree, with which he so magnificently addressed race.

Many people would argue that he should have already done that during the primaries.

My question is, exactly when should he have done that?

When Senator Clinton was claiming, in her official campaign, common cause with Senator McCain over the "Commander-in-Chief" threshold? When she was touting her support among "among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans" in her official campaign? When she played the elitism card, hammered him on "bitter-gate" and in her official campaign ran ads for Pennsylvania voters claiming the Senator looked down them? When her actual campaign supporters, humans who she sent out to talk for her, lectured us that "He's got to stop with all the arguments for the Volvo drivin', NPR totebag totin' liberals, he needs to talk to middle class working people," and "We can't win with eggheads and African-Americans." When Geraldine Ferraro -- who I'm pretty sure wasn't off the reservation in Senator Clinton's campaign -- spewed her particular brand of idiocy (and then wrote a seriously dumb op-ed to boot)? When Senator Clinton's proxies staked her campaign on continually trying to change the rules of the Democratic nomination process, accusing Senator Obama of trying to "disenfranchise" contests she herself said would never count. And then, in her official campaign, argued that her struggle to suddenly count these primaries was akin to the struggle for democracy in Zimbabwe? When the Senator was busy as part of her campaign lying to people about having the popular vote count majority, which at the very LEAST undermines the legitimacy of the winning candidate?

At what point was Senator Obama supposed to take his eye off Senator Clinton and Senator McCain and attack the mainstream press and elements of the political culture all while Senator Clinton was attempting to kneecap him?

....


I am pretty sure that Jackson and Kennedy didn't come into the conventions attacking the presumptive nominee from the right and spewing Republican talking points. Not to mention, I should be so lucky as to be "hustled" off the national stage after 54 goddam primaries and caucuses. Many, many, many of us who wanted Senator Clinton "hustled" off the stage wanted her gone not because a hotly contested primary race was the issue, but because of the way she ran it.

I didn't want a female senator out of the race. I didn't want a universal health-care advocate out of the race. I wanted the weirdly Republican-lite, crazy rules-changing, stereotype-reinforcing panderer that had somehow burrowed into Hillary Clinton's skull out of the race. Hell, the Republicans are actually using her "Commander-in-Chief threshold" argument in one of their ads against Senator Obama.

In short, Senator Clinton had my respect, based on her accomplishments and independent of her gender -- then she spent it, tossed it away in fistfuls, in trade for dirty borrowed blades with which to cut her way to the nomination. She Liebermaned on us. And what is particularly galling to me, positively enraging, is that if she were not indeed a woman, with all that entails to feminist politics in America, Melissa and Digby would be the first in the trenches calling out those tactics for the bullshit they are. Although they, and many like-minded bloggers, did indeed call fouls on such behavior, Senator Clinton would be dead to them in any other context. If there is a "lack of respect" for Senator Clinton, I assure you that for many of us, she came by it honestly.