A top campaign adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton resigned Thursday, a day after suggesting Democrats should be wary of nominating Barack Obama because his teenage drug use could make it hard for him to win the presidency.
Clinton herself apologized to Obama as they waited to fly to Iowa for a debate.
Bill Shaheen, a national co-chairman for Clinton and a prominent New Hampshire political figure, had raised the issue during a Wednesday interview, published on washingtonpost.com.
“I made a mistake and in light of what happened, I have made the personal decision that I will step down as the co-chair of the Hillary for President campaign,” Shaheen said in a statement released by the campaign Thursday. “This election is too important, and we must all get back to electing the best qualified candidate who has the record of making change happen in this country. That candidate is Hillary Clinton.”
At last I understand the Al Gore strategy: since they started this campaign ridiculously early, and we’ve had a gazillion debates that have bored America to tears, and now we’re reduced to whether or not Satan is Jesus’ brother or Obama should repeat what he published in his own autobiography 12 years ago, and all of it right through the Christmas season (what’s Easter gonna be like, I wonder), eventually we’ll all get so sick of these people we’ll turn to the guy who actually won the election seven years ago and say, “We’re sorry! Please rescue us from these people!”
How crafty is that?
And never forget how Harry Truman explained his victory in ’48: “People got so tired of Tom Dewey being President, they thought it was time for a change!”
Anyone remember “I didn’t Inhale?”
I never thought Hilary would seriously make it to the nomination and it may turn out I was right. But, unfortunately for the democrats, they don’t have anyone qualified behind her unless you go to the back tier with Biden or Richardson. Richardson would be the better bet. Always go with a governor, and a Hispanic from the west would help a lot.
I would love Gore to get in the race. It would rev up the moonbat faction of the democratic party and make the campaign really entertaining.
Bad choices, all of them. Again.
We need Ralph Nader meets Mike Huckabee.
So Hillary comes out and says “They do not represent my opinion, they are just hired help”, yet she has been leading the charge to get Karl Rove and Scooter Libby because after all, they merely do W’s bidding.
When is someone going to say “they are YOUR hired help, so YOU are repsonsible for what they say, just as you accuse Bush for being responsible for his staff. Why don’t you just admit ‘the buck stops here’ and take full responsibility?”
But no one will.
Jim –
I’m no Hilary fan, but what’s the beef? He ran his mouth, he’s gone. End of discussion.
IRNS and other respected Democratic voters here, I want to know: Do you actually, honestly, think Gore won the 2000 election? I’m asking a real question, not trying to be snotty — although I think it’s clear as a bell that he lost an agonizingly close one.
Katherine: I think that the 2000 election was a tie within the margin of error of a national election. But it had to go to somebody, and the process happened to give it to Bush. Personally I’d rather it had gone the other way, but… them’s the breaks. It’s the price we pay for not having to have an armed insurrection every time we want to throw a bum out.
The Wikipedia article on the Florida recount (insert usual Wikipedia disclaimer here) is interesting, by the way.
Katherine,
Its clear that Al Gore won the national popular vote in 2000 (by over 500,000 votes). No one disputes that. Nevertheless, he lost the electoral vote which is the only one that counts.
It’s like the 1960 World Series – the Yankees crushed the Pirates in terms of total runs scored – 55-27. But the Pirates won 4 of 7 games and, according to the rules, were declared the World Series winners. More on the 1960 Series:
http://tinyurl.com/jlb9u
Don’t let a sore loser bait you.
4. C Hathaway-
You don’t live in NM do you?
Richardson was a less than competent DoE secretary and his governorship has left most people here wondering how to get Gary Johnson back. Johnson was weird, but governed effectively. Richardson appears normal, but his administration of anything is weird.
Case in point: sponsoring a state run commuter rail system. Nice trains, but the payoff is decades away and they never connected to Santa Fe. Meanwhile, to pay for the right of ways and rolling stock, they raided the highway funds for current maintenance. Now the legislature is busy undercutting the rail project; the operative theme being epitomized by “when they put a rail station in Ruidoso I’ll vote for the rail system again”.
Richardson might be an OK VP or SecState. Keep him out of the POTUS office.
Thanks, Ross, William. It’s not that I’m being baited. I read an opinion piece in the the WSJ Online recently by a man who is not a conservative and in fact serves on some left-of-center think tank. He reports that many of his friends, the intelligentsia of New York and Washington, actually believe the hype about that election. I had previously thought this would be confined to the extremes of the fringe blogs (and yes, I know we’ve got those on the right, too). I was shocked to read that this opinion is mainstream, which is why I asked.
Process and structure are what keep the American experiment going, because obviously the differences of opinion are large. The effort to undermine the process was something I viewed as very wrong, and I would have felt the same if my guys had tried it.
Sen. Clinton was right to get rid of this guy. Dirty tricks are unfortunately part of politics, though. The questions to be asked when this kind of thing comes up are, is it true? and is it relevant?
Katherine:
1. Define “won.” My guy got more votes nationally, and I strongly suspect that, had the voting system in Florida actually represented the collective will of Florida voters, he would have won the election. Like the existence of God, I can’t prove it, but there are a lot of reasons to be suspicious.
2. A lot of youse guys seem to think that the Shaheen “Oops, I misspoke” followed by firing/resigning represents some sort of honest response by Hillary to a wayward aide’s loose mouth. I am disappointed in your lack of cynicism. While I have little regard for TV pundits (much as I enjoy watching them), the consensus among them seems to be that this was more-or-less planned, right down to the “firing” of the husband of former-governor-and-now-senate-candidate Jean Shaheen. Anyone who thinks he has left politics or won’t find his way back into the Hillary campaign in a few months (provided she wins) is kidding himself. Sadly, this is how things work these days.
Most of boomers and beyond did “inhale” at least once! These days that probably won’t be an issue unless we hold others to a higher standard than we have for ourselves. It has been 35 years since I inhaled — but I did it!
Thanks, IRNS. !. “Won” means got more electoral votes than the other guy. In Florida, “won” means got more actual votes, as collected and counted under the rules provided under Florida law the day the election was held. (In this case, it also included a mandatory state-wide recount under the law.) Woulda-coulda-shoulda is a wonderful game, but at some point, we have to count up the score and say, “That’s it.”
2. If you want my personal opinion of Clinton, it closely resembles your description. I find her seldom honest and practically never candid, less so than most other politicos by a long shot. It’s so bad that I don’t think reliable predictions of what she would or wouldn’t do as President can be made. I’m reasonably sure that on the whole she wouldn’t do what I want, but I don’t think that youse guys can really count on her either.
And saj, I agree. I won’t be voting for or against candidates because they were fools sometimes in high school or college. If you show me one was a murderer, or a big-time drug dealer, that might be worth talking about. Using stupid small-time long-ago mistakes as a campaign issue works against the one making the charge, unless you can show me that the sinner has consistently and deliberately lied about it, and even then, if he makes an acceptable “I was wrong” statement, enough.
“In Florida, ‘won’ means got more actual votes, as collected and counted under the rules provided under Florida law the day the election was held”
Which means that Vice President Gore “won” Florida’s electoral votes.
Florida law required dealing with ballots according to the “intent of the voter” as manifest on the ballot itself. A voter who dimpled or partially detached the chad for Gore while leaving the chad for the other candidates intact manifested an intent to vote for Gore. (For those don’t remember, dimpling a chad—i.e., ramming the chad against a mound of detached chads accumulated below it—requires many times more force than detaching a chad.)
Florida law required that overseas military ballots be postmarked by a specified date. Partisan election officials applied that requirement selectively, in a way that tilted toward allowing disputed ballots in counties likely to vote for Bush (e.g., Duval and Seminole) and disallowing them in counties likely to vote for Gore (e.g., Volusia).
Yes, votes should be counted under the law in effect at the time of the election. Running disputed ballots through a machine once, twice, or a thousand times does not substitute for counting those ballots according to the statutory “intent of the voter” standard. That was Florida law then—and, because it makes indisputable sense, remains Florida law now.
Tom Roberts, I don’t live in NM, and wasn’t advocating Richardson for President, principally because I’m a conservative and won’t be voting for a Democrat. But if I were a democrat I would be very unhappy that such poorly qualified Senators such as Edwards and Obama were next in line after Clinton. I don’t like Biden that much but he is smarter and more sensible than they are, and, statistically, Governors have done much better at getting elected than Senators.
Just an observation, not a recomendation. If I could influence democrats to vote I’d get them to nominate Kucinich 😉
I’d love to hear President Biden at his inauguration recalling his childhood in Wales.
No, Irenaeus. Those punched-hole ballots really are designed to be counted by machines and not otherwise. It is not possible to properly count them by looking at them and trying to decide if the voter intended to dimple that chad or not. The voter is to indicate his choice by punching the chad out, and if he doesn’t, he hasn’t legally indicated his choice. Why should Gore voters have been more likely than Bush voters to fail to punch the chad all the way through? They can be damaged, also, by being run through the machines, and after the count and mandatory recount, which was performed, their story was told. Quality assurance people will tell you that 100% inspection is not 100% accurate, and this is especially true for something which is not designed for count by visual inspection.
A consortium of newspapers completed the full statewide manual recount, which the Gore campaign had not asked for, several months after the inauguration and found that Bush still won.
The best lesson to come out of this was that this ballot type is not a good medium. People have been worked up about electronic voting machines, which I distrust, and I think the emerging consensus is the system my precinct uses, which is optical-scan paper ballots. These actually could be properly counted by hand, although as I said the machine counts, assuming the machine is tested and the count is supervised, is probably more accurate.
C’mon, gang. My Gore reference was meant to be humorous, not a revisit to 2000!
Thanks, IRNS. That’s all I wanted to know!
We’ve got enough problems with this election upcoming …
# 21: IRNS, isn’t it enough for you that he saved the planet AND invented the internet?
/humorous reference
We are a nation under judgment, evidenced by a dearth of godly and wise leaders.
Katherine (12:13 pm): Your comment shows that you don’t know how to apply the law to the facts.
Voting procedures are not some sort of game in which voters must perfectly navigate a set of undisclosed hazards in order to have their votes count. If voter receives and submits a ballot (and has thus been judged entitled to vote), the question becomes what the voter intended. Election officials must examine the ballot and ascertain whether the voter intended to vote for a particular candidate.
This “intent of the voter” standard is the law everywhere. And the manual recount is the gold standard for resolving such questions. That was true in Florida then and remains true now.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
You ask, “Why should Gore voters have been more likely than Bush voters to fail to punch the chad all the way through?”
Because Palm Beach County voters voted so overwhelmingly for Gore that there were mounds of chads under the Gore slot but not under the Bush slot.
To dimple a chad, you have to press it hard against something solid. Without that sort resistance behind the chad, the stylus will (as it is supposed to) tear the paper at the corners of the chad and detach the chad from the ballot.
Gore would have been glad to see a statewide recount. But Republicans asserted that time did not permit such a recount (a point to which I will return). So Gore proceeded with his request for a three-county recount. If Bush were concerned that a limited recount could skew the results, he could have obtained a statewide recount. But Bush’s strategy was in effect to insist that the initial count had ended the election and that invoking the normal, lawful recount processes was merely an attempt to steal the election.
In #25, the second paragraph should end:
“Election officials must examine the ballot and ascertain whether the voter MANIFESTED AN INTENT to vote for a particular candidate.”
Time was decided by the state constitution. The vote HAD to be validated by a certain date, the Supreme Court Justice upheld this view. In fact, the Republicans adn the State Supreme Court WANTED a full state recount, INCLUDING the military absentee ballots. It was the Dems who contested this, especially the Military ballots, which they wanted declared invalid from the start.
The main reason Gore wanted only the three counties was that this was were the ‘problem’ machines were located, most of the state had no problems, very few used punch cards (we used electric readers with ‘fill in the bubble’ ballots in Tallahassee).
When all was re-said and re-counted, Bush still won by 537 votes. later recounts by independent newspapers and journalists OF THE STATE (under freedom of information rules) confirmed this.
one source :
[url=http://www.chabotcollege.edu/Library/handouts/election2000topics.html]Chabot college[/url] which notes:
However, if a state did not name its electors by December 12, the U.S. Congress would have had grounds to question the state’s electors and that would have led to a Constitutional crisis.
[url=http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/stories/main.html]CNN[/url] (no friend to Pres. Bush) said:
[blockquote]
A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.
The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including CNN.
NORC dispatched an army of trained investigators to examine closely every rejected ballot in all 67 Florida counties, including handwritten and punch-card ballots. The NORC team of coders were able to examine about 99 percent of them, but county officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to NORC investigators. In addition, the uncertainties of human judgment, combined with some counties’ inability to produce the same undervotes and overvotes that they saw last year, create a margin of error that makes the study instructive but not definitive in its findings.
As well as attempting to discern voter intent in ballots that might have been re-examined had the recount gone forward, the study also looked at the possible effect of poor ballot design, voter error and malfunctioning machines. That secondary analysis suggests that more Florida voters may have gone to the polls intending to vote for Democrat Al Gore but failed to cast a valid vote.
In releasing the report, the consortium said it is in no way trying to rewrite history or challenge the official result — that Bush won Florida by 537 votes. Rather it is simply trying to bring some additional clarity to one of the most confusing chapters in U.S. politics.
Florida Supreme Court recount ruling
On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Florida Supreme Court ruling ordering a full statewide hand recount of all undervotes not yet tallied. The U.S. Supreme Court action effectively ratified Florida election officials’ determination that Bush won by a few hundred votes out of more than 6 million cast.
Using the NORC data, the media consortium examined what might have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened. The Florida high court had ordered a recount of all undervotes that had not been counted by hand to that point. If that recount had proceeded under the standard that most local election officials said they would have used, the study found that Bush would have emerged with 493 more votes than Gore.
Suppose that Gore got what he originally wanted — a hand recount in heavily Democratic Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. The study indicates that Gore would have picked up some additional support but still would have lost the election — by a 225-vote margin statewide. [/blockquote]
That should settle this, right?
Sorry, there should have been a paragraph break in there, reading as:
[blockquote]However, if a state did not name its electors by December 12, the U.S. Congress would have had grounds to question the state’s electors and that would have led to a Constitutional crisis.
[url=http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/stories/main.html]CNN[/url] (no friend to Pres. Bush) said: [/blockquote]
Also, sorry for the spelling errors.
“If a state did not name its electors by December 12, the U.S. Congress would have had grounds to question the state’s electors and that would have led to a Constitutional crisis”
FALSE. Federal law provides a certain sort of safe harbor for electors chosen by Dec. 12, but failure to chose electors by that date does not in itself create grounds to challenge the electors. The grounds arose from the sordid tactics of Katherine Harris and her allies.
BTW, we had a Constitutional crisis, in case you didn’t notice.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
“Time was decided by the state constitution”
FALSE. The deadline came from an ordinary statute, which the legislature changed the following year.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
“Republicans….WANTED a full state recount, INCLUDING the military absentee ballots. It was the Dems who contested this, especially the Military ballots, which they wanted declared invalid from the start”
The Republicans filed a timely request for a statewide recount? The Democrats sound to invalidate all military absentee ballots? Too FALSE to require rebuttal. Some imposter must have crept into our friend Jim’s library.
Irenaeus, I must conclude that because the process did not produce the results you wanted, you have to believe that the process was wrong. As posted above, independent (and certainly not “conservative”) examinations of the ballots found that, had Gore been able to get the partial hand recount he wanted in selected areas, he still lost. In addition, had he gotten the statewide hand recount which he did not ask for, he also still lost. He produced, in his court motions, no rationale for the partial hand recounts that convinced anyone but the partisan Florida court, which was not applying legal principles but rather its wishful thinking that the “right” guy could win. These motions also apparently convinced you, but I find it hard to believe that if the reverse, Bush losing to Gore, had been the case, Democrats would have given these arguments any weight.
In the case of the optical-scan ballots, it is possible to some extent to determine the intent of the voter by visual examination; for instance, the voter did not completely fill the circle or made a thin or off-center line which the machine cannot see and count. In the case of the punched-paper ballot, once the ballot is separated from the voter it is nearly impossible to determine his intent if he did not make the mark which was required, which was to punch the chad out. Chads almost out and hanging by a mere thread, perhaps, but not ones slightly marked with a maybe indentation. How can you tell if the voter changed his mind, or rested the stylus there before moving on, without intending to vote the spot? This type of ballot does not allow much interpretation, and applying statistical probability does not indicate what that particular voter intended. If he, unfortunately, did not punch the thing through, his intention is lost.
If my guy had lost by 400-500 votes, I would have been just as upset as you are.
Iren,
I purposely went to sources known to have a liberal bias for my information, and posted THEIR information. Any disagreement you have is with their official reports, not with me.
Democrats seem to go for two kind of nominees–a strong progressive labor leader (rarer now that unions are on the wane) or a Messiah-like charismatic figure who promises to take followers into a nebulous but exciting new age of finely-tuned socially responsible government based on the appeal of his words and personality. I don’t think Hillary was Messianic enough but time will tell.
From Andy Borowitz:
Hillary Accuses Obama of Bed-wetting
Calls Rival’s Behavior as Three-year-old ‘Relevant’
The increasingly contentious race for the Democratic presidential nomination got a little bit nastier today as Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) charged that her chief rival, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill), wet his bed when he was a toddler.
Iowans have grown used to displays of testiness on the part of the leading Democratic contenders in recent weeks, but few were prepared for Sen. Clinton’s accusation that her surging opponent had been a bed-wetter.
Moments after her campaign released this latest bombshell, Sen. Clinton went to great lengths to show that the bed-wetting incident, while occurring when the Illinois senator was only three years old, was “relevant†to the current presidential campaign.
At a campaign stop in Cedar Rapids, Sen. Clinton said that the alleged bed-wetting incident “should not disqualify†Sen. Obama from the White House, but should make Democrats “think long and hard†about voting for him in next month’s caucuses.
“Personally, I don’t have anything against having a bed-wetter in the Oval Office,†Sen. Clinton said. “But you can be sure that the Republican right-wing attack machine will have a field day with this kind of thing.â€
At a campaign appearance in Davenport, Sen. Obama brushed off his alleged bed-wetting as an “isolated incident,†and added an apparent jab at Sen. Clinton: “I’m not the one who’s so scared about this race that I’m peeing myself now.â€
In response to Sen. Obama’s remark, Sen. Clinton later released a statement referring to herself as “rubber†and Sen. Obama as “glue.â€
Elsewhere, the state of New Jersey banned capital punishment, arguing that living in New Jersey was bad enough.
Irenaeus
Now that was funny!
Irenaeus, that’s hilarious! Thanks for posting it!