The Left Anchor

I believe we can all be very pleased with Senator Clinton’s speech today. She did an excellent job of highlighting her own accomplishments, while still undeniably throwing her full support behind our nominee. I believed she did a great job of demonstrating the collective goals we all share, and helped to salve the bruises many of her supporters are probably nursing at the end of this hard-fought primary season. In fact, I believe this is one of her best speeches of the season (and not just because she’s endorsing Obama). I hope she can keep up the energy over the rest of this campaign season. Thank you, Senator. Today, we are no longer Clintonistas and Obamatons; we are all again Democrats.

Let me preface this by saying I do not intend this to be a slam against Hillary Clinton, but it is hard to get to the heart of what’s wrong with Mark Penn without talking a little bit about Sen. Clinton’s approach to the campaign. I believe Hillary Clinton is a consummate politician, but that Penn reinforced her worst instincts. I’m attacking him because I believe he is a poisonous force, and must be ejected from Democratic politics.

The Wall Street Journal did a fine piece on what went wrong with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The short answer? Two words: Mark Penn.
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CNN is reporting that Hillary Clinton will concede the race to Barack Obama today. Technically, she has only said that Obama “has the delegates to secure the nomination,” but I don’t expect she’s playing games here. Let the general election campaign begin!

This is the twelfth and final entry in our series of profiles regarding Barack Obama’s most likely candidates for the vice presidential nomination. You can view our previous entires here. Come back next week as we take a detailed look at the possible candidates for an Obama cabinet. Your favorite candidates that did not appear in our two week long series here, may very well show up in our cabinet profiles. Tomorrow I will boil down all that we have learned and make my predictions. Don’t forget to vote in our poll.
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This is as late as I’ll be tracking the results out of Oregon. Right now, with 78% reporting, Obama leads Clinton by 16 points (58-42), and has a net gain of about 90,000 votes. I’ll wait until tomorrow when all the precincts are in to update his lead in the popular vote. Needless to say, CNN has already declared Obama the winner tonight in Oregon. With his firm majority of pledged delegates, you can expect to see a lot of superdelegate endorsements in the coming days.
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CNN lays out the candidates’ fundraising figures for April. Obama brought in a respectable $31 million. He now has $37.3 million for the rest of the primary season, as well as an additional $9.2 million for the general election. Hillary Clinton exceeded expectations, raising $22 million for the month (though the campaign still owes roughly $20 million in outstanding debts). McCain set a new record for him, raising $18.5 million in April.
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Sen. Clinton went up against fierce, go-for-jugular news anchor Katie Couric to detail the difference between her plan and McCain’s plan:

KATIE COURIC: So let me start by by asking you, Senator Clinton, you dismissed opposition to your tax gas holiday by economists as elitist, but a new CBS poll finds that about half of all voters also think it’s a bad idea. And many think it’s politically motivated. Do you think this proposal will end up hurting you more than helping you?
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This is just indefensible. The gas tax holiday is a terrible idea. Hillary Clinton knows it’s a terrible idea. Its one redeeming quality is that it might help her pick up a few more voters who feel like she’s paying attention to their concerns. Well, as a part time delivery driver, I can assure you that gas prices are way, way up on my list of concerns, but her proposal won’t do a thing to change them. Demand will go up, and the oil companies will simply raise the price of gas to what it would be with the gas tax. In other words, her proposal is structured in such a way that it’s going to take money from the federal government and give it to the oil companies as increased profit margins. And it won’t save the consumer a dime — hell, even if it worked exactly the way she’s pretending it will it would still only save the average consumer maybe $20 or $30 bucks a month. That’s not real relief and she knows it.
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A week or two back, I wondered how anyone would find Hillary downing a shot in a bar as anything other than ridiculous (given its context within the “Bittergate” story). Now I see that some people are swayed by such obvious posturing and now I know who they are: conservatives.
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Dear God, please no! No more debates, no more pointless questions and no more explaining for umpteenth time the difference between “rejecting” and “renouncing” someone’s support/statement. That said, I’ll give Clinton credit for proposing a Lincoln-Douglas style debate (no moderator). As far as I’m concerned, that’s how debates should nearly always be run (or at least a solid portion of any given debate). Obama says there won’t be anymore debates between now and the NC and IN primaries, which makes sense, given that talking directly to voters is at least marginally more informative than the forum for soundbytes that most debates take. I trust a regular Indiana voter to ask more relevant questions than anyone in the news media.
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