Please, Someone, Help Howard Wolfson Pull His Head Out of His Ass

Well, I guess it wasn't the sexism, the media, and all the Hillary-bashing afterall.

Hillary Clinton lost because John Edwards lied.

At least, that's the latest coming from former Clinton mouthpiece, Howard Wolfson.

From ABC News;

"I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," former Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson told ABCNews.com ... "Our voters and Edwards' voters were the same people," Wolfson said the Clinton polls showed. "They were older, pro-union. Not all, but maybe two-thirds of them would have been for us and we would have barely beaten Obama."

As The Wonkette pointed out;

Of course, then there are “facts” like these: “[Obama campaign] officials never bought the argument that Clinton was the second choice of Edwards voters. Immediately after Edwards dropped out of the race at the end of January, Obama won eleven straight contests in a row.”

Nate Silver, in his "Why Howard Wolfson is Out of a Job" notes;

As such, Iowa pollsters did a lot of work in trying to determine voters' second choices. And in virtually every survey, Clinton did rather poorly as a second choice: an average of several surveys in December showed that she was the second choice of about 20 percent of voters, as compared with 25 percent for Obama and Edwards (an even later version I have sitting on my hard drive showed the second-choice breakdown as Edwards 30, Obama 28.5, Clinton 23.5)

So the odds are that, if John Edwards had dropped out on the morning before the Iowa caucus, Obama would have won by more points rather than fewer.

I guess Edwards didn't get the memo.

As part of Hillary Entitlement Campaign, Edwards was duty-bound to either not have had his cheating affair, or, as soon as he did, he was required to fess up, bow out of the campaign, and demand all his supporters move over to Hillary.

Edwards needed to, before he informed his wife of his infidelity, and before he aided his wife in her illness, he should have been working 24/7 to secure the nomination for Hillary.

Jeepers! ... No wonder she went down in flames ...

Nobody was following the plans!

How the hell can you feel you are entitled to the nomination, and then have all these people dropping the ball?

What the heck is our political system coming to?

Perhaps Obama, or certainly Howard Dean, and others in the Dem Leadership, need a sitdown with Her Highness.

With Wolfson's babble, and all the talk of parades, rallies, a "cathartic roll call vote", the Grand Central Station Locker Creatures ("Hillary is back! The keeper of the light! All hail Hillary! All hail Hillary! Oh Hillary can you see by the dawn's early light...") are still holding on to the pipe dream that "something" is going to happen in Denver, and Hillary will emerge victorious, with the nomination.

It's over! ... Give it up! ... Hillary Lost!

Thomas Schaller, in Salon has it succinctly;

The macro reasons for Hillary's loss are still the same: They underestimated Obama, they didn't have a plan for winning delegates in caucus states, and they were caught flat in the period immediately following Super Tuesday. None of those fatal errors can be attributed to illicit affairs covered up by a supposedly complicit media or anything else Edwards, Obama or any of the other Democratic contenders did or did not do.

Bonus Wolfson, Head-Firmly-Up-Ass, Links

Christy Hardin Smith: The Wolfson And The Sour Grapes

CNN: Clinton aide: If affair pushed Edwards out, she would have won

Top Ten Cloves: Other Ways Hillary Clinton Can Ignore She Lost Primary Race

The Most Fabulous Object In The World

Forget About What Obama Said ... Check Out Wolfson's Defense of Hillary!

Hillary's Smelling Burning Rubber! Or: The Garlic Was Right - Hillary Has Built Her "Field of Voices"

She Was The One She Was Waiting For!

It occurred to me, after our post last evening ("Back, and to the Left ... Back, and to the Left") the implosion of Hillary Clinton, the incredible irony of it all.

By her own, twisted, dark, logic/strategy, in context to her decision to stay in the primary race (a race she has been losing since Super Tuesday, and, just this past week, it became all-but-officially lost), related to waiting around for "something to happen" to/with Barack Obama, she reached into that rather large Clintonean Bag of Tricks, and brought up the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

As it has played out, universal condemnation has followed, and, to borrow from the Obama Campaign;

She Was The One She Was Waiting For!

How incredibly ironic ...

Amazing self-destruction, from the person who was, self-admitted, ready on Day One...

The shoddy, lazy, error-filled campaign Hillary conducted will be buried, a number of paragraphs down, when the history of this primary season is written.

We already posted the "Nixon In A Pantsuit" thing, so, if, in time, she does recover, it will be written as a "Nixonian" rise back into the game.

If Hillary was looking to take off the front pages her screaming banshee, "Give Me Michigan and Florida, or Give Me Death", well, she sure achieved that goal.

If Hillary was looking to prime the Rules Committee, before the meeting next week, whipping her supporters into a frenzy ... Err, not very likely she achieved that one (though, we can't rule out that she will use this self-inflicted wound to beat the "Everyone's picking on me" drum - again).

No, in a big-bowed basket of irony, Hillary, inserting foot firmly in mouth, ended up to be the "something happening", and "the reason to wait around".

She Was The One She Was Waiting For !


From the territory and borders around Hillaryland

Karen Timulty, of Time Magazine points out that this has been a pattern of Hillary's, going back to March;

TIME: Can you envision a point at which--if the race stays this close--Democratic Party elders would step in and say, "This is now hurting the party and whoever will be the nominee in the fall"?

CLINTON: No, I really can't. I think people have short memories. Primary contests used to last a lot longer. We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn't wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual.

Trex has an option for you;

Well, we could talk about how Hillary is now openly incorporating the possibility of an assassin’s bullet into her plans for this whole nomination deal until our heads explode.

Or we could watch this adorable video of a hedgehog eating a carrot.

From The Mahablog;

Clinton supporters are whining that people are picking on poor Hillary again, making a Big Deal out of an innocent remark. These are the same people who won’t let go of Obama’s “bitter” remark, which some argue was taken out of context. I say live by the gotcha, die (metaphorically speaking) by the gotcha.

Quoting the Rude One: “To Clinton’s campaign and its supporters, who have been holding out for some gaffe by Obama that would take him down: How’s that working out for ya?”

Andrew Sullivan;

She's been waiting for Obama to implode. Instead, she just has.

The Anonymous Liberal;

Hillary is very smart and has pretty good political instincts. She'd no doubt run a competent general election campaign. But I think Obama has demonstrated during this grueling one and half year primary campaign that he is every bit her equal when it comes to raw political skill, and his campaign has out-smarted and out-maneuvered hers at every step. When you combine that with Obama's far superior rhetorical gifts and fundraising potential, it's hard to see why people still think Clinton would be the more formidable general election candidate.

Oliver Willis;

Seriously, who says this sort of thing? Your average person doesn’t say it, let alone somebody running for president. Hillary Clinton didn’t lose this race because she was a victim of sexism. She lost this race because people are tired of her clawing for power and running over everything to do it.

Forget About What Obama Said ... Check Out Wolfson's Defense of Hillary!

Boy, the feathers were flying - big time - yesterday.

Seeking to throw a spike strip in front of the steamrolling Obama Campaign, the Clintonistas were up in arms over the Senator from Illinois using lines in speech, that had been previously used by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

And it wasn't subtle.

Plagiarism!, the cries went out.

Taylor Marsh could barely contain herself, both on her own blog and on The Huffington Post.

"Barack Obama isn't an original. He's the first 21st century L. Ron Hubbard of politics, Elmer Gantry, name your huckster ... "I have a dream" just became "I have a con."

Ouch!

We can only imagine, one of Marsh's staffers must have had to stand by while she was typing, cloth-in-hand, to wipe the foam away from her mouth.

You can see the conflagration here, on Memeorandum.

It didn't seem to matter, that as the Clintonistas were manning the flamethrower, Obama himself, as while as others, came to diffuse the situation, noting that Obama and Patrick are friends and have frequently shared campaign strategy, speeches, etc.

Even a Republican weighed in on it.

Obama, himself, noted that, in hindsight, it might have been wise to make the citation, while completely defending himself, pointing to the books he's written, etc.

And soon, as quickly as the arrows were flying at Obama, well, what do you know, examples of Hillary using the words of others in her stump speeches began appearing (Disclosure - It was not noted if Clinton was speaking in her own voice on these occasions, or if she was summoning up the voices of the dead)

Lost amid the drifting smoke was Howard Wolfson, Clinton Communications guy, and his sterling, backhanded compliment to his boss.

From Jake Tapper, at ABC News;

"I asked Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson and Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass, if they could assure the public that neither Clinton nor McGovern has ever done what Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, did when he used the rhetoric of Gov. Deval Patrick without footnoting him.

They would not.

In fact, Wolfson seemed to say it wouldn't be as big a deal if it were discovered that Clinton had "lifted" such language.

"Sen. Clinton is not running on the strength of her rhetoric," Wolfson said.

Sen. Clinton is not running on the strength of her rhetoric!

That is like the New York Yankees coming out today and saying that, "at least, Roger Clemens didn't leave his used needles lying around the clubhouse floor".

After all the hullabaloo, all the fuss, about Hillary "finding my own voice", Wolfson comes to her defense by, essentially, saying, she's a blockhead!

Oh boy, that is too rich ...

Wolfson might as well have just said "My client wouldn't do that, she's to dumb", or "Pigs will fly before Hillary has the mental capacity to pick up something like that".

With Obama leading in the voting, I half expect Wolfson to come out dissing him, perhaps with a Yogi Berra line, like "Nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded."

If Obama wants to have some fun, some wicked fun, the film "The Legend of 1900" comes to mind.

1900 is a stowaway, virtuoso pianist (hauntingly portrayed by Tim Roth), born, growing up on and never leaving, an oceanliner.

"At one point in the film Jelly Roll Morton (Clarence Williams III), of New Orleans jazz fame, comes aboard to challenge 1900 to a piano duel. 1900 merely toys with the hot-tempered Morton, even going so far as to play a note-for-note version of an original tune Morton just played! In the end, the ship-bound 1900 defeats Morton handily."

Obama, in the next debate, should emulate 1900, and word-for-word, hand back a Hillary answer, but with his tremendous skills.

Perhaps, like Jelly Roll Morton in the film, Hillary will simply slink away, throughly over- matched and defeated.

Who says that they don't write happy endings anymore?


The Grenade-Tossing, Flame-Throwing Links

The Plank: Former Clinton Speechwriter Weighs In On Plagiarism-Gate

Bob Cesca: The Wolfson Plagiarism Attack Is Ridiculous

Jeff Fecke: Is Barack Obama a Plagiarist? (No.)

James Joyner: Obama ‘Steals’ from King and Jefferson

Kevin Drum: The Obama Bubble

Good Thing Barry Crimmins Doesn't Work For MSNBC!

"Has your mother shown any remorse for the fact that her vote cost Iraqis a million of their lives?” a student asked Chelsea Clinton on Monday at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ms. Clinton replied: “She cast a vote based on the best available evidence. Perhaps you had clairvoyance then, and that’s extraordinary."

Maybe, Chelsea can influence her mother, and, include in her healthcare plan, a provision in that, if people want it, they can have a sixth sense surgically implanted.

As with Frank Rich last week, Barry Crimmins is now persona non gratis at MSNBC, assuming they are still applying the David Shuster standard, for Crimmins, yesterday, has a tremendous, multiple-tongues-in-cheek look at the former First Daughter.

"You have to wonder why they're keeping such a warm and engaging person away from the media. She could have been sarcastic, flippant, condescending, impatient and dismissive in response to a challenge from an obnoxious peasant. Instead this warm, open and humble young lady chose to suggest that anyone capable of out-thinking her mother in 2002 was gifted with psychic powers and very special indeed. Some people are just givers.

Get over to Barry's website and read "Premonitions of ESP"

It may be the best, most humorous post you'll read today


Bonus Chelsea Links

Dennis Perrin: Pimping Outrage

Rachel Sklar: L'Affaire Shuster: Big Camel, Big Straw

Chez Pazienza: Pimp My Riot: In Defense of David Shuster