Sen. Obama is downplaying his chances in Pennsylvania. Sen. Clinton is downplaying poll results that show her with a double-digit lead in the Keystone State. And now Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, the most influential super delegate in the state, is trying to lower expectations for Sen. Clinton here:
"Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell predicts that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's lead over Sen. Barack Obama will shrink before the April 22 primary. Rendell, a Clinton supporter, spoke Monday morning on ABC-TV's 'Good Morning America.' He appeared with Sen. Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat and an Obama supporter. Casey agreed that Clinton would likely win, saying Obama is 'certainly the underdog in our state.'"
As Early Returns knows well, if you set your expectations low enough, you just might surpass them.
... more from the P-G: Obama goes Happy Valley, all roads lead to Ed Rendell, Jim O'Toole sits down with Sen. Obama.
Hill and Bill
Sen. Clinton continues to drop hints that those pledged delegates should consider, maybe, switching their pledges away from Obama:
"Party rules don't bind delegates to the candidate they've committed to, and Clinton has been dropping the idea that she could poach some Obama delegates as the hard-fought nomination battle goes to the convention in Denver. 'Remember that pledged delegates in most states are not pledged,' Clinton told the Daily News editorial board last week. 'You know, there is no requirement that anybody vote for anybody. They're just like superdelegates.' While analysts think most pledged delegates are hard-core partisans who won't stray, City Controller Alan Butkovitz, who's running in the primary as a Clinton delegate, said this is a year in which anything could happen. 'What do [Obama] delegates do if Bill Clinton shows up at their house?' Butkovitz asked. 'He's the best salesman there is. He's a very potent weapon who brings tremendous emotional power. I think that's why the Clintons haven't given up. They know they have lightning in a bottle,' Butkovitz said. 'You've got two and a half months after the primaries before the convention. If they're 80, 100 votes short, do they think they can pick up a delegate a day?'"
... "Now that the Democratic fight is down to he's an unpatriotic racist / she's an unrepentant liar - and, I'd remind y'all, I wrote in January this thing's headed toward self-destruction - will Pennsylvania provide the coup de grace? What image or quote emerges here to follow the 'winner' into the fall? Remember, whoever claws through this race/gender/truth-telling tussle goes against a GOP with a pretty good record of knocking down Dems. (Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry all enjoyed leads in the spring of their respective years. Only a Clinton survived. An omen?)"
... SniperGate: "The Bosnian girl who famously read a poem to Hillary Rodham Clinton during her 1996 visit to the war-torn country is shocked -- and her countrymen infuriated -- that the former first lady claimed to have dodged sniper fire that day."
So, she's lost the Bosnian vote.
Obama-rama
Another superdelegate endorsement for the senator from Illinois:
"Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota announced this morning that she was endorsing Sen. Barack Obama, the latest prominent superdelegate to climb off the fence for the Illinois senator. Klobuchar, a freshman, had been reluctant to publicly reject Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, even though Obama had easily won her state in Feb. 5. In a statement, she compared him to homestate icon Hubert Humphrey, lauding Obama's 'different voice, bringing a new perspective and inspiring a real excitement from the American people.' She said her decision reflected Obama's success in Minnesota as well as 'my own independent judgment about his abilities.'"
... Obama's (in)ability to woo white, working class voters continues to be a concern:
"There was good news, and bad news in Sen. Barack Obama's convincing March 11 win in Mississippi's Democratic presidential primary. African Americans, who doubted Obama's candidacy just six months ago, gave him an astounding 92 percent of their votes - the most of any primary contest thus far - in his 61 to 37 percent blowout of rival Sen. Hillary Clinton ... But there's also bad news. Obama could only muster approximately 25 percent of white Mississippian support, with Sen. Clinton taking the lion's share. In fact, while Obama has won dramatically in overwhelmingly white states like Iowa, Vermont and Idaho; and has done exceedingly well in attracting white upper-class voters and college students, his white voter totals in several Southern states have been quite low. Low enough that Democrats fear those Southern White Democrats will do what they've religiously done in the past if Obama is the nominee - vote Republican."
Might not they do that anyway, even if Sen. Clinton is the nominee?
... Note to North Dakota: Blackface? No longer funny. Didn't Ted Danson teach us anything?
"Officials at the school in Fargo, N.D., are investigating a skit in which a white student wearing blackface portrayed Barack Obama receiving a lap dance. Performed by male members of the Saddle and Sirloin Club, the skit was part of the Mr. NDSU contest sponsored by the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority."
I'm pretty sure there are actual black people now in the acting field. Then again, Saturday Night Live couldn't find one, could they?
... Some political marriages last longer than others:
"A year into his tenure on Capitol Hill, Barack Obama (D-Ill.) approached John McCain on the Senate floor to propose the two work together on a lobbying and ethics reform bill. The four-term Arizona Republican, 25 years Obama's senior, quickly saw a willing apprentice to help shake up the way business was done on Capitol Hill. 'I like him; he's probably got a great future. We can do some work together,' McCain confided to his top staffer. Instead, what began as a promising collaboration between two men bent on burnishing their reformist credentials collapsed after barely a week. The McCain-Obama relationship came undone amid charges and countercharges, all aired publicly two years ago in an exchange of stark and angry letters. Obama questioned whether McCain sided with GOP leaders rather than searching for a bipartisan solution; McCain accused Obama of 'typical rhetorical gloss' and 'self interested partisan posturing' by a newcomer seeking to ingratiate himself with party leaders."
The other side of the ticket
Oh, and speaking of that McCain guy:
"With attention focused on the Democrats' infighting for the presidential nomination, Senator John McCain is pressing ahead to the general election but has yet to sign up one critical constituency: the big-money people who powered the Bush fund-raising machine. 'It takes an enormous amount of passion,' said Joyce Haver, who raised over $300,000 for President Bush's campaigns ... Building up his fund-raising apparatus is essential at this point for Mr. McCain, who struggled for much of last year to raise money. To prevail in the general election, he will need to raise substantial amounts of cash to cut into the vast fund-raising edge the Democratic presidential candidates have shown over the Republicans this election cycle. Even though he all but secured the Republican nomination by mid-February, Mr. McCain has so far managed to enlist only a fraction of the heavyweight bundlers of campaign contributions who helped drive President Bush's two runs for the White House."
... Five years on, and the Iraq war is still full of surprises, despite the fact that victory is, as we've been told, just around the bend:
"As he launched a tour designed to highlight his family's long tradition of military service, Senator John McCain said Monday that he was surprised by the latest turn of events in America's current war in Iraq. Mr. McCain said he had not expected Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to try to oust Shiite militias from Basra without consulting the Americans, and that he was troubled by some of the demands that were made by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr as part of his offer of a ceasefire after the militias held off the American-supported assault. And he tied some of the current problems to the Bush administration's old strategy there."
First Published: March 31, 2008, 5:15 p.m.
