Sam Stein

The Huffington Post

George McGovern: Still Backing Clinton, But Going Way Off Script

April 25, 2008 11:43 AM

Former senator and Democratic presidential aspirant George McGovern says he sees some striking similarities when it comes to his run at the White House and that of Sen. Barack Obama. But ultimately, McGovern argues, Obama has organized a much wider political coalition and thus a greater chance of electoral success.

"I think that is his strength," McGovern told The Huffington Post. "He has very broad appeal. He certainly is going to galvanize the black vote. But he has strong appeal to voters of all kinds. Some of the old buckaroos out here in South Dakota are for him."

In recent days, following Obama's loss in the Pennsylvania primary, concern has been raised in Democratic circles that the Illinois Democrat could not expand his political base beyond African-Americans and college students -- a limitation that stunted McGovern's candidacy.

But McGovern, who lost the 1972 election to incumbent Richard Nixon by landslide margins, doesn't attribute his defeat to merely the contours of his political base. Indeed, he argues that his candidacy was damaged more by the infighting that occurred within the Democratic Party even after he had secured the nomination.

"After I had the nomination won and everything except the crowning at the convention, the other candidates that I had defeated in the primaries and the caucuses ganged up on me and spent the next month just bad mouthing me around the country," he said. "And, of course the Nixon people used some of the quotes and threw them back at me in the general election."

It is in this regard -- not necessarily his general election defeat -- that McGovern worries history could end up repeating itself. Noting that Obama seems poised to be the eventually nominee, though believing Sen. Hillary Clinton should stay in the race, he called for a more civil discourse between the two candidates.

"That is the one minus," he said. "I think there has been a little too much negative backbiting. And that is the one negative that concerns me because it is what happened to me in '72... I had to go into that convention exhausted, instead of spending the last few months carefully and systematically picking a running mate and getting my convention organized. We can't have that again."

This, however, is not the only similarity McGovern draws between his run for the White House and the current process. In '72, after he won the California primary and clinched the nomination, McGovern's Democratic opponents argued that the delegation should have been rewarded on a proportional basis, rather than winner-take-all. It was, McGovern says, a changing of the rules in mid-game that resulted both in the weakening of his campaign and his limping into the convention. Thirty-six years later, he sees parallels with the Clinton campaign's push to count the results of the non-DNC-sanctioned Florida and Michigan primaries.

"We can't overturn those rules now that the counting is over," he said. "I think Barack didn't even enter one contest [Michigan]. Those states knew what the rules were, all the candidates knew what the rules were, and to change it now I think is wrong."

It's not the only process issue on which McGovern, who has endorsed Clinton, finds himself at varying odds with the New York Democrat. On the topic of superdelegates, which were created as a concession to the primary reforms that McGovern initiated, the South Dakotan argues that these party insiders must take into strong consideration the pledged delegate tally.

"Yeah, I think that is important," he said. "It also reduces the frustration we would have if the candidate with the most pledged delegates was rejected. There is going to be some frustration anyway. There always is. I just hope it doesn't result in the kind of back-fighting I had to face after I secured the nomination."

Despite these differences, McGovern is not backing away from his support of Clinton. He deems her "one of the most talented, articulate and well-informed people in the country," whom he has known for 35 years, since she worked on his campaign in Texas. And he expects her to stay in the race at least until the last primary commences in his home state. But in the interim, he hopes, the tone and tenor of the campaign will be ratcheted down a notch.

 

Newsmax.com

Limbaugh: 'Operation Chaos' Helped Hillary

Rush Limbaugh says his “Operation Chaos” played a significant role in helping Hillary Clinton achieve her 10-percentage-point victory in the Pennsylvania primary this week.

Operation Chaos is the leading radio talk-show host’s campaign to urge his conservative listeners to cross party lines to vote for Hillary Clinton. Limbaugh says the aim is to keep her in the race so she can continue battling Barack Obama and create chaos in the party, thereby aiding the Republicans this November.

“Were it not for Operation Chaos, Obama could win this by winning the primary process. But he can't now. Nor can she,” Limbaugh said on Wednesday.

“Both of these candidates need unelected superdelegates to be the nominee.

“So, unelected party hacks . . . are gonna choose the nominee. All the people that have voted in these primaries up to now will not be a factor. The nominee will have been delivered by party hacks, unelected superdelegates, and that is a dream come true for Operation Chaos."

On Tuesday, Rush told listeners as voters went to the polls: “Operation Chaos is succeeding exactly as planned and meeting all objectives.”

He pointed to the tens of thousands of voters in Pennsylvania who changed registration from Republican to Democrat in the weeks leading up to the primary and suggested they were “Operation Chaos operatives.”

Following Clinton’s win, the McClatchy Newspapers reported: “One out of 10 voters said they'd changed their party registrations so they could vote in the primary, according to exit polls. They broke for Obama by a margin of nearly 2-to-1.

“Yet late-deciding voters — including those who'd long been registered Democrats — broke heavily for Clinton. One possible explanation was the flood of controversial news about Obama in recent weeks, as well as his defensive performance in a debate last week.

“Another possible ingredient in the mix was mischief: Popular conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh for weeks urged his loyal listeners to register as Democrats to vote for Clinton and prolong an increasingly harsh battle that might benefit the Republicans.”

On Wednesday Limbaugh told listeners Obama could secure the nomination by acknowledging the success of Operation Chaos. "What Obama has to do is go out and say this [Hillary] win is artificial and this win is phony because of Operation Chaos,” he said.

chatterbox

 Hillary Clinton, Ex-Arithmecrat

Enough with the fake metrics.

Hillary Clinton has every right to stay in the primary race for as long as she wishes. She would enjoy that right even if she hadn't won yesterday's Pennsylvania primary. The reason she enjoys that right is that Barack Obama is still 544 primary delegates shy of the 2,025 delegates he needs to nail down the Democratic nomination for president, according to the Associated Press' delegate tracker. (Please note: Estimates of pledged delegates vary, and even AP's count will fluctuate as better information becomes available.) Unpledged superdelegates, who are harder to keep track of and can change their affiliations at any time, narrow Obama's nomination deficit to somewhere in the neighborhood of 310 delegates. Clinton's nomination deficit is 694 primary delegates, according to the AP. If you count superdelegates, her nomination deficit narrows to around 436 delegates. Given there are only 11 primaries left, none of them in delegate-rich states, it is very unlikely that Clinton will acquire the necessary 2,025 delegates before Obama does. Still, it's an arithmetic possibility. Arithmetic pedantry is practically the only friend Clinton has left.

Which makes it all the more baffling that Hillary is now quitting the arithmecracy. "We don't think this is just going to be about some numerical metric," Clinton strategist Geoff Garin told Dan Balz in the April 23 Washington Post. "When we get to those days after June 3^rd, we think the real choice is who's proven themselves to be the best candidate." At first I thought perhaps Garin was merely pandering to Balz, who at heart is a momentucrat. But today Clinton herself is speaking the momentucrat dialect. "The tide is turning," she said this morning on CNN. "Thank You Pennsylvania," reads the banner headline today on Clinton's campaign home page. "You turned the tide. Keep the momentum going!" The message is emphatically not "You showed Obama's momentum doesn't exist," but "You showed that we've got the big mo!" Even if you believe in momentum as the organizing principle of presidential primary victories, though, you have to have some concrete idea about where that momentum can carry you. According to Slate's Delegate Calculator, Clinton would need 80 percent of every remaining vote to catch up with Obama on pledged delegates. There's no chance anyone inside the Clinton campaign believes that is going to happen. It can happen, arithmetically, but the Clintonistas no longer believe in "numerical metrics."

Perhaps Garin read an earlier Chatterbox column ("Agony of the Arithmecrats"), in which I argued that if the delegate counts got really close, precise numbers wouldn't matter anymore. The trouble is that the delegate counts aren't getting really close and don't seem likely to in the future. Indeed, it's hard to know what "really close" would even mean, since political reporters and TV talking heads aren't even trying to hammer out a consensus on that question.

Anyway, it isn't completely true that the Clinton campaign no longer believes in arithmetic benchmarks. It would be more accurate to say that it no longer believes in the ones that matter. Clinton is still more than happy to sling irrelevant metrics. And the damned things keep changing! When Hillary started falling behind in primary delegates, her campaign emphasized her lead in superdelegates, the cigar-chomping party pros of yore who know a thing or two about electability. They gave that up when superdelegates started drifting Obama's way. (At the moment, Hillary has only 25 more superdelegates than Obama.) Then the Clinton campaign started arguing that you can't nominate for president someone who lacks a popular-vote majority in the primaries. They're starting to give that up because Clinton now has little chance of surpassing Obama in the popular vote. (That's just as well, because as Christopher Beam has pointed out in Slate's "Trailhead" blog, the caucuses screw up popular-vote counts as a reliable measure of candidate support. For what it's worth, Obama's ahead in the popular vote by somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000.)

As Clinton's prospects dim, her preferred metrics grow more rococo. The Democrats, Clinton now argues, can't afford to nominate someone who can't carry the big, industrial states that matter in the Electoral College. Never mind that, after the 2000 election, Clinton said the Electoral College should be abolished (she never followed through, alas), or that in the midst of an economic recession, it's hard to imagine Clinton supporters in hard-hit places like Ohio and Pennsylvania voting for the party in power. Obama's on the ropes, Clinton argues, because he spent three times as much as she did and still lost Pennsylvania to her by 10 points. But that's just another way of saying that Obama's campaign is flush and Clinton's is strapped for cash. And anyway, as long as we're being arithmetic, Clinton did not win Pennsylvania by the much-fetishized target margin of 10 points. She won it by 9.2 points, which rounds down to nine, not up to 10. Hillary's weirdest metric is that, if you count the primaries in Michigan (where Hillary was the only major candidate on the ballot!) and Florida (where neither Hillary nor Obama campaigned), she has won more primary votes than any previous Democratic nominee. So what? The Democratic National Committee refuses to seat the delegates from these states because they didn't follow party rules (a position Clinton had no problem accepting back when she had much more clout to change it; see "Fair-Weather Wolverine" by S.V. Dáte).