Hillary Clinton's victories in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island gives her newfound hope, and another endorsement for a mathematic principle now known as "Huckamath." Except, unlike Mike Huckabee's campaign that served as more of a campy sidebar to John McCain's ascension as this year's republican presidential nomination, Clinton's continued run threatens to undermine whoever wins the democratic nomination. From this point on the democratic campaign becomes a battle of character...

Labels: 2G2K Circus, barack obama, hillary clinton

Statement from Hillary Rodham Clinton

"America's prison population has grown at a staggering rate over the past quarter century. A new report now reveals a staggering and heart-breaking statistic: One in 100 American adults is currently behind bars. Our incarceration rate is several times greater than that of any other developed country. To state it plainly, the 1-in-100 figure represents a failure of our society at a number of levels. And the cost – to our families, to our communities, and to state budgets to the tune of almost $50 billion – are simply too great to bear. Many of those costs are borne disproportionately by minority communities: One in 15 African American adults is behind bars, and one in 36 Hispanic adults. We need a President who will be tough on crime, but smart about it too. A President who will take innovative steps to ensure our crime policies are reducing crime in the long run so that we have fewer victims of crime and fewer prisoners.

"To reverse this alarming trend, interventions are needed before crimes are committed, before offenders are shipped to prison, during their terms of incarceration, and as they are released and begin to reintegrate themselves into our communities. I will work to deter crime by re-investing in our communities, re-invigorating the COPS program, and putting 100,000 new officers committed to community policing into neighborhoods across America. Studies have shown that the COPS program deters crime. And I will close the revolving prison door by reforming our sentencing policies, promoting effective alternatives to incarceration, and investing in new "second chance" Reentry Partnership Grants to support reformed offenders and reduce recidivism. The solutions are within our grasp. What we need now is leadership, and that's what I'll provide."

Labels: hillary clinton, joan morgan, prison-industrial complex, vibe

Last night's debate was fairly collegial and was essentially a draw. Obama is playing keep away these days and will not engage in anything unless it's going to deliver the knockout punch to Clinton. Clinton, at least during the exchange on the question about Farrakhan appears ready to concede. She injected herself into that question in a peculiar way by rehashing how she was attacked by republicans in New York for allegedly supporting Palestine. There were a number of ways she could have entered that dialogue with the intent of harming Obama, but she did not and I think this represents a new tone in their debates.

They both actually seemed tired of these debates and it is becoming more evident that this process is wearing on both of them. Afterwards the pundits discussed the moderators' inability to elicit any new answers from either candidates, but why would either Obama or Clinton say something substantial?

One last point for now, is it me, or has health-care become a democratic proxy for the economy? It's amazing actually how much time Clinton and Obama spend referring to their health-care proposals, when in effect neither proposal can be launched if the economy is not somehow revived. Think about it this way, our current health care system all but means you need a job in order to have health coverage. If somewhere between 10 - 17,000 people a month are losing their jobs, fewer people are obviously going to have health coverage and the economy is not going to be able to afford to pay for them to be covered. Regardless of how much money we shift from spending on Iraq or how quickly we bring the troops back, neither plan will work under our current economic conditions.

Labels: 2G2K Circus, barack obama, hillary clinton

JOAN: Is there a chance Senator Clinton, that if you win the nomination that you will have Barack Obama on your ticket?

CLINTON: Of course there is. Of course there is. Now neither of us will answer this question [definitively] because we don’t want to look presumptuous and premature. But it is more than fair to say that—of course there is.

Labels: 2008 elections, barack obama, hillary clinton

Labels: 2008 elections, 2G2K Circus, barack obama, hillary clinton

This is a turning point in U.S. political history: no serious candidate for the presidency from here on out can ignore the mandate to build a multiracial coalition....

Unfortunately, the pundits have already seized upon an equally divisive and reductionist theme. Interethnic relations are no longer a sideshow, but our understanding of them is severely limited. Everyone following the campaign has now read Clinton pollster Sergio Bendixen's remark, "The Hispanic voter -- and I want to say this very carefully -- has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates." (JEFF NOTE: That argument is taken apart completely by Gregory Rodriguez right hurrr.) Also surfacing less noticeably in places like online forums was the assertion that racial prejudice inhibits Asian Americans from voting for Blacks.

While prejudice and narrow-mindedness circulates in various forms within sectors of the Latino and Asian populations, crude thinking can blind us to the less sensational but more significant reasons why Clinton prevailed. She had built up a huge lead and enjoyed immense name recognition, which translated into a huge lead in absentee voting. In many places, Obama has overcome these obstacles with an excellent ground game that has attracted and energized new voters. Local observers, however, have remarked that his campaign lacked either the time or proper strategy to develop effective grassroots outreach to Latinos and Asians in California.

But if Clinton's multicultural strategy is unprecedented, Obama's effort to transcend "minority" politics is historic. Casting Obama as a "colorblind" politician, the pundits and his left skeptics have largely missed the significance of what he represents. Getting "beyond race" today is not about ignoring the problem of racism or moderating ones politics to appease whites. Instead, it means thinking about America as a multiracial nation that dispels old notions of both white normativity and majority/minority identities. Culturally and demographically, millions of Americans -- especially youth -- already live in a world where that notion of white majority has been displaced by a multiethnic reality. Obama is helping us to envision what a new majority will look like politically.

For this reason, the Obama campaign is the only one with movement building potential and why we all have a stake in its efforts to build a multiracial coalition on new ground. Following the dictates of pollsters and consultants, traditional Democrats carve us all up into "interest groups," so they can push the hot buttons that reinforce our sense of victimization and vilify the other side. Obama has learned -- both from his study of what historian Charles Payne has called the black freedom struggle's "organizing tradition" and from his experience organizing against the depths of despair in Chicago's deindustrialized South Side -- that such an approach is not only ineffective but also spiritually bankrupt. If you are just a "minority leader," then you're not really a leader at all. If you are only fighting for your "fair share" of the riches controlled by those in power, you'll never address the root causes of oppression. Above all is the sense that none of us can be free in America or face the global crises of our lifetime until we change the whole country. That is why Obama has the "audacity" to think he is the best person to lead the entire nation.

It is clear from the California result that we will now be witness to a paradigm shifting clash between two consciously multiracial organizing strategies. Clinton's appeal is to give all minorities a seat at the table and a share of the pie. Obama challenges us to see ourselves instead as a collective majority....

Labels: 2G2K Circus, asian american voters, barack obama, hillary clinton, latino voters

Here's a rationale: Obama's victory in central Brooklyn and his ability to record a split in Congressman Charles Rangel's district in Harlem reiterated a national trend of African American votes steering in his direction. For example, in Brooklyn Obama received an endorsement from Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, who shares the senator’s profile as a charismatic emerging political star. Meanwhile in Harlem, Rangel, the dean of black democrats, older and like his fellow black political patriarch, Andrew Young, failed to deliver a victory for Clinton. Rangel’s failure should not have been a surprise considering Obama’s recent success in South Carolina, but this observation does nothing to replace the political capital that Rangel aggressively extended on Clinton’s behalf even as her support among his Harlem constituents plummeted.

These conclusions may seem trivial to non-New Yorkers, but they can potentially mark a historical breakthrough if Clinton makes it into the White House. A Clinton victory in November coupled with letdowns by Rangel and his Brooklyn counterpart, Yvette Clarke, means that New York is now poised to send a Latino senator to Washington, one who would join Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Ken Salazar of Colorado.

Of course, the decision of choosing the senator to replace Clinton rests solely in Governor Eliot Spitzer's hands, but given New York's current demographic shifts, most notably the fact that Latinos outnumber African Americans, Spitzer would have very little reason for selecting any of the black democrats who are presumably currently favored for this position.

The campaign’s other most potent form of currency remains its thick deck of race cards. This was all too apparent in the Hallmark show. In its carefully calibrated cross section of geographically and demographically diverse cast members — young, old, one gay man, one vet, two union members — African-Americans were reduced to also-rans. One black woman, the former TV correspondent Carole Simpson, was given the servile role of the meeting’s nominal moderator, Ed McMahon to Mrs. Clinton’s top banana. Scattered black faces could be seen in the audience. But in the entire televised hour, there was not a single African-American questioner, whether to toss a softball or ask about the Clintons’ own recent misadventures in racial politics.

The Clinton camp does not leave such matters to chance. This decision was a cold, political cost-benefit calculus. In October, seven months after the two candidates’ dueling church perorations in Selma, USA Today found Hillary Clinton leading Mr. Obama among African-American Democrats by a margin of 62 percent to 34 percent. But once black voters met Mr. Obama and started to gravitate toward him, Bill Clinton and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped caring about what African-Americans thought. In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user (by the chief Clinton strategist, Mark Penn, among others), “the black candidate” (as Clinton strategists told the Associated Press) and Jesse Jackson redux (by Mr. Clinton himself).

The result? Black America has largely deserted the Clintons. In her California primary victory, Mrs. Clinton drew only 19 percent of the black vote. The campaign saw this coming and so saw no percentage in bestowing precious minutes of prime-time television on African-American queries.

That time went instead to the Hispanic population that was still in play in Super Tuesday’s voting in the West. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles had a cameo, and one of the satellite meetings was held in the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s smart politics, especially since Mr. Obama has been behind the curve in wooing this constituency.

But the wholesale substitution of Hispanics for blacks on the Hallmark show is tainted by a creepy racial back story. Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was “making a historical statement.”

It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As the columnist Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, all three black members of Congress in that city won in heavily Latino districts; black mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the 1980s and Ron Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote. The real point of the Clinton campaign’s decision to sow misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez concluded, was to “undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build bridges and unite Americans of all types.”

If that was the intent, it didn’t work. Mrs. Clinton did pile up her expected large margin among Latino voters in California. But her tight grip on that electorate is loosening. Mr. Obama, who captured only 26 percent of Hispanic voters in Nevada last month, did better than that in every state on Tuesday, reaching 41 percent in Arizona and 53 percent in Connecticut. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign’s attempt to drive white voters away from Mr. Obama by playing the race card has backfired. His white vote tally rises every week. Though Mrs. Clinton won California by almost 10 percentage points, among whites she beat Mr. Obama by only 3 points.

The question now is how much more racial friction the Clinton campaign will gin up if its Hispanic support starts to erode in Texas, whose March 4 vote it sees as its latest firewall. Clearly it will stop at little...

Last month, two eminent African-American historians who have served in government, Mary Frances Berry (in the Carter and Clinton years) and Roger Wilkins (in the Johnson administration), wrote Howard Dean, the Democrats’ chairman, to warn him of the perils of that credentials fight. Last week, Mr. Dean became sufficiently alarmed to propose brokering an “arrangement” if a clear-cut victory by one candidate hasn’t rendered the issue moot by the spring. But does anyone seriously believe that Howard Dean can deter a Clinton combine so ruthless that it risked shredding three decades of mutual affection with black America to win a primary?

Labels: 2G2K Circus, african american voters, hillary clinton, latino voters

Clinton won a majority of Latino votes in several states with high proportions of Latino voters, including New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and - the biggest prize - California, where she beat Obama 2-1 among Latinos, according to an MSNBC exit poll. And she drew votes from about 75 percent of Asian American Democrats in California, who represent about 8 percent of the state's total Democratic vote, according the MSNBC exit poll.

But Obama did well with Latino voters in his home state of Illinois (JEFF NOTE: CNN's exit poll, shows he took 58% of 30-44...), as well as in Connecticut, and he took more than 40 percent of Latino votes in Arizona, the exit poll shows.

"We actually made enormous progress last night," Obama said at a news conference Wednesday in Chicago. "You take a look at a state like Arizona, where we got somewhere in the low 40s with the Latino vote, and it indicates what I suggested earlier after the Nevada contest, which is as Latino voters get to know me, we do better.

"And so it's just a matter of us getting more information to them, doing the kind of advertising that we had the resources to do leading up to Super Tuesday. When they receive that information, they realize that I'm somebody who's going to be battling for all people, including the Latino vote."

But Ayón doubts Obama will capture the Lone Star state's Latinos, given Clinton's advantage.

"It's a real hard sell. The only advantage he has in Texas is, he's got money and he's got time. But he's unknown," said Ayón. "The Clintons have really worked this ground. They're able to stage events, work those networks, get the machinery going. What Obama's doing everywhere is building an organization from scratch. And that's a lot harder to do in a large state."

Because the key to Obama's campaign success is its ground operation that is based on a grassroots community organizing model (a la Marshall Ganz), any time the campaign treads the traditional top-down and tested electoral campaign approach the Obama campaign falters in that area. I don't believe the kind of structure that existed in S.Carolina and Iowa existed in AA/PI immigrant L.A. or Latina/o L.A. If SEIU in LA had switched for Obama earlier and hit the ground, that structure would most likely would have existed. the past L.A. Latina/Labor alliance electoral work has proven this to be true. Maria Elena Durazo got involved with the Obama campaign without the usual footsoldiers she has on hand to make things happen. I don't believe it is just a case of whether a particular community has reached a particular zeitgeist of generational insurgency but the presence or absence of grassroots organization in particular communities.

Clinton also has emphasized her commitment to Asian Americans, locking down several important Asian American politicians, said Don Nakanishi of UCLA's Asian American Studies Center. Last year, for example, Clinton landed support from Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento, who chairs Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders for Hillary.

"The vote doesn't surprise me at all," Nakanishi said, noting that Clinton has strong roots in the community. "But there was a very active core of young Asian Americans who are very supportive of Obama, trying to raise his visibility."

Obama, who grew up in Hawai'i and has Asian family members, has made his multi-ethnic roots part of the political campaign. Last week, his Chinese Canadian brother-in-law, Konrad Ng, addressed Asian American voters, telling them that their perspective is important to Obama.

Although small compared to the Latino vote, the Asian American vote is gaining clout. The Asian American Studies Center estimates that between the years 2000 and 2005, the number of Asian Americans eligible to vote in California increased from 2 million to 2.5 million, pushing the Asian American share of the proportion of the state's voters to 12 percent.

"They also developed this reputation of being the new source of financial contributions, so they are being courted by political campaigns," Nakanishi said.

"People say Latinos won't vote for a black candidate. Well, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. There are existing tensions, but the way to overcome those is through familiarity, through learning something about a candidate that helps you connect."

Labels: 2G2K Circus, asian american voters, barack obama, hillary clinton, latino voters

Labels: 2008 elections, 2G2K Circus, asian american voters, barack obama, hillary clinton, latino voters, presidential elections

Labels: 2008 elections, 2G2K Circus, barack obama, hillary clinton

Labels: 2008 elections, 2G2K Circus, barack obama, hillary clinton

Labels: 2G2K Circus, barack obama, hillary clinton, john edwards, John McCain

Labels: 2008 elections, 2G2K Circus, bill clinton, billary, hill, Hillary, hillary clinton, trapped in the closet

Labels: 2008 elections, 2G2K Circus, barack obama, bill clinton, hillary clinton