Clinton: The management thing
Posted: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 9:15 AM by Mark Murray
At her event with veterans this morning outside Pittsburgh, Clinton will focus on military readiness, NBC/NJ’s Athena Jones reports. Clinton will also make the point that she is the one that Americans can count on to end the war in Iraq. She will say that McCain proved at the hearings yesterday that he is not prepared to end the war and she will reiterate that while Obama has said he would withdraw troops within 16 months, a (now former) foreign policy adviser has said that plan could change.
Is it fair to extrapolate what kind of West Wing Clinton and Obama will run based on the campaigns they've run so far? If so, then Politico has a piece that shows why this isn't a measurement the Clinton campaign wants to have used. “Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday.”
“It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling — if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign."
Bloomberg News has more on the Penn fallout. Some key quotes: Carville pooh-poohs the idea that Penn is still running things: “Geoff Garin is someone I've known for 30 years,'' [he] said… “If they think they're going to let him be used in some bait-and-switch campaign, they're mistaken.''
So what's Penn's role? Again, it may not be as little as having NO INFLUENCE, but it's not as much as the Obama campaign is trying to make folks believe.
The Clinton campaign acknowledges that Bill Clinton supports the Colombia free trade deal, while Hillary does not.
The New York Daily News adds, “Bill Clinton voiced ‘support’ for a controversial Colombia free- trade pact that his wife has fiercely opposed -- and he accepted $800,000 in speaking fees from a group boosting the agreement, it was revealed yesterday.”
The AP: “[T]here is one subject [Chelsea Clinton] will not discuss -- ‘The Other Woman.’ At least three times in the past two weeks, the former and possible future first daughter has been asked about the Monica Lewinsky scandal's influence on the presidential campaign of her mother, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. The answer has evolved each time.”
