Just dropped · Trial Balloon · Ep. 187
Bad Instincts
“A senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign who was accused of repeatedly sexually harassing a young subordinate was kept on the campaign at Mrs. Clinton’s request,” the New York Times reports.
“Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager at the time recommended that she fire the adviser, Burns Strider. But Mrs. Clinton did not. Instead, Mr. Strider was docked several weeks of pay and ordered to undergo counseling, and the young woman was moved to a new job.”
Chris Liddell-Westefeld: “How did one of the whitest states in the union propel the first African-American president to the nomination? What about him captured Iowans’ imaginations? What compelled hundreds of young people to uproot their lives and join a movement considered so unlikely in its nascent stages? What was unique about his organization that future candidates, aides, volunteers, and activists can learn from?”
“I spent a year looking for answers to these questions… The Obama campaign billed itself as an organic effort whose success would be built upon bringing new voters into a caucus process that discouraged broad participation. I wanted to tell that story from the perspective of the bit players history usually forgets.”
“I’m a journalist.”
— Sean Hannity, on Fox News in 2008.
“I never claimed to be a journalist.”
— Hannity, quoted by the New York Times on how he’s been advising Donald Trump.
In a previously unreported exchange from 2008, Donald Trump threw his support behind then-Senator Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, calling her “fantastic,” BuzzFeed reports.
Said Trump: “Well, I support Hillary. I think she’s fantastic.”
“Melania Trump earned praise for her speech on Monday at the opening night of the Republican National Convention, but her remarks almost immediately came under scrutiny when striking similarities were discovered between her speech and one delivered by Michelle Obama at the Democratic convention in 2008,” the New York Times reports.
CNN: “Side-by-side comparisons of the transcripts show the text in Trump’s address following, nearly to the word, the first lady’s own from the first night of the Democratic convention in Denver nearly eight years ago.”
Said a campaign spokesman: “In writing her beautiful speech, Melania’s team of writers took notes on her life’s inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking. Melania’s immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it a success.”
Donald Trump said in 2008 that Hillary Clinton would “make a good president,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“His kind words for Mrs. Clinton came in a previously unreported clip from ‘Trumped!,’ a syndicated radio feature that aired from 2004 to 2008 and consisted of a daily commentary of about 60 seconds from the real-estate mogul.”
“A frequent topic of the radio broadcasts was sex and women. In one segment, Mr. Trump advised men to do more chores around the house because psychological research showed they would get more sex from their wives.”
It actually took Hillary Clinton four days to concede the Democratic nomination after Barack Obama secured the necessary delegates in 2008.
As NBC News reported at the time:
“Advisers indicated earlier Tuesday that the former first lady would publicly acknowledge in her speech that Obama had crossed the delegate threshold. But she changed her mind and refused to do so … Her advisers said they considered the delegate numbers to be unreliable, even as the AP estimated Obama had several more than the 2,118 needed to nominate.”
Alan Abramowitz: “Perhaps the key lesson that we can learn from the results of the 2008 battle between Clinton and Obama is that Sanders supporters probably do not have to love Clinton in order to vote for her in the general election. They merely have to like her as well or better than Trump, and that should be a very easy bar to clear.”
“Trump has far less appeal to Democratic voters in 2016 than McCain had in 2008. According to the 2008 ANES data, McCain was viewed favorably by 23% of all Democratic identifiers and leaners and unfavorably by 58%. In contrast, according to four recent national polls… Donald Trump is viewed favorably by only 5% to 12% of Democratic voters and unfavorably by 82% to 89%. And while these polls did not provide data on Trump favorability among Clinton and Sanders supporters, it seems unlikely that he is viewed more favorably by Sanders voters, who tend to be, if anything, further to the left and more suspicious of billionaires than Clinton supporters.”
“In the wake of her victories in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut and Delaware, some of Hillary Clinton’s top operatives are ready for Bernie Sanders to call it quits. But Clinton’s own refusal to give up in 2008, even after she had no real path forward, remains an obstacle to ramping up that pressure,” Politico reports.
“Indeed, some veterans of Clinton’s 2008 campaign are urging empathy and space for Sanders, emphasizing that the decision to slog on is not about having a viable path forward — it’s about feeling that you’ve gone as far as you can go.”
The Lid: “There’s absolutely no question that he’s built a formidable coalition that’s making him a real threat to the establishment. But if ‘revolution’ by involving a massive amount of new people in the political process is the goal, the two nominating contests in the books already aren’t slam-dunk advertisements for the plan so far. Democratic turnout in BOTH Iowa and New Hampshire was DOWN from 2008. New participants made up 44% of the electorate in this year’s Democratic contest in Iowa, down from 57% eight years ago. In New Hampshire, newcomers participated at about the same rate as in 2008.”
“Yes, he’s raising massive amounts of money from small donors, which is an important data point here too. And yes, we’re only talking about the first two states, and there’s a lot of politicking left to come. But we’ll have to see some more raw vote totals — and an expansion of Sanders’ coalition in more diverse states — to be convinced that his movement is surpassing the scale of what Obama put together eight years ago.”
“When the exact same problems crop up in separate campaigns, with different staff, at what point do the principals say, ‘Hey, maybe it’s US?'”
— David Axelrod, in a tweet about the problems with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
“Clinton campaign officials tell NBC News that two key factors propelled Obama to victory over Clinton in 2008: 1) Obama’s ability to galvanize the African-American vote after winning the Iowa caucuses; and 2) Obama’s domination of the caucus contests.”
“But the Clinton campaign – while acknowledging the possibility they could lose Iowa – argues that Sanders will be unable to capitalize on either factor that benefitted Obama.”
“Well, it takes a team to win, so it takes a team to lose. I was part of a team that came in second outta two. So, yes, yeah, I mean, semantics, okay, words matter. You either win or you lose. We lost. That makes you not a winner. At that time.”
— Sarah Palin, quoted by CBS News, when asked if she was to blame for John McCain’s defeat in the 2008 presidential election.
Ryan Lizza: “The conventional wisdom is that Obama inspired voters with an uplifting message and out-organized Clinton in Iowa and elsewhere. And while it’s true that he had a superior organization and an optimistic message, the real beginning of the end for Hillary Clinton was when Obama attacked her greatest vulnerability: her character.”
“The kill-Hillary strategy began with an October memo that was written by several top Obama officials, including Axelrod, Grisolano, Pfeiffer, the campaign manager David Plouffe, and Joel Benenson, Obama’s pollster.”
“In front of several hundred evangelical Christians on Saturday, Trump took a dig at Senator McCain for a well-known incident in which Mr. McCain took away a microphone from a woman to correct her after she said that Barack Obama was an Arab,” the Washington Post reports.
“Mr. Trump compared that episode to his own response on Thursday, when a man accused Mr. Obama of being a Muslim and not an American. Mr. Trump was widely criticized for not correcting the man, but he told the Iowa crowd that if he had, he would have been attacked for violating the man’s right to free speech.”
Nate Cohn: “Hillary Clinton was inevitably going to lose some of her aura once she started campaigning. The high favorability ratings she earned as secretary of state simply weren’t sustainable. But over the last two months, the steady and expected erosion of her ratings has surprisingly accelerated. Her ratings are now lower than they were in 2007 or 2008, or at any point in her political career.”
Hillary Clinton “wound down her political operation in 2008 with 2.5 million email addresses in her campaign database. Seven years later, when campaign officials turned on the lights in April, they were stunned to find fewer than 100,000 still worked,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
“The huge attrition of valuable data is not unique to Clinton — a typical email list will lose 1 in 5 subscribers each year… But it created one of the first big challenges for the campaign’s growing digital team and sparked a response that illustrates the high priority campaigns now place on acquiring digital data.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.