She had the biggest donors and Bill Clinton’s organization behind her, but Hillary Clinton lost to Barack Obama in the fight for the huge block of party superdelegates in part because he contributed to more of their campaigns than she did. A new study of the 2008 superdelegate fight found that Obama gave $640,926 to 100 superdelegates, while Clinton gave $247,500 to 47. In the end, the spending helped to give Obama twice as many of the 840 party elders, House and Senate members and governors, which made up 20 percent of the Democratic delegate total.
Obama’s focus and spending on them also helped him win more superdelegates than Clinton in states where she won the popular vote. For example, she won 71 percent of the Arkansas Democratic primary vote, but he took eight of 11 superdelegates there, a pattern that played out elsewhere when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called on superdelegates to ignore the popular vote and side with the delegate leader, which was Obama at the time.
“Either Clinton did not spend enough or she gave to too few superdelegates,” said University of Oregon political science professor Priscilla Southwell in the prestigious journal Party Politics.
It’s a money-talks lesson that Democrats will follow in 2016, unless the party heeds Southwell’s call to bar candidate donations to superdelegates.
Reversal: Majority would recall Wisconsin Gov. Walker
A new Rasmussen poll finds that Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is in trouble of being recalled June 5, with 52 percent saying they will vote him out less than two years after he took office and immediately created controversy by going to work to cut the power of public employee unions.
The poll revealed a remarkable shift from February, when 54 percent of Wisconsin voters said they would vote against the recall. In Monday’s poll, just 47 percent said they would vote against recalling the governor.
Worse for Walker: 53 percent disapprove of his job as governor, with a whopping 46 percent saying they “strongly disapprove.”
New ‘Mediscare’ attack targets GOP
It’s deja vu all over again for Democratic critics of the GOP budget drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., as they ready an aggressive ad campaign warning seniors that the Republicans want to kill Medicare.
The effort worked well last year when Ryan, chairman of the Budget Committee, revealed his plan that included harsh reforms to Medicare that he said were key to saving it. Polls found the plan unpopular.
This week, with an improved version in the new Ryan budget just passed by the House, the groups that attacked in 2011 are stepping up their game in time for the fall election. Americans United for Change has teamed up with AFSCME to launch TV ads aimed at scaring elderly voters. One ad that targets Ryan notes that locals “gave that young man an earful” after his budget passed last year. “You’d think he’d have learned his lesson. Think again.”
Mainstream scream: Heartless Cheney attack from ‘NewsBeast’
Our weekly look at the loudest screech from the mainstream media features Allison Yarrow of the Newsweek/Daily Beast online show “NewsBeast” sniping over former Vice President Dick Cheney’s heart transplant. “Can you imagine being that organ donor?” she asked. “I would never do it. I would say, ‘Give me my heart back,’ ” she said.
Media Research Center Vice President of Research Brent Baker explains our pick: “Yarrow verbalized publicly what I’m sure much of the national press corps believe, the ridiculous notion that Cheney defines evil in a world of mass-murdering dictators. They’re so overtaken by their disgust for him that they are unable to see that his national security policies, which they so revile, are being largely followed by their beloved President Obama.”
Rating: Five out of five screams.
Paul Bedard, The Examiner’s Washington Secrets columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears each weekday in the Politics section and on washingtonexaminer.com.
