Hillary Easily Wins New York, Blunts Sanders' :Momentum"

Growing up through high school in Central New York, down state - i.e., everything from Westchester County and Orange County south - was always the Democrat bastion of New York State.  It proved to be so yesterday when Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders by over a 15%  margin.  Clinton carried all of "down state" and all of the large upstate cities except Albany.  Like here in Virginia, there is a pronounced rural/urban divide in New York, although one sees far fewer Christofascists than in rural Virginia.  One question now is whether or not Sanders will continue to try to destroy Clinton at any cost with no regard to possible handing the White House to Republicans in November.  The ultimate goal is to stop the GOP and I hope Sanders will begin to realize this and put his personal ego aside.  Here are highlights from the New York Times on Clinton's win:

Mrs. Clinton’s decisive victory ended a string of wins by Mr. Sanders and gave her more delegates than her advisers expected. Her base of support was Long Island, the five boroughs, and upstate cities, with female and black and Hispanic voters turning out for her in especially strong numbers.

Mrs. Clinton was set to win roughly 30 more delegates than Mr. Sanders, out of 247 at stake. She already had a lead of more than 200 delegates in the race.

Smiling broadly throughout her victory speech, Mrs. Clinton drew cheers as she thanked her adopted home state and then boomed, “Today, you proved once again, there’s no place like home.”

“The race for the Democratic nomination is in the home stretch and victory is in sight,” Mrs. Clinton added, reflecting the overwhelming mathematical advantage she has in delegates.

Sanders advisers had said that beating Mrs. Clinton in her adopted home state represented one of their campaign’s best opportunities to damage her candidacy and sow doubts about her strength as a general-election nominee. On Tuesday, however, Mrs. Clinton drew deep support among women and blacks — two groups that have been essential for her in many states — while Mr. Sanders was outpacing her among white men and people under 45, according to exit polls

“Bernie Sanders got very negative attacking Hillary Clinton and dividing the party in New York, and I think he now has to ask himself if he wants to keep going down that path,” said Jay Jacobs, a Clinton supporter who is the Democratic chairman in Nassau County on Long Island. “After New York, we’re moving into a phase of the campaign where we have to start uniting the party.”

Mr. Sanders and his team spent Tuesday looking past New York. Mr. Sanders held a rally at Pennsylvania State University in State College on Tuesday night, then flew home to Burlington, Vt., and spoke to reporters just after the race was called.

The Sanders campaign spent roughly $2 million more than the Clinton campaign on television ads in New York. The magnitude of the loss — both in the popular vote and in delegates — was steep for Mr. Sanders, who said he intended to get “recharged and take a day off.”

The senator’s advisers were optimistic that he would perform strongly in next Tuesday’s primaries in Pennsylvania as well as in Rhode Island and Connecticut. The other two states voting next week, Delaware and Maryland, are widely seen as Clinton strongholds. The Sanders campaign is already running television ads in those five states and Indiana, which votes May 3.

Today's GOP: Nattering Nabobs of Negativism

The hate and extremism fest known as CPAC has continued to provide great sound bites to use against individual GOP candidates and the Party in general. Interestingly, pollster Scott Rasmussen asked the crowd of loons to take a good look in the mirror. It's doubtful that the advice will be heeded, but long term I suspect that the only way to save the GOP is to allow it to largely self-destruct as it remains a puppet of an aging and soon to be extinct segment of the population. Given that the GOP has become a de facto religious party, the Party like the Christianists who control it is known more and more by what its against and who it hates. In both cases, the only ones not hated or opposed are those in the shrinking tent. A column in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon. Here are highlights (Dana Milbank coined the nattering nabobs of negativism phrase):

“How many of you,” Scott Rasmussen asked the crowd at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, “have ever mocked or made fun of the president’s call for hope and change? Raise your hands.” Most people in the Marriott Wardman Park hotel ballroom raised their hands. There were cheers and whoops. “With all due respect,” the conservative pollster and commentator told them, “I’d like to say that’s really stupid.”

This time, there was uncomfortable laughter. “Voters are looking for hope and change as much today as they were in 2008,” Rasmussen explained, and “you ought to be encouraging Republican candidates, people you support, to offer that positive step forward.”

Rasmussen had put his finger on a major problem for Republicans in 2012, and conservatives in particular: At a time when the national mood has begun to improve, they remain nattering nabobs of negativism. At CPAC, any hint of a “positive step” was buried in vitriol.

[W]ith optimism and confidence finally on the rise, Republicans are left with an anger management problem. They risk leaving the impression that they are rooting against an economic recovery. Take, for example, the speech to CPAC by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader. . . . . “The president seems to have forgotten . . . that he was elected to be president of the United States, not the Occupy Wall Street fan club,” McConnell lectured, spitting out the words.

The unrelenting anger in the ballroom was an extension of what’s been happening on the campaign trail. In the week preceding the Florida Republican primary, 92 percent of the political ads were negative, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group. There was only one positive ad for Mitt Romney — and it was in Spanish.

The dour message has contributed to low voter turnout and an enthusiasm gap among GOP voters — a worrisome development that the Washington Times’ Ralph Hallow tried to warn the CPAC participants about. “None of these things I see are particularly good,” he said during one of the conference panels. “Intensity and enthusiasm about voting is now with the Democrats.”
. . . . . But at the moment, the message remains backward-looking and negative.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) even dismissed the significance of the death of Osama bin Laden, the fall of Moammar Gaddafi and the birth of the Arab Spring. They are “tactical successes” that pale against the “mess that Barack Obama has created,” she said.

Such nattering is exactly what Obama needs.

More Clinton Race Baiting

It is getting increasingly difficult to adequately express my disgust with the tactics of Hillary Clinton's campaign. I know that I am not alone in this and I must applaud the Obama campaign for not going after Hillary's biggest Achille's heel: Bill's sexcapades which I suspect have continued since he left the White House. Of course, the questionable post White House deals that have made the Clintons wealthy ($34,900,000 as of 2006) might also be appropriate fodder. Here's some of what John Aravois at America Blog has to say (http://www.americablog.com/2008/02/clinton-surrogate-says-obama-is-really.html):

This is the sixth time, at least, I believe, that the Clinton's and their surrogates have launched racist attacks on Obama. It's not just abominable on its face, it's absolutely astounding that the Clinton campaign is now using Republican hate-emails to create their talking points about Obama. The Clinton campaign simply doesn't care if they permanently damage Obama for the general election by feeding the GOP Swift Boat attacks on the man who is very likely going to be our nominee.

Race-baiting simply isn't the same thing as saying your opponent is divisive and lacks credibility. What would be the same thing is were Obama and company publicly talking about Bill Clinton's sex life past and present. That would be inappropriate, disgusting, and damaging to Hillary and her run for the presidency were she to get the nomination - it would be the same thing as talking about Obama's race and ethnic origins. And in spite of how negative both sides have gotten, you don't see Obama's people, or even their surrogates, touching Bill Clinton's sex life, even though, frankly, it would be one hell of a bombshell to drop on Hillary. There IS a difference in how negative each campaign has gotten.Moving away from racism for a moment, my problem with Hillary's attack below is that 3 months ago she swore off such attacks, and now she's using them the same week that she's complaining about Obama going negative. Both sides have gone negative, but there's a difference between negative and vicious.

For a look at the Clintons' astonishingly soaring financial net worth (from $2,076,000 in 2003 to $34,900,000 in 2006), some interesting stuff can be found here: http://thememlingindex.com/hillary_clinton_net_worth-wealth.html