Edwards' Cover-up Cost Clinton the Nomination

[Parkbandit]

Sen. Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic presidential nominee if John Edwards had been caught in his lie about an extramarital affair and forced out of the race last year, insists a top Clinton campaign aide, making a charge that could exacerbate previously existing tensions between the camps of Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama.

Sen. Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic presidential nominee if John Edwards had been caught in his lie about an extramarital affair and forced out of the race last year, insists a top Clinton campaign aide.

"I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," former Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson told ABCNews.com.

Clinton finished third in the Iowa caucuses barely behind Edwards in second place and Obama in first. The momentum of the insurgent Obama campaign beating two better-known candidates -- not to mention an African-American winning in such an overwhelmingly white state -- changed the dynamics of the race forever.

Obama won 37.6 per cent of the vote. Edwards won 29.7 per cent and Clinton won 29.5 per cent, according to results posted by the Iowa Democratic Party.

"Our voters and Edwards' voters were the same people," Wolfson said the Clinton polls showed. "They were older, pro-union. Not all, but maybe two-thirds of them would have been for us and we would have barely beaten Obama."

Two months earlier, Edwards had vociferously, but falsely, denied a story in the National Enquirer about the alleged affair last October, and few in the mainstream media even reported the denial.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5553013&page=1

[Methais]

QQ

[Eszes]

Iowa's a caucus state. That matters because if you caucus for a candidate who can't get 15% of the vote, your choice is rejected and you have to vote for someone else. So, pollsters did a lot of second choice polling, trying to find out where supporters of guys like Richardson and Biden would go. Of the three real candidates, Clinton was the least popular (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/10/1197/0162/984/420064).

So if anything, with Edwards out of the race before Iowa, Obama wins by more.

[Keller]

if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle.

[Gan]

I see it as another spice to add to the DNC stew thats already simmering. The convention is going to be real interesting.

[Tsa`ah]

Iowa's a caucus state. That matters because if you caucus for a candidate who can't get 15% of the vote, your choice is rejected and you have to vote for someone else. So, pollsters did a lot of second choice polling, trying to find out where supporters of guys like Richardson and Biden would go. Of the three real candidates, Clinton was the least popular (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/10/1197/0162/984/420064).

So if anything, with Edwards out of the race before Iowa, Obama wins by more.

Not only was Clinton the least popular, but Wolfson is also apparently incapable of understanding the entrance polling data ... you know the portion of the poll where participants are asked who their second choice is.

Of those who caucused for Edwards, the polls range from 60-70% stating their second choice would have been Obama.

Clinton had a snowball's chance in hell to win IA ... it didn't matter if Edwards was on the ticket or not.

[Gan]

In the spirit of the OP, here's some more light on what we could expect in Denver.

:popcorn:

__________________________________________________ ____________

WASHINGTON: While Obama was spending three hours watching "The Dark Knight" five time zones away, and going to a fund-raiser featuring "Aloha attire" and Hawaiian pupus, Hillary was busy planning her convention.


You can almost hear her mind whirring: She's amazed at how easy it was to snatch Denver away from the Obama saps. Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole Guy doesn't eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama.


Now they've made Barry's convention all about them - their dissatisfaction and revisionism and barely disguised desire to see him fail. Whatever insincere words of support the Clintons muster, their primal scream gets louder: He can't win! He can't close the deal! We told you so!


Hillary's orchestrating a play within the play in Denver. Just as Hamlet used the device to show that his stepfather murdered his father, Hillary will try to show the Democrats they chose the wrong savior.


Her former aide Howard Wolfson fanned the divisive flames Monday on ABC News, arguing that Hillary would have beaten Obama in Iowa and become the nominee if John Edwards' affair had come out last year - an assertion contradicted by a University of Iowa survey showing that far more Edwards supporters had Obama as their second choice.


Hillary feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Obama's big moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain and improving her odds of being the nominee in 2012.


She's obviously relishing Hillaryworld's plans to have multiple rallies in Denver, to take out TV and print ads and to hold up signs in the hall that read "Denounce Nobama's Coronation."


In a video of a closed California fundraiser on July 31 that surfaced on YouTube, Hillary was clearly receptive to having her name put in nomination and a roll-call vote.


She said she thought it would be good for party unity if her gals felt "that their voices are heard." But that's disingenuous. Hillary was the one who raised the roll-call idea at the end of May with Democrats, who were urging her to face the math. She said she wanted it for Chelsea, oblivious to how such a vote would dim Obama's star turn. Ever since she stepped aside in June, she's been telling people privately that there might have to be "a catharsis" at the convention, signaling she wants a Clinton crescendo.


Bill continues to howl at the moon - and any reporters in the vicinity - about Obama; he's starting to make King Lear look like Ryan Seacrest, the host of "American Idol." The way the Clintons see it, there's nothing wrong with a couple making plans for their future, is there? That's the American way and, as their pal Mark Penn pointed out, they have American roots while Obama "is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values."


The Clintons know that a lot of Democrats are muttering that their solipsistic behavior is "disgusting." But they're too filled with delicious schadenfreude at the wave of buyer's remorse that has swept the Democrat Party; many Democrats are questioning whether Obama is fighting back hard enough against McCain, and many are wondering, given his inability to open up a lead in a country fed up with Republicans, if race will be an insurmountable factor.


Some Democrats wish that Obama had told the Clintons to "get in the box" or get lost if they can't show more loyalty, rather than giving them back-to-back, prime-time speaking gigs at the convention on Tuesday and Wednesday. Al Gore clipped their wings in 2000, triggering their wrath by squeezing both the president and New York Senate candidate into speaking slots the first night and then ushering them out of Los Angeles.


Wednesday will be all Bill. The networks will rerun his churlish comments from Africa about Obama's readiness to lead and his South Carolina meltdowns. TV will have more interest in a volcanic ex-president than a genteel veep choice.


Obama also allowed Hillary supporters to insert an absurd statement into the platform suggesting that media sexism spurred her loss and that "demeaning portrayals of women ... dampen the dreams of our daughters."


This, even though post-mortems, including the new raft of campaign memos leaked by Clintonistas to The Atlantic - another move that undercuts Obama - finger Hillary's horrendous management skills.


Besides the crashing egos and screeching factions working at cross purposes, Joshua Green writes in the magazine, Hillary's "hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency."


It would have been better to put this language in the platform: "A woman who wildly mismanages and bankrupts a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar campaign operation, and then blames sexism in society, will dampen the dreams of our daughters."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/13/opinion/edowd.php