The "Register for Change" Bus started rolling today in Crawford, Texas. It's a 50-state voter registration drive. DNC Chair Howard Dean just spoke at a rally in front of the Austin Convention Center where Netroots Nation is underway. Dean made it clear -- again -- that Democrats are running aggressive campaigns in all the states. Here's the bus:
From talking to my friends from Austin and the Texans I've been meeting at the conference, it's pretty clear that there is a campaign underway in Texas. Yes, Texas. And, Mississippi. And, Georgia. And, Alaska. And, North Dakota. This really is a 50-state strategy. It's pretty exciting.
BUT ALL THE WOMEN WON'T HAVE VOTED YET?! Oh that's right, by then they will have. I'm sure there will be some new and creative excuse next week as to why Hillary won't be able to concede just yet. Perhaps she'll need to stay in the race in order to save the whales. More from ABC:
Uncommitted superdelegate and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, visiting San Francisco, told KGO Radio today that he spoke this morning with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and last night to DNC Chairman Howard Dean and, "We agree there won’t be a fight at the convention," he said.
In April, Reid had suggested that he, Pelosi and Dean would convene after the last Democratic primary and decide on a course of action to make superdelegates take sides long before the convention. Today he said, "We’re going to urge folks to make a decision quickly – next week," he told Ronn Owens, according to his office.
I'm just having a hard time understanding why Howard Dean seems more interested in sucking up to Hillary than beating John McCain in the fall. Today we have definitive proof, again, of how Hillary is literally and quantitatively hurting our battle to win the White House, and Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid - and the superdelegates - aren't doing nearly enough about it.
From today's Washington Post we learn - as I've been saying for weeks - that Hillary's insistence to stay in the race, even though she's already lost - is hurting the DNC's fundraising in their efforts to take on John McCain.
In a banner fundraising year for Democrats, the struggles of the Democratic National Committee to stockpile cash are frustrating party leaders and complicating efforts to define Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee....
[A]s of the end of April, the DNC had collected $22.8 million this year and had $4.4 left to spend; the Republican National Committee finished April with $57.6 raised and $40.6 million in its accounts.
DNC supporters say several factors have contributed to the shortfall. Among them, they say, are that the protracted race between Obama and Clinton has soaked up funds that would otherwise go the party committee...
One longtime party strategist familiar with the inner workings of the DNC went further, acknowledging that although raising money is always "a difficult thing during a primary" for the DNC, "there is serious concern about their complete lack of fundraising success."...
A high-ranking DNC official who spoke with The Washington Post on the condition he not be identified because of the sensitivity of the situation said he worries that the party's impaired financial condition is leaving it powerless to help define McCain.
"Both campaigns have expressed a desire for us to attack McCain," the official said. "We made a small media buy. But we simply cannot sustain the kind of advertising we need right now. We can't even sustain even a national cable buy for a month."
But hey, Hillary has a bruised ego, and she's now hell-bent on convincing her supporters that the election was stolen from her by misogynist voters and superdelegates and mathematicians, so what's a lost presidency compared to Hillary's fragile emotions? Yes, Dean and Pelosi and Reid have talked to Hillary privately. That's nice. It clearly didn't work. Then again, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume that Dean, Pelosi and Reid never exacted a "no assassinations-talk" promise from Hillary, so technically she may not have breached their agreement. (Never get into a land war in Asia, and never get into a parsing contest with the Clintons.)
Everyone in the party is afraid of the Clintons. Far too many superdelegates are still not picking a side because they don't want to offend either Hillary or Obama. Take Rep. Clyburn. He's African-American and a superdelegate, and this weekend he expressed outrage at Hillary's assassination comments. But even so, he's still "undecided" as to who should be president. Apparently, hinting at the assassination of a black presidential candidate isn't enough to tip the scales for the most senior African-American member of the House. Maybe he's waiting to hear Hillary's position on slavery.
The superdelegates, our party leaders, are more interested in not offending Hillary than they are in winning the White House in the fall. So, we'll continue talking about "white Americans" and "assassinations" all the way until the convention, ripping our party in two, and defunding the effort to beat John McCain in the fall, because Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the rest of the superdelegates don't have the backbone to tell Hillary that it's over.
What more proof do you need that Hillary Clinton isn't slowly wrapping up her campaign gracefully? What more proof do you need as to the damage that Hillary Clinton is causing our party by staying in the race? What more proof do you need as to the venom that is motivating her insistence on staying in the race? Do you honestly still think that she's not capable of dragging this out until the convention? Today proved that she is capable of anything.
It's far past the time for quiet little conversations urging Hillary to play nice. She lost the right to ask for "the benefit of the doubt" ten racist eruptions ago. Dean, Pelosi and Reid should tell Hillary that she has till Monday to gracefully exit the race, or Monday afternoon they are publicly endorsing Obama and calling on her to concede. And then, if she doesn't concede, Dean, Pelosi and Reid should publicly call on all the superdelegates to immediately pick a candidate, or else.
Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid carry a lot of weight in this town. And among Democrats, they carry all the weight. Screw with any of them, and you can lose your political livelihood. It's only a question of how much Dean, Pelosi and Reid care about the permanent alienation of the black community from the Democratic party, and the civil war that Hillary Clinton pretty much guaranteed today with her incredibly offensive comments about June being the month for assassinations.
You gave her her chance. Now it's time to tell her it's over, before the damage is permanent.
Unlike the House and Senate campaign committees, the DNC trails the Republican National Committee in fundraising. At the end of March, the DNC had $5.3 million on hand compared to $31 million in the bank for the RNC.
With such a meager cash on hand total, it's hard to imagine the DNC keeping up a sustained paid advertising campaign [against McCain] for very long.
What that means -- barring a quicker-than-expected resolution to the ongoing Clinton-Obama scrap -- is that an outside organization must step into the void.
The obvious candidate is Progressive Media USA, the group now controlled by Republican turned Democrat David Brock. While Brock touted a $40 million budget for the group, its first foray -- an ad that ran on MSNBC and CNN last week -- cost just $7,000, according to a Democratic media buyer.
The dearth of money coming into the DNC and the lack of real dollars being spent on outside groups' attempts to define McCain present a serious problem for Democrats if the race between Obama and Clinton goes all the way to June 3 or beyond.
Not only do Democrats run the risk of allowing McCain several more months to define himself, they also could watch as disaffected donors, who favor either Clinton or Obama, walk away from funding the DNC and other outside groups if their preferred candidate doesn't wind up as the nominee.
Well, this is the way the DNC wanted it, I thought? The primary could go on forever, for all they care. How's that working out for you?
Last month, Hillary's fundraisers attacked Nancy Pelosi.
Today, they are on the attack again. This time the target is Howard Dean.
Don't these rich people have better things to do? Just a suggestion, but it might be a wiser use of their time to raise the money to pay off Hillary's debts, which were $8.7 million at the end of February -- and also start paying some of the small business owners who have been getting stiffed by the Clinton campaign.
NOTE FROM JOHN: Well, that didn't take long. You'll recall that I predicted the following less than 24 hours ago:
Get ready for the Hillary donors to once again threaten to destroy our majority in the Congress, and help John McCain become president, if Hillary's divine right of kings isn't honored.
If this isn't a reaction to last night's debate debacle, I don't know what is.
An increasingly firm Howard Dean told CNN again Thursday that he needs superdelegates to say who they’re for – and “I need them to say who they’re for starting now.”
“We cannot give up two or three months of active campaigning and healing time,” the Democratic National Committee Chairman told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “We’ve got to know who our nominee is.”
Dean clearly wasn't happy with what he saw last night. It's no longer just Hillary using right-wing talking points in an effort to destroy the guy who will be running against McCain in the fall, now the mainstream media has bought into the "let's destroy Obama" game. As Ben Smith notes, this is the first time the mainstream media has delved into the William Ayers issue, one of the many below-the-belt zingers that Hillary has been trying to throw at Obama:
Barack Obama took his first public grilling on his relationship with Bill Ayers last night, and between the moderators' pressing and Clinton's follow-up, it had exactly the effect the Clinton campaign hoped: finally injecting the issue into the public discussion.
At the moment, "Ayers" is the fifth most searched term on Google, according to Google Trends; "Ayers Obama" is 15th. "William Ayers" is 26th.
ABC, with Hillary's help, has now made yet another right-wing talking point a legitimate point of public debate about Obama. If this keeps up, every Swift Boat style attack against Obama will be considered a serious issue by the media, all because Hillary made it so. Dean has, in my opinion, had enough. He's watching Hillary's kamikaze attack on Obama metastasize into a media feeding frenzy against the guy who won our nomination two months ago. Hillary isn't going to win, Dean knows it, we all know it. The only question is whether she's going to take all of us down with her. Howard Dean is apparently now, finally, belatedly, saying "no."
Get ready for the Hillary donors to once again threaten to destroy our majority in the Congress, and help John McCain become president, if Hillary's divine right of kings isn't honored.
ABC may have just ended Hillary's run for the presidency.
Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean gave the keynote speech tonight about the influence of the netroots, and the restoration of democracy that George Bush has undermined, federal election reform (Bill HR811), the effect of the YouTube debate, and Iraq. Here's a snippet of Dean (I shot this from my table) comparing this Congress to the do-nothing Republican-controlled Congress.
Dean announced a new initiative by the Democratic Party to go out to every county in the country (down to the precinct level) and identify voting problems in advance of the 2008 election, looking at how vote counting and administration is handled, and whether an adequate number of voting machines is available for voters in those precincts.
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Hillary Clinton to skip breakout session
Breaking news out of the convention -- Hillary Clinton will appear at the Presidential Leadership Forum on Saturday night, but it was announced by YK organizers after Dean's speech that Clinton will not appear in a breakout session (that includes taking questions from attendees). All of the rest of the candidates will attend the forum and breakout sessions (except Joe Biden, who couldn't make YK). In her place will be senior advisor Ann Lewis. That announcement brought a lot of boos in the room from attendees, who had to pick in advance which presidential breakout session they were going to attend. The Hillary attendees are now understandably unhappy because it's not possible to trade in access wristbands for different presidential breakout session at this point because the other top tier candidate sessions are already full, I believe.
There's a lot of banter about it in this DKos diary.
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As A.J. mentioned earlier, Air America's Sam Seder moderated tonight's dinner. Seder wants to interview some of the bloggers here, and I've been tapped for a slot. (I do it tomorrow, but I think it will air Sunday).
Same old rhetoric from Bush today in his radio address. But, the Democrats are on the offense. We're all sick of the games that George Bush is playing while soldiers continue to die. We're also tired of the lies. It's time for George Bush to grow up and act like a responsible President:
In response, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean called on Bush and congressional Republicans to "stop trying to bully their way through this and work with Democrats to end the war."
"It's time for the president to show respect to the American people, who voted overwhelmingly to leave Iraq," Dean in the Democrats' weekly radio address.
