Bill Clinton’s enemies list
n spokeswoman Ilyse Hogue, who wouldn’t comment on Clinton’s charge, except to say that “we respect the president very much.” Hillary Clinton has privately complained about MoveOn before, at a small fundraiser held after the Super Tuesday primaries. “They flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support me,” she said, according to an audio recording obtained by Huffington Post. In the recording, she also refers to the MoveOn's fundraising prowess, telling donors that "MoveOn.org endorsed [Obama], which is like a gusher of money that never seems to slow down." On his call with donors, President Clinton also directed his fire at the media, asserting that he’s “never seen anybody persist against greater odds and against a more hostile media environment and a more imbalanced one” than the one Hillary Clinton has faced. This elaborated, or at least amplified, a theme Clinton has been asserting at least since her lopsided loss in North Carolina and surprisingly narrow win in Indiana on May 6. “It’s over, bag it. And the rest of you poor folks, you just get in line and stay home” is how he characterized the media coverage while introducing his wife at an event in Lexington,Ky., on the eve of the May 20 primaries in Kentucky and Oregon. With Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign on the verge of defeat, Bill Clinton has been placing blame on enemies including a brazenly biased media that tried to suppress blue-collar votes, a powerful anti-war group that endorsed rival Barack Obama and weak-willed party leaders unable to stand up to either of these nefarious forces.
Pieced together from the former president’s public remarks at his wife’s campaign events and a private conversation last week with top donors to her campaign, the theory goes something like this: After Hillary recovered from a string of losses to rival Barack Obama with March 4 wins in Texas and Ohio, powerful forces conspired to pressure the superdelegates who will decide the nomination to back Obama by discouraging her supporters from voting and trying to hide evidence proving she would fare better than Obama against presumptive GOP nominee John McCain
While the former president has offered parts of this theory publicly, he fleshed it out more explicitly during a conference call last week with maxed-out donors to his wife’s campaign, a recording of which has been obtained by Politico.
After rattling off a series of poll numbers showing Hillary Clinton faring better than Obama against McCain, Bill Clinton told donors: “We are in the strongest conceivable position electorally and not in a good fix with the superdelegates, because they have felt all the pressure from the Obama side, from the media, from the MoveOn crowd — who they think is an automatic ATM machine for everybody for life. So, they’re reluctant to take on all that.”
While the campaign has been blasting the media for weeks for prematurely calling the race for Obama, President Clinton has added a new entry to his enemy list: MoveOn.org, the anti-war group that endorsed Obama and that, through its political action committee, has raised millions for Democratic candidates, money the Clintons apparently believe has unfairly purchased superdelegate support for Obama.
Campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson offered another interpretation, telling Politico that “the president was referring to efforts online to pressure superdelegates in support of Sen. Obama,” pointing to a petition the group circulated in February asking superdelegates to “let the voters decide between Clinton and Obama, then support the people's choice.”
“No,” his wife’s supporters shouted in near unison.
Clinton asked the crowd to remember “every time you turn on the television and you listen to one of those people dissin’ her, they all have a college degree. They’ve all got a good job. They all got health care. And they’re having no trouble fillin’ up their gas tank.”
He began the Lexington speech by declaring that “by their own admission, this has been the most slanted press coverage in American history.” And this week at a rally in Fort Thompson, S.D., which — along with Montana — votes Tuesday in the last primaries of the campaign, he posed the query, “Why are they doing this?”
He answered his own question: “Because if you vote for her and she does well in Montana and she wins in Puerto Rico, when this is over, she will be ahead in the popular vote. And they’re trying to get her to cry uncle before the Democratic Party has to decide what to do in Florida and Michigan.”
That could happen Saturday, when a Democratic National Committee panel will meet to decide whether — and how — to allocate delegate votes from the two states, which were stripped of their say in the nominating process for scheduling their primaries before the DNC wanted.
Clinton won both states, though Obama wasn’t on the ballot in Michigan and neither candidate actively campaigned in Florida, and Team Clinton asserts she’d win both in a general election against McCain.
“She will win the general election if you nominate her. They're just trying to make sure you don't," Bill Clinton said at the Fort Thompson event. "It is just frantic the way they are trying to push and pressure and bully all these superdelegates to come out.” He then began impersonating an intimidated superdelegate: “Oh, this is so terrible: The people, they want her. Oh, this is so terrible: She is winning the general election, and he is not. Oh my goodness, we have to cover this up."
But on the donor call, he asserted such coverage may be starting to help his wife.
“It began to backfire on them in the states where people get it,” he said. “I think it actually helped her run up numbers in Kentucky and West Virginia because people were tired of turning on the TV every night and told to get in line or stay home and told that they didn’t matter and that they really didn’t have good sense and they were, after all, just poor blue-collar workers — what did they know?”
“It turned out they knew quite a lot about who would be the best president,” he continued, asserting that his wife “has performed magnificently since March 4, when we got back in this race. … She has worked her heart out.”
As has Bill Clinton, according to campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe. Introducing Clinton on the donor call, McAuliffe said “nobody has worked harder on this campaign than President Clinton. He has worked as hard as he did when he was president of the United States."
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