Right.  Which is why Pelosi should go tell them to f*&k themselves.  Obama's small donors, and his effective campaign to get such small donors to donate, will more than offset this gang of extortionist thugs.

Somebody in the Democratic Party needs to stand up to these knaves, and right quick.

screw them, let these people cut off their nose to spite their faces. If the Democrats lose this election they are going to suffer like everyone else, but when it comes time to pick up the pieces they are going to find that everyone will remember what they have done. Let us see how happy they will be in the Republican party then. If Obama has proven one thing, it is that the Democratic party doesn't have to be beholden to a bunch of rich plutocrats for funding, they only need to nominate candidates who are not total whores like Hillarycrats.

From Wikipedia:

-- Pelosi represents one of the safest Democratic districts in the country. Democrats have held the seat since 1949, and Republicans, who currently make up only 13 percent of registered voters in the district, have not made a serious bid for the seat since the early 1960s. Pelosi has kept this tradition going. Since her initial victory in 1987, she has been reelected 10 times, receiving at least 75% of the vote. She has never participated in candidates' debates.

I think the odds are precisely nil of Nancy Pelosi being worried about any personal threats from these fat-cat donors. They do not appear to be the type of people that anyone in the Democratic Party should be dealing with.

Well, no, the army of Obama small donors isn't about to replace the big donors across the board. These big donors really do have an irreplaceable function in funding party activities and the PACs that help to support down-ticket campaigns.

However, the correct response to such tactics is neither pretending that these donors can be replaced with small-sum donors nor giving in to their demands. It is simply to wait them out. If Hillary does not win the nomination, these donors will not, in fact, take their money and go home, swearing off political involvement for the rest of their lives. Nor even the rest of the month. (And any who do were never Democratic supporters to begin with; they were merely buying access to Clintons, and the party was going to have to do without their money sooner or later anyway.)

Hillary Clinton is a nasty piece of work and a living rebuke of most of what Democrats claim to value. But let's not go overboard in our criticism of her. (Deliberate, self-depreciating irony intended in the juxtaposition of those two sentences just there.) If Obama had it in his power to threaten to shut down the campaigns of people who were keeping Hillary's zombie of a campaign alive, he'd do so, and there wouldn't be anything wrong with that. This is a perfectly legitimate political tactic for Hillary to use, at least in part because everyone knows it's a bluff. She's the dictator threatening to invade with an army everyone knows will not follow her across the border.

rhubarbs, good points, I love the last line too. Yeah, it is hard to see with the Supremes in line for a generational realignment  (now it is 4-4-1), and the reversal of Roe vs. Wade, that these people are going to say "serves us right to lose." Long term, it is probably better for Dems to lose because it will bring about the end of the odious baby boomers, force the Republicans to deal with the mess they created, and watch the right wing supremes alienate most of America. People of Hillarys generation though will be forced to fade into the background which would be wonderful to watch. I long for the day Bill will be patronized by a crowd of Democrats, who will politely applaud him and ignore him, as they do to Carter.

Hey, y'all, how do you think this 'private' letter got public?  Nancy has already made her move...

I wonder how much of this scraping-the-barrel menu of tactics is working and how much is slowly but surely alienating the very people it's meant to influence.  Not everyone reads TNR (yes, I know, sorry you had to find out this way) and there's enough in recent history to say that Joe and Jane Public have heartily little time to spare for national politics until the conventions have happened and summer begins to fade.

In recent weeks the Clinton campaign has among others (1) posited a parallel between Obama and national pornographer-in-chief Kenneth Starr, (2) implied that there may be something to the "Obama's a secret muslim" story while appearing to dismiss it, (3) declared that the Republican opponent is qualified to be president but their Democratic opponent in the primaries isn't, and (4) suggested that only HRC and McCain are patriots who want what's best for the country.

I can't think of any Obama tactic that's run this low.  I'm personally a fan of Bill Clinton and it pains and infuriates me that he's willing to chip and hack at his own prestige in the party for the benefit of a either a losing battle, or even a winning battle that will leave so much cordite hanging in the air it will feel like Shiloh just after the fighting ceased.  There must be a point where he realizes that his own record as president is in danger of being dragged down in the mud -- this time by his wife's campaign.

The SD's -- especially the congressional bunch -- are loath to step in when this thing hasn't played out fully, however.  They aren't sure of the landscape, partly because nobody predicted this impasse.  But at some point the scale of the struggle to overturn the math becomes obvious, and the willingness to say absolutely anything becomes a political burden in itself.

Wow, fundraisers placing pressure on happy recipient of their cash to remain impartial in contentious election! You guys are right! We're one step away from 'Lord of the Flies.' This is the moral equivalent of genocide, the death of Santa Claus, and Yoko breaking up the Beatles all wrapped up in one story!

I'll take self-righteous over-reaction for 1000, Alex. Oh, the daily double!

irony- don't know the impact on the superdelegates, but the latest nbc poll has clinton's favorability ratings tanking (while Obama's have dipped much more slightly) over the period that the Wright stuff came out.

I think the only real question wrt Clinton is whether their campaign has permaently damaged not only HIllary, but the general regard for her husband's legacy.

This is yet another example of the old political saw: If you are going to slime and throw garbage at your opponent, be careful of the spashback.

I saw the NBC/WSJ polls too, showing Hillary's falling standing with the public, and Charlie Todd's insightful comments. There is no doubt that the superdelegates see this stuff. I'll bet most of them aren't appreciative. First Read at MSNBC Politics has an excellent story interviewing uncommitted supers: Many are unhappy with the constant personal attacks and contrived attempts to diminish the stature of the party's likely nominee. Sliming, otherwise known as "throwing the kitchen sink", is a bad way to go down. We don't call it going down fighting, rather we call it going down dirty. Sad.

Tthe Gallup Tracking, Rasmussen, and WSJ poll have them tied. And she's up double digits in Pennsylvania. Oh yeah, Hillary's permanently damaged. I mean c'mon guys, Obama is going to get the nomination and most likely get elected president. That's great, congratulations, but this will all go a lot smoother if you place your self-righteous indignation in a blind trust for the next four years.

Blackton is so right...I almost wish that Clinton would get the nomination so she could go down in a blaze of defeat.  Let the Republicans dig us out of the mess they made and get ready for a generational realignment for the next 30 years.  After all McCain is not personally reprehensible .  And just think we could have a 4 year spectacle of Lieberman standing by his side and whispering in his ear.

What Obama has started won't go away...He is enough of a brilliant organizer that somehow he could help us keep it alive for 4 years.

Except that it won't happen.  He will get the nomination and then we will get to see how much she has hurt or just conceivably may have helped him.

After all everyone knows now that he isn't a Muslim despite his funny name.

Lost in this: why do you people think that Pelosi is right?   Imagine a reverse situation where Obama, down in delagate count and popular vote, capitalizes on a Clinton blunder, wins most of the last primaries and eeks ahead in the popular vote.  "No, no, no" says Pelosi, "the superdelagates should ignore all that and just rubber stamp the leader in delagates."  Obama supporters would be outraged a la Dems in 2000, except this time it wasn't the electoral college that cost the election but the whim of Pelosi and those who arbitrarily set such a rule.  It would be anti-democratic (small d) to say the least given how gerrymandered-affected the delagate selection process is.

Now of course Clinton's supporters writing Pelosi aren't championing democracy and probably wouldn't want her sayijng the superdelagates are bound in any manner (delagates or popular votes).  But the idea that this is "dirty politics" is wacky -- go take a look at what Rove did to McCain ("you hate your dead sister"), Kerry/McClelland (trash war heroes), and Seiglman (jail!).  Save the outrage for things that deserve it.  

If Bill Clinton on the Rush Limbaugh show, sending photos to the Drudge Report and working with Scaife doesn't deserve your outrage, nothing does. This is cooperating with your sworn enemy to destroy the likely nominee of your party.

lymon, I for one would not be "outraged" in your scenario. The Democratic presidential nomination is not about the nationwide "popular vote." There isn't even such a thing, actually, which you can tell by the fact that every single major media "count" of the "popular vote" differs from all the others. If it is impossible to count something, then it is ridiculous to claim that the counting of the thing should determine an outcome. There simply is no principle by which one could say that the person who got the most primary votes "deserves" the nomination.

And even if it were true that there is such a principle dictating that the winner of the national "popular vote" should be the nominee, then the system of allowing states to vote on different days, rather than all at once, is the grossest inequity in the post-slavery history of American democracy. If every vote must count equally with every other vote, then it is intolerable that voters in each state vote on different days, with different information, among different lists of candidates, and therefore differing abilities to affect the outcome. What about people who voted for Edwards before he dropped out -- surely those voters have a preference between Hillary and Obama, but the "popular vote" advocates say "screw you" to those early voters and don't count their votes. But voting later comes at the price of reduced choices and the likelihood of the race having already been decided.

There is a reason that, as America made the switch to popular voting for president, we also standardized the date of the presidential election.

Also, I think people forget that the outrage in 2000 was not that Bush won the electoral college despite losing the popular vote. That happens, it's part of our system, and it's absolutely fair within the context of that system. The outrage was the Bush went to court to prevent an accurate counting of the ballots, claimed a Fourteenth Amendment right as a candidate to prevent votes from being counted, and then got the Supreme Court of the United States to violate the Constitution, which reserves both the conduct and the judgment of presidential balloting to Congress and the States, and hand him the presidency by judicial fiat as if we were a banana republic. Bush almost certainly would have become president had he and his conservative judicial lackeys obeyed the Constitution; that he became president by an unconstitutional process, that was the outrage. Not the ends arrived at, but the means used to get there.

"Hillary Clinton is a nasty piece of work and a living rebuke of most of what Democrats claim to value."

Hidden in that glib eloquence is an assinine notion, that Clinton, because she's a crappy campaigner, is a "rebuke" of "Democratic values."  Unless, of course, the Democratic élites who support Obama are closer to "Democratic values" than the "lower classes," who support Clinton and whom  the pundits and the Obamasnobs here like to wrinkle their noses at.

And speaking of Gore, there's still life in the draft movement, if you can believe Joe Klein:

www.time.com/.../0,8599,1725678,00.html

"There simply is no principle by which one could say that the person who got the most primary votes "deserves" the nomination. "

There's also no principle by which one can say that the person who got the most pledged delegates "deserves" the nomination.

The Democrats deliberately set the rules to be sure that they could override the states' selection of a liberal candidate.

lymon1, Pelosi's motives are the same for Hillary as they are for Jane Harman, to whom she denied the chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee.  Pelosi has effectively endorsed Obama, through her surrogate George Brown, so she can take her shot while appearing above the fray.  For Pelosi, Hillary and Harman are rivals as the party's alpha female.  It's that simple.  For Pelosi, politics is a cat fight.

lymon, I was never outraged when the nomination went to Mondale over Hart in 84. Nobody added up the popular vote totals in that scenario, and pretty much everybody knew even then that Mondale would go down in defeat (except, apparently Mondale). He had a clear lead in pledged delegates and so got the nomination off the backs of the superdelegates.

If you want to say it is too early to talk about it now, fine. I agree, lets get the next 14 contests done first. But what was good and right for Mondale should be good and right for Obama.

hey jm. I would love if at the end both Obama and Hillary agreed that this election is far too important to lose and were to endorse Gore. Ain't going to happen (although if Obama did, recognizing he would lose the general it would be interesting). He would be VP straight off.

Actually, jm_rice, the fact that Hillary is a crappy campaigner is not what makes her a rebuke to Democratic values. The fact that she achieved office and influence by nepotism and familial succession, the fact that she has voted with President Bush and against Democratic values on so many important issues -- war, diplomacy, civil liberties -- and the fact that she embraces the worst aspects of GOP-style attack politics against other Democrats (and not just Obama, but recall that she helped lead the piling on against Kerry for his stupid "get stuck in Iraq" joke). That's what makes her a rebuke to the values that make my party worth belonging to.

jm_rice, seriously? a cat fight?! Could you be more cliche? Here let me help your pathetic attempt at sexism: the cats have their claws out for a cat fight among a bunch of bitches who strap one on every day to brow beat and de-masculinize all the men cowering before the Lesbian Dominatrix in the Democratic Party. That Pelosi, f**'ing Lesbian Bitch. Yeah.

Yeah, 'cause she hasn't brilliantly guided a House with a bunch of differing factions to produce a fairly impressive batch of progressive legislation. Nah, that was that good old Manly Man Harry Reid that did that.

Really. Stow your penis and slowly back away.

[let's see if this gets past the TNR censors]

what peter1943 said. Calm down, ladies. You're not doing your heartthrob any favors.

Via Avi Zenilman , the crew over at First Read makes a great point about that heavy-handed letter from

teplukhin2you, huh? if you're last comment was directed at my comments, it's a complete non sequitur.

no, it wasn't directed at you, mc. more at my dear old friends on the fanclub side of the TNR aisle.

ah - good - I feel better :) Thanks