Hillary maintains lead among Democrats in latest national poll.

The latest LA Times/Bloomberg poll shows Hillary has maintained her lead nationally among Democratic voters. According to the poll released on January 23, Hillary leads Obama 42% to 33%.

As the competition has narrowed to essentially a two candidate race, Obama has picked up support from other nominees, while Hillary’s support has remained virtually unchanged during the past several months. Slightly more Edwards supporters said they would support Hillary over Obama if Edwards dropped out.

For complete poll details, including statistical charts, please select the following PDF link: LATimes/Bloomberg Poll 012308

It’s time for Edwards to withdraw.

 

Here’s the text of an editorial that appeared yesterday in the Laconia (NH) Citizen suggesting that John Edwards should leave the campaign now. Just what I was thinking!

The big question is: who would Edwards’ supporters embrace as their new candidate? All signs point to Obama, especially given Edwards’ far left — if not insincere — rhetoric.

Logic suggests it’s time for John Edwards to set aside his aspirations to become president and seek a job for which he is better qualified.

Edwards was humiliated in the Nevada caucuses Saturday, attracting only 4 percent of the vote.

Edwards was jubilant when he finished second in the first test of the candidates in Iowa, but it was euphoria soon lost. He ended far behind Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in New Hampshire, sliding to attract only 17 percent of the Democrats and the unenrolled in the record turnout of Granite State voters.

It’s time for Edwards to get out, just as U.S. Rep. Douglas Hunter did Saturday following a 2 percent share of the vote in Nevada’s Republican caucuses. He received only 1 percent of the vote in South Carolina on Saturday (Democrats in South Carolina vote next Saturday).

After his battering at the polls Saturday, Edwards exhibited a touch of reality, saying, “I got my butt kicked,” adding “I hope what happens in (Las) Vegas stays in Vegas.” It won’t. Polls show him running third — behind Clinton and Obama in his birth state.

But Edwards remains committed.

A former U.S. senator from North Carolina, a candidate for the Democratic nomination and John Kerry’s running mate four years ago, Edwards knows 2008 is his last reach for America’s most coveted political prize. He also knows in himself, he has come up short — way short.

Edwards tilts so far to the left it’s a wonder he doesn’t tip over. It’s been more evident in this campaign than previous ones. His has been liberal rhetoric like that right out of the early 1920s.

John Edwards’ seeming or pretended escape from reality notwithstanding, the contest for the Democratic nomination for president has come down to one between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Now, it’s what remains of the early primaries and caucuses and then on to Feb. 5 and Super-Duper Tuesday.

Obama wants “affirmative action” for his campaign.

 

Now that we have House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn telling former president Bill Clinton to “chill” and not give voters the facts, it is clear that the candidate playing the race card is Barack Obama: he wants “affirmative action” for his campaign.

Obama wants special treatment, a kid gloves process in which he gets to malign and attack Hillary Clinton, but has immunity from questions about his own history, his voting record, his campaign tactics. Treat him like any other candidate and he screams racism and calls in his “posse” — Oprah and Clyburn, for starters — to defend him.

As someone who has followed Democratic primaries for at least 30 years, I have never witnessed such a whiney, complaining candidate as I have Obama. Like his supporters, the Untouchables, Obama picks and chooses the rules that he wants to play by. If he doesn’t like the rules of the game, he either ignores them or complains about them.

What Obama really wants is affirmative action for his candidacy — a little “helping hand” to guide him into the White House.

Like good Democrats, we might even give it to him. While we’re at it, why don’t we just give him food stamps, rent subsidized housing, free child care, free health care, and free tuition to Harvard, along with the Democratic nomination AND the presidency? Perhaps he will finally feel he has a level playing field?

Don’t count on it. Given his track record as a candidate, I suspect he would then whine about Congress and accuse them of racism when none of his legislation gets passed.

Chris Matthews: “The Clintons hate me enough as it is.”

 

With the recent furor between Media Matters and Chris Matthews over his on-going attacks against Hillary Clinton and other powerful women, I remembered a tape recorded conversation I had with Matthews about Hillary some years ago. (The conversation was “on the record” and recorded with his permission.)

I spoke to Matthews just after Newt Gingrich & Company ousted the Democratic leadership in the 1994 midterm elections. The conventional wisdom was that Hillary was to blame, primary due to the health care mess. In fact, Matthews and most TV pundits did blame her.

When I called Matthews, I could tell he had a lot on his mind but was fearful of saying too much, too passionately. I prodded. I was patient. Like a good Catholic penitent with a fiendish mortal sin to confess, eventually Matthews let go.

Here’s how I reported our conversation in the Hillary Clinton Quarterly:

Hillary’s Caboose   
    
If Mort Zuckerman was wetting his pants with joy over Hillary’s comeuppance, Chris Matthews,  a new-Democrat type who writes for the San Francisco Examiner and appears regularly on Good Morning America, was doubled over in pain. It’s true: Matthews often looks like he’s about to pass a kidney stone, but the day after the election his anguish was unusually intense.
    
Matthews regularly faces off against former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett on Good Morning America. On this particular good morning, we thought we heard Matthews proclaiming Hillary the Guilty One during his post-election tete-a-tete with Bennett, so we got Matthews on the phone.
    
“Are you blaming Hillary?” we wondered, eager not to misquote him.
    
There was silence on the other end. Then he sighed. “I’m not saying it. I’m trying to be careful. I’m not giving you new material to exploit. The Clintons hate me enough as it is. You gotta give me a break here. I erupt some times and I say certain things. If you catch me, you catch me. But I’m not saying it.”
    
“We’re not trying to ‘catch’ you, Mr. Matthews. We’re just trying to check out the story. Were you saying that Hillary Clinton was at fault for getting Bill Clinton to drift away from his more centrist positions?”
    
“That’s not what I said.”
   
“Fine. OK. You didn’t say it. But what is your opinion? Did she play a role?”
    
Long pause. Then Matthews erupted, angrily squeezing out every word.
    
“Bill Clinton is a grown up. He’s the President, and if he wants a left-wing, socialized-sounding health care plan, he did that. If he wants to let his wife do that, he did that. It’s still him. How are we to interpret this? Is Bill Clinton just a caboose on her train? The whole health care thing was too far to the left. In substance and in selling. Both. The old Eleanor Roosevelt approach, the paternalistic ‘we know better, we’re gonna do this for the little people’ stuff is gone. It’s gone!”
    
Matthews took a breath.
    
“I am absolutely convinced that the reason the Administration lost every close race, the reason the Democrats were lambasted, the reason every Republican was reelected is because if the election had been held last year, this would not have happened. I know that, you know that. The economy’s gotten better this year, so what’s changed? The year-long push for a socialistic health care program, which was the showcase of this Administration, which gave it its definition as a left-wing Administration.”
    
While Matthews didn’t have the stomach to say it outright, he clearly believes that Hillary Clinton — directly or indirectly — was responsible for the gang bang of the Democratic Party. The equation, if we follow his logic, is this: Hillary = Health Care Reform = Left Wing Big Government = Crushing Defeat for the Democrats.*
 

* Frank Rich, writing an editorial in the New York Times entitled “Jo Rodham March,” used the last sentence of our story to explain how Democrats felt about Hillary.

Democratic, GOP political machines drone on while children are murdered in our cities.

Maybe I am as much at fault as anyone. My myopic fascination with political warfare has made me oblivious to nearly everything else. If something in the news has a political edge, I notice it. If not, it passes under my mental radar unseen.

What does get my attention, though, are the stories we have seen all too often lately about children dying in our cities because our social service systems — supposedly there to protect them — are broken. Last summer we read about the kids in the City of Brotherly Love who died — some murdered — because their social service files got misplaced.

This week it is Washington’s turn: four children dead. Mayor Fenty called it “egregious” and said that social workers had a “check off the box” mentality. I call it social worker abuse.

OK. Life sucks. Bad things happen. That’s just a byproduct of being human. But for poor and minority kids, when life sucks it doesn’t mean a parking ticket, a late fee on your checking account, a son or daughter who is getting a little too mouthy and you don’t know what to do about it.

For these kids in Philly and Washington, when life sucks it means death, physical abuse, neglect, starvation, broken spirits.

What is gnawing at me right now, though, is not just the tragedy of their unending pain, but the fact that we look away and ignore it. A Rake’s Progress is primarily a blog about political matters. So let’s get political: where are our presidential candidates, our would-be leaders, in expressing grief and outrage that these events continue to happen in our country? Where are their noble solutions, or even those little incremental changes that social scientists tell us can make a difference?

Why aren’t they speaking out about Philly and Washington?

There’s all this nonsense right now about “racism” being thrown back and forth between Obama and Clinton, when the real racism is that the child corpses being carried out of the tenements in body bags are African-American and Hispanic.

Why aren’t you — reader of tens of thousands of words written in blogs, on web sites, in your social networks — why aren’t you paying attention to this, demanding that our politicians act, demanding that we do a better job of protecting the vulnerable kids in our cities?

Why are searches that lead to this blog only about Hillary, Obama, Edwards, McCain, Romney, Thompson, Giuliani, Paul?

What about doing some blog searches for “children murdered in Philadelphia,” “four girls dead in Washington,” or “social service system corrupt and broken?”

Go ahead. Google “murdered children.” See what happens.