Reply #31: You're right [View All]

I was paraphrasing--I had thought that it would be obvious that she didn't say that directly, but, given all the acrimony, perhaps I should know better by now. I was referring to yesterday's Clinton campaign press conference call that I listened to.

Here's the link to the conference call on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c6rC5ojS4w&feature=user

The call included Howard Wolfson, the campaign's Communications Director, Jeff Garon, the campaign's Chief Strategist, and Deputy Communications Director Phil Singer. One note if you listen to the audio: Phil and Howard have very similar voices and accents, so it's easy to mistake them for one another, which one correspondent does at one point.

It's not on the web in text form, so here's the relevant passage from Wolfson verbatim, beginning at 7:08 of the audio link:

"We need to continue making the case, as Jeff just did, that Senator Clinton is a better matchup against John McCain than Barack Obama, uh, that the fact that we have won contests, uh, competitive contests against Barack Obama, in key swing states, like Pennsylvania, like Ohio, like Michigan, like Florida, uh, mean that we will be, uh, a stronger nominee, uh, uh, against John McCain in those states and, in fact, we run today ahead of, um, Barack Obama vis a vis McCain in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, in Florida, all of those states critical, uh, to any Democrat running, uh, in November. Uh, that our proven ability to win blue collar and working class votes in primary after primary, uh, again suggest strongly that Senator Clinton would be the stronger nominee against John McCain. Those are key swing votes that any Democrat would need to um, ah, ah, win, in order to beat John McCain, we've proven that we can do that. Senator Obama on the other hand has not yet proven that he can win the key swing states, has not yet proven that he can win uh, ah, ah, the votes of blue collar, uh, workers, uh, and, um, ah, that will be the crux of the argument that we will make to superdelegates, uh, and voters going forward."

I include all the "ums" and "ahs" not to be snarky (OK, not wholly to be snarky), but to show that he's thinking very, very carefully about what he's saying. Wolfson's a pro for whom these conference calls are old hat, and he does not um and ah his way through them ordinarily: he's parsing his language very carefully to avoid saying explicitly that Clinton will win the white working class, whereas Obama (in his spin, which I think is wrong) cannot.

They do make some noises, in a question directly on this very subject, about not taking anyone's vote for granted. But then, in summation (at around 42:00 of the audio), they say this:

"At the end of the day, what I believe is, is that if you are a strong Democrat, you're going to, and Senator Clinton is the nominee as we believe she will be against John McCain, you're going to look as a set of profound choices, profound differences between Senator Clinton and Senator McCain, out of all the important issues that we all care so much about and in the end, conclude that voting for Senator Clinton is the right choice, because the differences between Senator Clinton and Senator McCain are so great. But that doesn't, again, obviate the fact that we're gonna have to work hard to reach out to Senator Obama's supporters, and, certainly, we've done it and we will continue to do it."

Even if you interpret all of this most charitably, the argument is that we should reward those who are weak Democratic voters because the "strong Democrats" will vote for any Democrat over McCain.