Clinton's Debate Success Explained: - Democratic Underground

EV_Ares

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Sun Nov-18-07 05:18 PM
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Clinton's Debate Success Explained:

Edited on Sun Nov-18-07 05:33 PM by EV_Ares

A couple of postscripts to last week's Democratic debate -- not so much a debate as a chaotic interview of a gang of candidates in front of a Las Vegas crowd accustomed to prize fights and cheering for their favorite (Hillary Clinton) and booing the bad guy (John Edwards, when he criticized their favorite).

The low point came right at the end when Maria Luisa, a UNLV student, asked Clinton if she preferred diamonds or pearls. True to form, Clinton straddled the answer, saying she likes them both. CNN admitted the next day that a producer allegedly seeking to end the event on a light note gave the question to the student.

As an embarrassed Luisa explained on MySpace, everybody was asked to submit questions, including light-hearted ones. She had wanted to ask Clinton about Nevada's Yucca Mountain as a potential repository for nuclear waste, but at the last second was told to ask her pearls-diamonds question.

Later she wrote on MySpace: "Every question from the audience was pre-planned and censored . . . do not judge me or my integrity based on that question."

NOTE: Critique of Debate: Speaking of integrity, what in the world was CNN thinking when it booked its post-debate analysts to appear with Anderson Cooper? One was J.C. Watts, the former GOP congressman from Oklahoma. Fine, a token Republican. Another was Gloria Borger, an experienced pro.

The other two: James Carville and David Gergen. That's right, two former aides of Bill Clinton were asked to appraise the debate performances of the opponents of their ex-boss's wife. Predictably, they thought she did swell and Barack Obama didn't.

Cooper neglected to mention in his introduction that Carville is a clear supporter of Hillary Clinton. He wrote an e-mail fundraising letter for her Feb. 22 -- "Hillary is the strongest candidate Democrats have" -- and on "Meet the Press" on June 3 announced that he was not only a contributor to her campaign but was going to vote for her too.

Now, that's the kind of open mind you want "analyzing" her opponents.

What the polls measure, and don't

There's a new poll out in the Granite State by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center -- one of many we're likely to see as interest grows in the early primary, likely Jan. 8.

This poll shows Hillary Clinton leading Democrats with 35%, Barack Obama with 21%, John Edwards with 15%, Bill Richardson with 10% and all the others in a single-digit bunch. For the Republicans, it shows Mitt Romney in the lead with 32%, Rudy Giuliani second with 20%, John McCain third with 17%, a surging Ron Paul with lots of money up from 2% to 7%, Mike Huckabee at 5% and all the others, including Fred Thompson, below that.

But that's not the most important result. What's most important is the little-noticed numbers revealing that with slightly less than two months to go before the voting, 48% of Democrats and fully 60% of Republicans remain undecided.

Now that's a volatile setting, just made for stunning surprises in the nation's first primary vote.

Gore Watch: The end?

Oh, no! No more Gore Watch?

No more seizing on every strand of hope -- his daughter's wedding, his appearance on an NBC TV show, his sighting at a global environmental concert in New Jersey of all places -- that the 2000 Democratic presidential candidate would become the 2008 Democratic presidential candidate and save the party from more planted questions, who can get out of Iraq faster and who to tax more next.

"I don't expect to be a candidate again," he told the New York Times. Maybe they got it wrong and he really said, "I do intend to be a candidate again." But it doesn't look good for the Draft Gore movement.

It seems that Big Al has signed on with an industrial alliance promoting a string of new coal-fired electrical generating plants in the Ohio Valley. They wanted someone with both environmental and Washington credentials to explain the benefits of acid rain on "Larry King Live" and elsewhere.

Just kidding. Gore's actually taken a part-time partnership in a Silicon Valley venture capital firm called Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where he'll devote time to investigating the potential of new green industries, especially the growth potential of start-up companies in the alternative energy sector.

Gore already has an advisory role with Google in the Bay Area, sits on the board of Apple and is founder of Current TV, the San Francisco-based cable channel you've never heard of because it's devoted to viewer-created material.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ticket18nov18,0,5119100.story?coll=la-home-nation