Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton won in Indiana by by 1.39%. In North Carolina though, Obama trounced her by a 14% margin.

As I called it during my live twitter stream, HRC went from a double digit lead to 1-2% win. She squeaked it and it looks like the TV pundits finally have caught on to the fact that Ms. Clinton would have to get the superdelegates to decide the election in her favor.

I'll update later with the highlights of the night. Until then, good night!

About 10 minutes past 1:00pm but the post is but nevertheless:

The formal act of endorsing a candidate is generally (and properly)limited to editorial pages and elected officials whose constituents might be influenced by their choice. The rest of us shouldn't assume anyone cares. My avoidance of offering a formal endorsement until now has also been affected by the pull of old friendships and my reluctance as a teacher and commentator to be openly partisan. But my conscience won't let me be silent any longer.

I believe that Barack Obama should be elected President of the United States.

Go read the whole thing NOW.

Previously : Robert Reich didn't expect to support Obama but now he is.

John Heilmann helps Robert Reich drop a bomb on the Clinton campaign :

Reich insists that the endorsement does indeed come as a surprise — to him. As we chatted in Washington, where Reich had come from Berkeley, where he teaches, to give a speech and meet with some Democrats on Capitol Hill, he explained that, despite the criticisms he's made of the Clintons ("I call it as I see it"), he had planned to refrain from offering an official backing for Obama out of respect for Hillary. "She's an old friend," Reich said, "I've known her 40 years. I was absolutely dead set against getting into the whole endorsement thing. I've struggled with it. I've not wanted to do it. Out of loyalty to her, I just felt it would be inappropriate."

So what's changed? I asked Reich.

"I saw the ads" — the negative man-on-street commercials that the Clinton campaign put up in Pennsylvania in the wake of Obama's bitter/cling comments a week ago — "and I was appalled, frankly. I thought it represented the nadir of mean-spirited, negative politics. And also of the politics of distraction, of gotcha politics. It's the worst of all worlds. We have three terrible traditions that we've developed in American campaigns. One is outright meanness and negativity. The second is taking out of context something your opponent said, maybe inartfully, and blowing it up into something your opponent doesn't possibly believe and doesn't possibly represent. And third is a kind of tradition of distraction, of getting off the big subject with sideshows that have nothing to do with what matters. And these three aspects of the old politics I've seen growing in Hillary's campaign. And I've come to the point, after seeing those ads, where I can't in good conscience not say out loud what I believe about who should be president. Those ads are nothing but Republicanism. They're lending legitimacy to a Republican message that's wrong to begin with, and they harken back to the past 20 years of demagoguery on guns and religion. It's old politics at its worst — and old Republican politics, not even old Democratic politics. It's just so deeply cynical."

To have tossed aside a 40 year-old friendship and business relationship is beyond serious. It's a brutally honest repudiation from a man who has become a sort of oddball superstar in the academic wonkosphere with such ponderings as Is Capitalism Always Good For Democracy? and the nature of Supercapitalism. Especially since Reich happens to be from ... ahem ... Scranton, Pensylvania.

Robert Shales is right on the money when he says, To this observer, ABC's coverage seemed slanted against Obama. Memeorandum exploded in posts from irate liberals and journalists who saw nothing but a thinly vieled hatchet job against the front-runner of the Democratic Party.

Close to fifteen thousand people have sounded off at the ABC News post about the debate (which, by the way, they changed from "Clinton, Obama find brotherly love at Philly Debate" to "Philly Fight Night : Democrats Spar over Electability").

I suggest you add to the comments over there as well as give a ring to their offices :

Call 818-460-7477
Press 2,
Press 1

Then you can press one of these two choices :

967 (News wth Charles Gibson) or
199 (other news)

As I wrote at the chat last night, it's as if ABC News wanted to outfox FOX News. It was an incredibly embarrassing scene to watch.

Not only that, George Stephanopoulos should not have been one of the moderators. As the former speech writer of Bill Clinton and still a Clintonista, if you are going to have someone so biased, then you ought to create balance. Which is why I shall forever refer to him as "Clinton's Boy".

>

Source : Gallup.

Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's chief strategist has resigned from the Clinton campaign amid allegations of conflict of interest and ethical improprieties.

Penn had worked full time for the Clinton campaign even though he had not taken a sabbatical from his position as CEO of the international communications and lobbying firm Burson-Marsteller. What that meant was clear : Penn was taking meetings with political, corporate and consular clients while managing the campaign of a potential future president of the United States.

One of those clients was the government of Colombia, which had hired the firm in order to market in Capitol Hill a bilateral free-trade agreement with the United States as well as their anti-drug trafficking initiatives.

Penn vigorously defended the meeting saying he was there as CEO of Burson-Marsteller, not as campaign manager of the Senator. Yet he later retracted after it was revealed that Clinton was opposed to the trade agreement as well as her supporters with the labor movement.

[ Excerpt from, Special Comment : Wednesday 12 March 2008 ]

[ ... ] Senator Clinton:

This is not a campaign strategy.

This is a suicide pact.

This week alone, your so-called strategists have declared that Senator Obama has not yet crossed the "commander-in-chief threshold"…

But -- he might be your choice to be Vice President, even though a quarter of the previous sixteen Vice Presidents have become commander-in-chief during the greatest kind of crisis this nation can face: a mid-term succession.

But you'd only pick him if he crosses that threshold by the time of the convention.

But if he does cross that threshold by the time of the convention, he will only have done so sufficiently enough to become Vice President, not President.

Senator, if the serpentine logic of your so-called advisors were not bad enough...

Now, thanks to Geraldine Ferraro, and your campaign's initial refusal to break with her, and your new relationship with her -- now more disturbing still with her claim that she can now "speak for herself" about her vision of Senator Obama as some kind of embodiment of a quota...

If you were to seek Obama as a Vice President, it would be, to Ms. Ferraro, some kind of social engineering gesture, some kind of racial make-good.

Do you not see, Senator?

To Senator Clinton's supporters, to her admirers, to her friends for whom she is first choice, and her friends for whom she is second choice, she is still letting herself be perceived as standing next to, and standing by, racial divisiveness and blindness…

This is getting ridiculous.

I guess that to create a diversion from the Spitzer debacle, and to give racists in Pennsylvania a reason to get out the vote, Geraldine Ferraro "steps down" from her role as a member of Hillary Clinton's finance committee.

And just as other racist liberals, she raised the "intentions flag" : That their intentions are misunderstood, that their intentions are not what people say they are.

It gets better.

She goes down "in protest", arguing that she was being deprived of her First Amendment Rights and that they are attacking her to hurt Hillary :

Dear Hillary –

I am stepping down from your finance committee so I can speak for myself and you can continue to speak for yourself about what is at stake in this campaign.

The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you. I won't let that happen.

Thank you for everything you have done and continue to do to make this a better world for my children and grandchildren.