CNN News, April 11th 2008

(CNN)— With the economic outlook looking dim and the continued war in Iraq, President Bush’s job approval rating hit an all time low Friday, according to a just released poll.

The latest Gallup poll shows the president’s approval dropped to 28 percent, the lowest of his eight years in office.

The survey, which questioned 1,021 adults between April 6 and 9, with a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percent, found the decrease came largely because of Democratic and Independent dissatisfaction with his administration. Only 6 percent of Democrats questioned and 24 percent of Independents had a favorable opinion of President Bush, with about two-thirds support coming from Republicans.

The new estimate marks one of the lowest approval ratings any president has seen since World War II, with the exception of Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Harry Truman, who all had a mid 20 percent approval rating in their final years in office. The all time lowest presidential approval rating was 22 percent in 1952 during Harry Truman’s final year in office, who like President George W. Bush dealt with problems related to the economy and an unfavorable war.

Bush’s approval ratings have hovered around the low 30 percent range since July of 2007.

“We haven’t turned any corners, we haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator. And the progress, while real, is fragile and is reversible” from General Petrayus in Congressional Testimony

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top U.S. commander in Iraq told Congress on Tuesday he plans to stop U.S. troop withdrawals in July due to fragile security gains in a war update that drew scrutiny from U.S. presidential candidates.

A new outbreak in violence — including the deaths of 11 American service personnel in the past 48 hours — has thrust Iraq back among the top concerns of war-weary American voters ahead of the November election.

Gen. David Petraeus offered a cautious assessment of Iraq a year after thousands more U.S. troops were poured into the country, telling two Senate committees there has been an improvement in security in parts of Iraq but that the situation remains unsatisfactory.

“We haven’t turned any corners, we haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator. And the progress, while real, is fragile and is reversible,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

He said an Iraqi operation earlier this month to tackle Shi’ite militias in the southern city of Basra, which President George W. Bush had called a “defining moment” for Iraq, was a disappointment and not adequately planned or prepared.

To avoid jeopardizing the gains of the past year, Petraeus said he had recommended a 45-day halt in July to a series of troop withdrawals. After that pause, he would assess conditions on the ground to determine whether security is sufficient to bring more troops home.  Click here to read more in Yahoo News.

Now Mark Penn, (former campaign strategist) joins Pati Solis Doyle (former manager), Geraldine Ferraro (former spokeswoman), Judy Rose (former coordinator) , Bill Shaheen (former New Hampshire power broker), Norman Hsu (former contributor), and Mike Henry (former media specialist) on the sidelines.

Top Clinton Aide Leaving His Post Under Pressure

New York Times, John Broder, April 4th 2008

ALBUQUERQUE — Mark Penn, the pollster who has advised Bill and Hillary Clinton since 1996, stepped down under pressure on Sunday as the chief political strategist for Mrs. Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign after his private business arrangements again clashed with her campaign positions.

Mr. Penn, who was widely disliked by Mrs. Clinton’s fiercest loyalists and had bitterly feuded with many of them, sealed his fate last week by meeting with officials from Colombia, which hired him to help secure passage of a bilateral trade treaty with the United States that Mrs. Clinton, a senator from New York, opposes.

Mr. Penn met with the Colombians in his role as chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, a global public relations firm. He has refused to sever his ties to the company, which also represented Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, and through a subsidiary represented Blackwater Worldwide, the military contractor blamed for numerous civilian deaths in Iraq.

Mr. Penn’s shift — he will continue to do some polling — is the latest upheaval in a campaign that has seen its manager replaced, faced critical money shortages and has often lagged behind Senator Barack Obama of Illinois in a cohesive message and ground strategy. The move comes at a crucial juncture, just two weeks before the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, which Mrs. Clinton needs to win to keep hope of her nomination alive.  Click here to read more in the New York Times.

This item is from “Down With Tyranny”, a Progressive Democratic Blog Site

Down With Tyranny, April 4th 2008

One of the many red seats the GOP is desperately trying to hold onto is that of indicted criminal Rick Renzi (R-AZ) who is retiring from Congress– and public life– and is likely to be facing as many as 30 years in prison for too many charges to list here. He has already stepped down as co-chairman of the Double Talk Express. Howard Shanker, the Blue America-endorsed candidate for the seat Renzi is abandoning is doing very well and my contacts in Arizona tell me that McCain has gone ape-shit and demanded the local GOP deep six their weak and hopeless candidate, Kris Mayes, and stick in a GOP good ole boy in her place.

The local GOP didn’t have much to chose from; it was either Hayes, who is an Arizona Corporation Commissioner with little to offer but who hasn’t been arrested or involved in any major criminal activities, or a certifiably insane wingnut– and political semi-enemy of McCain’s– Sydney Hay. McCain’s infamous volatile temper exploded and he started screaming he doesn’t want any Hays or Mayes running for that seat and he demanded that local Republicans get former state Senate President, Ken Bennett, into the race. Bennett, like Hay, is a fanatic right wing kook but he has worse problems that have kept him out of the race. His son Clifton “confessed to police that he… sodomized the 11 to 14-year-old boys with broomsticks and flashlights in at least 40 incidents, court documents show.” Rumors have been rampant that his father, the then would-be congressman, got him off the hook. McCain says no one gives a damn about the broomsticks and demands Bennett get back into the race. McCain’s pal, Jim Click, a Tucson car dealer who is the Daddy Warbucks of the Arizona GOP, is also pushing for Bennett. Click and McCain may not care about “broomsticks” but the victims and their families are still furious. Zachary Motcheck, 13, the first to report the assaults to authorities, was angry when Bennett’s kid got off with a slap on the wrist. “I think it’s pretty stupid. “It’s unfair, and it’s just because Bennett’s dad is a senator… What they did was wrong, and they both deserved more jail time.” Although the county prosecutors had asked for 3 months in jail for the assault, the judge overruled them and gave Bennett’s kid 30 days.

McCain, who has his own set of lobbyist and corruption problems to deal with, is unconcerned with Bennett’s ethical problems. In 2004, Bennett sponsored legislation that would have allowed his family’s oil firm, Bennett Oil, to claim money from the State Assurance Fund for the cleanup of underground fuel leaks. The state had already paid Bennett Oil Co. $336,000 from the State Assurance Fund to help with cleanups. The fund was fed by a penny tax on every gallon of gas sold in Arizona. The bill would have required that the state pay even if the cleanup was covered by the oil company’s insurance. The bill would have reversed a court decision against Bennett’s company and ordered the state to pay instead.

Meanwhile, former Arizona Congressman Matt Salmon and Malcolm Barrett, chairman of the National Propane Gas Association, and a Prescott native like Mayes, have pledged their support for Mayes’ run. Barrett will serve as her finance chairman. This puts them at major loggerheads with McCain– who likes to think of himself as the king of Arizona Republicans.  Click here to read more of this story at Down With Tyranny.

Democrats Continue to Out-raise Republicans by 5 or 6 to one!

New York Times, Leslie Wayne, April 4th 2008

Senator Barack Obama raised $40 million for his campaign in March, roughly double the amount collected by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the same period as both campaigns saw their fund-raising drop from their record levels.

The Clinton number, which is her second-highest monthly total, was not officially released, but was confirmed by an official of the Clinton campaign with knowledge of its fund-raising.

The fund-raising numbers emerged in the midst of a very competitive and costly primary campaign in Pennsylvania. The state’s primary on April 22 will be followed by contests in North Carolina and Indiana two weeks later.

In February, Mrs. Clinton reported raising $34.5 million, or around 63 percent of the amount raised by Mr. Obama that month. In March, the gap widened with Mr. Obama raising $2 for every dollar raised by Mrs. Clinton.

In recent weeks, the Clinton campaign has been dogged by reports that it has been late in paying its creditors, including health insurance premiums for campaign workers, although aides to Mrs. Clinton said the delays were not reflective of a cash squeeze.

The $40 million raised in March brings Mr. Obama’s total to $237 million, compared with $193 million for Mrs. Clinton.

The financial differences are sharper in terms of cash available for the nominating contests and their campaign debts. At the end of February, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, had $31.5 million in cash available, compared with $11.7 million for Mrs. Clinton, of New York. In addition, the Obama campaign is nearly debt-free, compared with a debt of $8.7 million for the Clinton campaign.

The Obama campaign reported that more than 442,000 people contributed to the campaign in March, with more than 218,000 giving for the first time. That compares with the more than 385,000 people who gave for the first time to Mr. Obama in February. The campaign said the average contribution in March was $96 and the total number of contributors to date was 1,276,000.  Click here to read more in the NY Times.

Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Everybody believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. 

New York Times, April 5th 2008

Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.

Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.

A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.

The dissatisfaction is especially striking because public opinion usually hits its low point only in the months and years after an economic downturn, not at the beginning of one. Today, however, Americans report being deeply worried about the country even though many say their own personal finances are still in fairly good shape. Click here to read more in the New York Times.

She needs to win nearly all the remaining contests, analysts say, and persuade super-delegates that she has a better chance than Obama of beating John McCain.  Obama now leads by 130 delegates.

Christian Science Monitor, April 4th

Washington - – Bit by bit, the walls are closing in on Hillary Rodham Clinton. By just about every measure, including total votes, total delegates, and money raised, she is trailing Barack Obama in their pitched battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. And in the most important category where she’s still ahead – super-delegates – her lead is shrinking.

Thus far this week, three superdelegates – party leaders and elected officials who can support whomever they want at the August convention – have broken for Senator Obama while Senator Clinton hasn’t won any. It is highly unlikely that Clinton can overtake Obama in the “pledged delegate” count – those won in primaries and caucuses – but it is also impossible for Obama to secure the nomination just on pledged delegates. Thus, the super-delegates will decide the nomination.

Thursday’s stunning announcement that Obama had raised more than $40 million in March, with 218,000 new donors that month, dealt another blow to Clinton. Her campaign has not released its own March figure yet, but said it will come in below Obama’s.

So, can Clinton actually still win the nomination? In theory, yes, analysts say. But she would have to win just about every remaining contest, and then persuade enough super-delegates that she has a better chance than Obama of beating the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, in November.

The easiest way for that to happen would be for a bombshell revelation or major gaffe by Obama that would cause delegates, and voters – as reflected in national polls – to abandon the Illinois senator. Short of that scenario, Clinton and her team are fast running out of options.

“She would pretty well have to run the table after winning Pennsylvania convincingly,” says Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University.

“Convincingly” means by double-digits, he says. Then Clinton would have to pull off an upset in North Carolina (May 6) or Oregon (May 20), where Obama is favored. “Most people looking at the last 10 events or so see a bit of an edge for Clinton, but with Obama having significant places to look for wins as well,” Mr. Jillson adds.

For now, though, the trends seem to be heading in Obama’s direction – even in Pennsylvania, where polls showed Clinton with a lead in the mid-to-high teens until recently. The latest Quinnipiac Poll shows Clinton with a nine-point lead in Pennsylvania, a figure that makes sense to political analysts in the state.  Click here to read more in the Christian Science Monitor.

Associated Press, April 2nd 2008

PITTSBURGH - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is proposing billions of dollars a year Wednesday to keep jobs from being shipped abroad as she appealed to blue collar workers in Pennsylvania, the next big primary contest where she hopes to trim rival Barack Obama’s lead.

Obama seemed to ignore the former first lady, turning his political guns on presumptive Republican nominee John McCain to blast his stands on the Iraq war and the economy.

Clinton has come under pressure from Obama supporters in recent days to drop out of the contest because of what some see as the Illinois senator’s insurmountable delegate lead with just 10 primaries and caucuses to go.

But the former first lady showed no signs of quitting as she focused on job creation and challenges to the U.S. economy at campaign appearances across Pennsylvania, which holds the next primary contest on April 22 with 158 delegates at stake.

At an economic summit in Pittsburgh on Wednesday organized by her presidential campaign, Clinton proposed the elimination of tax breaks for companies that move jobs to other countries and use the savings to provide $7 billion a year in tax incentives to persuade companies to “insource” jobs in the United States. Click here to read more at MSNBC.com.

Recent relentless attacks on Obama may be having a negative impact on Hillary’s base.

Pennsylvania Democratic Presidential Primary Poll: Clinton 47% Obama 42%

Senator Hillary Clinton’s lead in the Pennsylvania Primary is shrinking.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in Pennsylvania shows Clinton leading Barack Obama by just five percentage points, 47% to 42%. For Clinton, that five-point edge is down from a ten-point lead a week ago, a thirteen-point lead in mid-March and a fifteen-point advantage in early March.

Support for Clinton slipped from 52% early in March, to 51% in mid-month, 49% a week ago, and 47% today. During that same time frame, support for Obama has increased from 37% to 42%.

Obama recently received a key endorsement from Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey and has also spent more on television ads than Clinton. If Obama is able to pull off an upset in the Keystone State, it would effectively end the race for the Democratic Presidential Nomination. Obama currently leads Clinton nationally in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll. However, while an Obama victory could end the nomination battle, Clinton remains ahead in the state and recently demonstrated her ability to finish strong in the Ohio and Texas Primaries.

Tensions clearly remain in the contest. If Obama is nominated, just 56% of Clinton supporters say they are likely to vote for him against John McCain. Forty percent (40%) of Clinton voters in Pennsylvania say they are not likely to vote for Obama.

On the other hand, if Clinton is nominated, just 67% of Obama supporters say they are likely to vote for her against McCain. Twenty-nine percent (29%) are not. Click here to read more from Rasmussen Reports.

Hillary Sends Not So Subtle Message to John Edwards

From the Editor: James Carville, political advisor to Hillary Clinton and her campaign, recently called Bill Richardson, a “Judas” who betrayed the Clintons after they had given him two jobs in Bill Clinton’s administration. If anyone ever fully vindicated the label of “divisive candidate of the year” it was Mr. Carville. Now Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico, Nobel candidate and 2008 Presidential Candidate gets his turn. As one would expect of a gentleman like Bill, the rhetoric is mild but barbed. If you want to send James Carville an email, try this address: James@carville.info

By: Bill Richardson

Washington Post, April 1st 2008

My recent endorsement of Barack Obama for president has been the subject of much discussion and consternation — particularly among supporters of Hillary Clinton.

Led by political commentator James Carville, who makes a living by being confrontational and provocative, Clinton supporters have speculated about events surrounding this endorsement and engaged in personal attacks and insults.

While I certainly will not stoop to the low level of Mr. Carville, I feel compelled to defend myself against character assassination and baseless allegations.

Carville has made it very clear that this is a personal attack — driven by his own sense of what constitutes loyalty. It is this kind of political venom that I anticipated from certain Clinton supporters and I campaigned against in my own run for president.

I repeatedly urged Democrats to stop attacking each other personally and even offered a DNC resolution calling for a positive campaign based on the issues. I was evenhanded in my efforts. In fact, my intervention in a debate during a particularly heated exchange was seen by numerous commentators as an attempt to defend Sen. Clinton against the barbs of Sens. Obama and John Edwards.

As I have pointed out many times, and most pointedly when I endorsed Sen. Obama, the campaign has been too negative, and we Democrats need to calm the rhetoric and personal attacks so we can come together as a party to defeat the Republicans.

More than anything, to repair the damage done at home and abroad, we must unite as a country. I endorsed Sen. Obama because I believe he has the judgment, temperament and background to bridge our divisions as a nation and make America strong at home and respected in the world again.

Carville and others say that I owe President Clinton’s wife my endorsement because he gave me two jobs. Would someone who worked for Carville then owe his wife, Mary Matalin, similar loyalty in her professional pursuits? Do the people now attacking me recall that I ran for president, albeit unsuccessfully, against Sen. Clinton? Was that also an act of disloyalty?

Click here to read the full story in the Washington Post.