Bill Clinton

"There may be somebody special here today," said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Barack Obama's sister, upon observing the large audience in the Hilton ballroom this morning. Then she abruptly added, "Two somebodies."

It seems the Obama family is having a hard time remembering Hillary Clinton this week. Last night, Obama painfully forgot to make an appeal for the cancellation of Clinton's debt to his supporters at a fund-raiser that was billed as a unity event in which he would make an appeal for the cancellation of Clinton's debt. This morning, in front of roughly 2,000 donors, mostly women, who had donated between $200 and $23,000 to a variety of Obama-related funds, the two former rivals appeared together to argue that equal pay and rights for women was a crucial aspect of any plan for American progress, and that party unity was a critical step to winning in November.  read more »

On the heels of Lanny Davis’ announcement last month, Howard Wolfson’s move today brings to two the number of top Hillary Clinton allies who have signed on with Fox News since the end of the primary season. And let's not forget that Terry McAuliffe, Clinton’s campaign chairman, also offered praise of Fox that the channel recycled into a promo.

None of this would have been imaginable a year or two ago, back when Fox still treated the Clintons as the face of the enemy. So what happened?  read more »

The Clinton campaign and Clinton supporters obviously believed that traditional “liberal” media outlets like CNN and MSNBC had it in for them and were openly promoting Barack Obama, while Fox – especially as the primary season wore on – was far

I'm on vacation this week, enjoying the sun, surf and sand here in Long Beach New York, where we've had a small summer home since 1987. I'm on the West End of town, where the biggest problem over the last few years has been the proliferation of second and third cars and the difficulty of parking on the narrow and crowded streets: Until this summer. This summer the big news is the price of gasoline. In the last year and a half, the price of gasoline has doubled. In January, 2007 gasoline was less than $2.20 a gallon, today it is well over $4.  read more »

David Axelrod has appeared in the press enclosure here at the Unity event. He says Hillary will be a "huge force in bringing about the change we all want."

And her husband?

"We would welcome him. You know, there are only four living presidents and he has so much to offer here. We hope to establish a close relationship."

Axelrod also predicted his campaign would be accused of "inventing" the tie result here in the primary but "that was what happened."

And with that, there comes the sound of Obama and Clinton being introduced. No one can see them yet, though, and the crowd, which was cheering wildly, has gone quiet again.

A reporter says to none in particular that HRC might have decided to make a last round of superdelegate calls instead.

Uma Thurman is reportedly engaged to financier Arpad Busson. [NY Daily News]

Those awkward photos of Sean Avery standing shirtless in a fashion closet at Men's Vogue mysteriously disappeared from the magazine's Web site. [Radar]

Graydon Carter, Jann Wenner, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Buffet, Gay Talese and others gathered at the Waverly Inn on Wednesday to celebrate Gonzo, a Carter-produced documentary about the life and work of Hunter S. Thompson. [WWD]

Raffaello Follieri's friends reportedly want Anne Hathaway to come get the chocolate lab the couple bought together.  read more »

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Michelle Obama did her part for Democratic unity here today, referring to Hillary Clinton as an "extraordinary woman" at a round-table event with former New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen.

"Because of Hillary Clinton's work, the issues of importance to women and working families are more at the forefront than ever before," Obama said, the day before Barack Obama will appear with Clinton for the first time since the primary ended.

Naturally enough, she sought to portray herself and her husband as closely in tune with female concerns.

One of the first rounds of applause during her brief speech came when she paid tribute to her mother for resourcefulness.  read more »

A reader sends over this letter from former Clinton bundler Yashar Hedayat calling for contributions to erase Hillary Clinton's campaign debt--and it includes this whiff of a threat to Obama supporters: " I don’t think any of us (including my Obama friends on this list) want her to be saddled with debt while she continues to do so much good for our country."

 

Here's the letter:

Friends, 

In the past eighteen months, Hillary Clinton ran a historic campaign for the Presidency. And thanks to so many of you on this list, there are eighteen million cracks in that highest and hardest of glass ceilings.  read more »

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If Barack Obama does defeat John McCain this fall, Democrats – who are all but certain to bolster their narrow House and Senate majorities no matter who wins the presidential race – will experience a type of euphoria they haven’t felt in 16 years, when Bill Clinton’s election last gave their party simultaneous control of the White House and Congress.

And surely you remember how that worked out for them. Yes, Mr. Clinton won broad popularity and a second term in 1996, but his presidency brought his party to its weakest point in decades. Democrats were swept out of power in the Senate and House in 1994 and by the time Mr.  read more »

Barack Obama the naïve sapling is out, replaced – for the time being at least – by a different caricature: the cunning opportunist, wrapping himself in the mantle of reform in ruthless and amoral pursuit of the White House.

The image began taking hold in the media last week, when Obama rationalized his way out of a previous commitment to make a good-faith effort at participating in the public financing system for the general election.

Given his earlier cutesiness on Nafta, his now infamous 130 “present” votes in the Illinois legislature and his penchant for blaming his staff for his own mistakes, the campaign funding flap could serve as a tipping point in the media’s portrayal of Obama.  read more »

Barack Obama has drawn some criticism from left-of-center blogs today for cutting a radio ad in support of Representative John Barrow of Georgia, a conservative Democrat who is facing a primary challenge from a more liberal candidate next month.

"One of the most enthusiastic enablers of the radical and lawless policies of the Bush administration," writes Glenn Greenwald, citing Barrow's positions on Iraq and the FISA debate.

There are two things worth noting about this.

One is that Obama's endorsement of Barrow probably shouldn't be seen as an endorsement of Barrow's politics.  read more »

Another sign of a thaw between the Obama campaign and some of the powerful women who have long been allied with the Clintons: Michelle Obama will speak at a lunch for the National Partnership for Women & Children tomorrow.

The release from the campaign notes that Emily's List founder Ellen Malcolm and Cheryl Mills, who was deputy White House counsel under Bill Clinton, are both on the board of the organization and will be at the event.

Here's the announcement:

Chicago, IL – This Friday, June 20, Michelle Obama, wife of Senator Barack Obama, will speak at the National Partnership for Women & Families 2008 Annual Luncheon.  read more »

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The Associated Press is reporting that the defamation lawsuit brought by former New York Post writer Jared Paul Stern against Ron Burkle, The New York Daily News, and Bill and Hillary Clinton has been dismissed by State Supreme Court Justice Walter Tolub. (This comes via Jim Romenesko.)

In April 2006, The Observer's Choire Sicha profiled Mr. Stern at his Catskills cottage and reported on his book deal which was subsequently cancelled .

Obviously, Democrats want voters to be thinking about John McCain’s age and fretting over whether it might be eating away at his mental faculties. There’s no other reason why party’s anti-McCain talking points would call for surrogates to so prominently slip forms of the word “confused” into attacks on the soon-to-be 72-year-old Republican candidate.

In a Wednesday conference call that received much attention, Susan Rice, one of Obama’s national security advisors, talked about McCain’s “disturbing, even disconcerting, pattern of confusing the basic facts and reality that pertain to Iraq,” while John Kerry called his Senate colleague “confused” – a word he repeated several times in an MSNBC interview later in the day. It’s not the first time Democrats have played this card this year, and it surely won’t be the last.  read more »

Who was the big media star of the weekend? The Huffington Post's citizen journalist extraordinaire Mayhill Fowler, of course! After her rope line "interview" with Bill Clinton made headlines, Ms. Fowler has found herself at the center of a journalistic ethics-new-new-new media kerfuffle.

After the jump, a snapshot of Ms. Fowler's big weekend (as compiled with the help of the redoubtable Jim Romenesko):  read more »

Outside, in line, BOILING. 11:22 a.m.

"Lanny, what now?" reporters ask Lanny Davis one by one. "We're going to take the White House" is his talking point today.

And here's a reporter who's been covering Hillary for the whole shebang. What's next for him? "Gonna take a week off."

Inside. There are 10 American flags in the room, six of them on the stage around the podium where she will speak. It's Mark Penn's strategy come at last to full flower, too late.

One-quarter of the floor space is unused, cordoned off.  read more »

James Rainey at the L.A. Times—the embattled L.A. Times!—scored the first interview with 61-year-old Mayhill Fowler, that dogged citizen journalist of the Huffington Post.

No, wait! She's not a journalist! And she doesn't want her sources—like Bill Clinton who told her on Monday that Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum was a scumbag—to know that either.  read more »

With Hillary Clinton’s decision to concede the Democratic race, Saturday now looms as a truly historic day, when Barack Obama will assume a place in political immortality beside John Paul Hammerschmidt and Frank D. White, the only other politicians in the world to whom the Clintons have been forced to say: You win, we lose.

Of course, Bill Clinton’s loss to Hammerschmidt in a 1974 Congressional race and his defeat at the hands of White in a 1980 gubernatorial race barely made a ripple outside Arkansas.  read more »

Gina Gershon and her team of lawyers are going after Vanity Fair for alleging that she has been having an affair with Bill Clinton. [TMZ]

Ethan Hawke and pregnant fiancée Ryan Shawhughes, who used to be the nanny of his two children with Uma Thurman, were seen applying for their marriage license and are getting ready to wed. [P6]  read more »

John Koblin examines Bill Clinton's angry response to Vanity Fair's recent profile of him. "The responses from the former president and his camp are very saddening in their own ways,” according to VF editor Graydon Carter. Plus: Ana Marie Cox joins Radar.

Leon Neyfakh reports from Los Angeles' Book Expo America where Random House's new C.E.O., Markus Dohle said, “I am looking forward to becoming a real New Yorker."

Spencer Morgan talks to Rip Torn about Norman Mailer: “Norman always dressed to the nines... He always had a suit, vest, tie, sometimes a hat. And so behind the lamppost, he turned to me and said, ‘Why you always dressed like a fuckin’ bum! Dress up, put on a nice shirt and tie, and you’ll get more respect.’"

Plus: George Gurley at 40... Eliot Spitzer's new job... and Sex and Our City.

On the afternoon of June 2, Wolf Blitzer was talking to Vanity Fair national editor Todd Purdum about his 9,647-word piece about Bill Clinton.

“Some people who work for him now say that he seems to be angry all the time, angry when he gets up in the morning and angry when he goes to bed at night,” Mr. Purdum was saying.  read more »

During Bill Clinton's spectacular meltdown yesterday--calling Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum a scumbag, sleazy and slimy--he also decided to drag just about everyone into the melee. He said:

"The editor of Esquire-- he sent us an email yesterday and said it was the single sleaziest piece of journalism he'd seen in decades. He said it made him want to go take a shower and he was embarrassed to be a journalist when he read it."  read more »

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“In many ways,” the New York Times’ Adam Nagourney wrote over the weekend, “Mr. Obama is wheezing across the finish line after making a strong start: He has won only 6 of the 13 Democratic contests held since March 4, drawing 6.1 million votes, compared with 6.6 million for Mrs. Clinton.”

Actually, it’s now worse than that: Mr. Obama’s late-in-the-campaign numbers took an additional hit on the final weekend of primary season, when Puerto Rico handed him his eighth loss since March. It is now indisputable that Mr.  read more »

On the eve of the final pair of Democratic primaries, a new poll of South Dakota Democrats gives Hillary Clinton a 26-point lead over Barack Obama – a surprise, at least to me, in a state that had the early makings of an Obama stronghold.

The survey, from the independent New Hampshire-based American Research Group, shows Clinton pounding Obama by a 60-34 percent spread. The only previous poll in the state, from about a month ago, had Obama up by 12. Because every other state around South Dakota previously went overwhelmingly for Obama, there had been little expectation in the national press that Clinton would win there.

Not surprisingly, the ARG poll is being greeted with some skepticism. But in a phone conversation a few minutes ago, Dick Bennett, ARG's president, told me that the assumption that South Dakota is Obama country has been flawed from the start.

"The numbers we got are consistent with what we've seen in other states," Bennett said. "The groups that are usually supporting her are supporting her. The people who live there look more like Clinton voters than Obama voters."  read more »

In an editorial board discussion this afternoon with the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, Hillary Clinton mentioned Bobby Kennedy’s mid-June assassination as a reminder that past primaries have carried on well into summer, and promptly got Drudged.  read more »

If anyone ought to be skeptical about the notion that Barack Obama’s fall prospects have been damaged by the primary process, it’s the Clintons.

With Mr. Obama in mathematical control of the Democratic race (despite West Virginia), Hillary Clinton’s supporters have fallen back on the argument that Mr. Obama’s chances have been harmed, especially among those much-discussed “white working-class voters,” for the coming contest against John McCain.

It’s worth noting, though, that Bill Clinton himself had to overcome a very similar assertion—that he had emerged from primary season as damaged goods—on his way to the White House in 1992.  read more »

Hillary Clinton has begun to ask her influential backers to be in Washington on May 14 for a meeting at her home, according to a major fund-raiser. Separately, the fund-raiser said, Bill Clinton will be speaking with top donors this afternoon on a conference call.

GREENSBORO, N.C. – Bill Clinton, making a late plea for votes on his wife's behalf here yesterday, asserted that "academic study after academic study" had shown the former first lady to be the victim of "the most slanted press coverage in American history" during this campaign.

Though it was not clear exactly what studies he was referring to, Clinton appeared especially irked by criticism of the senator's proposal to offer consumers a summer 'holiday' from gasoline taxes.  read more »

In her embrace of a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax – an idea that virtually every credible economist agrees is a gimmick – Hillary Clinton is making the same bet that delivered her husband to the Democratic nomination 16 years ago: that voters prefer promises of free candy to the truth.

In 1992, with the country mired in an economic slump, Bill Clinton made a middle-class tax cut the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.  read more »

Stop it! Stop asking me about Hillary’s pantsuits, or any other aspect of her personal style! If you persist, I swear to God I will stuff Mrs. Clinton into a Balenciaga bubble dress with matching gladiator spike-heeled boots, and then you’ll be sorry.

Every 20 minutes I get a jangling call from an earnest hack looking for quips about the fashion choices of the presidential candidates. These content generators are hell-bent on viewing the current political jousting match through the lens of la mode: What do I think of Hillary’s pink blouses?  read more »

The Massachusetts Democratic primary, along with nearly two dozen other primaries and caucuses, was held on Feb. 5. Hillary Clinton won it by 15 points, one of her best showings anywhere this year, and Michael Dukakis voted in it—but he won’t say for whom.

“I voted for a candidate, yeah,” is about all Mr. Dukakis, the state’s former governor and a lifelong resident of Brookline, will say.

Mr. Dukakis has maintained an adamantly neutral public stance throughout the campaign, hoping instead to sell both candidates and their campaigns on the need for assembling a massive grassroots organizing effort—a captain and six block leaders in all 200,000 precincts in the country—for the fall. But he also said that Barack Obama will probably be the nominee and the race decided by early June, and possibly much sooner, with primaries in Indiana and North Carolina on tap next week.  read more »

Tomorrow night marks the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington, D.C. Members of the press corps (including some Media Mob contributors who are already on their way—note low posting rate today!) will have a chance to clink glasses with the president and his cabinet and remind themselves that despite five years of war, an economy some are already calling a Depression, and a painful slog of an election season, it's all in good fun. L'chaim! To us!

This year's event will be emceed by CBS Late Late Show host Craig Ferguson, whom the W.H.C.A.'s president (and ABC News correspondent), Ann Compton, is really excited about: "Craig Ferguson is a fresh take on late night TV. As a new citizen, a first-time uncommitted voter and someone who has looked at American politics from the outside, I am looking forward to his unique take on our system."

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Jessica Silk, a wavy-haired, freckled grad student in public health, was sitting at the Organic Grille in the East Village on a recent sun-drenched afternoon, picking at a healthful seitan wrap. “Sometimes I think we can smell one another in a crowd, and not because we have snacks,” she said.

Ms. Silk, 27, was talking about former fat kids, of which she is one. Have you ever noticed how New York is simply swimming with these psychologically fragile souls? You can see it in the careful attention to what’s on their plates ... their slavish devotion to daily exercise routines ... and the slightly nervous look that creeps into their eyes now, as bikini season looms.  read more »

This weekend brought two reminders that what happens in politics is often, more than anything, about the past.

On Friday, Robert Reich formally endorsed Barack Obama, a decision that was greeted as noteworthy since Reich was an old Oxford chum of Bill Clinton’s and served as the 42nd president’s first labor secretary. He also scored a date with a young Hillary Rodham back in 1966, when, as the freshman class president at Dartmouth, he asked Hillary, his counterpart at Wellesley, to meet him for “a presidential summit” in Hanover. (There was no second date.)  read more »

The Obama campaign just announced that Robert Reich, who served as Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, is endorsing Barack Obama.

Here's part of what Reich wrote (where else?) on his blog:

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

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It looks like all the “whining” taunts have finally gotten to the Obama campaign.

It’s not so much that they’re denying that Obama has attempted to profit from a sense that he was victimized during Wednesday night's debate as much as it is an attempt to note that the tactic has been standard operating procedure for both Bill and Hillary Clinton since the beginning of this year’s contest.  read more »

Bill Clinton’s crimes against his wife’s presidential bid, generally in the form of deceptive or merely ill-considered comments that have thrown her campaign off-message, have been well documented.

There was the flap back in November when he claimed that he’s opposed the Iraq war “from the beginning,” even though—like his wife—he was silent while President Bush marched the country to war. And the tirade he directed at a local television reporter before Nevada’s caucuses. And his apparent venture into racial politics, like when he sought to water down the impact of Barack Obama’s South Carolina victory by pointing out that Jesse Jackson had carried the state in his presidential campaigns. And so on.  read more »

LEWISBURG, PA.—All Bill Clinton wants is for people to focus on the issues.

“I just think I’m for Hillary, and she’d be the best president,” Mr. Clinton told The Observer, after addressing a basketball gym full of Pennsylvanians at Bucknell University.  read more »

Bill Clinton told the Observer yesterday that the money his foundation has taken from foreign companies does not pose a conflict of interest for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

A story in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend examined the potential problems in Clinton's fund-raising relationship with a Chinese Internet company that has allegedly aided China's crackdown on Tibetan activists by posting "most wanted" pictures of protest organizers on the Yahoo China homepage, which the Cl  read more »

BLOOMSBURG, Penn.—At a campaign stop here yesterday afternoon, Bill Clinton made it clear that the campaign has no plans of letting Barack Obama off the hook for his remarks suggesting that the lagging economy had caused Pennsylvanians to become “bitter” and “cling” to their religion, guns and distrust of immigrants.  read more »

At an event in New York this morning former Bill Clinton aide Paul Begala sharply criticized Mark Penn. One attendee who I spoke with today added that Begala, employing a Cajun accent, also quoted a swipe taken by Jim Carville at the now former chief strategist.

'How come the guy who calls himself chief strategist doesn't have a strategy?' said Begala, channeling Carville, according to the attendee.

The theatergoers at Radio City Music Hall last night had paid between $125 and $2,300 to hear the Clintons talk and Elton John sing, and several more dollars to drink fluorescent purple cocktails illuminated by glowing straws. Hillary promised them it was not a night for “political speeches.” Then she gave a political speech.  read more »