The news just keeps getting worse for Hillary Clinton. Even as her staff keeps working, peppering journalists with memos attacking the Obama campaign, the senator is hunkered down for a much deserved yet very out of character long Easter weekend break at her Chappaqua, NY manse. The respite comes as it becomes increasingly clear that much sought-after Michigan and Florida revotes are almost definitely not going to happen and as new troubles for the New York senator crop up on all fronts.
One big problem dropped on the campaign like an anvil this morning, as news broke that erstwhile presidential contender and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson would announce his endorsement of Barack Obama today. Richardson is the country’s only Hispanic governor. Equally important, perhaps, is the fact that he served not once, but twice, in Bill Clinton’s Cabinet, as Secretary of Energy and UN Ambassador. Aside from Nancy Pelosi, John Edwards, and Al Gore, his endorsement is arguably the most sought after of all the Democratic powerbrokers. So we can all feel free to ignore Mark Penn’s understandably spirited but laughable assertion on a conference call with reporters today that both campaigns “have our endorsers” and Richardson’s defection to Obama is not “significant.”
Richardson is not the only problem the embattled Clinton campaign faces this Good Friday. Equally troubling are revelations from Clinton’s schedules as First Lady, which the Obama campaign say suggest Clinton is untrustworthy because they show she held five meetings about NAFTA in 1993, apparently in an effort to help get Congressional approval for one of her husband’s signature initiatives. While it is unclear what she said at the meetings, the schedules have been widely reported to document her role as a NAFTA booster. Hitting back yesterday, the Clinton campaign released a memo asserting that, “It is no secret that passing NAFTA was a priority of the Clinton Administration, but numerous contemporary accounts make clear that Hillary Clinton was personally opposed to NAFTA.” Today, Clinton spokesman Jay Carson went further, arguing on a conference call that “there’s been a lot of erroneous reporting on this” and saying Clinton was, in fact, “pushing back” on the legislation.
Then there’s the possibly illegal peek by State Department employees at Obama’s passport file (Clinton’s also was reportedly improperly looked at last year, as was John McCain’s). While there is no evidence that the Clinton camp had anything to do with the breach, potentially damaging innuendo is already surfacing. Meanwhile, a picture of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright visiting the White House and embracing Bill Clinton during his presidency was leaked to the media. Talk about the kitchen sink. Another month of this sort of vitriol and the Democratic Party will find itself hobbling into Denver.
Clinton’s advisers say they are committed to a peaceful resolution to the current chaos. “If every element has its role, the party will come together and certainly you can rest assured that the Clintons…will do everything in their power to bring the party together,” Penn told reporters today. But he quickly added: “This is a very, very close race….It’s not a race where you can get to a majority based on pledged delegates alone.” Penn also appeared to back away from previous campaign assertions that Clinton needs a popular vote win to claw back to the top and wrest the nomination from Obama, saying that many factors will come into play and the time for the conversation about what Clinton needs to do to make a legitimate claim will come after all the votes are counted. Perhaps the best bottom line summary of the call came from Deputy Communications Director Phil Singer, who suggested that long weekend in Chappaqua aside, there’s a lot of fight left in the Clinton camp. “We feel very confident that at the end of the day we are the most electable candidate,” Singer said, “because we believe that Senator Clinton will be the best president.”
