Palin Isn't Attracting Hillary Voters

To think that anyone thought it would. The only former Hillary voter who would vote McCain-Palin are the PUMAs, which number about 10,000 if they're lucky.

WaPo: Just 9% of women who supported Clinton in the primaries say they are more likely to vote for McCain because of his inclusion of Palin on the Republican ticket, according to a poll of 800 women conducted on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1.
A majority — 55% — said Palin’s inclusion on the ticket makes them less likely to vote for McCain, who will be nominated at the Republican convention tonight.
The poll has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. Emily’s List raises money for Democratic women candidates who support abortion rights; Palin is staunchly against abortion.

Obama The Underestimated One

Breakfast in Ohio

Frank Rich is spot on. Obama continues to outwit everyone by playing smarter, cooler and jumping higher. 

NYT: His campaign, unlike TV’s fantasists, knew the simple truth. The New York Times/CBS News poll conducted on the eve of the convention found that the Democrats were no more divided than the G.O.P: In both parties, 79 percent of voters supported their respective nominees. The simultaneous Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll also found that 79 percent of Democrats support Obama — which, as Amy Walter of National Journal alone noticed, is slightly higher than either John Kerry and Al Gore fared on that same question (77 percent) in that same poll just before their conventions.

But empirical evidence can’t compete with a favorite golden oldie like the Clinton soap opera. So when Hillary Clinton said a month ago that her delegates needed a “catharsis,” surely she had to be laying the groundwork for convention mischief. But it was never in either Clinton’s interest to sabotage Obama. Hillary Clinton’s Tuesday speech, arguably the best of her career, was as much about her own desire to reconcile with the alienated Obama Democrats she might need someday as it was about releasing her supporters to Obama. The Clintons never do stop thinking about tomorrow.

The latest good luck for the Democrats is that the McCain campaign was just as bamboozled as the press by the false Hillary narrative. McCain was obviously itching to choose his pal Joe Lieberman as his running mate. A onetime Democrat who breaks with the G.O.P. by supporting abortion rights might have rebooted his lost maverick cred more forcefully than Palin, who is cracking this particular glass ceiling nearly a quarter-century after the Democrats got there first. Lieberman might have even been of some use in roiling the Obama-Hillary-Bill juggernaut that will now storm through South Florida.

The main reason McCain knuckled under to the religious right by picking Palin is that he actually believes there’s a large army of embittered Hillary loyalists who will vote for a hard-line conservative simply because she’s a woman. That’s what happens when you listen to the TV news echo chamber. Not only is the whole premise ludicrous, but it is every bit as sexist as the crude joke McCain notoriously told about Janet Reno, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.

The best part of the story points out how sexist McCain's choice was, which is why many women, like me, were outraged.

The main reason McCain knuckled under to the religious right by picking Palin is that he actually believes there’s a large army of embittered Hillary loyalists who will vote for a hard-line conservative simply because she’s a woman. That’s what happens when you listen to the TV news echo chamber. Not only is the whole premise ludicrous, but it is every bit as sexist as the crude joke McCain notoriously told about Janet Reno, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.

Hillary Supporter Turned Star of McCain's Ad Talks

CBS doesn't go very deep in this interview, but talks to Hillary supporter Debra Bartoshevich, who now stars in McCain's ad.

A Devoted Hillary Supporter

What Hillary inspired

Hillary Says She Won't Upstage Obama

Contrary to what her husband has said and other news reports, Hillary says she's not undermining Obama. But she wants her supporters to have one more last say. It seems that these diehard supporters always need one more last thing.
I'll believe her. For now.

CNN: "I happen to believe that we will come out stronger if people feel that their voices were heard and their views were respected," Clinton said, adding that giving them a voice could provide a sort of "catharsis" for some of her supporters.

Clinton said she wanted her supporters to leave the convention feeling as if their voices were heard and satisfied with Obama as the nominee.

"I mean everybody comes, and they want to yell and scream and have their opportunity, and I think that's all to the good, because then, you know, everybody can go, 'OK great. Now let's go out and win.' "

The senator from New York immediately shot down the notion that she might try to upstage Obama.

"Since the delegate count is so close ... what if you are called up for nomination and what if you do win by a narrow margin?" a questioner asked her at last weekend's event.

"That is not going to happen, not going to happen. Look, what we want to have happen is for Sen. Obama to be nominated by a unified convention of Democrats," she said.

Hillary in a Pickle

She's helping Obama raise money and at the same time trying to pay off $25 million in debt. Maybe this is why she can't cut her PUMAs loose: 

Mantz is still Clinton's national finance director, a once-illustrious job that now carries the responsibility for a grab bag of thankless chores. He must help retire $25 million in campaign debt, and is piecing together a schedule of fundraising events -- no picnic in the best of times -- for a candidate who has lost but who needs new donors because so many of her earlier contributors gave the legal limit.

And he is in charge of persuading cranky Clinton donors, many of them still bitter about the way she lost, to open their checkbooks for Sen. Barack Obama, while he endures the doubts of Obama supporters suspicious of how much Clinton is doing for herself rather than for the presumptive Democratic nominee.
.......

Top Clinton supporters have formed new alliances to help the Obama campaign: The group Lawyers for Hillary, which raised $2 million for Clinton during the primaries and advised her campaign on legal issues, has recast itself as the Obama Lawyers Unity Fund, with nearly 75 members helping Obama raise money. (The group is working with, but distinct from, the Lawyers for Obama committee, which has been part of the Obama organization from the start).

On Wednesday night, two prominent Clinton supporters in Florida held a fundraiser for Obama featuring his wife, Michelle, that raised between $500,000 and $600,0000, aides said.

All together, Mantz said, Clinton has raised an unspecified but large amount -- "I would think it's several million already, and millions to go," he said -- and his counterpart, Obama finance director Julianna Smoot, agreed.

"She's been great," Smoot said in an interview, listing the joint events in which Clinton has participated.

An analysis by The Washington Post found that more than 2,200 Clinton donors became first-time Obama donors in June, giving him $1.8 million of the $52 million he raised last month. Of those, 355 contributed at least $2,000, for a total of $1 million. That leaves a long way to go for Clinton and her contributors to be considered a prime source of cash, but it represents what Obama advisers believe is the beginning of a real rapprochement.

Though a few election cycles have passed since former rivals had to help each other in this way, there are historical examples of the kind of partnership Clinton and Obama are trying to develop: Former president Jimmy Carter and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy helped each other retire debt after the 1980 presidential race, as did Sens. Gary Hart and Walter F. Mondale after the 1984 contest.

This year, the level of cooperation between the two campaigns' donors has varied, in part based on geography. In such places as New England, Georgia and Florida, top fundraisers for Clinton and Obama had relationships that predated the campaign, and they reported finding it relatively easy to unite after the primary race.

The Florida event with Michelle Obama on Wednesday night was an example of comity: held at the South Beach home of Abigail and F.J. Pollack -- who were once top-dollar bundlers for Clinton, with Abigail Pollack estimated to have raised more than $1 million for Clinton during the primaries -- the party pulled in more than Clinton herself did during her stops in New York earlier in the month.

PUMAs Phony Hillary Supporters

The self-declared PUMAs aren't really Hillary supporters. Hillary, after all is a democrat, and she and Obama see nearly eye to eye on issues. PUMAs are voting for John McCain. 

These "supporters," which Hillary probably would be embarrassed to have, voted solely to see the first woman in office, not a good reason to vote for someone. 

My hunch is they would've voted for McCain if there had been two men in the race for the democratic nomination. Otherwise, how would you explain such a shift: Hillary to McCain? I'm sure McCain and plenty of men are having their laughs at the expense of these women who've turned a political campaign into an emotional affair. 

John McCain Full of Malarkey

john mccain is making a big fool out of himself, pandering to women, who aren't falling for his ploy. just watching how he interacts with his wife cindy tells us what he really thinks about women. obama is up by double digits among women in polls.
frank rich makes the case:

nyt: TEN years ago John McCain had to apologize for regaling a Republican audience with a crude sexual joke about Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Janet Reno. Last year he had to explain why he didn’t so much as flinch when a supporter asked him on camera, “How do we beat the bitch?” But these days Mr. McCain just loves the women.

In his televised address on Barack Obama’s victory night of June 3, he dismissed Mr. Obama in a single patronizing line but devoted four fulsome sentences to praising Mrs. Clinton for “inspiring millions of women.” The McCain Web site is showcasing a new blogger who crooned of the “genuine affection” for Mrs. Clinton “here at McCain HQ” after she lost. One of the few visible women in the McCain campaign hierarchy, Carly Fiorina, has declared herself “enormously proud” of Mrs. Clinton and is barnstorming to win over Democratic women to her guy’s cause.

How heartwarming. You’d never guess that Mr. McCain is a fierce foe of abortion rights or that he voted to terminate the federal family-planning program that provides breast-cancer screenings. You’d never know that his new campaign blogger, recruited from The Weekly Standard, had shown his genuine affection for Mrs. Clinton earlier this year by portraying her as a liar and whiner and by piling on with a locker-room jeer after she’d been called a monster. “Tell us something we don’t know,” he wrote.