itsmeeeeeee

Hillary: Why I continue to run

BY HILLARY CLINTON

Sunday, May 25th 2008, 4:00 AM
Olson/Getty

Presidential-hopeful Hillary Clinton vows to fight on despite calls for her to pull out of the race.

This past Friday, during a meeting with a newspaper editorial board, I was asked about whether I was going to continue in the presidential race.

I made clear that I was - and that I thought the urgency to end the 2008 primary process was unprecedented. I pointed out, as I have before, that both my husband's primary campaign, and Sen. Robert Kennedy's, had continued into June.

Almost immediately, some took my comments entirely out of context and interpreted them to mean something completely different - and completely unthinkable.

I want to set the record straight: I was making the simple point that given our history, the length of this year's primary contest is nothing unusual. Both the executive editor of the newspaper where I made the remarks, and Sen. Kennedy's son, Bobby Kennedy Jr., put out statements confirming that this was the clear meaning of my remarks. Bobby stated, "I understand how highly charged the atmosphere is, but I think it is a mistake for people to take offense."

I realize that any reference to that traumatic moment for our nation can be deeply painful - particularly for members of the Kennedy family, who have been in my heart and prayers over this past week. And I expressed regret right away for any pain I caused.

But I was deeply dismayed and disturbed that my comment would be construed in a way that flies in the face of everything I stand for - and everything I am fighting for in this election.

And today, I would like to more fully answer the question I was asked: Why do I continue to run, even in the face of calls from pundits and politicians for me to leave this race?

I am running because I still believe I can win on the merits. Because, with our economy in crisis, our nation at war, the stakes have never been higher - and the need for real leadership has never been greater - and I believe I can provide that leadership.

I am not unaware of the challenges or the odds of my securing the nomination - but this race remains extraordinarily close, and hundreds of thousands of people in upcoming primaries are still waiting to vote. As I have said so many times over the course of this primary, if Sen. Obama wins the nomination, I will support him and work my heart out for him against John McCain. But that has not happened yet.

I am running because I believe staying in this race will help unite the Democratic Party. I believe that if Sen. Obama and I both make our case - and all Democrats have the chance to make their voices heard - in the end, everyone will be more likely to rally around the nominee.

I am running because my parents did not raise me to be a quitter - and too many people still come up to me at my events, grip my arm and urge me not to walk away before this contest is over. More than 17 million Americans have voted for me in this race - the most in presidential primary history.

I am running for all those women in their 90s who've told me they were born before women could vote, and they want to live to see a woman in the White House. For all the women who are energized for the first time, and voting for the first time. For the little girls - and little boys - whose parents lift them onto their shoulders at our rallies, and whisper in their ears, "See, you can be anything you want to be." As the first female candidate in this position, I believe I have a responsibility to finish this race.

I am running for all the men and women I meet who wake up every day and work hard to make a difference for their families. People who deserve a shot at the American Dream - the chance to save for college, a home and retirement; to afford quality health care for their families; to fill the gas tank and buy the groceries with a little left over each month.

I believe I won a 40-point victory two weeks ago in West Virginia and a 35-point victory in Kentucky this past week - despite voters being repeatedly told this race is over - because I'm standing up for them. I'm standing up for the deepest principles of our party and for an America that values the middle class and rewards hard work.

Finally, I am running because I believe I'm the strongest candidate to stand toe-to-toe with Sen. McCain. Delegate math might be complicated - but electoral math is not. Our campaign is winning the popular vote - and we've been winning the swing states we need to get 270 electoral votes and take back the White House: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arkansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Michigan, Florida and West Virginia.

But no matter what happens in this primary, I am committed to unifying this party. Ultimately, what Sen. Obama and I share is so much greater than our differences. And I know that if we come together, as a party and a people, there is no challenge we cannot meet, no barrier we cannot break and no dream we cannot realize.

MY "op ed" response:

hillary says "I believe staying in this race will help unite the Democratic Party."

i can't help but wonder what planet ms clinton inhabits...
because while she makes statements claiming that she believes her continued run for nominee is uniting the party -
her deeds and tactic here on planet EARTH have been NOTHING BUT deeply divisive.

and once again, she's twisted and turned HER own gaffe into yet another excuse to play the VICTIM!

this woman, her husband and her supporters are "one note wonders"! ...and the note they all sound is ALWAYS the same:

"whaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!"



is this really the trait we look for in a president?

no one can deny that victimhood runs deep in the clintons.

and something ELSE no one can deny is that almost ALL their problems are ALWAYS a direct result of their OWN behavior.

bill's well known weakness of character, not being able to keep his dick in his pants, caused the country nothing but grief during HIS two terms in the white house. one can't help but wonder, if bill weren't such a crotch hound, what this man COULD have accomplished?

hillary's entire campaign has been marred from start to finish with the same kind of arrogance and lack of discipline and wisdom. one gaffe after another has sabotaged her historic potential to become the first woman president, and criticism of each of these gaffes has been met with their now infamous "clinton persecution complex".

hillary started this nomination process with EVERY advantage...
AND VERY HIGH NEGATIVE RATINGS.

...and true to form, in her own insufferable whiney way, she has managed to squander EVERY advantage, and merely INCREASED her negative ratings. clinton fatigue is now at an all time high. just having her on a ticket is now a greater liability than it was when she declared. the entire party has been torn to shreds, and what SHOULD have been a landslide, will probably be a close election.

when all this started, i was open to voting for her, though i cited my serious misgivings about her iraq war vote, and the extremely unappealing proposition of living through another 4 long years of clinton drama, distraction, polarization and the obstructionist politics that always go hand in hand with this couple.

she may very well have mis-spoke when she uttered the RFK comments, but WHY is it that the clintons always turn THEIR faux pas into yet ANOTHER reason for everyone else to apologize to THEM?!!!!!

they fuck up, and we're expected to apologize?

at this point, everyone is asking, "what does hillary want?"

my answer to that question is, i don't give a fuck what SHE wants!
all i want at this point is this train wreck of a family OUT of my country's politics!

it's all too clear, expecting an apology from them for their shit will never happen!

__________________

Comicsartist

She's only running because she wants more Whitehouse dishware.

__________________

Mithrall

Hillary Clinton has absolutely no clue as how to apologize. She is like Fonzy trying to say he was wwwrong, only without the leather jacket and any measure of cool.

itsmeeeeeee

not only can the woman NOT utter the words "i was wrong" or "i'm sorry"...

ya gotta love how she's "staying in to unify the party".

Local and statewide Hillary supporter groups send out emails on a regular basis calling on FL Democrats to protest a fellow Democrat.

Rather than announcing her events - the majority of the emails were about protesting Obama's appearances, and I've learned her campaign wanted to hold "competing" Rallies in towns where Obama was to appear.

yup! she's "all about" unifying the party, alright!

i'm so far beyond "clinton fatigue" that now i can barely type her name anymore without battling the overwhelming temptation to instead type "fucking bitch", "whore", "demon", "garbage", or "piece of shit".

...let alone look at her face, or hear her speak, without flying into either a rage, or throwing up a little in my mouth.

when you look at national polls between her and obama, you see that i'm not alone in my repulsion.

you add democrats who feel this way to the HUGE block of far right republicans who would be motivated in droves once again by the "clinton brand" - and i just don't understand how ANY reasonable, thinking, logical person could POSSIBLY still this person should be on the ticket.

it would be just plain insane.

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Kana

It's bullshit that her words were taken out of context. On the contrary, it was the context of the question, "Why are you staying in the race?", that many people found so alarming. Without context, she's just giving the date of RFK's assassination. It was through the context that she fucked herself.

Now, if she claims she wasn't really making a veiled reference to the possible assassination of Barack Obama, well, I guess we'll just have to take her word on that. I mean, there's no reason to believe otherwise, so far as I know.

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Groovyville

itsmeeeeeee

Hillary Clinton is her own worst enemy

Sunday, May 25th 2008, 4:00 AM
Michael Goodwin

Hillary Clinton is her own worst enemy

Context, as in "you've taken my words out of context," is the last refuge of a politician caught with foot in mouth. That's where Hillary Clinton is today, alternately explaining and apologizing. But with both feet in her mouth, she doesn't have a leg to stand on.

Gravity is the toughest opponent of all, even for a Clinton hellbent on a comeback.

Of course the meaning of words can be distorted if they are lifted from their surroundings. The problem for Clinton is that her reference to the assassination to Robert F. Kennedy is just as outlandish when everything she said before and after is taken into account.

There is no question she was citing the RFK murder of 40 years ago in the spirit of "anything can happen" and thus as a reason she should stay in the race against Barack Obama.

Which means she was thinking of murder as a momentum changer. Not a pretty thought in any context.

But the full context works against Clinton for a larger reason, too. The assassination remark is the latest evidence that her increasingly erratic campaign suffers from a severe case of split personality disorder.

One day it's a focused machine, gobbling up votes in numbers big enough to stave off Obama's nomination triumph. The next day the same machine spews out gaffes and B.S. as though it's been sabotaged.

Dr. Jekyll, meet Mr. Hyde.

Consider the last three months. Fresh off big popular vote wins in Ohio and Texas in March, she shot herself in the foot with a tall tale about coming under sniper fire during her trip to Bosnia as First Lady. Only when she became the subject of ridicule, with a videotape showing her smiling and accepting flowers from a child in Bosnia, did she confess to being wrong.

In April, her top strategist, Mark Penn, was caught working both sides of a key issue in the upcoming Pennsylvania primary. Among Penn's private clients was the government of Colombia, which was pushing for approval of a free-trade agreement at the same time Clinton was denouncing the idea. When Clinton fired him, he was her second campaign honcho to get dumped.

May brought more of the same, even before the RFK reference. The day after disappointing results in Indiana and North Carolina, she trotted out the race card, saying "Senator Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again." She went on to landslide wins in West Virginia and Kentucky by tapping that very demographic.

The headline-grabbing blunders stopped her from scoring big gains against Obama, even though he was wounded by the Jeremiah Wright issue, his "bitter" comments about small-town values and growing concerns about his kumbaya foreign policy overtures. The delegate deficit is a hurdle for her, but she had a potent argument about his vulnerability in the general election.

Instead of cashing in, Clinton repeatedly stepped on her own story. And with finger-wagging Bubba piping up with frequent off-message zingers, the prospect of the restoration of the Clinton presidency has been a political wash at best.

She's now so toxic she's probably doomed any hope of being named Obama's running mate. He didn't want her to start with; now he won't have to take her.

This one matters most because the notion of Obama being assassinated has been much discussed. He is the first black candidate with a real chance to be President, and, not incidentally, received the endorsement of Ted and Caroline Kennedy, making him the symbolic heir to the Camelot legend that was twice felled by assassin bullets. She couldn't have picked a worse point.

Still, myths aside, Obama is looking weak. In addition to Clinton's pounding him in key states, President Bush and Republican nominee John McCain have taken turns using Obama as a piñata. His yes-we-can crusade has been reduced to explaining why he wants to meet personally with the leader of Iran, whose militias are killing American troops in Iraq and who pledges to wipe Israel off the map.

Obama's views on the Mideast are so muddled the appeasement label is starting to stick, but Clinton is in no position to benefit. That's the impact, full and final, of her mentioning murder in a political context.

__________________

itsmeeeeeee

her words are always "taken out of context"!
demonstrating over and over and over again that this woman would make a positively HORRIBLE president!

can you just imagine what her term would be like?

i mean, if much of the country is ALREADY sick to death of her shit, and she isn't even in the white house, just how much do you think she'd get accomplished? not only would the she revive the gop from their downward spiral, and almost single handedly rebuild their party FOR them, she probably wouldn't have much loyalty from her own party, who's she's fucked up possibly beyond repair!

you'd have to be completely OUT of your mind to support this "disaster at every turn" at this point!

i really, really feel sorry for her supporters...

their BLIND loyalty to her has them so fucking brainwashed that they obviously no longer know their head from their asshole!

__________________

HarperLee

It just doesn't end. There is no one around her who is able to make her shut the fuck up. The op-ed letter adds more insult to more injury.

She said exactly what she meant to say Friday and it was not misconsrued. Finally, after five months, both Meet the Press and This Week made it clear that "her husband" had tied up the 1992 nomination long before June -- like on
March 20, 1992, when Paul Tsongas withdrew from the race. So, the first part of her inflammatory sentence was a lie -- a lie that the media has let her get away with since as far back as February.

And no one anywhere has explained what the fuck she could have meant by mentioning that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968 except that Barack Obama might likewise be assassinated. It was a very deliberate, very calculated non sequitur.

As I have been saying since Friday, and as Doris Kearns Goodwin said this morning, Bobby Kennedy had not entered the Democratic primary until March 16, 1968. I assume nothing at this point about
Mrs. Clinton's intelligence, but her husband knows good and well the tortured history that led to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. One does not have to be a scholar of American history to
know that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated at the end of a long campaign. He campaigned for 92 days, not the 16 years that she has campaigned.

She has gotten away with saying many outrageous things in stump speeches. She was speaking to her uneducated, racist demographic, and did not realize there would be immediate national coverage which merely quoted her own words and showed us video
of her saying them. There was no room for misconstruction.

And yet no one will come out and say that she meant exactly what she said and said exactly what she meant. That bell cannot be unrung. Her hate statement cannot be charitably attributed to fatigue.

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Oliver Stone on George W. Bush: "the banality of evil"

http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home

HarperLee

Since I have heard everyone saying for almost three days that
Hillary could not have meant what it sounded like she meant,
I have two more things to say.

If, God forbid, something were to happen to Obama, Hillary would
not shed one tear.

And if anyone believes that the RFK assassination remark came so easily to her lips only because she had been thinking
about poor Teddy Kennedy and his family, get real. She is a
sociopath. She wouldn't have carred about Teddy's illness even if he had not endorsed Obama.

__________________
Oliver Stone on George W. Bush: "the banality of evil"

http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home

Heretic

I still say she ws daydreaming when she said it.

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"In space no one can hear you scream. in D.C. it won't matter..." -Clinton Resurrection: The Alien Queen lives!