In trouble
“To anyone tracking delegates, it’s been clear for more than a month that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is in mortal danger,” Peter Keating writes at nymag.com.
“But as long as she was battling Barack Obama at the polls every week, she could hope to control the narrative of the Democratic race, even if she was losing individual contests. And so her campaign kept sprouting new raisons d’etre: the wisdom of superdelegates, the enfranchisement of Florida and Michigan, her supposed ability to carry big states,” Mr. Keating said Tuesday.
“No more. We’re now halfway through the six weeks between Mississippi and Pennsylvania, and this long interlude has washed away Clinton’s spin. Now her campaign is not only over. It’s obviously over.
“For all the drama of the Democratic campaign, both candidates bobbed around in a very narrow range of support for most of February and March. But that’s changing right now. In four of the past five days, Obama has gone over 50 percent in Gallup’s tracking poll and has opened a lead over Clinton averaging seven points. This is the first time either candidate has moved significantly beyond the fluctuations inherent in daily surveys, and it’s the longest stretch one of them has spent as the leader since late February. Obama is breaking out in a meaningful way.
“Maybe Democrats liked what they heard in Obama’s speech about Jeremiah Wright. Perhaps all the talk about Hillary’s (not) quitting is cementing his status as front-runner. Bill Richardson and other superdelegates lining up for Obama could be having an impact. But one thing is clear: Clinton’s strategy of exploiting racial polarization among Democrats has failed miserably.”
Still falling
“With Barack Obama likely headed to the Democratic nomination, it’s time again to check in on Obama’s secret-sharer of rhetoric and other political stylings, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. As a neophyte politician, Patrick rode a wave of hope into Beacon Hill’s corner office, just as Obama is trying to do on a national level,” Dean Barnett writes at www.weeklystandard.com.
“When we last left the Patrick story some six weeks ago, Patrick’s popularity was plummeting, his legislative agenda lay in ruin, and he was in the process of redefining the phrase ’ineffective executive’ for generations to come. Since then, believe it or not, things have only gotten worse for the Commonwealth’s beleaguered regent,” Mr. Barnett said.
“Last week, Patrick’s signature legislative initiative bit the dust in humiliating fashion as the Massachusetts House defeated his proposed bill for three resort casinos by the not exactly nail-biting margin of 108-46. The fact that Patrick’s own party controls roughly 80 percent of the legislature compounded the loss’s embarrassment. But in Patrick’s defense, the rout of the bill wasn’t nearly as embarrassing as the fact that something so shabby as state-sponsored casino gambling had become the signature issue of a man who ran on ’hope.’
“The magnitude of the trouncing indicates how well Patrick has made friends and influenced people on Beacon Hill.”
Specter’s plan
“It’s not every day that a member of the world’s greatest deliberative body stops by to chat about his plans ’to close the Senate down.’ Especially if his name is Arlen Specter. But the Pennsylvania Republican tells us he’s concluded that this is the only way to prod Democrats to vote on, or even hold confirmation hearings on, President Bush’s appeals court nominees,” the Wall Street Journal says in an editorial.
“A look at the numbers explains why the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee is spitting mad. In the last two years of Bill Clinton’s Administration, when Mr. Specter was in the chairman’s seat, the Republican-controlled Senate confirmed 15 appellate court nominees,” the newspaper said.
“Now, more than halfway through Mr. Bush’s final two years, Chairman Patrick Leahy isn’t returning the Constitutional courtesy. The Democratic Senate has confirmed a mere six nominees with no plans in sight to move the remaining 11 forward. Judicial nominees rarely are confirmed in the final months of a President’s second term, so the clock is running out. Democrats figure they’ll retake the White House in November, and they don’t mind leaving the courts short-handed for another year or two as they stall for liberal nominees.
“Mr. Specter says he has recommended that Republicans ’go full steam ahead’ until Democrats agree to hold confirmation votes. He has in mind a series of procedural stalls that would make it next to impossible for the Senate to get anything done. These could include refusing to accept the usual unanimous consent motion to have the previous day’s deliberations entered into the official record without a formal reading, a process that would take hours. So would reading the text of many bills, which can run to hundreds of pages.”
Outcry on Hill
Nearly three dozen House Republicans are pushing a resolution that would support parental rights in education, including the right of parents to home-school their children.
The resolution, scheduled to be introduced today, was crafted mainly in response to a California court’s ruling earlier this year, which many home-school advocates fear will ban parents from home-schooling in California unless they hold teaching credentials.
Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, California Republican, who is backing the resolution, said he was “outraged” by that ruling.
Late last month, the court agreed to rehear the case, after an outcry from national and California home-schooling groups.
Mr. McKeon, who is the highest-ranking Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, said home-school rights simply must be protected.
AIDS bill passes
The House voted yesterday to triple to more than $10 billion a year U.S. humanitarian spending on fighting AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in Africa and other stricken areas of the world.
About $41 billion of the $50 billion over five years would be devoted to AIDS, significantly expanding a program credited with saving more than 1 million lives in Africa alone in the largest U.S. spending ever against a single disease.
The House voted 308-116 to extend and broaden the scope of the $15 billion President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief that President Bush promoted and Congress enacted in 2003. It has been hailed as a noteworthy foreign-policy success of the Bush presidency.
• Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or gpierce@washingtontimes.com.
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