Howard Fineman
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Nov 4, 2008 11:07 PM
For me, the campaign has ended in the “news nook” at 30 Rock, where I
am working the phones for MSNBC’s election night coverage. We’ve just
called Ohio and New Mexico for Sen. Barack Obama, which means that it’s
all but over. But that is no news to Sen. John McCain and his campaign,
which knew from the start that it was not going to be their night.
I know that because I talked to Mark Salter, McCain’s closest, most
loyal and longest-serving aide. I reached him at about 7 p.m. Eastern
time, before any states had been called. I couldn’t see him, of course,
but he sounded to me as if he’d been run over by a truck-or as if he
had just been having a good try at the end of a long year.
McCain and his inner circle were hunkered down at the old Biltmore in
downtown Phoenix-in the ironically but appropriately named Goldwater
Suite.
One reason there was such gloom in the room was this: Florida was and
remains in play, and could tip into the Obama column, because of the
Hispanic vote in general and the Cuban vote in particular.
A good source of mine in Florida told me at about 8 p.m. that
Republicans in the final day of the campaign had placed thousands of
automated “robocalls” into the Cuban community-staunchly anti-Communist
and Republican-claiming (falsely) that Fidel Castro had “endorsed”
Obama!
But, according to Sergio Bendixen, the Democrats’ leading pollster of
the Hispanic community, Obama was on course to win 35 percent of the
Cuban vote-nearly half again as much as Sen. John Kerry had won in
2004. And that increase alone might be enough to tip the state to Obama.
While the Obama campaign was watching these numbers, they were
preparing a huge celebration in Grant Park in Chicago. Watching those
preparations made me wonder where former President Bill Clinton and
former Vice President Al Gore were tonight. Well, they are not in
Chicago, and have no public events scheduled.
So what, you might ask. Well, it is a trifle strange for the Democrats
to celebrate the election of a new president without any evidence of
the last (and actually quite popular) presidential administration.
The absence of Clinton and Gore was a sign that the torch had indeed
been passed-and that the Baby Boom generation, which had its innings
with Clinton, Gore and George W. Bush-was history.
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Howard Fineman
|
Nov 3, 2008 02:38 PM
You knew it was going to happen. I’m only surprised it took so long.
In Pennsylvania, Sen. John McCain’s must-win blue state, local Republicans now are up with a TV ad linking Sen. Barack Obama to his former pastor, the corrosively race-based Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
The ad plays Wright’s familiar “no, no, no” and “KKK” clips from incendiary sermons, and asks how Obama could ever have countenanced the guy. In fact, Obama no longer does. The split was final.
The McCain campaign distanced itself from the ad, insisting that they didn’t approve of-but could not prevent-the spot being aired.
But here is the good news, and I don’t mean for either campaign, but for the entire country: so far as I know, the ad was the first of its kind to be sponsored by a state party or other above-ground entity.
Obama’s longtime relationship with Wright-and especially the Illinois senator’s shaded and reluctant characterizations of it-may be valid topics of debate. But McCain and the GOP largely have stayed away from the subject.
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