RUSH TO ANNOUNCEMENT
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was not prepared to
make her announcement that she was running for the Democrat
nomination for the presidency, but the campaign of Barack
Hussein Obama threw her plans out the window, say senior
Clinton advisers in Washington and New York.
“The plan was for February or March, not now, but Obama’s move
kind of forced our hand a bit earlier than we expected,” says one
New York-based source. “We had everything in place, he just made us
move a little faster than we really wanted to.”
Obama’s decision could not have been a surprise to anyone.
Longtime advisers and campaign consultants who could have committed
to other prospective presidential candidates months ago had taken
passes in order to work for him. The writing was on the wall.
“But we’ve had a plan and a calendar in place for her [Clinton]
for close to a year. That calendar remains largely in tact. The
difference is instead of some parts of the roll out beginning in
mid-February, they are being rolled out in late January,” says a
Washington-based Clinton backer.
Obama’s presence has also thrown the presidential aspirations of
former Sen. John Edwards into a tizzy. Edwards has
banked — literally — his hopes on the backing of big labor. But
with Obama and his labor ties in Chicago and with Clinton coming
out earlier, Edwards’ hopes of building up some cash sooner rather
than later have been put in doubt. “The field is suddenly a lot
more crowded than we thought it would be at this time,” says an
Edwards fundraiser. “I’m just one, but I’m having problems getting
the number of commitments I thought I’d have because of Obama and
now [Bill] Richardson in the race
so much earlier than we thought.”
All of which sounds like a pretty thin gruel of an excuse for a
leftover candidate with a light resume second only to that of the
man who stole his thunder last week. The reality is Obama and
Clinton are both looking at fundraising models significantly
different from Edwards’ or Richardson’s for that matter. Further,
Edwards could have been fundraising for months before the
announcements, but instead had to focus on burnishing his resume on
foreign policy issues, something Obama was attempting to do at the
same time.
What’s more, talk of Obama’s many rumored failings — such as
last week’s rumor that Obama was raised a Muslim, — isn’t coming
from Clinton people so much as it from Edwards surrogates, making
it clear that Obama right now strategically is viewed as a greater
threat to Edwards than to Clinton.
The next big question: What role does former president
Bill Clinton expect to play moving forward, and
how will Senator Clinton address his role and anticipated role in a
female Clinton Administration?
According to insiders, anyone who takes on the most senior title
within a Clinton for President organization will answer to both
Clintons on matters of politics and policy. “It’s understood that
there are two bosses in this campaign, and then there is everyone
else,” says a longtime Clinton adviser.
The same source says that no one is looking so far ahead as to
what roles people might have in a Clinton II administration, but
that everyone expects Bill Clinton to have some type of
semi-official role inside the West Wing, and possibly on the
diplomatic front.
BAD HENRY
It’s expected that in the coming weeks the House Government
Oversight Committee, led by Rep. Henry Waxman,
will begin aggressively issuing subpoenas for the many
investigations and witch hunts he plans to perpetrate.
One interesting note: Waxman has decided not to allow any
Republican staff, including the committee’s minority legal counsel,
in any depositions or interviews his committee staff holds. This is
a break in longstanding tradition: even in the darkest days of the
Clinton impeachment process, House and Senate Republicans allowed
Democrat attorneys and senior staff access to depositions and
interviews.
POGO SHARPENS ITS SHTICK
Last week, the Project for Governmental Oversight (POGO) held one
of its ongoing seminars in the Russell Senate Office Building,
training Democrat staff on how to conduct “effective oversight and
investigations.” The monthly programs, which began in September,
took on greater significance after the Democrat victories in
November.
The program is funded via the Ford Foundation, interesting given
the corporate roots of the organization and the fact that one of
POGO’s biggest targets in the sessions is corporate America.
POGO is one of the most active left-wing organizations in
pushing congressional investigations. It has encouraged and enabled
show-trial oversight hearings for years, most recently focused on
the Bush Administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq, and its
environmental policy, particularly through investigation of the
Interior Department.
POGO describes the sessions as: “A combination of hands-on
training and exercises, mock hearings, case reviews, and lessons
from some of the nation’s most well-regarded congressional
oversight experts, government insiders (or whistleblowers),
investigative journalists, current and former Inspectors General,
Government Accountability Office staff, and current and former
Congressional staff….Future topics include How to Prepare for an
Oversight Hearing, Handling Classified Information, Working with
Government Insiders and Whistleblowers, and Investigating the
Internal Revenue Service.”
While POGO barred non-congressional staff from attending the
sessions, it did encourage a number of reporters to attend as
participants in the seminar, not as observers. They attended with
the understanding that it was entirely off the record and as a
“source development and networking tool” for them to use in
covering future investigative hearings, according to one reporter
who attended the session.
Reporters from the New York Times, Washington
Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and
the Associated Press were encouraged to attend. Reporters from
other news services and papers were denied access.
In fact, James Grimaldi, an investigative
journalist for the Washington Post who covered the
Abramoff scandal, participated as a “facilitator” for a prior POGO
event.
Almost all of the participants and attendees to the programs are
Democrat or aligned with Democrats. POGO staff point to
participation by staffers from the Grassley, Snowe, and McCain
offices, but those staffers were well-known cooperators with
Democrats on oversight investigations.
