KAMALA OVER HILLARY
One reason that the national board of NARAL, the pro-abortion
lobbying organization, endorsed Sen. Barack Obama,
and encouraged its state membership to do the same, was a series of
behind the scenes conversations between the Obama campaign and
NARAL.
“The message was, get on board or risk losing influence,” says
an Obama strategist. “We needed one of these [feminist or
pro-abortion] groups to step up and walk away from Hillary. NARAL
did it, and to its credit under great danger to its credibility
with its membership.”
NARAL has since been bombarded by its members with hate mail and
threats of loss of donations for a perceived abandonment of
Clinton. But as part of the conversation with NARAL, Obama advisers
suggested that Obama was more likely to put in place key feminist
and pro-abortion activists than Clinton. “The name that kept
popping up was [San Francisco District Attorney] Kamala
Harris. The campaign promised she’d become increasingly
higher profile with Obama, and the women’s groups love her,” says
another Obama strategist.
Harris is viewed as one of the most radical local elective
office holders in the country, a district attorney who has refused
to seek the death penalty even against cop-killers, and who has won
high praise from the homosexual and pro-abortion lobbies that have
strong bases in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Harris has been mentioned for high profile jobs in an Obama
Administration, with some claiming she could be a dark-horse
candidate for Attorney General. “She’s smart, with not a lot of
experience, but given where the Senate could be [with 60
Democrats], confirmation of someone this unqualified for that
important a job wouldn’t be far-fetched,” says a San Francisco
Democratic operative. “That’s one reason why the campaign wants to
give her a higher profile in the coming months, to test her.”
SORRY MIKE
Talk inside the McCain campaign is that former Arkansas Gov.
Mike Huckabee isn’t going to be given the high
profile role in the general election campaign that he expected.
“He’s just not a team player and doesn’t seem particularly
committed to seeing John McCain win in November,”
says one McCain insider.
Before getting into the race himself, Huckabee famously told
political supporters in Arkansas that he thought it would be a good
thing for Hillary Clinton to win the presidency in
2008. On the campaign trail, Huckabee disputed that he’d made the
remark, except one of the sources was one of Huckabee’s
ministers.
Huckabee, meanwhile, has turned down opportunities to serve as a
surrogate for McCain, and instead is spending much of his time
either auditioning for cable TV commentator gigs or attending
fundraisers for House Republican candidates.
“Huckabee is more interested in laying the groundwork for his
next campaign, not in seeing Republicans win the White House,” says
a House Republican. “He’s looking to collect chits from us for down
the road.”
While the McCain campaign may have given up on Huckabee, it
hasn’t given up on reaching out to some of the higher profile
evangelical Christian leaders, including Focus on the Family leader
James Dobson.
McCain made of point of not currying favor with the evangelical
community during the primary season, and now is doing what he can
to tap into that important group for the general election. Dobson,
according to McCain insiders, has been cool to the outreach, but
not overtly dismissive.
