Obama will tip his e-base on VP choice
In the latest sign of how technology - the Internet in particular - is transforming politics, Barack Obama plans to announce his running mate via e-mail and text message.
"Barack Obama is about to make one of the most important decisions of this campaign - choosing a running mate," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe wrote to backers in (what else?) an e-mail. "You have helped build this movement from the bottom up, and Barack wants you to be the first to know his choice."
Obama has a website where supporters can sign up to receive e-mail updates. "You can also text VP to 62262 to receive a text message on your mobile phone," it says. (Standard messaging rates apply.)
With Obama on a family holiday in Hawaii through Friday, the conventional wisdom is that he'll announce his vice presidential pick next week - the week before the Democratic National Convention.
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The theory goes that since McCain, if elected in November, would be, at 72, the oldest person ever sworn into a first term, it might reassure voters if he pledged not to seek re-election. Also, not seeking a second term could free McCain to make less partisan decisions - to put "country first," as his campaign banner says. And McCain could then promote his running mate as apprentice and heir apparent.
But the problem is that such a promise would make McCain a lame duck the second he sat down in the Oval Office.
On "Fox News Sunday," host Chris Wallace pressed the issue with Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager. Wallace asked whether there was "any possibility that he would consider issuing a pledge, say, at the Republican convention, 'I will serve one term as president?' "
Davis replied: "Chris, you're going to have to come to the Republican convention to find out what's going to happen there . . ."
Wallace asked: "You're not ruling it out."
Davis answered: "I'm not talking about it at all."
The issue came up before the New Hampshire primary in January, when McCain was asked about it during a town hall meeting. "If I said I was running for eight years, I'm not sure that would be a vote-getter," McCain said then.
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They wonder how confirmation of the affair would have changed the first Democratic presidential contest had it knocked Edwards out of the race.
"I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," former Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson told ABCNews.com yesterday, voicing the argument that Clinton's dominance would have been strengthened by a win in Iowa - not punctured by Barack Obama's surprise victory.
Instead, Obama won the caucuses with 38 percent of the vote, Edwards finished second with 30 percent, and Clinton ended up third with 29 percent.
Obama emerged as the front-runner, Clinton had to pull off a come-from-behind win in the New Hampshire primary to stay in the nomination fight, and the Democratic contest became a bitter, drawn-out battle that lasted until June 3.
Entrance polls done for the TV networks, however, suggest that many Edwards voters would have gone for Obama instead.
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"Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence - on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to 'do the job from Day One.' In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles' heel," Joshua Green of The Atlantic magazine writes in the piece, which was posted online last night and appears in the magazine's September issue.
Green obtained a raft of internal memos, including one from strategist Mark Penn urging criticism of Obama's multicultural background. "It also exposes a very strong weakness for him - his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited," Penn wrote. "I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values."
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