False Claim: Winning the Big States

The False Claim:

That Hillary Clinton is more qualified because she has won "the big states" of AZ, CA, NY, OH, TX, NJ, MA, FL, and MI (as well as any others she won).

The Quote (from a official Hillary campaign Press Release by Mark Penn):

"After a week of wall-to-wall coverage of the Obama campaign’s big endorsements, money, and Superbowl ads, Hillary Clinton scored strong wins in big states throughout the country and is winning the popular vote. The margins in these big states were strong - Massachusetts by 15, California by 10, New York by 17, NJ by 10, Oklahoma 24, Tennessee 13. Polls predicting losses or close races turned out to be wrong when the actual votes were counted in these states.

Sen. Obama, in contrast, won with large margins in Alabama and Georgia, two states that have been in the Republican column in the last two elections. He also won with large margins in a string of caucus states with comparatively fewer voters - Alaska, Idaho, Utah, and Kansas - and have also been in the Republican column. Of course, he won his home state.

As super-delegates consider which candidate to support, they will be looking at which one candidate has a base and can win the big states, including the crucial swing constituencies. We believe the impressive wins in NY, CA, MA, MI, FL, NJ, AZ suggest that Hillary is the one who can motivate a strong turnout in November."

The Truth (part 1: The Penn Quote):

There are a lot of problems with the big state argument as a whole. But, first, let's look at just the Mark Penn quote in all its delusional, equivocating glory:

First - The idea that Obama winning superdelegates and raising more money is a negative. That, because Obama raised enough money and had enough judgment to advertise during the Super Bowl (while Hillary didn't) means any Hillary wins are thrilling upsets, regardless of her previous name recognition and seemingly insurmountable leads. The idea that the presumptive nominee who said she would have the nomination wrapped up by Super Tuesday, falling so far that she has to look for ways to say she won shouldn't be the story, but her rebound should be. The idea that the amount of ground Obama made up in the week before Super Tuesday should be completely ignored because Hillary's incompetence forced her to have to barely hold on to her "sure thing."

Second - Penn shrugs off Alabama and Georgia going to Obama because they have been Republican in the last two elections. Meanwhile, in the previous sentence, he talks about how important both Tennessee and Oklahoma were, even though both went Republican in the last two elections as well (including, and this is important, when Al Gore, who was from Tennessee, ran in 2000. If a native son can't win TN, why is it significant that Hillary won its Democratic Primary?) Additionally, if going Republican in 2000 and 2004 makes you insignificant, than Florida, Ohio, Texas, and Arizona are insignificant. Also, for what it's worth, Bill Clinton lost both Texas and Oklahoma in 1992 and 1996, as well as Arizona and Florida in 1992.

Third - In regards to Georgia, Obama netted more delegates out of the "small, insignificant Republican state" (30), then Clinton did in NJ and MA combined (28). Now, since Democratic delegates are awarded to states based on their Democratic population, how can Georgia realistically be called unimportant.

Fourth - Penn tries to deligitimize caucus states, because they don't fit in the box of demographics that seem to favor Clinton (like his problems with Bill Richardson). Unfortunately, this turns actual swing states like Iowa and Colorado against Hillary Clinton (as evidenced by the fact she lost most of Edwards' Iowan delegates, and one of her own).

Fifth - Penn talks about the crucial swing constituencies as being most important. But he then goes on to name NY, CA, MA, and NJ (which never vote Republican), AZ (home of the Republican nominee, and, thus, not a real swing state for Dems in the fall), and MI and FL (who's votes didn't count). So, when it comes to the important swing states, as Mark Penn says, Hillary has won Zero of them. What a terrible job Mark Penn has done.

Sixth - Hillary Clinton sent out the following press release before when the polls were still open on Super Tuesday, a fantastically underreported Dewey beats Truman moment: "In Missouri, Barack Obama outspent Hillary by $300,000 in TV ads," said an email sent to reporters. "He also benefited from the endorsements of high-profile surrogates across the state, all of whom actively campaigned for him and appeared in ads on his behalf. Despite these challenges Hillary Clinton won this important toss-up state" (my emphasis). So, Obama, by the Clinton campaign's own admission, won an "important toss-up state" by winning Missouri. Funny that it is nowhere in Mark Penn's press release. Also, Penn ignores the other Super Tuesday contests of Connecticut, Delaware, and Minnesota. All of which were significant wins for Obama in crucial swing states, or in important strong Democratic states.

The Truth (part 2: the argument as a whole):

First - Since the Penn quote is from Super Tuesday, let's look at the "big states" that have voted since (big state as defined by Mark Penn as a Democratic hub or a swing state).

• Washington - Obama by 37% (53- O; 25 - C; Obama by 28 delegates)
• Maine - Obama by 19% (15 - O; 9 - C; Obama by 6 delegates)
• Washington D.C. - Obama by 51% (11 - O; 4 - C; Obama by 7 delegates)
• Maryland - Obama by 23% (42 - O; 28 - C; Obama by 14 delegates)
• Virginia - Obama by 29% (54 - O; 29 - C; Obama by 25 delegates)
• Wisconsin - Obama by 17% (42 - O; 32 - C; Obama by 10 delegates)
• Ohio - Clinton by 10% (74 - C; 65 - O; Clinton by 9 delegates)
• Rhode Island - Clinton by 18% (13 - C; 8 - O; Clinton by 5 delegates)
• Texas - Complicated Primacaucus (98 - O; 95 - C; Obama by 3 delegates)
• Vermont - Obama by 20% (9 - O; 6 - C; Obama by 3 delegates)
• Mississippi - Obama by 24% (19 - O; 14 - C; Obama by 5 delegates)

So, if you ignore the Clinton campaign standard that a big state is one won by Clinton, since Mark Penn sent out his press release, Obama has won 9 out of the 11 staunch Democrat states or swing states, and has picked up 101 pledged delegates to Mrs. Clinton's 14. If you take away the caucus states (since, according to Clinton, these don't count), Obama only wins 7 out of 9 states, and walks away a still impressive net of 53 delegates.

Second - As far as the "big states" Hillary and her supporters keep mentioning:

• New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusettes - will vote Democrat no matter what. A state that any Democrat will win in November is hardly an important primary state to win.
• Arizona - will vote McCain no matter what. A state that any Democrat will lose in November is hardly an important primary state to win.'
• Michigan - first, their vote didn't count and were told so beforehand by the DNC and every candidate. Second, Obama wasn't on the ballot. Third, It will vote for the Democrat no matter what.
• Florida - I admit this is a debatable situation, but no campaigning coupled with telling voters their vote won't count meant a lot of people stayed at home (though Clinton supporters were told Clinton would go against the rules and try to make FL count.) Most importantly, though, McCain will win no matter what.
• Texas - First, Obama won Texas. Second, Texas will vote Republican no matter what (I stopped at Reagan, but I haven't seen Texas go to the Democrats in a long, long time).
• Ohio - The only real important, big, swing state Clinton won. However, analysts argue Obama would do better in Ohio vs. McCain in the general election (the pro-war Democrats Obama would lose to McCain are vastly outnumbered by the independents Obama would win). (note- recent polls taken after the Wright fiasco have pushed Obama back in head-to-head polls, but the logic behind the argument still stands). Either way, though, both poll 10 points higher than John McCain in the state.
  

So, Clinton has won only one real big, important, swing state. Obama has won Missouri, Iowa, Virginia, Minnesota, Mississippi, Georgia, and Colorado.

Third - It's a huge logical fallacy to assume that, in a general election, the states Clinton claims as "big wins" due to a primary win grant her a distinct advantage (with the possible exception of her scorched earth tactics in Ohio). The opposite most certainly can not be said about Obama. Take, for example, New Hampshire- Although Clinton won (a delegate tie), Obama outperforms her against McCain in General Election polls (the same as the Ohio situation above). This phenomena presents itself in other states too (according to a great post on dailykos):

A New York Survey USA poll taken February 14th, after Hillary’s February 5th victory in the state shows Hillary with a 52-41 lead in a head to head matchup against John McCain, a margin of 11 points. The same poll shows Obama with a 57-36 lead over McCain, a margin of 21 points. Despite the fact that Hillary won the Democratic primary, Obama actually would start out in much stronger position to win New York when matched up against John McCain.

How about California? A California Survey USA poll taken February 22nd, several weeks after Hillary’s February 5th victory in the state shows Hillary with a 58-35 lead in a head to head matchup against John McCain, a margin of 23 points. The same poll shows Obama with a 61-34 lead over McCain, a margin of 27 points. Clearly, the idea that somehow winning the primaries in big Democratic states makes Hillary more likely to win them than Obama is simply not true.

the argument is continued later about swing states:

How about Pennsylvania? I fully expect Hillary to win the primary there, but if she wins, will she be more likely to win in a general election? A recent Rasmussen poll of PA shows Obama leading McCain 49-39, a margin of 10 points. The same poll shows Hillary losing so McCain 42-44, a 2 point margin.

Michigan has already voted and part of Hillary’s argument for keeping her name on the ballot was that she didn’t want to have to go back and “pick up the pieces” in the general election. A Rasmussen poll of Michigan in February, well after Michigan’s primary vote, showed Obama leading McCain 47-39 in the state, a margin of 8 points. The same poll showed Hillary Clinton tied with McCain 44-44.

Fourth - Hillary's fight has been waged and lost before. I suggest everyone go read the great article here comparing Hillary Clinton's run in 2008 with Ted Kennedy's run in 1980. As best as I can sum it up:

Kennedy, in challenging President Jimmy Carter, won enough giant industrial states to keep afloat during the months-long primary season, even as Carter commanded the edge in overall delegates and cumulative popular votes. Instead of surrendering after the last primary in early June, Kennedy soldiered on, intent on using the summer to sow doubts about Carter that might prompt delegates to turn on the president and hand Kennedy the nomination.

Likewise, despite her revival in Ohio and Texas (and Rhode Island), the only realistic scenario under which Clinton secures this year’s nomination will require her to engineer the kind of backdoor maneuver that Kennedy failed to pull off 28 years ago. [...]

The primary season wrapped with Carter leading the delegate race 1,964 to 1,239—with only 1,666 delegates needed to win the nomination. But Kennedy argued—à la Clinton—that his success in the biggest (and most Democratic) states on the map somehow counted for more. He also claimed the late momentum: He won 200,000 more votes than Carter in the June 3 contests.

“Tonight is the first night of the rest of the campaign,” Kennedy thundered on June 3. “The people have decided that this campaign must go on!” [...]

Kennedy’s summer strategy involved fighting for a rules change at the August convention, pleading with delegates to scrap the rule that bound them to the results of their states’ primaries and caucuses. [...]

But that’s as far as it went, for several reasons. For one, there were just as many doubts about Kennedy’s electability—and maybe more—as there were about Carter’s. Chappaquiddick was barely a decade old and polls found him to be the most polarizing politician in the country. And for all of the Kennedy nostalgia within the party, a sizable chunk of Democrats had strong personal distaste for Ted, because of the nature of the campaign he waged against Carter or because of his own personal issues. He also had a weak moral claim to the nomination, having lost the delegate and popular vote tallies during the primaries. [...]

Fact Sheet: Rwandan Genocide

The Lie:

That Hillary actively tried to get Bill to intervene in the Rwandan Genocide.

The Quote: (from ABC News):

STEPHANOPOULOS: President Clinton has said, has suggested that you urged him to intervene in Rwanda in 1994. Is that true?

CLINTON: It is. It is true. And, you know, I believe that our government failed. We obviously didn't have a lot of good options. It moved very quickly. It was a difficult, terrible genocide to try to get our arms around and to do something to try to stem or prevent.

The Vetting:

First - No one in the Clinton administration, no public records (including speeches, quotes, minutes from official meetings, Bill and Hillary's memoirs), nothing in any comprehensive analysis of the tragedy, no American historian or scholar, nor any Rwandan historian or scholar attributes anything, not even an effort, to Hillary Clinton. In reality, pretty much every document on the genocide describes the very active and staunch policy of removing all of, not only our troops, but the entirety of the UN deployment.

Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power, after "a three-year investigation involving sixty interviews with senior, mid-level, and junior State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Council officials who helped to shape or inform U.S. policy," as well as "dozens of interviews with Rwandan, European, and United Nations officials and with peacekeepers, journalists, and nongovernmental workers in Rwanda," in an Atlantic Monthly article from 2001 (well before she knew who Obama was) described the specifics:

In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term "genocide," for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing "to try to limit what occurred." Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.

For more, see the Additional Notes on the bottom.

Second - As noted above, the troops the Clinton administration successfully fought to pull out of Rwanda were United Nations troops. Intervening, as the question was presented to Hillary, would have been drastically different than pulling out, given that we would have acted unilaterally, and had to have the option of suppression (which is, basically, an invasion). So either Hillary didn't have the information (and thus, no relevant experience) or she didn't have the judgment to know not to let the UN troops get pulled out. But, then, when she did have sufficient information, her judgment was to silently advocate a US invasion of the country? And she felt so passionately about it, she never mentioned it to another person? Either way you slice it, it doesn't look like this is a positive for her.

Third - If it were that easy to stem a government inflicted genocide, against the will of the government, unilaterally, we would have been in Darfur last year. Additionally, Bill's failure in Somalia wouldn't have made him all too welcome in Rwanda, had the US tried to go in unilaterally. This failure in Somalia, by the way, is the reason Bill wanted to get out of Rwanda in the first place (see Additional Notes on the bottom for information).

Fourth - Power cites an example that directly contradicts Bill and Hillary's claims:

A few years [after the genocide], in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this."

Now, if Hillary was discussing the severity of this crisis with Bill as it was happening, how could he have been ignorant of the magnitude of the genocide (or even how it happened)? Either way, they are both lying at least one of these times (most definitely both of them).

Fifth - SHE IS PLAYING POLITICS WITH THE GENOCIDE OF ALMOST ONE MILLION PEOPLE.

Additional Notes:

From a piece on Hillary's "Experience" in the Chicago Tribune:

Key foreign policy officials say that a U.S. military intervention in Rwanda was never considered in the Clinton administration's policy deliberations. Despite lengthy memoirs by both Clintons and former Secretary of State and UN Ambassador Madeline Albright, any advice she gave on Rwanda had not been mentioned until her presidential campaign. "In my review of the records, I didn't find anything to suggest that military intervention was put on the table in NSC [National Security Council] deliberations," said Gail Smith, a Clinton NSC official (and Obama supporter) who did a review for the White House of the administration's handling of the Rwandan genocide. Prudence Bushnell, a retired State Department official who handled the Rwanda portfolio at the time and has not allied with a presidential candidate, confirmed that a U.S. military intervention was not considered in policy deliberations, as did several senior Clinton administration officials with first-hand knowledge who declined to be identified.

From an absolutely fantastic piece from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings specifically about Hillary Clinton and Rwanda:

So, to sum up: the US didn't just fail to intervene in Rwanda. Our government urged the withdrawal of the UN peacekeeping forces that were on the ground protecting Rwandans, for no better reason than to keep the Belgians from looking like cowards. It refused to jam the radio station that was passing on instructions for genocide. It blocked further efforts to reinforce the peacekeeping forces there. It also failed to do any of the much smaller things that might have shown that our government was not wholly indifferent to the people of Rwanda who were, at that time, being hacked to death with machetes.

It's worth bearing this background in mind when you hear Hillary Clinton claim that she advocated military intervention in Rwanda. . . It's a lot harder to imagine that while Hillary Clinton was advocating military intervention, she not only failed to convince her husband to send troops, but also failed to convince him, for instance, not to advocate the withdrawal of most of the UN peacekeepers, or that he really ought to order the Pentagon to jam Radio Milles Collines. If she was doing her best behind the scenes, and failed to accomplish even this -- if, despite her best efforts, she couldn't persuade her husband not to advocate withdrawing UN peacekeepers just to provide cover for the Belgians -- then we really need to ask how effective an advocate she really is, especially since no one except her husband, in full campaign mode, seems to remember her efforts at all.

Of course, I think it's a lot more likely that she either didn't advocate action on Rwanda at all, or did so only in passing. If so, this would have to be the definitive example of her attempt to claim responsibility for everything good that happened during her husband's presidency, while disavowing all responsibility for his mistakes. This was, in my opinion, the most shameful moment of the Clinton administration.

The Somalia Connection:

After the failure of the Somalian mission, as a military intervention for humanitarian purposes, the Clinton administration completely revamped their outlook on humanitarian intervention. Our pulling out of Rwanda and letting the genocide occur was much more in line with that new outlook. In essence, our intervention in Somalia made any "intervention" in Rwanda not even up for discussion.

(from the book A People Betrayed by LR Melvern, p 190-191):

[T]he position of the Clinton administration became clear at a press conference given by national security adviser, Anthony Lake. Lake explained that America could not solve other people's problems. Nor could America build their states for them.

"When I wake up every morning and look at the headlines and the stories and the images on television of these conflicts, I want to work to end every conflict. I want to work to save every child out there. And I know the president does, and I know the American people do. But neither we nor the international community have the resources nor the mandate to do so. So we have to make distinctions. We have to ask the hard questions about where and when we can intervene. . . these kinds of conflicts are particularly hard to come to grips with and to have an effect on from outside, because basically, of course, their origins are in political turmoil within these nations. And that political turmoil may not be susceptible to the efforts of the international community. So, neither we nor the international community have either the mandate nor the resources nor the possibility of resolving every conflict of this kind."

This press conference marked the publication of the first ever comprehensive review on US policy towards multilateral peace operations. The review, months in preparation, and post-Somalia, was known as presidential decision directive no. 25 (PDD-25) and it set strict limits on future US involvement with the UN, which from now on was going to depend on certain criteria: whether or not US interests were at stake, whether or not there was a threat to world peace, a clear mission goal, acceptable costs, congressional, public, and allied support, a working ceasefire, a clean command and control and a clear exit point.
Rwanda failed every criterion bar one.

Lastly, for anyone with a vested interest in the subject, I would very strongly recommend A People Betrayed by LR Melvern. An absolutely fantastic and informative read.