Citizens of Indiana and North Carolina, please help stop the madness”. Only you can give us our lives back and stop the death spiral of the Democratic Party. You’ve had your 15-minutes, please find a way to stop the insanity. Until tomorrow, or June, or September we feel obligated to present “He Said, She Said” the Sunday Review of campaigns by “news analysts” and pundits rabidly loyal to one camp or the other or just tired of them both.

The New York Times
They reviewed the hour-long interviews between Clinton and Obama on the two big Sunday morning talk shows (thus depriving at least a dozen other pundits their weekly “look at me” fix). It was almost impossible to imagine before this year an entire hour on two networks with 1 on 1 interviews. How are we to know what to think without someone interpreting what they really said?

The headline was “Clinton Steals One Show, While Obama Endures Another.” And indeed the Clinton interview was a “show” with a live audience providing laugh track, her trademark cackle and peppy 1-liners. Obama sat seriously and took question after question from Tim Russert looking weary of it all and yet answered every question thoroughly.

So who’s more Presidential, the 1-line queen who will deliver tonight’s Top 10 List on Letterman or the man seething with rage that his former pastor continues to give him a grilling when white, respected church leaders have said much worse and get a free ride (including the spiritual advisor to 7 presidents, Billy Graham, talking about Jews in a way that should have generated enough ink by the barrel and talk show ire to sink the ship)?

FOX News Sunday
Howard Dean breaks the Democratic vow not to visit FOX News shows (after Barack Obama sits with Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace and Hillary Clinton has a bizarre appearance with Bill O’Reilly, the man who ordered the microphone of someone who disagreed with him turned off).

Dean opened by saying, “We stayed off Fox for a long time because your news department is, in fact, biased. But, Chris, you haven’t been. You’ve always been tough, but I always thought fair and I still think that’s true. And we need to communicate with people who are going to vote in the Democratic Party. Hundreds of thousands of Republicans have turned their back on their own party to vote in the Democratic primaries in the last six months. We owe it to our — to all the American people to reach out to those folks. This is not about Fox News. That’s not why I’m here today. I’m out because I want to talk to your viewers directly about why this election is important and what we can offer the American people.”

Yeah. What he said! I think. I dunno. Does this mean Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann need to be nice to and invite each other on their shows? I’m so confused.

Ambassador (appointed by Bill) Joe Wilson in the Raleigh Observer
Valerie’s husband chided Senator Obama in an Op-Ed piece blaming Senator Clinton’s vote for the war and says he did nothing to stop it.  Relying on his own experience in the Gulf before the War he says the real culprit is George W. Bush and calls Obama naïve and lacking in judgement.

OK, Obama may be over-stating Senator Clinton’s role and there is enough blame in this fiasco for both parties to go around. Why should we listen to you rail again against the guys who outed your wife?

Frank Schaeffer in The Huffington Post If Obama Must Answer for His Pastor Now, What Will They Do to Clinton, Inc. in October?
He rightly says the Republicans have been quietly pushing against Barack in the hopes of facing Hillary in November. The Karl Rove attack machine says nice things now because they want a McCain-Clinton fall match-up to rally their base.

As someone who once labored over liberal-bashing strategy with the likes of Jack Kemp, C. Everett Koop and Gary Bauer he says “let me tell my Democratic Party friends something: Bill and Hillary Clinton’s legacy is a far bigger threat to the chances of the Democratic Party winning in November than anything in Obama’s life.”

Everywhere…
Polls now show an overwhelming majority of voters say candidates calling for the suspension of the federal gasoline tax this summer are acting politically, rather than helping ordinary Americans. Senator Clinton, made the suspension of the gas tax a centerpiece of her campaign in recent days. Senator Obama wants other longer term efforts enacted. Both are very shrill and driving us crazy.

Meanwhile here in the UK gas is £1.11 per litre. The dollar closed Friday at $1.98 to the pound. There are 3.85 litres to a gallon meaning we pay… $8.42 a gallon or £4.27. Please stop pandering.

Photoshopgate?
Seems a Clinton mailer showing Obama soft on gun protections used a $2,200 German sniper rifle, the Mauser 66 that went out of production in the 90s. They then flipped the image. Ooops.

The Washington Post, Willie Horton 2008
“What this Wright guy has done is tagged Obama as a black guy. He is more aggressive and attacking, and that engages in people’s minds and that makes race salient.” Wright might well be the 2008 version of Willie Horton, the black Massachusetts inmate whose case was used against Democratic candidate Michael S. Dukakis in 1988. Talking up the controversy, moreover, gives Obama’s opponents a potent weapon: They can hook into voters’ hidden fears and racial attitudes without ever saying a word about the radioactive subject of race.

Paul Abrams on the Huffington Post
Hillary was wrong on the two big national security issues of out time. Hillary Clinton OPPOSED a timetable for withdrawal until she was no longer ‘inevitable’ for the nomination. She was posturing not to be open to criticism by the Republican nominee.
Then, realizing that her political fortunes in the Democratic primary depended on tacking away from the neocon positions she held, she began talking about troop withdrawals. Nonetheless, she refused to say directly that her vote was a mistake…that is, until the Ohio debate when her political fate depended on it.

And we close, blessedly, before everone’s eyes start to bleed, with this excellent voter analysis from David Sirota. Seems we have another Ooops moment as those mis-statements keep a-coming from the Clinton camp. “We entered Bosnia under smiper fire, there was no welcoming ceremony.”

Spinning OK, Spinning and Lying, Not Cool
Spin, as we usually refer to it, is trying to take facts and present them in a way that is good for one or another candidate. Lying, by contrast, is either saying things contrary to the facts, or pretending the facts just don’t exist. We saw this most often in the Bush administration’s lead-up to the Iraq War, and more recently, in Hillary Clinton pretending that she never supported NAFTA, when, in fact, a decade of public speeches shows she did. Now, Clinton is doing something fairly new: spinning AND lying - all at the same time.

Here’s what ABC News reports that Clinton is now saying:
“We came from so far behind in Indiana. We’re still the underdog.”

Clinton is trying to set expectations in advance of Tuesday’s Indiana primary, with the goal of making it seem as if a victory in Indiana would be “unexpected” and proof that she has “momentum.” The spinning part - the expectations part - is fine, and no surprise. That’s what candidates do, and that’s part of politics. What’s not fine is the dishonest basis of the storyline. Clinton has been ahead in Indiana from the beginning - and in, fact, has been ahead in the majority of Democratic primary polls done in the Hoosier state.

As Real Clear Politics shows, Clinton has been ahead or tied with Barack Obama in 12 out of 18 Indiana primary polls. In fact, she’s never been behind by more than 5 points - basically the margin of error in these polls. Put another way, Clinton has been either ahead or right on the cusp of the margin of error in 100% of the polling done in Indiana.

This isn’t surprising. Indiana is squarely within the Race Chasm (ie. the group of states whose black populations are above 6% and below 17% of the total population). Clinton has won most of her victories in Race Chasm states. I believe that is, at least in part, because of her deft use and exploitation of racial politics. In other words, Indiana is precisely the kind of state Clinton’s scorched earth campaign has proven adept at winning in a Democratic primary - her being consistently ahead or close is not news because it is to be expected.

Wow. And you think you’re confused?