Free Republic

Former US president Bill Clinton said Friday he has been ordered to hold his tongue by his wife Hillary for reviving an embarrassing story about her trip to Bosnia in 1996 while out campaigning. "Hillary called me and said 'You don't remember this. You weren't there, let me handle it.' I said, 'Yes ma'am," the grinning ex-president said during a campaign stop in Indiana, according to television pictures. A series of gaffes have made Bill Clinton somewhat of a liability in his wife's campaign for the Democratic White House nomination. And he put his foot in it again Thursday by...

A bitter Sir Elton John thinks America's sexism may be sinking his friend Hillary Rodham Clinton. John, a knighted British subject, said that gender discrimination is behind Clinton's problems in the polls as he addressed 5,000 Clinton supporters at Radio City Musical Hall last night in an event that raised $2.5 million for the cash-strapped campaign. "I never cease to be amazed by the misogynistic attitudes of some people in this country," said John, wearing a spangled black evening coat over a vermilion silk shirt. "I say to hell with them. ... I love you, Hillary, I'll always be there...

Hillary Clinton should hang in there and run a good race. And she has vowed to do so. Clinton has been under unprecedented pressure to bow out of the divisive Democratic primary and to clear the field for her opponent -- Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. Among those who want her to throw in the towel are, of course, Obama’s supporters. But many other Democrats are trying to push her out of the contest on the ground that a contentious race can hurt the party and could help their Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Clinton also has been...

Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean has a plan that will produce a nominee before his party's convention in August, avoiding what he fears could be a "really ugly and nasty" fiasco. Democratic leaders have begun complaining he has bungled the party's nominating process and alienated voters because of his failure to engineer a political compromise in the DNC's ill-advised decision to strip Florida and Michigan of all its delegates. But Mr. Dean, whose polls show the party's internecine warfare is hurting its chances in November, has been talking to party bigwigs about a deal and now says the delegations will...

MIAMI -- A donor to the Democratic Party asked for a rebate out of frustration over the party's Florida delegate dilemma -- and he got it. Federal records show that Paul Cejas has given six-figure sums to the Democratic National Committee for years, NBC 6's Nick Bogert reported. Cejas asked for his last donation back. He said he was angry with the party, particularly party Chair Howard Dean, over the failure to resolve Florida's delegate dilemma. "Frankly, he's dropped the ball, and I told him, 'You're going to go down in history as the worst chairman of the Democratic Party...

Are Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Elton John breaking U.S. laws by allowing the British pop singer, a foreign national, to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign by performing a concert on her behalf? That's the question Inside the Beltway put to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) yesterday, which does not rule out the possibility. First, some background supplied by the FEC: The goal of the 1966 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was to "minimize foreign intervention" in U.S. elections by establishing a series of limitations on foreign nationals. In 1974, the prohibition was incorporated...

When Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton square off in an April 16 debate in Philadelphia, they may be forced to spend time discussing an issue neither has talked much about in this campaign: gun control. April 16 will mark one year since the murder of 32 students at Virginia Tech, the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence will stage events around the country that day calling for stronger gun regulations, and for the candidates, gun control will be thrust on the table suddenly and unavoidably. Guns are an especially potent issue in...

Now that Hillary Clinton has been nailed in an outright fabrication of her role in Bosnia, it is time to remind ourselves of another, even more galling fantasy that Hillary tried to sell the voters. After 9/11, Hillary had a problem. New Yorkers were desperately focused on their own needs for protection and they were saddled with a Senator who was not one of them -- an Arkansasn or was it a Chicagoan? Interviewed on the "Today" show one week after 9/11, she spun an elaborate yarn. The kindest thing we could say was that it was a fantasy. Or...

In the 1960's I had a lady friend who loved Robert Redford. So, naturally, I got dragged to all of Redford's movies. I saw "The Candidate" several times. In that film, Mr. McKay (Redford), a "community organizer" like Barack Obama, hatches a slogan, "McKay, The Better Way" to run for office. Ironically, Barack "Barry" Obama has now chosen "The Better Way" as his mantra through February 10th. Well. Obama's slogan has about as much substance as the celluloid version popularized by Robert Redford. Obama is entirely a creation of wealthy contributors and powerful, liberal media interests. So what he does...

The campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) is seeking to play down news that the former first lady gave an incorrect account of landing in Bosnia in 1996 under sniper fire, and refused to answer additional questions about a flap that could hurt her chances of catching Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) in the race for the Democratic nomination. “We’ve said all we’re going to say on that,” said Deputy Communications Director Phil Singer on a Tuesday morning conference call with reporters. A video from CBS News had shown that Clinton’s version of having come under sniper fire was not...

U.S. Rep. Tim Mahoney, whose district includes much of Martin and St. Lucie counties, is hoping he won’t have to attend the Democratic Party national convention in Denver in August. If he does go, that will mean the Democrats still haven’t decided a nominee for the presidential election. And if neither Sen. Hillary Clinton nor Sen. Barack Obama has clinched the nomination by August, Mahoney says we may see a brokered convention, meaning the nominee could emerge from a negotiated settlement. “If it (the nomination process) goes into the convention, don’t be surprised if someone different is at the top...

Maybe, just maybe, it’s now worth at least asking whether Hillary Clinton might wind up as the Democratic candidate for vice president. When the chatter about a Democratic “dream ticket” began last year, it was easy to dismiss. Either Clinton or Obama would win a clear victory in the primaries and, after what inevitably would be a contentious campaign, each would want as little to do with the other as possible. Clinton, if she emerged victorious, would instead choose some kind of national security graybeard to her political right, a retired general perhaps, or maybe even a Republican. Likewise, Obama...

In some ways, Barack Obama's speech on race last week was as brilliant as it was nuanced. But for all its rhetorical beauty, it was also an enormous step backward and, in the end, a rather self-serving call for more discussion about racial grievance in a country that has already done way too much talking. Until last week, so much of Obama's appeal lay in the fact that he was not asking us to talk about the racial divide. Instead, he offered himself as a living and breathing symbol of racial reconciliation; his very origins pointed to the goal of...

When Democrats contemplate the apocalypse these days, they have visions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugging it out à la Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter at the 1980 convention. The campaign's current trajectory is, in fact, alarmingly similar to the one that produced that disastrous affair. Back then, Carter had built up a delegate lead with early wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, and several Southern states. But, as the primary season dragged on, Kennedy began pocketing big states and gaining momentum. Once all the voting ended and Kennedy came up short, he eyed the New York convention as a...

Hillary Rodham Clinton upped the tempo of her fundraising and her spending last month, only to be eclipsed by rival Barack Obama. At month's end, with debts of nearly $9 million, her money was nearly spent and he was sitting atop $30 million in available cash. Obama's campaign spent at a rate of nearly $1.5 million a day in February, a crucial month that began with the Feb. 5 Super Tuesday and ended with both candidates marching to a showdown March 4 in Texas and Ohio. Clinton, riding her best fundraising period yet, spent about $1 million a day on...

Geraldine Ferraro, a pioneer and trailblazer in American history, has done more to ruin a sterling reputation in the past few days than anybody but Eliot Spitzer. By claiming, I think falsely, that Obama would not be where he is if he were white or a woman, I think she totally overlooks the impact of his charisma, eloquence, demeanor, message, use of the Internet, focus on caucus states, and his refusal to take special interest money as factors in his sudden rise. She betrays a stunning inability to look more than skin deep for reasons for his success. But this...

The Clintons are trying to steal the nomination from Barack Obama — and he can't let them. The Clintons' campaign attacks put Obama in a bind. If he doesn't answer in kind, he's toast. But if he does, they'll have forced him off his winning message of hope and change from the bitter politics of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush eras. If they pull him off his game and onto theirs, they can wrest away the Democratic convention victory that he's earned. The solution for Obama is clear: Reply in kind, but do it through surrogates. Obama must...

After weeks of intense pressure, and more than a year after announcing her presidential candidacy, Sen. Hillary Clinton has offered little explanation for why she has delayed releasing the tax returns made public by most other Democratic presidential candidates in recent years. "What is the holdup?" said Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that tracks the role of money in politics. "She hasn't exactly made it clear as to what process is making it so cumbersome to just release them." Past Democratic presidential candidates have set a precedent for releasing their tax returns before or...

Republican crossover voters apparently helped win the Democratic primary in Texas for Hillary Clinton — with one in every 10 Democratic votes came from Republicans. And they could have been heeding the call of top-rated radio host Rush Limbaugh, who had been urging Republican listeners to vote for Hillary to prevent the Democrats from unifying around Obama and to keep the two candidates battling each other. “Hillary Clinton is back in the race, thanks in some small part to Republican voters mindlessly following the commands of radio entertainers and crossing party lines to vote for the candidate they view as...