Shrillary and Billary Double Down on Race & Ethnic Cards

Arianna Huffington answers the question about Hillary's new campaign chair Maggie Williams by pointing out the Williams-Johnny Chung connection where Maggie persuaded Chung to cough up money to pay the DNC for money they owed the WH for an Xmas Party!!! Puffington Host Prima Donna AH also reminds readers how, according to a Secret Service officer, Williams helped “clean out” Vince Foster’s office after he allegedly killed himself and before his office could be secured by law enforcement. Maggie is a woman of color who will succeed Patti Solis Doyle, an Hispanic/Latina, as campaign manager. Lots of compost for investigative reporters to pitchfork through!!

Ex-Broadway Reviewer Frank Rich comments on the comedy verging on tragicomedy that aptly describes the Dem primary slapstick cavalcade as it marches across the nation on its way to a second Civil War. Rich points out that [Hillary's expensive Hallmark Channel “Voices Across America: A National Town Hall”] looked like it was produced "in Stepford" and that the booooring tightly-scripted canned and planted questions

[were] a dramatic encapsulation of how a once-invincible candidate ended up in a dead heat, crippled by poll-tested corporate packaging that markets her as a synthetic product leeched of most human qualities. What’s more, it offered a naked preview of how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party, in the endgame to come.

For a campaign that began with tightly monitored Web “chats” and then planted questions at its earlier town-hall meetings, a Bush-style pseudo-event like the Hallmark special is nothing new, of course. What’s remarkable is that instead of learning from these mistakes, Mrs. Clinton’s handlers keep doubling down.

Less than two weeks ago she was airlifted into her own, less effective version of “Mission Accomplished.” Instead of declaring faux victory in Iraq, she starred in a made-for-television rally declaring faux victory in a Florida primary that was held in defiance of party rules, involved no campaigning and awarded no delegates. As Andrea Mitchell of NBC News said, it was “the Potemkin village of victory celebrations.”

The Hallmark show, enacted on an anachronistic studio set that looked like a deliberate throwback to the good old days of 1992, was equally desperate. If the point was to generate donations or excitement, the effect was the reverse. A campaign operative, speaking on MSNBC, claimed that 250,000 viewers had seen an online incarnation of the event in addition to “who knows how many” Hallmark channel viewers. Who knows, indeed? What we do know is that by then the “Yes We Can” Obama video fronted by the hip-hop vocalist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas had been averaging roughly a million YouTube views a day. (Cost to the Obama campaign: zero.)

Two days after her town-hall extravaganza, Mrs. Clinton revealed the $5 million loan she had made to her own campaign to survive a month in which the Obama operation had raised $32 million to her $13.5 million. That poignant confession led to a spike in contributions that Mr. Obama also topped. Though Tuesday was largely a draw in popular votes and delegates, every other indicator, from the candidates’ real and virtual crowds to hard cash, points to a steadily widening Obama-Clinton gap. The Clinton campaign might be an imploding Potemkin village itself were it not for the fungible profits from Bill Clinton’s murky post-presidency business deals. (The Clintons, unlike Mr. Obama, have not released their income-tax returns.)

Nor of course, have they revealed the donation list for the ex-POTUS Presidential Library & probably won't "until 2012." Of course, like Maggie, Patti Solis Doyle will have her past investigated, but not by fawning Hillary-idolator Karen Tumulty whose deep insight into the cattery of crones surrounding Hillary is:

The greatest benefit Williams may bring to the Clinton organization is a clarity in decision making. The operation has long functioned much as the UN Security Council does, with everyone in the top spots having an effective veto power over every move. That kind of cautious structure works for the near-incumbent campaign that they originally expected to be running at this point, but not for the long and tough race this has become.

Whew, journalism at its most profound.