h/t to Renee in Ohio for this one from the Buckeye State Blog.
Let’s recap:
July – October 2007: Clinton whines about the number of debates.
January 31, 2008: The last of the DNC sanctioned Democratic debates finish.
February 1, 2008: Clinton proposes a debate a week with Obama leading up to March 4th.
February 2, 2008: Obama campaign agrees to two debates; one in Texas and one in Ohio.
February 7, 2008: Sen. Clinton gets upset with degrading remark from MSNBCs David Schuster.
February 7, 2008: Clinton campaign says that they just might shun any debates hosted by MSNBC. On the account of her being hurt and offended.
Got it? Good. That leads us to yesterday when Clinton decided that campaigning and doing TV interviews was more important than voting on the FISA bills:
On Tuesday Feb. 12, the Cleveland NBC affiliate asked Hillary if she still plans to attend the February 26th debate at Cleveland State. Hillary tells the Cleveland NBC affiliate, “it’s not a surprise that I’ve been very troubled by the behavior of that particular network…” She never commits as the Cleveland anchor begs her to honor her previous commitment and come to our fair city.
The Youngstown NBC affiliate… SAME NETWORK, the same day… speaks to Hillary from the same room. I’d guess it all goes down within the same hour. Hillary tells the Youngstown NBC affiliate how much she’d love to do a debate on NBC in Youngstown. “I will accept right now.” When asked about the Cleveland State debate by the Youngstown NBC affiliate, Hillary responds “I have said I will participate in every debate.”
Go on over to Buckeye State Blog. They have video of both interviews. They also have supposition on why this was done:
Now why would Hillary tell one NBC affiliate one thing and another NBC affiliate – about 75 miles away, the same day – the exact opposite twice? It’s about African American turnout, baby.
[big snip]
So, David Shuster’s one regrettable, unfortunate remark becomes Hillary Clinton’s “get out of jail free card” to avoid Cuyahoga County, Cleveland, and the state’s largest black population.
I won’t pretend to know anything about Ohio. I do know that Buckeye State Blog is one of the best state blogs in the country.
At the very least, it should be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming weeks.
The ELECTION ‘08: Clinton debate drama by Anika Malone, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Tags: Hillary Clinton