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Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder - Marc Ambinder is the White House correspondent for National Journal and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. More

Marc Ambinder is the White House correspondent for National Journal. He previously served as the politics editor, and is now a contributing editor, for The Atlantic, where he curated the influential Politics channel on TheAtlantic.com and contributed to the magazine. He was also a chief political consultant to CBS News. Earlier, at NJ's Hotline, Ambinder was the founding editor of "Hotline On Call," a pathbreaking political news blog. He also worked as a producer and reporter for the ABC News Political Unit and was one of the founders of ABC's "The Note." Born in New York City, raised in Central Florida, Ambinder is a 2001 graduate of Harvard and lives in Washington, D.C.

RNC Memo: Dems In Chaos

By Marc Ambinder
Jun 3 2008, 12:34 PM ET Comment

The Republican National Committee will send out an agenda-setting memo later this afternoon that portrays the Democratic Party in a state of disarray and claims that legions of Hillary Clinton voters are poised to jump to John McCain.

The memo, illustrated by colorful graphics, includes the following assertions:

Nearly 18 million voters in the Democrat Party’s nominating process felt that Obama was not the best candidate to be President. The number of ballots cast against Obama in 2008 exceeds the number of total ballots cast in each of the last four Democrat Presidential primary cycles.


Obama is not wearing well as a candidate and has lost momentum since his high point in February. The more people learn about him and his views, the less they support him. Since March 4, he has lost a majority of primaries to Senator Clinton, including the all-important states of Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and West Virginia. He lost Kentucky by 35 points, West Virginia by 41 points, and suffered a 36-point defeat in Puerto Rico. Were it not for the Democratic proportional system of delegate allocation, these devastating defeats might very well have derailed his nomination.


A recent poll by Pew in May shows that fewer than half (46%) of Clinton supporters expect the Democrat party to “unite solidly behind” Obama – down from 58% in March.


Here's one example graphical example.

memohutte.JPG

No need for me to annotate or comment; the memo speaks for itself. Some of its assertions are quibbleable and others are very debatable, and privately, many Democrats would agree that that "united" is not the best adjective to describe the party right now. That said, the Obama campaign expects to receive a bump from his nomination clinching, and though they do not discount the need to work to gain the support of a large chunk of Sen. Clinton's supporters, they are confident that, by the end of the Democratic National Convention, the party will be more strongly united around Barack Obama than around any previous Democratic nominee.

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