Members of Hillary Clinton's advance staff received calls and emails this evening from headquarters summoning them to New York City Tuesday night, and telling them their roles on the campaign are ending ...
The advance staffers -- most of them now in Puerto Rico, South Dakota, and Montana -- are being given the options of going to New York for a final day Tuesday, or going home, the aides said. The move is a sign that the campaign is beginning to shed -- at least -- some of its staff.
That news comes from Ben Smith at Politico early this morning. Maybe it's more than a coincidence that the originator of the pants suit for women, Yves Saint-Laurent, went to meet the great designer in the sky last night.
But don't get too excited: NPR is reporting Clinton plans to battle on; and the script has been written by a "West Wing" writer for a bloody fight in Denver (h/t Andrew Sullivan).
Not exactly irrelevant to all this is the sidelining of Rush Limbaugh. More and more conservatives seem to want to distance themselves from him. His silly (and really almost criminal) effort to skew votes during the Democratic primaries was embarrassing to many.
We're going to have to deal, now, with Drudge's apparent emergence from the Republican miasma. Elsewhere in Politico, Ben Smith and colleague Jonathan Martin write:
... As Obama and Senator John McCain look toward the fall, Drudge has emerged unexpectedly as more of a threat to the Republican than to the Democrat. This, combined with the rise of left-leaning sites such as Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post—both of which have proven effective in promoting and amplifying a Democratic message—reflects a major shift from the last two presidential elections, a matter of open alarm to Republican strategists and surprised satisfaction to Democrats. ...Drudge himself is reviled by many on the left, but his news instincts are undeniable—and he has an uncanny ability to drive the national conversation with what he chooses to highlight on his site. Now, while his links tend to stress the energy and scale of the Obama phenomenon, he has emphasized a particularly damaging aspect of McCain’s candidacy: His age.
... Drudge almost single-handedly elevated Clinton’s reference to Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination into a campaign crisis and helped fuel her demise by leading with a YouTube link of the declaration by NBC’s Tim Russert following the Indiana and North Carolina primaries that the Democratic nominee had been chosen.
The Clinton campaign at one time attempted to establish a relationship with Drudge, to little avail. The site has been energetically ushering her offstage and even Clinton's victory in Puerto Rico Sunday won only another gloomy headline: "THE END."
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