Playing to Win

Two Against The One
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

In the dead of night in a small hideaway office in the deserted Capitol, a clandestine meeting takes place between two senators with one goal.

They grin at each other as they lift their celebratory shots of brutally cold Stolichnaya.

“Our toast to The One,” they say in unison, “is that he’s toast.”

“Obama should have picked you, Hillary,” John McCain tells her. “It isn’t fair, my friend. But it just makes it easier for me to whup him.”

“Don’t worry, John, I’ve put it behind me,” Hillary replies. “I’m looking toward the future now, a future that looks very bright, once we send Twig Legs back to the back bench.”

They chortle with delight.

“He’s a bright young man, but he got ahead of himself,” McCain says. “He needs to be taught a lesson, and we’re the ones to do it. Have you seen the new Bloomberg poll? Obama’s dropped and we’re even again. The Bullet’s getting all the credit, but you and I know, Hillary, that it’s these top-secret counseling sessions we’re having. And thanks again for BlackBerrying me the Rick Warren questions while I was in the so-called cone of silence.”

“Oh, John, you know I love you and I’m happy to help,” Hillary says. “The themes you took from me are working great — painting Obama as an elitist and out-of-touch celebrity, when we’re rich celebrities, too. Turning his big rallies and pretty words into character flaws, charging him with playing the race card — that one always cracks me up. And accusing the media, especially NBC, of playing favorites. It’s easy to get the stupid press to navel-gaze; they’re so insecure.”

“They’re all pinko Commies,” McCain laughs. “Especially since they deserted me for The Messiah. Seriously, Hill, that Paris-Britney ad you came up with was brilliant. I owe you.”

Looking pleased, Hillary expertly downs another shot. “His secret fear is being seen as a dumb blonde,” she says. “He wants to take a short cut to the top and pose on glossy magazine covers, but he doesn’t want to be seen as a glib pretty boy.”

McCain lifts his glass to her admiringly. “If I do say so myself, while the rookie was surfing in Hawaii, I ate his pupus for lunch. Pictures of him pushing around a golf ball while I’m pushing around Putin. Priceless.”

“I have a little secret to tell you about that, John. Bill made it happen. He loves you so much. He called Putin and told him that if he invaded Georgia, he could count on being invited to the Clinton Global Initiative every year for the rest of his life.”

“Wow. Should I call him? I saw your husband’s kind words about me in Las Vegas on Monday, saying I’d be just as good as Obama on climate change.”

“I think he’d like that,” Hillary smiles. “He’s still boiling at Obama. And you don’t have to worry about my army of angry women. We’ve spread the word in the feminist underground — as opposed to that wacky Obama Weather Underground — that ‘catharsis’ is code for ‘No surrender.’ My gals know when I say ‘We may have started on two separate paths but we’re on one journey now’ that Skinny’s journey is to the nearest exit.”

“But Obama’s says he’s finally ready to hit back,” McCain says, frowning. “He’s starting a blistering TV campaign and attacking me for attacking his patriotism.”

“Now, John, you know that every time he tries to get tough, he quickly runs out of gas. Sometimes in debates, he’d be exhausted by the third question. He must use up all his energy in the gym. He doesn’t have any stamina, and he certainly doesn’t have our bloodlust. Besides, you can throw that Mark Penn stuff at him that I couldn’t use in a Democratic primary about how he’s not fundamentally American in his thinking and values. While he’s up on his high-minded pedestal, you’ll scoot past him in your Ferragamos.”

“How can I ever thank you, my friend?”

“You can announce that you won’t be running for re-election because you’d be 76, and you can pick somebody really lame to run with, like your pal Lieberman. That means one term for you, and two for me.”

“It’s a deal,” McCain says, sticking out his hand to shake on it. “That was inspired to snatch his convention away — makes him look so weak. Listen, why don’t you stop in Sedona on the way to Denver? Wear a black wig and I’ll spirit you up to the cabin for the night. I’ll catch a catfish in the mill pond and grill it for you. It will be an adventure.” There’s a knock on the door. Jesse Jackson sticks his head into the meeting.

I am very surprise that Democrats didn't notice McCain saying he would hunt Been Forgotten where ever he goes. Just like Bu$h said it.

McCain has also attacked Barack Obama for saying he would capture or kill Been Forgotten in Pakistan without their permission.

What would repugs do with this?

Here is a link to my blog called, "The Politico Insider."

URL Changed.
http://thepoliticoinsider.blogspot.com/

III. The Use of Spies

1. Sun Tzu said: Raising a host of a hundred thousand men and marching them great distances entails heavy loss on the people and a drain on the resources of the State. The daily expenditure will amount to a thousand ounces of silver. There will be commotion at home and abroad, and men will drop down exhausted on the highways. As many as seven hundred thousand families will be impeded in their labor.

2. Hostile armies may face each other for years, striving for the victory which is decided in a single day. This being so, to remain in ignorance of the enemy's condition simply because one grudges the outlay of a hundred ounces of silver in honors and emoluments, is the height of inhumanity.

3. One who acts thus is no leader of men, no present help to his sovereign, no master of victory.

4. Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.

5. Now this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation.

6. Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men.

7. Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: (1) Local spies; (2) inward spies; (3) converted spies; (4) doomed spies; (5) surviving spies.

8. When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system. This is called "divine manipulation of the threads." It is the sovereign's most precious faculty.

9. Having local spies means employing the services of the inhabitants of a district.

10. Having inward spies, making use of officials of the enemy.

11. Having converted spies, getting hold of the enemy's spies and using them for our own purposes.

12. Having doomed spies, doing certain things openly for purposes of deception, and allowing our spies to know of them and report them to the enemy.

13. Surviving spies, finally, are those who bring back news from the enemy's camp.

14. Hence it is that which none in the whole army are more intimate relations to be maintained than with spies. None should be more liberally rewarded. In no other business should greater secrecy be preserved.

15. Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity.

16. They cannot be properly managed without benevolence and straightforwardness.

17. Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports.

18. Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of business.

19. If a secret piece of news is divulged by a spy before the time is ripe, he must be put to death together with the man to whom the secret was told.

20. Whether the object be to crush an army, to storm a city, or to assassinate an individual, it is always necessary to begin by finding out the names of the attendants, the aides-de-camp, and door-keepers and sentries of the general in command. Our spies must be commissioned to ascertain these.

21. The enemy's spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out, tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed. Thus they will become converted spies and available for our service.

22. It is through the information brought by the converted spy that we are able to acquire and employ local and inward spies.

23. It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.

24. Lastly, it is by his information that the surviving spy can be used on appointed occasions.

25. The end and aim of spying in all its five varieties is knowledge of the enemy; and this knowledge can only be derived, in the first instance, from the converted spy. Hence it is essential that the converted spy be treated with the utmost liberality.

26. Of old, the rise of the Yin dynasty was due to I Chih who had served under the Hsia. Likewise, the rise of the Chou dynasty was due to Lu Ya who had served under the Yin.

27. Hence it is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for purposes of spying and thereby they achieve great results. Spies are a most important element in water, because on them depends an army's ability to move.

Here is a link to my blog called, "The Politico Insider."

URL Changed.
http://thepoliticoinsider.blogspot.com/

Super Boom!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hVeWZjB8zM

Here is a link to my blog called, "The Politico Insider."

http://thepoliticolinsider.blogspot.com/

THE STATEMENT THAT THE FED. RESERVE CHAIRMAN MADE ABOUT WHY THE PRICE OF OIL DROPPED IS PROOF THAT CREATING WAYS TO GET MORE MILES PER GALLON (HYBRID CARS) MAKE SENSE.

REPUGS WANT TO TAKE THE CHAIRMANS STATEMENT & TURN IT ON ITS HEAD BY SPINNING & INDULGING IN PROPAGANDA.

MOST OF THE CONSERVATIVES ARE ACTING & SOUNDING LIKE THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN SUPPORTERS OF ALTERNATIVE ENERGY; CONSERVATIVES HAVE BEEN SERIOUSLY ATTACKING ALTERNATIVE ENERGY FOR OVER 18 YEARS.

Pelosi Statement on Today's Record Drop in Oil Prices

Last update: 9:18 p.m. EDT July 15, 2008
WASHINGTON, July 15, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi released the following statement this evening on the record drop in oil prices today -- the largest drop in 17 years:

"Today, the price of oil per barrel dropped $6.44 in one day -- the second highest one-day drop in history -- when the Federal Reserve Chairman predicted lower U.S. oil consumption. The biggest drop in history came 17 years ago, when President George H.W. Bush released oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in 1991 and the price per barrel dropped 34 percent in one day.

"President Bush tells us that there are no quick fixes -- but history proves otherwise. President Bush should free our oil by releasing a small amount of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and bring the price down further. Obstinance does nothing to help Americans struggling with record gas prices and a host of economic concerns."
SOURCE Office of the Speaker of the House

Copyright (C) 2008 PR Newswire. All rights res

Here is a link to my blog called, "The Politico Insider."

http://thepoliticolinsider.blogspot.com/

Black Cell: The term "fly over country" is popular to repugs. They tell their supporters who live in fly over country that liberals don't value them. It is one of the reasons average republicans cling to the Faux News.

Small-state plan pays dividends for Obama
Caucus wins helped fuel delegate lead

By Sasha Issenberg, Globe Staff | May 4, 2008

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - Last July, as Barack Obama's campaign began considering how to allocate resources among the two dozen states that would vote on Feb. 5, Jon Carson realized that some of the biggest gains could come from the smallest states.

Idaho, for instance, would have one caucus site in each of its 44 counties - which made a trip to a polling place so burdensome in 2004 that only a few thousand people bothered to vote. A campaign that was able to identify its supporters and move them across long, often mountainous, distances could overwhelm the caucuses and take a large share of the 18 available delegates.
Obama's national voter-contact director.

Seven months later, it did, as Obama won the state by a margin rarely seen outside autocracies. Obama carried Idaho with 80 percent of the vote against Hillary Clinton; in Kansas, where caucuses were held in each of the 40 state Senate districts, Obama won 74 percent. Because the states allocated delegates on a proportional basis, Obama left Idaho with a net gain of 12 delegates and Kansas with 14. That same day, Clinton won New Jersey's primary by 10 points, but earned only 11 more delegates there than Obama.

Obama's commitment to the votes of small states the week of Feb. 5 - the culmination of months of largely unrivaled attention to those states - has come to define the race. In the week's 10 caucuses alone, Obama tallied more than twice as many delegates as Clinton, a net gain of 113 delegates that Clinton is still trying, vainly, to overcome.

"That's really the heart of his advantage," said Tad Devine, a delegate strategist for Michael S. Dukakis in 1988. "In a system of proportional representation, if you get ahead in elected delegates, it's almost impossible for the trailing candidate to catch up."

As Obama confronts his first prolonged downturn of the campaign - with a sequence of major primary losses to Clinton, a shrinking popular-vote margin, and new skepticism about his general-election viability - he continues to guard the slender but apparently insurmountable lead in pledged delegates accrued with wins in early February. Now up to 154 delegates, according to Associated Press estimates, Obama's advantage continues to set the terms of negotiation for the support of superdelegates who will be essential to either candidate's nomination.

"If the votes of the superdelegates overturn what's happened in the elections, it would be harmful to the Democratic Party," House speaker Nancy Pelosi told ABC in March.

What has now become a structural advantage for Obama had its roots as a tactical gambit conceived over a series of meetings last June at his Chicago headquarters. At the time, the Democratic primary calendar was just beginning to take form, and a number of states moved up their primaries and caucuses to Feb. 5, the earliest date permitted by new party rules. That day, nearly half the total number of elected convention delegates would be up for grabs, creating a broader - and potentially more expensive - playing field than many campaigns face in a general election.

Clinton's campaign approached the day as an insurmountable hurdle for Obama and former senator John Edwards, assuming that only a nationally established candidate could have the stature and resources to compete in a de-facto national primary.

"They thought they would win enough early support in the early states and on Super Tuesday to convince other candidates to drop out," said Barbara Norrander, a University of Arizona political scientist who specializes in presidential primaries.

Obama, however, had already begun looking past the early states whose votes were the primary focus of attention of the media and the campaigns. "We were relatively sure that the first four contests - Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada - would not end the race, and that it would go on to Feb. 5 and probably beyond that," said Steve Hildebrand, a deputy campaign manager.

If Obama passed that threshold, he would probably enter a long race that would be determined not by attrition but by arithmetic. "Right from the start, they said this is a race for delegates," said Gordon Fischer, a former Iowa party chairman who endorsed Obama. "Even before I came onboard, I heard that."

Obama's campaign divided the Feb. 5 states into three categories: primaries like Illinois and Georgia they expected to win; those like New York and New Jersey where Clinton would be strong but Obama could work to minimize her delegate advantage; and the caucuses, the most demanding to organize but where Obama's appeal to party activists offered him a potential base of support.

"Our hope at that point was that we would have enough money to fully compete in all those states," said Hildebrand. "We just didn't know how our fund-raising would go. It was a little bit of a leap of faith."

In early June, the campaign used a "Walk for Change," a nationwide day of canvassing, to test its strength among activists and volunteers - assigning extra canvassers to Feb. 5 states to gauge Obama's potential in each.

"What we knew was that in caucus states you can't go in 30 and 60 days out [from the caucus day] and expect to be able to compete," said Hildebrand. By September, Obama had begun opening offices and assigning staff to many of them.

"I was slightly surprised and intrigued by their willingness to do it," said Wayne Holland, the Democratic party chairman in Utah, a primary state where Obama eventually had three offices. "We've never had even one single presidential campaign set up shop for a long time in Utah."

By the end of 2007, both Clinton and Obama had raised nearly equal sums of money, around $100 million each. "What differentiated the two campaigns was the nature of the investments each of the campaigns made," said Alan Solomont, Obama's Northeast finance chairman.

After Obama won Iowa and Clinton won New Hampshire, Obama sent his well-regarded Iowa field director, Anne Filipic, to Utah, which he eventually won by a margin of 58 to 42 percent, earning five more delegates than Clinton. "Without the resources they put in to the field organization in January, it would not have been" such a decisive margin, said Holland, a superdelegate who later endorsed Obama.

Obama's commitment to small states came often at the expense of large ones, where candidates had traditionally sought strong performances to generate national momentum and demonstrate strength to party elites, fund-raisers, and the media.

"The Obama people could have spent more money in California on television and reduced the margin here a little more, but they didn't see the delegate gains they would get out of that," said William Carrick, a Los Angeles consultant not working for a candidate.

And Obama was already making a concerted effort to nudge the media to focus on the delegate race. When early news reports after Nevada's caucuses on Jan. 19 declared Clinton the winner based on the statewide popular vote, Obama's campaign hastily called reporters to claim victory after it became clear he would emerge with more delegates, 13 to 12.

"It was a very smart move to work so aggressively to get the media to recognize that," said Devine. "In retrospect, that one delegate was a big one."

Clinton and Obama split the Feb. 5 delegates almost evenly, and his campaign expected to end the primary season with 1,806 delegates to 1,789, according to an internal campaign projection obtained by Bloomberg News. The next morning, Obama announced that whoever won the most pledged delegates should be the presumed nominee.

"If this contest comes down to superdelegates, we are going to be able to say we have more pledged delegates, which means the Democratic voters have spoken," Obama said.

A week later, Clinton dismissed Obama's small-state victories as irrelevant to the general election. "Unless there's a tsunami change in America, [Democrats] are never going to carry Alaska, North Dakota, Idaho," she told the Politico, a Washington news organization, in mid-February.

She has continued making that argument to the party's superdelegates - that the states she has won prove her to be a stronger nominee even if they yielded fewer elected delegates - while Obama has maintained his numerical advantage and moved closer to the nomination.

"Obama did it the old-fashioned way," said Donna Brazile, a strategist and uncommitted superdelegate. "He went everywhere to pick up anything available."

live free or die trying!

Watching the faux news Sunday contributors trying to influence Barack Obama to play their game was like watching a snake trying to trick the mongoose into its nest.

I later watched a tape of Obama playing their game, talking about how he would fight for them & I said to myself, "When the snakes get the mongoose in their nest they are going to prove to the world that this guy has only one thing on his mind... winning at all cost! "

They are slowly laying the foundation so they can say that Obama is just a smile filled with manipulative rhetoric.

Obama's Clinton-problem
by smintheus
Mon Apr 28, 2008 at 07:35:05 AM PDT

Barack Obama missed an opportunity yesterday when he was interviewed on Fox News Sunday. Whether or not it's advisable to agree to appear on Fox, it's certainly a mistake and a disfavor to Democrats to treat the network as if it's a normal, that is legitimate, news venue. Fox is a Republican propaganda outlet that aspires to be granted a respectability it refuses to earn. More to the point, Fox has been down in the dirt spreading malicious and false rumors about Obama for well over a year...for example, the ridiculous and anyway irrelevant "information" that the presidential candidate is a Muslim.

The right approach to an interview on Fox, if Obama really thought it acceptable to reward rumor-mongerers, would have been to use the appearance to denounce the network's lack of integrity, enumerate the lies it has propagated, and demand that Chris Wallace acknowledge that they're false. That's how one deals with bullying, by publicly humiliating the perpetrators - and Murdoch's network is nothing if not a Republican bully-boy.

Trying to persuade a Fox "News" personality that he's reasonable and moderate is just about the last thing Barack Obama should have been doing on that of all networks. Aside from Republican fanatics, who will always insist that the Democratic nominee shares every malign view and every reprehensible trait of every friend, associate, and neighbor, the rest of America has already figured out that Obama is fairly temperate, thoughtful, and likeable personally.

So why in the world, when Chris Wallace raised the topic of Reverend Wright over and over again, did Obama feel the need to assure him that it's a "legitimate political issue"? Even Wallace latered admitted that it's a distraction "from the real issues"! It's nonsense to link the two men's views; it has nothing to do with the future of the US; American voters don't seem to think Obama needs to justify Wright's comments; and in any case questions about his Christian church directly contradict the Muslim myth that Fox has been spreading with abandon. This is where the candidate, if he'd had his wits about him, should have picked up the club and whacked such a hole in the great wall of stupidity erected by Fox "News" that the sun shone on through. Instead, Obama conversed in the sweet voice of reason, portraying himself as a centrist who is passionate about nothing so much as political compromise.

That in a nutshell also is Obama's Clinton-problem. Unlike many commentators, I don't fear that the prolonged primary battle and the shrillness of the attacks leveled by the Clinton camp are doing lasting damage to Obama's reputation. Voters tend to discount desperate political charges, if they even are paying attention at this stage. Vague and silly attacks have a half life of a few days during a spring primary. Nor does it matter in the end that more and more pundits, ignoring the delegate math, are speculating that Clinton can retrieve her lost chances or take the nomination-battle as far as the convention. There are only three kinds of pundits: Those who can count, and those who can't.

No, Obama's Clinton-problem stems from the fact that he is well and pretty safely ahead in this contest and has been for a long time. His strategy for a few months has been to avoid stumbling and to run an unobjectionable, unifying campaign. He recognizes that he needs to avoid antagonizing the substantial minority of Democrats who've backed Hillary Clinton, in order to bring the party together as quickly as possible once the nomination is clinched. That means that he's chosen to pull many of his own punches while allowing himself to be used as a punching bag by the Clinton camp. It takes stomach to rise above the fray like that, especially in the kind of scrap this has become the longer Obama remains in the lead.

The sort of voter who admires moderation and quiet determination will be drawn to that kind of campaign. But many voters are looking for something else, or more, than purposefulness. They're looking for backbone in a president. And Obama's campaign, no doubt unintentionally, is sending the wrong signals to such voters now. I'm not suggesting that Obama lacks backbone. I've seen no evidence that he does; if anything there are hints that the opposite is the case. But at the moment there appear to be many voters who misread him in that way.

The point was brought home to me forcefully this week while I talked about the candidates with voters in the politcally moderate Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. I was looking to gauge emotional reactions toward the candidates so I asked people to tell me what they thought their greatest strengths and weaknesses would be as potential presidents.

Few had any clear or coherent ideas about John McCain, but the opposite was true of their impressions of Hillary Clinton. Her backers and even most of her critics kept offering the same word to describe her most positive attribute: "strong". I believe that idea was underlined by the attacking strategy she's employed against Obama; Clinton has given voters the impression, whether they like her or hate her, that she has backbone.

The people I spoke to used other adjectives to describe Obama's positive qualities: "calm", "determined", "moderate", "intelligent". None of that was very surprising, except nobody offered "strong" or any synonym. One dyed-in-the-wool Democrat working at a feed store told me that Clinton had "pushed around" Obama at the Philadelphia debate. Several other Democrats expressed similar ideas about Clinton's "toughness" and her refusal to let others push her around, while expressing various degrees of skepticism whether Obama has what it takes.

In any case, by far the most common negative attribute used to describe Obama is "inexperienced". It's rather an anodyne term that, whatever its descriptive value, never really attached in the past to other genuinely inexperienced candidates: not to George W. Bush in 2000 (though he was vastly less experienced than Obama in both national and international matters) nor to Bill Clinton in 1992, nor Reagan in 1980, nor... "Inexperience" has a purchase for now on Obama's public image at least in part, I'd say, because of public uncertainty about whether he has a forceful personality (something that those other outsider/change candidates clearly did project).

That is Obama's real Clinton-problem. In wanting to be seen to take the higher ground, in turning aside attacks (some of them quite outlandish) rather than responding in kind, Obama risks giving a certain part of the electorate the impression that he won't ever fight back. That's why his appearance on Fox "News" was a great opportunity missed. He needs a political fight. No, not a fight with a Democratic blog for goodness sakes. Obama needs to humble one of his political tormenters very visibly. Many good Democrats are still uncertain whether the candidate of compromise and bipartisanship has the backbone to fight for them if they send him to the White House. Obama needs to make clear to such voters once and for all that if push comes to shove he won't take guff from anybody.

And I won't pretend for a moment that demonstrating backbone is anything other than a foolish rite of passage for presidential candidates.

live free or die trying!

I find it fascinating that I am suppose to hate a pastor who has used God to kill no one & ignore the president whom has used God to promote the killing of thousands of innocent Iraqi's.

It is now time to play political chess in red states using our white pieces.

Sometimes you have to get in the sewer with the rats in order to defeat them.

Houston super delegate switches support to Obama

© 2008 The Associated Press
TOOLS
Email

Get section feed
Print

Subscribe NOW
Comments (8)

Recommend

AUSTIN — Democratic superdelegate and state Rep. Senfronia Thompson, of Houston, defected from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign Wednesday and joined a growing list of superdelegates to endorse Sen. Barack Obama for president, according to his campaign.

"I'm honored to have earned the support of Representative Thompson and am pleased that she'll play an important role in advancing our grassroots movement for change in Houston and across Texas," Obama said in a statement. "Throughout her three decades in the Legislature, she's been a tireless advocate for working families and when I'm president we'll work together to put the American dream within reach of every child in Texas and across our country."

Thompson, one of the longest serving Democrats in the state House, is one of the party insiders who, as a superdelegate, help choose the Democratic nominee at the national convention this summer in Denver.

Her defection was the second loss of the day for Clinton: Civil rights leader and Atlanta congressman John Lewis, a Democratic congressman from Atlanta, is the most prominent black leader to defect from Clinton's campaign in the face of recent near-unanimous black support for Obama.

Obama has won 11 straight primaries and caucuses since Super Tuesday, increased his advantage in the all-important delegate count and has attracted the support of his congressional colleagues.

In recent weeks, more than two dozen superdelegates have climbed aboard Obama's campaign.

Dems Now Favored in Key Illinois House Race, as GOP Nominee Quits
By Greg Giroux, CQ Staff

House Republican campaign officials — already hindered by a big disadvantage in the number of “open” seats they have to defend this year — suffered a blow Friday in their efforts to hold one that already was particularly vulnerable to Democratic takeover. The GOP now faces an emergency recruiting job in Illinois’ politically competitive 11th District after local officeholder Tim Baldermann, the winner of a competitive primary just two and a half weeks earlier, unexpectedly declined the nomination.

In light of Baldermann’s withdrawal, CQ Politics has changed its rating on the Illinois 11 race to Democrat Favored from No Clear Favorite.

Baldermann’s dropout — which he attributed to the problems he faced juggling the responsibilities of his local positions with an intense campaign for Congress — is a setback to the Republican Party’s already uncertain efforts to retain control of the district. The Democrats are fielding state Sen. Debbie Halvorson, one of their strongest open-seat candidates in this year’s House elections.

Halvorson is running to succeed retiring seven-term Rep. Jerry Weller . He is one of 24 House Republicans who are either voluntarily retiring or running for other offices, compared with just five Democrats who have voluntarily left their seats open.

The Republicans do have the opportunity, though, to make a more competitive contest out of it by November — if they can persuade a strong candidate to make a prompt decision to enter the race. That is because Illinois law allows party officials plenty of leeway to replace nominees who drop out after winning primary contests. Republican officials have until early April to select a new candidate.

Though the 11th District, a mix of urban, suburban and rural areas south and west of Chicago, isn’t exactly a Republican stronghold, it has enough of a GOP lean that the party’s planners will strongly resist the idea of just surrendering it to the Democrats. President Bush took 53 percent of the district’s votes in the 2004 election. Although Weller slipped a bit to 55 percent in his 2006 contest, he generally won his races by more comfortable margins.

Finding a new, strong candidate from scratch this late in the campaign may be difficult for the Republicans, though, especially since Halvorson has a sizable head start on fundraising and could benefit from the increased possibility that the presidential candidate at the top of the Democratic ticket may be Illinois Sen. Barack Obama .

It is possible that GOP officials will consider one of the two Republicans who also ran in the Feb. 5 11th District primary: Terry Heenan, an airline pilot, and Jimmy Lee, a former executive director of the White House Initiative for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. But both lost decisively to Baldermann in the primary.

According to the Web site of the Herald News in Joliet, Ill., Baldermann said in a statement that he could not balance a congressional campaign with his responsibilities as the mayor of New Lenox, a suburb 35 miles southwest of Chicago, and as the chief of police in the community of Chicago Ridge.

“I have reached the conclusion that I cannot ably serve the citizens of those two municipalities while also running a full-time campaign for Congress,” Baldermann said.

Baldermann also badly lagged Halvorson in campaign fundraising, a process he publicly admitted to loathing. Through Jan. 16, the latest date for which official figures are available, Baldermann reported raising just $104,000. That was less than one-fourth of the $428,000 in total receipts reported by Halvorson.

Halvorson had an even wider advantage in campaign cash on hand — $394,000 to $50,000 — because she was unopposed for the Democratic nomination while Baldermann had to spend money on his primary campaign.

For the moment, Halvorson’s only remaining opponent for the November ballot is Jason Wallace, the Green Party nominee.

Hillary Supporters, don't Shrillary convince you into buying into her sour grapes.