BREAKING: Clinton to Declare She is "Bad at Math"
Fri Feb 22, 2008 at 05:44:08 AM PDT
Clinton Camp Rolls Out New Strategy
In a dramatic, even startling, development in the campaign for the Presidency, CNN has learned that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will use a campaign rally in Cincinnati on Monday to announce that she is "really bad at math" and has "never had much of a head for figures." According to knowledgeable sources in the Clinton campaign, the New York Senator has decided to build on her dismissal of the importance of language by going after numbers as well.
Some have questioned the wisdom of this approach, seeing it as being fundamentally at odds with her image of wonky competence and the decision seems to reflect the ascendancy of the faction within the campaign centered around senior strategist and pollster Mark Penn. One advisor close to the Penn group spoke to CNN about the new direction: "We’ve been running the numbers and found that Senator Clinton’s criticism of Obama’s eloquence is beginning to have an effect. Frankly, a lot of Americans are tiring of it and starting to think that’s he’s just like that kid at the front of the class that always has an answer for everything. Nobody likes a smartypants." According to the advisor, the decisive factor in determining the new direction was the results of the so-called "Urkel poll" conducted for the Clinton campaign by Penn’s polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates. The poll indicated that a whopping 83% of Americans declared that they would "never" vote for Steven Urkel for president. However the most impressive part of this result was that it included 68% of black respondents. Said the Penn advisor: "If we can Urkelize [Illinois Senator Barack] Obama then we can take away his key demographic and this election is over. It’s just that simple. Numbers don’t lie."
Others within the Clinton campaign were aghast. The group surrounding media consultant Mandy Grunwald strenuously opposed the decision. One advisor with that group bluntly called it "the stupidest damned thing I’ve ever heard." He said "it reflects a profound lack of understanding of the campaign that we have been waging up to this time. The Hillary Clinton brand is all about competence. You don’t just stop and start suddenly claiming that she’s bad at math because of the results of one stupid poll. The idea that you’re going to ‘Urkelize’ this man [Obama] is just preposterous. They’re both skinny, black and good at basketball. That’s were it ends. Obama dresses well, dances well and has superlative social skills. How, exactly, is that like Urkel? It just isn’t. It’s just bone-headed. And they call us racially insensitive!"
The last comment was an apparent reference to the cancellation of an ad campaign conceived by the Grunwald group. As explained to CNN, the new commercials would have used the perceived "hipness gap" between the candidates to Clinton’s advantage. "She’s a highly educated white woman in late middle age. She’s not supposed to be hip," said one person close to the development of the commercial. The advertisement would have featured a narrator asking "Is Barack Obama tough enough to be commander-in-chief" while showing a split screen of the Illinois Senator dancing with Ellen DeGeneres juxtaposed against an image of Clinton jerking arrhythmically during a Harlem church service. The narrator would then have said "this is a contest for the presidency of the United States, not Soul Train. Sorry Senator Obama, but tough guys don’t dance." The project was spiked after a focus group deemed it inappropriate and racially insensitive. The Grunwald aide admitted that "it needed tweaking" but insisted that the concept was "basically sound" and would have fit in with their overall narrative of tested leadership and gravitas vs. flighty hipsterism.
Among political experts outside the campaign opinion was mixed. Though some consider it to be a risky move this late in that campaign, many are convinced that New York’s junior senator has tapped into subconscious prejudices that have built up in the minds of the American public over the last several years. "The fact is," University of Virginia political science professor David Rosenberg noted, "that after two terms of President Bush, Americans have grown used to the idea that the commander-in-chief should be a tongue-tied innumerate doofus we’d like to drink a beer with -- I mean if he weren’t such a total booze-hound that he would take one sip and immediately loose control and create a scene that would leave everyone in the bar mortified, you know probably something about how his father didn’t have the guts to finish the Gulf War or something like that. Anyway, I think that Clinton’s math anxiety gambit might just pay off for her."
Others were less sure. Republican pollster Frank Luntz was downright dismissive of the idea. "Bad at math?" he asked mockingly. "No one’s going to believe that. I mean, what, did she get a B+ on a test once or something? Come on. When President Bush whined about ‘fuzzy math’ back in 2000, there was a certain authenticity about him. Most Americans took one look at this guy and just knew he couldn’t count if he was wearing mittens. When he complained about math, there was real feeling in it and people could relate to that. With Hillary? It’s not real. It’s just not going to fly."
When asked if the New York Senator really is bad at math, Penn told CNN that she has "trouble following regression analysis and can’t always appreciate the significance of the raw numbers until they have been explained to her." The senator herself admitted to difficulty with conic sections and analytic geometry. "I know the formulae and all, but there’s just something there I don’t quite get."
One frustrated campaign aide speaking on condition of anonymity said: "She can’t seem to wrap her head around the fact that a blowout in Idaho or Nebraska can cancel out a win in New Jersey or Massachusetts. She didn’t have a plan to deal with the fact that Texas’s delegate apportionment favors African Americans over Latinos and hasn’t yet dealt with the fact that any gain she will make on March 4 will likely be cancelled out and then some by the contests in Mississippi and Wyoming, two more states that are ripe for Obama blowouts. Yeah, I think you can say she’s bad at math, all right."
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