What Worries Me Most About Clinton: That she may not have the intellectual capacity to discern even critically important distinctions. Including glaring ones.
Update appended, 6/13 at 12:42 p.m.
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“It should not take longer to start a business in America than it does in Canada or France. But that is the fact.”
— Hillary Clinton, during a small business discussion, Cedar Falls, Iowa, May 19, 2015
Our antenna always goes up when a politician asserts a “fact.” Clinton made this remark in the midst of a discussion about the “perfect storm of crisis” that she said small businesses face in the United States.
She made a similar point in an article she posted on LinkedIn on May 21, but with an additional country added: “It should not take longer to start a business in the U.S. than it does in Canada, Korea, or France.”
— Clinton’s claim that it takes longer to start a business in the U.S. than in Canada or France, Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, May 22
My own antenna always goes up when I hear a politician assert as fact a generic statement that is intended to imply what I know is a falsity or that patently makes no sense. In this instance, it was both, and, stunningly, was intended to imply a false fact that supports a key line in the Republican playbook: that federal regulation is keeping middle-class folks from starting or expanding a small business.
Marco Rubio claimed something similar in April—to which Martin O’Malley famously responded, when asked about it in an interview, “It is not true that regulation holds poor people down or regulation keeps the middle class from advancing. That’s kind of patently bulls—.” And Jeb Bush hinted at it a couple of months earlier.
When I read about Clinton’s statements before I read Kessler’s post (I didn’t see the post until about a week after it was posted), I was absolutely dumbfounded. As Kessler notes, Clinton complains about “red tape” in starting small businesses and says that the length of time in starting a business, caused by red tape, keeps people from starting businesses. The claim startled me; most red tape in starting businesses is state and local red tape, not federal, and the amount and type of red tape depends almost entirely upon the type of business and factors such as whether it requires a trade license of some sort (e.g., beautician), or a liquor license, and whether a permit of some sort must be obtained.
Opening a restaurant, for example, requires local health department permits and adherence to health department rules. It also requires procuring a physical space in which to have the restaurant, and usually also means obtaining a business loan. Starting a home-based web-design business requires none of those things. The incorporation process involves filing a short filled-out form with the state Secretary of State’s office and paying a fee.
Clinton doesn’t know these things? Really?
So the generic breadth of her statement was stupefying. She holds a law degree from Yale, was a partner in a corporate law firm, an active First Lady of a state and then of the country. Did she really not know that most red tape in starting a business does not touch upon anything that the federal government regulates? Or did she have something accurate and specific in mind, but rather than identifying it, indulged her penchant for talking in incoherencies apparently in order to avoid ever saying anything specific about, well, anything?
Kessler’s post answered that question. She did indeed have something specific in question: average statistics for businesses that employ between 10 and 50 people within one month, having five owners, using start-up capital equivalent to 10 times income per capita and being engaged in industrial or commercial activities and owning no real estate. In Los Angeles, where it takes an average of eight days to start such a business. Whereas in Paris it takes only 4.5 days and in Toronto five days. In New York City, though, it takes only four days.
Clinton lives near New York City and represented New York state as a senator. She knows that New York City is in this country.
This information was taken from the World Bank website, which, Kessler says, provides statistics that “lets you compare the individual cities to countries, so New York ends up tied for 6th place — with Belgium, Iceland, South Korea, the Netherlands and Sao Tome.” Los Angeles, he says, is in 15th place, tied with Cyprus, Egypt, Madagascar and the Kyrgyz Republic, among others. Oh, dear. But he points to another World Bank report that notes that “the differences are so large because, in the United States, ‘company law is under state jurisdiction and there are measurable differences between the California and New York company law.’”
I knew that! I should run for president in the Democratic primary. Every small-business owner and aspiring small-business owner knows that, so I’d have a natural constituency. And I have the advantage of actually recognizing problems that do affect many small businesses and that the federal government can address, by regulation. Including ones that recent Democratic congresses, together with a Democratic president, actually enacted.
Kessler comments, “So what does data about starting a business in the largest city have to do with small businesses in Iowa? Beats us.” It surely also beats small-business owners and people who are seriously considering becoming one. Including those who are fairly recent immigrants to this country and who don’t hold a law degree from Yale.
Kessler notes that even if Clinton were accurate in her claim that it takes longer, on average, throughout this country than in the other countries she mentioned to start small businesses generally, the difference would be a matter of a day or two. He writes:
The World Bank’s database lists 189 countries in terms of the time required to start a business. For 2014, in first place is New Zealand, with one day. In France and Canada, along with eight other countries, it takes five days. (South Korea, along with six other countries, is listed as four days.) The United States, with 12 other countries, is listed as six days.
First of all, one extra day does not seem like much of a hindrance — so much so that, as Clinton asserted in the LinkedIn article, the fact signified the “red tape that holds back small businesses and entrepreneurs.”
This is crazy. What, pray tell, is her point? To show that she’s too dumb to recognize distinctions between state and federal regulation, and between one type of small business and another? If you’ve seen one small business, you’ve seen ‘em all? And if you’ve seen state or local regulation, you’ve seen federal regulation?
Elsewhere in her LinkedIn letter she says that it takes longer to complete small-business federal tax forms than it is to complete multi-national corporations’ federal tax forms. Maybe so, but is that because the multi-nationals keep PricewaterhouseCoopers or Deloitte on retainer and the owners of the Thai food restaurant down the road probably don’t? She doesn’t say. She thinks the ultimate in clever political rhetoric is to make some dramatic comparison; the accuracy and even the coherence of the comparison doesn’t matter to her.
Clinton does this conflation/sweeping-two-or-more-things-together-that-need-to-be-recognizated-as-separate-things thing regularly. In her brief comment in Iowa in April in which she said she would support a constitutional amendment, if necessary, to reverse Citizens United and get “unaccountable” money out of politics, she misrepresented that Citizens United bars election laws that would require super PACs to identify their donors, and corporations to report the recipients of their political largesse. It doesn’t. No constitutional amendment is needed to permit such statutes and SEC, IRS and FEC regulations.
I had planned to post on all this earlier but didn’t get around to it. But two articles published in recent days, one in the Washington Post last weekend about the 2008 Clinton campaign’s gift of snow shovels to supporters in Iowa before the caucuses, the other a Washington Post column yesterday by Katrina vanden Heuvel, prompted this post. The snow shovels article, by David Fahrenthold, begins:
AMES, Iowa — In Phyllis Peters’s garage, there is a snow shovel. A nice one: green, shiny, with an ergonomic steel handle. It came from Hillary Rodham Clinton.
And it plays a part in a modern-day political legend, about some of the strangest money a candidate has ever spent.
Eight years ago, Peters was a volunteer for Clinton’s first presidential run. She had been an admirer of Clinton since her time as first lady. But just before Clinton lost the Iowa caucuses, her staffers did something odd: They bought shovels for Peters and the hundreds of other volunteers.
“If you’re in Iowa, you [already] have a snow shovel,” the article quotes Peters as saying. But she accepted the gift so as not to be rude. “For both those who gave out the shovels and those who received them,” the article says, “they came to symbolize a candidate who never quite got their home state.”
Clinton grew up in a suburb of Chicago, then spent four winters in Wellesley, MA. That was decades ago. But, geeez. She didn’t get cold-climate folks?
Vanden Heuvel’s column, titled “A new definition of freedom in America,” argues that the term “freedom” has had different meanings in different political eras, and that it’s imperative now that the Democratic presidential nominee, presumably Clinton, move aggressively away from the Conservative Movement definition of freedom as economic laisse faire, and reinstitute and expand upon FDR’s famous Four Freedoms. She writes:
This is Hillary Clinton’s historic opportunity. The greatest threat to freedom now is posed by the entrenched few that use their resources and influence to rig the rules to protect their privileges. She would do a great service for the country — and for her own political prospects — by offering a far more expansive American view of what freedom requires, and what threatens it.
Clinton should make it clear to Americans that in a modern, globalized world, we are in the midst of a fierce struggle between economic royalists and a democratic citizenry. If we are to protect our freedoms, citizens must mobilize to take back government from the few, to clean out the corruption and to curb the oppressive power of the modern day economic royalists.
But this requires a candidate who is both mentally quick enough and willing to respond, accurately and in specifics, to the Republican anti-regulation, supply-side-economics nonsense. Clinton doesn’t seem like she has either of these attributes.
Clinton appears to think that all that matters is the generic ideas people have about what she stands for, and a few specific policy proposals all in good time. She’s wrong. She needs to respond, in full oral statements, using clear fact-based arguments, to the anti-government policy cant of the Republican sheep herd, from which her opponent eventually will come. But I don’t think she can.
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ADDENDUM: I posted a comment in response to a comment by Mark Jamison that says in part:
One thing that comes through loud and clear from her attempt to Sister Souljah small-business owners and aspirants, Mark, is that she thinks Democrats NEED a Sister Souljah moment for small-business owners and aspirants. Dick Durbin could educate her on that, simply by referring her to what’s known as the Durbin Amendment.
Another thing that comes across is that, just as she didn’t realize in 2008 that Iowans all have snow shovels, she apparently doesn’t recognize that small-business owners and aspirants want solutions to problems that they actually have, and that that requires knowing the specifics of the problem, including the cause.
I want to make clear that I think the concerns of small-business owners are very much appropriate issues for progressive Democratic politicians to address. And that progressive Democratic elected officials do address them–the Durbin amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act being an example. What Democratic candidates and officeholders should not do is create straw men for them to swat down.
Added. 6/10 at 5:41 p.m.
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UPDATE: Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith yesterday linked to this post (thanks, Yves!), and the link spawned a surprisingly long exchange of comments there, started by reader Carolinian, who noted and linked to a Harpers piece from last year that makes similar or complementary arguments.
Carolinian notes in one of her comments in that thread that Clinton’s campaign is hellbent on getting across the claim that Clinton is a wonk–something that I’d planned to post on here at AB. A day or two after I read the articles about Clinton’s federal-red-tape-is-discouraging-people-from-starting-small-businesses tack, I read two articles, one by Peter Beinart on The Atlantic website (I can’t remember where I read the other, or who wrote it), assuring readers that Clinton is a wonk. I remember thinking, “OK, got it. Clinton is a wonk. It’s just that she’s a wonk who thinks most small businesses need permits or licenses from the federal government in order to open. And just this morning I read two more along that line, one of them (in Politico, I think), which says that her staff is pushing the “wonk” moniker because it’s accurate: that’s what she is.
The gist of these articles is that she really cares about policy–the nitty-gritty of policy, especially how best to achieve a policy goal. One problem with that, though, is that she keeps making sing-songy soundbite statements that are either inaccurate or misleading or irrelevant or downright incoherent.
Clinton and her staff seem to be misconstruing the meaning of “wonk,” which does including within it the ability to understand the meaning and implications of the statistics and other facts–and recognize the actual sources of those facts, as distinguished from the cliches that the Republicans are selling. The problems that people have in trying to start a business almost never involve federal red tape. By saying otherwise, Clinton’s now made clear that she’s no wonk.
Updated 6/13 at 12:42 p.m.
I could very easily imagine Mrs. Clinton having a moment similar to Poppy Bush’s astonishment at the price scanners in a grocery store. With few exceptions, most notably Warren and Sanders, our politicians much above the lowest local levels are part of an elite that has no conception much less a connection with what the life of most Americans is like (I hesitate to say average because there may not be such a thing).
Her “starting a business” comment is one of those banal, off the shelf, ready made campaign vomit sentences that insults the intelligence of any thinking being. It’s not even one step away from the standard Republican talking point regurgitation that salutes small business while advocating ALEC sponsored corporate policies.
I’ve got a Sanders sign in the front yard and it will stay there until November 2016. If Clinton is the nominee I will grudgingly vote for her because of SCOTUS but I will do so unenthusiastically. In the meantime I will work for local candidates who show promise in the hopes of building a progressive bench that can push aside .01 percenters.
One thing that comes through loud and clear from her attempt to Sister Souljah small-business owners and aspirants, Mark, is that she thinks Democrats NEED a Sister Souljah moment for small-business owners and aspirants. Dick Durbin could educate her on that, simply by referring her to what’s known as the Durbin Amendment.
Another thing that comes across is that, just as she didn’t realize in 2008 that Iowans all have snow shovels, she apparently doesn’t recognize that small-business owners and aspirants want solutions to problems that they actually have, and that that requires knowing the specifics of the problem, including the cause.
She’ll win because, well, the Republican nominee won’t. But she could have been beaten in the primaries by, say, Sherrod Brown or Jeff Merkley. Someone very progressive who thinks and speaks like a normal person rather than an automaton and is younger than Sanders.
Oh come on. We know Hillary is just a puppet. It would be Bill’s third term. It was a big reason why the Democratic electorate passed on “her” in 2008.
If she really was concerned about small business, if she really was concerned about the middle class, if she really was concerned about the nation’s economic direction…then she could steal a line from the past and update it to: I promise you customers with money in every town until your pots runneth over. (Runneth, make her sound folksy with images of the good old days.) In that or similar statement she covers it all.
But, that would mean she or her handlers actually thought about the various groupings of the constituents and what was common about their needs: MONEY! They all need money, in hand.
How could she possibly know how hard it is to start a small business? She has never done so. In fact, she has never worked in the private sector. Working at a law firm where your husband is Govenor hardly counts.
Maybe she has heard some complaints from small business constituents ( minions}
She is interested in one thing, and one thing only: power and money. This is the only way to understand her speech and behavior,
I’m steeling myself for a long , depressing presidential campaign. Bernie can’t win. Hillary is phony as a 3-dollar bill. And I just watched FDR doing his thing on NPR’s ” The Roosevelts ” , reminding me that in universes other than the one I occupy , it’s possible to have an outstanding progressive , an outstanding candidate , and an outstanding human being , all in one.
This country desperately needs a President that we can all respect and admire , but we ain’t gonna get one.
Crap.
I don’t understand why anyone would think that you have to have started a small business in order to know how hard it is to start one, Sammy. Or why anyone—you or Clinton or anyone else—would think that all small businesses are equally hard to start. That’s absurd.
Clinton met with small groups of small business owners in Iowa and New Hampshire and spoke briefly with a couple of others, owners of small businesses that she stopped in at on her trips to Iowa and New Hampshire. Which is great. What’s not great is that, apparently, she didn’t understand that the difficulties they had in starting their businesses involved such things as getting local permits, state licenses, and business loans. This is the red tape at issue.
Without question, there should not be unnecessary or unnecessarily complicated and time-consuming red tape in order to start a business.
But Clinton’s penchant for generic, sweeping statements completely lacking in specifics about what she’s even talking about and, of course, what she would propose to address the issues—and her ridiculous it-shouldn’t-be-harder-to-[fill in the blank]-than-to-[fill-in-the-blank], and it-shouldn’t-take-longer-to-[fill-in-the-blanks]-than-it-does-to-[fill-in-the-blank], is so obviously stupid that it’s really scary that our presidential-nominee-in-waiting thinks this is how she should campaign.
Hillary’s not a puppet, John, and a Democratic presidency beginning in Jan. 2017 will not be the 1990s Clinton administration redux; that’s true no matter who the nominee is. Yes, absolutely, a big reason why the Democratic electorate passed on her in 2009 was that we didn’t want another triangulation administration, and that was what she was promising then. But way, way too much has happened since 2008. Clinton was very late in catching on to that, but clearly has now caught on.
My biggest fear about her is that she’s coming off as stunningly stupid, which means that she is stunningly stupid. She either truly doesn’t know the things she’s seeming to not know, or she does know these things but thinks it’s political genius to pretend otherwise. These sing-song, generic cliché things she’s so fond of spouting are just jaw-droppingly dumb.
Sammy said
“She is interested in one thing, and one thing only: power and money. This is the only way to understand her speech and behavior,”
How does that make her any different from any other politician.?
Back in 2008 Obama was saying we needed to fix Social Security.
Hilary said SS was not in need of fixing.
Hillary was right.
Obama won.
Perhaps Hillary learned lesson one of politics: The people do not want to hear the truth. They want to hear what they want to hear. The politician who tells the most people what they want to hear wins.
Hillary would like to win this time.
As for “triangulation,” Obama has offered us no-angulation: Just give the bad guys what they want.
I have always believed in voting for the politician whose lies I like most, in the hope that they might have to deliver on some of them, or that if the lie turns out to be a winner, maybe enough people will come to believe it that even the politicians will come to believe it.
I have never seen that actually happen.
For some context on the small business issue: http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2015/06/what-share-work-for-large-employers.html
There are several things to unpack here. First, as Beverly points out, many regulatory impediments that affect small businesses are lodged at the local and state level. In some cases those hurdles exist because some professions end up acting like medieval guilds in limiting who can enter a professional door and thus compete; classic rent seeking behavior.
Along the same lines we but Republicans especially, are great at pandering to American archetypes which arevoften, at least partially, based on myth. Bill Clinton, with his Sister Souljah moment, may have been one of the earliest at what has become known as “concern trolling”. Triangulation seems to me as concern trolling raised to a political art form.
Perhaps most politicians suffer from a need to pander but both Clintons seem especially enamored of the tactic. To me they come across as cynical, needy, greedy and lacking in a degree of self control which may be a reflection of entitlement.
I agree that Merkley or Brown would be better candidates who could win although I’m somewhat relieved that Brown is staying in the Senate as one of the weaknesses in recent Democratic politics has been solid effective progressive legislators, both Brown and Warren are changing that calculus.
Mark
ALL politicians pander. The Clintons may just be particularly obvious about it because they know they can’t win by only appealing to their “base.”
Even Lincoln “pandered” to the racism in this country. What made Lincoln a great man is that when he was in a position to do something about it, he worked skillfully to end slavery. Even “saving the Union” by war was something I am reasonably sure I would have been against. But long thinking about it has left me with the strong feeling that Lincoln was smarter than I am, and above my pay grade in the morality department. Probably he could see that allowing the South to secede, and avoiding war, would have led to greater harm and more death, than the war. Lincoln did a number of other things I would not have approved of, but in terms of the “lesser evil,” he seems to have been way ahead of me as well as his contemporaries.
We don’t have any Lincolns around any more, though maybe Roosevelt was at least in the class of politicians who did good by “pandering” at times to the people whose help he needed just to make progress.
I think what makes Bill and Hillary lesser is that first they do seem to have no moral core (can’t be sure until we see), and also their enemies are too strong and too insane for any even reasonably honest (in politician terms) platform to win.
I would probably vote for Merkely … he is my senator… but i would have reservations because he seems to me limited also by “what people believe” and by the realities of having no way to sort through the million “plans” that he would be offered every day by those people.
I couldn’t agree with you more, Dale, that in 2008 Clinton took several positions to the left of Obama—healthcare insurance and Social Security among them (although I don’t think I knew at the time that Obama was for “fixing” Social Security). She also was much more specific about policy than Obama was. I supported Edwards until it became clear that the contest was only between Clinton and Obama, and was very leery about Obama’s mostly nonspecific policy positions. But I was leerier of Clinton, because she simply grabbed all the ole Clinton boys and girls—Mark Penn was the most vile, but there was Terry McAulliffe, and Donna Brazille (I think), and this one and that one and the other one, from the Bill Clinton era. No one else needed apply.
And I really, really, really didn’t want another triangulator Dem administration. Obama seemed less likely to have one, and certainly suggested throughout the campaign that he wouldn’t. So I rooted for him as against Clinton.
Ultimately, living in Michigan, which effectively had no primary because the Dem Party asked the candidates to boycott it because the Michigan state party moved its primary to Feb., I was just a bystander anyway.
Mark, my complaint isn’t that Clinton is pandering to small-business owners and aspirants; it’s that she’s doing it so stupifyingly incompetently, and at the same time is seriously undermining the (correct) Dem position vis-à-vis the Republican position about the role that federal regulation plays in job creation. It’s preposterous that she’s claiming, falsely, that federal regulation is creating roadblocks to the starting of small businesses, generally, and that the length of time it takes to open a small business of an unspecified sort—eight days in Los Angeles, vs. four or five days in Paris and Toronto—is discouraging people from starting small businesses in this country. It’s a safe bet that that difference—eight days vs. four or five—isn’t what’s causing aspiring small business owners even in Los Angeles to be more reluctant than their counterparts in Paris or Toronto to start a business. Much less, as Kessler noted, in Iowa.
Her claims are idiotic. If you’re going to pander, then pander competently. Or at least coherently.
All Iowans have those snow shovels with the ergonomic handles that make shoveling so much easier? I doubt that. Also, as anyone who has lived in a place where you shovel snow, shovels get bent. Not to mention it’s always handy having several so the job can be done by two and get done faster.
When someone uses an example like that it makes me wonder about the rest of their argument. Vis a vis business startup regulations, what bothers me is not that this sort of thing sells – lots of people, including business owners who should know better, think regulations are the hard part of starting a business, when that’s the easy part; getting customers and cash flow, and keeping your product high enough quality as you get more customers, is the hard part. Because the idea sells it’s a natural for politicians to use it, but ideally they should be educating people about the truth. Hopefully Bernie Sanders will be able to do during this campaign. Given Clinton’s position in the long distant primary, and the press’ stated animosity toward her campaign, her doing a risk-adverse campaign (especially this early) is likely a good move, and that means using a lot of these ideas that everybody knows are true even though they’re not.
I don’t get it. You’re mad at her for being a politician? Why not vote for Sanders, or O’Malley?
JDM
thanks for the snow shovel enlightenment. i didn’t think of that.
Citing the snow shovel story as evidence Hillary is dumb is itself dumb.
I see the snow shovel story as a clever show of determination, a photogenic way to empower the voters, some of whom wait hours for a hired snow removal service to come to their driveway after most snow storms.
The rest of the post about small business may all be accurate analysis, but you got off on the wrong foot. Watch you don’t slip on the ice, too.
Hillary Clinton will probably be one of the most intelligent presidents in the history of the US. She has risen to this level through her brilliance. She does not not understand anything that she doesn’t want to.
When she talks about red tape, she understands that means whatever the person listening and open to her point of view wants it to mean. She doesn’t need to get into specifics because that only causes problems.
It’s all about the propaganda and this is good propaganda. Just enough to get them excited but not enough details for them to know the specifics.
Yup. That’s right, THH. It definitely would cause problems for her if she didn’t indicate that she thinks that FEDERAL regulations discourage aspiring small business owners from starting businesses, and that all types of small businesses require the same FEDERAL red tape. And if she didn’t suggest, also falsely, that there’s some significant difference in the time it takes to navigate the federal red tape to start a business in this country and the time it takes to do that in France, Canada, and a few other countries she names.
What do you suggest she say next in order to avoid problems for herself? That fossil fuel use is cooling the earth, since she understands that means whatever the person listening and open to her point of view wants it to mean?
As someone who’s spent most of her life in snowy climates, I can attest that it’s always nice to have yet another spare snow shovel handy. But I’m not sure that that would make the difference for very many people between shoveling the driveway and waiting for a snow removal service to do it, Jerry.
The problem with the snow shovel gift was that apparently it didn’t come with some funny note indicating that it was a good-humored way of saying, “C’mon and vote, whatever the weather.” It was just the snow shovel; nothing else.
If you want to get elected, you cannot make the mistake of telling the truth. Obama was smart enough to stay away from that and it has been a spectacular success for him.
If you just say, let’s cut the red tape people eat that up. There is no red tape that doesn’t need cutting.
Yes, I would suggest she stay away from making any bold proclamations about climate change because Americans are not in the mood to hear that sort of thing and if she spouts off too much they will just elect Jeb.
You do not win elections by getting into the weeds. You win them by being vague and relying on good propaganda. Hillary just has to play it safe because the Rs are not electable. If she had to run against a charismatic candidate, she might want to get into details. But people are bored by details.
You are also overestimating how much Hillary is involved with things like snow shovels. She is being run around the country and being given talking points and she has a young propaganda team that handles the management of the locals. Her team may not know much about Iowa but she is not going to be involved in handing out snow shovels.
They may have forgotten to append a note to some guy’s snow shovel, but they remembered to tell the press ahead of time. The story got lots of free media which you can still locate with your search engine. There was nothing dumb about this gimmick.
Jerry, the only mention of it I can find from 2008 is this one in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/us/politics/22clinton.html?pagewanted=print
I didn’t find any from before the primary. If you have a link to one, I’d be interested in seeing what the media was saying about it then.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/01/iowa.2008/index.html?iref=hpmostpop
I found that by using the terms “hillary snow shovel iowa caucus”. On the same page I found all of these from before the caucus–
http://www.bleedingheartland.com/diary/862/
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/us/politics/30vote.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
and an ABC.com story where the link seems not to copy.
Repeating my search this morning I see your snide post appears among the results. Maybe you should retract it. And do better research next time you throw mud.
BTW, I also caucused for Edwards. Next time, for Bernie.