Chuck Todd: Don’t believe the PUMA hype

By: SilentPatriot on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
from CrooksandLiars

Chuck Todd makes an observation Monday night that many of his colleagues fail (or refuse to) acknowledge: That the influence of the PUMA crowd is greatly exaggerated, and the Republicans have their own “PUMA problem” with Ron Paul and his supporters.

“I think what’s happening is we’re in our Denver bubble. There’s 1/3 of the Democratic establishment here who would be big time players had Clinton won, and they can stoke this a little. The McCain campaign is stoking this, releasing this ad. And there is a small core group, but I think they have a louder voice than they do a volume of numbers. So, look, I think we’re gonna look back in a few days and say ‘these PUMAs are really no different than these Ron Paul folks that we’re gonna run into in St. Paul.’”

(Nicole) While it’s nice to see Todd employ a little balance given that his network indulged freely in their Hillary Derangement Obsession and could not go five minutes nor a single guest without asking about Hillary Clinton (don’t get me started on Chris Matthews–his record was 45 seconds without a Hillary question), he truly wasn’t being honest about the PUMA phenomenon. These PUMA detractors aren’t Democrats, no matter how badly the media wants to drag this out and create these fantasy dramas. The PUMA operation is very clearly a GOP game as much as Operation Chaos:

PUMA (originally “Party Unity My A**” and now officially a more sedate “People United Means Action”) was one of the original angry Hillary groups. Started by Darragh Murphy and depending on whose story you read Will Bowers, PUMA fed on the anger over the actions of the Democratic National Committee over the Florida and Michigan delegations. The PUMA PAC website features a graphic that now says “Obama National Committee” rather than Democratic National Committee.

As Amanda at Pandagon discovered, Murphy donated money to McCain in 2000. She has never donated money to Clinton. Disenfranchised Clinton supporter? I don’t think so. And Rumproast has documented how the PUMAs have sought to make themselves sound much larger and more organized than they are. 60 of them about to take charge of the convention? Not bloody likely.

(Continued here, with hotlinks.)