Politico :

Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote — which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle — and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else.

People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet.
. . .
The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe.
Story Behind the Story

The real question is why so many people are playing. The answer has more to do with media psychology than with practical politics.

Journalists have become partners with the Clinton campaign in pretending that the contest is closer than it really is. Most coverage breathlessly portrays the race as a down-to-the-wire sprint between two well-matched candidates, one only slightly better situated than the other to win in August at the national convention in Denver.

Slate :

Clinton can win only by overturning Obama’s pledged delegate lead—a truism that still has not gotten the traction it deserves. Ominous warnings about 1968-like riots aside, the prospect that Clinton would accept the nomination over the head of the people is fundamentally at odds with everything the party represents. She talks about wanting to enfranchise the people of Florida and Michigan. But then, inevitably, she would turn around and seek to revert the people’s decision, expressed through the pledged delegate count. Call me naive, but I find it inconceivable that the party would want this to happen, or that a candidate would want to win that way.

All this being a long way of saying, Hillary’s path to the nomination is not “narrow.” It’s barricaded. Yet still there seems to be a hesitation among the media to declare Clinton dead.

Hans Christian Andersen :

The emperor marched in the procession under the beautiful canopy, and all who saw him in the street and out of the windows exclaimed: “Indeed, the emperor’s new suit is incomparable! What a long train he has! How well it fits him!” Nobody wished to let others know he saw nothing, for then he would have been unfit for his office or too stupid. Never emperor’s clothes were more admired.

“But he has nothing on at all,” said a little child at last. “Good heavens! listen to the voice of an innocent child,” said the father, and one whispered to the other what the child had said. “But he has nothing on at all,” cried at last the whole people. That made a deep impression upon the emperor, for it seemed to him that they were right; but he thought to himself, “Now I must bear up to the end.” And the chamberlains walked with still greater dignity, as if they carried the train which did not exist.

In response to Barack Obama’s remarkable speech about racism in America, one of the neanderthals at The Corner couldn’t resist printing an email referring to Obama as a “race hustler” and making this Hillary Clinton-inspired claim :

I’ve always known that Obama was a con artist because when you don’t offer up ANY specifics during a campaign it’s usually because you either don’t have any core beliefs or your core beliefs are nutty.

This line of attack really annoys me. Obama doesn’t offer any specifics? Barack Obama’s website has a 64 page “Blueprint for Change” and has twenty sub-sections that cover a host of additional issues. If that’s not enough, there’s also Obama’s 384 page book “The Audacity of Hope”. It’s amazing to me that so many of Barack Obama’s detractors seem to be too foolish to find the policy details they claim to be searching for.

I can’t decide which pop culture analogy from Slate for the race between Obama and Clinton I like better. Monopoly :

Player 1 (Obama) holds virtually all the properties, railroads, and money. But Player 2 (Clinton) has Boardwalk and Park Place, with a tony little neighborhood of hotels and houses. Player 1 consistently amasses money, bit by bit, from Player 2 but can’t close the deal because he lands on Boardwalk or Park Place every three or four times around the board, thus prolonging the agony. “The other four players who started the game but went bankrupt four hours ago,” explains e-mailer Daniel Fiore, “lie on the couch yelling, ‘Come on, end it already!’ “

…or Looney Tunes :

You can give more or less weight to Obama’s political magnetism, the tactical and strategic miscalculations of the Clinton campaign, the delegate-allocation rules that weakened the punch of Clinton’s big-state wins, the crucial difficulty of a former first lady who embodies Restoration competing in an election in which change is the watchword. And here’s another explanation for this remarkable reversal of fortune, one that represents for me one of the few really reliable rules of presidential political warfare: Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck.

As shaped by genius animator Chuck Jones—he didn’t create the Warner Bros. icons, but he gave them their later looks and personalities—Bugs and Daffy represent polar opposites in how to deal with the world. Bugs is at ease, laid back, secure, confident. His lidded eyes and sly smile suggest a sense that he knows the way things work. He’s onto the cons of his adversaries. Sometimes he is glimpsed with his elbow on the fireplace mantel of his remarkably well-appointed lair, clad in a smoking jacket. (Jones once said Cary Grant was his inspiration for Bugs. Today it would be George Clooney.) Bugs never raises his voice, never flails at his opponents or at the world. He is rarely an aggressor.
. . .
Is there any doubt about who is Bugs and who is Daffy between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama? When Clinton insisted that Obama not simply “denounce” Louis Farrakhan but “reject him,” Obama shrugged. Well, he said, I don’t really see any difference, but if you think there is, I reject and denounce. Indeed, throughout the debate, Obama leaned back and asked for time with the flick of a finger, as if summoning a waiter for another bottle of wine. Clinton, meanwhile, leaned forward, pushing her points with grim determination.

Then again, maybe the better metaphor is Clinton is Microsoft and Obama is Google? Or Friendster vs. Facebook? Or The Eagles vs. a band that doesn’t really, really suck?

As someone who believes every bit of campaign sludge that is thrown against Barack Obama, I’m starting to get a little confused.

I thought I was supposed to hate Barack Obama because he’s a secret Muslim. So if he’s just pretending to be a Christian, can we automatically assume that Obama rejects what his Christian pastor says? If so, why bring it up at all?

If Obama is not black enough and his church is apparently too black, does this mean that they cancel each other out and are just the right amount of black?

Obama’s pastor says God should “Damn America” for “treating our citizens as less than human”, but I thought God hated American because of its acceptance of homosexuality. So which is it? Does God hate America for being too compassionate or not compassionate enough?

If Barack Obama is, as Geraldine Ferraro has implied, nothing more than a “lucky”, affirmative action candidate who only got to where he is because of the color of his skin, then why has it taken more than 200 years for an African-American candidate to capitalize on all these advantages?

If Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein, does that make him and Saddam cousins or something?

If Obama is the anti-Christ and the anti-Christ is in league with the Whore of Babylon and the Catholic Church is (according to McCain supporter John Hagee) “The Great Whore”, does this mean Obama is actually a Catholic pretending to be a Muslim pretending to be a Christian?

I love this. Not only is it hilarious, but it slices through the core argument being made by the Clinton campaign. I get a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of Sinbad over the next few weeks :

Finally, the Barack Obama campaign has found a big gun to help shoot down Hillary Rodham Clinton’s self-proclaimed foreign policy experience. And he may be the wackiest gun of all: Sinbad, the actor, who has come out from under a rock to defend Obama in the war over foreign policy credentials.

Sinbad, along with singer Sheryl Crow, was on that 1996 trip to Bosnia that Clinton has described as a harrowing international experience that makes her tested and ready to answer a 3 a.m. phone call at the White House on day one, a claim for which she’s taking much grief on the campaign trail.

Harrowing? Not that Sinbad recalls. He just remembers it being a USO tour to buck up the troops amid a much worse situation than he had imagined between the Bosnians and Serbs.

In an interview with the Sleuth Monday, he said the “scariest” part of the trip was wondering where he’d eat next. “I think the only ‘red-phone’ moment was: ‘Do we eat here or at the next place.’”

If Barack Obama can make Sinbad funny, then universal healthcare should be a breeze.

While I’m disappointed with last night’s results, I have to admit that I share Kos’s enthusiasm for the Democratic nomination process. While John McCain is calling all of his lobbyist cronies begging for campaign cash, the Democrats are still traveling around the country building up campaign infrastructure that will serve them well in the general election.

Having said that, as this process has continued, I’ve pretty much lost most of my respect for Hillary Clinton. Compared to McCain she’s a saint, but I’ve found her campaign’s strategy of throwing every scurrilous charge they can think of at their opponent while whining about how the press treats them to be disgraceful and pathetic respectively. A lot of Democratic partisans love the fact that the Clintons fight dirty (”don’t bring a knife to a gunfight”), but I’m not so partisan that I’m enamored of cheap shots and overall nastiness when it’s done by “our side”. Maybe I’d feel differently if Bill and Hillary had a history of using these sorts of tricks to achieve progressive goals, but the past 16 years of Washington experience has been marked by foolish decisions and shameless pandering. It’s telling that the same Hillary Clinton that has spent her entire Senate career giving George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt is eager to assume the worst regarding every bit of dirt her campaign can dig up about Barack Obama.

As far as where things go next, it’s still clear to me that Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a shot at getting the nomination for herself. Last night’s wins barely scratched the surface of Obama’s pledged delegate lead. Her only real chances are to beat Obama by margins that she’s thus far been incapable of amassing or cross her fingers and hope that Obama is brought down by some scandal (gotta love the irony that the Whitewater couple might be pinning their hopes on an equally vague real estate pseudo-scandal). Other than those two options, the only others are that she might win with help from superdelegates or the delegates from Florida/Michigan. If either of those two things happened, I’d have a hard time supporting her as nominee (I’m not a big fan of political coups).

When the math isn’t there for her to beat Obama in the pledged delegate race, I don’t really see what she’s accomplishing by staying in the race. In order to catch up to Obama in pledged delegates, she needs to beat him by roughly 60/40 across the board, but Clinton hasn’t cracked 60% anywhere besides Arkansas. Meanwhile, Obama has beaten Clinton by +60% margins thirteen times. Even if she wins every remaining primary, Clinton hasn’t shown the level of support necessary to turn this thing around.

At this point, I think Clinton’s goal isn’t to win the nomination but to chip away at the Obama’s support until she can maneuver her way into the VP slot. The month and a half between now and the Pennsylvania primary is going to feel like an eternity.

This might be old news, but funny as hell nonetheless. During a press conference in late 2006, Barack Obama inadvertently embarrassed a reporter in front of a girl he was trying to impress. The reporter later turned around and bitched about it on his paper’s op-ed page :

Obama owes me a public apology for making me look like a court jester and for blocking my shot.

Until that time, Hillary or Giuliani will get my vote.

Here’s what happened next :

As Mother Jones put it, “Presidential material? Definitely.”

It seems to me that with the Clinton campaign in circular firing squad mode, a lot of the things Hillary is saying on the campaign trail just make her look bad. For example, there’s her boast that the

Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested Monday she’ll press on with the campaign after Tuesday’s crucial primaries, arguing that momentum is on her side despite 11 straight losses to rival Sen. Barack Obama.

“I’m just getting warmed up,” Clinton told reporters, looking ahead to a busy day of campaign events in Ohio and Texas where polls show a close race ahead of Tuesday’s primaries.

Two months after the Iowa caucuses, I’d think campaigns should be well past their “getting warmed up” phases. That might explain why Obama was won the last 11 contests.

Worse yet, Clinton seems to have made the mistake of actually believing her talking points and, in the process, is doing the GOP’s work for them.

Hillary Clinton told reporters that both she and the presumtive Republican nominee John McCain offer the experience to be ready to tackle any crisis facing the country under their watch, but Barack Obama simply offers more rhetoric. “I think you’ll be able to imagine many things Senator McCain will be able to say,” she said. “He’s never been the president, but he will put forth his lifetime of experience. I will put forth my lifetime of experience. Senator Obama will put forth a speech he made in 2002.” Clinton was referring to Obama’s anti-war speech he delivered in Chicago before entering the United States Senate.

Clinton may think this line of attack serves her well in the primary, but it’ll kill her in the general (which is probably why she polls worse against McCain than Obama). The problem is that Clinton’s must-vaunted “experience” is trumped by McCain’s. Or, to put this in bumper sticker terms, here’s what Hillary’s talking points look like when applied to the general election :

Which is why Obama’s strategy is just better all around. All the experience in the world doesn’t matter if you need to make a crucial decision (like whether or not to invade Iraq) and you’re completely wrong. Which means, at least as far as the Iraq war is concerned, the talking points would look more like this :



A much better place to be for the Democrats this November, I’d think.