It's Official

Want to know how I knew Hillary Clinton was going to be Secretary of State? Simple. Neither she nor her Big Dog talked to the press for, like, weeks while their misshapen hunchbacks were out robbing graves and urgently wiring all the available electricity down into transducers until it was sucked up and they shouted, "It's a-live, it's alive, it's aliiiiivvve!"

The background is complicated, in an Eyes Wide Shut kind of way. Barack Obama offered the Secretary of Herbal Teas & Bombing to Hillary Clinton, and we early and dutifully passed that information along. But there was a catch, a huge Catch-22, and that's some catch. Her husband Bill has been flying around the globe promoting his Clintonian Global Initiative for the last 8 years on a free-range combination of "Feed the World" and "Air F*** One." So the deal was, he had to turn over the names of 200,000+ foundation donors to the Obama drill-masters, and that's what all the waiting was about.

The salutatorian of my high school got mononucleosis around Christmas, so he had to stay home for a few months, and he wasn't valedictorian because the typing teacher only gave him a B+. I had to listen to him bitch about it for 4 months of my senior year after my stepfather told me he wouldn't pay for Yale or Harvard, not a dime, not even on scholarship. I know what sucks. Even so, it must not have been easy for Bill to knuckle under Arkansas-style.

I can commiserate, but my imagined intern-job (which didn't exist at the time, not until now) would've been having the internet, a sexy librarian, and a modest travel budget to go through that list of Bill's donors. Now, anytime Hillary Clinton even thinks about going off the farm I could just browse through the donor list and construct an email titled, for example: "The New York Times: Adolescent Girls Recall Orgy, Fundraising Event In Azerbaijan With Former US President."

Bill is still tasked with foreign affairs. Hillary is tasked with a rain-delayed dance in Palestine. Game's on.

Clinton Decides to Accept Post at State Dept., Confidants Say

Damn You, Hillary, For Making Me Like You!

I listened to Hillary Clinton's post-keynote speech while Lord Wife and her staff of loyal servants watched it. La Clintonessa belted out a rejuvenated, unshackled voice, gleefully throwing combination shots at McCain and the Republicans while claiming her propers for being the most successful female candidate for President in United States history, finally throwing her full weight behind Obama.

In my office corner, I was looking at how she formulated. She pulled out all the stops in her preparation, calling back at least two former White House speech writers from their day jobs, one from a production executive position at Sony Pictures, then working on it non-stop for six weeks. It made the back-room context start to mesh. Biden's good history with Hillary, his sponsorship of the Violence Against Women Act (which could have been more kindly named), and his roundtable participations with women at the convention indicate that the Obama advisors figured it was more Electorally Important to capture her supporters than reach for the Redneck Vote. VP candidates Warner, Kaine, Webb and Sebelious would've helped in that regard, but they may not have been able to deliver a single state, so I hereby yield my populist, non-arcane revulsions to Biden as VP; we don't elect Presidents as a nation, we elect them state by state, and the Obama campaign is well-organized enough to have made the correct calculations. (By the way, hello, Florida! Thanks for Bush in 2000. Now meet Global Warming.)

What I've always liked about Hillary Rodham Clinton is how she's willing to work her butt off. I can carp about that trait being common enough amongst narcissistic megalomaniacs, but it's not typical in that group, far from it. She's not the best manager, but by the force of her will is a formidable individual achiever, and she only lost her party's nomination because she was out-foxed and ran out of states. She's smart, she hustles, and she has the required cram-it-down studiousness of a great future Secretary of State, a position I wholeheartedly advocate. My gut tells me she's the equal of Kissinger, maybe even a Talleyrand. She's the potential Meryl Streep of diplomacy, and for our sakes I hope she fills that Cabinet role. American corporate interests aren't going to change soon, but who you have at the negotiating table matters a great deal, matters crucially. We need someone of her caliber there, compared to the one-track-mind mediocrity we're suffering from now.

Her speech immediately garnered praise from Keith Olbermann as a Grand Slam for Democratic unity, a verdict which reverberated through Old Media and ran completely opposite to the previously dominant narrative arc of tension between the camps. The construction, content, and delivery of her performance seemed to come from deep press management Kung Fu, first to last. It was savvy, pushed all the right buttons, filling media maws deliciously and giving them much to chew on, anticipating reactions and setting the tone for a party finding its purpose.

The weakness of the Republican Party now is that they're slow. They're may be experts at going negative, and Karl Rove's deputy smear-meister Steve Schmidt has shaved 6 points off Obama's Gallup Poll leads since he took over as McCain's campaign manager in July, but they're media, not internet. They understand the old electorate, not the new. McCain himself is like an old boxer. Never a champion, always a contender, he's formulaic, loose on the message, slow to react. Punch-drunk. Schmidt has tried to limit these liabilities by taking McCain out of the campaign, protecting him, exposing him to only 38 minutes of total reporter time last week. McCain should be town-halled, debated in various cities, bewildered, and peppered with detail questions out of left field. He can't be prepped to react appropriately and will tire quickly. For example, he can't extemporaneously say anything sensible on health care, the big Moose On the Table campaign issue.

Hillary can be a big asset in forcing them to play to weakness and react in real time. The Pugs need eight hours or so to counter-punch, they're up all night right now, and tomorrow morning Steve Schmidt's talking points will probably be: "She was too good. The Dims are so screwed up, they've got the wrong nominee."

Hillary Clinton Plays Fill In The Caption

Quickie post, just saw this over at the excellent Born at the Crest, which I've come to rely on for news compression. Actually, I don't know how the blog keeps up its always concise, precise analysis folded down into short, info-rich posts. Thanks for doing your thing, Mike, linked to in the right margin.

Hillary's expression fits with some lyrics in that old Judy Collins hit song, "Send in the clowns. There ought to be clowns. Don't bother, they're here..."

Isn't it rich?
Isn't it queer,
Losing my timing this late
In my career?
And where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns.
Well, maybe next year.

That, and she seems to be saying the F-bomb to herself, or to the crowd in general. But she's an old political trouper, she will survive, and I hear she's slated to give the keynote at the Democratic Convention.

Quickee VP Non-Speculation

Lots of speculation today about Hillary Clinton's non-concession last night. Many support her for VP as a way to heal the party and bring in the "hard-working white people" vote. Some smart folk opine that she kept the race open and sent supporters back to her web site, ostensibly to tell her what she should do next, as a way to pay down some of her campaign's $30 million debt. Other long-time Clinton supporters aren't waiting, many having defected today, and the DNC's home page has a picture of Obama (the one above) announcing his status as nominee.

Various problems exist with a Hillary VP scenario, and the biggest is procedural: candidates for VP are required to present exhaustive documentation designed to vet them and protect the presidential nominee from taint before and after an election. For some reason, the Clintons have a big problem with transparency, and all the donors to their presidential foundation, all the business deals that gave them $120+ million of income over the past 8 years would have to be examined under clinically harsh light. That's a big hurdle, probably a show-stopper.

Even if that were cleared, an Obama presidency with Hillary Clinton as VP would set Operation Enduring Scandal in motion. While it's possible that Bill would stop blowing up at reporters for writing about his indiscretions, stop whoring across the globe on Ron Burkle's 757 (christened 'Air F*** One' by aides), neither is it bloody likely. You can't just imprison the man in a dungeon for four years, he's an ex-President...although that must have crossed a few minds, Hillary's not the least. He is simply an unacceptable liability.

Caroline Kennedy has been named to Obama's search committee, and she and Michelle Obama have a lot in common: they both despise the Clintons. Finally, although she would take it, Hillary Clinton doesn't really even want the spot--a mere Vice Presidency is obviously not big enough to contain her goals, and putting her there would be like having a cobra in your backpack. (Note per Jon: That is to say, she would eagerly take VP, but only as a stepping stone.) She needs more room to run, tasks to perform, someplace where she can deploy her full array of talents. Somewhere like Secretary of State.

Democracy, Its Psychotherapy And Cure

Although it is called such, the United States of America is not and has never been a democracy. In legal writ and practical fact, numerous safeguards have been maintained to ensure against its ever becoming one. Women and blacks still aren't equal, and punishment for being poor now extends into the upper middle class. Still, you never know. Democracy could happen.

Through circumstances which defy convenient explanation, I watched the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee proceedings on C-SPAN Saturday, holed up Howard Hughes-style all high-lonesome in a be-marbled Las Vegas hotel room. Except for dozing off a couple times, I saw the whole thing from about 2/3rds through Florida, and thought the horror show remarkable (almost regrettable) for restraint. Net-net, the HRC campaign was ruled and bylawed into a 50% Michigan-Florida compromise weighting after much twisting and kvetching. I wouldn't normally have watched this, but there was my general immobility to consider, and nothing better was on TV.

At times it looked and felt like an organization falling apart. Imagine, for contrast, if Florida and Michigan had bolted to the front of the Republican Party primary line. Zippo, nada, natch of their votes would be counted. If a couple of wayward states had given the RNC any guff, drunken thugs in pickup trucks would've dragged the offending apparachiks out of their homes in the middle of the night for manure-boarding sessions. The next morning, everybody would show up at the committee meeting shaved, showered, and smiling submissively, and their sole query would be, "Whose ass do I kiss first?" That's unity.

Whereas Democrats know all about diversity. And if any more diversity had gone on at the DNC, Harold Ickes would've dropped trou, shit on the Marriott's rug, started flinging turds at the co-chairs and said, "Look at me, I'm a gorilla!" This from the man who ran the party for 15 years, the incumbency-enhancing architect of the Super Tuesday soiree: "we need to make sure every vote counts." Oh, the passion, lo, the rampant egalitarianism. Listening to Harold, you could just feel liberty's heaving breast swelling to yell out, "Freedom! Freedom!" It was all I could do to not break out into the Pledge of Allegiance.

Simply put, Michigan and Florida Democrats were not well served by their state party leaders; they were insubordinate, intransigent, and insolent, and boy did they get off light. There isn't a leg to stand on: both states had the chance to do the primaries over according to the rules and have all their votes counted; they refused on the grounds of extra expense. A re-vote would have been the right thing to do, yet there wasn't a single word said about it by anyone who spoke into a microphone--curious, no? You could almost see the looming presence of Howard Dean in the ballroom, toying with a five-pound hammer and twirling a thumbscrew. The RBC committee meeting was more about putting down a snitty rebellion than about seating delegates, and the real question was whether the states and a significant, well-entrenched, and deeply unhappy faction would recognize the DNC's future authority.

In that context, the meeting's transparency was truly courageous--I can't imagine the RNC would allow live coverage in a similar situation. The committee's discipline was awesome, betraying guidelines that had been very well-rehearsed; it would have been easy, even natural, to rub the state reps' noses in messes of their own making, messes they had no excuse for. Although ironies and hypocrisies were flying fast and thick, that didn't happen. The most Shylockian propositions were accorded respect, and most anyone with a passing familiarity with Democratic party track record would've found it impossible to deaden impulses to derision without powerful incentives. For example, to the unremitting mantra of "disenfranchising voters?" Give me a break. Forty years ago the Dims settled on a nominee a full year before a ballot was cast.

Paradoxically, votes and involvement mattered more this time than in any other Democratic primary; campaigning mattered more; organization mattered more. As a brand, Clinton was as well-known as you can get, so she was not prepared for America's first real 50-state nomination fight. Everywhere Obama went, he closed the gap. He was down in Wisconsin by 20+ points in January. He traveled there and won it by 17 points. He was down by 24 in Virginia, began visiting, and eventually won it by 28. He was down by 20 in Pennsylvania three weeks before its primary, made a hasty tour and closed it to 9. The more exposure he got, the more votes he won. That's what happens in real democracies, that's the quality you want to see in your party's leader, and that's why the faithful have told Hillary Clinton to act like Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. Yes, your dead-enders want to fight on as an insurgency. Tell them to go home and plant crops.

The RBC's final vote bore the feel of a previous internal compromise and a carefully foregone conclusion. What was needed was done. Furthermore, it was the only actual open debate about an election or its processes which has occurred in my lifetime, and to my knowledge ever in these United States. I'm not sure of the full impact or follow-through, but that alone is no small thing. The DNC conspiracy, if such it was, expressed an even-handed but resounding "enough!" It gave the signal for the Clintons to pass the torch to a new kind of party, and it's going to be one far more representative and open than it has ever been before.

Why John McCain Is Doomed

The United States has been at war in the Mid-East for almost 7 years. That war was always enormously misguided, craven, and expensive, always was going to be. Just as predictably, we've lost that romp of incompetence although few seem prepared to admit it yet. Six years ago, very few people, and far fewer politicians, were mentally "with it" enough to point at the Big Picture. Even now, for fun and profit the tatterdemalion media prefer to focus on tactics, which factors to multiply which way: "Candidate X does better with bowlers, Candidate Y does well with eaters of seaweed. In other news, Occupied Country Z is opening an amusement park." Ad captandum vulgus, ad infinitum. It's like reading the titles of books as they're driven off their shelves by an earthquake.

Of course the longing for (some say the manufacture of) a new lion can be traced back to the disasters of the old. Yet perhaps it's more the Moment itself which calls new lions forth. Who we elect will, amongst other things, determine whether we can cut the atmosphere's CO2 levels enough to stop playing "The Ghosts of Mars" with Mother Earth, or whether we end up getting nuked or not. Little decisions, big outcomes.

Hillary Clinton supported the war, and her big backers support the war. John McCain supported the war, and his big backers support the war. That's why they will lose. They'll lose because they've been bought and paid for, they'll lose to someone we've bought and paid for. They'll lose because they'll never give this speech:

Good afternoon. Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.

The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don’t oppose all wars.

My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain.I don’t oppose all wars.

After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this Administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. I don’t oppose all wars.

And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Now let me be clear – I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity.

He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the President today. You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s finish the fight with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure that the UN inspectors can do their work, and that we vigorously enforce a non-proliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn’t simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.

Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.

The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not – we will not – travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.

Bunker Hillary

I've tried not to go after Hillary Clinton too much, first because it would be tiresomely biased, and next because this isn't an anti-Clinton blog per se; in terms of political analysis, it's more an extended musing on whether or not I should move my family to Vancouver, Ireland, or Argentina. I do not wonder alone; last week, Lord Wife walked up to me out of the blue and said, "If he (John McCain) wins, we're leaving, right?" This would seem to be an extreme option, but it's only an inconvenient one requiring close attention to a barometer. At best, the US faces some daunting challenges over the next few years; metaphorically, there are hangovers, and there are liver diseases. This country faces both, and "moments of clarity" are shortly in order.

Deep-background articles like the one below by Michael Crowley, published in the wonkish New Republic last June, confirmed what vectors the country would steer for with the Clintons conning the helm again. It also explains much about reporters' motivations, first in handling that family with kid gloves, and now with dirks:

On June 1, The New York Times published a front-page article titled, ONE PLACE WHERE OBAMA GOES ELBOW TO ELBOW. The feature detailed Barack Obama's love for pickup basketball, his jersey-tugging style, even the time he hit a long game-winning shot after getting fouled.

The Obama camp clearly welcomed the humanizing glimpse at Obama's life; his rivals, probably not so much. In an ordinary campaign, that might have been it. But this is no ordinary campaign--not when Hillary Clinton is a candidate. And so, the Clinton team let Times reporter Patrick Healy, who covers the Hillary beat, know about their "annoyance" with the story, as Healy later put it.

If grumbling about a basketball story seems excessive, it's also typical of the Clinton media machine. Reporters who have covered the hyper-vigilant campaign say that no detail or editorial spin is too minor to draw a rebuke. Even seasoned political journalists describe reporting on Hillary as a torturous experience. Though few dare offer specifics for the record--"They're too smart," one furtively confides. "They'll figure out who I am"--privately, they recount excruciating battles to secure basic facts. Innocent queries are met with deep suspicion. Only surgically precise questioning yields relevant answers. Hillary's aides don't hesitate to use access as a blunt instrument, as when they killed off a negative GQ story on the campaign by threatening to stop cooperating with a separate Bill Clinton story the magazine had in the works. Reporters' jabs and errors are long remembered, and no hour is too odd for an angry phone call. Clinton aides are especially swift to bypass reporters and complain to top editors. "They're frightening!" says one reporter who has covered Clinton. "They don't see [reporting] as a healthy part of the process. They view this as a ruthless kill-or-be-killed game."

Despite all the grumbling, however, the press has showered Hillary with strikingly positive coverage. "It's one of the few times I've seen journalists respect someone for beating the hell out of them," says a veteran Democratic media operative. The media has paved a smooth road for signature campaign moments like Hillary's campaign launch and her health care plan rollout and has dutifully advanced campaign-promoted themes like Hillary's "experience" and expertise in military affairs. This is all the more striking in light of the press's past treatment of Clinton--particularly during her husband's White House years--including endless stories about her personal ethics, frostiness, and alleged Lady Macbeth persona.

It's enough to make you suspect that breeding fear and paranoia within the press corps is itself part of the Clinton campaign's strategy. And, if that sounds familiar, it may be because the Clinton machine, say reporters and pro-Hillary Democrats, is emulating nothing less than the model of the Bush White House, which has treated the press with thinly veiled contempt and minimal cooperation.

Continue reading here.

Washington State's Super-Delegate Status

Representative Rick Larson (D-WA) announced Thursday he would cast his super-vote for Senator Obama. He said that early in the primary race he was leaning toward endorsing Clinton, and had also thought about endorsing New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

Still left uncommitted among Washington’s superdelegates are state Democratic Party Chairman Dwight Pelz and Vice Chairwoman Eileen Macoll; Democratic National Committee members Ed Cote, Sharon Mast and David McDonald; and Congressman Jim McDermott.

McDermott, our representative, is the last neutral superdelegate among the state’s elected Democrats. As recently as April 23, Larsen was saying he had no plans to choose sides before all states had a chance to vote in primaries or caucuses. He said then:

I haven't changed my view at all that we should let the states play themselves out.

Larsen said today that he, as well as other superdelegates, were impressed by Obama’s performance in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. It was, he said using a Clinton phrase, a “game-changer” and it “put a lot of uncommitted delegates into head-scratching mode” about what to do.

He met with Obama today in D.C. about an hour before his 2 p.m. conference all began. Larsen, a vocal critic of the superdelegate system, had already decided to endorse Obama, but he wanted to talk to the candidate about the state of the race and to raise a few Washington state issues, including the Boeing tanker deal.

There are a total of 796 superdelegates, including 17 in Washington. The 6 superdelegates backing Clinton here are U.S. Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, Congressmen Norm Dicks and Jay Inslee, former House Speaker Tom Foley, and King County Executive Ron Sims. Given that most of the above represent Western Washington, which caucused 75-25 for Obama, these reps can expect to be remembered with proportional malice at their next tries for re-election. Of these, Cantwell and Inslee seem most vulnerable.

With Larsen, the 5 superdelegates backing Obama include Congressmen Adam Smith and Brian Baird, Gov. Chris Gregoire, and DNC member Pat Notter. Gregoire faces another stiff test from Republican "family values" challenger Dino Rossi (who may have actually won the last election), so she made the right choice. The bottle stands by you, Jim McDermott.

(Much of the above adapted from David Postman's Seattle Times blog, Postman on Politics.)

Speak Up, I Can't Hear The Words "Mark Penn"

The caption for this photo was:

(Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton cups her ear as reporters ask her about Mark Penn, the pollster and senior strategist for Clinton's presidential bid who left the campaign Sunday, at the airport in Albuquerque, N.M., Sunday, April 6, 2008. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

By cupping her ear, what a prankster, she was apparently a joke of dodging reporters questions. Or maybe it was a way of expressing cognitive dissonance. The Clinton campaign has paid nearly 10% of all the money it has raised to Mark Penn, at least $13 million of $141 million. Penn is the author of the best-selling 'Microtrends,' a book about...umm, how small details explain everything? How little acorns become great oaks? How Fourier transforms applied to long-tailed stochastically-smoothed trendlines uncover power laws which foretell the future? I dunno what the thing's about, but will learn fast. Anyone who can shake the Clintons down for that much dough and not wind up dead deserves some quality time.

The rumpus is that Penn got into hot water for peddling influence to a foreign client, the government of Colombia, which is all aflame to get congressional approval on its bilateral free trade agreement. Bush sent the bill to the legislature today, along with a few now-customary insults. Why the hot water? Well, because H.C. is now expressly against anything containing the words "free trade agreement" (and don't you forget it, bub). As to why either Penn or Columbia should even want such a thing, I surely don't know. You'd think being Most Favored Cocaine Supplier would be enough for Colombia, and in Penn's case $13 million for doing some mumbo-jumbo special polls (and the sage advice to not bother running in caucus states) was pretty swell, too. So the New York Times and other sources reported that Penn was forced out.

But, not so fast, the Clintons aren't bothering to actually fire Penn. He was on the Monday campaign conference call as usual, and his firm will continue to be their pollster. So he's not resigned, not fired, not leaving, his firm's still getting paid, and he's just sort of helicoptering around like some Bellisarius of Bullshit. Man, this guy's good. I wonder what Obama is paying him? Unfortunately this means I'll have to read his other book: 'Winning Through Conflicts of Interest.'

(Much of this info came from Born at the Crest of Empire, a sharp blogger.

Clinton Compares Herself To Rocky Balboa: 'We Have A Lot In Common'

Honest, a mole in their campaign did not tell me last Friday Hillary was set to go Balboa:

PHILADELPHIA — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she has something in common with legendary film boxer Rocky Balboa _ she's not a quitter.

Recalling a famous scene on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art from the 1976 Oscar-winning film "Rocky," Clinton said that ending her presidential campaign now would be as if "Rocky Balboa had gotten halfway up those art museum steps and said, 'Well, I guess that's about far enough.'"

"Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit. I never give up. And neither do the American people," Clinton said in excerpts of prepared remarks to be given Tuesday to a meeting of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO.

The Bosnian Panopticon

Clinton's unforced, repeated errors in lionizing her 1996 trip to Bosnia were milestones, or better said, millstones in her Presidential campaign. It's no coincidence that old-line Democratic machine politicians (Richardson, Pelosi, Leahy) followed them by openly defecting and calling for her to end her run. Today's surprise endorsement by Pennsylvania senator Bob Casey, where Clinton still holds a 12-point lead in the polls, is one indicator of how damaging the fallout must be. While switching their allegiances, Richardson and Casey bore the relieved, euphoric looks of men who just reached the legal drinking age.

Hillary's fabrications were bizarre, banal political mistakes: so basic as to strain credulity. She was caught with video footage, yet continued to defend an unwinnable pretext. Now, let's imagine we are in front of cameras running for high office...would we repeat our whoppers 5 and 6 times verbatim, then stick by them as if there's no such thing as archival footage? 1996 is hardly too long-long ago and far-far away for insulation, and she should have expected people to check up on claims which were prima facie poetic. To knowingly make them at such great risk for a teensy upside, coming at a time when her campaign's position was improved, seems the political equivalent of insanity.

Or perhaps delusion. Maybe she really believed she was brought into a free-fire zone. Still, no military hierarchy on earth would ever put their President's wife in harm's way, simply to spare professional reputation. No reputations are more jealously guarded, and she may not have realized how profoundly her comments insulted the Tuzla base commander who hosted her and her daughter; one can easily imagine reactions of profanity and spittle-laced asperity, followed by marshaling the Army's considerable PR avoirdupois to set the record straight.

That's speculation. What is not speculation is that the Clintons are highly effective politicians with black belts in media management. Better than black belts, really--they're more like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-level adepts. The media didn't go after the elephants, the whales, the sequoias of previous scandal in the room throughout this whole election cycle. Any intentions to do so were masterfully construed as partisan low blows, personal attacks and not matters of record, off limits and beneath the standards of journalistic ethics. The strategy was brilliant and completely, mystifyingly successful. Even last week, Chelsea Clinton replied to a citizen's question about Monica Lewinsky with a blunt, "That's none of your business." And last weekend, Clinton advisors responded to a blog post by Obama's Iowa coordinator as "disgusting comments" and "gutter politics" for drawing a parallel to the same subject.

Hillary Clinton's Bosnia blunders, transparently false and clumsily self-serving, were like a very-best-of-CD gift set for a previously wrapped-up press. The newsies know Clintonian trustworthiness better than the public, and dodging imaginary snipers provided means to gain fresh purchase on the essence of their wrongness. Her every word was slam-dunk-debunked. It's a wonderful lens to view all the other indiscretions through, a way to boil the byzantine bits down into one digestible stew. The press doesn't have to return to the wearisome details of, oh, heck...there's a Clinton closet for every letter in the alphabet. Why bother going there, when here we've got Hill running across the hostile tarmac of her memory, a foreign policy resume padded with zig-zagging for her life?

Obviously, this has significantly strengthened the odds of an Obama victory; the new Pew Research poll has him up by 10 points, despite pronounced weakness among democratic social conservatives presumably ired by the Reverend Wright comments. (Of course, one in four of those respondents still think Obama is a muslim.) Net-net, if questioning Clintonian integrity is in season again, the campaign for the Democratic Nomination has entered an entirely new phase: denial. Calls for the Clintons to bow out have been made by the party establishment, and ignored.

While the calls aren't going to stop, the Clintons are not mere mortals; like the Bushes, they have "arrived," are cushioned and cosseted by personal reality-bubbles, so a concession appears neither likely nor soon. Rather, I suspect it's time to run up the "embattled fighter" theme, cue the inspirational music from 'Rocky,' and hit back like disgruntled royalty.

Clintoniavelli: Why Hillary Is Campaigning For John McCain

Why haven't the Clintons, smart and ruthless politicos that they are, dropped out of Hillary's candidacy? They know they can't win the Democratic nomination and are damaging their party, and they do think of it as fully theirs, more every day. So let's try surveying the terrain from their perspective, even thinking like them: 'Ok, so things didn't work out as planned, but we've still got checkmate if we knee-cap Obama. McCain becomes President, he's stuck with an economic "Repression," a decayed Mid-East occupation, and he's got cancer. The country will be more beat up, more ready for Hillary in 2012. Now, we will have to take out Pretty Boy a little more obviously than we took out Gore, Dean, and Kerry. Then Big Dog just gotta wait a little while.'

To them, the Democratic Party is their castle, and they will pour boiling oil over constituents before they lose it. Playing to the gutter of American history and human sentiment may not yet achieve the Clintons' goals; a smeared Obama is a tested Obama, and people understand that the more endangered the system, the more important its quality of leadership. While a polling lead has decreased, he will be running against the atrabilious John McCain, the Barnum & Bailey of lobbyists awaiting his own turns in the mea culpa spotlight. But the kitchen sink phase of Hillary's run might also work. If it does, Hillary's Berserker Campaign for 2012, an article by author Jeffrey St. Clair, will have been prescient indeed. If it fails he's only one insight shy, and truly has a handle on the Clintons:

...data culled from pulse polls and focus groups probing the hidden prejudices in the psyche of white America are being packed like shrapnel into political landmines set for Obama: he's unpatriotic, he's un-Christian, he's a Palestinian symp and, yes, he's black. That's three strikes and one head shot. Exploitation of racial panic is second nature to the power couple Ishmael Reed calls Ma and Pa Clinton.

Bill Clinton launched his 1992 campaign by personally overseeing the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged young black man. He wagged his finger at the rapper Sister Souljah, denouncing her music and political opinions as a danger to young minds. The Clintons pilloried their one-time friend Lani Guinier for her legal writings on the status of blacks and women and booted Dr. Jocelyn Elders from her position as Surgeon General for her refreshingly candid statements about the utility of condoms and masturbation for sexually active youths.

And that's how they treated people they knew. At a structural level, the Clintons' economic and social agenda, incubated at the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, struck directly at poorest precincts of America, targeting blacks and Hispanics with a fervor not seen since Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips crafted the infamous Southern Strategy for Richard Nixon. Hence, the dismantling of welfare, harsh federal crime bills, the refusal to intervene against racial profiling or redress the grievous injustices caused by the racially-motivated sentences handed out for crack cocaine.

The fallout from Ms. Clinton's racially-tinged blitz against Obama will spread far and wide across her party like the toxic particles from a nuclear blast. They've done it all before. The Clintons' reckless first two years in the White House, from the heavy-handed Travel Office fiasco to the fires of Waco and HRC's sophomoric bungling of the health care reform, spurred the GOP takeover of congress in 1994, which they used to their political profit.

Then in 1996, Clinton refused to allocate DNC money to tight senate and congressional races, a miserly tactic that allowed the faltering Republicans to retain control of both houses of Congress. It was a cynical decision that many high-ranking Democrats believe constituted a deliberate sabotage of the party's prospects, designed to secure a monopoly-like control of the party apparatus for the Clintons, turning the DNC into their own private PAC.

Read the full article here, surfaced by Bruce at The River Blog.

Steven Pizzo: The Good vs. The Bad And Ugly

(Vid above of Keith Olberman's smack-down of Geraldine Ferraro's recent race-baiting. Commentary below by Steven Pizzo, a journalist and author who writes News For Real.)

What are you going to do if Hillary Clinton succeeds bagging the Democratic Party nomination for President by playing dirty. I've begun thinking about that more and more over the last couple of weeks. The Clintons have built their entire political lives on the premise that, if they can't win pretty, they'll settle for winning ugly.

Which is why things have gotten so ugly lately. Once it became clear she could not beat Obama in a fair fight they switched tactics. IED's (Insinuations, Exaggerations and Distortions)

"Is Obama a Muslim." Hillary was asked on 60-Minutes. "No. Not as far as I know," she replied.

BOOM!

"Obama is not ready to become Commander-in-Chief," Hillary warns then coyly adds, if voters on the fence pick her, she'd consider putting Obama a heartbeat away from becoming Commander-in-Chief.

BOOM!

"I have crossed the threshold and met the national security test to be Commander-in-Chief," Hillary says. "John McCain has also met that test. Obama gave a speech."

BOOM!

"The reason Obama has gotten where he is today is because he's black," pronounced Clinton supporter and finance committee big shot, Geraldine Ferraro.

BOOM!

are now the weapons of choice for the Clinton campaign. Hardly a day goes by now when one of these IEDs doesn't explode into the news.

BTW -- that was not the first time Ferraro set off a racial IED in the midst of a presidential primary.

A Ferraro flashback
"If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race," she said.

Really. The cite is an April 15, 1988 Washington Post story (byline: Howard Kurtz), available only on Nexis.

Placid of demeanor but pointed in his rhetoric, Jackson struck out repeatedly today against those who suggest his race has been an asset in the campaign. President Reagan suggested Tuesday that people don't ask Jackson tough questions because of his race. And former representative Geraldine A. Ferraro (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that because of his "radical" views, "if Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race."

Asked about this at a campaign stop in Buffalo, Jackson at first seemed ready to pounce fiercely on his critics. But then he stopped, took a breath, and said quietly, "Millions of Americans have a point of view different from" Ferraro's.

 Discussing the same point in Washington, Jackson said, "We campaigned across the South . . . without a single catcall or boo. It was not until we got North to New York that we began to hear this from Koch, President Reagan and then Mrs. Ferraro . . . . Some people are making hysteria while I'm making history." (Politico.com)

A few weeks back Bill Clinton detonated an almost identical Jesse Jackson IED. Coincidence? No way...

BOOM!

Can you imagine! I never thought I'd see a leading Democrat dip back to the tactics of the dark days when racist Democrats ruled the segregated South, playing the fears of whites against the hopes of blacks. Disgusting.

But insurgencies are, by necessity, ugly business. Inevitably there will be collateral damage. Innocents will be hurt. The means are ugly, but the ends will make amends --we are assured. Once they win, the insurgents promise, they will get rid of the bad and the ugly and herald in the good.

Hillary holds up her role as First Lady as the reason she's "ready to lead from day one," and there may be some truth in that. Among the things she learned during those days was how run parallel political and insurgent actions. She learned this when husband Bill helped negotiate a settlement in Northern Ireland. While the Irish Republican Army conducted the ugly part of their insurgency the leader of its political arm, Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams, stayed above it all making nice in Parliament. When his IRA fighters blew something, (or someone) up, Adams would bemoan the violence, even condemn it. Then he'd offer his political solutions/demands.

Obama has already won the hearts and minds of the majority of Democratic voters. If she stops the IEDs now Obama would have a nearly unobstructed path to the nomination. She's can no longer count on just slowing him down, she's got to stop him. She needs to wound him so badly he can no longer win.

There's two ways to get this nomination: win it fair and square, or finagle it. Since she can no longer win, she's now onto finagling. Which means encouraging her surrogates to keep planting IEDs while she works the political angles -- Super-delegates, seating Michigan and Florida delegates, etc.

Meanwhile out on the field of battle her surrogates have turned to the nuclear option -- or as her own spokesmanr and snake turned snake charmer, Howard Wolfson describe it, "the kitchen sink strategy."

Call it what you like, boiled down to its essence it can be summed up as, "an IED a day keeps the nomination away" -- from Obama.

Sure it's dirty fighting. And sure, if successful it will leave the Democratic Party looking like Beirut on a bad day. And sure her victory would only reinforce the very kind of politics that have torn the nation apart since Newt Gingrich and his kind marched to power. And sure an ugly Clinton victory risks outraging Obama supporters to such an extent many will not even show up to vote in November, virtually guaranteeing another four years of GOP rule.

But those probabilities appear not to matter to Hillary Clinton. If she can't have the prize she'll make sure her opponent inherits a scorched political landscape; a party in disarray. a fractured party embroiled in a very un-civil war. It could even mean the end of the Democratic Party as a force in progressive politics -- not that the party has been much of a force in that direction anyway. But at least it would end the pretense.

Then there's African American voters who will feel betrayed, snookered and humiliated by the party they've supported through thick and thin for decades. And all those young Democrats, new to the process, who will retreat into cynical complacency. And why not? Why participate in a process where the best values and behavior are routinely trumped by the worst values and behavior?

So, have you been thinking about it too? About what you're going to do on election day next November if your choice is between the Republican version of Mr. Magoo and the Democrat's version of Imelda Marcos?

Media Mavens Beg For Primaries To End

A visibly exhausted Wolf Blitzer melted down in CNN's Situation Room today, suddenly turning away from a holographic display specially invented to explain the trans-dimensional Texas primaries, stating "Can Senator Clinton suffer a setback and keep on going? Wait a minute. No, no, that's it. Look, people--I'm sorry. I can't take the over-analysis anymore. Just let the Texans vote!"

Blitzer's attitude was apparently catching, with MSNBC's Tim Russert describing guest political commentator James Carville as a "glass-chewing bat-eared freak" who he advised to "get help or go back on meds." Russert then responded to conservative guest William Bennett in a low-voiced aside, "Take another trip to Vegas, Sparky," an apparent reference to Mr. Bennett's rumored gambling addiction.

Ok, those things only happened in the achievable fantasies of my mind. Rather, the media exists to sell air time by accentuating controversy, and behind their airbrushed earnesty the talking heads currently look as if they're about to pop like champagne corks. They're happy because Barack Obama's string of victories appears to be broken, an 11-primary run in which his smallest margin of victory was by 17 percentage points. After an absence of two centuries, Vermont and Rhode Island are electorally meaningful again. The Heads are even happier with the thought of a divided Democratic convention, which appears increasingly likely.

Simple math dictates that Hillary Clinton can't overtake Obama in either pledged delegates or popular votes; to draw even in delegates, she would have to win all remaining 16 states by 20 percentage points, a margin Obama leads by in Vermont and Mississippi surveys. Obama has nearly drawn even in committed superdelegates, a group generally not distinguished by the courage of its convictions and which knows going against a home state's popular vote is to quaff political pesticide. Yet even if he takes a lead amongst superdelegates, it's still possible that Obama would fall short of the 2,024 delegates required to take his party's nomination.

The Clinton plan to win boils down to "seating" Michigan and Florida delegates, ones currently disallowed because each state chose to break party rules by holding early primaries. The Clinton campaign pleads that these states shouldn't be disenfranchised, and while they'll probably not be allowed to pencil down all those delegates as theirs, the disenfranchisement argument is strong. There has been talk of Michigan and Florida holding do-over caucuses; the Democratic National Committee (chaired by Howard Dean) loves caucuses because they've gotten lots of new people to register and existing members more involved than any time since 1959. The DNC has already gone on the record pushing Michigan to caucus. The contest may not extend beyond June, but the nomination may ultimately come down to those two prodigal states. Party leadership is ready to proffer a compromise of caucuses, and the Clintons will be in no position to turn it down.

Change You Can Google!

I thought Hillary really helped herself in tonight's debate, even after a mid-debate negative jab: "you know, lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in, it's change you can Xerox." The audience booed. She made a nice recovery and kept improving on to her effective closing remarks, which show-cased some honesty, as Peggy Noonan suggested. She was so disarming at one point it almost sounded like a concession ("no matter what happens in this contest -- and I am honored, I am honored to be here with Barack Obama. I am absolutely honored.").

Yet afterwards, something kept tapping on my shoulder about her closing few lines, so I used what the internet gods gave me. I've never before known plagiarism to be leavened by irony:

Hillary Clinton: “You know, whatever happens, we’re going to be fine. You know, we have strong support from our families and our friends. I just hope that we’ll be able to say the same thing about the American people. And that’s what this election should be about.”
Democratic Debate, 2-21-08

John Edwards: “What’s not at stake are any of us. All of us are going to be just fine no matter what happens in this election. But what’s at stake is whether America is going to be fine.”
Democratic Debate, 12-13-07

John Edwards: “I want to say this to everyone: with Elizabeth, with my family, with my friends, with all of you and all of your support, this son of a millworker’s gonna be just fine. Our job now is to make certain that America will be fine.”
Campaign Speech, 1-30-08

An added bonus:

Hillary Clinton: “You know, the hits I’ve taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country.”
Democratic Debate, 02-21-08

Bill Clinton: “The hits that I took in this election are nothing compared to the hits the people of this state and this country have been taking for a long time."
Speech, 1992

What were her speech writers thinking?

(via Ruralvotes.com)

Peggy Noonan Gives Hillary Clinton The Key To Winning

It's not just tactics, it's something deeper. From last week's WSJ article:

...imagine if she tried honesty and humility. When everyone in America knows you're in a dreadful position, admit you're in a dreadful position. Don't lie about it and make them roll their eyes, tell the truth and make them blink.

As in: "Look, let's be frank. A lot of politics is spin, for reasons we can all write books about. I'm as guilty as anyone else. But right now I'm in the fight of my life, and right now I'm not winning. I'm up against an opponent who's classy and accomplished and who has captured the public imagination. I've had some trouble doing that. I'm not one of those people you think of when you hear a phrase like 'the romance of history.' But I think I bring some things to the table that I haven't quite managed to explain. I think I've got a case to be made that I haven't quite succeeded in making. And I'm going to ask you for one more try. Will you listen? And if I convince you, will you help me? Because I need your help."

Could Mrs. Clinton do something like this? I doubt it. She'd think it concedes too much and would look weak. But maybe it would show an emotional suppleness, and a characterological ability to see things as they are, which is always nice in a president.

Washington State Caucus: My First Politics

Just back from the Washington state caucus. The key swing issue there was electability–the Clintons enrage and mobilize the conservatives, giving McCain a chance in red states, and in states where he shouldn’t have one at all. Even the most eloquent and/or impassioned advocates (points were experience, Bill backs her up, health care, pro-choice, experience) couldn’t defend that point. About 3/4s of the undecideds in my caucus went to Obama, and 75% of caucus-goers in the most democratic, highest-turnout district in all of Washington state voted for him.

The debate was quite high-quality went from positive to invigorating and then it started to devolve into Not Pretty. The Obama campaign had sent out emails this morning urging everybody to dwell on the positives, and to not attack. At precisely twenty minutes into debate, the Clinton supporters started becoming more vocal, then comparatively acrimonious, hogging the chair, finally going negative, and at the end at least 5 of them (females) shot my loved one extended dirty looks while she was speaking, and after. Then the Undecideds got to confer, ask questions for 10 minutes, and choose a candidate. All but one did.

Of course, due to local circumstances, our anecdotes and results may not indicate much nationally due to the last race for Governor here. A Pug candidate with no political experience (Dino Rossi) came within about 40 votes in a bitterly re-counted election of taking the governorship on little more than a commercial of holding up a baby, smiling like a state patrol officer, and saying he was strong on family values. A few votes in Seattle were the only reason our governor (Christine Gregoire, Obama endorser) is a Democrat. She's a fine governor, but many feel a much stronger candidate should've been allowed to run, and there seems to be little remaining trust in the Democratic party in a state that went 70% for Gore in 2000. A taste for new ways of doing things is in the air here, and today's turnout was brim-full-to-overflowing.

Easily the most popular caucus attendee was an older man squarely in the Clinton demographic group who stood up and said, “Our generation brought in the most divisive politics in the 20th century. Hillary Clinton only brings more divisiveness, and our time has passed. The currency of the 21st century will be diversity, and no one has more appreciation of diversity, from where and how he grew up and what he's done thus far, than Barack Obama.”

Lord Wife bravely volunteered to take notes, brave because the high school gymnasiums and classrooms were all mobbed and quite noisy, but she did a professional job. She was then encouraged to run as a delegate by a couple 23-year old supporters who liked what she had to say.

I suspect they may have also been supporting the MILF ticket, but as the debate was drawing to a close, my better half made a very effective rebuttal to a claim that Clinton's public health plan is superior to Obama's. Shorter Lord Wife: "I work in public health research, so I've compared the two plans very carefully. The Clinton health care plan is mandated, mandated plans in California and Massachusetts have already failed, and it further sucks on vectors x, y, and z." She was subsequently elected to be a delegate to the state convention, as was the aging boomer, an 18-year old of Pakistani descent, a young executive of Indian descent, and a woman who works with special needs kids. My wife was tickled pink. (And she wants to write a post comparing health care plans soon.)

The Clinton supporters were barely able to eke out 2 delegates out of seven. I wondered how they did it, given the shrinking numbers of undecideds. Then I realized they had persuaded one last person to stay undecided, so that the Clinton delegate share went up mathematically from 1.488 to 1.5, thus allowing it to be rounded up to 2. Otherwise it would've been 6-1.

Overall it was quite an experience to caucus, that is, to participate in politics for the very first time. We live in one of the most impregnable of Democratic strongholds, probably one of the most Democratic neighborhoods in the country. Our House rep is that lightning rod of conservatives Jim McDermott, our state rep is a single-issue candidate (gay marriage), and everybody seems to be driving bio-diesels, Priuses, Honda Fits, scooters, and bikes. We're safe territory that wasn't even supposed to have mattered in the primary, and the Clinton campaign didn't even have an office here until this week. I'm not sure how far away this can be extrapolated, but we went in a landslide for Obama.

Clintons Claim Super Tuesday Victory

Present circumstances often remind one of wonderful anecdotes from the past's trove. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's economic advisor, John Kenneth Galbraith, was sent to debrief Albert Speer after Germany's surrendur. Speer had been his "opposite number" in terms of wartime economic planning. In an aside, Speer mentioned that it was perfectly obvious to him since 1943 that Germany would lose the war. By what economic metrics, Galbraith asked, did he arrive at the conclusion? Was it grain prices? Synthetic oil costs? The lack of rubber? "No, no, not at all," Speer answered. "It was because our heroic victories kept getting closer to Berlin."

After steady and nearly complete erosion of a seemingly insurmountable early lead, the Clinton camp's claims of victory on Super Tuesday bear comparison. It was the Clintons who had pushed for a Super Tuesday in the first place, planning it as a knockout punch. Crying "hooray!" while hauling ass off the terrain of your choosing is always incongruous, often unbecoming. The same day it claimed victory, the campaign announced it wouldn't cover most upcoming states, rather planning to concentrate its resources on Ohio. Today staffers started passing rumors that the Clintons believe caucusing is undemocratic cheating, and one described an atmosphere of desperation and rage. While dipping into their personal fortune for a $5 million loan and asking staffers to go unpaid, the Clintons started openly pointing at all the Florida and Michigan delegates, saying they're way ahead if you count those.

Question...why would Dims in Florida and Michigan knowingly violate their own party's bylaws, thereby invalidating all their delegates? And why would Clinton be the only name on the ballot?

Barack Obama Won Nevada

That's right, contrary to every major news story, he won Nevada. I just happened to notice it over the weekend, in a Hawaiian newspaper story posted on the Drudge Report--Hillary Clinton will take 12 Nevada delegates to the Democratic Convention, while Barack Obama gets 13. I don't pretend to know how, nor am I inclined to research the Rube Goldberg state electoral procedures, during which the Clintons unsuccessfully sued to invalidate the votes of the largest union there, the Culinary Workers, which endorsed Obama. Bottom line, he won 13-12 in a state which Hillary Clinton led by 25 polling points 4 months ago.

Kind of interesting that the national press didn't focus on that fact, instead only reporting that he was defeated in the popular vote. If Corporate Media consistently dumps on a candidate, that's probably a good reason to take a closer look at them. The Howard Deaning of Obama continues, along with others who find even less favor. What coverage John Edwards has gotten makes people think he's either a) unctious or b) is the most right-wing Democratic candidate, Ron Paul is ejected by bouncers, Dennis Kucinich is crossed off the guest list. Pundits shake their compensatory shotguns in anger about liberal media bias, the lovely status quo is protected, and the elites keep on singing their anthem: "They Can't Overcome."

(Update: Open Left put it way better:

I've learned two things today. First, the Democratic presidential nomination system is not particularly democratic, since the system of delegate selection is different than the concept of one person one vote. Second, I have learned that the national media is not actually covering the Democratic presidential nomination campaign. If the media was covering the Democratic presidential nomination campaign, then they would have projected Barack Obama as the winner of the Nevada caucuses, projected New Hampshire as a tie between Clinton and Obama, and declared that Clinton finished second in Iowa. That is, after all, what actually happened in the Democratic presidential nomination campaign, which is based on delegates, not popular votes from states. Instead of covering the Democratic presidential nomination campaign, the media is instead covering who wins the popular vote of individual states. While what the media is covering is interesting and closer to the concept of one person, one vote, it isn't the Democratic presidential nomination campaign.

Until the national media declares that Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election because he won the popular vote, I will continue to assert that Barack Obama won the Democratic caucuses in Nevada. To agree with one statement without agreeing to both statements is to be caught in a logical contradiction. If delegates to the national convention don't determine who won a state in a nomination campaign, then the Electoral College doesn't determine who wins the Presidency in a general election. We all know, of course, that both of those propositions are false.)

New Hampshire Recount

Dennis Kucinich is paying for a democratic primary vote hand-recount in New Hampshire, scheduled to start Wednesday, January 16th. The optical scan counts were performed by Diebold, and a comparison of the scanned Clinton/Obama votes vs. their hand-counted votes is rather remarkable:

Head to head comparison - corrected numbers
Clinton: statewide optical scan tally
95,843 52.73%

Obama: statewide optical scan tally
85,910 47.27%

Clinton: statewide hand-count tally
16,767 46.75%

Obama: hand count
19,097 53.25%

1/5 - 1/7 Real Clear Politics seven poll average (head-to-head pairing)
Clinton 43.9%
Obama 56.1%

The closeness of the match of the two candidates hand-count with the Real Clear Politics seven-poll average (1/5 - 1/7/08) - compared with the divergence of the optical scan tally - remains under investigation.

(via The River Blog, originally posted at News From Undergound, data from Election Defense Alliance.)