That’s the actual headline from an Associated Press story on Yahoo.

But isn’t that what the whole world has been saying for years now? Anyway, it’s sorta surprising to see Gates say this to his own “boss.”

(Okay, okay, another cheap, jokey entry…but I couldn’t resist.)

SMU to host Bush library, will ‘celebrate his accomplishments’

No, I am not making this shit up. (Couldn’t if I tried.)

In the Democratic presidential primaries, everyone’s obsessing over Ohio, Texas, and the superdelegates — more or less following Clinton’s own spin. But one of the most problematic and possibly decisive features of the electoral calendar has received little comment.

On March 11th, Spring Break begins. That’s the day when that deepest of Deep South states, Mississippi, holds its primary. There are no more votes in the Democratic race for six whole weeks, until April 22nd, when Pennsylvania chimes in. (The Republicans do have a caucus in the Virgin Islands during that period, but their race will probably already be decided by then.) After that, there’s a vote every week or two. Seven more states still have to weigh in, with the Democratic race ending in Puerto Rico on June 7th.

Currently, by most counts, Obama leads Clinton by around 60 delegates. The way the polls are looking now in the upcoming states, that margin will probably be closer when Spring Break begins. More likely than not Obama will still be ahead, but either way it will be very close.

And then — six weeks without a vote. Can you imagine? Think about how the endless punditry and horseracing festers after only a few days without a fresh result. Six weeks ought to be enough for the professional blabs on T.V. to have their mouths fall off, exposing the vacuums inside their heads. We can only hope.

It could get pretty ugly. You think the battle for the superdelegates is intense now? Wait until that’s the ONLY battle running.

But don’t forget — this is BEFORE all the voters get their say. Now, it’s one thing when somebody runs away with the nomination, and some states don’t get to influence the outcome. That’s too bad, but at least it makes sense. But it makes no sense at all to say, in the rare case where a race is close enough and exciting enough that it’s going to go all the way down to the wire, with every last state in the balance, that we STILL have to wrap it up early somehow.

Yet during Spring Break — you mark my words — the pressure within the Democratic Party to “resolve” this thing — that is, to preempt the people and prevent the final eight states from having an impact — will reach unbearable levels. Both candidates will be trying to stampede it in their favor. (I would say all three, but I don’t see too much of an opening for a Mike Gravel stampede.) Some superdelegates will be talking about resolving this thing quickly, others will be holding out. The rival camps will be behaving about as well as drunken teenagers in Palm Springs. The corporate media will be in full blather mode, pollsters will be endlessly redoing upcoming states (mostly Pennsylvania, Indiana, and North Carolina), but no one will be voting. Just talking. And after a while, the talk will start to stink like a fetid swamp.

Above all, during Spring Break the nonsense about how a prolonged fight for the nomination will hurt the Democratic party will get overwhelming. And it IS nonsense. We haven’t had down-to-the-convention nomination fights in a long time, but back when it used to happen regularly, it didn’t hurt a party or its nominee. Otherwise, Polk, Pierce, Lincoln, Garfield, Wilson, Harding, and Eisenhower, among others, would never have been presidents.

The most modern example, Eisenhower, had to battle Robert Taft (son of President William Howard Taft) all the way to the end of the first ballot and beyond at the 1952 Republican convention. While the history books will tell you Eisenhower picked up the nomination on the first ballot, they don’t always mention that he was actually a little short after all the states had voted. Then some delegates clamored to change their votes and put Eisenhower over the top. Technically this was still the first ballot. That’s how close it was.

Taft was much more conservative than General Eisenhower, the hero of the Congressional right. It was a battle for the soul of the G.O.P. (Picture Newt Gingrich versus Colin Powell.) And the right-wingers lost. It was one of the closest, bitterest and most bruising head-to-head nomination contests in American history, much nastier than Clinton-Obama is so far. Eisenhower went on to win by a landslide in the general election, the first Republican presidential victory in 24 years.

So, no — you don’t need to wrap up a nomination fight quickly “for the good of the party.” It’s the party insiders who don’t want to let the people get too uppity who get nervous when these things go on “too long.” We the People don’t need to be told when we have to make up our minds. We just need the right to have our votes count.

The fact remains, six weeks is a long time between votes. Spring break never lasted that long when I was in school. And the kids knew better than to campaign for student council during a vacation. But these guys don’t know what a vacation is.

So get out your Easter eggs. It’s gonna be a long, hot spring.

By the way — if anyone actually reads this blog, I apologize for the low content level of recent posts. I’ve had an academic deadline. Some real shit will hopefully roll your way soon (assuming the path is downhill and not too sticky).

Should I pick it, or shouldn’t I?

It won’t be Mike Gravel.

Wow, I am a bold man.   :)

Perhaps everyone was too busy watching the Super Bowl to notice, but the other Super of the Week — Super Tuesday — is also shaping up to be an upset, albeit a smaller one.

Political scientists and other compromised pundits have been telling us for days now, “Obama has momentum, but it probably won’t be enough.” Maybe — but Zogby, the poll the mainstream loves to hate but that has been hitting it on the money this primary season (except for New Hampshire and South Carolina, which NOBODY got right), has some numbers out that sound some pretty discordant notes for the Billary duet.

According to Zogby, Obama now leads California by 4 points. This is pretty shocking for a state where Obama’s little-engine-that-could campaign was mostly hoping to lose by a small enough margin not to lose too many net delegates. Clinton, with 41% to Obama’s 45%, with 15% undecided, could well still win, but if Zogby’s on track on here, she’ll need a swing back the other direction, and Maria Shriver be damned.

It gets worse for her. Zogby also shows New Jersey — long thought to be a Clinton lock — essentially a dead heat, with a 1% Clinton lead. She has the same negligible margin in Missouri. Zogby doesn’t give results for Illinois or New York, but presumably the favorite son and daughter, respectively, will win those states. In Georgia, Obama’s cruising with a 20% lead, 48-28.

This isn’t looking too good for the second incarnation of the Clinton Inevitability Parade.

Nothing is certain yet, of course. These numbers could be wrong, or the trend could reverse itself in time for Tuesday. And almost no matter how it comes out, it’s unlikely either Obama or Clinton will have anything near a lock on the nomination after Tsunami Day — and that’s a GOOD thing. The last thing we need is more drive-thru democracy.

The reason both candidates are likely to survive Tuesday’s votes, despite such a huge number of races and delegates at stake, is the Democratic Party’s proportional representation rules for its primaries and caucuses. This is one of the few places in American politics where proportional representation — the principle that if you get x% of the votes, you get x% of the seats — is used. It’s remarkable how radical that logical principle appears to inside-the-Beltway opinion, even though it’s used in the parliaments of most European democracies. The Democrats opted for this methodology for their presidential nominations, under massive citizen pressure, to stop another power grab like what Hubert Humphrey pulled in ‘68.

Proportional representation means that a candidate who wins a state narrowly only gets a few more delegates than the runner-up. This in turn means that the delegates are actually a reasonable reflection of the voters’ wishes. It’s bad news, of course, for the horse race doctors of corporate news, who want to treat the races like a football game. If someone scores a last-minute touchdown and barely pulls it out, they are purely and simply the winner, says the pundits. The other candidate is the LOSER, and who likes losers?

The Republicans obligingly have winner-take-all rules in many states. That’s why the Republican race, despite having three strong candidates, may well collapse in the near future.

But the Democrats insist on making the election at least a little bit about the voters, and not altogether about the horse race. That’s why the punditocracy has been so obsessed over the past 20 years with overemphasizing the results of each early primary while breathlessly blathering about how this dooms the candidate who has finished a strong second or third in the first one or two races. They have quite literally been trying to cancel out the democratizing effects of proportional representation on delegate selection by triggering early stampedes. Starting in the nineties, the media had achieved stunning success with this technique — until this year, when the voters decided to be ornery.

Of course, the pundits are still falling over themselves demanding that the races narrow down to a small number of candidates who agree on almost everything anyway. Better yet, they say, let’s have only ONE candidate — the kind of choice you got in a Soviet election. God bless America.

Trouble for them is, it may not be happening. And that’s good news, not only for Obama supporters, but for anyone who thinks We the People should not yet be phased out as a factor in American politics.