My sentiments exactly…

Hillary will probably win in Pennsylvania, but probably not by nearly big enough of a margin to enable her to mount a comeback and win the popular vote, let alone the pledged delegates. But remember this, as the results roll in: for her, this has ceased to be primarily about winning the people’s votes.

In boxing, when you win a round, you normally gain one point on your opponent. So what does a boxer do if he figures he’s behind by more points than there are rounds to go? Theoretically, he could try for two-point rounds: if you really smashingly dominate a round, once in a blue moon you’ll be given two points instead of one. But the chances of doing this in more than one round are negligible.

So what does he do? He stops trying to win on points. He puts all his hopes on a knockout.

It’s been evident for some time now that Hillary Clinton is in similar straits. People have long since pointed out that she has no practical chance to win the pledged delegates count. Instead, they’ve argued, she could win the national popular vote compiled from all the primaries and caucuses, and make the case that this represents the true will of the people, which the superdelegates should honor.

Horsepucky. She’s not winning the national popular vote. Bloomberg.com, in an article that expresses skepticism about her prospects of doing it, but not enough skepticism, remarks that

Clinton would need a 25-point victory in Pennsylvania, plus 20-point wins in later contests in West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico. Even that scenario assumes Clinton, 60, would break even in Indiana, North Carolina, South Dakota, Montana and Oregon — a prospect that’s not at all certain.

It’s not just not at all certain, it’s very unlikely. Indiana is uncertain. North Carolina, South Dakota, Montana, and Oregon are natural states for big Obama wins, based on the pattern so far. In North Carolina, there are even polls to back this up. It would be miraculous if she broke even cumulatively in those states. For that matter, a 25-point win in Pennsylvania would overturn all the polling that’s been done there lately.

And 20-point wins in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Puerto Rico? Well, she’d need 60% of the vote. So far Hillary’s broken the 60% barrier in only one race–her husband’s home state of Arkansas. Obama, meanwhile, has scored over 60% of the vote in 18 races—15 states plus D.C, Democrats Abroad, and an astounding 90% in the Virgin Islands (where his boyish looks apparently enabled him to pass for a virgin).

In fact, the consistent difference in this otherwise very close race has been precisely Obama’s ability to win some races by big margins. Because the delegates are allocated proportionately in each state, you really need this to build up a lead.

Anyway, for Clinton to get 60% in four of the ten remaining races, when she’s only done it once out of more than forty chances so far, is a pretty gigantic stretch. Obama’s consistently shown the ability to use his combination of cash, appealing T.V. ads, and energized base to put up sizable numbers even where he’s relatively weak.

So Clinton’s not going to win the national popular vote, and she’s not winning the pledged delegates either. If she doesn’t win the pledged delegates, she needs a majority of superdelegates. So far, they’re almost evenly divided, so she has to pick up a sizeable majority of the remaining ones. But, she can’t argue to them that she’s the people’s choice unless she wins either popular votes or pledged delegates.

Quite a dilemma, ain’t it?

However, she is a shrewd and experienced enough practical politician to know that there is, in fact, one possibility still open to her. It’s not exactly likely, but it’s by no means impossible either. And although it depends heavily on events beyond her control, she has been moving heaven and earth to make it happen. (Or hell and earth, depending on your perspective.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Commenting on Barack Obama’s remarkable speech on race, Charles Kaiser says,

If Obama is elected president, it will be because he has been the first candidate in many years to try to appeal to what is best in America: “What is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.” Unlike the approach of every Republican candidate for president, that is a perfect example of the way religion should be used in American politics.

In Obama’s words today, you could hear the mystic chords of memory—an echo of the words of another man from Illinois with humble origins who understood the proper role of religion in politics. The spirit Obama embodied today was the same one Abraham Lincoln evoked in the peroration of his greatest speech in 1865:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Well put, Mr. Kaiser. However, in Lincoln’s second inaugural address, just before he got to the “with malice toward none” bit quoted above, he had something else to say. As the Civil War approached its close, here are the words–almost inconceivable today in their eloquent bluntness–with which the American president dared to combine religion and race:

The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

“God damn America,” indeed. It strikes me that old Abe was in some ways closer to Reverend Wright than to Obama–praiseworthy, thought-provoking, and indeed groundbreaking though Barack’s speech was.

To be fair, Lincoln made clear that he hoped God wouldn’t damn America, and the out-of-context snippets from Wright’s speeches we’re being bombarded with don’t make that clear (not that that proves anything one way or the other about Wright). Nonetheless, Lincoln said explicitly that if God did damn, or more precisely curse, America, in the cruelest possible way, that it would be just. More–that perhaps he was already doing so, in the form of the war that cost more American lives than any other. And that the North’s own centuries-long complicity in slavery and benefit from the wealth it extracted meant that the North, too, was liable to God’s justice. Had the North not had slavery, and then, after slowly abolishing it, kept the Southern slave system alive through its political acquiescence? Had Northern mills not woven Southern cotton? Does our economy not today rest in no small part on the backs of our own black and brown grunt laborers and on the cheap products of overseas sweatshops? Does it not further depend on the colossally murderous gunboat diplomacy to which Wright made such maligned mention, whereby countries around the world are kept open to American trade and business at the point of a knife?

I wonder what outcry must have greeted Lincoln, or would have had he confronted an American populace like the one of today. “He’s taking political correctness to a new extreme! Slavery isn’t my fault–I’m a Northerner and can’t even own slaves. Why should I be punished for it?”

He gives to both North and South this terrible war.

If God wills that it continue until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…

the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

These words are carved into the Lincoln Monument. They should be seared into the nation’s soul as a protection against the stupendous denial of collective responsibility into which we have fallen–and the vicious anger that greets any attempt to break through it.

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.

Let’s take a cool, hypeless look at what has happened so far in the race for the presidential nominations.

As of last month, Iowa was considered to be a tight three-way among Edwards, Clinton, and Obama. New Hampshire was expected to go for Clinton by a healthy margin, with Obama a competitive second and Edwards a distant third.

So what happened? I could almost say ditto, but not quite. Obama broke out of the pack to win Iowa by a convincing (though hardly overwhelming) 8-point margin, with the other two in a near-tie for second. New Hampshire went exactly as projected, except that Obama came a little closer than expected.

Of course, all this was presented as a wild set of gyrations back and forth. Now we are told that McCain and Clinton have the momentum, Romney is on the ropes, and Edwards — well, he was too anti-corporate for the corporate media to have conceded him much chance to begin with, and they certainly don’t give him any now.

Here are the pledged delegate totals (i.e., those awarded for success in caucuses and primaries — not counting the undemocratic “superdelegates” that the, ahem, Democratic Party uses to make sure it doesn’t risk being too democratic):

Source: CNN

Can you imagine how different both of these races would be if the standing of the candidates was actually presented in proportion to these results? Supposing, for example, the media portrayed Romney as the most consistent Republican candidate so far (which he is), but (to be fair) facing some doubts over his failure to win a big one yet. (Of course, he did win Wyoming, which is the only Western state polled so far and, though low in population, has two fifths as many folks as New Hampshire, but I digress.) Supposing McCain was portrayed as flush with victory, yes, but also only 4 delegates ahead of Fred Thompson, well behind the two leaders. Supposing the Democratic race was portrayed as a competitive three-way race, with Edwards a little behind the other two. Can you imagine how much differently voters might behave in subsequent contests, with these emphases and options placed before them?

And that’s exactly the point. Read the rest of this entry »