New Year's predictions 2018

January:  Doug Jones will be sworn in as the new Senator from Alabama.  He will have to dodge Roy Moore, who will run in and try to snatch the Bible off the table and administer the oath of office to himself.

February: Justin Timberlake will perform at Super Bowl halftime, fourteen years after the infamous 'wardrobe malfunction' in which he ripped Janet Jackson's outfit and exposed her breast.  This time he will surprise people and invite Jackson back on stage, but this time,  in this year of #TakeaKnee and #MeToo  , when Timberlake tries the same thing again he will  'take a knee' from Janet to the nether regions.

March:  The start of baseball season will include a pitch clock. A major scandal will erupt when the Red Sox get caught speeding up the clock when the Yankees are pitching. Donald Trump will send a tweet blaming Hillary Clinton and reminding people Massachusetts is a blue state, even if they do call their team the Red Sox.

April:  The Trump administration announces that entry fees to National Parks will rise again, to well over a hundred dollars for top National Parks.  When it is pointed out  that this might make it too expensive for a family to visit Yosemite,  White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders Huckabee says,  "Well, then, they can go to Six Flags and see Yosemite Sam instead !"

May:  A few months after passing a tax bill that raises the deficit, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio will cite the skyrocketing deficit as a reason to cut entitlements (as they already have said they will.)  Social Security payments will be cut only slightly for present retirees.  Future retirees will be promised a t-shirt saying, "I paid thousands into Social Security but all I got was this lousy t-shirt."  When somebody points out that immigrants are overwhelmingly young people who could help stabilize Social Security and Medicare, conservatives will drown it out with chants of "build the wall, build the wall."

June:  Six months after moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, citing reasons of 'convenience,'   the Trump administration will announce they are moving our consulate with the Palestinian Authority to an abandoned oil platform off the coast of Louisiana,  also citing 'convenience.'

July:  The GOP effort to privatize Social Security by ramming it all through  in a matter of days that began in May will fail in the Senate.  Donald Trump will respond with a series of angry tweets attacking Hillary Clinton.

August:  The record breaking drought continues around the southwest.  In southern California and Arizona, mold is added to the 'endangered species' list.

September:  The Trump administration will announce a solution to the Confederate Monument controversy. They will all be relocated to Puerto Rico to serve as windbreaks for families who are still living out in the open with no heat or shelter a year after Hurricane Maria.  He will praise himself for helping bring 'a great success' to Puerto Rico.

October:  The Mueller investigation issues a final report several weeks before the election, concluding that there is evidence that Russia was in close collusion with members of the Trump campaign to ensure Trump's election.  Rather than indicating any concern about a foreign power being involved in our election, Republicans derisively criticize former FBI director Mueller and start wearing  Putin masks at Halloween parties.

November:  Democrats decisively win control of the House, many Governorships and despite the terrible Senate map, are able to pick up a 50-50 tie for control of the Senate.  Trump sends out a tweet calling the election results 'fake news.'

December:  On Christmas morning, the nation wakes up to find that the White House is buried under hundreds of tons of coal, with a reindeer poop on top of it.  Donald Trump will blame Hillary Clinton.

Jan Brewer's phony outrage

The local news is full of Jan Brewer's faux outrage at the Obama administration for daring to challenge the new immigration law, especially the part about Hillary Clinton apparently first spilling the beans during a trip to Ecuador.

This may play well with the Republican base that Brewer is trying to hang onto as she heads into a competitive primary contest but hardly anyone who knows politics is fooled by this. As evidence, just last week Brewer got into a fight with Terry Goddard, who would have to defend the law in his capacity as Attorney General over precisely this matter. So for her to now claim that she is surprised is the height of hypocrisy. Goddard for his part (and keeping in mind that if Brewer survives her primary she would be running against Goddard in the fall) did voluntarily step aside today (giving Brewer what she demanded from him last week) and wisely isn't going to be defending this law.

The immigration bill was certain to be challenged in court from the moment it was signed, not only because it places the state in the position of the Federal Government, but also because one can seriously question the constitutionality of requiring that all citizens (because it is not only non-citizens who will be questioned) carry identification with them in order to avoid possibly being detained as a 'suspected undocumented' immigrant. This seems contrary to the fourth amendment protection against unreasonable searches.

True that if you are driving a vehicle you need a drivers license with you but that is only while you are driving. If you are not driving a vehicle (such as if you are walking down the street, standing on the corner or only a passenger in a vehicle) there is no current requirement for I.D. but the Arizona law in fact if not in letter does now require I.D. (certainly for anyone-- read that Hispanics or people who may be mistaken for Hispanics such as American Indians-- who may be 'suspected' of being an undocumented immigrant.)

Brewer knew very well that this law would certainly be challenged in court, and virtually certainly by the Justice Department, so her expressions of shock are purely contrived. As to the matter of Secretary Clinton first disclosing this in Ecuador, it may have been a slip of the tongue, or it may have been intentional. Either way, official notification will follow when the Justice Department is ready to file their suit. Likely as not they are carefully wording their official court briefs in order to comply with all necessary legal requirements, whereas the Secretary of State, as she is not the one who will be filing the suit, is under no obligation to wait for them to file the official suit.

If she wanted to avoid a lawsuit there was an easy way to do that-- veto the law last month. But Governor Brewer made it clear which side she is on. Fine, but then don't turn around and claim to be shocked and surprised when the inevitable consequences roll around.

The importance of a primary

2008 was destined to be a Democratic year at the presidential level. As has been pointed out in many other places, the electorate was thoroughly tired of George W. Bush and after the economic crisis that began with the failure of the Lehman Brothers Bank on September 14, last year's election would have been an unwinnable scenario by any Republican candidate against any competent Democrat (maybe if the Democrats had nominated John Edwards and the Rielle Hunter scandal had erupted a week before the election, but it would have taken something of that magnitude to shift the poltical landscape last year enough to produce a GOP win.)

In that framework, it is worth taking a look back to last year's epic primary battle betwen Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. There is no reason to suppose that the November result would have differed much (Clinton might have lost North Carolina and Indiana and won Arkansas, West Virginia, and/or Missouri but regardless of small differences in the electoral map, in the end the result would have been the same.)

The differences come after that. The ongoing differences between Clinton and Obama are highlighted by a report today that Clinton urged Obama to take a tougher line last week with Iran. One can argue whether she was right or not (certainly the Khameini/Ahmadinejad regime has blood on their hands and deserve to be called on it, but equally certainly the unarmed demonstrators never had a chance against the armed militia, backed by the police, backed by the army if it had come to that, and Obama was fundamentally right during the campaign that Iran is too big and too important a country to maintain the Bush policy of isolation in regard to) but this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is different. Hillary Clinton remember, backed the Iraq war (and continued to back it well after most Democrats had realized that the most we could win was a Pyrrhic victory) even siding with the Bush White House on the surge, interrogation methods and a whole host of other war issues, and also voting with the Bush White House against Iran on a resolution in late 2007 naming the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization (a vote which in fact may have cost her crucial support in Iowa, especially when she appeared to blow off voter anger over it, chastizing a man who asked her about it at a rally.)

It is impossible to know how Hillary Clinton as president would have dealt with any specific situation but let's remember that she was intimately involved in decision making during her husband's presidency and he would have been very involved in hers. Hillary is not Bill, but the Bill Clinton presidency (not least because they do in fact have similar political views) provides a guideline for what we might have expected. Bill was far more ready to use military force than Obama has been. For example it's a good bet that if Hillary Clinton were president we'd have marines on the ground right now returning president Zelaya to Honduras (remember that Bill Clinton faced a nearly identical situation in Haiti and sent the marines to restore Aristide.) It's also worth noting that Hillary Clinton in the Senate several times voted for more funding for the military (including for the war in Iraq) that Barack Obama opposed.

Besides the fact that Bill (and very probably Hillary) was and would have been more hawkish in terms of foreign policy, there are also domestic policy differences.

On social issues there are very few differences. It's not hard to imagine Hillary Clinton nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, and on issues like the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the 'Mexico City Rule' the results would likely have been identical. In fact, arguably Hillary Clinton would have done more on gay issues than Obama has done (an area of civil rights where he has been slow to implement promises he made during the campaign.)

However on economics there are some major differences. Hillary Clinton was strongly pushed by the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council), an economically conservative pro-business group within the Democratic party. Bill Clinton was instrumental in its founding, and if one thinks back to the Clinton Presidency on economic issues Bill Clinton had a decidedly conservative tilt. He actively pushed for less regulation of markets. On this issue he was nearly indistinguishable from most Republicans; in fact, Bill Clinton deserves a share of the blame for the present multiple crises caused by lack of adequate regulation. For that matter Hillary would likely have had more trouble than Obama reversing course on regulation, not only because doing so would cut against her core economic beliefs but because in many cases Obama has had to change rules that were written during the Bill Clinton presidency-- something Hillary Clinton would certainly have to answer about. Also, Bill Clinton generally was opposed to bailouts and favored free trade. Hillary Clinton in the Senate took these positions as well. There may have been a stimulus bill if Hillary Clinton were president but with the Clintons' aversion to deficits (even going back to Arkansas) and her early campaign promise (granted, made before all hell broke loose) to produce balanced budgets it might not have been large enough. Remember too that Al Gore was frustrated that the Clinton White House never pushed for higher CAFE standards or other environmental legislation because they spent too much time listening to the business lobby, and it's likely that if Hillary Clinton were president we would never have seen much of an effort along the lines of the global warming bill the House passed last week.

On health care, Hillary's most famous battle (and most famous defeat) came in 1994 trying to create a universal coverage plan. During the primary she promised to try again, but between her dislike of deficit spending (one reason for the big surpluses during the Clinton presidency was that they raised taxes to pay for a health care plan early on but then didn't get the plan) and her more cautious approach (even more so having been burned once on it) the likelihood is that healthcare 'reform' would have been something much more modest than the sweeping changes we are likely to see in the Obama bill. With the Clinton ideal of focus groups, triangulation and pollwatching driving the process we might well end up with a fancy sounding 'reform' that in the end would do relatively little. There might have been a mandate to buy health insurance (as there is today in Massachusetts) but no public plan to hold down costs by competing with the private plans.

Of course, there are areas where I don't agree with Barack Obama (and at least in one area, civil rights, there are reasons to believe that Hillary Clinton might have been the more progressive of the two) but on balance I believe that it is a good thing that Democratic activists (including me) became involved in the primary and pushed Obama over the finish line. In at least two major areas, foreign policy and economic policy it is clear that because of the primary we have a far more progressive presidency than we would have if Hillary Clinton had been nominated.

Key witness in State Department passport case gunned down outside his church-- one year anniversary

Remember a scandal that erupted last year in the State Department when it turned out that Department employees had illegally accessed passport information regarding Barack Obama? Later on it turned out that the files of Hillary Clinton and John McCain were also accessed, though most of the scrutiny was of Obama's passport file.

At the time it was passed off as the clumsy work of a couple of low level trainees who apparently had accessed the information on a lark. Then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice even called Obama to apologize for the breach. A number of State Department employees were fired as a result.

Only the investigation didn't stop there. It led to an ongoing investigation into passport fraud. One key witness was Lieutenant Quarles Harris, Jr.

Well, obviously there is more at stake here than just ordinary passport fraud. Harris was shot to death one year ago yesterday as he sat in his car in front of his church.

It is not yet known who killed him or whether it is related to the passport fraud case. We will have to wait for the police to finish their investigation before we know that. But the fact that Harris was apparently specifically targeted at a location where he was known to frequent on Sundays is disturbing to say the least. Will they ever find out who killed him or will this simply be swept under the rug?

CORRECTION: I had originally looked at the date on the story and figured it happened this year. In fact this year was the one year anniversary of when it happened. And apparently they still have no killer.

Sort of like the Energizer bunny.

Socks, formerly the Clintons' cat, died today. When the Clintons moved out of the White House, they gave Socks to press secretary Betty Curry, who has kept him for the past eight years.

Socks, it seems, had only one life.

But the Clintons do have nine lives.

I don't get why some Latinos are upset about Richardson cabinet appointment

I read an article today where some Hispanic leaders are upset that Governor Bill Richardson, who endorsed Obama (though late in the campaign, when it was clear which way the tide was moving) and dearly wanted the Secretary of State's job, will instead be getting a less prestigious and less influential cabinet post, that of Secretary of Commerce. Hillary Clinton will be the next Secretary of State.

Now I will give one point that the dissapointed Hispanic leaders are making. There is no question that Richardson is more qualified in terms of his foreign policy experience, having actually sat across the table from some pretty tough characters and hammered out real agreements with them. Clinton has never done that. But that isn't the same as saying that she can't, she is certainly smart and capable enough to do it (and she will of course have the advice of her husband, who has done plenty of direct negotiating.)

However, when I was working with the Richardson campaign (yes some longtime readers of this blog may recall that I was a former Richardson supporter,) I remember that polling never showed that he was getting near the support that Clinton was getting among Hispanics in states like California, even before he dropped out. His support among Hispanic voters rarely polled above 10%.

So my question is a simple one: How can a group of voters be upset that a candidate doesn't get a position, when they themselves never really got behind him (and the person they did support gets the position instead?)

There is no question that Bill Richardson broke new ground by becoming the first Hispanic to run for President in a major party primary. But I don't see how Obama is somehow obligated to choose him for Secretary of State based on some combination of his resume, his demographic and his endorsement that came so late it seemed opportunistic (Joe Biden, who at one time was also talked about as a potential Secretary of State did far better by not endorsing either Obama or Clinton at all.)

Hillary was right to dodge a GOP photo op

Today Hillary Clinton is being derided for backing out of a rally at the United Nations to protest Iranian nuclear development once she found out that Sarah Palin would also be there.

I think she made a wise decision. There is nothing wrong with protesting Iranian nuclear development or the failure of the U.N. to take a stronger stand against it (though I believe that the Iranians will do what they want to do whether the U.N. toughens their stand or not; and our own misadventure in Iraq has effectively taken any real threat of a U.S. invasion of Iran off the table for the foreseeable future since we right now don't have the available military units to be able to carry it out.)

There is also nothing wrong with Governor Palin going as a representative of the McCain campaign, clearly indicating Senator McCain's support for stronger U.N. action against Iran.

The reason Hillary was right to decide against going is that she might have been stuck with a no-win situation, completely unrelated to Iran or nukes.

Keep in mind that last week Hillary informed the Obama campaign that while she is willing to keep up the attack on McCain she refused to jump all over Palin. And I can see why that is, she herself would gain nothing from such an attack and frankly is probably happy in at least the most general sense that a woman (even one she herself would never support) is now running for VP. It does in a sense validate the historic nature of Hillary Clinton's campaign earlier this year.

Suppose that Governor Palin made a point of seeking out Senator Clinton and making a light conversation, possibly including a handshake? In this hyper-political year, that would be all over the front page and would seem to imply that Hillary at least found a McCain-Palin Presidency acceptable (remember that the McCain folks have spent a lot of time and effort going after disaffected Clinton supporters.) So if that is not a message that Hillary Clinton wants to send she can't afford to be photographed yukking it up while shaking hands with Sarah Palin (though publically neither woman has said anything negative about the other recently).

The other alternative, to publically snub Governor Palin, would be even worse. That would cast Hillary as purely a party hack (not that you would find many Republicans who would say she's not, but it's still a label she doesn't want to refresh.) It would also cast her to a lot of people as rude and would seem to undercut the whole success she had in earning 18 million votes. And that would also be a headline that the Obama campaign doesn't need right now, with Obama gaining momentum in the polls this week thanks to a combination of the Lehman Brothers-Dow Jones-AIG economic woes and McCain's gaffe on Monday that have definitively moved the focus away from Sarah Palin and onto the economy.

So going to the rally was a lose-lose proposition for Hillary. True she is now still getting some bad press (and the right will spin this is a snub of Palin anyway) but it's a minor story and doesn't look one fiftieth as bad as a face to face snub would be.

It's good to see Hillary keeping her word to stand behind Obama

I think that Hillary Clinton is a better candidate when she's stumping for someone else.

And it's good to see that she's keeping her word and pushing Obama as she travels about.

She made a pretty good speech in fact to the convention of the American Federation of Teachers (a group which I used to be a member of when I worked at an institution where we organized a union under AFT auspices.)

Obama was also in Chicago on Saturday, and addressed the conference by satellite today. But Clinton, who received the AFT's backing during the primary, appeared in Obama's hometown yesterday to speak highly of her former rival before an audience of her supporters.

"I can't wait to see Barack raise his hand, take that oath of office and get to work," she told several thousand educators at the conference.

And she jabbed at the Republicans, using a line that drew such applause when Clinton used it earlier this week in New York that Obama borrowed it when he spoke at an event without Clinton on Thursday in Virginia....

"A vice-president who shoots somebody in the face, you couldn't make that up," Clinton said to laughter.

She added, "the Republicans should hold a press conference and apologize to the country and say they're just not going to run anyone for president."

I admit that I was a bit concerned about whether Hillary's promise to 'work her heart out for [Obama]' if he won the nomination might be just words. Obviously during the obligatory joint appearances she praised him, but the real test is what she would say when she goes on the road alone and doing her normal routine. And now we can see that she is doing what she can to help him. This will certainly help get her back into the good graces of a lot on the left who had abandoned her over Iraq and other issues before.

And I loved that line about Cheney. I agree, that if the Republicans can't come up with anybody better than Dick Cheney for number two, then it would be better to leave that line on the ballot blank.

Of course Cheney has served his role well. Over the past eight years, he's been the best argument Bush had against any serious attempt at impeachment.

Obama is the Democratic nominee

The last primary results are in and the last state to vote, Montana (which closed its polls one hour after South Dakota and so deserves credit for being the last) is the state that pushed Barack Obama over the top and gave him the delegates needed for the nomination. As a former resident of the Big Sky state I'm glad that Montana put him over the top.

Hillary Clinton ran a great campaign, but it's time for her to put action behind her pledge to 'work to unify the party.' She said she won't make a decision tonight, but he's now got enough delegates that when the roll call is called in Denver he will end up on top. She has the right to continue to challenge, but I'd only point out that the last four nominees who had convention fights (Humphrey in 1968, McGovern in 1972 and Carter in 1980 for the Democrats, and Ford in 1976 for the Republicans) all lost the following general election. And were that to happen then any ideas that Hillary had about running in 2012 would probably be about as good as Ted Kennedy's of running in 1984 were after a lot of people blamed him for Carter's loss in November. Yeah, I know-- Ronald Reagan fought Ford at the 1976 Republican convention but it didn't hurt him in 1980. However the difference was that in 1976 neither Ford nor Reagan entered the convention with a majority of delegates; there were some legitimate unocmmitted delegates to fight over. True, this year the Democrats have 'superdelegates' who can change their mind, but that is the point-- they would have to change it. Hillary has already made every argument she can think of and they are still for Obama. So it's unlikely they will change now.

But regardless, the night clearly belongs to Obama. He made a great speech, and is clearly ready to go after John McCain.

Even if Hillary gets everything she wants, Obama still wins

Hillary Clinton does have a right to remain in the running as long as she wants.

And she does have a case that the voters in Michigan and Florida should not be faulted or punished because of the actions of elected leaders who gambled on moving those primaries up. The intent was to get some of the national media attention (not to mention campaign spending) that was focused on the early primary states. Of course the elected leaders lost on that account. Especially in Michigan-- Obama took his name off the ballot, and all the state got out of it was a somewhat competitive GOP primary that only saw two candidates campaign much and gave Mitt Romney his biggest win of the primary season-- a win which was not all that big, in fact. Florida at least can make the case that John McCain's win, coming just after his South Carolina win and just before Super Tuesday may have played a decisive role in the Republican race. One can only imagine what kind of thoughts must have crossed the minds of those who moved the primaries up, complaining that otherwise they wouldn't have had a voice, watching all the attention and campaign money that was lavished on Pennsylvania for six full weeks leading up to that state's April 22 primary.

At the same time, Barack Obama has a case that he can make that the results from last January don't represent what would have happened if he and Senator Clinton had campaigned in the two states. Obviously being named on the Michigan ballot would make a difference, but beyond that in both primaries a lot of independents, having been told that the Democratic primary would not matter at all, cast their votes in the Republican primaries. Obama has consistently outpolled Clinton among independents (and until Rush Limbaugh started urging conservatives to vote for Clinton, he also outpolled her among crossover Republicans) so it is virtually certain that had the primaries been competitive Obama would have done quite a bit better than he did.

But I did some math, and even if she makes her case for Florida and Michigan, she still is extremely unlikely to catch him.

According to the BBC tally if the results were counted fully and as voted, they are:

DISQUALIFIED DELEGATES


Florida: 210
Michigan: 156
Hypothetical Florida result (elected delegates): Clinton 113, Obama 72, John Edwards 13
Hypothetical Michigan result (elected delegates): Clinton 80, Uncommitted 55

If we take the numbers currently reflected on the Real Clear Politics scoreboard we see that as of right now, Obama leads Clinton 1959-1778 in total delegates (counting both pledged delegates and announced superdelegates.) There are also 55 delegates remaining to be selected from Puerto Rico, 15 from South Dakota and 16 from Montana.

If we add all 193 Clinton delegates from Florida and Michigan to her total and the 72 Florida delegates to Obama's total, we still would have Obama leading 2031-1971, a lead of sixty delegates. She would then need to replicate her West Virginia margin, 70-30 in all three of the remaining contests (unlikely given Obama's appeal in the plains states) just to get to a tie. And that's giving Clinton EVERYTHING, including counting all the rest of the uncommitted and Edwards delegates as uncommitted (not for Obama.) In reality, that won't happen-- it is no secret that people who voted 'uncommitted' in Michigan were voting primarily for Obama (and most of the rest for Edwards), and since Edwards' endorsement of Obama, nearly all of his convention delegates have unsurprisingly followed his recommendation and moved over to Obama.

Sexist attack on Clinton goes too far

I've been plenty critical of Senator Clinton at times for both her positions on issues and for some things she's said. And I've been very clear about my support for Senator Obama and I'm glad that is getting close to clinching the nomination. But in this post I have to say that Rep. Steve Cohen, an Obama supporter from Tennessee, went just one step too far, though Cohen did apologize for the remark. Not so some bloggers, who have gleefully spread it around on the internet.

He compared her to Glenn Close's character in the movie, "Fatal Attraction". I saw that movie once, many years ago, and have no desire to see it again. Close's character plays an obsessed psychotic killer who has an affair with a married man and becomes obsessed with murdering his wife and taking her place.

To begin with, this remark is dripping with sexism. No one considers Hillary Clinton to be a psychopath, but the intent is to suggest otherwise. In fact, about the only thing that is common between Clinton and the character is that they are both female. Cohen probably considered the first real or fictional female psychopath he could think of (I guess Aileen Wuournos crossed his mind later.) Stop and think. Suppose a male Hispanic politician was compared to Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem's chillingly cold killer in No Country for Old Men.) Would it be considered a racial smear? Absolutely. And it is no less a sexist smear to compare a female politician to such a horrible character.

I know, I know. Some Republican will undoubtedly point to some post where someone compared Bush to Hitler. All I'd say about that is that it is also wrong (There was only one Hitler, thank God, and no one since then has been as completely and unalterably evil.) I have been known to compare Bush to Mussolini a few times but when I have it has not been a reference to any real or perceived Italian heritage, but rather a reference to macho but incompetent leadership and poorly planned military adventurism (and I'll let the present state of things in the world make that case.) In other words, it is a comment about policy, not a comment about DNA or anatomy.

But while I may disagree about many things with Hillary Clinton, I respect her for putting her best effort and point of view out there, and we should applaud the first woman to come as close as she did to being nominated by a major political party for President of the United States instead of passing off sexist cheap shots.

Once again, Bill Clinton says something that will boomerang against Hillary

It's been noted that Bill Clinton keeps giving the Hillary Clinton campaign headaches, and at times he's been more of a net negative than a positive. Most notably, it was Bill Clinton who first played the race card, suggesting in South Carolina that African-American voters were only voting for Obama because he was black and comparing him to 'Jesse Jackson,' thereby earning Clinton the mass defection of the previously sizeable number of African-American voters who had been supporting her in that state and elsewhere.

Well, he said something that will give her campaign heartburn again Sunday while campaigning in West Virginia. In that state, polls have been suggesting that she will win big, maybe even by more than forty percent (which would be a 70-30 percent pasting.) Of course that won't matter because well over 90% of the pledged delegates have already been chosen for the convention and West Virginia's puny delegate total of 28 delegates wouldn't do much, even if Clinton won three quarters of them (21-7 which would be a margin of +14, insufficient to change the delegate reality in which Obama has increased his margin just of superdelegates by more than fourteen just since last Tuesday.) But rather than setting her up to bask in the glow of a big win, he inexplicably raised the bar to an impossibly high level. According to ABC News he said about West Virginia:

You have to realize that if you show up in enough numbers, and your neighbors in Kentucky do, and we have a good run through the rest of these states," asserted Clinton, "We gotta have your help and get the largest number of people to show up on election day. See all this stuff you are hearing about is an attempt to discourage you. That's what this is, pure and simple, hoping, well, Hillary can get eighty percent of the vote in West Virginia, and if only 100,000 people show up it is not enough. But if 600,000 people show up, and you say we want a president than you will see the earth move.

Let's look at what he said in terms of what Bill is saying defines an 'earth-shaking' Clinton victory: 1. He is suggesting that 600,000 people need to show up to vote in the Democratic primary. Even in this year of record high turnout in primary elections, that would be extraordinary. In fact that would be nearly every registered Democrat in the state. 2. He is saying that Hillary can get 80 percent of the vote. That would be a sixty point blowout. Impressive for sure. But virtually impossible, even for Hillary Clinton in the West Virginia primary.

So now, thanks to Bill, no matter how badly things go in West Virginia on Tuesday, all the Obama campaign has to do is quote back Bill Clinton and suggest that Hillary didn't win as impressively as she was supposed to. Bill Clinton has just turned what should be a blowout win by any standard for Hillary Clinton into what can be described as 'underperforming expectations.' Conversely, by setting the bar so low for Obama (20%), Bill Clinton has in effect given him a way to say he has some momentum, even in a state in which over 90% of the voters are white.

Once again, Hillary's worst enemy isn't the media, the anti-war movement, the vast right-wing conspiracy or any other active candidate. Her worst enemy is, well we know who it is.

Obama wins big in North Carolina, Hillary fails to counter it in Indiana.

It's been as bad a last couple of weeks as Barack Obama has had. After losing in Pennsylvania, he's had the news focus on all-Jeremiah-Wright-all-the-time, been accused of not being able to 'close' and had a tough time getting on message. Various pollsters and pundits were predicting that Hillary Clinton would have all the momentum tonight, and playing up her chances of taking away the nomination.

In spite of all the bad news, Obama proved he has what it takes tonight. He won the biggest prize left, North Carolina, by a crushing 16-point margin (who says he can't win in a big state?) and in Indiana, where polls out this week had Clinton winning by upper single digits (in fact a Survey USA poll showed her winning by 12 points) it was a nailbiter in which Clinton finally pulled out a win by less than two percent. In fact, the margin is so close that it is attributable entirely to Rush Limbaugh's ordering thousands of dittoheads to vote for Hillary Clinton (probably not a single one of whom would vote for her in the fall.) Winning only because she has the support of Rush Limbaugh (whose stated goal is to drag out the Democratic primary process all the way to a convention floor fight) DOES NOT QUALIFY AS A WIN (even if she does squeak out a one or two point margin.) There are numbers to back that up too: In the CNN commissioned exit poll, the question is asked how voters would vote in an election between Clinton and McCain. 16% of voters in today's Democratic primary indicated that in such a matchup they would vote for McCain. One would expect the cut off your nose to spite your face crowd would mostly be supporters of the other candidate. That is true, but not overwhelmingly so-- of those sixteen percent, Hillary Clinton got 41% of their vote. Forty-one percent of sixteen percent represents about 6% of the total vote (three times Clinton's total margin of victory.) So that is six percent of the total number of voters in Indiana who DID vote for Hillary Clinton today but who say they would vote for John McCain in the fall even if Hillary Clinton is his opponent. So yes, I think it is clear that she won Indiana because of Rush Limbaugh.

So, with things looking as bad for Barack Obama as they have at any time since Iowa, he beat back the challenge.

Hillary ran a tough race but it's time to unify the party (as she said in her own speech tonight). Obama will win the nomination and there is little she can still do to prevent it.

It doesn't get much closer than that.

Guam caucus result:

Barack Obama defeats Hillary Clinton 2,264 votes to 2,257 votes, a seven vote margin. Each candidate receives two of the territory's four pledged delegates.

I originally wrote,

Luckily this wasn't in Florida, or the state bureaucracy, the candidates' legal teams and the courts would tell us the result sometime before the convention.

but it turns out that there are dozens of spoiled ballots which will need to be figured out. It likely won't change the delegate total, but it would be premature to say that Obama won.

Joseph Andrew concludes that a vote for Hillary is a vote for McCain-- and he's right.

Today, Joseph Andrew, a Democratic superdelegate from Indiana who was once named by President Bill Clinton as chair of the Democratic National Committee, announced that he has changed his support from Hillary Clinton, who he had supported early on, to Barack Obama. He made it clear that he wrestled with the decision, but today he wrote about why he made the decision.

Part of what he wrote is here:

Today I am announcing my support for Senator Barack Obama for President of the United States of America. I am changing my support from Senator Clinton to Senator Obama, and calling for my fellow Democrats across my home State of Indiana, and my fellow super delegates across the nation, to heal the rift in our Party and unite behind Barack Obama....

I believe that Bill Clinton will be remembered as one of our nation's great Presidents, and Senator Clinton as one of our nation's great public servants. But as much as I respect and admire them both, it is clear that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to continue this process, and a vote to continue this process is a vote that assists John McCain.

I ask Hoosiers to come together and vote for Barack Obama to be our next President. In an accident of timing, Indiana has been given the opportunity to truly make a difference. Hoosiers should grab that power and do what in their heart they know is right. They should reject the old negative politics and vote for true change. Don't settle for the tried and true and the simplistic slogans, but listen to your heart and dare to be inspired. Only a cynic would be critical of Barack Obama inspiring millions. Only the uninformed could forget that the candidate that wins in November is always the candidate that inspires millions.

I ask the leaders of our Party to come together after this Tuesday's primary to heal wounds and unite us around a single nominee. While I was hopeful that a long, contested primary season would invigorate our Party, the polls show that the tone and temperature of the race is now hurting us. John McCain, without doing much of anything, is now competitive against both of our remaining candidates. We are doing his work for him and distracting Americans from the issues that really affect all of our lives.

He's right too. About two months ago, most polls showed that John McCain was behind both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama. Today many of the same polls show McCain virtually tied or in some cases leading either of them.

If the math was there for Hillary I wouldn't question her continuing onward. But to win she will have to convince not only a majority of the superdelegates remaining, but an overwhelming majority. I don't see that happening.

Here are some stark facts:

1. Obama has a lead of 156 pledged delegates, with so few remaining now that for Hillary to catch him she would have to win by amazing margins in all of the remaining primaries, something in the 70% plus range. She may be delusional in thinking that she can actually win, but she won't.

2. Both candidates have raised well over a hundred million dollars-- and spent it to beat up on each other. John McCain, despite having misjudged his fundraising abilities and constraints so badly that they have seriously jeopardized his campaign at least twice (proving how bad "Mr. campaign finance's" judgement is-- the first way you can judge a candidate's ability to manage is how well he or she runs their own campaign,) may well start out the fall campaign with more cash on hand than the Democratic nominee.

3. McCain should by all accounts be getting killed. He has stated in the past his complete agreement with some of the worst and most unpopular decisions by the Bush administration-- including to stay in Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and continuing to borrow to cover deficits and for Social Security privatization. If the race was being run strictly on the issues, McCain would be campaigning in Idaho trying to avoid a fifty state sweep.

4. The campaign has become quite nasty on both sides. McCain doesn't have to go negative. It is guaranteed that the winner of the Democratic nomination will already have high negatives. People don't just forget overnight.

5. Obama keeps saying the campaign is about 'judgement.' He's not just talking about Iraq. The truth is, Hillary's campaign focused only on large and early states, which let Obama's campaign pretty much organize uncontested in a slew of midsized states like Virginia, Maryland, Wisconsin and Washington as well as a lot of small states until the last minute, and it is in these states where he won by lopsided margins and ran up his delegate lead. See what I said in #2 about management ability and what we can learn about it by watching how a candidate handles his or her campaign. Obama may have lost some races, but he didn't skip a bunch of states.

Of course there are those who want Hillary to keep on winning. For example, Ann Coulter earlier this year said she wanted Hillary for President, and talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham have ordered their listeners to re-register as Democrats and vote for Hillary. This 'rush' of tens, or even of hundreds of thousands of 'dittoheads' to the polls certainly made the difference in Hillary's paper-thin margin in the Texas primary, and may well continue to inflate her vote total. But even with all the help she is getting from Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, Hillary still can only claim to be ahead if she counts votes from Florida, where she campaigned one day and Obama none because the DNC told everyone the votes wouldn't count and ask the candidates to pledge not to campaign there, and Michigan, where Obama signed a similar pledge and therefore took his name off the ballot. So I guess if you don't mind Rush Limbaugh choosing the Democratic nominee, then go ahead and vote for Hillary, right alongside his army of 'dittoheads.'

But let's make it clear. Hillary won't win the nomination. She'd have to win about 2/3 of the remaining pledged delegates (she won't) and then also convince the superdelegates to take it away from Obama and give it to her. She also won't do that. So at this point given the way Republicans are gleeful to see this race going on and getting more and more negative in the process, the only thing I can say is this: A vote for Hillary is a vote for John McCain.

Obama takes the right position on 'gas tax holiday,' even though it will cost him votes

Gas is creeping upwards towards $4.00 per gallon (diesel heading towards five) and may get there this summer. Voters want to see gas prices go down. So both John McCain and Hillary Clinton have proposed a Federal 'gas tax holiday' during the summer (peak driving season.) Clinton, to her credit, at least has a plan to offset the loss of revenue-- earmarked for highway funding-- with a windfall profits tax on oil companies. I guess McCain would just as soon sacrifice the quality of American roads to serve his own short term ambition of getting elected President. Of couse he flies everywhere anyway so I guess he never has to worry about a pothole doing thousands of dollars worth of damage to his car.

However the candidate showing real leadership here is Barack Obama. In the face of the demands for a 'tax holiday,' he is making the difficult case that cutting off the gasoline tax won't reduce prices, and whether offset by a Federal windfall tax on oil companies as Clinton proposes or offset by not funding highway repairs as McCain proposes, either way in the long run it will cost more, not less.

For starters, in an economics 101 class you will learn that if you decrease the price on any item, demand increases. But if supply does not, it puts upward pressure on price which in turn leads you back to the same equilibrium point, a price at which demand equals supply. That is as true for gasoline as for any other commodity, which is the point that economists are making, Senator Obama understands and Senators Clinton and McCain either don't understand or choose to wilfully ignore in their reckless search for votes.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- As summer approaches, Hillary Clinton and John McCain have found a common problem and a common solution. Both want to suspend the federal tax on gasoline, giving drivers a break from high prices at the pump.

At first glance, that sounds like a great idea. But if economists are right, it's their fellow senator Barack Obama who's got the better idea when it comes to the gasoline tax: Do nothing.

Both McCain and Clinton would suspend the 18.4 cents a gallon tax on gasoline. Clinton said Monday that she would also suspend the 24.4 cents a gallon tax on diesel this summer...

It would appear that Obama is risking a chance to win populist points by not standing behind a tax break, particularly when gasoline is at a punishing $3.65 a gallon. But if it's real relief the candidates are looking for, economists say, they should look elsewhere.

"I don't think that a gas-tax cut would result in a really big drop in gasoline prices," said James Hamilton, a professor of economics at the University of California San Diego. It's simple economics: Without a corresponding increase in supply, he added, the price would rise again.

Boosting supply at this stage would be difficult. In the summertime, refineries run at close to full tilt to meet expected demand from vacationing families and other summer drivers.

Since the refiners can't produce much more without building new refineries, the price has to go back up," wrote Len Burman and Eric Toder on TaxVox, the blog of the Tax Policy Center. (Their post is titled "What Were They Thinking???") "Unless the plan's aim is to boost short-term profits for petroleum refineries, the proposal makes no sense...

It might seem axiomatic that cutting taxes on gasoline would make it cheaper. But economists also say a side effect of cheaper gas would be increased demand for fuel as more people drive. That, they point out, would put prices right back where they started.

"They'll bid the price back up," said Andrew Samwick, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College and a former economic adviser to President Bush.

In fact, if the Clinton plan is adopted there is nothing to prevent the oil companies from passing the tax right back to the consumers while if the McCain plan is adopted then sooner or later the highway repairs will still have to be done, which means that some other tax will have to be used for the purpose and likely raised. So what we really see is that there is no such thing as a free lunch, just politicians who promise you one.

Obviously while Obama is right on this one, it is going to cost him votes. But sometimes leadership means doing what's right, even at a price.

The truth is, the reason for the high gas price is because we spent so many decades doing nothing (recall that Jimmy Carter had a plan to make America self-sufficient in energy by 2000 but except for the Alaska pipeline, a small part of it, Ronald Reagan dismantled the whole plan.) Just a couple of months ago, Congress passed the first increase in CAFE standards since 1978. And America is a nation of cars, partly because we lag the rest of the world in investment in mass transit (and then, like in the case of the Phoenix light rail system, we wait to build it until decades after it is proposed, and therefore at dozens of times the cost.)

We will need a comprehensive long term energy policy (which the next administration can and should put together and propose,) not a short term bandaid which will in the end save you nothing.

Hillary ENDORSED McCain at a dinner I was at. So what in blazes is she attacking Obama for?

Yesterday in Reading, Barack Obama said that all three remaining candidates, including John McCain 'would be better than George Bush.'

First of all, that is almost certainly correct. That's because it is a very, very low bar. Not just me, but many Presidential historians now consider that George W. Bush is likely to go down as the worst, or one of the worst Presidents of all time, in terms of everything from wrecking the economy with his ruinous tax cuts that ballooned the deficit and gave it away to foreign governments, to his stupid war in Iraq that gave bin Laden a chance to evade capture as Afghanistan became secondary.

So by that standard, every other President is 'better than Bush.' Even Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush would be by comparison 'better than Bush.' But that doesn't mean for a moment that I would want another Nixon, Reagan or Bush Sr., and I don't want John McCain.

But Hillary Clinton, always on the prowl for something negative to say, immediately jumped on the comment by Obama. She said, "We need a nominee who will take on John McCain, not cheer on John McCain, and I will be that nominee."

OH, MY GOD!! WHAT A HYPOCRITE!!!

I was at the Wild Horse resort in Chandler in 2004 to listen to Hillary visit and make a speech. I took my then eight year old with me. And during her speech, she praised John McCain and went so far as to endorse him for his Senate run that year (I don't know if she was trying to prove she was a 'moderate' or what the heck she was doing.) Keep in mind that this was a room full of Democrats. What was really insulting was that our statewide candidates (who had been introduced earlier) had a table of honor right in front of the speakers platform. Among them was Stu Starkey, who was running against McCain that year. I don't think that even Stu thought that he had a prayer of winning, but he campaigned gamely anyway and managed to deny McCain one jewel he would have dearly loved to have-- Stu held onto the votes of registered Democrats by a small margin (NO THANKS to the Senator from New York.) I was absolutely shocked to hear those words come from the mouth of our keynote speaker, and I doubt if I was the only one.

So to hear Hillary going after Obama after she had the nerve (right in front of me, and not more than twenty feet from the Democrat who was McCain's opponent) to gush all over McCain and endorse him for his Senate re-election in 2004 is nauseating. Absolutely nauseating.

Richardson endorses Obama.

Thursday, Bill Richardson, who I supported for President until he dropped out, endorsed Barack Obama, who I switched to and who I actually voted for.

You'd think this post would therefore be completely laudatory. But it's not. In good faith I can't just jump up and down and yell about how happy I am about it. I'd love to but I have just a few nagging reservations, and they are best addressed by looking at some of the political angles.

It is true that I am very happy to see Richardson, who was criticized during the campaign for being indecisive (i.e. 'Yankees or Red Sox?') firmly committing himself to endorsing a candidate. It is true that I still respect Richardson (who I first met over twenty years ago when he was my congressman) and believe that he would do a fine job in any cabinet position, especially any that involved diplomacy, at which he has excelled. And it is true that I am glad that when he finally made a decision about choosing a candidate he chose Obama. That isn't easy to do. Bill Clinton reportedly got in his face and berated Richardson earlier in the campaign (not sure if it is the day the two of them pointedly watched the Super Bowl together) for not endorsing his wife then (asking whether two cabinet positions Richardson was appointed to during the Clinton administration was not enough to warrant an endorsement,) and the conversation that Richardson had with Hillary Clinton before he endorsed Obama was (according to Richardson, but reflecting what others have said about similar phone conversations), 'painful' and difficult. The sense of anger, frustration and resentment from the Clinton campaign is palpable, with Clinton friend and confidante James Carville noting that it happened just before Easter and comparing Richardson to Judas Iscariot and claiming that his 'betrayal' was for 'thirty pieces of silver.' It is clear that if Hillary beats the odds and ends up as President, Richardson won't be nominated for dogcatcher.

However I have to say that the quote by Richardson that he made his decision after hearing Obama's speech on race last week just doesn't feel right. It may well be that Richardson, after doing the delegate math and figuring out that Obama will most likely win, may have used the speech on race as the first major event that came along that he could reasonably cite as a reason to endorse Obama and hitch his wagon to the winning train. However, Richardson has always struck me as a good hard calculator and not one to get carried away with the emotion of the moment (one of the characteristics which has made him a good diplomat,) and as such I would much rather see him just go ahead and say so. Say he believes that Obama is going to be the nominee and that he is supporting him.

Richardson is rumored to want to be the Vice Presidential nominee, or if not that then Secretary of State.

He won't be the Vice Presidential nominee. Obama, assuming he wins the nomination, will need to unify the party. As such there will be a lot of pressure for him to accept Hillary Clinton as number two. If that doesn't happen (either because he resists the pressure or she refuses the job) then there are two somewhat contradictory schools of thought on how he could unify the party. One is to choose a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton if she doesn't want it herself, especially one who would help with the electoral math. Two men who are known to be on her short list, Senator (and former Governor) Evan Bayh of Indiana and Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio-- both of whom also have the executive experience that Obama lacks, would likely be at the top of that list. The other train of thought in terms of getting Hillary supporters to accept Obama is that many women have waited for a long time to have a female President. To obviously reach and choose a woman (as Walter Mondale did when he chose congresswoman-- yes, Geraldine Ferraro-- in 1984) would seem to be a pander and would likely turn off a lot of voters who see Obama as being above that kind of thing. However he could without reaching look for and choose a highly qualified female candidate, especially a Governor who has proven she can do the job as an executive and would therefore make a good running mate for Obama. That may be easier said than done though. Three of the four Democratic Governors whose names come up first, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, Christine Gregoire of Washington and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, endorsed Obama much earlier in the campaign, and might not help with hard-core Clinton supporters who support Clinton for her positions rather than her gender (and there are many of them, in fact.) The fourth, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm is a strong supporter of Clinton but runs afoul of the Constitutional requirement that if she became President she would have to be native-born (Granholm was born in Canada.) Uniting the party in the event that Hillary Clinton refuses to join the ticket or Obama feels that he can't accept her would be a problem for Obama, but it's not a problem the solution to which puts Bill Richardson on the radar screen in any way. For that matter, if Clinton-- after finishing a very strong second, were passed over in favor of the candidate who finished a very distant fourth and withdrew the day after the New Hampshire primary, that would probably be seen by Hillary and her supporters as the equivalent of a slap in the face, and with some justification. So the bottom line is that Richardson certainly won't be nominated to run for Vice President.

A much stronger likelihood is that Richardson is angling for the position of Secretary of State. He'd likely be very good at it too, based on his numerous diplomatic successes in all kinds of negotiations in the past. Richardson, in his position as a freelancing diplomat as well as U.N. ambassador during the Clinton administration, has successfully negotiated treaties with everyone from the dictatorship of North Korea to bands of thugs who have taken American hostages in remote and war-torn regions. Last year he negotiated a cease-fire in Darfur. Frankly, even if he had not endorsed Obama, Obama would be foolish not to pick Richardson for Secretary of State. Politically, Richardson may have the inside track on that job, especially if the other top contender is another former Presidential candidate, Joe Biden. Biden has been even more cautious about issuing an endorsement than Richardson, and while he has been the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate, he has never personally gotten his hands dirty with the business of negotiating tough treaties in tough circumstances as Richardson has. Given Obama's inexperience in foreign policy, he needs the best Secretary of State he can get and that would be Bill Richardson.

So it's clear that Obama can give Richardson the position he wants. What Richardson brings is an appeal to Hispanic voters, a group that Obama has underperformed with. Further, by the timing of his annoucement, coming on virtually the same day as the 'passportgate' scandal which cast Obama in a role in which he was both the victimized party and able to forcefully but calmly demand an investigation, Richardson was able to give Obama two major news stories favorable to Obama within the same news cycle and blow Jeremiah Wright's sermons off the front page despite the best efforts of the right-wing media to keep them there. And in the news business, once news is old and replaced by new news, it doesn't tend to return unless there is something new to pull it back to top billing.

Clinton campaign manager Mark Penn said that Richardson's endorsement comes too late to really help Obama with Hispanic voters. Rarely do I agree with Mark Penn, but I think he has a point there. Nevada, New Mexico, California, Arizona and Texas have already voted (and all for Clinton). There is a small but possibly significant Hispanic concentration, oddly enough, in North Carolina (a state Obama is expected to win anyway) and some in Oregon, and then there is Puerto Rico's last-in-the-nation primary, but the truth is that the vast majority of Hispanic voters have already voted. Very likely, given the small margins by which Clinton won in both states, a Richardson endorsement and campaign on behalf of Obama in New Mexico and Texas would have swung both states to Obama but Richardson was too cautious and did not issue an endorsement in time for either state. However, Richardson could be a strong help to Obama if he does campaign in Puerto Rico, and in a general election may be just the antidote that Obama needs if he is willing to barnstorm for Obama, especially in his own state but also in other swing states.

But Richardson, in taking as long as he did to make the bold move, and appearing to worry too much about trying to please both sides (or perhaps it might be better said, trying to displease neither) until so late in the campaign, brought into sharp focus some of the weaknesses he had that probably hurt him during his own Presidential run.

Clinton wins make for a supreme irony for Florida, Michigan

Well, it is obvious that the battle for the nomination will go down to the wire with Hillary Clinton's wins tonight in Ohio, Rhode Island and Texas. I am of course an Obama supporter, but clearly Clinton is a fighter, and she's going to make sure that Obama has to earn it if he is the nominee.

She is clearly a winner tonight (as is John McCain, who finally mathematically clinched the Republican nomination, prompting Mike Huckabee to drop out.) Barack Obama is not a big loser, however. He won Vermont and will apparently clearly win the caucus portion of the Texas vote though narrowly losing the popular vote in the primary (meaning he may still win more delegates in Texas than Clinton will.)

But this makes it clear that there are two huge losers in this primary season, at least on the Democratic side: the states of Michigan and Florida. And even more than the fact that they are losers, is how they got there-- a supreme irony, that.

In 1999, Baylor had the football and a 24-21 lead in a football game against UNLV. With the clock running down, UNLV out of timeouts and Baylor inside the UNLV ten yard line, the Bears only had to kneel down and let the clock run out. Instead coach Kevin Steele threw sportsmanship to the winds and tried to run up the score, calling for a play to try and punch the ball into the endzone.

Only it didn't work out that way. In one of the most spectacular instances of comeuppance in sports history, the ball was fumbled on the goal line and the fumble was scooped up and returned 100 yards for a touchdown with no time remaining and a 27-24 UNLV victory. By trying to run up the score instead of walking off the field and into the pressroom with a hard-fought victory, Steele instead had to explain an inexplicable loss.

That serves as an introduction to what happened to Michigan and Florida. They violated party rules and 'jumped the gun' by scheduling their primaries in January, in violation of party rules which spelled out which states had early primaries. Their thinking was that if they held the primaries earlier, they'd 1) get the candidates to come there and campaign, 2) get more national media attention and the attendant dollars that an active campaign would bring into the state, 3) have the candidates focus on issues of importance to them (such as the auto industry in Michigan and senior issues in Florida) and 4) have a real say in choosing the nominee (instead of having the race already decided by the time it was their turn to vote.)

By so doing, they badly miscalculated, at least on the Democratic side (Republicans competed in both states, and in fact Florida turned out to be the key win for McCain, juicing his campaign and deflating Mitt Romney's just in time for Super-Duper Tuesday.) But on the Democratic side, the DNC stripped both states of their delegates (rendering both contests devoid of real meaning,) had the candidates sign pledges not to compete (in fact Obama and most of the other candidates even took their names off of the ballot in Michigan) and even is refusing to seat super delegates from the states (such as Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, who pushed for and signed the early primary law into effect.)

And the irony is that both states, especially Michigan are reaping what they sowed (Florida can at least take some solace in the hard fought Republican campaign there and the role the state played in making McCain the nominee. Michigan in contrast, didn't even have much of a Republican contest, with Mitt Romney getting his biggest win of the primary season, which wasn't really all that big.)

In the most competitive Democratic race in decades, it is likely that Democratic voters in EVERY OTHER state EXCEPT Florida and Michigan will get to cast votes that mean something. In short, to note the above four points, 1) the candidates didn't campaign in either one, 2) they aren't getting all the national attention that we've seen lavished this week on, for example, Ohio and Texas, 3) watched the candidates talk about other issues, but not much about the auto industry or-- surprisingly-- senior issues, and 4) not only will the voters not have a say, but even their elected officials-- superdelegates otherwise, will not be seated at the convention. I doubt when Governor Granholm signed the bill she knew she was even signing away her own vote at the convention.

On top of that, recently Florida Governor Charlie Crist proposed scheduling another Democratic primary later this year. Crist, a supporter of John McCain, wants to do so because if Florida's delegates were added back in to the total, it would likely just push the finish line back farther and drag things out longer (you can see the crocodile tears he is shedding over the Florida Democratic party.)

White men as swing voters?

After an earlier story run before the South Carolina primary on CNN backfired on the network, in which they asked black women whether they supported Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, with the obvious subtext that the election was about race vs. gender, the networks seem beside themselves in discovering that the new 'swing voters' are white men in the Democratic party. The theory goes, apparently, that since black voters are voting heavily for Obama and white women are mostly voting for Clinton, Obama's recent success is courtesy of white men choosing Obama over Clinton.

The subtext to this one is that the white men are more sexist than they are racist, which is why we (I am a white male Democrat) are supporting Obama.

Which is utter and complete bologna, and I reject their analysis.

To begin with, let's consider who white male Democrats are. As we know, the preferred party of white men in general is the Republican party. And white men who are either racist or sexist are much more likely to feel at home in an anti-abortion party that opposes affirmative action, child care and anti-poverty programs than they are in today's Democratic party. Very likely they've already left.

The white men who are left, such as myself, are therefore likely to be the most liberal of white men, those who reject the essense of the Republican party.

And the truth is, Hillary Clinton has not been getting the votes of these men because she is the more conservative candidate. The Iraq war vote in 2002 was huge, but that isn't all. Her reluctance to question the wisdom of that vote and renounce it (a la John Edwards) spoke volumes. But she also voted for NCLB, Patriot I, Patriot II, the bankrupcty bill, and just to show that she still hadn't learned anything, the Iran vote last year. So the reason I didn't vote for Hillary Clinton isn't because she was a woman, the reason I didn't vote for her is because her hawkish foreign policy reminded me of Joe Lieberman (I didn't vote for him either when he ran for President in 2004.)

A friend of mine feels the same way, but he told me about how he had been roundly excoriated by some female friends of his who believe that he based his vote on gender. This is of course ridiculous. In fact, the last time when there was a serious competition between a white woman and a black man within the Democratic party, Nancy Pelosi in 2005 defeated former congressman Harold Ford of Tennessee to become minority leader (and then accede to speaker after the 2006 elections.) Most Democratic men I know, if they had a strong opinion of the race, felt that it was better that Pelosi won because she better represents the traditional views of the Democratic party. I agree with that assessment.

But the idea that white male Democrats decide who to vote for based on gender (or race for that matter) is insulting at the deepest level to many of us who have spent a great deal of time and effort supporting the candidate who we believe is better.