Of Leaders and Eunuchs

One of these three has balls:  Tommy Boy, Junior, or Hillary.  And the winner is - Hillary!

Even though her duel at the ballot box isn't until November of next year, Democratic presidential frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, has wasted no time in serving notice that the fight against climate change will be front and center in her campaign.

In fact, Hillary's is the first ever presidential campaign to make combating climate change a core issue.

Our boys, Mulcair and Trudeau, get to strut their stuff this year and, like the wee geldings they are, climate change seems to be something they're not too keen to talk about.  Oh Canada, indeed.

The Still Beating Heart of Progressivism

Not dead yet.  The venerable Boston Globe has published an editorial urging a certain American to run for the presidency of the United States of America.  The newspaper wants senator Elizabeth Warren to enter the race.

...the Democratic Party finds itself with some serious divides that ought to be settled by the electorate. Some are clear-cut policy differences, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an enormous free-trade agreement with Pacific Rim nations that Warren opposes and Clinton backs. Even in areas where the candidates agree, there are bound to be different priorities: It’s hard to imagine a President Clinton defending and enforcing the Dodd-Frank legislation with as much vigor as a President Warren, for instance.

Indeed, the big-picture debate on financial regulation and income inequality is what’s most at peril if the Democratic primaries come and go without top-notch opponents for Clinton. While she has a great many strengths, Clinton seems far more likely to hew to a cautious approach on economics. Her financial backing from Wall Street, her vote in the Senate to reduce bankruptcy protections, and her past reluctance to raise capital-gains taxes are no secret. Nothing about her record suggests much gumption for financial reform or tackling the deeply entrenched economic problems that increasingly threaten the American dream.

Seven years after the financial collapse, those challenges remain serious. To name just a few of the financial problems facing Americans: stagnant wages; ballooning student loan debt; exploitative payday lenders; shady subprime car loans; the proliferation of dubious for-profit colleges; inadequate retirement savings.

Unlike Clinton, or any of the prospective Republican candidates, Warren has made closing the economic gaps in America her main political priority, in a career that has included standing up for homeowners facingillegal foreclosures and calling for more bankruptcy protections. If she runs, it’ll ensure that those issues take their rightful place at the center of the national political debate.

The Globe is right on the money.  Hillary is the closest thing the Republicans have this time around to a presidential candidate.  She's a Democrat but not by that bloody much.  Clinton is a foreign policy hawk with decidedly Wall Street instincts.

Hillary for State Secretary

The Guardian is reporting that Hillary Clinton will accept the post of Secretary of State in the Obama administration.

Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama, who is reaching out to former rivals to build a broad coalition administration, the Guardian has learned.

Clinton would be well placed to become the country's dominant voice in foreign affairs, replacing Condoleezza Rice. Since being elected senator for New York, she has specialised in foreign affairs and defence. Although she supported the war in Iraq, she and Obama basically agree on a withdrawal of American troops.

Rumours of the appointment have been circulating for the past two days but this is the first indication that Senator Clinton has decided to accept the offer.

Palin Will Run in 2012, Alluah Akbar!

Alaska governor, small town mayor, hockey mom and moose assassin Sarah Palin says with a little help from mighty Allah, she will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

Palin, who probably doesn't know that Muslims, like Christians and Jews, worship the same, Old Testament God, says a little Divine inspiration is all she needs. From The Guardian:

"If there is an open door in [20]12 or four years later, and if it's something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, then I'll plough through that door," she told Fox News on Monday night.

"Show me where the open door is. Even if it's cracked up a little bit, maybe I'll plough right on through that and maybe prematurely plough through it, but don't let me miss an open door."

So, to recap. An open door is all she'll need to plough straight through but if the door isn't opened, she'll "prematurely" plough through anyway. The good news - we've got two more years before the campaigning begins for the 2012 race. The bad news - all we've got is just two more years.

I'm bettin' there are a lot of Republicans who aren't real keen on giving Sarah Palin another chance to destroy their party's prospects of retaking the White House. Then again, Hillary versus Sarah in 2016? Where do you get tickets? Sign me up, you betcha!

Clintonistas Under a Microscope

Hillary Clinton was the first woman to lose a major party's nomination for president and that's not sitting well for some of her more zealous feminist supporters. Michelle Goldberg writing in The New Republic analyzes the lasting legacy of feminist bitterness in her article, "3 A.M. for Feminism, Clinton dead enders and the crisis in the women's movement."

It's an eye-opener and is worth a close read regardless of which candidate you favoured:

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=2c2ec3a8-e813-4d4e-b566-510e0f19eced

That Zombie Named Hillary

The primaries are over and Obama has taken the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. He came from behind and bested not only the shoo-in favourite but also her popular ex-president husband.

So, where were we? Of course, Obama has won the delegates he needs to take the Democratic nomination so where is Hillary? Has she done what is demanded of any losing candidate and fallen behind Obama to support his fight against the Republicans? Of course not. This is a Clinton who believes that America's imperial age continues and that, no matter the result of the primaries, the nomination is still hers because - well, because she's a Clinton. How arrogant of that skinny little upstart to even run against her in the first place? Really.

The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is unquestionably an Obama supporter and has been throughout. Notwithstanding that, her take on Billary in today's paper is spot on:

"Whoever said that after denial comes acceptance hadn’t met the Clintons.
If Hillary could not have an acceptance speech, she wasn’t going to have acceptance.

“It’s never going to end,” sighed one Democrat who has been advising Hillary. “We’re just moving to a new phase.”

Barry has been trying to shake off Hillary and pivot for quite a long time now, but she has managed to keep her teeth in his ankle and raise serious doubts about his potency. Getting dragged across the finish line Tuesday night by Democrats who had had enough of the rapacious Clintons, who had decided, if it came to it, that they would rather lose with Obama than win with Hillary, the Illinois senator tried to celebrate at the St. Paul arena where Republicans will anoint John McCain in September.

...“What does Hillary want?” she mused, in her most self-aware moment in some time. “I will be making no decisions tonight,” she concluded, asking fans to go to her Web site to share their thoughts.

And, even though Democrats were no longer listening, Hillary’s camp radiated the message that Obama was a sucker who had played by the rules on Florida and Michigan, and then reached an appeasing compromise, and that such a weak sister could never handle Putin or I’m-A-Dinner-Jacket.

...Clintonologists know that Hillary is up to something, but they aren’t sure what. Theory No. 1 is that it’s the Cassandra “I told you so” gambit: She believes intensely that he’s too black, too weak and too elitist — with all his salmon and organic tea and steamed broccoli — to beat her pal John McCain. But she has to pretend she’ll do “whatever it takes,” even accept the vice presidency, a job she’s already had and doesn’t want again, so that nobody will blame her when he loses on Nov. 4. Then she can power on to 2012.

Theory No. 2 is that it’s a “Bad stuff happens” maneuver, exemplified in her gaffe about the R.F.K. assassination, that she figures that at least if she moves a few blocks from Embassy Row to the Naval Observatory, she’ll be a heartbeat away from the job she’s always wanted.

...For months, Hillary has been trying to emasculate Obama with the sort of words and themes she has chosen, stirring up feminist anger by promoting the idea that the men were unfairly taking it away from the women, and covering up her own campaign mistakes with cries of sexism. Even his ability to finally clinch the historic nomination did not stop her in that pursuit. She did not bat her eyelashes at him and proclaim him Rhett Butler instead of Ashley Wilkes."

The Hate Vote

Americans have spent an enormous amount of time, energy and money over the past half century to convince themselves that they had finally left behind their nation's horrible racist history.

Even if Barack Obama should lose to McCain in November, he'll have done his country an invaluable service by exposing just how alive and well racism is in today's America, among Democrats as well as Republicans, even among some feminists who ought to be the last to tolerate much less embrace racial bigotry.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen calls it "A Campaign to Hate."

"Wherever I go -- from glittering dinner party to glittering dinner party -- the famous and powerful people I meet (for such is my life) tell me how lucky I am to be a journalist in this the greatest of all presidential contests. I tell them, for I am wont to please, that this campaign is indeed great when, as history will record, it is not. I have come to loathe the campaign.

I loathe above all the resurgence of racism -- or maybe it is merely my appreciation of the fact that it is wider and deeper than I thought. I am stunned by the numbers of people who have come out to vote against Barack Obama because he is black. I am even more stunned that many of these people have no compunction about telling a pollster they voted on account of race -- one in five whites in Kentucky, for instance. Those voters didn't even know enough to lie, which is what, if you look at the numbers, others probably did in other states. Such honesty ought to be commendable. It is, instead, frightening.

...So I see little to be happy about, little that pleases my jaundiced eye. Yes, voter participation is way up and in the end, the Democrats will choose a woman or an African American and, to invoke that tiresome phrase, history will be made. But this messy nominating process has eroded the standing of both candidates. It has highlighted the reality that racism still runs deep and that misogyny, although more imagined than real, is not yet a wholly spent force. This is an ugly porridge that has been placed before us, turned rancid since the cold, pristine days of Iowa only five months ago. We were, with apologies to Bob Dylan, so much younger then. "

The Terrible Tempered Mr. Bill Runs Out of Steam

Bill Clinton used to know how to keep his cool. His ability to maintain his composure no matter how many times he got caught lying his ass off, mainly about his chronic inability to keep it in his pants, was instrumental in helping him survive the Republican's attempted impeachment coup.

Let's remember, the Republicans paid dearly for going after Bill because they weren't able to make a fatal dent in his public support. That might've been much different had then president Clinton revealed the ugly temper he's shown so often during his wife's campaign for the Democratic nomination.

It's not that Bill doesn't have reason to be upset. This nomination, after all, was supposed to be hers in a cakewalk. She was so far ahead of all the other Democratic candidates combined that she was as unsinkable as the Titanic.

It's useful to recall that Hillary, not Obama, had the black vote sewn up. Black voters were devoted fans of Bill Clinton. Barack Obama didn't steal those votes, the Clinton camp drove them out with their repeated race-baiting stunts. That was an event of seismic proportions that shook the black community. Interestingly enough it was Bill, not Hillary, who began that blunder.

And the Clinton campaign just kept tripping over a string of blunders. When she realized that what she had wasn't selling, Hillary kept trying to re-invent herself and pandered shamelessly to one group after another. She downed boilermakers with the blue collar crowd in Pennsylvania and professed her love for hot peppers to the Latino voters in Texas and showed up wearing an Indian necklace to appeal to South Dakota natives who had already decided to back Obama. Then there was that miserable "3 a.m." phone call ad, her attempt to knife Obama in the back by saying only she and McCain were experienced enough to be commander in chief, her crack about "I think he's a Christian," the one about her exclusive affinitity to "hard working Americans, white Americans," the outright and oft-repeated lie about braving sniper fire, the Bobby Kennedy assassination ploy. All this and more and yet Mrs. William Clinton and her rabid supporters claim the nomination was stolen from her. That is a pathetic, bordering on sick, joke.

Yet Bill still contends that "she wuz robbed." Of course it's the media's fault, especially the black media, those disloyal, ungrateful darkies. This campaign has shown the ugly side of Bill Clinton.

The New York Times' own black columnist, Bob Herbert, plainly won't be sad to see the Big Dog depart from the campaign:

"The cry of “McCain in ’08!” at the Democratic rules committee meeting in Washington over the weekend came from a supporter of Senator Hillary Clinton.

It reminded me of Bill Clinton’s comment that “it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country.”

He was talking about Hillary Clinton and John McCain. The former president’s comment played right into the sustained effort by opponents of Barack Obama to portray the senator as some kind of alien figure, less than patriotic, not fully American, too strange by half to be handed the reins of government.

This was supposed to have been the Democrats’ year. But instead of marching to victory, the party has been at war with itself in some of the ugliest ways imaginable. There was a time, not that long ago, when Democratic voters were crowing about how happy they were with all (or almost all) of the potential nominees.

But the Clinton and Obama partisans spent months fighting bitterly on the toxic terrain of misogyny, racism and religion. It can only make you wonder about the vaunted Democratic claims of moral superiority when it comes to tolerance.

This should have been the year when the Democrats just hammered the Republicans over the economy, the war, energy policy, health care, appointments to the Supreme Court, the failure to rebuild New Orleans, and so on. The list of important issues on which the Republicans are vulnerable is endless.

There is no end of blame to be apportioned among the Democrats. The Clintons have behaved execrably. But weak-willed party leaders showed neither the courage nor the inclination to stop them from fracturing the party along gender and ethnic lines.

As for Senator Obama, he’s been mired in a series of problems of his own — problems that have done serious damage to the very idea that brought him to national prominence in the first place: that he was a new breed of political leader, a unifying candidate who could begin to narrow the partisan divides of race, class and even, to some extent, political persuasion."

At the end of the day it may be clear that Bill Clinton did no favours for anyone.

Hillary's End Of The Road

The misery is almost over. Hillary Clinton swept the Puerto Rico primary today, for what that's worth. Now there are just two states left - South Dakota and Montana, both of which are expected to be wins for Barack Obama.

The Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg wrote this touching obituary of the Clinton campaign:

"...A lifetime's worth of ambitions, 16 years of acquaintances in the Democratic party establishment, 16 grinding months of rallies and debates, and $215m (£108m) in campaign funds, all now are exhausted.

So too was Clinton. Her face as she took the stage at the Pine Ridge reservation was drained of colour. People took pictures anyway. Those old enough to remember are still talking about the late Robert F Kennedy's visit to this remote outpost during the 1968 campaign.

They were already talking about Clinton's campaign in the same way: history. "I'm just curious to see her in person," said Beverly Tuttle, a grandmother from nearby Porcupine. That was as far as it went. Tuttle was voting for Obama. "I'm looking at her more like a celebrity than candidate," she said.

Clinton still has ardent supporters, even in a remote location such as Kyle (population 1,000). They just have been swifter than she has in recognising defeat. "She should be vice-president," said Tangerine LeBeau, who is just 18 and will be voting for the very first time.

Strength and resolve can only carry Clinton so far. Obama has powerful backers in the west. Tom Daschle, a South Dakota native who was once Senate majority leader, was one of Obama's earliest supporters. Obama's deputy campaign manager is also from South Dakota.

Despite the courtship by the Clintons, Obama was endorsed by the entire tribal leadership of South Dakota, and was adopted as a son of the Crow tribe in Montana. Obama also has the money to pour resources into South Dakota and Montana. Clinton's coffers are beyond empty. Her campaign, now $20m in debt, has no money for the prime venues that she favoured in the early months of the campaign. Almost all of her campaign events are held outdoors despite unpredictable weather. At one rally, Clinton's only stage prop was a giant cottonwood tree.

She has little money to get voters to the polls - a huge liability on the reservations where poverty and long distances depress turnout. Clinton also has little money for advertising. Her first television ad in South Dakota went on air less than a week ago. The ad, despite her own insolvent campaign, attacks President George Bush for running up the national debt.

Her entourage on the campaign trail is similarly shrunk. Her assistant, Huma Abedin, once deemed so glamorous she was given a Vogue photospread, remains along with a couple of other aides. News outlets have scaled back their coverage. Camera crews once used to jostling for positions on risers now have yards of space to themselves.

But it's possible to forget all of that, even in a modest crowd. At the end of her big rally in South Dakota last week, Clinton worked the rope line long after people had dispersed, stretching out to every last hand, unwilling to let go."

Despite all the reasons Hillary has given her opponents to dislike her, distrust her, perhaps for some even despise her, it is both touching and sad to watch her play out these final days. It's also just a bit painful to have to observe the spectacle.

The Parallel Universes of George and Hillary

As I've watched Hillary Clinton's ill-fought campaign, particularly over the past six months, I've been struck at how she seems to have learned and adopted so many of the political tactics of the outgoing hooligan, George w. Bush. The Guardian's Gary Younge lays it out beautifully:

"As the primary season draws to a close it has become increasingly apparent that Hillary Clinton has run her campaign with the same contempt for intelligence, decency and democracy that Bush has run the country. Like the Bush administration, her campaign has been sustained by cynicism, divisiveness and fear-mongering, leaving a toxic and rancorous rift in its wake. Like the White House, her aim has been to win at all costs. And like the White House, it has produced the same result. Failure.

It is a continuum not of policies - on that front she is closer to Barack Obama than either of them would concede - but a mindset that has served America ill these past seven years. Creating a bespoke reality out of whole cloth and then hoping people will not just buy it, but wear it.

In a last, desperate bid to resuscitate her campaign, Clinton will put her case for the ratification of the results of the Michigan and Florida primaries to the Democratic National Committee rules and bylaws committee later this week.

Both states held their primaries in January, in defiance of Democratic party rules. The party warned them beforehand that their delegates would be disqualified if they went ahead, and asked the candidates not to campaign there. The candidates obliged. The states went ahead anyway. Clinton won both. Her senior adviser, Harold Ickes, was on the committee that voted not to recognise them. Obama's name was not even on the ballot in Michigan.

Back in October last year Clinton said uncomplainingly of Michigan: "It's clear, this election they're having is not going to count for anything."

But then she won both. Now everything is different. Speaking before a crowd of senior citizens in Boca Raton, Florida, last week she went into metaphorical hyperbole, comparing the battle to seat the delegates from Florida and Michigan to the suffragettes, the civil rights movement and Zimbabwe - where more than 40 people have been killed in election-related violence. "We're seeing that right now in Zimbabwe," she explained to a crowd of senior citizens. "Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people. So we can never take for granted our precious right to vote."

Clinton insists she is winning the popular vote. She's right. But only if you tally votes with the same degree of selectivity as Robert Mugabe. For her claim to make sense, you would have to count the discounted Florida and Michigan primaries and discount the legitimate caucuses in Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington state, three of which Obama won. These four states do not reveal popular vote totals. It's like saying if you include your goals that were ruled offside and don't recognise your opponents' headers (it is football after all) then you really won the game.

The reason Clinton has had to resort to this sophistry reveals another trait she shares with Bush - hubris. She believed she would have the nomination sewn up by Super Tuesday. She woke up on the following Wednesday out of money, ideas and volunteers. It was a month and nine contests before she won again. By then the momentum was Obama's and, though he has stumbled, he has been running with it since. By most reckonings he leads by about 190 delegates and 400,000 votes. Even if Michigan and Florida were counted, she would still trail in delegates.

And, like Bush, she has appealed to the basest instincts of the electorate to dig herself out of a hole. First came fear. "It's 3am in the morning and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the telephone [in the White House]," went her ad.

Then there is racism. The most recent example of which was her claiming that Obama's "support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again", as evidence of her own viability. Later she would concede that equating "white" and "hard- working" was a "dumb comment".

On Friday she was lambasted for intimating that she was staying in the race because, like Bobby Kennedy, Obama may yet be assassinated. It was clumsy. But a reasonable reading of the context shows she neither said nor meant anything of the kind. Her problem is that by now the general impression is that there is almost nothing she wouldn't do or say. It would indeed take something that dramatic and tragic for her to win.

Like the Bush administration, the issue is no longer whether she leaves the stage with her reputation irreparably tarnished, but what state she leaves it in and how many people she is prepared to take with her."

That Flushing Sound is Hillary's Last Shred of Integrity

To borrow a line from Keith Olbermann, "shut the Hell up." Right now Hillary Clinton is nose-deep in the cesspit of her own hypocrisy.

It's all about Hillary's attack questioning Obama's ties to '60s radicals and it's got a lot of those very radicals questioning why Hypocrite Hillary is overlooking her own history with them. From the Washington Post:

"...her comments baffled two retired Bay Area lawyers who knew Clinton in the summer of 1971 when she worked as an intern at a left-wing law firm in Oakland, Calif., that defended communists and Black Panthers.

"She's a hypocrite," Doris B. Walker, 89, who was a member of the American Communist Party, said in an interview last week. "She had to know who we were and what kinds of cases we were handling. We had a very left-wing reputation, including civil rights, constitutional law, racist problems."

Malcolm Burnstein, 74, a partner at the firm who worked closely with Clinton during her internship, said he was traveling in Pennsylvania in April when Clinton attacked Obama for his past interactions with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, members of Students for a Democratic Society who went on to found the bomb-making Weather Underground.

"Given her background, it was quite hypocritical," Burnstein said. "I almost called the Philadelphia Enquirer. I saw what she and her campaign were saying about Ayers and I thought, 'Well, if you're going to talk about that totally bit of irrelevant nonsense, I'll talk about your career with us.' "

The very things she's accusing Barack of could be said of her with much greater evidence," said Tom Hayden, a leading anti-Vietnam War activist, author and self-described friend of the Clintons.

Robert Reich who went to Yale Law School with Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton and later served in the Clinton administration, called Hillary Clinton's attack on Obama "absurd," adding: "That carries guilt by association to a new level of absurdity. Where does guilt by association stop? I mean, she was a partner of Jim McDougal in the 1980s, for crying out loud." Reich is now an Obama supporter.

Clinton's associations date to her years as a student leader at Wellesley from 1965 to 1969. It was the height of student opposition to the Vietnam War, and Carl Oglesby, the president of Students for a Democratic Society, came to campus to speak.

"I gave a talk at Wellesley, where she was a student," Oglesby said in a telephone interview from Amherst, Mass., where he is recovering from a stroke. "I can't say that I was a close friend of hers. It was more of a passing acquaintance. I liked her. I think of her as a good guy. I think she has a good heart and a solid mind. And I support her in the current primary."


Oglesby now talks warmly about Clinton. In an interview with Reason magazine, he called their association "a friendship, a comradeship, within the context of the movement. She and I, for a while, were warm with each other. She and I were semi-close."
But Oglesby said he has not contacted Clinton because he is afraid that he could harm her candidacy.

"A friend of mine mentioned me to her not long ago, and according to him she got a case of the shakes. I think it was because she could imagine if any of her considerable enemies on the right wanted to do her in, they would be happy to discover a relationship between her and me," he told the magazine."

I think what Hillary is revealing is what many Democrats most fear - that she's willing to do anything, say anything on her way out the door, even if she winds up kneecapping the Democratic Party in the process. Between the blatant pandering and the hypocrisy, not to mention race-baiting, Hillary has also put her last shred of integrity into the toilet.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/18/AR2008051802101.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter&sid=ST2008051802293

Hillary's Post Mortem

Hillary may refuse to accept that she's as dead as the moose hanging in some working man's bar but her campaign staff know she's finished, and why.

Michelle Cottle at The New Republic interviewed some Clinton campaign staffers and reveals their telling insights. A really worthwhile piece, "What Went Wrong?":

http://www.tnr.com:80/politics/story.html?id=f7a4a380-c4a4-4f84-b653-f252e8569915

Why Hillary Is Yesterday's News

HIllary Clinton has a good grip of politics, politics past that is. In many ways she appears like just another rich, old white man; the kind that has ruled the United States since the Revolution. The ranks of those people have been full of reformers who've done remarkably little to transform their country into a nation for the 21st century.

Hillary Clinton meant it when she claimed to be the candidate to appeal to "hard working Americans, white Americans." That was no gaffe. That was her specialty, outright pandering and wedge politics, the kind that ought to be reviled. Her loyalty to black America was always feigned which is why black support for Clinton quietly bled out as this campaign wore on. Yet her support from working-class white Americans hasn't been as universal as she would like to crow. She's done well where racism still smoulders but where those embers are dying out, it's a different story.

As Timothy Egan writes in today's New York Times, Hillary's "white America" is becoming yesterday's news:

"...on May 20, when [Oregon] voters... could finally end the Democratic presidential marathon by giving Senator Barack Obama an outright majority of pledged delegates, don’t expect to hear much about how a black man has broadened the playing field for his party by winning a heavily white state. Apparently, white people in Gore-Tex country don’t count as much as white people in Appalachia. Nor, if you look at Colorado, a Bush state that Obama won this year, do white people who sing “Rocky Mountain High” matter as much as white people who sing, “Almost heaven, West Virginia.”
It’s absurd, of course, to tout the implied superiority of “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” as Hillary Clinton said last week of her core supporters. And those other white Americans, in Iowa, Wisconsin, or here in Oregon — all heavy Obama supporters — are slackers? Not to mention black supporters.

The map of counties that Hillary Clinton won big this year shows a broad swath of Appalachia and rural America, places where a Democrat is unlikely to prevail in the general election. The scab of racial animus can be thick in those counties, judging by exit polls of Clinton supporters who say they would never vote for a black man, and by anecdotal reporting.

The political math of the future lies with the new America — fast-growing communities in Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and elsewhere, where people are trying to step out of the cement shoes of race. Yes, race is still a factor there — it’s coded and complex — but not as raw as in other states. The transient nature of these places, where nearly everybody is from somewhere else, makes it difficult for old biases to harden."

And that's why Hillary doesn't have a hope in hell of a comeback in 2012. She's yesterday's news and that's just the way she likes it.

Hillary Wins W. Virginia in a Landslide!

Well maybe it was more like a mudslide or one of those mine collapses. There's no question that Senator Clinton handily defeated Barack Obama by a 2-1 margin but (and there's always a "but") it was West Virginia! That's about as big a deal as, well, not very much.

West Virginia has 28 delegates. That's it, 28. Maryland has 70, Missouri 72, and California 370. That's why to someone trailing in the final weeks of a campaign, triumph in the least literate state in the union has to be taken out of all proportion.

Dana Milbank had a fun piece in today's Washington Post in which he compared what remains of the Clinton campaign to Monty Python's "dead parrot" sketch.

"...Clinton has crossed the Blue Ridge and is over the green hills of West Virginia, home of what she calls the "hardworking Americans, white Americans." This is Clinton Country.

2:57 p.m., Yeager Airport, Charleston, W.Va.: A steep descent brings Clinton's plane to Charleston's hilltop airport. After an appropriate wait, she steps from the plane and pretends to wave to a crowd of supporters; in fact, she is waving to 10 photographers underneath the airplane's wing. She pretends to spot an old friend in the crowd, points and gives another wave; in fact, she is waving at an aide she had been talking with on the plane minutes earlier.

Customer: "That parrot is definitely deceased, and when I purchased it not half an hour ago, you assured me that its total lack of movement was due to it being tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk."

Pet-shop owner: "Well, he's, he's, ah, probably pining for the fjords."

Customer: "He's not pining! He's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! He's expired and gone to meet his maker! He's a stiff! Bereft of life, he rests in peace! . . . His metabolic processes are now history! He's off the twig! He's kicked the bucket, he's shuffled off his mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible! This is an ex-parrot!"

At the convention centre, a crowd of 89-supporters has gathered to celebrate Hillary's victory:

"There are some who wanted to cut this race short!" Clinton says from the faux-wood lectern. They boo.

"I am more determined than ever to carry on this campaign," she says. They cheer.
"There are many who wanted to declare a nominee before the ballots were counted or even cast," she says. They boo.

"This race isn't over yet," she says. They cheer.

The sound system emits a loud screech of feedback. The confetti cannons fire.
See? She wasn't dead; she was just pining for the fjords. "

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/13/AR2008051302862.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter

No Wonder Bill's Looking a Bit Glum

Hillary Clinton's nomination campaign isn't just out of money, it's in the red to the tune of $20-million. It's believed at least $11-million of that debt is in the form of money loaned by Clinton to her own campaign.

This suggests Hillary is now entering the "pay as you go phase" where the amount of campaigning she'll be able to do will be governed by the wad of cash in hand at any given point. There have been rumours in recent weeks of antsy creditors looking for payment on outstanding bills.

Her senior advisor, Howard Wolfson, told Fox News Sunday, "There is no reason for her not to continue this process." Actually Howard there are about twenty million reasons but, then again, who's counting?

A Feminist Explains Why She Can't Support Hillary

This is from Stephanie Salter, a columnist at the Terra Haute, Indiana Tribune-Star.

"A friend who teaches in public school here in Indiana was appalled not long ago when an e-mail from a colleague went out to everyone in the school’s cyber-address book.

The subject of the e-mail was Barack Obama and how he is “secretly” a radical Muslim bent on destroying the United States from within. A widely circulated pack of lies — e.g., he took the oath of office holding a Koran — the e-mail boasts that its contents are verifiable on the legitimate myth buster, snopes.com, which is the opposite of true.

At least my teacher friend’s colleague didn’t send out one of the popular e-mails that insist Obama shows all the signs of being the antichrist.

I wish I could say I was kidding, but I can’t. I live in the United States of America — a country in which most people are alleged to be literate — and I am about to participate in a historic presidential primary. But I am starting to wonder if some of my fellow citizens have a grasp on reality, let alone the issues.

A jihadist? The antichrist? Oh, for God’s sake.Before anyone is tempted to play the region card, don’t. Indiana has no exclusive claim to people who are spending time this spring telling one another that Obama is a jihadist and/or the antichrist. Google offers about 2.25 million hits on the latter subject. (Mercifully, renunciations are part of the volume.)

...I’m a 1960s feminist who thought I would never live to see the day a woman would make a viable run at the U.S. presidency. I look at how smart, brave, tough and committed Hillary Clinton is, and I see someone who is more than capable of being commander in chief.

But one of the great things about being a feminist is knowing that liberation means searching your head, heart and gut, then acting freely on what you discover there.

Four weeks ago, I watched Clinton go for the cheap shot and turn Obama’s lengthy, measured observations about frustrated working-class Americans into Bittergate. My head, heart and gut yelled, “Blatant foul!”

Clinton chose, repeatedly, to call Obama’s remarks “elitist” and “out of touch” with ordinary Americans. She emphasized, repeatedly, that his excerpted words were made at a private fundraiser in San Francisco — as though she had never been the focus of such an event — and she encouraged her campaign operatives across the country to keep piling on.

Ignoring all the times her words and deeds have been perverted out of context by her enemies, Clinton chose to play the nasty old game in which victorious ends justify crummy means. Knowing that Americans need more division like we need more conspiracy theories, she chose to further divide.

My head, heart and mind said, “Go to Plan B. Barack Obama is smart, brave, tough, committed and capable of being commander in chief — and he struggles mightily against cheap shots to deal honestly with the complexities and contradictions of his country and its people.”

No waffles, no sexist slurs, no al Qaida, no Satan. Just a rational decision. My idea of the American Dream."

"He's Not Really Black"

Muncie, Indiana florist Judy Benken says she'll be voting the way her family has voted for generations - white.

Benken told the Toronto Star that she'll support Barack Obama, claiming, "He's not really black – he doesn't have those pronounced features."

"Muncie, Ind., is divided by rail tracks. Its more upscale north, including Ball State University, is expected to back Obama; its gritty blue-collar south expected to support Clinton.

The south side is also the remnant of a once-proud industrial sector that barely exists these days, supplanted by the north side's university and service industry."

http://www.thestar.com/World/Columnist/article/421225

The Distrusted Candidate

Maybe Canada should have 12-month long election campaigns. One thing is sure, the more you see of any particular candidate, the less you're apt to like them.

Running for president in the United States is a terrible grind. Hillary Clinton shows the wear and tear more than the others. They'll all probably look a lot worse by the time the summer is over.

No candidate's fortunes have changed as much as Hillary Clinton's over the past year. Once considered a shoo-in, she's now pretty much washed up. Her problems, however, extend well beyond the Democratic primaries. A significant majority of the American people find her dishonest and untrustworthy. The Washington Post:

"Clinton is viewed as "honest and trustworthy" by just 39 percent of Americans, according to a new Washington Post - ABC News poll, compared with 52 percent in May 2006. Nearly six in 10 said in the new poll that she is not honest and trustworthy. And now, compared with Obama, Clinton has a deep trust deficit among Democrats, trailing him by 23 points as the more honest, an area on which she once led both Obama and John Edwards.

Among Democrats, 63 percent called her honest, down 18 points from 2006; among independents, her trust level has dropped 13 points, to 37 percent. Republicans held Clinton in low regard on this in the past (23 percent called her honest two years ago), but it is even lower now, at 16 percent. Majorities of men and women now say the phrase does not apply to Clinton; two years ago, narrow majorities of both did."

Like Obama, Clinton has enough hurdles facing her in this race to the White House. A loss of trust among the electorate may be one hurdle she has no hope of clearing.

HILLARY WASN'T LYING! The Real Sniper Incident Revealed!

What makes this clip so good is there stands Hillary amidst an adoring crowd and she's beaming at them and lying right to their faces. The only thing she didn't say was, "I did not have sexual relations with that sniper." It makes you wonder, is this the vaunted "experience" advantage Hillary claims entitles her to the Democratic nomination?

By the way, when that hotline phone rings at 3 a.m., I hope the person who picks it up isn't under any delusions about being under sniper fire.

Hurricane Hillary - the Democrats' Own Katrina

The best thing that John McCain has going for him is Hillary Clinton. So long as she's in the race for the Democratic Party's nomination his popularity soars. By the time November has come and gone the toughest opponent McCain may have faced in his march to the White House could be Mike Huckabee.

David Brooks, writing in the International Herald Tribune, says Hillary simply can't help herself - or the Democrats.

"The door is closing. Night is coming. The end, however, is not near.

Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she's probably down to a 5 percent chance.

Five percent.

Let's take a look at what she's going to put her party through for the sake of that 5 percent chance: The Democratic Party is probably going to have to endure another three months of daily sniping.

For three more months (maybe more!) the campaign will proceed along in its Verdun-like pattern. There will be a steady rifle fire of character assassination from the underlings, interrupted by the occasional firestorm of artillery when the contest touches upon race, gender or patriotism. The policy debates between the two have been long exhausted, so the only way to get the public really engaged is by poking some raw national wound.

For the sake of that 5 percent, this will be the sourest spring.

About a fifth of Clinton and Obama supporters now say they wouldn't vote for the other candidate in the general election. Meanwhile, on the other side, voters get an unobstructed view of the Republican nominee. John McCain's approval ratings have soared 11 points. He is now viewed positively by 67 percent of Americans. A month ago, McCain was losing to Obama among independents by double digits in a general election matchup. Now McCain has a lead among this group.

For three more months, Clinton is likely to hurt Obama even more against McCain, without hurting him against herself. And all this is happening so she can preserve that 5 percent chance.

When you step back and think about it, she is amazing. She possesses the audacity of hopelessness.

Why does she go on like this?

Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support?

Is she simply selfish, and willing to put her party through agony for the sake of her slender chance?

The better answer is that Clinton's long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life.

For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn't know, the hundreds of thousands of times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.

No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It's like a machine for the production of politics. It plows ahead from event to event following its own iron logic."