The Results Are In

That's it, it would appear to be over.

The Rules & Bylaws Committee of the DNC has ruled (apparently with the agreement of both parties) to seat both FL and MI delegates with half a vote each, giving the UNDECLARED delegates to Obama.

There's some minor issue about 4 delegates in MI that Clinton says should be hers, and they reserve the right to protest about it, but...

She picked up just 26.5 delegates on Obama, 34.5 if they give her the four she's complaining about.

The results after this are 2052 delegates for Obama, 1877.5 for Clinton, with a willing threshhold of 2118. Obama needs 66 more. He's expected to pick up at least 40 of those in the next three days (the final three primaries in PR, SD and MT), and probably the rest from super delegates pushed into declaring by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Howard Dean and the other Democratic party leaders.

It's pretty much over. Reading between the lines of the statements made so far, it sounds like she might be on the verge of giving up.

Then again... nothing she does surprises me, so we'll see in the next few days.

Liam.

McCain's Brain

I'm really getting the sense that John McCain (a man I respected and actually voted for in the 2000 election) is losing his facilities and trying not to let anyone notice it.

There have been so many little slip-ups. He was publicly corrected by Joe Lieberman for saying that Iran was training al-Qaida when the former is predominantly Shiite and the terrorist groups is primarily Sunni, a pairing that hate each other at least as much as they hate us. Lieberman whispered in his ear and he corrected his statement... and then went on to assert the link again in other interviews, one as early as 12 hours later.

This week he asserted that we had drawn our forces down to "pre-surge levels" (we have not, we have over 20,000 more troops in Iraq than before the surge, and even after the draw downs complete in July or August we're projected to have over 10,000 more people there than we had in January 2007 (when the surge was announced). When called on it he behaved as though it was ridiculous that anyone would assert he had said such a thing... but it's on video.

There are others. Watching him speak, I get the clear sense of my grandfather in his later years, still trying to be the vibrant, confident man he was in his 60s but just not quite pulling it off.

I hate to bring this up, because the McCain campaign and the media have portrayed ageism in this campaign as akin to sexism and racism, but the thing is, there's a difference. Gender and race have little to do with a person's abilities. A black man or a woman of either race has just as much chance of being a great leader as a white man (and a much higher chance than the current white man in the job).

Whereas we all know that our faculties diminish with age. Anyone in their 40s or over who suddenly finds themselves reaching for the reading glasses in order to enjoy some light fiction, or who spends an entire day walking gingerly after a moderate game of tennis knows that our bodies stop providing us with the same level of service they once did.

Those like me who find increasingly that finding the word we want is difficult (and let me tell you how much fun that is, while writing a blog entry, knowing there's a word or phrase that conveys exactly what I'm thinking and being unable to conjure it up) know that our minds are just as disloyal as our bodies.

John McCain seems to be in pretty good shape for a man his age... but the combination of having lost a step or two mentally combined with his reported stubborn streak (apparently not being terribly willing to listen to opposing viewpoints, and where have we seen THAT behavior recently?) make for a bad combination in a President.

Anyway, I'm going to finish this with a video from YouTube. I'm still not sure posting this is a good idea, because we've all seen many examples of these sorts of videos cobbled together from a lifetime of public speaking in order to make a perfectly competent politician look silly.

Still, though, this one has several examples in it that I've seen in context, and they're just as bad.

Take it with as many grains of salt as you need. (These are two parts of essentially the same video, or at least two different videos by the same production company, "Brave New Films").





Liam.

A Comment I Made On Another Blog

I have been having an argument with a Clinton supporter on another blog. He keeps saying "rules aren't iron clad, it's OK to change them when they're wrong" and the like.

I particularly liked my response to him, so I figured I'd cross post it here:

*******************************

Yes, , and I’ve as much as said that here today. However, when rules are bad, you choose a time to revise them when it isn’t in the middle of a game.

Let’s put it in different terms: In the NFL, they seem to tweak the rules each off season. This year they removed the “force out” rule, so that a force out is now not a complete catch. They’ve changed the instant replay rule numerous times.

But they never change the rules in mid-season, and certainly not in mid-game. Teams look at the rule set for that year and work on their game plan based on it. To change the rule set in mid season would screw up the teams’ plans, and what Clinton and her camp is essentially suggesting is that now that we’re starting the fourth quarter and they’re down by a pretty conclusive margin *according to the current rules*, now they want to go back and put the force-out rule back into play, and claim credit for two TDs they would likely have scored in the first quarters of the game had their pass not been called “incomplete” due to a force-out.

Actually, it’s more like when the teams have pre-season scrimidge games (I never could spell that right), and some teams play to win (to get early confidence) while others play their second string team (to get them some experience). Teams make different choices than they do a few weeks later, when the games count. So what Clinton is really asking for (in MI in particular) is that we suddenly count the pre-season games, because she played to win and the other team didn’t, knowing that the contest didn’t count.

Rules are not iron-clad. But changing them in mid-stream isn’t fair to anyone. And wrapping your demand for change up in flag waving “but we’re Democrats, we COUNT all the votes” is hollow at best if you only start saying it AFTER you won the contest, and don’t say anything like that before hand.

Besides, if she gets everything she wants AND manages to convince the majority of the supers to support her, but in the process so pisses off the Obama fans, some of whom will clearly vote for McCain because they can’t stand having been beaten unfairly, won’t that be something of a pyrrhic victory?

You play the hand you were dealt. If you don’t like it, you can quit the game the next time, or call for a different set of rules (Texas Hold’em instead of Five Card Draw, for example) next time, but you finish out the game you started and you don’t start lecturing people about how you’re the only one who truly respects the rules of Texas Hold ‘Em because you’re losing the game of Draw that you are in the middle of.

Liam.

McClellan: The Reaction

I have noticed two things in the official reaction from the White House and assorted loyalists to the revelations in Scott McClellan’s book.

First, not one that I’ve heard has actually called the allegations false. They’ve cast aspersions upon Mr. McClellan, trying to cast him as outside the information loop and in other ways cast him as some sort of marginal, clueless and possibly slightly insane person, but never actually saying that anything of substance he says in the book is incorrect.

But second, this coordinated response is so obviously a list of talking points that it becomes very difficult to take seriously. I understand the point of talking points, but when your talking points depart from a list of position points to a script that everyone follows, it becomes comical and really detracts from the veracity of any of the speakers. I know this isn’t the first time this has happened in the Bush administration, but go back and watch any of the pro-White House speakers in the last couple of days, you’ll find their responses consist almost exclusively of the following points:

• “We’re puzzled and saddened. This doesn’t sound like the Scott McClellan we knew. It‘s hard to believe he (wrote/would write) these things”. This is almost always said in the same pitying voice one might say “I knew Aunt Marge was starting to fade, but I never thought I’d see the day when she’d defecate in her own pants”.


• “Scott wasn’t really in on any of the big meetings, we just briefed him on what to release to the press”, in other words “This guy doesn’t know anything, you can’t trust him.” And by the way, why would Dana Perino and Ari Fleischer be so quick to defend the White House, when by extension this talking point says some pretty bad things about them and their position as well.


• “We didn’t know Scott had any of these concerns. If he had them, he really should have mentioned them to someone, and he didn’t as far as we’re aware.” Ari Fleischer went so far as to say that if McClellan had these concerns he really had a duty not to take the position, completely ignoring the fact that it’s possible, likely even, that McClellan came to understand things about his employer in the course of his job that he didn’t understand before he had it, or when he was simply a deputy to Fleischer.

It’s really amazing, the reaction is those three items, every time, worded only slightly differently, but all three are there every time. The word “puzzled” comes up more often than a random sample of people would likely use it. Not one person seems to think this sounds like the Scott McClellan they knew, and amazingly to a person, they all wonder why he never expressed any of his misgivings to them or someone above him.

The problem, though, is that as a coordinated message, it makes me wonder what any of them think privately. So many of the quotes of McClellan’s book that have been leaked deal with message control and the lack of open information dissemination, and I think it’s extremely telling that the reaction to a book accusing them of tight fisted control of message and information flow is an extremely tight fisted control of message and information flow. No one deviates from the script, even ex-employees like Fleischer and Karl Rove.

Liam.

Another McClellan Quote

On Cocaine Use:

'The media won't let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,' I heard Bush say. 'You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don't remember.'

I remember thinking to myself, How can that be? How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine? It didn't make a lot of sense.

(From the ABC News Blog, which has a lot of additional great quotes.)

Scott McClellan Speaks

And finally for tonight (although I have several other things I’d like to write as well, when I’m less tired), some reported quotes from former Bush Administration White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s book, officially to be published next Monday. These are from Politico.com, and I think they speak volumes, so I shall report them and not add a whole lot of my own text.

• On Hurricane Katrina: “One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term. And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”


• “I still like and admire President Bush, but he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.”


• On the Valerie Plame issue: “I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood. It would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the president effectively. I didn’t learn that what I’d said was untrue until the media began to figure it out almost two years later.
  
  “Neither, I believe, did President Bush. He, too, had been deceived and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”


• “There is only one moment during the leak episode that I am reluctant to discuss. It was in 2005, during a time when attention was focusing on Rove and Libby, and it sticks vividly in my mind. … Following [a meeting in Chief of Staff Andy Card’s office], … Scooter Libby was walking to the entryway as he prepared to depart when Karl turned to get his attention. ‘You have time to visit?’ Karl asked. ‘Yeah,’ replied Libby.
  
  “I have no idea what they discussed, but it seemed suspicious for these two, whom I had never noticed spending any one-on-one time together, to go behind closed doors and visit privately. … At least one of them, Rove, it was publicly known at the time, had at best misled me by not sharing relevant information, and credible rumors were spreading that the other, Libby, had done at least as much. …
  
  “The confidential meeting also occurred at a moment when I was being battered by the press for publicly vouching for the two by claiming they were not involved in leaking Plame’s identity, when recently revealed information was now indicating otherwise. … I don’t know what they discussed, but what would any knowledgeable person reasonably and logically conclude was the topic? Like the whole truth of people’s involvement, we will likely never know with any degree of confidence.”


• On Iraq: “If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.
  
  “The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

(Thanks again to Politico.com, from which most of this is directly copied).

Liam.

Another Clinton Argument…

I’ve been thinking about the argument in the Clinton camp that not seating the delegates from Florida would push voters away from the Democratic party. Florida being denied their delegates, so the argument goes, is blatantly unfair because the people who made the choice to push the primary date up in violation of DNC rules were Republicans.

So can anyone else see where I’m going with this? If those delegates are not seated, would it not make some sense for the Democrats to make hay with it? Point out to Democratic party members in the state that it was not the DNC which caused their problems, but the Republicans who violated express DNC rules.

Now, you can argue all day whether it’s fair to the voters of Florida to have their votes not counted (it isn’t) or whether the votes that they did cast were representative of the results of a more normal primary in which the candidates campaigned in the state (it isn’t). The best solution for all concerned would have been a re-vote, which apparently even had the support of major fund raisers who would have borne some or all of the cost of the second primary. But of course, that didn’t happen.

But to me, the idea that not counting the FL delegates necessarily means a backlash against the Democratic party is the same as implying that loyal Democrats and those Independents who are tired of Bush policies who opted for Senator Clinton will immediately bolt and vote for John McCain just because it’s Obama and not Clinton at the top of the ticket.

That’s not to say there aren’t some who will bolt from either camp to McCain if the other wins (heck, I’ve as much as said I find Clinton so odious I can’t honestly say I’m sure McCain would be the worse choice between the two), or that there may not be some people out there who could never bring themselves to vote for a black man (or a woman) and would thus be lost to this candidate or that.

But the idea that California is suddenly going to become a red state, just because Senator Clinton is not the nominee is ludicrous.

And the idea that the backlash in Florida couldn’t be turned into even more anger at the Republicans by the Democrats is similarly ludicrous.

Liam.

Continua

Can we please all take a step back and recognize the nature of continua? (Note: That’s the plural of continuum)

Continua are the reason why the same cause can have two different effects, at different ends of the spectrum. For instance, blowing on hot food helps to cool it down, because our breath is cooler than the food, but blowing on our hands on a freezing winter day helps warm them up, because our breath is warmer than the ambient temperature.

A bell curve is a perfect example of a continuum, and I’ve spoken at length about the Supply/Demand curve and the Laffer curve and the mistaken notion that just because at some points on the curve a reduction in price and/or tax rate will result in higher overall profits somehow magically it follows that in ALL cases reduction will result in same. Although some politicians seem to want to imply to the contrary, cutting the tax rate to zero would not miraculously solve all of our resource problems.

The one I want to talk about today, though, is the continuum of governmental regulation. We can all cite examples of government regulation gone too far, causing damage far in excess of the problem it was intended to solve, but it is possible to take regulation cutting too far.

The examples are numerous. The Airline Industry. The Savings & Loan Industry. The Energy Industry (Enron). Most recently the Mortgage Industry.

And yet there are those who, having successfully removed large percentages of the governmental oversight of said industries and then watched as those industries got into huge trouble (either for themselves or for their customers), respond by wanting to cut even MORE regulation.

Case in point, a recent speech by John McCain in which he said “our financial market approach should include … removing regulatory impediments”.

Senator McCain, the fox was left in charge of the hen house, and now most of the hens are gone. Do you HONESTLY believe the best solution to the problem is to allow the fox more latitude?

Our society has been slowly and deliberately conditioned to believe in black and white. We see it every day in the labels “liberal” and “conservative” that leave those of us who choose a sensible mix of both philosophies branded as extremists on the other side by people of both stripes, for not swallowing THEIR philosophy hook, line and sinker. We see it in what we’re told about Iraq and Iran and other current hot spots of anti-Americanism, being told that they’re the bad guys and we’re the good guys instead of anything like a comprehensive approach to foreign policy that says “Let’s try to understand what we each want, so we can understand why we each think the other guy is the bad guy”.

And now we see it in the fallacious argument that because it is possible to have TOO much regulation, and that in such situations some deregulation is best for all concerned, that therefore that is ALWAYS true.

Don’t fall for it. The Mortgage Crisis happened because former Senate Banking Committee chair (and current McCain advisor) Phil Gramm persistently weakened governmental control over mortgage lending practices, allowing more foolish and ill-advised loans to be written, ending with companies like Bear Sterns going belly up and loads of people looking at losing their houses.

When an action has a bad result, only a fool thinks the solution is more of the same, while still residing in the same general area of that particular continuum.

Liam.

Specter of Assassination, the Aftermath

I love this. This is classic Clinton campaign. SHE makes the statement, but she blames HIS campaign.

The Washington Post's Blog has this item. The Clinton campaign is accusing the Obama campaign of fanning the flames regarding her statement.

Never mind how often she's fanned the flames of the Rev. Wright issue. And forget the fact that the only statements I can find from the Obama camp on the RFK comment are the same ones quoted in the article I've linked to, one statement from the campaign calling her words "unfortunate" and one comment from Obama in which he said he took her at her word that she meant no harm.

Classic blame redirection. It's not that I broke into the bank and stole all that money, your Honor, it's those damned police for catching me.

Liam.

Growing Pains

[This was originally posted at 11:12pm, but after having added a couple of additional posts, I want this one at the top of the page, so I'm changing the post time.]

As a parent, one of our more painful experiences is watching our children outgrow the wonder of youth and begin to see the world in all of its sometimes less than savory aspects. The first time your child looks at you and you see in her eyes that she’s finally grasped that you are not some mystical demigod walking the Earth, that "Dad" is not a title bestowed upon the perfect, the eternal, the all powerful, but that in fact her parent is just another human being with warts and failings.

As we get older these moments become fewer and further between as with each disappointment, each minor pin of reality bursting another fragile soap bubble of hope and fantasy we become a little bit more jaded, a little bit more cynical, a little bit less likely to believe the hype.

It is just such a painful realization that I have gone through in the last five months watching Bill and Hillary Clinton run her campaign for the White House.

I am not a staunch Democrat, I have intentionally remained independent in order that I might continue to hold my fiscally conservative values along with my progressive social concern for my fellow human beings, without being sucked into the sports team mentality which has become so pervasive in our national political discourse. Still, I have generally considered Bill Clinton to be one of the better Presidents of my lifetime. I have been willing to forgive him his personal failings, because who among us is truly free from sin, and I'd much prefer a man with personal failings but a professional aptitude for the job than a man of supposedly good moral character dragging the nation down by his lack of foreign policy and diplomatic skills.

Six months ago, Bill Clinton was here in New Hampshire campaigning for his wife, and I was extremely excited to meet the man and hear him speak, one of the better political orators of our time (made to seem all the more so by the miscues and malapropisms of his successor). What a difference that half of a year makes.

I don't suppose I need to go through the entire litany of things both members of this couple have done in service of her campaign as she's slid from inevitable nominee to pathetic hanger on, I shall simply give a few examples, but suffice it to say that the political expedience of her ever changing narrative have left me believing there’s little "there" there.

We've seen an endless litany of which aspects of the primary contest should really count and which should be discounted, always miraculously trending towards counting that which favors her and discounting that which does not.

We've watched as she's gone from agreeing with her Democratic rivals that she would remove her name from the MI ballot (and not from FL only because FL law did not provide a method for candidates to do so) to deciding to leave her name on the ballot "because we all know this isn't going to count, so what does it matter?" to the moralistic preaching about how we aren't the party that ignores votes after she wins a nearly uncontested primary in that state. And she won 55% of the vote. Against Dennis Kucinich, Chris Dodd, Mike Gravel and "uncommitted" she could only manage to pull in 55% of the vote and she now believes this is representative of the will of the people of MI and should be counted as is (55% of the delegates for her, none for her opponent). This in a primary in which had she kept her word, her votes would also have been split between that "uncommitted" category and the bump in the Kucinich, Dodd and Gravel numbers that would have come from our collective tendency to believe that a vote for anyone other than one of the pre-printed names is essentially a wasted vote.

We've watched as she and her surrogates have repeatedly (and sometimes not so subtly) inserted race into the campaign while trying to paint anyone not in her camp as misogynistic, as though entirely unable to grasp that some people might vote for Obama for his message, rather than against her for her gender.

We've seen her repeatedly praise Republican John McCain over her opponent Barack Obama, sending the clear message "If I'm not the Democrat on the ballot in November, you really should vote for the Republican." I may not value brand loyalty in the voters, but I do value it in the candidates. There are very real, substantive philosophical differences between the parties, and to throw her party and her principles under the bus in service of her own campaign shows that she puts her own good ahead of that of the party or the principles, leading to the inescapable question “What makes us think she’d put the good of the country ahead of her own?”

On a more personal level, I believe the most damaging thing about the Bush Presidency has been the severe shift towards an Imperial (Unitary) Executive branch and away from the checks and balances of co-equal branches of government, and in the rhetoric of the Clinton campaign I hear ominous echoes of the same attitudes towards Presidential power which I think are so dangerous. Whether used in service of goals I approve of or those I abhor, the means are not justified by any ends.

And just this morning, in the midst of yet another half-truth about the campaign and her remaining in it, she raised the specter of political assassination when one undercurrent of the whole race has been the question of whether Barack Obama could make it all the way to the White House without some racist nut case taking a shot at him. The political half-truth was in raising the idea that "lots of previous contests have gone into June" while ignoring that those were in years when our primary seasons began in the middle of March, not the very beginning of January.

I don't know what I was expecting. They are all politicians and as such marketing, particularly of themselves, is a natural skill that our political system breeds for. Still, I had allowed myself to believe that they were good people largely tarnished by some right wing conspiracy (the existence of which is all too obvious), instead of simply the left hand side of a political tug-of-war.

In these last few months, I've had to grown up again. I've seen behind the curtain and realized that the Wizard isn't who I thought he was. I've learned once again that Dad can't fix any problem and doesn't know everything. I've walked behind the façade of the Hollywood set and seen it for the shallow falsehood that it is, all glitz and glitter and no actual substance.

Growth is never easy. But it is a part of life.

Liam.

Raising the Specter of Assassination

I've been thinking about this a lot today, and the truly offensive part of Hillary Clinton's comments about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy isn't that she made them.

Yes, we live in the age of the sound bite, where a single misstep or misstatement (or even a perfectly reasonable statement trimmed down until all shade of context is purged) can dog a candidate for years, and although I'm as guilty as the next person, when I think about it I try to forgive honest missteps. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are running on fumes, physically. They've been campaigning hard for months, I'm sure they're both perpetually overtired, and so that she might make this slip is understandable.

The truly offensive part is her non-apology.

Let's compare it to another recent stupid move, Mike Huckabee's ill-conceived off-the-cuff joke about someone aiming a gun at Barack Obama. It is a very real truth in both of these statements that Obama, just by being of some African descent, faces a much higher risk of assassination (or at least such attempts) than most non-black candidates. And when Huckabee made his comments to the NRA, within 24 hours he'd made the following statement:

During my speech at the NRA a loud noise backstage, that sounded like a chair falling, distracted the crowd and interrupted my speech. I made an off hand remark that was in no way intended to offend or disparage Sen. Obama. I apologize that my comments were offensive, that was never my intention.

That is an apology. He takes responsibility for his actions, and there's no wavering or wishy-washy language. Note in particular the declarative "I apologize that my comments were offensive".

Now let's look at Senator Clinton's non-apology. Recall that she is guilty not merely of raising the prospect of assassination when her opponent faces a much higher chance of it than she does, but also of raising a painful memory for the Kennedy family near the anniversary of that event and within a week of the awful diagnosis of Senator Kennedy's brain tumor. She responded thusly:

I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation and in particular the Kennedy family was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that whatsoever.

This is the typical politician's non-apology. She doesn't admit that she did anything wrong, she doesn't apologize for it, she merely regrets that anyone found it offensive. And I fear that this may be literally true, that like my children when caught misbehaving, she's not sorry she did something wrong, only that it had repercussions for herself.

To me, the only appropriate response would have been to come out and say something like "Y'know, when you speak as much as we have to speak on the campaign trail, occasionally you'll say something stupid, and boy did I say something stupid. It was wrong, it was offensive, and I am terribly sorry for it."

Mike Huckabee was clear. His remarks were offensive, he knew they were offensive, and he apologized for making them.

Hillary Clinton was not. She references "if" her comment was offensive, as though she is still not sure, and apologizes for the offense taken, not for the statement itself.

This is just one more reason in a growing list why I see Hillary Clinton less as a good woman wanting to work for the country than as a self-serving power hungry politico who will do or say anything in order to win.

Liam.

Clinton: Another Bloggers Take

I ran across a fellow blogger's "Post Mortem" on the Clinton campaign, and while he throws around the term "idiot" a bit more than I'd like, I think he observations are essentially correct.

Click here to read his take on things.

Liam.

The Clinton Campaign: The Death Watch Continues

After yesterday's contests (again thanks to Slate.com's delegate calculator), if Hillary Clinton wins 100% of the vote in the three remaining primaries (Puerto Rico on June 1, Montana and South Dakota on June 3 AND the delegates from FL and MI are seated 100% AND the split of those delegates is the more-than-fair balance of 65/35 in her favor in FL and 57/43 in her favor in MI, only then does Clinton come out ahead in pledged (elected) delegates, by 7.

If any of those things doesn't happen, she loses the elected delegate race.

Given the current Super Delegate counts (obviously subject to change) of 306 for Obama and 278 for Clinton, that still leaves her needing to take 21 more of the remaining super delegates than Obama does.

Now, suppose MI and FL half half of their delegates seated, at the percentages I specified (which seems to be one of the most likely current plans). Obama drops by 60, Clinton drops by 96.5 and Obama is the elected delegate leader by 29.5.

My friend Ross clearly disagrees with me, because of the difficult-to-quantify element of the super delegates, but it becomes ever clearer to me that Hillary Clinton is not going to win the elected delegate race, and that the super delegates are unlikely to reverse the elected delegate results in the absence of some huge bombshell before the convention.

Liam.

McCain Foreign Policy Blunder

Boy, ya gotta love it when a guy running for President supposedly on the strength of his foreign policy bona fides can’t even keep simple facts straight about a nation that he would say is among the top threats to our nation right now, and in fact belittles those who try to correct him.

In specific, John McCain yesterday got into a back-and-forth with a reporter, after McCain asserted that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the leader in Iran. The reporter (Time Magazine’s Joe Klein) pointed out that in terms of foreign policy, the supreme leader of Iran is actually Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. According to the CIA that’s true. According to the Council on Foreign Relations that’s true.

But McCain said dismissively “I think of you asked any average American who the leader of Iran is, I think they’d know”, clearly implying that Klein was not even as up on Iran as the average American.

But the fact is that Ahmadinejad is the President, his decisions are subject to confirmation or veto by the Supreme Leader (Khamenei) and the “Council of Guardians”, made up of Islamic religious leaders.

So McCain is wrong. On one of his claimed areas of strength, relating to one of our top enemies, he’s wrong and happily casting aspersions on anyone who tries to give him correct information.

Nice.

Liam.

After West Virginia

A few things for Clinton supporters to keep in mind after West Virginia.

• 7% of the populace voted for John Edwards, so even among her much-touted support from less-educated blue collar workers contains enough people who dislike both an african american and a woman as President so much that they'll vote for a guy who dropped out of the race months ago, just because he's male and white."


• She previously needed 70+% of the vote in every remaining state to take the lead in elected delegates. Although 67% of the votes is close, West Virginia was her best chance and she couldn't even meet that threshold. How is she going to meet the same standard in more Obama friendly states that remain?


• With the WV results factored in, Clinton now needs to win over 80% of all remaining votes. If you include FL and MI with the same delegate breakdown I have been using all along, she needs more than 71% of all remaining votes. She's simply not going to get that. And after making such a big fuss about how not seating FL and MI is disenfranchising those voters, it's kind of hard to swallow the idea that her entire chances rest on the superdelegates reversing the elected delegate totals, thus "disenfranchising" a whole lot more voters than just MI and FL.

She can't win, mathematically, without a major event in the Obama campaign, and if such an event were to happen, she'd be the obvious choice even if she does drop out now.

So why stay in it?

Liam.

Election Update

OK, it looks like the margin in NC is going to end up around Obama 58, Clinton 42. Indiana at this point is still too close to call, Obama slightly behind but with a solidly Obama district as one of the few still to report.

However, assuming Clinton wins 52-48 (the current numbers, which aren't likely to expand) and once again using Slate.com's delegate calculator, without Florida and Michigan, Hillary Clinton now needs to win more than 85% of the vote in every remaining contest, a 70% margin of victory over Obama, in order to win the popular delegate count.

If you bring in Florida and Michigan, in the percentages I spoke of in the previous post, she still has to win over 72% of the vote in every remaining contest.

Assuming she does not manage to convince the super delegates to overturn the election (which doesn't appear at all likely in today's political climate), I really don't see that she has any shot.

Liam.

McCain, Translated

I just got an e-mail from the McCain campaign that touches on a number of my sore points with regard to the Orwellian last seven and a half years in the US, so I thought I'd go through it and comment.

To limit the size of this post, I will only quote the lines I want to reply to, but I'll post the full text of the e-mail in the first comment on this post.

If one of my Democratic opponents is elected in November, you can rest assured that given the opportunity to appoint judges, they will appoint those who make law with disregard for the will of the people.

This is a big tug at the emotions, but it is a bogus argument, and it disagrees with what he says later. The Judicial Branch is not there to rule by popularity, they're there to rule based on the law, and most importantly among the laws, the Constitution. If popular opinion disagrees with the Constitution, we have a method of resolving that, it's called a Constitutional Amendment.

I will nominate judges who understand that their role is to faithfully apply the law as written, not impose their will through judicial fiat. If you want judges who will clearly and completely adhere to the Constitution of the United States and who do not legislate from the bench to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, then I ask that you join my campaign for president today...

This is simplistic claptrap. The role of a judge isn't simply to apply the law as written, the problem is the difference between theory and practice. When an Engineer goes to build a building, he has to confront the actual laws of physics, not the theoretical ones in the head of the architect. So when a judge goes to apply the law to a case, he has to determine how the law applies, when the original law as written isn't exactly clear.

If the law was 100% clear, 100% complete and 100% unambiguous, there'd be no need for judges. You'd plug in the facts into a Constitutional computer along with the jury's verdict (for those cases that have juries) and the computer would tell you exactly what punishment the law specified.

But the law is not clear. For example, the law may say "Striking an individual with intent to cause harm is criminal assault and punishable by so many days in prison". It may also say "Assault committed in the process of defending one's self against an external attacker shall not be considered criminal assault." But then someone needs to figure out what counts there. Does the defense have to be against an assault, or is it OK to haul off and hit someone who is verbally abusing us? Does the defense have to be against personal harm, or is it ok to defend our children? Our spouses? Our friends? An innocent bystander?

And how do you deal with the evolving English language? I've discussed this before, but the argument that a right to "privacy" is not explicitly in the Constitution is bogus. The word "privacy" in the days the Constitution was originally written meant "bathroom" or "outhouse" or the act of being unobserved while using said location. So to have written about the right to "privacy" at that time would have been like saying "We believe every American has the right to urinate with the door closed and no one observing them." It makes no sense.

If you limit judges to only enforcing the literal word on the page and don't even allow them to interpret what that literal word meant in the language of the day it was written, you will quickly find our legal system falling apart. Interpretation is not merely the purview of "activist judges", but in fact a vital portion of the job of any jurist.

I need your support now so that as your president I can nominate judges like Justices Roberts and Alito. Judges who have proven themselves worthy of our trust. Judges who take as their sole responsibility the enforcement of laws made by the people's elected representatives. Judges who can be relied upon to respect the values of the people whose rights, laws and property they are sworn to defend.

Really? Values like the right to be secure from improper seizure of our property? It was Alito and Roberts who sided with the rights of states to apply eminent domain not for public works projects, but to then provide the land to developers who plan to build shopping malls or in at least one case, condominiums. Is that really the values we support as a nation, if someone wants to build nicer homes for richer people on the land on which you currently reside the state should be able to just shove you off of your land?

Personally, I think the Supreme Court has muddled along pretty well for most of its existence. There are a few cases I could point to that I disagree with, some on legal grounds and others on moral grounds. Some of the latter type I agree with on legal grounds, but believe the law should therefore be changed.

It is my belief that when McCain and others of his philosophical ilk say they want to avoid "judicial activism" what they're really saying is "I want judges who will practice my particular brand of judicial activism, re-making the Constitution in the image I have of it, not necessarily the image that the Framers had."

Liam.

Another Great Example

Here's a great summation of how I've been feeling about the Clinton campaign, courtesy of Keith Olbermann...



In any argument, once you define every conceivable result as something you can claim as a victory, your claims of victory become hollow. They're on record as defining nearly any result as truly a win for the Clinton camp, which means a claimed win by the Clinton camp means nothing at all.

Liam.

It's Really Past Time

It's really time for Senator Clinton to get out of this race.

Using Slate.com's Delegate Calculator, I've done some analyses of the race as it exists today.

If we assume (as seems to be the common wisdom) that Indiana will be a virtual tie and North Carolina will be won by Obama by a small margin (say 55 to 45), then Clinton needs to take over 80% of the vote in all of the remaining contests to win the popular delegate count.

Even if you seat all of the FL and MI delegates, she needs to win more than two-thirds of the vote in every remaining contest to take the lead in popular delegates. (Note, to determine the allocation of FL and MI delegates, I noted that Clinton won MI with 55% to 40% "uncommitted", and so assumed a 57/43 pro-Clinton split was fair. FL is murkier, she won 50% but he only won 33%, with Edwards taking the lion's share of the balance. Most Edwards supporters have been tilting towards Obama, but I went with a 65/35 pro-Clinton win, to be extremely conservative).

It would seem to me that in light of this, it's nearly mathematically impossible for Clinton to win, and just as unlikely that the so-called "super delegates" will find her to be so convincingly better a candidate as to override the "will of the people".

She should really get out, preserve some of her dignity and (more importantly) stop shredding the reputation of her party.

Liam.

My Take On Hillary

I've been trying for a few weeks now to figure out why it is that I'm so loathe to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election, should she be the Democratic nominee. Clearly, given what I believe to be the biggest problems in the nation at this point, any Democrat would seem to be my best choice this time around, so long as the Republican is one who has so closely aligned himself with President Bush.

Certainly it can't just be the negative campaigning, although there's been a lot of that. And it can't just be frustration that she keeps on when mathematically it seems absurd to think she's got any shot of winning this thing, thus dividing and tarnishing the Democratic party at a time when all indications should be they should have an easy walk to the finish line.

I think I've finally figured it out. Listening to her speak, I think she shares one very important common view with President Bush, and it's the single most toxic piece of the President in my view: a belief in the Imperial Presidency.

I get the sense that Clinton shares the feeling that the President is a 4-or-8 year elected king, rather than one of three co-equal branches of the United States government. I don't get the sense that she'd do anything to curtail executive power back to where it belongs, but rather that she'd dig in her heels and have to be dragged, kicking and screaming (if Congress or the Judiciary even have the will to do so) back to the proper Presidential place in the Constitutional balance of power.

And that, I think, makes her an equally toxic candidate.

Now, comparing her to John McCain, who I liked a lot in 2000 and who has gone a long way to proving me wrong in that assessment. My impression of McCain is that he's pretty set in his ways... and that he's far too close to Bush on a lot of issues, but I don't particularly perceive him to be in the Unitary Executive camp, or at least no more so than Clinton, and he wins over her in one major respect: He's 72 years old. If he wins, in 4 years he'll be 76 and who knows how the stress of running the nation will have affected him. I think there's a very good chance that he would not run again if he won, giving us another shot at someone who put the good of the country over his-or-her own Presidential power, while the chance that Clinton wouldn't run for a second term is almost nil.

All in all, of the three, I have to say I like Obama. He may have less experience, but he's got the idealism and at least a wish to correct some of the excesses of the office, and that gives him a lot of points in my book. But if he's not the nominee, I may just have to vote for McCain. If not, it'll be an opportunity for me to write in a "moral-but-no-chance-of-winning" candidate, because there's simply no LESSER evil to vote for.

Liam.