The question is, can Obama win - against McCain?

He can- it's by no means a sure thing, but it's about as likely as something can be in politics, I think. The economy's sliding (although not into recession yet), the housing market is on the skids, and we're stuck in a war that in my judgment can't be won or even fought to a sustainable stalemate. All great material for an opposition candidate. John McCain, the Republican heir apparent- and war supporter- was in Iraq a few weeks ago with Joe Lieberman making some extraordinarily goofy statements about Iran and the Shia and Sunni factions in Iraq, which suggested to me that he'd be better off refraining from that sort of ad libbing and start reading from a script instead, unless it was all was his attempt at being "Reaganesque" (i.e. ingratiatingly clueless). He may be off his game, and the media are about to start taking an interest in his campaign again.

This is almost surely going to be the Democrats' year, and the biggest problem for President Obama is not going to be winning November 4th, it's going to be governing afterward.

I'd say George F. Will understands the Clinton method pretty well:  

Yankee Fan Go Home
     
By George F. Will
Thursday, May 8, 2008; Page A23

Hillary Clinton, 60, Illinois native and Arkansas lawyer, became, retroactively, a lifelong Yankee fan at age 52 when, shopping for a U.S. Senate seat, she adopted New York state as home sweet home. She may think, or at least would argue, that when she was 12 her Yankees really won the 1960 World Series, by standards of "fairness," because they trounced the Pirates in runs scored, 55-27, over seven games, so there.

Unfortunately, baseball's rules -- pesky nuisances, rules -- say it matters how runs are distributed during a World Series. The Pirates won four games, which is the point of the exercise, by a total margin of seven runs, while the Yankees were winning three by a total of 35 runs. You can look it up.

After Tuesday's split decisions in Indiana and North Carolina, Clinton, the Yankee Clipperette, can, and hence eventually will, creatively argue that she is really ahead of Barack Obama, or at any rate she is sort of tied, mathematically or morally or something, in popular votes, or delegates, or some combination of the two, as determined by Fermat's Last Theorem, or something, in states whose names begin with vowels, or maybe consonants, or perhaps some mixture of the two as determined by listening to a recording of the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda" played backward, or whatever other formula is most helpful to her, and counting the votes she received in Michigan, where hers was the only contending name on the ballot (her chief rivals, quaintly obeying their party's rules, boycotted the state, which had violated the party's rules for scheduling primaries), and counting the votes she received in Florida, which, like Michigan, was a scofflaw and where no one campaigned, and dividing Obama's delegate advantage in caucus states by pi multiplied by the square root of Yankee Stadium's Zip code.

Or perhaps she wins if Obama's popular vote total is, well, adjusted by counting each African American vote as only three-fifths of a vote. There is precedent, of sorts, for that arithmetic (see the Constitution, Article I, Section 2, before the 14th Amendment).

"We," says Geoff Garin, a Clinton strategist who possesses the audacity of hopelessness required in that role, "don't think this is just going to be about some numerical metric." Mere numbers? Heaven forfend. That is how people speak when numerical metrics -- numbers of popular votes and delegates -- are inconvenient.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur said that every military defeat can be explained by two words: "too late." Too late in anticipating danger, too late in preparing for it, too late in taking action. Clinton's political defeat can be similarly explained -- too late in recognizing that the electorate does not acknowledge her entitlement to the presidency, too late in understanding that she had a serious challenger, too late in anticipating that she would not dispatch Barack Obama by Super Tuesday (Feb. 5), too late in planning for the special challenges of caucus states, too late in channeling her inner shot-and-a-beer hard hat.

Most of all, she was too late in understanding how much the Democratic Party's mania for "fairness," as mandated by liberals like her, has, by forbidding winner-take-all primaries, made it nearly impossible for her to overcome Obama's early lead in delegates. If Democrats, who genuflect at the altar of "diversity," allowed more of it in their delegate selection process, things might look very different. If even, say, Texas, California and Ohio were permitted to have winner-take-all primaries (as 48 states have winner-take-all allocation of their electoral votes), Clinton would have been more than 400 delegates ahead of Obama before Tuesday and today would be at her ancestral home in New York planning to return some of its furniture to the White House next January.

Tuesday night must have been almost as much fun for John McCain as for Obama. The Republican brand has been badly smudged by recent foreign and domestic policies, which are the only kinds there are, so McCain's hopes rest on the still-unattached cohort called "Reagan Democrats," who still seem somewhat resistant to Obama.

McCain's problem might turn out to be the fact that Obama is the Democrats' Reagan. Obama's rhetorical cotton candy lacks Reagan's ideological nourishment, but he is Reaganesque in two important senses: People like listening to him, and his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness -- the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/07/AR2008050703190.html

Quoted from theBEATLESrock_on

hehe...i don't get why some people on here actually pay attention to our silly politics when they live in other places! granted, most of the people on this thread are americans, but for those who aren't: why do you know more about the society i live in than i do???

Because what happens in America affects the rest of the western world. You have a recession, we have a recession. You have a war, we get dragged into it. The price of oil is skyrocketing because the dollar is so week. Everyone pays. Well, except the Norwegians. Because of America's declared 'War On Terror', and subsequently Britain's more or less enforced involvement, the UK is once again subjected to terrorist attacks (7/7). And you wonder why we're interested in your "silly politics"?

From what I can see the American electoral system is a playground for rich incompetent buffoons to carry out their very public slanging matches. I'd rather not be interested, but I have to be.

And by the way, six of the top ten posters on here are European.

This must be cheering Hillary Clinton's supporters:  

Did Rush Limbaugh Tilt Result In Indiana?

By Alec MacGillis and Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 8, 2008; Page A01

Even as Barack Obama's campaign celebrated Tuesday's primary results, aides charged yesterday that they would have had an even stronger showing were it not for meddling by an unlikely booster of Hillary Rodham Clinton: the popular conservative radio host and longtime Clinton family nemesis Rush Limbaugh.

The impact of Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" emerged as an intriguing point of debate, particularly in Indiana, where registered voters could participate in either party's primary, and where Clinton won by a mere 14,000 votes. As he had before several recent primaries, Limbaugh encouraged listeners to vote for Clinton to "bloody up Obama politically" and prolong the Democratic fight.

Limbaugh crowed about the success of his ploy all day Tuesday, featuring on-air testimonials from voters in Indiana and North Carolina who recounted their illicit pleasure in casting a vote for Clinton. "Some of the people show up and they ask for a Democrat ballot, and the poll worker says, 'Why, what are you going to do?' He says, 'Operation Chaos,' and they just laugh," Limbaugh said Tuesday.

But Limbaugh called off the operation yesterday, saying he wants Obama to be the party's pick, because "I now believe he would be the weakest of the Democrat nominees."

He added: "He can get effete snobs, he can get wealthy academics, he can get the young, and he can get the black vote, but Democrats do not win with that."

The Obama campaign and many of its supporters condemned Limbaugh's intervention tactic yesterday, calling it a major factor in Clinton's narrow Hoosier State win.

"Rush Limbaugh was tampering with the primary, and the GOP has clearly declared that it wants Hillary Clinton as the candidate," Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), an Obama supporter, told reporters on a conference call. On the same call, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said Limbaugh "had a clear factor in the outcome."

Whether that is true remains in question. Even if Limbaugh's exhortations brought as many of his listeners to the polls as he says, his operation did not cripple Obama, who emerged stronger from the day's primaries after better-than-expected showings with some key groups of voters.

Those looking for evidence of Limbaugh's influence pointed to Clinton's edge among Republicans in Indiana and North Carolina. In Indiana, 10 percent of Democratic primary voters described themselves as Republicans, a higher rate than in any state but Mississippi, and they went for Clinton by eight percentage points, according to exit polls. In North Carolina, they were 5 percent of the electorate, and went for her by 29 points.

By contrast, Obama won Republican voters, often by very large margins, in seven of the eight states where exit polls were able to report the group before the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4, when Limbaugh first coaxed listeners to vote for Clinton.

Also notable was that in Indiana, six in 10 Republicans who supported Clinton on Tuesday said they would vote for presumptive GOP nominee John McCain over Clinton in the fall, if that were the matchup. By contrast, most Republicans who voted for Obama said they would back him against McCain. And a slight majority of Republicans who voted for Clinton in Indiana told pollsters that she does not share their values, raising further questions about why they supported her.

But at least as much data suggested that many Republicans voted for Clinton because the Democratic primary was the more meaningful one and because they simply preferred her to Obama. In Indiana, about nine in 10 GOP Clinton voters said she would make a better commander in chief, and more than six in 10 said she would have a better shot at beating McCain.

And Clinton's edge among Indiana Republicans was relatively small, if set against the broader racial divisions in the contest. Her eight-point advantage among Republicans, nearly all of whom are white in the state, was much narrower than it was among white Democrats, whom she won by nearly 2 to 1 over Obama.

Edward Carmines, a political scientist at Indiana University, said that he concluded from the data that while Operation Chaos "existed to some extent, I don't think it was a major factor."

Indiana defied easy analysis from the start, having not held a competitive Democratic presidential primary in decades. Clinton had a demographic edge, with the state's low proportion of black voters and its mix of Rust Belt workers, farmers and Southern transplants. Obama's primary advantage was that he hailed from next door, and many voters were familiar with him.

The Clinton campaign credited its narrow win to the organization of Sen. Evan Bayh (Ind.) and the more than 100 campaign stops made by Clinton and her husband and daughter. Robby Mook, Clinton's Indiana director, said she did better than expected in Indianapolis and in northwestern Indiana, where Obama was expected to benefit from his exposure on Chicago television.

But he fared better than the final polls predicted by cutting into Clinton's huge margin among several key groups in Ohio and Pennsylvania, such as white women and white voters without college degrees. He racked up big totals in college towns and with African American voters in Gary and Indianapolis, as expected. But he also won by 22 points in Hamilton County, an affluent Republican-leaning suburb north of Indianapolis; by 12 points in the county that includes Fort Wayne, after losing similar Rust Belt cities elsewhere; and lost by only four points in Evansville, on the southern border.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....;sid=ST2008050703934

Some necessary and overdue blunt talk:

Seeds of Destruction

By BOB HERBERT
Published: May 10, 2008

The Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully.

Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the candidate favored by “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” and that her opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can’t cut it with that crowd.

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.

There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.

(Representative Charles Rangel of New York, who is black and has been an absolutely unwavering supporter of Senator Clinton’s White House quest, told The Daily News: “I can’t believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb.”)

But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now.

I don’t know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to deliberately convey the idea that most white people — or most working-class white people — are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.

The last time the Clintons had to make a big exit was at the end of Bill Clinton’s second term as president — and they made a complete and utter hash of that historic moment. Having survived the Monica Lewinsky ordeal, you might have thought the Clintons would be on their best behavior.

Instead, a huge scandal erupted when it became known that Mrs. Clinton’s brothers, Tony and Hugh Rodham, had lobbied the president on behalf of criminals who then received presidential pardons or a sentence commutation from Mr. Clinton.

Tony Rodham helped get a pardon for a Tennessee couple that had hired him as a consultant and paid or loaned him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over the protests of the Justice Department, President Clinton pardoned the couple, Edgar Allen Gregory Jr. and his wife, Vonna Jo, who had been convicted of bank fraud in Alabama.

Hugh Rodham was paid $400,000 to lobby for a pardon of Almon Glenn Braswell, who had been convicted of mail fraud and perjury, and for the release from prison of Carlos Vignali, a drug trafficker who was convicted and imprisoned for conspiring to sell 800 pounds of cocaine. Sure enough, in his last hours in office (when he issued a blizzard of pardons, many of them controversial), President Clinton agreed to the pardon for Braswell and the sentence commutation for Vignali.

Hugh Rodham reportedly returned the money after the scandal became public and was an enormous political liability for the Clintons.

Both Clintons professed to be ignorant of anything improper or untoward regarding the pardons. Once, when asked specifically if she had talked with a deputy White House counsel about pardons, Mrs. Clinton said: “People would hand me envelopes. I would just pass them on. You know, I would not have any reason to look into them.”

It wasn’t just the pardons that sullied the Clintons’ exit from the White House. They took furniture and rugs from the White House collection that had to be returned. And they received $86,000 in gifts during the president’s last year in office, including clothing (a pantsuit, a leather jacket), flatware, carpeting, and so on. In response to the outcry over that, they decided to repay the value of the gifts.

So class is not a Clinton forte.

But it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee — and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.

The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/opinion/10herbert.html?hp

Richard Nixon's "southern strategy;" the Clinton variant:

LOL! Go, Hills! "Hard-working Americans" are white, and obviously are those who have not completed college think she's the bee's knees. She may very well be right in that the broadest base of Americans are less-educated white people, but it doesn't make them dumb. Argh, she annoys me. (I know, it's all "political" speak and not remotely genuine, but it's so phony and calculated, it grates on my nerves.)

Geoff, thanks for posting all this. I'll try to catch up. I wrote a response to one of your articles a couple of days ago, and cleverly erased it before posting. So clearly I'll be swinging over to the Clinton camp.

I'm still fangirling on Glenn Greenwald. He demonstrates by quoting articles out of various newspapers (such as the NYT) that whichever Democratic candidate is behind gets the better press. It's all part of trying to divide the party further. So when Clinton looked like the winner, Obama was gold. When it's reversed, the world has unfairly evaluated poor Clinton. I really fear that our mass media is so controlled and manufactured these days that no one will get a good picture of ANY issue unless they dig into it themselves. Between the two jobs and no vacation scenario that McCain has so temptingly offered us as our future, I just don't see many average citizens having that kind of time. Our country is determined to shoot itself in the foot. I only hope the people will look around early enough to say, "Hey! I didn't put this system in place!" and kick it out before the old US of A falls into pieces.

Thanks for reminding me of Glenn Greenwald; I haven't thought of him in a while. As for the rest of the media (Fox News likely proving to be the exception, as usual), I rather expect that with the Democratic race settled in everyone but Bill and Hillary Clinton's minds, they'll soon turn their guns on John McCain, who's been going out of his way to provide large and easy to hit targets lately. I would love to hear McCain explain how he plans to offset the revenue lost by his proposals to extend Bush's tax cuts, repeal the alternative minimum tax, and cut the corporate tax rate by- surprise!- closing loopholes and cutting pork. That load of rubbish makes Hillary Clinton's summer gas tax suspension plan (swiped from McCain anyway) look like sensible policy.

Have you seen Jon Stewart's "magic wand" send-up? Clearly McCain is following Bush's magic wand theory of governing; just wave your magic wand and make it so! It beats having an actual plan.

As someone who's against women's rights and rates a 0 on environmental issues, he's going to be tough to beat. He also has amazing self-possession, as when he had a melt-down due to a college student persisting in asking him about waterboarding as torture. (For the record, it isn't--not unless the water is "forced"-- thank you, Senator McCain). I like a man who isn't afraid to be intimidated by a college student. He should do well in world government. All he needs is a stern nanny to steady him and scold all those meanie questioners on his behalf, and everything will be fine.

McCain's temper, like Clinton's, is legendary on Capitol Hill.

Here's one melt down:



And a minor Bill classic; complete with sophistry, wagging finger, and self righteousness passed off as concern for the Little People, for comparison:

Quoted from BlueMeanie

Because what happens in America affects the rest of the western world. You have a recession, we have a recession. You have a war, we get dragged into it. The price of oil is skyrocketing because the dollar is so week. Everyone pays. Well, except the Norwegians. Because of America's declared 'War On Terror', and subsequently Britain's more or less enforced involvement, the UK is once again subjected to terrorist attacks (7/7). And you wonder why we're interested in your "silly politics"?

From what I can see the American electoral system is a playground for rich incompetent buffoons to carry out their very public slanging matches. I'd rather not be interested, but I have to be.

And by the way, six of the top ten posters on here are European.

sorry. that was a stupid thing of me to say. i wasn't thinking of all the things that affect all of the rest of the world. And you're right: the electoral system is a playground for rich incompetent buffoons.

... and here comes Ron Paul. This could be a thing of beauty.  


Ron Paul's Forces Quietly Plot GOP Convention Revolt Against McCain

Virtually all the nation's political attention in recent weeks has focused on the compelling state-by-state presidential nomination struggle between two Democrats and the potential for party-splitting strife over there.

But in the meantime, quietly, largely under the radar of most people, the forces of Rep. Ron Paul have been organizing across the country to stage an embarrassing public revolt against Sen. John McCain when Republicans gather for their national convention in Minnesota at the beginning of September.

Paul's presidential candidacy has been correctly dismissed all along in terms of winning the nomination. He was even excluded as irrelevant by Fox News from a nationally-televised GOP debate in New Hampshire.

But what's been largely overlooked is Paul's candidacy as a reflection of a powerful lingering dissatisfaction with the Arizona senator among the party's most conservative conservatives. As anticipated in late March in The Ticket, that situation could be exacerbated by today's expected announcement from former Republican Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia for the Libertarian Party's presidential nod, a slot held by Paul in 1988.

Never mind Ralph Nader, Republican and Democratic parties both face potentially damaging internal splits that could cripple their chances for victory in a narrow vote on Nov. 4.

Just take a look at recent Republican primary results, largely overlooked because McCain locked up the necessary 1,191 delegates long ago. In Indiana, McCain got 77% of the recent Republican primary vote, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, who've each long ago quit and endorsed McCain, still got 10% and 5% respectively, while Paul took 8%.

On the same May 6 in North Carolina, McCain received less than three-quarters of Republican votes (74%), while Huckabee got 12%, Paul 7% and Alan Keyes and No Preference took a total of 7%.

Pennsylvania was even slightly worse for the GOP's presumptive nominee, who got only 73% to a combined 27% for Paul (16%) and Huckabee (11%).

As Politico.com's Jonathan Martin noted recently, at least some of these results are temporary protest votes in meaningless primaries built on lingering affection for Huckabee and suspicion of McCain.

Given the long-since settled GOP race, thousands of other Republicans in these states, who might have put up with a McCain vote, crossed over to vote in the more exciting Democratic primaries, on their own for Sen. Barack Obama or at the urging of talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, who sought to support Hillary Clinton and prolong Democratic bloodletting.

According to a recent Boston Globe tally, Paul has a grand total of 19 Republican delegates to Romney's 260, Huckabee's 286 and McCain's 1,413.

In the last three months, Paul's forces, who donated $34.5 million to his White House effort and upward of a million total votes, have, as The Ticket has noted, been fighting a series of guerrilla battles with party establishment officials at county and state conventions from Washington and Missouri to Maine and Mississippi. Their goal: to take control of local committees, boost their delegate totals and influence platform debates.

Paul, for instance, favors a drastically reduced federal government, abolishing the Federal Reserve, ending the Iraq war immediately and withdrawing U.S. troops from abroad.

They hope to demonstrate their disagreements with McCain vocally at the convention through platform fights and an attempt to get Paul a prominent speaking slot. Paul, who's running unopposed in his home Texas district for an 11th House term, still has some $5 million in war funds and has instructed his followers that their struggle is not about a single election, but a long-term revolution for control of the Republican Party.

So eager are they to follow their leader's words, that Paul's supporters have driven his new book, "The Revolution: A Manifesto," to the top of several bestseller lists.

While Paul has consistently refused a third-party bid, he has vowed not to endorse McCain, a refusal mirrored by hundreds of his supporters who have left comments on The Ticket in recent weeks. And, no doubt, they'll flock back here today to spread the gospel below.

-- Andrew Malcolm

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/05/ronpaulgop.html

Quoted from BlueMeanie

Because what happens in America affects the rest of the western world. You have a recession, we have a recession. You have a war, we get dragged into it. The price of oil is skyrocketing because the dollar is so week. Everyone pays. Well, except the Norwegians. Because of America's declared 'War On Terror', and subsequently Britain's more or less enforced involvement, the UK is once again subjected to terrorist attacks (7/7). And you wonder why we're interested in your "silly politics"?

From what I can see the American electoral system is a playground for rich incompetent buffoons to carry out their very public slanging matches. I'd rather not be interested, but I have to be.

And by the way, six of the top ten posters on here are European.

I might find this a bit unfair. But oh well. I think I will continue to stay away from the current affairs forum because I don't want to be accused of attacking anyone. Again. It's just no fun.

^^^what she said. it gets a bit annoying for me when people take things too literally and start accusing people of insulting them.