435-305

Obama maintains solid delegate lead despite PA loss

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
4/22/08

Well, Rush Limbaugh’s big push to have Republican supporters switch allegiance and vote for Hillary in Pennsylvania in order to keep the race going had a profound effect.

The polls from the political analysts suggest that Hillary would win by 11 points. With about 80% of the vote counted, she is leading by ... ten. Back when Rush first suggested voting for her, she still led in the state by about twenty points.

So the big dittohead boost didn’t materialize, and while she won by just enough to stay in the race, she faces dwindling donations as her campaign falls ten million in debt.

She did win, and she’ll get a boost from that, a small bounce in the polls which may or may not help her in Indiana two weeks from now. (North Carolina isn’t really in play, with Obama enjoying a solid 20 point lead there). But she only gained about fifteen delegates on Obama.

But after tonight, she’ll still need 430 or so delegates in order to win the nomination, and Obama only needs about 310. No matter what happens in the remaining primaries, Obama will go to the convention with the most voter-chosen delegates. So Pennsylvania served only to keep Hillary alive, but not improve her position.

The corporate media is busy explaining how all this is good for McCain, but don’t you believe it. It won’t get much coverage in tomorrow’s news but the fact is that in Pennsylvania, five out of every six votes cast was for a Democratic candidate. The Republicans had a primary, and most districts were selecting candidates for the House and the state houses, and voting on initiatives and local measures.

Even worse, with no meaningful opposition, McCain only got 73% of the GOP vote. Ron Paul, who is still running (windmills, beware!) got 15%, and Mike Huckabee got 12%. Given a result like that, if the GOP moves at the convention to nominate McCain by acclamation (as they almost certainly will do) it will ring a little hollow in his ears.

So when you break it down in terms of total votes, Hillary won with about 43%, Obama got about 39%, and McCain got about 13%.

That doesn’t suggest he has a commanding lead in Pennsylvania. The LOSER outpolled him by a three-to-one margin.

It didn’t escape the notice of Obama or Clinton, both of whom noted in their speeches this evening that they were running against four more years of Putsch misgovernance. Both doubtlessly heard about today’s Gallup Poll, which showed public disapproval of Putsch at a 69% level, the highest such negatives ever recorded in the poll’s 70 year history.

It means that McCain is running on a platform of “stay the course” when “the course” is one of the most hated in American history. The last candidate to be caught in such a nightmarish scenario was poor old Hubert H. Humphrey, who could only get LBJ’s support if he promised to support the war in Vietnam, long after public patience for that mess had worn out. Nixon beat him by lying to the public that he had a “secret plan” to end the war (he didn’t). Only widespread hatred and mistrust of Nixon prevented the 1968 election from being a complete blowout.

Normally being ignored is a death knell for a campaign, but in McCain’s case, it might be his best last hope. By the time the Democrats have sorted themselves out, he might hope that it will be too late for the public to give him a hard, critical look. He doesn’t have a prayer if they do.

The Republicans are hoping (against hope, at this point) for a Hillary nomination, because they believe that she would have the same sort of luggage and the same sort of negatives that Nixon had, and which kept the otherwise doomed Humphrey competitive. Of course, what they don’t quite realize is that there just aren’t that many Hillary haters outside of the GOP. She has detractors, as any politician of note does, but she’s certainly no Nixon.

The corporate media keeps trying to foster a civil war among Democrats, of course, as evidenced by the ABC debate last week, in which the moderators, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, took the approach of a rather nasty small boy who manages to trap two beetles in a jar, and starts shaking the jar in order to make them fight. But I noticed that even though the two candidates sniped and sparred, both avoided anything that might come back to haunt the victor in the general campaign.

I was interested to note that neither Obama nor his supporters moved to criticize Hillary for her remark that if Iran were to lob a nuke at Israel, America would “obliterate” Iran. My own initial reaction was that it was a hideous thing to say, but the fact is that I’ve remarked myself (and in public arenas) that if a country like Iran or Pakistan were to ever lob a nuke at the US America would promptly turn their entire country into a rapidly-boiling sea of molten black glass. Deterrence does have its uses, and since nuclear containment has pretty much failed, it’s what we have to work with. I wouldn’t nuke Iran if they attacked Israel; I don’t feel any compulsion to commit genocide as an act of vengeance on behalf of a country that has gone out of its way to make enemies. But reminding Iran that any such act would have consequences isn’t such a bad idea.

Obama’s people could have made a political football out of that without making their candidate look weak on national security. They didn’t. For one thing, the day may come when President Obama may have to make such a threat himself. Or defend himself against accusations that he wouldn’t fight in the event of a nuclear attack, generated by the right wing hate machine.

So Indiana and North Carolina are next. Indiana will be the one to watch. Always a politically schizophrenic state, the polls are showing it all over the map on this primary, with both candidates showing sizeable leads, depending on which polls you look at. It won’t settle anything, but it will give a clue as to which way heartland America will jump.

But when you look at the overall totals from Pennsylvania, one thing is clear: McCain has his work cut out for him.