It May be Over	5/6/08	At Hillary Clinton’s victory speech in Indiana, Bill Clinton looked decidedly downcast. Chelsea Clinton was off camera, but BBS presenter Katty Kaye reported that she looked on the verge of tears. There was a telling moment in her “victory speech” when she said, “I win, he wins, he wins, I win. No matter what happens, I will work for the nominee of the Democratic party because we must win in November. And I know that Senator Obama feels the same way.” That sounds more like a concession speech, and it may well be one. I suspect a lot of people will go to bed tonight convinced that Hillary did win Indiana, and perhaps she did. But normally, when there is a 4 point margin between candidates with 87% of precincts in, it’s time to release the balloons, give the speech, and congratulate the loser on a fine effort. But it’s not quite over in Indiana. Two counties have no returns at all. One of them is Lake County, which adjoins the small hamlet of Chicago, in Obama’s “home state” of Illinois. It features the medium-sized city of Gary, Indiana. It’s expected to go heavily for Obama. The other is Union County, just up the road from Cincinnati. Correction: Lake County just reported well after midnight their time, and with 28% of precincts counted, Obama is leading 75%-25%. No, Indiana isn’t settled yet.
435-305	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.
A Lazy Breeze	4/16/08	The Scots have a benign sounding term for what is actually a rather nasty thing. “A lazy breeze.” A lazy breeze is a wind so cold and bitter that it goes through you, rather than around you. About now Republicans, CEOs, and Hillary Clinton must be shivering and cursing the way the wind is blowing. For the second time in three weeks, right wingers exalted that something had happened in the Barack Obama campaign that would destroy his run for the Presidency. The first was the Reverend Wright and his incendiary remarks about relations between America and her black population. The second was Obama’s “bitter” remark last week. Faux and right wing talk radio tried pile-driving it, of course, but not many people outside of their little circle of friends pay much attention to what they have to say these days, and that means about 2% of all Americans. The mainstream media, dutiful whores to the GOP, don’t even bother trying to hide their Republican servitude these days. Even Dana Milibank, no friend to liberal politicians, was taken aback, writing, “So much for the liberal media. John McCain and Barack Obama both appeared before the nation's newspaper editors yesterday. The putative Republican presidential nominee was given a box of doughnuts and a standing ovation. The likely Democratic nominee was likened to a terrorist. At a luncheon for the editors hosted by the Associated Press, AP Chairman Dean Singleton quizzed Obama about whether he would send more troops to Afghanistan, where ‘Obama bin Laden is still at large?”’
Elitism!	4/13/08	Back when I was 11 and in Southern California, a time of a too-slowly dying pope and a too-rapidly living president, I had a liberal aunt who loved Adlai Stevenson. As a part of her (eventually successful) drive to liberalize me, she had me listen to some of his speeches. They were on scratchy LPs, mono, and of dicey sound quality. Combined with Stevenson’s still-unfamiliar American accent, they made understanding the speeches a bit of a burden. Part of the problem was that I was only 11. Stevenson, unlike most politicians, spoke as an adult to adults. Compared to what we have today, so did Eisenhower. Neither of them were aiming for audiences that might be mentally challenged by the Teletubbies. But Adlai had a wit that reminded me of my hero, Winston Churchill. And the Cuban missile crisis the year before had taught me that the boring stuff on the front page of the newspaper could kill me if I wasn’t paying attention. My aunt told me of his legendary decision about letting cats roam free*, and the time someone told him that he was sure to “get the vote of every thinking man” in the U.S. Stevenson replied, “Thank you, but I need a majority to win.” Years later, as Reagan ascended and America began a decline, I heard some of those speeches again. He didn’t use sound bites, he didn’t use race or economics or religion to bait and entice his listeners or stir up their anger against commies or beatniks. He spoke to them as if they were thinking adults capable of evaluating the facts and drawing their own thought-out conclusions.