Over and Done With. But we move on anyway.
The charade continues, though I gather a few more people are now viewing it as the charade it is. Fine and dandy it is, and perhaps not as party smashing as various pundits believe it to be. Or maybe it is still providing John McCain that hole he can use to ride a truck through.
Wait. That Home Spun style Aphormism doesn’t even make any sense. I am not worthy of Hillary Clinton.
Give them both credit for taking their wins and making the most of them in the arguments. Barack Obama referenced North Carolina as a “swing state”. And, it is. Kind of. North Carolina lags behind Virginia as southern states where demographic trends are tugging it into the Democratic direction. If Obama wins by 7 or 8 percentage points, significant as that was Bill Clinton’s 92 and 96 margins of victory, North Carolina will probably be in his column.
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, set up her narrative for her almost certain victories in the next primary states of West Virginia and Kentucky. They have been allowed to fall out of the Democratic side, and she intends to WIN THEM… in the fall. These are two states that voted for Bill Clinton. And which are trending that other direction. Sorry, but it will take a bigger blow-out for these two states to win, and frankly Hillary Clinton’s big poll advantage in these states argure poorly for any Democrats’ chances.
I see this new editorial line out there that Clinton “found her compelling message” — fighter and all that — basically after she lost her real chance at the nomination. It is a filling in for Obama’s least natural constituency message-wise and racial-wise, and nature abhors a vacuum I suppose. But her tailoring of a message to the “white working class”, in addition to leading to some cringe-inducing home spun tedium of pandering, also shows how contrived these things can be. I think I made part of this point with John Edwards, but he at least seemed to be building off some themes he deveolped ini 2004 and carried forward through his post-election pre-campaign career.
Somewhere in hearing Clinton calling on the juant in Burma to accept humanitarian aid (will the Burma Juanta heed Clinton’s calls?), I had a gut feeling of her closing call. Michigan and Florida. And so we got to see or hear (I was listening to NPR) the crowd chant “Count the Vote! Count the Vote! Count the Vote!”, and Clinton smirks in with a “Little weird to pick a nominee based on 48 states.” Which, it is, but as some were trying to order an order-less process, two states jumped the gun and provided two phony elections.
But, you know, Clinton closed the lead in North Carolina… funny, as that is not anything her campaign will take seriously about Pennsylvania’s less than desirable results for Obama.
After a spell, it occurs to me that the line about “a refreshing policy discussion suddenly broke into the Democratic presidential campaign” is a sign of how empty this trends to. The gas tax holiday issue, I suppose, might have broken into the first 45 minutes of that infamous Stephanopolis debate. And, notwithstanding the merits or detrimets of the policy proposal (and, yes, I am with Obama)… good gawd this is a pittance of an issue. “Let them eat Cake”, indeed.