Yes, Yes.  I know that Hillary Clinton has connected herself to that very same Right-wing Conspiracy she blasted off in the figure of Richard Mellon Scaife.  But that is almost beside the point.  Almost.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has become a mad scramble to legitimize the most undemocratic part of the Democratic Party nominating process, which has surfaced in the way of rebuking Nancy Pelosi’s helpful suggestion / hint that superdelegates may just lin up behind the popular vote and delegate count winner.  So the Clinton campaign informs us that this does not fall into what the party had in mind in when they set the system up in 1984.  Which, as I already rattled off, what the party apparently had in mind was bolstering the chances of Walter Mondale so as to defeat the possibility of the 49 state loss disaster of George McGovern.

The word on the street is that Hillary Clinton is rolling into the “Tonya Harding Option”.  I never fully understand these post-modern politics we have, whereby the public is supposed to not just respond to the tactics “Tonya Harding Option” but also the full awareness that the “Tonya Harding Option” is now being employed, the wink and nod and marionette strings.  Understand, the 3 AM phone call ad was perfectly legitimate, and naturally exposed in full an item of vulnerability in Obama’s candidacy he will just have to shore up largely with is veep pick but also with a strong suggestion that the “You know that old Beach Boys song?” message of John McCain’s is not where we want to travel as a nation.  What is not good from the Clinton candidacy is the appearance of the message of “Clinton loves our country.  As does McCain.”

This has lead more than one to speculate that Clinton is now running for the 2012 election, after a McCain — yes McCain — term.  I was with that one first (or before this found its way into the zietgiest), though I guess I can’t take credit for that since I did not bother to record it.   I guess we will have a better idea of this when we get to the 2008 DNC Obama nominating convention by the tone of her speech.

I heard a classic song the other night from Nina Simone, which reminded me of one comment made within the Reverend Wright controversy.  The comment was the blacks shouldn’t say “God Bless America”, blacks should say “God damn America.”

The Nina Simone song… Mississippi Goddamn.

Which, of course, you could replace “Mississippi” with any number of locations in America at any number of racially charged incidents.  Everybody knows about Detroit Goddamn.  Everybody knows about Los Angeles Goddamn.  Everybody knows about Little Rock Goddamn.

Goddamn America; please bless it.

But the controversy has shifted slightly.  At the moment there is a mild whoop-de-do at one phrase in Obama’s speech, regarding his aunt “She is a typical white person.”  I have to roll my eyes at this one and ask anyone bothered by that one to please grow up.

Who do you think would win a Superhero match-up between Aquaman and AntMan?

So, someone left the following message on the bathroom wall of a business I frequent, one whose bathrooms basically encourage graffiti-ing:

“Ayn Rand is God”.

I responded with:
“Ayn Rand is selfish and a Jerk.”

To which some ignorant person wrote:
“And no one likes him.”

Which was followed by a small scrawling of:
“HIM?”

And the original person reprised with:
“Obviously I like HER. And also obviously, you are an idiot.”

Later, the following showed up:

AYN RAND RULES!!!
— among Fascists.

LOVE IS ALL YOU WILL EVER HAVE.
— and Ayn Rand does not believe in love.

It seems, though, that the original person boxed in the “Ayn Rand Rules”, suggesting that the “Love is all you will ever have” was written by someone else, and the “Ayn Rand Rules” person wanted that to be known.  Just as I had to scrawl a little comment to distance myself from the “him” reference.

A real heart-breaker.

So the Portland State Vikings were down to The (23 point) Spread by one point, 85 to 61.  Kansas had the ball, with one second separating the shot clock and the game clock, meaning in all probibility, the Vikings would have one last shot to beat The Spread.   Kansas shot and missed with seven second left, and Portland State rushed down the court.  A Spread-beating buzzer-beating 3 point shot was aimed, and…

It rimmed off.  Portland State lost to the Spread by one point.  Almost beat it.  But almost is only good in horseshoes.

Oh well.  There’s always next year.  Next Year the Portland State University Vikings will make the Tournament, and goshdarnedit, they will BEAT THE SPREAD!

I was reading through a book, Running on race : racial politics in presidential campaigns, 1960-2000 by Jeremy D. Mayer.  Parcing through the racial dimensions of various campaigns, from the splitting and double-backing of your Kennedy through and on, I end up thinking that Jesse Jackson’s 1984 campaign strikes me as particularly loathsome, and this aspect of Clinton’s 1992 campaign served some low points, in the manner that he innoculated himself from any possible Willie Horton effect.

But that is in the past.  Flash forward to Obama’s speech yesterday in handling the problem of his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  In the past month, John McCain has been scoping out the various nutty right-wing evangelical Christian pastors, notably one John Hagee, and “Whore of Babylon” to you too.  In electoral terms, I found myself biting my tongue with this one, knowing that behind door number one for Obama, from out of Obama’s identity politics searching youth to assert his essential blackness, was Reverend Wright and this church.  Not without his merits, but also not without its dark corridors, somewhere lurking beside your Louis Farrahkan.

The problem here is that in a contest of religious and cultural nutcasery in the public scope, Obama is going to lose on this score.  The racial edge is too strong — I go back to the several seconds of b-roll where two burly black men pop into view — the “Amen!” chior throwing their hands down, which to clarify the meaning of that post, this image, whatever words Wright is saying muted, in itself is strikingly innocuous even if it is scary looking to white America and even as the media seems to want to burnish it into the public’s retina– and we have somehow come as a nation to accept the constellation around Pat Robertson into mainstream electoral politics.  Besides which, Obama has a sustained relation with Wright; McCain just wants a bunch of symbolic huggings.

I admit to being cynical and jaded with regard to Obama and his speechifying, thinking too often there’s just no there there.  So with that in mind, I was prepared for Obama’s poetic eloquence with yesterday’s speech, expecting to fall into my cynicism, and…

… It was just about the finest product of any politician in this century.  This, I guess, is that famed eloquence everyone talks so much about in service of Substance, the parsing out of the fissures of our nation’s racial discombobulation.

So I liked it.  I thought it answered the question.  But I am not necessarily John Q Public.  How did it play in Peyoria?  My pundit game of guaging mass opinion fails me on this one.  And I don’t think John Q Public can necessarily provide an answer.  This morning, I saw some AP poll results asking various ethnic groups if they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of other ethnic groups, and I had to shake my head — what a completely and utterly useless and unanswerable poll.  The poll answers is going to be that 4 percent view another ethnic group unfavorably — but this matter does not work that way.  A better guage, for Obama’s problem, goes along the lines of what percentage of voters believe he is Muslim.

I can only suggest that this speech played better in Peyoria than any other tact Obama may have gone with — whether with political cynicism or with his whole heart.  I note the ripples from the National Review’s “Corner”, where your bloggers have shifted out the one positive review admist a whole mass of kvetching — too much victim politics, where’s the forth-right condemnation and disassociation of Wright, etc.?  The problem is that Wright sits there, undeniably, and there is not extracting him from the historical record of Obama’s life.

Overall I will say this did Obama better than Mitt Romney’s Mormon speech did him.  Not saying I can calibrate the political slidings here, but this will end up being judged an act of brilliance based on the simple fact that he will likely be the nominee and likely the next President, and that is how these things are judged.

PSU VERSUS KANSAS.

Woo hoo!  This should be great.  I suppose.

Um.  See, they scheduled it first so that we can just get it all over with.  I mean, Kansas’s 50 point victory over Portland State.

I was indeed rooting for PSU to get that number 16 seed, because, you see, they were going to get thumped no matter what, so we might as well have it so that if by some weird happenstance they win, it should mean something.  And it doesn’t really mean anything for a 15 seed to beat a 2 or a 14 seed to beat a 3, because such things have happened a time or a handful of times.

So, here we are, a college basketball team that attracted a grand total of 4 thousand fans to the Conference Championship game at the Rose Garden, ie: No one cares much.But riding on the bus the day before the Big Sky Tournament, I overheard a conversation between two college students.  Seems a friend is coming in from out of town.  It’s Spring Break at this friend’s college, and they don’t have sports at her college, so it’d be fun to watch, um, the Portland State University Vikings basketball team.  I had a bit of cognitive dissonance with the concept — if you want to see college athletics, you attend a game in Eugene or Corvallis.  As a student, I did attend a couple of Vikings basketball games, but that was only because they were handing out free pizza.
But, you see, somebody somewhere does give a flying riff.

Anyway.  Go Vikings.  They should be down by 20 points five minutes in the game, but you never know, do you?  Except, yeah, you kind of do know.

#1: “Oregon isn’t all that blue”.  Speaking of Feingold, neither is Wisconsin.

#2:  I hate the word “Progressive”, but it is something I just have to learn to live with.

#3:  A red flag went up recently.  A reference to Jeff Merkley as being “well, he is what he is — Jeff Merkley” — “Someone who will not excite anyone”.  Which reminds me of several Democratic Presidential nominees.  In terms of a Senate bid, I suspect this would work well in an open election, but against a reasonably entrenched well financed incumbent, a challenger somehow needs to break down that barrier and garner an emotional response.  It is one liability that off-sets Novick as being to the “Hard Left”.  Though, maybe just barely…

#4:  Mind you, Peter Defazio was a better bet.  As was John Kitzhaber.  After that, things are a little dicey, methinks.

#5:  Speaking of Kitzhaber…

#6:  The DSCC — credit them and fault them accordingly.  Clearly a tapping of Bob Casey, Jr — against the desires of any number of liber– er — Progressive Interest groups was wise in taking down Santorum in Pennsylvania.  For that matter, the same with Harold Ford, Jr in Tennessee — pegged forever as the magical Democrat #51, who ultimately lost.  But then there’s Montana, where they tapped a “John Morrison”, figuring his DLC centrist credentials would sway this red state.  Squinting at the primary from afar, I could sware that I saw no way Morrison could win, and I could see how Tester, preferable to probably your tastes as well mine, might.

#7: I suppose it won’t do my “Democratic Party Unity” card to suggest that I had a secret desire to see Ford lose in 2006, though through the entire Summer I hoped Jim Webb in Virginia would supplant Ford for the elusive “Democrat #51″, and that if I were in Nebraska in 2008 and Bob Kerrey had been slated for the Democratic side, I would vote for the Republican (never mind he is the Democrats’ best shot in deepest Republican state).  The last one is made easier by the numerics of the Senate — Democrats will add some seats in the next election, and probably fall below the magical mark of 60.

#8:  Ralph Nader.  So, what was your opinion of the man circa 1998, and if it was somewhat negative, could you have stomached a positive opinion? And is it okay to be ambivalent about a Dick Morris lead Bill Clinton, circa 1996?

If I may suggest something regarding Al Gore. (Deep breath). So, his poll numbers were sagging and clearly behind W. throughout the first half of 2000, somewhat sputtering along. At the convention he settled in and focused his campaign, and thus was born “The People Versus the Powerful”. With this as his focus, his poll numbers stabilized and the race reached the “dead heat” stasis it was from there on to the election. The post-convention bounce was not illusionary. This campaign theme seems clearly formed in large part to handle the threat to his left, meaning Nader forced Gore to his focus point.

Granted, after that, Nader was the Spoiler everyone remembers him as. Until he reappeared in 2004, at which point he sent a quick shock through the Democrats’ spines, but turned out irrelevant. As he iss now. Though, frankly, he was only a spoiler in Florida (clear on the eve of the election) and New Hampshire (only obvious in retrospect). Nader voters in every other state are free from blame from saving us from, um…

The 2008 presidential campaign of Joseph Lieberman.

#8A: Historical corrolary: Hencry Wallace’s campaign aided the 1948 election of Harry S Truman. This is not a precise match, as part of Wallace’s aiding came through good old fashioned red-baiting of an easily
baited (backed by the Soviet Union, after all) Wallace, but the political campaign Truman’s advisor forged for him was to forge him to a specific liberal positioning to run against the platitudous Dewey, a firm position necessary to get through to the electorate, the coordinates determined in large part from his left plank in Wallace.

#9: Election Campaign logic tends to amuse me. A primary contest can present a candidate who is said to be dividing the Party’s base. Never mind that Steve Novick was there first.

#10: Wait a week and I may well argure for Jeff Merkley. Or Charity Nebbie, for that matter. Candy Neville.

Supposing for a moment the ponderance of how something — anything — is “threatening to threaten the Obama Campaign” — can we throw in an extra “threaten”?

CNN is hilarious sometimes, but it is maybe not their fault.  It is a scandal that was obviously going to come sometime, and I knew it would, and more than anything else would serve as the Cultural Wedge that would deflate Obama — but it amuses me more than anything else.  Basically what amuses me is the handful of seconds of b-roll that I saw on CNN last night.  Reverend Wright is speaking.  Popping into the screen for just a few seconds — two burly black men who seem to be Throwing It Down — or something.

Change the channel, or turn the channel off as the case was, and come back to it an hour later, and you’ll see that b-roll again.  And again.  And again.  Wright preaches, two burly men pop into screen-shot and gestilate wildly, then pop out of the screen-shot.

Last week, Jeff Merkley made some remarks which clarified why the better choice in the race between Merkley and Steve Novick to battle Gordon Smith for the Senate seat from Oregon is, indeed, Steve Novick.

Apparently Jeff Merkley is happy to be a Democratic Party Apparatuck, Get along to get along.  This route does have some of its advantages.  The means of legislative (and indeed executive) government needs to be some unholy mixture of working with the “Powers that Be” and calling such out.  The problem with the former is that it inspires a certain amount of timidity.  The latter model has its problems — the “Powers that Be” have a certain amount of, um, power to shuttle things, after all — but within this framework, you have to solve the pressing problem of the Democrats first.

The words went to the effect of pointing to Novick’s praise of Ralph Nader voters in 1998, an alluding to his vote for the candidate in 1996 by way of dishonestly suggesting he did so in 2000.  As well in pointing to a certain level of ambivalence in the candidacies of Clinton and Obama.  To which I have to say, Good for Novick.  Really.  It’s a Senate I used to sometimes view as being compose of Russ Feingold and 99 others, which means that if things settle in with your Harry Reid — Tom Daschle component of managing a caucus, you need someone to counteract your Ken Salazars.

Absent any compelling reason Merkley would be more electible than Novick, and I cannot find any, Novick has to be your man… Oregon, so far as I can tell, being the seventh most likely Republican Senate seat to go over to the Democratic side.  Which, if I had to guess, is about where the races settle between the donkey party winning and the Elephant party winning.