The news media report that, adding the delegates earned in tonight's primaries and superdelegates newly committed to him, Senator Obama now has enough votes to win the Democratic party's presidential nomination on the first ballot. Senator Clinton is expected to speak later tonight, but it remain unclear whether she will concede or hold out in a final effort to change the minds of superdelegates. If the reports hold up, history will obviously have been made, but it would have been so either way. I've favored Obama in this particular campaign, but I suspect the outcome tells more about the faults of Hillary Clinton than it rewards the virtues of Barack Obama. Despite all the present persistent whining about alleged misogyny, I submit that, had another woman campaigned from a power base like New York State with as much name recognition as Hillary Clinton has, she could very well have beaten Obama across the country. I don't believe that any powerful female politician would be perceived as Hillary has. There is too much particular history involved for that to be plausible. This campaign has been a national referendum on Hillary Clinton as much as it's been a rally to Obama's charisma. She is too much of an individual, too much of a historical figure already, to have been judged as some abstract female. So let's hear no excuses from the Clintonites and the feminists and the feminazis. If they want to keep fighting, and if she does, let them; this is still a free country. Let them have their own party if they want, something they probably wouldn't allow other people, and see how many people come.
From this point forward, if the media have called it right, it will be Obama who sets the terms of his own electability. He was a little bit gutless late in the game in finally quitting his silly church, but McCain's similar predicament with his past pet preachers should clean that slate. During this last month, Obama has been fighting with one hand tied behind his back, voluntarily it seems, since he never saw fit to refute Clinton's criticisms with the obvious references to her own electability issues. This made it seem at least superficially that Clinton's argument was undisputed or indisputable, if only because Obama would not make the obvious comparisons to show that he was more electable than her. He was probably wise in withstanding the storm, since doing as I would have liked would probably have made it even less likely that hard-core Clintonites would finally vote for him. One hopes, however, that he'll be less reticent with Senator McCain, because it needs to be made clear that the Republican is ready and willing to get more Americans killed for no good reason, and it is not bad form, or mean, or negative, to say so.
As of 10:00 p.m., my time, it is not over.
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4 comments:
And still (1:30PM 6/04/08) Hillary refuses to concede defeat. Now it appears that she is trying to leverage her current "position" to become Obama's running mate.
My feeling is that to include the Clintons in any major position in his administration would be a mistake for Obama. The Clintons had their chance --- 8 years worth. And they couldn't rise to the challenge then, why should we believe they can rise to the challenge this time?
The problem is, the Clintons have a lot of people convinced that the did rise to the challenge. A big part of their campaign has been telling people they never had it so good as in the 1990s. Fortunately, we can assume that most Democrats realized that 90s prosperity was just as much built on a bubble as the "best economy ever" some conservatives credit to Bush. Without another internet boom on the horizon, it's unlikely Clinton II could have done as well, to the extent that she could actually do anything. Some of us remember that Bush didn't invent outsourcing, rising inequality, and the other phenomena that led some of us to vote for Nader in 2000, and we weren't eager for more of that from Mrs. C.
Now that we know that Swillary is waving the white flag, flip-flopping 24 hours after it was reported in the press that she was angling to be the VP, maybe she & Blubber can do us all a favor and take an extended vacation----to the Moon!!!!
I thought that we never had it so good as in the 1950s. Or was that in the 1980s under Reagan? I can never seem to remember when I had it good.
The odd thing is, the job I have now is the highest paying job I've ever had and I was hired in 2001, so strictly speaking, I've never had it economically as good as I have had it under the Bush administration. Now the place I work for looks like it may be soon shutting it's doors. Should I assume it's because Bush is leaving office? Or is there really no cause-effect relationship to Dubya's administration and the fact that newspapers are a dying industry?
People should never automatically assume that their position or their happiness or contentment level or status, etc has everything to do with the political administration of the time. Sometimes is just random happenstance.
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