If you strictly look at the numbers, then yes, Romney won the popular vote and the delegates were split 50/50 because the race was so close in a state in which he should have cleaned up. But in a state in which he should have cleaned up, was this really a win for Mitt Romney? Yeah, I don't think so either.Rick Santorum claimed a partial victory Wednesday when final results showed he and Mitt Romney evenly split Michigan' s 30 delegates, even though Romney got more overall votes in the Republican presidential primary Tuesday.The latest estimates from CNN showed both candidates with 15 Michigan delegates, while Romney was ahead in the popular vote with 41% to Santorum's 38%.
“Six months before this thing got going, every Republican I know was saying, ‘We’re gonna win, we’re gonna beat Obama.’ Now even those who’ve endorsed Romney say, ‘My God, what a fucking mess.’”~Republican strategist Ed Rollins
So he's pretty much laying it out that he knows the Birther thing is all bullshit, yet he stops short of admitting it's a load of crap for political expediency. But that's not all Perry's doing to remove the cement shoes from his feet after jumping into the GOP primary pool. Seeing the meteoric rise of fellow charlatan Herman Cain* the more he repeats his 999 Plan, Perry has decided to announce a tax reform plan of his own. A flat tax. But just one look at Perry's plan and anyone can tell it makes absolutely no sense.“I’m really not worried about the president’s birth certificate. It’s fun to poke at him a little bit, say, 'Hey, let’s see your grades and your birth certificate.'”
I haven't written very much because of my schedule lately, but I just read a Huffington Post item that I couldn't let pass.
I speak with fellow blogger Armadillo Joe and our habit of surfing around and comparing our findings of posts we read blaming everyone and everything - the media, misogyny, sexism - for Hillary Clinton's downfall, rather than where it should truly lie, her terrible campaign leaders and campaign strategy, GOP-style negative smear tactics and "insert both feet" gaffes that have wasted her name recognition status and cause over half of voters to find her untrustworthy, when once she was the odds-on favorite to win the party nomination for the presidency.
"How Dare You!" written by Jill Iscol is just another example in a long line of reasons that Hillary Clinton's campaign has failed time and again and why any good will towards her has diminished. Iscol's first few lines read like a parody. I was waiting for it to get funny and show it's sarcasm and irony, but that paragraph never came.We need to talk. How dare the leadership of the Democratic Party turn on Hillary Clinton! How dare they betray Bill Clinton! How dare they not speak out when Hillary is disrespected by words like bitch, whore and the "c" word!
Really? Who called her a "whore" or a "cunt"? Did anyone from her own party talk about Hillary that way? Did Obama? The only one I remember calling Clinton "bitch" was Tina Fey on a Saturday Night Live skit, and it was "in a good way." Did that offend women or were they pumping their fists in agreement?
Iscol describes herself as a "Hillary supporter... along with millions of Democrats throughout our country" and is outraged at the treatment of her preferred candidate and that the Democratic leadership is not sticking up for her. What she doesn't mention is that, unlike millions of other Democrats throughout the country, she isn't just a supporter but a Campaign Finance Chair for Clinton. Not much disclosure there, huh? She goes on:...This is not the party I thought I belonged to. ...That Party stood proudly by a president who many called the first black president because both he and his wife had demonstrated a lifelong commitment to civil rights and human rights.
That is until Bill Clinton compared Barack Obama's win in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson's primary wins in 1984 and 1988, inferring that he won because of the black vote. And Geraldine Ferraro revealing herself to be a passive racist, the kind that live next door and smile to your face but peer out from behind their blinds to make sure you're not doing anything of which they'd disapprove. And Hillary Clinton's "hard-working Americans, white Americans" gaffe.Women are outraged. We are still fighting for her, and we are ashamed of how our candidate, a woman who has devoted her adult life to serving others... has been treated not just by the media but by her own Democratic Party.
Yes, it's true women are outraged. But not just female Clinton supporters. How about the outrage of Obama supporters who happen to be women? Do they not count? Are they so vapid that they don't know what they're doing and therefore dismissed?
I said it once, I'll say it again and now I'm putting it in writing: Hillary Clinton is not losing/did not lose the Democratic nomination because of her gender, no matter how many times you may scream it at the top of your lungs. She lost because she was the hare, and thought she could take a break after February 5th, while Obama the tortoise looked at the whole race and didn't nap under a tree after Iowa.
And as far as the "treatment by her own Democratic party" is concerned, let's take a look at at how Hillary Clinton has treated "one of her own" in the Democratic Party, as well as her foot-in-mouth disease, and her thoughts on the Democratic process itself:- your insistence that there have been widespread calls for you to end your campaign, when such calls had been few.
- your misspeaking about Martin Luther King's relative importance to the Civil Rights movement.
- your misspeaking about your under-fire landing in Bosnia.
- insisting Michigan's vote wouldn't count and then claiming those who would not count it were Un-Democratic.
- pledging to not campaign in Florida and thus disenfranchise voters there, and then claim those who stuck to those rules were as wrong as those who defended slavery or denied women the vote.
- the photos of Osama Bin Laden in an anti-Obama ad.
- fawning over the fairness of Fox News while they were still calling you a murderer.
- accepting Richard Mellon Scaife's endorsement and then laughing as you described his "deathbed conversion."
- quoting the electoral predictions of Boss Karl Rove.
- the 3 a.m. Phone Call commercial.
- President Clinton's disparaging comparison of the Obama candidacy to Jesse Jackson's.
- Geraldine Ferraro's national radio interview suggesting Obama would not still be in the race had he been a white man.
- the dozen changing metrics and the endless self-contradictions of your insistence that your nomination is mathematically probable rather than a statistical impossibility.
- your declaration of some primary states as counting and some as not.
- exploiting Jeremiah Wright in front of the editorial board of the lunatic-fringe Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
- exploiting William Ayers in front of the debate on ABC.
- boasting of your "support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans"...
- repeatedly praising Senator McCain at Senator Obama's expense, and your own expense, and the Democratic ticket's expense.
This Olbermann list doesn't even mention her comparison of the Democratic party process to the Republican one and how she claimed if we were playing by their rules, she'd be the nominee by now. For anyone still using that argument and the threat of not voting for Obama, the Democratic candidate, when he wins the nomination, I say, "Please review your party affiliation and re-register to vote as a Republican. We don't need your triangulating, Republican-lite kind around here."
But now, Senator Hillary Clinton, after shooting herself in the foot countless times, often with Mark Penn's finger on the trigger, takes the sawed-off shotgun and sticks it in her mouth on her own with her awful comment regarding the 1968 election and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. When I first heard this secondhand, I thought surely there was some mistake. Did she actually use the word "assassinate"? And of course, I know that she doesn't want any harm to befall Barack Obama, but how brain dead or "sleep deprived" do you have to be to make such an idiotic comment?
I was still confused about her comment, not knowing what to make of it. Then I remembered a pundit on Countdown (I believe it was Howard Fineman) speaking of a previous Hillary comment ("Obama's not a Muslim.... as far as I know.") and saying that Clinton doesn't say anything without thinking about it. Wow. Could she be thinking, "Let me stick around... you never know what can happen... remember Bobby Kennedy?" Then Keith Olbermann set me straight.
The fact is that it doesn't matter what Clinton was thinking. In fact, it shows that if anything, she wasn't thinking when she made that comment, effectively ending, in my opinion, any possible shot of wresting away the nomination from Obama.
Comparing the media's treatment of Hillary to that of Obama's is a bad joke. How do you compare the Rev. Wright's six week debacle (where Obama renounces his Christian Pastor and there are still 11% of voters at this point who still think he is Muslim), questions of patriotism and lapel flag pins, the sham of the ABC debate, pundit after pundit during primary after primary trying to make it look like a horserace, asking why Obama can't "close the deal" when in fact they should be asking why the well-known Hillary couldn't "close the deal", how does Clinton compare that to anything the media has thrown at her?
Jill Iscol's delusion of how the Democratic party has "betrayed" Hillary Clinton is laughable when in fact it is Hillary that has, at almost every turn done or said practically anything to try and stop the Obama tidal wave from flooding her dingey of a campaign with a bailing bucket the size of a thimble. Any excuse save reality keeps these people grasping for something that they themselves have squandered.
No surprises here. Terrry McAuliffe: "Hillary Clinton has now received more votes than any candidate ever running for president in a primary." Even if you change the rules and fully seat Michaigan [sic] and Florida and count them for the popular vote totals and don't count any portion of the Michigan "uncommitted" (which were understood a the to be for Obama) vote for Obama, Hillary is still behind in the popular vote total. The only way she moves ahead in popular vote is if you do all that and don't count four of the caucus states.
Will someone explain to Hillary Clinton and her campaign that she can't keep claiming that she has more popular votes than Barack Obama?
From Josh Marshall at TPM:
Some stuff is just too ridiculous to let pass.
Well hell, looks like Gravel can still win this race too by that standard. Only count the 27 votes he's received and don't count any others.
Oh, and by the way, when you get to the point of trying to remain viable because Karl Rove said so, it's time to hang it up. I don't know if you remember Turdblossom, Hillary, but he was the guy who got us into this mess in the first place with the idea of a perpetual Republican Party rule. I know it's been ages since he's left the White House and you're probably sleep deprived and don't recall, but I'm guessing chances are Rove is saying exactly what he needs to say to help the Republicans.
The longer the race goes on, the longer the McCainstream Media will ignore the Maverick's shortcomings and continue the fallacy of a horserace on the Dem side. At this point, fine - take it to June 3rd and then thank everyone and bow out gracefully. Everyone will have voted, which is what you've been touting all along, isn't it?
Whether you're a Clinton supporter or not, everyone knows she's galvanizes the GOP, and if they have any chance of winning the general election in November, they need voters to come out in droves not so much to vote for McCain, but to vote against Hillary.
So if Hillary Clinton is taking any stock in what Karl Rove is saying, either she's a complete fool, or she thinks we are.
It's a foregone conclusion that Hillary Clinton is going to win today's primary in West Virginia, especially with comments like this coming from its edumucated citizens:“I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife’s an atheist.”
Yes, that comes from a lifelong "Democrat." 67-year-old retired coalminer Leonard Simpson would rather vote for McCain given the choice of the Straight Talker or the Muslim with the atheist wife (that would be Obama in his mind).
So I'm not expecting too much out of West Virginians, but I think the main issue is how the punditocracy is going to spin it. Are they going to say what we all know, that Hillary's win is nothing that we didn't expect but with superdelegates streaming toward Obama and the not so fuzzy math and the massive debt her campaign is carrying, she's still trying to climb a nearly impossible mountain for the nomination?
Or are we going to get yet another false horserace, with Hillary being the comeback kid and "why can't Obama close the deal?" inane banter to fill out the slated hours of "coverage" of a primary whose projected results will be known about two minutes after the polls close?
I'll take a quick look tonight but won't hold my breath for anything newsworthy.
Hillary Clinton called North Carolina a "game changer" in the race for the Democratic nomination, but I don't think this is what she had in mind. Barack Obama had taken North Carolina 56%-42%, after major barnstorming by Bill Clinton this past week. Some reports say he's done 100 stump speeches in the last two weeks in the Tarheel State.
O-mentum was apparently only slightly delayed.
Obama wins Mississippi 61% to 37%
By now we've all seen Tuesday's results, but who was voting?
A Rude Reader from Texas has some very interesting insight:I can tell you that Clinton did not *win* the popular vote in Texas. We are the state of the 19-percenters, Huckabee-lovers and Hagee. Republicans knew that McCain would win Ohio and since in Texas we have open primaries, the RNC, Texas Repubs and Rush had been telling all their zombies to vote Clinton because they think they can beat her. My own mother, who hasn't voted for a Democrat for 40 years, told me that she voted for Hillary because 'you know, I support McCain, so I voted for her like everyone else up here.' My mother wasn't our only contact to verify our suspicions. All those rural counties with few votes...Republicans to the core and they HATE Hillary with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. Although I live in an Obama county near the George HW Bush Presidential Library, we must have had a huge number of crossovers ourselves because Huckabee nearly beat McCain here.
For a while now, Rush Limbaugh and other wingnuts have been terrified of an Obama nomination and have pulled out all the stops. They're urging their listeners to vote for Hillary in the open primaries because the GOP has a better shot running against her than Obama in November.
... Watch the caucus results. Those are going to be far more accurate because only the true-blue Democrats return for the meetings after the polls close. The delegate representation is determined by how many supporters for each candidate show up for the caucus. The popular vote has nothing to do with how these delegates are chosen. At the caucus we vote on delegates to the county and state conventions as well as resolutions for the party platform, so the Republicans stay away lest they be outed or contaminated with our Democratic ideals."
Taking a look at the Texas Caucus poll numbers, as "CW" suggests, shows that Obama leads Clinton 56%-44% with 40% of precincts reporting with final reports due by Saturday. Meanwhile, Obama supporters are going all out, helping his campaign raise a record $55 million in February. That doesn't sound like buyer's remorse to me.
So did Hillary Clinton really "win" Texas? If she did, it was by the thinnest of margins. Thinner than the actual 101,000 vote difference suggests. Were there at least 101,000 Republicans voting in the Democratic Texas primary? I have no doubt.
Clinton takes Rhode Island and Ohio handily. Ohio, ... sigh. Texas was called for her at about 12:40am but it's a squeaker 51%-48% as of this post. Obama looks like he'll win the caucus vote there an he won in Vermont by a wide margin.
Delegates? Negligible. Obama still leads by 150 or so.
I didn't think this was going to happen, but I now believe that this thing is going all the way to Denver. Jeebus help the Democratic Party.
...in terms of voting? First they run out of ballots and have to keep polls open later, now MSNBC is reporting that Cuyahoga county (Cleveland) won't have their count in until 4:30am. In fact, NONE of Ohio's cities have reported yet. What the fuck?!
That's what I heard the "pundits" calling tomorrow's primaries. And with a couple of big states up for grabs, the Clinton camp continues to suggest that nothing but an Obama sweep will deter them from swinging away til the bitter end.
Meanwhile, Obama had some swinging of his own to do."What precise foreign-policy experience is she claiming that makes her qualified to answer that telephone call at 3 a.m. in the morning?" Obama asked of the former first lady at a town-hall meeting. It was a reference to dueling television ads over who would exercise superior judgment in responding to a national emergency in the middle of the night.
...Obama criticized Clinton expressly for failing to read the classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons capabilities, a report available at the time of her October 2002 vote authorizing the Iraq war.
"She didn't give diplomacy a chance. And to this day, she won't even admit that her vote was a mistake — or even that it was a vote for war," Obama said.
"When it came time to make the most important foreign policy decision of our generation the decision to invade Iraq Senator Clinton got it wrong," Obama said.
Well, first the 3am phone call:
...The Clinton camp, playing off of a memo it had sent to reporters earlier in the day, insisted that if Obama was unable to pull off a four-for-four day in Tuesday's primary, it would signal "buyer's remorse" with his candidacy as well as "interest in having this campaign go on, at least to Pennsylvania" (which votes on April 7).Of course they say this knowing they have a sizable lead in Rhode Island and only a 2 point lead in Ohio after losing the lead in the latest Texas polls. So does this mean that if Clinton gets smoked in Ohio, Texas and Vermont, but wins in RI, she's still contending? "I don't anticipate that that will be an outcome," said [top Clinton aide Howard] Wolfson. "I'm much more optimistic than that scenario being presented."
So after taking a deep breath and stepping back to look at the overall campaign situation and the history of the last couple of weeks, here's my take on the Clinton campaign going all out negative on Barack Obama: desperation.
1 - Obama has won 11 straight contests, beating Clinton by wide margins.
2 - Clinton going negative (but not all the way) in Wisconsin was viewed by their campaign as a boost for them. They've been quoted as saying the didn't lose by as much (17 points) as they thought they would.
3 - Her closing statement in the Texas debate was viewed by many as conciliatory, which probably prompted the Clinton campaign heads to work overtime to negate that view, else be perceived as giving up.
4 - The Obama mailers on health care and NAFTA caused Hillary's campaign to see red and go off the deep end.
Now, it's one thing to challenge Obama and call him out on it: "Shame on you, Barack Obama. It is time you ran a campaign consistent with your messages in public — that's what I expect from you... Meet me in Ohio, and let's have a debate about your tactics."
It's another matter entirely to mock his message and compare him to the second coming of Jeebus. And here, in my opinion, is where the flaw with Clinton's reactionary attacks get the best of her.
Does she not remember the painting of Howard Dean in 2004 as unhinged because of his overenthusiastic "YAAARRR!" during a rally that sunk him? Seeing the anger in her eyes (scary) reminds me of the Dean incident, not in seeming like a nut, but in how it may be perceived.
The latest polls show Obama beating Clinton or in a statistical dead heat in Texas and Ohio after Clinton had 20 point leads in both states just two weeks ago. The Clinton campaign is not conceding and actually turning 180° in the attacks, looking for a fight to the bitter end.
One thing's for sure: it's going to be a very interesting debate on Tuesday in Cleveland.
Time is running out. It's now ten straight states for Barack Obama, as he easily beat Clinton in Hawaii by an amazing 52 points, 76-24! O-mentum is sweeping the nation. I don't know how the Clinton campaign can stand it.
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