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Good night Irene Hillary? (UPDATED)
In today’s last-big primaries left (187 pledged delegates up for grabs of the 404 remaining) day, Sen. Barack Obama scored a decisive victory (around 15 points or more) in North Carolina and Sen. Hillary Clinton holds around a 4 point lead in Indiana with around 85% of precincts in, as of 23:00 “fast time” (EDT). Insofar as North Carolina is significantly bigger than Indiana, and insofar as Sen. Obama’s margin of victory there will be greater than Sen. Clinton’s margin in Indiana, assuming she even wins it at all, Obama will improve on his around 150 pledged delegate (and 135 or so overall delegate) lead, with only 217 pledged delegates left for grabs, in contests in Kentucky, West Virginia and Puerto Rico (likely for Clinton), and in Montana, South Dakota and Oregon (likely for Obama)… i.e., they’ll all net out or come pretty close to doing so, and Obama’s lead will hold… and superdelegates will start breaking in droves… for Obama.
The game is called “delegates;” telling us that if you count Florida and Michigan, (and only count White people at that) that Hillary “actually won” the “real” popular vote… or that some poll tells us Clinton will do better against McCain in selected counties in Florida and Ohio… really tells us nothing. If Clinton supporters want to make the case that the Rev. Wright has rendered Sen. Obama unelectable, apparently, the voters in both North Carolina and Indiana don’t seem to be accepting that, given the respective margins tonight, which, as noted above, will give Obama a net delegate pick-up, despite “Hillary’s momentum” and wall to wall Rev. Wright coverage on broadcast media (and of course, the shameless pandering on the gasoline tax).
If we accept polls that show that raw racism is something that Democrats should respect (i.e., evidently, a significantly higher number of Clinton voters say they would not vote for Obama than vice versa, and, as their policies are pretty much indistinguishable, I think we know why they would say this), then the Democratic Party may as well start selling the furniture at DNC headquarters, because it will no longer have a reason to be, nor would it ever again be assured of its only reliable base (hint: it’s neither unions, nor working class White people).
So… while this election may be too important for Democrats to lose, if it involves “winning” by elevating the candidate in distant second place in delegates, “winning” may well be a Pyrrhic victory: the end of the Democratic Party in any meaningful sense. Not that Sen. Clinton (and certainly Pres. Clinton) seem to care a jot about this. If the argument that Obama– a man who was a state legislator just three and a half years ago, is unelectable, then the answer to that problem might well be “Al Gore” (Gore-Obama?), but it is surely not the candidate with every conceivable advantage of name recognition, organization and fund-raising prowess and a popular husband ex-President to boot who still couldn’t beat the man who was a state legislator three years ago (because she ran one of the stupidest campaigns in the history of the world).
Does Sen. Clinton have every right to soldier on? Yessirree, and frankly, if I were her, I might well myself, because this may well be her last opportunity to run, and certainly, she may never be this close again. Of course, it’s quite possible that her campaign is broke (again). And superdelegates are now going to start committing in droves, insofar as, while there are nominally 5 or 6 more contests, they are, combined, barely more than tonight’s total, which included an Indiana that had many demographic similarities to Clinton-strongholds Ohio and Pennsylvania, and yet, it might well only be Rush Limbaugh’s operation chaos that pushes her over the top there.
Is primary season and the race for the Democratically nomination technically or mathematically over? Not by a long-shot. Is it over? Yes, boys and girls, I’m afraid that it’s over.
Hey, who knows? If Sen. Obama can wrap this up in the next few days, he might even have time to come to our Columbia ’83 class reunion in three weeks time. No… crazy talk on my part. But unless Sen. Obama is videotaped on a boat called Monkey Business, or shows up on the client list of the Emperors Club, or some other outrageous scandal that involves sex, any doubt that he will be the Democratic nominee has by and large just been removed.
(Cross-posted at the talking dog blog)
UPDATE: Here is Obama’s North Carolina victory speech tonight. (We embed…you watch and decide!). If the video doesn’t show all of it, please go to THIS LINK to view it:
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2 Responses to “Good night Irene Hillary? (UPDATED)”
Hillary put together her campaign strategy the same way she put together her health insurance fiasco–too much hubris, too little common sense. (Glaring example- her faith in Mark Penn, who reportedly operated her campaign for months on the assumption that the Democratic primaries/caucuses were winner-take-all–and then there was Super Tuesday.) Bill set the conditions in South Carolina for a campaign underscored with racism just as he set the conditions with his many paramours for his impeachment–during attempts to satisfy his immediate personal goals.
Hillary's constituency right now consists primarily of undereducated whites of all ages and some redundant feminists trying to recapture their glory days. I don't see the point in separating white blue collar workers and their wives with a high school education from retired white blue collar workers and their wives with a high school education. I attribute a great deal of the political responses of this group to a lack of interest or skills to access the Internet–they believe what their drinking, hunting and church brethren are talking up, often based on the junk coming out of Fox News and its ilk. And to the fact that many of this cohort either lost jobs or failed to get them owing to competition from blacks and latinos as this country finally awakened. Someone needs to remind them that hundreds of young black, native american, and latino men and women have died in the service of this country, most recently in Vietnam and Iraq.
And that someone has come along to say to all of us: We cannot leave the working poor and the middle class of any race or religion fighting over the scraps of our economy left after the wealthy have feasted–it is already turning into a battle between working poor and lower middleclass blacks, whites and latino(a)s and none of them will emerge winners. This economy, with its appalling inequities, must be recast to embrace us all. Our poor, working poor, and lower middleclass citizens differ only by skin color–their hopes, wants and needs are the same. Who better to send this message than Obama, the long-time community organizer of the Chicago streets (who could with much less trouble be making a large fortune on Wall Street if he cared to)? And who worse than a candidate who is manipulating these blue collar whites to act on their basest impulses to secure her Presidency?
(Disclosure: I am an older well-educated financially comfortable professional white woman, granddaughter of immigrants, originally a supporter of John Edwards. I would very much like to have a woman president–just not this one. I am in total agreement with Obama's message: all of us (no exceptions) should have the opportunities that he and I and millions of others in this country have had that exist no longer, and this cannot be done without a sea change in our society as it is currently constituted.)
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