I haven’t posted anything of a political nature at all recently.   Mostly it’s a lack of time and a sense of ennui that prevented me from doing so.

But last night the nominating process for the Democrats finally wrapped up with Obama surpassing the (new) magic number of delegates needed. 

Of course, Hillary hasn’t actually conceded yet.   Or really suspended her campaign.  Granted, her powerful surrogates are making noise about VP slots on the ticket (bad idea) and talking reconciliation, but no final definitive word that she wouldn’t try something on the floor of the convention.

Hurrah. 

Sadly, I wouldn’t put it past her to come up with some sort of reason not to really officially say that the race is over up until the convention. 

Got to love it.

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Obviously yesterday did not go as planned.  The tear-filled political machine that is Hillary Clinton did not succumb to the wit and charm of Barack Obama.

Damn.

Did you know that AM & I almost moved to Pennsylvania?   Really.  Waaaaaaaay back when AM was doing her job search, she had a promising prospect out there in the Mid-Atlantic states.  It didn’t work out, and she got the offer from Wisconsin instead, and here we are.

Thank.  Goodness.

I’m sorry Mom.  I know Pennsylvania is the closer state, but they’re about to undergo seven weeks of BRUTAL political bombardment there.  I don’t have much hope that anyone will survive.

I hate to quote political hacks that are trying to be both funny and relevant, but…THERE WILL BE BLOOD.

Now, I’m not going to make any excuses.  I am certainly disappointed…on several levels.  I’m not looking forward to much more in the way of “I’m the Bestest Democrat in the Land!”  “No I am!”  “You’ve got no record!” “You’ve only got a nebulous history of ‘experience’ that anyone can point to!”  Actually, I’m not looking forward to the race after that either.  But what can you do?

Ah well.

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I’m a smidge behind on this one…

So I had heard that the Clinton Campaign was being rather….dismissive about any state that Obama had carried in recent caucuses and primaries, but I hadn’t read the actual quote.

Ready?

Here it is:

“Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn’t won any of the significant states outside of Illinois?”  –Mark Penn, Clinton Chief Strategist

So…is your strategy to be a big ol’ jerk?  I mean, I understand you have to spin.  Everyone has to.  Everyone does.  But when you’re presumably one of the people responsible for helping a candidate to win a nomination (much less an election), it’s probably not a good idea to belittle a huge swath of the country you’re trying to lead.

This is the nail in the coffin for me.  I will not vote for Hillary Clinton.  Ever.  We’ve lived eight years with a presidency that played up the “If you’re not with us, you’re against us, so get the hell out of our way” rhetoric.  And I’m not going to vote for eight more.  My daughter deserves better than that.

I’m not asking Hillary to capitulate.  Lord knows, it’s still close enough and intense enough that anything could happen, and hope survives.  But don’t dismiss half a nation ’cause they didn’t vote your way, especially when your own staff and supporters have pulled out all the stops to try and get you elected.

Win magnanimously.  Lose with grace.  Lead all the people.  Ignore none of them.

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Just in case you didn’t know, tomorrow is the primary in Wisconsin. If you’re not a resident of the state, you can tell by the increased use of the terms “Wisconsin”, “Obama”, and “Clinton” in news stories in your media of choice. If you happen to actually be a resident, you’ve no doubt noted the uptick in the number of political commercials on the air.

It’s actually kind of interesting in an annoying sort of way.

I kind of wish I had kept the link to the article, but there was a story or two detailing how Clinton is muting operations in Wisconsin in favor the big states on March 4th. I’m not sure if it was because I had those articles in mind while I was watching TV, but I thought it was pretty visible. We were watching Glory on one of the local channels last night and every single commercial break had an Obama commerical. On the other hand, we spent the last few hours of the evening watching the Food Network, and I think I saw maybe one Clinton commercial.  On the other other hand, I didn’t see any Obama commercials on the Food Network.

Of course, none of this really matters much to me.

No, it’s not because I had planned to vote for Obama during the primary.  Well, actually, that’s part of it, but not the whole reason.

I’ve actually already voted.

Yes.  That’s right.  Already voted.

AM & I decided/were told that we needed to register to vote so that we could participate in what will hopefully be another blowout victory for Obama (though the last set of polls that I saw on Real Clear Politics didn’t seem to indicate a blowout).   As we were out-of-staters, we actually had to go down to the City Clerk’s office to register.  When we got there, the lady at the desk asked us if we wanted to vote absentee, as the official list of voters had already been printed and voting at our polling station would involve an ordeal of paperwork and probably a “provisional” ballot.

So, AM & I voted.

There was only one other thing on the ballot besides the Democrat and Republican nominees, and that was local council elections.  In speaking to AM afterwards, she had declined to vote in the local elections as…well…we’d only been in state a few months and she really didn’t know any of the local candidates.

I, of course, pursued the time honor tradition that many Americans employ while voting for things they know nothing about:  pick randomly and pray for the best.

Unfortunately for me, I may have chosen poorly.  In our car ride home, AM was telling me about some of the discussions that the long-timers had been having about the local council elections.  Apparently there’s a lady who attends every council meeting faithfully and runs every time to try and get on the council.  She’s of the extreme left-leaning, hippie-tree-hugging persuasion who, when granted the floor in the council meetings, opens every speech with a tirade about how we’re harming Mother Earth and how we should all respect the blah blah blah.

I think I may have voted for her.

My only hope is that I somehow also voted for a balancing figure while randomly choosing names.  Of course, this means I would have had to pick a fascist industrialist with a long mustache and a white cat, but there it is.

In any case, I voted.  You can stop playing the commercials now.

Please?

Categories: Daily Life, Politics And Issues
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According to the City Of Janesville website, I can wait until the very very very last minute to register to vote in next week’s primary.

Which is a good thing, given our complicated schedule and the MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF SNOW we’ve been getting these past few weeks.

The latest polls, taken just before the primary,  put Obama ahead by four points, after he’d been trailing by double digits for weeks.  The gap is probably wider now that he’s been rolling around middle America gathering up victories.

I’m kind of curious to see what the overall popular vote is doing at this point.  I realize that it’s probably a lot harder to tell anything as even with record turn out for primaries we’re still well below general election standards.  But still…I’m curious.

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AM came into the den just as I was settling down to the beginning of Super Tuesday results.

“Can we watch American Idol?”

I love my wife. Really. And given the stress of her every day, she needs that mindless enjoyment that she gets from watching American Idol.

Still…I hesitated.

Super Tuesday.

Huda and I have been trying not to watch. We had long phone conversations worrying over the one percent or less of votes that had come in for each state, instantly flipping that state firmly into one candidate or another’s column. The past few hours have been hard. The phrase “If Hillary wins, I don’t know what I’m going to do” came up multiple times.

The picture isn’t exactly rosy right now, and the big boys haven’t weighed in yet, but still…Hope Survives.

“In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” - Barack Obama

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I’ve watched this video about 4 times in a row. And I’m still getting the chills running up and down my spine. The lyrical nature of the speech mixed with the singing of celebrities is just about the most powerful thing I think I’ve ever seen.So like anyone else out on the web who thinks they’ve discovered the next great thing and that they’re totally original, I’m posting this to my own website. Gotta propagate the hope.

Tomorrow is a big day out there, little Democrats and Republicans. Don’t let anything stop you from making your voice heard. This time around, more so than any other time in my memory, we can make a difference.

Yes. We. Can.

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For whatever reason I found myself not paying attention yesterday.  So I didn’t spend the evening refreshing screens on various political websites.  I wasn’t waiting for results to come in to tell me about what would eventually come to be known as the Spanking in South Carolina.  So the results kind of took me by surprise.

Or maybe I just didn’t want to be disappointed again.  After all, in the weeks prior to the primary, Obama was set for a big win in South Carolina just as he was set for a big win in New Hampshire.  And just like that primary, the picture coming to us from the media started changing.  Bill was attacking.  Hillary was gaining.  The politically potent duo could have once again flipped the expectations of the viewing public on its ears and drive fairly substantial nail in the coffin of the Obama campaign and the public’s reliance on polling data.

And then everything turned up roses.  The media declared the state for Obama practically the moment the polls closed and the final results were spectacualar.

55% of the primary voters.

Wow.

Of course, I have to wonder if it’ll mean anything in the end.   Both lead candidates have “momentum” that cancels out the other person’s momentum.  Hillary has a head start in the Super Tuesday states as Big Bill was out there being nasty for her in South Carolina.  Edwards is still…Edwards.

So now we approach Super Tuesday with six candidates on either side loaded for bear.  In the end, probably nothing will be decided on that day either.  Twenty-odd states gives each candidate plenty of room to claim some sort of mandate to keep going.

As so many people I’ve talked to have said:  we haven’t had a race like this in a long long time.

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We’re one day away from yet another step in the oh-so confusing exciting race for the 2008 nomination.  Can you feel the tension in the air?

I was all set to get kind of excited and interested this morning until I noticed that winning Michigan brings exactly 0 delegates to the Democrats and 30 for the Republicans.  (You might recall the DNC and RNC actually punished a few states for trying to essentially push the nominating process into 2007 in an effort to garner more media/political attention).

It’s kind of hard to get excited about political battles that don’t really matter.  It’s not unlike being a Democrat in Georgia on Election Day.

Still, there are Republican delegates up for grabs, even if it is a reduced number.  I may not run to my computer every 5 minutes to update the results, but I’m certainly hoping for the best (Namely that Mitt “I’m the Evil Bill Clinton” Romney gets knocked out in his ancestral state).

Ah well…back to work.

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“Dan, I think I jinxed it.”

Those were the opening words from Huda after I answered the phone last night.  Earlier that day we had been discussing politics and primaries, and now she was watching CNN as the results started to come in.

Now, I don’t often espouse my political views.  It seems to cause more trouble than its worth, but basically you could sum up my particular viewpoint on life as: You’re Wrong.  My friends who lean in the liberal direction consider me to be a conservative.  My conservative friends assign me to the loony left.  I don’t seem to have any moderate friends.  Lucky me.  I think that I just like to argue and thus take the opposite opinion of whomever I’m talking to.

In my heart, though, I’m an idealist.  I never could shake the idea that the leaders of our nation should be just that:  leaders.  Great Leaders.  Powerful, charismatic men and women who could reach past the pettiness of every day people and tell us that This Is How It Is.

Of all the candidates that I’ve seen on both sides, the person who has fit that particular description best for me has been Barack Obama.  I can’t get hugely excited about anyone in the Republican field.  Ditto for most of the Democrats.  There are people on both side that could be (or could have been (as some have dropped out)) good Presidents.  But no one inspires me.  Except for Obama.

Huda is also an Obama supporter.  She had delighted herself with the results of Iowa, and conversations had grown giddy in the run up to New Hampshire.   Obama had a mortal lock on the state, it seemed.

I’ll give Hillary this much: she can definitely turn out her supporters.  It’s petty and snide of me, I know, but when I read that one of the keys to her resurgence in the voting was recapturing the woman vote, I have to think to myself:  it’s because she cried.

In any case, Huda called us as the results were coming in.  She felt sure that her last post had jinxed the whole thing for Obama. She couldn’t tear herself away from watching the nearly constant margin of votes between Hillary and Obama.   (Neither could I, but I wasn’t going to tell her that while AM tried to coax Huda away from the computer.)

And now everything’s tallied up and Clinton has the win for NH.  The best I can say is that she barely pulled it off.  Personally I don’t see this as a momentum changer, only a roadblock.  But I’m not the one with deep pockets funding political campaigns, so what do I know?

Anyways, time for work.

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