Quite a day...

The DNC's Rules and Bylaws committee has issued it's decision.
1) Florida will have half it's delegates restored.
2) So will Michigan.

Hillary's people have accepted #1 and strongly opposed #2. Why? Because OBAMA WAS NOT ON THE BALLOT IN MICHIGAN. Also, they have taken 4 of the delegates she would have won in Michigan and given them to Obama. This is a HUGE mistake. This was a state Obama must have in November. It will only hurt them more with those blue-collar voters. Add on top of that the announcement that Ford is building a giant new $3 billion dollar "global car" plant in Mexico (read NON-UAW workers) and the Obama campaign is really behind the 8-ball in the automobile manufacturing state and it's 17 electoral votes. Why attach that to the Obama campaign? Because Michiganers will remember the story about the Obama people secretly telling the Canadians that they weren't serious about renegotiating NAFTA. Another trust issue for him and white blue-collar voters.

Hillary's spokesman, Harold Ickes, said she reserves the right to challenge this at the credentials committee...which doesn't meet until the Denver convention. While rumors swirl that she is ready to exit gracefully after next week's final primaries, this bone-headed slap at the Clinton candidacy was a bad move. She could have stepped down gracefully...will she now?

Finally, the Obamas chose today to announce their resignation from membership at Trinity United Church. They blamed some of this on press hounding of shut-in members of the church. He's been getting such good press up to now, why bite the hand that fed him? Not smart. This invalidates much of his defense of them in his race speech last March in Philadelphia. Frankly, this is what most political wags would have recommended to him...months ago.

When you consider that he has been selling himself as "change", and he acts like a typical politician, it raises questions in the undecided voter's mind. Obama's people have often characterized the Clintons as people who would do whatever it takes to get elected. So far, those thrown under the Obama bus, have been Rev. Wright, his grandmother, and now the church itself. He's now saying that "I’m confident we’ll be able to find a church that we’re comfortable with,” he said. “We probably won’t make any firm decision on this until January, when we know what our lives are going to be like." So he will now decide on his faith like he's looking for a new place to live closer to work? I don't even know where to go with this.

How are the Obamas any different from the Clintons now?

Coach

Iceberg, dead ahead!

What a dangerous weekend ahead for the Democratic National Committee.

The Rules Committee meets on Saturday to go over proposed solutions to the denial of seating delegations for Florida and Michigan. Boy, two states the party needs to take in order for it's nominee, whoever it might be, to have a chance to win the White House.

The committee will be made up of 40% of it's members chosen by Obama's people, 40% by Hillary's folks, and 20% from the DNC itself. If 20% of the members don't like whatever is decided, then they have the right to issue a minority report. The minority report would then have to be considered by the convention committee right as the convention is starting. What does this all mean?

It means that the convention could begin with either some, or none, of the state delegations from those two important states still not seated and ready to vote.

Meanwhile, a poll by the highly respected Pew Center shows Obama's approval rating with white women taking a nose-dive since February. At that time, his approval rating was 56 positive, 36 negative. Today, it's 43 positive, 49 negative. That's not good...especially in places like...well...Florida and Michigan!

What should the Obama people do? They should agree to seat both delegations and expect that the superdelegates will continue to come Obama's way. That way the two states will feel they got a fair deal and can fully support Obama this November.

If the Democrats don't do this, it will play to all the "what happened to 'every vote should count" calls from the Clinton supporters. Obama can't afford to give away so many Clinton supporters this fall. Polls already show McCain ahead in Michigan right now.

We will see what kind of confidence Obama and his people have in the superdelegates by how they play things this weekend.

Know this...even if the committee ends up recommending only a partial seating of delegates, this would almost guarantee that the Michigan and Florida delegation issues would be quite alive when the delegates show up in Denver this August.

Bad idea.

Coach

A historian looks at the Iraq war

I admit it...I have a soft spot for historians. Especially those who use the classical historians as their model.

Victor Davis Hanson's most recent book was on the Peloponnesian War. Those who liked talking about "Sparta" can find out the real thing, not the Hollywood nonsense, by reading his book.

Recently, he sat down with Bill Steigerwald of Townhall.com. I can't recommend this short interview enough for those who want to put the Iraq conflict in context. He refers to the past several wars we are familiar with (WW I & II) and looks at how our handling of the war went...and how things will perhaps be seen 50 years hence.

Please click here.

Coach

An outstanding example of American exceptionalism

I have just finished my yearly history course with my high school students. We never get any farther than Watergate and the Nixon resignation, but something interesting happened this year.

As we begin the Nixon Adminstration, I have a picture of Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon with with the American flag. The kids yawn, and I move on. I tell them that we haven't been there since 1972 and we will be going back in the next several years.

This year, one of the kids said "Why". It reminded me of what a jaded generation this is. I always considered the exciting people in history to be the ones who took chances, who had dreams, and who lived with a passion and ambition for enlarging our knowledge of the world...not just providing gov't checks or expounding on diversity and tolerance...someone has to push the edge of the envelope.

Tonight, we were reminded that one reason the American soul is so attractive to other peoples of other nations is exemplified by what NASA and JPL achieved tonight with the successful landing of the Phoenix Mars Polar lander. I am listening to Mike Griffin, NASA Administrator telling us regular humans what was achieved with this difficult mission. In order to successfully land at such an extreme angle onto the Martian North Pole, they had to send a vehicle 650 million kilometers over 10 months and have it enter the Martian atmosphere at an exactness of within a 20 meter window in order to not skip off the surface or crash land on the surface. Amazing.

Also, we are seeing initial pictures just to let us see that the craft is ok and operating. This from an agency that landed two roving craft on the surface in 2004. Those two craft, Spirit and Opportunity, had a design lifespan of 6 mos. They are both still operating some 4 years later, the only serious threat to their existence being a cutoff of their funding from Congress so that we can keep farm subsidies or study the sex of the fruit fly or some other stupid congressional earmark.

It reminds you of the dynamism of this country. It's people continually pushes forward, stays on the cutting edge, and welcomes the contributions of it's friends. Canada has designed a $37 million weather station that should give us great forecasting information. Hopefully, it will still be operating for that day when man finally sets foot there...if the nation keeps it's focus on the road ahead, not just the white stripes next to the wheels.

It's a good day to be a proud American. Let's all contemplate and thank those who made the supreme sacrifice this Memorial Day. I am of course referring to those men and women who served so that our brilliant scientists and workers can have the vision and freedom to conceive of and execute such an exciting mission. Phoenix is going to examine the frosted environment on Mars' North Pole...looking for past evidence of the building blocks of life on the Red Planet.

As Yakov Smirnov used to say, "What a country!"

Coach

What was she thinking?

I am in the midst of finals, so this will have to be a short one. But one has to ask...

WHAT WAS HILLARY THINKING?

I find it hard to believe that a woman who has been around politics as long as she has couldn't possibly been thinking that "if he gets shot, I get the nomination." Ok, ok...it's the Clintons, so maybe she was. But why would she SAY IT OUT LOUD?????

One of the things that happens in a long campaign, is that people who are inexperienced say so many things, under such pressure, with so little sleep, that dumb things come out. Perhaps this is what happened to Hillary. Lord knows, Obama has committed his share of gaffes lately, but the press will always give him a pass because they want the Democrats to win. But Hillary is keeping that from happening and every little cough and belch right now is under scrutiny.

She likely won't get a single superdelegate now, but I still look for her to win the Puerto Rico primary.

Meanwhile, John McCain addressed two areas that the press was hammering him on: his wife's tax returns and his health. In the words of one press wag, "It looks like McCain has been swimming with cocoons", a reference to this wonderful film from the 80s. The former Navy pilot has obviously been keeping up the PT and runs a schedule that keeps those junk-food eating press weenies tired. He also has a few buddies at his place this weekend, eating brats, downing some of his wife's source of income, and having his ring kissed as they seek the Veep nod. Must be fun.

More later, after finals next week.

Coach

Laying the groundwork for 2012?

Just about everyone recognizes that Hillary Clinton is probably a dead candidate walking...except the Clintons. Tuesday promises to be another split day. She should win big in Kentucky. She will once again get tons of white working class Democrats who fear what Obama represents to them...and I am not even going to try to interpret that. I lived in Kentucky for a while and married into a Kentucky family. There are all types there, and the media portrayal of whites who DON'T vote for Obama as racist is as untrue as it is, in it's own way, racist. But that is the culture we live in right now.

In Portland Oregon, where the other primary will take place on Tuesday, an estimated 75,000 came out to hear Obama speak. It certainly is a phenomenon. If you want to know what I think, you can go check out my first opinion piece at my new companion blog, Lincoln's Ghost. That blog will have the opinion that I strive to keep out of this one!

Where do we stand? Nothing has changed except we are another week closer to the reality of this campaign: Obama will be the Democrat Party nominee. What are his chances? Try as they might to downplay it, the problem he has with blue-collar Democrats is serious...and I'm not sure how he can fix it. His latest screed against some of their sacred cow lifestyle choices(SUVs, food, energy usage) will not help. I wonder if he hasn't decided to ignore that part of his base the same way McCain is ignoring part of his. It will be interesting to see if two candidates can realistically realign their parties by themselves. I doubt it.

In other news, Obama reacted to a Bush speech in the Israeli Knesset the other day. Bush was criticizing those who appease dictators and made the comparison to the appeasement of Hitler in 1939. Bush quoted the misguided statement of Republican Senator Borah who, in 1939, said, in response to Hitler's invasion of Poland: "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided."

Obama instantly criticized Bush for inserting domestic politics into a speech in a foreign country. This has traditionally been a no-no in American politics. The Bush peoples response was "I understand when you’re running for office you sometimes think the world revolves around you — that is not always true and it is not true in this case," said Bush press secretary Dana Perino. Ouch. Methinks Senator Obama doth protest too much. Why did he think that comment was aimed at him? Further background from the Bush White House pointed out that the comments were actually aimed at former President Carter who was recently on his tour of Israel-hating representatives and a comment on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visits to Syria and comments on "dialoguing" with Iran's Achmadinejad. Obama was criticized for being thin-skinned by many of his supporters in the media and seems to often have a hard time letting critical comments go, revisiting the offenses over and over. Over the next 5 months, that might not be the best strategy.

McCain jumped on the comment as well, trying to also remind their his base that he contends that he is a conservative. More grist for the mill, as he also took time Saturday to appear on Saturday Night Live in a week that included another guest appearance on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. It seems that he may have a career in television if the Oval Office thing doesn't work out. His two skits included the obligatory jokes about his age and an encouraging word to Clinton and Obama to keep the fight going for a while longer.

Will Tuesday make any difference? No. There are already rumors that the Clintons have some tape of a talk given by Michelle Obama that will "change the race for the nomination" but that sounds more like fantasy than anything else.

Look for each to have huge victories, and corresponding parties, in their victories state, and look for Obama to officially announce the race over. The intent is to justify his ignoring of Clinton from Tuesday on and into full-attack mode on Senator McCain.

Should be fun.

Coach

What does a girl have to do to get noticed?

Poor Hillary. All you have to do is read this article from the Politico to see her problem. She wins West Virginia by 41% and the media yawns.

Ok, so it's only a few delegates.

And it's heavy in that demographic group that I have been talking about for weeks that Obama has a real problem with.

But seriously folks...Obama only beat John Edwards by 20% and Edwards quit in February.

I still expect superdelegates to choose Obama, and I still expect him to be the nominee in spite of this ominous warning from an important Democratic group.

There is no joy in Elephantland either. They got whacked again in a special election in a conservative southern congressional district, this one in Mississippi. While it was close, the fact is that the Republican base is mad as he** and is taking their ball (and their significant $$ donations) and are staying home.

This could be a real wild one this November.

More later,

Coach

Country roads, take me home

Is this the last trail for the Hillary White House express?

West Virginia casts its votes in the Democratic Presidential Primary marathon today. Of course, it may be easier to find an African-American in Iceland than in the Mountaineer state (only 3.3% of the population) so Hillary should have one last big night as this thing winds down towards it's inevitable conclusion. It's sad that race keeps coming up as a deciding factor in this contest. I suppose this years election will be dissected for years on that subject alone. I would expect that Obama has some big time superdelegates set to announce in the wake of this big victory in order to give the mainstream media a chance to stay focused on his inevitability as the Democrat Party nominee.

This is coming at a time when we once again see that the electorate is disgruntled with the current administration and there is little doubt that the war in Iraq and the price at the pump has a lot to do with that.

Once you factor all that in, it is not only amazing but instructive that most polling data still shows John McCain either competitive or the front-runner for the fall election. How can this be?

Perhaps it is because of the actual choices: a generic Democrat would win heavily, but given the two alternatives to McCain, he remains preferable to many who would otherwise pull the lever for a Democrat.

What happens next? It's likely that next Tuesday's contests in Kentucky and Oregon are a split decision like last weeks contests in Indiana and North Carolina. At this point, Hillary may be doing little more than negotiating for the DNC or the Obama donors to pay off her sizable campaign debt.

Otherwise, she may be simply waiting and hoping for some fortuitous Reverend Wright-type of revelation or an Obama campaign fluff to cast further doubt on his viability in the minds of superdelegates.

But all you have to do is quietly talk to Democrat party operatives in places like Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to know that Obama has a formidable challenge ahead of him to win that oft-cited white working class vote. And he won't be able to win them by whining about Republicans "trying to use the same distractions" as in the past. That may play well with his current voters; not with the ones he needs to win over for November.

In that vein, consider this: No Democrat has won the general election without also winning the West Virginia primary since Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Can Obama break that streak?

Coach

More on Lake County

A follow up article on the problems in Lake County.

Hillary's people suspect the same thing that many were implying...that vote manufacturing was the reason for the delay.

Coach

Force Quit

Every once in a while, my computer freezes up. My techie son long ago showed me how to go into Windows task manager to try to shut down the offending program. When that little piece of strong persuasion doesn't work, then I do a force quit: I turn off the power. I know I shouldn't...that kind of "termination with extreme prejudice" can have dire consequences down the road, but I get impatient for the program to shut down and kind of take a "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" attitude and pray it doesn't give me the "blue screen of death" someday when I try to reboot my computer.

That's what happened to Hillary Clinton last night.

It was clear for sometime that Obama would win North Carolina big. Over 33% of the Democrat party vote in the state was African-American and it is becoming a crusade for that powerful demographic group to both vote for Obama and put the Clintons in their place. Barack got almost 94% of the black vote in the Tarheel state. He also did almost 2-1 over Hillary in the Research Triangle amongst white educated voters and the college group put their studying for finals on hold to go cast their votes for Obama.

What happened in Indiana was different, though. The Clintons have risen to the heights of American politics using old-style smash mouth Democratic party tactics. Last night, the party put a force quit on them. I suppose I began to suspect something when certain counties were slow coming in, particularly Lake County, which holds Gary. Gary is a de facto suburb of Chicago, and Chicago..well, Chicago is Obama country. The mayor of Gary promised a surprise, and since he is also the county Democratic Party chairman, he was able to "deliver". There is no surprise that you would see that area go heavily for Obama, but it's the way it happened that raised many eyebrows last night, and the silence from the DNC on last night's events is deafening.

Here's the way it works:

The precinct captain knows how many people have voted and how many have not. His precinct is almost all Democrat, you can't even find a Republican who would be willing to serve as a poll-watcher in many of those inner city polling stations. When the Democratic state officials calls in to the precinct to find out how the voting is going, the precinct captain asks "how many do you need?" With the new "early voting" that goes on in most states these days, it's no problem, and not unusual, when suddenly a new batch of "absentee ballots" is dumped on the table to be tabulated. Of course, they are almost all for the Democratic candidate, (in this case, the RIGHT Democratic candidate) and they must be carefully counted...and this takes time.

All last night, the results from Lake County dribble in...and were overwhelmingly for Obama, gradually drawing down Hillary's margin of victory so that it became so small that Obama will probably end up with as many delegates from Indiana as she will. This could not have happened without the acquiescence of DNC higher-ups. This is how Richard Daley secured Illinois for JFK. It's one of those dirty little secrets in Midwestern politics. Someone with longtime experience in these matters in this area writes on it here. If you are dubious about my conjecture here, I encourage you to click on some of the links I have put in this text. There is little fear that this will be exposed because it is a primary, and most people in the political chattering class will consider it an "internal matter" relating to Democrat party machinations. It's actually kind of alarming to see this so clearly exposed in this matter because it's the kind of tactic you hold back for something important...like the general election.

Many speculate that this was a tactic that the Democrat party was going to unleash on George W. Bush in Ohio in 2004. The Bush people (read Karl Rove) were aware of this little midwestern tradition and had dispatched dozens of RNC paid lawyers, particularly to Cuyahoga County. This inner city section of Cleveland was where Democrats had always looked for big margins to offset Republican strength in the outlying areas of Ohio. No one went to bed before Cuyahoga was counted. But in 2004 those RNC lawyers were ready to challenge any curiously discovered ballots. The Bush people had seen this tactic in Dade and Broward County in 2000. Without some "late" found ballots there, the Florida recount would not have been necessary: Bush was ready to declare victory and Gore was ready to concede. Until Gore was advised to seek a recount...by his Mayor Daley's son, Richie Daley. Nobody on the Republican side missed the irony of Daley's statement, made that night, that "every Florida vote should be counted." A former GOP Ohio official I have gotten to know posts more about this tactic here.

Bush fought back at what he saw as a naked attempt to steal Florida by the old "sudden" batch method of voter fraud. Most books recounting that election accuse the Bush people of stealing 2000 through the court system, or that the Electoral College is unfair because it gave the victory to a man who lost the popular vote. Little has been said about the "irregularities" in the votes leading up to the great Recount Drama. When investigations of the areas with questionable matching up of votes with voter records over and over showed that the suspect areas were in the inner cities, the civil rights leadership yelled about prejudice and disenfranchisement of black voters. Bush has paid the price with Democrat voters to this very day: it was a costly victory in terms of his perception by the voting public, that he was somehow an illegitimate victor when the truth was that he believed he was trying to keep the other side from stealing it away. How ironic.

More ironic is that the tactic was now used on the Democrat president who he succeeded. The DNC decided weeks ago that the ongoing Democrat civil war was caustic to it's chances in the fall general election. The Clintons refused to go quietly so a "force quit" was the only choice left. Now, the party will be brutal to it's former fair-haired boy and his wife. Superdelegates will declared for Obama every day for the next several weeks. It will be choreographed like a funeral dirge for the Clintons. Her money will dry up (she is already loaning herself more). Even those she should win the next few primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky by large margins, she is a dead candidate walking. She will be told by the DNC Borg that "resistance is futile", and that if there is a McCain victory, she will get NO help from the DNC or it's money machine in 2012.

You will now see a ton of media death pronouncements of the Hillary campaign like here, here, and here.

What this does NOT fix is the racial makeup of the Obama support in the Democrat party and the number of white voters who vow that they will either vote McCain in the fall or sit this one out. In the past, the party has unified to support the candidate in spite of the bitterness of the primary contests. Will this happen this year? The DNC is nervous about this one and you can bet that there will be HEAVY pressure on union leaders to bring their rank and file around by November. Time will tell, but there are media concerns about what the numbers show about this problem here, here, here, here, and here.

What's also amazing, is the number of media outlets who have suddenly discovered Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" attempt to keep her in the race to beat up on Obama now that the Obama campaign has raised it as the only reason Barack did not win Indiana as well. Even Germany picked up on this story. You can read those here, here, here, and here.

The DNC got what it wanted, and now can go back to it's full time occupation, along with an Obama-adoring media: beating up on the Republicans. The Republicans are finally waking up to what kind of a dire future they face in November. The sacrifice of the former Democrat standard bearer was worth what the Democrats could reap in the fall election.

In a way, it's kind of sad to see the Clintons go out this way. But as the old saying goes, "live by the sword, die by the sword." Right now, the Clintons are looking at so many of their former administration and DNC friends, saying "Et tu, Brute?"

Coach

PS...The Clinton campaign is claiming it will fight on, and Hillary is loaning herself more money...Good thing she can, I think her outside funding is about to dry up.

Midday report

While we are waiting for the first exit polls (BTW, with few exceptions, they have ended up exaggerating Obama's strength by 6-10%; they had Obama up in PA by 2%--he lost by 10)

I think this analysis by Jim Geraghty happens to reflect my views...with a lot more experience that he brings with it...

Schizophrenic Tuesday

Another Tuesday, another big primary for the Democrats. Indiana and North Carolina hold their time in the spotlight tomorrow in two very different demographic groups for the two candidates.

North Carolina would normally have promised to be another repeat of past southern stompings administered to Hillary by Obama. Mostly because of the heavy African-American makeup of the Democratic party primary voters in the south, Obama has swept to big double-digit victories in Dixie. Will that repeat itself tomorrow?

Since the last victory, Mississippi, we have had the Reverend Wright connection addressed in two major Obama speeches, the "bitter and gun-clinging" episode in San Francisco, and Obama's off-hand remark about "typical white person" referring to his grandmother. Will this motivate southern whites to back Hillary by bigger numbers and offset some of Obama's votes in the black community? Will it encourage Republicans to take this chance to affect the Democratic nominating process as they seem to have done in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania?

In the Hoosier state, it should have been a solid win for the Clintons. Home state senator Evan Bayh, a member of one of Indiana's most storied political families, is working hard for Mrs. Clinton. Whispers continue that, if she is successful in the winning the nomination, he is on her short list to be her veep nominee. Obama has made Indiana's outcome uncertain because of the strength of the black vote in Indianapolis and the northwestern corner of the state; a de facto suburb of Chicago and Obama's home state of Illinois.

The most likely scenario is that tomorrow's contests will be a split decision. And if so, not much would change. But what path is it that would "remain unchanged?" A brokered convention? Howard Dean forcing a June ending to the blood-letting? Clinton Inc.'s scorched earth pursuit of the nomination?

Most experts seem agreed that if Obama were to win both primaries, the pressure on Hillary to withdraw could be unbearable. But what if she were to win both, or, more likely, win Indiana and come very close in North Carolina?

John McCain campaigned in New Orleans last week, continuing his "I'm not George Bush" tour of places where Bush dare not go. While there, he met with one of the few bright future stars of the Republican party. And, perhaps, his vice-presidential nominee?

I still believe that the Democrat party hierarchy have decided that Obama must be chosen in order to preserve the New Deal coalition that has kept the Democrats in control of Congress for most years since the Great Depression. They know that only the near unanimous support for the party's candidates over the last 40 years by African-American voters has kept them from being in the wilderness during the Nixon-Reagan presidencies. Without their support, they could never have regained control of Congress in 2006...and seem destined to enlarge those majorities this year...

...unless black voters were to stay home because Obama had been "cheated" out of the nomination by Clinton machinations. And the Clintons could only pull this fat out of the fire if the party higher-ups acquiesced.

But what do the voters think?

We are about to find out...

Coach