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.