Corleone Family Tactics... Or Montana?

The question is, after she's done wiping out the disloyal, freezing out the interest groups who betrayed her, who's left to elect her in November? This is less like The Godfather, and more like Scarface, even if it works out for her. Unfortunately for her, just about everybody recognizes that whatever she says about Barack Obama's electability, she's kneecapped herself with major constituencies of the party, and many find her politics against her own party distasteful.

And that really is the heart of it: It isn't just that she attacked Obama. That's to be expected; politics ain't beanbag. It's that she's attacking her own party in a certan fashion. She's cooperated with folks on the right to do this(even folks that hounded her in the past), folks looking for strategic advantage on their own side who won't vote for her. She's taken up many of the Republican standards against her own party, with a party that no longer has any patience for the demonization of the left, and which can get independents and disaffected Republicans without having to sell themselves out.

So, in the end, she's dug her own electoral grave, and pretty soon the party's going to start burying her candidacy with no small sense of relief.

Loyalty Defined Down

I will have serious reservations about backing the Clintons in future contests because of this one. This article in the New York Times isn't what pushed me over the edge, I think their behavior over the past few weeks has been more the cause of that.

I'm really sick of politicians who define loyalty one way, towards themselves, but don't give back. It would be easier for the Clintons to keep friends if they acted like friends; friends of the party, friends of the middle class, friends to those who helped them, supported them, but have had differences of opinion.

If they took these things more maturely, if they accepted that they weren't entitled to win every contest, and that letting a few fights go might help keep them in the running for future candidacy, they might not have screwed themselves so royally. As it is, now, they've turned a huge portion of their party against them. What the hell now makes them the better candidates? Obama's not going to punish people for supporting Clinton. They won't be so forgiving, but as they decline, Obama's open arms are going to look a lot more welcoming than their turned backs.

Gibson and Stephanopoulous Are angling for his Job...

The Brush-Off

Yes sir, brush that dirt off.

Barack Obama's Speech in Steelton

Further asskicking commences!

Bad Idea. Terrrrrrrible Idea.

I'll tell you what the problems with holding a Superdelegate convention before the real one to decide who gets them are:

1) It won't prevent a nasty public fight, it will likely just relocate it.

2) It would have all the elitist charm, if it's results went a certain way of somebody trying to appeal to the superdelegates at the convention.

3) Mathematically, we already have a decent standard on hand: pledged delegates. And that has the bonus of having a winner ready made, even if some in the party don't like it.

4) There's already a way for the superdelegates to decide what to do on their own. Follow the general state of the primary. If some catastrophe happens, you can always turn around and goe the other way.

At the end of the day, if the Superdelegates weren't so craven, we'd have a candidate already. And if we didn't have them at all, we'd hardly be having this conversation. We'd have a candidate. But that would be doing things the easy way, and the Democratic Party's hardly been interested in that for the generation or two before this one. Oh well, said the hydrologist.

The Long and Short of this...

Is that if they're being this reckless with letting Bill out to do damage, they are really desperate.

Bill's problem is that he's not merely a loose cannon on deck, but essentially a second captain on a ship that should only have one. Ideally, he should have have remained in the background, because he's hardly the kind to stay on the bench and let Hillary shine for herself.

Reality Call for Evan Bayh, Steve Daugherty on the Line...

I know the Indiana senator's just trying to back his candidate, but it's a little too early to start calling these states for Hillary in the General Election.

Here's how it breaks down: she's a long shot in the general election if she can't unite her party behind her. No matter what the poll results say now, they will say something else entirely eight months from now.

Senator Clinton has a chance to beat McCain that's better than even odds, but she will depend upon and campaign mainly in the swing states, and in the safe states that form our core constituency. This will make for a fragile set up, where local victories by McCain will make more of a difference.

Obama has the skills and organization to move past this, to make our victory more robust. Every time we've depended on swing states to win, we've lost. We need to move into new territory to win. Obama can take on challenges in both the Swing States and the Red States, and by doing that lead us to a comfortable win and mandate, as opposed to a weak 50+1 victory that only benefits Clinton politically, and that, by getting her into office.

Clinton's Experience?

She goes around, talks with people, gets people organized, makes strong statements on moral matters.

So says the Chicago Tribune.

Which means the only real thing she has on Obama is a couple of years in the Senate. And he has six years on her in elected office.

Experience might count, if you have it, and have learned properly from it. Otherwise, all experience is a collection of bad habits made more confidently.

Well, the least you can say is that she's got guts...

...because otherwise, I don't know how you can say this after your campaign has done this, otherwise.

More to the point, what Powers said actually makes some kind of sense. You want somebody in the loop when they're hashing out the details of the plan. You could make claims taking certain words out of context, of course, if you were inclined to do that, but as a whole she's saying that the Obama campaigns committed to getting us out, just not doing it in some ideologically imposed way. An ideologically imposed entrance into the war is what got us into trouble in the first place. Why should we allow ourselves to make the same mistake going out?