- every single erg that Hillary and her campaign spend will only hurt the Democrats
While the likes of Limbaugh and Ingraham are showing they control their audiences in much the same way as the Chinese do theirs, it's time for the rest of us to get our act together. So I'll say it:
There is no further upside to the Hillary campaign, unless you're a Republican.
She has become the proxy of the McCain campaign, whether senator Clinton knows that or not. This is not merely true in some strategic sense, drawing out the primaries and spending money. It's also true in the tactical sense: the Clinton and McCain campaigns have effectively joined forces against a Democratic frontrunner who is also the leader in national polls. There is no longer any doubt which candidate Democrats prefer. There is no longer any doubt which candidate can win it for the Democrats.
Texas and Ohio aren't going to be Hillary's fire-wall, they're more likely to be a firing-squad's wall. The ineptness with which her campaign has approached Texas and Pennsylvania lead me to wonder if her staff hasn't already given up, or if all the smart people have gone.
I say this knowing that I'm essentially discounting my own vote here in Texas.
I guess I'm supposed to be happy that Texas is back at the center of the political universe for the next two weeks, or that Texas are supposed to be excited that The Story will eventually go something like this:
"After a string of ten eleven victories, Obama faced Hillary Clinton's self-described 'fire-wall' in Texas. After an epic debate, which gave us the now-famous phrase '_____," (not to mention the notorious _____ gaffe), the senator from New York simply could not pull off the blow-out wins she needed in Texas and Ohio. It ended here, in the streets of Austin and amid the flaming couches of Columbus."
Or something.
(Wow, I never realized how easy it is to just write stories ahead of time. If I were a "journalist" I guess I'd already be headed to the hotel bar.)
I hope that Democrats in Ohio and Rhode Island and Vermont and Wyoming and Mississippi and Pennsylvania and Guam and Indiana and North Carolina and West Virginia and Kentucky and Oregon and Montana and South Dakota and Puerto Rico will understand. The primary hasn't gone this deep into an election year in a very long time. Certainly, those of us in Texas didn't think we'd ever have a chance to decide this thing, and people scheduled to vote later didn't either.
Desperate times, desperate measures. It's becoming increasingly difficult to tell the Clinton and McCain campaigns apart. Both are hoping that voters are too stupid, for instance, to read the black and white of Obama's pledge on campaign finance, and that they'll ignorantly believe the candidate offered to unilaterally accept public financing, but is now waffling.
"If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election."
I mean, how hard is that to understand? C'mon, it's about as hard as getting laid in Ireland. There's no offer of unilateral anything from Obama, no matter how the wingnuts and Hillary Clinton may be playing dumb together. Let them collapse in a pool of comingling drool, it doesn't change the black-and-white of what Obama said.
If Barack himself is having difficulty telling the difference between McCain's attacks and Hillary's, I offer this simple cheat sheet: one of the elitists who preys on low-information voters is wearing a bra, the other elitist who preys on low-information voters is wearing a diaper.
That's the only functional difference anymore.
The funny thing is, the McCain and Clinton supporters claim that we are the ones who don't know anything about our candidate, and yet they're the ones who are betting the farm on the voters being stupid. They prove it with every press release.
Just as the Republicans can only win through voter suppression, intimidation, and fraud, Hillary can only win the nomination by subverting the process of nomination itself. Even if the stories are true, even if Hillary does manage to get pledged delegates to ignore the voters, never mind what happens with the superdelegates, the best she can hope for is to "win" a "nomination" that has no constituency, only to run a campaign that will unite a fractured Republican party.
She can't win, she can only shit the bed for the rest of us. In her defense, I honestly think she does not know this.
Look, we wanted a contested primary, and we got one. Now we know why the party establishment thought we were crazy. We are crazy, but we also happen to be right. The primary fight has kept the meaning of the nomination closer to the concerns of the party voters. It has dragged Barack and Hillary, not to the left, but down closer to our populist base.
Yes, I know: it remains to be seen how long that will last. But I think the deciding factor will be the change in the composition of the Congress.
That's where Obama comes in. As I've said before, I decided to support Obama even though I preferred Edwards' positions. Why? Because no candidate's campaign promises survive first contact with a legislature, even a friendly one. Policy positions offer only a rough outline of principles, so the difference between the two leading candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was a wash.
The difference is process, not position. Obama's campaign is compatible with Howard Dean's Fifty-State Strategy that made the victories of 2006 possible. Clinton's campaign has been openly hostile to the people and the principles underpinning Democratic success. That was enough for me.
Contesting each state, even the ones that "don't matter" to the Clinton people, doesn't just put more pressure on the Republican's campaign finances. It ties the party closer to the interests of people in those regions, places that a Terry McCauliffe or a Mark Penn would ignore, depriving the party of the support of the people in those regions. I'm making this complicated. It's simple, really. It's called 'democracy.' This is what it looks like with the Democratic party gets more ... democratic. Representatives ... representing. Brilliant! If you offer that, you can win, because it's only then that people understand why they're paying their taxes and obey the laws: because they get something out of it.
We win when we stick to our principles. Principles are not abstractions. As much as Obama may not take all of the positions that are popular with us down here in the "nutroots," his success comes from walking our walk, leaving no state behind.
Obama is the only remaining Democratic candidate who has made the effort to reach every vote, rather than carve up the country into necessary this and impossible that. You don't think that matters to me as a Democrat living in Texas? I'm not represented in Congress right now. When the shit hits the fan and dKOS is posting action links, I have no office to call. Nothing. No one.
That's changing now, and we all know why. So it's time to stop fighting the change, fighting each other. That part is over.
.