I came across today's Gallup polltracking presidential nomination preferences in the democratic party. According to this poll, Obama should have no problem uniting the democratic party behind his candidacy. Here are a couple of interesting facts from this poll:
Barack Obama's lead over Hillary has increased from four percentage-point in early May (O:49% C: 45%)to 16 points from May 16-18 (O:55% C:39%).
I know you can’t wait to get Hillary out of the way so you can, as the pundits say, pivot to the general election. But until the vast majority of her supporters, supporters you will need after you wrap up the nomination, until they feel she has had all the many, many chances she is entitled to, it will not go down well with them if you do anything that looks like claiming victory. It will look like another man has stepped on her ambitions (you) and thwarted her aspirations. Something she and too many women legitimately feel has happened to them. And thus you will pay a political price for it.
I have a confession to make. I've gotten complacent. For the past week and a half, I have not made many phone calls, and I laughed off Obama's 41-point loss in West Virginia. I have been telling Obama supporters in the blogosphere to lay off of Clinton, figuring she was just staying in until Tuesday or until the end of the primaries and then would bow out gracefully. I did not think we needed to worry much about what she says or does anymore.
Last night, I got a wake-up call. I listened to the audio of her conference call with bloggers, which a DUer was kind enough to partially transcribe, and I realized that while she may bow out on June 4 and endorse Obama and encourage her supporters to vote for him, there's more to her strategy than meets the eye. I don't think she is planning to take this to the Convention, and she could be angling for the VP slot. But there's a far more troubling possibility here. From the sound of what she encouraged her bloggers to push last night, it sounds like she is trying to delegitimize him or cloud his legitimacy when he eventually clinches the nomination, as part of a stealth campaign for 2012.
There's only one way this ends, and it's not going to be pretty. Hillary Clinton has deliberately driven a stake through the heart of the Democratic Party, and not because she's a sportman's and refuses to leave the field of play until the last whistle, it's because she want to position herself as completely indespesible to Barack Obama in the all.
She's been more than willing to pander and try and bribe the electorate with her gas tax holiday scheme. She's been willing to bait and pander to poor, ignorant West Virginian's like these...
Listen to this Hillacrat dreck, "Obama's a Muslim - he's doesn't know the Pledge of Allegiance or the Star Spangled Banner - he doesn't believe in America the way Hillary or McCain do..."
Why is Hillary willing to win on the back of this swill?
West Virginia has less than 1% of the party's delegates;
Fewer than 2/3 of West Virginians voted for Clinton, so she failed to meet expectations;
Less than half of those voters could be characterized as lower-income "hard-working whites," to use Clinton's own formulation;
In short, the portion of the electorate about which Hillary and the media are trying to make so much hay only account for less than 1/2 of 2/3 of less than 1% of the only tally that matters -- delegates.
In conclusion, since when did less than 0.33% of the electorate become so important?
Yes, indeed. First was Rep. John Lewis. Then Senator McGovern. And now the rothweiler of the Clinton camp is about to defect as well. He's practically called the nomination for Barack Obama and promised to send a check. The ship is all but sunk, folks.
I went to West Virginia Sunday with one of my coworkers to campaign for Obama. We went to Martinsburg, which is in the northeastern tip of the state, near the area where West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania all come together.
For a Jewish girl who grew up in New Jersey, West Virginia was a bit of a culture shock. Martinsburg is only two hours from my apartment in Northern Virginia, but it felt like it may as well be a different country. I had been to West Virginia once before, canvassing for Kerry in 2004, but the area we visited then seemed a lot more suburban and familiar than where we were Sunday.
I want to make it clear at the outset that I in no way look down on the people of West Virginia. The culture shock I felt and my fear of canvassing there has to do with my own insecurity, feeling like an out of touch elitist who talks too fast and has lived on the East Coast my whole life.
Immediately upon arriving in Martinsburg Sunday, we saw a car with a Confederate flag decal. Not exactly the most encouraging sign when you're about to knock on people's doors and tell them to vote for a black man.
One of the latest Clinton campaign talking points making the rounds is that if the Democratic primary had been run using Republican delegate allocation rules, she would be winning. However, I had never seen the campaign produce an actual attempt to break this down by state and analyze it. And considering her campaign's track record with understanding the rules (California winner-take-all? Crying over the Texas prima-caucus?), well, color me skeptical. A few diaries have been floated here with state breakdowns, but all that I have seen have committed egregious errors, such as counting every state as winner-take-all (very few truly are), or failing to understand the very different district-level rules used by the Republicans.
So, I decided to crunch some numbers and do it myself. The details are below the fold, but the final tally is that Obama would be holding an 82-delegate lead going into the West Virginia primary. Another Clinton talking point shot down by the cold hard sniper fire of truth.
I know there have been a lot of diaries already about Clinton's "hard working whites" comment, but I'm hoping to provide a balanced, civil approach. First, I want to say that I don't think she was trying to imply that black people are not hard-working. If anything, I think it was the opposite...I think she said "hard working people" and then clarified that she meant white people, so as not to imply that black people are not hard-working. If she had just said "hard working people" and not added "white people", it might have sounded as if she was saying that the 90% of African Americans who have been voting for Obama don't work hard.
That said, her comments are still offensive, because she is essentially asking the superdelegates to count the votes of certain demographic groups more heavily than others, and she is essentially making the argument that she is more electable because she's white.
I wanted to post a message to Hillary supporters of reconciliation after Tuesday, hoping that we could come together and begin to heal. So I signed on to her websight. No dice! None of my entries into her blog were allowed. and now I am recieving messages on a daily basis. The latest one came a while ago and was titled..."The Next Step". After reading it I am wondering if these people are dellusional, or are they up to tricks?
I haven't seen this count diaried anywhere, so I thought I'd spell out (or maybe count out) the net superdelegates won by Obama since his recent big primary victory.
According to DemComWatch, Obama has netted a 22-1 advantage in super delegates since the May 6 primaries in NC and IN. This is assuming I have counted right, but I'm certainly close. He did this by winning endorsement from 22 supers, including three who switched to him after previously endorsing Sen Clinton. HRC picked up four, but when you subtract the three she lost, that gives her a net gain of just one.
You can find the resultshere, at DemComWatch,, which dailykos has been using as its primary source for superdelegates because of the site's transparency and high standards for verification.
On Saturday, Obama got five new supers including one switch (Kevin Rodriguez from the DNC). Clinton gained one, for a net of zero.
In an exclusive blog post by Lawrence O'Donnell at the Huffington Post, Lawrence tells us that a senior campaign official and Clinton "confidante" informed him that Hillary Clinton will drop out by June 15th.
Randi Rhodes has just advanced a great theory about Rush's OPERATION CHAOS: that the point is not to drive GOP voters to Democratic primaries, but instead to make it look like the stampede OUT of the republican party is part of some grand strategy rather than passengers on the Titanic heading for the lifeboats.
Despite all the huffing and puffing over just when and how Hillary Clinton will finally pull a heroic Rocky-II-like comeback knock this black teenager out of the race - all the real numbers say she's already lost.
Barack Obama will be the Democratic Nominee, all he has to do is sit back and wait for it.
And you can prove it for yourself and all your friends with CNN's handy-dandy popiel-o-matic Delegate Calculator.
With this pocket-size tool, You Too, can be a Pundicator.
(Isn't it odd that no-one who actually appears on CNN knows how to use their own website?)
