McCain voted for the Iraq war. He now wants to run for President based on his opposition to the way the war was conducted. It is a thin distinction, the kind you come up with after the fact. When you know the war is an unmitigated disaster, that might ruin not only your  run for the Presidency, but also drown your Party's chances.

So McCain now claims  that he asked for Sec. Def. Rumsfeld's resignation.  That is his figleaf, to hide the shame of  his Iraq delusion. Did he? There is no doubt that McCain doesn't like Rumsfeld. But then, there are lots of people he doesn't like. Many of his Republican Senate colleagues for example. They don't like him much  either. That is not the point. Did McCain ever publicly ask for Rumsfeld to be fired? Not till Rummy  had already  been fired in the wake of the 2006 election where Republicans were clobbered. But look here:

McCain Website Nov 19 2007 speech:

I made the Pentagon angry when I called for the resignation of Don Rumsfeld; said we needed a different strategy in Iraq

Oh Really. Where did you call for  that, Sen. McCain?

The most sparkling  debates of this campaign season are between the John McCain of yore (remember him, the Straight Talking Maverick) and the one  running for President now.

McCain is now against withdrawal from Iraq. Willing to stay even a hundred years if needed. But that earlier McCain used to think very differently. Here he is urging a quick withdrawal from Somalia

Replace the word Somalia with Iraq and you get a very sensible analysis of what to do in Iraq now. But here is the McCain of April 2008:

Things look very good for us now. Just won three special elections in strongly Republican districts. They are freaking out, by all accounts. McCain is triangulating away from their base: suddenly he is an environmentalist. And he just set a 2013 timeline for withdrawing from Iraq, a position  for which he kneecapped Romney in Florida. All we have to do is to make a video of the old maverick McCain arguing against the new  McCain in Panic.

Can things get any better in terms of improving our chances? Yes. Bush interjects himself into the campaign with a hamfisted comparison of Obama to Nazi appeasers of yore. Our cup runneth over. Only thing I wish is that  all this was happening in October, not May. You want your opponents over-confident and happy, not running scared, six months in advance. You want your own troops worried and ready to fight the fight of their life now. Still, there may not be  much the Republicans do to improve their lot between now and November. So let us savor this moment.

Everyone but Sen. Clinton knows it is over. Everyone is busy with post-game analysis of why she lost. But the reason is so obvious that it is staring us in the face. Even  the best analysis,  from Karen Tumulty, does not mention it, perhaps because it is too obvious.

1. She misread the mood and tried to run as a Washington insider/incumbent when the electorate was hungry for change.

2. Her strategists didn’t have a good understanding of the nomination rules. Allegedly, chief strategist Mark Penn was actually ignorant of the proportional allocation rule and thought just winning the big states would be enough to secure the nomination.

3. She underestimated the caucus states and chose not to put resources into them because she thought her core voters would be unlikely to caucus.

4. She relied on old money for fundraising and didn’t tap into the new modes of Internet fundraising.

5. She didn’t plan ahead for a long race and was very late to set up operations in states which voted after Super Tuesday.

I do not want Hillary Clinton to drop out any time soon. I want her to continue the suicidal course she is on and completely wreck her career as a politician. Then I want her to retire to Chappaqua, get her rich husband to pay off her campaign  debts and leave us alone for the rest of her life.

If she drops out now, she might still be left with a shred of dignity. She might be able to crawl her way back  into politics. Even pretend that she helped Obama get elected. But if she sticks around and continues to make racist statements like

Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me

her own supporters will abandon her.

I want her to at least get to the point where  she will get a primary challenge for Senate in 2012  . I don't want to have to vote for her again for Senate because no viable candidate can be found against her.

It is getting to the point where we are running out of movie analogies. Is she the Glen Close character in Fatal Attraction?

I won't be ignored

you can almost hear her scream.

There have been many calls for unity on this site. One obvious way to unify the party is to have Sen. Clinton on the ticket as the VP candidate. It does not look like Sen. Clinton is too eager to be VP, but at this stage she would not say so even if she were interested. Like many Obama supporters, I am dead set against an Obama/Clinton ticket. I will detail the reasons in a minute.

But let us restate the obvious up front: it is Sen. Obama's decision. If we are willing to trust him with the fate of the country, we can trust him with this one also. There will no whining if Obama were to choose Sen. Clinton and she accepts it. We would work hard for the Democratic ticket either way.

The pros of Sen. Clinton as VP are obvious. They have been presented repeatedly here. She would help unify the party after a bruising primary season. Her supporters, many of whom find it hard to switch allegiances to Obama, but might easily do so to McCain, will stay with the Democrats in the General Election. Also, she brings on board a team of political professionals, and fundraising ability. Bill Clinton can be an asset in the GE campaign. Finally, if she is on the ticket, she and her supporters will not be causing mischief.

I don't buy any of these arguments. Below the fold, they are refuted point by point.

This parrot is not dead. It is resting.

Sen. Obama has run a thoughtful campaign, avoiding gimmicks like a tax holiday on gasoline. His opponents have shown no such restraint. McCain and Clinton  are double-teaming Obama, making ridiculous promises they know they can't keep if they were elected.

Yet, Obama needs to come up with more specific proposals that can be examples of his style of Governance. We understand a message not only by its overall principles, but by such examples. Besides, it is good politics to relate to small issues that have an emotional resonance with the ordinary voter. Gimmickry works. Bill Clinton  campaigned on school uniforms in 1996. Did you hear anything about it once the election was over?

Obama does not need to trivialize himself like his opponents. He only needs to publicize examples already contained in his proposals. Like the idea that the IRS, which already has the tax information on most people, should prepare a tax return for us and send us a bill. Just like a credit card company does. We would have the right to dispute it. For many  of us it would take away some  of the pain of April 15.

Sen. Obama is already has two formidable opponents in his race for President. Now he has a third, the Rev. Wright.  The good Reverend says he is not running for office, but his moves are every bit like  a campaign nevertheless. As much as we wish he would just go away, he will not. Any more than Sen. Clinton.

Don't get me wrong. I find much to admire in Rev. Wright. He did serve in the Marines for seven years.

How many years did Cheney serve?

the Reverend asks, quite legitimately. He has led a life of service to the people of inner Chicago. For Obama he has been a kind of father figure, a mentor through the difficult transitional years of his life. If many of us can see further than him, it is because we sit on the shoulders of people such as him. From that perch,  we don't have  to endure the pain of walking barefoot on stones like   him  and others of his generation.

But that does not entitle him to ownership of Obama. At this moment when the Nation needs a new kind of leader, we do not have to be burdened with this voice from the past. Nothing entitles anyone to spread the kind of hateful,  idiotic lunacy that the Reverend has been repeating at every opportunity: in Detroit in front of the NAACP, at the National Press Club.

He married it. Not that there is anything wrong with that.  As the biography by Joseph Ellis makes clear, George Washington made his money the same way.

It would be unfair  to say that McCain  married Cindy Hensley only for her money. He also married her for her stocks,  her seven homes and her corporate jet. The jet in particular has come in really handy when Sen. McCain needs to make a campaign trip and has run out of money to rent one. Not that there is nothing illegal about that. When McCain wrote the law, he put in  a nifty exemption for family owned jets that would cover exactly this eventuality. Not that there is anything wrong with that. We expect our lawmakers to use their personal knowledge of the real world while making laws.

It just looks odd that this is the same  McCain that  blasts Obama for being out of touch with the common man. Michelle Obama was not born a beer heiress. She does not own a corporate jet that Barack can slip into when he needs to rush off somewhere. He needs to actually pay for it from money he has raised from all of us. May be McCain thinks that this will make it hard for Obama  to stay in touch with ordinary voters. Apparently only people with spouses worth over $100M have the right to call their opponents elitists.

The Clintons are big on loyalty. Their court jester ( or is he the idiot of their village? the flying monkey of their Oz?other ideas?) James Carville famously called Gov. Richardson a Judas because he dared to endorse Obama over Clinton. So, how loyal have the Clintons been ? No group stuck with the Clintons more consistently than the African-American community through the dark days of the Impeachment witch hunt. Clinton had their near unanimous support , and it played an important role in saving his Presidency.

James Clyburn (D-SC) is the Majority Whip, the Third  Ranking member of the House Leadesrhip. He is also the highest ranking African-American in Congress. Still officially uncommitted in the Primary, Clyburn says that

black people are incensed over all of this.

That is, the behavior of Bill Clinton in South Carolina.

He let it rip in an interview with the NYTimes:

When he was going through his impeachment problems, it was the black community that bellied up to the bar. I think black folks feel strongly that that this is a strange way for President Clinton to show his appreciation.

Sen. Clinton  was born in Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. She went to school in Massachusets and Connecticut . She then married and moved to Arkansas. Now she represents New York in the Senate.  Therefore she is from all those places. She won primaries in all these significant  states:  Massachussets, Arkansas, Connecticut and New York. Her win in PA is partly attributed to her grandparents being from there. Illinois doesn't count because Sen. Obama is from there too.

Thus,  it is clear that having roots all over the US is a distinct advantage to Sen. Clinton. It makes her a hometown girl in most of the places she has won. Even in TX  her connections date  back to the seventies when she campaigned for McGovern there. And as first lady she spent so much time in CA, everyone was surprised  when she chose New York from which to run for the Senate.

The next primary is in Guam, May 3rd. Nine delegates at stake.  Almost  the number of delegates Sen. Clinton won in her gigantic victory in PA. Guam is definitely a significant contest.

I have such fond memories of Guam!

Sen. Clinton began her Press Conference  yesterday. The reporters were skeptical.

No matter what happens in PA, the nomination of Obama as the Democratic nominee seems likely in the end. Most Democrats would like a quick end to the acrimonious Primary campaign. A united Party with Clinton and Obama working together to defeat McCain is the dream of many activists as well as rank and file democrats.

The Dream Ticket looks very unlikely now. We can at least hope for a photo-op  with the two contenders smiling and hugging. What, after that?  There is reason to believe that Sen. Clinton is at least as likely to be a drag on the Democraric GE campaign as an asset. Sure, she has a little less than half of the Democratic Party supporting her. According to polls, 80% of them will continue to support the eventual Democratic nominee, even if it is not Sen. Clinton. The remaining 20%, which is 3 to 5% of the total electorate, says they  will not vote for Obama. This is within the margin of error of most National Polls.

John Dickerson says in Slate that the attack ads put out by the Clinton campaign this week are simply creating more work for her in the GE campaign.

Effective or not, Clinton's new ad will add more evidence to fuel the claim that Clinton is trying not just to beat Obama but to destroy him—because if he loses against McCain, she gets an opening in 2012. If Clinton doesn't get the nomination, she's going to have to deal with this view or see her future chances in presidential politics severely damaged. She already suffers from high negative ratings. If she's pegged as a hope killer because she bloodied Obama, she may lose the chance to woo a bloc of Democrats forever.

Clinton's best chance to fix this problem is to suck up to Obama after the primaries by working hard for him in the general election. The more she dings him now, as she does with this new ad, the more work she's creating for herself in the fall.
..
If Clinton ends up in this corner, you can imagine the assignments that Obama or his staffers will dream up as payback.

Let us think up places that Obama can send Sen. Clinton in the Summer and Fall.

On the face of it, the Primary campaign is all about personality and not about substance. The stated positions of the two candidates, the wisdom goes, are so close that the argument is over who can make the better against Sen. McCain. Then why is there such a heated prolonged battle between the Clinton and Obama camps?

In fact what we are seeing is a historic realignment in the Democratic Party. The Republican Party of Ronald Reagan that held such sway over the Nation ( even through the Clinton years) has collapsed. Eight years  of incompetence and malfeasance, and a longer period of successes, have drained it of energy. This is not to say that the Right Wing in the country is finished. The Clinton wing of the Democratic party is moving in to fill that role. In effect they are aligning themselves with what is left of the Republicans to defeat the Liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The Liberal Wing is in effect, the continuation of the Hubert Humphrey-McGovern tradition. It was revived fiour years ago by Dean and is now led by Obama. It is the

Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.

Obama has done  it again.  He has committed a gaffe. That is, he told a simple truth. And assumed that there are some adults in his audience.

People of rural PA, like those of upstate NY,  are bitter. Factories have been closing. Jobs are disappearing. Young folks are moving away to find work. And it  didn't just happen to them. It was done to them. By the good folks who brought us NAFTA. By the fat cat lobbyists who took money from foreign Governments to lobby for Trade Deals with no protection for workings folks. It is not raining. You are pissing on them.

When people are struggling financially, they cling to the familiar: friends and family, religion and in rural areas, guns. So what. To pat  them on the head and tell them they are resilient and optimistic when they are mad as hell is patronizing. That is what is elitist. Especially if you just banked $800,000 that  your husband made from a foreign Government for lobbying for a Trade Pact that will further impoverish these folks.

An ex-President amasses  wealth and influence that he  then uses to install a family member in the Presidency. We are not talking of Argentina, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the  Philippines or Africa. This is the good old United States of America, whose founding fathers explicitly  renounced Aristocracy. The Bushes and Clintons are taking the United States into dangerous territory, familiar  to the rest of the world,  but  new to us.

Bush 41  was not the first ex-President to make unseemly amounts of money on the basis of his fame and influence of his office. That would be Reagan,  who made an obscene 20 million dollars from a single   speech to a company in Japan. Reagan has been all but canonized now, so nobody talks about how he sold out the prestige of the Presidency.  Before that,  ex-Presidents made  a living by writing books (Carter and Nixon). Or simply by going back to their  home and living modestly off the pension (Harry Truman). There is honor in the ruler of a great nation  returning home to be a citizen farmer, as George Washington did.  The worst you can say about him is that  he made his money the old fashioned way, by marrying into it.

Sen. Clinton has tried to have it both ways on Free Trade and  on the Iraq war. But the dirtiest trick of her campaign has been the attempt to corral Sen. Obama as her VP running mate. It is her dream ticket: let Sen. Obama bring the idealists, dreamers and youth (those people who she think of as naive) and join them with her own following of seasoned warriors to anoint her as President.

As Sen. Obama noted, it is the old Okeydoke. A way to hoodwink loyal Democrats  into ignoring the obvious fact: he is defeating her in the nomination contest. How does it make sense for someone in second place to offer the number two spot to the one in the lead?

You would think he laid this idea to rest many weeks ago. But nothing is over with the Clintons. After all, they are still fighting the battles of the 90's. From  before when  many of today's voters were even born. One of Clinton's operatives, Adam Parkhomenko has resigned from the campaign and launched a petition for a Clinton/Obama 08 ticket. It would be laughable were it not for the genuine desire by many of us to bring the nasty divisive Primary campaign to an end and start hammering away at McCain.