Exactly so.

Barack (smiles): You wearing a wire?

That was good stuff. I was waiting for the kicker: That Wes Clark had no meeting with Michelle.

Bill Clinton’s campaign song. Fleetwod Mac.

Ah. So that would be an example of that big-on-fancy-words,-short-on-actual-substance criticism Hillary keeps leveling at Obama.

Bill Clinton’s campaign song. Fleetwod Mac.

So how would The West Wing actually do it? Lawrence O’Donnell Jr., former West Wing writer-producer, has a scenario.

Best exchange:
Barack: Hillary, I care about two things exactly as much as you do: the party and getting the nomination.
Hillary: You mean you don’t give a shit about the party and you’d kill to get the nomination?

You mean, they were at some point??!!!

Exactly. Who’s more electable than John McCain in November? Who the fuck cares? Who is going to be more effective in getting the job done.

The Big Picture.

Someone here has stopped thinkin’ about tomorrow.

The central problem with your statement of the central premise is that it’s just wrong. It isn’t that having the supers decide the nominee is illegitimate. It’s that to give the nomination to Hillary the supers would have to vote counter to the way in which the people have.

The rules say they can do that, yes. Nobody is legitimately arguing that they can’t. The complaint is, doing so would go contrary to the popular vote (expressed will of the people), piss off a large segment of Dem voters and quite probably cause serious problems for the Dems in the general election.

I happen to believe that Obama is the better candidate, but more than that I believe he will be a better president.

I believe both of those things now, and strongly, but I believed neither of them at the time when Edwards dropped out and I had to find a new candidate. SHE, more than her opponent, has changed my mind, and a lot of other people’s minds. Her remaining supporters really need to come to grips with what that says about her campaign. “Electable” my ass- her nomination would hand McSame the election on a silver platter. She can’t go after him on almost any significant Democratic issue after me-tooing him slavishly throughout the primary campaign AND she would depress black turnout to a remarkable degree. The outcome wouldn’t even be close.

Wellstone: That does not mean I don’t respect Obama or have any problem supporting his nomination.

Yes, it shows in nearly every mention you make of him.

Now that’s a strong argument for voting for Hillary: She’s less evil.

1. Hillary’s major strength seems to be this idea that she can motivate the white base of the Democratic party better than Obama can. Since when has the white base of the Democratic party won the White House? Oh yea, Bill Clinton. That was two lifetimes ago in Presidential politics.

2. In this particular race, Hillary is running as a moderate Republican on the Democratic party ticket. People already believe that McCain is a moderate Republican, and a war hero to boot. Why would anyone vote for Hillary Clinton over McCain?

3. Meanwhile, the rabid base of the Republican party hates the Clintons with a passion.

4. She has at least as many weaknesses as Obama. Her negative issues – Whitewater, the Health Care task force, her husbands infidelity, Vince Foster – have been largely ignored during the primary season due to the media focus on Obama. I don’t believe for a second that these things will remain under the radar during the general election.

(let me add as an aside that all of these attacks are beneath contempt. But they will come.)

5. Like it or not, her campaign has disenchanted a good number of people who may have once considered voting for her. I happen to believe that Obama is the better candidate, but more than that I believe he will be a better president. Still, I may have once been willing to vote for Clinton. But I loathe the campaign that Clinton has been running since at least Super Tuesday, when her coronation was put into question. I’m not sure I can bring myself to vote for her in the fall. (And no, I won’t vote for McCain either. I haven’t heard a lot of Obama supporters saying they would, unlike some in the Clinton camp.)

I don’t believe that Clinton can beat McCain – and if she did, I’m not sure we wouldn’t be getting a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

All of Obama’s negatives come inevitably back to the question of the angry black man. In spite of this, I do think he can win. And if he can’t, if we’re really not ready in this country to have a black man as President, well then I’d rather it be decided out in the open in November, than have us give up at the outset and not even nominate him for fear of “what if…”

That’s exactly my feelings. Before the primaries started, I thought any of the three main candidates would be great choices for the Democrats. In fact, my dream ticket was Edwards / Obama, but when Edwards fell behind early I switched to Clinton / Richardson as my second choice. However, her campaign has not just been poorly run, but it has been destructive. If she was running a constructive campaign, then I would have no issue were her still campaigning.

See, that’s funny, because last year the pledged delegate count was king for Clinton as well. Now not so much.

That’s pretty good.

Obama buys CAKE??

How can you say no to cake? AND he paid for it himself, AND he left a $10 tip.

Guess I read too much into the part in his book where he talks about using Blow as a teenager when he could afford it.

Ya. I guess you did. Nice try at deflecting.
I for one admire that he admits it. For years I’ve been waiting for a candidate to field the question “Did you ever use drugs?” with “Yup. Don’t do it now. So what?”
Now we have one. And I’m proud of it.

http://www.mydd.com/:

Democratic strategist Ari Melbers’s appearance on MSNBC Sunday during an hour long Obama love-fest hosted by David Schuster was particularly dishonest about the situation:

“Senator Clinton is highly unlikely to make up the elected delegate metric, which is the key thing here, that’s the count from the people who’ve actually voted in these states…Even if she does her best, she’s going to be down in the Democratic count and there’s really no way she can legitimately win the nomination at this point.”

The central problem with this statement is the premise that superdelegates handing someone the nomination is inherently illegitimate when in truth, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will need superdelegates to win the nomination. As you can see from DemConWatch’s handy chart, there simply aren’t enough pledged delegates left to put either of them over the top.

Now, of course, in the mind of Melber and all proponents of the Obama inevitability campaign, the pledged delegate count is king, which means that if superdelegates hand it to Obama it’s OK, but if they hand it to Clinton it’s not. How convenient. The problem with this formulation though is that there’s absolutely no basis or precedent for the presumption that the superdelegates are bound to the pledged delegate leader. As Howard Dean himself has said of the superdelegates:

Their role is to exercise their best judgment in the interests of the nation and of the Democratic Party. I am confident that they will carry out that duty responsibly and in accordance with the highest values of our democracy and our Party…”

Obama buys CAKE??

For a second there, I read Obama buys COKE for the voters, and I thought we had us some real news!!

Guess I read too much into the part in his book where he talks about using Blow as a teenager when he could afford it.

Race card.

1. Will Black voters go to the polls if Hillary wins the nomination even though she’s behind in pledged delegates because the Superdelegates voted her in?

Chris Rock said “Damn, I never even heard of “Superdelegates”. Until a Black man took the lead!”

I really hope they do. I will understand frustration and anger, I would feel the same way. I lived in NYC’s South Bronx and Spanish Harlem as a boy, I lived and fought the ghetto’s dynamics and grudges. But I hope they will consider the alternative: McCain in power and 4 more years of having a Republican instead of a President.

1A. Can the Democrats win the White House without a Black vote? Maybe. We can’t afford to lose anybody, young, Black, senior, Hispanic, women are all crucial parts of the Dem coalition. But the Black vote has not and will not affect states like MS, AL, GA, KY and many more. They are going to the GOP anyway. If Hispanics, especially younger Latinos register and vote Democrat in huge numbers, it may help worst-case losses among the Black electorate. In 2004, Bush claimed over 44% of the Hispanic vote. If we get half of those back, it will definitely have a positive impact, especially in the “New West”, CO, NV, NM, and maybe even AZ.