• Tag Archives Hilary

  • Obama By Five Percentage Points

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    52  bar rises 29.84 0mph NW dewpoint 30 Beltane

            Waxing Crescent of the Hare Moon

    The Hare moon stands in the west, just above the treeline a ways off our deck.  The night is misty and the crescent has a faded glow around it.  These nights, still cool, and days that don’t get too hot, ideal.  I like the cool days for garden work.  Today I stayed out in the sun too long and got a little woozy.  Just because the air is cool doesn’t mean the sun isn’t out to get ya.

    I wrote Hillary asking her to get out quite a while back.  Now the hounds are at her heels.  Money won’t come in.  The math doesn’t work.  Superdelegates have begun to flee.  Yet, she has decided to press on.  Why?  Pride, maybe?  Certainly a commitment to being the first woman presidential candidate and then the first woman president.  Both laudable and signficant, but by themselves insufficient to keep her in the race.  She may not believe what’s happening.  She will.

    My own take is that Obama will look like very different against McCain than he has against Clinton.  He embodies change, as she did, too, but he will look younger, stronger, less hidebound, though he will also look less experienced, less weathered by fate and circumstance.  The race will hinge on his ability to pick up some of the Reagan Democrats who swung so decisively behind Hillary.  How can he do that?  VP is one strategy.  I still think his best shot is Bill Richardson, but I read some pundits who think a strong woman would be a good choice.  Maybe John Edwards? 

    Obama by 5 percentage points in the end.  That’s my prediction.  And I have no basis for it, other than hope and gut instinct, neither too reliable, but there you are.

               


    📂This entry was posted in Great Wheel Politics 📎and tagged

  • Hillary Needs to Quit

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    31  bar steady  29.86 0mph SSW windchill 31

         Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

    Hillary Clinton got an e-mail message from me tonight asking her to quit the race.  She can’t win, the mathematics of the upcoming races don’t allow it.  No matter how you feel about her it’s time for her to get out, unify the Democratic party and get going to whip McCain. 

    This does not have to be her only year, nor has her campaign been in vain.  Ever after this year a female candidate for office will be a serious contender if they have the political credentials and more and more women do.  She has proved that women can run presidential campaigns.

    Obama is not so much a better candidate, as an acceptable candidate who has done what the primary process demands, collected votes.  The differences between them are not great and the hair-splitting over who would be better on day one comes down hard beside the point.  The point is, who has convinced the Democratic party faithful that they are the candidate for this race.  Obama. 

    Has he done it in an overwhelming manner?  No.  Praise be to God we have two candidates with good qualifications.  In that case the method of choosing between them is just as it was when we were choosing among them, go to the voters and follow the process.

    In a political campaign the voters decide the outcome, not prior expectations or the hopes of any one constituency.  This primary season has had the most excitement and genuine campaigning I can recall since I became aware of politics at age 5. 


    📂This entry was posted in Politics 📎and tagged

  • Coming Down off a Techno High

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    30  96%  30%  omph WSW bar 29.85 rises windchill30  Winter

                         New Moon

    Watched an HD movie tonight:  An American Haunting. Sissy Spacek, Donald Sutherland and James D’Arcy provided the core of a good ensemble cast.  This movie tells of the Bell Witch, an early 19th century century haunting in Adams, Tennessee. There is a cottage industry of folks who believe, including debunkers of other believers.  A bit like a snake biting its own tale.  The book An American Haunting: The Bell Witch recounts the supposedly true events which ended in 1821 with the death of John Bell.  The movie suggests incest, but fails, at least to my satisfaction, to link it to the strange occurrences at the Bell House.  Here is a website with further information.

    Feel like I’m coming down off a techno high, a sort of cyber electric dream occasioned by optical cables, coaxial cables, HDMI cables, speaker wire, subwoofers and high definition televison.  Alice could tumble through an HDMI cable into a virtual wonderland, I have.  This is an enchantment of sorts, and as such it must be encountered with awareness, not naivete.

    Hey, how about that Hilary, huh?  Coulda fooled me.  Looked like Obama was a shoe-in in New Hampshire.  Just what this means for the race is anybodies guess right now.  I love it.  Real candidates in a real horse race.  Jockeying for position, fighting over the issues and over how to organize campaigns for types of candidates who’ve never run before in this serious a manner.  This is (to use a much abused phrase) a historic moment for American democracy.  It can be a time when we win back the world’s admiration if we allow ourselves to enter the process without cynicism.  Hard, I admit, but possible and desirable.  Imagine a campaign about real politics and not weirdo ideologies.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television GeekWorld Politics 📎and tagged

  • Obama and Huckabee

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    16  85%  26%  omph S  bar 30.07 falls windchill 16  Yuletide

                   Waning Crescent of the Cold Moon

                             Iowa Caucus Night

    Oh, the political junkie in me is humming tonight.  Obama takes Iowa.  Huckabee takes Iowa.  Who knew all these folks wanted Iowa in the first place?  It would have been fun to be in Iowa tonight. 

    If you’ve never submitted yourself to the pleasures of an Iowa subcaucus evening, you haven’t lived politically.  The DFL here in Minnesota adopted the Iowa subcaucus process.  In three hotly contested elections I subcaucused in Minneapolis.  It’s sort of the political version of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  How many gender neutral, pro-labor, anti-gun McCarthy voters are there?  If there are a few left over for a viable caucus, who can we cut a deal with to get  more for our issue?  It’s wild and if there are a lot of people it’s exciting.  Horse trading and dickering at a fast clip.

    It also makes tallying up winners an interesting process as Wolf Blitzer kept saying all evening.  In the end CNN counted the total of Iowa state delegates each candidate got, created percentages and called their winners.  The more sedate Iowa Republicans took straw votes and went home.  Much easier, but not nearly as much fun.

    What does this mean for the race as a whole?  Well, Hilary doesn’t look inevitable anymore.  Obama is far from having it locked it up, but, as a commentator on CNN said (not poor bewildered Wolf Blitzer), if he carries two predominantly white states, Iowa and New Hampshire, black voters will flock to him and quite possibly away from Hilary.  They won’t want to stand in the way of the first black president.  By February 5th, a quick time in politics, it may done since AL, AK, AZ, AR, CA, CO, CT, DE, GA, IL, MN, MO, NJ, NY, ND, OK, TN & UT primaries plus New Mexico, Idaho and Kansas Democratic primaries are on Tuesday, February 5th.

    That would mean the general election race would begin that night and last until November.  What does that mean for an election process usually compressed in the days following Labor Day?  Don’t know.  Anyhow, lots to keep us junkies up nights until then.


    📂This entry was posted in News of the Strange Politics 📎and tagged