• Tag Archives primaries

  • 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. 


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  • 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.


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