21 April 2008

A rational person might not be able to understand how you could lose the state in close to double digits and yet still carry more delegates.

I, of course, am hoping that Hillary wins the popular vote in a big way. It would be icing on the cake if Obama then managed to win more delegates at the same time.

Hillary could then argue that the elected delegate system was not actually reflecting the wishes of the majority, therefore the purpose for which the superdelegate status was created needs to come into play.

Actually, I thought that was one of her better lines. One ad she should be running now would be that of Obama's condescending "oh, you're likeable enough, Hillary" dismissals. I think their best weapon against Obama is to make him look like Adlai Stephenson as much as possible.

Wow, what a guy. Is there anything he cannot do in the field of international diplomacy?

Cue background music: "...rockets keep falling on my head, but that doesn't mean my blood will soon be turnin' red, bleeding's not for me..."

Abu Zuhri also noted Hamas would see any future Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as "transitional."

Abu Zuhri said Hamas's outstanding position not to recognize Israel's right to exist remained unchanged despite its acceptance of a state in 1967 borders.

Speaking later to reporters, Carter said Hamas leaders whom he met "didn't say anything about transitional."

Funny how that happens, isn't it. Oh, well, you did the best you could. Please go home now. Drink some nice warm milk. Relax. Turn your talents towards this other New York Times front page item:

The Senate has taken the unusual step of proposing that the Justice Department begin a criminal investigation of a long-running Congressional embarrassment known as the Coconut Road earmark. ...

The Senate’s call for help from the F.B.I. is commendable, but requires House concurrence. Speaker Nancy Pelosi prefers that the inquiry be assigned to the House ethics committee, a panel heretofore noted for interring, not illuminating, scandal. Both investigations should go forward.

Presumably unindicted Abscam co-conspirator Jack Murtha will be in charge. I say this is a job for Jimmy Carter!

Chuck Todd and the gang at NBC's First Read make a similar point:

"Curious of what the bitterness and anger could look like if Obama is somehow denied the Democratic nomination? Check out the reaction from the ObamaNation over Wednesday's debate. To put it simply, ABC was under siege. This may only be a taste of how the ObamaNation would react to a Clinton nomination. If MoveOn is motivated to do a petition campaign against the media over a debate, imagine what Clinton delegates and undecided superdelegates would face this summer if there is doubt."

I see this as a significant factor, myself. How many superdelegates will be willing to take that kind of heat? Just for openers, they can count on being slandered as racists.

Will the Bill Ayers connection (all but ignored by the news media, other than Fox, until Stephanopoulos raised it) hurt Obama? National Review's Jim Geraghty puts it this way:

"Do you, personally, know anyone who has ever tried to blow up the Pentagon? Do you know of anyone who actually brags that they did, successfully, plant and detonate a bomb at the Pentagon?

"Do you, personally, know anyone has ever planned to blow up an officer's dance at a military base, say, Fort Dix?

"Do you, personally, know anyone who has gotten someone killed in an explosion because of their actions?

"Even if these bombings and attempted bombings occurred forty years ago, is that the sort of thing you could forgive, and/or dismiss? Do you believe that assembling a bomb, and intending to kill police, members of the military, and ordinary innocent civilians is the sort of thing that should be considered 'water under the bridge' once enough time has passed?

"Could you shake hands with this person? Go to a party at their house? Accept a donation from them? If you knew this about a person, could you look at them and forget that they gathered the explosives, assembled the wires and the parts, scoped out their target, planted it, and watched it detonate with excitement? Do you relate to having people like that in your social circle?

"No, I don't, either."

It isn't like Ayers has matured and changed his mind, either. The morning of 9/11 the New York Times, I heard, ran an item on/by him which said he regretted not having done more bombing than he did. It ran before the planes hit.

And I also heard that Obama's state senator campaign was kicked off at Ayers' house.

Nice try, but they have a problem. Quite a large number of reporters have had unlimited access to McCain, riding on his bus and also just plain hanging around, taking conference calls, etc. They've had years of being intimate with him. They are going to know what his temper is like, first-hand, and will be able to recognize political spin by the Washington Post when they see it.

Clinton's effort to brand Obama as elitist has failed to move the polls, probably because Democratic primary voters agree with Frank. Nevertheless, Democratic pros feel that the San Francisco incident halted an Obama surge in Pennsylvania that might have won him the state and ended Clinton's campaign tomorrow. What really worries them, however, is the impact on independents and Republicans who had been entranced by the young man from Chicago. Now, they wonder whether the appealing unifier is really a divider.

Obama is trying to change the subject, but he lost his cool demeanor when ABC News questioners Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos returned to his San Francisco statement, among other difficult issues, in the debate. In watching campaign debates dating to Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, I never before had seen a candidate criticize the moderator or challenge his premises so often (at least eight occasions). "Look, let me finish my point here, Charlie," said Obama, after Gibson interrupted him following a 126-word answer.

The other unprecedented element was the deluge of abuse heaped on the two ABC moderators by media reporters, television critics and political writers. They object to prolonging what amounts to a debate on "What's wrong with Obama?" But exploring whether Barack Obama is a modified Thomas Frank does not depend on television talking heads or on Hillary Clinton. Supporters of John McCain, seeking to reel back the Obama Republicans, will press the issue from now to November.

I was a bit surprised the elitist comment did not resonate more in Pennsylvania, but then I realized that we were talking about only Democrat primary voters, not the general state population. Considering Hillary's high negative numbers, the Democrats who felt offended by Obama may also have felt they had nowhere else to turn...but that won't be true in the case of McCain.

And, yes, I'm thoroughly enjoying watching Hillary and Obama go at it, while McCain...

This is great! Thomas Frank, the author who many think caused Obama's problems, now digs him in deeper!

No one means by this term (elitism) that Mr. Obama is a wealthy person (he wasn't until last year), or even that he is an ally of the wealthy (although he might be that). What they mean is that he has committed a crime of attitude, and revealed his disdain for the common folk.

It is a stereotype you have heard many times before: Besotted with latte-fueled arrogance, the liberal looks down on average people, confident that he is a superior being. He scoffs at religion because he finds it to be a form of false consciousness. He believes in regulation because he thinks he knows better than the market.

When a liberal defines something as a "stereotype", this is code for trying to get you to believe that there's nothing actually to the charges, they're sort of all made up out of thin air. It does not matter if the shoe fits, he still wants you to acquit.

After that, Frank starts flailing out in all directions, almost in hysteria:

"Elitism" is thus a crime not of society's actual elite, but of its intellectuals. Mr. Obama has "a dash of Harvard disease," proclaims the Weekly Standard. Mr. Obama reminds columnist George Will of Adlai Stevenson, rolled together with the sinister historian Richard Hofstadter and the diabolical economist J.K. Galbraith, contemptuous eggheads all. Mr. Obama strikes Bill Kristol as some kind of "supercilious" Marxist. Mr. Obama reminds Maureen Dowd of an . . . anthropologist.

I hadn't seen that column and don't know the context, but actually it is a fair remark if you are thinking about anthropologists such as the famous Margaret Meade, who studied indigenous cultures to which she was, as a simple fact of existence, far superior in terms of education, experience, and knowledge of the wider-world. This type of anthropologist is studying a culture alien to his own, in an effort to learn about it and understand it. Maureen is very perceptive if she views Obama in this manner.

I'm somewhat disconcerted to see that Frank is the only person I have encountered so far who noticed this fact. I wonder how many of the journalists thought the fact that she was in Crown Point, Pa, had something to do with the whisky's name?

And when the former first lady talks about her marksmanship as a youth, who cares about the cool hundred million she and her husband have mysteriously piled up since he left office? Or her years of loyal service to Sam Walton, that crusher of small towns and enemy of workers' organizations? And who really cares about Sam Walton's own sins, when these are our standards? Didn't he have a funky Southern accent of some kind? Surely such a mellifluous drawl cancels any possibility of elitism.

Ah, I love liberals and Liberal Logic. The man just got through pointing out that the charge of "elitism" in Obama's case had nothing to do with him being wealthy, but here Frank suddenly starts talking about wealth in the case of Clinton and Sam Walton.

My own father, definitely a salt-of-the-earth type, struggled most of his life by being burdened with the given names of Ernest William. He detested Ernest, wanted to be called just plain Bill, but he also had one of his formative life experiences in his escape from life on an Illinois farm to a hitch in the U.S. Navy. Elitists may not be aware of what the military calls a "payroll signature", but it consists of your first name, middle initial, and surname, with no variations permitted. (With specified rules for people who had no given middle name, as well as those mostly-Southern types who had only initials and not complete given names.) As a result, Dad was Ernest W. all of his life.

Once I innocently asked him, after hearing him complain about how many people, attempting to strike up a false camaraderie, would call him "Ernie" after seeing his signature, why he didn't change his signature to E. William Calkins.

That's the sort of "elitist" behavior people mean when they speak of Obama's actions.

Elitists look at Sam Walton and see him as a "crusher of small towns and enemy of workers' organizations". The ordinary folks who live in those small towns think differently...but how would the elite ever find that out?

I moved to Jackson, California, and set up my real estate office there, in 1980. One of my good friends had the Firestone Tire dealership, at which he worked hard, personally, getting his hands dirty, but also earning a much better-than-average living in the process. As it happened, K-Mart came to Jackson quite some time before Wal-Mart did, but the effect was somewhat similar. A lot of small businesses, mom-and-pop stores, could no longer compete, and Main Street started drying up and transforming its character.

Naturally, there was a lot of grumbling about K-Mart destroying local businesses, but at the same time this was also due to the fact that the locals went to K-Mart to shop rather than pay the higher prices charged by their friends and neighbors in their smaller stores. K-Mart and Sam Walton didn't put those local stores out of business, the people of the community did by abandoning them in favor of the blue-light specials.

Anyhow, one of the interesting cultural phenomena with respect to K-Mart's arrival was the fact that, at first, shopping there was akin to frequenting one of the several whore-houses which still existed in Jackson at that time. Somehow they were surviving, but nobody wanted to be seen going there. For quite some time after K-Mart opened, bumping into someone you knew who was also shopping there led to a certain amount of embarrassment on the part of both. If possible, each of you preferred to give the impression that we weren't really shopping, not exactly, as much as checking out the competition.

Well, K-Mart had an automotive department, which sold tires and did lube jobs and minor repairs quite a lot like my friend's Firestone dealership. One of K-Mart's bonus services was that you could have your car serviced while you were doing your other shopping, a service which a lot of people greatly appreciated.

On the other hand, when your car was ready they would announce your name over the store's PA system! "Tom Jones, your new tires have been mounted and your car is ready now."

As luck would have it, I happened to encounter my Firestone friend in K-Mart during its early days, and we stopped for a few moments to commiserate about the unwanted changes it was bringing to town. As we chatted, the PA system hummed to life. "Tom Jones, your new tires are ready now." My friend's eyes widened in surprise! "That's MY customer!" he exclaimed in shock. It was embarrassing to both of us, but wryly amusing at the same time.

Wal-Mart and Sam (not Samuel) Walton did not crush the small town businesses, the people who abandoned them for better value did.

My friend stayed in business partly because he gave outstanding service and had a reputation second to none for customer satisfaction, but also because he also managed to carry an additional line of less-expensive imported tires which could compete in price. He never lost me to K-Mart or even Wal-Mart, after it arrived in Jackson, because of the fine work that he did and also our personal friendship, but nevertheless it was a fact that the two large stores were somehow full of customers.

As for Hillary's service on the corporate board of Wal-Mart, I don't think Frank wants to remind us about Obama's board service right about now...

Frank did send me home laughing, though. After a long column complaining about the Obama elitism stereotype, Hillary, Sam Walton, etc etc etc, he finishes with this:

Perfect, as George will would say. If you hadn't simplified it for us poor yokels we jes' plain would never have been able to unnerstan'. As Obama is reported to have mused in puzzlement after his gaffe was pointed out to him, "what did I say?"

He honestly did not know, any more than Mr. Frank recognizes his condescension here.

Michael Yon writes some of the best reports from Iran that you'll ever see. I was surprised at this conclusion, though:

Yon: ...the best thing the U.S. is going to get out of Iraq is a great generation of leaders who have had a unique experience in American history of trying to help freedom and democracy and the rule of law take root in a culture that has never known them. Someone should write a book about what that experience could mean for American democracy.

The other day Michael Medved asked me during his show what I would say to people who say that the U.S. military in Iraq is the dregs of American society. And you know you are not supposed to be struck speechless in a radio interview; it’s very bad form. But I really was. At first I thought I was hearing him wrong because it seemed just impossible that anyone would say that. The men and women serving in Iraq are the elite of America — and that I believe is going to become very clear over the next 10-20 years.

Lopez: Let’s say Barack Obama becomes president. How does Iraq work out?

Yon: Well, I don’t do politics.

But since you brought it up, in my view the Bush administration was mostly wrong about the war for a long time and now seems to be mostly right. I will say that Sen. McCain is one of the few who seems to have understood the war, not just backed it, but understood it from the very beginning.

That shows in his steadfast opposition to torture, by the way. Betraying American values is no way to win a counterinsurgency. We win counterinsurgencies by killing the “irreconcilables” and then showing everyone else what America is really like.

Lopez: What is the future of al-Qaeda?

Yon: In Iraq its future is bleak. Al-Qaeda is not a mistake the Iraqi people will make twice in a lifetime. Al -Qaeda will still do some killing, especially up in Mosul, but mostly they are just being killed or captured and losing ground month by month.

Okay, how about evolution vs intelligent design, for a change of pace? This from Dinesh D'Souza:

In Ben Stein's new film "Expelled," there is a great scene where Richard Dawkins is going on about how evolution explains everything. This is part of Dawkins' grand claim, which echoes through several of his books, that evolution by itself has refuted the argument from design. The argument from design hold that the design of the universe and of life are most likely the product of an intelligent designer. Dawkins thinks that Darwin has disproven this argument.

So Stein puts to Dawkins a simple question, "How did life begin?" One would think that this is a question that could be easily answered. Dawkins, however, frankly admits that he has no idea. One might expect Dawkins to invoke evolution as the all-purpose explanation. Evolution, however, only explains transitions from one life form to another. Evolution has no explanation for how life got started in the first place. Darwin was very clear about this.

In order for evolution to take place, there had to be a living cell. The difficulty for atheists is that even this original cell is a work of labyrinthine complexity. Franklin Harold writes in The Way of the Cell that even the simplest cells are more ingeniously complicated than man's most elaborate inventions: the factory system or the computer. Moreover, Harold writes that the various components of the cell do not function like random widgets; rather, they work purposefully together, as if cooperating in a planned organized venture. Dawkins himself has described the cell as the kind of supercomputer, noting that it functions through an information system that resembles the software code. ...

Could the random collision of molecules somehow produce a computer?

It is ridiculously implausible to think so. And the absurdity was recognized more than a decade ago by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix. Yet Crick is a committed atheist. Unwilling to consider the possibility of divine or supernatural creation, Crick suggested that maybe aliens brought life to earth from another planet. And this is precisely the suggestion that Richard Dawkins makes in his response to Ben Stein. Perhaps, he notes, life was delivered to our planet by highly-evolved aliens.

Which confirms intelligent design, of course, but also only moves the goalposts further back. Where did the aliens come from?

Indeed. Read about the Big Bang Theory some time. After you get done, you'll find yourself wondering if it doesn't require taking as many unproven and unprovable things on faith as does the Bible's simple statement about "in the beginning".

Just as in the case of the first cell, which Darwin doesn't even claim to understand, the Big Bang is, like evolution, all about what happened after a seminal event, whereas the question of intelligent design, or creation itself, are all about what happened BEFORE.

Not that there is any answer possible, you understand, either way. No matter how many people you like up on your side, or they on theirs, you still won't know anything for a fact, one way or the other. If your side is big enough and powerful enough then it can force the other side to shut up, but that won't prove anything, either, except for the fact that your side is the bigger and most powerful side.

You're kidding me, right? Obama's missteps didn't come early, but late. Some of them are still echoing back and forth right at this moment. Obama had Hillary on the ropes over Bosnia...and then we went to San Francisco and opened his mouth.

Under the circumstances, new ones by Obama seem to me to be more likely to happen than not.

Here is a quick guide to sort through the inevitable post-PA spin.

--Obama wins: Race is totally over.

--Clinton wins by 5 or less: Race is effectively over.

--Clinton wins by 6-9: Status quo, which favors the front runner Obama, particularly as the clock winds down.

--Clinton wins by 10-13: Clinton remains the underdog, but her odds of being the nominee will be considerably higher than the conventional wisdom in the media.

--Clinton wins by 14+: Totally different race, as Clinton will be on a path to claim a popular vote win that will give her every bit as much of an argument as the legitimate "winner". In this scenario anything could ultimately happen, including neither Clinton nor Obama becoming the eventual nominee.

No, I don't think Algore is going to come in and replace both of them, nor will Wes Clark or anyone else. One of the two will win.

I'm feeling cocky tonight (probably because of the wine), so I'm going to predict Clinton by 14+.

I admit this is probably wishful thinking on my part, because I am a McCain fan enjoying the Democrat destruction derby.

I also lean towards the notion that the nation is better served when the executive branch and the legislative branch are in different hands...either all Democrats or all Republicans might not be the best thing. I'm not a fanatic about this idea, but I think it has merit. Since we seem likely to have a Democrat-dominated congress, President McCain could become an essential counterbalance.

And this is fun, too, since I write as I read. After I wrote the above, I came to Mickey Kaus:

Okay, now I'm forced to reveal my own analytical tools. Hillary had a 50-43 lead, I read, with 7 undecided. I gave them all to Hillary.