Iowa Liberal

If she’d voted against the Iraq War and campaigned the way she spoke tonight from the beginning, she would be President-elect in November. Enough ifs for now though. I heard an expression the other day, can’t remember where, but I think it applies: If life gives you lemons, blow everybody’s mind and make orange juice. Tonight, Hillary Clinton made orange julius with a $50 bill at the bottom of the glass. Bruising primary campaign? Don’t remember. Was I there? Couldn’t have been that bad. Let’s rock it in November, baby!

-jb

UPDATE: Well, apparently there were some subtleties that gave some Obama folks cause to continue grumbling…Hillary didn’t want to give the GOP any talking points about reversing some of her harsher claims about Obama, so gave them talking points about those criticisms remaining valid.

And then Bill Clinton came on the second night and blew that shit straight out of the water. People can talk all they want about 2012, but I’m thinking you’ve got to be a pretty miserable son-of-a-bitch to let the Republicans win this election for personal ambition. I think it’s fair to say that the Clintons are doing their best to cope with their pride and put the Democratic Party and the country ahead of themselves. Obviously if McCain were to win, Hillary would take it in 2012, but as they’ve always said, you take things one election at a time. There’s no reason Hillary can’t take it in 2016.

Kudos to both.

If Hillary works as hard to unite the Democratic Party as she did to get herself elected, we’re going to be sitting pretty in November. Today she takes the first step:

“The way to continue our fight now to accomplish the goals for which we stand is to take our energy, our passion, our strength and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama, the next president of the United States,” she said in a speech before cheering supporters packed into the ornate National Building Museum, not far from the White House she longed to govern from.

“Today as I suspend my campaign, I congratulate him on the victory he has won and the extraordinary race he has run. I endorse him and throw my full support behind him and I ask of you to join me in working as hard for Barack Obama as you have for me,” the New York senator said in her 28-minute address.

All things must end. With grace, endings become beginnings.

-jb

Delegate count from the PA primary:

Clinton: 52
Obama: 46

Total delegates for each so far:

Clinton: 1,556
Obama: 1,694

And it’s not just the delegate count that clearly spells Hillary’s fate. The popular vote tells the exact same story. It is to be expected that regardless of the margin, the Clinton camp will trumpet tonights win of Hillary’s home state as a devastating defeat. The cable news outlets will play along because the continuation of the Democratic Party candidate selection process affords them a few more weeks of lazy horse-race narration. But at what cost?

Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.

On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.

The pattern has become all too familiar. Clinton is the presumed winner in the upcoming caucus/primary because of wide early margins amongst all demographics. The Obama campaign moves in, organizes, and the gap rapidly narrows leading to either a win or a close second despite the Clinton campaigns repeated willingness to immediately go negative. In contest after contest, Clinton has blown huge margins yet we’re supposed to believe that come November she will not repeat the same performance when facing John McCain? And after putting up with months of the type of abuse from his Democratic rival (the nature of which my eight-year-old niece would be ashamed of) we’re supposed to believe that a knock-kneed Obama, when facing a Republican slime-machine that the Clinton campaign has shown no hesitation in aping, will be too overcome by Rovian shock-and-awe to mount an effective campaign? We already know how the Republican Party is going to attack Obama because we’ve seen it from the Clinton campaign. Obama’s performance in handling Clinton’s slash-and-burn tactics should be more than enough evidence that he’s got what it takes to face a light-weight like John McCain head-on.

I do not want to see Hillary Clinton on television after the November elections explaining that regardless of the fact that she lost the delegate count and the popular vote she is still the best candidate (just like she is doing right now). I would much rather place my bets on a battle-hardened Obama candidacy with a track-record of effective campaigning and driven by a fierce work-ethic.

-mg

An admitted Clinton supporter spells out some of the reasons why the Obama faithful are such a huge turnoff to so many of us. The usual response to these charges is a neat reversal: “How can you fault a person for expressing hope?” – as if they only way to express hope were the deployment of cult-of-personality rhetoric, and as if the hope expressed weren’t mainly selling itself. Elsewhere, one of Obama’s many feminist supporters pulls out the “play with me or I’ll take my ball and go home!” trope, which fewer Clinton supporters use; it hearkens back to the Naderites with its my-way-or-the-highway spoiled child posturing, then goes the extra mile and volunteers a vote for the guy who, having been held prisoner and tortured, still thinks torture’s cool.
Election years! So filled with great sentiment and noble impulse!

-TT