Pancake City

It’s not too often I agree with Robert Novak. In fact, this may be the first time that I have. But this is a sound overview of the Democratic nomination race at this point.

Subtitle: Why die-hard MCain-hating conservatives are full of horse @#$%.

Mittmentum came to a sad stop today with Mitt Romney suspending his campaign for the Republican nomination. (Suspending rather than ending a campaign allows the candidate to keep his delegates until the party convention).

It was obvious he was going to lose to McCain weeks ago, and that he was going to drop out soon after Super Tuesday, but having the actual event occur crystallizes reality in a way that may significantly alter the thinking of Democratic party voters.

After Super Tuesday, the vote and delegate totals between Clinton and Obama from that day were virtually identical. Obama has favorable states in the rest of February, Clinton favorable states in the rest of March + April, and there was every reason to think that the fight could go on to the convention.

With Mitt Romney dropping out, it now becomes undeniable that the Republican party has selected their candidate. Every day that goes by that Obama and Clinton are still fighting and spending money against each other gives McCain an advantage. McCain can raise money and unify his base while the Democratic nomination battle goes on.

Now, this isn’t a total lost for Democrats as a long primary campaign puts the focus of the media and the country on them, helping them energize the base and familiarize themselves with voters who aren’t paying close attention to the race. It’s also hard to run attack ads against your opponent when you don’t know who your opponent will be.

But on balance I think it’s a negative development, and Democratic voters are going to start feeling the pressure to settle on someone. This won’t change the votes of die-hard Clinton or Obama fans, but undecided or soft supporters will take it into account. This makes momentum and electability against John McCain real factors for the first time.

The way this may help Obama is that many of the February primary and caucus states favor him. He may well end up with a long string of victories in the next three weeks. These victories could create a powerful perception that more of the party is gravitating to him, creating a snowball effect that will get soft Clinton supporters to vote for Obama, a candidate with similar policy positions as Clinton, if they think doing so will end the nomination battle early.

The reverse could happen too, if Clinton is able to fight Obama to a draw in February. But for now this development favors Obama’s campaign, due to the upcoming primary schedule.

On another topic: die-hard MCain-hating conservatives are full of horse poopy.

The rapid conservative wing of the party, including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter, have been frothing at the mouth at McCain’s nomination, making ultimatums like “I’m staying home if McCain is nominated” or in Coulter’s case, “I’m campaigning for Hillary Clinton if McCain is the nominee.”

What a bunch of B.S. Every conservative Republican is going to find some rationalization to support McCain once the Democratic party nominates The Next Liberal Devil. McCain is going to throw them a bone, kiss their boo-boos, and tell them everything will be all right. They will wipe their runny noses, sniff a bit and then agree to come home. For the good of the country. Or so we don’t cut and run in Iraq. Or whatever rationalization they will come up to hold their nose and vote. I just don’t see many of them having the integrity to stay home and not donate to McCain once the democrats nominate someone they hate even more.

I try not to become too involved with politics during Presidential elections, but I can’t help it. I didn’t really realize how much I’m into following politics at times until I made a tag cloud of all of my writing for the past four years, and “politics” came up as the #1 tag.

The following is a comment I left on a favorite political site of mine, The Washington Note, that became long enough to deserve its own post. Steve Clemons, the author of TWN, has some really good writing on foreign policy with a level of detail beyond what usually appears in a newspaper, and some interesting thoughts on the election, especially in his criticism of the candidates.

It is about the news today (Wednesday) that Hillary Clinton lent $5 million dollars to her campaign early in January. I’m not sure who if anyone will be interested in such a insider politics topics, so this is also a good opportunity for me to try out the “Read the rest” option.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thoughts:

* I am astounded every time a pundit willingly, without threat of death or torture, refers to today as “Super Duper Tuesday”. Unless you are reporting from the ball bin at a McDonald’s playground, or are ending your Tuesday report with an immediate trip for some ice cream, just call it Super Tuesday.

* Anyone else think Obama Girl is creepy? Is it not called stalking if it’s on YouTube?

* I have zero idea what the results will be, and I’m no good at predicting, so I won’t bother. The polls for California, for example, are all over the place. One major one has Clinton up by 10 points, and another has Obama up by 10. Twenty percentage points is a huge difference. It seems like the polls for the Democratic contests so far have been more wrong than right.

* There are political trading markets like Intrade that allow you to buy and sell shares of a candidate. The price is based on what percentage chance you think he or she has to win the party nomination, among other bets.I find that these markets are poor at predicting the future and late-breaking trends (they had Barack Obama at 70 until the N.H. results came in), especially when there are large groups of undecided voters, but a good sample of current opinion and conventional wisdom. Barack has been at 35 for the past few weeks, and slowly inched up to 40.

* In the last two days though, his share price shot up to 50. I’m not sure why. He’s still behind a few points in most national polls against Clinton. I wonder if this is the equivalent of insider information (e.g. exit polls), or if traders are just lagging behind Obama’s rise in the polls that started several days before the rise in his share price. (Edit: Went up 5 more in last hour, to 55. Promising exit polls for him were released recently. No way to know how accurate the exit polls are, but I guess that explains the run up in share price for now.

I stumbled upon this commentary by Tucker Carlson about the 2000 Republican Presidential candidate debates. Guess how Bush acted four years ago? It makes it easier to understand why he’s held far fewer press conferences than any modern-era President.