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The more often Hillary describes Obama as a seriously flawed candidate—though not a Muslim, as far as she knows—the truer that statement becomes. So Rachael, while I love your idealism and see nothing naive about caring more for your country than your party, from a strictly partisan perspective you must be hoping this Democratic primary goes on and on; every day it does is a good one for John McCain.
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The brouhaha over Charlotte Allen's awful essay continued today on Washingtonpost.com, where the author fielded questions from readers almost as uniformly incensed as XXers were by the piece. She started off the chat by poking a huge hole in Outlook editor John Pomfret's rushed insistence that the piece was satire (Allen: "I'm not sure whether I'd characterize the piece as satire, but I'd certainly characterize it as humor: my poking fun at the dumb things my sex does"). For a woman who felt perfectly comfortable dashing off a couple thousand words on how unintelligent the vast majority of her sex is, she sure didn't seem to have much of a cogent argument to offer in the chat. Instead, she comes across as very petty and once again not funny at all despite trying hard to be so. Allen doesn't so much make an argument as fire off a series of defensive "jokes" (sample witticism—"Is the pope German?"). Her back is clearly up against the wall—she might be the most hated woman in the feminist blogosphere right now—but it's pretty telling that the majority of readers' questions were longer than her responses. I guess Allan wasn't expecting women to be able to string so many words together, though.
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Well, I woke up this morning, switched on my computer, read the headlines, and suddenly had a nightmare vision of Denver-Democratic-Convention-as-Florida-in-2000: a political horror show in which two candidates are running neck and neck, both sides are lining up their lawyers, legal scholars are looking for decades-old precedents, pundits are howling, and no one knows how to resolve the dispute because this sort of thing hasn't happened for a century or more.
That nightmare would be bad for the candidates, bad for the Democratic Party, bad for the political process, bad for the country. It might even be bad for John McCain, since if he won, in the wake of a Democratic Party meltdown, his victory would be suspect, too. Democracy only works when an election is held according to a set of rules which most people in a given society agree to abide by in advance, even when they don't like the result. That advance agreement is what then confers legitimacy on the winner, who is accepted by the losing side because he won fair and square. But when the rules suddenly become unclear, as they did in 2000, and the victor has to be chosen according to some other, ad hoc, previously untested procedure, as in 2000, the winner will inevitably be considered illegitimate by some part of the population.
And—let's face it—no candidate chosen after a rowdy, chaotic, confusing August convention will be considered legitimate by all Democrats, and may not be considered a legitimate presidential candidate by the general public, either. What are superdelegates, after all? Why haven't we ever talked about them before? Why did the Democratic Party impose proportional representation, the worst voting system known to man, on its candidate selection process? Why exactly don't the Florida and Michigan votes count? Should they be held again, as the Detroit Free Press says today? None of these questions can be resolved, post facto, and since they haven't come up before, or at least not in living memory, no one knows how to resolve them in advance.
Maybe some smooth, establishment thing will now happen, either Hillary or Obama will be gently induced to step down, and the Democrats will move on to do battle with McCain, secure that their candidate is the right one. And if not? Time to start playing the creepy horror movie music, since the scary shark scenes are approaching fast ...
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Check's in the mail, Hanna. Not sure how our bake sale/carwash/raffle to end the never-ending primary fits into the campaign-finance laws, but let's let the lawyers figure that out.
I don't know whether Rush Limbaugh had an effect on the Texas or Ohio primaries or not, Melinda—people are twisting the data into all kinds of knots today to make their cases, but as blogger Allahpundit puts it: "a man who couldn't sway enough conservatives to tip close primaries from John McCain to Mitt Romney probably isn't capable of getting them excited about Hillary Clinton." Whatever the case, I think my fellow righties who are encouraging voters to go for Hillary because she'd be easier to beat in the fall might be too clever by half, and last night's results prove it. For the second time in two months, pundits and experts were itching to write Hillary's political obituary, and for the second time she responded with a resounding victory. Do Republicans really want her to get the nomination? Eight months is an eternity in the era of the 24-hour-news cycle, and anything could happen.
I had a choice between ballots yesterday when I went to vote in the Ohio primary, but I happily took the GOP ballot and voted for McCain. It's not my nature to play political games, but if it were, I'd have voted Obama. I know it might sound naive or idealist, but I want this country to end up with the best possible president come November. I would be thrilled with McCain, and I could live with Obama, but I sure don't want to roll the dice on Hillary.
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I hear you, Hanna and Emily et al.—OK, pretty much everybody, now—and no doubt you're right, but I have to confess that I don't feel entirely ready for this to be over. I like this contest. I like the analysis and entrail-reading. I like getting up in the morning to find out how the returns came in overnight. I like watching as the Democratic party tries to manage the Godzilla-versus-Mothra nature of this battle between two formidable candidates and as superdelegates and party people try to decide which side to side with. It's suspenseful and exciting—like a great basketball game that's now gone into overtime. It doesn't seem such a bad thing if these two candidates continue to differentiate their positions and levels of readiness; and if Obama starts getting tougher media questioning and being obliged to respond, surely that will enable all of us to get to know him better. And I think that the primary results do enable us to look for illuminating patterns among voters.
Ruth Marcus has a terrific column today in the Post. She convincingly refutes Hillary Clinton's complaints about sexism: Given that Clinton began this race as the establishment favorite, Marcus point out, it's ludicrous for her to plead that the playing field, for her, isn't level. However, Marcus also points out that for future female presidential candidates, sexism, while it may not be the most constraining "-ism" in America, cannot be dismissed. Noting that Hillary Clinton doesn't do as well among Democratic men as she does among women, and that there have been sexist overtones to some criticisms directed at her—the b-word among them—Marcus says, "I've been wondering whether the country, particularly the male half, can comfortably fit a woman into its mental picture of a president. Obama's success stems in large part from his ability to use rhetoric to inspire and persuade. The country has scant experience of a woman in that role." She quotes Ruth Mandel, director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, pointing out that Americans lack "historical memory" of a charismatic leader who is a woman. Would we accept one, I wonder? Would voters flock to a woman with Obama-like charisma? If not, why not? Hillary Clinton isn't the candidate to answer these questions; there are too many variables, too many other reasons why someone might oppose her, besides gender. But I think these are interesting conversations to have and I'm prepared to keep having them for a while longer. It beats working.
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Hanna, you write: "My only thought this morning is that I really want it to be over. I'll vow to raise $5 million for Hillary if she'll drop out." So, do you accept Paypal?
Hillary's selling points are that she's tough, she's a fighter, she's experienced. Doesn't this argument come apart in the fall in a contest against John McCain for the undecided and independent voters?
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Slate minds seem to be thinking alike today. I hadn't read Mickey's crack of dawn post when I thought I had an inspiration for the deadlocked Democratic race: What if the superdelegates all lined up behind whoever won their state? Maybe that could deliver us a clear winner. I truly had no idea whether Obama or Clinton would fare better, so it struck me as the perfect disinterested proposition. Since over at Trailhead they're much closer to the numbers than I am (no, I'm not saying we're math-challenged here at XX, just that we're not doing number-crunching duty, and they are), I asked for their help. And the winner is ... well, so much for a simple clarifier. Clinton and Obama are almost dead even in superdelegates when they're apportioned this way: 289 for Clinton, 286 for Obama. Add that to their regular delegate totals, and you get: Obama at 1,737 and Clinton at 1,654. Now I'm hoping Trailhead will keep up the calculating and figure out what Clinton would have to do to win in this alternate reality—what states she'd have to win and by what margins.
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Well, as Chris Matthews rather too harshly pointed out to Hillaryland's Lisa Caputo last night, it can't really be buyer's remorse, given that each state is a new group of buyers. (Still, ungallant to have someone on and then tell her that her metaphor is dumb.) This morning, there seemed to be some question about whether it's really the Democrats who are dithering; after Rush Limbaugh spent all week telling Texas Republicans to turn out for Hillary in their state's open primary, on the premise that she would be the weaker candidate in the fall, 9 percent of the Democratic vote did come from self-identified Republicans. Only as it turned out, they broke for Obama! I can't remember another primary in which it was so hard to tell the true crossovers from the aspiring process manipulators. Or when so many people in both parties were claiming they'd vote with the other party in the fall if their candidate did not prevail. So, this is still a happy day for El Rushbo—with Hillary pledging to go down shooting—and one mixed-up election. And given the—how do I say this?—previous lack of close personal friendship between Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, the very idea of him getting to broker this thing must make everything that's happened since 2000 seem almost worth it. (Unless, like those guys yelling, "Iron my shirts," he was joking at her expense.)
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I'm also ready to close the deal already, one way or the other. That sentiment doesn't exactly seem to be sweeping the nation, though, at least not when each state gets its turn to vote. And those women: Wow, are they coming out in droves—59 percent of the vote in Ohio; 57 percent in Texas, Vermont, and Rhode Island. If the men were that jazzed, Obama would probably have won by now. Since he hasn't, the superdelegates seem to me to be in an awkward position. If they break for Obama, they're cutting off the process the party designed before it plays out and right after Hillary proved her staying power. If they don't, then the party continues a long march toward a stalemate. What do you do when one person is winning and the other one can't catch up but the race is long and the guy in the lead is only a stride or two ahead? It's an oddly dissatisfying variation on the tortoise and the hare.
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My only thought this morning is that I really want it to be over. I'll vow to raise $5 million for Hillary if she'll drop out.
Second thought: I'm glad Cindy traded canary yellow for red—it looks better on her. Hillary boringly wore red, as I predicted.
Final thought: This is a result of Democratic neuroticism—don't want to be a member of any club that would have me. When one rises high, they just see his/her flaws, and vice versa. It's like the girl who can't close the deal and get married. Republicans, though originally faced with worse, more flawed choices, just know how to make a decision. They are the Deciders. We are the Ditherers.
Read the rest of the conversation.
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I spent the night trying and failing to find a caucus to eavesdrop on here in El Paso. A volunteer at Hillary's headquarters downtown gave me a bum steer, and I found myself at an empty courthouse. Instead, I headed to a Chili's near a caucus center. The mood around 8 p.m. was a bit punchy. Caucus-goers had just begun to trickle in. A Latino Obama supporter—a county courthouse clerk—ordered nachos and asked the bartender to change the TV from basketball to CNN. He was excited to find that Obama was ahead. He had been a supporter of the Clintons, he told me, but witnessing the past few weeks' of "mudslinging" from Hlilary—"that turned me off," he said, as had his growing sense that Hillary's policies were shaped by special-interest groups. Giddily, he talked about how many Obama signs he'd seen by polling places during the day. "El Paso isn't usually real big on voting," he said, "but we had huge turnout at the courthouse and then at the caucus." Listening to him talk, two young female Chili's employees defended Hillary. "I like her resistance to mandatory testing," a young blonde named Sarah told me. Conversation turned to the rumors that Obama was Muslim. Both women said they thought it was possible Obama was not Christian at all but a secret agent of Islam. "You always hear rumors about them working from the inside out," Sarah told me.
Around 9 p.m., I headed over to Frankie's, a pool hall/entertainment center where Obama supporters had been told to gather to watch the returns on MSNBC. About 20 people were there when I arrived—among them, two interracial couples, a few attractive young women, and a lone young Latino man—but the place steadily filled up. The news wasn't looking good for Obama, and the edge of excitement ebbed: With some 50 percent of the votes counted, Clinton had overtaken Obama. Jessica, a psychology Ph.D. who had been a precinct captain, said that her caucus had gone for Clinton. Berto, the lone Latino man, said his precinct had gone 42-5 for Hillary. More food and beer was ordered. Jessica explained to me why she had become a volunteer for Obama, and what she said stood in stark contrast to the meme that Obama inspires voters by purveying vague hopes. Back in January, she told me, she had read a "blue book" outlining the specifics of Obama's health-care plan and more. After reading about Hillary's, she was convinced his was smarter. "I know he takes flak for not covering everyone. But we need to think sensibly about what we can accomplish."
As we sat there, it became clearer that Hillary was likely to take Texas—even though everyone was unsure about how and when the caucus votes would be counted. (Several caucuses continued until nearly 9 p.m., if not later.) During Hillary's speech from Ohio, groans rang out at the words "when that phone rings at 3 in the morning ..." But the mood brightened when Obama spoke—especially when he talked about focusing on restoring America's reputation around the world.
Just now, MSNBC has projected that Hillary would take Texas. So the race continues.