Obama...gets stomped in West Virginia

It is strangely unsatisfying. Around Wednesday or Thursday the pundits and America’s Democrats began leaving Hillary for dead. Nothing happened in the previous 24 hours but the settling of North Carolina and Indiana, which fell out as expected Those two contests confirmed what the previous 40 or so primaries and caucuses had already confirmed. Barack can raise money, rouse people and say “change” 2-3000 time in each speech. Hillary brings a square jawed, long suffering intelligence with a confidence in her own abilities along with sour, old school politics. Barack wins many contests by huge margins, Hillary wins key States by much small margins. But the bottom line is that Barack wins. It has been that way since Super Tuesday where the math could not work out any other way. But now, she is dead. Super Delegates are peeling off a few each week and there is now a palpable sense of inevitability.

They were willing to let her hang around till June 3 and the last primary until she was quoted in The USA Today as saying:
“"Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me . . . There's a pattern emerging here."

Now the party strategists who were divided about whether this long term campaign dragging on is bad for the party, are divided no more. So Hillary is left for dead but like all good zombies she is walking around like she does not know it. there is a hubris among the Clinton’s which will not allow acknowledgment of defeat. Their spin meisters will begin discussing how she beat all odds to get as far as she did, fighting against the media and the establishment. To be fair she has beaten all of the odds to get so far but it has more to do with being a women and all the institutional challenges she overcame. She has transformed the discussion on that count and has made a great contribution to the national dialogue. I just wish that when she spoke i did not always feel like I was being scolded. I believe that and the nationwide exhaustion with the Clinton Bush years made someone like Obama a foregone conclusion. That this powerful man who can speak so brilliantly burst on the scene as she was moving forward has to be tremendously galling but her life in the public eye, like her life with Bill has never been a walk in the park. She will grit her teeth and move on, and no doubt, prepare for 2012.

Now it comes to Obama/Mc cain. I like John Mc cain. I have liked him almost his whole career, without always agreeing with him. he is, or was kind of like Bill Clinton for me in that regard. But in order to unite his party and rally the old politics he has, since Romney dropped out of the race, sold his soul. I know that with a guy like Mc Cain he is likely doing and saying what he thinks he needs to do and say to get elected and i have every confidence that he will break with Bush’s failed economic policies and that he will appoint common sense Judges who will apply the law with the spirit of our great constitution honored as opposed to interpretations of it’s literal meaning. Both those things are important to me. Unfortunately he is dug in to our failed policies in Iraq and that along with his age makes it an easy choice.

The problems with Barack are many fold but me like many others will say, so what? it is the fact that he has no record of long term political “accomplishments” gained from Washington deal making that give me the hope that he will bring something different, that he will be something different, that he will transcend our current political nightmare of the 50.1 percent to 49.9 percent “mandate” that allows the winners to take all and carry their own agenda, no matter what the cost for the rest of the country. I am scared of Obama, more then a little because he is so charismatic and such a great speaker that there is chance for him to become a demagogue and a dictator if it all goes to hell. But, it will be exciting. My brother has been calling for a benevolent dictator for some time. Perhaps now he get his way.