Hillary's Flimsy Case for the Nomination

Hillary's Flimsy Case for the Nomination

By Matt Taibbi

Created Apr 5 2008 - 10:16am

In the space of three short months, I've contrived to write two lengthy,

gloating political obituaries for Hillary Clinton, only to see both of them

blow up in my face after fantastic eleventh-hour comebacks that ended with

scenes of the Hillmeister doing the dual flabby-arm raise on CNN while gusts

of confetti whooshed across the room, obscuring almost everything except the

shocking results blaring out from the crawl on the bottom of the screen.

There was a time when this race looked like it might become the most

uplifting in a generation. It's now threatening to become the most divisive

and disturbing. It is a good time to ponder how that happened - and to

address a few of the other Frequently Asked Questions about this depraved

circus that is now poised to continue well past Pennsylvania.

Isn't Hillary Clinton better qualified than Barack Obama to be president,

given that she is the more experienced candidate?

The idea that Clinton is somehow more qualified to deal with international

crises because she has more "experience" is one of the strangest things I've

seen the media swallow whole in a long time, dating back to the "tiny,

sand-covered, yet-to-master-the-art-of-plumbing nation of Iraq is an

imminent military threat to the United States" fiasco. According to my

calculations -worked out over many hours, using long division out to

eighteen places -Clinton is a second-term senator, while Barack Obama,

conversely, is a first-term senator. By any reasonable standard, both are

political neophytes.

Clinton talks a lot about having visited "over eighty countries" -but then,

Chelsea was with her on a lot of those trips, and I doubt folks are rushing

to hand her the red phone. In case anyone has forgotten what exactly first

lady Hillary Clinton really did all those years, here is a press account of

a 1997 trip that she made to Senegal with her daughter: "Her first stop in

Senegal was at Goree Island, where she peered through the 'Door of No

Return,' through which slaves passed on their way to the dreaded Middle

Passage of the Slave Trade. When she arrived in Dakar, the first lady was

greeted by Senegalese who danced and serenaded her with lyrics written

especially for the occasion." Shit, I feel better about that 3 a.m. phone

call already!

It is worth noting that Hillary was being packed off on these trips into the

heart of Africa at precisely the time when her husband was getting his knob

polished by an intern in the Oval Office. That's not a reflection on her

personally -but for the Hillary camp to tout her advantage in foreign

affairs based on these trips into the marital wilderness, as compared to a

candidate who has actually lived overseas and has actual relatives living in

villages like the ones Hillary passed over in her glass-bottomed boat, is

beyond absurd.

When it comes time for delegates to vote at the convention, shouldn't they

take into account that Clinton has performed better than Obama in the

so-called battleground states? Doesn't she stand a better chance against

John McCain in the national election?

In reality, the exact opposite is true. Everything about the results so far

suggests that Obama is the more electable candidate according to the

"battleground" voter the Clinton camp is claiming for their own.

The Clinton strategy for winning the presidency is so simple, even a

chimpanzee could grasp it. You win the blue states, the Massachusettses and

the New Jerseys, almost automatically, just by being pro-choice and saying

nice things about trees and gay people. You concede the really red states,

the places like Tennessee and Kentucky where you're fucked anyway, places

where huge pluralities believe the devil really exists and has thick red

skin and a bull's horns. That leaves you free to compete hard in the

mixed-bag states by drifting to the right as far as you can without losing

your in-pocket blue territories, which is really hard to do unless you start

wobbling on abortion or selling out the spotted owl. It is through the prism

of this new Clintonian strategy that presidential politics has basically

been reduced to winning Florida and Ohio.

But saying that Hillary is better qualified to take on John McCain because

of her performance in those states only makes sense if (a) you believe that

the people who voted for Clinton in the primaries will not vote for Obama in

the general election, and (b) you believe that no Democrat can win the

traditionally red states. In fact, Hillary has mostly been winning the

traditionally blue states -places like New York, California, Massachusetts

and New Jersey -that are going to go blue in November anyway, no matter who

is running on the Republican ticket. And even in the states Hillary has won,

it has been registered Democrats, not swing voters, who have carried her to

victory, while Obama has dominated her in virtually every contest among

registered independents. Even in her home state of New York, Obama whipped

Hillary among independents by fifteen percent. In Missouri, that margin was

twenty-eight percent. In California? Thirty percent.

Obama, meanwhile, has performed extraordinarily well in traditionally red

states like Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina. And sure, some of that is

due to the black vote. But all of his victories have been marked by two

things: larger-than-usual turnout and routs among independents, leading to

the large number of blowout wins that are basically responsible for his

delegate lead at the moment. On Super Tuesday, Hillary won sixty percent of

the vote in only one contest, Bill's home state of Arkansas. Obama won seven

states by that margin or more.

In other words, Hillary is winning the Democratic voters who are going to

vote Democratic anyway. Obama is bringing in new voters, and he's winning

large numbers of swing voters in red states.

What happens if Hillary ends up taking the nomination despite trailing in

both the popular vote and the delegate count?

Put it this way: If this race ends up getting decided by a bunch of

political insiders, in defiance of the popular vote, it's going to render

all self-righteousness about the 2000 debacle meaningless. And if Hillary

ends up winning it by claiming Florida delegates from an uncontested

election, in the process once again disenfranchising thousands of minority

voters in Miami and other urban areas (who would have voted for Obama, just

as they voted for Gore in 2000), then it'll end up being a double fuck-you

to the public, a signal that the Democrats are no different from the Bush

Republicans.

What if the nomination gets decided by the superdelegates?

In the old days, we had a different name for superdelegates. We called them

party bosses. If either Clinton or Obama wins by virtue of a superdelegate

revolt against the popular will -particularly when both candidates have

given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the superdelegates through their

leadership PACs -then we're looking at an election that huge pluralities of

the country will view as illegitimate. One more experience like this and

we'll end up with Swedish election observers stepping in to run the 2012

race.

Are the Clinton camp's attacks against Obama racist?

Not really. What they are is opportunistic. The Clintonian campaign

philosophy is basically an inverse of the Nixonian Southern Strategy: It

accepts as gospel the notion that the old coalition of white labor and

blacks that kept the South Democratic for generations has been severed

forever by the rise of evangelical Christianity and social conservatism.

Therefore the Clintons don't try to win back those white workers in the lost

Southern states through, say, a more staunch advocacy of unions; instead,

they try to pry away Nixon's old "silent majority" voters by courting the

same fears about safety and national security that Tricky Dick used to take

the South away from Democrats in the first place.

It's no accident that Hillary ran her "3 a.m." commercial in Texas but not

Ohio; this was a cunning ploy to win back those scared white voters whom the

Clinton strategy insists are needed to win. And it worked: After the ad, her

support among white Texans jumped from forty-four to fifty-six percent. Does

it help that her opponent is a black dude with a Muslim middle name? Sure.

But the fearmongering by the Clintons is more about winning blue-collar

votes without alienating their big-business buddies than it is about

exploiting fears of a black planet. With the Clintons, ideology is always

whatever gets them through the night. They haven't been reduced to

balls-out, Willie Horton racism yet. That's not to say that they won't get

there -they're just not there yet.

Won't the Republicans go after Obama with even nastier stuff?

Not long ago, I was talking to former Bush speechwriter David Frum, and he

told me he thinks that Obama's Achilles' heel is patriotism. Put Obama in

the general election, he said, and the Republicans are going to hammer him

relentlessly. They're going to bring up everything they can find that

bolsters the argument that Obama isn't slobberingly, priapistically

patriotic: the famed decision to stop wearing his American flag pin because

it was being used as a substitute for "true patriotism"; the now-infamous

photo of him holding his hands at his waist while Hillary patriotically

clasped her heart during the national anthem; the comments by his wife,

Michelle, about being really proud of America "for the first time in my

adult life"; the associations with Sixties radicals. Along with his middle

name and the unkillable rumors of Muslim leanings, it's obvious where the

Republicans are going to be aiming if they have to run against this guy all

summer. If and when that happens, Obama is going to find out pretty quick

that there's no explanation you can possibly give to Middle America for

taking off your flag lapel pin that is going to make sense to them.

So Obama is weakest on the issue of patriotism?

No -- Obama's real weakness is that nobody really knows yet what he's all

about. He is running as a symbol of a new politics, a politics somehow less

disgusting and full of shit than the old politics. But if it were to get out

that he's not that -that all he is is the same old deal dressed up in black

skin and a natty suit -then he quickly morphs into a different kind of

symbol, a symbol of how an essentially bankrupt political system can

seamlessly repackage itself to a fed-up marketplace by making cosmetic

changes, without altering its basic nature. There have been disturbing signs

along that front, from the accusations that Obama aides called his

anti-NAFTA stance "just politics," to his angry stumpery against a Maytag

plant closing even as he pals around with Lester Crown, a Maytag board

member who raised huge sums for his campaign. Right now, Obama has millions

of voters thinking Santa Claus really does exist; but if he keeps getting

caught turning the usual tricks with campaign donors, attention is going to

shift away from his heroic image and toward the prosaic reality, which in

politics is always grubby and depressing. And with that, his value as a

symbol will evaporate, and Christmas turns into just another holiday with

those same relatives you hated every other day of the year.

Should Obama go negative against Hillary, as the press is urging him to?

It doesn't matter what Obama does at this point. He's fucked either way. If

he gets into a catfight with Hillary, the peanut gallery will slam him for

being just another typical politician. If he sits there and just lets her

plunge knife after knife into his abdomen, he'll have every hack at Time and

Newsweek saying he doesn't have "what it takes" to compete in the "blood

sport" that is politics (as if any of those news-mag yuppie turds know

anything about actual "blood sports"). I'll say one thing: This endless

he-said/she-said piss-fighting between the two camps, with its attendant

daily purging of loose-lipped campaign staffers of the Samantha

Power/Geraldine Ferraro genus, is a bad place for Barack Obama to be. Nobody

in American history has ever been better than the Clintons at calculating

the electoral math of resentment, paranoia, media aggression and just

flat-out, back-alley nastiness. Every day, the Clintons come up with some

new and brilliantly devious way to color the subliminal background of the

electoral canvas, from using comparisons to Jesse Jackson to buttonhole

Obama as a "black candidate," to floating rumors of an "unstoppable"

Hillary-Obama ticket -despite the fact that Hillary would rather eat a KFC

bucket full of her own shit than run with Obama -in order to con

on-the-fence voters into thinking that a vote for Hillary might also be a

vote for Obama. That's why it seemed so weirdly appropriate that Samantha

"she's a monster" Power was forced to resign from the Obama campaign, while

Gerry Ferraro could all but call Obama a ****** and then claim that she was

the victim of discrimination. We expect the Clintons to play dirty, and

don't demand that they apologize for doing so. But we'd be disappointed in

Obama if he went there.

So with all this Democratic infighting, is John McCain going to be the next

president?

McCain may be an asshole, but he's not an idiot. He's doing exactly the

right thing right now by going overseas for a fact-finding tour in Europe

and the Middle East -basically exiling himself from the public eye -while

Obama and Hillary claw each other's eyes out every five minutes on MSNBC.

He's smart enough to know that whichever candidate emerges from the

Democratic scrum is going to have a face like an uncooked side of beef come

general-election season; he doesn't need to say a word to raise both of

their negatives. Hillary is doing half of McCain's dirty work for him by

repeatedly assailing Obama's supposed lack of experience and questionable

patriotism, while Obama is inadvertently helping McCain's cause by forcing

Hillary to go all craven psycho-bitch on him to stay alive in the race. We

saw this effect on display most overtly after the Cleveland debate, when the

angry back-and-forth banter by both Obama and Hillary left McCain, for the

first time, leading in the polls against either candidate.

Democrats had all the momentum going into this race because of seven years

of uninterrupted press scrutiny of the Bush administration; by the time

November rolls around, however, most voters are going to feel like the

Democrats have been in charge for over a year. And McCain will be able to

swoop in and ride a "throw the bums out" uprising straight to the White

House -just in time to actually keep the same old bums in charge. In

American politics, always look for the worst possible scenario to emerge

triumphant. And right now, that's it.

--

NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not

always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material

available to advance understanding of

political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I

believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as

provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright

Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107

"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson

On Apr 7, 2:33 pm, "Gandalf Grey" <valino...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hillary's Flimsy Case for the Nomination

>

> By Matt Taibbi

>

> Created Apr 5 2008 - 10:16am

>

> In the space of three short months, I've contrived to write two lengthy,

> gloating political obituaries for Hillary Clinton, only to see both of them

> blow up in my face after fantastic eleventh-hour comebacks that ended with

> scenes of the Hillmeister doing the dual flabby-arm raise on CNN while gusts

> of confetti whooshed across the room, obscuring almost everything except the

> shocking results blaring out from the crawl on the bottom of the screen.

> There was a time when this race looked like it might become the most

> uplifting in a generation. It's now threatening to become the most divisive

> and disturbing. It is a good time to ponder how that happened - and to

> address a few of the other Frequently Asked Questions about this depraved

> circus that is now poised to continue well past Pennsylvania.

>

> Isn't Hillary Clinton better qualified than Barack Obama to be president,

> given that she is the more experienced candidate?

>

> The idea that Clinton is somehow more qualified to deal with international

> crises because she has more "experience" is one of the strangest things I've

> seen the media swallow whole in a long time, dating back to the "tiny,

> sand-covered, yet-to-master-the-art-of-plumbing nation of Iraq is an

> imminent military threat to the United States" fiasco. According to my

> calculations -worked out over many hours, using long division out to

> eighteen places -Clinton is a second-term senator, while Barack Obama,

> conversely, is a first-term senator. By any reasonable standard, both are

> political neophytes.

>

> Clinton talks a lot about having visited "over eighty countries" -but then,

> Chelsea was with her on a lot of those trips, and I doubt folks are rushing

> to hand her the red phone. In case anyone has forgotten what exactly first

> lady Hillary Clinton really did all those years, here is a press account of

> a 1997 trip that she made to Senegal with her daughter: "Her first stop in

> Senegal was at Goree Island, where she peered through the 'Door of No

> Return,' through which slaves passed on their way to the dreaded Middle

> Passage of the Slave Trade. When she arrived in Dakar, the first lady was

> greeted by Senegalese who danced and serenaded her with lyrics written

> especially for the occasion." Shit, I feel better about that 3 a.m. phone

> call already!

>

> It is worth noting that Hillary was being packed off on these trips into the

> heart of Africa at precisely the time when her husband was getting his knob

> polished by an intern in the Oval Office. That's not a reflection on her

> personally -but for the Hillary camp to tout her advantage in foreign

> affairs based on these trips into the marital wilderness, as compared to a

> candidate who has actually lived overseas and has actual relatives living in

> villages like the ones Hillary passed over in her glass-bottomed boat, is

> beyond absurd.

>

> When it comes time for delegates to vote at the convention, shouldn't they

> take into account that Clinton has performed better than Obama in the

> so-called battleground states? Doesn't she stand a better chance against

> John McCain in the national election?

>

> In reality, the exact opposite is true. Everything about the results so far

> suggests that Obama is the more electable candidate according to the

> "battleground" voter the Clinton camp is claiming for their own.

>

> The Clinton strategy for winning the presidency is so simple, even a

> chimpanzee could grasp it. You win the blue states, the Massachusettses and

> the New Jerseys, almost automatically, just by being pro-choice and saying

> nice things about trees and gay people. You concede the really red states,

> the places like Tennessee and Kentucky where you're fucked anyway, places

> where huge pluralities believe the devil really exists and has thick red

> skin and a bull's horns. That leaves you free to compete hard in the

> mixed-bag states by drifting to the right as far as you can without losing

> your in-pocket blue territories, which is really hard to do unless you start

> wobbling on abortion or selling out the spotted owl. It is through the prism

> of this new Clintonian strategy that presidential politics has basically

> been reduced to winning Florida and Ohio.

>

> But saying that Hillary is better qualified to take on John McCain because

> of her performance in those states only makes sense if (a) you believe that

> the people who voted for Clinton in the primaries will not vote for Obama in

> the general election, and (b) you believe that no Democrat can win the

> traditionally red states. In fact, Hillary has mostly been winning the

> traditionally blue states -places like New York, California, Massachusetts

> and New Jersey -that are going to go blue in November anyway, no matter who

> is running on the Republican ticket. And even in the states Hillary has won,

> it has been registered Democrats, not swing voters, who have carried her to

> victory, while Obama has dominated her in virtually every contest among

> registered independents. Even in her home state of New York, Obama whipped

> Hillary among independents by fifteen percent. In Missouri, that margin was

> twenty-eight percent. In California? Thirty percent.

>

> Obama, meanwhile, has performed extraordinarily well in traditionally red

> states like Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina. And sure, some of that is

> due to the black vote. But all of his victories have been marked by two

> things: larger-than-usual turnout and routs among independents, leading to

> the large number of blowout wins that are basically responsible for his

> delegate lead at the moment. On Super Tuesday, Hillary won sixty percent of

> the vote in only one contest, Bill's home state of Arkansas. Obama won seven

> states by that margin or more.

>

> In other words, Hillary is winning the Democratic voters who are going to

> vote Democratic anyway. Obama is bringing in new voters, and he's winning

> large numbers of swing voters in red states.

>

> What happens if Hillary ends up taking the nomination despite trailing in

> both the popular vote and the delegate count?

>

> Put it this way: If this race ends up getting decided by a bunch of

> political insiders, in defiance of the popular vote, it's going to render

> all self-righteousness about the 2000 debacle meaningless. And if Hillary

> ends up winning it by claiming Florida delegates from an uncontested

> election, in the process once again disenfranchising thousands of minority

> voters in Miami and other urban areas (who would have voted for Obama, just

> as they voted for Gore in 2000), then it'll end up being a double fuck-you

> to the public, a signal that the Democrats are no different from the Bush

> Republicans.

>

> What if the nomination gets decided by the superdelegates?

>

> In the old days, we had a different name for superdelegates. We called them

> party bosses. If either Clinton or Obama wins by virtue of a superdelegate

> revolt against the popular will -particularly when both candidates have

> given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the superdelegates through their

> leadership PACs -then we're looking at an election that huge pluralities of

> the country will view as illegitimate. One more experience like this and

> we'll end up with Swedish election observers stepping in to run the 2012

> race.

>

> Are the Clinton camp's attacks against Obama racist?

>

> Not really. What they are is opportunistic. The Clintonian campaign

> philosophy is basically an inverse of the Nixonian Southern Strategy: It

> accepts as gospel the notion that the old coalition of white labor and

> blacks that kept the South Democratic for generations has been severed

> forever by the rise of evangelical Christianity and social conservatism.

> Therefore the Clintons don't try to win back those white workers in the lost

> Southern states through, say, a more staunch advocacy of unions; instead,

> they try to pry away Nixon's old "silent majority" voters by courting the

> same fears about safety and national security that Tricky Dick used to take

> the South away from Democrats in the first place.

>

> It's no accident that Hillary ran her "3 a.m." commercial in Texas but not

> Ohio; this was a cunning ploy to win back those scared white voters whom the

> Clinton strategy insists are needed to win. And it worked: After the ad, her

> support among white Texans jumped from forty-four to fifty-six percent. Does

> it help that her opponent is a black dude with a Muslim middle name? Sure.

> But the fearmongering by the Clintons is more about winning blue-collar

> votes without alienating their big-business buddies than it is about

> exploiting fears of a black planet. With the Clintons, ideology is always

> whatever gets them through the night. They haven't been reduced to

> balls-out, Willie Horton racism yet. That's not to say that they won't get

> there -they're just not there yet.

>

> Won't the Republicans go after Obama with even nastier stuff?

>

> Not long ago, I was talking to former Bush speechwriter David Frum, and he

> told me he thinks that Obama's Achilles' heel is patriotism. Put Obama in

> the general election, he said, and the Republicans are going to hammer him

> relentlessly. They're going to bring up everything they can find that

> bolsters the argument that Obama isn't slobberingly, priapistically

> patriotic: the famed decision to stop wearing his American flag pin because

> it was being used as a substitute for "true patriotism"; the now-infamous

> photo of him holding his hands at his waist while Hillary patriotically

> clasped her heart during the national anthem; the comments by his wife,

> Michelle, about being really proud of America "for the first time in my

> adult life"; the associations with Sixties radicals. Along with his middle

> name and the unkillable rumors of Muslim leanings, it's obvious where the

> Republicans are going to be aiming if they have to run against this guy all

> summer. If and when that happens, Obama is going to find out pretty quick

> that there's no explanation you can possibly give to Middle America for

> taking off your flag lapel pin that is going to make sense to them.

>

> So Obama is weakest on the issue of patriotism?

>

> No -- Obama's real weakness is that nobody really knows yet what he's all

> about. He is running as a symbol of a new politics, a politics somehow less

> disgusting and full of shit than the old politics. But if it were to get out

> that he's not that -that all he is is the same old deal dressed up in black

> skin and a natty suit -then he quickly morphs into a different kind of

> symbol, a symbol of how an essentially bankrupt political system can

> seamlessly repackage itself to a fed-up marketplace by making cosmetic

> changes, without altering its basic nature. There have been disturbing signs

> along that front, from the accusations that Obama aides called his

> anti-NAFTA stance "just politics," to his angry stumpery against a Maytag

> plant closing even as he pals around with Lester Crown, a Maytag board

> member who raised huge sums for his campaign. Right now, Obama has millions

> of voters thinking Santa Claus really does exist; but if he keeps getting

> caught turning the usual tricks with campaign donors, attention is going to

> shift away from his heroic image and toward the prosaic reality, which in

> politics is always grubby and depressing. And with that, his value as a

> symbol will evaporate, and Christmas turns into just another holiday with

> those same relatives you hated every other day of the year.

>

> Should Obama go negative against Hillary, as the press is urging him to?

>

> It doesn't matter what Obama does at this point. He's fucked either way. If

> he gets into a catfight with Hillary, the peanut gallery will slam him for

> being just another typical politician. If he sits there and just lets her

> plunge knife after knife into his abdomen, he'll have every hack at Time and

> Newsweek saying he doesn't have "what it takes" to compete in the "blood

> sport" that is politics (as if any of those news-mag yuppie turds know

> anything about actual "blood sports"). I'll say one thing: This endless

> he-said/she-said piss-fighting between the two camps, with its attendant

> daily purging of loose-lipped campaign staffers of the Samantha

> Power/Geraldine Ferraro genus, is a bad place for Barack Obama to be. Nobody

> in American history has ever been better than the Clintons at calculating

> the electoral math of resentment, paranoia, media aggression and just

> flat-out, back-alley nastiness. Every day, the Clintons come up with some

> new and brilliantly devious way to color the subliminal background of the

> electoral canvas, from using comparisons to Jesse Jackson to buttonhole

> Obama as a "black candidate," to floating rumors of an "unstoppable"

> Hillary-Obama ticket -despite the fact that Hillary would rather eat a KFC

> bucket full of her own shit than run with Obama -in order to con

> on-the-fence voters into thinking that a vote for Hillary might also be a

> vote for Obama. That's why it seemed so weirdly appropriate that Samantha

> "she's a monster" Power was forced to resign from the Obama campaign, while

> Gerry Ferraro could all but call Obama a ****** and then claim that she was

> the victim of discrimination. We expect the Clintons to play dirty, and

> don't demand that they apologize for doing so. But we'd be disappointed in

> Obama if he went there.

>

> So with all this Democratic infighting, is John McCain going to be the next

> president?

>

> McCain may be an asshole, but he's not an idiot. He's doing exactly the

> right thing right now by going overseas for a fact-finding tour in Europe

> and the Middle East -basically exiling himself from the public eye -while

> Obama and Hillary claw each other's eyes out every five minutes on MSNBC.

> He's smart enough to know that whichever candidate emerges from the

> Democratic scrum is going to have a face like an uncooked side of beef come

> general-election season; he doesn't need to say a word to raise both of

> their negatives. Hillary is doing half of McCain's dirty work for him by

> repeatedly assailing Obama's supposed lack of experience and questionable

> patriotism, while Obama is inadvertently helping McCain's cause by forcing

> Hillary to go all craven psycho-bitch on him to stay alive in the race. We

> saw this effect on display most overtly after the Cleveland debate, when the

> angry back-and-forth banter by both Obama and Hillary left McCain, for the

> first time, leading in the polls against either candidate.

>

> Democrats had all the momentum going into this race because of seven years

> of uninterrupted press scrutiny of the Bush administration; by the time

> November rolls around, however, most voters are going to feel like the

> Democrats have been in charge for over a year. And McCain will be able to

> swoop in and ride a "throw the bums out" uprising straight to the White

> House -just in time to actually keep the same old bums in charge. In

> American politics, always look for the worst possible scenario to emerge

> triumphant. And right now, that's it.

>

> --

> NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not

> always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material

> available to advance understanding of

> political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I

> believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as

> provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright

> Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107

>

> "A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

> spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

> government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

> suffering deeply in spirit,

> and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

> debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

> patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

> back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

> stake."

> -Thomas Jefferson

>This man has no authority whatsoever to tell who and who can't run for president..

Let him do his TV work..and MHOB!!