Prairie Weather

Pants -- Hillary's pants -- on fire

Remember how there was once the (quaint, antique)  Constitution and then there was the law of Bush?  Well, we may be electing another fantasist.  First there is The Math and then (just as with Karl Rove) we have Clinton's math.

“I’m very proud that as of today, I have received more votes by the people who have voted than anyone else,” Clinton said the day after her victory in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary.

But has she really? No. Not really. Not unless you throw out the existing rules of the Democratic Party and invent a new set of Hillary Rules.

Under Hillary Rules, Clinton counts the popular vote in Michigan, where she was the only major candidate on the ballot. The Democratic Party does not recognize those votes.

Under Hillary Rules, Clinton also counts the popular vote in Florida, where candidates were forbidden to campaign. The Democratic Party does not recognize the results of the Florida primary, either.

Under Hillary Rules, Clinton throws out the “votes by the people who have voted” in the states of Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington, because those were caucus states, where popular vote tallies were not officially kept and where, by the way, Obama won three out of the four contests.

Under Hillary Rules, Clinton gets to choose the contests that help her, throw out the contests that do not and declare herself the winner.

Steve Kornacki of The New York Observer did an excellent, detailed story last week on Clinton and the popular vote, going through a number of different scenarios and projections for the contests that remain.

His conclusion: “The point is that under the most basic and probably the fairest criteria — simply counting every state and U.S. possession where there was a legitimate primary or a caucus where popular votes were tallied — Obama will finish the primary season hundreds of thousands of votes ahead of Clinton.”

Oh, okay.  But after all, a campaign is a campaign and, you know, politicians do these things...

Yeah, we know.  They do.  And then they go on doing it.  In case anyone's forgotten, there's always the example of the Bush campaign followed by the Bush push in Florida followed by the Bush presidency.

We rest our case.

What "victory" really looks like

Clinton has picked 9 superdelegates since her win in Ohio. Obama has picked up 40. Since Pennsylvania, Clinton has picked up 5; Obama has picked up nine. ... Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic ...

Ambinder goes on to comment:

There are 237 left. The trickle of superdelegates to Obama reflects two forces. One is that superdelegates are becoming more and more concerned with that if the party fails to unify quickly, it won't be able to unify, ever. The second is a conviction that because Obama will win (cross-reference the mathematical arguments), the party must draw hermetic circle around him as quickly as possible in order to avoid allowing any more of his magic to escape. This pressure is crossed by the superdelegates' own personal political concerns and their own personal preferences.  So one one hand, the superdelegates face peer pressure and public pressure to coalesce around Obama; on the other, they nurture their private doubts.

And then, of course, there's the behavior pattern that emerged from the Clintons' (plural) campaign.  The last thing we need is a bullying, unscrupulous president with a sense of personal entitlement and a tendency to scoff at "rules."  Been there.  Done that.

Another hint for the super d's

For a sometime New Jerseyite, the state's embrace of Clinton in the February primary was a little hard to take.  But all that has changed according to Andrew Sullivan who sees it as "buyers' remorse." 

The truth about Clinton remains: massive negatives, little appeal to Independents, and several looming scandals involving Bill.

Latest polls are showing New Jersey has come to its senses with Obama's favorable ratings have risen significantly while Clinton's lag by 12 %.  Among Jersey independents, Obama is walking away with the lead.  Let's hope the super delegates get the message.

Wait!  There's more from New Jersey via the pollblog,  FiveThirtyEight.

In New Jersey, a Monmouth/Gannett poll shows impressive-sized leads for both Democrats: Hillary Clinton leads John McCain by 14 points, while Barack Obama leads him by fully 24 points.This result is so optimistic for the Democrats as to frankly stretch credulity, and I know very little about the Monmouth/Gannett polling shop. At the same time, there have been a handful of decidedly optimistic polling results for the Democrats in recent days (such as their performance in Indiana in the Selzer poll), while at the same time both are doing fairly well in the Rasmussen tracker. The conventional wisdom that the elongated primary season may be hurting the Democrats does not have a lot of evidentiary wisdom behind it. As I have said before, it isn't when it ends that the problem, but how it ends that counts.

Iran wins a round

The number Bush has done on US relations with Iran is coming back to hurt us where it will hurt the most:  the dollar.  Iran is no longer trading oil in dollars, according a Reuters report.

Iran, the world's fourth-largest oil producer, is conducting all its crude trading in euro and yen, instead of the U.S. dollar, an Iranian official was quoted as saying on Wednesday.

Iran has been reducing its exposure to the dollar as the United States has ratcheted up sanctions because of a dispute over Tehran's nuclear programme. In December, an official said 90 percent of its oil export earnings were outside the dollar.

"All of Iran's oil trading is being done with euro and yen," Hojjatollah Ghanimifard, international affairs director of the National Iranian Oil Company, told Fars News Agency.

This will affect our economy in many ways, but most notable will be in the number of dollars we will have to hand over for oil as the dollar loses value and, worse!, China decides to sell its loser-dollars.

Vijay Vaitheeswaran of the Economist was interviewed this morning on NPR about rising gas prices.   Why are prices rising as such a rate?  There's no solid answer.  Some troubles in Nigeria and Britain, both big oil producers, can account for a small and temporary rise.   But in general, Vaitheeswaran says, we should be seeing lower prices  during this season.  It probably has more to do with speculation -- after all, the oil companies are reporting huge revenues and investors are rushing in to take advantage of the higher values of petroleum shares.

What about a gas tax moratorium?  Sheer stupidity!  If the price were to dip now as we go into summer, people who would have been driving less will drive more and the price of gas will soar -- the "rebound effect" -- to even higher levels.  Anyone ask McCain and Clinton about that?

Powerful "bubba" may guarantee Clinton a North Carolina "victory"

Clinton just got a big boost in North Carolina.  That state's governor, Mike Easley, will endorse Hillary Clinton today bringing with him the bulk North Carolina's blue collar voters.

"He's clean in the culture. Easley's wrecked the Charlotte Motor Speedway doing 150 miles per hour, and Bubba likes that," said Saunders, referring to NASCAR fan Easley’s 2003 race car crash. “He's a hunter. He's a strong Second Amendment guy. He gives her great cultural validation in the state of North Carolina."

Clinton aides were jubilant.

"Huge deal," Clinton's North Carolina director, Ace Smith, told Politico.

Smith, sticking with the campaign’s official line, said that if Clinton could keep the margin within 15 percentage points — she currently trails Obama by 12  percent in an average of polls  – she'd have won a victory.

But other Clinton backers were more optimistic, saying Clinton had a shot at the definition of victory she set for Obama in Pennsylvania: Victory.

"The governor clearly feels she can now pull this out," said a prominent Clinton supporter.

All of this is going on while Obama has to deal with Reverend Wright's demanding ego.  Ben Smith notes, in another Politico piece, that Wright's well-covered routine at the National Press Club yesterday originated with a Clinton supporter.

Obama's campaign has disavowed Wright's media tour, and a correspondent notes an interesting detail:

Wright was invited to the National Press Club by a journalist and minister who supports Clinton.

The Tribune reports that Wright was invited by Barbara Reynolds, a former USA Today editorial board member who has written on personal blog of her support for Clinton.

The Al Franken vote

Minnesota senator Norm Coleman "has long been considered one of the more vulnerable incumbent senators up for re-election in 2008," according to Rasmussen.  "Any incumbent who polls below 50% is considered potentially vulnerable and that is especially true for an incumbent who trails a challenger early in the campaign."

Al Franken is running against him.  A shoo-in?

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows that Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman has opened a seven-percentage point lead over Democratic challenger Al Franken in his bid for re-election. Coleman, widely considered one of the most vulnerable incumbents of Election 2008, attracts 50% of the vote for the first time this year while Franken earns support from 43%.

Damn!  Franken was several points ahead of Coleman.  Now his support is slipping.  What happened? 

On the plus side, McCain is way down in Minnesota against both Democratic candidates.