Not what she signed up for

Dick Morris writes in The Hill:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is finding that her job description is dissolving under her feet, leaving her with only a vestige of the power she must have thought she acquired when she signed on to be President Obama’s chief Cabinet officer.

Since her designation:

• Vice President Biden has moved vigorously to stake out foreign policy as his turf. His visit to Afghanistan, right before the Inauguration, could not but send a signal to Hillary that he would conduct foreign policy in the new administration, leaving Hillary in the role of backup.

• Richard Holbrooke, the former Balkan negotiator and U.N. ambassador, has been named special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He insisted on direct access to the president, a privilege he was denied during much of the Clinton years.

• Former Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine), negotiator of the Irish Peace Accords, was appointed to be the administration’s point man on Arab-Israeli negotiations.

• Samantha Power, Obama’s former campaign aide, who once called Hillary a “monster,” has been appointed to the National Security Council (NSC) as director of “multilateral affairs.”

• Gen. James L. Jones, Obama’s new national security adviser, has announced an expansion of the membership and role of the NSC. He pledges to eliminate “back channels” to the president and wants to grow the NSC’s role to accommodate the “dramatically different” challenges of the current world situation.

• Susan Rice, Obama’s new United Nations ambassador, insisted upon and got Cabinet rank for her portfolio, and she will presumably also have the same kind of access to Obama that she had as his chief foreign policy adviser during the campaign.

So where does all this leave Secretary of State Clinton?

While sympathy for Mrs. Clinton is outside the normal fare of these columns, one cannot help but feel that she is surrounded by people who are, at best, strangers and, at worst, enemies. The competition that has historically occupied secretaries of State and national security advisers seems poised to ratchet up to a new level in the current administration.

Hillary’s essential problem is that she is an outsider in the current mix. She was the adversary in the campaign, and Rice and Powers — at the very least — know it well, having helped to run the campaign that dethroned her. Can they — and she — be devoid of bitterness or at least of normal human trepidation? Not very likely.

The fact is that the power of the secretary of State is not statutory, nor does it flow from the prestige of the post’s occupant. Former Gen. Al Haig, once supreme commander of NATO and chief of staff to President Nixon, found that out when he was undercut as secretary by the White House troika of Mike Deaver, James Baker and Ed Meese. Bill Rogers, Eisenhower’s attorney general and Nixon’s California confidant, found himself on the outs from the moment he became secretary of State, with Henry Kissinger soaking up all the power through his direct access to Nixon as national security adviser.

The power of the secretary of State flows directly from the president. But Hillary does not have the inside track with Obama. Rice and Powers, close advisers in the campaign, and Gen. Jones — whose office is in the White House — all may have superior access. Holbrooke and Mitchell will have more immediate information about the world’s trouble spots.

So what is Hillary’s mandate? Of what is she secretary of State? If you take the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan out of the equation, what is left? One would have to assume that the old North Korea hands in the government would monopolize that theater of action. What, precisely, is it that Hillary is to do? The question lingers.

And for this she gave up a Senate seat?

Mr. Obama obviously heeded the ancient wisdom of "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" in offering Hillary the post of Secretary of State.

I have no doubt that he was very much aware that of all the people who have a vested interest in seeing him fail Hillary stands at the head of the list. If his performance is so dismal in his first term that he chooses not to humiliate himself by waging an unwinnable campaign for reelection he knows that she is the most likely Democrat to pick up the baton and run in 2012.

By taking Hillary into the administration he denies her an independent platform from which to criticize him and makes it impossible for her to organize any kind of public effort to gain support for a 2012 run.

However I am also certain that Mr. Obama is very much aware of the way in which a treasonous shadow government consisting of elements of the Pentagon, State Department and CIA worked behind the scenes to undermine the Bush administration.

With such a clear and recent example of how dangerous it is to have enemies working against you from within your own administration even someone with much duller political instincts than Mr. Obama could hardly fail to learn the lesson.

Thus the president has sought to transfer most of the important duties of the Secretary of State to other, more reliable, members of his administration. This leaves the Secretary of State's job a mostly ceremonial one. Mrs. Clinton will find herself spending the next four years having tea and dumplings with various heads of state while other men and women do the actual heavy lifting of America's foreign policy.

As for why Hillary would give up a Senate seat for the job I can only guess that she also learned the lessons of what happened to George W Bush and wished to have a position which would allow her to operate against Obama from behind the scenes. I imagine that she thought that if she could sufficiently damage him in his first two years in office that he would have little or no chance of reelection that she could resign early in the third year. This would disassociate herself from the Obama debacle and give herself plenty of time for a 2012 or 2016 run.

I think she also assumed that the large number of Clinton administration veterans in the Obama administration would make her the primary object of their allegiance rather than Mr. Obama. I doubt that she thought it necessary to have an office in the White House when Rahm Emanuel, once a senior adviser to her husband, was going to be his chief of staff with an office right next to the Oval Office.

I would imagine that the fact that Mr. Emanuel is not going to be her spy and surrogate in the White House came as something of a nasty shock to her - just as the knowledge that all the other Clinton administration retreads have transferred their loyalty to the new guy must have.

The lesson here is that payback is a bitch especially when you are being paid back for being a bitch. Hillary spent her eight years in the White House calling the Secret Service agents who were sworn to lay down their lives protecting her and her family as "trained pigs" and flying into a rage if any low level employee committed the gross offense of simply looking directly at her.

Because Hillary genuinely believes herself to be a special breed, truly better than her fellow citizens it will never occur to her that this kind of behavior does not attract loyalty. Like Hitler raging at his generals for betraying him by losing the war when they had only followed his orders, given against their advice, Hillary will feel herself knifed in the back by a pack of ungrateful Judases.

How all this will affect her conduct in office and the behavior of her ex-president husband, who already has a severe impulse control problem, remains to be seen.

Expect hijinks.

Obama clutches a viper to his bosom :)

Here is another of those stating the obvious articles, but some things need repeating.

Here is a thought experiment that does not take very much thought. Picture, if you will, Hillary Clinton facing a foreign-policy conundrum. With whom will she discuss it first and most intently: with her president or her husband? (I did tell you that this wouldn't be difficult.) Here's another one: Will she be swayed in her foreign-policy decisions by electoral considerations focusing on the year 2012, and, if so, will she be swayed by President Barack Obama's interests or her own?

The next question, and I must apologize in advance for once again making it an un-strenuous one, is: Who else will be approaching Bill Clinton for advice, counsel, and "input" on foreign affairs? It appears from the donor list of the Clinton Foundation that there is barely an oligarch, royal family, or special-interest group anywhere in the world that does not know how to get the former president's attention. Just in the days since the foundation agreed to some disclosure of its previously "confidential" clients—in other words, since this became a condition for Sen. Clinton's nomination to become secretary of state—we have additionally found former President Clinton in warm relationships with one very questionable businessman in Malaysia and with another, this time in Nigeria, who used to have close connections with that country's ultracorrupt military dictatorship.

The Nigerian example is an especially instructive one. Gilbert Chagoury is a major figure in land and construction in that country and has contributed between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation as well as arranged a huge speaking fee for President Clinton at a Caribbean event and kicked in a large sum to his 1996 re-election campaign. In return for this, he has been received at the Clinton White House and more recently at Clinton-sponsored social events in New York and Paris. This may have helped to alleviate the sting of Chagoury's difficulties in Nigeria itself. As a close friend of the country's uniformed despot Gen. Sani Abacha, he benefited from some extremely profitable business arrangements during the years of dictatorship but was later compelled, after an investigation of his transactions, to return an estimated $300 million to the Nigerian treasury in exchange for a plea-bargaining arrangement by which his bank accounts could be unfrozen.

Aha, you say, there's no evidence of any quid pro quo here. (Or, in other words, Chagoury gives a fortune to Clinton because he, too, wants to "fight AIDS.") Of course, this may only be seed money for a later "quid" or even "quo" that hasn't yet materialized. And if Chagoury or anyone else had ever received the impression that the Clintons would play for pay, it's easy to see how he got the idea. (See my Nov. 24, 2008, Slate column on the investigations of the Clinton campaign-finance scandals and the shenanigans surrounding the Marc Rich pardon.)

But does a contribution to Bill Clinton's foundation get you any traction with Sen. Clinton, at least in her political and official capacity? Let's see. A recent story in the New York Times managed to begin with some very crisp and clear and fact-based paragraphs:

An upstate New York developer donated $100,000 to former President Bill Clinton's foundation in November 2004, around the same time that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton helped secure millions of dollars in federal assistance for the businessman's mall project.

Mrs. Clinton helped enact legislation allowing the developer, Robert J. Congel, to use tax-exempt bonds to help finance the construction of the Destiny USA entertainment and shopping complex, an expansion of the Carousel Center in Syracuse.

Mrs. Clinton also helped secure a provision in a highway bill that set aside $5 million for Destiny USA roadway construction.

Why should anyone doubt, then, that in small matters as well as in large ones, the old slogan from the 1992 election still holds true? As Bill so touchingly put it that year, if you voted for him, you got "two for one." What the country—and the world—has since learned is a slight variation on that, which I would crudely phrase as "buy one, get one free."

The deal struck by the wide-eyed incoming Obama administration is that the list of donors to the Clinton Foundation will be reviewed once every year and that only the new donations from foreign states—which already include an extraordinarily large number from Gulf sheikdoms—will be scrutinized by administration lawyers. How would we react if we read that this was the rule for the Vladimir Putin government, say, or former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's regime in Germany? Before me, for example, is the report of a pledge of $100 million to the Clinton Foundation's Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative by a set of companies based in Vancouver and known as the Lundin Group. The ostensible purpose of this mind-boggling contribution is stated in the usual vacuous terms of "sustainable local economies," chiefly in Africa. All I know for sure about the Lundin Group is that it does quite a lot of business in Sudan. And all I can think to ask—as perhaps some senator might think to ask—is why such a big corporate interest doesn't just donate the money directly, rather than distributing it through the offices of an outfit run by a seasoned ex-presidential influence-peddler. What do they and the other donors suppose they are getting for their money? A good feeling?

That was another no-brainer question I just asked. So let me stop insulting you, dear reader, and pose a question to which we do not have any obvious answer. Why is Sen. Clinton, the spouse of the great influence-peddler, being nominated in the first place? In exchange for giving the painful impression that our State Department will be an attractive destination for lobbyists and donors, what exactly are we getting? George Marshall? Dean Acheson? Even Madeleine Albright? No, we are getting a notoriously ambitious woman who made a fool of herself over Bosnia, at the time and during the recent campaign, and who otherwise has no command of foreign affairs except what she's picked up second-hand from an impeached ex-president, a disbarred lawyer, and a renter of the Lincoln Bedroom. If the Senate waves this through, it will have reinforced its recent image as the rubber-stamp chamber of a bankrupt banana republic. Not an especially good start to the brave new era.

But the Senate will wave Hillary's nomination through. The Democrats have 48 Senators (and if Franken gets the courts to rubber-stamp his election fraud they will have 49. Of course this doesn't take into consideration the RINO's (mostly from the Northeast) who can be counted upon to vote with the Democrats.

And that doesn't take into account Crazy John McCain who has taken it as his holy mission to ensure that every last thing that Obama wants sails through the Senate with as little opposition as possible.

But back to Hillary. True she has no foreign policy experience and equally true she has terrible political instincts. True also that her and Bill's co-presidency was one of the most corrupt in the history of the nation and true also that since his retirement from the presidency and Hillary's election to the Senate Bill's Foundation has been little more than a bribe collection agency for his wife.

BUT that's not important right now.

Remember Barack Obama is the president! The nation is screwed! With Hillary as the Secretary of State or without the nation is still screwed.

What is important right now is that as many people be made aware of how badly the nation is screwed as quickly as possible and having Hillary Clinton (who has all the gentle subtlety of Reinhard Heydrich) in such a prominent position cannot but help that goal.

That and the fact that she will be working tirelessly to undermine the Obama administration from within will do much to put the GOP back in control of congress in 2010 and the White House in 2012.

I don't know how long Hillary will last as a member of the Obama administration but that time will be filled with hijinks.

Keeping your enemies closer

According to the British newspaper The Guardian Hillary Clinton is planning to accept the little messiah's invitation to be his Secretary of State:

Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama, who is reaching out to former rivals to build a broad coalition administration, the Guardian has learned.

Obama's advisers have begun looking into Bill Clinton's foundation, which distributes millions of dollars to Africa to help with development, to ensure that there is no conflict of interest. But Democrats do not believe that the vetting is likely to be a problem.

Clinton would be well placed to become the country's dominant voice in foreign affairs, replacing Condoleezza Rice. Since being elected senator for New York, she has specialised in foreign affairs and defence. Although she supported the war in Iraq, she and Obama basically agree on a withdrawal of American troops.

Clinton, who still harbours hopes of a future presidential run, had to weigh up whether she would be better placed by staying in the Senate, which offers a platform for life, or making the more uncertain career move to the secretary of state job.

From Obama's perspective it offers him the chance to de-fang the only Democrat who would be likely to challenge him for his party's nomination in four years. I'm sure that he's also thinking that she would be far less likely to attempt to sabotage his administration if she is a part of it, but he should remember the way that Colin Powell and his buddies at the State Department did everything in their power to undermine President Bush.

From Hillary's point of view this gives her a far more prominent stage to act upon than being the junior Senator from New York. However her fortunes are now going to be chained to a man of little experience and fewer real accomplishments.

When things start to go south in the Obama administration she - and Bill - are going to find ways to communicate the fact that it isn't HER fault while Obama will be seeking to place the blame on anyone other than himself.

Expect hijinks.

Hillary pulls the plug

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton brought an end to her campaign for the White House on Saturday with a rousing farewell to thousands of supporters here and an emotional and unequivocal call for her voters to get behind Senator Barack Obama, the man who defeated her for the Democratic nomination.

For 28 minutes, standing alone on a stage in the historic National Building Museum, Mrs. Clinton spoke not only about the importance of electing Mr. Obama, but also the extent to which her campaign was a milestone for women seeking to become president. She urged women who had followed her campaign — who had turned out at her headquarters, flocked to her rallies and poured into the polls to vote for her — not to take the wrong lesson from her loss.

“You can be so proud that, from now on, it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories, unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee, unremarkable to think that a woman can be the president of the United States,” she said. “To those who are disappointed that we couldn’t go all of the way, especially the young people who put so much into this campaign, it would break my heart if, in falling short of my goal, I in any way discouraged any of you from pursuing yours.”

At that point the cheers, mostly from women, swelled so loud that Mrs. Clinton’s remaining words could not be heard.

Mrs. Clinton first mentioned Mr. Obama seven minutes into her speech. But when she did, she swept away any doubt — created by her speech on Tuesday night, after he won the nomination — that she had any hesitancy about endorsing him or about his qualifications to be president.

“The way to continue our fight now, to accomplish the goals for which we stand, is to take our energy, our passion, our strength and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama the next president of the United States,” Mrs. Clinton said, her voice echoing across the stone walls of the building. “Today, as I suspend my campaign, I congratulate him on the victory he has won and the extraordinary race he has run. I endorse him and throw my full support behind him.”

Would all of the people who swore up and down that they knew Hillary Clinton and that she would never withdraw from the race and endorse Obama now please admit that they did not, do not and probably never will know what they were talking about. Furthermore would they please acknowledge their culpability in saddling the Republican party with John McCain as our nominee.

It was the craven, cringing, cowardly wing of the Republican party which stood transfixed before Hillary Clinton like a rabbit in front of a rattlesnake then ran to the polls on their state's primary day to vote for John McCain because they thought he was the only one who could slay the Hillary monster.

Well she doesn't look so damn tough now does she?

What we are running against instead is a naive neophyte of mediocre intelligence and absolutely no significant accomplishment who, despite his young age, has managed to accumulate an enormous amount of negative baggage due to his propensity to associate with the most extreme radicals the political left has to offer (and let's not forget the shady financial dealings too).

This should be an easy contest for Republicans to win except for the fact that our candidate holds far too many positions which are in substantial agreement with his left-wing opponent. On deeply important issues like global warming, immigration, campaign finance reform, closing Guantanamo Bay and the Second Amendment there is little meaningful difference between them.

Iraq, the one issue on which McCain can legitimately claim to hold a different and superior view than the Democrats, becomes less urgent every day as the US and Iraqi forces continue to make important gains against both al Qaeda and Iranian-backed insurgents. This plus the progress being made by the Iraqi government creates a likelihood that by election day the war will be so nearly won that it will be a non-issue to the electorate.

In every other area in which McCain is attempting to draw a distinction between himself and Obama his record actually undercuts his current position, as with judicial appointments where he was the one who sabotaged the Republican plan which would have guaranteed an up or down vote on all presidential appointments and taxes where he actually voted against Bush's tax cuts.

Add to this the fact that McCain's fractured psyche is compelling him to run what he terms a "respectful campaign", which means not launching anything that could be considered an "attack" on his opponent, and you have a campign which seems almost designed to fail.

Learned commentary on Senator Clinton's presidential campaign

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

Words mean nothing to liberals. They say whatever will help advance their cause at the moment, switch talking points in a heartbeat, and then act indignant if anyone uses the exact same argument they were using five minutes ago.

When Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election by half a percentage point, but lost the Electoral College -- or, for short, "the constitutionally prescribed method for choosing presidents" -- anyone who denied the sacred importance of the popular vote was either an idiot or a dangerous partisan.

But now Hillary has won the popular vote in a Democratic primary, while Obambi has won under the rules. In a spectacular turnabout, media commentators are heaping sarcasm on our plucky Hillary for imagining the "popular vote" has any relevance whatsoever.

It's the exact same situation as in 2000, with Hillary in the position of Gore and Obama in the position of Bush. The only difference is: Hillary has a much stronger argument than Gore ever did (and Hillary's more of a man than Gore ever was).

Unbeknownst to liberals, who seem to imagine the Constitution is a treatise on gay marriage, our Constitution sets forth rules for the election of a president. Under the Constitution that has led to the greatest individual liberty, prosperity and security ever known to mankind, Americans have no constitutional right to vote for president, at all. (Don't fret Democrats: According to five liberals on the Supreme Court, you do have a right to sodomy and abortion!)

Americans certainly have no right to demand that their vote prevail over the electors' vote.

The Constitution states that electors from each state are to choose the president, and it is up to state legislatures to determine how those electors are selected. It is only by happenstance that most states use a popular vote to choose their electors.

When you vote for president this fall, you will not be voting for Barack Obama or John McCain; you will be voting for an elector who pledges to cast his vote for Obama or McCain. (For those new Obama voters who may be reading, it's like voting for Paula, Randy or Simon to represent you, instead of texting your vote directly.)

Any state could abolish general elections for president tomorrow and have the legislature pick the electors. States could also abolish their winner-take-all method of choosing presidential electors -- as Nebraska and Maine have already done, allowing their electors to be allocated in proportion to the popular vote. And of course there's always the option of voting electors off the island one by one.

If presidential elections were popular vote contests, Bush might have spent more than five minutes campaigning in big liberal states like California and New York. But under a winner-take-all regime, close doesn't count. If a Republican doesn't have a chance to actually win a state, he may as well lose in a landslide. Using the same logic, Gore didn't spend a lot of time campaigning in Texas (and Walter Mondale campaigned exclusively in Minnesota).

Consequently, under both the law and common sense, the famed "popular vote" is utterly irrelevant to presidential elections. It would be like the winner of "Miss Congeniality" claiming that title also made her "Miss America." Obviously, Bush might well have won the popular vote, but he would have used a completely different campaign strategy.

By contrast, there are no constitutional rules to follow with party primaries. Primaries are specifically designed by the parties to choose their strongest candidate for the general election.

Hillary's argument that she won the popular vote is manifestly relevant to that determination. Our brave Hillary has every right to take her delegates to the Democratic National Convention and put her case to a vote. She is much closer to B. Hussein Obama than the sainted Teddy Kennedy was to Carter in 1980 when Teddy staged an obviously hopeless rules challenge at the convention. (I mean rules about choosing the candidate, not rules about crushed ice at after-parties.)

And yet every time Hillary breathes a word about her victory in the popular vote, TV hosts respond with sneering contempt at her gaucherie for even mentioning it. (Of course, if popularity mattered, networks like MSNBC wouldn't exist. That's a station that depends entirely on "superviewers.")

After nearly eight years of having to listen to liberals crow that Bush was "selected, not elected," this is a shocking about-face. Apparently unaware of the new party line that the popular vote amounts to nothing more than warm spit, just last week HBO ran its movie "Recount," about the 2000 Florida election, the premise of which is that sneaky Republicans stole the presidency from popular vote champion Al Gore. (Despite massive publicity, the movie bombed, with only about 1 million viewers, so now HBO is demanding a "recount.")

So where is Kevin Spacey from HBO's "Recount," to defend Hillary, shouting: "WHO WON THIS PRIMARY?"

In the Democrats' "1984" world, the popular vote is an unconcept, doubleplusungood verging crimethink. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Miss Ann most always uses humor in her writings but this time she has outdone herself. After all what could be funnier than expecting logical consistency and simple honesty from the left?

That is as zany as expecting Barack Obama not to sound borderline retarded when speaking without a teleprompter to read or John McCain to act like a conservative.

Hillary not the VP?

The Washington Times is reporting that Hillary Clinton is losing her chance to join Obama in the ticket as vice president:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is conceding the Democratic presidential nomination to Sen. Barack Obama, as party leaders and strategists began to openly oppose the former first lady's aggressive efforts to join the ticket.

"Senator Clinton will be hosting an event in Washington, D.C., to thank her supporters and express her support for Senator Obama and party unity," the Clinton campaign said in a statement Wednesday night. The event is set for Saturday.

A series of other events Wednesday consolidated Mr. Obama's power over the party as its de facto nominee - a continuing surge of superdelegate endorsements, statements by party elders that the race is over, and his naming of a vice-presidential team, which brought about the inevitable debate over Mrs. Clinton as a running mate.

Most likely this, if true, just means that she never wanted the VP slot in the first place. If that is the case it means that she either wants one of the Supreme Court appointments which will open up in the first year of Obama's administration or that (and this is much less likely) she either believes that Obama will do so poorly as president that he will either not seek reelection or that she can challenge him in the 2012 primaries. Well, it could also mean that she thinks that Obama will lose to McCain and she wants to be positioned to be the logical choice for the Democrats in 2012.

Of course there is another possibility we have to consider. Given what we now know about Hillary's incompetence it is possible that she desperately wanted the VP position and tried as hard as she could to get it but simply screwed it up the way she screwed up health care in her husband's administration and her own presidential campaign.

The preliminary autopsy results

The postmortem examinations of the failed [Hillary lost!] Clinton campaign are already being written. Among the first is a piece by Jackie Calmes in the Wall Street Journal. Calmes attributes Mrs. Clinton's loss mainly to serious mistakes made by the candidate herself:

"Inside the Clinton campaign and out, the finger-pointing has begun. The bottom line is this: She called the biggest plays, and she got them wrong."

". . . Sen. Clinton is responsible for what one confidant called "grievous mistakes." Those help explain why Sen. Clinton -- the best brand name in Democratic politics, and an early favorite to be the first female nominee in U.S. history -- lost to a relative newcomer who would be the first African-American major-party nominee."

"The mistakes boil down to mismanagement, message, mobilization failures and the marital factor."

"Sen. Clinton's management choices, it is widely agreed, gave rise to fatal strategic blunders. The main one, in the eyes of many associates, was her message: She emphasized her Washington experience when voters wanted change."

"The campaign's most inarguable mistake was its failure to organize voters in states with caucuses rather than primaries. That left Sen. Obama to build what proved an insurmountable lead in convention delegates.

Many supporters blamed Ms. Solis Doyle and her deputies. But the failures started at the top with the Clintons' bias against caucuses and an ignorance of key party rules. Early on, the campaign figured she would lock up the nomination with Feb. 5's Super Tuesday primaries."

"Advisers point to a missed opportunity. Veteran Iowa organizer Steve Hildebrand had sought a job with Sen. Clinton in mid-2006. In a 45-minute interview, the senator talked about congressional elections but never mentioned the coming presidential race, Mr. Hildebrand says. Months later, he signed on as Sen. Obama's deputy campaign manager and oversaw his Iowa push."

""The issue became, 'If she can't control her husband in the campaign, who the h- is really going to run this White House?'" one adviser says."

Incompetent and thick-headed with no political instincts.

No surprises here. I have been writing similar things myself for some time. You can see for yourself here, here (that one helps explain Clinton's lopsided win in West Virginia too) and here (damn, I called the negative effect that Bill would wind up having on her campaign pretty early) and here from Sept. of last year I was dismissing the idea that Hillary was inevitable.

The nomination was Mrs. Clinton's to lose and she proved equal to the task.

I may never have the chance to say this again

Hillary Lost!

From ABC:

Sen. Hillary Clinton's decision to end her historic bid for the White House and ceding the Democratic nomination to Sen. Barack Obama, ends a long, often bitter battle for the right to challenge Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the general election.

There is so little to feel good about in this fraked up election season at least I will be able to look back no matter how dark the upcoming days may grow and say that HILLARY LOST.

Obama crossses the finish line

Dragging Hillary who has her hands clamped onto one of his ankles in a death grip.

From The Washington Post:

With a split decision in the final two primaries and a flurry of superdelegate endorsements, Sen. Barack Obama sealed the Democratic presidential nomination last night after a grueling and history-making campaign against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton that will make him the first African American to head a major-party ticket.

[. . .]

Obama's victory was notable not simply for its historic importance but also because it marked a rejection, albeit by the narrowest of margins, of a candidate who represented the most powerful family in Democratic politics. Clinton's defeat seemed almost inconceivable a year ago as the race was beginning to unfold, but Obama and his advisers proved equal to the challenge.

[. . .]

During his speech, Obama offered praise to his rival. "She has made history not just because she's a woman who has done what no woman has done before, but because she is a leader who inspires millions of Americans with her strength, her courage and her commitment to the causes that brought us here tonight," he said.

Obama still faces a sizable job of uniting his party, and his uneven performance during the final months of the nomination battle could make Clinton's supporters more difficult to win over quickly. Clinton has pledged to help unify the part, but last night she signaled that she will do so on her own timetable.

Clinton, who waged a fierce campaign to become the first woman nominated for the presidency, spoke shortly before Obama at a rally in New York. Amid questions about when or whether she would quit the race, she declared: "This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight."

Earlier in the day, she opened the door to considering to be Obama's vice presidential running mate, should he make the offer, leading to speculation about what her goals will be.

Also from The Washington Post in an article called In Defeat, Clinton Graciously Pretends to Win Dana Milbank writes:

What Hillary did not want to do was to concede defeat. "I want the nearly 18 million Americans who voted for me to be respected, to be heard," she told her fans, who answered with cheers of "Denver! Denver!" and "Yes she will!"

The campaign was over, and Obama had locked up the nomination after a flood of more than 40 superdelegates announced their support for him throughout the day. But in the Baruch College gymnasium here (the "Bearcat Den"), Clinton spoke as if she were the victor.

She and her husband and daughter took the stage, smiling, clapping and bopping to the beat. She said nothing about losing the nomination, instead thanking South Dakota for giving her a victory in Tuesday's balloting: "You had the last word in this primary season!" This, she said, confirmed that she had won "more votes than any primary candidate in history."

Clinton congratulated Obama -- not for winning the nomination, but for running an "extraordinary race." She recognized Obama and his supporters "for all they accomplished."

It was an extraordinary performance by a woman who had been counted out of the race even when she still had a legitimate chance. Now she had been mathematically eliminated -- and she spoke as if she had won.

Though some might think her remarks self-delusional, Clinton wasn't kidding herself; earlier in the day, Clinton had told lawmakers privately that the race was over and she would consider being Obama's vice president. Her public defiance reflected a shift in the balance of power that came with Obama's victory. Now that he had won the race, he would need to woo Clinton if he wanted to prevail in November.

[. . .]

Only obliquely did Clinton refer to the fact that she had, in fact, lost the nomination. "The question is: Where do we go from here?" she said. She would figure that out "in the coming days," she said, but "I will be making no decisions tonight." The crowd in the Bearcat Den erupted in a sustained cheer. She referred her supporters to her Web site, as she had after many a primary night victory.

For a candidate who had just lost the nomination, she seemed very much in charge.

That must be what Hillary wants.

Hillary is not going to officially withdraw from the race until she gets exactly the deal she wants and it is looking increasingly like she wants to be the vice president.

I detailed some of the advantages that would bring to the Democrat ticket in a post yesterday so I won't repeat them here but with a wounded Obama crawling across the finish line carrying Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn, Tony Rezko and Michael Pfleger on his back those advantages have to be looming large in Obama's political advisors' minds.

Can it really be over?

WASHINGTON - Hillary Rodham Clinton will concede Tuesday night that Barack Obama has the delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, campaign officials said, effectively ending her bid to be the nation's first female president.

Obama is 40 delegates shy of clinching the nomination, but he is widely expected to make up the difference Tuesday with superdelegate support and votes in South Dakota and Montana. Once he reaches the magic number of 2,118, Clinton will acknowledge that he has secured the necessary delegates to be the nominee.

The former first lady will stop short of formally suspending or ending her race in her speech in New York City.

She will pledge to continue to speak out on issues like health care. But for all intents and purposes, the two senior officials said, the campaign is over.

Most campaign staff will be let go and will be paid through June 15, said the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to divulge her plans.

The advisers said Clinton has made a strategic decision to not formally end her campaign, giving her leverage to negotiate with Obama on various matters including a possible vice presidential nomination for her. She also wants to press him on issues he should focus on in the fall, such as health care.

This can only mean one thing. A deal has been struck. The terms will become manifest over the next few days or weeks, but one thing we can be sure of is that Mrs. Clinton's price will not be cheap.

I continue to hold on to the thought that she will insist on the vice presidency. I know that Michelle Obama hates her and that Barack will not wish to have his presidency take place in Bill Clinton's shadow. However Hillary's position is so strong, having almost half the delegates and a somewhat legitimate argument to make about both the popular vote total and the fact that she was able to carry must-win states like Pennsylvania and California, that she will be able to demand the VP slot or anything else she desires from Obama and expect to get it.

From Clinton's standpoint it would be a good deal in that it would combine her campaign with Obama's and allow him to assume her debt. From Obama's position including Clinton on the ticket has many advantages. One is that it would go far to unify the party. It will be difficult for Hillary's supporters to jump ship and vote for McCain if Hillary's name is on the ballot.

Another advantage for Obama is the Clinton network of contacts, supporters, fundraisers and the accumulation of favors owed after eight years in the White House and a term and a half in the Senate.

Obama brings in the black and upper-middle class educated vote and Hillary brings in the women, blue-collar and Hispanic vote. If you combine the amounts which both the Clinton and Obama campaigns have raised to date the number comes to around 500 million dollars. And together they have the potential to easily match that amount dollar for dollar before November.

What would the general election campaign be like with a unified Democrat party with half a billion dollars in the bank and the mainstream media in their pocket fielding an historic first black/first woman ticket running against an old man with severe anger management issues who has so alienated around 25% of his base that they will never vote for him and who has profound difficulty raising cash look like?

Words like "slaughter" and "massacre" come to mind.

Does anyone still care what goes on behind the scenes of the Hillary campaign?

From The Daily News:

Rep. Anthony Weiner, a likely 2009 mayoral candidate, is pouring his heart into Hillary Clinton's White House bid - literally.

Weiner, whose district includes parts of Queens and Brooklyn, finally 'fessed that he is romancing Clinton's glamorous "body woman," Huma Abedin.

Asked by The Associated Press about all the time he's spending on the road campaigning for Clinton, the 43-year-old bachelor said, "It's largely because I'm dating Huma."

The whispers have been around for months, but until yesterday Weiner ducked questions about Abedin, saying his personal life was off limits.

Though she posed recently for a glamorous photo spread in Vogue, Abedin, 32, is famously press-shy.

The New York Observer, in a long profile last year, called her "a sort of mythical figure" who never has a hair out of place or a wrinkle in her Prada suit and can hush a crowd of rambunctious reporters with a single look.

"I think there's some dispute as to whether Huma's actually human or not," an admiring Weiner said then.

Abedin was born in Michigan to a Pakistani mother and an Indian father and was raised in Saudi Arabia.

She landed an internship in the First Lady's office in 1996 and quickly become her indispensable right hand.

If I came even remotely close to giving a damn I would say that the relationship between Weiner and Huma is a red herring cooked up to deflect speculation that Huma is Senator Clinton's lesbian lover.

Weiner has the look of one of those androgynous geldings which are the only kind of man (other than "out" homosexuals) who Hillary will tolerate in her personal space (other than Bill, whom she tranked herself up and copulated with enough times to produce Chelsea because having at least one child was politically useful*) .

I would point out that this would not be the first time that such a sham arrangement was made to keep up appearances (although it has traditionally been a powerful man finding a lesser man to pretend to be the husband or boyfriend of his mistress).

But like I said, I don't even come remotely close to giving a damn.

*This assumes that Bill is Chelsea's father because there are rumors that Webb Hubble is Chelsea's real dad. This is backed up by the extraordinary physical resemblance Chelsea has to Hubble (go here to see for yourself).

NOW he gets it

The left-wing media has been in the tank for B. Hussein Obama for months now but they have so far refrained from giving Hillary Clinton the exact same kind of treatment that she would get if she was a conservative Republican - until now.

In a Daily News column entitled Hillary Clinton's colossal blunder simply the last straw an overwrought leftist named Michael Goodwin has this to say:

SICK. Disgusting. And yet revealing. Hillary Clinton is staying in the race in the event some nut kills Barack Obama.

It could happen, but what definitely has happened is that Clinton has killed her own chances of being vice president. She doesn't deserve to be elected dog catcher anywhere now.

Her shocking comment to a South Dakota newspaper might qualify as the dumbest thing ever said in American politics.

Her lame explanation that she brought up the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy because his brother Ted's illness was on her mind doesn't cut it. Not even close.

We have seen an X-ray of a very dark soul. One consumed by raw ambition to where the possible assassination of an opponent is something to ponder in a strategic way. Otherwise, why is murder on her mind?

It's like Tanya Harding's kneecapping has come to politics. Only the senator from New York has more lethal fantasies than that nutty skater.

We could have seen it coming, if only we had realized Clinton's thinking could be so cold. She has grown increasingly wild in her imagery lately, invoking everything from slavery to the political killings in Zimbabwe in making her argument for the Florida and Michigan delegations. She claimed to be the victim of sexism, despite winning the votes of white men.

But none of it was moving the nomination needle, with Obama, despite recent dents, still on course to be the victor.

So she kept digging deeper, looking for the magic button. Instead, she pushed the eject button, lifting herself right out of consideration.

Giving voice to such a vile thought is all the more horrible because fears Obama would be killed have been an undercurrent to his astonishing rise. Republican Mike Huckabee made a stupid joke about it recently. Many black Americans have talked of it, reflecting their assumption that racists would never tolerate a black President and that Obama would be taken from them.

Clinton has now fed that fear. She needs a very long vacation. And we need one from her.

Say good night, Hillary. And go away.

"We could have seen it coming, if only we had realized Clinton's thinking could be so cold." This has to qualify as one of the stupidest statements of this entire campaign season. Where has Mr. Goodwin been since 1992?

Has Mr. Goodwin forgotten the Travel Office scandal where Mrs. Clinton fired some low level White House employees in order to give their jobs to some of her friends and then attempted to have those low level employees framed for felonies and sent to federal prison?

Has Mr. Goodwin forgotten what Chelsea Clinton (who would have only been 12 or 13 at the time) said to a pair of Secret Service agents who attempted to scold her for referring to the Secret Service bodyguards as "personal trained pigs"? Her response was "That's what my parents call you all the time".

Has Mr. Goodwin forgotten Vince Foster?

Has Mr. Goodwin forgotten what Mrs. Clinton said to an Arkansas state trooper who was part of the governor's security detail after he wished her a "good morning"? Her response was “F*ck off! It’s enough that I have to see you sh*t-kickers every day. I’m not going to talk to you, too. Just do your g*dd*mn job and keep your mouth shut.”

Has Mr. Goodwin forgotten that White House staff (maids, janitors, waiters and so on) were forbidden to look Mrs. Clinton in the eye?

These incidents are only a representative sample of the public record of the "real" Mrs. Hillary Clinton. All of this information has been floating around for years, some of it for more than a decade. So, I repeat, where has Michael Goodwin been all these years.

Of course the answer is that while Hillary Clinton was Bill Clinton's first lady and then Democrat Senator from New York and then presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Mr. Goodwin, as a faithful member of the left-wing lapdog mainstream media, was far too busy carrying Mrs. Clinton's water to criticize her or do anything like a real piece of investigative journalism into her true character and fitness to hold a position of public trust.

It is only now that Mr. Goodwin and the other left-wing lickspittles have a new receptacle for their fawning sycophancy that they can be bothered to view Mrs. Clinton as she actually is.

Not that I don't enjoy seeing Hillary Clinton exposed, laid bare, revealed [download 143 gigabytes of Japanese porn to purge the mental picture] shown for what she really is in her deepest soul [there that doesn't dredge up any image]. But I have very little respect for those like Goodwin who would still be sipping the Hillary kool-aid if she were ahead in pledged delegates.

Yes Hillary, you said that out loud

Mrs. Bill Clinton puts her foot in it.

From The New York Post:

Hillary Clinton today brought up the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy while defending her decision to stay in the race against Barack Obama.

"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it," she said, dismissing calls to drop out.

Clinton made her comments at a meeting with the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader's editorial board while campaigning in South Dakota, where she complained that, "People have been trying to push me out of this ever since Iowa."

Obama, the first African-American to advance so far in the race for the White House, has faced threats, sources have said.

Robert Kennedy, the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy, was gunned down in 1968 after winning the California primary. He had been a hero on the left for his civil rights agenda and calls to end the war in Vietnam.

Barack Obama, who leads Clinton by nearly 200 delegates and has already secured a majority of pledged delegates, has been the subject of threats. Early in the campaign, the Secret Service gave him a security detail at the request of Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Illinois).

Clinton criticized an "urgency" to end the campaign prematurely, saying, "Historically, that makes no sense."

Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson told The Post, "She was talking about the length of the race and using the '68 election as an example of how long the races in the past have gone -- she used her husband's race in the same vein."

Jughead reacts:

Senator Clinton's statement before the ARGUS LEADER editorial board was unfortunate and has no place in this campaign, said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton...


The Hillbilly White Trash take on the whole affair:

Yawn. Mrs. Clinton committed what is called a Freudian slip. She accidentally spoke what her subconscious mind desires, for some gun-nut Klansman type to gun down Jughead so that she can not only get the nomination, but also have an excuse to champion new gun control legislation. Especially if the Klansman uses an [cue scary music] assault rifle.

In fairness to Hillery

She doesn't have a mustache, but otherwise it seems dead on. Warning: language



H/T: Joshuapundit

It didn't take long

I said that the Democrat party would begin pounding the stake through Hillary's heart after her double digit loss in North Carolina and microscopic win in Indiana.



WASHINGTON (AP) - Apart from George McGovern, a plainspoken man who knows something about losing elections, not a single Democrat of national stature publicly urged Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday to end her campaign for the White House.

They didn't have to.

There was no shortage of other ways to signal, suggest, insinuate or instigate the same thing. And certainly no need to apply unseemly pressure to a historic political figure, a woman who has run a grueling race, won millions of votes and drawn uncounted numbers of new Democratic voters to the polls.

Instead, many Democrats instead preferred to say softly what the party's 1972 presidential nominee said for all to hear. Barack Obama has won the nomination "by any practical test," McGovern said.

Then there's this:

Very early Wednesday morning, after many voters had already gone to sleep, the conventional wisdom of the elite political pundit class that resides on television shifted hard, and possibly irretrievably, against Senator Hillary Clinton's continued viability as a presidential candidate.

The moment came shortly after midnight Eastern time, captured in a devastatingly declarative statement from Tim Russert of NBC News: "We now know who the Democratic nominee's going to be, and no one's going to dispute it," he said on MSNBC. "Those closest to her will give her a hard-headed analysis, and if they lay it all out, they'll say: 'What is the rationale? What do we say to the undeclared super delegates tomorrow? Why do we tell them you're staying in the race?' And tonight, there's no good answer for that."


And this:



There are so very few things to be happy about in this miserable election. Three unqualified candidates each of whom would do terrible harm to the nation are all we have to choose from after all. But the one good thing is that we get to see the Clintons rejected by their own party.

To any conservative who lived through the 90's that is sweet wine indeed.

So let's say it one more time (and maybe for the last time) - Hillary Lost!

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

Well, it looks like it's the end of the road for Hillary. Time for her to pack up her pantsuits and go back to -- wherever it is she's pretending to be living these days. Now we just have to get rid of the other two. Perhaps if I endorse Obama ...

This week, Bill Clinton lost his second presidential election for a protege.

Ronald Reagan was so popular, he not only won a 49-state landslide re-election for himself, but he also won a symbolic third term for his boob of a vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush (who immediately blew it by breaking his own "no new taxes" pledge).

By contrast, in addition to not being able to get half the country to vote for him in two tries, Clinton's connection to any other presidential candidate spells utter doom. Both his vice president and his wife have been defeated in elections they should have won, but lost because of their unfortunate association with him. The country has spoken. It wants to be rid of the Clintons.

The reason two elections in recent history -- the 2000 presidential election and the 2008 Democratic primary -- were razor-close is that in both cases there was some strange, foreboding, otherworldly force dragging down the presumptive winner.

Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, lost an election that should have been his in a walk. In fact, he was the first incumbent president or vice president in 100 years to lose an election in peacetime with a good economy. Mind you, that was before we even knew that Gore was a deranged conspiracy theorist who believes the Earth is in serious peril from cow flatulence.

What was the mystery factor to explain such a historic loss?

The media's pollsters may have lied to the public about Clinton's vaunted popularity, but Gore's pollsters got paid not to lie to him. And they told Gore the truth: Clinton was killing him.

After the election, Gore pollster -- and erstwhile Clinton pollster -- Stanley Greenberg told Vanity Fair magazine that if Clinton had helped, he would have "had Bill Clinton carry Al Gore around on his back." (This was when one man could still actually carry Al Gore on his back.) But research showed that whenever Clinton was mentioned, Gore's numbers went down faster than -- oh, never mind.

Steve Rosenthal, political director of the AFL-CIO, also blamed Clinton for Gore's loss, saying polls showed that voters who cared about character voted for Bush. (I know, I know. Are there actually people who care about character and vote Democrat? Yes, apparently they exist.)

Poor Gore did everything he could to distance himself from Clinton, publicly criticizing Clinton's sexual exploits with an intern, refusing to allow Clinton to campaign with him and taking as his vice president Joe Lieberman -- the first Democratic senator to scathingly denounce Clinton's antics with Lewinsky from the Senate floor.

But voters couldn't forget Gore's boss, the purple-faced lecher.

As election predictors go, the Dow Jones has been remarkably accurate. If the Dow goes up from the end of July to the end of October, the incumbent president or vice president wins; if it goes down, the incumbent loses. It has been wrong only four times since the Dow was created in 1896.

Thus, on Nov. 1, 2000, an article in The New York Times began: "The verdict of the Dow Jones industrial average is in, and it says Al Gore is headed for the White House."

And yet Gore lost. It was only the third time in more than a century that the Dow went up in the three months before the election and the incumbent lost. The two other times were: (1) Herbert Hoover in the middle of the Great Depression, and (2) Hubert Humphrey in the middle of the Vietnam War. (The only time the Dow went down and the incumbent won anyway was for popular Dwight Eisenhower.)

So we have documented proof: Americans rank Bill Clinton with national misfortunes on the order of the Great Depression and the Vietnam War. (This, of course, is an overreaction: The Great Depression wasn't that bad.)

And now Bill Clinton has wrecked Hillary's campaign, too. He's like the creepy guy who graduated last year but still hangs around the high school cafeteria chatting up sophomores.

In a Time magazine poll taken earlier this year, more than twice as many voters said Bill Clinton's involvement in Hillary's campaign made them less likely to vote for her as said they were more likely to vote for her. (Some even said that "having Bill Clinton around makes me less likely to vote for What's-Her-Name." One-third of the respondents were upset Bill didn't call the next day, like he promised.)

So before remembering that we are now left with two dangerous choices for president -- a young liberal who is friendly with terrorists or an old liberal who is friendly with Teddy Kennedy -- take a moment to revel in the fact that our long national nightmare is over. It turns out getting rid of the Clintons was the change we've been waiting for.

As usual Miss Ann is correct. It is a fine thing, richly satisfying, to say that Hillary lost here in North Carolina and by double digits too! Her razor thin win in Indiana does not help her, although it may give her a rationalization to keep hanging around.

But even if she tries to avoid her political grave and walk the earth like a zombie sooner rather than later the party's elder statesmen like Carter and Gore will drive a stake through her heart and consign her to oblivion.

Slimy dick has it figured out

Does Hillary Clinton really believe she can overtake Barack Obama among elected delegates? No way. The math is dead against her and she’s a realist. Even after Pennsylvania, Obama still leads by more than 140 in elected delegates. They’ll likely break even in Indiana and he’ll win North Carolina where one third of the vote is African-American. After that? If she wins Kentucky, West Virginia, and Puerto Rico by 15 points and they break about even in Guam, North Dakota, Montana, and Oregon, she’ll still trail him by at least 130 votes among elected delegates.

Does she believe she can persuade super delegates to vote for her? Again, probably not. Obama has steadily eroded her edge among super delegates and now they are almost tied among committed super delegates. And the prevailing sentiment among those that remain is not to overturn the will of the voters.

So why is Hillary still running so hard? Why is she especially focused on pushing up Obama’s negatives?

Until the last vote is counted on June 3rd, we can chalk up her persistence to determination, courage and sheer obstinacy. But if she persists in her candidacy after the last primary, we must begin to consider whether she has an ulterior motive.

Does Hillary want to beat up Obama so that he can’t win the general election in November, assuring McCain of the presidency so that she can have a clear field to run again in 2012? Obviously, if Obama beats McCain, Hillary is out of the picture until 2016, by which time, at 69 years old, she might be too old to run. But if McCain wins, she would have to be considered the presumptive front runner for the nomination, a status which she might parlay into a nomination more successfully than she has been able to do this year.

Every day that she stays in the race and punches Barack Obama, she must realize that she is decreasing his chances of getting elected in November. Each time that she waves the bloody shirt and says that only she is strong enough to fight the war on terror, she obviously raises doubts about Obama’s strength and leadership. Every time she criticizes him for not switching pastors or for saying downscale white voters are bitter, she raises issues that are very destructive to Obama should he win the nomination.

[. . .]

In 2004, it is pretty obvious that Hillary did nothing to help John Kerry beyond giving a speech at the convention and waging a token campaign on his behalf. Bill did even less. Their goal was obvious: they wanted Kerry to lose to Bush so that Hillary could run in 2008. Is she playing the same game now? Only time will tell.


Slimy dick is correct this time and it only took him 5 days to reach the same conclusion that I came to last Wed. (read my post here)

As I said then a vote for McCain in 2008 is a vote for Hillary in 2012 and a vote to enlarge the Democrat majority in congress in 2010.

Not just Obama's "Swift Boat"

From The Wall Street Journal:

Sen. Hillary Clinton's reference to a Chicago charitable organization may have flown over the heads of viewers of Wednesday's Democratic debate. But many in Washington wonder whether the Woods Fund could be the "swift boat" of this campaign.

The Woods Charitable Fund of Chicago is a touchstone in the latest controversy swirling around Sen. Obama's past associations. In this case, the association is with William Ayers, a 1970s radical turned college professor, whose tenure as a director of the charity overlapped with Sen. Obama's for three years ending in 2001.

Mr. Ayers is a familiar figure in the annals of radical politics: He was a lieutenant in the Weather Underground group, an organization that advocated acts of anarchy as a way to end the Vietnam War. Accused of taking part in a bomb-making exercise that blew apart a Manhattan townhouse and killed three members of the group, Mr. Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, also of the Weather Underground, went into hiding for about a decade, later turning themselves in.

Correction: The Weathermen advocated and committed acts of terrorist violence.

[. . .]

Sen. Obama puts up no argument. "That was the rollout of the Republican campaign against me," Sen. Obama said Thursday of the debate, pledging to a North Carolina audience to respond "sharply and crisply" when it does arise.

But first Sen. Obama has begun with Sen. Clinton, noting during the debate that her husband, former President Bill Clinton, during the last days of his administration, commuted the sentences of two Weather Underground members, including Susan Rosenberg, who was involved in the 1981 heist of a Brinks armored truck in New York that left two policemen dead.

In a conference call with reporters Thursday, Howard Wolfson, communications director for the Clinton campaign, sidestepped a question about whether Sen. Clinton approved of her husband's pardoning Ms. Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans, a Weather Underground member implicated in several bombings in the 1980s.

In addition to commuting the sentences of the two Weathermen Bill Clinton also pardoned a couple of Puerto Rican terrorists. He did this to curry favor with New York's Puerto Rican community in order to aid Hillary's Senate run.

Hillary bases her claim to be qualified for the presidency upon her "experience" but that claim is only valid if we assume that she was deeply involved with Bill in the governing of the nation as a kind of "co-president". This is, after all, how they presented themselves when Bill was campaigning for the White House.

However the march of time, with a great deal of help from talk radio and the blogosphere, has brought to light a great many unsavory details about the former Clinton administration and Hillary now finds herself harmed far more than helped by her past as "co-president".

Hillary's inability to fully exploit the Ayers case because of her and her husband's own dirty hands is just the latest example of a Clinton administration skeleton breaking out of the closet and parading itself before the world.

Remember all those years ago when everyone thought that Bill would be Hillary's greatest asset on her cakewalk into the Oval Office? Instead she is forced to wear him like Marley's ghost wore his chain.

The thing to remember here is that during the general election John McCain will not have Hillary Clinton's baggage weighing him down on this issue. The only thing holding him back will be this retarded obsession with running what he calls a "clean campaign". Every time you criticize either Clinton or Obama in any but the most bland and general terms McCain runs to the nearest microphone and denounces you while reassuring the public that both Clinton and Obama are fine honorable people each of which would make excellent, excellent presidents.

Since I don't care which of the three stooges wins this November I am not bothered by this. However if McCain wants to win he had better understand that the Democrat party has transformed politics, at least at the national level, into a knife fight in a sewer with the only rule being that the last person standing wins.

The gangs of The Left

From NRO:

Exit polls have shown that the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has produced deep divisions among Democratic constituencies. It looks something like tribal warfare. Whites have voted, if you average the results from the states, 53 percent to 39 percent for Clinton; blacks, 80 percent to 17 percent for Obama; Latinos, 58 percent to 39 percent for Clinton; Asians, in California (the one primary state where they’re numerous enough to gauge), 71 percent to 25 percent for Clinton.

The differences in voting by the young, overwhelmingly for Obama, and the elderly, overwhelmingly for Clinton, are as large as any I can remember in either a primary or general election. Upscale voters are heavily for Obama; downscale voters are heavily for Clinton.

As the contest has continued, increasing percentages of Clinton and Obama voters say they wouldn’t vote for the other candidate against John McCain.

But the exit polls don’t show another tribal division, one that emerges when you examine the election returns by county and congressional district. In state after state — from New Hampshire and Michigan to Texas and Ohio — Obama runs unusually strongly in counties with large universities. Academics — and I include here those who choose to live in university towns as well as those actually in or teaching school — seem to find Obama particularly appealing.

Also, Obama runs unusually well in many state capitals — Concord, Lansing, Tallahassee, Atlanta, Nashville, Santa Fe, Dover, Jefferson City, Sacramento, Trenton, Madison, Columbus, Austin — which of course have unusual concentrations of public employees (and in some cases big universities, as well).

Clinton’s highest percentages come in counties with large numbers of Latinos and what I call Jacksonians. You can see the latter in counties in what is loosely called Appalachia — southwest Virginia, southern Ohio, the north end of Georgia, non-metropolitan Tennessee, northern Alabama, northeast Mississippi, all of Arkansas, southern Missouri, eastern Oklahoma, east and central Texas.

These are lands that were settled by the colonial-era immigrants from northern England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland and their descendants, who thronged down the Appalachian chain and then, like their heroes Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston, kept going southwest.

Clinton’s strong performance among Jacksonians may reflect her positive appeal (it certainly does in Arkansas), but it also seems to reflect a distaste for Obama. Buchanan County, Va., which borders the yet-to-vote states of West Virginia and Kentucky, voted 90 percent for Clinton and 9 percent for Obama.

What’s behind these sharp divisions? You could sum it up by saying that Jacksonians are fighters and academics (and public employees) are not. Jacksonians fought fierce battles against Indians as they moved southwest; they have always made up a disproportionate share of the American military (and were on both sides in the Civil War).

As historian David Hackett Fischer writes in Albion’s Seed, they believe in natural liberty — I’ll leave you alone if you’ll leave me alone, but if you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you. Academics are, to say the least, lightly represented in the American military, and in economic terms they tend to compete with the military for public dollars. They seek honor for the work of peace as fiercely as Jacksonians seek honor for the feats of war.

I heard Sean Hannity interviewing Michael Barone about this article Friday afternoon. When Barone got to the part about the Jacksonians having the "attack me or my family or my country and I'll kill you" attitude Hannity was incredulous. He asked Barone if you could really say that about an entire people.

The answer is yes. What Barone calls the Jacksonians are actually the Anglo-Celts. We speak English, but our culture is Celtic. Although we are religious our ancestors did not come to this nation primarily for religious freedom. We came for land and freedom and to be away from the annoying presence of authority.

We do take a live and let live attitude and follow the belief that what a man does on his own land is his own business. But if you threaten us or ours we will kill you.

Those Anglo-Celts inclined to vote Democrat will tend to prefer Hillary however the majority of Anglo-Celts will unfortunately choose to back McCain.

Oh, the reason that Obama is leading by such a wide margin here in North Carolina? The most heavily populated part of NC is the central part of the state which contains the University of North Carolina and Duke University. It also has the state capital of Raleigh and the Research Triangle which is peopled largely by transplanted Yankees.

In other words there is a large colony of New Jersey in the middle of NC and that tends to skew our numbers.