First we divided into camps, Hillary vs. Obama.

Then Hillary gave a conciliatory speech.

Then we divided into camps, Obama supporters who want reconciliation and Obama supporters who attack Obama supporters who want reconciliation.

If this keeps up, Hillary's camp is outta here.

Yesterday I had commitments that prevented my hearing Senator Clinton's speech live. When I finally heard it, I was overjoyed. Senator Clinton pulled off something I thought nearly impossible after Tuesday night - a convincing message to unify the Democratic Party for all the right reasons.

Hillary Clinton was once again the candidate I originally supported, but she was much more. She was truly eloquent and inspirational. I think it's ungenerous to quibble over technicalities such as whether she used first person singular too often. Her message did not come over as self-serving - quite the opposite. The only negative feeling I experienced was regret at the absence of this inspiring, eloquent Hillary Clinton during the long painful months of this presidential campaign.

It's impossible to comprehend why such an attractive candidate has been hidden from public view. I can only speculate that the candidate I admired yesterday fell victim to advice from a cabal of veteran male advisers - geniuses like Mark Penn, Harold Ickes, and Bill Clinton. The Hillary Clinton who spoke yesterday was fully capable of competing with Obama by offering a positive alternative. The strategy that attacked Obama's eloquence as empty and worthless deprived Hillary of a powerful tool - her own eloquence. The decision to dismiss Obama's inspirational message, and inspiration itself - as an infantile wish to see solutions fall from the sky - deprived her of her own inspirational voice. The decision to concede younger generations and African Americans to Obama and to court other demographic groups based on resentment was not only harmful to the Democratic Party, it was nothing less than tragic for Senator Clinton.  She could have competed with Obama in his areas of strength, retained her advantage among women, and offered greater experience as well. She could have won, rallied universal Democratic support, and left an undamaged Obama with a bright future. Obama's most ardent followers would have been disappointed but strongly committed to electing Hillary Clinton president.

The election could have played out as what we originally thought it was - a difficult choice from a roster of outstanding Democratic candidates, but a choice certain to produce the next Democratic president after eight catastrophic years of incompetent and malicious Republican rule. We are now at a more challenging pass, but there is much greater hope today than 48 hours ago.

With respect to this campaign, there is little point in speculating about whether the real Hillary is the eloquent, inspirational woman we saw rallying the party yesterday or the mean-spirited candidate who seemed to feel no compunction about antagonizing millions of Democrats for the slightest chance of improving her own chances at the nomination. I hope the former is the true Hillary and the latter an illusion conjured by a band of idiots who hijacked her campaign.

In either case, few politicians could redeem themselves after waging a divide-and-denigrate campaign like the one so skillfully designed and implemented under Penn, Ickes and company. Nevertheless, in my view,  redemption is exactly what Hillary pulled off yesterday. Against all odds, she redeemed herself along with Democratic hopes. Whatever motives are the true definition of her own heart, the Hillary Clinton who spoke yesterday proved herself a candidate who could have won the nomination and the White House on her own strengths. If that Hillary Clinton had taken the podium from January until June, she would have won.

Looking to the future, if we see that Hillary Clinton throughout this fall's campaign and in years to come, we may yet live to see the inauguration of President Hillary Rodham Clinton.

No ambiguity here. Robert Mugabe says of the US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Jendayi Frazer:

"You saw that little American girl [U. S. Assistant Secretary of State
for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer] trotting around the globe like a
prostitute..."

If this seems like a great year to nuke Iran, why not bestow a small tactical warhead on Zimbabwe's "President"?

What underlies the racial polarization in the Democratic primaries is income inequality. The disparity in income between rich and poor is now, as both Obama and Hillary have noted, greater than at any time since the Republican heyday in the Roaring Twenties. We all know that the Haves and the Have Mores, as George W. Bush once called his supporters, have done fabulously in recent decades, with particularly generous treatment under the administration of President Hereditary-Have-More himself.

Unfortunately, focusing a Democratic primary campaign explicitly on the needs and fears of white Have Nots inevitably awakens that group's tendency to fall for the Republican line that blames the plight of white Have Nots on powerless black Have Nots who are even worse off. Any program designed to increase economic opportunity for blacks is presumed to exist at the expense of aid needed by white Have Nots in places like the Appalachians.  Intentionally or not, the effort in Ohio to pin responsibility for NAFTA and the offshoring of traditional union jobs on a black candidate, Obama, played into this narrative.  Since whites hold most good union jobs, the  narrative wrote itself: a black candidate would be less concerned about preserving the jobs of whites than creating jobs for blacks. Comments we hear now in Kentucky about how white politicians look out for whites and black politicians look out for blacks have likely surfaced in greater numbers as a consequence of trying to associate the black candidate in Ohio with policies that exported jobs. Even the fact that a black candidate is competing with a white candidate for a single very important job reinforces the narrative.

The feelings that Hillary tapped into in blue-collar neighborhoods and regions like the Appalachians are so powerful because the white working class and other white Have Nots have truly suffered under Bush. If economic conditions for white Have Nots had been improving, there would not have been such a wellspring of white anger available to direct at blacks and a black candidate.

It is important in the remainder of the campaign to remind all Democrats that the suffering has been shared by all Have Nots and the whole middle class of all races. Somehow the message must come through that the division that has worsened the lives of most Americans in the last eight years is between the very rich, who have enjoyed near total political power, and everybody else. Polarization within the middle class and the class of Have Nots will only perpetuate this - whether based on race, religion, gender or anything else.

As Democrats, we need to ensure that the discussion in the general
election brings everybody together to redress the economic injustice that has hurt all but a very few. The
healthcare issue is just one manifestation - care is rationed based
on the ability to pay. The war has its economic dimension - it has enriched the few at the expense of the people who serve and those who will inherit the debt and the costs of long-term care for wounded veterans. Our distorted economy underlies every issue.

This is obvious, but it has been lost in the din of racial discussions. Republicans will play up racial divisions, same-sex marriage and God knows what else to divert voters from the economic realities their policies have created. Democrats must united and focus this election on the economy and its ability to serve a broad spectrum of the American people, white and black, male and female, rural and urban. The whole economy has been turned into one giant golden parachute to protect wealthy Republicans from the disaster their policies created. The Democratic campaign must not allow the Republicans to distract voters from this reality.

There's been such a din about the unelectability of a black nominee
that we forgot about the unelectability of a woman. And yet there are
eerie parallels that spell doom for us as Democrats.

The current Clinton argument for nominating her reduces to the following:

1. The United States is a racist country.
2.
The majority race in the U.S. is white. For sad historical reasons,
almost all presidential candidates of all parties have been white.
Without exception, all U.S. presidents have been white.
3.
Consistent with the foregoing, it is clear that a significant portion
of the white majority is racist and will vote only for white
candidates. Moreover, minority voters are accustomed to voting for
white candidates and can be counted on to accept a white candidate. In
addition, there is a strong racist strain in the Republican Party that
plays to its advantage. We don't like these realities, but we must face
them. That doesn't make us racists.
4. As a black, Obama can never win.
5. As a white, Hillary is the only remaining Democratic candidate who can win.
6.
It would be a fatal mistake for the Democratic Party to take a chance
on attempting to elect the first nonwhite president because racist
forces in American culture are insurmountable.
7. Therefore, the Democratic Party has no alternative but to nominate Hillary.
8.
Under the circumstances, superdelegates have a fiduciary responsibility
to overrule any primary and caucus votes cast for a black candidate.

There is a parallel argument to consider:

1. The U.S. is a sexist country.
2.
While the electorate is roughly half male and half female, sad
historical realities have meant almost all presidential candidates have
been male. Without exception, all U.S. presidents have been male.
3.
Consistent with the foregoing, it is clear that a significant portion
of the male half of the electorate is sexist and will vote only for
male presidential candidates. Moreover, female voters have been
accustomed to voting for male candidates and can be counted on to
accept a male candidate. In addition, there is a strong antifeminist
strain in the Republican Party, even among Republican women, that will
play to the advantage of Republicans if Democrats nominate a woman,
especially a woman who lacks enthusiasm for baking cookies. We don't
like these realities, but we must face them. That doesn't make us
sexists.

4. As a female, Hillary can never win.

5. As a male, Obama is the only remaining Democratic candidate who can win.

6. It would be a fatal mistake for the Democratic Party to take a
chance on attempting to elect the first female president because sexist
forces in American culture are insurmountable.
7. Therefore, the Democratic Party has no alternative but to nominate Obama.
8.
Under the circumstances, superdelegates have a fiduciary responsibility
to overrule any primary and caucus votes cast for a female candidate.


It is debatable which argument is more powerful. Clearly, the safe
course for Democrats was to nominate a white male. Since the
irresistible forces of racism and sexism in American culture leave the
Democratic Party in a hopeless position, we blew it. We reinforce the
hopelessness of our position every time a Democrat says the black
candidate can't attract enough white voters or the woman candidate
can't attract enough male votes.

Curiously,
this is where the symmetry breaks down. We've only been hearing one of
these messages from Democrats. This is true even though the leading
Democratic male candidate has generally trounced our leading female
candidate with male voters. In North Carolina, for example, Clinton got
only 39% of the male vote to Obama's 58% - didn't you hear the networks
talking about that all night long, reminding us that Republicans and
independents tend to be disproportionately male? Telling us this could
hurt Hillary even more than the tendency of Republicans and
independents to be disproportionately white hurts Obama?

Perhaps
we should accept the hopelessness of our position now that we've doomed
ourselves to choose between a female and a black candidate. On the
other hand, like typical Quixotic Democrats who think they can improve
the world, we can attempt to break through the racist or sexist barrier
to the White House this year.

But which barrier should we try to break first?
A
modest proposal: We could let Democratic primary and caucus voters
decide, not superdelegates saving us from one candidate's theory of
unelectability.

An even more modest proposal: We could stop
saying a black can never win over white voters in a McCain-Obama
matchup, and continue to refrain from saying a woman could never win
over Republicans, independents, and many working class white males in a
McCain-Clinton matchup.

Or we could go on cutting our own
throats, sparing the delicate feelings of the Republicans who usually
perform the gruesome task.

Hillarization:

Hil-lar-i-za-tion n. [hil-er-uh-zey-shuhn ]

Simultaneous, self-serving, cross-party polarization along racial, gender, economic and cultural lines.

Is there any data as to which people flip Republican after seeing the Gross Old Party's fabled attack ads?

With no data to go on, my sense is that it's the white working-class voters Hillary so proudly claims as her own. The ads seem designed to make these very people feel threatened by blacks, gays, immigrants, etc.

My deep analysis says blacks don't flip Republican based on Willy Horton ads, affluent Democrats don't flip Republican based on images of gay marriages, highly educated progressives don't flip Republican at the mention of socialized medicine,  reality-based foreign policy wonks don't flip Republican after seeing the umpteenth image of Osama bin Laden, etc.

Why should we believe white working-class voters won't desert Hillary when the first ad demonizes her based on God knows what trumped up charges?

The SoS has taken a big chunk of votes away from Obama and a few away from Hillary.

This hardly inspires confidence in the competence or integrity of Pennsylvania election officials.

Can someone please explain these two apparent anomalies in reporting of the PA results:

1. Everywhere, Hillary's margin is reported as 10%. The two sets of numbers I see as of 6:27 a.m. are the PA secretary of state's and the media's, which show Hillary winning by 8.5% and 9.4% respectively. Has somebody changed the conventions of rounding in Western mathematics?

2. Seems very odd that the results on sites other than the secretary of state's show Hillary's vote total increasing by 23,698 and Obama's total by only 1,161. Did Hillary win a late precinct with 95.3% of the vote?

Funny business by the Rendell machine? Late corrections to earlier errors? Somebody please explain so we can have some confidence in these votes.

Also, has anybody analyzed results to estimate the Limbaugh/Scaife malicious crossover factor? Is it even 1%?

As Hillary goes ever more Republican, there may be more scenarios to worry about than sour grapes within the Democratic Party. She has already shown herself willing to cost the Democrats this election for the tiniest chance at winning the nomination. She is crossing the border into Joe Lieberman territory at the very least; ZellMillerland lies just around the bend. So three questions:

1. Does Hillary feel such a deep, intrinsic entitlement to the presidency that she will run as a third-party candidate as Lieberman did when denied Connecticut's Democratic nomination for the Senate?

2. Is Hillary's continuing praise of John McCain - most recently on the environment - setting up a McCain-Clinton ticket?

3. Will Hillary be the surprise keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention?

As usual, I was so furious at Hillary's  willingness to throw away a Democratic chance at the White House that I was beside myself during the debate.

But as Hillary reached again and again into her political toolkit for the right instrument to kill Obama, a funny thing happened. She was reaching too much - for "bitter," for Wright, for Farrakan, for anything at all.  And she didn't really seem troubled by any of it. It was child's play for her - she was the precocious gradeschooler plucking the legs off a helpless grasshopper as a demonstration of power over the entire playground.

Only there was something else there on that stage with her. Her campaign has been trying to get the press to write about Ayers and the Weathermen and Obama's "ties" to terrorism for months. Finally she actually had to trot it out herself in the debate. That was when I realized it.

Hillary has worked so hard to genetically engineer a heap of steamy green slime to throw at Obama. A passer-by left a single strand of DNA on Obama's coat sleeve one day on the streets of Chicago, Hillary's minions retrieved the strand from Obama's drycleaner, tinkered God-like, and finally resurrected some Dark Creature from Obama's Past - the Dread DCOP. They hand fed the DCOP, which, after all, has the right to life in this, our Republican world. They coaxed the DCOP with little liver treats to roar and slash the air with its six-foot fangs, and here at this perfect moment, Hillary herself led the fearsome DCOP on stage for all the world to see. There it stood, living proof that Obama can't win, that his past is fatally flawed, transforming the debate into the nationally televised death of Obama, right in front of Good Morning America and everybody. In a sickly flash, Democrats would realize they have no alternative to Hillary, no choice but to recognize the loser of this contest as the inevitable nominee.

Hillary is standing there admiring the DCOP that she has given the gift of life, waiting for the world to gasp at the creature with green slime oozing from its jagged teeth, waiting for everybody to say, "Obama is dead. Long live Hillary!"

Only nobody is staring at the DCOP. Everybody is staring at all the steaming green genetically engineered slime on Hillary's hands. Everybody sees that it's Hillary's monster, not Obama's.

Poor pathetic Hillary.

Americans rejoice!

Foreclosures are up! Bankruptcies are up! Healthcare costs are up! Gas costs are up! Food costs are up! Personal debt is up! Food stamp dependence is up! Unemployment is up! Murders are up!

Consumer confidence is down! Home prices are down! The stock market is down! The value of the dollar is down! Disposable income is down! Approval of the president is down! Approval of Congress is down!

Bitterness is neither up nor down. It is forbidden.

Turns out that's what happened in Michigan and Florida, but not the way it's represented by Hillary's campaign.

Based on a statistical comparison with turnout in other states’
primaries, it appears that roughly two million more people would have
voted in Florida and Michigan had they expected their delegates to be
seated.

Just seating Hillary's delegates in light of this wouldn't exactly be fair to these 2,000,000 Democrats. This also further undermines the shaky case for counting the popular vote in these two flawed Democratic primaries. Millions of Dems didn't vote because they knew it would be a waste of time.

How should the Democratic nominee respond to the attacks the Republican attack machine will launch, whether Hillary or Obama gets the nomination? Allowing our noble press corps to do it's job and contribute its vaunted "objectivity" will clearly never work. The press seems to relish repeating lies ad nauseam rather than exposing who and what is behind the attacks.

We all know how false and successful these attacks have been going back to Dukakis. For my part, I'd like to see the Democratic nominee do the following:

1. Tell everyone from the outset the attacks are coming, reminding people of the job done on John McCain in the SC Republican primary and John Kerry in the 2004 general election;

2. Identify the slimy operatives by name, in advance;

3. Ridicule the attacks, including making up some to look for: Does Obama have a Martian child?

4. Identify the financiers who repeatedly fund these things, including Karl Rove's buddies;

5. Have both the financiers and the slimy operatives investigated in every aspect of their lives, such as tax records, marital history, criminal records, history of civil litigation, credit history, bad debts, child support not paid, war profiteering, and complete history of hit operations on politicians, etc. Investigate anything that can be investigated within the law;

6. Publish portraits of these people;

7. Hit back at each attack within hours, complete with every negative fact about the individuals behind the attacks; if that is not immediately known, announce that the attack is a fabrication and investigators are on the case; strip away the phony organization, like the "Swiftboat Veterans for Truth," and expose the people, including the real businesses of the money people;

8. Name all the connections to the McCain campaign and all Republican politicians and organizations;

9. File law suits and criminal complaints wherever there is any conceivable legal basis against both organizations and individuals; get the slime merchants under oath and trap them in a lie, if nothing else. Make them spend their funds on lawyers instead of sliming political opponents.

In short, make their lives miserable the way they made the Clintons' lives miserable for eight years, and Kerry's life miserable in 2004. Pursue them with the tenacity Judicial Watch originally showed when it dogged the Clintons.

Democrats have to do something. The Republican attack machine will continue ruling this country until the people running the slime industry under a different organizational name each year have to pay the same price as their victims.

If we grant that Penn, Carville, Ickes, and the Clintons themselves are
political geniuses, it follows that there must be some intelligent
strategy behind their divisive actions. There has to be a bit more than
destroying all the other candidates and rallying everybody under the
"Vote Hillary - you have no alternative!" banner. Yeah, I know, there's"Vote Hillary, or you're against women's rights, you rat," but that's not
enough to put Hillary over the top.

Puny-minded folks like me
don't see how the Democratic candidate can win without blacks in
Hillary's case and without women in Obama's case. So I've assumed the
Clinton strategists think blacks will come crawling back to vote for
Hillary because - ta da! - they will have no alternative. Only it's
asking a lot for black folks and lots of others to forget having such a
great alternative right before our eyes for so long.

I think
it's so clear the geniuses are wrong about hanging onto the black vote
that I'm beginning to wonder if they're not making a
mistake, they're just a couple of steps ahead of everybody else.

What if
Clinton strategists have decided it's time for the Democratic Party to
ignore the black minority in political calculations? Not to expel
blacks, of course, or to say blacks are unwelcome, just to make
campaign decisions without regard to black opinion. Not to send Hillary
to Philadelphia, Mississippi to extol states rights. Nothing that
crass. Just going with the numbers.

After all, blacks are a
shrinking percentage of the population - a mere 12.8%. Supporting
pro-black positions is a handicap for the party -- too many unpopular
positions like affirmative action and busing repel more than 12.8%
of the population. We'll remain committed to equal rights, of course, but be
quietly effective instead of so all-fired loud and moralistic about it
all. Besides, if you don't win, you can't do a thing about equality,
can you?

If it's not a new Southern + rural Midwest + iron belt + middle PA strategy, I'd be grateful to
anyone who reveals the gem of rationality behind the apparent train
wreck that is the Clinton campaign.