Race Over or Not, Obama Takes a Victory Lap

In Conservative circles here in the UK they are known as the men in the grey suits, the party big wigs who eventually take a candidate to one side and gently explain to them that their campaign is finished. It is becoming apparent that the Democratic party's equivalents are preparing to tell Hillary that the fight is over and that she has lost.

Even as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton persisted with her campaign for the nomination, Mr. Obama made a celebratory return to the Capitol, where he received an enthusiastic reception on the House floor in an appearance staged to position him as the party?s inevitable nominee.

Behind the scenes, there were new discussions between Mr. Obama and the party leadership. Senior Democratic officials said he met with Speaker Nancy Pelosi when their paths crossed at Democratic Party headquarters. They had spoken by telephone earlier in the week. Ms. Pelosi and Mrs. Clinton have had no known recent talks.

Addressing concern among some Democrats that Mrs. Clinton would fight on to the national convention in late August, Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Clinton campaign, suggested that the race would end quickly after the final primaries early next month, sparing the party a potentially debilitating summerlong battle.

?After June 3, this is going to come to a conclusion,? Mr. McAuliffe said on NBC?s ?Today? program.

Even Clinton's supporters appear to be ready to concede that the battle is over:

?I think she should complete the primary season, and then she has to re-evaluate and her supporters have to re-evaluate,? said Representative Nita M. Lowey of New York, a Clinton backer.

And more and more super delegates are coming out in support of Obama:

Representatives Brad Miller of North Carolina and Rick Larsen of Washington said Thursday that they would back Mr. Obama. Several more uncommitted superdelegates in Congress told Mr. Obama that they would be announcing their support in the coming days, campaign advisers and House Democratic officials said.

Hillary is now running out of money and running out of time.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, US election 2008, Democratic presidential nominee

Read The Full Article:
http://the-osterley-times.blogspot.com/2008/05/race-over-or-not-obama-takes-victo
ry.html

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Where's the Village

Hillary won't acknowledge she's not the nominee. The voters have already spoken, but it'll take the superdelegates and Democratic party leaders to dislodge her from the field.

It'll take a village!

Read The Full Article:
http://whathappenedtomycountry.blogspot.com/2008/05/wheres-village.html

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Seven Days in May

I've been trying to get around to posting a follow-up on the May One at Faneuil Hall thing. I've got lots of great pix but my battery went semi-dead the last week. Not the camera battery, my posting battery. Maybe it's my digestion - of life in Bush's[...]

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Docudharma/~3/286978536/showDiary.do

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Hillary Clinton As the Good Old Boy

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

"Senator Obama?s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.... Whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There?s a pattern emerging here."

No, that wasn't Orval Faubus speaking, and you haven't been transported back to the Arkansas politics of 1957. Instead, you have entered the modern sewer of Clintonland, where anything goes and it commonly stinks to high heaven.

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http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/carpenter/068

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ABC now has Obama ahead with superdelegates

ABC News is the first news organization to place Obama ahead in the one category where Clinton has always led -- superdelegates:

Sen. Barack Obama moved into the lead today in the last category that Sen. Hillary Clinton had claimed to have an edge -- support among the Democratic Party's superdelegates.

The Illinois Democrat grabbed the superdelegate lead thanks to a switch by New Jersey Rep. Donald Payne and an endorsement from previously uncommitted Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon.

Those two votes gave Obama a 267-266 lead over Clinton. That is a huge shift since the days when Clinton boasted about a 60-plus vote lead among the party's pros back on Super Tuesday.

Everyone has a different tally for superdelegates. I rely on Democratic Convention Watch. They name names -- their totals are: Clinton 269.5/Obama 263.

It's just a matter of time -- a short amount of time -- before Obama takes the lead on all the sites tracking superdelegates.

Some superdelegates are actually getting their spines.

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Americablog/~3/286879189/abc-now-has-obama-ahead-w
ith.html

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Cultivate Your Sense of Wonder, and Live
Ecstatically

I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity. Through the ministrations of radio and the phonograph, we are rapidly and quite properly learning to appreciate the elements of aesthetic narcissism -- and I use that word in its best sense -- and are awakening to the challenge that each man contemplatively create his own divinity. -- Glenn Gould, quoted in "Glenn Gould: Musical Individualist"

In "Passing on the Sense of Wonder," I wrote:

I know that some people view my writing as bleak and pessimistic; they think I approach events from a perspective that is despairing and fatalistic. Some believe my primary message is that we're headed into monumental catastrophe, and there is nothing to be done about it. In the most important sense, such a view of my work strikes me as surpassingly strange. It is absolutely not how I think about the world at all. To begin with, the fundamental fact of life itself, coupled with the further extraordinary fact that we are aware of it, is nothing less than miraculous to me. Many times a day, as I'm reading or listening to music, and once in a very, very great while when I'm writing and think I may have stumbled onto a particularly pleasing way of expressing some idea, I'll think: "Isn't this just the most amazing thing, that people can create in this manner!" I consider the supreme artistry of Maria Callas, and I am overwhelmed and inspired by the greatness of which human beings are capable. The breadth of that kind of vision, together with an exquisite sensitivity to the smallest detail and an unbreached dedication to settling for nothing less than the absolute best we can do, fills me with wonder. It makes my own soul sing, and I am determined to work harder than ever in my own small way.

If I had to select just a single word to express my deepest feeling about the world, and about humankind, it would be that one: wonder. I consider it a measure of how unevolved we are that so many people appear to be capable of that feeling only when they contemplate an imaginary, supernatural plane. It is hardly surprising that our world holds so much unnecessary suffering, when so many people are willing and eager to condemn it to second-rate status in favor of one they've made up out of whole cloth.

A little farther on in that essay, discussing what may lie in our future culturally and politically, I said:

I think it highly probable that our circumstances will continue to get significantly worse, although this deterioration may come quickly or comparatively slowly. You may live the rest of your life without seeing the worst of what will happen, or even anything close to the worst -- or you may not. There is no way to know, and the variables are close to infinite. But I say again: it does not have to be this way. Extraordinary events have transpired in history before, and they might again. We need a miracle, but not one delivered to us from a supernatural realm: we require a miracle that we create.

It can happen. Hold on to your sense of wonder; if you do not have a sufficiently strong one, then develop it. For me, it is the most precious resource in the world.

I read the Glenn Gould passage that appears at the beginning of this piece, and which I don't recall ever seeing before, in this fascinating entry, which I came across because of this post. I offer my sincere thanks to Peter Saint-Andre; the particular terms of his kind words mean a great deal to me. "Flecks of Light" and the earlier Callas essay may be my two favorites of my own essays, because they are so deeply personal. I myself am not at all certain that I merit in any significant way Saint-Andre's comparison to Gould. Aside from my incurable dissatisfaction with my own work and my reluctance to claim too much for it, I am largely unfamiliar with Gould's writing and thought, although I have a number of his recordings. Clearly, I will need to read the books that Saint-Andre mentions.

In the second half of "Passing on the Sense of Wonder," I mentioned two works that I had recently viewed and read, and that capture aspects of this perspective, Alan Bennett's The History Boys, and Albert Jay Nock's, Our Enemy, the State. I quoted a brief speech of Hector's in The History Boys; as I wrote, Hector is "a teacher of about 60 who 'merely' provides 'inspiration,' which the headmaster considers 'unquantifiable' and therefore insufficient." Hector tells his students:

Pass the parcel.
That's sometimes all you can do.
Take it, feel it and pass it on.
Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day.
Pass it on, boys.
That's the game I wanted you to learn.
Pass it on.

From the conclusion of Saint-Andre's essay about Gould:

Although Gould never accepted students, he emphasized to those who did that "your success as teachers would very much depend upon the degree to which the singularity, the uniqueness, of the confrontation between yourselves and each one of your students is permitted to determine your approach to them" (Gould 1984, 5). He cultivated in himself "those virtues of temperamental independence which signal the genuine re-creative fire" (Gould 1984, 252), almost to the point of becoming a hermit. He longed for "a world where nobody cared what anybody else was doing -- in which the entire group-think ... syndrome utterly disappeared" (Gould 1984, 460). This ethical individualism is fully consistent with his views on the mission of the artist, which Payzant describes as follows:

According to Gould, artists have a moral mission and art has an unrealized potential for the betterment of humankind. Human improvement can occur only as the result of modification in our attitudes as solitary, private individuals, and not as some kind of collective modification of our species, voluntary or not. Each person must accept the challenge of contemplatively creating his own "divinity." "Divinity" here refers to the better part of individual human nature, which for Gould is the introspectively and ecstatically contemplative part.... (Payzant 1984, 120)

Yet this artistic mission is not moralistic, nor does it involve the kind of "preoccupation with an art that communicates easily with the masses" or "insistence upon an overt message" (Gould 1984, 174) that Gould found so repugnant in Socialist Realism. For Gould, "the purpose of art is ... to serve its own end, from which each man will derive what he chooses to derive" (Gould 1984, 170). It is this ideal that Glenn Gould pursued throughout his life as a musician and thinker, and that makes him a powerful example of aesthetic and ethical individualism.

And the final paragraphs of "Passing on the Sense of Wonder":

We should note the conclusion of Nock's Epilogue too, where Nock proposes "a violent frontal assault" on the "vocationalists" like Murdstone, who think "the world be merely a place to work in," a world where "nobody seems to be having a very good time," whether poor or rich:

All the physical apparatus of happiness is about us, and yet no one, apparently, is having a cent's worth of fun out of it. Well, here is the classicist's opportunity. He can throw his experienced eye, trained by his incessant commerce with the ages, over this anomaly and show cause for it. He can survey the life of our well-to-do and poor alike, and show that about the only fun to be had out of such a life is the search for fun, and show why the desire remains ungratified. He can show by practical example -- by horrible example -- where, in the preparation for life, certain essential values which have been disregarded by the vocationalist, come in. Thus he has now an advantage which he never had before, in the opportunity to appraise a whole society which represents quite fairly the finished work of his opponents. But we are convinced that he will once more merely fumble this advantage unless he stands immovable upon the bed-rock thesis that life is given to human beings for their enjoyment, that all its other purposes, if it have any, are incidental and ancillary to this one; that the human world by its original intention is not Murdstone's world, not a world of industry and efficiency, but a world of joy.

Just before Hector's final speech in The History Boys, Hector's rival, Irwin, says: "He was a good man but I do not think there is time for his kind of teaching any more." One of the students replies: "No. Love apart, it is the only education worth having."

Live in the sense of wonder, and in the world of joy. Take it, feel it and pass it on.

That's sometimes all you can do -- for someone, somewhere, one day. It's everything.

I now add that, when you engage in this process, you yourself live ecstatically -- today.

And that is everything.

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May 20th is Victory Day

Jed reports that May 20th is when Obama can pretty much declare himself the winner of the Democratic nomination:

As Barack says, the key thing about May 20 (the day of the Kentucky and Oregon primaries) is that on that day, he will secure a majority of democratically selected pledged delegates. After that point, the most important part of the process will be over. Unless superdelegates decide to overturn the judgment of voters and take the nomination away from Obama, it will be his.

We all know that won't happen, especially after Obama's blowout victory in North Carolina and his close performance in Indiana. (He would have won Indiana were it not for the meddling McCain supporters.)

The key reason we need superdelegates to get off their butts and sign up with Team Obama before May 20 is that as a party, we must make it clear that voters -- not party insiders -- chose our nominee.

That's 11 days for Hillary to slowly bow out gracefully. Obama's being generous. He won two months ago. And now that the media has turned on Hillary, as have her donors, he doesn't have to give her breathing space at all - but he is. Let's see how classy the Clintons and their staff can be. And, let's see if the superdelegates finally get a spine.

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What's wrong with CNN McGovern is NOT a
superdelegate

We've heard multiple reports this morning that CNN is repeatedly claiming that George McGovern is a superdelegate. He's not. And if you don't believe us ask the DNC.
They're saying he is one of 3 superdelegates that has switched from Clinton to Obama in the past couple of days.

At CNN.com they include him in an article about superdelegates called "Obama narrows lead in superdelegates"

There are now more superdelegates than pledged delegates among those who remain undecided.

Following Clinton's narrow win Tuesday in Indiana and and her double-digit loss in North Carolina, former Sen. George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, said he had decided to back Obama over the former first lady.

So did a Virginia superdelegate -- Jennifer McClellan, a member of the state House of Delegates from Richmond. - CNN

If anybody can find video of this let us know.

Most trusted name in news? Goes to show you how bad the big media is today.

Read The Full Article:
http://demconwatch.blogspot.com/2008/05/whats-wrong-with-cnn-mcgovern-is-not.html

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DOES McCAIN EVEN HAVE A CHANCE IN NOVEMBER

Paul Krugman hasn't been an advocate for Obama this year. In fact, he's tilted so far towards Hillary that I thought he might tumble off his rock-steady Rocinante. But this morning he's back being  an analyst and back being the brilliant and relevant Paul Krugman whose columns have become such a key part of the liberal conversation. And he's got a warning for Obama: don't squander a sure thing. A sure thing? The polls show a tight race between Obama and a third term for Bush, not a landslide.

Political scientists, by and large, believe that what happens on the campaign trail, while it gives talking heads something to talk about, is more or less irrelevant to what happens on Election Day. Instead, they place their faith in statistical analyses that identify three main determinants of presidential voting.

First, votes are affected by the state of the economy-- mainly economic performance in the year or so preceding the election.

Second, the approval rating of the current president strongly affects his party?s ability to hold power.
Third, the electorate seems to suffer from an eight-year itch: parties rarely manage to hold the White House for more than two terms in a row.

This year, all of these factors strongly favor the Democrats. Indeed, the Democratic Party hasn?t enjoyed this favorable a political environment since 1964. Robert Erikson, a political scientist at Columbia, tells me: ?It would be difficult to find any serious indicator that does not point to a Democratic victory in 2008.?

What about polls that still seem to give John McCain a good chance of winning? Pay no attention, say the experts: general election polls this early tell you almost nothing about what will happen in November. Remember 1992: as late as June, Gallup put Ross Perot in first place, Bill Clinton in third.

Of course, no one expects McCain or his desperate corporate allies-- and that, obviously, includes the media-- to just raise the white flag. If you think Hillary fought like a mad dog for the nomination, just wait 'til you see what McCain will do to give himself the opportunity to make up for those lost years in the Hanoi Hilton. Today's Wall Street Journal reports he's been working hard, almost Madonna-like, in re-defining the latest incarnation of John McCain as "a reliable conservative but not a George W. Bush clone" and will soon start the process of smearing Barack Obama with a series of campaign ads (and the kind of Rovian innuendo once-upon-a-time used against McCain himself).

And yet, the national media still shies away from a serious analysis of McCain's actual voting record in the Senate-- not his rhetoric or how he nods and winks on the Daily Show but how he actually voted. True, he's been prone to not showing up for tough votes-- or for even scurrying out of his seat and hanging out where one would normally expect to see Larry Craig during contentious times but he still has a voting record and even if the corporate media refuses to look at it seriously, Keith Poole, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego just did. He concludes that although McCain has been slightly less right-wing than the average Republican senator for much of his career, once he decided to run for president, he tossed the "moderate" and "maverick" guises off as fast as he could and re-invented himself as an extremist nut-job. He votes the Bush-Cheney line-- both domestically and internationally-- 95% of the time. The only Republicans who have more extreme voting records are an assortment of far from the mainstream neo-Confederates like James Inhofe (OK), John Cornyn (TX), David Diapers Vitter (LA), Jeff Sessions (AL), Saxby Chambliss (GA), Jim DeMint (SC), Miss McConnell (KY), Tom Coburn (OK)... the real bottom of the barrel. For this current session of Congress, McCain consistently ranks among the 20 most far right extremists in the Senate-- across the board policy-wise. Anyone who wants another 4 years of what we've just gone through need only examine John McCain's voting record to know who their candidate must be.

Read The Full Article:
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2008/05/does-mccain-even-have-chance-in.html

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Hillary Hurls the "W" Word

For Billary, it's all about power.

Getting, keeping and wielding it.

There really isn't anywhere they won't go to be the Democratic party powerbrokers. Peggy Noonan takes aim at Billary's over-the-top tactics in "Damsel of Distress." (Wall Street Journal)

Noonan points out that Billary's hatchet man set their gutter parameters this week. On CNN Tuesday night Paul Begala uttered the "W" word. Accusing Barack Obama of not caring about white voters, he charged that if "there's a new Democratic Party that somehow doesn't need or want white working-class people and Latinos, well, count me out.... We cannot win with eggheads and African Americans."

Democratic party activist, African American Donna Brazile, wasn't having any of this, telling Begala to "stop trying to split us into these groups," and admonishing him... "It's our party, Paul. Don't say my party. It's our party...."

Putting the exclamation point on Begala's remarks, Thursday Hillary said in an interview with USA Today she has "a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," citing an AP report that she said "found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states [IN and NC] who had not completed college were supporting me."

Hard-working white Americans!.... and, if you have a college degree forget it, you're not hard-working enough. Ugly class and race-baiting from the spouse of the first black president.

As Noonan pointed out, "If John McCain said, 'I got the white vote, baby!' his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic party."

But evidently this isn't the old Democratic party.... with superdelegates and party leaders cowering behind "more time" squeaks as dominatrix Hillary and her finger-pointing, has-been husband dispense their punishment. They are going to make everyone suffer until they are given their due.... their coronation, or the destruction of Obama and the Democratic party.

Noonan says it's obvious .... "The Democratic Party has a winner. It has a nominee. You know this because he has the most votes and the most elected delegates, and there's no way, mathematically, his opponent can get past him...."

But to diminish Obama, Hillary is playing the race card to "highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical 'the black guy can't win but the white girl can' is -- well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by."

It's not easy to go against Billary. Just ask Gov. Bill Richardson who endured their long tirade when he told them of his support for Obama.... and felt the lash from Clintonite James Carville who accused Richardson of being a "Judas."

Or House Whip Rep. James Clyburn who said he was subjected to a 50 minute phone-reaming from Bill after their loss in South Carolina over his TV remarks about Bill playing the race card there.

It's 3 a.m. and Billary's phone should be ringing.... who'll make that overdue call?

Read The Full Article:
http://whathappenedtomycountry.blogspot.com/2008/05/hillary-hurls-w-word.html

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