Electability

Phototoons? I love phototoons! Maybe the April caption could have been “Of course, I would’ve walked right out of that mosque!” Hillary is running out of time. She can’t be blowing set-ups like that and still hope to win the valuable super delegate votes.

Listening to NPR today they were talking about her recent argument that only she can bring the “hard working white folks”. While I would certainly not ever try to say that spending 12 hours tied to a laptop could be compared to the exhaustion and difficulty of intense manual labor day in and day out, I still kind of resent the implication that because I have a college degree and a masters degree and happen to work with ideas I’m not a “real American” or a hard worker. (I must have missed something during all those years of 60-100 hour work weeks)

- to be clear… i think the manual worker with HS education is ALSO a real American. I just think my opportunity to have further education and then make use of it should not disqualify me.

and, um, Adam? Wouldn’t it be “only John McCain or I can keep us safe”?

sorry…you can take the girl out of the editor position, but, you know

I agree. I, too, am a hard-working American! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to check out a few more websites and then I’m taking some comp time this afternoon. Come on, Hillary, Barack, and John, which one of you wants to claim me? No shoving!

Becca and/or Brian … I couldn’t agree more. What really chaps my ass is how people assume that those of us who went to college and beyond somehow lucked into it. With apologies to the great John Hiatt, I’ve always been pissed off by that “I didn’t go to college ’cause I didn’t have the luck” attitude. Luck had not a damn thing to do with it. I worked my tail off in high school to get to college, while a lot of my peers couldn’t be bothered. And I worked my tail off in college to get to law school. Drank my tail off, too; but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

Oh, and guess what? Having not been born to rich parents in Park Ridge, Illinois, I had to pay my own freakin’ way all the way through. My folks were both teachers, and we didn’t have two nickels to rub together, so every thing was a struggle. At one point in college I worked three separate jobs and held down a full class schedule just to pay the bills. I graduated college in 3 years because the money and the financial aid just plain ran out (thank you very much Ronald Reagan and former Ill. Gov. Jim Thompson). I got as many credits as I could so I could get my diploma before the well ran dry. I’m not saying that to brag; I’d have given anything to have one more year as an undergrad!

Anyway, sometimes I think I knew more about “hard work” by the time I was 21 than HRC will ever know.

So, I got no bone to pick with those who took a different path. Sometimes - often times - I wonder if I shouldn’t have done the same. But, fer Chrissakes, don’t tell me I “lucked” into college, or I got there just because I belonged to some elite group, or that life has been easy since then.

Sorry for the rant; it’s just been a sore spot for me for, oh, 25-odd-years or so …

After all, if Hillary Clinton had that much influence over voters, wouldn’t SHE be the one everyone is lining up behind?

I think that the rhetoric from the Clinton Camp is starting to sound more conciliatory. She may be a fighter but she can still read the writing on the wall, and she is not Ralph Nader who is the only person in America who thinks he didn’t cost Al the election.

I also think that Barack’s focus will head towards McCain now that Hillary’s bid is virtually out of reach. (Of course if videos of BHO burning a Bible in a Mosque to the tune of “God Damn America”, and laughing at bitter common people surfaces, well,,, that’s why we have super delegates).

Dave,

First off, my comments were directed to Adam’s cartoon, not to your mutual-admiration-society debate about who is more hard working and noble.

Second, I did not mean to sound as if I was taking offense at the cartoon. I was simply suggesting that it, and its ilk, are not a particularly effective means to achieve the puported goal of getting BHO elected, and seem designed more to setting up for a scape-goat for loss in November rather an effort to avoid a loss in November.

Your comments, and Adam’s cartoon for that matter, make appear that if you and the BHO crew were going “awfully easy on HRC over the past few months,” it was nothing more than a tactic to paint HRC as the horrible “negative” one. Again, once you think the process is over, you take the gloves off.

Well, guess what, the process isn’t over and it won’t be over at the convention in August either. It’s simple math that the Democrats can’t win the White House without the support of all those voters who came out in support of HRC and all those voters who came out in support of BHO.

It’s not about thick skin, it’s about practicality.

Dave — Talk about thin skin. Do you hear yourself?

My comments had absolutely nothing to do with whether HRC is being practical in continuing her campaign. Nor did I suggest that BHO supporters were being impractical by supporting BHO. I’d be more than happy to have either of those debates with you if you’d like.

My comments concerned the very limited issue of whether it makes sense — and is practical — for BHO supporters to take the kind of shots at HRC evidenced by Adam’s cartoon. Your position seems to be “hell, yeah, HRC has been horribly devisive, so it’s only fair to give it right back to her.” I am suggesting that you may want to consider that if it was so horrible and devisive for HRC to take what you consider to be cheap shots at BHO — because it will so undermine the party’s chances in November — then perhaps, just perhaps, it would be just as unproductive to take cheap shots at her.

Is it only devisive and counterproductive to take cheap shots at the candidate who seems to have garnered the support of slightly more that half the party, but not at all divisive and counterproductive to take shots at the candidate who seems to have garnered the support of slightly less than the other half of the party?

David Sirota’s column today, “Acknowledging the Race Chasm”, had an extremely interesting discussion on this. (The S.F. Chronicle publishes him from time to time.)

I’m beginning to get the depressing feeling that, no matter who wins this, we the people lose, since if BHO wins, we must be incurable misogynists, while if HRC wins, we are clearly incurable racists (Mr. Sirota would agree with this one). And of course if John McCain wins, everyone else loses.

Hillary will come back to her senses and help Obama win the general election. She went off the deep end in her ever more desperate attempt to win the nomination, a nomination she believed she deserved. But the godawful things she said were going to be said by the McCain campaign in the general election, so I still suspect two purposes were served: those things are now old news, so unless they actually have some kind of enduring traction, they will be less of a problem in the general election; and Obama got a chance to respond to them, and deal with his personal distress because of them, before the general election. The greatest damage is what Hillary did to herself, and to the kind of broad tent the Democratic Party actually is. That she would attempt to set core constituencies against each other is pretty appalling. And what a shame that what should be a remarkable positive, that a black and a woman could be the two finalists for the Democratic nomination in an election the Democrats will win, has become an acrimonious divider.

First thing I would like Obama supporters who said they would not vote for Hillary if she were the nominee to do is send a note of apology to Hillary. The supporters of the nominee need to set the tone. Then I would look for reciprocity from the Clinton supporters who swear they will not vote for Obama. They don’t need to send apologies. They just need to vote for Obama. Hillary probably holds the key to what a lot of her angry supporters will do.

In the general election, John McCain will mostly self-destruct, while Obama will inspire. This will be a general election for the ages, even though the media would likely prefer to continue to reduce it to a freak show.

My choice: Obama/Richardson, although Janet Napolitano is an intriguing possibility. Hillary is too prominent to be a vp. If she were going to be in the administration, it would need to be as secretary of state or, to smash a glass ceiling, secretary of defense. Otherwise, I think either back to the Senate as majority whip or, and I really like this idea, onto the Supreme Court. I would love to watch her take Antonin Scalia’s sorry ass apart and serve it at a barbecue. She is a formidable personality, knows the Constitution, and would be free from some of the shitbrained triangulation she was guilty of, especially regarding the Iraq Warcrime. She would rise to the stature of SCOTUS,
unlike the silly-assed Federalist Society egomaniacs and their sadly unenlightened black colleague.

But first she must do everything in her power to undo the damage she has done, for her own sake and for the stature of the Democratic Party. She won’t cause Obama to lose. She can’t. But she can help add to the margin of his victory. I’m looking for a 53-47 spread at this point, but I would love to see 57-43. And I look for both North Carolina and Virginia to wind up in the D column this time. I have trouble imagining Ohio not being a D win. There has been a significant shift in Ohio politics.

Do not hang your heads, Democrats. You are poised to be winners, which means America is finally poised to be a winner again.

Wow. While I was composing my comment, Adam said Motherfucker. Let’s see if Fanny is like the “Shut Your Mouth” girls in the song Shaft and blocks me. MoFo or not Adam’s reply was necessary.

Adam, now can we see some foto funnies of Barack and his minions demonizing Hillary? There’s a lot of material you can draw from.

How about some wacky stuff showing how Barack has shot himself in the foot over and over again with stuff that was naive, dumb, and unwise, demonstrating questionable judgement over and over again in things he has said and ways he has dealt with issues that later blew up in his face?

“I spent the last three months completely mired in this stuff, reading every press release, watching every available stump speech, seeing every talking point that both of their surrogates churned out.”

Damn, Adam, at the risk of sounding like our president, funny is hard work. Ain’t it?