On primaries

When I began this blog in January, it was my intention to “cover” the primaries as best that I could. It certainly wasn’t lack of material that kept me from publishing. Life, as they say, intervened and conspired to keep me from publishing. When I finally thought that I couldn’t put my posting off any longer, the motherboard on my server failed. More on that later, suffice it to say that the blog has been completely offline for almost 60 days.

So, it seems appropriate for me to weigh in again on the Democratic presidential primaries. I feel it necessary to update my predictions, since I had previously predicted that Hillary Clinton would steal the election. One thing that the Clinton campaign certainly failed to understand is that a 55-45 split is not a “win”, it’s a 55-45 split. It’s been a long time since a primary was contested through all 50 states. It’s clear now that the Clintons did not expect to have to contest nearly that many states. They expected to knock him out after five or six races.

As we all know, that didn’t happen. When you’re only contesting less than half of the primaries, as has been the modern practice, you can squeak out a narrow margin in New Hampshire and say that you won. When your opponent is in it for the long hall, and half of New Hampshire’s and every other states delegates go to him, it’s a lot harder to declare victory.

This was a very close race and the party should be better for it. Certainly, Obama and Hillary were capitalizing on TV coverage all Spring while McCain was mulling around with nothing much to do. However, the race certainly did lag on longer than it should have. Somewhere around late March, it became a mathematical impossibility for Hillary to clinch the nomination. Yet, like some sort of zombie vampire bitch, she refused to concede. My favorite columnist, Matt Taibbi, wrote about this phenomenon for Rolling Stone. He does the topic more justice than I ever could. I suggest everyone check him out, if they haven’t already.

The whole Michigan, Florida debacle was infuriating to me. Living in Florida, as I do, I was pretty upset that my vote wasn’t going to count for shit in the primary. This, of course, was nothing new. Since, the trend of presidential primaries in my voting lifetime has been to only contest 10-15 states (not Florida) before anointing the nominee. Parties are not governed by the Constitution and are regulated by very little Federal legislation. The people that run the parties generally do whatever they want, though logic would dictate that they do what is in their collective interest. Therefore, the DNC was operating under the premise that it was in the party’s interest to exclude Michigan and Florida from the primaries.

In fact, the whole “short calendar” regime that places South Carolina’s importance above Florida and Michigan and New Hampshire above all is in the party’s interest only if you define the party’s interests in terms of it’s ruling elite. Read Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Clinton’s assumed that a short calendar was in their interest, if only they could knock out all challengers without a fight. It saved them money, time and resources, to not compete in Michigan and Florida, and that’s why they were oddly silent during the whole pre-election disenfranchisement story. Four months later, the short calendar strategy did not actually work out. They were out on a limb and suddenly they changed their tune.

The whole thing irked me more than usual, because my vote was actually caught up in this bit rate tv drama. I didn’t vote the Presidential ballot in January. I had been assured by Chairman Howard Dean that my vote didn’t and in fact wouldn’t count. Not wanting to give the dog and pony show any legitimacy, I turned in a blank Democratic ballot. I wouldn’t have voted at all, if it wasn’t for that pesky “save our homes” property tax amendment.

Then, months later, the Chairman and his minions, who are starting to seam more and more like the oligarchical politburo that they are, decided that my vote did count; counted for half, anyway. This end result ended up being an even greater insult and injustice than if they had just continued with the plan to wipe Florida off the electoral map. Think of all the mouth breathers out there that didn’t even bother, because the television and the newspaper told them it didn’t matter. We have the Clintons to thank for this sorry state of affairs. They’ve had their way with the party since Bill was elected. If they didn’t personally engineer the original Florida penalty, they certainly stoud idly by and let it happen. Then, they came along and pretended to be our half saviors, when it served their interest.

Thankfully, the Clintons are politically dead. Or are they? We still don’t know who Obama’s VP nominee will be.