Wednesday, March 05, 2008

HILLARY BACK FROM THE DEAD


One thing you never want to do is to count out the scrapper from Illinois, the other scrapper from Illinois that is. Clinton won 3 out of 4 states yesterday giving her victory in all the largest states to date and a bunch of big ones (New York, California, Texas, Ohio, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Michigan) while Barack has won a handful of the large states (Illinois, Georgia, Wisconsin and Virginia) but none of the largest states.

Forty of the fifty states have spoken and no one has a clue what is going to happen. There have been 28 primaries and 13 caucuses although Texas, to make things interesting, had one of each, and the delegate count and total vote are near deadlocked. For the record Obama has 86 more delegates than Clinton even after losing 3 states yesterday but that is the Democratic Party way. Michigan and Florida had primaries but were penalized and no delegates were allowed.

No wonder the world watches in awe. Now if I were living in any country in the world watching this bizarre election I would have to say I don’t think democracy is for me. How can a political party be allowed to dictate the rules for elections in the land of the free? Probably the same way financial institutions and oil companies can dictate the price of oil in a free capitalistic society. Competition seems to have its limitations.


So Hillary finally halts for the moment the Obama machine. How about this analysis? Hillary loses 12 straight primaries before yesterday and only trails Obama by about 106 delegates. Then she wins 3 out of 4, two in rather large states, and still trails Obama by at least 86 delegates. The Democratic Party rules give credence to the saying “you can’t win for losing.”

On the Republican side McCain assured his party nomination and knocked his last opponent according to the media, Huckabee, out of the race by winning all four primaries. Somewhere along the line the media killed off the Ron Paul campaign although he never did quit himself and still shows up on all the ballots. When you don’t buy political ads from the media you can’t expect them to recognize your existence.

So now we get to wait 8 weeks for the Pennsylvania primary before there will be any significant shift in the delegate counts. We may well have to wait until August and the nominating convention to really figure out who will represent the Democrats. And even after all the votes and delegates are counted there is yet another group of 842 Super Delegates in the Democratic Party who will really decide the election in the end. Don’t you just love democracy?

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