Assuming that Hillary Clinton can't lead the Democratic Party and the
rest of the country into Bizarro World, there's a good chance that
Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States.  By
my reckoning, that would make him only the fourth cool President in our
history.

A genuinely cool President has to be someone who would be cool even if
he or she wasn't President, someone you'd think it would be cool to
hang out with in a situation that had nothing to do with
politics.  That leaves us with Thomas Jefferson, Theodore
Roosevelt and John Kennedy.  Kennedy makes the list by the skin of
his teeth, since it would only be cool to hang out with him somewhere
like Las Vegas or Hollywood, and only if you were in serious party mode
and relatively drunk.  You'd have to be able to forget that he was
a married man with two small children.  (Bill Clinton was cool in
a similar sort of way, but only if you grew up on a farm and met him on
a rare visit to a roadhouse on a rocking Saturday night.)

Jefferson and Kennedy were sexual creeps, so Obama would be only the
second cool President who was also a decent human being in his private
life.

The Democratic Party continues its triumphant march to
oblivion.  John McCain can probably nap between now and 4 November
and still wake up on the morning of 5 November as the President-elect.

What we're seeing I think is a phenomenon characteristic of monopoly
“capitalism”, something that might be called morbid inertia. 
Large
institutions which are accustomed to monopoly power in some arena
cannot change, even when they are marching towards the edge of a cliff.

So the recording industry, faced with widespread consumer revolt
against the shoddiness and overpricing of its products, made possible
by a virtual monopoly over distribution, will not change its products
or its marketing methods when a new system of distribution
emerges.  It tries instead to enforce the old distribution system
by legal (and illegal) actions which have no logic and no hope of
success.  It sues soccer moms for downloading a few songs, it
introduces the concept that consumers don't own the songs they buy, or
even the machines which play the songs they buy.

So the television networks, losing market share steadily, year after year,
refuse to adapt to new conditions and keep doing the same old
things over and over again — going for the last cash they can squeeze
out of a paradigm which even a child can see is doomed.

So Hollywood refuses to make films for large segments of the public and
concentrates instead on the one segment it thinks it knows best, young
males, and fails to satisfy even them on a regular basis.  The
market, reacting in kind to this contempt for consumers, resorts to
casual piracy, which Hollywood then identifies as the source of all its woes.

So the establishment of the Democratic Party, faced in Barack Obama with the almost unimaginable gift of a
transformative candidate who is swelling its ranks with new, young
voters, the Democrats of the future, and building a new and virtually
inexhaustible fund-raising base of millions of small-time donors,
clings to its old ways and tries to muscle an establishment, machine-anointed candidate
into the White House against the will of the majority of voters.

Today
Bill Clinton mused wistfully about how nice it would be to have a
Presidential race in November between two candidates “who love America”
— meaning his wife and John McCain.  It was a statement whose
unspoken but unmistakable premise was that the the third possible
candidate in November, Barack Obama, is someone who doesn't love
America.

Hillary has almost no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, and
therefore almost no chance of becoming President.  Her thinking
seems to be that if she can't have the Presidency, then no Democrat
will.  She's already suggested that only she and McCain are
qualified to be commander in chief.  Now her husband is riffing on
the right-wing radio notion that Obama is not a true, patriotic
American.

It has sometimes been suggested that Barack Obama “transcends race”
— or that he's selling the delusional notion that America has
transcended race.  I
think the truth of it is quite otherwise — that one of the deepest
unspoken appeals of Barack Obama, to all Americans, has been the
sneaking suspicion that one day he was going to speak
about race directly, open up the honest conversation about race which
this country has been too confused and too frightened to have.  It
makes him slightly dangerous but also utterly intriguing.

I always assumed that he would say what he had to say on the subject
after he was elected President, and perhaps he made the same
assumption, but the Reverend Wright controversy made it necessary to
say it sooner rather than later.  So on 18 March, within hailing
distance of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he gave the most
important
speech on race delivered in this country since Martin Luther King's
address from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to the crowds gathered
for the March On Washington.

At this point I don't think it matters how people respond to Obama's speech
as a bit of political strategy, how it may hurt or hinder his campaign
for the Presidency.  It's a speech that will echo down the
years.  Curiously, for a man who is both praised and condemned for
emotional rhetoric, the speech was most notable for its sober and sobering
analysis of the state of half-conscious or unconscious racial division
in the country.  There were no sweeping appeals to idealism, no
sense that the division could be repaired by lofty slogans, by “dreams”.

He told us where we are — where, on some level, we all know we
are.  He gave us permission to speak about the issue from where we
are.  He brought the talk around the kitchen table into the public
square.  Nothing but good can come of it.

As
every political junkie must know by now, Texas had a two-step system
for choosing delegates to the Democratic Convention this August — a
primary in which about two-thirds of the delegates would be selected
and a caucus in which about a third of the delegates would be selected.

Only the results of the primary voting were known in the wee hours of 5
March — Hillary Clinton won in that voting, by a three-percent
margin.  The cable news services, anxious to put a period to the
day's events, reported that Clinton had “won Texas”, and this has become
the story out of Texas, Clinton's “Texas victory” one aspect of her
“comeback”.

But with about 40% of the caucus votes tabulated it is clear that Obama
will win the caucus by a substantial margin and that he will gain about
six delegates overall from the Texas election.  By any measure, he
will win Texas, because he will win more delegates there.

Don't expect the corporate media to tell you this, or to make anything
of it.  The “Texas story” is set in stone now — Obama's victory
in Texas, when it becomes official, will just be a footnote.

The pundits of cable news are clowns, parroting the predictions of
fallible polls and dutifully reporting whatever spin the respective
camps decide to put out, without making the slightest effort to
evaluate the reliability of the press releases or media conference
calls.  They will justify themselves by saying that they're just
reporting on “the perception” that Clinton won Texas, even though they
created that perception by irresponsible reporting.

Hillary
Clinton says that Barack Obama is not a secret Muslim “as far as I
know.”  It's good to see she's keeping an open mind on the
subject, unwilling to come to any definite conclusion until all the
facts are in.  That's the sort of nuanced judgment one likes to
see in an elected official.

Another inspiring thing about Hillary Clinton is that while Barack Obama talks a lot about hope Hillary is running a campaign grounded
in hope — the hope that she can cut a backroom deal with Super
Delegates to override the will of the voters in the Democratic primaries and caucuses.  That should make
the streets of Denver an interesting place to be this August when the Democratic Convention assembles there.

In a box somewhere I have the headband with a peace sign on it I wore
when I got tear-gassed in front of the White House
protesting Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State killings in
1970.  (At the time I was trying to overturn one of the buses
lined up end-to-end around the executive mansion to keep me and a few thousand of my closest friends
from knocking down the wrought-iron fence around the White
House.)  To me the headband is like a campaign ribbon — a symbol of one of
the only signal services I ever did my country.

With the circulation of the photo of Barack Obama looking silly (and oh
so “other”) in traditional Somali garb, it's clear that the Bill and
Hill machine is back on message, delivering its urgent warning to all
real Americans:

“The Negroes are coming!  The Negroes are coming!”

The
flop on 5 February didn't favor either Democratic player — Clinton was
still ahead with her AK to Obama's AQ.  Obama spiked another queen
in the Potomac primaries, however — not because he won all three of
them by big margins and not because it gave him the lead in pledged
delegates . . . he paired his queens because for the first time he made
big inroads into Clinton's base, older white women, Latinos and
non-black lower-income voters.

If he can keep doing that in the primaries to come, his queens will
hold up.

Clinton will pair her kings and take the lead if she
wins big in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania, getting close enough to make
a brokered convention acceptable to the party as a whole — or at least
not totally unacceptable.  Clinton would be likely to win a brokered convention.

However, if Obama leads significantly in vote totals, states won and pledged
delegates after the primaries, I suspect that Clinton will take the card room manager
aside and argue that AK high beats a pair.  If he rules in her
favor, the card room will riot and the Democratic party will be
finished for the foreseeable future — which might not be a bad thing
at all.

I
personally like to hear a little religion come up in the political
discourse of this country.  Abraham Lincoln, like Martin Luther
King after him, was very good at reminding us that our actions of the
moment have to be seen in the light of transcendent values, and
religion has powerful language in which to frame such ideas.

Word up, dude.

I was really pissed off at the Mike Huckabee campaign ad in which a
bookcase behind him was lit to present the image of a gleaming
cross.  Huckabee later said it was inadvertent.  Right. 
It was a Christmas message, in which Huckabee mentioned celebrating the
birth of Christ — why lie about the cross image?  Was he just too
wimpy to put a crucifix behind him — did he think it would be better
to sneak it in?  Subliminal messages like this, especially when
denied, are very
creepy.  (Have a look at the ad yourself here and draw your own conclusions.)  I also am totally unmoved by mere statements of faith, or
policies defended by scriptural doctrine.  I want the ideas behind
those doctrines to take center stage in the discourse.

Commenting
on the Republican primary in Florida tonight Tom Brokaw used a poker
analogy to describe Mike Huckabee's current position in the race —
“He's holding a pair of twos.”  In other words, he doesn't have a
premium hand, especially compared to what the other players at the
table are holding, but it's still a hand.  What Brokaw was getting
at was that Huckabee, by taking votes from Romney among “values voters”
in the Southern states, could still affect the race in a decisive way
and earn political capital in the process, specifically with John
McCain, who might seriously consider Huckabee as a running mate.

That got me to thinking about what hole cards the other candidates are
holding at present (thoughts that admittedly won't make much sense
unless you know the game of Texas Hold-em.)

On the Republican side, of the three players still in the pot,
Huckabee
has his ducks (a pair of twos), McCain has cowboys (a pair of kings)
and Romney has jack-ten suited — or maybe jack-ten unsuited, or maybe
jack-queen suited, or maybe . . . well, with Romney it's hard to be
more precise — apparently he has a bunch of mediocre cards up his
sleeve which he can play at will.  In any case, McCain has a
made hand and Romney
is on a draw.  Romney has enough chips in front of him to call
McCain down to the river but he's chasing.

On the democratic side, Hillary is holding big slick, ace-king, and
Obama is holding little slick, ace-queen.  If neither hand
improves, Hillary wins.  Obama has to catch a queen and Hillary
has to miss catching another king.  For Obama, a queen would be a
last-minute surge next Tuesday that keeps the delegate count close and
convinces the old-guard Democratic party hacks that he has an unstoppable
momentum which it would be too costly to get in the way of.

We'll see the flop in both games on Tsunami Tuesday.

Participating
in the Nevada Democratic Caucus last week gave me an interesting
perspective on the Presidential race this year — a look at things on the front
lines, where actual votes are cast and recorded.

Prior to the caucus I got a phone call from a live Clinton supporter
who urged me to vote for Hillary (“because she has the experience to
get things done”) and told me where my caucus site would be.  I
got a recorded message from Edwards, inviting me to a meeting of his
supporters in Henderson.  Nothing from the Obama campaign. 
That struck me as odd — I thought perhaps his campaign had decided to
cut back on the expense of outreach calls because of the boost he got from his
endorsement by the Culinary Workers Union.  If so, it was a big
miscalculation.

My caucus site was the auditorium of an elementary school a few blocks
from my house.  When I got there, one side of the room was filled
with Clinton supporters, mostly older white women wearing yellow
Hillary T-shirts that the Clinton coordinator was handing out. 
Behind them sat five or six undecided voters.  On the other side
of the aisle were the Obama supporters, mostly blacks of all
age-ranges.  Behind them were a handful of Edwards supporters, and
later in the proceedings a single Kucinich supported identified himself.

I sat with the Obama supporters.  The Obama coordinator had no
T-shirts, just some campaign stickers to put on your shirt front.

There were 55 voters in total present for the caucus.

At one point I overheard two of the Clinton supporters, older white
males, whispering to each other about caucus strategy.  One of them said, “We've got
to make sure none of the undecideds go over to the dark side.” 
They smiled conspiratorially at the phrase, which I didn't feel was a
reference to Stars Wars.

There's a lot more of this sort of casual prejudice abroad in the land
than people might like to believe and I think the Clintons have made a
deliberate decision to exploit it — to position Obama as “the black
candidate” and make people feel o. k. about indulging their sense of
blacks as “other”.

It's pure, cynical Rove-ian politics, morally sickening in itself and
even more sickening because it will probably work, at least as long as
Hillary can make plausible denials about her involvement in the
statements of her supporters, including her husband Bill.  To me,
such denials are not plausible, and I won't vote for Hillary in the
general election if her tactics succeed, unless it's absolutely
necessary to defeat an even more objectionable candidate, like Mitt
Romney.  In other words, John McCain has become my second choice
for President this year.

If the Clinton tactics can so thoroughly alienate an old-time lefty
like me, I hate to think how she would fare with more moderate
Democrats and independents in a general election.  I think we
might see a Democratic defeat of McGovern-like proportions.

At my caucus, there weren't enough Edwards supporters or Kucinich
supporters to make either of them eligible for delegates from our
district.  In the end, all the Edwards supporters and almost all
the undecideds moved over to the Obama camp and the vote ended up very
close to even, with Clinton edging out Obama by a few statistically
insignificant votes, as it turned out.  We awarded 5 delegates to
each candidate.  This mirrored the way things went throughout the
state, with Hillary getting more votes overall but splitting the
delegates just about evenly with Obama.  (The press tended to
report only the vote totals, which gave Clinton the “beauty contest”
win, barely mentioning that in the race for delegates the Nevada
contest was essentially a dead heat.)