Afternoon Open Thread

It’s a cold and chilly day here in Central PA. Not very “May” like. Days like today make me feel like I’ll never be warm again. We’re going to dinner in about an hour. In the meantime, here are some things to ponder.

Emily’s List founder, Ellen Malcolm, wrote a piece for the Washington Post this morning called Quitters Never Wiin. And it’s true. The Obamaphiles seem to be counting on a strong, persistent demand to get out of the race as the best way of forcing Hillary out. But so what if she doesn’t? Then what? Well, it only means that Obama has to wait longer to wrap it up or not wrap it up at all. And we’re behind her all of the way.

Following up on Anglachel’s and Bringiton’s math, I’d just like to point out another little detail that works against Obama. In the primaries, we see him winning decisively in two scenarios: the state is sparsely populated, has a lot of Republicans and runs caucuses OR the state has a critical mass of African-American voters. In the case of the latter, African-Americans are voting for Obama in overwhelming numbers. They now represent a block for Obama. But even with a block, the difference in delegate counts between Obama and Hillary is pretty small. That means that even with almost every African-American in the country voting for Obama, they can just barely swing it for him and with FL and MI, they can’t even do that. So, what’s going to happen to Obama when that 12% of the population that is concentrated in the greatly non-discriminatory Democratic party now is diluted by independents and the more racially picky Republican party in the general election? They AA population is no longer a critical mass, methinks. Forget ever carrying North Carolina.

This is an open thread.

Sunday: Happy Mother’s Day!

Yesterday was my brother’s 40th birthday. We had a party for him but he had to leave it early. He’s in the Army Reserves and he’s been assigned to 5 months of training in Georgia before he is deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. We’re not really sure if he’ll have any time off between training and deployment so yesterday was the last time we were going to see him for a long time so we celebrated a birthday and mother’s day.

My brother has two little girls. When my little sister and I were kids, we often went through this ritual with my dad who was in the Navy just before he went on 8 month long cruises to southeast Asia. The coming home is the best part. They will have a chance to visit him a couple times in Georgia but it will be a long time before he comes home.
To those Obama supporters who rashly accuse the rest of us about not caring whether John McCain becomes president, think again. Some of us care very deeply about it. The last thing we want to do is hand the nomination over to someone who is likely to lose it, who can’t carry the states he presumably won and who, if he were elected, is going to need a lot of time to figure out what all the moving parts are. I want a person who is ready to lead from day one and who I can trust to stabilize our crumbling military while getting us out of our overextended committments as carefully as possible. That person is Hillary.

In the meantime,

Anglachel reinforces Bringiton’s main idea about electability in Percentages, Preferences and Defections. Oh, My!
Over at Corrente, Bringiton writes about the math and electability in Hillary Clinton Must Be the Democratic Nominee; Do the Math.
And rounding things out is this summary from TheCityEdition called Bamboozling the American Electorate Again, describing the strategy behind the unholy alliance between the Rove controlled media, the Obama campaign and its support machine on the left. This is where the the realy animosity between the Obama and Clinton camps originate. Once again, Karl Rove has figured out how to pander to self-interest, this time on the left. He figured out where our weak point was and he inserted a wedge there. The worst part about it is that everyone has always known we’ve been getting played but instead of rising above politics as usual as Obama’s campaign vowed it would do, it validated what we have always suspected about ambition and human nature- it got down in the dirt with the Republicans in order to take Hillary out. We’ve seen it. We knew it. This piece summarizes the whole shebang. We’ve gotten the weakest candidate as our frontrunner. Yep, people on the left are just as stupid and gullible but this time they did it with their eyes open. Thanks Karl.
(Hey, Obama, what goes around, comes around)