general election

Patrick Ruffini has written an excellent post explaining how Barack Obama's justification for skipping public funding is fundamentally deceitful.  The problem, of course, is not with private financing, but with what this says about Obama. 

Given the choice between keeping his word and keeping the money, Barack Obama chose money.

This is interesting. These are the bragging rights posted at Obama's site:

The lighter states were won by Obama, the darker states won by Clinton. Look at that huge dark swath from the Great Lakes west to the Mississippi. That's really phenomenal.

Now, I'm the first to admit that using Obama's performance against a member of his own party to project a performance against McCain would be logically unsound. However, it's fair to say at the very least that this is a weak area for him. We know from exit polls that this area of the country in particular is worried about the economy above all else. I wouldn't be surprised to she Obama choose a VP with economic credentials and ties to this part of the country.

I posted yesterday that the DNC, for its own sake, needed to accomplish two objectives at its rules meeting yesterday: 1) satisfy the two states, and 2) satisfy the two candidates' camps of voters. Well, by halving the vote-counts of both delegations and by essentially reassigning some of Hillary's pledged Michigan delegates to Obama, it appears the committee failed to do the latter. In fact, many Hillary supporters seem more incensed than ever.

Take Ms. Harriet Christian, for example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KACQuZVAE3s

yikes!

In her last 15 seconds she makes a decent point, though. With the Hillary camp as disaffected as it still is, if McCain can just hold off a third-party spoiler, he can capitalize on this discord and win the election.

<Note to TNR powers that be -- can we embed youtube videos? pretty pretty please?>

Today the DNC rules and bylaws committee (streaming live at CNN and the Washington Post) meets to determine how and even if to seat delegations from Florida and Michigan. What's the significance for GOP supporters?

Well, there's no possible seating of the delegation that could result in a lead in the state delegates for Hillary. But she is petitioning today to have the tally from the two states included in the national popular vote tally. If she is successful in doing so - with Barack receiving zero votes in Michigan - then she will indeed overtake the popular vote lead nationally. This will give her a stronger argument that she should be the party's nominee, and there's an outside chance that she could eventually sway enough superdelegates to win the nomination.

Obviously, if Clinton is the nominee instead of Obama, the face of the entire general election is changed.  While the Clinton name inspires almost irrational levels of antipathy in certain states,  she is a more competitive opponent than Obama in Florida, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky.

But assuming that the committee meeting today does not result in Hillary overtaking the nomination, its ruling still impacts the general election. The complications of the primaries have hurt the Democratic Party's standing in both states. The DNC has the difficult task of coming up with a solution that satisfies voters in the two states involved without further widening the growing gulf between Hillary and Obama supporters. If the DNC fails to do the former, they effectively forfeit the two states' combined 44 electoral votes to McCain. If the DNC fails to do the latter - i.e., if the DNC approves a plan in which either Obama or Clinton appears robbed of their rightful votes, it will only further the animosity between the Obama and Clinton camps. The end result will be that many Democratic voters will be even more adamant in their refusal to vote for any other than their own preferred candidate in November. A reduced Democratic turnout in November would help Republican candidates across the board.

And finally, even if, somehow, the DNC finds a solution today which satisfies the states of Florida and Michigan and the campaigns and supporters of both Clinton and Obama, the DNC still faces the difficult prospect of reconciling the members of the two candidates' camps - so deeply divided in what has been a long, difficult, and emotional battle over the voting rights of the two states.

So while the GOP and its candidate is not ostensibly affected by the outcome of today's hearings, there are both short-term and long-term ramifications for this election, and many Republican voters, myself included, will be curious to see the committee's rulings today.

Everybody loves a great political gaffe when it falls right into their lap.  They've often been the deciding factor in elections, which is one reason why Hillary Clinton is justified in staying in the Democratic primary all the way to the convention.  You just never know when Barack Obama might commit one that causes his entire campaign to throw its hands up and start updating resumes. 

Unfortunately for Clinton, as she has found out in recent days with her reference to Bobby Kennedy's assassination, the longer she stays in the race, the greater the likelihood that she'll commit one herself.  It was an embarrassing misstep, to say the least, but it still wasn't enough to end her hopes.  In fact, it seems the only thing that could end her hopes (that is, her own hopes, and not of those of us who dwell in the material plane) would be a six-month stint in a padded cell and a straightjacket.  And even then, there'd have to be cage fighters armed with cattle prods stationed at the cell door.

But, the constant vigil for malapropisms that so many conservative bloggers and opinion makers strikes me as symptomatic of the difficulties that the movement faces going into the fall elections.  For instance, Obama's Gaffe O' The Day wherein he claimed that his "uncle" was involved in the liberation of Auschwitz created a stampede of salivating conservatives scrambling to their keyboards in hopes of being the first blogger to bust his chops on what appeared to be a reincarnation of Hillary's "Lioness of Tuzla" blunder(s).  Sadly, it turned out to be a simple matter of confusion with regard to location and generation rather than an attempt to deception or narrative embellishment.  Still, the first reflex for many conservatives was to seize on it as an outright lie in the hope that it would be the killer gaffe.

Conservatives would be well advised to stop betting on the emergence of a campaign-ender and focus more on Obama's actual weaknesses as a candidate.  Most likely, there won't be any gaffes of sufficient magnitude to render him completely unelectable. 

Still, this wasn't a completely harmless misstatement of fact.  It does feed into the sense that many people have of Obama that, at times, he is historically clueless.  His speech in Selma, Alabama is another example when history failed to support Obama's biography.  One would expect that a man seeking the highest office on the face of the planet would be intimately familiar with the details of Nazi war crimes in a time when anti-Semitism resides at the very core of the dangers we face in our foreign policy via the struggle against Islamic terrorism. 

In fairness, the first thing that came to my mind upon hearing Obama's claim wasn't the fact that it was the Russians who liberated Auschwitz.  But, in the end, what came to my mind doesn't matter, since I'm not asking people to make me the leader of the free world and to cut me a little slack on my lack of foreign policy experience based on my worldliness and brilliance.