Posts Tagged ‘primary’
The Biggest Winners in Indiana Don’t Even Live There
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I just guest-posted this commentary on PunditMom‘s “Mothers of Intention” column. Much will be said about last night’s primaries, but I always try to follow hockey star Wayne Gretsky’s advice, something like: “I don’t skate toward where the hockey puck is. I skate toward where the hockey puck is going to be.”
Sometimes when you win, you lose.
That’s the lesson of the Indiana primary.
Read MorePennsylvania Station 2008
Pennsylvania was clearly going to be either the semi-finals or the finals in this game. Looks like the semi-finals are headed into overtime. And that’s a good thing.
In the pre-internet old days of backroom politics, the party powerful would long ago have taken these two candidates into the proverbial smoke-filled room and knocked heads together until the smoke cleared and they struck up some kind of deal that resolved which one would be the party’s nominee.
Today, we have a much more transparent, much more participatory, much more democratic-with-a-small-d process.
The superdelegates are the closest thing the party has to the backroom now. Clearly, if they continue their trend to supporting Obama, then Clinton is sunk even though she won Pennsylvania. Quite likely they’ll ultimately go with whoever they perceive as a winner. Yesterday it was Obama. Tomorrow it could be Clinton, for three reasons.
Read MoreBarack’s Hubris
Oh honestly. At 9:53pm Barack Obama called John McCain to congratulate him on winning the Republican primary and tell him he looked forward to running against him in the fall. Now that’s hubris way beyond the confidence Clinton exuded in the famous Katie Couric interview when she said she’d be the Democratic nominee and was excoriated by the press. OK, Chris Matthews, are you going to notice and beat up on Obama?
Read MoreWHY WOMEN NEED TO LEARN HISTORY’S ELECTION POWER LESSON
Like many women who identify themselves as feminists, Kathleen Turner and I are divided in our presidential candidate pick. We spent 18 months collaborating on her just-released memoir, Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles.
During that time, we talked about politics quite a bit, because she sees herself as an activist as well as an actor. I rolled my eyes last summer when she announced to me that she’d decided to support Barack Obama and was going stumping for him in North Carolina’s August heat.
I thought it a naïve choice, but Obama had the good sense to invite her to a meeting with a few prominent women and had asked directly for her support. She’d been impressed, as I was when I first met him soon after his 2004 election to the U.S. Senate. And like many people, I was thrilled that the Democratic candidate lineup looked more like America, whereas Republicans were still mired in cookie-cutter white male political hegemony. Nevertheless, it seemed at the time that Hillary Clinton was surging to an unassailable lead for her party’s nomination, so I didn’t need to press too hard on Kathleen to join me in supporting her.
REALITY SHIFTS AND “TRUTH” WITH IT
Read MoreMIDNIGHT AT THE PING PONG PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY
Ping . Vermont’s presidential primary with its 15 delegates split 9-6 is called as expected for Obama.
I’m watching CNN and thinking about my first and only Texas precinct convention, in 1972. I’d learned from the League of Women Voters how my natal state’s Byzantine primary system worked, and I’d decided to participate from the ground up. As I recall only a few dozen people showed up; we met in someone’s living room; consequently, though I was a first time attendee I was elected to attend the county convention. I did attend that convention, but realized it would be impossible for me to participate further because of family obligations. So despite the friendly county judge who offered to put my name in the hopper for the state convention (that’s how it was done and probably still is), I declined.
Just as the predominantly Democratic Texas I grew up in changed its stripes to majority Republican (I allege that after I left for Arizona, the state went to hell) the current Texas Democratic party rules in which 2/3 of delegates decided in voting primaries and 1/3–the superdelegates—decided in precinct conventions or caucuses could well have changed over the years. But some fundamentals stay the same.
Pong. Early in the evening John McCain was declared the far and away winner in Ohio and Texas.
Republicans don’t have to pretend to be democratic. They understand elections are about gaining or retaining collective political power. That’s their big advantage. The Democrats turn themselves inside out trying to look democratic while in actuality their convoluted rules shore up the entrenched power of the party operatives as much or more than the Republicans. Their pronouncements express their egalitarian principles but their results tilt toward the political machine.
The Republicans will fall in line behind McCain, just as McCain sucked it up, accepted Bush’s hug and carried his water after being viciously assaulted by the Bush-Rove disparagement machine in 2000, and just as Mike Huckabee submitted himself graciously after the Texas numbers put McCain’s delegate count over the top and sealed him as the Republican presidential nominee.
The Democrats, says pundit Paul Begala, want to fall in love. More than that, I think, Democrats want to believe they are voting for the best ideas and ideals. And they love to put a fine comb through the arguments about who has them in purest form.
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