By my calculations, the Texas Secretary of State has Hillary Clinton winning three two delegates in the primary portion of the Texas contest. Obama is winning the caucus portion of the Texas contest (with only 5% reporting) by a 56%-44% margin. These numbers are incomplete and I think it is likely that Obama may win an extra delegate in the 25th Senate District. I see CNN has called Texas for Clinton, but there is no doubt that she will not wind up with more delegates from Texas than Obama.
Nevertheless, she seems to have rolled up big wins in a bunch of Latino districts, getting 3-1 splits that most people did not predict. This enabled her to wipe out Obama’s huge delegate lead in the cities. Clinton definitely outperformed expectations in the delegate game in Texas, but she is still going to lose.
Overall, she is going to get about 6-10 delegates out of Ohio, and she may get one delegate (or none) out of New England. I actually think there is a good chance that they will split the delegates from tonight 50-50. She needed to win 57% of the delegates tonight just to tread water. Now her task is just that much harder.
The media, however, is not listening to that. They do not care one iota about the delegate counts and they are pushing this race through Puerto Rico and beyond.
That’s too bad, because it will only encourage Clinton to push on in an utterly hopeless and ultimately destructive and humiliating quest.
What a shitty evening it’s been. I was really hoping we’d get some closure tonight, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. No we have to go a couple more MONTHS of this at least. Ugh!
There is a silver lining
All this back and forth between our candidates has forced the Republicans to hold most of their fire. They can’t attack either Obama or Clinton too fiercely til they know for sure which one will win. The long that goes on, the harder it is for McCain to gain national attention.
Considering McCain that might not be all that great since he’s got so much negative history , too.. but meh 🙂
Whatever happens, I don’t see tonight as a failure. What i saw all day were democrats out in force and doing their best to participate. That’s just not bad news anyway one looks at it.
Today broke records and I’m thrilled to have seen it.
It was a shitty for me last night because I worked through most of it. I’m so tired.
Of course I wish the outcome was better. But I was prepared to go to PA, so Booman, look out, here we come.
I’ve BEEN ready to go the distance. I’ve got a willing spirit. I’ve got a fighting spirit. I also have a cell phone, proximity to PA and more money to give.
Bring it. She does not own this party. I own this party. YOU own this party. WE own this party. No more Clintonian drama.
Like Shrub, she doesn’t deal with reality well. Whatever. We’re going to win.
Did she say “win in Iraq and win in Afghanistan?”
We can’t win in Iraq.
“end the war in Iraq and win in Afghanistan”. Seems to be some discussion on that sentence throughout the blogosphere.
Too bad I’m not watching this on TiVo. I could back it up and watch it a few dozen times.
Wait a minute. No I couldn’t.
I’m so sick of this primary season. Okay, I need to take a deep breath.
Is there ANY conceivable way she could win anything besides PA? Is there ANY conceivable way that by winning every state from here on out she could in fact clinch this thing?
Sorry but I needed to vent. Any help is appreciated.
No.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
OK, that was low. She apparently is likely to win in a couple other states, like Indiana and — Kentucky maybe? But I think the unspoken message tonight was, that’s all she’s going to get, and until she can win a state that Obama is likely to take, she can’t really lay claim on the nomination. (They also said more or less the same thing about Obama — he needs to take one of Hillary’s states away from her. There could be some truth in that.)
she can win in West Virginia and Kentucky, for sure.
.
I’m no good at math either, but with the help of Slate’s Delegate Calculator I’ve scoped out the rest of the primaries, and even if you assume huge Hillary wins from here on out, the numbers don’t look good for Clinton. In order to show how deep a hole she’s in, I’ve given her the benefit of the doubt every week for the rest of the primaries.
Need to get 2,025 delegates to clinch the nomination. Decision will end up with the superdelegates and … undetermined Michigan/Florida delegates sitting in the penalty box.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
Yes. Republican crossovers in Mississippi, loss of the Appalachian states, Pennsylvania.
This reminds me too much of the collapse of the Dean campaign, and McCain coming back from the dead.
“Election 2008, Year of the Undead.”
Chuck Todd just made in interesting observation. He pointed out that, insofar as Dean can do anything about the situation (he obviously can’t force either Obama or Clinton to drop out) Dean has a choice to make that will impact any decisions he makes with regard to do-overs in Michigan and Florida, at least: Does he want to just win the Presidency, or does he want to build the party up? Then he pointed out that that was essentially the situation they faced in 1992. Bill Clinton won the Presidency, but at the same time the party structure overall atrophied and withered in many states. That’s something that only now being corrected, in my opinion — and it’s a very fragile correction.
Decisions, decisions.
If Hillary starts to play nice again, is there a chance she’d be the VP?
After the nasty things she’s said about Obama? I’d like to say “not likely,” but it happens. Remember George W. Bush railing about Reagan’s “voodoo economics” in 1980, only to end up as Reagan’s running mate? (I do.)
They played about a minute and a half of his speech tonight. Good thing they ended it early, I was getting ready to go to sleep. That guy is better than Sominex.
Since she won both states (popular vote) she stays in through PA.
Maybe sometime in the next 6 weeks the party leaders can pressure her to get out, but right now I don’t see them doing it. With the media reporting that Hillary ‘won’ both TX and OH and the current polling showing that most Democrats think she shouldn’t drop out – I think they’ll be wary of looking like they are srong-arming her.
The Obama camp is already putting out e-mails denying the 50 superdelegate endorsement is coming.
Obama needs to turn his sights on her in the next 2-3 weeks. Besides running a PA campaign he needs to pound the media with the math. The math needs to become the whole story in the MSM, not just the blogs. It needs to invade the psyche of the voters – it needs to be reflected in the poll numbers about whether she should drop out.
It might not get her to drop out before PA but it might create the right narrative in case she wins PA too.
Unfortunately math is MEGO for most people. They start to hear about math and they go in to MEGO mode — meaning My Eyes Glaze Over.
I agree that somehow the Obama campaign has to get people hip to the idea that Clinton can’t win — that she can’t win the nomination, and if by some chance she did, she can’t win against McCain. I’m not sure how to do that. If I knew I’d go hire myself out to his campaign (assuming they’d listen to me).
They don’t need to understand the math, it just needs to become common wisdom that the math doesn’t work for her.
Think about it. I know lots of baseball fans. Half of them don’t understand the math at the end of the season and how ‘magic numbers’ are derived. But they accept that they exist.
That’s what Obama needs to do.
Chelsea Clinton’s going to be on Penn’s campus tomorrow…if I didn’t have a project I had to finish by tomorrow night, I would show up and rail her for her bullshit ‘clairvoyant’ comment.
All it means is that this is going to be a lot longer – and a lot harder – to get Obama to the nomination.
I’ll be calling up the Obama office here in Philly and finding out if they have any use for 20-25 volunteer hours during the week.
What fun. Tonight I get to be ashamed of my state (yet again) and of my gender. (My county, at least, went for Obama).
But at least the media had a good night, and they get to remain Vitally Important and Relevant for several more weeks, at least. And now they have a perceived change in the narrative that they can spin and analyze to death.
Just freakin’ great!
It’s time to see Hill & Bill’s Tax Returns!
If they can pretend to be serious candidates, we all deserve to know where all their riches have come from. And they claim that Obama “hasn’t been vetted.”
Common wisdom up until now has always been that going negative hurts Obama as much as it might hurt her. His gimmick is that he’s different.
Is that changing now? Or is that still true?
Poblano over at dKos is advocating that he show nuclear capability:
He says the most obvious option is the Clintons’ tax returns and/or Bill’s fundraising scandals.
He needs to start hitting hard, but even more than that, he needs to find surrogates who can hit even harder.
If he doesn’t stand up and fight after what she did to him in the last week, I am going to write him off as a pussy who can’t handle hardball politics. He doesn’t need to do any of the dirty work in his own name. He can use MoveOn and the Teamsters and the other groups supporting him to slay the bitch. But she must be taken out… and she’s shown us that it will have to be a brutal, bloody slaying.
AND-
It’s time for him to dump the “truckload of oppo research” that he claims exists that could hurt the Clintons. He’s a shrewd operator and we know he has tons of dirt. Dump it to friendly press right now and kill her momentum. She and her husband must be taken out.
don’t call her a bitch on this blog. It won’t be tolerated. I shouldn’t have to ask. I am no fan of Hillary Clinton’s style of politics, but I don’t want people calling a bitch on this site.
Sorry about that Boo. I should have chosen my words more carefully. It won’t happen again.
Now we’ll get to find out what Obama is made of? He’s got a picture of Muhammad Ali on his desk apparently. Let’s see if he can throw a punch or two. Because if he can’t he will not survive the slime of a general election with desperate Repubs.
How is he going to thread going negative with his message of hope??
.
Obama’s war room failed past week on his Rezko ties and the NAFTA interference by Canadian officials. It’s all in the political game, you have to play ball untill the final score is undisputed in your favor.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
The NAFTA interference was disgusting. It’s transparently obvious that Harper leaked a forged memo to try and damage Obama in Ohio, almost certainly at the request of the Hillary or McCain campaigns. He’s playing “What, me?” and batting his eyes innocently, so it’s damn clear he’s guilty as hell, but it’s also damn clear that the Liberal party doesn’t have the guts to call him on it. You think the DLC is bad? We’ve got an entire party full of those idiots. They should know that Harper knows that his entire “American integration” agenda falls apart with a Democrat in the White House, so he’s going to do anything he can to help ensure that doesn’t happen.
Let’s see the tax returns.
Obviously the Clintons are planning to fight this thing out on the convention floor, twisting superdelegates arms and defying the majority of pledged delegates, overturning all the usual rules of math. Otherwise they would not be going on because if they were planning to accept the majority of the delegates as decisive, they would now withdraw. They know as well as anyone who can count according to the plebeian one-two-three system, which they are perfectly aware of, they can only get the nomination by lobbying superdelegates. Very unpleasant. The whole Michigan and Florida situation is ridiculous. Why would any one consider letting the Clintons change the rules in retrospect, especially since their campaign agreed to them, if I’m not mistaken. I find it bizarre that any one even takes the trouble to listen to them. They’re probably counting on the powerful Beltway crowd to campaign more actively for them. Clearly there is a wide preference for the Clintons in those circles. Obama now has to get tough, as others upthread have said. For a start:
Let’s see the tax returns.
Yesterday, on the BBC World Service, a presenter interviewed the chief editor of Time (?) (I didn’t catch his name) about the derogatory references to Obama’s middle name. The presenter tried to elicit the Time man’s opinion on the matter: you know, is it sensible, intelligent to make a point of the name…? Then the presentor intentionally said Osama instead of Obama, as a smart joke, quickly correcting himself. The two chortled self-satisfied at the in-crowd witticism. I could have gone through the roof. There is not so much sympathy for Obama in much of the media establishment. They say he’s ’empty’, while never saying what it is precisely that the Clintons are full of.
Let’s see the tax returns.
Sums it up, really. I would really like it if someone in the media nailed Clinton into a chair and asked her how she hopes to win the delegate math.
Two words:
Florida and Michigan.
The longer this goes on, the more Clinton can and will make the case that Florida and Michigan should count regardless of whether or not it’s fair, and the more the DNC will give in to her on this.
And the more damage will be done. The McCain Media won’t let anyone forget.
As best I can tell from the delegate counter here:
http://demconwatch.blogspot.com/2008/03/ohio-texas-vermont-and-rhode-island.html
even if you add in the flawed MI and FL results from before, Obama is still ahead. Really her only option is to strongarm the superdelegates.
Perhaps the most absurd notion being used now by the Hillary campaign is that, how Ohio goes so goes the nation, as if a party primary could determine a national election.
The reality is different. It assumes that Hillary Democrats will switch parties in November and vote Republican if Obama is the candidate. Here are the results from yesterday:
Total votes Democrats: 2 180 292
Hillary 1,203,924
Obama 976,368
Total votes Republicans 1 004 391
McCain 632,575
Huckabee 323,074
Paul 48,742
Democratic voters were more than double the voters who came out and voted Republican.
Obama beat McCain in total votes. Obama continues to beat McCain in head to head polls of the presidential race, while Hillary does not.
Doesn’t anyone understand why McCain as well as the Republican right wing were campaigning for Hillary? There is an expectation that McCain can beat Hillary but not Obama based on national polls.
The point is that the national results involving both candidates and all voters cannot be predict from a primary.
But this is what the Hillary people are claiming, with even Hillary is pushing this farce.
I’ve been thinking about the 3am ad. I had already decided long since not to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election based on my active distaste for her conduct, but that ad had a weird effect: it awakened my apathy. I still won’t vote for her in the general election if she wins the nomination, but now it will be because I just don’t care.
Why? I am affected every day by domestic policy. I’m partially supporting my retired mother and an unemployed ex-wife who’s having trouble finding full employment. I have to balance those responsibilities against needs for things like medical care and paying off my debts. Foreign policy doesn’t enter into my personal life since the last person I knew in the US Army died in Iraq a couple of years ago. And with the US-Soviet nuclear detente largely in abeyance, stuff that happens overseas has, at best, a muted effect on my life. The Cold War taught me not to sweat the small stuff, and compared to tens of thousands of nuclear missiles crisscrossing the pole on their way to ignite artificial suns over every town with a population of more than 10,000, a handful of al Qaeda loons definitely count as small stuff.
So when it gets down to it, there’s nothing important in an immediately life-threatening way where today’s foreign policy is concerned. The war at this point is mainly significant to me in terms of its deleterious effects on the economy, and that’s what I deal with every day. It’s definitely not that I don’t care about the human suffering it has created, but there’s some emotional distance there. When I think about political policy hitting home, I’m usually sitting at my kitchen table paying my bills. In any case, most of us aren’t going to die of terrorism; we’re going to die of cancer and heart disease.
So great, Hillary is going to answer the phone at 3am if some highly localized event directly affects some infinitesimal fraction of the country. Big fucking deal. What’s she going to do about the distinctly less exciting problems that are facing all of us every day?
Good comment.
I am very concerned about her answering that 3 AM call because I fear she will take us into another multi-trillion-dollar war over a simple misunderstanding, in order to prove how “tough” she can be. This expense further prevents us from being able to take care of our own. And generations pay the debts…
The irony is that I don’t think anyone doubts that Hillary is tough. At least I don’t need selling on that point. It’s her ability to work constructively with others that concerns me.