The Obama campaign is like a really fast racing bike that has slipped a gear and is spinning its pedals waiting for the chain to catch so they can take off down the track. You can see the rabid enthusiasm in Eugene, Oregon where he basks in adulation and an army of folks just chomping at the bit to take the fight to the Republicans.
As his bus pulled up, he strode onto the handsome old track just as the women’s 5K was ending. A murmur went through the crowd, the public-address announcer confirmed his arrival, and the action came to a halt as 5,000 track fans rose as one to cheer the senator from Illinois who appears suddenly on the verge of claiming his party’s presidential nomination. The javelin hurlers dropped their equipment, and the 400-meter hurdlers paused in their warm-ups as a waving Obama made his way around one of the country’s most famous tracks bathed in late-afternoon sunlight — a victory lap.
“You guys are just so fast. I congratulate you,” Obama said as he reached the finish line, where the 5K runners still waited — as if the applause was for anyone but him.
Meanwhile, in West Virginia, another, darker story is unfolding.
They traveled here from New York, Pennsylvania and Indiana last week to stand in the rain on a rural street corner, at a four-way intersection of winding mountain roads. One woman, a doctor, took vacation time from her job to make the trip. Another, a mother of three, hired a babysitter for the first time in months.
The 10 volunteers, linked by a resolve to keep Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign alive by helping her win Tuesday’s West Virginia primary, met to wave campaign signs patched together with duct tape. They cheered as the first car, a beat-up white Volvo, rolled toward the intersection, and a young man in aviator sunglasses leaned out his driver’s-side window.
“Hey,” he said. “Don’t you think you’re wasting your time?”
If there is a fault line in the Democratic Party, West Virginia is the place to find it.
But on this day, the intersection of Highway 480 and German Street, where they stood, divided Shepherdstown into two factions. College kids from Shepherd University approached from the north, angry that Clinton has remained in a race she appears destined to lose. Truck drivers and farmers approached from the south, their support for Clinton fortified by her perseverance.
The two groups met at the intersection in a cacophony of honking horns and shouting that echoed across this town of about 1,000 near the Maryland border. After two hours, Luanne Smith had heard enough.
“It’s become so personal, just one insult after another,” Smith said. “These sides are starting to feel some hate for each other. Everybody is angry, but I’m going to keep at this as long as I can. I never want to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘You quit. You didn’t do your part.'”
In any argument between young and old, the young will eventually get their way. But in West Virginia (and next week in Kentucky), the old Democratic Party will get one last chance to have their say. They will say ‘no’ to change in a resounding voice. They will not ratify this sea-change in the American power structure. And that’s okay. We’ve been here before. Every progressive movement in this country has been accompanied by dead-enders who clung to the way things were. Right now, their lack of consent for change is preventing the Obama movement from getting in gear and speeding off down the track. But Oregon will be the moment when everything snaps in place, and the race begins in earnest.
Come November, the Democrats are going to be competitive almost everywhere (although, perhaps not in West Virginia and Kentucky). In North Carolina, our senate candidate is actually leading Senator Elizabeth Dole. In Texas, Rick Noriega is only trailing Sen. Cornyn by 4 points. In Oregon our candidates are in a deadheat with Sen. Gordon Smith. We are winning special elections in deep red districts in Illinois, Louisiana, and (hopefully) Mississippi. Even seemingly safe seats in places like Staten Island are succumbing to scandal. There are almost no safe seats and no safe states for the Republicans this year round.
We are on the way to a realignment not seen since 1964.
It’s very, very sad that it has come to this:
Well, the Clintons were citing SNL skits earlier in the campaign…hmm…think they’ll cite this one (in any other way than to whine and complain)?
These SNL attack skits only really have an affect after the media gets done playing them in an endless loop.
I’ve seen more of SNL from the clips on the web than from watching it.
Ouch.
Hi BooMan. I posted some thoughts on Steven’s Secret Service post. Hope you have a look.
The USS Clinton is taking on water and listing dangerously to the right. Captain Hillary should really abandon ship and preserve whatever political life she may have left. I fear, though, her stubbornness and inability to bow out gracefully will cost her very, very dearly.
Sail on Obama, sail on.
Sometimes, the simplest things are the hardest ones to see.
.
Not a U.S. frigate, she is more like the Bismarck, it will take big guns to take her down. She isn’t like a Spanish galleon either, her treasure chests will be empty when she sinks and settles on a sea shelf.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."…it’s West Virginia. They are literally tearing their world apart with mountaintop mining. There will be nothing left when Big Coal is done. It will be like Madagascar or Haiti.
Yeah, that’s just sick. Many seem to believe their economic survival depends on it. But that can be changed with education and incentives for alternative approaches — whipping the coal companies into line wouldn’t hurt either. But it’s not gonna be Hillary that’s gonna do it. She’s all, “Grab yer guns, ya’ll! Them squishy lib’ruls are comin’ fer yer livelihoods!”
We are the future!
Guys, lets not get ahead of ourselves. We have a lot of work cut out. Obama is doing poorly among senior citizens even in the general.
Yeah, and that group, along with — and as part of — the lower to middle income white voters, is probably shaping up to be the key social demographic Obama’s going to have to capture. He’ll also fight McCain over independents and moderates, though much more competitively than Clinton could (which I’d reckon offsets some of her strengths with the senior vote).
There is an irony that Clinton garners support from just the demographics who have suffered by Clinton/DLC economics.
It would behoove Obama to make a broad proposal for those people who are hanging on by their social security, who are getting buffeted by the politicos who’ve been preying on them all these years.
Spoken like a man with no children. 🙂
I hope that you are right, Booman.
I really do.
But…beware the ghost of Fitzmasses past.
I mean it.
Word.
AG
The Republicans know this.
Ha Ha Ha! Republicans and McSame as agents of change? Change for the worse, maybe!!
Looking around the internet, it’s starting to feel like the Clinton camp is contracting down into a desperate core of idealists who fight for little more than the dream of the first female president as the ultimate victory of 60s and 70s-era feminism. And, as per usual, there’s a schism in the feminist movement over this. Hillary must be elected, not because she’s right, the best choice this cycle or a force for positive change, but simply because she’s been the first viable woman candidate for POTUS. Expressions of the sentiment found in this article seem to be representative of the main argument (via BuzzFlash):
Hillary selling out almost everything even remotely progressive doesn’t matter to them. Running as a John McCain wannabe doesn’t matter. What are those Emily’s List people going to do when McCain, should he sneak in, starts gutting reproductive rights? For the umpteenth time, I bet every one of us would jump at the chance to put the first woman in the Oval Office — but it’s got to be the right one.
And they’re now partnered with those like the “Obama’s a gun-stealing black Muslim terrorist” Hillary faction in WV and KY, while Bill goes around playing up class and educational (if not racial) divides (and Bill knows well the vernacular: “They think you ain’t got no sense. They think they better’n you.”). The end of this nomination race is going to be very frustrating for them and there’s still uglier stuff to come. I think the Clintons are digging in, which I’m hopeful an en masse superdelegate movement can abort. Or are the Clintons helming an extortion strategy — VP? Senate Majority Leader? A payoff of her campaign debts?
As to the realignment in the South, I feel something happening, but not sure how broad or deep it is yet. Childers in MS-01 is getting the R’s all freaked out. They’ve blown probably 15% or 20% (it’s well over a million bucks, I think) of their wad for these congressional races to defend Wicker’s old seat — just that one seat in the bastion of Southern Republicanism. (Swing State is following this really closely.) The D’s are matching them and it’s a fight.
UPDATE: Ohio’s Official Results:
from The Jed Report
single digit, I’ll take it in the victory box come November.
Holy dwindling double-digit drubbings!