Ten Things to Remember on Tuesday Night
Hillary Clinton will win Pennsylvania.
Arguments over the meaning or meaninglessness of her win will dominate MSM and stretch bandwidth to its breaking point. Bloggers and pundits will dust off their favorite boxing metaphors: "Hillary's off the ropes!" "Obama can't land the knockout!" Hillbots will rejoice, Obamabots will panic, and McCainbots will watch Murder She Wrote and go to bed at six-thirty. I'll probably write a scathing post attempting to prove that Hillary is the devil incarnate. We'll all lose our minds.
In hope of preventing some of this hysteria (especially my own), I thought it'd be helpful to keep a few things in mind during Tuesday night's results -- from Hillary's "victory" speech to the blizzard of spin that's sure to follow:
1. Remember that there's no way Hillary can become the nominee without a superdelegate coup -- which would alienate a generation of young Democrats and dangerously fracture the party.
2. Remember that her campaign leaked internals showing an eleven point lead (as a means of firing up her supporters and getting out the vote). Therefore, any win smaller than eleven points should be considered a disappointment by her own assessment.
3. Remember that every time Hillary begins a sentence with "you know," or "my opponent," the next thing out of her mouth is a lie.
4. Remember that when Clinton surrogates say "this proves Obama can't win the big states," they're ignoring the fact that he actually won more delegates in Texas -- not to mention twice as many states as she has.
5. Remember that when the pundits argue that Obama can't win in white rural areas because they broke for Hillary, they're ignoring the fact that he won (in alphabetical order): Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
6. Remember that when Hillary talks about who will be "better against John McCain in the fall," she's talking about the fall of 2012.
7. Remember that Hillary's campaign is $10M in debt, while Obama's has more than $40M in cash on hand.
8. Remember that Hillary's lead in Pennsylvania was as a high as 26 points only a month ago.
9. Remember that Hillary's late Pennsylvania rebound was forged in the fires of negativity and fear-mongering.
10. Remember that the only manufacturing job Hillary ever brought to Pennsylvania was the manufactured notion that she was a middle-class, whisky-swilling duck killer, and not an anti-union multi-millionaire.
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She will win PA... but still be less qualified, less genuine and less intelligent than her opponent. I will miss our democracy when it all comes crashing down because of people like the Clintons.
Bona Na Croin
Thanks! You may have saved my sanity as well as made me laugh out loud twice!
I'm from PA & I KNOW she's going to win there. Philadelphia is great but in the suburb where I grew up, they still say "colored people" well, the polite ones do anyway.
My prayer is that if she wins by less than 11 points, she drops out! Of course I am praying to St.Jude, the patron of the IMPOSSIBLE!.
I'm going to save this & re-read it tomorrow night! Thanks, Seth
Thank you for this. I think I'll glance at it periodically tomorrow.
Seth Grahame-Smith's blog post translated -
I thought Obama was going to win PA.
I just saw the latest polls and realized he won't.
Now, in frustration, I will tell you why Hillary sucks.
The end.
Your last four words say it best.
LOL sting like a bee!!!!
FTW!
Eh, I don't think we needed the latest polls to know that Hillary's the favorite for PA. Why begrudge an Obama supporter the chance to vent a bit, knowing that tomorrow Hillary's "victory" will be flooding every media source around and Clinton supporters will be blowing raspberries at us? The poster's just having a bit of fun and keeping it in perspective for himself.
PA is not a microcosm of the whole country, otherwise Hillary would have had no trouble this whole time, so in the grand scheme of things, this primary won't resolve anything if she wins.
Thank you for your even-handed, fair-minded, and balanced posting. Some people think you are an Obama partisan, but you mentioned Hillary far more than you did Obama, and I appreciate that because we will soon cease to here much from her for a long time.
Bwah!
The winning the big blue states talking point is dead. No body believes it, not even the people who insist on posting the same thing over and over again. Obama will win all the blue states as well as Clinton. That is why they call them blue states.
You might want to look up the 1960 presidential primaries, then. Sen. Kennedy carried Pennsylvania, but "lost" Ohio (DiSalle) and California (Brown).
I say lost, because he didn't actually compete in Ohio, and I'm not certain he was in California either.
Gov. Carter lost California in 1976....
You should be careful believing the Clinton for America campaign press releases.
No meaning since often those happen winner picked and thus not viable statement.
Huh? Could you repost with complete sentences? Thanks!
"McCainbots will watch Murder She Wrote and go to bed at six-thirty." - why so ageist? Can't you pump your candiate without dismissing entire segments of the population in this way? Everything is on the table, apparently - gender, age... good thing that there is no handicapped person in the race. That would be really humorous.
SLal, we know race handicaps Obama. That's an unspoken truth. Anytime you hear someone refer to him as Hussein you know it's true.
Isn't that what Geraldine Ferraro was saying?
Race also enriches him and probably has a lot to do with why he is empathetic to different groups. I see the plusses as so much greater than the minuses that I think Geraldine Ferraro was right, although in a way she didn't recognize. She was thinking affirmative action, as in poor candidate given a hand up, and I am thinking here's a guy who's found opportunities in every challenge, and now he's got more cards in his deck than anybody -- in short, a rich candidate. Success earned.
Why the Murder She Wrote hate? That's the real question! Before CSI and Law and Order Jessica, Columbo and Perry were on the case :) Hallmark plays a couple episodes past 6 every so often
Riptide and the Screaming Mimi! (Why didn't that show last? :-)
Makes you wonder what people would do if FDR were running now, doesn't it?
I consider Hillary handicapped. She has the unusual ailment that when her lips move she is lying.
"Remember that when Clinton surrogates say "this proves Obama can't win the big states," they're ignoring the fact that he actually won more delegates in Texas -- not to mention twice as many states as she has."
While I respect your right to your opinion in your other "reminders" this one is not fair. When Clinton says she won Texas, she is making that argument in terms of how she would do better than Obama in the general election in a big state like Texas, which is measured in the number of votes a person received. While Obama may have won Texas in terms of delegates due to the screwy delegate distribution rules of the primary/caucus hybrid, Clinton indisputably won Texas in terms of votes from both the primary and the caucuses by about 100,000. Obama may have gotten more delegates, but more people voted for Clinton.
I am not saying that the popular vote should be the determinant of the nomination because that is won by delegates not by the popular vote. But when making an argument about her ability to do better in Texas in the general election, when the number of votes are the only thing that matters and there aren't TWO ELECTIONS IN ONE STATE, Clinton has every right to say she "won" Texas.
chasgoose, there is no way a Democrat takes Texas in the fall. Even if her name is Hillary Clinton. It's just not happening.
Yeah texas going blue, is like the sky turning blood red.
Ummm...no
And the problem with your logic is the Operation Chaos cast 120,000 votes, so she only won b/c the republicans wanted to mess with the democratic race. You could say that the caucuses which occured after only -corrected- that taint, b/c the repubs couldn't bother themselves to caucus for her.
So, no, she did not "indisputably" win.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/03/17/many_voting_for_clinton_to_boost_gop/
Read DNC rules that Hillary wants to chuck out the window Chasgoose! Pledged delegates determine the winnner. Texas had an open primary with Comedian Rush Limbaugh exhorting republicans to vote for Hillary. Why do you think he would do that ? Simple, Hillary the pathological liar could lose to McCain whereas Obama would beat him handily.
You forgot the most important of all if you are really a Democrat.
#11: No Democrat has ever won the White House who lost the Ohio, California, and Pennsylvania primaries.
The only constant we can rely upon in life is that things change.
YET!
Your leaving out a few important factors to that equation: the war in Iraq, and our bad ecomomy. It seems like the Clinton people keep forgetting one important aspect to the November general election, it will be against a republican, after George Bush, my goldfish can win the general election.
Does your goldfish wear a flap pin? And I don't hear some lame excuse about yer goldfish not having l!apels
Yeah, but how many of them were not white males. The rules don't really fit this time for either candidate.
If you believe a Republican will take California in the fall, you live in a time warp and you think John McCain is really Ronald Reagen.
John McCain will win Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania. The Democrats cannot win if they lose those three states. He is leading Obama by 20 points in Colorado which was supposed to be one of his "new" states for Democrats in November.
I hope all you Obama people won't blamc the Clinton's for Obama's loss in November.
He will lose because he's unqualified, because he has stuff in his past that he doesn't handle well, because he has no experience in a general, national campaign. In spite of all the whining, this primary/caucus season has actually been quite civil as primary seasons go. The general election will be another matter entirely.
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