With no apologies given to Fall Out Boy, this ain't a primary, it's a god damn landslide.
Check out the vote percentages from the Democratic primaries and caucuses to date. Barack Obama has won more than 15 states by more than 20%. Hillary Clinton has only approached crushing victories in two states. For me, this is the biggest unreported story of the Democratic presidential campaign.
In a very important way, presidential politics is no different from high school student government association elections: It's all just a popularity contest anyway. Obama's snowballing streamroller of a tidal wave in staunchly Republican states like Alaska and Idaho and Kansas and Virginia (since the late 1960s) shows that voters really do like the freshman senator from Illinois.
In another even more important, though, presidential politics is very different from SGA elections in that primaries and caucuses encourage and reward strategic voting. In open primary states like Virginia, Republicans can cast ballots for Democratic candidates and essentially vote "no confidence" on the Democrat they like least. The fact that nearly twice as many Democratic ballots as Republican ballots were counted in the Commonwealth yesterday stands as pretty strong evidence that hundreds of thousands of people went to the polls yesterday specifically to vote against Clinton.
Or, more to the point, probably 150,000 votes for Obama were actually notes to Clinton that read "F.U." Mine kind of was, but the note was a much more polite, "I'm sick of you and your husband shaming the office of the presidency. Stop campaigning now."
Caucuses, whose rules specifically dictate the forming of alliances among candidate blocs based on the Sun Tzu principle of "My friend's enemy is also my enemy," are even more encouraging and rewarding of strategic voting. Closed primaries are slightly discouraging of electoral gamesmanship, but they certainly can't prevent a voter from pulling the lever for Jones just because "There's something I don't like about that Smith guy."
What all of this add up to is that voters like Obama and really dislike Clinton. While CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, The Newshour, and the one-man cottage industry that is Tim Russert are slicing and dicing the demographics and trying to find out if white male rural Catholics between the ages of 30 and 49 who earn less than $50,000 a year are more likely to vote for Obama than are black urban women Protestants over 60 with household incomes of more than $250,000 (there has to be at least one, right?), they are missing the larger point that everyone is more like to vote against Clinton because Clinton is unlikeable.
And while you catch your mind's eye's breath after reading what may be the single longest sentence in blog history, allow me to illustrate my point with an anecdote.
I went to get my hair cut yesterday. My barber is a casually racist white woman of about 50 with generally centrist Democratic views. Except for the casual, reflexive, but not really mean-spirited racism. And that's worth mentioning twice because while my barber is Clinton's wet dream of a potential supporter, my barber flat out told me, "I will vote for Obama as soon as I get off for lunch. I just want her and husband out of my life. This year I'm kind of more for McCain, but I'd vote for anybody to make Hillary go away."
And with that being the huge unmissed story of the Democratic presidential campaign, the speculative questions become the following:
-- Will Clinton realize that Americans are voting in a referendum on her popularity and in huge majorities saying she is definitely not cool?
-- If Clinton realizes this, or even knows it already, will the knowledge drive her to quit the presdiential race, or will she throw a Ted Kennedy in 1980 fit and hamstring her party going into the fall election season?
-- If Clinton does decide to suspend her campaign, will the final shot from her concession speech look like this?
Tomorrow, I make with the music again. I swear. For now, here's a video of that Fall Out Boy song I referenced at the beginning of this post.
1 comment:
What I think is the most likely outcome is that Obama will have the most pledged delegates by the convention, but Clinton will not give up and may "steal" the nomination with the super and unpledged delegates. What that will do to the party remains to be seen.
I predict a convention floor fight and it may flow out to the streetsas in the days of old.
If you think that the Clintons can't or won't use extortion and blackmail to swing votes, just remember who has the secret files.
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