Category: The Dish

Why is the media buying the Clinton spin that these two states are somehow the most pertinent? Chait:

The states that Obama won over the weekend had a total of 185 pledged delegates. Tomorrow’s primary states have 168. That’s a total of 353 delegates. Ohio and Texas, meanwhile, combine for 334 delegates. (That’s my back of the envelope calculation from the numbers at wikipedia.)

And Obama won enormous blowout victories over the weekend, and is up by double digits Tuesday. So even if Clinton wins Texas and Ohio, it will be impossible for her to make up just the delegate advantage Obama has won and should win over these few days.

She needs to start thinking about conceding.

Even counting the Clinton machine’s super-delegates. He’s winning it the old-fashioned way – state by state, argument by argument, debate by debate. Clinton should consider stepping aside if tomorrow’s votes go the same way. If she couldn’t put this thing away by now – with all her party clout, all her chits, all her husband’s pull, all her big donors, and all her brand-name recognition – she’s not going to do it in the end. All she will do is put her own party through an ordeal it need not experience. But I guess the Clintons have done that before, haven’t they?

It’s like the scientologists:

"It is, apparently, very difficult, if not impossible, to erase all traces of yourself from Facebook if you should want to leave."

Jim Henley’s explanation:

I believe that if [Bill and Hillary] were animals on the paradigmatic veldt and one of them died, the other would hang by the body and howl for days.

But he did. In South Carolina.

Lost in generational translation.

A pretty fascinating analysis of the demographics of the current race. It turns out that Obama doesn’t have a problem with Southern whites as such. Just white Southern Baptists. If you follow the analysis and project forward on a straight line (never a good idea in politics), the nomination is now Obama’s to lose.

What if the Republican president had hewed to the projected spending levels of his Democratic predecessor – you know, that flaming liberal, Bill Clinton? If you project the Clinton administration’s 2001 plans for long-term spending and you allow for all the new defense spending in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, you still end up with a surplus. The difference is Republican recklessness.

The Giuliani defense:

"I haven’t had the pleasure of campaigning in Virginia as much as I would have liked."

Andy Bacevich looks at the evidence:

In Afghanistan, NATO is failing. Nominally, all 26 alliance members are contributing to the war effort, with some 43,000 total troops deployed. In reality, stripping away the forces provided by the United States, Britain and Canada, the alliance has fielded barely 20,000 soldiers — this to pacify a country that is 50% larger than Iraq. Many national contingents, Germany’s being the most prominent, operate under restrictions that make them unusable except in areas where relative security exists.