The Dish

Al Giordano reports that a super delegate flood is coming.

From the New York Times in March of that year:

Mr. Clinton is already close to the halfway mark in the number of delegates needed to win the nomination and has a 7-to-1 edge over Mr. Brown, who is running a maverick, anti-establishment campaign. Many Democrats said that barring an unexpected collapse by Mr. Clinton’s campaign, it is difficult to see how Mr. Brown can overtake the Governor.

"It certainly brings it much closer to a conclusion," said Ronald H. Brown, the Democratic national chairman. "You could argue that it’s theoretically possible for Jerry Brown to mount a come-from-behind challenge, but the math and the reality of Bill Clinton’s momentum certainly work against him."

Yes, the Clintons once used the math argument against an opponent – as early as March 20, only a couple of weeks after New Hampshire. Brown could have rallied in his home state of California, but it was effectively over long before then. The Clintons will say anything, deny anything, refute themselves, contradict themselves – as long as it helps them gain power. They have no other point of reference.

Here’s Clinton on March 6, again remembering the assassination of RFK:

I think people have short memories. Primary contests used to last a lot longer. We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn’t wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual.

Weird.

Powerline excuses:

For those of us who remember RFK’s assassination, it’s easy to understand why, speaking off-the-cuff, Clinton would refer to the event that made the 1968 California primary memorable. In short, there’s nothing here, and the New York Post’s headline that "Clinton Raises Assassination Issue" is grossly misleading.

PJM:

This is the gaffe of gaffes, the Mother of all campaign faux pas. There’s no taking it back at this point. The statement is out there, hanging like a rapidly decomposing side of beef in the hot sun. To suggest that you should hang around and stay in the campaign “just in case” the unthinkable occurs is beyond anything yet seen in this campaign. And considering all the race and gender cards that have been flying around, the assassination card tops them all.

Taylor Marsh:

Clinton’s statement today reveals our collective fatigue and was unbelievably unfortunate. Looking at her make her statement of regret you can see her pain and that she is devastated by what she said, which is clear in the statement below from the Clinton camp.

But anyone believing Clinton was suggesting that an assassination could vault   her into… never mind, I can’t even finish the statement. It’s just too ludicrous. But that’s where we are today.

Ambers:

For those who contend that Clinton was referring to competitive contests or example, why didn’t she bring up Ted Kennedy in 1980? Or Gary Hart in 1984? I think she was pointing to primary races where the eventual nominee was unknown at this point in the cycle…. But 1984 would apply more, her husband was the de-facto nominee at this point, and the compressed calender really renders such comparisons null and void.

This may finally kill talk of a fusion ticket. God forbid anything happen to Obama now.

More dissents:

I, too, loved "Team of Rivals," but I don’t think the comparison works.  Obama’s accepting Hillary as vice-president would not be like Lincoln’s choice of Seward, Bates, and Chase.  It would be more like selecting Jefferson Davis.

I was on the stairmaster when the news came through. And I saw the apology as well – an apology to the Kennedy family, I might note, not to Senator Obama. Since some seem unwilling to point out why this remark was more than unfortunate, it is worth remembering that we have the first black candidate for president. You only have to spend a few minutes talking with African-Americans about this campaign to discover that the fear that Obama could be assassinated is very much on their minds. It is in everyone’s subconscious, especially Michelle Obama’s. To refer to the June assassination of Bobby Kennedy in the context of reasons to stay in this interminable race against Barack Obama is therefore catastrophically inappropriate. Coming after her pitch for "white votes", it is reckless.

As for her argument that June primaries are nothing new, she is correct. But in no previous primary election did the voting start just after New Years’ Day. The New Hampshire primary in 1968 was on March 12, two months later than this year. For June, therefore, read August. Yes, this season has gone on for ever. And for Senator Clinton, it has now obviously gone on too long.

She’s been waiting for Obama to implode. Instead, she just has.

Blogger SuperFrenchie wrings his hands. Nuls points! Here’s the frog entry this year en anglais. I don’t think it’s Mike Myers:

The military eases its ban on sex between the unmarried.

Ross replies:

"I think this is a good example of why arguments about what "true conservatives" will do often don’t tell us very much. Sure, a conservative might support a carbon tax for the reasons Andrew lays out – but then again, a conservative might instead agree with Jim Manzi that any carbon tax will perforce be both onerous and overly-ambitious. Moreoever, a conservative might also disagree with premise that climate change is the most pressing "emergent question" that our government ought to "ameliorate" and favor reform on other fronts instead.

I don’t deny that on questions having to do with the scope of government action Andrew may be marginally to my right. (Though not far enough to prevent him from supporting Barack Obama.) But overall, I think our disagreements have more to do with differing assessments of the big problems the U.S. is facing – he’s primarily worried about global warming and the looming entitlement crunch, so far as I can tell, and I’m more concerned about issues related to family structure, mobility and inequality – than with deep-seated ideological differences that make him a "true conservative" and me something else. Not that Andrew and I don’t have deep-seated ideological differences, mind you – I just don’t think the question of whether government should try to "solve" every problem or merely "ameliorate" the most pressing ones is one of them."

I agree. The trouble with a political philosophy that is not ideological and that relies on a prudential judgment of emergent problems … is that it is resolved by prudence. And there is no eternal, external guide to what such prudence will dictate in any given moment. So we can all call ourselves conservatives and come up with different priorities. The way this thread started has confused that. But it’s clearer now.

So what are our primary, emergent problems? I agree with Ross that social and cultural inequality is one of them – not because inequality is inherently bad. Just because we know that overly-polarized societies tend to have trouble remaining healthy liberal democracies (see your Aristotle).

But I agree with Ezra that on this one, conservatism doesn’t have much of an answer except muddling through. Once you accept globalization, meritocracy and economic change, I can’t see how the deeper problems, outlined in The Bell Curve or Mickey’s End Of Equality, are finally resolved. I definitely don’t think that sending more government money to the struggling is much more than a panacea. Maybe a defensible one, but no solution. Education, obviously, but that’s a truism.

We do have climate change – but the answer here is a pragmatic one for conservatives. I’m persuaded that the carbon tax makes sense, but Manzi’s critique is certainly powerful. Dealing with variables stretching decades into the future is an inherently uncertain one. To my mind, the biggest problem is obviously the confluence of a globalized world, extreme inequalities, advancing destructive technology, religious fundamentalism and terror. How we tackle these complex inter-related problems -without watching civilization blow up – is the central challenge. Whether to back an Obama-style rapprochement with the world, as opposed to Bush’s polarization of it, at this moment in time, is again a prudential issue.

The genius of conservatism is that it has no fixed permanent set of policies to pursue. It just has a prudential, empirical modesty in tackling them. All conservatives should be arguing on those grounds. Increasingly, I’m happy to say, many are.

A critique in the TLS:

So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s "Orientalism" to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies. Above all, "Orientalism" licenses those academics who are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something much more exciting, namely "speaking truth to power".