Text of a speech by Senator Robert F. Kennedy, one day after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.

City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio April 5, 1968

Mr Chairmen,Ladies And Gentlemen

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lost their cause and pay the costs."

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

First, James Carville, the smart-mouthed shitheel and long-time Clinton fixer, equated the ringing endorsement of Barack Obama by New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson with the sale of Christ for thirty pieces of silver by Judas Escariot. To make sure nobody thought he might’ve simply “mis-spoke”, he has repeated it several times.

Then came Clinton’s disjointed and flagrantly false explanation of how she “mis-spoke” when she described, at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, how she dodged bullets on the tarmac in Bosnia, circa 1996.

When video surfaced showing her actual arrival, where she was presented with flowers by a young girl, everyone smiling and seemingly at ease on a sunny day, she tried to wriggle out of it. It’s what the Clintons are always doing, evidently, wriggling out of things. Not this time.

She simply “mis-spoke,” she tried. It was pointed out that her long and exciting narrative, which conferred on her the heroism of Jessica Lynch – well, maybe that’s a bad example – was not an example of a “misstatement” but a fabrication, she retreated to comparing herself with Obama, saying “We all make mistakes,” although what lies Obama has told recently escaped actual mention.

Then she tried this: she’d been “sleep deprived.”

Kurt Vonnegut is now spinning in the ether, exclaiming, “I died too soon!”

The candidate, conflated with Jesus Christ by her own cadaverous Karl Rove impersonator, had been “sleep deprived” when she related the story of her courage under fire.

There are two really, really serious problems with that.

First, she is evidently experiencing numerous episodes of spectacular falsehoods brought on by this malady, because not only did she make the same “under-fire” claims at least four other times, once during the Texas primary, she has also trumpeted her key role in brokering peace in Ireland, a claim that Irish newspapers are finding both hilarious and insulting, and which the Nobel Prize winners who did bring the peace have stated to be ridiculous.

Second, according to Clinton, when the red phone rings in the White House at three in the morning, we are supposed to want her to answer it, a sleep-deprived liar who doesn’t believe in talking with “our enemies.” Oh, great.

In a strange way, this was all quite predictable. Having voted cynically for the war in order to establish her “tough” credentials, I suppose in order to prove that she could pass the “Commander-in-Chief threshold”, she’d failed to lead and failed in her most fundamental responsibilities. The war was going badly, and Obama had always been against the war.

She was shaken by Iowa. The great Clinton machine had been out-organized by this insurgent candidacy and a field operation put together by the guy who’d put together the field organization for Cesar Chavez and the U.F.W.

She tried to right the ship but that didn’t happen. Obama had struck a nerve in the country, against the odds and in the face of history, and the young, especially, could hear him.

Clinton is now in full attack mode. Today, MSNBC reported an unnamed but high-ranking Democrat saying the campaign would “have to pull a Tonya Harding”, to “kneecap him” and “break his back”.

It’s been obvious for a long time now that that’s the only possible way for her to win. She can never catch him in delegates. She’d need close to 80% of the ‘super delegates’ to overturn the Obama lead, and that would happen only if Obama were to be so damaged, so fatally-damaged, that the party could not nominate him regardless of the consequences.

Clinton knows. They ALL fucking know. She can get the nomination only by burning down the house. There is no other possibility. And she’s doing it.

According to “news” reports, Clinton’s campaign now claims that elected delegates – meaning Obama’s elected delegates – are NOT ACTUALLY BOUND to vote for the candidate they’ve been chosen to support.

And a lot of publicly uncommitted ‘super delegates’ are wringing their hands and saying “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do!”

If the Democratic Party is not actually owned by the Clintons and their corporate “friends,” then the course is quite clear. Any leaders with any guts at all will now take the news to the Clintons. And ‘super delegates’ who don’t know what to do can get off their fat asses and endorse the obvious electoral winner. That ought to do it.

This is a year in which the national electorate is begging for something better. We’ve had it with George Bush. We’ve had it with the war, the scandals, the crooks in the boardrooms. There are few moments with that kind of opportunity. We also have a chance to elect a President who has the capacity to become one of our greatest.

Under these circumstances, in this year, in a political party whose charter and history place it on the side of the people, will not those, like Bill Richardson, who see what is happening here stand together for the sake of their country?

I first heard about the Spitzer story from the talking heads of CNN and MSNBC, and it looked like another classic idiot blunder by another arrogant pol who figured he was immune due to the grace conferred on him by God. That’s how it’s being played and that’s what it is, of course.

However, that is not all of what is. Not by, as they say across the eastern pond, a long chalk.

As I’ve mentioned on this site several dozen times, my attention has not been focused on national politics in, roughly, thirty years, and I hadn’t known anything about Mr. Spitzer. Well, I’d heard he was giving the bankers a hard time, and that had cheered me some; anyone willing to take those sleazeballs on was a friend of mine. But I hadn’t known any of the details.

I do now.

But before we get to those details, some observations.

First, what in the world was this guy thinking? Spitzer made his bones in major league prosecutions and had a sophisticated understanding of law enforcement methods and practices, including wiretapping, electronic eavesdropping, and the use of informants. He knew that a big time call girl operation would be connected with organized crime and, often, police payoffs. A fifty-dollar hooker, all you get is a disease, and maybe potential blackmail. You can still be a Senator, like that right-wing cracker whose name I’ve already forgotten. Or you can sleep with your friend’s wife, and still be Mayor of San Francisco.

Second, money laundering is a felony. Repeat... Oh, never mind.

Third, the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C.? Why not in the Senate rotunda?

In Washington, on the day after Spitzer’s Mayflower assignation, the Washington Post ran the following editorial. In it, Spitzer accuses the Bush Administration of criminal conduct, actively conspiring with the banks to promote predatory lending and further the economic collapse we are now experiencing. Here it is.

Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime
By Eliot Spitzer
The Washington Post

Thursday 14 February 2008

How the Bush administration stopped the states from stepping in to help consumers.

“Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers' ability to repay, making loans with deceptive "teaser" rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.

“Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.

“Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York's, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.

“What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.

“Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.

“Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.

“In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.

“But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.

“Throughout our battles with the OCC and the banks, the mantra of the banks and their defenders was that efforts to curb predatory lending would deny access to credit to the very consumers the states were trying to protect. But the curbs we sought on predatory and unfair lending would have in no way jeopardized access to the legitimate credit market for appropriately priced loans. Instead, they would have stopped the scourge of predatory lending practices that have resulted in countless thousands of consumers losing their homes and put our economy in a precarious position.

“When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.”

ADVANCE TEXT: BARACK OBAMA’S REMARKS IN NATIONAL TELEVISED ADDRESS, June, 2008.

“Good evening. I want to speak to you tonight about two issues which are of concern to the American people, and which have not been discussed openly by the candidates for President.

“We have had debates about other important issues: the economic problems which beset most families and individuals, and which have arisen as a direct result of the policies of the Bush administration; the war in Iraq, which is draining our treasury and costing the lives of so many people, and the poor judgment which led to it; the health care system which leaves many millions, including children, without insurance.

“But the issues I must speak with you about are being raised on the internet, and in media commentary, and they are often mixed with rumor and prey upon people’s fears. These are the issues of religion and race.

“I am a Christian. Because I have an unusual name, there have been stories on the internet which claim that I am a Muslim. These stories are false, but they are being circulated in an effort to associate me with an unpopular religious view.

“We live in a free country. One of the most basic principles upon which the United States was founded was freedom of religion. This means that every one of us has the right to worhship God, or not worship God, in the way we want to.

“I happen to belong to the largest religious group in America, Christianity. That is my choice, and it reflects my beliefs. But one of the great glories of America is that every other person is to be respected in his or her own beliefs, and all other religions are as important and valid as my own.

“The issue of race is different. When America was born, neither African-Americans nor women could vote. African-Americans were considered to be property, to be owned as slaves. Women could not hold property and had few other rights.

“It is part of the history of America that these deprivations would fall under the weight of freedom. The promise of America has always been that all human beings are equal under the law, and that all races and both sexes are entitled to respect.

“We have come from a time in which women were denied the right to vote to a time in which women may be elected to any public office, including the presidency. And we have come from a time in which African-Americans were excluded from participation in politics to a better day, one in which all people may serve their country, regardless of their race.

“In this critical year in our history, we have reached a moment when the promise of America may be fully realized. The measure of our candidates may no longer be their gender or the color of their skin, but their intelligence, their knowledge, their judgment and their character.

“If that is so, then we may fulfill many other promises, many of them long in waiting, promises about jobs and a decent life for all Americans, about health care and quality education available to all Americans, about a national government which respects the Bill of Rights and the laws of the land.

“Senator Clinton and I have reached this moment not because our race or gender conferred upon us some unfair advantage but because we speak to the concerns and hopes of many millions of Americans.

“There have been barriers to women and to people of color. These barriers are falling. It is a great tribute to America that we are bringing them down. It is a great tribute to the American people that we are bringing them down together.

“As we continue this campaign over the weeks and months ahead, let us remember to respect our differences and to celebrate this opportunity to recover what is best in our country.”

- 30 -

In 1984, Walter Mondale got himself nominated for President. He chose as his running mate one Geraldine Ferraro, congresswoman from New York. It was a historic moment, the first time a major American party had selected a woman for the ticket and, although they were beaten badly in Reagan’s re-election, it opened a door which could never be entirely closed again.

A lot of people felt pretty good about it. Ferraro, it was conceded, had done nothing especially noteworthy to earn the nomination. She had a scant political record. The only hard battle she had fought had been the one women in politics had always had to fight in America. For a lot of us, that was battle enough, and sufficient proof that had Mondale won Ferraro would’ve handled the job.

It is really not in dispute that Geraldine Ferraro attained that nomination solely on the basis of her gender. She’d snagged her leadership position in the House because Tip O’Neill needed a woman for political reasons. It is not that she was unqualified, only that a great many others could claim broader and deeper political experience.

Today, Ferraro, who is a supporter of Hillary Clinton, told the media that Barack Obama would not have become a major candidate, and could not have achieved his success thusfar, were he not black.

Oh ha... hahahahaha... and the tears rolling down my cheeks. Yes, it’s been an easy road for the black guy with the weird name and ‘mixed’ parentage, as they say, his mother waking him at four every morning so that she could tutor him before he went off to school and she to work. The guy with the name that makes xenophobes twitch. The guy who did astonishing work organizing on Chicago streets, empowering people without power, who, when he got a taste of what it was going to take, went back East to Harvard Law School, got named editor of the Law Review, and when he could’ve named his price anywhere – clerk to a Supreme Court judge, six-figure starting income at any firm in the country – returned to Chicago to work as a poverty lawyer.

People who knew Obama then say that he drove a beat-up old car which sometimes didn’t run and wore shoes with holes in them.

His rise in Illinois politics was meteoric, but those who watched it testify that it was not easy. There was great resentment of Obama at first, a young state Senator who expected to make a difference, and his race was just another obstacle to overcome. Before he left, six years later, he’d converted nearly everyone. He’d put together a series of innovative state programs bringing health care to uninsured children, augmenting education, real campaign reform. He was so popular that Republicans had actually to import a candidate, Alan Keyes, from another state.

Obama has achieved what he’s achieved by being smart, articulate, dedicated, tough, and wise. His race is the least of it. But in her increasingly frantic and desperate struggle to avoid being beaten, Hillary Clinton is trying to exploit every racial fear she can. There’s simply no doubt about it.

Some of her earlier stabs at making this about race, and they have been numerous (see earlier posts; I can’t keep repeating myself), have scored some votes and her campaign people obviously believe this is a rich vein for further exploration. Ferraro’s remarks were not accidental nor distinct from Clinton, who refused to disown them. She wants to win badly enough that she and her crew will tear at every festering racial wound in this country.

Clinton knows that she can’t win a delegate majority. But she believes that if she can win a big majority in Pennsylvania – and sharpen the racial divide in doing so – she can present the super delegates with the following choice: a black candidate who is losing in white areas, or a white candidate who is on the safe side of race.

It is cynical, ugly, and reprehensible. It’s politics at its very worst. Clinton is now counting on the racism still running through the country.

There’s only one answer to this. People who see in Barack Obama what is best in us need to do whatever we personally can to help this man win. If you know people in Pennsylvania, if you can GO to Pennsylvania, if you can, give to a campaign which is being funded – more than ninety percent – by contributions of less than a hundred dollars.

If Barack Obama can score in Pennsylvania against the odds, if he can reach the voters, then he can bring an end to this shameful part of the Presidential campaign.

I’ve got a story about another primary, a long time ago.

In 1960, few states held primaries. The first after New Hampshire was West Virginia, where it was assumed by all the smart people that John Kennedy, a young and largely untested Senator with lots of money, couldn’t win. America had never elected a Catholic. West Virginia was thought to be full of prejudice. Hubert Humphrey was favored. But something happened.

Yes, I’m aware that JFK’s father dispatched Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., with bags full of cash to bribe everyone they could find. And I’m aware that Kennedy played-up his military service and genuine heroism.

But what won West Virginia and, ultimately, the presidency for this great man, was how he dealt with the toxic aroma of religious fear. He confronted it. It was in his nature to believe that people could be better. He called upon the best in us. In West Virginia, people said, you know, we may be poor, and we may be uneducated, but nobody is going to say we’re prejudiced. We’re better than that.

This is the chance Obama’s got in Pennsylvania. He must speak to the voters, and to America, about race. His message has galvanized millions because he has reached inside us to where crazy shit like hope for humanity still lives. I believe he can do this, that we can do this.

Hillary Clinton has finally said something really, really interesting. It is this: Barack Obama is not qualified to be President because he has not “crossed the National Security Threshold” but he is qualified to be her running mate.

Since she had earlier stated quite plainly that her principal criterion in selecting a Vice President was that he or she be absolutely ready to assume the office of the presidency without notice, this apparent contradiction raised a little interest among otherwise rock-stupid media types, especially after Mr. Obama commented on it.

He said he was surprised that Senator Clinton could think him both qualified and not qualified for the presidency at the same time.

The Clinton camp suffered through yet another hilarious attempt to explain just what their candidate was up to. Obama wasn’t yet qualified, said one of her hacks, and hadn’t yet passed the threshold, but they were confident that he would one day.

Well, what day might that be? In time for the inauguration? It’s a classic puzzle of quantum physics, the Schrodinger’s Cat problem. Essentially, this puzzle has forced scientists to contemplate how a physical body can be one thing or another depending upon it being observed. The cat is alive or dead, but is neither/both until someone opens the door to find out.

Clinton, in the latest bizarre example of why absolutely nothing she says can be believed, does not stand for anything other than winning. In that she is every bit as Machiavellian as Karl Rove. She attacked Obama as unready in order to stir the fears of voters in Pennsylvania and elsewhere and to drive down his poll numbers when he’s matched against John McCain. If she can damage him enough in those numbers, she can make a case to the super delegates that Obama wouldn’t be as likely as she is to win in November. It appears to have worked, for the moment.

But Clinton is also catching a lot of shit from party insiders for her tactics, many of them worried that she’s going to sink not only Obama but the whole bloody party. That’s why she and husband Bill – still working off the hours he owes her for not breaking the lamp over his head – started jabbering about the “dream ticket.” It’s designed to pacify a few leaders while simultaneously appealing to voters who honestly like them both.

It doesn’t matter that the statements, eached launched with great solemnity, are mutually exclusive unless the laws of the universe have been repealed. To Clinton, whatever she says at the moment is really true.

This race is now straight through the looking glass. Up is down and down is up. Clinton aide reassures Canadian pol that she didn’t really mean her criticisms of NAFTA and that it was only for political reasons (the Ohio primary); aide reports this to inner government circles; memorandum ‘mistakenly’ names Obama, is then leaked to the media by way of the Clinton campaign. The media abets Clinton’s Ohio win, buries the corrected story when it emerged a few days later. Only Olbermann on MSNBC talks about it. So Ohio’s given Clinton the excuse to stay in the race (she actually LOST Texas, a subject nobody in the media mentions; he captured more delegates), and we can forget about the slander. But of course there is residual damage, as there was meant to be, for the Illinois Senator about whom there are questions in the public mind.

Here’s a news item the networks haven’t figured out yet: what’s actually been going on around Michigan and Florida.

The party’s in deep shit because they blew it and because Clinton suckered them into it a long time ago. When the two states decided to hold primaries ahead of time, three people at the DNC said that the delegates elected would not be seated, that the votes wouldn’t count, and that none of the candidates could campaign in those states. One of the three men was Howard Dean. The other two were part of the Clinton apparatus, including one who is now effectively running her campaign. Smell a rat yet?

It was a set-up. Clinton was on the Michigan ballot, with only renegade Dennis Kucinich as an opponent; Edwards, Obama, and the others followed the rules. In Florida, everybody was on the ballot anyhow – a Republican governor controls it – but they were not to campaign. But Clinton did, with a flock of ‘fund-raisers’ and plenty of friends to say hi to. Then on primary night she flew to Florida to make a ‘victory’ speech.

Clinton would probably have won Florida in a fair fight, though not by such margins, but Obama would have had an excellent chance at Michigan, another state where, as I’m sure Bill Clinton would be the first to point out, Jesse Jackson won back in ‘88.

Clinton knew that the party couldn’t refuse to seat Michigan and Florida, not if it had any interest in carrying those states in November. She could urge the seating of these illegitimately-selected delegates on the grounds that people should not be disenfranchised – especially not in Florida where the elections haven’t been honest in living memory.

So something has to be done, and done fast. Obama would be fine with splitting the delegates, a reasonable suggestion actually because there is certainly no other fair way to allot the votes... unless new primaries were held.

Obama of course wants caucuses because that’s where he does exceptionally well (it’s how he took Texas). But Clinton said she would only agree to open voting primaries. This sounds democratic, and it is, but she knew one other thing: that the time period for setting up the apparatus for and conducting the primaries would force them into July, at best. There were state laws which required specific filing periods. It would be a mess and probably not possible.

But in maneuvering the party into this position she is able to play her trump card: the only way primaries can realistically be held is by mail. And mail balloting favors Clinton. I’m too tuckered out tonight to explain the details but it has to do with strengths among different voting groups. The point is: if she can take what ordinarily would’ve been an open primary in Florida and a primary/caucus Michigan election, and turn them into vote-by-mail, she gains. And she’s always known it.

In a way, I guess you could say that the cleverness of her scheming does qualify her in a weird way to be Commander in Chief, if you like that sort of thing. She’s smart and completely ruthless. But Hillary Clinton has only one gear, and it seems to me a decent bet that as President, when that phone call does come at 3:00 a.m., she will run us right off a cliff.

Lyndon Johnson once observed that it is a mistake to wrestle with a pig. You always end up covered with mud, he said, and, besides, the pig enjoys it.

This is the situation which presently confronts Barack Obama, who won his twenty-eighth primary today and stretched his lead in delegates to 97. On Tuesday, he will carry Mississippi.

Johnson also famously accused an opponent in a Texas congressional contest of having carnal relations with a barnyard animal. I know it’s not true, he admitted to friends, but I’m gonna make him deny it.

That’s where we are in the Democratic race.

There are the numbers. Obama’s got 1,347 elected delegates and an estimated 202 ‘super delegates’ endorsing him. That’s 1,549. Clinton’s got 1,211 and 241, and a total of 1,452. There are 599 delegates yet to be selected in primaries and caucuses.

A reasonable analysis of how these primaries and caucuses will break down assigns these numbers to each candidate:

Mississippi (33): Obama 20, Clinton 13.
Pennsylvania (158): Obama 71, Clinton 87.
Guam (4): Obama 2, Clinton 2.
North Carolina (115): Obama 62, Clinton 53.
Indiana (72): Obama 32, Clinton 40.
W. Virginia (28): Obama 13, Clinton 15.
Oregon (52): Obama 29, Clinton 23.
Kentucky (51): Obama 23, Clinton 28.
Montana (16): Obama 10, Clinton 6.
S. Dakota (15): Obama 9, Clinton 6.
Puerto Rico (55): Obama 30, Clinton 25.*

* Puerto Rico is scheduled to conduct delegate selection through caucuses, but there is a move by Clinton forces, who don’t have a good field operation, to shift the process to a primary election.

At the end of the primary process, the numbers will look like this:

Obama: 1,850
Clinton: 1,745

To these totals, each candidate will draw from the pool of remaining uncommitted ‘super delegates.’ The pool is today said to number 352. It is unlikely that this number will hold between now and the final primary. There is a strong probability that these delegates will split in reasonable relation to the popular vote because ‘super delegates’ are members of congress and state pols, and such people are receptive to being re-elected.

In order for Clinton to deny Obama the nomination, she will need 229 of the 352. That is not a practical possibility. Not unless she destroys Obama. That’s the cold logic of the “kitchen sink” attack promised by one of her aides.

She leaked, if not actually created, the ‘memorandum’ on a meeting between an Obama adviser and a Canadian government official, which falsely attributed to Obama a duplicitous view of NAFTA. This attack alone, while it does not account entirely for the Ohio outcome, was quite significant. It probably turned a 52-48 nail-biter into the 9% margin she was able to hail as another of her “comebacks.” And as Keith Olbermann noted – and no one else is even mentioning – it was actually a Clinton agent who had offered “reassurances” on NAFTA.

An even nastier side of Clinton was revealed when she answered a reporter’s idiot question about whether Obama was actually a secret Muslim by saying he wasn’t “as far as I know.”

She has in the last week rolled out a bushel of military men and, flanked by a dozen huge flags, proclaimed that both she and John McCain were capable and experienced enough to serve as Commander in Chief, but that Obama wasn’t. She repeated this charge several times over the following three days to make sure it stuck.

As the results from Texas came in, her campaign accused Obama’s people of using the same strong-arm tactics in the caucuses that she had herself used to steal Nevada, the one caucus state which she has “won.”

Democratic Party leaders are so alarmed by what she’s doing that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Clinton supporter, went public this morning with a plea to the candidates that they curb their “negative” campaigning, although nobody thinks she was speaking of Obama.

We are witnessing an historic drama, and the prospect of tragedy is in the air. Eight years of the madness of George Bush may be replaced with four years of the madness of John McCain because Hillary Clinton cannot accept the bitter truth that she is not going to be President.

At least one of the remaining candidates cannot be trusted to “answer the phone” at 3:00 a.m., and we know which one that is.

Two days ago, Clinton tried to replay the Canada/NAFTA lie, this time about Iraq. She claimed that Obama’s emissary had assured a foreign official that he would not really withdraw from Iraq. This bizarre falsehood is what provoked an Obama foreign policy adviser, a Harvard professor who had co-authored a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on genocide, to call Clinton “a monster who will stoop to anything.”

How’s that for rolling in the mud with the pig?

In Wyoming, Obama told wildly cheering audiences that the story was false, then took the state 61-38, a landslide which the media, predictably, downplayed, even though Clinton, her husband, and her daughter had all campaigned there over the past week.

It will not be as simple as some “commentators” claim for Obama to remain positive, keep to his message, and disregard the attacks. For one thing, there is and always has been the danger that his message, being one of cooperation among people, may be seen as “too weak.” We are living in an America where violence is celebrated and bellicosity is patriotic. If you do not wish to kill everybody, you are helping the terrorists win.

For another thing, he is seeing what you’re seeing, what we’re all seeing: a serious Presidential candidate turning into the Glenn Close character in “Fatal Attraction.” As Michael Douglas was to discover, you do not say “no” to her. Hillary Clinton strikes me as being about one more loose cog away from boiling the bunny.

So somebody’s got to do something. Somebody with political power and a reputation for acumen and straight talk. Someone who has a personal as well as political relationship with the Clintons.

Senator Boxer? Barbara? Are you listening?

They’re talking about Michigan and Florida finally, the dimwits who run the Democratic Party. Guess what? They’re a little late. Due to an inconvenient Florida law, no election which anybody might wish to schedule can be held unless they take out the papers no later than next Monday. Nobody wants to pay for one, either.

Florida says they’ve already had one and the next will have to be covered by the Democrats. They are saying this because the Republican Governor, Crist, and the Democratic Senator, Nelson, have a common interest: preventing the nomination of Barack Obama.

You probably know already that Clinton ‘won’ Michigan because she was on the ballot and Obama wasn’t. Clinton also campaigned in Florida, skirting the prohibition by appearing at several well-publicized fund-raisers and running television ads which were seen there.

The party leadership, including Howard Dean, should’ve seen this coming. They didn’t.

As a result, the Clinton campaign believes that it can hijack the nomination. That is the logic of what’s happening. Strictly speaking, if the Democrats select the candidate with the most delegate votes fairly chosen, it cannot be Clinton. But if she can get the issue of the Michigan and Florida delegations to the Credentials Committee in Denver, where ‘super delegates’ will have the deciding votes, then she has the chance to force the convention to seat them. And, once seated, these essentially stolen delegates might give her a majority.

And how might Clinton “force” the Committee to seat those delegates? By so damaging Obama in the public mind between now and then that the party’s ‘leaders’ could fear that he would lose.

Clinton’s relentless, almost entirely baseless attacks on Obama have so far included the claim that he is a liar on NAFTA, when it turns out that it was Clinton whose agents ‘reassured’ Canada that she was only kidding about the issue to fool Ohio voters. That is now an established fact, but even on CNN, supposed to be a decent television news source, this gets only passing mention.

It’s a sick thing to have to say this, but I think it’s obvious that Clinton’s baseless whining about not getting enough media coverage, her ‘victim’ thing, went through NBC (a subsidiary of the major weapons contractor, General Electric) like a bolt of lightning. Somebody sure as shit called somebody because the next thing you know, again on the eve of Texas and Ohio, there’s Clinton on the ludicrous ‘Saturday Night Live’ and the morning talk shows. She was ‘humanizing’ herself while her surrogates carried out some of the most vicious operations seen in living memory, and I remember Karl Rove. And, as was the case with the Canada thing, she labels Obama with her own behavior. Today, or was it yesterday, one of her hacks accused Obama of acting like Ken Starr.

It’s a ludicrous act, but the media’s buying it, except for Keith Obermann, the only one worth watching. And it’s a very, very dangerous act, too, and I will bet you a set of Mizuno irons that most party leaders know it.

The thing about Hillary Clinton: she is completely amoral, totally unethical, and smart as hell. She has not been able thusfar to outmaneuver Obama with the people, and this fact has shook her deeply. Ever since Iowa, and despite her ‘surprise’ win in New Hampshire, her eyes have had madness and shock in them. She, as much of America, is surprised by Obama. She’d known he could speak, all right, but she hadn’t known he could organize.

Now, trailing in delegates by a mathematically-near-certain margin, Clinton’s campaign is trying to win by lying, leaking phony or perhaps contrived documents, and name-calling. After the Kenneth Starr line yesterday, one of Obama’s aides was forced to resign because she told a reporter – about a second before saying it was off the record – that Clinton is “a monster.”

More serious in the minds of party leaders is Clinton’s repeated claim that both she and John McCain are experienced and competent enough to be Commander-in-Chief in wartime, but Obama is not.

You cannot do that. You are betraying everyone who works in the party; you are jeopardizing their jobs and their positions because in handing the election to McCain you are also harming every other candidate.

The leaders of the Democratic Party, if there are any, now have to stop this.

I am absolutely certain that there have been discussions, and that these discussions are continuing despite Clinton’s overblown “victory” in Ohio (she lost Texas, it turns out). They know what she’s up to.

It might help, you know, for ordinary people like us to get ahold of these party leaders, especially Barbara Boxer, and let them know that we know what’s going on. There’s too much riding on this for us to leave it to Nancy Pelosi.

Since television “coverage” of the Democratic presidential race is being delivered mostly by mannikins reading from scripts drafted by 12-year-old interns – at least, that’s one explanation for its uniformly wrong interpretation of events – we will begin to offer on this site a frequent reality check, an update on What It All Means which I’ll write as often as I can stand doing so.

The chief television news sources, CNN and MSNBC (I will not watch F*x News [sic] under any conditions; these other fools are bad enough), are today providing their viewers with the following take:

* the Democratic race is essentially tied; Obama’s lead is so slender as to throw the nomination up for grabs;

* Clinton scored a “huge” (CNN) or “great” (MSNBC) victory on Tuesday;

* the feuding among Clinton’s high command is “healthy”;

* Clinton’s primary wins have come in states which the Democrats “have to win”, while Obama’s wins are from states the party won’t carry anyhow; therefore, her victories are more meaningful.

Well, dumb media hacks, the truth of the matter, with respect to those four points, is: no, no, no, and no.

Clinton’s victory in Texas was apparently a loss. She achieved a narrow electoral victory but lost the caucuses, and there is a slight net gain for Obama. His victory in Vermont offset hers in Rhode Island. The Texas vote was also skewed. The best estimate here is that 9% or more of the primary vote came on Republican cross-overs. Ordinarily, independent votes have helped Obama; they may have done so here as well. But Republican cross-overs in Texas were no doubt influenced by Rush Limbaugh, who urged his listeners to vote for Clinton in the primary. While we have no specific numbers here – yet – her 3% popular margin there could easily represent such cross-overs.

As to Ohio... well, we’ll get to that one in a minute.

The argument that Clinton’s wins have been in historically-Democratic states is valid, but what it means is not that she is a stronger candidate. To the contrary. Both exit polls in these states as well as tracking and moving polls in these states indicate that either candidate would win a general election race against McCain. It is therefore inaccurate to claim that Clinton’s wins in New York or California carry any meaning other than that she has won more delegates there than Obama. His overall greater delegate numbers reflect Democratic voters in the country, and these suggest that he is a stronger candidate than Clinton against McCain.

As for Ohio, let’s remember what happened. Clinton had long enjoyed a 20-plus lead in polls there until Obama began to gain momentum. A week before Ohio voted, most polls showed her still leading but by four-to-six percent. Then came the sensational charge that an Obama representative had met privately with a Canadian official to assure the Canadian government that his opposition to NAFTA was not real; it was done for political purposes, a memo said, and the voters of Ohio, where NAFTA is roundly denounced as contributing to the miserable economic situation there, thought that this new guy, Obama, about whom they must’ve retained some uncertainty, was both a liar and a pro-NAFTA candidate.

The mass media jumped all over the story. Obama denied it, but so what? The damage was done. A memo purporting to describe this Obama duplicity was leaked to the press by Clinton. Even when the Canadian government said that it was untrue, that was given little attention. In the last hours before Ohio voted, there was a sudden shift against Obama in all of the tracking polls. He ended by losing the state by 10%.

Today, two days later, it develops that indeed there was a meeting involving Canadian ministers in which the “don’t worry about what the candidate says because it’s just politics” conversation was discussed. Except that the conversation involved an agent not from the Obama camp but from Clinton’s.

MSNBC broke the story but there is little evidence that anyone cares. It seems, instead, that Clinton’s maneuverings, which involved bare-faced lies and maybe worse, caused barely a ripple. Meanwhile, her campaign today accused Obama of “Ken Starr” politics for insisting that she release her tax records so the people could find out where her money has been coming from.

Clinton, today, appeared in front of a row of American flags and in the company of several military officers. She declared that the next President must pass the “Commander-in-chief threshold”, and that although she AND McCain could do that, Obama would have to prove it.

This is the latest in a series of Clinton statements involving “national security” in which she proclaims that both she and McCain are qualified but Obama is not.

Now, listen. I am not unschooled in these things. I’m from the sixties, and I’ve been in a few campaigns, and run a few as well, and I am quite aware that in these matters it can get a little rough. Candidates say things. But we need to recognize that what Clinton is doing here is NOT done, ever, by a major party candidate. Ever. The closest thing we’ve got is probably Hubert Humphrey accusing McGovern of being the candidate of “acid, amnesty, and abortion” when his frustration boiled over back in 1972. But even Humphrey did not cross the line to say that McGovern’s opponent, Nixon, was better able to protect the country than was his own primary competition.

Clinton has put herself into Joe Lieberman territory. She is establishing clearly that unless she gets the nomination she can and will destroy the party’s chances by burying its nominee.

I’ve run the numbers and will get into them in a later post. But at this point, a very good estimate is that Clinton can, at best, come out of the primaries and caucuses trailing Obama by 105 votes. He will not have a majority. As of today there are 352 uncommitted ‘super delegates’ and a nice chunk of who-the-fuck-knows in Michigan and Florida. More on that later, as well.

I’ve been trying to get through to Senator Boxer’s office because I actually know her and would like to add my two bucks’ worth of advice, but her Senate office has neatly insulated her from popular input on the matter. It’s a “legislative office,” her staff informed me, and cannot be involved in partisan political contests. I know that she’s in a tough spot, but this doesn’t pass the smell test.

Boxer’s moved since I knew her and so I can’t drive down to her Greenbrae home and sit outside with a sign, but she must be around somewhere. Some of the readers of this webLog live in Marin or the Bay Area. Maybe you’ve got some access or some ideas.

The only thing which can avert a total disaster at this point is for someone who can grab Clinton by the arm, and how many of those do you think there are? Maybe a small number. Pelosi, or Boxer. These may be our only hope. We have to find a way to move them.

Why am I screaming about this? Why not let Obama’s crew handle it? They’re generally a very smart bunch and handle crisis a lot better than Hillary “Three-A-M” Clinton. I’m screaming because it’s up to us as well. Obama’s right: we are the change we’ve been waiting for.

p.s. this site is getting an increasing readership judging by the data it gives me, and many of you are not subscribers yet. If you want to receive notice of these posts automatically, sign up in the space above. Your credit cards will not be debited; no sales people will call; your name will not be entered to win time shares at Lake Tahoe.

Several days before Ohio and Texas, I got an e-mail from the Obama campaign entitled “Here Comes The Kitchen Sink.” They didn’t know what the combination of loopy weirdness and mad-dog vengeance we were about to witness would consist of, but they knew it was on the way, and they were right. Oh, were they ever.

A month ago on this blog I wrote about the trap the Democratic Party had gotten itself into over Florida and Michigan, and how that trap would be used by Hillary Clinton as leverage to pry an otherwise unobtainable nomination away from the candidate who has beaten her.

She always knew the party would have to seat the delegates “elected” in Michigan and Florida because what else was it going to do? Tell these two states which it needs in order to win in November that the Democrats don’t respect their elections? That’s the position the dumb fuckers who run this party got themselves into because Clinton’s insider strength, i.e. ability to really mess with you if you stand in her way, forced this situation to occur.

Clinton’s name was on Michigan’s ballot; Obama and Edwards agreed to obey the party’s rule. The only other name on that ballot was Dennis Kucinich. Guess who “won”? In Florida, the candidates agreed not to campaign in the state. That did not deter Clinton surrogates from showing up in record numbers, nor Clinton herself from appearing at a number of fund-raisers. No one can seriously argue that the voters in Florida and Michigan got a chance to see the candidates engage there. And of course nobody had the name-recognition of Clinton. Effectively, Obama and others were forbidden to personally make their cases to the Democrats there.

With Clinton now believing herself to have an outside chance at either breaking Obama as a viable candidate or strong-arming enough ‘super delegates’ to overturn the actual delegate plurality Obama is certain to bring to Denver, we are in for a terrible time of it.

The Ohio race is an indication of what we can expect from the Clinton camp. An otherwise ordinary meeting between an Obama adviser and a Canadian official, which resulted in a memorandum said to reflect Obama’s “real” view of NAFTA being other than the one he’s always held in public, was turned into a spectacular attack with quite obvious results. Obama had nearly erased the entirety of Clinton’s 20 point lead in the polls. On Tuesday, she carried the state by more than 10.

Who wrote the memo? A Canadian pol with “conservative” sensibilities, according to the scant news reports mentioning him at all. Who leaked it? Someone gave it to Clinton (assuming her people did not arrange the meeting itself as a pretext for the memo), who then leaked it to the press. The Canadian government promptly discredited the memo but the damage had been done.

Ohio was perfect for this bombshell. It didn’t have to be true. The Clintons realize that Obama is, in many ways and for many people, a blank slate. We are only now beginning to know him, even though he has offered a wide range of specific, detailed policy statements, written two books, and spoken in terms many find believable and deeply moving. In Ohio, the legacy of the Clinton-Bush years have caused great misery. NAFTA has ruined Ohio’s economy. With the war spending has come a reduction in expenditures on America’s infrastructure and its social services. Bill Clinton championed NAFTA and nearly wiped out Aid For Families With Dependent Children. Obama has always criticized NAFTA. Clinton has not, not until she had to face the hurting people in Ohio. By casting doubt on Obama’s NAFTA position, Clinton turned reality on its head, and used people’s uncertainty about who Obama is to fool the voters.

I am not fantasizing. This is how politics has worked for a long, long time. These people operate at the epicenter of power, and they are not kidding around.

Thus the photograph of Obama in ceremonial Kenyan dress leaked to the public via the Drudge Report by the Clinton campaign, and Hillary’s coy response to a reporter’s question whether she thought Obama was secretly Muslim.

Thus the imputations of wrongdoing by Obama in having bought a residential property in concert with a Chicago man now on trial for illegal business practices, although the record shows nothing remotely wrong with this single deal, Obama long ago diverted a relatively modest contribution from Rezko to charity, and does the term “Whitewater” ring a fucking bell?

Okay, I’m a little pissed off.

The Republican candidate is very dangerous and he has an excellent chance to win thanks to Hillary Clinton.

On national security, Clinton now says that both she and John McCain are qualified to deal with crises while Obama is not. Democratic Party pols must be alarmed by this time. If they aren’t, they are officially comatose and should all be removed from office, put on a barge, and floated out with the Japanese current.

All it would take, Clinton is saying to the “super delegates”, is for any kind of crisis to occur during the campaign, or for national security issues to be emphasized, which they certainly will be, and McCain now has a video of Hillary sandbagging her party’s own nominee. Even Hubert Humphrey didn’t piss this badly on McGovern when he called him the candidate of “Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion” back in ‘72, paving the way for Nixon’s landslide.

Hillary Clinton has always postured as a friend to children, just as her husband postured as a friend to blacks. This is the Senator who voted for the unprovoked attack on Iraq, the incalculable destruction, the six hundred thousand refugees (it may he as high as two million), the murdered mothers and fathers and children, all because she didn’t want to appear to be “weak.”

I have tried to contact Senator Boxer. I’ve actually known her for maybe thirty-five years since we’ve lived in the same community. She’s a “super delegate” who’s said that she feels obligated to follow the vote of her constituents, which should suggest Clinton, who carried the state. But she’s also someone who, before she got to be a congresswoman, was a volunteer organizer against the Viet Nam war, and a county supervisor who never sold out her values for political advantage.

I know she’s a friend to the Clinton family. They are actually in-laws, or sorts, or were, I can’t remember what happened with that wedding, but you get the point.

The thing is:

Hillary Clinton – if she is not dissuaded by persons or events – will carry a scorched earth campaign against Obama all the way through, at least, June. The damage will be incalculable. Obama, of course, cannot fight back as effectively as Clinton can, because he has rejected that kind of politics. If he does fight back, she will have undermined his call to civility and commonality; if he doesn’t, he will be called too “weak”, or he will simply be damaged beyond repair.

Therefore, she must be dissuaded. There is no other course. And this is Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have amassed great wealth and power, and upon whom one does not generally make demands.

So it’s got to be people with real power: the real leaders, if there are any, in the Democratic Party. The only way to avert this unbearable nightmare is for Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and the other party hotshots to get off their asses. They need to tell Hillary Clinton that they respect her and appreciate her service to the cause but that she must now stop this.

Boxer’s office responds to my mail by saying that it is an official government office and can’t participate in partisan issues. It also does not suggest an alternative means of communicating with the Senator, curiously enough.

I’m going to find a way of getting through to Boxer, however. Suggest you do the same. I’m also going to ask my anti-war congresswoman Lynn Woolsey why she is pledged to Clinton and whether, under the circumstances – being that if McCain is elected this war, and many others, will never end – she might reconsider.

I don’t know what else to say right now. I haven’t felt this way in a long, long time. Might be the same for you.

I am grateful as all hell to my friend who gave me a few xanax tablets a few months back, and gratified that I had the foresight to save them. Tonight’s the night.

For three days I’ve been trying to write my thoughts about the Democratic race, about Clinton and Obama, about a coming general election, about charges and counter-charges and ego and smugness, about dirty politics, image and reality, who really said and did what, and how the mass media is making a holy hash of the entire thing.

Every time I try to write, I lose the narrative, the thread, and most of my remaining marbles because I’m angry as hell and have no idea what to do about it.

My own history in politics is as long as Hillary Clinton’s, at least according to the record. She says she’s been doing this for thirty-five years, and I could well believe it judging by her complete dissociation of mind and spirit. She’s leaving out her really early political years when she was a poll watcher for Richard Nixon in – you guessed it – Chicago. Well, what’s one embarrassment more of less when you’re impervious to them?

My own history being long, I have views. I’ve seen presidential campaigns and other contests where real power is in dispute, and they are hard-fought, sometimes bitter, occasionally nasty. But Hillary, in a close contest with Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, has made this one simultaneously the ugliest and the weirdest one I’’ve ever seen.

Let’s consider November. John McCain will be running against Clinton or Obama. Ralph Nader will be lurking somewhere, ready to cause as much king-hell trouble for the Democrats as possible. There are two possible scenarios.

The first is with Barack Obama. The issues of the campaign will have been these: the failing economy, joblessness, the price of gasoline and what ought to be done about it, the mess in Iraq, the growing crisis in Central America, health care, taxes, and racial sensitivity.

Obama should win. His record on the economy is a blank slate. Media barkers do not understand (yet) why this is a good thing; they will. Voters do not understand economic issues. They know, however, that whatever the fuck Bush has been up to it’s been the wrong thing. Joblessness will be a serious crisis by then. McCain’s record is pretty hopeless because the free market won’t cut it now.

McCain’s already trying to sound green on the environment and “clean energy” sources to supplant some foreign oil; he’ll also back drilling for oil everywhere, including your back yard. His “clean energy” will be nuclear power. Obama, while he hasn’t made a point of it, is also wrong on nuclear power, but it won’t cost him against McCain.

McCain’s war position will be this (he gave a brilliant speech tonight): he will work hard to bring the war to an end as rapidly as possible, but only when we are assured that we’ve lived up to our word and protected America’s interests. That’s a tough position to argue against; I know, it’s crazy, but remember: it worked for Nixon in 1968. Think about it. Humphrey, in ‘68, was tied to Johnson’s war policy and afraid to condemn it; Nixon promised he had a plan. Five more years of misery and 200% more deaths and other casualties in Viet Nam. Obama will counter that it is the wrong war, that it is not “getting better” (every day there will be more deaths he can refer to, asking “how many more of these people have to die to validate a failed policy?”)

Central America is a stickier situation, and it is not beyond the Bush administration to manipulate events to create the possibility of intervention. While everybody’s looking at Ohio and Texas, Colombian troops crossed their border with Ecuador and killed a rebel leader. Both Ecuador and Venezuela have moved troops to their borders with Colombia. If it has slipped your mind in all of the domestic excitement of late, the United States is in a very antagonistic position with regard to several Latin countries, among them Venezuela and Chile. John McCain would like to get his hands on Venezuelan oil. Obama had better be careful with this issue. The “liberal” mass media has routinely trashed Venezuela and its president, always referring to him as a “leftist,” and often suggesting that he is a dictator of sorts, although I suspect that his election was more credible than George Bush’s. Anything which McCain can use to tie Obama to the Venezuelan government will be dangerous for Obama. Central America will be the wild card.

On health care, Obama’s got McCain because the country’s ready. The disputes over this guy’s plan and that guy’s plan won’t matter. The media will get lost in parsing the details either because they do not understand the issue or because they have time to fill in between ads for the pharmaceutical industry. The public will know only that it’s time and that Obama’s going to be able to pull it off.

On taxes, Obama’s got McCain because while McCain bleats about “tax-and-spend” Democrats, Obama can talk about the billions to Iraq and the billions in tax breaks to people who didn’t need them. It’s a great issue for John Edwards. Obama will use it well. He can also tie about 200 lobbyists to McCain’s tail and every one of those guys got tax breaks from Bush while the value of the dollar declined.

On race. See, Obama’s got two problems. First, his race and his name. There are votes he will never get, even if McCain declares himself the anti-Christ and begins throwing lightning bolts at the Pentagon. Some white and Latino and Asian people do not like African Americans. That’s about 20% (see the Boneyard Baseline in a previous post). Thing is: he wouldn’t get those votes anyhow, even if he were the color of dead sea bass and his name was Jones. Those people are cretins. It’s the rest of them he needs to worry about. But that raises the larger problem: Obama’s sensitivity to race. The lunatic shit we’ve seen already on the internet is as nothing compared to what’s in store for us if this guy’s the nominee.

Obama reacted badly to that Cincinnati lunatic’s chanting of his middle name. His people nailed it for what it was. But nailing it for what it was was a mistake, and it’s a big one. Barack: everyone’s got a middle name. Yours is Hussein. So what? Think of how you might raise your eyebrows and wonder with a half smile whether we are going to decide the great issues of our time by voting on the candidate’s names. I mean, we are not naming a baby here, we’re electing a President.

If he defuses these more public, ham-handed attacks, especially if he does it with humor, he will also deflate the entire, hate-filled racist internet campaign against him. People who might then not be sure, who might waver, who might have problems with him on an issue or two, will vote for him anyway for the same reason West Virginia’s supposed anti-Catholic voters backed a millionaire’s Catholic son named Jack Kennedy in the 1960 primary and proved to the rest of the country, and maybe to themselves, that they were not bigots, at least not any longer.

I hope Ted Sorenson’s reading this.

Now we get to scenario number two. Hillary Clinton.

If she is nominated, she will lose. There are several reasons for this, but these are the main ones: people do not like her; she is very bad in crisis situations and although that should already have been made evident it’s been obscured by the mass media’s preoccupation with more superficial matters. With national security an issue, her three-in-the-morning scare ad backfires against her because she has no previous crisis experience and because the debates (and her tactics) reveal her to be someone who whines or dissembles when caught unprepared, as she has been repeatedly. Example: reporters asked her to talk about any “red phone moments” she’d had in her career and neither she nor a bunch of generals she had on the line at the time could give an answer. I’ve heard the tape. There’s this very long silence. It was her ad. How is it that someone who claims to be able to act in a crisis can’t even plan well enough to know that question is coming?

Clinton can’t handle the issues in a race against McCain because her record traps her. She loses the war as an issue, much as Humphrey lost it in 1968. That alone is very bad for the Democratic Party. The party has waffled in Congress for a long time; a majority of its members voted to enable Bush to invade Iraq; it’s protection of the constitution itself has been almost non-existent. With Hillary Clinton temporizing about the war, she will lose the base which has been awakened by Obama’s candidacy. People are sick of nuance. They want the war over. But Clinton, like McCain, voted for it. McCain will say he wanted more troops sent at the beginning, as though that would’ve done the trick. Against Clinton, he can get away with that argument, but not against Obama.

The leaders of the Democratic Party know at least some of this. They know that Obama would run a stronger race not because he’s leading this week or next month but because he’s positioned on issues to take advantage of McCain’s weaknesses and Clinton isn’t. They are privately unhappy that Clinton has unleashed the kinds of attacks she has against Obama, most recently handing McCain a great video ad by saying that she and McCain, but not Obama, were able to handle national security and crisis situations. That’s way over the line. Way over. You don’t get to do that, even if you are a woman who was cheated on by your schmuck of a husband.

On CBS’ Sixty Minutes, one of the heaping pile of free air time shows she’s gotten on the eve of the latest primaries, Clinton, upon being asked whether she thought Obama might be Muslim, responded, “Not that I know of.” She is a plague. She is Richard Nixon in a pant-suit.

There is no nomination worth gaining for Clinton, not under the circumstances, and not despite this evening’s results which appear to give her Texas, as well as Ohio. At least they have not lost their marbles in Vermont. The only way she can get the nomination is by subterfuge, blackmail (Florida and Michigan), and destroying Obama in the remaining primaries. I think it is a reasonable possibility that such a course will also destroy the Democratic Party.

Is she so self-absorbed, so mad and selfish that she’s prepared to give the country John McCain rather than accept that she is not wanted? Right now, it looks as though the answer is yes.

Today was probably the last straw. Senator Clinton released a video advertisement which asked the viewer, over dramatic music and shadowy scenes meant to depict the White House, who they would trust to answer the phone which would ring at 3:00 a.m. Okay, it’s a little bit over-the-top, with its “the Terrorists Are Coming!” theme, but as political theater, very clever and reasonably within the limits of fair play.

Within one hour, the Obama campaign issued a response video, same questions about three a.m., same portentious theme music, only now the answer was, we want the guy who’s been right in tough moments and courageous enough to say what he believes.

It’s not the content of Obama’s answer which had to send shock waves straight through the heart of the Clinton high command. It’s the amazing speed and clarity of response.

She may as well quit now. She’s over-matched. So is John McCain, for that matter. He ought to quit, too.

Barack Obama is the Tiger Woods of American politics. Like Woods, his mixed-race heritage is meaningless in the face of his brilliance. And as a golfing great observed of Woods, he is playing a game with which I am not familiar. They’re muttering the same thing tonight wherever Hillary Clinton tries to get some sleep.