This is what I mean

You know things have gotten bad when someone writes a utterly ridiculous snark diary lampooning Hillary-hate diaries and…people mistake it for a genuine Hillary-hate diary.

You know a particular group has jumped the shark when you get to the point where you will actually believe that they would say anything. (This goes for Obama-bashers as well).

Almost close to home

If I still lived in northeast Tennessee, I would have gone to this. As it is it’s about a 3 hour drive for me. Bummer.

Completely non-germane update:

I just noticed I had misspelled the name of the blog when I switched it over last night.  Doh!  At least it’s easy to fix, and at least the url is right.

Reforming the system

I think one of the things that became apparent in this primary fight was that the system for selecting the democratic nominee for President is largely broken, and there are several reasons why:

Superdelegates

There are 823.5 superdelegate votes in this year’s nomination contest. That makes up 19.5% of all delegates in the selection process. There are more superdelegates than pledged delegates in the 3 largest states combined. It led us into a situation where neither candidate could claim a majority of delegates using pledged delegates alone. While Obama has effectively clinched the nomination using superdelegates, by their very nature as “unpleded” delegates, Obama will not have enough delegates to win the nomination until the actual ballot for President at the convention if one wants to get super strict on the point.

I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with having a few superdelegates for people based on their roll in the party. Former Presidents and Presidential candidates and congressional leaders should probably get such a vote at the very least (and lest we forget, as much as the GOP may pretend otherwise, they also have their own version of superdelegates – it’s just they make up a tiny percentage of the total delegates).

I basically see no reason why every DNC member in every state should be a super. I could maybe go for state chairs being superdeleates, but not everyone. That could cut the superdelegate number by 300 or 400 right there. Also, should every member of Congress be a super? If so, you’re looking at 250-300 supers just from that pool, and throw in governors on top of that.

My proposal would be to either eliminate supers all together, or include only:

1) DNC state chairs (I believe this would be 55 votes if one includes the territories)
2) National DNC leadership (currently 9 members based on wikipedia)
3) Members of the House and Senate leadership (6 I think – Speaker of the House, President Pro Tempore of the Senate, both Majority leaders and both Majority whips)
4) Chair of the DCCC and the DSCC (2)
5) Current Governors (28 )
6) Distinguished Party Leaders (basically former Presidents, Vice Presidents, and presidential nominees) (maybe half a dozen)

That would create about 100 to 110 superdelegates total – not a terrible number and I think it probably would be acceptable.

Caucuses

This number, if nothing else, should be why we should no longer have caucuses:

Every caucus delegate represents 2,426 votes. 441 delegates represent about 1.07 million votes.

Every primary delegate represents 12,338 votes. 2,962 delegates represent 36.5 million votes.

That means each caucus delegate basically has 5 times as much power as each primary delegate, at least as far as the number of people they represent.

And this doesn’t even address the ways that caucuses depresses turnout by making voting about as inflexible as possible.

Congressional district appropriation of delegates

I support proportional allocation of delegates. However, the appropriation of delegates, where often many, if not most, delegates in a state being allocated by congressional district, is so fine that it has the potential to distort the proportional allocation of delegates. I would support just having all delegates allocated at the state level.

I think the ideal solution would be to have a national primary, but that probably isn’t going to happen any time soon.

My Daily Kos diary

I had written a (temporary) good-bye diary at Daily Kos, just cause I was sick of what the place had become in the primary and I wanted an extended break, though I did leave the door open to coming back if the place seemed to get better.

I hadn’t looked at the comments until now because I just wasn’t in the mood. However, I went back to look today, and I’m at least glad that most of them are pretty well-mannered, and I have to thank the people who think that I have added something to the site, and I think that makes my eventual return that much more likely once I finally get comfortable with the site again.

One of my pet projects is doing some big election pages there. I’ve been doing results live blogs with graphs there for the primary, and I helped run a big 2006 election night diary as well.

I’m still gradually working on my plans for 2008 hoping that I can work on it once again.

As far as returning to Daily Kos, I’ve been visiting(but not commenting, though I did let one slip the other day) about daily just to see what the attitude is there, and while it’s not great, it’s not as bad as it has been in the last week. I probably won’t go back before the Democratic Convention just because, as I said, I need some time I think, but it is my hope to return sometime.

Interesting coincidence?

Apparently Obama has tapped Jim Johnson (among two other people) to run his search for a Vice Presidential candidate.  Who is Jim Johnson?  He led the Vice Presidential search for both Walter Mondale and John Kerry.  What is special about those?  One of those searches ended in picking the first woman to a Vice Presidential nominee and the other resulted in the 2nd place finisher in the primary being put on the ticket.

Guess who fits both of those descriptions.

Oh yeah, he’s also tapped Eric Holder, who was a deputy Attorney General under President Clinton.

I personally don’t think it’s likely Clinton will be put on the VP spot, if for no other reason than I’m not really sure she wants it (the only rationale I could think of is if she thought her only chance at being President now would be running as the incumbent Vice President in 2016), but it is an interesting coincidence.

Time for the Clinton blogs to stop

OK, I started out the resurgence of this blog by making my displeasure over some of the Obama-blogs known. Now it’s the Clinton blog’s turn (hey, I’m an equal opportunity basher).

Just like how there are reasonable Obama-leaning blogs and over-the-top Obama-leaning blogs, there are reasonable Clinton-leaning blogs and over-the-top Clinton leaning blogs. Most of the reasonable ones have already started the process of reconciliation with Obama and a realization that McCain is the true nemesis in this election.

However, some of the harder-core Clinton blogs are still holding out and I say to them: quit it and get on board. If you really are a democrat, there is absolutely zero reason to vote for McCain over Obama. I guess I could maybe understand not voting if you really loathe Obama, but even most of that is due to the same “I’m 100% right and you’re 110% wrong” disease that infects the over-the-top Obama blogs, resulting in them saying that my candidate can do no wrong while the other candidate is worse than Hitler. But there are other options than voting for McCain, and “I don’t like Obama” isn’t a good enough reason to do so.

Also, remember how Greens were trashed in the Democratic Party after 2000 for voting for Nader, hading Bush New Hampshire and Florida? Imagine the backlash to those in those who would directly vote for McCain. You can assume right now that it won’t be nice (and it shouldn’t be nice).

I haven’t really seen a truly cogent argument for democrats voting against Obama in the general. Obama isn’t any more sexist than Hillary is racist. Some of this supporters haven’t necessarily been nice (and neither have some of Clinton’s supporters), but you can’t really attach the actions of a candidate’s supporters to the candidate him or herself. Some of them are sore over the Michigan compromise by the DNC, and while I agree that it was a bad compromise, it was 4 friggen’ delegates. If they’re going to get up and leave the party over 4 delegates, then they have bigger problems than supporting McCain.

Also, some sites are announcing doom and gloom based on Rezko being found guilty, claiming that this will ultimately bring Obama down because of some, yet to be uncovered connection between the two. Other sites have been hyping vaporware videos which will supposedly be damning to Obama. If either of there were to be true, then it may very well be bad for Obama, but this is the problem: there is absolutley no evidence than any of it is true, and one can’t make a decision on “what ifs.” You can’t make a decision based on completely unfounded allegations. If we did, then we would never be able to make decisions.

I also find it ironic that some seem to say that they won’t vote for Obama because he is “unelectable” which, of course, is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. If enough people didn’t vote for someone because they “aren’t electable” then they eventually will lose.

Another ironic point is that, if they’re staking so much on Hillary winning the nomination, why are they now ignoring Hillary when she says to support Obama? Remember how some Deaniacs threatened to bolt from the party in 2004 because they felt wronged by how Dean was brought down? Yet most of them ultimately came home in November.

Some of this is just being down and angry after losing a very close election, and in a sense it’s understandable, and they do have 5 months to get on board, and I have confidence that most of them will.

Victory Tour

I had a good thought this afternoon in a string of thoughts about the VP spot.

First off, I was thinking that Clinton will likely not be Obama’s VP, not because of any disrespect towards Clinton, but because Clinton is a very polarizing figure for Obama.  I actually think that this is probably the best argument against putting her on the ticket.  Republicans are down.  Why give them a reason to get excited.

Most of the arguments for having Clinton on the ticket involve some variation of “she can help Obama with her base,” but I think Clinton can help with that without necessarily being on the ticket.

Then I came up with a thought: what if Obama and Clinton went on a two week or so “victory” and or “unification” tour in battleground states and states which Obama needs but Clinton performs better in (see: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and  Florida).  They could basically go around and campaign together for that two week period and I think it would work wonders for both unifying the party and (hopefully) healing the wounds between Obama’s supporters and Senator Clinton.

Now, there are some reasons why Obama may not want to do this.  First, it keeps the media on him and Clinton instead of Him vs. McCain mano-a-mano.  Second, it would just continue to fuel the flames of her being his VP.

On the flip side, on top of the benefits for Clinton and for reunification, do you think McCain would get much press while Obama and Clinton went around campaigning together for two weeks? Probably not.  His biggest problem for the past 3 months is that he hasn’t been able to get any media attention at all, except when something bad happens (see: Hagee, lobbyists).  Going through the rest of June and still not being able to get any press would be good for Democrats and may make McCain increasingly desperate to make news (and thus more likely to make a big mistake).

Also, if Obama really is seriously considering Clinton for VP, going on a tour like that could act as sort of a trial run to see how well it might work.  In any case, I think having 36 million votes campaigning together on stage is a definitely an appealing opportunity.

Clinton to Concede Saturday

Also going to endorse Obama. Should I complain that the big orange blog didn’t say anything nice about Clinton in the process of reporting it?

I think most of the talk previously was that Clinton would probably drop out “by the end of the week” after South Dakota and Montana, and even after this and reports that she wasn’t conceding on that night, the Obama-blogs went nuts. Not conceding on the night someone clinches wasn’t necessarily expected and isn’t necessarily what happens all the time anyway.

I’d be interested in what Clinton and Obama has talked about and what party leaders talked to Clinton about. Despite what some of the Obama-blogs would like to believe, I do think Clinton has earned the right to at the very least have Obama’s ear. The dismissing of 48% of the delegates and 18 million votes by some of those blogs are quite disturbing to me.