John's Blog

We survived Super Tuesday with no knock-out blows being scored by either side. I'm sure both camps will have the spin machines going full tilt explaining how things went just the way they wanted. But this one looks like it's gonna' be much more of a horse-race than we've seen in a long, long time.

Let's hope that this speed bump doesn't throw off the alignment of the Obama campaign momentum which seemed to be building prior to Tuesday's vote. When you look at Obama's widening base as seen in the exit polls, and consider that the states Hillary won are the "traditional" Democratic strongholds, I have to conclude it suggests that Barack is probably the stronger candidate in the general election. Lets face it; despite the problems I have with a Clinton candidacy, if the choice comes down to her and Mr. CrankyPants, the choice is easy to make. But do I think that Clinton has the same appeal to the swing Republicans or the independent voters? Of course not! Obama has a greater potential to pull the undecided and those from the other side of the isle, without bringing the dark clouds from the past.

As Maureen Dowd pointed out in her Op-Ed piece Darkness and Light, there is still much work to be done if we are going to see Obama emerge victorious...

Hillary Clinton denounced Dick Cheney as Darth Vader, but she did not absorb the ultimate lesson of the destructive vice president:

Don’t become so paranoid that you let yourself be overwhelmed by a dark vision.

I think Hillary truly believes that she and Bill are the only ones tough enough to get to the White House. Jack Nicholson endorsed her as “the best man for the job,” and she told David Letterman that “in my White House, we’ll know who wears the pantsuits.” But her pitch is the color of pitch: Because she has absorbed all the hate and body blows from nasty Republicans over the years, she is the best person to absorb more hate and body blows from nasty Republicans....

Her argument to the Democratic base has gone from a subtext of “You owe me,” or more precisely, “Bill owes me and you owe him,” to a subtext of “Obambi will fold at the first punch from the right.”...

Better the devil you know than the diffident debutante you don’t. Better to go with the Clintons, with all their dysfunction and chaos — the same kind that fueled the Republican hate machine — than to risk the chance that Obama would be mauled like a chew toy in the general election. Better to blow off all the inspiration and the young voters, the independents and the Republicans that Obama is attracting than to take a chance on something as ephemeral as hope. Now that’s Cheney-level paranoia....

But, if he wants to be president, he will still have to slay the dragon. And his dragon is the Clinton attack machine, which emerged Tuesday night, not invincible but breathing fire.

Tags: Barack, Obama, elections, politics, pointless rambling