UPDATED EARLY FEB 16

A failure to recognize the importance of being out-organized in Iowa as well as the significance of an early caucus state 3d place began to cast doubt on Sen. Clinton’s stance as “inevitable”. While she was being the frontrunner, Sen. Obama was able to present himself to voters in his own way — as a reform minded, “clean and articulate” (Sen. Biden regrets … ), non-race-baiting stemwinding speaker. Later, she’d try to portray him as a sleazy southside Chicago ward heeler, but by then it was too late.

Her “electability” argument failed on Super Tuesday. She was no more electable than Obama and they fought to a tie.

“Ready on Day One” seems shakey in light of campaign staff turmoil — is this how she reacts to crisis? Cold dismissal and just ignore her losses? Doesn’t take personal responsibility, does she?

Now she’s got Latino “firewalls” and “wait until March.”

I wish she’d at least make it a noble end. I wish she would just say flat out that the White House needs a woman and a woman’s point of view. She calls herself transformative, why doesn’t she try BEING transformative and just get down and dirty and talk about gender? She’s a codependent mommy with a 10 point plan to fix everything. I’d frame every damn issue in terms of “the children” whether it was the mothers of wounded veterans or the debt we’ve piled up on our grandchildren or the costs of raising children and emergency room horror stories and on and on and on. It’s the vision thing, as we used to tell Bush I. I’d completely change the story from this insider campaign demographic superdelegates crap and I do it dramatically. I’d go to Walter Reed Hospital or some such in every state and visit wounded soldiers’ parents. I’d be in day care centers and nursing homes and not factories. I’d be saying every day that I could bring something to the White House no other candidate can bring — a mother’s heart, the heart that’s been broken by so many slights from men who underestimated her willingness to work hard and succeed in a man’s world. Perhaps I’d be just ever so slightly more subtle, you understand, but I swear to God that if I were her, I go down fighting in the ring and not in the back rooms of a convention hall. I’d defy them to deny me and destroy the hopes of every adolescent girl in the country, in the face of their shattered mothers’ wrath. If I’m Mark Penn, I tell momma to get mad and line everybody out and use the slogan: “If momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy, and mommas all over this country ain’t happy.”

She can’t do that.

Sorry.

POST SCRIPT: I FOUND THIS QUOTE FROM THE GRUBBY LITTLE DICK MORRIS AFTER I WROTE THE ABOVE ABOUT HILLARY. DO YOU THINK HE READS MY STUFF? JUST SAYIN’.

She could have waged a grassroots, small-donor, Internet campaign of change based on being the first woman running for president with a serious chance of victory. The charisma could have been hers, the excitement hers and the novelty hers. But by embracing experience and pretending to be safe and tested, she deadened the excitement her candidacy could have generated.

HERE’S THE LINK. I CAN’T BELIEVE I THINK LIKE THAT WORM. OH, WELL. TURNS OUT HE WROTE HIS SHIT ON FEB 13, TOO.

I’m looking for a game-changer, someone willing to dare to be great. Maybe Obama will fail. But, I believe he will fail greatly and well. I won’t be ashamed if I lose because I think he — and we — did our best and didn’t go down without a fight. From day one, he “re-brands” America in a way that destroys a lot of prejudices we’ve well earned in the past few years. It’s a transformative start. I’m a lawyer and I hate what’s happened to our Constitution, our laws, our courts, the Department of Justice, my profession. He’s a constitutional law professor. He knows this Bush stuff is screwed up and I believe he will quickly move to change all that. He knows this war is whack but he’s not stupid about getting out (“We need to do a better job of planning to get out than we did planning to get in.”).

The Republican Party, I think one way or another are replaying the film of the helicopters lifting off the Embassy in Saigon. It paralyzes them in Baghdad. Trillions in debt, a recession, a war that can’t be won or lost. And, McCain managed to twist himself into knots over the looney far right social agenda.

Obama will win Wisconsin by about 5% and do better in Hawaii. Hillary will win both Ohio and Texas, but not get enough delegates to make up all the slack. Obama will win — barely — in Pennsylvania and big in North Carolina and it will be over.

Obama’s message will be policy oriented and include swipes at McCain about equally as Hillary over the next three weeks. By Pennsylvania and North Carolina, he will begin painting a picture of McCain as “the past” and attack his former “maverick” credentials by portraying them as mere flip flops — he was against the tax cuts before he was for the tax cuts. The campaign will become a reality show narrative but he will be the nominee at the convention as superdelegates break to him in the background. That’s only to keep our interest, though, because I think much of the latter part of the campaign the fix will be in and the stuff in the papers will be a kabuki show.

So, why do they keep playing the game now that I’ve called it? Go figure.

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Yesterday, Obama won the “Potomac Primary”, putting Virginia, Maryland and D.C. in his win category by large majorities. Today, both candidates are in Wisconsin for next Tuesday’s contest, Hillary having given up on Hawaii (?). A Republican Party sponsored poll by Strategic Vision shows Obama slightly leading in Wisconsin.

She says she’ll catch back up on March 4 in Ohio and Texas or, at the least, by Pennsylvania in April. We don’t yet know if North Carolina will “count”. One of my mainstays is a site called “Real Clear Politics” — it has real clear polling and real conservative commentary. It accumulates polls and data from other sources and does a rolling track of the average of the reports. It presently shows Obama leading: 1. In earned delegates; 2. In total delegates: 3. In total votes; 4. In total votes including Florida; 5. in the national polls against Sen. Clinton; and, 6. in the national polls against Sen. McCain.

Most of the pundits are starting to count her out and, it seemed to me, Obama made a “pivot” during the past week and is now running for president and not the nomination. Today, he “framed” an economic issue: he stood in a GM plant in Wisconsin and told them not to look for applause lines because he was announcing a new jobs creation program. He proposes to spend $210 billion over 10 years on two programs, one that creates environmental “green collar” jobs and another that restores infrastructure such as bridges and highways. I think this is an extraordinarily good idea in that it kills two birds with one stone, but I’ll save that discussion for another day. For now, let’s just say that over the past week or so he has been putting more and more substantive policy positions in his speeches, he’s been looking across the party divide at the presumptive GOP nominee and doing less of the rah-rah stuff.

That’s actually pretty classic “underdog” stuff in a campaign. First, it’s the warm and fuzzy introductions and getting to know you speeches and ads and only later the specifics of policy differences and ending with negatives on the other guy and a “hey, let’s all get along together” close. All along, he’s been ignoring Hillary, in a way, because the GOP has been beating Al Gore and John Kerry by “defining” those two guys in a year-long “narrative” of the campaign. Now, they won’t do that so easily with Obama because he’s “pre-framed” himself and defined his own identity. The GOP has also pre-“framed” the debate, but for the past 15 years against Hillary, their favorite punching bag. I think at first the GOP went after Hillary because Bill was “bulletproof” and going after his wife was a way of getting under his skin (we’ve seen that he can lose his head in her defense just this year.) This is all also very much in harmony with Obama’s 50 state campaign, going for delegates and wins even in the “red” states. Now, even GOP voters in the red states have seen the soft and conciliatory image ads Obama has run in those states. Republicans also know who Obama is, but on his terms and not Rush Limbaugh’s.

Obama’s jobs program also helps him sew up the raw gashes in the party. For a long time, supporters of Hillary, especially older white women, have complained that Obama doesn’t have the “policy heft” of Hillary, who can list 35 proposals she favors at the drop of an issue category. This “movement” stuff just doesn’t grab them, they want specific legislative goals that advance the people who sit at the kitchen table and pay the bills. It’s an old fight in the Democratic Party that goes back to the 19th Century. It’s the “process progressives” versus the “program progressives.” Without giving a history lesson, it’s the difference between those who emphasize fair housing and those who insist on building low cost/low income housing first. This is Obama trying to fill the gap between those positions, putting the environment as a big national goal (movement) and backing that up with “green collar” jobs that move away from energy dependence (global warming, the war in Iraq) and give people jobs to help us work out of the recession that Bush is leaving us with. There’s an extra special little Wisconsin spin on all that: the infrastructure jobs proposal is front and center in a state that remembers the collapsed bridge next door in Minn. better than we do here in Oklahoma (Is Minn. an even later primary state?).

From another perspective, Obama makes a major jobs policy speech and rips the horserace questions off the front pages to a certain extent because all those stories are about her and not him.

Meanwhile, there’s Hillary’s electoral “firewall” in Ohio and Texas to talk about. Again, I’ll try to be brief and I’m going to leave out Ohio all together for today and focus on Texas. (Last month, a poll showed Sen. Clinton ahead 23 in Ohio and this month’s only poll shows her 17 points ahead.) First, Texas has a very wierd election this time (for an extremely detailed explanation of the Texas election, I’m indebted to the texas obama blogger who is wonked into this.) : it’s part primary (daytime) and then turns into caucus (after 7 p.m.). No place but Texas has such a thing as far as I know and I can’t really figure out how that’s going to work exactly, but I’ll say this: it seems to me that Obama’s excellent “ground” organization and his upper educated and upper financial class block seems to me to give him some advantages over Hillary’s blue collar, high school grads. Next, let us not forget the shitty deal that Tom Delay pulled in Texas with redistricting. I still think it’s unconstitutional, but that’s another argument. Almost all the urban blacks in Texas have been crowded into a very few congressional districts as have the heavily Latino congressional districts along the southern border. If there really is a black/brown divide, the two will cancel out in the porportional delegate scheme of the Democrats. I don’t see it in the papers or even on the ‘net, but there’s an “understory”: Texas, more than most states, has a very deep “hate Hillary” strand and it even infects the Democrats. It’s an open primary, so independents will also be able to come to the caucuses and I think they will to vote against Sen. Clinton; they hate her just that much. My conclusion is that while the pundocricy says that Sen. Clinton “must” have all three of her firewall states, I think Texas is a place where Obama may surprise. If she “must’ win by more than 5 percent or more than 15 percent (in order to get the delegates she needs to catch up in earned delegates), then I don’t see her doing it in Texas. In fact, I’m persuaded by this anonymously blogged piece on Talking Points Memo that she’s dead in the water.

A final caveat: Hillary leads the only poll available to me by 12 points in Texas, and never let it be said she can’t fight and couldn’t win with that kind of “leg up”. Obama may not cruise without a good fight. I think she knows these 5 things she needs to win.

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Do I have a chance with that woman? Now, I can figure it out. Here’s the formula.

Flibbi, is there one of these for women, does this apply to you or is this one supposedly male only?

Nary a word about bowling in the whole formula. Imagine that.

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LATE UPDATE: OBAMA SWEEP; DELEGATE COUNT TBD

POST SCRIPT: I’m watching election news on the ‘net Sat. eve. as I tidy up the house. I just ran across a piece by Ben Smith at Politico.com about the Louisiana primary that made me laugh. The Obama camp complains of “irregularities” in the voting. No shit. It’s Louisi-fucking-ana, buddy. Where have you been since about forever? Yeah. Right. Return to your regular programming. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

I wrote a fairly long piece about my realization that I’ve turned into a confirmed and eccentric batchelor and that I don’t see the arc of my future including another frenzied dating spurt and perhaps not including much dating at all. I’m trying to get my head around that with uncertain results. Anyway, I spiked that draft.

Then, I wrote a rather long piece that looked at the three states having primary or caucus races today for the Dem nomination. I spiked it, too. The short version is that the next seven states — Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington Saturday, Maine Sunday and the “Chesapeake Primary” in Maryland, Virginia and D.C. Tuesday — all appear to be Obama states. The question is the split of delegates: the states that give O less than 60% and/or HRC more than 40% are states that split their delegates more evenly. For every 5% that HRC falls below 40%, O picks up critical increments of delegates. The problem with the analysis is that no one (and I mean literally no one) really knows what that means since no one agrees on how many delegates each candidate can claim. I’ve seen sober claims of splits close and far and the trouble, in part, is the superdelegates and the other part of the problem is the way caucus votes work — O may have “won” a caucus on the precinct level but not do as well or do much better on the District and State levels, depending on local rules. I tried hard to come up with my own delegate estimates, but it’s too difficult and the data just isn’t publicly available without turning the process into a full time job. Until we know how things work out through Tuesday, there’s just no telling about Ohio and Texas, big ticket states and the next two states that vote, both of which look good for HRC.

I spiked that piece too, and if you didn’t fall asleep during the last paragraph, you know why. I made my own eyes glaze over.

The political news cycles have become a sideshow of annoying and irritating quality: was Chelsea “pimped” and do we care?; was HRC’s fundraising cycle news all a stunt?; do you become part of a cult if you back Obama? It’s all just too stupid to really care about, but feel free to get on a few websites and join the flame wars if that appeals to you.

I’ve let Sinatra outdoors in the beautiful weather and I’ve got some windows open this afternoon (Sat) and I put together a little piece in which I talk to the cat about what’s going on in the neighborhood, but it, too, just sort of fell apart and I spiked it, too.

Maybe you’d be interested in just what I’ve been doing on my internet “vacay”, but, I tell you it’s so boring that it’s what sparked off the “I’ll never date again” post I spiked. I watched “Sin City” on DVD and did a little work at the office and I’ve had an allergy attack that’s making me grumpy and I was very pissy at work with the feminista Hillary-backing, chihuahua owning attorney at my office. Not very interesting.

I have a first cousin who just went into rehab in MS and I’m concerned and would like to reach out. My neice in S.C. is struggling with her pregnancy and I’m praying for her and my sister as I read Mary’s blog. I’ve been amused watching Flibbi and MCARP jousting over the precise meaning of “fucking” and “sexual expression”. Sometimes I’m a bowler, sometimes I dance.

Mom dropped by with a gift appropos of nothing: a new pair of shoes. Out of the blue, but another pair of black slip ons with a tassel is exactly what I needed: after all, everyone knows that nothing can pick up your mood like shopping for shoes. She’ll be back Tuesday with my next Christmas gift installment — maid service. It’ll take me all weekend to clean up enough for them to see the house and clean the toilets.

I’m looking forward to KayOh’s FiveOh party on the 26th, but absolutely refuse to believe she’s that age — she’s still 43 and I don’t much care what anyone says. Of course, my stand on the issue allows me to reduce my age by 7 years, making me a mere 48. Or so. Kinda. About. Nevermind.

I’m trying to put together a poker game for next week, maybe that’ll be something worth writing about. Meanwhile, maid service or not, I’ve got to do some dishes and laundry and change the sheets and all that stuff, so catch you on the flip flop.

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little nugget

Jake Tapper at ABC comments about the cult of Obama HERE and I respond by comment at 10:33 p.m. 7Feb.