Obama Chokes

Rush Limbaugh has become a Hillary Clinton backer of late - not a fan, you understand, but a backer - for one reason, and one reason only: he doesn't want to be bored.

At least that is how I interpret his expressed wish that his listeners in Ohio and Texas cross over to vote for Mrs. Clinton in yesterday's Democrat contests in order to blunt Barack Obama's momentum and increase the liklihood that his nomination brawl with the Empress extends all the way to Denver in August.  If Hillary went down in both big states and dropped out of the race (as if!), we'd be looking at the same anti-climactic coronational processional, only the incoming lefty monarch would be King Hussein rather than the Queen of Mean.  Eight months of electoral pre-emption; eight months of orgasmic media speculation about "hope" and "uplifting" and "fixing the country" and "rebuilding our global reputation" and who's going to be in Obama's cabinet and what a strong, active first lady Michelle is going to be, ad barfeum.  Eight months of having nobody to support, of the press rubbing McCain in our faces, of having to "make the best of it" when there's no "best" to make anything of, of the systematic RINOizing of the GOP (that portion of it that is still Reaganized, anyway).  Even a talker of Limbaugh's calibre would be hard-pressed to squeeze interesting, much less entertaining, commentary out of such a bleak, sterile electoral death march.  I know, because I remember what the Bob Dole campaign was like twelve years ago, and that unfolded without the ingrained distrust and detestation any sane conservative maintains for Darth Queeg.

Well, I don't know if it was Rush's coy exhortations, or the Clinton Machine's publicizing of Senator Obama's ties to a Chicago real estate swindler, or Saturday Night Live's Obama parody last, well, Saturday, or just that that B.O. magic had an appallingly shorter shelf life than anybody would have suspected, but let's just say the reports of Hillary Clinton's political demise were greatly exaggerated:

Hillary Rodham Clinton scored comeback primary wins in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island Tuesday night, denting Barack Obama's delegate lead in a riveting Democratic presidential race....

Clinton's three triumphs ended a month of defeats for the former first lady, and she told jubilant supporters, "We're going on, we're going strong and we're going all the way."

Obama won the Vermont primary, and sought to counter Clinton's claims that the night had been a race-altering event. "We have nearly the same delegate lead as we did this morning and we are on our way to winning this nomination," he told supporters in Texas.

I can't help remembering Romneylans invoking the same defensive boast after their candidate lost Iowa and New Hampshire.  And, as then, it is true now for Obama, as far as it goes.

But in primary campaigns, it isn't about the delegate count, but public perceptions.  If HRC had lost either or both big contests yesterday, Obama's small delegate lead wouldn't have been significantly higher; but the Illinois huckster wouldn't be talking about the delegate count this morning, but rather how "Democrat voters have spoken" and "it's time to unify our party for the fall campaign to retake the White House", etc.  He'd be talking like the winner.  And Mrs. Clinton, who will have to be dragged out of this race by her feet before she'll EVER concede it, would nonetheless have faced the hugely daunting obstacle of being perceived as the inescapable loser.

Where that perception gains its powerful traction is in the matter of the infamous, Donk-only entities known as "superdelegates".  After the month-long winning streak he's been on, Obama triumphs in Ohio and Texas would, barring mob-style "persuasion" from La Clinton Nostra, have turned the recent trickle of defections of superdelegates from Mrs. Clinton into a flood.  Certainly Obamanations could have afforded to dial down their own racist strongarming.

The reason why the superdelegates bear enhanced importance in this go-round is straightforward: the inevitability of a brokered Democrat convention:

There is only one thing the public can be certain of regarding the Democratic presidential nomination: without a miracle, there will be a brokered convention. Senator Barack Obama was leading Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the delegate count going into the Super Tuesday II primary elections on March 4. Obama held 1,193 primary delegates to Clinton's 1,038....

A Democratic candidate needs to reach a minimum of 2,025 delegates to clinch the nomination outright. Clinton will not reach that figure before the last primary election is held in Puerto Rico on June 7. Neither will Obama. The Illinois senator needs 832 more delegates to reach the magic number of 2,025. There are only 981 remaining primary delegates that are up for grabs. Three hundred seventy delegates will be decided on March 4 and 611 will be divvied up across 12 primaries between March 8 and June 7. Obama would have to win an astonishing 85% of the remaining 981 delegates in order to claim the Democratic nomination outright. There are no winner-take-all primaries for the Democrats. Obama will never get the needed 832 delegates. He may fall short of reaching 2,025 delegates by as many as 250.

This means that neither Obama nor Clinton will tally the needed 2,025 delegates when the primary election season is completed. The pair will have eleven weeks between Puerto Rico's primary election on June 7 and the convening of the Democratic convention on August 25 to persuade super delegates to support their candidacy.

This would have been the case regardless of yesterday's "Super Duper Tuesday II" results.  But Hillary coming back in Ohio and Texas makes it a lot easier for the Clinton Machine to throw its weight around come convention time.  Particularly given the nature of the "persuasion" that will need to be applied, which Double-H looks upon as if seemingly for the first time:

Team Clinton will follow that old adage: Whatever is rewarded is repeated.

Hillary was rewarded by throwing anvils at the young and lightly credentialed Illinois senator, and by drawing attention to the Rezko trial.  Expect more anvils and more arrows pointing towards the federal courthouse in Chicago....She'll have to cheat to win.  Period.

Yes, Hugh.  And your point is....?

Of course, the Clintons will "cheat," if that's what it takes.  Although this wouldn't be "cheating," by the strict defintion of the word.  They would call it "winning".  And if winning takes churning up a huge mud cloud and making multiple personal threats of varying degrees of severity in order to overcome the presumed small primary/caucus delegate lead Our Mr. Hussein brings to Denver, does anybody really think the Empress wouldn't go through with it?  C'mon, this is a forty-year payoff we're talking about.  She'd kill to be the next president of the United States.  The promise of that endgame is probably the only reason she didn't have Mr. Bill murdered years ago.  She's not going to look twice at "thwarting the will" of Democrat primary voters, even if some of them DO listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Besides, as Mark Hyman argues, Hillary will have another ace in the hole that won't require nearly as much direct bulldozing:

Complicating the matter for Obama is the status of the 313 primary delegates Clinton picked up in the Michigan and Florida primaries. The Democratic Party has stated it would not seat the Michigan and Florida delegates because those two states moved up their primary dates without national party blessing. But will national party leaders really not seat the Michigan and Florida delegates? Not hardly.

National Democratic leaders realize their nominee must capture at least one and possibly both Michigan and Florida if their candidate is to win in November. Party leaders cannot afford to disenfranchise the voters in those two states and give them a reason to stay home in November. On top of this, Clinton will not let the status of the Michigan and Florida delegates pass without a fight. She could turn to the courts for relief.

Just imagine: another presidential election hanging in the balance before the Supreme Court of the United States, whose balance was tipped a hairsbreadth rightward by the President who Democrats have screeched for the past seven years was "appointed" by the SCOTUS over Bill Clinton's vice president; and this ruling could determine whether another "rising star" Donk senator becomes the veep caddy for his wife, and lead, perhaps, to a Gore-like sequel screwing in 2016.

Praetor Hewitt thinks this could "shatter" the Democrat Party even worse than 1968:

What's "the community" going to think of this digit-by-digit deconstruction of the charismatic adopted son of the South Side?  They were expecting it from the Republicans, but from establishment Democrats? 

It is finally their turn, but they have to watch fifty days of attacks on Obama simply because the Clintons want another eight years of power?

The Democrats are now dancing on a cliff unlike any they have been on since 1968 when the demands for new voices and change ran straight into the entrenched interests of unions and special interest groups that have long made common cause with the D.C. Dems.

The Dems shattered forty years ago.  The sequel may be even more destructive of the left.

Ah, but remember - in a presumptively Republican year, with the Dems collapsing under the weight of a burgeoningly unpopular war, Lyndon Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, still fought Richard Nixon to a photo-finish (albeit with a bit of help from George Wallace).  And if Bobby Kennedy had lived, Nixon would have been buried, and there'd have been no Republican era at all.

Whether it's Hillary or Obama - or, as I have predicted since 2004, Hillary AND Obama - either Donk will annihilate Benedict McCain and whichever of his toadying RINO Sith apprentices he sentences to be fed backwards through the electoral bunghole with him.

But with her victories in Ohio and Texas yesterday, Mrs. Clinton has both enhanced her chances of attaining her dreams of world domination AND helped guarantee that the competitive portion of the 2008 presidential race will last for another five months.

And that will give ALL of us a lot more to talk about in the otherwise bleak weeks and months to come.