Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Miscellaneous Election Thoughts

Maybe I'm among the campaign naive, but this website and message is pretty terrible and pathetic. I don't know if the HRC campaign has any direct link to this page or is in any way responsible for it, or even how recent it is, but its brazenly sad. After last night, it reaks of desperateness. (h/t Ezra Klein)

Also from Ezra's keyboard, I think he makes a possibly relevant point about Obama's breaking into Hillary's speech last night:

Obama just cut in on Clinton's speech. On the one hand, I sympathize with the intent. She wasn't giving a concession tonight -- she lost, but it didn't count, so no concession needed -- but instead using the tradition of the concession speech to offer a nationally televised "contrast" speech, in which she said things like "only one of us is ready on day one to be commander in chief, ready to manage our economy, and ready to defeat the Republicans. Only one of us has spent 35 years being a doer, a fighter and a champion for those who need a voice." Obama, realizing he owned the airwaves, started right over her. And why not? Why give her airtime to bash him?

My first instinct when I watched it was to think Obama was being rude or churlish. But if this was in fact what precipitated Obama's move, the justification provided by Ezra seems reasonable.

The only excuse I could see Hillary making about Wisconsin was that Independent voters were able to participate, and that Obama apparently only won the Democratic vote by 51% to 48%.

But (a) Obama still won the Democratic-only vote and (b) Hillary's inability to appeal to Independents does not bode well for how she would do as the nominee in the general election in November.

Update: The delegatehub.com website I linked to above is (a) recent--today and (b) a creation of the Clinton campaign. (h/t John Cole)

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