Hillary .... It’s over

[syscom3]

By Dick Morris
Posted: 03/06/08 06:02 PM

TheHill.com - It's over

The real message of Tuesday’s primaries is not that Hillary won. It’s that she didn’t win by enough.

The race is over.

The results are already clear. Obama will go to the Democratic Convention with a lead of between 100 and 200 elected delegates. The remaining question is: What will the superdelegates do then? But is that really a question? Will the leaders of the Democratic Party be complicit in its destruction? Will they really kindle a civil war by denying the nomination to the man who won the most elected delegates? No way. They well understand that to do so would be to throw away the party’s chances of victory and to stigmatize it among African-Americans and young people for the rest of their lives. The Democratic Party took 20 years to recover from the traumas of 1968 and it is not about to trigger a similar bloodletting this year.

John McCain’s nomination guarantees that the superdelegates wouldn’t dare. A perfectly acceptable alternative for most Democrats, McCain would harvest so large a proportion of Obama’s votes if Hillary steals the nomination that he would probably win. Even putting Obama on the ticket would not allay the anger of his supporters; it would just make him complicit in the robbery.

Will Hillary win Pennsylvania? Who cares? Even if she were to sweep the remaining primaries and caucuses by 10 points, she would move just 60 votes closer to Obama’s total of elected delegates. And she won’t sweep them all. Even if Hillary wins Pennsylvania, the largest prize up for grabs, Obama will probably win North Carolina, which is almost as large. He’s likely to win Mississippi and Wyoming and has a good shot in Oregon and Indiana. The most likely result of these coming contests is that Obama will be roughly where he is now, about 140 elected delegates ahead of Hillary.

Suppose that Hillary will carry those states by enough to offset Obama’s delegate lead. The proportional representation system makes a knockout impossible and so mutes relatively narrow victories as to make them almost inconsequential. Little Vermont, with 600,000 people, gave Obama a net gain of four delegates, half of what Hillary won from the Texas primary, a state with 20 million residents. Even after Hillary won big-state victories in Ohio and Texas, she drew only 20 closer to Obama’s total of elected delegates.

Hillary won’t withdraw. That much is for sure. The tantalizing notion that 800 insiders can offset a season of primaries and caucuses will drive both Clintons to ever-escalating rhetoric. Will their attacks hurt Obama? Likely all they will achieve is to give him needed experience in the cut and thrust of media politics.

Left out of the entire equation is poor John McCain. Unable to get a word in edgewise and unsure of which Democrat to attack, he will have to watch from the sidelines as Hillary and Obama hog the headlines. If the superdelegates deliver the nomination to Hillary in the dead of night without leaving fingerprints at the crime scene, McCain’s nomination will be worth having. If Obama prevails, it won’t be worth the paper on which it is written. The giant killer, Obama will have soared to new heights of popularity and McCain won’t be able to bring him back to Earth in the nine weeks that will remain.

Suggestion for Obama:

The next time Hillary uses the recycled red phone ad, counter with one of your own. When the phone rings in the middle of the night, have a woman’s voice, with a flat Midwestern accent, answer it and say, “Hold on” into the receiver. Then she should shout, “Bill! It’s for you!”

Because with Hillary’s complete lack of any meaningful experience in foreign affairs, and her lack of the “testing” that she boldly claims, she’ll be yelling for Bill.

Morris, a former adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Bill Clinton, is the author of Outrage. To get all of Dick Morris’s and Eileen McGann’s columns for free by email, go to DickMorris.com.

[evangilder]

Very interesting turn of events. I am curious to see how this one unfolds.

[syscom3]

I wonder what John Edwards will do at the convention.

[mkloby]

Nice post sys. Morris is very insightful. He may be right that after the all the whining about popular vote from 2000 that to deny Obama the nom would seem horrid in the eyes of most dems. I also saw Sharpton on tv and he threatened to take to the streets if Obama has a delegate and popular vote lead and he is denied the nomination.

[renrich]

The interesting comment I have heard is that the dem ticket will be obama-clinton with hussein on top. Is that an ugly picture for our country. Bob Beckel(whom I can't stand) mentioned that and he gave a guarantee she would accept that position.

[syscom3]

I do find it funny that Hillary offered the VP position to Obama.

He should have come out swinging reminding her and the public he is in the lead and shes desperate now.

[wilbur1]

Originally Posted by evangilder

Very interesting turn of events. I am curious to see how this one unfolds.

Same here eric this is gonna get ugly

[Erich]

gosh I hope so................get ugly that is, I hope both those snots just dump all over each other with scandal after scandal

[Njaco]

So do I Erich. Flay themselves on each other until nothing is left.

[freebird]

Originally Posted by mkloby

Nice post sys. Morris is very insightful.

he is also very anti-Clinton, so I take his opinions with a grain of salt.

Never count Hillary out until she has a wooden stake through the heart...

The other thing to consider is that Hillary can argue that she came ahead in most of the battleground states where it really counts, like FL, NV, NM, OH, AR, TN, while Obama only won in battleground MO, IA & CO. Obama won lots of really RED states like KS, NE, ID, UT, AK, GA, SC, AL, which don't have a hope in hell of voting Dem anyways.

Election Guide 2008 - Presidential Election - Politics - Democratic Map - The New York Times

[ToughOmbre]

Originally Posted by freebird

Never count Hillary out until she has a wooden stake through the heart...

That says it all

TO

[Soundbreaker Welch?]

Hilary is powerful in the democrat party. She may not care if blacks hate her.

[mkloby]

Originally Posted by freebird

he is also very anti-Clinton, so I take his opinions with a grain of salt.

Never count Hillary out until she has a wooden stake through the heart...

The other thing to consider is that Hillary can argue that she came ahead in most of the battleground states where it really counts, like FL, NV, NM, OH, AR, TN, while Obama only won in battleground MO, IA & CO. Obama won lots of really RED states like KS, NE, ID, UT, AK, GA, SC, AL, which don't have a hope in hell of voting Dem anyways.

Election Guide 2008 - Presidential Election - Politics - Democratic Map - The New York Times

That's very true - but then if they nominate a candidate that did not win pop or even majority of delegates... well look at how they fussed in 2000 over the popular vote...

[chuckn49]

As I've watched the primaries unfold this year, two thoughts have struck me: racism is alive and well in the Democratic Party; and, when will the Republicans begin to point out to the nation that by electing Democrats they will be voting for the "Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" based on what a disaster they've made of their own primary process?

If they can't run their own party, why would any sane person choose them to run a country? For a party that screamed blue murder over a trumped up charge of voter disenfranchisement in Florida in 2000, they seemed very willing to disenfranchise all the voters there this time around deliberately.

As for racism in that party, let us be honest: this is a party founded on racism. People forget their history in the US quickly. All of the founding fathers of the Democratic Party were slave owners. None of them emancipated any of their slaves even upon their deaths despite hypocritical posturings decrying its evilness.

For the first 60 years of its existence it was the champion of slavery. When it became clear the tide was turning against the source of so much of their power, they committed treason to save it. What other political entity has done that? What other party is guilty of so much abuse of civil rights for over 200 years?

Once they failed to split the United States into two countries: one free; one slave holding, they then spent the next century trying to undo the Constitutional prohibitions against slavery by indenturing southern blacks in economic servitude and political impoverishment. They've successfully rewritten American history so that most Americans think Reconstruction was an evil attempt by greedy Yankees to oppress their southern brothers. Their was oppression but, for the most part, it was by our southern brothers oppressing blacks. Remember, this is when the KKK was formed which, eventually, persecuted Jews, Catholics and immigrants (legal or otherwise). It makes me cringe when I realize all of these victims have, more or less, embraced their persecutors.

Their control of the MSM, academia, Hollywood and the legal professions have allowed them to propagandize the American population so successfully that the very victims of their blatant racism, African-Americans, think they are their saviors -- speak of your Stockholm syndrome. It would make more sense for a Jew to join Aryan Nations than for a black to vote Democratic.

As for Hillary, until I see the stake sticking out of her heart and a priest sprinkling holy water on her slack face, I will not believe she is down and out. After all, the Democrats know that African-Americans have nowhere else to go because they've been so successfully indoctrinated. So, they'll either vote for Hillary or stay home. In either event, that may be the lesser of two evils if a recent poll is right that 20% of Democratic white voters would migrate to McCain if Obama wins the domination. Blacks, at best make up only about 6% of the voting population in most elections. Even if an Obama candidacy brought them out in droves, they are less than 12% of the population.

[renrich]

Your points about the history of the democrat party are well taken but the dem party today is not the dem party of the 19th century. In fact, for the most part, the two parties have swapped places. Today the dem party is the party of big government, centralised power, the super rich and the "oppressed minorities," which described the Republican Party of 1865. The Republican party today is the "states rights" party, the party of individualism, the "hawk" party, the party against isolationism. This shift started during FDR's reign. The best evidence of this is the demise of the "solid south" The dems used to be able to count on the states of the Southern Confederacy to vote solidly democrat. That is no longer true as the people in the South began to realise they were voting for a party that stood for everything they abhorred. When I was a kid growing up in Texas in the 30s and 40s, there were almost no Republicans on the ballot even if one wanted to vote for one. Believe me, an attitude left over from the War of Northern Aggression, was that any means was acceptable to keep a Republican from holding office. One fact is that, for the most part, the democrat party really does not care one whit about the blacks in the US. Rather they profess they care but they really use, like many black leaders, racism to gain power. The interesting thing to me, but scary as hell, is that the dem party today and it's leaders, pelosi, reid, clinton and obama are far to the left. There are essentially no conservative democrats and almost no moderates. One wonders when the American people are going to become aware of this. Today the Republican Party represents the ideas, to a great extent, of all moderate and conservative citizens, which comprise the vast majority of our country. Yet the election will probably be extremely close, split 50-50.