by George Will
May 8, 2008 -- "Hillary Clinton, 60, Illinois native and Arkansas lawyer, became, retroactively, a life-long Yankee fan at age 52 when, shopping for a Senate seat, she adopted New York as home sweet home. She may think, or at least argue, that when she was 12 her Yankees really won the 1960 World Series, by standards of "fairness," because they trounced the Pirates in runs scored, 55-27, over seven games, so there.
Unfortunately, baseball's rules - pesky nuisances, rules - say it matters how runs are distributed during a World Series. The Pirates won four games, which is the point of the exercise, by a total margin of seven runs, while the Yankees were winning three by a total of 35 runs. You can look it up.
After Tuesday's split decisions in Indiana and North Carolina, Clinton, the Yankee Clipperette, can, and hence eventually will, creatively argue that she is really ahead of Barack Obama - or at any rate she is sort of tied, mathematically or morally or something, in popular votes, or delegates, or some combination of the two, as determined by Fermat's Last Theorem, or something, in states whose names begin with vowels, or maybe consonants, or perhaps some mixture of the two as determined by listening to "Help Me, Rhonda" played backward or whatever other formula is most helpful to her, and counting the votes she received in Michigan, where hers was the only name on the ballot (her rivals, quaintly obeying their party's rules, boycotted the state, which had violated party rules for scheduling primaries), and counting the votes she received in Florida, which, like Michigan, was a scofflaw and where no one campaigned, and dividing Obama's delegate advantage in caucus states by pi multiplied by the square root of Yankee Stadium's ZIP code.
"We," says Geoff Garin, a Clinton strategist who possesses the audacity of hopelessness required in that role, "don't think this is just going to be about some numerical metric." Mere numbers? Heaven forefend.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur said that every military defeat can be explained by two words: "too late." Too late in anticipating danger, too late in preparing for it, too late in taking action. Clinton's political defeat can be similarly explained - too late in recognizing that the electorate doesn't acknowledge her entitlement to the presidency, too late in understanding that she had a serious challenger, too late in anticipating that she would not dispatch Barack Obama by Super Tuesday (Feb. 5), too late in planning for the special challenges of caucus states, too late in channeling her inner shot-and-a-beer hard hat.
Most of all, she was too late in understanding how much her party's mania for "fairness," as mandated by liberals like her, has, by forbidding winner-take-all primaries, made it nearly impossible for her to overcome Obama's early lead in delegates.
If Democrats, who genuflect at the altar of "diversity," allowed more of it in their delegate selection process, things might look very different. If even, say, Texas, California and Ohio were permitted to have winner-take-all primaries (as 48 states have winner-take-all allocation of their electoral votes), Clinton would've been more than 400 delegates ahead of Obama before Tuesday and today would be at her ancestral home in New York planning to return some of its furniture to the White House next January.
Tuesday night must have been almost as much fun for John McCain as for Obama. The Republican brand has been badly smudged by recent foreign and domestic policies, which are the only kinds there are, so McCain's hopes rest on the cohort called "Reagan Democrats," who still seem somewhat resistant to Obama.
McCain's problem might turn out to be the fact that Obama is the Democrats' Reagan. Obama's rhetorical cotton candy lacks Reagan's ideological nourishment, but he is Reaganesque in two important senses: People like listening to him, and his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness - the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits."
George is at his best when he emulates good blogging. Which is why certain heretofore popular scribes are bereft of an audience these days. Throw in some facts, leaven it with some preposterous humor, and most of all take a side and beat your opponent into the dirt from which the filthy bastard sprang. Being part of the mainstream elite, George must temper all of the above so as not to seem TOO real, because being too real would scare the begum out of editors who only permit liberals and minorities to spleen vent on a regular basis.
Something the Yellowstream Media NEVER mentions is the Clintons leaving the White House with everything BUT the kitchen sink. What they didn't steal they trashed. Visions of dainty little Hillary Rodham morphing into the Oval Orifice had not yet taken root so they didn't think they'd ever darken that doorstep again, but once they believed the fix to be in all past transgressions to property other than their own waere not only forgotten by the Yellowstreamers, it was sent to dwell in that lonely place where moslem middle names go to live. That and her abominable answer to Universal Healthcare and Travelgate and Bimbogate and gates too numerous to unlock.
The loons had a likeminded minority person, sort of, to champion, and what the loons want the press obliges. But all hells broke loose when B. Hussein Obama (there, doesn't it feel good to be on the outside for a while little guy?) took his half-blackness on the road and his handlers played the ridiculous democrat delegate system like a Stradivarius. The real reason the democrat primaries have drawn record numbers is the fact that the constituents were whipped to a frenzy by having two certifiable lunatics to choose from. So not only was Hillary's camp TOO LATE, it was also TOO STUPID to realize that a GENUINE minority, sort of, could beat an elite former first lady if the battle was fought with anything resembling an intelligent manner.
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