All Bombers

To: Retort
From: GS & JP

[Two views of the US electoral scene, one from Geoff Sea inside the heartland, and the other from John Pilger outside. IB]

The Obamicon Has Been Crossed:
Election Thoughts on Monday, the Twelfth of February
Geoffrey Sea
 
Fittingly, it was the U.S. Virgin Islands, voting for Barack Obama with an 80 point spread, that puts him over the top in the delegate race, as of this morning. Both RCP and CBS now have the race, including superdelegate endorsements, as 1134 for Obama to 1131 for Clinton. (Since Iowa, Obama has held substantial leads over Clinton in pledged delegates -- those determined by primary and caucus votes -- but Clinton has claimed to hold a lead in superdelegate endorsements, even though the supers are free to vote as conscience and circumstance dictate.)
 
The Virgin Islands will send six delegates to the Denver Convention, all for Obama, though each is given only half a vote. (And they say that racism is dead. Come on, why not award each one three fifths of a vote?  Ok, maybe not.)  Thus the "three" total delegate votes from the U.S. territory account precisely for Obama's current lead.
 
The real picture is much more black and white than that. The stalemate has now been broken, by almost any measure. You won't hear it reported yet by the mainstream media, which has an interest in a prolonged horse race, but after five stunning Obama victories, each by a surprising margin, over the weekend, the end of the nomination battle is now in sight. Here's why:
 
1. Many or most of the 795 supers, about 450 of whom have not endorsed a candidate, will vote either in accordance with the primary or caucus votes of their states or districts, or according to the overall winner of pledged delegates. This is the arrangement being worked out to avoid total party breakdown, and 82% of respondents support this solution in an informal CNN poll. For example, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Maine had vowed to vote for the winner of the Maine Caucuses, which is now Obama. Donna Brazille, a DNC heavyweight, has threatened to resign if the supers do not collectively crown the overall winner of the primary process. (None of these super commitments are included in Obama's delegate totals.) Since Obama has now won 20 states and territories, compared to 10 for Clinton, and the final tally will be at least as heavily weighted for Obama under any scenario, he will almost certainly hold the ticket for party unity. Clinton will be in the position of either conceding early, or arguing for force majeur on the part of the superdelegates, tantamount to splitting the party and sinking its prospects.
 
2. General election match-up polls are showing a rising lead for Obama over McCain, while Clinton's prospects are falling. Two weeks ago, both Obama and Clinton were beating McCain marginally, by about two points. Now Obama is beating McCain by seven points, while Clinton is breaking even. These polls do not account for the turnout factor whereby Clinton's high negatives would drive more Republicans and anti-Clinton Independents to vote. That tells the Democratic superdelegates all they need to know. 
 
3. The current Obama surge makes it almost impossible for major players to come out with new Clinton endorsements, and indeed, we've seen none lately. The Obama endorsement train rolls onward. Look for an Edwards endorsement later this week. Since Obama won in Delaware and Connecticut and tied in New Mexico -- don't look for any Biden, Dodd, or Richardson endorsements for Hillary any time soon, if at all. She won't have any cabinet posts to offer them.
 
4. The weekend results definitively resolve the lingering question from Super Tuesday about Obama's momentum and the impacts of early voting. It is now clear that Obama's upswing never faltered, and that if not for votes cast before his major surge, he would have won or more nearly tied in California and New Jersey. Analysts are already referring to "voters' remorse" in California.
 
5. The margins by which Obama is winning in all corners of the country and in the lilliest of lilly-white states defeat any accusation that his appeal is limited. Counting Maine as a 20-point victory (actually 19.6), Obama has now won 14 contests by 20 points or more, 11 by 30 points or more, 4 by 40 or more, 3 by 50 or more, 2 by 60 or more, and 1 by an 82-point spread (Virgin Islands). The other above-60 victory was Idaho, quite a transcendental distance from the Virgin Islands, and it's difficult for anyone to remain unimpressed by this. By contrast, Clinton has won only two contests by more than 20 points, and one is considered a home state -- Arkansas.
 
6. Coming tomorrow are Maryland and Virginia, where Obama leads by about 20 points in polls in each, and the District of Columbia, where no one has bothered to look for an ardent Clinton supporter. Then come Hawaii, where Obama is considered a hometown boy (he grew up there), and Wisconsin, where most of the population lives along the border with Illinois.  After these, Obama will lead 25 contests to 10, with a substantial delegate lead. Even before Ohio and Texas vote on March 4, the pressure on Clinton and on superdelegates to end the party's pain will grow intense.
 
7. Texas is looking worse and worse for Clinton. Her decision to avoid Louisiana for fear of raising the issue of Clinton Administration failures to strengthen the levies (oh yeah, that) was duly noted along the Texan hurricane coast, where many Katrina refugees now reside. Expect Edwards to campaign there for Obama. The much discussed Hispanic vote, which adhered to Clinton only while it appeared that she would be stuffing the pinata post-election, will now migrate decidedly to Obama. And on the subject of altered projections....
 
8. I thought I might be overestimating  the impact of this past weekend until I checked Intratrade, the futures market, which is a pretty reliable predictor of political outcomes according to conventional wisdom of the moment. Before Super Tuesday, Intratrade gave the edge to Clinton by about 60-40. After Super Tuesday it shifted slightly to 55-45 with Clinton retaining the upper hand. But this morning, whoa!, Intratrade rates Obama's chances of getting the nomination as 70% to Clinton's 30%. One can assume that this is both a reflection of and a guidance for how party leaders intend to steward the nomination process. The Obamicon (Obama's rubicon) was crossed this weekend.
 
9. There is a cold logic to the Intratrade switcheroo. Clinton's only mathematical chance is to get the bogus Michigan and Florida tallies counted. But that decision will be made by the Convention Credentials Committee, whose members will yet be chosen from among the legitimate elected delegations. The lopsided Obama victories over the weekend guarantee that Obama forces will control or at least be able to stalemate the Credentials Committee. Therefore, the votes in Washington, Nebraska, Louisiana, Maine and the Virgin Islands have a big multiplier effect. The phony Michigan and Florida results will not be counted. And sure enough, we now have level-headed  proposals for a re-vote in Michigan, and an even division of delegates from Florida. If Michigan -- like a darker-skinned Wisconsin -- does re-vote with Obama on the ballot this time, Hillary Clinton is done. (Even a re-vote is not a perfect solution, since many disenfranchised Democrats and Independents crossed over to vote in the Republican primary; presumably they could not vote again as Democrats.) 
 
10. Which brings us to Ohio. In one sense, Ohio is now preeminent, or at least the Clinton forces would like it to be. On the other hand, Clinton doesn't only need to win Ohio, she will need to win it hugely, like by 30 points. That, my friends, is impossible. Ohioans do read and watch TV. After Wisconsin and Virginia vote heavily for Obama -- and Ohio is in between them, more ways than geographically -- Ohio, which has been hurt as much as any state by the Bush Administration, will not buck the winning trend. Yes, it's possible that Clinton will eke out a slim margin here, attributable to the old creaky machine. But I think we'll see an outpouring of the youth vote and the black vote and the fedupped vote, all of which were artificially suppressed in 2000, 2004 and 2006. It's happening everyplace else. Why not in Ohio?
 
That is why things are fundamentally changed on this Monday morning. And why Obamistas throughout the land are making vacation plans with the Virgin Islands in mind.
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The danse macabre of US-style democracy
John Pilger
23 Jan 2008
www.johnpilger.com

The former president of Tanzania Julius Nyerere once asked, "Why haven’t we all got a vote in the US election? Surely everyone with a TV set has earned that right just for enduring the merciless bombardment every four years." Having reported four presidential election campaigns, from the Kennedys to Nixon, Carter to Reagan, with their Zeppelins of platitudes, robotic followers and rictal wives, I can sympathise. But what difference would the vote make? Of the presidential candidates I have interviewed, only George C Wallace, governor of Alabama, spoke the truth. "There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrats and Republicans," he said. And he was shot.

What struck me, living and working in the United States, was that presidential campaigns were a parody, entertaining and often grotesque. They are a ritual danse macabre of flags, balloons and bullshit, designed to camouflage a venal system based on money power, human division and a culture of permanent war.

Travelling with Robert Kennedy in 1968 was eye-opening for me. To audiences of the poor, Kennedy would present himself as a saviour. The words "change" and "hope" were used relentlessly and cynically. For audiences of fearful whites, he would use racist codes, such as "law and order". With those opposed to the invasion of Vietnam, he would attack "putting American boys in the line of fire", but never say when he would withdraw them. That year (after Kennedy was assassinated), Richard Nixon used a version of the same, malleable speech to win the presidency. Thereafter, it was used successfully by Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and the two Bushes. Carter promised a foreign policy based on "human rights" – and practised the very opposite. Reagan’s "freedom agenda" was a bloodbath in central America. Clinton "solemnly pledged" universal health care and tore down the last safety net of the Depression.

Nothing has changed. Barack Obama is a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan. Hillary Clinton, another bomber, is anti-feminist. John McCain’s one distinction is that he has personally bombed a country. They all believe the US is not subject to the rules of human behaviour, because it is "a city upon a hill", regardless that most of humanity sees it as a monumental bully which, since 1945, has overthrown 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed 30 nations, destroying millions of lives.

If you wonder why this holocaust is not an "issue" in the current campaign, you might ask the BBC, which is responsible for reporting the campaign to much of the world, or better still Justin Webb, the BBC’s North America editor. In a Radio 4 series last year, Webb displayed the kind of sycophancy that evokes the 1930s appeaser Geoffrey Dawson, then editor of the London Times. Condoleezza Rice cannot be too mendacious for Webb. According to Rice, the US is "supporting the democratic aspirations of all people". For Webb, who believes American patriotism "creates a feeling of happiness and solidity", the crimes committed in the name of this patriotism, such as support for war and injustice in the Middle East for the past 25 years, and in Latin America, are irrelevant. Indeed, those who resist such an epic assault on democracy are guilty of "anti-Americanism", says Webb, apparently unaware of the totalitarian origins of this term of abuse. Journalists in Nazi Berlin would damn critics of the Reich as "anti-German".

Moreover, his treacle about the "ideals" and "core values" that make up America’s sanctified "set of ideas about human conduct" denies us a true sense of the destruction of American democracy: the dismantling of the Bill of Rights, habeas corpus and separation of powers. Here is Webb on the campaign trail: "[This] is not about mass politics. It is a celebration of the one-to-one relationship between an individual American and his or her putative commander-in-chief." He calls this "dizzying". And Webb on Bush: "Let us not forget that while the candidates win, lose, win again... there is a world to be run and President Bush is still running it." The emphasis in the BBC text actually links to the White House website.

None of this drivel is journalism. It is anti-journalism, worthy of a minor courtier of a great power. Webb is not exceptional. His boss Helen Boaden, director of BBC News, sent this reply to a viewer who had protested the prevalence of propaganda as the basis of news: "It is simply a fact that Bush has tried to export democracy [to Iraq] and that this has been troublesome."

And her source for this "fact"? Quotations from Bush and Blair saying it is a fact.