A few links and thoughts as the Democratic presidential candidates continue their fight to the death, and as the Repubilcans bury their dead and nominate the Undead.
Hillary won Massachusetts handily, which had long been anticipated. The Clinton crowd called in their chits here a long time ago, and even though the famous members of the Kennedy family all spent time stumping for Obama, they were about a year too late to make any serious difference. Massachusetts also has a pant-load of "superdelegates" due to its relative prominence in national Democratic politics, and she got all of those, too. The "Stop Hillary" movement among the Dems, which seems to have appeared out of nowhere, also smacked of too much last-minute wankery to have any real effect. This is not the sort of state that’s ever going to upset the front-runner, even if the late polling numbers start wobbling. Mitt Romney should be very thankful for that after his profound embarrassment in New Hampshire.
At "The Seminal", Jason Rosenbaum made a last-minute prediction yesterday, before the polls closed, that the net result of the day would be a wash for Hillary and Barack. Making a prediction like that yesterday isn’t exactly sticking your neck out, but he quoted another political blogger from OpenLeft who pointed out that neither Clinton nor Obama can clinch the nomination outright at this point unless one or the other drops out of the race. That’s a very different image of the way the late primary campaign was looking like at the beginning of January, when everyone, myself included, felt sure that MegaTuesday was going to settle both parties’ nominations.
Mr. Neutron made a good observation about probably the most fundamental difference between Clinton and Obama: Hillary Clinton, like many professional politicians, views politics as a win-lose proposition. It doesn’t matter what your positions are, whether they help anybody or not, whether they change with the winds of expedience or not, as long as at the end of the day you are the winner and your opponent is the loser. Obama, he contends, is about using the political system to accomplish some goal external to the politics itself. In a perfect world, of course, every politician is more interested in the end than the means, but certainly in the last 12-16 years it’s been all about the game. My own feeling is that the only reason Obama is not about the game is that he’s still too new to national politics. His very centrist positions on most issues will inevitably push him to that point of meaninglessness that career politicians reach, and he’ll settle for looking good over doing good. My fear is that being elected President would only make that happen to him all the sooner.
Mick Hume, the editor of the British political website Spiked, writes about the desire in the American electorate for "change", and how that does not match up to the reality of the two parties choosing such middle-of-the-road, more-of-the-same candidates like Clinton and McCain. As he points out, and as I am utterly frustrated with, more people are voting in these primary elections and turning out for party caucuses than ever before, but (to come back to Jason Rosenbaum’s point) the large collection of candidates all-too-quickly settled down into predictable professional politicians, who have well-established records as being "part of the Washington crowd", and now it seems evident that the Democratic nominee will be chosen in a brokered convention rather than by a straight single-ballot delegate vote. We don’t really want actual change, we just want the superficial change of a new face, a new identity. "Change", after all, might require us to actually do some changing, too.
