[jasonrh]

Originally Posted by Frosty

Clinton campaign finance committee member, former vice presidential candidate, and former Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, D-NY, told the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Ca., that, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

Of Clinton, Ferraro said that the press "has been uniquely hard on her. It's been a very sexist media. Some just don't like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign."

"I was reading an article that said young Republicans are out there campaigning for Obama because they believe he's going to be able to put an end to partisanship. Dear God! Anyone that has worked in the Congress knows that for over 200 years this country has had partisanship - that's the way our country is."

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpu...on-backer.html

Will Ferraro be asked to resign like Samantha Power?

For Ferrarro to do this is much worse than Power's action.

Firstly, Power was an unpaid advisor. Ferrarro is a major wheel in Clinton's campaign. She is also an old-school Democratic power broker who has a huge public profile, perhaps mostly as the VP candidate on the ticket that suffered the worst defeat in US presidential election history.

Instead of apologising when the media quoted her, she immediately jumped out and threatened the Obama campaign that they had better stop these baseless attacks on her because she was a big time fundraiser. Where these baseless attacks from Obama were coming from, I'm not sure (Obama refused to comment on it initially). Even the media hadn't even ramped it up yet as the night-time pundit shows and the morning editorials hadn't gotten a hold of it and it was still a pure 'news' story.

It is like she made the comment and then followed a set script to make herself the victim of her own attack. That's a classic Clinton tactic, she just did it about 24-48 hours too early. She's now claiming she's only being picked on because she's a woman.

Of course there isn't a racist bone in Geraldine Ferrarro's body.

A Ferraro flashback


"If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race," she said.

Really. The cite is an April 15, 1988 Washington Post story (byline: Howard Kurtz), available only on Nexis.

Here's the full context:

Placid of demeanor but pointed in his rhetoric, Jackson struck out repeatedly today against those who suggest his race has been an asset in the campaign. President Reagan suggested Tuesday that people don't ask Jackson tough questions because of his race. And former representative Geraldine A. Ferraro (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that because of his "radical" views, "if Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race."

Asked about this at a campaign stop in Buffalo, Jackson at first seemed ready to pounce fiercely on his critics. But then he stopped, took a breath, and said quietly, "Millions of Americans have a point of view different from" Ferraro's.

Discussing the same point in Washington, Jackson said, "We campaigned across the South . . . without a single catcall or boo. It was not until we got North to New York that we began to hear this from Koch, President Reagan and then Mrs. Ferraro . . . . Some people are making hysteria while I'm making history."

Once again, not a single racist bone in her body.

These people need out of politics now before they get the chance to destroy yet another decade with hate and power-hungry Nixonian madness.

[Cal?]

Originally Posted by Red Dreams

brilliant Cal....and the democrats will just happily nominate the old hag after she has driven out half the party....

You go on and on about how Clinton will drive out all the African American voters yet conveniently fail to mention the effect an Obama nomination will have on the Latino voters...

Originally Posted by Red Dreams

sticking my neck out here....there wont be a revote for MI and FL....not that it would make a huge difference in terms of pledged delegates...Clinton wants the supers connected to Flordia...now they cant vote...the DNC will seat the delegates After the nomination has been ironed out. Remember the DNC made the rule...they cant go back and break it...just cause Clinton is trailing...
and they wont lose the votes.....there was no hue and cry when they moved the dates and the voters in Fl which everyone is talking about voted mainly on property taxes. Voters will vote in the General election on issues...

Also the main thing to look out for is what key leaders in the Democratic party are saying...Richardson and Pelosi and it said even Gore are leaning Obama...these people wont allow a bloodbath at the convention...which would just give the election away...

what will happen is they will allow the primaries to finish and quickly pull the delegates together to force the 'loser' to accept the verdict.

these superdelegates are politicians who would want a candidate that will help Them...Clinton will solidify the Republicans....why do you think every Republican pundit and politician is sideing with Clinton...the FL governor being among them....they know Clinton would be a Dream candidate for the GOP to run against.

Everybody knew from day one that Clinton will solidiy the Republicans, nobody deemed it a problem at all a few months ago, yet it appears that is all the Obama campaign wants to talk about nowadays...

As for Michigan and Florida, they will just have to give Hillary the delegates if they don't come up with something quickly...

[Red Dreams]

Originally Posted by Cal?

You go on and on about how Clinton will drive out all the African American voters yet conveniently fail to mention the effect an Obama nomination will have on the Latino voters...



Everybody knew from day one that Clinton will solidiy the Republicans, nobody deemed it a problem at all a few months ago, yet it appears that is all the Obama campaign wants to talk about nowadays...

As for Michigan and Florida, they will just have to give Hillary the delegates if they don't come up with something quickly...

Latino voters....they are voting for Hillary rather than against Obama because she is more 'known' among them....just like older women she has her base...that issue would be easily solved by a Richardson VP on the Obama ticket (my guess of course)...referring to Latino votes not older women

Clinton solidifying the GOP is more the Democratic party fear...which they are right to...when the campaign started Hillary was the 'best' option they had...in spite of her negatives...until the Obama phenom....(btw Obama has more stressed that he is a unifiyer...rather than say the obvious which the whole world knows...that Hillary is divisive figure...which she is!)

better read up a bit more about the rules of the DNC than making stupid hopeful statements....they wont Have to give her the delegates

fyi...the DNC made the decision to punish MI and FL for bringing forward the primaries and taking away the delegates... Hillary signed a pledge with Obama agreeing to this...but when she realised what a stupid campaign she had run...she is trying Anything to get those Superdelegates back...
she aint gonna get them

they will seat those delegates..after the nomination has been decided....but Obama correctly is in no hurry to have a revote

[Red Dreams]

Originally Posted by jasonrh

For Ferrarro to do this is much worse than Power's action.

Firstly, Power was an unpaid advisor. Ferrarro is a major wheel in Clinton's campaign. She is also an old-school Democratic power broker who has a huge public profile, perhaps mostly as the VP candidate on the ticket that suffered the worst defeat in US presidential election history.

Instead of apologising when the media quoted her, she immediately jumped out and threatened the Obama campaign that they had better stop these baseless attacks on her because she was a big time fundraiser. Where these baseless attacks from Obama were coming from, I'm not sure (Obama refused to comment on it initially). Even the media hadn't even ramped it up yet as the night-time pundit shows and the morning editorials hadn't gotten a hold of it and it was still a pure 'news' story.

It is like she made the comment and then followed a set script to make herself the victim of her own attack. That's a classic Clinton tactic, she just did it about 24-48 hours too early. She's now claiming she's only being picked on because she's a woman.

Of course there isn't a racist bone in Geraldine Ferrarro's body.



Once again, not a single racist bone in her body.

These people need out of politics now before they get the chance to destroy yet another decade with hate and power-hungry Nixonian madness.

class jason

[crappycraperson]

Originally Posted by MikeUpNorth

For fucks sake, why do they have to even mention the ethnicity or gender of candidates? Of what relevance is it to anyone with half a brain?

Because it is an issue. Both sex and race are.

[Wibble]

I still find the whole US electoral system bizarre. It seems to be so unlike anywhere else. The Aussie one is odd with preferential voting (if the one you vote for is last your votes go to the person you put second on the ballot until someone has more than 50%) but far less so.

[Cal?]

Originally Posted by Red Dreams

Latino voters....they are voting for Hillary rather than against Obama because she is more 'known' among them....just like older women she has her base...that issue would be easily solved by a Richardson VP on the Obama ticket (my guess of course)...referring to Latino votes not older women

Clinton solidifying the GOP is more the Democratic party fear...which they are right to...when the campaign started Hillary was the 'best' option they had...in spite of her negatives...until the Obama phenom....(btw Obama has more stressed that he is a unifiyer...rather than say the obvious which the whole world knows...that Hillary is divisive figure...which she is!)

better read up a bit more about the rules of the DNC than making stupid hopeful statements....they wont Have to give her the delegates

fyi...the DNC made the decision to punish MI and FL for bringing forward the primaries and taking away the delegates... Hillary signed a pledge with Obama agreeing to this...but when she realised what a stupid campaign she had run...she is trying Anything to get those Superdelegates back...
she aint gonna get them

they will seat those delegates..after the nomination has been decided....but Obama correctly is in no hurry to have a revote

Right, nobody is against Obama, everybody loves him...

You might as well produce a show called Everybody loves Barack...

When African Americans vote for Obama, they are anti-Hillary, when Latinos and older women vote for Hillary, they have nothing against Obama and will happily vote for him come November.

Now you're suggesting the superdelegates should vote in line with the pledged delegates (excluding MI & FL) so that Obama wins the nominations, and then they should seat those same delegates (who were previous excluded and have their views ignored by superdelegates) at the convention so as not to piss people off in 2 of the bigger states?

Excellent plan... you should consider a career as a spokesman for the Chinese communist party...

[jasonrh]

Originally Posted by Wibble

I still find the whole US electoral system bizarre. It seems to be so unlike anywhere else. The Aussie one is odd with preferential voting (if the one you vote for is last your votes go to the person you put second on the ballot until someone has more than 50%) but far less so.

As you know, it is designed so that the people of each state get a say in the election.

For those who have no clue what the fuck exactly is going on...

It is designed to keep the most populous states from dominating the electoral process. Of course that means giving small states a disproportionate say, but hey-ho, there you go.

The parties used to choose their nominees in private meetings (the so-called smoke filled rooms of US political lore), but eventually democratised and created the same style system as the federal general election (down to 'delegates' replacing the electoral college) to give people more say in their parties. Caucuses are just mini-primaries, except that they are more like town hall meetings where everyone gets a say. Normally only hard-cores show up for those where a lot show up for primaries.

Each state gets to choose its own rules for deciding how those delegates are apportioned. With more than 50 jurisdictions each making various political concessions as well as compromises of all sorts over the decades, there are some enormously complex systems - Texas screams out with both a primary that awards delegates by Congressional district, plus a caucus, plus more delegates arranged by the winner of the popular vote of the state over all!

It used to be that every state everywhere in both parties awarded delegates via winner-take-all based on the popular vote of the state overall (like electoral votes are). After the disaster that was the Democratic campaign of George McGovern in 1972 (anyone who can not manage to beat Richard Nixon qualifies as a "disaster"), the old-school Dems tricked the newer ones into splitting things up proportionally in every state, but left it for the states to decide how.

The only rule was that the party could set a date which is the earliest that a primary can be held. This is designed to spread things out and preserve some old-time Presidential politics traditions, like Iowa being the first caucus and New Hampshire being the first primary. Florida and Michigan violated the Dem's rule, and being an utter Genius, Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean (yes, that Howard Dean from 2004) decided to strip them of all of their delegates. That meant their primaries didn't count. All the campaigns signed pledges to that effect, promised not to campaign in either state, and they even agreed to remove their names from the ballot in Michigan (they couldn't do so under Florida election law once they were on there).

Of course Hillary Clinton broke both of those rules, and now wants her "win" in Florida to count, and to get the delegates out of Michigan because it was Obama's choice to withdrawn from Michigan, even though she also promised to do so and claimed a "beaurocratic snafu" had kept her from doing it. There now seems to be a real movement towards some sort of do-over, and if so there will be a real problem waiting when Hillary does something else crooked, probably involving doing what she did in New Hampshire and busing fake voters into Michigan while compromising ballot integrity in Florida's mail-in private primary.

But that's all an aside to why one race is over and they other isn't.

The proportional representation system meant that the big states had even less of a say in the nomination, and was originally a firewall against California/New York radicals and gave the more conservative smaller states in the midwest and south even more control than under the winner-take-all delegate system.

This system was designed by conservative Dems to keep the 1960s types from winning the nomination, but things have changed. Now the conservative Democrats in those small states have long-since either switched over to being Republicans or have taken a dirt nap (some would argue that's the same thing).

Those Democrats in the small states with the hugely disproportionate representation are now much more liberal, fairly affluent, and highly educated. The working class tend to be Republican in those areas. Clinton's major support base is amongst poor whites, poorly educated whites, and women over 40. Clinton is seen as an old-school politician and Obama as the new liberal. The Clinton crowd are now the conservatives, but due to those huge demographics shifts the more conservative 1960s generation have been fucked again, this time via the system that was supposed to fuck up the liberals!

Republicans followed suit with proportional representation in some jurisdictions, in others they did not. As I said above with the Texas example, some states have staggeringly complicated methods seemingly designed specifically to give state legislators and mathematicians a bit more employment.

The Republican nomination is sewn up because of not having proportional representation in most states. If the Democrats worked on a winner-take-all system, Hillary would have become their nominee on Super Tuesday back 6 weeks ago and America would be damned to another decade of utter hell. Proportional Representation has meant that even if Hillary wins a state 60-40 she might only take an advantage of 2 or 3 delegates out of 4000-something because of the methods of splitting them up. He's won so many more states than her that he has amassed a 5% or so lead in elected delegates.

But there's a nasty and dirty little secret in the Democratic nomination process.

In 1982 the Democrats were faced with an all-mighty conundrum. They are the party who fights for minorities (largely by doing fuck all and then lying about it), but they don't sit at the same table as them. Along comes a hugely popular long-term civil rights activist (and Grade A twat, but that's irrelevant here) named Jesse Jackson.

He's (whisper it) black.

That didn't sit too well with many Democrats (and doesn't sit well with a lot of the current crop of party leaders today who have a painfully pathetic form of condescending bigotry towards minorities). To give you a bit of an idea as to why Jackson was so unpalatable back then, the then Democratic leader in the Senate was a former Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan. He's still in the Senate and is venerated by Democrats.

Of course they're the party of non-bigotry (in spite of opposing the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s) because they say they are. But a N****r as their nominee? As if.

So they designed a new firewall, this time (they say) designed let party elders make sure that the party nominates someone who will have a better chance to win, or as a safety against buyer's remorse from voters, or in order to decide a race in which there are more than 2 candidates, so no one has a pure majority. Now they even claim that it was because not enough party regulars were let in the hall at the 1980 Democratic Convention.

These new delegates vote just like an elected delegate, and represent nearly half of all the Democratic delegates who choose the nominee. They're called Super Delegates. The key here is that they don't at all have to vote for the candidate of their state. They can vote for whoever they want and have total freedom in their decision.

These wise sages of the party who should be trusted over the will of the people include former president Bill Clinton (an admitted perjurer), Governor Elliot Spitzer (who resigned today because he has been involved in a prostitution ring), Congressman Barney Frank (whose boyfriend ran a brothel out of his basement for a couple of years before getting caught) and a slew more of those whose judgement is clearly superior to the actual democratic will of the people of the Democratic Party.

There hasn't been a close race since 1984, so they haven't been a big deal. Over time it has become a bit of a joke, and they've been handed out like candy. But that doesn't change the fact that they were designed by the party of the people to keep the (black) people down.

Whether the party bosses (now just as corrupt as the ones they fought against in 1968 and 1972) will play 'slap the negro' this time remains to be seen. But Clinton, their campaign aide with his "could have sold cocaine" comment, the "Hussein" thing they started, Governor Rendell of Philadelphia, the "turban" photo, and forner VP candidate Ferrarro are certainly making it pretty clear that the candidate of choice for the ignorant poor old cross-burning crowd is Hillary Clinton.

Robert Byrd is smiling from his hospital bed at the idea of getting a chance to thwart his party's nomination of some uppity n****r for President. He didn't do all of that sheet wearing just to see them take control of the place.

[jasonrh]

Originally Posted by Cal?

Right, nobody is against Obama, everybody loves him...

You might as well produce a show called Everybody loves Barack...

When African Americans vote for Obama, they are anti-Hillary, when Latinos and older women vote for Hillary, they have nothing against Obama and will happily vote for him come November.

Now you're suggesting the superdelegates should vote in line with the pledged delegates (excluding MI & FL) so that Obama wins the nominations, and then they should seat those same delegates (who were previous excluded and have their views ignored by superdelegates) at the convention so as not to piss people off in 2 of the bigger states?

Excellent plan... you should consider a career as a spokesman for the Chinese communist party...

What the fuck is this all about?

La Raza ("The Race", a leading hispanic group in the USA) is long known for its questionable attitude towards blacks, and there are buckets of animosity between hispanics and blacks. You're either kidding yourself or staggeringly thick to not realise this.

Those who are black and are voting for Obama just might (perhaps) be doing it not because he is black, but because he isn't a nasty bigoted psychotic fuck.

Clinton started playing the bigotry game before a state with a real black population had even voted. Do you think Obama got victories in Iowa, Wisconsin and Idaho via the massive black populations there?

The raw numbers bear out the fact that the Clintons have been waging a campaign of racial division in an attempt to polarise the people of the party and either arrange a backroom deal or get racist whites/hispanics in a tizzy and make sure they turn out for her safe in the knowledge that black turnout is famously low.

In South Carolina, in spite of Clinton's "fairy tale" and "Jesse Jackson won here" comments, the vote was split about 60/40. Yesterday it was 90/10. That's not because the negros are all backing their brother over the jive turkey bitch. It's because the Clintons are vile little pieces of excrement whose entire plan for taking over the reigns of power merely for their own egos hinge on destroying and polarising the country.

Polls show that equal numbers on both sides will be "extremely" or "very" dissatisfied if their candidate doesn't get the nomination, and the numbers are also about even for those who threaten not to vote at all.

Carry on, though...facts have never mattered for the Clintons, why should they matter for their supporters?

[jasonrh]

Originally Posted by Cal?

You go on and on about how Clinton will drive out all the African American voters yet conveniently fail to mention the effect an Obama nomination will have on the Latino voters...

Show me a single example - just a single one - of an Obama operative being overtly racist or prejudiced towards hispanics.

I can show you at least a half-dozen major incidents with the Clintons and blacks.

You might want to reserve the smirk smileys for when you're not making an utter and complete fool of yourself.

[Cal?]

Originally Posted by jasonrh

Polls show that equal numbers on both sides will be "extremely" or "very" dissatisfied if their candidate doesn't get the nomination, and the numbers are also about even for those who threaten not to vote at all.

That's exactly what I was getting at.

Red Dreams seem to think that Hillary getting the nomination will drive out a lot of black voters, yet if Obama gets the nomination, latinos and old women are likely to vote for him.

[Cal?]

Originally Posted by jasonrh

Show me a single example - just a single one - of an Obama operative being overtly racist or prejudiced towards hispanics.

I can show you at least a half-dozen major incidents with the Clintons and blacks.

You might want to reserve the smirk smileys for when you're not making an utter and complete fool of yourself.

That does not matter, the fact as you pointed out yourself latinos and blacks often don't see face to face. The point is, an Obama nomination will push a lot of latino voters away.

[Frosty]

Jason, why haven't you been signed up as a political commentator yet for a major cable news channel?

[jasonrh]

Originally Posted by Cal?

That does not matter, the fact as you pointed out yourself latinos and blacks often don't see face to face. The point is, an Obama nomination will push a lot of latino voters away.

It matters hugely when one actually enters the ballot box come November. If Obama works hard and really goes after winning over the hispanic vote, he's got a chance. White old ladies he can give up on.

But if Clinton's the nominee she's got real problems with blacks no matter what she does - even if she appointed a black VP and promised an all-black cabinet. Would you vote for someone whose election strategy was to say horrid things about you?

The antipathy is very strong now, but it is more likely to be overcome by Obama, although he will have to work his arse off to do it.

The racism strategy actually worked for Bill Clinton in 1992 because a lot of those older conservative bigoted Democrats were still alive. I love my grandmothers, grandfathers, and great aunts and uncles, but they were all conservative Democrats. They weren't bigoted, but they sided with Clinton because of some of his crap.

The 'Sista' Soulja' incident is famous in US politics - Clinton went after a musician basically because she was black and destroying black culture or somesuch crap. It was all to show white conservatives that he wasn't somehow "pandering" to the black vote and win back "Reagan Democrats" who had defected from the party after Carter.

My conservative Democrat relatives are now all gone, God bless them all, and the new brand of Democrat thinks the Clintons are dirt for playing this game. But they've got no other strategy, so they're reusing their playbook from 20 years ago.

Latinos, on the other hand, are more likely to be able to think over whether they should vote for McCain or Obama without thinking that the Democratic candidate is bigotted towards them.

With the nomination of a pro-amnesty for illegal aliens moderate for president on the Republican side (the first one of my lifetime) and the Clinton's antics involving race, the Republican Party has a chance to eat severely into the minority vote which has been solidly Democratic.

Largely because of Lyndon Johnson in 1964, blacks have voted Democratic in huge numbers. In 2000 the split was 91% to 9%. That's a staggering number seen nowhere else in American politics, even from "very liberal" voters in the Northeast in the days of Franklin Roosevelt.

The Republican Party was the party of the biggest black support prior to Eisenhower's utter apathy towards the plight of blacks in the segregated South and the deteriorating inner cities (while whites fled to the suburbs). The shift from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s was seismic.

If Clinton gets the nomination and McCain does as promised and takes the high road while being extremely moderate and supporting the expansion of several social programs that he has been looking to reform and improve, then there is a real chance of the Republicans slowly breaking the stranglehold that Democrats have on the black vote.

Even a 70/30 split (as is the traditional number for hispanics, mainly due to the Cuban population supporting Republicans because of their perceived toughness towards Castro) would guarantee the Republicans the White House for the forseeable future, similar to the near-lock they had on the office in the post-Reconstruction era of the 1880s-1920s.

The current Moderate Republicans really want to do more for blacks than to Democrats, but Democrats are better at lying to blacks than Republicans are at telling the truth.

[Red Dreams]

Originally Posted by Cal?

Right, nobody is against Obama, everybody loves him...

You might as well produce a show called Everybody loves Barack...

When African Americans vote for Obama, they are anti-Hillary, when Latinos and older women vote for Hillary, they have nothing against Obama and will happily vote for him come November.

Now you're suggesting the superdelegates should vote in line with the pledged delegates (excluding MI & FL) so that Obama wins the nominations, and then they should seat those same delegates (who were previous excluded and have their views ignored by superdelegates) at the convention so as not to piss people off in 2 of the bigger states?

Excellent plan... you should consider a career as a spokesman for the Chinese communist party...

Cal..you really are a thick fuck...

jason has addressed your arguments re Latinos...
regarding blacks...if you overturn a decision that was arrived at based on rules that have been agreed on by ALL parties.....they will want fucking revenge.... there are polls out there that say Obama supporters may actually vote for McCain...rather than stay home....

on MI and FL...ffs google the rules by which those states were not included...
MI and FL blew this themselves...no one else to blame....
Obama only needs to wait out the primaries....yes...they dont need to even seat the delegates....but of course they will...and sorry Cal....the superdegates Wont count for Hillary....

btw this mail in voting that is being floated by the Hillary camp...wont pass muster...it is illegal in FL... go google it...

[jasonrh]

The legality of the Florida mail-in is shaky at the very very best. The practicality of one in Michigan is equally shaky.

Technically it appears that a private re-vote is illegal (as a Floridian attorney who has looked at the issue I certainly think it is), but there might be an argument that it isn't actually a primary but is a private vote.

If it was just a private vote of invited members (who happen to be all of the Democrats registered in the state), then it would seem that they might be able to nominate "representatives" (as opposed to formal "delegates", because delegates must be selected via the state's formal election procedures) to the Democratic National Convention. However, if the courts consider it to be a primary-in-disguise that might disenfranchise anyone (like those who registered as Democrats late in the day, who send in their faux-ballots "late" or some such scenario), then they very well may either prohibit it from happening or (more likely) enjoin it until such time as the issue is litigated. That would be long after the August convention even if it was litigated on a fast-track basis.

There are huge legal problems with a re-vote in Florida. I don't think the campaigns truly realise it, and I know Howard Dean doesn't. He barely manages to remember to wipe after taking a shit, so I wouldn't trust him to figure anything out at all. He's the idiot who made this mess specifically because he wanted to show the country how tough he was.

In Michigan there is a better chance of a mail-in or a re-vote passing legal muster (a "firehouse primary" where you go to a private polling place designated and paid for by the party and informally vote is the more likely option), but there is a staggeringly massive practical problem. Michigan has no party affiliation in their registrations. So they would end up allowing both Republicans and Democrats to vote in the Democratic primary with no way of separating them out. This wasn't an issue in the previous primary because the Republican nomination was still in question.

Some Democrats (mainly pro-Hillary ones who want desperately to find some way to count the old vote) are claiming this all was some Republican conspiracy to disenfranchise Democrats.

The problems with that being that 1) Florida Democrats introduced the bill moving the primary into the state legislature; 2) both the Republican governor of Florida and the Democratic governor of Michigan have been side-by-side in attacking the DNC on this issue; and 3) the Republican governor of Florida is actually in favour of counting the original Hillary victory rather than spending taxpayer's money on a new vote.

The old "vast right wing conspiracy" trick of the Clinton's isn't going to work here.

Whether a re-vote will work remains to be seen. Obama's people think a mail-in vote in either state is wildly open to fraud (the party wouldn't even have access to the state's voter signature records to verify the votes), while Democrats in Florida absolutely oppose any sort of a re-vote.

The best solution is to just send the delegates to the convention at a 50/50 basis. No matter what happens the nomination will be decided by party bosses at the convention, so it isn't going to tip the race anyway.

[Red Dreams]

The best solution is to just send the delegates to the convention at a 50/50 basis. No matter what happens the nomination will be decided by party bosses at the convention, so it isn't going to tip the race anyway.

thats what I think will happen jason....

btw excellent analysis re the black vote and the history re the parties...the Democratic Party has taken them too much for granted and personally I think it would be better for blacks and for both parties if both parties actually vie for their votes...finally their lot May improve...

a comment about Obama and McCain...I do think they will bring the country back to the center...Obama cannot administer from the left and McCain wont do so from the right.

[Red Dreams]

one final comment...

I hope Howard Dean roasts in hell........what an idiot........

[Wibble]

I think the thing I find the most odd is the elongated public brawling within each party before they then unite to fight the other party. It seems that the campaigns themselves, often dominated by cult of personality, take precedence over sober policy formation as a whole, with policy formed subject by subject in isolation based on the voting preferences of the electorate of the next primary. I guess I also find it odd that so much power is given to one individual (I know that this is overly simplistic but it is true comparatively). I am much more comfortable with the role of President being more like the Irish model I suppose.

I am also not a fan of federation of states type government. I'm not sure how you would get around it in the US given the size and population of the place but here in Oz is seems ludicrous that we have 5 state and 2 territory governments as well as a federal government. Do 20 million people really need 7 different sets of road rules, education systems and health systems not to mention the waste of 8 sets of politicians?

And I'd can preference voting tommorow.

[Cal?]

Originally Posted by Red Dreams

The best solution is to just send the delegates to the convention at a 50/50 basis. No matter what happens the nomination will be decided by party bosses at the convention, so it isn't going to tip the race anyway.

Right, so under every scenario, Hillary would win more delegates in those 2 states but you 2 think they should be 50/50... a real comeback from the "democratic" process you've been harping on about...

If the nomination is given to Obama by small margin, you not only have driven away the hispanics who don't like Obama, the old women who won't vote for Obama, now you've succeeded in driving FL (one of the vital states in a general election) to the McCain column.... great idea.