Author: Greg Saunders

Y’know it’s funny that all of the Republicans who are wetting themselves about Barack Obama rejecting public financing seemed to have no problem with huge financial disparities when they were the ones outspending the Democrats in 2000 and 2004. Hell, at the time, they were the ones who were the loudest opponents of campaign finance laws, insisting that giving corporate interests the ability to buy elections was a “free speech” issue. Now that the tables are turned, however, they can’t complain loudly enough about Obama’s apparent “hypocrisy” for rejecting public financing after previous expressing support for it. Needless to say, it’s hard to take someone’s complaints of hypocrisy seriously when they’re committing and even more egregious form of insincerity by conveniently failing to mention that John McCain not only backed out on a binding promise to accept matching funds in the primary, but that in not binding himself to the public financing commitments that he made, John McCain’s campaign is breaking the law.

Unlike John McCain, Barack Obama is under no legal obligations to accept public financing. Does that mean Obama’s ability to raise more money gives him an unfair advantage in the general election? Welcome to our world, Republicans. Boo-frakkin-hoo.

Recently Barack Obama promised “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” We’ll see if that pans out, but his online supporters certainly aren’t shy. In response to recent reports that conservatives are planning to bash Michelle Obama into the ground, 23/6 has a new campaign :

So as a public service, from now until the second Tuesday in November, every time Michelle Obama is unfairly attacked or portrayedby the media or a Republican-backed 527 group, 23/6 will remind you of this terrifying and true fact about Cindy McCain.

There’s more than enough reasons to oppose John McCain, so I hope as the general election goes on, we can avoid joining conservatives in delving into this muck :

Perot’s real problem with McCain is that he believes the senator hushed up evidence that live POWs were left behind in Vietnam and even transferred to the Soviet Union for human experimentation, a charge Perot says he heard from a senior Vietnamese official in the 1980s. “There’s evidence, evidence, evidence,” Perot claims. “McCain was adamant about shutting down anything to do with recovering POWs.”

Oddly, this was the second time I’ve seen the POW issue pop up in the past week. Earlier, I saw it mentioned in the last two minutes of this video created by a Ron Paul supporter (via JedReport) :

I’m not being disingenuous when I say that attacks on John McCain’s time as a P.O.W. are unseemly and should be avoided. Any mentions of John McCain and Vietnam are a rabbit hole Democrats would be ill-advised to jump down. I don’t mention this because I’m trying to be high-minded, but because these assertions are largely unprovable and only highlight the military record that John McCain hides behind to help distract people from the fact that he’s a hot-headed, ethically-challenged, war-mongering phony who doesn’t know his ass from a hole the the ground. The “he said, she said” accusations about McCain’s time as a P.O.W. won’t really settle anything and are overshadowed by his three decade record of being a shameless panderer and faux moderate who, despite his self-righteous rhetoric about working across party lines, has an overwhelming record of voting with Republicans and helping dig the hole we’re stuck in now.

I didn’t expect Hillary Clinton to concede and/or endorse tonight, but I certainly didn’t expect her to use her speech as a big “fuck you” to Barack Obama. It’s customary to use the final big speech of a campaign to thank supporters and reflect on the campaign’s themes and accomplishments, but tonight’s speech went beyond that. The ways Clinton used her speech tonight to further divide the Democratic party makes it seem as if my last post was written with the help of a time machine. I wrote about Clinton using rhetoric to give voters the impression that “Barack Obama’s victory is somehow illegitimate”, now take a look at her speech :

Who will be ready to take back the White House and take charge as Commander-in-Chief and lead our country to better tomorrows? People in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the territories, all had a chance to make your voices heard and on Election Day after Election Day, you came out in record numbers to cast your ballots. Nearly eighteen million of you cast your votes for our campaign, carrying the popular vote with more votes than any primary candidate in history. Even when the pundits and the naysayers proclaimed week after week that this race was over, you kept on voting.

You are the nurse on the second shift, the worker on the line, the waitress on her feet, the small business owner, the farmer, the teacher, the miner, the trucker, the soldier, the veteran, the student, the hard working men and women who don’t always make the headlines but have always written America’s story. You have voted because you wanted to take back the White House, and because of you, we won together the swing states necessary to get to 270 electoral votes.

In all of the states you voted because you wanted a leader who will stand up for the deepest values of our party. A party that believes everyone should have a fair shot at the American Dream. A party that cherishes every child, values every family, and counts every single vote.

On the very night when Barack Obama sealed the nomination, she couldn’t even be humble enough to acknowledge the fact. Instead, she used her speech to once again insist that she won the popular vote, insist that she’s the stronger candidate against McCain, and make a thinly-veiled jab about Florida and Michigan.

Even worse is that her insistence that she wouldn’t concede was just another plug for her website :

Now the question is, where do we go from here, and given how far we’ve come and where we need to go as a party, it’s a question I don’t take lightly. This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight. But this has always been your campaign, so to the 18 million people who voted for me and to our many other supporters out there of all ages, I want to hear from you. I hope you’ll go to my website at HillaryClinton.com and share your thoughts with me and help in any way that you can.

As Kos notes, rather than be magnanimous tonight, she chose to stir up her supporters even more and end the night with a fundraising appeal. Even as she’s laying off staff and becoming more obvious about her desire for the VP slot, she’s trying to squeeze every last dollar she can out of her supporters to pay off her campaign debts (to herself). And she has the gall to follow up the plug for her website with this :

In the coming days, I’ll be consulting with supporters and party leaders to determine how to move forward with the best interests of our party and our country guiding my way.

Yeah, and I’m sure the reminders about her “18 million” supporters aren’t implicit threats to take her voters and go home. If she truly cared about her party, rather than just HER campaign and HER supporters, she wouldn’t have picked tonight to pour salt the Democratic party’s open wounds and exploit her supporters passions (and disdain for Obama) to try to weasel her way into the VP slot and re-fill her bank account.

Embarrassing. Pathetic. Classless. Disgraceful.

With the superdelegate endorsements coming in fast, it’s looking like even a lackluster showing tonight in Montana and South Dakota will be enough to push Obama over the delegate threshold. All eyes now seem to be on Hillary Clinton. I don’t know if she’ll concede or not, but it would be nice if she at least started the process of unifying the party by cutting out all of her bullshit rhetoric that’s had the effect of subtly implying that Barack Obama’s victory is somehow illegitimate.

Hasn’t that been the whole point of Clinton’s campaign over the past few months? There was the insistence that caucuses are “undemocratic” and that Obama’s wins were in small states that “don’t count” and the insistence that Obama was trying to “disenfranchise” voters in Florida and Michigan and finally their long-standing obsession with the popular vote. The clear impression here is that Barack Obama may have technically won the nomination, but that Hillary Clinton is the true choice of the American people.

Which is a load of crap. If caucuses didn’t count, the Obama campaign would have diverted their organizational energy into other contests. If the small states didn’t count, they would have concentrated their resources in large states like Clinton did. If Michigan counted, Obama wouldn’t have removed his name from the ballot like many of his fellow candidates. And if the popular vote was the metric by which the Democratic party chose its nominee, both candidates would have completely ignored sparsely populated states (like SD & MT). Obama’s campaign has been about accruing delegates wherever he can get them, not winning the race according to some hypothetical rules that come out of the Clinton campaign.

By insisting that there’s something unfair about the way the Democratic party is choosing its nominee, Clinton has undermined Obama’s victory and has done more to weaken the party going into the convention than McCain could dream of. While I happen to agree with many of the points the Clintons make (caucuses are undemocratic, popular vote better metric than delegates), the relative unfairness of these particular points is trumped by something that’s even more unfair, changing the rules mid-game. In order to make her case to undeclared superdelegates, Clinton has exploited some of the legitimate grievances that some have about the nominating process (grievances that she only seems to have found religion on when their outcomes prove to be politically expedient), and in the process has fanned the flames of division within her party.

So if Hillary is truly serious about bringing the party together, it’s not enough to simply concede the race, but to reiterate to her supporters that the Democratic nomination is decided by delegate count alone and, more importantly, that Barack Obama won a fair fight to gain the nomination. In other words, she needs to have the humility to put her party ahead of her own ambitions.