Why racism among White ethnics (and Latino Americans) is undermining Obama's campaign: A Honest View

http://www.startribune.com/templates/Print_This_Story?sid=18152709

All,

The obvious and ominous signs are everywhere that as Dionne and so many other political analysts have pointed out Obama is being systematically sabotaged by white ethnic (and Latino American) racism both within the Democratic Party and in the larger general society. Astonishingly, commentators keep asking in infantile and very disingenuous terms: "What's behind the national Catholic vote against Obama" and "Why are they voting against Obama 8 and 9-1 across the board throughout the country?" and "Why can't Obama 'connect' with white people over the age of 50 in working and lower middle class communities" and "Why are so many Latino voters--again by huge margins of 8 and 9-1 voting against Obama?" Meanwhile the criminal Clinton Machine keeps brazenly and viciously exploiting these "differences" in every possible way their Machiavellian Karl Rove-like minds can think of...

DUH! Who do these so-called pundits and "analysts" think they're kidding with this bullshit? 99% of the "catholic vote" in this country is made up of four major ethnic groups only: Irish and Italian Americans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Rican Americans. These four white and Latino American ethnic groups generally despise the African American community and have as individual voting blocs consistently voted against African American candidates in the great majority of local, state, and national elections for over 50 years in the case of Irish and Italian American voters, and the last 30 years among Mexican and Puerto Rican Americans. These statistical facts are very well documented and have been written about extensively by academics and political scientists and social policy wonks since the 1960s.

It is precisely this ethnic racism against blacks (joined and augmented of course by the even more traditional and virulent historical racism of working class, and middle and upper middle class WASPS) that have been and continue to be the major obstacle to building and sustaining any kind of viable, national progressive coalition of leftists and liberals within the Democratic Party and in independent 'third party' movements--radical or reformist. This persistent problem has in fact ultimately sabotaged or destroyed every serious attempt of African Americans to join in and organize principled radical and/or liberal reform political and economic coalitions since Reconstruction (i.e. 1870-present). It happened with the populist movements of the 1880s and 1890s, it happened with the rise of national trade and industrial unions during the Great Depression period of the 1930s and 1940s and yes, it happened in the 1960s and 1970s during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. Of course there were some exemplary exceptions to this generally ironclad rule among a small, relatively marginal number of groups and organizations led by the Communist Party USA and various small Socialist parties and New Leftist groups (especially from 1920-1970) but for the most part white ethnic and WASP racism (now coupled with the relatively recent historical expressions of antiblack racism by Mexican Americans on the West Coast and in the southwest as well as many Puerto Rican Americans on the east coast) have completely subverted, sabotaged, and destroyed any chances for a viable progressive coalition to emerge and sustain itself as a serious force either within the Democratic Party or in independent 'third party' contexts.

Thus the political catastrophes that have consistently beset the Democratic Party and all other leftist and liberal organizations over the past 60 years continues apace against Obama. From the "Dixiecrats" (southern Democrats who were virulently against and fought the Civil Rights Movement tooth and nail) to Nixon advisor Ken Phillips's insidious "Southern Strategy" in the 1970s to the so-called "Reagan Democrats" since 1980 (mostly former southern--and some midwestern and eastcoast--Democrats who simply decided to formally change political parties since they already hated blacks and women and loved white male power and conservatism so much) to the Clinton Machine DLC Democrats (who use raciist opportunism and thinly veiled white 'gliberal' southern-style demagoguery to manipulate, control, and exploit racism against blacks within the Democratic Party while at the same time using the black vote to their exclusive advantage) white ethnic and Latino American racism (along with the ever present WASP elites) have worked against African American voting interests and candidates especially on the state and national levels. As a direct result there have been only two (2) black governors in this country since slavery officially ended in 1863 (for a devastating historical constrast consider that there were two others elected from 1870-1880!), and a mere two (2) black Supreme Court Justices. Under these criminally racist circumstances one can see why the very idea of an African American president was not only taboo but considered impossible (and for the even more dismal and revealing historical record there have also never been any American president who was either female, Jewish, or of Italian, Latino, or Asian descent; in fact of the last 19 U.S. presidents since 1897 16 of them have been WASPS and only three (3) were Irish Americans. Of those Irish Americans TWO were assassinated (McKinley and Kennedy) and there was an unsuccessful assassination attempt on the third--Ronald Reagan--in March, 1981.

So this is the actual oppressive society that we all (and Barack Obama) "live" in. And no amount of rhetorical evasion or intellectual pretension to the contrary can possibly conceal or obscure what it all means. The task for us, as always, is immense and made even more severely difficult because the pervasive poisonous and deadly doctrinal disease of American racism and white supremacy still rules our politics, our culture, our economic system, our world, and our lives...

Kofi

P.S. Check out these other links for other important articles about racism and national anti-Obama movements as well:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/23/obama-strategist-dont-wor_n_98301.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aLBlgR8dCIRw&refer=home

http://www.mercurynews.com/politics/ci_9036927

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/04/is-obama-mcgove.html

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/politics/blog/2008/04/obamas_white_workingclass_prob.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/politics/23penn.html?em&ex=1209096000&en=f230aa92364c80ac&ei=5087


E.J. Dionne: Resistance to Obama seems driven by race and religion

By E.J. Dionne
April 24, 2008

WASHINGTON - Perhaps it was inevitable: The Democrats' battle for the presidential nomination has now led us into the thicket of race and religion.

Hillary Clinton's significant victory over Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary was the result of many factors, but most troubling for Obama's camp were exit polls suggesting that an underlying anti-Obama vote was responsible for the size of Clinton's victory.

One little-noticed finding was that 6 percent of Clinton's own voters said that they would defect to John McCain in the fall against Clinton herself. These Pennsylvania Democrats were clearly not Clinton enthusiasts. They were voting against Obama.

What was behind the anti-Obama feeling? More specifically, did Obama's race play a role? The evidence suggests that race mattered; it's just not clear how much.

Among white Pennsylvania voters, roughly one in six said race was a factor, and three-quarters of them voted for Clinton. By contrast, Clinton's gender seemed to help her more than hurt her: A substantial majority of men who said a candidate's gender was a factor (a very small group) voted for Clinton.

The import of race was widely debated in e-mail discussion groups and on websites from the moment the exit polls became available. There is certainly a danger of exaggerating the impact of race in Pennsylvania, since Clinton also beat Obama by about 3-2 among whites who said race played no role in their decision.

Nonetheless, elections are usually decided at the margins, and these findings will (and should) prompt a more open and candid discussion of race's role this year.

Republicans clearly know that they can find ways to play on racial feeling while fully denying they are doing so. On Wednesday, the North Carolina Republican Party released a television ad showing Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, giving his now-famous sermon in which he declared, "God damn America."

Of course Wright's comments were offensive, but to pretend that the ad does not have racial undertones would be to deny the obvious. After all, why didn't North Carolina Republicans focus instead on attacking Obama's alleged "elitism" or his foreign-policy views?

And a pattern was set that may define the rest of the campaign: Will John McCain be able to profit from incendiary ads run by his partisan allies even as he insists he would never run such ads himself?

The religious factor, and specifically the Catholic factor, is equally complicated. But it is no less important. Among white Catholics in Pennsylvania, Clinton received 72 percent of the vote, 9 points better than her share among whites as a whole and 13 points better than her performance among white Protestants.

Some of the differences can be explained by the fact that self-identified Pennsylvania Catholics were older than other voters -- and older white voters have been at the core of Clinton's base. Among voters under 45, by contrast, the differences between white Catholics and white Protestants were negligible.

Nonetheless, older white Catholics were decidedly more resistant to Obama than other older whites. Even as Pennsylvania's votes were being counted, a top Clinton campaign official was touting the extensive work Clinton had done to woo Catholics.

He spoke of campaigning by nuns around the state, a special "Catholic conversation" hosted by some of Clinton's prominent Catholic supporters just before CNN's "Compassion Forum," and even of the fact that Chelsea Clinton had attended mass at St. Christopher's parish in northeast Philadelphia with Catholic supporters.

The Obama campaign was slower in organizing Catholics, but earlier this month announced the formation of a Catholic "advisory council" whose ranks include Sharon Daly, a former top official at Catholic Charities USA, and Mary Jo Bane, who served in the Department of Health and Human Services in Bill Clinton's administration. Since Catholics have a history of backing the ultimately victorious presidential candidate, the struggle over Catholic voters will be closely tied to arguments with superdelegates over whether Clinton or Obama is the more electable Democrat.

But the debate over what happened in Pennsylvania is, finally, an argument over whether 2008 really is the year when the patterns of the past will be broken.

Will younger voters or older voters set the tone of the campaign? Will past divisions over race and religion reassert themselves, or will the electorate decide to push them aside in the interest of a new 21st-century politics? Never has Obama's slogan, "Yes We Can," seemed more relevant to his political task.

E.J. Dionne's column is distributed by the Washington Post Writers Group.

© 2008 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

American Racism, Political Sanity, & the Pennsylvania Primary

ttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/politics/22cnd-campaign.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

All,

What tonight's results clearly indicate is that traditional American racism among a majority of older, less educated, poor and working class white voters (along with the national Latino vote) is finally going to determine who actually wins the national election in November--just like it usually does. Forget about Billary, Inc.'s primary win against Obama tonight. The simple fact is that Hillary is too far behind Barack at this point in terms of not only the majority of delegates and the national popular vote in the primaries but even more importantly she is not going to win most of the remaining nine primaries (ALL of which she would have to win by very big margins--i.e. more than 15 percentage points each--to have any chance at all of overtaking Obama at this point). It's thus mathematically impossible for her to catch up not only because it's clear that Obama will probably win at least 5-6 of the remaining 9 contests but also because even if a political miracle occurred and Hillary won them all she still would not have enough delegates overall to surpass Obama. Case closed...

BUT (and this is a very big BUT) if the majority of the remaining 300 'superdelegates' foolishly decided between now and the Democratic Party convention in August to give their support to Clinton anyway despite the fact that Obama leads in EVERY SINGLE CATEGORY of votes (delegate count, popular vote totals) that act would be absolute political suicide for the Democratic Party BECAUSE IT WOULD LOSE AT LEAST HALF OF THEIR BLACK, INDEPENDENT, AND YOUNGER VOTERS which would then ensure that John McCain won the national election. African Americans, younger voters in general, and independents would leave the Democratic Party in droves in outraged disgust and either refuse to turn out in great numbers to vote for Hillary-- thereby essentially boycotting the election altogether-- or a number of black and younger voters would vote for other more leftist candidates in protest, and some of the independents would even switch their votes to McCain.

So what it all comes down to in reality is whether traditional white racism within the Democratic Party is going to trump traditional white racism in the rest of the country at this point. It's certainly no surprise to me that Obama is going to have to continue to unfairly/unjustly face down traditional white and Latino racism at this late date of his national campaign but the bitter truth is also that many white voters (especially white ethnics like Irish and Italian Americans, as well as many Latino and Asian Americans in this country) still have to make up its traditionally reactionary and bigoted mind about whether it's more important to vote sanely and rationally in one's own general political and economic self interest (i.e. vote for Obama) or irrationally vote against one's own self interest by voting for McCain or skipping the election altogether "because a black man is running." We'll see if sanity and self preservation win out over traditional American racism in the end. Right now it frankly don't look too good for the forces of sanity, tolerance, and rational self interest. I wish very much that I could confidently assert otherwise. I really would. However, I know far too much about this country and its actual endlessly destructive pathologies (especially in the so-called area of "race") to pretend that Obama is finally going to be given a legitimate shot to simply win the election on the "merits" of his campaign. Clearly, IF the country can finally awake from its massive racist coma Barack might just get a real opportunity to win.

But as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Bob Marley (among so many others) always wisely cautioned us in these matters only "time will tell"...

Kofi


April 23, 2008

Clinton Wins Primary, Keeping Bid Alive

By PATRICK HEALY
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton scored a victory over Senator Barack Obama on Tuesday in the Pennsylvania primary, giving her candidacy a boost as she struggles to raise money and persuade party leaders to let the Democratic nomination fight go on.

The Pennsylvania race turned into a mammoth political battle in recent days, with both candidates pouring millions of dollars into television advertising — much of it negative — and criticizing each other relentlessly on the campaign trail. Mrs. Clinton questioned Mr. Obama’s electability and attacked him for saying that struggling Americans were “bitter,” while Mr. Obama tried to shave her lead in opinion polls.

Mrs. Clinton faces major challenges going forward: her campaign is essentially out of money, with unpaid bills piling up, and she faces growing frustration among some Democratic officials who would prefer her to end her campaign in recognition of Mr. Obama’s lead in the overall popular vote of the primaries and caucuses so far, as well as his continuing edge toward amassing the 2,025 delegates needed to secure the nomination.

With nearly 90 percent of the electoral precincts reporting, Mrs. Clinton had 55 percent of the vote to Mr. Obama’s 45 percent.

Mrs. Clinton’s victory was propelled by her strong performance among women, older voters and less affluent and less educated voters; among white union members with no college education, she won almost three-quarters of the vote, polling showed.

Speaking to supporters in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, Mrs. Clinton emphasized that she had triumphed came despite trailing Mr. Obama financially. “He broke every spending record in this state trying to knock us out of this race,” she said. “Well, the people of Pennsylvania had other ideas.”

But she quickly put out a call for supporters to donate to her campaign, noting that “we can only keep winning if we can keep competing with an opponent who outspends us so massively.” She urged viewers to visit her Web site and “show your support.”

Amid chants of “yes she can” — a riposte to Mr. Obama’s motto, “yes we can” — Mrs. Clinton described herself as “a president who is ready to lead on day one. That means ready to take charge as commander in chief and make this economy work for middle class families, and I thank you, I thank you Pennsylvania, for deciding I can be that president.”

Mr. Obama congratulated his opponent at a Tuesday night rally in Evansville, Ind. But he also implicitly chided Mrs. Clinton for the negative tone of her attacks over the past week — and, tacitly, acknowledged his own missteps.

“It’s easy to get caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit-for-tat that consumes our politics, the bickering that none of us are entirely immune to,” he said. “That trivializes the profound issues — two wars, an economy in recession, a planet in peril.”

He added that Americans “believe that the challenges we face are bigger than the smallness of our politics.”

Looking to capitalize on Mrs. Clinton’s performance in Pennsylvania, her campaign spent Tuesday planning a fresh fund-raising drive, while other aides mapped out political strategy and staff movement to the next major primaries, Indiana and North Carolina on May 6.

Yet with Mrs. Clinton raising $21 million in March compared with Mr. Obama’s $42 million, her advisers said they realized they had tough challenges ahead. Chief among them, besides paying bills and financing new advertising, was persuading impatient Democratic superdelegates — party leaders and elected officials — to remain neutral in the contest and let the remaining primaries play out through early June.

The Pennsylvania Democrats who cast their ballots in Tuesday’s primary did so with the economy weighing heavily on their minds, according to surveys of voters leaving polling places. Those surveys showed that more than half the voters questioned believe that the worsening state of the American economy is the most important issue confronting the country, with about 90 percent saying the United States has already slipped into a recession.

Half of those polled also said that they were looking for a candidate who could bring about change, which has been the main theme of Mr. Obama’s campaign. Mr. Obama leads in delegates, but has consistently trailed Mrs. Clinton in polls taken in Pennsylvania, though the gap had been closing in recent days.

About one-quarter of those who participated in the exit polling, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for five television networks and The Associated Press, endorsed the idea that experience, which Mrs. Clinton has emphasized in her campaign, is the most important quality to be sought in a candidate. For the polling, the margin of sampling error in the sample of 40 precincts across the state was plus or minus four percentage points.

Both candidates performed strongly among the same constituencies that have supported them in other primary states.

Mr. Obama was backed overwhelmingly by black voters and also scored well among voters younger than 45 and college graduates, the results show. Geographically, he performed strongest in Philadelphia and its suburbs, which has the largest concentration of population in Pennsylvania, with Mrs. Clinton winning the majority of the vote in the rest of the state.

Trailing Mr. Obama over all in both the national popular vote and in the competition for delegates, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said Tuesday that they were girding for a tough spring. Two associates of Mrs. Clinton said that if she had lost Pennsylvania, she would most likely end her campaign, recognizing that any hope of overtaking Mr. Obama was futile.

And next up are the Indiana and North Carolina primaries — with Indiana posing another make-or-break challenge for Mrs. Clinton, according to several of her advisers, who said that they would urge her to quit the race if she lost that state. Mrs. Clinton, former President Bill Clinton and their allies have campaigned frequently in Indiana in recent weeks, and she has some important endorsements, including support from Senator Evan Bayh, the state’s former governor.

“She has to win Pennsylvania and Indiana — pretty much everyone in the campaign agrees on that,” said one senior Clinton adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the campaign’s electoral expectations.

But Clinton advisers emphasized that neither they nor Mrs. Clinton were feeling anything close to defeatist — rather, they said, they believed that a Pennsylvania win would help her build momentum in Indiana and other states in the region with coming contests, like West Virginia and Kentucky in May.

Mrs. Clinton is particularly counting on winning sizable margins of victory in the popular vote in future contests, in hopes of edging closer and perhaps overtaking Mr. Obama on that score.

More difficult would be amassing enough delegates to overcome Mr. Obama’s lead on that front — he now has about 150 more delegates over all. His advisers say that in the coming days, they also plan to roll out additional Obama endorsements from superdelegates, the party leaders and elected officials who have an automatic vote in deciding the nomination and the discretion to choose a candidate.

Clinton advisers said they were already picking states, cities and towns to dispatch staff members and volunteers from Pennsylvania, and budgeting for television advertising. They are also planning a busy travel schedule for the Clintons, their daughter, Chelsea, and an army of surrogates; they are expected to focus heavily on Indiana, and to a lesser extent in North Carolina, where Mr. Obama is widely seen as strongly positioned.

A greater concern in the shorter term for Mrs. Clinton is fundraising: She raised $21 million in March, compared with Mr. Obama’s $42 million, and her campaign faces a cash squeeze as unpaid bills mount and she spends more money than she is taking in, according to new campaign finance filings.

Mrs. Clinton currently has $10.3 million in outstanding primary debts but only $9.5 million available to cover them, leaving an $800,000 shortfall at the end of March. In February, the Clinton campaign had unpaid bills of $8.7 million and $11.7 million in cash.

By comparison, Mr. Obama had $43 million in cash for the coming primaries and a campaign debt of less than $660,000 at the end of March. Mr. Obama is spending 75 cents for every dollar he is taking in; Mrs. Clinton is spending $1.10.

Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting.

Political and Economic Elites vs. the Working Class Vote in 2008

All,

The following article by Randy Shaw from 'Beyond Chron: The Voice of the Rest', a San Francisco based alternative online daily of political news and commentary, is an excellent and well informed take on the ideological and political implications of the ongoing media battle between the Clinton Machine and Barack Obama over the national working class vote. With the upcoming Democratic Party primary in Pennsylvania looming on April 22 Shaw points out that what is really at stake in this "war of words" between the candidates over the present disposition of this major class group and crucial voting bloc is nothing less than a national referendum on the future direction of the economy and general domestic policy in the United States come the general election in November.

Kofi

http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Frenzy_Over_Obama_s_Bitter_Working_Class_Shows_Elites_Seek_McCain_Clinton_Race_5562.html


Frenzy Over Obama’s “Bitter” Working Class Shows Elites Seek McCain-Clinton Race
by Randy Shaw

Apr. 14‚ 2008

This weekend conclusively disproved two claims: that media coverage has favored Obama over Clinton, and that the Illinois Senator is favored by corporate America. In a week in which the Clinton family’s $109 million earnings were essentially ignored, when Bill Clinton’s receiving money from China business interests involved with the crackdown in Tibet is overlooked, and when the Clinton campaign created a new set of whoppers about Hillary’s Bosnian trip, the traditional media preferred to criticize the rather obvious claim by Barack Obama that working-class voters are “bitter” over the nation’s betrayal of their interests. And in emphasizing Hillary Clinton’s false framing of Obama’s words, no traditional media outlet had the guts to juxtapose her account of a happy, smiling “optimistic” working class with the virtually identical analysis routinely given by our President, George W. Bush. If anyone doubted that corporate America is desperate for a McCain-Clinton status quo race, this weekend closed the case.

Whenever one thinks that Hillary Clinton cannot sink deeper into Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove style-politics, we are proved wrong. This weekend, Clinton led the media on a frenzy over Barack Obama’s social analysis of working-class America – a critique that would be an “A” paper on college campuses but which, in Clinton’s angry world, she describes as evidence of Obama’s “elitism.”

A Bitter Working-Class

Yes, Barack Obama has committed the gravest of sins. He has told the truth about the federal government’s longtime contempt toward the social and economic security of its working-class.

This sin is grave because it exposes the dishonesty of the American Dream. The Dream says that if we work hard and play by the rules, our economic fortunes will advance over that of our parents.

Well, that has not been the reality for millions of hard-working Americans for some time now. And since the flip side of the American Dream is that failure is attributable to individual shortcomings, millions of working-class people are embittered both by the falseness of the Dream, and the lengths to which politicians have gone to stifle social and economic fairness.

Does bitterness over government unfairness lead the working-class to practice what Richard Hofstadter deemed long ago as “the politics of resentment”? Nixon and George Wallace sure thought so, and both made political careers appealing to such bitterness.

As with his speech on race, Barack Obama appealed to the intelligence of the American people. And our traditional media – the same media that has elevated anti-intellectualism from the days of Joe McCarthy, Nixon, Wallace and Ronald Reagan to that of George W. Bush – is boosting Hillary Clinton’s cynical attacks on Obama for telling the truth.


80% Believe the Nation is on Wrong Track

If I had not heard Hillary Clinton with my own ears, I would not have believed she could make the statement on Saturday that her travels in Pennsylvania revealed an “optimistic” and hard-working people who were not “bitter” about their situation.

I guess she’s only talking to the 20% of Americans who believe the nation is on the right track.

Optimistic? The only politician speaking optimistically about the current state of the United States is President Bush. Add Hillary Clinton to the increasingly small list of politicians who have no clue as to how people in this country really feel.

Clinton is the Bitter One

The biggest shortcoming of the media’s coverage of Obama’s comment could be its failure to note the irony of Hillary Clinton accusing someone else of being “bitter.” Clinton is the bitter candidate in this race, and the only serious presidential candidate in decades that is as equally acerbic and sarcastic is Clinton’s good friend, John McCain.

Why did the media not turn Clinton’s charges against her? Because of insecurity about its own avid support for the free trade and elitist economic policies that have so damaged the working-class over the past thirty years.

And Clinton has had the media on the defensive since Iowa about unfair coverage. Bill Clinton attacks the media coverage of Hillary in every press event, and one need only check the New York Times letters page to find a gaggle of Clinton-backers convinced that the male-dominated media has it in for Hillary.

Corporate America Wants McCain-Clinton

It would be great to believe that Hillary Clinton’s ability to direct media coverage to her latest attack is just coincidence, or an example of effective staff. But activists know too well how the media frames coverage to suit its favored candidate (see Bush v. Gore, 2000)

How did the alleged Clinton-hating Times handle Obama’s “bitter” comment? Well, it not only put the non-story on its Sunday front page, but ended the article with a quote from a “Democratic strategist” who claimed that Obama’s comment “could mean he’s rendered himself unelectable.” He also said it would “offend rural voters.”

The strategist, David Saunders, is known for an ability to attract the “Bubba vote” in rural America, using Nascar, bluegrass music etc. But he was working for John Edwards when Obama won the Iowa primary, and Obama has defied critics throughout the primary season with his ability to win rural votes.

Saunders is certainly entitled to his opinion. But his comments should not have been used at the end of the article, with the Times giving them more weight than was merited.

And Obama has won the majority of endorsements from rural newspapers in Pennsylvania. Guess they don’t but the line that it is “elitist” to say that the working-class is bitter over its betrayal by national politicians.

The more corporate America hears Obama, the more they are concerned that they cannot control him. In contrast, corporate America bought the Clinton’s back in the 1980’s, and John McCain has danced to their economic tune for most of his career.

With the nation’s recession deepening, and the popular mood turning grim, people are open to a degree of change that was considered unimaginable only two years ago. A McCain-Clinton race will bottle up this desire for change, while Obama is increasingly seen as too great a risk to the status quo.

Obama’s lead over Clinton remains insurmountable. But that won’t stop the traditional media elite from doing its best to get Bill Clinton, Mark Penn, and the whole gang back in the White House in January.