Are my eyes really blue?

Make no mistake: I like Hillary. I think she’s a bright woman with considerable talent who has been famously ill-used by the political media in this country for nearly two decades. I also think she has a bright future in the Senate for as long as she wants to stick around, and would in fact be an ideal figure as Senate Majority Leader, displaying a degree of testicular (uterine?) fortitude that Harry Reid seems tragically incapable of.

However, at this point, I think the writing is on the wall, and it says that the Clinton goose is well and truly cooked. I think she has been failed in spectacular fashion by the gang of idiots running her campaign; the fact that they misread the delegate allocation process in Texas and nearly failed to submit a full slate of delegates in Pennsylvania suggests only one conclusion: the Clinton brain trust never had a Plan B. There was no consideration of what might happen after Super Duper Mega Donkey Collider Tuesday, and now that the nomination is still in play, they’ve fallen back on the worst of all possible solutions: the Rove offense. This is tantamount to going into the locker room down 30 at the half and coming out for the third quarter in the wishbone.

The Rove offense is predicated on two things: the perception of inevitability (shot to hell) and the ability to suppress undecided and independent voters, usually with massive waves of negativity, in order to magnify the impact of the activist base. Now, what any moron who made at least a B in PSCI 101 should be able to tell you is this:

1) Primaries are overwhelmingly contested by activist voters; by definition, anybody who turns out to vote in a primary is almost certainly motivated and non-neutral.

2) Polling demonstrates that going into Feb. 5, roughly three-quarters of each Democratic candidate’s supporters would be happy to have the OTHER candidate as the nominee, which suggests that attempting to drive up the opponent’s negatives is an uphihll fight (not to mention tremendously counter-productive for the general election).

3) Therefore, running the Rove offense at this stage of a binary primary fight is the sign of a drooling moron who should probably be in care, not at the helm of a major campaign. QEMFD.

(There’s only one thing you need to know, really: on the eve of the DC-MD-VA primary, the first big battle after Feb. 5, Clinton’s go-to political maven Mark Penn was…doing a book reading in New York City, thus displacing Doug Feith for the title famously bestowed by Gen. Tommy Franks: “the stupidest f!!!-ing guy on the face of the Earth.”)

Look, I feel for Hillary, I really do. She was basically coming in hobbled from the beginning: by a political press stuck in 10th grade, by 16 years as the highest evil in the Republican mythos, even by a Democratic party who saw her as the one thing that would unite a depressed and fractured GOP and therefore a general-election liability. And there’s a very real chance that if the Democrats win, it will be 2016 before there’s another contested primary for the D’s, at which point she will be 68 years old. It’s not right, it’s not fair, and it’s not good, but there’s no getting around it: Hillary Clinton, fifteen years removed from the White House and pushing 70, will be past her sell-by date as a Presidential candidate. If it’s going to happen, it had to be this year, and at this point, derailing the frontrunner would require a live broadcast of Barack Obama waterboarding a kitten while pouring buckets of motor oil onto a burning Prius and going to third base with Ann Coulter.

So that’s it. At this point, all the Clinton campaign can do is hobble Obama for the general election. (Although it’s possible that another 10-point win for Obama in Texas and/or Ohio would only make him look more powerful, so who knows.) Meanwhile, the Obama campaign looks more and more like one of those running backs who hits the line harder every quarter than the last.

God knows I would love to put off the general election circus – eight months of this is bound to be even worse than last time – but at this point, we’ve got the matchup. Apologies to Clinton, Huckabee, Ron Paul and anyone else who’s still hanging on, but there’s only two seats on the ship, and it’s leaving port.

Er…kneel before Steve! Beg, you drug-riddled lard-ass! Beg for mercy from the mighty mock turtleneck!
All must bow before the power of the Hexachrome Fruit. Even if the stock’s shat the bed in the last month…

UK 52

Vandy 93

FINAL

Largest margin of victory over Kentucky…by halftime, when we led 41-11. Read that again. ELEVEN POINTS IN A HALF. We only won the second half 52-41, but I guess the team must have changed out of Doc Martens at the half.

We lost in Lexington in double-OT earlier in the season, and then had to play a lot of games on the road in an above-average conference. And I’m sure a lot of people were expecting the fast fade in February that has been a hallmark of years past. But nothing ends the wailing of “Same old Vandy” like taking the conference’s most storied program and beating the evangelical Hell out of them.

If you need me, I’ll be finishing this bowl of Honey Bunches of Whoop Ass.

Not only does Hillary Clinton get shut out, 0-4 for the weekend, but her rival wins a Grammy.

And John McCain, putative frontrunner, is already 0-3…and it looks like the only thing between him and 0-4 is the chairman of the Washington GOP, who is apparently Earl Hebner. (If you get that, I will send you a free fruit.)

I rode a bike an awful long way today. Now I’m getting sick. Everyone knows exercise is bad for you.

I have determined something about my wife’s view of my unfortunate fixation on the Redskins (which by and large does not happen with any other sports team I follow). She doesn’t really have a handle on it, she detests the way it drives me into an emotional frenzy, she’s learned to live with it as the price of having me but keeps it on the periphery of her awareness…

Basically, for my wife, the Redskins are my period.

(facepalm)

JIM !-ING ZORN? YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS.

Now to see if they wear right. It’s tough with DMs or DM-like shoes: by the time you break them in, you have zippy chance of returning them, so you’d better guess right when you buy. Early indications is that these are right, though – and they are built like a tank at first glance. I will definitely work on trying to keep these nice – so as soon as they’re assured of fitting, it’s time to get out the dubbin and polish up =)

“Politics is the art of the possible. If you want to dream, major in theater.”

DEM: Obama closes the gap, but never manages to overtake Clinton, who in turn never quite manages to pull away. Popular enthusiasm for Obama carries almost all the way to the convention, but it’s not enough to get over the top, and the superdelegates while not decisive make it look a lot less close than it was.

REP: Huckabee does a lot better than expected down South – not enough to remain viable, but enough to get the second seat on the starship as McCain’s VP choice. The usual suspects on the right make all the predictable noises about how neither of them could carry Reagan’s pet chimp, but once they have a Clinton to campaign against, they dutifully fall in line – and with a sympathetic media narrative already in place, coupled with a lack of turnout among once-enthused Obama supporters, ride to a narrow but decisive win in November.

I don’t know a single person, conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, who actually LIKES this scenario, but that’s what I got. I’m not wild about it myself, and I’d be happy to be wrong, especially since I don’t have any cash on it.

OK, maybe it’s all about the Patriots and Giants for most people, but two Washington Redskins were voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame this weekend. Art Monk, who has deserved this for a long time for being one of the greatest clutch receivers ever, and Darrell Green, who is the best cornerback ever, outside of maybe – maybe – Night Train Lane in the 50s.

Two great Redskins, two great players, two great human beings on and off the field, two guys who personify what this franchise means to the millions and millions who live and die with the burgundy and gold. Well done, gentlemen.

Numbers first. This is it for Rudy – he half-assed it in Iowa and New Hampshire on the firm belief that he could take Florida and then flop a straight on SuperDuper Tuesday. He’s cooked;; the Great Mentioner says he’s coming out for McCain tomorrow. McCain only beat Romney by 3%, but by the rules, gets the whole nut (more on this in a bit). Nevertheless, Romney has enough money and delegates to hang on and see what happens on the 5th. Huckabee is still hanging around, although he has no money and precious little organization, but with Fred Thompson gone, he still has a chance to redneck his way into a nice chunk of delegates on the big day. Which leaves us with:

MCCAIN: Loved by the press in a way that would get a restraining order slapped on them, but largely unacceptable to movement conservatives (Tom DeLay, Rush Limbaugh, etc).

ROMNEY: Derided as “Multiple Choice Mitt” by true believers, unacceptable to holy rollers because he is TEH MORMAN!!!!!, but loaded with cash and clocking enough second-place finishes to stick around for a bit.

HUCKABEE: Still trying to prove that you can win the nomination with nothing but a mildly interesting personal story, a double-handful of good zingers, and Chuck Norris. Unacceptable to the kind of people who want to build a 900-foot fence across the Mexican border, but beloved by holy rollers, and the church angle gives him the potential to coast for a while on less material support than another candidate might need.

PAUL: Is he still living? He might have been better off running a third-party campaign the way he did in 1988, with the Libertarian brand name and plenty of loose cash.

So yeah. First past the post, McCain takes all the Florida delegates with 36% of the votes. And that’s not as many delegates as would normally be there, because the GOP gimped the Florida delegate count to punish them for jumping the gun on SuperDuper Tuesday. The Dems did the same thing only worse; they decertified the primaries for Michigan and Florida and will not award any delegates.

Now, what’s the practical impact of this? Well I’ll tell you:

NOTHING.

Not once since the dawn of the primary era has the selection of the Presidential nominee gone down to candidates with less than 50% of the delegate totals hashing it out in the circus of a convention. What happens – over the course of a series of races in Iowa, then New Hampshire, then Super Tuesday, then the other assorted checkpoints over a period of months or (more likely) weeks – is that a gradual sense develops that it’s going to be candidate X. Once the blessed diadem of inevitability is placed on X’s brow, it’s all over with, and there will be a motion at the convention to make it unanimous, and then they’ll play the music and drop the confetti and generally try to pretend that we still have old-style conventions full of pomp and drama and smoke-filled rooms rather than meaningless 4-day infomercials. God, even I don’t care about this anymore.

The point is, Hillary Clinton has a couple of wins in decertified primaries. They mean a whole lot of nothing, because there won’t be any delegates awarded, and Obama is still sitting on more live delegates in hand – but inasmuch as they contribute to the sense that she will be X, they are valuable wins. But they will only contribute to that sense *IF* the results are presented in that matter.

Because right now, Barack has 63, and Hillary has 48. To win, you need…um…TWO THOUSAND TWENTY-FIVE. Yes, that’s right, neither candidate yet has FIVE PERCENT of the delegates they need to clinch the nomination. And the Dems allocate their delegates proportionally, so as long as the Big Two keep finishing 1-2, they can carry this thing an awfully long way.

The Rs don’t generally do proportional representation, but let’s do their numbers: McCain 95, Romney 67, Huckabee 26, Paul 6 (!), Rudy 1 (!!!!). Total needed to win: 1,191. Super front-runner McCain is less than 10% of the way home.

And the fact of the matter is this: our candidates are selected in a series of state elections, all with different rules, and they aren’t even official government functions: they’re private elections conducted by private organizations. And even these private organizations have differences between their state orgs and the national party, or we wouldn’t have this mess in Michigan and Florida. Basically, we have a big cloud of chaos that kinda sorta eventually vomits up a candidate, like Jonah from the bowels of the big fish (the Bible doesn’t actually use the word “whale”), and then we can say “you and him fight.” And if we’re very unlucky, it takes 8 or 9 months.

Seriously, folks – the parliamentary model looks better every day.