Obama '08?

stop
check
preoceed
.
Change start from you
Hope as well.
let there be no barbarism made in USA

Oh no, I didn't mean to imply that they were. I'm just old enough to remember what brokered conventions were like, however, and they were a far sight more interesting than the coronations we have become accustomed to since the primary system was installed. But when the primary system doesn't pick the candidate, then you go to Plan B, and it is possible that both candidates could then be rejected, especially if they have accumulated sufficient negatives to have become a liability to the party.

The question is, of all the impressive Democrats in the country, if you had to pick one that you would most like to see as President would it be Barack or Hillary? If enough people say no, then somebody else gets drafted.

I do expect either Barack or Hillary to be the Democratic Party nominee however. (My parents were delegates to the 1952 Democratic Convention.)

Here's an example of how big a mess the vote counts are in some of the states. It isn't just a national DNC problem. It goes clear down the line...

California is making Florida 2000 look like child's play. I wonder if all these uncounted votes will be just as important to the national DNC when considering MI and FL.




There still hasn't been any examination or decison made. This one will probably end up in the courts too.

Wow! Yall's posts today took an hour to wade through. Very interesting.
Hillary was scheduled to be in Cville today.
Over on Nimh's thread about "Polls, bets and pretty graphs..." I have Obama by 5 points in VA. Nimh's polls have him winning by more, and also taking MD and DC by big margins.
On his thread I wrote a little essay about VA politics. It looks like tomorrow, in the SW quadrant, the weather could be bad. Light snow overnight changing to sleet tomorrow mid-day and continuing.
I was thinking of going in to vote in the early afternoon, but maybe I will continue my habit of being very early.
One year I was 12th.
I liked going early because the parents at the school where I vote would bring in and sell home-made baked goods to raise money for the school. They don't do that anymore. Liability reasons. Sad. There were some really good cooks.

Here's one for Cyclo, with love.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/11/91158/5807/161/454432

By MONICA LANGLEY
February 11, 2008; Page A1

On a conference call to prepare for a recent debate, Barack Obama brainstormed with his top advisers on the fine points of his positions. Michelle Obama had dialed in to listen, but finally couldn't stay silent any longer.

"Barack," she interjected, "Feel -- don't think!" Telling her husband his "over-thinking" during past debates had tripped him up with rival Hillary Clinton, she said: "Don't get caught in the weeds. Be visceral. Use your heart -- and your head."

EXCERPTS


"Malia is starting to ask: 'What's the impact? If Dad wins, will I finish my school year?'"
-- Read more from Mrs. Obama's interview with the Journal.The campaign veterans shut up. They knew that Mrs. Obama's opinion and advice mattered more to their candidate than anything they could say.

With the Democratic presidential race wide open, Mrs. Obama, a 44-year-old Princeton- and Harvard Law-educated hospital executive, is assuming the same dominant role in Sen. Obama's public life that she has in his private life. At home, she expects a lot of every family member, from having her 6- and 9-year-old daughters set their own alarm clocks to insisting her husband pick up his dirty socks. Her most recent directive to him: Stop smoking.

On the campaign trail, she has emerged as an influential adviser whom aides watch as a barometer for how both they and the candidate are doing. They watch for "the look" between her and Mr. Obama, on stage or in private moments, as an indication of his mood.

Inside the campaign, she's been dubbed "the closer" because she often pushes harder to seal the deal with voters than he does. But worries about her sarcastic humor being taken the wrong way have forced her to cut back some of her public candor, she admits.


The role of spouses in presidential politics is evolving, from one of smiling wife to equal and visible partner -- complete with appearance schedule, entourage and opinions. With this, though, comes greater potential to be either an asset or a liability.

In the Democratic race, Bill Clinton has come across at times as empathetic, seasoned onetime leader of the free world -- but at other times as red-faced, argumentative attack-dog-in-chief. Mrs. Obama carefully avoids discussing policy and strategy, but jumps right in to dish about issues that affect her personally, such as being a working mom and overcoming obstacles, which plays well with key voting groups like working women and minorities.

The Obamas present themselves as equals. "We're two well-versed lawyers who know each other really well," Mrs. Obama says in an interview. "We each think we're right about everything, and can argue each other into a corner." Friends and campaign aides describe them as a high-powered team built on contrasts: She's the heart to his head, the enforcer to his lapses, regimented to his laid-back, critic to his ego, details to his broad strokes, sarcasm to his sincerity, toughness to his cool vibe.

Sporadic Start

Mrs. Obama's campaign role is growing in ways big and small. After a sporadic start due to her reluctance to upend her family's life, she has picked up steam. In Iowa, she appeared at 33 events in eight straight days. Earlier this month, she hosted a rally in Los Angeles with Oprah Winfrey and Caroline Kennedy. She has met with every department in the campaign from the new-media unit to the ground organization, and she got the campaign to form a women's outreach initiative.

But sometimes her approach can backfire. When she told audiences that her husband is "snore-y and stinky" in the morning, doesn't put the butter back in the fridge and one morning "put on his clothes and left" while she juggled her own schedule to deal with an overflowing toilet, some voters and observers cringed that she was emasculating her husband.

And when she said last fall it was "now or never" for his presidential run because of the "inconvenience factor" of a campaign, some saw her remark as a threat that he wouldn't run again if he lost.

"It wasn't a threat -- but to do this again? Put these two girls through this again?" Mrs. Obama says. "This is the only time Barack will be this close...to issues on the ground" from having spent more time as a community organizer and state representative than a Washington politician and still leading a normal life like taking out the garbage and paying off student loans.

Her role, Mrs. Obama says, "is to give people yet another slice of who Barack is, making him even more multidimensional," because people picking a president "want to know not just about policies...but who are you? What do you believe in? Can I trust you?" Her comments about his foibles were meant to prevent "deifying" her husband, she says: "He's a gifted man -- one of the most brilliant politicians you'll see in this lifetime -- but in the end, he's just a man."

Mr. Obama, in a speech after a primary, called his wife "the love of my life and the rock of the Obama family." But in a candid moment last March, he told a crowd: "She's too smart to run. It is true my wife is smarter, better looking. She's a little meaner than I am."

Where Mr. Obama's personality and consensus approach to politics were shaped growing up as a mixed-race child in a predominantly white world, Mrs. Obama's style is rooted in her own background growing up in a working-class African-American family on Chicago's South Side.

A striking woman who's as tall as her husband when she wears her Jimmy Choo heels, she grew up in a four-room apartment with a kitchen the size of a closet. Her father, a pump operator at the city water plant, and her stay-at-home mother pushed their two children to be "achievers" and get the education they didn't have, says her brother, Craig Robinson. They both went to Princeton in the 1980s.

College Experience

In her senior thesis in 1985, Mrs. Obama wrote that her college experience "made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' " than ever before, adding, "I will always be Black first and a student second" on campus. At Harvard Law, Mrs. Obama, involved in the Black Law Students Association, pushed hard to improve the low numbers of African-American faculty and students.

"We got into big debates on the condition of black folks in America," says Harvard classmate Verna Williams. "She's got a temper."


Sen. Barack Obama acknowledges the cheers of supporters and receives a hug from his wife, Michelle.
After law school, she returned to Chicago to join the high-powered firm of Sidley Austin as an associate specializing in intellectual property. Friends say she worried about selling out but wanted to pay off her education loans.

Then her father, whom she watched go to work every day despite multiple sclerosis, and her best friend from Princeton, struck by cancer, died the same year. She says she urgently wanted to find her life's calling because "nothing was really guaranteed."

Enter Barack Obama. At Sidley Austin, she was assigned to mentor the summer associate, who was two years older but had started Harvard after she did. He wanted a date; she wanted no mixing business with pleasure. But one night, he persuaded her to join him at a meeting of community organizers in a church basement. "When he took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves," Mrs. Obama recalls. "He talked about the world not as it is, but as it should be." She changed her mind about him that night.

Shortly after they got engaged, Mrs. Obama moved from her law firm to the staff of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, as a liaison with service agencies on tasks such as finding shelters for the homeless during the winter. In 1992, she married Mr. Obama, who was launching his own unconventional career, working at a small public-interest firm, teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago and writing a memoir called "Dreams of My Father." They lived in a South Side condo.

In 1996, Mr. Obama was elected to the Illinois senate and traveled frequently to Springfield. "I never thought I'd have to raise a family alone," his wife told him, according to his second book, "The Audacity of Hope." Working long hours on her own job, she often refused to attend political events if they impinged on her time with their two young daughters.

When Mr. Obama prepared to run for the U.S. Senate in 2003, she tried to talk him out of it, say friends. They add that after he promised the move would be either "up or out," she reluctantly agreed to continue her role as political spouse.

Sen. Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention propelled him to national celebrity. His first book became a best seller and he got a signing bonus for a second, allowing the couple to pay off their education and credit-card debts and buy their first house, a three-story, $1.65 million brick home in Chicago's Hyde Park. (The wife of an Obama contributor who has since been indicted on corruption charges bought the adjoining lot and later sold the Obamas a strip of it, which Mr. Obama subsequently told reporters was "boneheaded.")

look at the boldened large text in the second paragraph...THAT is my objection to Obama and his followers.......in a nutshell. so please, stop asking me to back up my feelings. that sentence is eloquent in it's explanation of my opinion.

Haha, read that one earlier today.

From tomorrow's NYT -



Wuh oh.

After tomorrow, you will see more of this.

Cycloptichorn

vote early
vote often
vote Kucinich.

Hey Dys, I'd send you a bunch of California's Independent Ballots to vote with but we can't even get them counted once much less multiple times.

Da-a-amn...

And the same thing happened in several previous elections, and they didnt do anything about it???

Boggles the mind.

94,500 votes - thats 2,3% of the state wide vote..

Your objection is that Obama "overthinks" too much, and has to be called back from doing that by his wife?

One more reason to vote for him!!

---

Even CNN is telling it like it is...

Yeah, Nimh. It's turning into a huge mess. There are many more voters all over the state that were turned away from the polls from workers who incorrectly said they couldn't vote if they weren't registered democrats. They could vote democrat but they had to ask for a democrat ballot.


It was only the republican party that had the restriction, not both parties.

Wait, I know that guy.

He rep-re-sents, the Lollipop Guild, the Lollipop Guild, the Lollipop Guild, doesn't he?

And, in the name of the Lollipop Guild, he welcomes me to Munchkin Land, right?

I'd consider that a reason to vote for him, of course; but just so you can make an equal comparison on that issue, this is from the same site:

Hillary Clinton

Voted for a 10-year extension of the assault weapons ban. Voted for requiring extensive background checks at gun shows. Supports licensing and registration of handguns, mandatory trigger locks for handguns, holding adults responsible for their children's use of guns, raising the youth handgun ban from age 18 to 21, limiting gun sales to one per month and allowing the Consumer Products Safety Commission regulate guns.

Do you agree more with that?

Regarding concealed carry laws, by the way, when in 1999 a proposition was on the ballot in Missouri that would have required local police authorities to issue concealed weapons permits to eligible citizens, Hillary taped a phone message that was automatically dialed to 75,000 homes statewide with the message, "Just too dangerous for Missouri families." It was subsequently rejected by 51% to 48%.

Careful there Gargamel. He might send Azrael after you for impersonating a humorist. :wink:

Disagree - Voted for a 10-year extension of the assault weapons ban.
Agree - Voted for requiring extensive background checks at gun shows.
Disagree - Supports licensing and registration of handguns
Disagree - mandatory trigger locks for handguns
Agree - holding adults responsible for their children's use of guns
Agree - raising the youth handgun ban from age 18 to 21
Disagree - limiting gun sales to one per month
Disagree -allowing the Consumer Products Safety Commission regulate guns.

The only reason I pointed out the Obama one is because it looks like that particular section about a nationwide ban on concealed weapons is the differentiating factor in their gun laws posisitions. It is a position only a senator from Illinois or New York could have though.

How does that position (either way) do anything with regard to gun shows?

Not that it matters much. My guess is that an national ban on concealed carry would be shot down as unconstitutional. The Federal Government has never had any involvement with concealed carry permits - it's an issue that thusfar has always been left to the states and the Federal level would have a very hard time demonstrating that it is suddenly a national issue.

This is the one area (gun control) that I totally disagree with Obama on, btw. He's pretty much tried to take every position there is at one point or another and hasn't stuck with a single one of them yet. Because gun control has dropped off the national radar as a priority I don't think he's been forced to think through his positions on it and he's gotten some really stupid advice from advisors.

I don't follow.

I was asked what I thought about Clinton's positions, which is what I responded to.


Oh, and I'm agreeing to her positions that I agree with in general, under reasonable circumstances. For example, I agree that parents should be held responsible for thier children using their guns in an illegal manner. But it depends on what "held responsible" means. If it means that they are tried as if they committed the crime themselves, then I don't support it.

Forgot to add this earlier.

From Jonathan Chait, over at the Plank (I started reading them again after our conversation Nimh and I concede that they aren't anti-Obama lol):



http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/02/11/texas-and-ohio-won-t-decide-the-democratic-race.aspx

Hillary made a huge error in not having a ground game ready for post-Super Tuesday. A gigantic error. She will lose more delegates in these two weeks then she can possibly hope to make up in TX and OH - IF she wins those states, given that Obama will have quite a bit of momentum behind him.

Spoke with several people in WI tonight - many were pissed that Hillary was skipping their state completely in order to go to Texas and campaign. Another strategic mistake, though they likely think that there's no shot at all of her winning there anyways.

Cycloptichorn