I always am amazed that discussions of the Unity Ticket never seem to include any reasons why it MIGHT be a good idea. Thus, I must protest Bob Wright's discussion with Mickey Kaus of the Unity ticket possibility.

Their entire discussion is predicated on the assumption that, despite the fact that Democratic voters strongly support a Unity Ticket, it is bad for Obama to have Clinton on the ticket. I think the polling has clearly said otherwise. I have made arguments for why I think it is almost essential that Obama pick Clinton as his running mate. No such arguments are addressed in most elite pundit discussions of a Unity Ticket.

More . . .

The normally sharp James Joyner plays dumb in order to take a swipe at Hillary Clinton:

The “Electoral College” argument, though, is interesting. On its face, it’s silly. The Democratic Party has a set of rules in place for how it selects its nominee. Those rules don’t at all resemble winner-take-all model mirrored on the Electoral College. Consequently, her opponents didn’t run their campaigns as if that were the case. To now claim that this is how the race should be decided is brazen.

Joyner's point is silly. Clinton is arguing to the superdelegates who can vote for whomever they like. Clinton is arguing she has a better chance to win in November. It is silly to argue that this argument is somehow out of bounds. She may be wrong. You can argue against her points. But to call the argument silly is, well, silly. Joyner himself seems to recognize this:

In the continuing rationalization of the malign acceptance of sexism, the latest version is the deflection -- the knocking down of a strawman argument - the unmade argument that Hillary Clinton may lose because of sexism. I have seen no one, I mean no one, make such an argument. Indeed, it is absurd to argue it. Hillary Clinton is winning white men in droves now. That is one of the concerns that smart Dem political thinkers are addressing now. But some people do not want to talk about THAT.

People like Scot Lehigh need this strawman to justify their behavior - his malign acceptance of the sexism seen in this campaign. He writes:

Like Marie Cocco, I could come up with my own list of Media Matters clips and offensive merchandise that I could use to argue definitively that racism is worse than sexism. But I'm not sure what that would prove, other than that I believe the prejudice I've faced is qualitatively worse than the prejudice I know nothing about.

Is is really impossible to just condemn sexism without comparing it to racism? As for making a list of examples of racism in the Media so that we can address that problem as well, I think that is a very worthy thing to do. I would support it. Serwer's attempt to trivialize Cocco's concerns is frankly, outrageous. When he writes:

Chris "Tweety" Matthews, speaking from the ObamaLand that is the Obama News Network, NBC, is talking about Hillary Clinton living in "HillaryLand." It is one of the more amazing "news" broadcasts one has ever seen.

Forget for a moment that indeed Hillary Clinton has at best a very long shot to win the nomination. This is true imo. But is that REALLY the only story of the night? (In ObamaLand, Tweety is predicting a "surprisingly close" Kentucky result.) Remember this is supposed to be a NEWS network. Not a propaganda arm for Barack Obama. [More...]

Marie Cocco names names:

I won't miss Citizens United Not Timid (no acronym, please), an anti-Clinton group founded by Republican guru Roger Stone.

Political discourse will at last be free of jokes like this one, told last week by magician Penn Jillette on MSNBC: "Obama did great in February, and that's because that was Black History Month. And now Hillary's doing much better 'cause it's White B---- Month, right?" Co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski rebuked Jillette.

[MORE . . .]

and

Two of my favorite songs from the Vietnam protest days. A third is below the fold. For those of you too young to remember the war in Vietnam, this BBC series is excellent. At the bottom of the first page are links to the next segments.

If you weren't around here earlier today, this and this is what tonight's late post relates to. [More...]

Scott Lemieux (Lemieux responds here) misunderstands politics imo. I know he misunderstands my argument for a Unity Ticket.

He writes that "some people in the Clinton Hackosphere [meaning me, thanks for the kind words Scott] are trying to set up the argument that a decision by Obama to choose anybody but Clinton must be motivated by personal animus, because there simply can't be any rational argument . . . against it." Um no, I assume that, unlike people like Scott Lemieux, there are enough mature adults in the Obama camp who will make a rational mature decision on this issue. It so happens that the signals I am seeing are that the decision they seem to be approaching is a very bad one that is NOT directed at unifying the Party. I think that would be wrong. I think party unity is the most important criteria now. Apparently Scott Lemieux does not care about the unity issue. Or perhaps Scott Lemieux thinks Ted Kennedy's statement was helpful and unifying. On that, we would disagree.

More . . .

If ever you wanted to see how clueless the Beltway Gasbags are, watching them discuss the Presidential election and potential VP choices today will convince you. They have no clue about the depth of the commitment of Clinton supporters to Hillary Clinton. They live in their DC bubble and have no idea what happens outside of it.

On the Unity ticket issue, I recommend Jerome Armstrong's fine post on the subject.

This is an Open Thread.[ More...]

I just got an email extremely upset about the Amy Poehler sketch on Saturday Night Live tonight. It's not on here for another half hour. Anyone see it?

If SNL isn't on yet in your neck of the woods, here's Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame Wilson's ad for Hillary that is airing in Oregon.

Comments now closed.

In arguing that Barack Obama is a shoo-in in November, Frank Rich makes a strange case:

[T]his isn’t 2004, and the fixation on that one demographic in the Clinton-Obama contest has obscured the big picture. The rise in black voters and young voters of all races in Democratic primaries is re-weighting the electorate. Look, for instance, at Ohio, the crucial swing state that Mr. Kerry lost by 119,000 votes four years ago. . . . Voters under 30 (up by some 245,000 voters) accounted for 16 percent, up from 9 in 2004. Those younger Ohio voters even showed up in larger numbers than the perennially reliable over-65 crowd.

If Rich had dug a little deeper into the exit poll numbers, he might have realized that Hillary Clinton split white voters 18-29 with Obama in Ohio. He might have learned that Clinton swamped Obama among white voters in every other age group. He might have learned that in Pennsylvania, Clinton won white voters 18-29 by 52-48. He might have learned that in Florida, Clinton won non-blacks 18-29 by 47-36. And so on. [More...]

Susie Madrak on Matt Stoller:

Obama’s now vacuumed up the majority of the grassroots donors, is discouraging his donors from giving to anyone else, and there’s no point whatsoever to placating the netroots. I can’t believe Stoller doesn’t get that. They don’t need us, and we will have no influence whatsoever in an Obama administration. Those of you who dream of a new progressive netroots Utopia will have a rather rude awakening, I think. (Not that this makes some huge difference in my own life - I’ve never thought bloggers were anywhere near as influential as they like to think.)

Yep. It's not that the Netroots sold out. It's that they got nothing on issues, or anything else, in exchange for their unstinting support of Barack Obama. The whole thing has been extremely strange.

Yep, again I just speak for me.