Here I sit, on Tuesday March 4, 2008, waiting for the election results to come in. I got a whole day to wait, perhaps 10 hours. So I figure I will do as I do and make some predictions.

The main race is on the Democrat side. It is doubtful there will be too much big news on the GOP side. In either Ohio or Texas, McCain, in true winner take all fashion, could clinch the nomination. One thing I think would be fairly interesting is if Huckabee, disregarding conventional wisdom all together, decided to stay in the race, or… and here’s an idea that might be interesting to discuss, what if he pulled a Lieberman, and withdrew from the GOP race to go on the ballot as an independent? We all know that Christian conservatives hate McCain because he is a person who is not in line with their reactionary cultural agenda, and when he makes overtures to their side, they sound insincere at best. We all know McCain, the inheritor of the Barry Goldwater seat, is a National Security type of Republican. He hasn’t made too much mention about gay marriage, abortion, or stem-cell research. But Huckabee is their man in this department. A good southern Baptist minister, he is truly a man of God, and therefore a good candidate for office for folks on the social-fascist side of the spectrum (in fact, nothing recommends him higher for the job: he need have zero foreign policy experience, for example. He only needs to throw God into every other sentence, profess Jesus as his own personal savior [which apparently doesn’t take anything away from the millions of other dupes who profess the same thing] and he is fit to be anointed the second coming of King David.)

I would love to see Huckabee create a christian fundamentalist Party which competes for the soul of the GOP, so we can get that nonsense out of the Republican Party and get them back to good sound Barry Goldwater principles. Or better yet, how about principles expressed by TR, who in my estimation was the last marginally good Republican President. That’s my dream scenario for the Republican Party: a split along social lines, where the legitimate Party expresses the notion that a social agenda based on a religious point of view has no place in the politics of a secular nation of Law (that is the law of Man, not God.) Will it happen? Probably not. Hopefully the christians just stay at home waiting for their rewards in the afterlife and let the rest of us alone for a while. That probably won’t happen either.

To the Democrats, however, I will say I am eagerly anticipating the results. Personally, I would like to have seen Clinton drop out of the race months ago. That warmonger should have been disqualified from service for her vote to support the war. But the fact is, it is unfortunate that there is no such law in this country, so we have to endure her. She is currently running neck and Neck with Obama in Texas and Ohio. She seems to have an edge in Rhode Island, and Obama will probably do well in rural Vermont. So I will predict a split: two and two for both Clinton and Obama. Clinton will pick up Ohio and Rhode Island, Obama will get Texas and Vermont.

The question then is about margins. I think Obama’s margin in VT will be sizable, where Clinton’s margin in RI won’t be very large. In this two contests, I give Obama between 18 and 24 points in VT, and Clinton between 8 and 13 points in RI. In Ohio, I give Clinton a much smaller margin, between 4 and 8 points, while in Texas, I think Obama may be between 10 and 13 points. With these margins, it is possible to predict that Obama will win the day (especially since he will likely take the cities in Texas, and the way their delegates are apportioned in Texas, the rural areas basically balance the couple of very large cities. Assuming Obama does well in the cities and ok in the countryside, he’ll have no problems pulling delegates out of Texas by the boatload,) and will net more delegates in total. He will therefore open his lead tonight.

There remains one question then: Will Clinton withdraw from the race? The answer, as if the pundits who talk about this stuff daily know very well, but like to raise the question anyway to fill the news cycle, is of course not. Obama’s winning streak will, I mean I should say, emphatically, WILL be broken tonight, and it will be marked that over the last month, his score will be 13 and 2. But you see, that two, or even if it was JUST Ohio, is enough to give Clinton a reason to stay in the race. I mean, she wants the nomination so bad that I can taste it. She will grasp at any reason to stay in the race, and will employ any tactic that she has available to do it. She summed up her argument earlier this week, when she said, “He [McCain] will put forth his lifetime of experience. I will put forth my lifetime of experience. Sen. Obama will put forth a speech he made in 2002.” She is clearly convinced that she and her prescriptions are precisely what is needed for this country. And so she will continue until there is no possible way she can hope to succeed in her bid for the Presidency. Then she might pull a Lieberman too.

But this raises an interesting argument. People are saying she should just get out of the race, that she is finished, and so forth. I wish I had a transcript of Joe Scarborough talking about this topic this morning on MSNBC. He said something like “Well, everyone says, ‘Let’s let the voters speak’…” As if he was complaining about it. But that brought an interesting thought to my mind: This process really demonstrates our country’s nominal commitment to democracy, doesn’t it? On the one hand, pundits use lines like “Well, let’s let the voters have their say.” and they sound disingenuous. It’s as if they say, “Well, I know what the campaign said a few days ago, but we’re not ready to give up yet, we have a lot of money, and we will continue to fight on, because a few people are still voting for us and still donating to the campaign, and if we give up now, the money dries up.” Even if they know they don’t have a shot in hell of actually winning the campaign. This is a very cynical view of someone who can see through the rhetoric to the substance of the argument. It is code to donors telling them to keep giving, and to activists to not give up. And it is really destructive.

But: Let’s consider the possibility that these people who say things like this are really sincere. What if Terry McCauliffe is really sincere about letting all voters have a say in the process? What if they really mean that they are committed to the process? It is possible that there is a genuine commitment to the notion of democratic selection of candidates among both Clinton and her supporters and Obama and his, and not just when they are losing either. Maybe having each vote counted is genuinely important; maybe the aggregation of the general will is truely important, more important than winning, and therefore worthy of supporting even if there is no chance of winning from such a process.

Here’s why the cynical approach is more correct. I am willing to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt. I am willing to concede that she is committed to democracy more than victory. And yet, she still doesn’t call for a national primary. If all votes were truly “one person, one vote”, as it should be in a real democracy, there wouldn’t be these rolling primaries. Clinton has her surrogates talk about counting every single vote, because she knows, VERY WELL (as any idiot who studies political science knows) that each vote cast today is entirely contingent on votes cast yesterday or those cast a month ago. Her commitment is not to democracy therefore, but to her winning. Her message couches her ambitions in democratic language, and relies on the ignorance of the people to buy it. She thinks she still has a chance to shear off enough votes to cause the elites of the Party to 1) continue to support her against an unknown and actually insurgent movement candidate, and more importantly, 2) to continue to support her campaign financially. If she was genuinely committed to democracy, regardless of the outcome of that process, she should have been getting her friends to schedule a national primary instead of adopting the rules of the game as they are, allowing a horse race to occur. If she was truly the best candidate on January 10, or March 5, or whenever the National Primary was scheduled, she would have been elected. Instead, she uses the rules of the game as it is to continue to try to probe at her opponent, and try to get that half-plus-one which guarantees nominations, but not elections. It is actually unimportant whether or not that will actually happen.

This is not to say that Obama wouldn’t be doing the same thing if he was in Clinton’s position. But I imagine that the pundits were correct, that if it was Clinton coming off an 11-state winning streak, she would have long ago said that her claim to inevitability was vindicated, and Obama would probably have dropped out long ago, or if he were still in the race, Clinton would have been calling his continued participation “destructive” to the Party, and etc, for continuing to fight against someone with such an impressive record. (Her campaign actually chooses to highlight a different double-standard in US politics, one which makes her the victim, while ignoring this double-standard, that Clinton, as the First Lady [heretofore a position only ever held by white women,] has all this experience in the national executive, and this has been her primary qualification for election.) The call to “count all the votes” is usually used by the loser who knows that they will probably lose but want to get as close as they can so they can try to de-legitimatize the process somehow, where as those who blow out their opponents rarely demand that the inconveniences of democratic process be endured for the sake of the process itself. Consider Gore’s defeat in 2000. People focus on Florida and said “Let ALL the votes count” or some variation of this. But his supporters, who proceeded to de-legitimatize Bush’s presidency before he could do it himself” neglect to look at any number of other states which Al Gore could have and should have won, which would have changed the outcome. They don’t say that Gore was ran a bad race; instead, Bush must have cheated, because the Supreme Court wouldn’t let “all the votes be counted.”

This is a common political tactic, and demonstrates that the commitment to democracy, as messy and inconvenient as it is, constantly espoused by the Clinton Campaign, is actually incredibly hollow. And if you want another empirical example, consider Clinton’s inevitability. Many of those who were independently analyzing polls before the elections actually began, like this article from the “Swamp” blog claimed that there was no doubt about it, Clinton was going to trounce Obama in the primaries, and then she was going to go on and fight the GOP on their grounds. Did she do anything to disabuse people of this notion? Did she say, “Well, bring on all comers, let’s let the voters speak?” No. Comments like this were absent from the record when she believed that she would beat Obama and others early and be fighting the GOP nominee by now. But, as we all know, a funny thing happened on the way to Iowa City. Some predicted caution.

Now, at the beginning of our third month, it turns out that the cautious analysis was more accurate, and Clinton is reduced to appealing to the democratic process, because her massive money raising machine and name recognition that she earned as First Lady (which also helped her get elected in New York in 2000) weren’t enough to clinch it for her the way she thought it should. Granted Scarborough acted inappropriately by whining about McCauliffe’s comments with regard to that appeal, but he put his finger tangentially on a very important topic. The problem is not, as he suggested, just the Clinton campaign is complaining and she should just get over it and withdraw instead of trying to play the process (which she will probably lose,) out. Instead, he should have highlighted how the appeal to democracy was hollow when it comes from someone who is obviously behind (if not in the process of losing the election.) Appealing to democracy is appropriate (contrary to the sense I got from the commentary on TV), but it is insincere when it comes from people who are such professional politicians (in the US sense of the word), who are using every tactic in their arsenal to try to get as close as they can so they can later turn around and de-legitimatize the process and try to get some scraps in return for their abandonment of the argument. As I wrote before, Clinton knows exactly what she is doing, and she knows exactly what her surrogates are saying. I would say she has the best message discipline on the Democrat side of US politics.

Good for her. If she is sincere about democracy, let her call for a national primary (which she probably would have won, by the way,) which would make every single vote to be cast be entirely contingent on the positions of the candidates, rather than based on votes cast before, and worse, the analysis of those votes by the corporate media. As it is, she benefits from a thoroughly undemocratic system, and either she needs to fix herself and take no benefit from it, or she needs to stop appealing to it, and start telling the truth about why she is really still in the campaign.

In sum:

Clinton wins Ohio and Rhode Island by closer margins than Obama wins Texas and Vermont and Obama wins the night in terms of delegates.

Most Serenely,
The Reverend
The Wizard of S
W. Doc Stodden