Letter From The Left Coast: Has Anyone Told Hillary She's Down and Out?

As the Democratic race enters its final furlong, Ian Bowater wonders why the Republicans still can't agree on McCain

True to form my last campaign prediction failed miserably. Despite being thrashed like a cheap rental car last Tuesday, Hillary is still in the race. Super Delegates are leaving in droves. But there is some suspicion in certain quarters that Obama is only picking up secretly pledged Super D’s and there are still some up for grabs. Where? Tell me where, fer crissakes! TIME magazine has already declared him the nominee. Most cable news pundits called it on Tuesday night only to wake up Wednesday to find she was still there, like a bad headache that won’t go away.

There are several polls still out there that have Clinton beating McCain more handily than Obama. Interestingly, both prospective opponents beat the very senior senator for Arizona in hypothetical match-ups. The admiral’s son has had another stormy week. He is still losing 30% of the Republican vote to guys who left the race back in March. The week culminated with the specter of a third party candidate looming. Actually, it’s really a fourth party candidate. Has anybody heard anything of Ralph Nader lately? I mean anything!!

Bob Barr, the former Georgia Republican congressman, announced his candidacy today. He is running as a Libertarian. For those who don’t know any American Libertarians, they are usually grumpy old fascists with a bit of character. You know “ real characters”, or bigots over sixty. Barr is appealing to youth vote. He is only fifty-nine. He appears to be running on the “it’s the economy stupid” ticket that worked for the first Clinton regime. "The government has run amok fiscally," he said at a press conference.

There was also a whiff of the Reagan “government off your backs” tendency when Barr added, "As the American people see their standard of living falling, the standard of government keeps going up."  Not quite what he meant. Barr has apparently vowed to make sure the standard of government doesn’t go up. So he is very much in the George W. Bush mold. It sounds like a winning trifecta.

As Congressman Barr, he was the scourge of the Clintons in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He was all for pressing the perjury charge. But he was more interested in inveighing against the moral turpitude of the Bill’s juvenile sexcapades.  So, as steamy night follows daytime dalliance, it’s likely that some campaign aide, PR girl or, being from Georgia, a sister or first cousin will crawl out of the woodwork to tell us how well he polls. We will see. I hope he gets the Libertarian nomination. It will be entertaining to say the least. But what a pity there isn’t a Libertine candidate in the race this year.

The actual campaign politics have entered their dog days. Policy went out of the window months ago. McCain came up with a gasoline tax break for the summer. Hillary went one better and demonstrated how to pay for it. Obama thought it was a gimmick and had nothing to do with it. Someone should have pointed out that none of them could do anything about it, since they were only running for President. The summer will be long gone before any of them gets elected.

There’s apparently nothing left to say. Hillary, in her victory speech, offered sympathy to the victims of the Burma cyclone. Barack spoke first gave another eloquent stream of verbal diarrhea then thought, “Damn! I forgot to mention Burma.”  The China earthquake will offer a moral dilemma to the victors on Tuesday night. Hillary and Obama will call for more airdrops of food aid. McCain will probably call for carpet-bombing.

We are left parsing the tyranny of words. In an off-the-cuff press conference, McCain seemed implied that Obama was all for Hammas. He probably meant hummus. Barack flashed back saying McCain “had lost his bearings”. This was seen as a huge gaffe, an ageist comment, implying McCain is senile. The Obama people were outraged that someone could turn their words on them. Just like they did to Bill Clinton in South Carolina, way back when what seems like years ago. Hillary Clinton speaks about her support her hard working voters and her Wal-Mart democrats. We are told these are all code words for “white”. Apparently there are no political demographics anymore. The Jewish vote, the Black vote, the rural vote, the urban vote are all gone. Race has been injected into the race by various elites who have never suffered any discrimination or prejudice let alone oppression. Words are cheap until they are imbued with costly meanings in a “gotcha-style” campaign devoid of real issues.

Finally, Ted Kennedy staggered back into the limelight, long after his endorsement did so much to help Obama get thrashed in Massachusetts. Old Squarehead tried to drive Hillary’s campaign off the proverbial Chappaquidick Bridge by saying; she was not worthy of being V.P. on an Obama presidential ticket. When the party is crying out for unity, they should hardly look to the man who refused shake Jimmy Carter’s on the platform at the 1980 convention. He ought to be ashamed of himself. But then shame is a foreign country to the surviving crop of Kennedys

And so… we move on. Tuesday, it’s West Virginia. Bill and Hillary are chasing the moonshine vote. Yee-haw!