Moonage Political Webdream

First, she lost this one:

Now, a lot’s being said about that one, but I think it’s over-rated as far as the average voter goes.  He’s popular in Boston, but that’s about it.  The only thing it does show is a crack in the Clinton “establishment”.   Bill & Ted go back a long way, I’m kinda surprised Ted would publicly diss the Clintons in a primary.  Bad judgment on his part.  Experienced politicians usually don’t create rifts within their own party by taking sides during a primary.  They can help quietly and let the word out without doing a lot of in-party damage.  However, when they go this public, it leaves a LONG history.  Ted better hope Barack wins or any agenda he has for the next eight years is toast.  At his age, that’s probably permanent.

However, the endorsement Hillary seems to be losing that DOES matter comes in the form of this pic from Collegehumor.com.

Namely, she got trounced in South Carolina leading right into Super Tuesday.  Now, without going into a ton of research into exit polls and the like, my basic assumption that makes South Carolina different than, say, Nevada, is the minority population.  Namely, the minority population that identifies with the guy that beat her.  Some people were implying Obama wasn’t “black enough” to appeal en masse with the African-American voter, but I think Hillary’s a little too white to offset the implied whiteness of Barack.  Where this gets touchy for Hillary is next Tuesday.  Namely:

 

1,059 delegates are at stake in states that have more than 10% African-American voters.  I use this as the criteria because otherwise, most serious candidates will garner somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% of the vote regardless of anything else.  A 10% block of votes will swing that election.  In South Carolina, that block came in at about 30%.  Obama won with about 47% of the delegates.  Needless to say, the math sure looks obvious.  Using that same math for 2/5, it looks tough for Hillary.  It’s not enough votes to seal up the primary, since Hillary’s leading at the moment, but it sure swings the momentum to Barack in a major way going into the last few remaining big delegate states the following couple of weeks.  A few of those have very large African-American blocks as well.  So, that pic of Hillary and the little girl just sort of struck me as being totally iconic to the situation Hillary’s in. 

The bigger problem for Hillary that I can see is I don’t have a clue what she can do to overcome the unfair advantage that familiarity with a candidate based on purely non-political issues presents.  Maybe I’m wrong, and I hope I am, but I really don’t expect this race to become anything more than a one issue race that Hillary and Edwards will not be allowed to debate.

Technorati Tags: 2008 Presidential Race, barack obama, Fun with Numbers, hillary clinton, john-edwards, Political Correctness, Racism

Tags: 2008 Presidential Race, barack obama, Fun with Numbers, hillary clinton, john-edwards, Political Correctness, Racism

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