primary notes (hey, jacob's RI vote matters after all!): updated throughout the day
21:34 classy concession speech from huckabee (though i agree with keith olbermann that the "liberty or death" note was odd). mitt romney, that's how you should have rolled. in other news, the clinton campaign's nastiness is depressing the missus, who's flipped over to uefa cup coverage.
20:54 now the msnbc table (including rachel maddow!) is gnashing its teeth over fearmongering in the hillary ad. i'm...inclined to agree with fox on this one; the ad doesn't bother me. also, that matchbox twenty song will not get out of my head, so thanks, tables.
20:32 new rule for lazy commentators: if you say "texas two-step" on air, you have to donate $5,000 to charity.
20:22 cnn reports obama 58% / clinton 41% thus far in texas, and that there has been an unusually high voter turnout. today or altogether? it should be noted that texans were casting votes in this primary before i was born.
20:08 breaking on fox news: hillary's "3am" ad plays on voters' fear of The Terrorists, so she...might be awesome from a conservative standpoint. the round table loves her and hates itself for a moment.
19:56 reuters makes a first call: obama and mccain in
19:48 breaking on fox news: a reporter "embedded with" bill clinton reports that he reports that there are no texas caucus shenanigans, despite what you might have heard! in vaguely related news, i predict that when bill clinton dies, fox news will bury a reporter with his corpse, like a pharaoh's manservant.
19:00 the missus flees to the gym, muttering about needing distraction. the vivacity of this season's political coverage gets to be too much even for him, which is kind of frightening.
17:56 npr's primary voter video interview stills remind me more than a little of the onion's "what do you think?" feature. interestingly, answers to the sample question i linked there (re: the killing of captain america) could all work as primary voter interview responses.
14:04 hey, it's postsecret for the politically inclined! i dream of barack and i dream of hillary collect "real dreams people have had about the political candidate[s]." the webmasters report that "[d]ue to curiosity and demand," they're going to start accepting dreams of john mccain. no word on cindy, which is fine: the irises of her eyes are the same color as her hair. she terrifies me.
13:00 according to (family ties writer) gary david goldberg, alex p. keaton would have a man-crush on obama, too.
I think that Alex might just be ready to take a chance. I can picture him stepping into the voting booth, closing the curtain behind him, taking a deep breath and then for the first time in his life putting his hand up to the Democratic Party lever. He’d touch it tentatively, trying to get comfortable. Take his hand off. Put it back. He’d grasp the lever firmly. Squeeze it. And as he was about to pull, we FADE OUT.i realize that post is twelve hours old, but i had a massive poster of michael j. fox behind my door when i was nine. i need to keep tabs on rivals for his affection.
11:18 i only realized a few hours ago that the addition of today's republican delegates would put mccain over the top once and for all. bad day for formerly-heavy h! just now, UPI reported new poll results:
Among Republicans, if presumptive nominee U.S. Sen. John McCain,. R-Ariz., gets the GOP presidential nod, 17 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents said they'd like to see former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on the ticket as vice president.(almost) no one hearts huckabee.
09:15 joe (the missus) is beginning the first of the dozens of hillary gripes i expect to hear today. in mentioning her experience and mccain's, sez he, she is clearly softening obama up so that, if he beats her, he will then lose the general election and she can run again in four years. i thought i was the cynical half of this couple.
09:00 joe scarborough is replaying (part of) hillary's satellite cameo from last night's daily show. her delivery is far better than it was with amy pohler on saturday night live this weekend.
Actually, I don't think she did that badly on SNL, but sounded awful on The Daily Show. It may be the satellite. Or it may be that she had her lines down on SNL, with no such aid during the interview.
ReplyDelete--
All of this, I'm aware, feeds into the perception that Hillary is a script-reading robot. This, of course, is totally unfair. If you think that Obama's speeches are not focus-grouped and gamed-out to death by his people, you'd better think again; there may be ad-lib variances built in, but he knows what he's doing. Thus: I don't know why Hillary suffers from the "stay on message" tag, though. Maybe it's because Bill did it to no end, maybe it's the lingering stigma of "triangulation." I don't know.
In re Huckabee: you know, I never thought I'd kinda sorta like a Bible-thumping creationist preacher. But I find it nearly impossible to hate the man; in a neither-death-nor-Canada-are-options world, I'd pick Huckabee over Dubya in a heartbeat.
ReplyDeleteI mean, there are not a lot of people in the right wing who are actually funny, or even have so much as a minimal sense of humor about anything. All of them are wailing and hanging up black crepe because they kicked God out of the schools (or some such nonsense). But Huck can actually joke around (or, at least, deliver one). Case in point? His realization that superdelegates can't vote for him about halfway through his SNL cameo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT05g9mhVmg
But, then again, he wants to rewrite the Constitution so conform to the Bible. There are drawbacks, you know.
@tom1: i think the satellite feed was monkeying with the exchange. after watching the first six minutes of the video, i gotta say, i still like her there more than i did live this weekend. much more natural responses, once she could figure out what jon stewart was saying.
ReplyDelete@tom2: i can't say i'd pick huckabee over dubya. i detest many, many things about the current occupant, as garrison keillor would say, but the huckatron makes my ovaries hurt. a shame, as he is funny.
John McCain is (purported involvement in S&L stuff in the 90s, conservative leanings and Washington fucknuttery aside) a reasonably honorable guy.
ReplyDeleteBut, seriously: my high school commencement speech was better than his speech tonight. This is you. This is you after twenty some-odd years in the Senate. This is me passing out on the couch.
For real, John: take a few No-Doz an hour before any speech, just so we don't have to.
the most exciting part of going to the polls last night was the moment when i realized that my polling registration guy was also...my travel agent (who had heretofore been a disembodied voice on the phone). which led to a somewhat amusing conversation about whether i liked my london hotel room, and also that i would call him today about the honeymoon planning.
ReplyDeletemegan, on the other hand, was stuck behind a woman who a) didn't know if she was a democrat or republican, and b) wished to vote for multiple candidates.
Two choice quotes. From Andrew Sullivan (conservative and Obama-guy), earlier today: "Never, ever under-estimate the ability of the Democratic Party to screw it up."
ReplyDeleteAnd a Will Rogers line (no, not that one, which is also pretty good and timely): "Democrats never agree on anything. That's why they're Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans."
that's the thing - when i started feeling the barfy-disappointment in my gut last night, it wasn't (just) because hillary pulled up again. i (re)started worrying about whether or not she could beat mccain, and about how we're wasting precious time with infighting. then the media teases me with heds about a joint ticket, and - i just feel very batted about. my feelings as a liberal voter are our cats' spit-covered mousie.
ReplyDeleteThis post feels oddly unfinished... like you didn't have the heart to post about how we are eating each other for breakfast and we're blowing our one chance at the white house. Which I would understand. Yesterday was disheartening all around. Not that I even mind Hillary, but someone needs a clean win. If the Clintons try to broker this convention, my vote is they will destroy their legacy. And possibly our damn party.
ReplyDelete@Meg: ding ding ding! we flipped back to political coverage once texas had been declared for hillary, and i tried to post one last bit about how i need to remember that i'll campaign for the victor no matter what, and this shit shouldn't matter that much...but.
ReplyDeletein short, yes, i have blue state blue balls.
Of course, figuring out who won, after all of the primaries are done, is not obvious. Do you count votes, with each caucus participant being equal to a primary voter? Do you count delegates, which are apportioned in a really screwy way, based in part on past performances? And what about Michigan and Florida and --
ReplyDelete[political vapor lock]
RE: Alex P. Keaton...my best-friend-turned-chauvinist-archrival in grade school (really, it happened young) somehow modeled himself after Alex, which I picked upon and would call him "Alex P. Keaton" to try to get him to stop telling me boys were naturally smarter than girls. For some reason, this seemed really cutting in grad school. But he never stopped.
ReplyDeleteBut when I think of the young Republicans, he often comes to mind. Does that mean that Mallory is campaigning for...Clinton or Obama, though?
Primary coverage here has been weird - everyone was surprised when Hillary won TX and OH, and photos in the news have shifted 180, with Obama now looking glum and serious, and HIllary looking less tired than usual. When people ask me about it, though -- which happens as much here as in Germany -- I just tell them that I want an electable Democrat. Now, I add, that I want the infighting to be done with.