harikari.com

Barack Hussein Obama is the Democratic candidate for the President of the United States of America.

Jonathan Schwarz thought about that and put up a post on This Modern World:

It’s September 12, 2001. You’re sitting in front of a TV, watching footage of the World Trade Center collapse over and over and over again.

All of a sudden, someone from seven years in the future walks out of a tiny temporal vortex, and tells you: George W. Bush is going to fuck this up so badly that in 2008, the United States of America will likely elect as president a black man whose middle name is Hussein and whose father was Muslim. Oh, and he also admits he’s used cocaine.

I think it would have been easier to convince me of the reality of time travel. “No, no, I believe you really are from the future. But the other stuff, that’s CRAZY.”

Of course Hillary Clinton hasn’t admitted to herself that she’s so far behind now that, even if she is granted her wish to have the “disputed” delegates from Florida and Michigan counted in her favor, she won’t be able to overcome her deficit in both pledged delegates and the popular vote in the remaining primaries.  Phil Singer, one of her own campaign spokesmen, estimates that even in a best-case scenario, she’d still be about 100 delegates behind. 

Clinton will fight on regardless.  She says she’s “staying in this race until there is a nominee,” and has decided to loan another $6,000,000 of her own money to her campaign fund.

So what are going to see from now until the nomination that’s already been decided is decided?  Garbage time.

Yes… Hillary is like a player in an NBA series that is already down three games and is eleven points behind with 14.8 seconds to go.  Intentional fouls are ugly things, but that’s what we’re going to have to watch for the next few weeks.  Obama will fend them off and shoot his free throws in the remaining contests.  If he misses a shot here and there, Hillary might close the gap a little bit, but she’s not going to win.

Hillary will probably continue to hack away at Obama and attempt to prove to the superdelegates that she, in spite of what we voters have decided, is the better candidate for president. 

She’s not the better candidate, but she could be a better opponent.  

All she has to do is look at the bigger picture.  She’s a Democrat and the real battle ahead is with the Republicans.  She could choose to focus her attacks on John McCain while she runs out the clock on her campaign.  She could explain why it would be terribly wrong to vote for a man that wants to appoint more Supreme Court justices like Roberts and Alito; that it’s a bad idea to vote for a man that doesn’t have a plan to end the war in Iraq; that voting for a man who wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent will lead to larger budget deficits and greater income inequality; and that voting for a man that thinks free markets will solve all are problems will not get us on the pat the universal healthcare.

We’ll soon find out how she chooses to play the game.

On the campaign trail in Pennysylvania yesterday, Obama said:  “Either Democrat would be better than John McCain, and all three of us would be better than George Bush.”

Clinton, now in perpetual attack mode, addressed her supporters with this response:  “We need a nominee who will take on John McCain, not cheer on John McCain.”

Cheer on?

Bush will in all likelihood be tagged with “Worst President Ever,” so saying McCain would be better than him is hardly a cheer, it’s more like a backhanded compliment. Clinton had to recognize it as such but she’s desperate, so she’ll take anything Obama says and twist it around to suit her purposes.

Since becoming the nominee, McCain has learned to campaign like a true Republican – with the expected rigt-wing red baiting.  You can waste your time reading his remarks in the story link, or you can read a good opinion piece about right-wing red baiting here.