New Orleans This is all becoming wild!
Obama took three states yesterday by surprising margins, including the battleground of Washington and Louisiana where I got to vote and therefore raise my voice. Our family of four seems to have somehow managed to vote for three different candidates on the Democratic side, which isn’t easy to do anymore.
Of course even in this era of modern, high speed technology and instant communication and information, we now know that one answer to the question of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” may be that they are several weeks behind the news. Somehow they voted overwhelmingly yesterday for Huckabee over McCain, even though his current participation is at best quixotic and made mathematically impossible with the virtual concession of the nomination on the Republican side to McCain with the withdrawal of Mitt Romney.
But, besides all of that, I am carefully following the slipping, sliding, and spinning around these issues of delegate counting and super-delegates, and today piled even more scorn on both of these topics. To wit:
* In the Times an impassioned plea and argument by the delegate manager for Mondale that super delegates should remain uncommitted and have an obligation flowing from the compromises that created their status to remain uncommitted and then follow the will of the people who have voted.
* Senator Obama seems to have come out favoring pledging super delegates based on the results of the contests in their states. Senator Clinton (currently “ahead” on super delegates) disagrees of course but says that she would love to have Senators Kennedy and Kerry support her if this evolves, and may have had more to say but her tongue was so firmly in her cheek that the words were garbled.
* The Public Editor for the Times spent his whole space trying to defend why the Times was such an outlier in counting the delegates, but so much of the argument seemed to be little more than the proposition that “the Times knows best” that it was hard to read all the way through. He did of course make the argument that contrary to how it might appear (as I stated yesterday), none of this had anything to do with the editorial preference of the paper for Hillary.
Bring it on!
