Barack Obama Elected President!

[Southofnowhere]

Barney is Republican so he's not allowed but i would rather hear him talk that his master!LOL

[DevotedToAMC]

See we agree again

[Roman]

Me too.

[Roman]

I can't stop laughing.

From Newsweek:

Popular Vote Poison

How Hillary's latest math hurts the party.

May 21, 2008 | Updated: 3:31 p.m. ET May 21, 2008

Give credit where it's due: Hillary Clinton has shown grit and determination in finishing out the race. She has proved herself a strong campaigner. And in the week since West Virginia, she has stopped the cheap shots that had marred her campaign this year.

But Clinton has continued with one claim that could have a pernicious effect on the Democrats' chances in November. While she knows that the nomination is determined by delegates, Hillary insists on saying at every opportunity that she is winning the popular vote. And she has now taken to touting the new HBO movie "Recount," which chronicles the Florida fiasco of eight years ago. Everyone can agree that the primary calendar needs reform. But popular-vote pandering is poison for Democrats. For a party scarred by the experience of 2000, when Al Gore received 500,000 more popular votes than George W. Bush but lost the presidency, this argument is sure to make it harder to unite and put bitter feelings aside.

Oh, and it's not true.

Let me go through the numbers without making your head spin.

After Kentucky and Oregon, Obama has an official popular vote lead of 449,486.

This does not include Iowa (where Obama first broke from the pack), Nevada (where Hillary won the popular vote narrowly), Maine (where Obama won easily) or Washington state (another strong Obama state). Why? Because these caucus states don't officially report their popular votes. But if we're going to truly count all the votes, official and nonofficial, as Hillary advocates, you can't very well not include caucus states.

Adding in the unofficial tally from caucus states, as estimated by realclearpolitics.com based on official caucus turnout and the number of local delegates selected at the precinct level, that gives Obama a lead of 559,708.

Now we come to Florida and Michigan, whose popular votes Hillary says should be counted. The argument for counting them is no better than for counting the caucus states (and maybe worse, considering that these states violated party rules by moving their primaries up on the calendar, and no one campaigned there). But for the sake of argument let's count 'em. That gives Hillary a lead of 63,373.

HILLARY WINS POPULAR VOTE!

Not so fast. If the Democratic National Committee completes its expected settlement on May 31, Florida and Michigan will each get half of their votes counted. Translated to popular votes, that would subtract about 325,000 votes from Hillary, putting Obama back into the lead.

Beyond not being official numbers, there's another problem with counting Michigan in these totals. Obama wasn't on the ballot there. You can say this was his own choice, but that doesn't change the fact that had he been on the Michigan ballot he would have received a lot of popular votes. How many?

Try 238,168. That's the number of Michiganders who voted for "uncommitted." Were they possibly genuinely abstaining? Maybe a few hundred of them at most. The rest were clearly Obama supporters who launched a grass-roots campaign. Everyone in Michigan knew on January 15 that a vote for "uncommitted" was a vote for Obama.

That means that by a generous definition of popular votes (and remember, Clinton wants to enfranchise as many people as possible in her count), Obama leads by about 166,000 votes.

With a big win in Puerto Rico, Clinton could possibly erase that margin (plus several thousand more that Obama is expected to net in Montana and South Dakota). She could then proclaim that with the help of Puerto Rican voters who cannot vote in a general election, she is the popular vote winner.

The shorthand many Clinton supporters are already taking into the summer is that she won the popular vote but had the nomination "taken away" (as Joy Behar said on "The View") by a man.

What a helpful message for uniting the Democratic Party.

If the Obama people have any sense, they will demand in their negotiations with the Clintonites that Hillary cease and desist in her specious claim to have won the most popular votes.

Given that more than 35 million voters took part in the Democratic primaries and caucuses, the math games on both sides look awfully silly. Everyone should agree to call it a tie.

© 2008

[DevotedToAMC]

Me three...and probably me five million plus people

[Roman]

I mean, that article is hilarious.

[Roman]

And you know something?

She keeps saying how every vote should count......

Yet she wants the SDs to overturn the votes and go against the will of the people to give her the nomination.

How many faces can she talk out the side of?

[Wales2004]

If you didn't catch it, a clip will probably be posted tomorrow. He essentially ragged on her for comparing her selfish desire to some great noble cause and mentioned how she brought up the 2000 election, some election in Zimbabwe, civil rights and some other things. Oh and he brought up Terry McAuliffe's book and some reference to it about 2004 and something to the effect of how destructive not following party rules would be. But that was then.

[DevotedToAMC]

She is talking about each vote in MI and FL....if they seat those delegates, she is ahead and would be deserving of the rest of the delegates. If they are not seated, at least let the votes of the people count so she would be ahead in the popular vote and therefore should be awarded the rest of the SDs

[Roman]

I'm looking at it right now.

She has just.........man.

I have no words.

She truly thinks we have forgotten everything she agreed with. She's starting to really sound like the !@#$%^&*] whose currently in the WH.

[DevotedToAMC]

It is bad of her to associate with Terry McAuliffe. I think he cost Howard Dean the nomination in 2004 and Dean should have been the nominee, not John Kerry

[Roman]

I had also started to warm up alittle to the notion of them being on the ticket.

No more.

I don't want her anywhere near him and his run for the WH. She has ruined that for me from here on out.

[DevotedToAMC]

She would bring in many votes on the ticket with getting him the Hispanic, Asian, senior citizens, blue collar workers, more women, and some Independents and young voters...she attracts more people than the other possibilities for VP

Here is an article from the politics board where I post about an Obama/Clinton ticket:

After PA, Obama Should Beg Clinton to Be His Running Mate

Like it or not, Barack Obama should beseech Hillary Clinton to be his vice presidential running mate, because he can barely close the deal with Democrats without her on his team. And let's be honest: without stronger party support for his candidacy, many Democrats would question his nomination's legitimacy.

However, Hillary now has no realistic possibility of heading the Democratic ticket, as her Pennsylvania "win" was too small, too diminished from the 20-point edge she held six weeks ago in the Keystone state. It was simply too little, too late by any objective measure.

(And her fundraising lags far behind his campaign coffers. See the most current fundraising statistics for Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton .)

Hillary is the working-class ying to Barack's college-educated yang, and the two halves make one whole Democratic party in 2008. And it's looking increasingly like neither can make to the White House without the other. As my About.com Conservatives counterpart correctly observes, "McCain is making in-roads in turf normally claimed by Democrats."

That, of course, is due to two factors in Pennsylvania:

Obama's wrong-headed remarks that working class folks resort to religion and guns as paranoid medicine to bitterly soothe their economic woes; and

Using every divisive political tactic and trick in the playbook, Hill and Bill have triangulated, aggravated and separated enough blue-collar workers, senior citizens and older white women from Obama's message to ensure that he can't politically survive without them.

Clinton: Bullying and Whining to Diminished Victory

Reminiscent of Karl Rove's campaign strategies, the Clinton's bully behavior in Pennsylvania has again been been replete with fear-mongering, whining, smear-tactic robocalls, trash-talking, and and their trademark self-pity. The New York Times observes today in The Low Road to Victory :

"It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

"If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race...

"Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead."

Obama: Offending His Way to Wider Loss

While Pennsylvania is the perfect storm of conditions for Clinton victory, Barack Obama made matters far worse for his cause by uttering behind closed doors to wealthy supporters in sophisticated San Francisco:

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them...

" And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

These callous remarks are a permanent problem for the Obama campaign. His words convey an essential lack of empathy for white working-class woes, as well as a shallow understanding of the role of religion in the personal lives of the faithful.

In short, Barack Obama, a brilliant, coolly sophisticated, Ivy-League educated, urban-raised black man, has little in common with the white, blue-collar Americans who live in small town America. He knows. They know it. And John McCain knows it.

Hillary Clinton as vice presidential running mate is the obvious antidote to this, Barack Obama's most glaring and painful electoral weakness. And it's becoming clear that it may be his only victorious pathway to the White House.

Obama Arguments Against VP Clinton: Deal with It!

I can just hear the Obama team arguments against Sen. Clinton as Vice President: She's too divisive. She takes too much money from too many lobbyists. She's too controlling and pushy. Then there's the Bill baggage: scene-stealing, whiny, and far too uncontrollable.

To which I respectfully respond to Sen Obama and staff: Deal with it. And get over yourself. You're not perfect either. And in Pennsylvania, we finally realized that alone, you, too, aren't the whole package.

After the revealing and important debacle of the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, Barack Obama should beg Hillary Clinton to be his vice presidential running mate.

For the sake of the Democratic party. For the sake of the country.

If partnering with Hillary Clinton involves eating some crow coupled with humble pie, so be it. All the better character-building preparation for being President of the United States.

[Roman]

Nowhere near the ticket.

So you can post that same article for the third time if you want.

[DevotedToAMC]

Did I already post it? Not sure if I did or not

She makes good points on why it is a good idea for them to run together...and a lot of people in the party want them as the ticket