This week's posts...March 5: All Done[ post a reply ] Vermont Democrats, you are the odd men and women out. As predicted, you voted for Barack Obama. Nobody else did. Well, millions of others did. It's just that nowhere else were they a majority. In Rhode Island, Ohio, and Texas, your fellow Democrats chose Hillary Clinton. Narrowly in Texas, but by wide margins in the other two states. So despite your best efforts, the race continues, with a new twist or two. Obama still leads Clinton in delegates. But now, for the moment, she has…well, if not exactly momentum, at least energy. And he has a big problem, not simply because he lost but because of how and when he lost. He lost at the end. Last Friday, Obama was ahead in Texas, just about tied in Ohio, and leading in the national polls. On Tuesday, he lost Texas, got whumped in Ohio, and was tied with Clinton in the nationwide Gallup tracking survey, having dropped eight percentage points in four days. What happened? Well, maybe that Clinton commercial about how she would (and, by implication, he wouldn't) know what to do if a national security emergency hit at 3 AM had some impact. But that ad was shown only in Texas. It couldn't account for Clinton's 54-44 percent win in Ohio. What hurt Obama there was his mishandling of the story about one of his advisors supposedly telling Canadian officials not to take seriously Obama's attacks on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a treaty the typical Ohioan (perhaps incorrectly) blames for the loss of some 300,000 factory jobs in that state since the new century began. Obama and his aides first denied that any such meeting had taken place. It had. Then they claimed that the advisor had been misquoted. Perhaps he had. But for the moment, the candidate who had presented himself as above engaging in politics as usual seemed to be playing politics as usual, and rather ineptly. In other words, the question "Is this guy really ready for prime time?" has not conclusively been answered in the affirmative. But—thanks in part to you Vermont Democrats—he still has roughly 100 more convention delegates than Clinton. To convince enough of the unpledged delegates to support her, Clinton is going to have to win convincingly someplace else, notably in Pennsylvania on April 22. Nine other states have not yet chosen their delegates. The next contests are the Wyoming caucuses this Saturday and the Mississippi primary next Tuesday. As for Vermont, it was not close. Obama won by 62-to-38 percent. A few folks opted for ex-contenders John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich, whose names remained on the ballot. (These are unofficial results; official results will be available next Tuesday at 11 AM at the Secretary of State's office and on its web site at http://www.sec.state.vt.us/). That should give Obama at least 10 of the state's 15 pledged delegates, and he already has most of the unpledged "super" delegates from Vermont. As usual when a candidate wins that big, Obama won just about everywhere and among just about all constituencies, according to the exit polls. Also winning pretty much everywhere was Sen. John McCain, now over the top in pledged delegates, and therefore the Republican nominee. Mike Hucakbee came in a distant second and late Tuesday evening withdrew from the race. Ron Paul came in a more distant third and is concentrating on holding onto his seat in Congress. And that, as someone once said, is all he wrote. Got an opinion?Log in and post a reply.
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