Hillary's gracelessness then

Here's a link to the Register's editorial, written Wednesday and printed on Thursday, about Hillary's incredibly graceless performance on Tuesday night. Even though she seems to have recovered somewhat with her concession/whatever speech today, I think that tone-deaf performance took her out of any possibility of getting the vice presidential nomination. And that's a good thing. The Clintons are incredibly solipsistic, to the point that I seriously believe they see other people only as tools or means for them to achieve their ambitions. It would probably be fun, as a journalist, to watch the dysfunctional mess an Obama presidency would be with a Clinton as vice president, scheming and working independently all the time. And perhaps, if you figure a government that can't get anything done is a good thing, since most of the things such and administration would want to do would be terribly harmful to the country and to freedom, that would be a good thing. But it would be somewhat disheartening to watch at the same time.

Live-blogging Hillary's speech

I've been live-blogging Hillary's concession/endorsement/whatever speech over at the Register's Horserace'08 election blog. Bottom line: She went on too long, but she did what she had to do, endorsing Barack semi-persuasively and maintaining her own viability for 2012, 2016 -- or August. I did offer some snarky comments along the way. Check it out if you like.

Democratic rifts

Here's the editorial the Register ran after last week's primaries, and I think it holds up pretty well after Hillary's expected win in West Virginia today. I'm not persuaded that the long primary has harmed the Democrats as much as some believe, but it has exposed interesting rifts. Wellesley-Yale Hillary has become Ms. Blue Collar, and has actually mentioned her dominance among white primary voters. Hard to say if Barack can win them back in a general election. But if the supers put Hillary in, will African-Americans, the Dems' most loyal constituency, feel betrayed?

Not so different

Here's a link to the column I wrote last week for Antiwar.com, comparing and contrasting the three remaining possible candidates for president on the Iraq war and foreign policy. I concluded that even though their rhetoric is rather different, when you get to likely policies they aren't all that different. Obama will face the fact that even a prompt withdrawal will take more than a year just to get all the people and equipment out, and might face a situation that makes him want to delay withdrawal a while. McCain, obviously more militaristic, will face the prospect of the military being thoroughly "hollowed-out" if he stays in Iraq much longer. Likewise Hillary.

The striking thing is that when it comes to what the political scientists call Grand Strategy there's not more than a dime's worth of difference among them. They all believe the U.S. should play a grandiose role in the world at large. Even Barack does, though he calculated that Iraq was a mistake at the outset, which was not all that tough to do.

Obama wins in South Carolina

Here's the post I did for the Registers Horserace'08 blog on Saturday night after Barack Obama trounced Hillary Clinton, getting an absolute majority. I also have to say that listening to his victory speech almost made me appreciate Obama as an orator, which quite frankly had eluded me until then. But his speech had a cadence and rythm, a sense of when to pause and when to continue, that almost made one believe that this was the guy to bring about change (although the nature of the change was still kinda vague.

Andrew Sullivan, who confesses that he's rather enchanted with Barack, wrote that he had listened to dozens of Obama speeches, and this was the best he's heard. Well, maybe that's it, I found myself somewhat impressed by the best. But still only somewhat impressed. I think most pundits have pretty low standards for public speaking. Barack is good, but he's not that good.

I do think it's interesting that Ted Kennedy has endorsed Obama, along with Caroline. It suggests sttrongly that plenty of Democrats are fed up with Billary, and that there is a Democratic tradition that preceded the Clintons that they'd like to preserve. Fascinating that so many Demcrats and liberals are letting loose on the Clintons (Frank Rich at the NYT is almost apoplectic, though that's hardly untypical) now that they've seen Bubba exercising his campaign skills on a Democrat instead of on Republicans

The race is on

Here's a link to the piece I did for the Register's Sunday Commentary section today on the presidential race. On the Democratic side, in the wake of Iowa Hillary is looking much less inevitable, while Huckabee's win has put the Republican race into a certain amount of confusion, although Giuliani's strategy of focusing on Florida and beyond just might work. Having been in New Hampshire for a couple of days, I expect Obama to win here, and McCain on the Republican side. I expect Ron Paul to do better here than the 10 percent he pulled in Iowa, but the race is really up in the air. Local TV stations report that their polls show 39 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans are either undecided or open to changing their minds between now and Tuesday. Plus 40 percent of New Hampshire voters are registered Independent and they can vote in either primary.