Florida’s Democratic primary was not sanctioned by the Democratic Party because they violated party rules by holding their primary too early. At first, the Clinton campaign was cool with this, but once it became clear that it needed to grab at straws to even remain in the primary fight, they started belly-aching about disenfranchisement. One of the sub-arguments is that the state’s Democrats were disenfranchised by the mean old state Republicans. Well, here is a video of the “fight” Florida’s Democratic leadership didn’t put up in terms of trying to abide by the rules:

You’ve got the smirking Democratic minority leader of the Florida state Senate winking broadly and kind of, sort of pretending to support a resolution purporting to oppose holding the primary too early. I think I heard that something like 3 of Florida’s Democrats actually opposed the move to hold early primaries. They deserve what they get.

For what it’s worth, here is a biography on Barack Obama published on a web site called Political Base. For some reason, I was a little vague on his time in the Illinois legislature; thinking he had only been there a couple of years before running for the U.S. Senate. Turns out, he was in the Illinois Senate from 1996 – 2004, before his current term as U.S. Senator. So, it looks like a good dozen years in politics. It’s not quite the 26 years McCain has been in D.C., but at least a healthy background in public service.

Obama’s background:
1979: Graduates from high school in Hawaii.
1979 – 1981: Occidental College, in L.A.
1981 – 1983: Transfers to and graduates from Columbia University, B.A. Pol. Science with an emphasis in foreign relations.
1983 – 1984: Editor at the international financial division for Business International Corporation
1985 – 1988: Church-based community organizer in Chicago “seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment.”
1988 – 1991: Harvard Law School; J.D. magna cum laude; President of the Harvard Law Review.
1992: Illinois Executive Director of Project Vote.
1993 – 1996: Practicing attorney with Miner, Barnhill & Galland. Begins teaching Constitutional Law at Univ. of Chicago Law School (1993 – 2004).
1996 – 2004: Illinois State Senator.
2004 – 2008: United States Senator for the State of Illinois.

And, just because I was curious –
McCain’s background:
1954: Graduates high school in Alexandria, VA.
1954 – 1958
: Follows his father and grandfather, both admirals, into the Navy; graduating from the Naval Academy in 1958 (894 out of 899).
1958 – 1966: Various naval assignments. He graduated flight school in 1960 and was then stationed on carriers in the Mediterranean and Caribbean “surviving two airplane crashes and a collision with some power lines.”
1966 – 1974: Assigned to combat in the Viet Nam War. In 1967, he was shot down over Hannoi in the course of his 23rd bombing mission. He was a prisoner of the North Vietnamese from October 1967 to March 1973.
1973 – 1977: Commanding officer of a training squadron in Florida.
1977 – 1981: Navy liaison to the United States Senate.
1981 – 1982: Vice President for Public Relations of Hensley & Co. (working for the father of his second wife, an Arizona beer baron and one of the state’s richest men.).
1982 – 1987: United States Representative for Arizona’s First Congressional District.
1987 – 2008: United States Senator for the State of Arizona.

The Washington Post has an article on Obama & McCain tangling on ethics reform. It looks like both of them wanted essentially the same things but they got sideways with each other when Obama wasn’t mindful of Senate customs about seniority and the like. McCain threw a punch and Obama threw an effective counter-punch, and that was pretty much that.

Deanna Martin, writing for the Courier Press, has an article on Indiana’s superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention. These folks will have a role in selecting the Democratic Presidential nominee. Indiana will have 13 of them, but only 12 are known at this point. I’m not sure how the 13th gets chosen.

There are 6 who are chosen by virtue of being Democratic members of Congress:
Evan Bayh – Declared support for Clinton early.

Pete Visclosky – (IN-01)

Joe Donnelly – (IN-02): Says he won’t decide until after Indiana’s primary. Indiana’s primary vote is part of the equation, but he’ll take other factors into consideration as well.

Andre Carson – (IN-07)

Brad Ellsworth – (IN-08): Says he’s inclined to let the voters of the 8th District make the decision.

Baron Hill – (IN-09)

There are 6 unelected superdelegates:

Joe Andrew – Former DNC chair, committed Clinton supporter.

Dan Parker – Indiana state party chairman, declared for Clinton

Bob Pastrick – Former East Chicago mayor (apparently not without scandal); has declared for Clinton

Phoebe Crane – DNC member out of Whitestown, “unwavering Clinton supporter.”

Connie Thurman – DNC member from Indianapolis, has declared for Obama.

Cordelia Lewis Burks – State party vice-chair, has declared for Obama.

The Huffington Post has a nice biographical summary for Indiana’s superdelegates.

DemFromCT has a run down of some of the ways in which John McCain is getting a pass. Some of the stuff is important, some not. Mostly, I wouldn’t feel terribly inclined to jump McCain on most of these, but my anecdotal sense is that the “hammer on Obama for trivial things” train is picking up speed; and, at the least, McCain needs to be held to the same standard. In a race of McCain v. Obama that focuses on policy ideas; Obama wins. It’s hard to excited about a continuation of the policies of the Bush administration, from which McCain has not indicated a departure in any significant way. In a competition of biography v. biography; the race gets closer, particularly if the scrutiny applied to Obama is stricter than that applied to McCain.

Among other things:

• McCain is very honored by the support of John Hagee (Hurricane Katrina is punishment for homosexuality, etc.);
• McCain, foreign policy power house, is unclear on the distinction between Shi’a and Sunni;
• McCain thinks there is “strong evidence” that vaccine preservatives cause autism — there isn’t.
• McCain is unsure of whether information about contraception helps stop HIV transmission.

Personally, I doubt that McCain actually holds a lot of the views of his wingnut supporters. But, because of the nature of the Republican coalition, he has to tap dance vigorously on these issues. But, if we’re going to spend a month or two trying to hold Obama personally responsible for what his minister says about foreign policy (I expect we’ll hear about the racial intolerance of his barber next), I figure it’s fair game to sweat McCain over the sillier ideas of his supporters. (As well as the far more significant Sunni/Shi’a/Iran/al-Qaeda statements he made on a number of occasions.)

Those opposed to Sen. Obama are digging pretty deep for dirt. They are trying to conjure up an issue about his status while at the University of Chicago. Follow this, if you can; (frankly, I’m having a hard time): the fact that you served as a law professor at the University of Chicago doesn’t mean you can say you were a law professor at the University of Chicago.

Lynn Sweet’s blog entry, linked above, makes much ado about “serving as law professor” and “holding the title” of law professor. If you have to split hairs that fine to try to raise doubts about a candidate, I’d say the candidate is in pretty good shape. Incidentally (or perhaps not so incidentally), Sweet doesn’t quote directly any of the supposedly “misleading” direct mailers, so it’s impossible to tell how or to what extent Obama’s direct mailer falls on the wrong side of the hair-split.

Most folks, including myself, don’t know or care about the finer points of academic titles. I know that many within academia care passionately about such things. Like Mr. Sayre said, “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.”

Steve Penhollow, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, tried to cover the Presidential campaign from a different angle. He tried to talk with members of the national media traveling with Sen. Clinton as she campaigned in Fort Wayne. Security around them was apparently as tight as that for the candidate. Unapproachable and a little cranky seemed to be the theme. I guess as Marshall McLuhan noted, “the medium is the message.”

Todd Beeton at MyDD has a good post up on the effects for Senator Clinton on the “kitchen sink” strategy she adopted just before the Ohio and Texas primaries. Basically, while she managed to drive down Obama’s positives a bit, her own positives just tanked.

I could be misremembering, but even though I’ve favored Obama over Clinton for a while now, I don’t think it was until the advent of the Kitchen Sink that she morphed from Worthy Opponent to The Enemy. Beeton and the folks he quotes suggest that she go back to emphasizing strengths and focus the hard hitting on McCain instead of her fellow party-member. I don’t really think she can win that way, but, then I don’t think she can win the kitchen-sink way either.

Benjamin Lanka, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, has an article about Indiana House Majority Leader, Russ Stilwell, campaigning for Barack Obama. Among other things, Stilwell supports Obama as a reaction to Senator Clinton’s history with NAFTA which Stilwell feels has been detrimental to Indiana’s economy.

Joe Hogsett, Senator Clinton’s Indiana campaign manager, is asserting that Clinton did not push NAFTA while she was First Lady. In fact, this is consistent with Clinton’s campaign assertion that she has “been against NAFTA from the very beginning.”

Pre-campaign news reports and documents from her time as First Lady show that this simply isn’t the case.

Randy Shaw at BeyondChron, a San Francisco newspaper, characterizes Clinton as “re-imagining” her history with NAFTA. He wrote about Clinton’s “re-imagination” in February, before Clinton’s “re-imagining” of coming under sniper fire in Bosnia blew up. According to Shaw:

* In 1998, the Buffalo News reported that Clinton attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and praised corporations for mounting “a very effective business effort in the U.S. on behalf of NAFTA.”

* On November 1, 1996, United Press International reported that on a trip to Brownsville, Texas, Clinton “touted the president’s support for the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it would reap widespread benefits in the region.”

* The Associated Press reported the next day that Hillary Clinton touted the fact that “the president would continue to support economic growth in South Texas through initiatives such as the North American Free Trade Agreement.”

* In her memoir, Clinton wrote, “Senator Dole was genuinely interested in health care reform but wanted to run for President in 1996. He couldn’t hand incumbent Bill Clinton any more legislative victories, particularly after Bill’s successes on the budget, the Brady Bill and NAFTA.”

For the Indiana campaign, Hogsett and the Clinton campaign need to revise the NAFTA talking points. As I see it, there are 3 basic possibilities:

1. Clinton was and still is in favor of NAFTA; the anti-NAFTA rhetoric is just campaign fluff.

2. Clinton was always against NAFTA. She wasn’t being honest with people at the time by telling them she thought it was a bad idea. Instead, she was being a good soldier for her husband’s administration by saying it was a good idea.

3. Clinton was in favor of NAFTA at the time, but now that she has seen its effects, she is against NAFTA.

Visits by ex-Presidents apparently require expenditures of “dead Presidents.” The Journal & Courier ran the obligatory story about how much one of these visits costs the community. Bill Clinton’s recent visit in support of his wife’s candidacy apparently required about $7,300 in overtime costs by local government.