A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

Michigan Primary

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With 99% of precincts reporting:
Republicans
Romney 39 336801
McCain 30 256600
Huckabee 16 139268
Paul 6 54233
Thompson 4 31998
Giuliani 3 24654
Uncommitted 2 17942

Democrats
(The Democrats didn’t have a real primary. Apparently the DNC got mad at the Michigan Democratic Party for moving their primary up and stripped them of their delegates or some such. Edwards and Obama weren’t on the ballot.)

Clinton 55 327971
Uncommitted 40 236598
Kucinich 4 21688
Dodd 1 3852
Gravel 0 2363

Democratic talking points of the day – Kucinich got almost as many votes as Giuliani. Clinton’s vote total almost equaled Romney’s. Both of these despite Democratic indifference to the race because it didn’t count.

Swiftboating is ugly

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I’m not interested enough in McCain to justify back-to-back posts about him, and yet here it is. Oliver Willis has a post up about a McCain swiftboating taking place in South Carolina:

The campaign, which has vowed not to take any attacks lying down this time around, said in a statement that a group calling itself “Vietnam Veterans Against McCain” had sent out a negative mailing about Mr. McCain to South Carolina voters.

“Today, a shadowy political organization calling itself ‘Vietnam Veterans Against McCain’ launched a vicious attack on John McCain in an attempt to impugn his character in the closing days of the South Carolina Republican Primary,” Orson Swindle, who was a fellow prisoner of war in Vietnam with Mr. McCain, said in a statement put out by the campaign. “The group claims that John McCain turned his back on his fellow POWs in order to save his own skin.”

Weathervane McCain

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John McCain is one of the more acceptable Republican candidates in the field. But, I keep reading about McCain being right on this or that from the beginning. Seems appropriate to once again link to Tim Dickinson’s Weathervane McCain post over at Rolling Stone.

Oh, and according to Talking Points Memo, McCain was going so far as to consider switching parties before Bush became Mr. 9/11.

Polls

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The New Hampshire polls proved to be of little use, but just because I saw it and was surprised by how high Edwards’ poll numbers are:

The poll by the Reno Gazette-Journal, released Monday morning, showed Mr. Obama with 32 percent, Mrs. Clinton with 30 percent and Mr. Edwards with 27 percent.

Courier Press Washington Post on Ron Paul

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Update Normally, I add my updates at the bottom, but this one warrants a top of the page correction. I have been advised that the editorial I criticized was actually a guest editorial from the Washington Post. This was apparently clear in the print edition of the paper but not in the online version. I probably wouldn’t have bothered pounding out a criticism of the Washington Post – I think I hold the Courier Press to a higher standard. (Oh, the irony.) End Update

The Evansville Courier Press Washington Post takes a pretty dim view of Rep. Ron Paul and his candidacy. That doesn’t bother me in and of itself since I don’t really think he’s the best bet myself. His past writings are fair game, and the racial absurdities that appeared in his newsletter are deal breakers so long as Paul continues to fail to provide adequate explanations for their appearances in his news letter. But, still, the Courier Press’s Washington Post’s editorial seems a little lazy to me.

The Courier Press Washington Post casually dismisses Paul’s “golden rule diplomacy” (do unto other countries as we would have them do unto us) because it doesn’t provide all of the answers. It seems like a standard habit of editorial writers to hold “fringe” candidates to higher standards than “serious” candidates. When a mainstream candidate offers platitudes, they generally don’t get such dismissive treatment.

And the Courier Press Washington Post positively sneers at the idea that our foreign policy contributed in the slightest to the attacks of 9/11. It isn’t “blame America first” to go looking for all of the reasons. Reason #1 – bin Laden is a murderous religious fanatic. Reason #x – U.S. foreign policy caused us to maintain military bases in Saudi Arabia that didn’t sit well with certain religious types.

Strict isolation isn’t a winning foreign policy, in my opinion. But neither is it worthy of the casual dismissal it seemed to get from the Courier Press. Washington Post.

Mike Kole on Ron Paul

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Mike Kole has a good post up today on the subject of Ron Paul and the unexplained racist and homophobic articles that showed up in Paul’s news letters.

When Ron Paul, most-visible libertarian is seen as a racist or homophobe, then libertarianism is liable to be seen as racist or homophobic.

So, keep distancing yourself from these writings. You would do even better if you identified who wrote them. There is fair criticism about not identifying the writer, if not you.
. . .
Until the writer is identified by you, those who were hurt by the comments on your newsletter are going to continue to sling arrows and mud your way. It distracts from your very worthy message of liberty, and worse- makes people equate liberty with racism or homophobia, which of course is patently wrong.

Rove on Obama

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From this blurb at Talking Points Memo about Rove’s column on Obama, I couldn’t tell whether Rove was really talking about Obama or a flashback to C. Thomas Howell’s character in the movie Soul Man.

I’m probably not going to stun you by telling you that Karl Rove is using racial code words. But as long as we’re talking about Andrew Cuomo’s decision to stick his foot so far into his mouth that it’s coming out of his behind, you really must read Karl Rove’s piece on New Hampshire in today’s Journal oped page.

I’ll just pick out the highlights, but in the course of a single column Rove manages to flag Obama’s “trash talking”, “his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard”, and the alleged fact that “he is often lazy.”

Reality Free Presidential Coverage

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O.k., I shouldn’t call it “reality free” — the cable news media personalities certainly use a nugget of fact. They take the poll results for the Presidential candidates which are certainly facts. But then they proceed from there to spin fanciful narratives. The only reason that Hillary Clinton was in such a tailspin was because the pack of pundits declared in gravely knowing tones that it was so. And, lucky for her, because the New Hampshire “comeback” would not have been possible without the Iowa “collapse.”

At the moment, with about 2/3s of the precincts reporting, Clinton has 69,000 votes; Obama has 64,000 votes; and Edwards has 30,000 votes. If these results hold up, that will give Clinton and Obama about 0.6% and .4% of the delegates they need, respectively, to get the nomination. They’ll split the take of 22 delegates when they need something like 2,200 to win.

The media personalities are essentially hyperventilating over the pre-season. Unfortunately, politics being such an abstract competition, these solemn pronunciations by our wise men can affect the game. Too bad it’s not like competitions that are more reality based. When Bob Sanders hits a guy really, really hard, he goes down, no matter how wrong Tony Kornheiser’s commentary will inevitably be.

Update My delegate counter hasn’t updated yet, but my understanding is that the results of the New Hampshire primary in terms of delegates was 9 for Obama, 9 for Clinton, and 4 for Edwards; bringing the Democratic total to Obama – 25; Clinton – 24; Edwards – 18. On the Republican side, the results were 7 for McCain, 4 for Romney, and 1 for Huckabee. The totals for the Republicans are Romney – 21; Huckabee – 14; and McCain – 11. As you listen to or read media coverage, see if what you hear bears any relationship to these vote totals or the percentage of the totals they represent.