Apparently Hillary Clinton showed some emotion on the campaign coverage. I’m not a big fan of Sen. Clinton’s, but the press coverage of this stuff is stupid, bordering on hysteria. Oh, she’s breaking down! It’s calculated! I think maybe she a) meant what she was saying and how she was saying it; and b) she has to be dog-tired after all that campaigning; and c) the display of emotion was pretty mild.

Meanwhile, I kind of like Barack Obama, but I have to confess, I am a little bewildered by all of the (to me) over the top “hope of a new generation” commentary I’ve been hearing and reading. And it’s not just pundits and bloggers. I’ve heard a number of superlatives from friends and acquaintances talking about Obama’s recent speeches. I get the feeling that Obama is the kind of guy upon whom folks can project their hopes and dreams, regardless of whether he is actually an instrument by which they can be achieved.

I’ve expressed my preference for Edwards before, but I wouldn’t be at all upset if Obama got the nomination. The degree to which Edwards is left out of the pundits’ conversation is truly amazing. I hear more about Rudy Giuliani than I hear about John Edwards despite Edwards’ superior poll numbers and fund raising. (Ron Paul supporters are now suggesting I cry them a river.) I’m realistic enough to realize that Edwards’ path to the White House is not clear if one even exists. In sporting terms, he does not seem to control his own destiny. He has to hope for some help, either through Clinton or Obama imploding or something else. He could have an interesting role to play if we get to the Democratic Convention with neither of the other two having a majority of the delegates.

The excellent political site, MyDD has created a handy-dandy Presidential delegate counter widget. I’ve plugged it into the left sidebar (the formatting is a bit off — it will probably drive crazy my poor web designer wife, but it’s good enough for my aesthetically challenged sensibilities.) If you are interested, the widget code is available here.

As of right now, the Democratic delegates are as follows:
Obama 16
Clinton 15
Edwards 14
(Out of 4,372 possible)

The Republican candidates are:
Romney 17
Huckabee 13
Thompson 8
McCain 5
Paul 4
Hunter 1
Giuliani 1
(Out of 2,516 possible)

The media generated “momentum” from Iowa can’t be discounted, but in terms of actual delegates, it bears repeating that Iowa is not terribly significant. I’m wondering why very little is being made of Romney’s victory in Wyoming. Is it just because political reporters have decided arbitrarily that Iowa and New Hampshire are important or is there something less artificial going on?

I watched the Presidential debates last night off-and-on, intermixing it with watching some of the football playoffs. How is the citizenry supposed to inform itself with that kind of competing programming?

Anyway, the format was kind of interesting. For starters, it was a back-to-back debate with the GOP going first and the Democrats going second. So, that put the tone of the two debates in starker contrast. Second, there was kind of a roundtable format with all the candidates sitting around and some back and forth permitted. To me, it looked like the Republicans had their knives out much more than did the Democrats. By and large, it was Mitt Romney on the receiving end of those knives. I think Huckabee had the best zinger of the night. He had said something about Romney’s position and Romney took the occasion to admonish Huckabee not to characterize his position. Quick as a whip, Huckabee interjected “which one?” — highlighting Romney’s, shall we say, flexibility. In terms of substance, it seemed to me that the Republicans (except for Ron Paul) tied the albatross of George W. Bush’s foreign policy ever more firmly around their necks.

On the Democratic side, the candidates were generally more polite to each other. One thing that was evident was their exhaustion. They all did fine when they were actively speaking, but they all seemed to have that glazed look when they were watching one of the other candidates. That’s understandable given the pace of the campaign. As a strategic matter, it looked like Edwards had made it his goal to knock off Clinton and worry about Obama later. Stylistically, he was probably the most passionate of the candidates, really hitting his stride when the topic shifted to domestic economics. As a practical matter, I don’t know how much his debate performance helps or hurts him in terms of his efforts to get out of third place in New Hampshire.

Clinton’s gender puts her in a tough spot when Obama and Edwards gang up on her. Do too little and she looks ineffective and vulnerable. Do too much and, fairly or unfairly, she’s going to get tagged with the “shrill” card. She can’t really go with a strategy of claiming that “those mean guys are ganging up on poor little me,” because a) you don’t really want that in a President; and b) she’s campaigning as (and probably is) a tough person. Her most implausible gambit was the “35 years of change” mantra. To me that’s like claiming that four right turns constitutes a change of course. A couple of times, I felt bad for her because they were talking about how she looked or how likable she was in a way that was pretty well tied to her gender.

Obama didn’t make a particular impression on me. He certainly didn’t hurt himself, but I don’t think debates are necessarily his most effective forum. I think he’s more effective standing at a podium by himself making a speech. I think his best moment was when the moderator asked him something about the Republican debate and Obama confessed that he’d been flipping back and forth between that and the football game. He proved that he actually had been watching when he advised the moderator that the Redskins hadn’t been doing so well.

Bill Richardson was just along for the ride. It’s probably a failing on my part, but whenever he talks, I can’t help but think of Horatio Sanz from Saturday Night Live.

I find Ron Paul to be an interesting candidate even if I don’t ultimately support him. He’s raising gobs of money and his poll numbers are comparable to a lot of the other Republican candidates. So, it’s inexcusable to me that the upcoming GOP debate sponsored by Faux News will be excluding Rep. Paul. Apparently I’m not the only one. The New Hampshire Republican Party is withdrawing as co-sponsor of the debate.

John Cole has a post up. Obama is relatively inoffensive among the right wing for now. But, as soon as he’s put down the ice queen they hate so much, the venom has to go somewhere – and it will be directed at barack HUSSEIN obama.

But anyone who doesn’t think that that’s all going to change instantaneously if Obama is the nominee hasn’t been watching how this faction operates over the last 20 years. Hatred is their fuel. Just look at the bottomless personal animus they managed to generate over an anemic, mundane, inoffensive figure like John Kerry. At their Convention, they waved signs with band-aids mocking his purple hearts while cheering on two combat-avoiders.

Iowa Democratic Caucus results are here. Very early on the delegate take breaks down like this:

Senator John Edwards : 33.06%
Senator Barack Obama : 32.20%
Senator Hillary Clinton : 32.14%
Governor Bill Richardson : 1.78%
Senator Joe Biden : 0.70%
Senator Chris Dodd : 0.08%
Uncommitted : 0.04%
Precincts Reporting: 433 of 1781

It’s tight as a tick, as Dan Rather might say.

I have MSNBC on the tube and, as of 8:52 EST, Huckabee has 36%, Romney 23%, and Thompson 14%.

What’s really interesting about this is that it seems to be almost a completely media generated storm. In terms of actual delegates, Iowa is fairly inconsequential. But, with a 24 hour news cycle, the media demands winners and losers. The narratives they create will tend toward being self-fulfilling prophecies. If the Clinton campaign is “devastated” because of a 3rd place finish in Iowa, it’s only because the chattering classes say so; not because she came in 10 delegates fewer than Obama or Edwards.

Update

It looks like Obama is going to come in first in Iowa. Edwards and Clinton are currently neck-and-neck. Obama – 36.42%, Edwards – 30.42%, and Clinton – 30.12% with 1473/1781 precincts reporting. Chris Matthews is already becoming insufferable. “Hillary Clinton has been rejected by 2/3s of the Democrats.” Rachel Maddow quickly pointed out the obvious — in a three way tie all of them are being rejected by 2/3s of the voters.

In the Republican primary, Mike Huckabee won pretty big with 34% versus 25% for Romney and 14% for Fred Thompson. It bears mentioning that Ron Paul outpolled Rudy Giuliani – 10% to 4%. You know, as I think about it, I think Giuliani’s campaign was ended by Joe Biden when he said of Giuliani “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”

Update II Obama’s lead continues to inch upward. With 1701 of 1781 precincts reporting, Obama has 37% of the delegates compared to 30% for Edwards and 29% for Clinton. One of the big stories from tonight might be turnout. Apparently something like 212,000 Iowans turned out for Democratic caucuses, up something like 70% from 2004 which was considered a pretty big showing at the time. If my math is right on the Republican side — and it may well be wrong — it looks like about 117,000 showed up for the Republican caucuses. If that is at all reflective of the respective levels of enthusiasm among the parties, November 2008 could make November 2006 look like a fond memory for the GOP.

Update III An interesting statistic relative to Update II:

Total Voter Turnout (approximate)
356,000
Percentage of total vote
24.5% Obama
20.5% Edwards
19.8% Clinton
11.4% Huckabee (R)

I mentioned the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” in reference to Anderson’s mayor’s refusal to step down. Plate o’ shrimp – that street fighting imagery came up again today in Dan Balz’s Washington Post blog entry about John Edwards.

Nice clothes aside, Edwards has turned street-fighter for the final stretch run. His message can be boiled down to a single word — “Fight!” — which he repeats over and over and over and over again: Fight. Fight. Fight. Fight.

Edwards has rolled out anecdotes he never used in the past to make it all the more personal. They conjure up images that hardly square with his slight frame and good looks. He was, as he now explains, a brawler as a kid, taking on bullies the way he later took on corporations and insurance companies as a trail lawyer.

“Like many of you, I had to fight to survive,” he told an audience of nearly a thousand people on Saturday night. “I mean really. Literally.”

He describes the southern mill town where he grew up as a tough little place and tells the story of getting into a fight one day with an older boy. “Got my butt kicked,” he says. When he got home, his father offered a stern lesson in life.

“I don’t ever want to hear, son, about you starting a fight,” he says his father told him. “But you listen to me and listen to me clearly. I don’t want to ever hear that you walked away from one. Because if you’re not willing to stand up for yourself and if you’re not willing to fight, no one will stand up for you.”

The enemy he sees is corporate America and corporate greed. His message seeks not to unite America but to finish what he describes as “an epic struggle” against forces that are, literally, killing America — destroying jobs, holding down wages, putting ordinary Americans out of work or denying them medical care.

I really enjoy the advice from Edwards’ dad — don’t ever start a fight, but make sure you finish them. That was the problem in Iraq – we started that one which makes it impossible to finish. If your goal is just to beat the hell out of the guy who picked a fight with you, that’s pretty easy if you’re strong enough. In Iraq, our goals were never very well defined — depose Hussein, get rid of WMDs – fine. Mission Accomplished. And yet, we’re still there. Create democracy in the Middle East — um, no thanks.

Does the greed of a few constitute an assault on the majority of citizens? I don’t know. It’s probably worth at least talking about. Certainly things seem to be getting harder for the middle class over the past few decades. Most families need two incomes to get by, it seems. I don’t think that was always the case.

Oh, but Edwards is rich and has nice hair. Clearly he shouldn’t be talking about these things.

Any Hillary Clinton supporters out there? I’m just wondering — and not disingenuously, I honestly don’t know — what the basis of her claims of superior foreign policy experience might be. I get the sense that I’m supposed to impute to Hillary the foreign policy experience of Bill. Now, I don’t doubt that Hillary Clinton was more active than most First Ladies in the presidency of her husband. However, I don’t think she gets credit for merely being around — I don’t want the surgeon’s wife trying an operation on me. So, if she is claiming foreign policy experience from her stint as First Lady and if she performed foreign policy tasks in the Bill Clinton White House, I’d like to know specifically what those are. Otherwise, I don’t think she gets any particular bonus points for having been First Lady.

Oliver Willis flagged a pretty strong quote from John Edwards on the subject of the 17 year old girl who was first denied a life saving liver transplant before her insurer, Cygna, changed its mind and approved the transplant. The delay may well have cost the girl her life.

John Edwards tonight cited the case of a 17-year-old California girl who died after her insurance company refused coverage on a liver transplant to save her life as a call to action to change the current system of healthcare in America.

Nataline Sarkysian died last night at UCLA Medical Center after complications arose from a bone marrow transplant to treat her leukemia. Her insurance provider, CIGNA Healthcare, first denied the potentially lifesaving transplant, but relented after a loud public protest and outrage. By that time, though, Sarkysian passed away before the procedure could be performed.

“Are you telling me that we’re gonna sit at a table and negotiate with those people?” asked a visibly angered Edwards, challenging the health care companies. “We’re gonna take their power away and we’re not gonna have this kind of problem again.”

His approach to dealing with the insurers differs from that of Clinton and Obama who would probably prefer a more collaborative approach.