Saturday, May 10, 2008

Barack Obama is Jesus

Just kidding. Anyway, just so people know where I stand on this, it really never mattered much to me who won this nomination, at least once Kodos faded. I leaned various ways at various times, and I became more and more annoyed at the Clinton campaign over time. Obama did a bunch of things that annoyed me too, but not as much recently. I'm sure Hillary Clinton would be a decent president. "Electability" arguments for either of them aren't very persuasive, though smart people on both sides are pretty convinced that their candidate will win and the other will flame out spectacularly.

At this point, however, Obama's won. There's no nomination path for her which doesn't involve rewriting the rules in a way which would never be seen as legitimate, or a massive shift in superdelegates which would likewise be problematic, and even those paths range from unlikely to impossible. I don't think Clinton has to drop out. She can continue to campaign through to the last contest if she wants (she doesn't need my permission to do so), though hopefully this article is correct and the, uh, emphasis of the campaign shifts away from Obama's supposed lack of appeal to real Americans.

One wishes we could've rewound things to about March 4 and had a more substantive campaign, instead of the identity politics-based Freak Show campaign we've had since then. It isn't all the candidates' fault, of course, as you go to campaign with the media you have and not the media you want. But I've never bought into the excuse that there aren't enough policy differences between the two candidates for that conversation to matter.