Month: May 2008

Originally bloggded at YPP under the name A Philly Progressive on May 21, 2008 I’ve not been fond of the Clintons for a long time. It goes back to a few days after the 1992 election when I heard Bill Clinton talking about his ambitious plans for health care and I turned to a friend and said, “I sure hope he knows now to count to sixty.” It took no special prescience to see the disaster of Clinton care coming. The program was formulated in secret with plenty of experts but few congressional allies. Those experts were more intent on creating a document to satisfy their fellow wonks than in developing a plan that might attract a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. No one was surprised that the Clintons lost both the Congress and the issue. Instead of using the failure of the Congress to address the major issue of… Continue reading

Some notes on the Presidential Race 1.Hillary is over and has been for at least a month. It is impossible for her to close the delegate gap. So, to win, super-delegates would have to decide to support her in one of two ways. They might, first, simply hand her the nomination against the will of the majority of the delegates. Or, second, they could change the rules in a way that gives Hillary the majority of regular delegates by, say, seating overwhelmingly pro-Clinton delegations from Michigan and Florida. The first path is manifestly undemocratic. The super-delegates might get away with this without too much complaint from the Obama supporters and the broader public if there were broad agreement that Obama is somehow too flawed to be President or far less likely to defeat McCain than Clinton. But, in the absence of an utterly unforeseeable event, that is just not going… Continue reading