A locus for eccentrics (hopefully)

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Super Tuesday

Really a super interesting night to see how much most of between the coasts America just does not cooperate with the democratic party machine, especially sort of against type. I mean, Obama is more liberal, black, etc. Yet he takes more conservative democratic states like Minnesota, Dakotas, Utah, Kansas and Missouri (well not so much in Missouri with its huge urban population)? Shows you how much midwesterners dislike Hillary Clinton, I guess. The really substantial win by Hillary in California is not a race ender, but is really a huge blow IMHO. Especially the margin of victory, really quite substantial. Clinton won less states yesterday, but she definitely won all the ones that counted most.

It's funny, the big thing people were thinking that would be a problem with race for Obama would be whites shying away from him. Turns out that the fact that Latinos and African Americans hate each other in most urban areas is turning out to be the most telling barrier. Another sort of revealing and interesting thing taken from this already unusual race.

As for the Republican race, it's over. Shows you why the race has early states set consecutively before the big states--in order to *coordinate* on two candidates. When that coordination fails, you see some predictable results for the two candidates with the closest ideal points. Nevertheless, for the Republicans, I think the result was good news for America in general. I wouldn't vote for him (despite what others on the lemur, have, to my surprise, said they would do), but I certainly wouldn't fear for America's safety with McCain at the helm. All you have to do is look at the anger among conservative nutjobs to see that the country will benefit from a Obama/Clinton--McCain presidential race.

2 Comments:

Blogger neill said...

I was heartened to see that Obama tightened it up a little bit in CA -- the split was something like 58 to 40 when I went to bed, so any improvement was welcome. I also have to thank the party for their ultra-proportional delegate arithmetic that left the candidates in an effective tie even though Clinton won CA and NY by decisive margins.

I do wonder how long it's going to take the media echosphere to pick up on what the new racial status quo is in this country, however. Part of it is conventional wisdom -- whites who are racist vote Republican. Whites who vote Democratic aren't racist. Obama has no trouble picking up white votes in the Democratic primaries, and his victories (particularly in the West) were not just a Jesse Jackson effect.

The other part is, like you say, a lot of Latinos really, really don't like black people. Of course, the pundits will eventually call a spade a spade in regards to white/black racism (ie, the Clintons in SC), but I can't imagine a similar standard being applied to black/brown.

4:22 PM

 
Blogger steve said...

Surprisingly, one of the CNN guys at the back desk last night (an African American guy) was talking about it actually.

5:34 PM

 

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