Clinton out soon, Obama will win presidency

First the news everyone knows by now, via JS Online

Obama has 1,840.5 delegates to 1,688 for Clinton in The Associated Press tally. It takes 2,025 delegates to win the nomination in Denver this summer.

Clinton vows to remain in but has loaned her campaign $6.4 million, most likely a sign of money raising woes. Superdelegates appear to be headed toward Obama.

However, she is expected to take West Virginia and Kentucky next week and, perhaps, prolong her campaign and the Democrats agony further. She holds out hope for Florida and Michigan.

Clinton told reporters it would take 2,209 or 2,210 delegates to win the nomination, not the 2,025 in use by the Democratic National Committee. The higher total would come into play if the delegations were seated from Michigan and Florida, two states that held primaries outside the time frame that party rules required.

But here’s how I see it now. Obama wins the Democratic nomination. That’s obvious to all except Clinton supporters. He then eschews public funding of his campaign. If the voters let him get away with going back on his “promise,” he easily raises more money than McCain.

I’m not sure at this point if McCain ditches the “nice guy” campaigning he’s been engaging in till now, because any criticism of Obama will be proclaimed as racist.

Hey, we’re a long way away and I could be wrong. In fact, I hope I am.

UPDATE: Mac Ranger disagrees.

UPDATE II: Robert Novak says,

With Clinton about to be out of the picture, look for a big Obama jump in the polls to take a lead-maybe a commanding lead-against McCain. The dreadful state of the GOP, as reflected in its recent loss of a Louisiana congressional seat (see below), was bound to catch up with the presidential race. McCain cannot win without sustained battering of Obama, a tactic that McCain deplores.

That’s the way I see it. People want a change; they don’t really care what kind.

Round Two in VP Madness

It doesn’t mean a thing, but round two of CQ’s VP Madness has begun.

With record turnout, more than 6,000 votes were cast in the first round. Here are the big winners:

• Condoleezza Rice (69%) vs. Chuck Hagel (30%)
• Mike Huckabee (60%) vs. Lindsey Graham (39%)
• Mark Sanford (84%) vs. Jim DeMint (15%)
• Mitt Romney (75%) vs. Marsha Blackburn (24%)
• Tim Pawlenty (82%) vs. Phil Gramm (17%)
• Colin Powell (56%) vs. David Petraeus (43%)
• Tom Ridge (53%) vs. Haley Barbour (46%)
• Kay Bailey Hutchison (69%) vs. Rudy Guiliani (30%)
• Sarah Palin (59%) vs. Rick Perry (40%)
• Sam Brownback (61%) vs. Fred Thompson (38%)
• Michael Steele (65%) vs. Tom Coburn (34%)
• Bobby Jindal (58%) vs. Mike Pence (41%)
• Rob Portman (60%) vs. Eric Cantor (39%)
• Joe Lieberman (66%) vs. Jeb Bush (33%)
• John Thune (63%) vs. Jon Huntsman, Jr. (36%)
• Charlie Crist (66%) vs. J.C. Watts (33%)

Visit the site  to make your picks.

VP Madness (GOP Edition)

Via techPresident comes this link to CQ Politics, which has a vice president bracket for the Republican vice presidential candidate.

Just select between the sixteen sets of two choices and whoever receives the most votes in each set goes on to the next round. After you’ve selected, a window pops up showing the current results.

UPDATE: For those of you interested, neither Carla Fiorina nor Paul Ryan is on the list.

Another potential McCain VP?

From The Week magazine’s website

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has been touring poorer parts of the country with Republican presidential candidate John McCain, acting as an economic adviser and campaign surrogate. Fiorina, named the GOP’s ceremonial “Victory” chairwoman for 2008, is reportedly on McCain’s short list of vice presidential choices. (The Wall Street Journal) “We could do a lot worse than Carly,” said Republican National Committee Deputy Chairman Frank Donatelli. (NBC11.com)

What the commentators said
Carly Fiorina? Come on, said Shawn Wasson in the blog The News Junkie. She was a “failed executive” at HP, and “if she can’t run a computer company, she certainly can’t run this country.” If this isn’t a ploy on Fiorina’s part to garner “a little positive publicity for herself,” it’s clearly a “calculated move” to “confuse” the Democrats.

Of course, we saw comments like this at Sean Hackbarth’s also interview at The American Mind when she was in the area with McCain earlier this month.

But maybe since good business people haven’t done that well with the economy, we should let some poor business people try.

Will they split the difference?

From My Way News - Top Michigan Democrats suggest splitting delegates

Michigan Democrats working to get the state’s delegates seated at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday suggested splitting them 69-59 between presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

Clinton has argued that she should get 73 delegates based on the results of the Jan. 15 primary, which she won - 18 more than Obama.

Obama, who removed his name from the ballot, wants the 128 pledged delegates split evenly, 64-64.

The compromise, suggested Tuesday in a letter to Michigan Democratic Chairman Mark Brewer, fell halfway between the two proposals.

Obama would be well served to take this deal, as would Clinton. Clinton gets the win she can brag on, Obama doesn’t lose that much ground and delegates get seated, thus avoiding a charge of disenfranchisement.

Clinton challenges Obama to Lincoln-Douglas style debate

Yeah, it would be like that.

Except Douglas would have had to have called Lincoln, “Ape,” and Lincoln would have had to have replied, “Shorty.”

Or something like that.

Early electoral outlook

UPDATE: Here’s a nice little map to summarize.

From the Associated Press, favors the Democrats, supposedly. In summary,

The competition to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win is expected to play out primarily in 14 states. All but one saw the greatest action in 2004. The exception is Virginia, a longtime Republican stronghold where Democrats have made inroads. Eight of the states went for President Bush four years ago, including the crown jewels Ohio and Florida. Six, including big-prize Pennsylvania, voted for Democrat John Kerry. In the battlegrounds, far more electoral votes, 97, are up for grabs for Democrats than the 69 available for McCain to go after.

The states? Those which went Republican in 2004 with their electoral votes, Colorado (9), Nevada (5), New Mexico (5), Iowa (7), Missouri (11), Ohio (20), Florida (27), and Virginia (13).

Those that went for Kerry, Minnesota (10), Wisconsin (10), Michigan (17), New Hampshire (4), Pennsylvania (21) and Oregon (7).

The article mentioned several wild card states, Arkansas (6), West Virginia (5), North Carolina (15), Georgia (15), Louisiana (9), Mississippi (6), Montana (3), Kentucky (8), Arizona (10), Washington (11), Maine (4), and, perhaps, even New Jersey (15) and Delaware (3).

Yeah, it winds up being a lot. The reasons for each are given in the article.

Is Huckabee Already Preparing for Another Prez Run?

That’s what Matt Lewis asks on Townhall.com.

I hope he waits until after John McCain’s second term.

In 2016.

McCain Wisconsin Economic Summit

Cindy Kilkenny is covering this. Start with the link and move forward for the chronological sequence of posts.

McCain compiles list of running mates

From Yahoo News

McCain has given no hint of his thinking on a running mate, although he frequently speaks warmly of his former rivals for the nomination, particularly former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Among the other possible choices are several governors: Minnesotas Tim Pawlenty, Floridas Charlie Crist, Mississippis Haley Barbour, South Carolinas Mark Sanford and Utahs Jon Huntsman Jr.

A nice list, right? Others would add Mitt Romney amd others.

All I can say is I don’t think it should be any of these fine seven men.

In a year when, at the least, Republicans are going to face an African American man or a woman or both, McCain has to look at people like Steele, Rice, Martinez or someone from a “minority” group.

More Florida primary news

St. Petersburg Times poll: Fla. Democrats say count our primary

According to a new St. Petersburg Times/Bay News 9 statewide poll, the Democratic presidential contenders’ boycott of Florida had little effect on Democratic voters’ choices here, and an overwhelming plurality want the officially meaningless Jan. 29 results to count.

Lots of charts at the link. Seventy seven percent think its important that Florida delegates count and 24% are less likely to vote for the party’s nominee if the delegates are not counted. If they did revote 46% would vote for Clinton and 37% for Obama.

And who’s to blame? Twenty-eight percent blamed the Republican leaders of the Florida legislature, 25% blamed Howard Dean, 20% blamed the Florida Democratic Party, and the rest were divided between the candidates, no one, everyone and 14% didn’t know or refused to answer the question.

Florida lawmakers offer up plan to seat delegates

From CNN.com

Florida Senate Democratic Leader Steven Geller and Sen. Jeremy Ring outlined a proposal to seat all the delegates at the convention in August.The plan recommends seating half of Florida’s 210 delegates based on the results of the January 29 primary.

The remaining delegates could be allocated in a number of ways, including evenly, proportionally based on the national popular vote (excluding Florida and Michigan) or proportionally based on the total national delegate count, also excluding Florida and Michigan.

No analysis on what this would mean at CNN, but just taking percentages, Clinton would get about 52 of the first half with Obama getting 34 and then Obama would get 56 of the other half with Clinton getting 49 when based on delegate vote. He would get a couple less if we go by the popular vote.

That would give Obama about 85-90 delegates and Clinton about 100 or so delegates. This, of course, is at the moment. It could change between now and convention time. I wouldn’t expect it to change much.

No indication on if the previous rules for distributing delegates would apply to the half allocated that way. Here’s the Green Papers current count with a couple of scenarios for the Democrats.

Clinton might not go for it since it’s not much better than just splitting the delegates two ways.

A Florida Democratic Party statement says,

It means that a solution will have to come from the DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee, which is scheduled to meet again in April.

Michigan’s re-vote looks unlikely, also.

Will the campaigns agree on any solution?

Barack Obama’s speech on race

I never heard him say those things.

Oh, wait, yes I did.

Will McCain ask Mitt Romney to be Vice President?

Redmanbluestate asks the question

I answer. Only if he loans the general election campaign as much as he loaned himself.

Republican VP choices

THEWEEKDaily.com gathers the op/ed pieces that speculate on whom John McCain should choose.

The election and the web

An e-mail from techPresident informs me that the last post on John McCain’s blog was Mar. 4 and before that was Feb. 25. What’s up with that?

On a related note, I signed up for a “MyMcCainSpace” a while back and I can’t logon. All I get is this error page.

Maybe he’s conceding the internet to Obama and MoveOn.org who have some ambitious plans, it seems.

Some other news on the technology front, courtesy of techPresident.

YouTube is expanding its popular YouChoose platform to Senators, Congressman, and state candidates.

There was also a link to a site called TubeMogul which had an analysis of the correlation between online video views and donations to presidential candidates. Fascinating.

Ferraro steps down from Clinton campaign

What she says is true.

Ferraro also told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that “every time” someone makes a negative comment about Obama, they are accused of racism.

It’s just nice to see a Democrat say it once in a while.

And it will be the big hurdle in the general election for Republicans.

Obama Accuses Clinton of Deception

From the Washington Post

Eager to shift the narrative after a difficult week, Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign sharply criticized the tactics of his rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, charging her campaign with attempting “to deceive the American people just so that they can win this election.”

Isn’t it interesting, now that they don’t have to defend them against “The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy,” how many Democrats are telling us what we conservatives already knew?

Vice presidential candidates and the web

TechPresident is keeping track of Technocrati mentions of candidates on blogs.

Here is the chart of Democratic vice presidential candidates. Here is the one for potential Republican vice president. (Well, those links are supposed to go to each chart, but it just goes to the main page, so you’ll have to scroll down to the end.)

They also have charts on MySpace friends, Facebook, YouTube views, and others.

It might come down to this