Increasingly, Clinton is operating in a virtual reality programmed by her pollster Mark Penn during his downtime from working for the butchers of Colombia. Adhering to Penn's fatal calculus, Clinton has endeavored to re-segregate the Democratic Party electorate into demographic segments and then pitted them against each other. The Clinton campaign has intentionally inflamed these simmering antagonisms: black versus Hispanic, black versus white, black versus older women, white collar versus blue collar, young versus old, under-educated versus college grad...

Her campaign now resembles a political neutron bomb that wipes out all living contenders and leaves only the super-structure of her own aspiration standing.  Apparently, the idea is to crush the interloper Obama, either in Denver, through some deus ex machina of spineless super-delegates stampeding her way, or to have McCain do her work for her so that she can challenge the septuagenarian in 2012. If so, her motto will be the familiar taunt of the schoolhouse tattletale: "I told you so." [More] . . read more

To have persuaded enough Democrats that a black man can be their champion in November and have a passable chance of winning the Oval Office is a tremendous achievement, even if Obama’s campaign has flagged badly in recent weeks... The battle was won in the first two months, when Obama ambushed Mrs Clinton’s slow-moving phalanx. He crushed Mrs Clinton in grassroots organizing and in fundraising which eventually left her campaign, top-heavy with consultants extorting huge salaries, deeply in debt. Meanwhile Obama banked millions both from big Wall Street institutions and small contributors.

Obama right now has an edge in electoral college votes, though this somewhat depends which faction of number crunchers you believe. By almost every yardstick, except the wild card of his skin color, he’ll win. It should be inconceivable for a Republican to capture the White House for the third time in a row when the price of gasoline is headed towards $5 a gallon, food prices are soaring and most Americans reckon things are going to get a lot worse. [More] . . read more

One of Hillary Clinton’s big achievements has been to seriously, maybe fatally, wound Obama among her own supporters. Since South Carolina, back at the start of March, the Clintons have deliberately fragmented the Democratic vote. Here’s where the mysterious resignation of John Edwards from the campaign race has been particularly significant. As the Clintons methodically widened the racial divide, Edwards would have been there to capture the white working class male voters who don’t particularly care for Hillary...

Hillary must know that she cannot possibly win the nomination by any rational standard... In other words there’s no rational scenario here, except the one suggested here by St Clair a month ago that her real aim is to ensure a McCain victory this year and come back in 2012. [More] . . read more

Do we have the second American civil war? Will some states want to secede from the Unitedness of it all? Will Bush hang in there for an extended second term 'in the national interest'? Will Mugabe ask for asylum?

Add to these nice concerns the impact of the recession-which-isnt-really-here-yet but will bite in the fall and the inevitable global tensions of a turbulent Beijing Olympics and you'd reckon on the message for 2009 being a right royal state of disunion. Get into gold or cash. Soonest. . . read more

So why does Hillary persist? Because she hasn't abandoned her aspiration for the White House. Not in 2008, but for 2012. Here's the perverse logic at work. If Obama defeats McCain in November, it will take an act of treachery beyond anything even the Clintons have ever conjured from their grimoire of political demonology for Hillary to challenge him in 2012. She will be 69 in 2016, almost ready to move into one of the Beverly Nursing Homes, owned by a company she once represented as a corporate lawyer, aggressively protecting the bottom line against such extravagances as healthy meals, clean sheets and proper medical care for the elderly.

Hillary Clinton is the prisoner of an unimpeachable mathematics. So she makes the most of a remorseless situation by doing what the Clintons do best: commit political fratricide. Quite literally, in this case, by knocking off a brother. In order to realize her vaulting ambition, Hillary must mortally wound Obama as candidate in the fall race against John McCain so that she can run against McCain in 2012. [More] . . read more

In the end, the Clinton end-game strategy of using the race card, and of trying to recast herself, absurdly, as a working-class hero, may end up being all to the good for Obama. Clearly it forced him to move away from his empty “change” and “hope” slogans and to address the issues of ordinary working-class Americans - something he had largely avoided doing earlier in the campaign. It also put the issue of race - which the Republicans can be expected to use even more blatantly in the general election - out front and center, where it could be exposed to the light of day.

What seems to be happening is that racist Democrats, those who cannot vote for a black candidate, are rejecting Obama, and will probably either skip voting in November, or swing over to McCain, just as they swung over to Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon before, on different but related issues. The difference is that Obama seems to be able to reach independent white voters and even liberal and libertarian Republican voters who are turned off by the Republicans’ overt racism, as well as by many of the Republicans’ so-called “social policy” positions, such as abortion bans, opposition to gay rights, denial of global warming, etc. [More] . . read more

But this seismic shift in mass consciousness was nowhere to be seen in the Democratic primaries in recent months. On the contrary, as Hillary Clinton’s quest for the Democratic nomination succumbed to the momentum of Senator Barack Obama’s, the multi-millionaire Clinton ludicrously posed as a populist spokesperson for that minority of stereotypical rural, racist whites who steadfastly refuse to vote for any black candidate... Now, as Clinton faces the inevitability of failure in her quest for the presidency, she is floating the possibility of vice president on Obama’s ticket. He should give her a middle finger, after surveying the wreckage the Clinton campaign has left behind.

U.S. politics are at a potential turning point, in which a nation founded upon slavery, with racism ingrained in its very foundation, could finally begin to correct its hideous past. This process is long overdue. But realizing it requires a candidate willing to wage a frontal assault on the minority of white Americans from all social classes who still cling to racism — who the Clintons have consciously emboldened — while championing the civil rights of African-Americans, Muslims, Latinos and Asians victimized by the system. [More] . . read more

Clinton’s tactics amount to trying to enhance her claims of owning a house by burning it down. Clinton’s increasingly mean-spirited assaults on Obama provide more fodder for Republican Party attacks than foundation for elevating the long-term credibility for her candidacy.

Dizzying duplicity reeks from Clinton’s campaign with the insulting carping on Obama’s alleged connection with Minister Louis Farrakhan and Obama’s association with the retiring pastor of his church, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Despite Farrakhan never explicitly endorsing Obama, Clinton baited and the corporate media bought contentions that Obama is despicable for receiving electoral support from the Muslim minister. Farrakhan did praise Obama during a major speech in February but in offering praise of Obama’s place in history, Farrakhan pointedly told his audience he was not telling anyone who to vote for. [More] . . read more

Now the primary campaign heads off to Indiana and North Carolina amid a steady downpour of news stories about the mathematical impossibility of Hillary Clinton outstripping Barack Obama in either the delegate count or the popular vote. But math isn’t the issue here. Mrs Clinton is set to stay in the race until the roll call at the Democratic convention in Denver on August 27 conclusively settles the issue.

Not since Isaac Newton sought to decode the Ancient Testament or since Ronald Reagan redefined the properties of a meal fit for children to eat, has anyone defied science as absurdly as Mrs Clinton in her efforts to show that if you count things her way she’s in the lead. She is in the direct lineage of Joseph Stalin who said it’s not a matter of who does the voting, but who does the counting. [More] . . read more

Senator John McCain is a poster boy for the pathologies of the military brat. Born in the Panama Canal Zone, he attended twenty schools in his nomadic childhood. "The place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi," is how he shuts up critics of his carpetbagging, but he is making their point: Senator McCain's loyalty is not to any particular American place but rather to a bureaucratic institution (the military) and an abstraction (the American Empire)...

The Democrats are no more connected to particular places than is McCain. Hillary Clinton's rootlessness became a national joke in her 2000 U.S. Senate campaign to represent New York, a state in which she had never lived. Wearing a Yankees cap was about as far as she went to assert her ersatz New Yorkness. Barack Obama, lauded as the "world candidate," was born in Hawaii, a state that is only in the union because of its military significance. Raised also in Indonesia and at various times resident in Los Angeles, New York City, and finally Chicago, Obama is a "cosmopolitan"...

Why does this matter? What's wrong with electing competent but rootless people to public office? Because just as one cannot love the "human race" before one loves particular human beings, neither can one love "the world" unless he first achieves a deep understanding of his own little piece of that world. [More] . . read more