Hillary Is Broke

As reported here last week Hillary is broke. Her campaign’s vexation: who is going to give to a campaign where the outcome is assured? She has lost the Democratic nomination for president. Her donor base has dried up, although her spokes-person says a win in Pennsylvania will “reenergize” her base. As reported yesterday in the NYT, the Clintons are sorting through their FOBs to determine friends past from friends present.

The New York Senator ran a dismal campaign from start to finish. Her husband misread the political terrain. He thought his wife’s campaign would be 1992 re-dux. It is not. The American people have grown tired of the rancor and bitterness of our politics. They want political principles that will elevate them not cause division and polarization.

Our last two presidents have both sowed this division by immoral conduct. It can be argued that Clinton’s adultery and President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq (a violation of self-determination) were both morally wrong acts. While the former was an act of decadence the latter is a crime against humanity that we will pay for dearly in the decades to come. If we consider pragmatism to be the American ideology there was no utilitarian calculus (unless its basis is oil) performed before our Iraq invasion. It was not an answer to 9-11 but petulance. A peevishness of a child rather than the thoughtful analysis supposed to be possessed by adults. In particular the adult we elected as leader of the free world.

There have been criticisms that Barack Obama is an elitist that he has studied and grounds his worldview based on philosophical premises. Isn’t it time that the American mind be cured of its schizophrenia? We should either be disinterested actors or a player that imbues moral and ethical conduct in our domestic and international affairs. Right now we are neither; our domestic policies favor the rich and their special interests, while our foreign policy of violence over diplomacy smacks of empire building. Here too our concern is not for the public interest but to further the aims of special interests which have already poured the blood of four-thousand Americans and cost billions in taxpayer dollars.

Today is the Pennsylvania primary and we will see how many voters will buy diversions such as Obama wearing native Somali garb, his relationship with Jeremiah Wright or William Ayers? Will Clinton be judged by her misspeaks on Bosnia, the racial attacks by some in her campaign against Obama, or her displays of feigned working class roots?

Tonight the media will focus on the vote totals instead of delegates won. Plurality of the vote means nothing in these contests. Obama could lose by five percentage points in the popular vote but still garner more delegates than Mrs. Clinton.In fact Obama lost by ten points but will garner thirty-seven delegates to forty for Mrs, Clinton. Delegates are apportioned by congressional district a candidate could receive a million votes in one district but only the delegate seats up for grabs in that district. The notion that popular vote should be part of the nominating process is ludicrous. Who wins big states and who wins “little” states is also irrelevant.

From the response of voters one can assume that the American people are looking to an insurgent candidate to lead them. Not the old divide and conquer politics of the past. Will they see through the diversions the GOP will offer up during the Fall campaign, or look at the issues?

Will John McCain stick to the tenets of the Bush Administration with regard to Iraq? Is he campaigning for a third Bush term? Will his age be a factor? Will his admission that he knows little about economics sink him, or his admittance that his Iraq strategy will embroil us for the next fifty-years? Our grandchildren or great-grand children may be another casualty of this war. Bad enough by our profligate spending we will hand them the bill for a three-trillion dollar debt do we want them to inherit our biggest foreign policy blunder in history?

This is what’s at stake in this election. Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain (regardless of how much a maverick his press shop tries to paint him) is a member of the old politics as is Mrs. Clinton. They will not accept a new paradigm of our politics because they are deeply entwined with the old special interest model. We have seen in recent years what this model has wrought: corporate scandal, predatory lending, and currently price gouging at the pump by Big Oil.

It’s time for a change.