Posted by
beltway girl on Friday, March 07, 2008 10:13:26 PM
It's still curtains.
And let me tell you how I know this.
You know, I blog for fun. I'm not a "pundit." But I watch them all the time. Sometimes, right before I have to go and take an aspirin so I can come back and watch them some more, they'll say something that interests me.
The map, you know? They pull those maps up all the time to show how Mrs. Clinton has all these blue states, and Mrs. Clinton has won this swing state, and Mrs. Clinton has won that swing state.
Ohio! So goes the nation(except in 1960)
!
And Obama's a big loser with all these red states (boo! hissss...) that the Democrats will never carry in the general election.
So, you know, I got out a big wall map we have here, and I looked at some websites (really hard to understand ones, like Wikipedia), and do you know what I found?
True blue (or safe blue) states right now include Washington, Illinois, Hawaii, Maine, Vermont, DC, Maryland, and Connecticut. And Obama has won these. Safe or true blues also include California, Rhode Island, New York, Deleware, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and these have gone with Clinton. Now, pundits, I think the score on that is eight to six.
Ah, but the pundits will fall over each other countering with the Super Blue Theory. Mrs. Clinton has carried the ball for the Democrats in electorate-heavy New York, California, and Massachusetts! Don't you know what this means?
Sure I do. It means you could run out to the dime store, buy a GE light bulb, paint a smile on it, and dangle a blue tie on it. And Democrats in these states would vote for it. In fact, they did just this with John Kerry. It worked, but you can't win the general election like that.
Next, the swing states.
Ohio!
So goes the nation(except in 1960)
!
Right, but Ohio's not the only swing state on the map. Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Virginia are all swing states, and they've gone for Obama. Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico (where they were counting, and counting, and counting), Tennessee, and Arkansas are also swing states, and they've gone with Clinton. Indiana, Oregon, Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania haven't voted yet.
(I'm not counting Florida because I think all the cadidates have to agree that an election can be held there before you can call it a win.)
(I'm also not including Michigan in here because, unlike the Clinton camp, I think the opponent's name should be on the ballot to count as a win.)
Okay, so what I found especially striking about the swing state part is that when you look at the swing states on the map, Obama's home state is stuck right in the middle of a huge swath of them. And he has already carved into the area pretty substantially. If you look at Senator Clinton's New York, it's all GE country.
You know why the media isn't discussing any of this?
Because they're in the tank for Obama. Thank God we have Saturday Night Live to look out for us!
So tell you what. I'm just going to leave the pundits to muse over the super blues.
"But Hillary will deliver the super blues!"
And if Hillary is the one to deliver the super blues, the Democrats are going to be using those super blues in more ways than one. And they will be double-edged.