Posted by
beltway girl on Saturday, August 16, 2008 2:08:32 AM
At this Democratic Party convention in Denver, we will have Hillary Clinton's name presented in the roll call. At that roll call vote, anything can happen, and it quite possibly will. With the demise of John Edwards, voters' memories might go into rewind mode, pausing at that final debate going into New Hampshire. That was the debate where John Edwards and Barack Obama sat there, shooting the breeze and chuckling (and perhaps snickering), completely leaving Hillary out of the inside jokes. It looked mean-spirited. Actually, it looked downright nasty. And yes, it looked sexist. More than the thoroughly dissected tears, the performance by all three that night may have delivered New Hampshire to Hillary Clinton.
Not only, though, do we have the Edwards Factor going into this Big Dem Circus, we have Obama tied today with lucky, lucky John McCain in Gallup polls.
How'd he get so lucky?
Well, first of all, it's not all luck. McCain's vast foreign policy credentials speak for themselves, and Obama hasn't exactly been going for big guns at the veep post to compensate for his own lack in this area. Instead, he's been out twittering on a far-left branch with Tim Kaine, who also has no foreign policy experience.
Birds of a feather. Please note this writer is not saying that the chickens have come home to roost.
So we've got a lightweight courting another lightweight. Obama probably thought this was pretty cute, considering the Iraq War is as unpopular as it is.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the convention. The bear woke up.
It was a deep hibernation, but it had to come to an end some time. And the end came just in time to highlight the vast differences between John McCain and Barack Obama in the realm of foreign policy. And to put some of Obama's potential cabinet members in the spotlight.
That didn't turn out very well for the Change Cabinet. By almost all estimates, they embarrassed themselves. Obama himself left much to be desired in terms of his own responses.
So when the big, bad bear bared its teeth at the west, there was something of a very slight bounce for Obama, the Hopemogerer. But once the voters actually got a chance to think through the responses of the big players, the bounce quickly, understandably, and predictably evaporated.
So now, we have presumptive nomineee Barack Obama preparing to take the stage in Denver. Will he go rolling in, riding the crest of his rhetorical hope and change wave?
No, he will not.
Barack Obama will limp into this convention, a lame-duck candidate tied in the polls with the less-than-electrifying John McCain. Obama will have been struck down by his gaffes (his own white grandmother, a typical white person, and all those bitter Pennsylvanians). He will have been struck down by his allies (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Ludacris, and Michael Pfleger). He will have been struck down by his own radicalism (fighting against medical help for babies that survived the abortion procedure, and a very narrow economic agenda in the Illinois General Assembly which is recounted in the Weekly Standard). He will have been struck down by his own ego (his controlling attitude with the press, his general demeanor disparaged by Jesse Jackson and others, and his celebrity status, so cunningly nurtured by the press and so deftly examined by the McCain campaign).
He's ripe; the Clintons will almost definitely pick him.
Barack Obama has already sold his convention to the Clintons. They own it now, it's theirs.
If they could get this far in controlling the convention, taking the actual nomination is a very real possibility. These are the Clintons we're talking about, here. The Clintons, with their lust for power, their war rooms, and the memos we've just seen released saying to attack Obama as foreign
Hillary Clinton, never the Mary Poppins of the Democrats, "Oh, it's going to be me" Hillary Clinton, well, she's not just going to walk away from an opportunity to seize back her chance at the White House on a roll call vote that just might go her way.
No way. If she can get it, she'll take it. And Hillary's supporters are often like the candidate herself. They'll stop at nothing to finish on top in this tangle, so it's a very real possibility.
What might get in the way, though, is the enormity and ferocity of the African American vote. So this theft of the nomination could become a very dicey proposition. It wouldn't rule it out entirely, though. If Hillary could actually stage such a coup, she could try to salve the wounds by making Obama her VP.
What is probably more likely, though, is that we're seeing the genesis of the Scream Ticket, a prospect that is probably the Dems' last, best hope. The Hillbill as veep with the overly encumbered but rhetorically gifted Obama at the helm just might work, and they know it.
This makes McCain's choice for VP critical. If he chooses choice, he's finished. No voter who likes our abortion laws as is is going to go to McCain with an Obama-Hillary ticket in the offing, even if McCain has an abortion himself.
He'll be destroyed.
So it's roll call time. We may be being set up for a Scream ticket. If not, count on seeing Hillary again when the time is right. In the meantime, McCain had better respond to Obama's abortion "rights" veep candidate in kind. Otherwise, we may all end up screaming, too.