Just Above Sunset

There are serious matters, always, as on Tuesday, May 13, fires were burning, cyclones causing unimaginable devastation and massive earthquakes leveling cities – and tornadoes were “on a record pace” across the American South and no one really knew why. You might assume something was up – Mother Nature saying something like PAY ATTENTION! If you were of a fanciful nature you could imagine the planet itself was sort of slapping us all in the face – Snap out of it, forget Barack and Hillary, and old-man McCain, and even the shallow, mean and vindictive George Bush and his Svengali, Dick Cheney! 

But of course there was no “Thanks, I needed that.” Most people watched those news stories with the usual odd mixture of being properly appalled and vaguely bored – save for those in Florida, Myanmar (Burma), central China, or Tulsa. All of that was elsewhere – far away. We live in our own world, with our own concerns.

The same day brought us this news story from the UK:

A man who dressed up as Darth Vader, wearing a garbage bag for a cape, and assaulted the founders of a group calling itself the Jedi church was given a suspended sentence Tuesday.

Arwel Wynne Hughes, 27, attacked Jedi church founder Barney Jones - aka Master Jonba Hehol - with a metal crutch, hitting him on the head, prosecutors told Holyhead Magistrates’ Court.

He also whacked Jones’ 18-year-old cousin, Michael Jones - known as Master Mormi Hehol - bruising his thigh in the March 25 incident, prosecutors said.

But it seems this was all a matter of competing obsessions, intense enthusiasm, and a lack of restraint:

Hughes claimed he couldn’t remember the incident, having drunk the better part of a 2 1/2-gallon (10-liter) box of wine beforehand.

“He knows his behavior was wrong and didn’t want it to happen but he has no recollection of it,” said Hughes’ lawyer, Frances Jones.

District Judge Andrew Shaw sentenced Hughes to two months in jail but suspended the sentence for one year. He also ordered Hughes to pay $195 to each of his victims and $117 in court costs.

In the 2001 United Kingdom census, 390,000 - 0.7 percent of the population - listed Jedi as their religion.

Almost four hundred thousand people list Jedi as their religion? George Lucas has much to answer for. But one is reminded of the Hillary Clinton supporters – as this was the day she won the West Virginia primary, not that it mattered much. Obama leads in pledged delegates, superdelegates, the popular vote and all the rest. But she did win the state, somewhere around 66-27, but the percentages. She picked up perhaps fifteen pledged delegates, just after Obama had picked up fourteen more superdelegates. It was a win of sorts.

Reuters reported it this way – Hillary Shellacs Obama in West Virginia Primary – “As was widely predicted in polls, Clinton takes the state. Obama conceded West Virginia, but Hillary’s campaign argues that he shouldn’t be able to write off the loss given her decisive margin.”

The Associated Press offered Determined Clinton Wins W.Va., Says Race Not Over:

Hillary Rodham Clinton coasted to a large but largely symbolic victory in working-class West Virginia on Tuesday, handing Barack Obama one of his worst defeats of the campaign yet scarcely slowing his march toward the Democratic presidential nomination.

“The White House is won in the swing states. And I am winning the swing states,” Clinton told cheering supporters at a victory rally.

She coupled praise for Obama with a pledge to persevere in a campaign in which she has become the decided underdog. “This race isn’t over yet,” she said. “Neither of us has the total delegates it takes to win.”

As least she didn’t swoop in as Darth Vader, wearing a garbage bag for a cape, and slap Obama around, even if the Force is With Him. CNN has a video of her victory speech – part madness (the numbers don’t mean a thing) and part graciousness (Obama is a fine fellow and someone does have to defeat Grandpa McCain, who is really George Bush, and one of us must).

So her campaign was rescued from the dead, as CNN put it. And the Clinton campaign had already pointed out that this one really did matter, as “no Democrat has won the White House without winning West Virginia since 1916″ – so you see, Obama’s devastating primary loss in this case shows that, in spite of his large lead in the polls over John McCain, he cannot possible win the general election – no way, no how. Those polls lie.

Matthew Yglesias has a few things to say about that:

What’s even more interesting is that no Democrat has won the White House without carrying Minnesota since 1912 (it went for Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party) so given that Obama won Minnesota and Clinton won West Virginia, McCain is guaranteed to win the general election - unless the eventual nominee can somehow completely replicate the social and political conditions prevailing in pre-WWI America. The outlook, in short, is very grim.

Yes, it is all quite mad – but then Matthew Yglesias lives in another world, and he writes books. The good people of West Virginia don’t mess with those –

According to the exit polls, about two-thirds - 65% - of all Democratic primary voters today are whites with less than a four-year college degree. That’s by far the highest percentage for any primary state so far. … The age distribution of the West Virginia Democratic primary electorate is older than most states. A quarter (26%) of those voting today are seniors, 65 and older. Just 12% of the voters are under 30.

It’s an interesting place. It’s no place for a Jedi knight.

As for ever sorting out the madness, over what had happened and what it meant, Josh Marshall at Talking Point Memo said don’t watch television:

This is fascinating. I spent most of the evening writing a sprawling post about the historical and demographic roots of Sen. Clinton’s strength in Appalachia (which accounts for almost all of her purported strength with rural and working class white voters). But now I’m listening to the MSNBCoids discussing the finer points of objective fact versus epistemological relativism, or, in this specific case, whether Sen. Clinton simply has a different, equally valid, opinion on the closeness of the race, or whether she’s living in her own separate reality. So I’m not really sure there’s any point.

Yep, everyone has their own separate reality, and some run for president. The trick is to get the pundits on television to say, yeah, we see the actual facts, and she does seems crazy as a loon, but to be fair, we obviously must consider whether everyone else in the world is crazy, including all of us, and only she sees the truth, and thus the facts really don’t matter – it’s only fair.

But there are basic facts, and Andrew Sullivan offers them up:

The exit polls reveal what the demographics have long foretold, and what the polls last February predicted, with just a few wrinkles. The race factor seems to have tipped very heavily toward Clinton in West Virginia. In Indiana, 16 percent said race was an important factor for them; in Pennsylvania, 19 percent; in West Virginia, 22 percent. The racial skew to Clinton does soar in West Virginia: 81 percent of race-based voters went for Clinton; in Pennsylvania, it was 55; in Indiana, it was 53 percent.

Oddly, Obama did better among white Catholics in West Virginia than he has in the past. No idea if that means anything.

Was this racial? See this:

Josh Fry, a 24-year-old ambulance driver from Williamson, insisted he was not racist but said he would feel more comfortable with Mr McCain, the 71-year-old Vietnam war hero, in the White House. “I want someone who is a full-blooded American as president,” he said.

There’s much more here –

Yet another was told of Obama by a Clinton supporter: “He’s a half-breed and he’s a Muslim. How can you trust that?”

Yeah, well – there is the matter of competing obsessions, intense enthusiasm, and a lack of restraint.

And then the is Camille Paglia, the “feminist that other feminists love to hate,” offering this in Salon:

“She Came to Stay.” That was the American title of Simone de Beauvoir’s first book, a 1943 roman à clef about a manipulative and self-absorbed young woman who saps the energy and willpower of her admirers and plunges them into the existential abyss.

Bulletin to all nations: help! Tornadoes, typhoons and earthquakes batter the globe, while the U.S. is teetering into recession and paralyzed by a stupid war it can neither win nor quit. But somehow we are locked at the hip to Hillary Clinton, who won’t stop her manic tarantella until her party whirls into ruins, like the run-amuck carousel in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.”

That’s just not nice, no matter how packed with amusing allusions. But it comes down to this:

As a candidate running a close second, Hillary would normally have every right to complete the primary process, which runs into early June. Calls for her to drop out of the race began months ago and were certainly premature. But at this point, even with strong wins in Appalachia, Hillary has no true rationale for her candidacy, other than her inflamed gender and her putative Washington “experience” - which has yet to produce a tangible legislative achievement. Her persistence is now keyed to her hope (chillingly close to a curse) that her rival will make a major gaffe or be besmirched by some unknown past scandal. And her message maliciously undermines the presumptive nominee by targeting his presumed weakness in the general election. But the gifted Obama is just getting started on the national stage, while his opponent, John McCain, is a clumsy, fusty, narcissistic waffler whose party is in disarray and revolt against him.

And Paglia knows Hillary is not quitting:

I’m puzzled by the optimism of so many commentators and Democratic functionaries who are prophesying Hillary’s graceful withdrawal by mid-June. Is there anything in the Clintons’ tawdry history to support such a thesis? Why wouldn’t they play smiley-face rope-a-dope now and smash-mouth alley-and-ambush fisticuffs right to the bitter end - meaning the convention in August? It’s now or never for Ms. Hill. Even if Obama loses this fall, there’s no guarantee whatever that she would win the Democratic nomination in 2012. That hoss will have been around the rodeo way too many times. The infusion of fresh new blood into the party - especially women governors - has already started. Who will want to resurrect all those 1990s mummies?

And should she somehow win the nomination, there would be trouble:

Republican operatives have been salivating for Hillary to be the nominee. Her vainglorious claim to have been fully “vetted” is ludicrous. She and her husband left a mountain of manure in Little Rock and Washington that hasn’t even begun to be thrown. The mainstream media, despite its tilt toward Obama, has been amazingly protective of the Clintons during this campaign. Where were the chronologies of the voluminous Clinton scandals that voters (especially young ones) needed to evaluate Hillary’s professional judgment and character? That the conservative Washington Times has now begun to make document drops about Hillary’s stonewalling and duplicity (such as over the Rose Law Firm billing records) suggests that Republicans have concluded her candidacy is kaput.

Surely, given Hillary’s claim of expertise on the basis of her service as first lady, every major or ambiguous episode in her husband’s two presidencies should have been systematically reexamined by the media. …

Not to worry – see The Portland Tribune with Poll: Obama trouncing Clinton in Oregon (Illinois senator leading former first lady 55-35) – “A bit more than a week away from Oregon’s May 20 primary, Barack Obama has amassed a nearly insurmountable lead in the Democratic presidential race, according to statewide polling …”

But does that matter? See Christopher Beam in Slate with this review of the Clinton reality, after West Virginia. Here’s the alternative truth:

1) Obama’s coalition is splintering. Clinton’s major argument has been that Obama can’t win working-class white voters, and that he relies on too narrow a coalition. Well, tonight helps her case. Clinton won almost every single demographic normally loyal to Obama. She won all income slices, although less decisively among wealthier voters. She won 54 percent of independents, as well as 59 percent of conservatives. She took college graduates by 57 percent. (She even won voters with postgraduate work, 51-47. Hey now!) And, most surprisingly, she won young voters (age 17-29) with 57 percent. Everyone expected Clinton to win West Virginia because of its demographics - they didn’t expect Obama to slip quite so much among his usual fans.

2) He’s too vulnerable. It looked like Obama’s campaign disasters - the Rev. Wright, “bitter,” the flag pin - didn’t hurt him much in Indiana and North Carolina. In West Virginia, though, they clearly did. Fifty-one percent of voters told pollsters they thought Obama shares Wright’s views. Only 47 percent of voters said Obama shares their values - a pretty clear stand-in for questions of patriotism. Clinton could argue that these voters are the tip of a big, judgmental iceberg of general election voters. If you think Obama’s having trouble now, wait till all the racists come out of the woodwork in November.

3) Economy blues. Consider this: Sixty-four percent of voters named the economy as their top issue. At the same time, a whopping 63 percent said her gas tax holiday proposal was a good idea. That despite almost unanimous opposition to the idea by experts. Clinton can now say she’s got the people on her side. She can also argue that if the economy crashes between now and November, she stands to benefit much more than Obama.

4) It’s not over! According to Fox News, 78 percent of voters think Clinton should stay in the race. That includes a good chunk of Obama supporters. If Clinton needs to persuade superdelegates to hold their tongues until June 3, this is the stat she’ll cite. And right now, buying time is the best thing Clinton can do.

All this may work, or it may not.

But there’s more, like Robert Novak’s column from May 12, with this:

Some U.S. Christians are not reconciled to McCain’s candidacy but instead regard the prospective presidency of Barack Obama in the nature of a biblical plague visited upon a sinful people. These militants look at former Baptist preacher Huckabee as “God’s candidate” for president in 2012. Whether they can be written off as merely a troublesome fringe group depends on Huckabee’s course.

Yglesias comments:

Now there appears to be no actual evidence that Huckabee, working in tandem with God Himself, is actually fighting to deliver the presidency to Black Nationalist Muslim devil-man Barack Obama, but Novak’s got plenty of idle speculation.

But Obama could be the Antichrist, ruling in wickedness until the True Christ is triumphant (and the world ends) – you never know. But people say lots of things. Chris Matthews in this video clip says that Hillary Clinton is “the Al Sharpton of white people” – whatever that means. And there are four hundred thousand Brits who list Jedi as their religion. We live in our own worlds, with our own concerns.

And it’s not like the guy now is charge is any more grounded than anyone else:

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families: He has given up golf.

And via Duncan Black, from October, 2003:

Mansfield also reports: “Aides found him face down on the floor in prayer in the Oval Office. It became known that he refused to eat sweets while American troops were in Iraq, a partial fast seldom reported of an American president. And he framed America’s challenges in nearly biblical language. Saddam Hussein is an evildoer. He has to go.” The author concludes: “… the Bush administration does deeply reflect its leader, and this means that policy, even in military matters, will be processed in terms of the personal, in terms of the moral, and in terms of a sense of divine purpose that propels the present to meet the challenges of its time.”

And also from October, 2003:

Bush was in an expansive mood on the flight from Indonesia to Australia, wearing an Air Force One flight jacket, snacking noisily on a butterscotch sweet and chopping the air for emphasis.

And so it goes. It’s all madness.