2008 Presidential Campaign
Chelsea Clinton Remembers 1992 Campaign with “My Dad for President” Essay
Chelsea Clinton was asked to pen a remembrance of her father’s 1992 campaign — which kicked off in October 1991, 20 years ago this month — and she authored this essay, “My Dad for President” as part of that commemoration.
The 1992 Clinton presidential campaign was actually the first presidential campaign I ever took part in, but it wasn’t to help Bill Clinton or the Democrats…it was to help First Lady of Arkansas Hillary Clinton become the First Lady of the United States…so she could take the first steps towards becoming President Clinton herself.
I was 15 years old at the time, in a Catholic high school in the suburbs of Cleveland, with Brandon Walsh (decidedly not Dylan McKay) sideburns and a respect for Hillary Clinton earned my freshman year, a full year before most of the country had ever heard of her, when I researched Hillary’s work as Arkansas’ First Lady for a debate in Ms. Habrat’s speech class. Oddly enough, I also researched Tipper Gore for the same class, but a different debate — that one on music censorship. I found Tipper to be, largely, an irrational nut and think the same to this day.
Hillary Clinton, however, intrigued me for being a woman people forever accused of being behind all sorts of ridiculous things and seemingly having magical powers with which to thwart her enemies. When the Clintons emerged on the national scene, and both the Left and Right started maligning her, I followed her exploits with even greater interest.
In life, I’ve always had a natural affinity for people who not only take punches well, but punch back even harder. I can’t stand wimps. I don’t like people who are forever too afraid to fight and have no interest in ever supporting anyone who I don’t trust to do what she or he thinks is best no matter what the establishment wants her or him to do instead.
I remember the 1992 campaign because both of my grandmothers were thrilled to see Hillary on the national stage, and cheered every time she took a stage and socked it to her critics. Both grandmas hoped they’d live to see Hillary as president herself, but both died before Hillary announced her 2008 campaign.
The night the Clintons won in 1992, and emerged from the statehouse in Arkansas for Bill Clinton to make his acceptance speech, my grandmothers and I all promised together we’d do everything we could to help Hillary Clinton win the White House herself in the future. Since I was all that was left of that pact in 2008, I tried to do everything I’d imagine my grandmothers would have done, and then some, to elect Hillary Clinton.
HillBuzz.org was started as a Hillary Clinton campaign site inspired a little by the round-robin telephone trees and Ladies’ Guild newsletters my grandmothers relied on in their time to communicate with like-minded people and work towards goals, like electing favored candidates to office. Though they could have never imagined something like a website existing to help Hillary, I hope they would have enjoyed the site my friends and I created for the campaign…and that I continued, and evolved, with friends old and new in the years since.
It still kills me a little every day that I couldn’t think up the magic strategy that would have defeated Obama in the primaries. I feel I failed my grandmothers because I didn’t save the day and win the nomination for our HRC.
I know Hillary Derangement Syndrome runs strong in a lot of you who read this site now, and I learned long ago that I am never going to convince anyone to change their firmly established perceptions of this woman. My boyfriend Justin, in fact, was raised to hate Hillary Clinton (though he can never clearly tell me why) and his parents honest-to-goodness believe Hillary stole a “heart attack ray” from NASA and uses it on her enemies (like Tim Russert, whom Justin’s father, a veterinarian, seriously believes Hillary murdered during the 2008 presidential campaign. He also thinks Hillary murdered someone he calls “Vince Vaughn”, so you can imagine why I have never deigned to argue with this man or challenge his perception of HRC).
There are ENORMOUS lessons for conservatives to learn from what the Obama campaign did to Hillary Clinton and her supporters in 2008, but in the three years and change I’ve been writing HillBuzz.org, I have never been able to convince Republicans to put their Hillary hate to the side long enough to see that everything the Left did to Hillary in the primaries was a dry run for what the Left will do to the Republican nominee in 2012.
John McCain, for whatever reason, didn’t really want to be president and never truly challenged Obama. McCain was the “it’s his turn” nominee, and ran a lackluster, meandering campaign that he actually suspended at one point and talked about just giving up. The only thing this man did right, in fact, was introducing Governor Sarah Palin to the national stage and launching her on a path to become the first female President herself.
It still hurts my heart that Hillary Clinton will never be president, but I see in retrospect her year to run was actually in 2004. She could have been the nominee, if she hadn’t listened to the Democrat establishment that told her to wait her turn and that “2008 would be her year”. I have it on very good authority that Ted Kennedy himself told Hillary that, and she foolishly believed him, being a good and loyal Democrat who decided to respect the establishment’s wishes and postpone her own ambitions so John Kerry could run the establishment-approved campaign in 2004…while the establishment geared up to backstab Hillary Clinton the next election by deciding, as early as 2004, that Barack Obama would be the 2008 nominee. The Democrat Party hates women, but knows it needs blacks to keep blindly voting Democrat, so having the first black president was always more important than running a candidate who would have made an excellent president.
During the 2008 campaign, I saw just how vile the Democrat Party really is. In truth, I’d always been uncomfortable being part of a Party that relied to heavily on union thuggery and that worked so hard to keep black people and Hispanics so poor and dependent on government handouts so they would keep blindly voting Democrat forever. I also hated the identity politics that drives the Democrat Party, and the corruption endemic to every major city that’s under complete Democrat control.
I would have probably become a Republican 20 years sooner if it wasn’t for the Clintons, because while Bill and Hillary Clinton were the heads of the Party, at least I felt the Left was kept somewhat at bay and such an entity as a conservative Democrat could actually exist. I learned my lesson at around 5pm or so on May 31st, 2008 when the Democrat Rules & Bylaws Committee actually stole Delegates from Hillary Clinton and awarded them to Obama, to secure the nomination for him.
I was there, in DC, when the actual decision came down. It was pouring rain that day. I will never forget a slight, bespeckled, Asian woman in a pink rain coat with a Hello Kitty umbrella who stood outside the hotel the RBC was meeting in holding up a sign that read “Count every vote, every vote counts!”. The rain had warped the letters and the paper was falling to shreds, but there she stood, crying because it was so clear to her the fix was in and the Party had decided on Obama no matter what the voters wanted.
That was it for me in terms of the Democrat Party. I will never in my life vote Democrat again, and I hope in some small way I can use my life to help metaphorically burn the Democrat Party to the ground for so embracing voter fraud, thuggery, Alinsky Methods, and everything else the Left employs to glorify Obama and keep him in power.
I came out as gay during the 2008 campaign because the Clinton campaign here in Chicago needed someone to fundraise and recruit volunteers in Boystown. I soon found myself on TV and the radio and doing interviews with the media. It was the scariest thing I’d ever done, and I was terrified there was no turning back ever, but I did it because Hillary Clinton needed it to be done and I couldn’t do it unless I came out. I got to meet a great many of Hillary’s friends here in Chicago, and got to know a few of them very well. They knew the sacrifices I made for the campaign and were a better support team than I could have ever dreamed I’d have in coming out. I got to know Chelsea Clinton a little by working several events with her and had the shock of my life one day in February when she actually called me on the telephone to thank me for organizing a small dollar fundraiser for her mother.
There were stretches when I’d get to speak to Hillary herself in person several times a week. My family pretty much disowned me and was embarrassed by me for coming out, and in talking with her Hillary learned this and actually tried to intervene to mend these fences for me. I was just a campaign worker in Chicago, with the little website my friends and I ran, running my little volunteer efforts here, and the woman who was in the fight of her life against Obama and the Left actually remembered what I was going through every time I’d see her and she’d take a moment to check in and encourage me to stay strong and to know I made the right choice in coming out.
I still get hatemail here at HB from people who say how much they hate Hillary Clinton and go on about how evil she is or how she killed “Vince Vaughn”. I forward those last ones to my boyfriend Justin with a note saying, “Tell your dad to stop writing me!”. I will always treasure the experiences I had on the 2008 campaign because a former First Lady of the United States, a former United States Senator, and the current Secretary of State is a person who showed me such incredible kindness right when I needed it most and who made sure I knew how much she appreciated what I went through in trying to help her campaign.
So, the Clintons will always mean something to me on a very personal level. When Justin is mad at me and wants to be a jerk, or just wants to get my goat because he’s still at that point in his 20s when he thinks everything he does is HILARIOUS, he’ll forward me a picture of Hillary looking terrible somewhere while traveling around the world and attach a message of “Your gal’s not looking so hot these days”. I just ignore him, because his Hillary Derangement Syndrome will never allow him to take a step back and appreciate how much Hillary’s personal kindness to me will always mean, no matter what he, his parents, or anyone in conservative ranks says about her.
On days when I was so sick I almost couldn’t get out of bed or have felt so attacked and defeated I just didn’t want to live anymore, I swear I thought about Hillary Clinton standing in the rain in Pittsburgh, PA back in 2008…refusing to cancel a campaign rally…and delivering an electrifying speech to the crowd as lightning flashed above her head and I marveled at her tenacity from the sidelines.
I never thought another person on Earth would inspire me like this, but then emerged Governor Sarah Palin who has the same tenacity and determination, even if she’s in a different party and is on a mission to take down the establishment in a way Hillary Clinton never did.
It’s actually been really hard for me to come to terms with this, but I had to accept a long time ago that even though Hillary was betrayed by the Democrat establishment (in both 2004 and 2008), it’s just not who she is to bring these people down. Maybe that comes with being a former First Lady, or from having been in the Senate and lived in Washington for too long. It was never in her 2008 campaign to take down the establishment…but at the time, I didn’t even know back then this is what America needed to do to survive.
I know in comments people will rehash all the old anti-Hillary, hateful remarks that I’ve seen and responded to thousands of times at this point. I also know I’ll be asked “how can you support Palin now after being such a strong Hillary supporter”. I hope regular readers will answer this stuff for me because I just don’t have the strength to repeat myself on this again. Though, I will say that in 2008 the best choice for President was Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, who would have never done to this country what Obama did because she would have never allowed the Left — or anyone alive — to dictate the course of her presidency.
The best choice for President in 2012 is Governor Sarah Palin, because I believe she has the same tenacity and fight inside her that Hillary Clinton did in 2008…but with the realization that the permanent political class needs to be fought tooth and nail, in a way that Hillary didn’t see clearly when she was in a position to have done so herself.
I grew up knowing the strongest fighters and the best Americans around me were the moms, grandmothers, and aunts I knew back in Cleveland who took care of me and all of my friends and who always rose to the challenge when they needed to…when too often the men that I knew in life slinked off to play golf or go on vacation when the going got tough.
I think America’s going to be saved by moms, grandmothers, and aunts in 2012. I think a lot of these women — and the men who will stand with them — were Hillary voters in 2008 who will back Governor Palin in next year’s election. From Hillary to Sarah so many of us will go, with many never imagining in a million years they’d make a transition like this.
It’s sure been a strange journey for me, and for everyone from the Team Hillary days who’ve continued with me here on HillBuzz.org for all these years.
This post ended up being much less of a nostalgic look back at the 1992 campaign than Chelsea’s reminiscence that started it…but while I’ll never forget the past and will always cherish its part in me, I can’t help but set my sights on the future and the people I know are best to lead America through the tough times ahead.
The 45th President of the United States will be a woman, but she won’t be named Clinton and despite the personal feelings I have for the Clintons, I have to say yet again that the next president has to be — HAS TO BE — someone who is willing to absolutely destroy both the Left and the Cocktail Party GOP establishment if America is to recover from what Obama has done to the nation.
The only person alive who can do this is Sarah Palin.
I seriously pray every day she answers this call. I know if my grandmothers were still here they’d be praying the same thing, as are millions of us Hillary ’08 vets who are willing to get back into the trenches again and fight Obama and his minions under Palin’s banner this time.
Could blacks really not show up to vote in 2012 to re-elect Obama?
Much of the black community was pretty obnoxious back in 2008 regarding the election of Obama, who was branded “the historic and unprecedented first black president”, despite being half-white and mostly Arab (since his Kenyan father was actually only 1/4 black and 3/4 African Muslim).
Blacks here in Chicago harassed Hillary volunteers during the primary campaign, calling us RAAACISTS! for supporting Clinton instead of Obama…when we knew all along how terrible Obama would be as president and did everything we could to stop him from getting the nomination. The Obama campaign clearly ramped up the racial tension and actively encouraged black people to hurl racially-motivated insults and epithets at the Clintons themselves. Remember what happened during the South Carolina primary back in 2008? Obama surrogates not only played the race card against both Hillary and Bill Clinton, but Obama pushed the Pigford Black Reparations scam to black community leaders as a carrot to lead them away from supporting the Clintons and secure them in the Obama camp (it was then-Senator Obama who engineered the Pigford Black Reparations scam, which was a reward to the black community for abandoning and attacking the Clintons so Obama could become president).
On election night back in 2008, I attended the McCain/Palin results watch events in Chicago, with one group hosted in a hotel overlooking Grant Park downtown…directly across the street from where the Obama cult rally took place. It was nowhere near as large as the cameras led people watching on television to believe (with Mayor Daley apocryphally claiming at the time that “there were 2 million people there!”, when a few days later the Park Service admitted it was more like 300,000, which is less than the attendance of both the Gay Pride Parade here in Boystown or the Taste of Chicago food festival downtown). But there were indeed a lot of Obama cultists out in force that day, most of them being part of the national lamestream media, with “journalists” crying on camera, so emotionally affected by Obama’s election.
Inside the hotel, some group affiliated with Jesse Jackson had one of the ballrooms for an event of their own. Many black attendees of the group, all dressed in orange Jesse Jackson tee shirts, thronged the corridors, elevators, and public rooms of the hotel loudly cheering not for Obama, but for their race. “A black man in the White House!”, they shouted at anyone white. “It’s the Black House now, suckers!” They shook their butts, made obscure and bizarre hand and arm gestures (which are apparently common in black fraternity and sororities, but alien outside the black community), and hooted and hollering until dawn over Obama’s win.
In an elevator with other McCain/Palin supporters riding to our floor, several of these orange-shirted Jackson affiliates made horrible comments to us, in playground, taunting tones unexpected from grown adults. It was a very tense elevator ride, because it wasn’t about the election of a politician…it was about these particular black people singling out the white people in front of them for a verbal attack based on our race as opposed to theirs.
Of course, because these were black people doing the taunting and freely shouting obnoxious racially-motivated exclamations into the air, this was all okay. The fact these were people participating in an orange-shirted Jesse Jackson event of some kind just made everything all the more obvious.
After the election came the belief that “Obama money” would be flowing into the black community like honey from a Pennsylvania Avenue bee hive once Obama took over. Remember the absurd, delusional woman who said on camera that Obama was going to pay her rent, and her gas bill, and her car note, etc.? There were near-riots in Detroit when black people lined up to get their “Obama money”, when none was to be had.
The only “Obama money” that ever materialized was that affiliated with the Pigford Black Reparations scam that Obama cooked up as a sitting US Senator and pushed through as President — but those reparations went only to the politically connected Obama operatives in the South, as payback for their help defeating the Clintons.
In a city like Chicago, Obama has done about as much for blacks as President as he did for them as a US Senator or a state senator here in Illinois before that: jack smack.
Obama does not care about black people, largely because Obama does not consider himself to be a black person. Throughuot his life, Obama has only been black when it’s best suited him. Mostly, Obama considers himself to be a Muslim and an Indonesian, based on the obvious fact that he spent his formative years in a foreign country hating America and was adopted by Indonesian Lolo Soetoro when his mother married this Indonesian man. There is an alien, foreignness to Obama that’s the root of who this man is. Very clearly this keeps him from relating to the lives and problems of Americans…especially the black ones.
I’ve always found it striking that Obama has allowed his grandmother and brothers in Africa to live in abject squalor, suffering without electricity in their homes, while he enjoyed great riches benefitting from everything the Left showered him with as Leftists prepared Obama’s rise to the top. He could have very easily made a better life for his black relatives, including his Aunt Zetuni who lived in a housing project in Boston (illegally so), but he chose not to.
Just as he chose not to do a darn thing to benefit the black community he represented here in Chicago as a state senator…and then recommitted to doing nothing for the black community as a US Senator after that.
Here and there, I hear black community leaders in Chicago grumble about this.
They get angry when pressed for an opinion about what Obama has done for blacks as president.
According to this bit in the Washington Post, blacks are not enthused about re-electing Obama.
I wonder how hard it will be to gin up the race-card flinging, hatefest the Obama campaign produced with ease back in 2008 when this spectacle is needed by his re-election campaign next year.
Will so many black people participate in this the next time around?
Will black people get on the Obama bandwagon again to intimidate white voters and call anyone not voting for Obama a RAAACIST again?
More importantly, will people be intimidated and bullied this way again?
Do the threats of being called a RAAACIST carry as much weight now, and will they carry that much weight again in 2012?
Will Republicans actually grow a spine and push back on this garbage…or will the Cocktail Party GOP establishment stand back and allow these threats of being called RAAACISTS for opposing Obama’s re-election hamstring the Republican effort in 2012?
I’ve heard several times now that black voters will not show up for Obama in the numbers Obama needs to win re-election in 2012. Though it’s rare to hear it from black people on the street, there is immense disappointment in Obama in the black community.
But, the simple truth is that it was not black voters that gave Obama the win in 2012.
Obama won because independents voted for him to prove they were not RAAACISTS and very foolish Republicans sat home on election day “to teach the party a lesson” because they felt McCain was not conservative enough.
Will this happen again in 2012?
What think you?
Gold Action Item: Think of ways to consistently ask Americans if they received the hopeychange Obama promised them in 2008
I have been told the Cocktail Party GOP establishment does not want Americans asked on a regular basis if they got the hopeychange Obama promised them in the 2008 election.
Say it with me: the Cocktail Party GOP establishment is stupid, and far too dependent on consultants who eat their crayons.
The thinking (if you stretch the word enough to cover this folly) is that “Republicans need to save this attack for 2012″.
Right.
The same way the Party of Stupid is forever saving this, reserving that, and generally abstaining from winning strategies…for one inane reason or another.
The article at the top of this post predicts $6 gas this summer…with a massive surge in food prices. States are so broke, many cannot even afford to keep funding their food stamp programs. That means disaster, not hopeychange, is barrelling down on millions of Americans…many of whom were stupidly Obama voters in 2008.
On a daily basis, people who voted for Obama three years ago need to be asked if they received the hopeychange they were promised and if they are in better shape than they were back when they drank all that Kool-Aid.
I do not see any way that people who did NOT vote for Obama in 2008 will be so charmed by his job performance that they support his re-election.
I have never heard a McCain/Palin voter wish they could time travel and pull the lever for Obama instead…not even for the free ride in an operational, flux-capacitored DeLorean.
That leaves our focus on asking the non-crazy, but misguided 2008 Obama voters if all the hopeychange hype and Media zeal was worth it in THEIR DAILY LIVES.
Make people realize what a bad hiring decision they made in wanting to take a chance on an untested, mysterious, exotic who never delivered on the soaring promises of his job interview.
Give people a BUSINESS and not emotional decision to make…and watch them vote in their economic best interests to evict the Obamas from Washington.
Remember: the GOP Cocktail Party establishment will fumble this, because part of me thinks the consulting firms these fools rely so heavily on WANT to lose important elections.
We have a year and change to prevent this.
And it starts by asking every last Obama voter in the country if they got the hopeychange they were promised.
Does anyone out there REALLY know a soul who is better off today than he or she was before The Golden Age of Hope and Change began?
Something conservatives should keep in mind: not all former Democrats (or even current Dems) are “libs”, “Liberals”, or Leftists
There’s something that happens here, and on other sites, every once in a while that I personally read as a pejorative, even if I know 100% it’s not meant to be; it’s when someone refers to me as a “former lib”, a “reformed Liberal”, or even — most ridiculously — “a onetime Leftist”.
I was NEVER (bold, ALL-CAPS, NEVER) a “lib” or a “Liberal” or a Leftist…even if I spent my first 30 years or so of life being a Democrat.
Really, the first 16 years or so of that wasn’t a choice of mine, because growing up in a Democrat household in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1980s and 1990s meant there were pictures of John and Jackie Kennedy up on all our walls…until they were replaced by photos of Hillary and Bill Clinton in 1992.
In grade school, I remember Sister Mary Howard asking our third grade class what the difference between Democrats and Republicans was…and I raised my hand to say “Democrats are good and Republicans are evil”. As a child, with few frames of reference, I boiled politics down to something I could understand from the TV shows and movies I liked. Transformers. Thundercats. Jem. Star Wars.
I thought Democrats were the Autobots, Thundercats, Holograms, and Rebel Alliance…and Republicans were the Decepticons, the Mutants, the Misfits, and the Evil Galactic Empire.
I politically came of age in the early 1990s, when the Clintons — through immense personal effort — dragged the Democrat party kicking and screaming towards the center. To this day, the Clintons are hated by many in Democrat party ranks for this. It is why Hillary Clinton is not sitting in her Oval Office right now…and the reason the Democrat party worked so hard against her to make Obama the 2008 nominee and current president. Because the Clintons are not Leftists…no matter how much many of you in conservative ranks have claimed through the years that they are. If you want to see Leftists, look at the Obamas. If you don’t think there would be any difference between an Obama and a Clinton presidency, then I am sorry to tell you that you are nuts. Multiply by 100 every bad thing you ever thought about the Clintons, or ever irrational nightmare fantasy written about them, and you will only just scratch the surface on how Leftist and dangerous the Obama presidency is.
This site began as a Hillary Clinton 2008 campaign site. Since Hillary is no longer in politics, and this is a political site, Hillary is no longer the focus of HillBuzz. You can think whatever you want of her, and I do not proselytize for the Clintons, but my support for Hillary Clinton does not brand me a “lib”, “Liberal”, or Leftist.
I honestly would rather be called a cannibal than a “lib”, or even “former lib”, since that’s like calling me a “former cannibal”.
I consider the words “lib”, “Liberal”, and Leftist to be pejoratives.
It horrifies me whenever I see someone describe me as “a former lib who saw the light and became conservative”.
No.
That’s not what happened at all.
I was a centrist who grew up in a centrist Democrat household that hated Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter, and essentially all the fools who hijacked the Democrat party and ran it into the ground after President Kennedy was assassinated. If he had lived, and if he was still around today, President Kennedy would be a REPUBLICAN.
Once upon a time, Democrats did not want to see this country destroyed. They didn’t want government spending to race out of control and didn’t want tax dollars funneled endlessly into the labor unions, so the unions could pump the cash back into the DNC in a taxpayer stick ‘em up pyramid scheme.
Absent the arrival of the Clintons on the scene in 1992…in an alternate universe where Mario Cuomo or Paul Tsongas or Jerry Brown became the presidential nominee instead of then Governor Clinton…I bet I would have voted Republican that year…and every year since.
They are the only reasons I decided to pull Democrat levers for so long…so it’s fitting that the betrayal of the Clintons by the Democrat party, and the grotesque lurch to the far Left the party has taken with Obama as standard bearer, is what divorced me from the Democrat party for good.
If the ghost of Sister Mary Howard ever asked me again what the difference between Democrats and Republicans is, I’d raise my hand and say “Democrats are Leftists who hate America and want to turn this into a Third World thogocracy while Republicans for the most part are Cocktail Party establishment buffoons too afraid of their own shadows to stand up to Democrat bullies and radicals”.
I am a conservative.
A gay conservative.
I am a guy who spent every cent he had and gave up his life for two years to elect Hillary Clinton president…and who is ready, willing, and hopefully able to do the same thing to elect Sarah Palin our next president.
I know it is my destiny that this will forever perplex a great many of you out there. I have answered repeatedly how and why I can support both of these extraordinary women…in the moments of time when I believe they were the best choice on the field to lead America when the country needed them.
Hillary Clinton would have made a much better president than Obama, John McCain, or anyone in the 2008 race.
Sarah Palin will make a much better president than anyone else alive I can think of at the moment, save for possibly Allen West.
In the future, if one of you reading this appears on the horizon as the best choice in my opinion, I might possibly champion you…and put everything I have in life into your campaign.
Because I love this country more than I could ever tell you, and I would never want to be associated with those who wish to see it harmed, who want America “changed at its core” in ways that turn us at best into a failed European socialist dystopia and more realistically into a Central or South American, African, or Middle Eastern thug-controlled garbage heap.
So, it honestly does boil my blood to be called “a former lib” or a “reformed Liberal”…when I was never, ever anything like that.
It horrifies me that some of you think this, because I take this to mean you believe that at one point in my life I would have sided against this country and only now see this as a bad thing to do.
It’s preposterous and more than a little hurtful to me.
And it’s worth mentioning because I see conservatives do this a lot, actually…in terms of the tens of millions of former Democrats who were alienated by the Obama lurch to the Left in 2008.
It is beyond madness for conservatives to give these people any pause about voting Republican now. Shouting, “Hey lookit, Suzie used to be a cannibal but now she wants to come to the hotdog cookout like a normal person…and she won’t be eating anyone there this time!” would be strange to your ears.
Calling me, and all the former Dems I know like me, “ex libs” or “reformed Liberals” is bizarre too.
The right terminology to use is “former Democrat”. If you really want to get hyper accurate and ultra specific, you can say “former Centrist Democrat Hillary supporters”, which I’d wager 99% of us are.
Not everyone who voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries is now voting Republican under Obama…but I bet almost all former Democrats who now identify as Republican in the Golden Age of Hope and Change we currently live in were Hillary voters three years ago.
There is a reason for that: because we were never “libs”, “Liberals”, Leftists, or whatever you want to call the lunatics who control the Democrat party completely today.
So please don’t slander us with those pejoratives.
Save them for the loons who really deserve them.
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NOTE: It’s always dangerous when reading anything I write on this site or anywhere my work is published to assume I am talking about YOU, specifically, or something YOU, individually, did…where you think YOU prompted or inspired whatever that post was about.
I am not shy. Trust me, if you did something I thought was counterproductive or any sort of attack on me or the site, you would hear personally from me about it. And it would not be via an essay on HB, it would more likely than not be in an email asking why you did whatever it was to us.
Tonight a dozen or so people wrote in wondering if something they said today or yesterday made me write the above post regarding the “lib/Liberal/Leftist” pejoratives.
Actually, this note was prompted by a conservative site I like that talked about the recent HB 3.0 upgrade in an article that gave us kudos for the redesign. As stated at the very beginning, the person who called me a “reformed lib” didn’t mean any harm and didn’t really think about what he was saying. To him “Democrat” and “lib/Liberal/Leftist” are all synonymous. Which might be the case today, with the Obama Democrat party as your reference, but it was not the case while I was a Democrat for all those years in the Clinton Democrat party.
Do you know how the word “gay” used to exclusively mean “happy” or “high-spirited”, so when watching old movies immature people today giggle uncontrollably whenever “gay” is used to describe people who are clearly not homosexual? Well, words sometimes change and become co-opted in unforeseen ways. So someone who may have described him or herself as “gay” in 1920 in hopes of nailing their gregarious nature in a bio might very well blush in 2011 now that the terminology has taken on a radically different meaning.
Honestly, this is what even the word “Democrat” itself feels like in this the Golden Age of Hope and Change under Obama. I still can’t believe that every single Democrat in the Senate voted for the Obamacare bill on Christmas Eve in 2009 without even reading it…including people I had liked for my entire adult life, like supposedly “centrist” Evan Bayh, whom I had gotten to know fairly well during Hillary’s 2008 campaign when I worked events in Indiana every day in the runup to that primary.
When Bayh walked into the Senate to vote with all the loons like Claire McCaskill, Ben Nelson, Russ Feingold and others who gleefully backed the economy-killing horror of Obamacare – WITHOUT EVER READING IT FIRST – I knew the word I used to know as “Democrat” now meant something else entirely for all intents and purposes, since Obama had redefined the party so drastically.
So don’t be too hard on anyone who labeled themselves a Democrat prior to 2008…and appreciate just how radically the party altered itself in just the last three years.
Remember, also, that you should never be too quick to tar someone with a brush that should be reserved for the very worst peolpe belonging to a group, just because that person calls themselves a “Democrat”, “Republican”, or whatever.
It would be like someone misguided calling you a “rightwinger” just because you are a Republican and lumping you in the same boat as the lunatic fringe of the GOP (or, even worse, assuming you’re like Olympia Snow, Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, and other terrible Cocktail Party buffoons just because you all put an (R) after your name and favor spotlessly dry-cleaned blazers).
I doubt lifelong Republicans who focus on fiscal responsibility and limited government enjoy being linked to the loons of the GOP on the far right or the useful (to Democrats) idiots in the Cocktail Party crowd.
So, yes, I am a former Democrat. I am a reformed Democrat. I am an ex-Democrat. I am a gay Hillary Clinton supporting Democrat who left the party because it deliberately veered to the Left and party leaders like Donna Brazile, Howard Dean, and others decided bitter-clinging-Midwesterners with conservative beliefs were no longer welcome in Democrat ranks.
But I am not and never have been a lib, Liberal, or Leftist any more than I bet a single one of you reading this has ever been a “rightwinger nutjob”, as the Media likes to call members of that dangerous fringe.
Ed Rendell calls this “a nation of wussies” after NFL game called due to snow
Ed Rendell tells it like it is. There is a deliberate wussification of America underway. How can we stop it?
Ed Rendell was one of Hillary Clinton’s top surrogates in the 2008 primary campaign, and worked incredibly hard for her. I got to go on pub crawls with Rendell, Chelsea Clinton, and other surrogates in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as part of Hillary LGBTQ efforts…and Rendell was a laugh riot.
After HRC suspended her campaign, Rendell memorably got on a stage with Obama and made jokes about people drinking his Kool-Aid…as in, giving up all reason and becoming part of the hopeychangey, O-Ba-Ma…O-Ba-Ma…chanting crowd. ”Time to drink your Kool-Aid,” Rendell laughed, pantomiming drinking a giant glass while saying “glug, glug, glug” under his voice and putting his arms out like he’d become a zombie.
It was hilarious, and Obama just stared at him, incredulous that someone in his company was making fun of him, right at his side like that.
I don’t know what you may think of Rendell as a Governor, but as a character, he’s hilarious. He probably would not have been Hillary Clinton’s VP pick (that would have been either Evan Bayh or Ted Strickland, both of whom were enormously popular still back in 2008), but can you just imagine if this guy was Vice President?
He has that says-whatever-he-wants spirit that drives Joe Biden, but he’s much smarter than Biden, and actually knows what he’s talking about.
Republicans should be calling this “a nation of wussies” because in a lot of ways that’s sadly what it’s become. Where is that pioneer spirit, as Rendell rightly asks?
We need to rediscover that.
Part of the reason Sarah Palin’s Alaska is such a fun show for everyone to watch is that most of the people featured in it, including the Palins themselves, seem superhuman on such a regular basis…hunting, fishing, hiking, dragging large animals home to their freezers, battling things with enormous teeth and claws, surviving in brutal cold, etc.
That’s actually not SUPERhuman, but HUMAN…in that just a generation or two ago, before the rise of megacities and the emergence of suburbia, this is how the majority of the country lived. Eeking out an existence on a frontier, fending for themselves, not looking to a government to provide for them.
The Americans who formed the Greatest Generation that won WWII were not part of a nation of wussies…but sometime in the 70s, with the rise of the Left and the takeover of our education system, and its subsequent PC-nation mindset, that’s what we became.
It’s sad, but true.
How do we change things back in the years ahead?
*************************************************
NOTE: Here’s a great email someone sent in about Ed Rendell:
Dear HillBuzz,
I was born and raised in Philadelphia and currently live in a suburb of Philly. I’ve always liked Ed Rendell and agreed with him politically….until the past 2 years.Before Rendell was mayor of Philadelphia, he was a partner in a large law firm that our family lawyer was also partners in. When he became mayor of Philadelphia, he took on the unions. The city was bankrupt, city workers wanted raises, and Rendell told them in order to give them a raise, he would have to lay off workers to fund raises and gave them the option. Hard to believe with the current atmosphere of the Democratic party but Rendell brought fiscal responsibility back to the city and took it out of bankruptcy. Fiscally, he is moderate. While he agreed with the stimulus the Democrats pushed through, he also criticized it saying that while it would save jobs in PA, it wasn’t going to create enough private sector jobs.I voted for him both times for Governor. He’s not only a likeable guy, but he was more honest than most politicians and really did have the best interest of the state at heart.Ed Rendell was a Hillary supporter until the end. He is also a strong party line-toeing man. Before being Governor he was head of the DNC. IMO, Obama brought out the worst in him and many other Democratic politicians I used to respect.When asked why he supports Obamacare the only talking points he brings up are the few details in the bill that even the Republicans agreed on, such as pre-existing conditions, children’s coverage. I have a sneaking suspicion he really doesn’t like the law but is toeing the line in the name of the Democratic party and for possible political gain for either him or his wife (a federal judge). Some will criticize him for putting politics first, but as you most likely know, that’s the nature of politics and both party’s are guilty of it. It doesn’t make it right but it happens.He was always a good speaker and able to defend his position logically. But lately I think he’s becoming unhinged and maybe a tad tired of having to spin Obama’s failures. Unhinged people will say and do crazy things, like calling us wussies.Lifelong PA Resident
An Open Letter to Rush Limbaugh and His Listeners — With Notes on the Democrat Civil War Already In Progress
When Obama and the DNC attacked Hillary and her supporters, they permanently alienated tens of millions of us from the party. I know for a fact I am not the only guy with a picture like this on his wall who is working every day to bring down the Obama White House and Democrat Party. Not for Hillary, though I love the woman, but for America...because I love this country even more.
Dear Rush,
It’s my great hope that some of your listeners find a way to get this letter to you, or that it makes it to “Snerdley” and finds its way into your hands. I don’t think even you understand just how much damage Obama has done to the Democrat Party — to the point where formerly lifelong Democrats like myself, and everyone here at HillBuzz.org, are actively working to expose the party and literally burn it to the ground for the good of the country.
None of this is being reported in the media, but a Civil War in the Democrat ranks has been raging since May 31st, 2008…a date every Hillary Clinton supporter knows well, because that was the date of the Democrat Rules & Bylaws Committee Meeting where Howard Dean (then-DNC Chair), Donna Brazile, and scores of other Kool-Aid slurping Obama flunkies took off their masks and revealed the full extent of the Leftist coup that had taken over the party. This was the day when the DNC took delegates Hillary Clinton won in Michigan away from her and handed them to Obama (despite the fact he wasn’t even on the primary ballot in that state, because he removed his name when his campaign realized he’d come in third in that race).
May 31st, 2008 was a day when Hillary “babes” (as you call us sometimes) like us flew to Washington in large numbers to stand outside the Marriott near the National Zoo, where this Rules & Bylaws Committee Meeting was held, to shout for the DNC to count all the votes and operate the nominating process fairly — but they refused. The anger over that day has never abated. In fact, it’s grown considerably since then.
This was the determining factor in millions of us leaving the Democrat Party for good. This was the day when the P.U.M.A. movement began — in response to Donna Brazile’s calls for “party unity” following the Rules & Bylaws Committee Meeting, we “Hillary babes” said “Party Unity My A$$” (or People United Means Action, depending on how you want to phrase it). Exit polls showed 8 million PUMA voted Republican for the first time in our lives in the fall of 2008…casting ballots for McCain/Palin (and in truth, mainly for Palin, whom we support, and not to a small degree because she receives many of the same attacks lobbed at Hillary Clinton all these years).
You seem to know most of all this, so I’ll end the history lesson by noting the people alienated by the Democrat Party during the primaries in 2008 — where it was clear the party and the media colluded at great lengths to push Obama while hammering Hillary Clinton into the ground — never came back to the Democrat Party.
This is also when most of us stopped using the term “Democratic Party”, since there’s nothing “democratic” about these people. They are the “Democrat Party”, and even that is hard to acknowledge because they really and truly have proved themselves to be enemies of real democracy.
I’m still registered as a Democrat here in Chicago (because the Cocktail Party GOP establishment so disgusts me I can’t will myself to party-ID Republican, and there’s no Independent option here in Illinois) but I can’t imagine ever voting for another Democrat again, as long as I live. To Hell with Democrats. This was solidified for me on Christmas Eve of last year, when Democrats rushed Obamacare through the Senate in the dead of night, through various secret channels, and every single Democrat voted for its passage (even supposed moderates like Evan Bayh in Indiana, who quickly realized his vote would cost him re-election…so the coward retired rather then face angry voters over what he did). I just don’t believe Democrats should be given elected office by voters because they cannot be trusted to even read bills before they vote on them, not even when said bills seek to permanently alter the entire American economy. This is reckless and reprehensible to the point of treason.
I was a Democrat for 32 years before the heavy-handed push for Obama alienated me from the party…and I borrow what Hillary Clinton said about Republicans once, back when she was a Goldwater Girl, and will paraphrase by saying that I didn’t leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left me.
After it beat me to a pulp, called me a racist, berated and insulted me, and used Alinsky Rules to hit me with everything it had. Not just me, but all Hillary supporters.
This is the part I don’t think you understand because I don’t know if you and your listeners paid much attention to what the Obama campaign and DNC did to malign and assault Hillary Clinton’s supporters during the 2008 campaign. None of this has been forgotten by any of us.
If you have not seen it already, Rush, you need to watch Gigi Gaston’s documentary “We Will Not Be Silenced 2008″. I’m featured in a segment on the voter fraud that was committed in the Iowa Caucus back in January of 2008. While I was always aware Democrats use unions and other means to cheat in elections, I never knew the Democrat Party was capable of the large-scale, aggressive, unapologetic fraud it committed on Obama’s behalf all through 2008. In Iowa, I watched Obama’s ACORN and SEIU goons push and shove old people, bully them, and intimidate them when they wanted to vote for Hillary Clinton. I saw scores of Illinois license plates fill the parking lots outside caucus locations, with Chicagoland Obama supporters illegally entering the Caucus sites to vote for Obama and game Iowa for him. Having planned ahead, Obama supporters actually RAN those caucus sites, and held the doors open for all these fraudulent voters to walk right in, without being asked for IDs, where they then took control of the caucuses and bullied the Iowa residents into supporting Obama — lest they be called RAAACISTS! out in the open in front of their friends and neighbors in those open-air caucuses.
The media has never talked about this. I don’t remember ever hearing you talk about it. But one of the biggest reasons the Democrats are in the trouble they’re in right now is because of how frequently the Left and the media (one and the same, really) called anyone who opposed Obama a RAAACIST. If you supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries instead of Obama, you were called a RAAACIST. If you were someone like me who fundraised for Hillary, who hosted events for her, who put yourself out there and wrote columns advocating her or did media spots talking up her candidacy, you were aggressively targeted by the Obama campaign and his supporters…relentlessly attacked as a RAAACIST! and assaulted with the Alinksy Rules for Radicals in hopes of breaking your spirit, terrorizing you, and making you abandon Clinton for fear of having these people destroy your life, ruin your business, and make you an absolute pariah in your community.
This is what the Obama campaign, the media, and the DNC did to DEMOCRATS.
For almost a year, the Obama zealots and the Left waged all-out-war not just on Hillary Clinton, but on lifelong, loyal, dyed-in-the-wool Democrat voters like me. This came straight from the top, from Obama himself. Both he and his wife Michelle called the Clintons racists. Obama’s surrogates like James Clyburne, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and others called Geraldine Ferraro, Madeline Albright, and others racists. The Obamas toxified the South Carolina primary, in particular, with foul race-baiting and turned North Carolina and Indiana into racial powder kegs by ramping up accusations that anyone not supporting Obama was a vile racist that needed to be pounded into the ground.
Stephanie Tubbs Jones, my former Congresswoman back home in Cleveland, was a black Hillary Clinton supporter to the very end — and she was called a “race-traitor”, an “Aunt Jane”, and all manner of worse names as she was bullied, berated, and verbally assaulted by the Obama team…because she was black and dared to stand with her friend Hillary Clinton, the person Tubbs Jones knew would make a better president than “The One”. To her dying day in August of 2008, Tubbs Jones was threatened by the Obama campaign and told she’d be primaried in 2010 and kicked to the curb for being a “race-traitor”. She died of a brain aneurysm while driving her car, and Obama supporters filled Daily Kos, DemocratUnderground, and other George Soros-supported sites with lies about her drunk driving, doing drugs, and other slurs because even after she died these people wouldn’t stop hating her for daring to be an outspoken black woman who would never abandon Hillary for Obama.
This is similar to the grief that I’ve received here in Chicago for being a gay Hillary former Democrat in Boystown who never drank any Kool-Aid, never stopped speaking out against Obama, and who recently fully came out as a conservative — in the face of the same kind of Alinsky-grade, identity-based, “traitor” hectoring that Tubbs Jones got for being a black woman who didn’t kneel before the Obama altar.
Well, Rush, let me just tell you, from personal experience, that the tens of millions of people relentlessly abused and hounded by Obama supporters (remember that back in 2008 he urged his followers to “get in their faces” and “confront their neighbors” if they weren’t drinking his unicorn-pumped sparkly Kool-Aid ) will NEVER EVER FORGET what the Obama campaign directed at them, in terms of all this Alinsky bullying.
To quote Jeremiah Wright, the man Obama spent twenty years eagerly listening to at Trinity United Church of Christ: somebody’s chickens have now come back to roost.
During the campaign, Donna Brazile famously said that the Democrat Party no longer needed the people Obama once described as “bitter, religion-and-guns-clinging, Midwesterners”. Brazile took this further and said, outright, that the Democrat party did not need blue-collar white voters, the Jacksonian voters, the Hillary voters, because the party was “Obamafied” and would win elections for generations with the Obama coalition of blacks, Leftist elites, Hispanics, low information gay voters, and self-hating Jews.
This is all the Democrats have left, Rush.
Speaking from personal experience, as someone who has worked in fundraising for over 10 years and who has been a part of every presidential campaign since 1992, the Democrats have permanently alienated tens of millions of people who normally turned out reliably every year not just to vote Democrat, but also to write checks and otherwise participate in campaigns.
No more. Never again.
Here in Chicago, just about everyone who was part of Team Hillary efforts with me on the ground has completely divorced themselves from the Democrat Party. Being called a racist repeatedly and hearing from Donna Brazile that we are not needed will do that to a person.
But in a bigger sense, Democrats, by being so shameless and aggressive with the voter fraud in 2008 have opened too many eyes for us to ever go back to pretending that fraud and corrupt practices aren’t the hallmark of the Democrat Party.
There was a show on ABC a few years ago called Alias starring Jennifer Garner in which she played a woman working for a company called Credit Dauphine…which she was told was a front for a CIA organization called SD6. Garner’s character, Sidney Bristow, carried out her missions for SD6, overlooking different things the organization did that she might not have liked, because she thought she was doing what was best for the country. And then, one day, Sidney learned SD6 was actually an enemy of America…that it’s real mission was to destroy the country…that everything Sidney was told about SD6 was a lie. The mask came off SD6, and Sidney Bristow realized she had to work aggressively to take the whole enterprise down.
Rush (and his listeners), please hear me on this because you will not read this in the media — but just about every one of us from the Hillary 2008 campaign is a Sidney Bristow today.
Those of us who worked Democrat campaigns in the past put up with union associations and the other unsavory aspects of being a Democrat because we were told this was the only way Democrats could win…with union muscle. But, in 2008 the Democrats revealed themselves to be an SD6 conglomeration of every force in this country that wants to bring America down, tank our economy, usurp our Constitution, and lay waste to the American way of life.
Democrats took off the mask. The DNC reveled in being fully Leftist-controlled. Crazy people unapologetic in their Communist admiration took over positions of great influence not just in the DNC, but in our state and federal governments as well.
I’m horrified by that.
Hillary supporters are horrified by that.
And we have not sat back quietly to allow this to happen without a fight.
I know for a fact that people I worked with on the Hillary 2008 campaign have been actively working against every single Democrat who supported Obama’s nomination. Everyone who backstabbed Hillary Clinton is being undermined and sabotaged by people who might still be registered as Democrats but have no more loyalty to the party. Sometimes, conservative sites try to make this into a “sour grapes” sort of “Hillary’s revenge” meme — and there might be a taste of this in what’s going on — but the real driving force is that we former Democrats saw just how insane these people really are and we are now doing everything we can, behind the scenes, to use everything we know about the Democrat Party to collapse it from within.
If you think about it logically, there is not enough energy to sustain a years-long drive to remove Obama supporters from office just because people are still upset Hillary Clinton was not the 2008 nominee and is not president today. Sometimes, I think even you believe this is what this is all about. Your “Reverse Operation Chaos” initiative seems predicated on this, but that belief is apocryphal in that it misses a few big marks.
This is and it isn’t about Hillary.
What it’s really about is what the Democrat Party did to Hillary that alienated tens of millions of Jacksonian/Clintonian/middleclass Americans from the party permanently — and this includes what the party and Obama campaign did to Hillary’s supporters themselves (ie, calling them racists, telling them they weren’t wanted, calling them bitter clingers, etc.).
For the first time in our lives, so many of us former Democrats were given an Alinsky taste of what the Democrat Party really stand for…what it really believes…and how it really feels about America, our Constitution, our economy, and our way of life.
Howard Dean, Donna Brazile, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Obama took the mask off the Democrat Party…and the Leftist gorgon that lurked beneath is something America-loving, middleclass, Jacksonian/Clintonian Democrats want nothing to do with.
As part of your “Reverse Operation Chaos”, you really need to emphasize something the media just won’t talk about — and that’s the simple fact that even if you called yourself a Democrat for 32 years, the way I did, because everyone you grew up with and everyone in your family was a Democrat, that in 2010 it’s time to ask yourselves what that really means.
Do you want to be in a party that calls people racists for stepping out of line and voicing opposition to the socialist lurch of the current administration?
Do you condone voter fraud and the shameless, undemocratic tactics employed by Democrats?
Do you wish to associate with the likes of ACORN, the SEIU, the Black Panthers, and all the other thugs, goons, and degenerates the Obama campaign and White House employ as the DNC’s muscle on the ground?
It is crystal clear that being a patriotic American who loves this country is intellectually incompatible with being a Democrat. If you love America and want it to prosper, the Democrat Party is at absolute odds with everything we need for a thriving, successful economy.
Hillary supporters realize this.
We received a heaping helping of Alinsky assaults to wake us up to this reality.
The reason so many of us support Governor Palin is not just because we see the same Alinksy assaults being waged upon her…but the woman is pitch-perfect in outlining exactly why Obama and the Left are wrong, and why Democrats under Obama are dangerous to have in elected office.
I know you talk about a “Hillary 2012″ but Rush, as much as I love Hillary Clinton, and as much as I worked my heart out for her in 2008, there’s no way that even she can repair the damage Obama has done to the party. Certainly not by 2012. MAYBE the Clintons and their supporters can purge the Obama lunatics from the party by 2016…but I doubt even that will happen. Just like with the Leftists Carter infected the Democrat Party with, Obama legacy hires will be in the DNC for a generation to come…and it might not be until the 2030s before the Democrats can remove the taint Obama and his Leftist agenda have put on the party.
Democrats have made themselves synonymous with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-democracy. Obama and his acolytes decidedly upped the ante when it came to their aggressive push towards socialism…and this Center-Right nation is resisting it in what I am certain will be an epic refudiation (to borrow the Governor’s term) next week.
On November 3rd, no one I know will be resting on any laurels. November 3rd starts the 2012 campaign…and not just the presidential race (where we’ll back Governor Palin) but the drive to knock people like Claire McCaskill out of office, continuing our work to take down every last one of the Obama supporters who backstabbed Hillary Clinton and helped install this socialist into the White House back in 2008. When you hear talk of a Hillary “enemies’ list”, or just “The List” as we call it in HRC supporter circles, this is very much real…and we are truly committed to making sure the Claire McCaskills out there get everything that is coming to them for all their service to Obama and his agenda.
Hear that, Ben Nelson…voters will be coming for you.
You and everyone like you.
Every last one of you.
If you voted for Obamacare, you are politically dead but may not know it…and it is your own fault. Being intensely stupid is no defense. If you were a YES vote on anything related to Obamacare you are going to be defeated…if not in 2010, then in the primaries in 2012. If you survive those, you will be taken down in the 2012 general election. Your political career is over…dummy.
Hope your time on the Obama Kool-Aid bandwagon was worth ruining your life over.
We will not forget those Obamacare votes. We will not forgive being called a racist because we don’t support this terrible man and his awful agenda. We will not be silenced.
We will not give up.
It’s going to be years, if ever, before the lamestream media ever catches up to any of this, and realizes that a large swath of people who used to be Democrat loyalists are now doing everything they can to destroy the party. Some of them are out and open, like me and my friends here at HillBuzz, but many are doing their part quietly. They just stop writing checks. Or maybe now they write checks to Democrat opponents. They might continue to attend events and fundraisers, but now they call up Republican sites and give them all the dirt on what they heard in those meetings. The Democrat Party alienated so many people who are now working to bring it down that I could go on for pages and pages more on this topic.
It’s very Sidney Bristow, Rush. And if you watched that show Alias, you’d know she not only won in the end, but looked damn good kicking ass while doing it.
THAT, El Rushbo, is what your “Hillary babes” are up to.
Here in Boystown, and in every town, because the Civil War Howard Dean, Donna Brazile, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Obama started on May 31st, 2008 is raging without end until the Democrat Party is no more.
Tell your listeners to count on that.
Kevin DuJan
Editor-in-Chief, HillBuzz.org
Hillary “Babe” in Buzzquarters, Boystown
We Have A Word In Mineral City For People Who Bet Against Hillary Clinton – They’re Called “Idiots”, By Patricia Melton
My name is Patricia Melton and, among other things, I am President-For-Life of the Mineral City Coffee Club. For the record, I am also an accomplished aquaculturist, amateur historian, armchair detective, certified, grade-A, proud mother and incredibly tolerant and patient wife (my husband Earl is, as many of you know, either a lovable burden or my living wit’s end, depending on how much jam he’s had that day and how involved he’s been in his basement full of model trains). As President of the Coffee Club, it is my duty to moderate our daily discussions on world events and the goings-on in Mineral City. We devote, precisely, 50% of our focus to world events and 50% to Mineral City, except when nothing of interest is going on in Mineral City (that happens from time to time), in which case we adjust that math accordingly. We have a pair of high quality binoculars (which we won on eBay, beating out worthy competitor SmileyBob84, thank you very much) that we use to determine if anything important is going on in Mineral City (we each take turns using the binoculars, because they do not make binoculars that 6 retirees can use all at once…those would be dodecanoculars, and would most likely be prohibitively expensive. Or, I suppose, we could just buy twelve pairs of regular binoculars. Eleven, really, because Anne doesn’t need a pair of her own. That woman’s in everyone’s business enough as it is and doesn’t need binoculars to encourage her further).
Today, being a rather uncharacteristically dull, gray day in Mineral City, the Coffee Club decided to sit down around my kitchen table and focus our undivided attention on the Democratic primaries and what we believe is going to happen leading up to the Convention in August. Now, none of us are political experts, that I know of. Someone could be a political expert in our group without telling me, but as stated before, I am something of an armchair detective so I believe, if I must say so myself, that I would have sniffed this out by now. Political experts tend to be relatively long-winded and have a tendency to be wrong almost all of the time, and the Coffee Club Ladies tend to get things spot-on, A-OK correct, generally speaking. Except Anne, who is almost always wrong, and wrong for the sake of being wrong, usually. She more or less does that to spite me, because, I believe, Fate’s assigned her role in Mineral City to be the personal bane of my existence. She’s also been assigned, for reasons beyond my understanding, the charge of selecting the different international flavored coffees we enjoy at each Coffee Club meeting. Today’s pick was North Carolinian Tarheel Turkish Blend, which was as awkward to drink as it was to pronounce. I honestly don’t know what goes through that woman’s head when she’s picking out the coffee. I think she just puts words together and makes things up as she goes along.
Political experts have been doing that a lot as well. Making things up, not making bad coffee (though they could be making bad coffee, too, if they were able multi-taskers). Tim Russert, on Meet the Press and various other shows on NBC (including, I believe, Days of Our Lives), makes things up a lot, and is almost always wrong. His head also looks like a large potato, though I don’t know if that’s my imagination or not. His name is Russert, and the Pic-&-Pay’s got barrels full of russet potatoes (which Earl likes cut into little smiley shapes), so maybe that’s where that comes from. Or, maybe he’s just got a big, dumb, potato head. Chris Matthews tells lies. I know that is not my imagination, and there aren’t any potatoes that sound like Matthews that lie. Potatoes are some of the most honest vegetables, so all of this is, of course, very ironic.
Today, Grace, our Coffee Club Vice President, ran through a list of the latest pontifications and prognostications of all the political experts like Russert and Matthews and all the other talking heads (whenever I hear, or type, that phrase I always think of those ghoulish shrunken heads in the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! museum up at Niagara Falls that Earl and I visited once on our whirlwind tour of Canada…those shriveled up, gray, stinky things strung together, bobbing in the wind, not good for much of anything). Grace is one of the most detail-oriented and meticulous members of the Coffee Club, having served for many years as the top executive assistant to some big deal executive or another (and if I remembered who it was, I’d be the detail-oriented one!). She knows a good set of statistics when she sees one, and she can sure find the best parking spot at the mall. I call her Eagle Eyes, or, more usually, “Grace”. Because that’s her name. Grace.
Grace came across an excellent analysis of the upcoming primaries that people like Tim Russert and Chris Matthews are not telling the American people (because, quite obviously, they have a narrative they want to deliver, and that narrative is decidedly pro-Obama and anti-Hillary Clinton). Grace found an article by Michael Barone over at U.S. News that spells out what common sense (decidedly uncommon amongst reporters these days) says will happen from Pennsylvania’s primary until the Convention.
When all of this is said and done, Hillary Clinton is going to end up ahead in the popular vote, though Obama will be slightly ahead in delegates. That’s because of the the caucuses, mainly. No disrespect intended to states that have caucuses, but caucuses are the dumbest things I have ever heard of. Most of the ladies in the Coffee Club are retired, but we live full and active lives discussing world events at our meetings, volunteering in our community, judging people, running our households, and judging people. We don’t have time in our hectic schedules to spend three hours at a caucus, and imagine a lot of people don’t have time to do that either. It’s un-American to expect anyone to spend three hours in a cramped room at a community center somewhere, standing around counting each other at some caucus. The Coffee Club Ladies and I all watched the Iowa and Nevada caucuses on TV: they had signs in different corners of the room and actually told people, “Okay, Go!” and everyone wandered over to stand by the sign for their candidate. It was ridiculous. People bossed one another around and husbands told wives, or wives told husbands, not to stand with one candidate because they wanted their family to all go to another candidate. The only time I think something like that should happen is when I’m telling Earl and my children who to vote for, because they should listen to me. Everyone else in America should be able to vote in secret for whoever they want. Isn’t this supposed to be a democracy? Except in my house, where these people owe me, so what I say goes.
According to Barone, Hillary Clinton should do very well in Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, Montana, and South Dakota. Only North Carolina and Oregon look like good states for Obama. Grace pointed out, because she is so eagle-eyed, that Barone did not factor Guam into the mix. Guam has one of those crazy caucuses, and Guam votes on May 3rd. Guam has a large population of Filipino voters, who are Catholic, and who would seem to be demographically up Clinton’s alley. But, it’s a caucus, and that means whoever is bossiest wins. Quick, someone get me on a plane to Guam!
If Hillary Clinton wins Pennsylvania by as large (or larger) a margin as her win in Ohio, then it will set off wins for her in the majority of the upcoming states. Just like February heavily favored Obama with all the crazy caucuses, April, May, and June favor Clinton, because of the demographics and
the fact that primaries are more representative of the will of the people. Clinton not only wins the big states, and all the states Democrats really need to win in this race, but she wins the states that hold primaries, and we are not going to be caucusing against John McCain in the General Election.
Why don’t we just give the state to whoever’s supporters can eat the most cereal? Or, have the two best cereal eaters in a state square off in a head to head, bowl to bowl, match up? I’d volunteer Earl, because as long as he can put jam on it, that man can eat just about anything in record time. A caucus makes about as much sense as a cereal eating contest between my train-obsessed jam enthusiast and whatever cereal-eater Obama would put up against him (this assumes, of course, that Hillary Clinton doesn’t, in fact, have someone who could eat more cereal faster than Earl. Who knows, maybe Hillary herself could spoon up and best them all in a Cap’n Crunch Caucus. That woman can do just about anything, so I sure wouldn’t put it passed her — Clinton gets stuff done).
The Talking Heads have all gotten pretty good at eating their words, what, with the mess they made of prognostications after Iowa, before New Hampshire, leading up to Super Tuesday, going on to Ohio and Texas, and whatever. And Tim Russert eats a lot…of words. I’m surprised that man can find his own way home at night, he’s so wrong most of the time. The Coffee Club Ladies and I almost unanimously agree Obama will lose the nomination because, in the end, he will lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, will be only slightly ahead in pledged delegates, and will have to own up to the fact that Florida and Michigan want no part of him. Anne, of course, disagrees and says there’s no way Hillary Clinton will win this, because Anne listens to Russert and Matthews, and also because Anne is an idiot.
No one’s ever gotten rich betting against Hillary Clinton. And no Democratic nominee should be picked based on winning crazy caucuses in Idaho, or eating cereal in someone’s basement or whatever goes on in Iowa. Tim Russert and the media need to stay out of this, and let people in the upcoming states vote.
Because why have all those primaries scheduled all the way through June if you aren’t expecting them to count for anything?
