"He joined the Dem party in Chicago for connections to get rich, and milked them well tossing aside anyone who got in the way, his constituents, public housing tenants, indicted slumlords and so forth and then decided he was qualified to be President without even finishing a single term in the presidency. He and his fawning neolibs who should bloody damned well know better by now have crippled our strongest candidate. Obama has done this for his own ambitions knowing damned well he doesn't have a chance against McCain once the press turns on his resume and colorful history which they will assuredly do the moment they are sure Hillary really is done."

This is a perfect example of why I could never support Hillary. Her shrewish shrill vixens of supporters are mostly jerks.

I was quite neutral on Hillary until I read post after post like this. Rezko this (ignore Chu), ethical violations (ignore Rose Law Firm, cattle futures), etc.

For you little shrews Hillary is a goddess. But she is going down. Obama is no perfect guy, far from it. He is green, but an effective speaker.

He is not perfect, and neither is Hillary. She actually is often convincing, and a good speaker.

It is her harridans of supporters that make me spew green upchuck. Shrill isn't the half. Vindictive witches is more like it.

I think you take the cake for the dumbest post on this thread, which is saying something.

Name a dove who won a general election. Hawks win generals. JF Kennedy, in case you've forgotten, the guy everyone is so eager to compare Obama to, was a HUGE hawk. He tried to run to the right of Nixon, claiming Eisenhower hadn't taken the missile gap seriously and we had to build our military even bigger. He was a rabid anti-Communist. Good luck if you send little boy Barack out there with a dove on his shoulder and an olive branch in his hand. McCain will eat him and spit him out cheerfully.

I knew I liked something about you. I'm from WA state too, although I'm living in California right now. Thank-you for the links. I love the possibilities of wind energy. Have you seen the documentary called "Who Killed the Electric Car"? I thought that was interesting, especially since at the end it makes it seem like the hydrogen fueled thing is a mirage, and that between better battery power and wind electricity we could create cars that don't require foreign oil dependence and air pollution.

Fascinating.

Why hasn't the Republican Party finished the count? Stopping at 87% of all returns smacks of results-driven politics.

Does anyone have any information about this?

Okay, Clinton supporters, I'm going to try one more time to explain the Obama appeal (to me, anyway; I can't speak for others), before I get shouted down.

Remember the film "Amadeus"? Clinton and Obama are to politics what Salieri and Mozart are to music. Clinton is the hard worker, the person who's been slaving away, who stuck by her man, who's tried so, so hard to make all the right moves, and who actually has a decent argument that she *deserves* to be the next President. Her sheer desire to be President was never more evident than the time she teared up in response to that questioner from New Hampshire (and I have no doubt that it was genuine, and touching). She is the devoted servant of whatever supreme force it is in the universe that politicians worship.

He is the Mozart, the young man who strides into the room and proceeds to do naturally and effortlessly, what she, through a lifetime of hard work, can't even do as a rough imitation of the real thing. I have no doubt that is maddening for her and her supporters, and that she and they find him arrogant, ungracious, and undeserving. And who knows? Maybe he is. I don't know the guy personally.

But guess what, folks? We don't pick Presidents, nor should we, based on who "deserves" it more (if we did, we all know we'd be heading towards the tail end of the second Gore administration right around now). In fact, if Hillary Clinton wants to personally, emotionally survive this experience, she and her supporters need to come to terms with the fact that this guy, quite simply, has The Gift. JFK had The Gift. Reagan had The Gift. Bill Clinton has The Gift. Dubya has...something, still not sure what. HRC just doesn't have it. And what does Salieri learn in that movie, when he refuses to accept his fate? (I know, I know, it's just a movie, but work with me). He learns that he can't somehow through trickery, no matter how cleve, claim for himself what he feels he's entitled to, without destroying himself *and* Mozart. I mean, what she's trying to do now is so pathetic that Stephen Colbert picked up on it a couple of weeks ago--he said her new campaign slogan is "Hillary Clinton '08: What Obama said."

Also, watch how the "Potomac primary" comes out on Tuesday. You know who's voting in that? The entire federal bureaucracy, the Congressional staffers, plus all those Clinton political appointees who've been hiding out in places like the New America Foundation and the Center for American Progress, or running their own "consultancies" for the past 8 years, waiting for a Dem return to power. The fact that the Potomac primary is strongly trending for Obama should tell you something. A lot of these folks know the Clintons personally, or at least saw the inner workings of the Clinton administration. The civil servants, many of them, have worked for four different presidents. These folks are no dummies, nor are they people easily taken in by a charlatan with a smoke-and-mirrors routine. They're about as politically cynical as you can get. They know, all too well, as one of my favorite sayings goes, "Most revolutions are about who gets to oppress the oppressed next." They don't think Obama is a Messiah by any stretch of the imagination.

What they do know is how to recognize a once-in-a-generation political talent when they see one, as surely as you know when you hear the first few bars of "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" that you've encountered a timeless classic. It has nothing to do with what anyone deserves. It just is what it is.

What HRC has to do is accept. I'm not saying concede the primary; hell, for all I know she'll turn it around and win. I'm saying, she has to accept what the true difference is between herself and him, and stop trying to be someone she's not, even if it does cost her her lifelong dream.

Al Gore's been through this process (worse, in fact; I mean, gee whiz, to lose to Obama is one thing, but to lose to someone like Dubya?), and once he came to terms with who he really was, I think he realized he never even really liked being an elected politician. And now look at him! I think we can safely file his life story under "Things Happen for a Reason."

Anyway, that in a nutshell is my best way of explaining what the Obama appeal is. That's not to say this is enough to vote for him. I met Obama pretty early on in this process at a high-end fundraiser, and I can't say I was particularly blown away by him that night or by anything he did for several months afterwards. I wasn't impressed with him until I started learning more about his actual policy positions and the extremely smart advisors with whom he has surrounded himself. I still don't think he's perfect; I have huge problems with his ties to the nuclear industry, for starters. But seeing that there is little daylight between his policy positions and hers, and also really not a huge difference in the amount of experience they have (unless you count first lady as "experience"), the fact that he clearly has The Gift is what really pushes me into his camp. To have someone working for our causes, and at the same time have enough political skill to get someone like my Archie Bunker-like dad to actually listen to him...I can't ignore that, any more than I could forget the bars of "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" playing in my head.