Remember how Clinton’s campaign was pretty much up against it a few weeks back, and if they didn’t win both Texas and Ohio, she was dead meat?

And remember how the media said she won Texas?

Well, how is it that Obama winds up getting 38 delegates from Texas while Clinton only gets 29?

Easy. His campaign outworked her campaign, and his people attended more caucuses than hers did.

Texas is a bit whacky (kind of like Washington). They did both a party primary and a caucus. In Texas, the Democratic Party assigns some of its delegates from each (in Washington, the Dems used only the caucus results; the Republicans used both the primary and the caucus) and Obama’s team kicked BUTT at the caucuses and hung almost even at the primary.

But because of their arcane system, he winds up getting 9 more delegates than she does from the Lone Star State.

Now, you watch. You won’t hear the media saying this very much; they won’t be reporting “Clinton lost Texas, big time, after all” and they CERTAINLY won’t say “She lost because Obama is a better leader who organized a much better team, a team that worked harder and longer and did a far better job”.

The media, whether they know it or not, is invested in having something to report. And right now, since the Republicans figured out a lot quicker who their candidate is, the only thing they have to report is the “race” in the Democratic Party.

But the reality is that Clinton only has a small chance of winning- like less than 20%, maybe even less than 15% chance of winning. She’s got to win Pennsylvania by a really big margin, like 25 or 30 percent, to improve that chance of winning.

You won’t hear them saying THAT, either.

One of the more frustrating (at times) and endearing (at times) human traits is a refusal to accept the inevitable.

Right now, it’s frustrating me. There’s almost no scenario that has Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic Party’s nomination for President. She’s behind by hundreds of thousands of votes in the overall popular vote among Democrats; she’s behind in “pledged” delegates; and she’s behind in the count when you throw in superdelegates who’ve announced their support.

The only way that Clinton can win right now is by continuing to fight, viciously, against Obama- and every time she attacks him for something, it plays right into the Republicans’ hands. What’s more, she’s making attacks that she had previously said she had no intention of doing- like when she said she “wasn’t going to touch” the whole made-up controversy over what Obama’s pastor had said, then later brought it back up as an issue when it was dying down.

Clinton’s strategy is basically going to be to try and hang on and either wait for Obama to suffer some major meltdown that makes him “unelectable” (which, in my opinion, isn’t going to happen) or to try and make some kind of technical, legalistic argument that she’d be a beter candidate because she got more votes in bigger Electoral College states or something. Thing is that the odds are the Democrats aren’t going to buy that kind of argument, and in making it she’ll drag the process out until the convention.

The best thing that can happen is more and more of the big Democrats coming into the discussion, like Patrick Leahy did the other day, and saying “look, Clinton needs to step aside”. They’re moving in that direction; the tone of the comments now is more along the lines of “we need to get this wrapped up by June”, which means if Clinton can’t make any significant changes between now and then, at that time she’ll have a ton of pressure on her to step aside.

It’s a bit amusing to see how this has blown up in her face. There was always a sense that the Clintonistas felt her nomination was inevitable, almost a right somehow, and that anyone foolish enough to get in her way would be irrelevant.

American politics being what they are, that’s just not happening.

The thing about Clinton is that very name- Clinton. The rabid right wingers that hate her probably hate her even more than Bill, who (at the end of the day) just seemed like a really smart guy but still a good old boy who is entertaining and just wants to chase some cutie in a skirt. The neocon portion of the Republican Party (who are trashing that party, by the way) act like they’re shocked by that, but man, they lap it up (just watch how much Fox News uses sex to grab viewer attention sometime).

Hillary, on the other hand… they utterly hate her, and if she were nominated it would be one of the ugliest fights of all time.

No, she’s got to go… but that human trait of not being able to accept the inevitable is stopping her from admitting it. Too bad.

I chipped some money in to Barack Obama’s campaign the other day. (I’m not, NOT soliciting you to do the same- it would be illegal for me as a federal employee to ask people to do that.) I mentioned it to my girlfriend, who told me that if I had money to donate I shouldn’t give it to some rich guy, I should give it to a local soup kitchen or shelter or an NGO or something, because those would really make a difference.

This led to a moderately interesting discussion and points out something that I think is a problem with politics today. People don’t see the connection between them and the leaders, between what they do and the change that those political candidates will create.

I can’t blame them, in a way; let’s face it, Barack Obama and I are about as close as, say, me and the ninth child born today in Bangalore, India. The more remote our leaders are and the more people they have to represent, the less likely it is that we’re going to feel as though we have a personal connection to them.

The second part of this is that we also feel that the bigger the government, the less likely it is that someone’s going to be able to change things.

There’s not a lot we can do about convincing people otherwise about the first part. That is, in large part, why Obama’s campaign up to now has been successful; he’s got a ton of charisma and that makes a higher percentage of people feel connected to him. (Of course, him being a black guy DOES make things harder in this department; there’s a natural human reaction to bond more closely with people who look like us, who are “from our tribe” so to speak. Thing is that I think Obama can overcome this.)

But the second part is relatively easy. When she said she didn’t think it was a good idea because it’s too remote and wouldn’t change anything anyway, I asked her if she thought things would be different in America today if Al Gore had been the President the past several years instead of George W Bush. The war, the federal budget, the spending priorities, the economy, the worth of the dollar against foreign currencies… didn’t she think things would definitely be different?

Of course, that got her. She said “you know, you’re right”.

(She still wasn’t sure that me giving moolah to Obama was a good idea, but at least she isn’t rejecting the idea out of hand now. This matters since we’re living together; while we obviously still have a lot of autonomy, cohabitating means some joint decision-making when it comes to money.)

I do think that giving some money can make a difference. In an email the other day, the Obama campaign pointed out:

In February alone, more than 94% of our donors gave in amounts of $200 or less. Meanwhile, campaign finance reports show that donations of $200 or less make up just 13% of Senator McCain’s total campaign funds, and only 26% of Senator Clinton’s.

This is what’s different about Obama. He’s getting regular people- the “little” people, in other words- collectively excited and feeling connected about his campaign in a way that Clinton and McCain would/could NEVER do. And let’s face it- thanks to democracy, the votes of individual people DO matter.

Think back to 2000. If Ralph Nader doesn’t run, odds are Al Gore wins. Things are entirely different over the next several years (for example, since we don’t get distracted by the needless diversion into Iraq, we probably catch Osama bin Ladin- and that’s just a start.) That difference could have been brought about by just a few thousand people in Florida- out of 300 million Americans.

We CAN make a difference, and that’s why it’s important (IMO) for us to not just watch the news but to actively and actually pay attention to what the candidates themselves say. It’s why I actively (but as politely as I can) challenge independents and conservatives to ignore Fox News (a struggle, I admit) and actually WATCH Obama’s speech on race, or read it in its entirety.

This campaign is going to set the course for America over the next several years, just as Bush has set it on a bad, bad course. It’ll take a LOT of work to get things righted. The Bushies are setting things up such that the next President would have a harder time getting us out of Iraq, for example. I expect Scalia to resign prior to January 2009 so Bush can appoint one more young, uber-conservative to the bench, for another example. (Pray for the good health of 87-year-old John Paul Stevens.)

Another example is the “news” that broke yesterday about the panic that the Bush Administration is trying to induce over Social Security and Medicare. The spending on the Iraq war alone would have ensured SS’s health for at least the next 50 years.

These things DO matter, and our individual voices DO matter. Even my hundred bucks, sent to Obama yesterday, matter; that’ll pay for a few more newspaper ads or radio ads or help pay for a TV ad in Pennsylvania. He’ll probably lose Pennsylvania to Clinton, but if he doesn’t lose it by much then he’s only got to win in North Carolina and there’s effectively no way that Clinton can win the nomination.

So if my money can help convince just a couple more young people at some college in Pennsylvania to vote for Obama, it’s money well spent, because it might lead to him becoming President.

I got to shake John Edwards’s hand when he was here on a campaign visit. I believe that the money I sent to Edwards (more than Obama thus far!) was money well spent. His campaign served as a reminder to Democrats that paying attention to actions to try and help the desperately poor in America is needed. Obama and Clinton (and the rest of the nation, for that matter) were moved a bit more towards Edwards’s side.

Yeah, my guy lost. Never caught fire with the voters. And I think he’s hurting the party by not advocating for Obama; he could possibly help in union-heavy Pennsylvania. But it was a good fight and it did mean something.

What are you going to do today that has meaning?

You know, the ones that many Republicans spent the last few years villifying?

We sure could use them now, I believe.

Here’s the deal. I think that a significant portion of our economic problems stem in part to the crackdown on illegal immigrants. Here’s how.

First of all, we’re seeing inflation rear its ugly head. Not only is this in sectors that are heavily influenced by oil prices but other areas are seeing jumps in prices- specifically, some foods are skyrocketing. And guess what a large part of the cost of food is? Labor in picking it- and that labor is getting a lot more expensive because we’re driving the people who do the picking out of the US. Anyone who’s shopped for fresh produce lately has seen the effects here.

The dollar is losing tons of value against foreign currency. That’s due to many factors, but I think that at least part of it is because illegals working here send home billions of dollars a year- but now that there’s fewer of them, they’re sending less money home. That has both positive and negative effects on the economy; it’s negative in the sense that if they didn’t send the money home, it would still be here and spent/circulated in the economy here.

But money sent home has a positive effect in that it makes the money that IS here more valuable, because there’s less of it. (View, as an example, how the US Postal Service enthusiastically encourages stamp collecting- because those are stamps that they sell but never have to provide services for.) With less money being sent home, it doesn’t have as much of a stengthening effect on the US dollar- and the dollar is at all-time lows against the euro and other foreign currencies.

And a third factor is just what I mentioned above. With fewer people spending money in the economy, there’s less activity, less churn, less generation of business. With the push to send more people home and crack down on employers, there are many stories that illegal immigration has slowed considerably and that our population is growing less quickly. That’s fewer people going down to the local McDonalds for a burger, which leads to less money for the potato grower in Idaho, which means less money for someone making fertilizer… you get the idea.

Illegal immigrants also need a place to live. While the vast majority of the meltdown in the subprime mortgage markets (and, to a lesser extent, in the adjustable-rate mortgages even among people whose credit wasn’t “subprime” but who now can’t afford the new payments after their rate changes) are not illegal immigrants, a small but significant portion are.

What’s more, when would-be investors (I work with a couple of guys who do this) are looking for foreclosure or cut-rate, save-face types of deals on houses to buy as potential rentals or quick-flip investments, they don’t have as big of a market to sell to. Much of this portion of the economy is reliant upon group-family living situations, where you might have one or two people who are legally papered to live/work here (often they’re US citizens) that officially buy or rent the house, and then they have a bunch of family, extended family, and friends move in with them to help make the payments- and a lot of those folks might be illegal immigrants.

Now that there’s pressure forcing many to leave the US, there’s not as many available to rent. Even though in some areas the rental market is doing well on the surface of it (for example, in Seattle our apartment rental market is very strong on the landlord’s side, thanks to apartment-to-condo conversions) the submarket on the lower end of the socio-economic scale is getting weaker. And we’ve all seen how lower prices for houses, even if it’s limited to the low end of the market, affects the market as a whole.

All of these things, I believe, are playing a part in our present economic problem. I’m not saying it’s the root cause, or even a major cause, but I suspect that these things are certainly not helping.

Does that mean we should reverse our stance on illegal immigration? No, not exactly… but I do think that it shows that the entire problem of illegal immigration is not so easily summed up with jingoistic slogans and ranting. Both sides in this debate are guilty of this (although I believe that it’s a lot worse on the “round them all up at gunpoint and ship them home” side than it is on the “let anyone live where they want” side of things).

It’s just another example of how illegal immigration is a big, complex problem that has complications and effects extending throughout our society.