Passing It Along

Just Passing It Along This Morning

Linkfest day.

Chris Bowers looks at just how hard Hillary's delegate math is, and Jay Cost at Real Clear Politics has a D.I.Y. spreadsheet.

Semi-confirmed reports that Speaker Pelosi dissed the high-end Clinton donors threatening to withhold donations to the Democratic Party over remarks they saw as too pro-Obama. Pelosi allegedly said “Hillary’s just acting bougie, to impress her bougie little friends.” Oliver Willis plays the class card:

These people are symptomatic, quite frankly, of the negative that came along with all the good President Clinton did during his tenure. The moribund liberal wing of the party, defanged after the losses of Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis, gave way to the big check writers, the elite crowd whose cash did prop up the party for the short term and helped President Clinton gain his office. But for the Democratic party and the progressive movement they have been a waste. Just look at the congressional seats lost during Clinton’s tenure, look at how unprepared the party was to field a coast-to-coast slate of candidates under Terry McAuliffe’s leadership - a party chairmanship that was all about fundraising to the exclusion of getting majorities and a president elected.

These are the hangers-on who look down their plastic surgery noses at Governor Dean’s 50-state strategy and his middle class demeanor even as the party begins to regain its role as a truly national party. These are the people who think nothing - nothing - of throwing a tantrum because us people, us regular Joes and Janes, had the gall to not vote and caucus for the candidate they bankrolled and sought to shove down our gullets the way they always do. Instead we chose to vote for a candidate whose donor base is almost 2 million strong.

Joe Klein raises my nightmare scenario:

Let's say the elders of the Democratic Party decide, when the primaries end, that neither Obama nor Clinton is viable. Let's also assume—and this may be a real stretch—that such elders are strong and smart enough to act. All they'd have to do would be to convince a significant fraction of their superdelegate friends, maybe fewer than 100, to announce that they were taking a pass on the first ballot at the Denver convention, which would deny the 2,025 votes necessary to Obama or Clinton. What if they then approached Al Gore and asked him to be the nominee, for the good of the party—and suggested that he take Obama as his running mate?

Down the ballot: A seat by seat look at the California congressional races. And corporate tool Al Wynn, defeated in the Democratic primary, is bailing on his term six months early, walking off the job and likely costing Maryland taxpayers a special election.

Non-political: How bad grammar becomes good. And a brilliant and hilarious Keith Richards interview. Author's note on Keef's voice: "It’s not speaking, actually. Or at least not what you think of as speaking. It’s more of a slur-mumble. Words run together and then get coated in cigarette smoke and that thick accent. It makes you wish he provided his own subtitles. I mean, when I transcribed the tapes from this interview, I had to listen to each sentence maybe three times to decode it."

Personal note: The Smallest Farm 2008 is officially underway, as the first pea seeds went into the ground Wednesday.