I am thinking of the story the media is NOT telling; the story that someday will be written about in a book; too late, as always. This is the story of how the DNC deliberately fixed the nominating process so that Obama would win. And this is no sour grapes paranoia, it's true. The media has been reporting the delegate counts, and the various primary and caucus results as if all things have been equal, and that Hillary just simply hasn't done as well. But it's not true. The recent general election polls are not a fluke; Hillary is the more popular candidate among all the voters, and among Democrats.
This is what Donna Brazile did: In 2006, she got the delegate allocation in primaries to change so that Black voters essentially got more votes and more delegates. The bogus rationale was that they were giving more votes to district with a higher proportionate Democratic turnout in the last election, but that is a palpable excuse. The true reason was to make AA votes count more than the other ones. Then, she helped make sure that South Carolina had a very important spot in the sequence of primaries. Why was that? Certainly not because SC was a major contested state; Republicans win it by about 70-30% every time. No, it was because it had the highest percentage of AA voters, and thus was an almost certain Obama win. The goal was to make that the key primary, which the media helpfully went along with. And when Florida and Michigan tried to move their primaries up a bit, Brazile was so incensed and so dedicated to keeping SC in the key spot, that she punitively tried to rob those two states of all their delegates, and disenfranchise all their voters. Those were two states that Hillary would have won (Florida by a landslide), and so this managed to take away key delegates as well as completely change the narrative of the campaign. Then we have caucuses, which Brazile and Dean tried to foist on as many states as possible. Caucuses, as we all know, are undemocratic. In this case, they are worse, because Obama's forces cheated, lied and intimidated, as much evidence shows. So all of this was a stacked deck for Obama. It played out just as was planned. Every time Hillary won a big state like Pennsylvania or Ohio, she only gained ten delegates or so, because of the disproportionate strength of AA votes. Obama's wins in AA-dominated Southern states got him more delegates. His wins in caucuses in states where virtually the only Democrats are college students, got him more delegates than Hillary could get even by winning big states by impressive margins. It's like playing a poker game where someone has set the rules so that your chips are always worth less than the other person's. This all means that there really was nothing Hillary could have done much differently. Yes, it would have helped if she had a better plan for caucuses, but they are inherently stacked against her support base, which is older working-class. She didn't fail in one major primary, despite all the obstacles. She won every state she needed to win--except the loaded dice of delegate apportionment meant that no matter what she did, she never could win enough delegates to overcome the Southern state which Obama was sure to win. All Obama had to do to guarantee his delegate advantage was to play the race card so that AA's would vote for him in large numbers. There was no mathematical way that Hillary could counter that, no matter how well she did in major states. That is a mathematical truth. The media could have covered this, told how this system strongly favored Obama, and was not indicative of the relative strength of the candidates. But they did not. They acted as if it was a completely level playing field. The truth is that the DNC, and particularly Brazile, fixed this contest from the start, thus rendering all the work, effort, time and money spent by Clinton and her immensely dedicated supporters, essentially insufficient. Let no one say that Hillary should have done this or that differently. She did everything she could, given the stacked deck, and given the fact that the media would never give her the benefit of the true story. If Hillary doesn't get this nomination, I don't think her "power base" is going to be much. The Democratic "leaders' have had this fixed up for some time. Hillary withdraws, they say nice things about her, they urge/threaten her to strongly support Obama; and she goes back to the Senate with no realistic chance of ever being President. Obama controls the Party and the DNC, gets rid of most of the people that didn't support him; and makes sure that if he wins two terms, the next candidate is the person he picks for VP, or someone he favors. Hillary thus becomes one of those tragic figures who is in the wrong spot at the wrong time, and never is able to do the kind of things she wanted so much to do for the country. Any other view of where she will be after withdrawing is naive and wishful, I think. In this case, she didn't even really lose; but was the victim of a nominating process carefully stacked against her. Outside of sending her own squad of bullyboys to lock people out of caucus rooms and scare them, I don't know what else she could have done. She won every big state except Obama's own; she won virtually every swing state, mostly by comfortable margins. She has been the victim of the DNC fix and a rabid media, which is not going away any time soon. The only nice thing they will ever say about her is when she withdraws, just like Gore. The horrifying thing is that the goal of the media has not just been to get Obama nominated. It has been to absolutely destroy the career and reputation of Hillary Clinton. The fact that they continue to talk about something which by any rational analysis is an absolutely non-story, is as evil as it gets. The media may be what is most wrong with this country. At the start of every election cycle, like Charlie Brown hopefully running up to kick the football, I somehow think that this campaign will be different; that the media will actually try to be fair and provide reasonable coverage. Moreover, every time I immediately see that they are worse than the last time, more biased, more vicious, more slanderous, more willing to twist and distort reality to their own purposes. On the other hand, maybe it is just that they are too stupid to understand much of anything; after all, I know that a college education is not what it used to be. Moreover, being a frat-boy or sorority girl with a nice smile may get you on TV, but it doesn't give you any qualifications for analyzing anything. What has happened with the RFK "story," however, is far worse; because it is deliberately intended to make Hillary look like a bad person, which she most certainly is not. But I'm sure there will be lots of hand slapping and high-fiving done in the newsrooms and on the news desks, if Hillary withdraws. So justice never does come to such despicable people as the Dowds, the Roland Martins, the Anne Kornbluths, the Andrea Mitchells, the Russerts, Matthews, and all the others. Frankly, I'd take this to the convention, tell the DNC and the media to go screw themselves, and let's see what actually happens. But Hillary is no me, and she does not want to be hated by her colleagues, who have mostly tried to diminish her throughout the campaign, in favor of a propped-up, inexperienced, arrogant, elitist, calculating, disenfranchising, lying opponent. Obama is their candidate, not ours, if "ours" means the vast middle-class, the working people, those who truly care about the immense problems facing our country, and who realize that we desperately need someone immensely hard-working and competent, not a lazy inexperienced person who reads a teleprompter well. The fight Hillary has waged is for all of us, and she has gone to every state to do so. I wish I could think of something positive or cheerful to see out of a Hillary withdrawal, but I cannot. I see perhaps the end of the last New Deal Democrat to remain on the political stage; and I see an endless series of empty images parading to the White House, carefully selected by the corporate powers, and sold to Americans by the media like a new brand of perfume.
