Obama, America, and Race

There are times when I wish Barack Obama could take off his white hat and put a black one on for a while, the way Bruce Wayne does when becomes Batman, the Dark Knight. Then he could make his enemies the villains. Kick a little ass and take a few names.

Or, if he was so inclined, he could take a walk on the wild side, and get to do what the villains do.

There's nothing like wishful thinking, but it doesn't win presidential campaigns - so I don't expect to see Obama traipsing around in a cape and a mask in the middle of the night.

I don't know why the McCain campaign even waited - they should have cut the pretense and hauled out the tried but true "race card" strategy from the beginning. It could have saved them a lot of cash - they would have had free campaign advertising every night for the last six weeks. Between this and the pundits like Sean Hannity, who have an innate ability to work O.J. Simpson's name into any discussion of Obama, I will expect to see everybody from Mike Tyson to Mike Vick paraded across TV screens in the coming weeks.

Race is still the biggest problem America has, so it’s no surprise that we end up talking about it a lot. But it is hard to talk about abstract ideas when I am actually living them, and harder still to say those unpopular but true things that need to be said to accomplish anything worthwhile.

And it doesn’t help that the few thousand people in New York and LA who control and produce practically all of the media imagery we see, who as a group are more mentally (and racially) homogenized than the last gallon of milk you bought, have absolutely no qualms in meeting mainstream America's need to be titillated, shocked, or riveted by a constant parade of reverends, rappers, and reluctant campaigners.

The few black columnists and pundits out there often spout half baked theories, honing them in front of other learned blacks and professional brown nosers (pun intended), until they have convinced themselves that they have unearthed a gospel truth explaining the actions of the black masses.

From what I can see, Obama is doing exactly what all of us who were smart but wanted to be "in" did - never let them see you sweat. We all downplayed how hard things were, how much effort it took, how little sleep you'd had, because the people you were trying to appeal to didn't want to hear it.

To assume, because Obama doesn't constantly use racially tinged rhetoric, that he can somehow "escape" how he looks, and how Americans are prone to feel about someone who looks like him, is one of the most ridiculous propositions our friends in TV land have debated for the last few months.

So far, Obama's been able to turn the good fortune smiling upon him into opportunity because he seems to be a guy who has always done his homework beforehand. But despite all of his campaign's careful planning and preparation, he will have to struggle with the racial consciousness of those Americans who used to blindly vote for the Democrat on the ticket all the way to the ballot box.

Senator McCain's campaign will make sure of it.

This Is Not A Horse Race

One of the fallacies that has been propped up by our main stream media journalists for the last month and a half is that this primary is still a horse race. What almost all of them conveniently ignore is the tremendous amount of energy, time, money, and an improbable shift in the actual demographics of the remaining states that would be needed for the Clinton campaign to garner more than the 50% total of the outstanding pledged delegates she is projected to get based on current state by state estimates.

Which is why if you are unfamiliar, as most Americans are, with the way delegates are actually accumulated through the proportional vote totals of individual congressional districts, we are more likely to think of the way a sporting event is scored – that Clinton COULD upset Obama if she could “run the table” in the remaining contests.

But “running the table” – Obama having no net gain in delegates – is impossible. He would have to get less than twenty percent of the vote in each of the remaining states for Clinton to get within spitting distance. Most of the larger congressional districts out there have 4 to 6 delegates at stake. 62.5% of the vote in that district is needed to go from 2-2 or 3-3 to 3-1 or 4-2. In order to blank an opponent, the opponent has to have a vote total that is below the threshold needed to gain at least one delegate, which is usually 15%.

The thing that is maddening to me is that every journalist in the country who is on the political beat or is a political columnist sees this kind of information about each states primary delegate allocation methodology all day every day. Yet their headlines suggest that Obama is hearing Clinton’s footsteps as she gains on him.

These are the numbers as of yesterday, which is already off when you include the guy below for Obama:

Clinton is 430 delegates short of the 2025 needed to nominate and has to capture 62 percent of the 408 pledged delegates yet to be selected and the 286 superdelegates yet to commit in order to get there.

Obama needs just 295 delegates of any stripe to close it out.

295.

That’s it.

There are 191 delegates at stake over the next 6 days (May 3rd and May 6th). From where we stand right now, Obama looks to pick up 95 – 100 of them.

In the 14 day stretch after that (May 20th), there are 131 delegates at stake. From where we stand right now, Obama looks to pick up 55 – 60 of them.

There are only 86 pledged delegates left to fight over between May 20th and June 3rd. From where we stand right now, Obama looks to pick up 35 – 38 of them.

If you add 95, 55, and 35 – the low end of the estimates – you get 185, which puts him 110 delegates away.

In this scenario, Clinton gets the balance of the 408 delegates outstanding – 223.

If my math serves me correctly, from where she is right now, this would put Clinton 207 delegates away – only a hundred delegates but twice as far from the prize.

Something tells me there are more than 110 superdelegates who are wearing an “O-Man” t-shirt under their dress shirts. There are a lot more people who will be ready to get to the end of this thing, like the guy below, in the next two weeks.

110 and counting.