The Ashford Zone Blog

It’s true.

On the GOP side, they already have their nominee.  Huckabee is still in the race, but short of a miracle or the death of McCain, he simply cannot muster enough delegates to overtake McCain.

On the Dem side, it’s over for a different reason:

Here’s the math. There are 3,253 pledged delegates, those doled out based on actual voting in primaries and caucuses. And you need 2,025 to win the nomination.

To date, about 55% of those 3,253 delegates have been pledged in the voting process — with Clinton and Obama roughly splitting them at about 900 delegates a piece.

That means there are now only about 1,400 delegates left up for grabs in the remaining states and territories voting.

So, do the math. If they both have about 900 pledged delegates so far, they need to win more than 1,100 of the remaining 1,400 delegates to win the nomination through actual voting.

Ain’t gonna happen, barring a stunning scandal or some new crazy revelation. So, they’ll keep fighting this thing out, each accumulating their chunk of delegates, one of them holding a slight edge and bothing finishing the voting process with 1,600 or so delegates.

And that means the nomination will be decided by superdelegates, that ragtag group of party bosses, governors, Congresscritters, and state legislators.  And who do they largely support?  Well, they’ve been in the game for a while, so they’re going to support the candidate who has been in the game with them the longest.

And that ain’t Obama.

Obama’s campaign is quite aware of this:

Barack Obama’s advisers are anticipating the possibility of a Democratic presidential race deadlocked past the last primary, and the outcome may hinge on a fight over whether delegations from Florida and Michigan get seats at the party’s national convention in Denver.

One scenario prepared for the Illinois senator’s campaign and released inadvertently yesterday with another document projects Obama will end up in June with 1,806 of the delegates who select the party’s nominee to 1,789 for New York Senator Hillary Clinton. That is short of the number needed to win the nomination.

Obama, speaking with reporters traveling to Omaha on his campaign plane, said he hadn’t seen the document. “I think it’s going to be close,” he said of the nomination battle. “Down to the wire.”

A candidate needs half of the total delegates plus one. Right now, that figure is 2,025. Any additional convention delegates would raise the amount needed to win nomination.

The Obama forecast doesn’t include Florida and Michigan, which were stripped of delegates by the Democratic National Committee for holding early primaries. Clinton won both uncontested and is vowing to fight for those delegates — which were slated to be a total of 366 — to be seated when the nominating convention opens on Aug. 25.

“This is only one of an infinite number of scenarios,” Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said. He added that the information was released unintentionally.

Moreover, any scenario could be altered with changing circumstances or conditions.

Another issue is the so-called super delegates, 796 Democratic officials and officeholders who aren’t bound by the results of primaries and caucuses. Obama’s campaign forecast projects less than half will be pledged to either Obama or Clinton. The rest could swing the nomination.

To my mind, the only way that Obama can pull this off is if he overwhelming wins the pledged delegate count, such that it would look really bad, and anti-democratic, for the party bosses to throw themselves behind Hillary.

I fear it’s not going to be pretty.

UPDATE:  His full analysis is a must-read, but the bottom line of Chris Bowers is this — he thinks there are three ways in which the Dem primary could end:

• "If Obama wins non-Michigan and Florida pledged delegates by more than 100, then he will win the nomination. From that point, he will be able to dictate the rules of the convention via the credentials committee, and win.
• If Clinton wins non-Michigan and Florida pledged delegates even by 1, then she will win the nomination. From that point, she will be able to seal the deal via super delegates and the credentials committee.
• If, after the primaries and caucuses finish on June 7th, the pledged delegate totals are somewhere in between those two ranges, then we will probably have a brokered convention. Or, at least, there will be some sort of brokered pre-convention, involving the credentials committee and negotiations with Howard Dean."

So, in a sense, I guess my headline here is wrong.  The primaries DO matter in the sense that they predict the vantage point for what will be some heavy-duty political brokering.

Andy Brorowitz explains the problem:

My biggest mistake was, in 2004, I supported John Kerry – which was not a mistake, I’m proud of supporting John Kerry, but the mistake I made was that I gave John Kerry my email address. As a result, like many John Kerry supporters, I still receive emails periodically from JohnKerry.com. And I sort of feel like John Kerry is like a bad ex.

I just feel like I want to reach out to him and say; "You know, I really feel like we need to start seeing other people." Because I just feel like he’s stalking me. And if that weren’t bad enough — if I just had to field these emails from John Kerry, but I also suspect that he gave my email address to Dennis Kucinich because I’m now also getting emails from DennisKucinich.com, and I’m pretty sure that I never supported Dennis Kucinich in any way…. with God as my witness, I have never given Dennis Kucinich my email address. I might have given it to his wife, but I really don’t think I gave Dennis my email address.

So the only thing I can kick myself over is this whole email relationship with John Kerry, which I just want to bring to an end.

You know, if it was on Facebook, I could just "de-friend" him….

I just feel like there ought to be some way to tell John Kerry to stop emailing me without hurting his feelings. Like if I could say "It’s me, not you." You know there’s nothing wrong with him, it’s just that I’ve moved on, and I’m looking for something different now and I’m sort of having an existential crisis. I still have feelings for him, it’s just they’re not the feelings I used to have. I have more of those feelings for Barack Obama.

…(And) that’s the weird thing, because (Kerry’s) apparently moved on to Barack Obama too because he’s endorsed him. But then I’m thinking, is he just stalking me? Because he knows I’m with Barack, so now he’s with Barack? I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s just weird.

UPDATE:  Romney’s out, which makes what I say below only more relevant. (P.S.  The reason he’s dropping out of the race?  Because if he stays in, the terrorists win.  Video of his exit speech here)

Man, it’s everywhere.  Everyone on the political right is telling McCain what he HAS to do now to win over the conservative base.  He needs to pick Huckabee as his vice-president.  He needs to say he’ll appoint Ted Olsen as attorney general.  He needs to stake this stance or that stance.  Many of the various demands are chronicled in today’s New York Times.

Of course, I read these things and I wonder: Why does McCain have to do this?  The Republican party had a full slate of candidates running this year, just like the Democrats.  They had a broad spectrum of political ideologies, from staunch conservatives like Thompson to libertarians like Ron Paul.  McCain, the independent "maverick", prevailed.

That’s the way it is.

I think what is happening is that the conservative base of the Republican party has yet to come to terms with the fact that they are small and in the end, they don’t matter.  They are essentially asking McCain to move to the right after his nomination (whereas, typically, candidates typically move to the center after they are nominated).  For every conservative vote McCain will pick up, he’ll probably lose a couple of moderates.  He’ll satisfy the conservative base, and lose the election.

And even if McCain does accede to the conservative wishes, he’s still not going to satisfy all conservatives (James Dobson recently reitierated that he will never ever vote for McCain).  For example, a Huckabee VP nod might mollify evangelical conservative voters, but for fiscal conservatives, Huckabee is considered even worse than McCain.

It’s almost sad to see how the fragmented bands of conservatives think they have the clout to dictate terms to the Republican nominee.  The fact that McCain is the nominee clearly shows that such clout no longer exists.  Like it or not, conservatives have to realize they are a captive audience this election cycle, and they either have to accept McCain as McCain, or accept a Democrat in the White House.  Those are the only two choices.  Period.

Take, for example, this comment I read to a Michelle Malkin post entitled "Is the GOP ‘Lost’?":

“Reaching out” and compromising conservative principles will get us destroyed in the election.

Now that’s just delusional.  Most of the country isn’t conservative; they are moderate or liberal.  How can you win an election by sticking to conservative principles?

It all stems from a self-important notions that a person cannot be elected President without the conservative base.  This, of course, is untrue.  After all, a person got nominated without the conservative base, yes?  In fact, it is probably best to recognize that the conservative "base" isn’t a "base" at all.  Not any more.  Just a hodgepodge of people with different conservative agendae. [RELATED NOTE:  McCain is speaking today at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).  Registrants attending the conference have been asked not to boo him.]

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Conservatism isn’t dead.  Rush and his ilk will still have their radio shows.  Fox News will still be there.  But it’s a niche segment of the full political spectrum now.  Their day in the sun is over.  And McCain, is going to what the hell he wants — not what they want.

Now, I’ve seen it all (although I’ve yet to actually see it) — a "Web-only film that uses the real words of the Illinois senator and Democratic presidential hopeful to tell a fictional tale of Obama battling vampires at Harvard Law School."

With a running time of ten minutes, it’s been described as a cross between Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Jesus Christ Superstar, with choreography set to a funk/rock/gospel soundtrack.

It will be released in the next few weeks.  Oookay, then.

Link to official website.

From an anti-Obama letter to the editor in a Kansas newspaper:

But to even consider turning over the reins of government to a Muslim fundamentalist would be, as my grandmother used to say, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Oh, Kansas.  We’re so lucky fo have you in this country.