Like last week, Tuesday’s primary came as no surprise. Hillary took Kentucky, maintaining her stranglehold on the Appalachian region, while Obama took Oregon, further consolidating his strength in the Northwest.
You can find the exact numbers here, but a quick look shows that Clinton made no gains in either the delegate count or the popular vote. What is probably the most interesting fact of yesterday is that Clinton’s claim that Obama can’t win working class white voters may have been exposed as a fallacy.
As Andrew Sullivan noted, statistically there’s not much difference between the white voters in Oregon and Kentucky, and as it’s shaping up it looks as if the choices they make have more to do with region than with economic factors. Furthermore, Obama’s momentum continues to flow as can be seen in this video showing a rally he held in Oregon attended by a staggering 75,000 + people:
In other election news, John McCain had a shakeup in his campaign as a phalanx of his inner circle was shown the door because of their lobbyist connections with some of the worse dictatorships on the planet. Josh Marshall breaks it down here:
Perhaps that wouldn’t have been too bad on its own, but McCain further stepped into it further by latching onto President Bush’s unprecedented criticism of a Presidential candidate at a foreign legislative body, the Knesset in Israel. Bush compared Obama to Neville Chamberlain and claimed that by wanting to negotiate with regimes hostile to America Obama sought to ‘appease’ our enemies. This led to a great Chris Matthew’s smack down over at Hardball, and McCain quickly dove in claiming that he would never open a dialogue with Hamas and that Obama would speak to Iranian President Ahmadinejad without pre-conditions.
Both of these claims were utterly false. As Klein correctly states, Obama made no such statement and, furthermore, understands that any dialogue would be with the real power in Iran, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who ultimately makes all the real decisions in Iran, sort of like Dick Cheney but with a cooler name. And as for talking with Hamas? Well McCain was for it before he was against it:
Finally, in political news outside of the election, over the weekend Senator Ted Kennedy suffered a seizure and yesterday he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Yeah, we all know that he was the original party boy of the Senate and jokes can be made (and will be made) but no one can deny that through it all Senator Kennedy was one of the strongest and most dedicated proponents of the progressive movement in this country and an ally in the fight for economic and legislative justice in America. When Senator Kennedy goes the left would have indeed lost its strongest warrior. And on that note I’ll leave you with this clip showing the Senator from Massachusetts taking the Republican’s to task as he’s done since 1962.
Things to look forward to next week: Hillary won’t leave the race. Ever.
The Wolf runs a blog on political matters at www.wordofthepeople.blogspot.com. His first novel, The Intellectual Prostitute, will be dropping this fall.
