Wednesday, March 17, 2004
The Pre-Season is Over
All of the silliness up to this point in the Dems Primary Battle ends as of yesterday. Kerry got enough pledged delegates last night in Illinois to go with his Super delegates to lay verifiable claim to the nomination. End of story. Everything else harkening back to the horse race that just ended is nostalgia. More than anyone, the Bushies have known this day was coming for weeks. That's why they've hit so hard. That's why they continue to strike and undermine the Dems. That's why so many negative ads are on the air in so many far-flung corners of this country. Alas, conventional wisdom in this election season sucked monstrously. Dean flamed out like the craziest dotcom scheme ever concocted. Edwards and the static in the background amounted to nothing. Kerry was dead, but then fought like a madman and kicked everyone's ass. Yet until you face the machine that is Bush, you ain't got no cred in the biggest political game there is to play. The money Kerry's raising is impressive - that changes the Money Primary's stakes more than any number the Deaniacs rang up in 2003. And even Clinton is now in the fold, angling to raise $10M in the next 10 days for Kerry. TeamKerry pulled in $11.5M since Super Tuesday (that's two weeks, folks - a number that rivals Bush in a sprint even if the bank statements for Bush are much more impressive). So any early pundit-pronouncements of a Bush cakewalk stand to be equally wrong when compared to how little you can compare this race to in years' past.
I predict the Aznar Administration's handling of the post-Madrid bombings will stink up the room that is the EU for some time to come. Can you imagine Bush or Blair pushing a PR-spin that turns out to be tragically-wishful thinking a few days before a major election? The newschannels here would spontaneously combust with the contact-heat streaming from their collective hyperventilation in covering such a debacle. Playing down Spain's upheaval only proves how little our country knows about Europe, or seems to care. The national protests in Spain over the weekend drew between 11 and 12 million people on a single night - more than a quarter of their population. The comparable number here would be 50 million folks in the streets. Now THAT'S a crowd tally I'd like to see.
All of the silliness up to this point in the Dems Primary Battle ends as of yesterday. Kerry got enough pledged delegates last night in Illinois to go with his Super delegates to lay verifiable claim to the nomination. End of story. Everything else harkening back to the horse race that just ended is nostalgia. More than anyone, the Bushies have known this day was coming for weeks. That's why they've hit so hard. That's why they continue to strike and undermine the Dems. That's why so many negative ads are on the air in so many far-flung corners of this country. Alas, conventional wisdom in this election season sucked monstrously. Dean flamed out like the craziest dotcom scheme ever concocted. Edwards and the static in the background amounted to nothing. Kerry was dead, but then fought like a madman and kicked everyone's ass. Yet until you face the machine that is Bush, you ain't got no cred in the biggest political game there is to play. The money Kerry's raising is impressive - that changes the Money Primary's stakes more than any number the Deaniacs rang up in 2003. And even Clinton is now in the fold, angling to raise $10M in the next 10 days for Kerry. TeamKerry pulled in $11.5M since Super Tuesday (that's two weeks, folks - a number that rivals Bush in a sprint even if the bank statements for Bush are much more impressive). So any early pundit-pronouncements of a Bush cakewalk stand to be equally wrong when compared to how little you can compare this race to in years' past.
I predict the Aznar Administration's handling of the post-Madrid bombings will stink up the room that is the EU for some time to come. Can you imagine Bush or Blair pushing a PR-spin that turns out to be tragically-wishful thinking a few days before a major election? The newschannels here would spontaneously combust with the contact-heat streaming from their collective hyperventilation in covering such a debacle. Playing down Spain's upheaval only proves how little our country knows about Europe, or seems to care. The national protests in Spain over the weekend drew between 11 and 12 million people on a single night - more than a quarter of their population. The comparable number here would be 50 million folks in the streets. Now THAT'S a crowd tally I'd like to see.
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