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Playing Out The String



Two Weeks of Trivia
David Broder 5/8/2008
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The endless Democratic presidential campaign has lurched from irrelevance to trivia, triggering a near-universal call to bring it to a halt.

The two states that voted on Tuesday -- Indiana and North Carolina -- are so unimportant to Democratic chances of electing the next president that it is unlikely Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would make more than a token appearance in either after one of them is nominated.

Unless John McCain butchers his campaign, he will be an odds-on favorite to continue the Republican winning streak in both states. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and a host of earlier candidates failed to make them competitive.

In a sensible nominating system, these states would never become important battlegrounds. Lots of people complain that Iowa and New Hampshire enjoy disproportionate influence because of their place at the start of the process. But both are closely contested in November -- not throwaways.

Indiana and North Carolina were doubly irrelevant this year, because the "issues" that Clinton and Obama discussed in the two weeks before those states' primaries were some of the phoniest of this entire election cycle.

Obama was all but obliterated for that time by the huge media-fanned controversy over
his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Wright's inflammatory comments were obnoxious, but they bore no resemblance to the rhetoric and the record of the Illinois senator. I'd like to know what kind of people Obama would bring into his White House and where he would turn for a Cabinet, because there is so much uncertainty about his actual policies at home and abroad.

Wright would clearly not be anywhere in that administration, so why waste a full fortnight on him?

But if Obama contributed to the Wright fiasco through his hesitancy to break with him, Clinton was worse. She flooded North Carolina and Indiana with phoniness -- playing a drag version of Dennis Kucinich, a beer-drinking populist, not the honors graduate of Wellesley College and Yale Law School that she is.

As if that were not enough, she joined McCain in promoting the idea of a gas tax holiday that would last just through the summer, a step that would guarantee no actual reduction in the price at the pump and could encourage more energy waste. The fact that this cockamamie idea had already been rejected not only by President Bush but also by the Democratic speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, did not deter Clinton from promoting it as if it were a serious policy.
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Hillarys Everest
By O'Farrell  - The Illawarra Mercury, Australia  * Posted 05/08/2008
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Hillarys Everest
© Copyright 2008   O'Farrell  - All Rights Reserved.
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