Numb3rs

Does everybody get what they want?

Get It Try It

The numbers are coming in. It's getting close to the wire.

Barry's got a PD lead of 140. And then he's pulled in front with the SDs today.

But this campaign isn't Hillary against Barry: it's Wolfson against Axelrod. And Axelrod's in a class by himself. From the beginning he's had a handle on things and kept it. Barry's been out collecting money earlier; Barry started kicking Hillary in the knees when Axelrod told him to; Axelrod's given over three times as much to SDs to buy their votes as Wolfson has. Axelrod also knows how to stay out of the news.

Axelrod knows how to get fanatics of all ages working for him. He watches while they bully pensioners and hijack caucuses; infiltrate election locales; and so forth. And of course he's not going to let anyone chastise them. They're good for his purposes.

There've been nine primaries since the beginning of March. Hillary's won six; Barry's won three. Barry's only winning spurt came between the beginning of February and the beginning of March. Hillary could have been in another country for that month. Her coffers were empty, run down by a former campaign manager who #1) wouldn't let her declare until after the 2006 senate victory, thereby giving Barry a head start; and #2) still figured everything would be over by Super Tuesday and spent the money accordingly. With empty coffers and dissension in the ranks Hillary had to regroup and get ready for Texas and Ohio instead. And Barry won a string of insignificant but impressive Republican victories.

The victories were Republican because it was Republicans who in each case put Barry over the top. Counting only registered Democrats Hillary won them all. But Howard Dean in his wisdom thought it was a good idea to let Republicans vote in his party's primaries. Nobody's called Howard Dean a stupid idiot - yet.

Towards the end of that stretch Barry started coming right out and encouraging Republicans to vote in his primaries. Axelrod undoubtedly told him so. Perhaps the numbers were low in those remaining states and Barry needed all the help from the enemy he could get.

Back sometime in 1972 an organisation known as 'CREEP' ('Committee to Reelect the President') with their covert black ops group 'the plumbers' broke into the Watergate complex in Washington DC and got caught at it. The Watergate burglary was only the latest in a number of pranks the plumbers were pulling for the man Nixon. The objective of their efforts was to eliminate all the heavy contenders for Nixon's job in the 1972 general election.

One after one the contenders fell. Leaving in the end only McGovern. McGovern was the fool the plumbers, CREEP, and the president himself thought was the silliest of all the possible opponents. Right what they ordered.

McGovern had a coalition of blacks and educated whites. The Democrats - run by a predecessor to Howard Dean and bolstered by predecessors to Donna Brazile, John Kerry, Chappaquiddick Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, and other luminaries - were overly joyful. McGovern was just the candidate they'd wished for!

They never understood at the time how the Republicans had made fools of them. The Democrats thought they got what they wanted and the Republicans knew they got what they wanted - the White House.