naked candidate

Dig if you will a picture, of an elderly medical patient in a comatose state, hooked up to tubes and sundry medical apparatuses. There is no movement from the patient and the room is filled with erudite looking doctors with gloom shadowing their faces. The prognosis is not good and the end is near.

Definitely near.

Maybe.

Such is the state of our present primary. It is clinging to life support, lost in the in between stage of life and death, a political purgatory. The lifeline the contest binds itself to is the ‘never say defeated’ attitude of Clinton. She will not concede defeat, and technically she does not have to, and continues on her march to…somewhere. After last night’s victory, listed anywhere between 8-10 points and Donklephant putting it at 8.6, she has claimed the ‘tide is turning.’

Has it turned though? She wrapped up a win in a state that would have been a surprising devastation for her to lose. Talking points aside, her base has become the working class white – lunch pail democrats. Losing a state filled with those types of voters would have meant she had lost her base and thus the primary.

What we witnessed was that both candidates maintained their respective base and not a whole lot has changed. Obama can’t win over enough of Clinton’s base to finish her off and she cannot win enough of his base to catch up. Therefore, we now look to see whether Indiana or North Carolina can make a difference. While there were 158 delegates at stake in Pennsylvania, there are 187 delegates up for grabs in the North Carolina and Indiana primaries on May 6. Obama looks to win NC by a large margin and win IN in a squeaker, making them a wash against last night’s results and putting all of us right back where we were on Monday.

Super.

Obviously, kudos to Hillary for her hard-fought victory. It was a bloodbath and, looking over the news this morning, there is more being said about the bruising than the winning.

First off, Hillary’s hometown rag, The New York Times, started the morning off with a scathing rebuke of her tactics. This is the same New York Times that previously had endorsed her candidacy. In a piece entitled ‘The Low Road to Victory‘ the times chastises her campaign for its tactics and launches into her campaign’s shortcomings from the first few words:

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Her hometown press called her victory ‘inconclusive’ and called her campaign ‘vacuous‘ and ‘desperate.’ How exactly does that work? How has she managed to lose the support of a paper that endorsed her? The Times goes on to say her tactics are ‘demeaning‘ the entire process before schlacking her upside the head with this:

On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.

They are correct in that, once again, she launched a fear-mongering ad just prior to the primary that was meant to scare the hell out of the good folks in Pennsylvania. Apparently, the part of Hillary Clinton will now be played by Rudy Giuliani.

Did you ever see the movie ‘Scrooged‘ with Bill Murray. It was an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol‘ and had Murray playing a soulless but successful studio executive. He is producing a movie called ‘The Night the Reindeer Died’ and it is filled with horror, violence and gore. After watching a preview, Bobcat Goldthwait likens to film to ‘the Manson Family Christmas.’ You can see part of the video below:

My point is that it reminds me of Hillary’s ad. She put together a Manson Family Christmas Special to scare the living wits out of anyone watching television in Pennsylvania. Her tactics are pure Rove, and maybe a little Manson. What is worse – she thinks they work and so we are in for a lot more negativity.

The most accurate summary I have seen of last night’s events came from Jed Babbin at Human Events:

While neither Clinton nor Obama came out of Pennsylvania with electoral momentum, the atmosphere of this campaign did. Negativity will rule from here on, and will build the bitterness between the camps. The hotter the campaign rhetoric gets, the longer it continues, the less chance the Democrats have to unite around whomever the superdelegates eventually crown as the nominee.

The only thing picking up speed is this campaign as it descends into the bowels of fear and vitriol. We will suffer an onslaught of threatening images and meritless attacks and be inundated with trivial and excoriating diatribes against contrived controversies.

And she will revel in it. It is all that keeps her alive, much like Darth Vader’s suit. It is the mantras of the dark side of campaigning that gives her message any sustenance at this point. She must play voters like pawns on a board in which every square serves to remind them of their helplessness in the face of the forces that conspire towards their individual destruction.

Do we need another Bush?

Do we need another Cheney?

Do we aspire to a general election of McCain versus McCain?

Should the race continue? Of course. In a nation in which, at least in slightly laughable theory, almost any adult can run for President, the race should continue on until it is resolved. No one should be forced to leave. However, we are at a point at which we need to examine the way in which the entire process is being protracted. It has become clear that, from Camp Clinton, those means will be ceaseless rabid attacks and Manson Family Christmas commercials.

The Clintons are prepared to beat into submission and scare the piss out of the general population. The concept of a new leadership has been entirely abandoned and their hearkening back to the golden days of Slick Willie are served with a side of ‘America: Scared Witless.’

And I could not have been more spot on with that last remark. They no longer want you to think, they want you to panic. They shun thoughtful consideration and welcome a population scampering for safety and salvation from the creature in ‘Cloverfield.’

And the Clinton’s are correct: There is a monster that landed in NYC and is capable of destroying everything we hold dear, but it is not a giant alien that tears down buildings and causes people to explode. It is a two-headed monster that first sprang from Hope, Arkansas and is slithering from state to state on its belly, no longer able to walk, but with enough remaining venom to infect the masses and send our country spiraling off in the wrong direction.

There is no longer a place for such fear in our political dialog. Never, NEVER, before has FDR been more correct:

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.