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On Tuesday night, while the G.O.P. Congressional candidate was losing in a Mississippi district George Bush carried in 2004 by 25 points, Barack Obama was being trounced in the West Virginia Democratic primary — by 41 points. I can’t find a single recent instance of a candidate who ultimately became his party’s nominee losing a primary by this kind of margin.
Bloggers were quick to pounce on this ridiculous claim and the problem with reality as Colbert says, it too can have a liberal bias. I’ve nothing against conservative columnists and actually enjoy reading David Brooks and Clive Crook but when a columnist makes a factual error to base his opinion on, it is unforgivable. Glenn Greenwald, the liberal watchdog blogger says, he took less than 2 minutes to disprove Kristol and he didn’t even venture beyond this year’s primary results. The results for Utah were extraordinarily skewed; Romney - 90%, McCain - 5%, Paul - 3%, Huckabee - 2%. Now of course, Kristol has never seen the eventual nominee being trounced by 85 points let alone 41, right? If you think Utah is an outlier, then McCain also lost Arkansas to Huckabee by 40 points and Kansas by 36 points. Surely Kristol wouldn’t summarize McCain would have a problem winning in Arkansas or Kansas, right? In fact, McCain regularly gets only ~70% of the votes in the simultaneous Republican primaries and considered rest of the contenders have overwhelmingly endorsed him and campaign actively for him, it is more cause for worry.
Why just examine Republican margins of victory? A commenter on Greenwald’s blog pointed out that Clinton lost Kansas to Obama by 49 points; lost DC by 51 points; lost Hawaii by 52 points; and lost Idaho by 62 points. The problem is that these states didn’t go to polls in the endgame but were part of those 12 states Obama won on the trot. To be fair, NY Times added Greenwald’s corrections to Kristol’s column. Now that must hurt.
Given the way Democrats allot delegates proportionally, I don’t even see why winning states matters anymore. Usually momentum-building exercise, winning early states is more important than winning the last five states. At the end of the day, it is the pledged and super delegates that will elect the nominee but Clinton knows her politics well. Being a typical politician, she will not let of the spotlight so easily. and will continue to claim to stand up for Florida and Michigan voters by comparing it to the civil rights movement. But that is a different topic altogether. Never was the hunger for power this evident.
by Patrix | on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 10:30 am | 
Current Affairs, Politicking, United States . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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May 23rd, 2008 at 1:26 pm reply
I think Greenwald comes closest to the definition of a libertarian. I don’t think I would really call him liberal.
Defending the first amendment rights of a neo nazi is pretty clearly non-liberal non-conservative (and perhaps commendable) behaviour.
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:56 pm reply
Niket, I guess you’re right. The Right paints him as a liberal though probably because of his fisking of them.
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:06 pm reply
“Never was the hunger for power this evident.” — holds true for every politician, Clinton, Mc Cain, Obama or otherwise. The problem is media treats these democratic primaries as American Idol finale. Root for the underdog, and when the underdog becomes the superdog, find ways to tone down the superdog to just dog, meanwhile finding ways and justifications to now promote once-superdog-now-underdog back to superdog status.
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:50 pm reply
I agree. Margin of victory in individual states should not matter. I think at this stage, barring a miracle, Obama has the Dem nomination and the political pundits are simply micro-analyzing to keep the public interested.
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:37 pm reply
So Bill Kristol’s at it again, still not chastened by his erroneous statements regarding the Iraq war. He has to be one of the smarmiest guys around, and delusional to boot.
May 24th, 2008 at 11:00 am reply
Supremus, wow! That’s plenty of dogs. But true; every politician is hungry for power but Clinton is making a obscene display of it which is even turning off her supporters.
Santosh, and of course, the pundits need something to talk about everyday, right?
Amit, I still don’t understand why NY Time had to add him to the op-ed board for so-called ‘fair and balanced’.
May 25th, 2008 at 12:24 pm reply
Maybe they are choosing the least evil of the conservatives. Maybe it’s a statement about the times that they could not find anyone more fair and balanced than Kristol!