Global Paradigms

The May-November Surprise(s) Posted on April 23rd, 2008 by Leon Hadar Some of my friends in the reality-based community who have been celebrating the alleged (read the rest)

Business Times - 24 Apr 2008 When will the US presidential race really begin? By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT SENATOR Hillary Clinton has won the Democratic presidential primary in Pennsylvania - a crucial 'swing' state in the general presidential election - on Tuesday. Apparently, the margin of victory over her rival, Senator Barack Obama, about 10 per cent, is a number that seemed to have played well in the media-driven game of expectations. Indeed, most pundits had argued on the eve of the primary that Mrs Clinton would need to win by more than 8 per cent in order to gain the momentum she needed in order to continue in her fight for her party's presidential nomination. And she did very well among important demographic groups: women, blue collar workers, Catholics, Jews and older voters. Mrs Clinton achieved her victory in Pennsylvania after facing a younger and more charismatic figure who had enough resources to outspend her during the month-long campaign in a sta...

I’m not sure what to make of Hillary’s victory in Pennsylvania. We’ll probably have to wait for the reactions from those superdelegates. Unless the Democrats want to commit electoral suicide, they need to conclude this race sooner than later. In any case, some of the results of the exit polls on CNN and CNBC suggest that Iraq didn’t seem to play a major issue in the campaign. But Simon Jenkins in a report from Washington in the Briish Guardian provides a very original commentary on the impact of the Iraq War, etc. on the election campaign, arguing that the War is the conceptural framework for this presidential race: Americans still do not travel abroad, and rely on television news for their knowledge of foreign places, which they continue to regard with bizarre suspicion. Hence a world view is lumped in with defence and security in a collective paranoia. And a candidate’s stance on foreign policy is a proxy for his or her character. (read the rest)