Fewer phrases mean more to politicians that 'for the sake of the party'. It is one which will Hillary Clinton is hearing a lot at the moment, as fellow Democrats implore her to withdraw from the Democratic race. After last night' results in North Carolina and Indiana it is hard to see how she can win without dragging her party through a deeply divisive summer into a fractious convention. But that's exactly what she seems intent on doing. Meanwhile, John McCain can't believe his luck as his poll rating gradually improves, as his two rivals knock ten bells out of each other.
And 3,000 miles away another politician broods about his own position, which os getting weaker by the day. They haven't quite said it yet, but when Labour MPs start uttering the phrase 'For the Sake of the Party' Gordon Brown will know the game is all but up.
35 comments:
Yep, although Hillary IS the better candidate for the Dems the 'media's' choice has ALWAYS been Obama. Crikey, Obama has NO experience and let's face it, if he were a white candidate and a church pastor came out with THAT 'racist' diatribe, he would have been shot down in flames. Barack is the mirror image of Blair- and that should set all alarm bells ringing. Hillary should stay in the contest-until the end. After all, she has taken all the 'major' states- Obama could NOT carry them. Though i think if it's 'even steven' at the Dem conference, i think she's effectively sunk, where the 'give the black a chance' feeling will win through. McCain will win the general election though- due to misplaced emotional PCism from the Dems and American media.
You could turn it round the other way and ask why does Obama not withdraw "for the sake of the party"?
The primary system is good, we should adopt it here. Just imagine if G Brown had been scrutinised a bit more closely before ascending to the throne!
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JE06Aa01.html
Asia Times has Hillary grinding the Democrats into submission.
Hillary Clinton has won Indiana !!
Reading your post, one would think she had lost ?!
Yes, she won it by a much narrower margin than she needed to.
Is "for the good of the party", close enough?
No mention of 'for the sake of the Country', yet. Maybe that's next on the agenda - but with these NuLab apparatchiks I very much doubt it. They believe that Party and Country are one and the same.
For all we supporters of the GOP, great ain't it! Keep going Billery.
Hillary the better candidate with hubby Clinton leading her to the White House? Hillary's presidency will be Clinton's third term at the White House whose Oval office he desecrated dallying wih a girl of his daughter's age. What Hillary has done is what Clintons do and what their friend Blair did to smear the opposition with lies and half truths. What did Hillary say when Clinton was caught with proverbial pants down? She blamed the right wing press. What Brown and his followers say about Boris and Tories win, the media helping them and slick salesmanship. Clintons, Blair and Brown are all snake-oil salesmen. Gladly they are disappearing like my pension hit by Brown's stealth taxes!
Its time for the Conservatives to make the case for a general election if Brown resigns.
Yes, it chimes with " For pity's sake..."
Hillary and Gordon are both doing their party far more damage by going on than they would if they stepped aside. The only problem is that they have been waiting to lead their countries for so long that they are blinded to the obvious truth of their plights.
I am not sure I agree with your point about McCain, Iain. The theory that the 'long war' between Clinton and Obama is destroying them doesn't stack up. I blogged about this at
http://royalandfederal.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/why-so-much-gop-crowing-about-the-dems-long-war/
My idea for the Democrats is for them to exploit this situation. Why don't they make this a competition about who could fight McCain better, not who can knock out the other Democrat. Again, it's something I have blogged about:
http://royalandfederal.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/heres-an-idea/
Talking of Partys - one party states and such things.
Saw on the box President Putin handing over power to Medvedev (hope I got the spelling!).
I wonder what the new Russian Bear will do faced with Clinton/Obama? For McCain the answer's simple - put his tin hat on as McCain ratchets up a new cold War.
Off topic:
I wonder how Mr Bean would fare with one of these lie detector tests the Beeb has been whittering on about? Esp at PMQs.
Perhaps NuLab need to emulate Dumas (D'Artagnan/Milady).
They should print a small number of discrete letters, indicating that the bearer has done what he has done for the good of the party and is totally excused and free to continue life.
Quite clearly Gordo aint gonna do the decent thing by the party, so will need a little encouragement........9 grams worth. :-).
"Barack is the mirror image of Blair": I suspect that he's more intelligent than Blair. But then so is Brown, and much good.....
I reckon Cameron's 44% last week is going to go up, not down, between now and the GE.
Labour has now been exposed as having relied on systematic lying as a means of government for the last 14 years. Major's government was ousted because Labour lyingly claimed it was sleazy; Broon's government clearly is sleazy, but unlike Major's can't even claim to be competent.
I sense a mood of real public anger towards Labour. Meanwhile, there is a delusional state of detachment and denial on loony fringe sites such as LabourHome. They all think that if they can just spin and lie a bit harder, and go a bit more hard left, and wait for Boris to cock up, they can pull it back.
They will certainly spin and lie, but Boris won't cock up and Cameron's lead will solidify. I can see him at 48, 49% at the GE, with Labour struggling to avoid coming third. The Welsh Nats and Tories will kill them in Wales, the SNP will kill them in Scotland, the BNP will kill them in the inner cities and the Tories will kill them everywhere else.
Honestly, I can see them reduced to about 125 seats in the north and north-west. The whole question of who follows Broon will then become hilariously simple. In the wake of a rout like that, the only plausible candidates still in a seat will be Broon, Balls and Miliband. Broon may not even have the decency to step down, like Kinnock didn't in 1987, and even if he does, those two creeps are both empty-headed weird-looking idiots who won't last a Parliament in post (Labour will never elect Miliband leader anyway, because he didn't go to a selective school).
In fact, Labour itself will not survive the coming GE defeat. It is insolvent as it is, even with the advantage of having been able to sell honours. Out of office, it will have no civil service to do its political work, vastly reduced sinecure opportunities within the House, and no ability to manufacture and state-fund quango jobs to do Labour Party propaganda. The BBC, its broadcasting arm, will be dismantled. We can be sure that Cameron, who's guaranteed four terms in office and thinks Blair wasted his first two, will set about the universities, the legal system, the schools, and all the other areas of entrenched leftism, and ferret that leftism out root and branch between 2010 and 2026.
The next non-Tory PM is probably still an ovum. When he / she does take office, it will be on a leftist platform of Thatcher-style economics and social programmes, because that's the sort of government we'll consider leftist in around 2040.
I think Dave should stand down in his second term. He will have achieved his place in history by establishing total electoral dominance. An open and transparent leadership election, perhaps with US-style primaries for the candidates, will reinvigorate the government. If done early enough, it will mean that defeated post-Cameron candidates still get another shot, and will improve their suitability between contests by holding further great offices of state.
Hillary's intention is not to win the nomination now, but to ensure that McCain wins this time so that the incumbent is too old next time to run again. Then she's in with another chance.
Broon's Talking Bawgie ... brilliant
I have no respect for hillary whatsoever.
she claims she's the most experienced candidate - but she's only been a senator for 2 years longers than Obama and being married to the President is hardly first rate experience in its own right. is norma major ready to be our next PM?
Similarly, her "misspeak" over sniper fire and pandering over fuel tax is nothing short of patronising - thinking the electorate are too stupid to know better. Oh, and when the going gets tough she cries a bit.
when the phone rings at 3am, people want a president - not someone who will start snivelling before waking up her husband to ask what to do.
It would be good to have a woman in the white house, but it has to be the right woman. she isn't it.
The Cyclone. 5 Live has had a phone in on people donating to help the Burmese.
Response. I can't give anything, I'm too poor myself, you can have some old clothes and old tins of food but I'm not giving any money to a corrupt government.
The Tsunami saw the largest act of charity giving in this country ever.
The cyclone has caused the same level of damage to a very very large number of clearly impoverished people.
What has changed over the last 4 years to change peoples sense of giving.
Is it We feel poorer, we are taxed more, we don't trust state bodies to deliver anything they promise, we don't consider our country a rich country.
Mr Brown, if you listened you would have heard angry, ordinary people who were pulling up the ladder and looking to themselves.
Largely your fault Mr Bean.
Why does one of the G8 countries, one of the genuinely wealthy countries in the world feel so impoverished?
So never mind for the sake of the party, for the sake of the people of this and the rest of he world's countries, GO..GO NOW.
Obama has twice the number of states, over a hundred more delegates and half a million more votes. why is clinton still in this?
when you look at the big states people keep banging on about - clinton's victories are all (apart from Penn) by just a few points. When Obama wins, he wins big.
she cares more about herself than she does keeping the republcans out of the white house.
when the phone rings at 3am, people want a president - not someone who will start snivelling before waking up her husband to ask what to do. (Billy, 1.07pm)
Billy, if Mrs Clinton wants to ask her husband what to do at 3am she's going to have to telephone him.
Stay in there Hilary, she is twice the candidate that Obama is.
Just what has he got going for him apart from his colour, thats not good enough reason to be President
valleys mam..."what does obama have"?
how about the support of the majority? a 60+ page detailed manifesto? A track record of sticking up for what he believes no what he thinks peple want to hear? Not supporting Iraq war/nuking Iran? Being humble? (unlike Hillary "I expect to have won this by Super Tuesday" Clinton.
You're right in part though, his race is not what's important. That is why he steers clear from talking about it as much as he can.
Now answer me this, where exactly would Hillary be in this race had she not been a) a woman b) the wife of a former president?
if he were a white candidate and a church pastor came out with THAT 'racist' diatribe, he would have been shot down in flames
Geraldine Ferraro (Mondale's VP pick in '84) said much the same thing and was hounded off the air for being "racist".
Hillary should stay in until Denver - it used to be that the convention that decided the perty's candidate.
Q&A with McCain can go on for hours, Q&A with Obama ended recently with him walking out saying a dozen was enough. Trouble is, the primaries got "front loaded" to crown Hillary but Obama came along and took a bunch of delegates in the messiah mode with the press cheerleading etc, now he's starting to receive scrutiny (from a few) and the gloss is going a bit dull. His wife is thoroughly unlikeable which women voters notice.
You're right in part though, his race is not what's important. That is why he steers clear from talking about it as much as he can. (Fizzle 3.07)
I must correct you; his race is important. Were it not that he could pass for black, Obama would be just another one-term junior senator.
But what a shame they can't all three of them (Baz, Hillbilly, McCain) lose.
nah that's not true rush-is-right. yes he's had significant support from the black community, but he's also had massive support from other key groups.
An April poll (think it was IPSOS) said that Obama has a 25 point lead with men. He also led by 20 points with college graduates and 10 points with white collar workers. He also consistently leads Clinton on national polls over electability and personal approval. To say his success is only because he is black is simply not true.
Here in Virginia, deer hunters tell me that they often experience a phenomenon in which they have fatally shot a deer with an arrow or a bullet but the animal will run for some distance before collapsing. As one man put it to me, “The deer is dead; it just doesn’t know it right away.”
Last night, after being drubbed in North Carolina and eking out a victory in Indiana (as of this morning the margin is less than 23,000 votes out of more than 1.25 million cast), Mrs. Clinton uttered brave words about being headed “full speed” to the White House. News accounts this morning state that she plans to hit the campaign trail in West Virginia, a state, like Kentucky, in which the demography of the Democratic primary electorate would seem to give her an advantage. She also is scheduled to hold a fundraiser this evening in Washington, at which she is expected to rake in $500,000.
The trouble is that, as of this morning, the Clinton campaign is dead; she doesn’t know it yet. A report this morning is that the Clintons loaned her campaign almost $6.5 million; other reports are stating that the surge in fundraising success that her campaign experienced after Pennsylvania was short-lived. Taken as a whole, these reports indicate a campaign in perilous financial condition. By any of the standards that she has insisted that her performance and that of Senator Obama be judged, e.g., popular vote and pledged delegate count, she is behind and closing the gap would be nigh impossible. Even if the Democratic Party concedes her “victories” in Michigan and Florida, for example, she still would be behind in popular vote by approximately 90,000 votes.
Obama won the expectations game last night by scoring a double-digit win in North Carolina and coming as close as he did in Indiana. Political professionals and, one would think, superdelegates probably are impressed this morning by his comeback in North Carolina and his strong showings in central and northern Indiana where he carried majority-white counties by substantial margins. Watch for some members of the press to declare that Senator Obama’s success in last night’s primaries, after what can only be described as some very rough weeks—e.g., getting around the “Reverend Wright problem”—prove that he can “take a punch” and, therefore, is battle-ready for the general election. As soon as this line becomes accepted as conventional wisdom (and it won’t take long, as the news media seems more than a little tired of this race) and polls continue to show Obama besting McCain in any match-up (as they now are), the final rationale for the Clinton candidacy—that she would be the strong general election candidate—will evaporate in short order.
Admittedly, Barack Obama has not won the nomination outright and he’ll probably need superdelegates to put him over the top. However, over the next few days, Senator Clinton’s obstinacy in pressing on to what is sure defeat will seem ever more delusional and divisive. Watch for calls for Hillary to admit defeat and withdraw gracefully from Democratic leaders, like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, to increase in frequency and volume and for pressure, public and private, to be exerted on currently uncommitted superdelegates to emerge, possibly in groups, to declare their preference for Senator Obama. In the end, therefore, do not be surprised if this race is over by Memorial Day.
Dearie Me - I agree that Obama's more intelligent than Blair who is stupid, but sly. Obama's also handsomer and a more elegant looking man than Blair. But underneath, they are two of a kind. Inexperienced at ... well, anything, actually. Ambitious way, way beyond their capabilities and knowledge. Full of confidence at their own wonderfulness and their own powers of persuasion. The ME would eat Obama alive, flattering him, pretending to agree with all his wonderful thoughts and plans.
Hillary Clinton has a realistic grasp of what government entails. She also has incredible fortitude, which is needed in a national leader. She doesn't back down, which I admire.
I don't like the Dems and I don't want to seem them in the White House, but if it has to be a Dem, Hillary is a much safer, more grounded pair of hands.
Rush Is Right - I agree with you. If he couldn't pass for black, he would be just another junior senator.
Re Burma, How long as Aung Sang Suchee been held under house arrest now? How many years? Without trial. Burma is crap. They should get no international aid and then they would understand how despised their government is. The French had a revolution. The Filippinos had a revolution. The Eastern bloc had a revolution. It's the Burmese people's turn to step up to the plate.
I would not send one pound. (Of course, I never do anyway, but this time I am not sending it with malice.)
As someone who has met Sen Obama and talked with him at some length, and have a close friend who knows Sen Clinton well. I have to say there is a world of difference between these candidates.
In Barack what you see is what you get. A man of high morals and highly intelligent. Someone who gave many years to help his fellow man as a community organizer when he could have been earning big bucks as a lawyer.
On the other hand you have a woman who is consumed by a drive to be President at all costs. Who 60% of the American public deems untrustworthy to a high degree. Who will say and do anything to succeed including lying on a regular basis and saying she would "obliterate" Iran.
So who is more like Blair?
As a Brit living in NY I have a vested interest in this contest. Barack will beat McCain hands down and make a fine principled President. I look forward to being in DC in January at his inauguration.
verity said...
"Burma is crap. They should get no international aid ... revolution."
Very true. I'm sick of these 'aid' organisations rushing in to prop up murdering governments.
Fact is Hillary would prefer McCain - not because of sour grapes - but because he shares the same worldview as she does.
Obama wants to drop all the Bilderberg, Iraq War, play heavy with Russia and China rubbish, and just run a foreign policy in America's strategic interests. Hillary will all she can to help Mccain stop Obama, having failed to do so herself.
Rush-is-Right said...
"..what a shame they can't all three of them (Baz, Hillbilly, McCain) lose."
It's a strange line-up.
One is too old.
One is black, which will alienate a lot of voters.
One is a woman, which will probably alienate even more.
Broon's Talking Bawgie said...
"Major's government was ousted because Labour lyingly claimed it was sleazy"
It wasn't a claim. It was a statement of fact.
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