England for Obama

Barack Obama has arrived in Iraq on the second stage of a major foreign tour.

Source BBC News

Politico.com has reported that the NRA plans a “Fall blitz” of advertising against Obama, investing a total of $40M to help elect McCain. That amount includes $15M directly targeted at adverts describing Obama as a threat to the Americans’ “right to bear arms”. The article quotes Chris Cox, head of the NRA’s political arm, as saying: “Our members understand that if Barack Obama is elected president, and he has support in the Senate to confirm anti-gun Supreme Court nominees, [the District of Columbia v. Heller decision] could be taken away from us in the future.”

Foreigners are often bemused by the American insistence on the right to own guns - knife crime is bad enough - but there is an even more important point to be made. Obama has been accused of “flip-flopping” on his pledge to use public campaign financing, but the NRA’s $40M investment makes it obvious that the Republican budget will not be limited to the relatively small amount ($85M) officially available to McCain. This is clearly one of the loopholes in the “broken system” that Obama and his advisors were talking about.

The Obama campaign has launched a new anti-smear website to try and clear up the mud that has been thrown over him over the past months:

Today it appears certain that Barack Obama will become the Presidential Nominee for the US Democratic party in the 2008 elections.

2,118 Delegates

Obama has 2,154 delegates to Hillary Clinton’s 1,919. There now seems no way forward for the former first lady.

Its been an amazing journey for Obama and his supporters. I hope in some small way this website helped to contribute to his success.

After Hillary’s ‘big’ win in West Virginia on Tuesday Obama’s campaign needed a little bit of massage to revive the Senators standing as front runner.

Step in John Edwards. Former Democratic contender and all round nice guy to help out.

To a packed crowd in Michigan Mr Edwards delivered a glowing speech endorsing Obama:

“There is one man who knows and understands that this is a time for bold leadership…there is one man who knows in his heart that it is time to create one America, not two - and that man is Barack Obama.“

Press coverage:

• Barack Obama secures endorsement of John Edwards - The Times
• Edwards endorses Obama in US race - BBC News
• Edwards To Endorse Obama - ABC

Despite almost unanimous acceptance that the race is over in the media, Hillary Clinton today announced that she intends to remain in the presidential race “until there’s a nominee.”

It is difficult to understand why - although she is perhaps banking on a rebound from almost certain victory in the upcoming primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky - she is (for now) claiming that she will soldier on despite every possible argument for not doing so, including the inclusion of non-contests in Michigan and Florida, now being lost.

Hello Hillary, the race is over!

Continuing the contest, despite news that last month her campaign was only perpetuated by loaning herself $6.4 million, can only cause harm to the Democratic Party she claims to love. As other Democrats despair, superdelegates again trickled toward Obama today - a trickle which surely must soon become a flood if they are to end unnecessary division.

Having fought a campaign mirroring the worst of the Republican tactics which Obama last night said we should move beyond, the Clinton campaign has few friends, no argument, and diminishing support. She perhaps hopes to claim that the nomination was ’stolen’ from her by the very superdelegates she was relying on to overturn the choice of voters, but in her heart she knows (being a consummate politician) that the race is over.

The superdelegates now need to reinforce last night’s message - that Obama is going to fight McCain - to avoid a needless distraction of a horse race between a thoroughbred and a lame filly. If they can do so without pulling out the pistol, all the better. If not, there are many who will happily supply the bullet.

In many Democrat minds, the contest in November was always going to be best defined by the candidate who had the judgement to oppose the Iraq War from the start, but Obama’s surprising appeal and his ability to raise massive fortunes from over 1.5 million individual donors has also not gone unnoticed. A message of ‘the future not the past’, fought between a 72 year old Republican and a young Senator barely tarnished by Washington politics-as-normal, will also help in a year where voters are already demonstrating a desire for change.

The future is tall, black, and dynamic. It is not old, muddled, and tarnished.

The following memo has been sent to superdelegates by the Obama Campaign manager, David Plouffe, in an effort to end this race before any further damage to the Democratic Party’s cause is done by Hillary Clinton’s (so far) continued determination to fight on:

There are only six contests remaining in the Democratic primary calendar and only 217 pledged delegates left to be awarded. Only 7 percent of the pledged delegates remain on the table. There are 260 remaining undeclared superdelegates, for a total of 477 delegates left to be awarded.

With North Carolina and Indiana complete, Barack Obama only needs 172 total delegates to capture the Democratic nomination. This is only 36% of the total remaining delegates.

Conversely, Senator Clinton needs 326 delegates to reach the Democratic nomination, which represents a startling 68% of the remaining delegates.

With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days. While those scenarios may be entertaining, they are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or its millions of supporters, volunteers, and donors.

We believe it is exceedingly unlikely Senator Clinton will overtake our lead in the popular vote and in fact lost ground on that measure last night. However, the popular vote is a deeply flawed and illegitimate metric for deciding the nominee – since each campaign based their strategy on the acquisition of delegates. More importantly, the rules of the nomination are predicated on delegates, not popular vote.

Just as the Presidential election in November will be decided by the electoral college, not popular vote, the Democratic nomination is decided by delegates.

If we believed the popular vote was somehow the key measurement, we would have campaigned much more intensively in our home state of Illinois and in all the other populous states, in the pursuit of larger raw vote totals. But it is not the key measurement. We played by the rules, set by you, the DNC members, and campaigned as hard as we could, in as many places as we could, to acquire delegates. Essentially, the popular vote is not much better as a metric than basing the nominee on which candidate raised more money, has more volunteers, contacted more voters, or is taller.

The Clinton campaign was very clear about their own strategy until the numbers become too ominous for them. They were like a broken record , repeating ad nauseum that this nomination race is about delegates. Now, the word delegate has disappeared from their vocabulary, in an attempt to change the rules and create an alternative reality.

We want to be clear – we believe that the winner of a majority of pledged delegates will and should be the nominee of our party. And we estimate that after the Oregon and Kentucky primaries on May 20, we will have won a majority of the overall pledged delegates According to a recent news report, by even their most optimistic estimates the Clinton Campaign expects to trail by more than 100 pledged delegates and will then ask the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters.

But of course superdelegates are free to and have been utilizing their own criteria for deciding who our nominee should be. Many are deciding on the basis of electability, a favorite Clinton refrain. And if you look at the numbers, during a period where the Clinton campaign has been making an increasingly strident pitch on electability, it is clear their argument is failing miserably with superdelegates.

Since February 5, the Obama campaign has netted 107 superdelegates, and the Clinton campaign only 21. Since the Pennsylvania primary, much of it during the challenging Rev. Wright period, we have netted 24 and the Clinton campaign 17.

At some point – we would argue that time is now – this ceases to be a theoretical exercise about how superdelegates view electability. The reality of the preferences in the last several weeks offer a clear guide of how strongly superdelegates feel Senator Obama will perform in November, both in building a winning campaign for the presidency as well as providing the best electoral climate across the country for all Democratic candidates.

It is important to note that Senator Obama leads Senator Clinton in superdelegate endorsements among Governors, United States Senators and members of the House of Representatives. These elected officials all have a keen sense for who our strongest nominee will be in November.

It is only among DNC members where Senator Clinton holds a lead, which has been rapidly dwindling.

As we head into the final days of the campaign, we just wanted to be clear with you as a party leader, who will be instrumental in making the final decision of who our nominee will be, how we view the race at this point.

Senator Obama, our campaign and our supporters believe pledged delegates is the most legitimate metric for determining how this race has unfolded. It is simply the ratification of the DNC rules – your rules – which we built this campaign and our strategy around.

For more on Obama’s delegate count, check out the official Obama campaign Results Center.

Despite the campaigns being held against the backdrop of what Barack Obama called a “rough couple of weeks” he decisively won North Carolina and came within a whisker of also winning Indiana. He is now the the presumptive nominee.

Hillary Clinton meanwhile has cancelled all public appearances today, including scheduled interviews on morning TV shows, as speculation grows that she will soon concede that the race is over for her. If she doesn’t, and last night she talked of going on, then she can expect diminishing financial support as well as being handed defeat as superdelegates swing behind the presumptive nominee.

Barack Obama has now won 32 of 47 contests; is 34 pledged delegates short of a majority; and just 173 total delegates shy of the winning line. It’s clear now that the Democratic Party will unite behind Barack Obama and focus on soundly defeating John McCain in November.

Having accused Barack Obama of being an elitist, despite being the poorest of the candidates (and he made his money on his book sales), Hillary Clinton who is reported to be worth $110 million said this on Fox News:

“Rich people, god bless us. We deserve all the opportunities to make sure our country and our blessings continue to the next generation.”

During a media stunt to highlight the petrol tax holiday plan McCain dreamed up and she endorsed, she was also caught not being able to use a coffee machine. The video of that shot to the top of YouTube yesterday with almost half a million viewers watching it in 24 hours.

Here are both in one video:

Today is the 5th anniversary of the photo-op of President Bush standing on an aircraft carrier’s deck in front of a star-spangled banner declaring “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. Since that time, thousands of US and Iraqi lives have been lost and the Republican’s candidate shows no sign of wanting to change the occupation of that country.

The Democrats however have the opportunity of nominating a candidate who has consistently opposed the war, or they can nominate Hillary Clinton. Clinton knows how fundamental this choice could be, so has lied about Obama in an attempt to muddy the clear blue waters which divide them on this issue. Lied is a strong word, but one we have had to use in the past with Senator Clinton, so before the brickbats fly let’s recap on Hillary’s Iraq problem:

I’m grateful to The Jed Report for creating this video, entitled Hillary Clinton: War, Lies, and Misjudgement.

We leave the final word to Hillary Clinton herself:

If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.