Obama Wins Nomination
CNN projects Senator Obama has won the Democrats' nomination for president.
Congratulations to Senator Obama!
It is no small accomplishment to be the first African-American in U.S. history to lead a major-party ticket.
As expected, Obama picked up a slew of superdelegate endorsements on Tuesday. According to CNN, those endorsements, combined with the delegates he's projected to receive from South Dakota's primary, will put him past the 2,118 required to win the nomination.
Obama will claim victory during a speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, according to prepared remarks released by his campaign:
"Tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another -- a journey that will bring a new and better day to America," he's expected to say.
"Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States."
2 comments:
Fascistic- Democratic did very good job.
Ramesh Manghirmalani
Barack Obama has won the race for the Democratic nomination for president against Hillary Clinton on the issues. Sort of.
This is not what the pundits will tell you: they would rather focus upon the most superficial and trivial aspects of the two final candidates' style, personality, associates, personal history, and campaign organization and strategy, not to mention race and gender.
This is not what many on the left will say either, in recognition of how little differences there were between the two candidates' stated positions on most policies.
Still, Obama was able to defeat the once-formidable Hillary Clinton because he was perceived to be the better candidate among the increasingly progressive base of the Democratic Party.
Many progressive supporters of Clinton pointed out how many on the left tended to criticize their candidate incessantly for her militaristic and pro-corporate policies while making excuses for similar positions taken by Obama. Obama's public positions on issues which ran counter to most progressive voters were often rationalized as being necessary in order for him to be elected or as part of the unfortunate reality of corporate power in the American political system, while Clinton's similar positions were attacked as a reflection of her real agenda.
To the extent that this was true, a major reason that the left may have cut Obama more slack than it did Clinton is that many progressives gave the Clintons just that kind of benefit of the doubt back in 1992. The line at that time was that "Bill Clinton has to say those things in order to get elected, but once in office, his policies will be far more progressive than his campaign rhetoric, which is aimed at winning votes from the center." The reality, however, was that the policies emanating from the Clinton White House over the next eight years were not to the left but actually to the right of positions he touted during the campaign. Though seven and a half years of President George W. Bush makes the Clinton Era look pretty good by comparison, the reality was that the Clintons presided over the most conservative Democratic administration of the twentieth century. As a result, there was an assumption among many party progressives that a second Clinton White House would be more of the same.
Obama, by contrast, has not yet had the opportunity to disappoint. It certainly doesn't mean that he won't. In fact, he probably will. Yet it appears that most Democrats in the progressive wing of the party took the attitude that the Clintons had their chance and blew it, so let's give the nomination to the new guy who worked as a community organizer, who has a more grass roots focus, whose progressive policy positions have been more longstanding and consistent, and who has relied more on small donations and less on corporate contributors.
The most significant reason Clinton lost, however, was Iraq. Obama's outspoken and principled opposition to the war back in 2002 and his public recognition that Saddam Hussein was not a threat to the United States or any of Iraq's neighbors contrasted sharply with Clinton's support for the war and her false and alarmist statements about alleged Iraqi WMDs and links to Al-Qaeda. (See my article Obama vs. Clinton - October 2002 ) Indeed, Clinton's vote to allow President Bush to invade a country on the far side of the world that was no threat to us went well beyond "bad judgment" and moral culpability for the predictable tragedy that resulted: it was demonstrative of her dismissive attitudes toward international law, the United Nations system, the U.S. Constitution, and common sense
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