I’m not writing a long post today.  In fact, I hadn’t intended to write a post at all, but when I saw that John Edwards had endorsed Barack Obama, I had to weigh in.  The past few weeks and even months have been hard to watch.  It’s been amazing to watch the process go on this long and watch voters across the country make informed decisions, but I worry about how much damage this election has done to the Democratic Party.

There’s no doubt that the bickering the country has endured between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has been bad for Democrats.  It appears that the Democrats are disorganized and childish and later on John McCain will step in as the voice of experience.  I will resist the urge to talk about John McCain, but I assure you it’s quite difficult.  I am somewhat comforted by the fact that the media has portrayed the Democratic nomination battle as sparring between the two candidates and I don’t think that has been associated with the party as a whole in media reports.  The fact that John McCain has been inactive is helping for the time being, but he will make this time come back to haunt the nominee.  The number of people who have been brought into the Democratic party by this nomination process also helps lessen the impact of the bitterness these past two weeks.  Overall, the effect on the party is probably a wash, but to some it will certainly leave an unfavorable impression of the Democratic party.

Senator Obama was briefly floundering in his battle for the nomination.  Reverend Wright took the spotlight and the Obama campaign was left scrambling for cover.  After his recent win in North Carolina and his better than expected performance in Indiana, he’s back on the road to the nomination.  Senator Clinton has shown signs of preparing for her withdrawal by stating repeatedly in recent weeks that she will work hard for whomever is the nominee.  If you do the math, the race is over.  Here’s why:

• If Clinton and Obama split the vote 50/50 in every remaining contest (Kentucky, Montana, Puerto Rick, Oregon, South Dakota) and also split the remaining super delegates 50/50, then Obama wins the nomination by 165 delegates.
• For a more realistic scenario, I used information from Pollster.com, which takes averages of all the major polls, and pretended those were actual results for the remaining contests.  I left Puerto Rico, Montana, and South Dakota as 50/50 because of the number of undecideds and lack of good polling information, which obviously makes this less useful.  However, with Clinton winning by 20 points in Kentucky and Obama leading by 6 points in Oregon, with superdelegates still split, Obama wins the nomination by 157 delegates.  This is with superdelegates still split.
• Even if Clinton wins every delegate in Kentucky, Montana, Oregon, and South Dakota, with superdelegates split, Obama wins the nomination.
• I split the remaining superdelegates 50/50 in all of the above scenarios, which is very favorable to Clinton.  Given the Edwards endorsement, Clinton will be lucky to get 40% of the remaining delegates.

The people at Clinton’s campaign headquarters can do the math better than the fun interactive tool that CNN has, so I’m sure they know this already.  Clinton should graciously bow out and support Obama or risk damaging her political future.

I’m very happy that Barack Obama has the endorsement of John Edwards.  This brings us one step closer to having closure to the Democratic nomination and defeating John McCain, which is absolutely essential.  I am officially predicting Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee and Clinton will drop out on or before June 3rd.  Now the real question is this: Will Edwards be the Vice Presidential nominee?

Barack Obama came under fire a few weeks ago for saying:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Obama was criticized for making “elistist” comments and being “liberal.” Interestingly enough, I always though those were good qualities, but just to make sure, I looked in a dictionary. Elitist means “one who believes society should be ruled by a certain class or group enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic status.” Liberal means “favorable to progress or reform.”

Barack Obama was not wrong in what he said. Perhaps he could have chosen his words better had he been thinking about the political fallout from his statement, but I think it is the truth. After a streak of bad luck people tend to get bitter. In their bitterness, people are drawn to what is familiar to them, something like guns or religion. Then comes the hatred of other people who aren’t like them. Certain people are always looking for someone on which to blame their frustrations.

What got Senator Obama into trouble was not the text, but I think his opponents twisted his words so that it became popular belief that he was characterizing middle America. I can’t speak to what middle America is actually like, but some people are less educated than others and in their frustrations, it is not entirely unreasonable to suggest that some of those people may be exactly as Senator Obama described.

This president in particular has turned politics into something ordinary. Instead of the presidency being a job reserved for well educated people and well prepared individuals, the presidency is now an anyone-can-do-it position. My position is that elite is good. The founders had that in mind. Farmers are good at farming, lawyers are good at being lawyers, doctors are good at being doctors, so by letting them vote for people they trust, they can give up the responsibility of being intimately involved with every issue, which becomes a big loss of time. It’s the problem with direct democracy. Instead, we elect people to know the issues, then represent us. The person who makes those decisions should not be the guy you want to have a beer (sorry, a Diet Coke) with. It should be somebody who really knows what they’re doing.

Elite is not a bad word and it should not be used like one. I don’t want my president to be like me, I want my president to be smarter than me. Somehow, being smart and good at what you do has become bad and people want the friendliest guy to be the most powerful guy, even if he can barely tie his own shoe laces. Someone tell me why that isn’t messed up reasoning.