Obama in Oregon, Clinton in West Virginia

First place first:

... As his bus pulled up, he strode onto the handsome old track just as the women's 5K was ending. A murmur went through the crowd, the public-address announcer confirmed his arrival, and the action came to a halt as 5,000 track fans rose as one to cheer the senator from Illinois who appears suddenly on the verge of claiming his party's presidential nomination. The javelin hurlers dropped their equipment, and the 400-meter hurdlers paused in their warm-ups as a waving Obama made his way around one of the country's most famous tracks bathed in late-afternoon sunlight -- a victory lap.

"You guys are just so fast. I congratulate you," Obama said as he reached the finish line, where the 5K runners still waited -- as if the applause was for anyone but him.

Meanwhile, in West Virginia:

They traveled here from New York, Pennsylvania and Indiana last week to stand in the rain on a rural street corner, at a four-way intersection of winding mountain roads. One woman, a doctor, took vacation time from her job to make the trip. Another, a mother of three, hired a babysitter for the first time in months.

The 10 volunteers, linked by a resolve to keep Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign alive by helping her win Tuesday's West Virginia primary, met to wave campaign signs patched together with duct tape. They cheered as the first car, a beat-up white Volvo, rolled toward the intersection, and a young man in aviator sunglasses leaned out his driver's-side window.

"Hey," he said. "Don't you think you're wasting your time?"

In West Virginia (and next week in Kentucky), the old Democratic Party gets one last chance to have their say. They will say 'no' to change in a resounding voice. They will not ratify this sea-change in the American power structure.

And that's okay. We've been here before.

Every progressive movement in this country has been accompanied by bitter-enders who clung to the old way, the way things used to be. Right now the Clinton supporters' lack of consent for change is preventing the Obama movement from getting in gear and speeding off down the track. But Oregon will be the moment when everything finally snaps into place, and the race for the White House will begin in earnest.

Obama will, despite what occurs in WV and KY, win the necessary number of delegates to secure the Democratic nomination on May 21, in Oregon. Yes, because they violated the rules early on, the delegations from Florida and Michigan aren't included in the tally. Too bad for them.

Here in Texas, there will be a state Democratic convention in Austin held the first weekend in June, and a whole passel of Clinton delegates will trudge through the formalities of electing a few people to go to Denver to watch the coronation of Barack Hussein Obama near the end of August.

(There's much more important Texas Democratic Party elections for both they and the Obama delegates, but that's grist for a future posting.)

And come November, Democrats are going to be competitive almost everywhere in the United States (although perhaps not in West Virginia and Kentucky). In North Carolina, the Democratic senate candidate is actually leading Senator Elizabeth Dole. Here in good ol' Deep-In-The-Hearta, Rick Noriega is trailing John Cornyn by just 4 points. In Oregon the Democratic candidates are in a dead heat with long-time incumbent Republican Gordon Smith. We are winning special elections in deep red districts in Illinois, Louisiana, and (hopefully) Mississippi. Even seemingly safe seats in places like Staten Island are succumbing to scandal. There are almost no safe seats, and no safe states, for the GOP in 2008.

We are on the way to a realignment not seen since 1964.

More Funnies (a Clinton-free edition, thankfully)

Voter ID : the 21st-century poll tax

Despite innuendo, there actually is no proof of any widespread fraud in Texas, at least not the kind that government ID would take care of. In fact, there are far greater possibilities of fraud or malfunction with Texas’ paperless electronic voting machines.

That's the moneyshot from James Harrington, the director of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

This government ID scheme works against older voters who no longer drive or travel (as we saw with the old nuns denied the ballot in the recent Indiana primary), students in college, voters with disabilities, minority and poor people, new voters who recently became citizens, and homeless individuals. No matter whether people have voted in their precinct, are known to election staff, or have other ID, they still must get a driver’s license or specified government ID.

Texas Republicans lead by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and state Rep. Leo Berman (Tyler) want to impose the same burden on Texas voters. Surely, although they would deny it, their real agenda is to dilute the electoral strength of individuals, who tend to vote Democratic. There is no other viable explanation.

That's not going to slow them down, though.

Texas originally started out enabling people to vote, rather than impeding them. The delegates to the 1875 convention, which gave us our current constitution, lead by Grangers and progressive Republicans, rejected a variety of electoral impediments: poll taxes, literacy tests, property taxes, and multi-member legislative and judicial districts.

The delegates rejected schemes to limit suffrage because they understood that denying the franchise to African-Americans inevitably would deprive them of the political power they needed to break state government's unholy alliance with big business, railroads, and monopolies.

The 1876 Constitution reflects a populist revolt that gave Texas some of the broadest suffrage rights in the nation. For example, until 1919 non-citizens could vote if they met the residency requirement and declared their intent to become citizens.

Anti-voting laws came into Texas in the early 1900s to disenfranchise African-Americans who voted in significantly higher proportions than did the whites. In fact, African-American voter turn out reached 80 percent in some areas. The poll tax, the white primary, and multi-member districts all became law. Even those tricks didn’t work totally, and the KKK used a violent campaign to suppress black voter turnout. Similar tactics kept down Mexican-American voting. This all lead Texas further down the path of racism and segregation.

The Voting Rights Act and Supreme Court decisions undid much of that history, and minority electoral strength increased dramatically. The Republican Party’s reaction since has been to send “poll watchers” to minority precincts around the state to depress voter turnout through intimidation, even though there was no recent election malfeasance history. Dewhurst and Berman want to add yet another hurdle to people voting.

The Republicans decry voter fraud as a problem akin to illegal immigration; the only difference is that they have failed to figure out how to exploit it for profit as they have the undocumented worker.

Voting is a fundamental right, the cornerstone of our democracy. Our legal system should break down barriers to the polling place, not build them up. Let’s help the Legislature remember this when it meets in 2009.

Yes, let's.

Update: Chris Bell piles on ...

Under the Republican proposal, photo identification would be required. Since there’s no problem, there’s nothing to fix; however, two Hispanic state senators, Mario Gallegos (D-Houston) and Carlos Uresti (D-San Antonio), point out there are a lot of elderly voters in their heavily Hispanic districts who don’t have driver’s licenses because they never drove a car.

And that’s just what the Republicans are counting on. Voters like those would have to get some other form of photo identification. That’s obviously going to be a major inconvenience, and since it’s hard enough just to get people to register to vote in the first place, chances are they might not vote at all. ...

(S)some people might be a little concerned what happens with real problems like public school education and health care if Republicans are spending so much time on non-problems.

That argument overlooks the most recent census data which shows the number of Hispanics in the United States rose by 1.4 million in just the last year alone and every study shows that Hispanics now lean Democratic by an overwhelming margin.

So see, if you’re a Republican, this really isn’t a non-problem at all.

Sunday Funnies (Going, going, ...)