The hearse is waiting outside

There's room for another casket.  The one already in the back is ... little.

Clinton’s victories in Ohio, Florida, Illinois and North Carolina put her firmly on course to defeat her primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. As the results were announced on Tuesday evening, she took the stage before a boisterous crowd of supporters here and seemed to pivot towards the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, who also won in Florida.

“We are moving closer to securing the Democratic Party nomination and winning this election in November!” Clinton declared.

No polling versus reality shockers to be had on this night.

It looked as if Sanders might prove the Clinton campaign’s bullish prediction wrong after he won a stunning upset in Michigan on March 8, but Clinton’s victories on Tuesday helped her stop Sanders’ momentum and establish a seemingly unbeatable lead.

Though Clinton was expected to win the primaries in North Carolina and Florida on Tuesday, polls showed her potentially losing in Ohio, Arizona, Missouri and Illinois. Even if Sanders had won all of the states that were in play on Tuesday, he would still have faced an uphill battle. However, by taking Ohio and Illinois, Clinton definitively pulled ahead.

Elsewhere, the mood was more that of a wake.

Sanders took the stage shortly after Clinton’s appearance in Florida and addressed more than 7,000 of his cheering supporters in a convention center in Phoenix with his usual stump speech. The 74-year-old senator mentioned raising the minimum wage, getting money out of politics, fixing free trade deals and reforming the criminal justice system, among other typical stump-speech issues.

What Sanders didn’t mention were the five states that voted in the Democratic primaries Tuesday night, and what the results meant for his viability as a candidate. This was in contrast to Sanders’ election night appearance on Super Tuesday, when he explicitly downplayed his mixed showing and reassured his supporters he would take the fight to “every” state. In contrast with most election night gatherings, there were no TVs showing primary results in Phoenix, so Sanders’ supporters were not shown Clinton’s wins racking up in the background as the evening progressed. Arizona’s Democrats vote next Tuesday, and Sanders is expected to do well in the state.

Thanks again, corporate media.

No major cable network carried his speech, which coincided with Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s remarks and later, as Sanders continued speaking, with Donald Trump’s victory speech.

So we wait a bit longer for Team Sanders to wake up and smell the coffee, bust a move, and instruct his support network which way to go.  If you know any Sanders people, you already know that they're considering all options.  Since so many of them aren't Democrats -- like Sanders himself, allegedly -- we should expect to see wholesale defections among the blue ranks as Clinton turns her battleship to the right and steams ahead for the fall.  And there ought to be plenty of Republicans for them to recruit.

That's the only interesting storyline left to unfold (as far as I'm concerned): post-Sanders, how do the Democrats plan, go, and do in the general.  They may have been gifted with another Goldwater ... or perhaps will deliver us the nation's worst nightmare.  There's a bitter pill the #NeverTrumps have to swallow.  Will they?

Some Democrats say it's just like 2008 and  Hillary's PUMAs: everybody will get over their upset and fall in line, get onboard.  Eventually.  By November.

I'll just be glad to get to blogging about some things beside the presidentials every day after the past two months.

Against Bernie Sanders

(Open Source Dem, aka J. R. Behrman, infrequent poster here, former SD-13 committee chair, former presiding judge of the Harris County EVBB, former chair of the Texas Democratic Party's Progressive Populist Caucus -- among other honoraria -- posted this to his Facebook page after sending it to me.  I offered him my deepest condolences on the loss of his wife last week.)

I oppose the nomination of Bernie Sanders, Senator from Vermont. 

That is a surprise to some who fancy me a "left-wing" member of the Democratic Party. After all, I supported George McGovern back in the day. I supported Howard Dean there for a while. Moreover, I did not just support Barack Obama in 2008, I fought the pro-Clinton state party establishment tooth and nail through the highly contested primary and convention process. 

No, Belinda and I are so conservative we come around from the other side to a sort of traditional liberalism. 

Moreover, I have grave reservations about Secretary Clinton and her "permanent campaign" entourage, not least their reprise of the "inevitable" campaign. It is not doing her any good now, and it will be a burden for her when she challenges whoever or, dare I say, whatever the GOP comes up with. 

So why my change now? 

First, it will take not a "village" but an entire national party to defeat the GOP at all echelons of government today in 50 gerrymandered states and dozens of rotten Congressional Districts. 

Sanders is an independent and has kept his distance from the Democratic Party -- unlike, say, Howard Dean. Our nominee must first take the reins of the Democratic Party. 

Second, Hillary Clinton has been an altogether loyal and constructive contributor to the administration of President Obama. 

Sure, Sanders' socialism is somewhat attractive to me, as far as it goes. Labels do not scare me. But, President Obama is not a socialist (or a Muslim). He has pretty much exhausted the limits of what can be done in just one of the nine echelons of our dysfunctional government and politics. These accomplishments do not deserve Sanders' conceited dismissal. 

No, his socialism is almost a museum piece and does not even begin to provide a robust intellectual foundation for future governments. As Paul Glastris at Washington Monthly says, Sanders is "intellectually consistent but not intellectually honest." 

Even venerable socialist governments and even the formidable Green parties in Europe or charismatic leaders like Yanis Varoufakis are struggling to dump obsolete or delusional intellectual frameworksto govern their own parties, and to fix a broken socialist international. 

Finally, Bernie Sanders is simply a novelty. Sure, he is charming and attractive to political junkies who are disillusioned with and critical of our party and government. 

(Yes, that could be said of me.) 

But I stand with those like Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, who expect to see more actual progress from a Clinton administration than a Sanders crusade. 

In any event, here is what I would like to do: 

Build a strong party 

Sanders would need and Clinton will need a new kind of political party to actually govern. This is where the most radical of new ideas can flourish, because a political party is "lightweight" -- a good thing in engineering -- even "flimsy". It is easily transformed almost overnight. No negotiations or "deals" with the crazy-right are necessary or even possible. 

Not a lousy claque 

A political party is not, actually, an extension of government, though you would not know that here in one-party Texas with its kludge of cornpone state and county parties. No, my party should be a check on government and an instrument of the people. In our case, that is a party rooted in republican principle and built on democratic aspirations. 

Make it work 

This means that the Sanders and Clinton supporters will have to have a voice in party affairs, will have to cultivate party loyalty, and will have to stop political exit on the left that is manifest as despair and apathy. Otherwise, right-wing extremism will just keep growing and poisoning everything. 

Right here, right now! 

There is actually no better place to start that transformation than Harris and eight surrounding counties in Texas. It will take strategy, planning, and finance. That is where I hope to play a role. 

But not for a while. 

The wheels are off my life right now, following Belinda's death. I will sign in at the desultory Senate District Convention, but not attend the silly state convention. 

After the national election, it will be time to consider robust reconstruction of the post-Reconstruction Texas Democratic Party. It is now just an antique facility for bi-partisan concession-tending that is no longer viable at any echelon of government or politics.

$20 billion for her Iraq vote

“I’m sitting there in the Oval Office, and Bush says to me, ‘What do you need?’ And I said, ‘I need $20 billion to rebuild, you know, New York,’ and he said, ‘You got it.’ And he was good to his word,” Clinton said in response to Matthews’ question on why Bernie Sanders was right on the Iraq War vote and Clinton was wrong. 

“Literally, that same day, I get back to the Capitol, and the Republicans are trying to take that money away. We kept calling the White House, Bush kept saying, ‘I gave them my word, I’m going to stick with it.’..."

About the four-minute mark in the video embedded here.

I suppose we should take her word for it.  I mean, she's probably not lying about this.  This is how a "progressive who gets things done" operates, after all.

She is either clueless about the things she says and does, or she just doesn't care what anybody thinks about it.  We already had one president like that, and he's in the photograph above.

Y'all go ahead and hug it out, though.  I'm done.

Update: I'll let the Republicans handle this one (the other gaffe from last night):

In comments that are sure to draw the ire of her Republican critics, Hillary Clinton sought to contrast the war in Iraq with the intervention in Libya during her stint as secretary of state. 

“I’ve said Iraq was a mistake,” Clinton told Chris Matthews during an MSNBC town hall event on Monday night. “Libya was a different kind of calculation. And we didn’t lose a single person. We didn’t have a problem in supporting our European and Arab allies in working with NATO.” 

As Politico noted, Clinton was probably referring to the U.S.-backed overthrow of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 and not the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, where four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, were killed.

A few predictions for tomorrow

I've previously forecast that March 1 -- and then March 15 -- would be the day of reckoning for Bernie Sanders and his erstwhile presidential campaign.  I have to extend the deadline further out for that because he continues to rise in the polling, even as Hillary Clinton keeps shooting herself in the foot, the one which also happens to be in her mouth.

New Public Policy Polling surveys of the 5 states that will vote on Tuesday find that the Democratic contests in Illinois, Missouri, and Ohio are all toss ups, while Hillary Clinton maintains a significant advantage in Florida and North Carolina. [...] 

Clinton leads Bernie Sanders just 46/41 in Ohio and 48/45 in Illinois, while narrowly trailing Sanders in Missouri 47/46. Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri are all open primary states and Sanders is benefiting from significant support from independent voters and a small swath of Republicans planning to vote in each state, putting him in position to potentially pull an upset sweep of the region on Tuesday night ...

The race is going to go on for some time; more debates and town hall fora should ultimately be on tap despite resistance from the buffoonish Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and the primary schedule is somewhat lighter ahead, with more states moving to 'winner take all' upping the ante.

And the polling could be askew, as it was in Michigan.

Here's what we know: down by 37 in Illinois just five days ago, Sanders is now up by two according to CBS News; down by 30 in Ohio five days ago, Sanders is now down by only single digits; the only polling in Missouri has Sanders in a statistical dead heat with Clinton, per the poll's margin of error; and while the polling in Florida at first blush seems less favorable -- Sanders has "only" cut 17 points off Clinton's 45-point lead in the last 48 hours, according to CBS News -- the Sanders campaign reports its internal polling shows a race in the high single-digits, and given that this internal data turned out to be correct in Michigan, it seems we should all be paying it some mind.

Go read more there as Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook is already sounding the "we're losing!" alarm bells.  Time -- as in tomorrow evening -- will tell, but it looks as if Bernie is going to make it a race for awhile longer.  How much longer?  Won't hazard another guess.

For the Republicans, the outcome seems more certain.

Billionaire Donald Trump has slightly increased his overwhelming lead in Florida to 24 percentage points, while Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) looks set for a crushing defeat in his home state, according to a Quinnipiac poll released (today).

Everyone say "goodnight, little Marco".  More looking-ahead from Non-Prophet News.

The expectation is that Rubio will drop out after he loses in Florida. If Kasich is able to pull (the upset) off in Ohio, then he will likely stay in the race for the foreseeable future. That's a problem for Ted Cruz less because Kasich will be taking stealing his delegates, but because he will be stealing his media coverage. Kasich is the only one left who hasn't gotten any time in the limelight, and Rubio dropping out sets the perfect stage for everyone to start talking about Kasich and not talking about a two-person race. 

After these states cast their ballots, the calendar cools down until April 26; until then, only four states (Arizona, Utah, Wisconsin, and New York) will vote. That's a long time for a great deal of speculation about the race to occur and conspiracies theories to spread. What happens on Tuesday will go a long way towards setting the narrative of what happens over the next month.

There is no reason to believe that Trump is going to be upset, blocked, or otherwise prevented from the GOP nomination.  Not today, not tomorrow, not at the convention, brokered or not.  There is some reason to believe that Hillary Clinton will.  Everything you'll read and hear after Tuesday night will be spin about the polls or the he said/she said bullshit.  Until we have more debates or more election results, take everything with a shaker of salt.