The New York Times wiped away the makeup and revealed an unfortunate black eye on the planning for the 2008 Democratic Convention in Denver next month. The new boss is in town and he isn’t happy. Senator Obama took over most DNC operations last month, moving most of the day-to-day functions to Obama’s hometown of Chicago. Obama’s team began to apprehend the mess in Denver just weeks ago and have reportedly been none too pleased at both the lack and misdirection of progress, and have sent a cleanup unit of ten staffers to wrest the mess from its current planners.

The disaster is being laid at the feet of the man who helped bring you the Michigan-Florida primary debacle, Governor Howard Dean, and his assistant, the Reverend Leah D. Daughtry. God bless the Governor and his much-vaunted 50 state strategy, but they’ve barely cleaned up the delegate seating mess and he could use a redemptive trajectory to reassure a party that might be wondering if they’d rather be going into battle with the ruthless, step-on-their-neck-and-snuff-the-life-out-of-them street fighter like Rahm Emanuel than the erstwhile stoner ski bum who was probably more adept, consistent, and disciplined at medicine than he has been at politics.

The planning is apparently already $6 million over budget. That’s in addition to the $11 million shortfall from the $40.5 million they’ve estimated to need for their Dream Convention. This is a combination of bad planning and too big a piggy bank. And in a time when we circumstances we should stay frugal and live within our means, this is probably the wrong message to send. Granted, no expects them to rent a banquet room at the Airport Sheraton and have all of the delegates dial in on GoToMeeting, but you don’t want it to get out that you turned down inexpensive office space in favor of top-dollar executive suites in downtown Denver and then deck them out with $50,000 a month rental furniture, during a summer when most of your constituents and those you want to woo who are spending their summer vacations in the backyard or splurge and taking the wife and kids 60 miles down the road to the Enchanted Forest, thanks to a $25 gas card you got at the office Christmas party last year and a travel voucher for the Pony Soldier Inn that you received from a coach flight bump back when you could afford to travel.

Sure, it ain’t Six Flags, but there’s lots of free high-sugared treats at the Pony Soldier’s continental breakfast. And at least six or seven dozen cars in the Forest’s parking lot so they can play the license plate game. And there’s help on the way, thanks to the resurgent Democrats in Denver who are getting together for a week to talk about how they’re going to ease your pain, surrounded by green-friendly vodka ice fountains and buffets of cruelty-free fugu.

Okay, maybe it’s not that bad, but the convention organizing committee has already rankled more than a few dozen local caterers by their onerous demands for color-coordinated food. I’m no event planner, but how about red beans and rice, white-meat chicken, and a nice house salad with blue cheese dressing. It’s cheap, all-American, and will look great with everyone’s flag lapel pins.

What is even more problematic is that the committee is looking at the party’s new Daddy Warbucks to bring his fund-raising mojo to bear and bail out the benched A Team that allegedly spent money like they’d already won the Revolution, and in their monied insularity forgot that they were supposed to be convening in representation of the people to whom $4.22 a gallon gas actually means something, many of whom nonetheless scrounged an extra wrinkled $20, $50, or $100 to send to the Obama Campaign.

Yes, his latest dip in fund-raising prowess notwithstanding, Senator Obama can probably step in and rectify this mess, but he shouldn’t. If he wants to bring in a small posse of his faithful to bring clipboards to foreheads and rulers to wrists and restore some order, so be it, but this party doesn’t need an extravaganza. Today’s Republicans are constitutionally incapable of living in physical discomfort, and the creature comforts and luxury appointments they’ll swath themselves in in Minneapolis, paired with the politically tone-deaf calls for offshore oil drilling, holiday gas taxes, and the continued gift-that-keeps-on-giving of the Bush tax cuts, will provide a hundred pictures and a hundred soundbites worth a thousand words each. The Democrats don’t need to neutralize that by delighting in a lavish, overbudgeted soiree that is bordering on the plutocratic.

That’s not to say they won’t, though. There’s nothing more dangerous than a Democratic party that believes the hype and figures their victory pre-ordained before they even step in the ring for real.

FYI: The poo-flinging is over for the moment and they’re all taking vacations they planned back in February. I don’t get vacations, but I’m taking one from the blog. I’ll be back on Monday to discuss Hillary’s supposed concession on Saturday. Also, VeepsBlog puts Big Brown at 3-1 at Belmont Saturday afternoon.

They couldn’t stop the war or impeach the President, but the singular accomplishment of the 110th Congress may have just happened today, when Hillary Clinton finally acceded to the entreaties of 23 of her exasperated Congressional colleagues–all Clinton supporters. She may not have cancelled the bumper sticker order yet, but Senator Clinton has tentatively agreed to fold the tents and start her summer vacation on Saturday.

We’ve heard this before, but only the heartiest soul can resist the smelling salts for so long. A Clinton is more durable than cockroaches and Don King’s hair. As I said here four months back, though, that at some point a sober awareness of legacy and professional mortality has to kick in. I thought that would have happened in March, and she’s incinerated a few handfuls of villages since then, but it’s not too late, and she has to see that now. Right? Doesn’t she?

I’m through making bets, because if I’d been placing money on this I’d be lining up in the mornings to give plasma to supplement my already-meager income. I’ve bet unsuccessfully on this woman’s end so many times already that Bob Shrum would hire me.

She believed last night that she’s got the right to leave the stage whenever she damn well pleases. And indeed, she does. She’s fought this campaign for well more than a year, and she’s waged a very close race, no matter how much collateral damage she’s been responsible for. She’s got a devoted army she could very easily order to upend the convention and the fall campaign if she so much as utters the attack word, “Denver!”

It all started with a small conference call with Congressional supporters that snowballed to the size of one of Dennis Kucinich’s Town Hall Go-T0-Meeting sessions. As Andrea Mitchell said of the genesis of today’s conference call, “Obama has had a lot of his colleagues approach him and say, ‘I want to support you, but I can’t until she releases us.’ There is a lot of frustration, embarrassment, and anger among her supporters on the Hill.”

“That makes sense,” she finally relented, and after a number of meetings with her supporters, she decided to drop the envelope on the Democratic Party’s desk before someone had to call the security guard to stand by while she gathered her personal effects before escorting her off the premises, which would have been awkward for everyone–and given the volatile nature of the last few months, there was a very real fear that she could have marched in with a duffelbag full of AK-47s and anti-personnel grenades, and take the whole party off to Hell with her.

She hijacked Obama’s victory party last night by demurring on a concession, and even going so far as to burying her followers in a New York City fallout shelter two stories deep without television, cellphone, or Blackberry reception so no one would be able to see Barack Obama go over the top in delegates and become the party’s presumptive nominee. The only thing missing was the HAM radio and the men in beards and fatigue jackets standing with shotguns guarding the larder.

Then she played coy about her future plans and invited the chants of “Denver! Denver! Denver!” One couldn’t help but have visions of the Japanese soldiers who were alleged to be living in caves in Iwo Jima still ready to fight World War II years after the Empire’s surrender was signed on the USS Missouri. She’s going to fight this thing through Inauguration Day–2013.

She was desperate and dug in with her carbine on a night that should have belonged to Barack Obama clearing the delegate threshold and being the first black man in the nation’s history to win a major party nomination for President Of The United States.

It was a spectacularly selfish and standoffish gesture from a woman who has become spectacularly selfish and standoffish. Why she came to her senses today is anyone’s guess, but blessedly she did.

This was only hours after she floated her magnanimous offer to be Barack Obama’s Vice Presidential running mate if he were so gracious and flattering as to offer it. And just to make sure that he apprehended the fact that she had 18 million voters she was sure she could send over to John McCain if she didn’t get her God-granted consolation prize, longtime Clinton attorney/diehard Lanny Davis started circulating a petition today to make sure that he didn’t get some silly idea as to tap that portly Judas with the doofy-looking hipster beard, Richardson.

I’ve been wondering for a few weeks now if she doesn’t have the right of first refusal on the Veep nod given her narrow margin of defeat. Her stubborn last stand last night put Obama in a difficult spot, I thought, what with her massive support base, but I think I was dizzy from lack of sleep. He’s going to tell her to pound it and court her voters without her if she tries to force the issue, and with a few exceptions, it’s likely to turn into a “Yeah? You and what army?” moment, as the batallion vanishes behind her.

Another wrinkle was added today when there were comments from both campaigns that not only was the Obama team not only cool to bringing Hillary to the ticket, but that the Clintons would surely balk at being asked to open Bill’s full financial records, including the donors to his Presidential library. There’s a huge pile of philandering supermarket magnate and alleged fellow Bill poonhound Ron Burkle’s dollars there, and who knows what else.

In any case, it’s time to hang it up and call it a day. It’s not too late to do the right thing. She can bow out now and embrace the winner and a month or two now when the Dems are all united, pummeling John McCain and fending off the relentless “Obama-is-a-Muslim” 527s, all anyone is going to remember is that she fought hard and bowed out graciously. Could it be so? Friday’s a long ways away, and you’ll die if you try holding your breath until then anyway.

The AP declared this morning that Hillary was going to concede tonight. Free at last? Our long national nightmare is over?

Not so much. Terry McAuliffe fired back promptly that this story was a canard. No retreat, no surrender. Even as the superdelegates continued to trickle in, moving Obama toward that hallowed non-Clinton goal line of 2,118.

The Clinton campaign had cancelled all appearances beyond this week, sent a personal email to senior supporters and donors to come to New York City for her Important Speech on Tuesday, and notified staffers that they were done but would be paid through the 15th of the month, and to make sure they got their expense reimbursement requests in by the end of the week.

Then…just more stirring the hornet’s nest.

I came in midway through her “Hello Goodbye” speech this evening, and what I saw immediately spelled doom for party unity. “I don’t know where we go from here…” Hmm, I don’t know. Back to Chappequa? To D.C. to meet with Barack Obama to decide how she’ll support him in the fall? Back to the hotel for a tall glass of bourbon to congratulate herself on a campaign well (albeit at times ruthlessly) fought?

Nope. She put the ball on the tee and the audience launched it onto the fareway. Where are we going to go from here? “Denver! Denver! Denver!”

The other place she wanted everyone to go from here was her Web site. On the night of her alleged concession, and surrendering in this long and vicious battle, she did the same thing as she did every other night when she wanted her supporters to check their pockets for disposable Lincolns, she urged everyone to head to www.hillaryclinton.com.

That thought didn’t come in more of a scathing package than Tanya Acker on Dan Abrams’ post-election coverage on MSNBC “I came here tonight thinking ‘Hillary wants to be Vice President,’ and as soon as I heard her speech I thought, ‘Hillary wants to be President.’”

That was one story that the campaign didn’t disavow. As the delegates came over to Obama one by one, it was conspicuous–in a way that the abdominable cramps and intestinal rumbling are conspicuous after a suspect piece of pork–that she retracted the concession story at the same time she was declaring herself available for the Vice Presidency.

I wasn’t averse to the idea of her as Vice President–she would have the heft of 18 million voters behind her and she could help in some states where Obama’s tastes and mannerisms are a little too refined for those who come home each day with some of their work on them–but she’s turned this into a Mexican standoff at best, and a hostage situation at worst. Obama looks weak if he gives it to her now; she has 18 million voters who can knock him around and take his lunch money if he doesn’t.

In any case, more on this Wednesday. The general election has begun–and we’ve still got three candidates.

All morning long, there were choking, caustic, and festering projectiles of ugly belching forth from every vent and fissure of the Democratic Party and, almost as advertised, nary a soul in the Clinton camp was happy with the results of yesterday meeting of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, that gave Hillary Clinton a few dozen fewer delegates than she asked for on her most covetous if unrealistic Santa list that still would have left her eight country miles away from the nomination. The repetition of the talking points was so vehement, persistent, and practically hypnotic that by end of the day if you were tired or let your guard down you would have believed that we’ve always been at war with Eurasia.

It was my own bad for immersing myself in the imbroglio, but on and on it went, with Clinton surrogates Terry McAuliffe, Harold Ickes, Howard Wolfson, and Mandy Grunwald making the rounds on the Sunday shows and insisting in an endless loop:
1) Obama voluntarily took himself off the ballot in Michigan.
2) Hillary has received more popular votes than any Presidential candidate in history.
3) Unity was not served yesterday by Obama taking four delegates away from Hillary.
4) Hillary can in win in more swing states than Obama evidenced by the swing states where she has beaten Obama.
5) We will appeal to the remaining superdelegates to encourage them to back the more-electable candidate.

This is all magnificent spin on the part of the Clinton campaign, and I do marvel at their fortitude and steadfast refusal to accept the holy water and last rites.

1) “Obama voluntarily took himself off the ballot in Michigan.” Hillary and Barack agreed to the DNC penalization of Michigan. Every candidate except Christopher Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and Hillary Clinton took their names off the ballot, yet Hillary told NPR in October, “This election in Michigan will not count for anything.” And they didn’t, until Hillary needed those delegates to win the nomination, at which point she began invoking Zimbabwe and Florida 2000 and voter disenfranchisement.
2) “Hillary has received more popular votes than any Presidential candidate in history.” Team Hillary is counting all of the votes Hillary specifically received in Michigan and none that went to “uncommitted” which may or may not have gone to Obama–admittedly, an impossible number to assign to Obama, but his name was not on the ballot and her assumption is that none of those votes would have gone to Obama, even though Michigan Congressman John Conyers was supporting ads encouraging Democrats to cast their “uncommitted” vote for Obama–and they’ve discounted the non-binding primaries in the caucus states of  Washington, Idaho, and Nebraska.
3) “Unity was not served yesterday by Obama taking four delegates away from Hillary.” Well, she’s kind of got him on that one. Donna Brazile’s contention that this was an olive branch to the Clinton campaign that they didn’t accept after Obama gallantly refused the 50-50 compromise that he had the votes to win is just a bit disingenuous. If he really wanted to be so magnanimous, he should have pushed for the compromise–that the Clinton campaign was willing to accept–that the uncommiteds would go to Obama only if the candidates who did take their names off the ticket agreed that the delegates representing the uncommiteds should go to Obama. He shouldn’t have received the additional four delegates that should have gone to Hillary. That said, this is a divorcing couple arguing over the Air Supply cassettes and the beanbag chair that’s been sitting in the garage for the last ten years. It’s all about “fuck you” rights. Those four delegates don’t mean boo in the grand equation of the nomination, but if Barack is asking for those four, there isn’t a chance in hell that Hillary would willfully surrender them, regardless of the futility of such a stand. On this, I don’t blame her, though. Give her the goddamned delegates.
4) “Hillary can in win in more swing states than Obama evidenced by the swing states where she has beaten Obama.” Weak. That’s a bold assumption that everyone who voted for Hillary in these states in the primary won’t vote for Obama in the general election. Poll ten people on whether they would prefer chocolate ice cream or vanilla. If six choose chocolate and four pick vanilla, the six who chose chocolate aren’t going to abstain from ice cream when their choices are only vanilla and rutubaga. It may not be their favorite, but they’ll take the vanilla.
5) “We will appeal to the remaining superdelegates to encourage them to back the more-electable candidate.” A brave last stand. And one you will lose by noon on Wednesday. By the latest credible estimate, from NBC and the Huffington Post–though the estimates are all over the map–there are 203 uncommitted superdelegates, and Hillary needs something in the neighborhood of 195. In the campaign of 41 year-old men, I’m not the worst one in the lot, but I’m not the best either. No matter how much I’ve given it my all, I appreciate my limitations, and I’m willing to accept where I lose.

It was far uglier down the line amongst Hillary’s hardcore supporters. I spent a few hours today going through the comments section of politico.com, ABC News’ blog, and a number of other sites, and the tenor and passion of all of them have me wondering what Obama’s role was in 9/11. I had to Google it, but I ran across repeated references to Obama as “Soetero,” which was the last name of Barack Obama’s Indonesian step-father, Lolo Soetero, who allegedly was responsible for enrolling his stepson as “Barry Soetero” in a madrasah. The repeated “aka ‘Soetero’” allusions, of course, are intended to suggest that Barack Hussein Obama would give aid and comfort to our enemies and that he’s some kind of Manchurian Candidate who’s going to have all of Hillary’s supporters in burkhas within six months of his inauguration. And these are supposedly good Democrats.

We have two more contests remaining, in South Dakota and Montana, and then we’ll start to see if there’s any chance at party unity. Hillary’s war isn’t over, though, and we’ll see if she signs the armistice on Obama’s battleship, or if we’re going find her down the road holed up in the caves of Iwo Jima fighting a battle that’s long since been over.

The Huffington Post reported this morning that the Committee has already reached a compromise on Florida, where the entire delegation will be seated with half a vote for each member, netting Hillary 19 delegates. No such luck on Michigan, where Carl Levin is reportedly holding out that Michigan spokesperson, Senator Carl Levin, is holding out for the seating of every delegate with full voting rights for each, and that he won’t back down unless Iowa and New Hampshire are stripped of their right of first refusal in nominating contests.

Nothing would make me happier than to sit around in my shorts and yesterday’s stubble and live-blog this penultimate donnybrook of the primary season, before Puerto Rico, Montana, and South Dakota round out the main (if flaccid) card this week upcoming, but gas is too expensive and I have to make the donuts.

2:17 PM EST:  The Florida deal seems all but done, despite Lanny Davis blowing out two or three vital organs in a tete-a-tete with DNC member Jon Ausman, lambasting the committee and the Obama campaign for its perceived arrogance in “generously” agreeing to let Hillary have half the delegates. “They could have given us 38 and they’d still win. I’m fucking angry.”

There is apparently a deal laid down for Michigan where the candidates who removed their names from the ballots would agree to let all uncommitted delegates go to Obama. How this differs from another proposal that the Clinton campaign has rejected out of hand—that the uncommitteds be automatically allotted to Obama—has me baffled, but I was never any good at math to begin with, and Clinton Math is like Chinese trigonometry. Apparently, Hillary gets more “fuck you” points if Obama gets the identical amount of delegates her way.

There was another proposal that had the delegates split 50-50, but it was fell three votes short. Since this was deemed unacceptable, the likely result will be 55-40 instead of 50-50. In the grand scheme of things, we’re fighting over crumbs here, and this shouldn’t mean a net difference of more than a handful or two of delegates. Still, that’s one or two anonymous delegates to you and me, but it’s pretty heady stuff to the vice mayor of Grand Rapids or the assessor of Clinton County.

7:48 PM EST: Harold Ickes isn’t happy about it–”"I submit to you ladies and gentlemen, hijacking four delegates … is not a good way to start down the path of party unity.”–but it’s a done deal. However Ickes has offered the caveat that they “reserve the right” to take the fight to the Credentials Committee. Obama is now 66 delegates away from nomination.

Michigan and Florida will be seated with half-votes, with Hillary getting 69 delegates to Obama’s 59 in Michigan, and Florida will seat 105 for Senator Clinton and 67 for Barack. It’s all over but the shouting–and there will be much shouting to come. They’re shouting already, in fact. There are a lot of women who are very angry at Barack and the DNC right now, and they’re already threatening “Hillary or McCain in ’08″ or “NOBama ’08.”

This is a shorty tonight, as I have to channel my energy into a congratulatory several hours of revelry for a friend. I’ll return with updated highlights in the wee small hours tomorrow, when I dust myself off and return to the garret to toil in service to Election 2008.

Every minute, every hour, every day as the remaining superdelegates trickle over to the Obama column, Hillary has reached deeper into her quiver for the remnants of the last few broken arrows that she can shoot or even just throw at the Obama campaign. She’s lain down with the worst of her and her husband’s enemies from the 1990s, she’s tepidly dismissed the possibility of Barack Obama being a Muslim (“as far as I know…”), she’s invoked the struggles at Selma and the Deep South of the 1950s in defending the right of the Michigan and Florida delegates to be seated at the convention–after she and her surrogates sided with the DNC Rules Committee that these delegates would in fact not be seated if they went against the strict orders of the party not to attempt to move their primaries up ahead of Super Tuesday–and even conflated the situation with the fraudulent elections in Zimbabwe. She invented a lie about being under fire in Bosnia and has, more times than most people have fingers, changed the metric of victory. She’s made it clear a long time ago that she’s going to win at any cost, and she’s continued to reiterate that determination every single day.

She went off the rails again this afternoon in South Dakota–and in the worst way yet–when she suggested that it made some perverse sense for her to stay in the race because “I’ve been around long enough. You know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know, I just don’t understand it. You know, there’s lots of speculation about why it is.”

Yes, he was assassinated in June in California. And we’re coming up on that horrible 40th anniversary–just after this week when RFK’s brother has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Exhaustion and desperation notwithstanding, it’s astonishing that she would have evoked this gruesome imagery to justify her continued pursuit of the Presidency. This isn’t Mike Huckabee staying in a lost race wishing for “a Macaca moment.” Call it a befuddled moment at the end of a long campaign day at the end of a string of several hundred long campaign days, but as Keith Olbermann pointed out, this isn’t the first or the second or the third, but the fourth or fifth time since February that she’s alluded to the RFK assassination when she’s justified her staying in this race.

Recognizing the stark reality of mortal limitations, as in the case of Senator John McCain, is one thing. Implying the possibility of political assassination as a reason to maintain your increasingly quixotic campaign is quite another.

I don’t know what America that people like Sean Hannity are living in right now, but it isn’t the one where people live in fear every day of losing their jobs–even as their jobs are becoming almost prohibitively costly to go to with gas going up pennies a gallon every day. I have anemic health insurance and a fragile job, with no savings and no retirement, and I’m golden compared to tens of millions of my fellow Americans. Unlike a lot of elections in so many of our adult lives, this isn’t an academic exercise or a parlor game that we can hope for the best but dismiss the results if they’re the worst and move on with our lives, just because a megalomaniac with more guile, more ego, and more resources happens to win the day by the power of the personality and the damage they’re willing to exact on their opponent, even if it extends to the country at large. Now more than ever, this election is about the person who’s not only going to engage the Congress and the states and start helping to effect some real change, but it’s also about electing the person who isn’t going to poison the community well in trying to get there.

Hillary has lost her marbles if it’s even lurking in the rearmost recesses of her mind that a political assassination would be regretful but okay, in the collateral damage sense, if it would get her the nomination. An assassination is a dagger in a nation’s soul, and to even evoke the possibility, no matter how inadvertent, casts a deservingly despicable light on he or she who uttered it. I’m sure that Hillary doesn’t wish that Obama would catch a bullet, but I’m also sure that she would welcome, no matter how regrettably, the advantage in her quest for her return to the White House that such a tragedy would afford her.

She’s proven it already: Win at any cost, win at any cost, and win at any cost. Also, if in doubt, win at any cost.

This is naked ambition that’s gone way past its sell-by date. We’ve gone well beyond pluck, and determination, and hard-nosed dedication to principle. She’s running on nothing but ego right now, and is queering the patch in the best shot the Democrats have had to win the Presidency since 1976 (despite his rock-star bonafides, her husband won in 1992 thanks in large part to H. Ross Perot, and Jimmy Carter wasn’t half the campaigner that Barack Obama is and very nearly lost that 1976 race to Gerald Ford).

A desperate plea to the Clinton Campaign: You’re exhausted. You’re out of time and out of votes and out of money, and after your comments today, you’re out of dignity. It’s time to call it a night, Madame Senator.

Thank you for your patience. The humor will return tomorrow night.

The John Edwards endorsement on Wednesday, in front of 12,000 screaming blue-collar voters, was a whack in the kneecap of Hillary’s post-West Virginia claim that Barack Obama couldn’t attract the support of blue-collar voters. On Thursday came the endorsement of the 650,000-member United Steelworkers Union–hardly a bastion of the effete, overeducated latte-and-sushi crowd that is supposed to be carrying the Obama vote along with entrenched, blindly color-loyal black voters and naive, short-attention-span kids who by the fall will be back to text-messaging and Lady Sovereign downloads. On Tuesday, as Hillary prepared for what she hoped would be a reiteration for anyone who wasn’t listening the week before when she said Barack Obama couldn’t attract non-college-educated blue-collar workers, the 105,000-member United Mine Workers Union stood up and gave their nod to Obama.

Every day Hillary puts another quarter in the Presidential gumball machine, hoping for the Everlasting Gobstopper of Executive Anointment, and instead holding out her hand only to have another bitter pill roll out of the dispenser. On Monday Hillary’s colleague on the Senate Armed Services Committee and, at 49 years and counting, the longest-serving member of the Senate, Democrat Robert Byrd–from West Virginia–gave to Obama not only his superdelegate endorsement but his storied, beloved copy of the Constitution of that has famously carried around in his pocket for decades.

Senator Byrd doesn’t have the electoral mojo of a John Edwards or an Al Gore, but he’s the grand old man of elocute and pound-the-podium deliberative democracy, our living embodiment of Jimmy Stewart’s Jefferson Smith, and the biggest colussus in the most august body in American government. The United States Senate has had their shingle hung out for 219 years. Robert Byrd has served in that body for 49 of those years. He’s known more dead people than the living most of us have known. And at 90 years old, there isn’t a day sunny enough that I’d get in a pissing match with this learned old bird, unless I wanted my intellectual ass handed to me.

That he endorsed Senator Obama over Senator Clinton and over the votes of his constituents was big enough, but giving him his prized totem of his fabled breast-pocket Constitution was telling and no small thing psychologically. Everyone wants granddad’s blessing, especially if granddad hasn’t rounded the band and needs around-the-clock tending and supervision.

There’s a curious disconnect going on here between West Virginia rock star Senator Byrd and the hundreds of thousands of blue-collar voters flocking to Obama, and Hillary’s hostage-situation entrenchment that she’s going to save the party from itself because Senator Obama can’t win the ones with dirt under their fingernails.

The exit polls and white-fright prognostications aren’t going to hold come fall.

IGNORAHMUS: I have to second Air America’s Thom Hartman’s ire at Norah O’Donnell explaining away Barack Obama’s Oregon primary victory as expected in what she called one of the most liberal states in America. Oregon is, geographically, the 9th largest state in the union, and it’s liberal enclave encompasses a 110-mile swath of Interstate 5 from Portland to Eugene, and the rest of the state, with the possible exception of part of Bend, in Central Oregon, is as red as Kansas. I grew up having beer cans thrown at me and called “fag” just because I listened to Human League and hung out with someone with a Flock of Seagulls haircut, and still run into high school acquaintances who, when describing persons of Hispanic descent, deploy the antiquated epithet “beaners.” Even in what is referred to as “The People’s Republic Of Portland,” all I have to do is drive four miles in any direction to share a half-rack of Milwaukee’s Best Ice with someone who can recite talking points from the Obama “Muslim” email. Don’t tell me we’re all tempeh and arugula, and will vote for the charismatic African-American who can’t bowl strictly out of white guilt. Come on out to Oregon, Norah, and we’ll take a road trip to a few taverns I know, and then we can talk about how unabashedly liberal the Beaver State is (one of those would be an all-nude club on SE 82nd in Portland called the “Beaver Inn”, though I’m not sure they’re name derives entirely from state pride.)

For as much as I resent the promulgation of the “liberal elite” stereotype and believe that it’s mostly the product of FOX News, alleged well-meaning middle-of-the-roaders like Norah O’Donnell are only spraying gasoline on the fire.

Though I’m not technically residing in Oregon at the moment, I still consider myself an Oregon resident. I lived there for the better part of 37 years, I work there, I pay taxes there, I buy my liquor and gasoline and food there, and I’m actively seeking to undo the mistake that was my temporary residence in Washington. So even though I can’t vote, I do feel I have a vested interest in Oregon’s U.S. Senatorial race, especially since the odds are better than not that I’ll be casting my vote there come the general election.

I was living in Oregon and twice had the chance to vote against our wretched fraud of a Republican Senator Gordon Smith. After years carrying the Bush water, Smith has reinvented himself as a conciliator, a man of reason, an ardent opponent of the war. I suppose it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that he could have had a turn of conscience and want to make amends for the rotten things he did in the name of his erstwhile ideology. Lord knows that old firebrands like George Wallace and Barry Goldwater discovered an enhanced humanity in their later years that wasn’t present when they were frothing young middle-aged turks leading the torch-and-pitchfork brigade that wanted to be led to a new and snarling promised land, all nuclear all-the-time and as Negro-free as allowed by law.

Not so much here, though. Gordo’s up for re-election, and he’s scared. He probably should be, because in an ongoing SurveyUSA poll on United States Senators, his disapproval ratings are frequently in the 40-43% range, which is in the neighborhood of blessedly-slain douche-fountains like Conrad Burns, Bill Frist, and Rick Santorum. He’s trying to avoid the same ignominious fate as his former Senatorial bretheren and has initiated an extreme makeover and is applying more and more makeup and Botox as the election draws nigh. In fact, he’s not even waiting for the election, using the primary season to lambaste his opponent even before he knows who it will be.

He rolled out the new Gordo today on the eve of Oregon’s primary announcing his emergence from his winter coccoon as “moderate, independent, bipartisan.” He’s not crowing about any of his pre-2007 votes, however–such as his yes votes on a Constitutional ban on flag desecration, yes on a Constitutional ban against same-sex marriages, yes on wiretapping, yes on restricting the right of habeus corpus, yes on Samuel Alito, yes on John Roberts, yes on restricting rules on personal bankruptcy, no on repealing a tax subsidy for companies who moved U.S. jobs overseas, and a steady drumbeat of “no,” “no,” and “no” on any education bill that didn’t involve vouchers or charter schools, not to mention his 83% approval rating by the Christian Coalition.

There are legitimate challengers looking to untie the Gordonian knot and their throwdown is coming to a culmination tonight. Jeff Merkley is the Oregon Speaker of the House and the anointed favorite of still-in-his-probationary period Senatorial kingmaker, Charles Schumer. Merkley is a reliable progressive, but he’s the establishment’s progressive. Steve Novick, however, is more of a wildcard, and would certainly be a hell of a lot more fun to watch in the general election. Novick is 4’9”, was born without a left hand, and wears a prosthetic hook. He enrolled in college after his junior high school closed due to budget cuts and graduated the University of Oregon at the age of 18, moving onto Harvard Law School to graduate at the age of 21. He was lead counsel on the Love Canal trial and secured a $129 million settlement for the plaintiffs. He’s been active in Oregon politics but has never held elective office.

He doesn’t have a lot of patience for Dems whom he feels have betrayed the tribe and aren’t playing the progressive card aggressively enough. Oregon political analyst Jeff Mapes says “Novick is a loose cannon given to slashing attacks against Democrats with whom he disagrees,” while The Oregonian’s David Sarasohn observes, “if the best chance to unseat Smith belongs to the candidate most capable of biting large chunks out of him, the edge probably (goes) to Novick.”

Well, not that I have a vote, but I already know where I’d place it. In lieu of exercising my will at the ballot box, I’m at least going to show solidarity by attending his post-election party tonight at Portland’s Benson Hotel. My co-worker is a refugee from the state and local political wars before he hung up his husting hooves for the less personally-vicious milieu of a tech job.

The Benson was abuzz when we arrived about 9:20 PM, eighty minutes after the polls closed in Oregon. There should have been a big helping of numbers served up for Oregon early, as the state is all mail-in voting, and as of this morning 38% of the ballots of all registered voters were in already. We came into the lobby, but there was no big-screen TV with election results anywhere in sight. Bad form for a post-election party, and I don’t care how august the Benson prides itself on being.

We passed the main-floor meeting room off the reception area, where State Senator Kate Brown declared an early victory over two strong candidates, and is now moving on to clobber flaccid Republican nominee Rick Dancer.

There were no Novick returns coming yet, which is always a bad sign, as the leftie melting pot lined up for overpriced drinks and bobbed their heads to “1999” as they waited for the candidate to arrive. There was a vague air of deflated expectations in the room. We headed for another rally to see what might be going on there.

My co-worker introduced himself to the fiance of a Democratic candidate for Jeff Merkley’s House District 47 seat. He managed to insult her and elicit a “fuck you!” within 45 seconds, so I was sure they must have been old friends, but I learned later that they had indeed just met 45 seconds before her Dick Cheney Hello. That said, she was a great sport for accepting from a total stranger a scathing pejorative about how adversely she’s weathered her thirty or so years. I realized that was just Neil being charming. Neil is in his 40s and single. Then again, so am I, and he’s gotten action more recently than I have, so maybe this could have been a teachable moment for me.

She was a devout Hillary supporter and was engaging with Neil on how fascinated she was that she was meeting so few Hillary supporters who weren’t women over 50. I offered a few comments but didn’t weigh in heavily on what I thought about Hillary’s campaign this year, and how far she’s fallen from the woman I was putting my Lincoln on this past winter. I didn’t have my surly on this evening, and why sully a nice scotch and beer buzz?

Former Governor John Kitzhaber came in and the natives started to stir in the Novick room. I followed the cacophony and found Kitzhaber introducing Steve Novick. And then, just like that…concession.

“We thought we could stick it to the man, but just like so many other times, the man stuck it to us.” All in all it was a gracious and conciliatory address, and he spent the next many minutes thanking everyone but six donors whose names he couldn’t read and the custodian who cleaned up after his rally in Roseburg in March.

It was a little dispiriting. Who’s going to help us pummel Gordo now? I guess it’s up to Speaker Merkley, and Steve Novick was gracious in defeat and sincere in his urgings for his supporters to get behind Merkley to take down Gordo, though it’s going to be no small feat, as Merkley is, as Novick would have been, after their primary fight, entering the race broke.

We clearly picked the wrong party. For anyone not familiar with Oregon politics, Kevin Mannix is our troglodyte Harold Stassen. He shows up every two years with a flamethrower, a rucksack full of grenades, and, when he starts flagging in the polls, one of his well-heeled Uber-Christian benefactors ready to fly in with the napalm strike on his opponent, even if it means the immolation of his own village. He’s a law-and-order and fiscal responsibility conservative with a glaring financial management problem of his own, who made his bones early putting incendiary measures on the state ballot.

Fortunately for Oregon, he keeps losing at the statewide level. He’s lost twice for Attorney General and twice for Governor, and threw his hat in the ring once again for the Republican nomination for the open 5th Congressional District seat of retiring Democrat Darlene Hooley, against entrepreneur and perennial failed officerunner, Mike Erickson.

One poll leading up to the election showed Mannix trailing Erickson 52 to 44, so he called in an air strike, just days before the election mailing out a flier divulging that his fellow pro-lifer Erickson paid for an abortion for a woman he dated in 2000.

A tawdry attack, for sure, and perfectly in keeping with Mannix’s reputation, but if it was true he was hoisting Erickson by his own petard. The “no comment” from the Erickson campaign for the first few days of the story was telling, but they broke the silence on Thursday came their admission that Erickson had indeed dated said woman for a few months lo those many years ago, and had recalled loaning her some money “to help her with financial problems she was having” but that was the extent of it. This already wasn’t passing the smell test, and they came back the next day and added that, yes, he did remember giving her a ride to, um, a…clinic–but insisted that she never mentioned a pregnancy.

Tuesday morning it was announced an election-eve poll showed a 23-point shift to Mannix among pro-lifers and a 20-point shift among senior citizens. It looked like a sure but unfortunate beatdown on Erickson by Mannix, so we seriously considered the maudlin Erickson post-election party but decided on the Novick party instead.

Unfortunately, in a mail-in state like Oregon, last minute bombing raids aren’t always as effective as they are in ballot-box states. Despite our predictions and those of the local pundits–including Willamette Week which announced Erickson as a loser as they went to press on Tuesday night–it was the Mannix party that wounded up being the downer ball of the evening, as Erickson prevailed by three points. Oh well. On the upside, we almost certainly won’t have Kevin Mannix to kick around anymore.

THE OTHER GUY: Not too many surprises tonight. She gave him a horse-stomp like Big Brown in Kentucky, and he won by a less-impressive 16 points in Oregon. He split the vote of white women and non-college white voters. With both states, 83% of Obama’s votes today came from white voters. More ruminating and chin-scratching on the national candidates from both state contests tomorrow.

Good Lord, no wonder the streets were so empty today. Okay, I really have no idea. It was Sunday, and it’s my only day resembling a day off, so I never leave my apartment. Still, I bet they were very empty.

Tom McCall Waterfront Park in Portland is an area that I and most sensible Portlanders have learned to avoid for much of the summer months. In early June, you have what used to be called the Rose Festival Fun Center which came to be referred to as the Crime Center, what with its proliferation of shirtless methamphetamine users and fistfights and the occasional stabbing, so they’ve since assumed an anodyne corporate-sponsored name to lure the white people back from the suburbs. The next three months are blues and food festivals where the food and beer are too expensive, the lines are too long, and you have to address your personal hygeine needs in plastic booths. The closest I’ll get to these messes is the occasional friend with the boat where I can sit with a cooler on the Willamette and watch the teeming masses with a cold drink always within immediate reach.

I drive by on the Marquam Bridge on I-5 and rarely bat an eye at the enormous swath of humanity. I think I would have noticed if I’d headed down that way this afternoon that Barack Obama drew 75,000 people to his Waterfront Park rally on a hot May. That’s barely fathomable. We’re talking Sugar Bowl here, Grand Funk Railroad in Michigan in 1973. Hell, the Promisekeepers rarely draw like this.

It doesn’t seem worth mentioning anymore. Barack, a venue, a bajillion people. Blah blah blah. This is rather mind-boggling, though. 75,000 people would sacrifice their Sunday for a crowded, uncomfortable, difficult to get in, difficult to get out political event.

Love him or hate him, whether you buy into that Muslim hokum, this is the kind of stuff you don’t see every election cycle. I don’t think we’ve seen it in our lifetime. I went to a Michael Dukakis rally on a toasty spring weekend afternoon just like this one with no limits on attendance and I don’t think the crowd cracked 1,000.

I’ll leave the pie-eyed idealism to others, but even my jaded, cynical self has to concede that this is veering toward the neighborhood of astonishing. Whether it’s the steady IV drip of nakedly-disingenuous talking points we’ve been fed over the last seven-plus years or the impressively consistent ability of this Administration to screw up one one-car funeral after another and wrecking our dollar, our gas and food prices, our Constitution, our standing in the world, our infrastructure, our schools, and the 4,000-plus killed and however many tens of thousands of our kids have had their brains or organs scrambled by our ill-fated Middle East adventure, there’s a lot of folks out there who are ready for a change of Executive Branch scenery.

You aren’t going to be seeing anything resembling these numbers for a McCain rally. I don’t imagine this went over too well in the Hillary camp today, either. The only question for her Oregon campaign now is whether she would prefer paper or plastic when the state hands her ass on Tuesday.

Blacks are registering in record numbers across the country and they’re scaring the hell out of the Republicans for a fall election where they usually count on a significant of voting-eligible African-Americans sitting out the race because they’re understandably skeptical about being represented by either party’s standard-bearer.

Not in 2008. Once they go Barack, they almost certainly won’t go back. His MLK Day retraction notwithstanding, John McCain is a man who has no credit on the street. He has his African-American supporters, but they seem to be limited to the black GOP pundits that MSNBC has been inviting on lately.

According to recent estimates, black voter registration has roughly doubled since 2004 in Georgia and South Carolina.

In Georgia, for example, George Bush in 2000 received 55%, Al Gore received 43%. They were separated by a difference of 303,490 votes. Since October 2007, black voter registration in the state is up 400,000. Somehow I don’t see that as being a by-product of the all-inclusive, big-tent appeal of Senator McCain. And Georgia has 15 electoral votes on its platter. If Al Gore had excited that kind of African-American passion in 2000, our main debate now would be whether to elect that shifting turncoat Joe Lieberman, assuming Gore didn’t see his true colors and jettison him before 2004.

The GOP is already smarting by and stunned from last Tuesday’s special election loss by Republican Greg Davis to Democrat Travis Childers in Mississippi’s 1st Congressional District. George Bush won this district with 62% of the vote in 2004. Similary, Democrat Don Cazayoux won his own special election in Louisiana’s 6th District, which hasn’t gone Democrat in more than 30 years. Senator Obama has been trying to make a point of his campaign’s companion voter registration drive to woo black and young voters who haven’t previously been participating voters, but as recently as last month his discussion of that effort fell on deaf ears to reporters who were more eager to talk about Reverend Wright.

I can’t say I’m surprised that the media is ignoring it, because voter registration just isn’t that sexy, but this is the story that’s going to reverberate beyond tomorrow’s headlines, if only because of the results. When you have just less than half of the country’s eligible voters not participating in our elections, that’s a ginormous untapped resource, especially given that the last two elections have been lost by a whisker and/or the creative finessing of extra-electoral forces. If a few hundred thousand extra voters in just a handful of state go and pull the lever for you, then your election is never going to come down to dubious polling place/ballot box practices or a Supreme Court who on six other days in the week would decide in favor of state’s rights.

This isn’t the only Southern rebellion that John McCain has to worry about. Former Georgia Republican Bob Barr has joined the race, vying for and likely to receive the Libertarian Party nod for the nomination later this month.

A CLINTON IN EVERY POT: “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” That was Herbert Hoover’s 1928 campaign slogan, and we all know how that worked out. I’m going to lose a $5 bet I made with my 25-year-old niece last year that Hillary would be win the Presidency, but I don’t have a problem with that given the way Hillary has disappointed me like a father who finds out his beautiful, brilliant daughter has decided to pay for her Master’s degree working as an escort.

I’ve been skeptical of the Clinton economic plan, and only more so after the championing of the absurd gas tax holiday. Somewhere in Heaven right now, Paul Tsongas is throwing a beer can at his television, screaming, “See??? ‘Pander bear’, just like I said about her philandering husband in ’92!!!”

I’m calling bullshit on the Clinton Economic Bonafides, for petty and personal reasons, because twice in the last two months my family has lost money because of the Clinton Presidential Campaign. Most recently was today when I arrived at my mother’s wine shop where I work on Saturdays to find all of the parking spaces along State Street in Hood River blocked off. I pulled into the shop and parked in the back shortly before they barricaded the entire block. Even though Hillary is going to get throttled in Tuesday’s Oregon primary by 15 or more points and that, this being a mail-in-only state, all of the ballots that haven’t been mailed and will have to be dropped off represent a tiny few of the whole, Bill and Chelsea were scheduled for an evening rally outside the Hood River County Library. With the barricades and the Secret Service prowling everywhere, we did no business today and closed at 2:00 PM. Sir and madame, your wife and mother is going to get clobbered here, so God bless you for fighting the good fight and for leaving us with $155 in till at the end of the day.

My mother suggested to a police officer helping with the barricading that she might “bill Bill” if she, as it indeed turned out, lost most of her business for the day. Amusing, yes, and forgive her her naivete. Even if they were obligated, they wouldn’t pay her. My sister hosted a catering when Hillary attended a rally in Hillsboro, Oregon in early April. Like a number of other vendors who have agreed to sell their services to Clinton-related events, she hasn’t been paid yet. I can appreciate how paying their bills would cut into their futile media buys in lost states, though.