Jay Reding.com

The AP is reporting that Sen. Barack Obama has the delegates to be the Democratic nominee. However, it appears that Hillary Clinton may not concede tonight, but will make an almost certainly futile attempt to get superdelegates to swing to her side. No matter what, it appears as though Hillary will not be the top of the ticket.

Despite all the rumors, fanned by Clinton herself today, I don’t see her as VP either. If Obama needs a woman, why not Gov. Katherine Sibelius of Kansas? If he needs to get someone who can resonate with red state voters, why not Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia? The “dream ticket” could just as easily be a nightmare—why share the stage with someone like Hillary Clinton? (Not to mention Bill…)

The other winner tonight is John McCain. Obama is an untested candidate who only just won a battle among his own party. Obama has made rookie mistakes, which can damn a candidate. Even an accomplished politico like John Kerry can die the death of a thousand cuts in a long campaign. Someone like Obama who has never had a competitive campaign outside a state legislative race faces a truly great challenge.

With luck, tonight ends the dominance of the Clinton machine—and good riddance. However, like Freddy Krueger, Hillary Clinton may just come back to terrorize our political discourse again—but not this year.

Jim Geraghty has tonight’s big win for Hillary Clinton in West Virginia. He makes one valuable point for the Democratic echo chamber:

You’ll see the press, and Obama’s surrogates (perhaps I repeat myself) insist that tonight’s result means nothing, and indeed, in the delegate count, the effect is marginal. But superdelegates ought to be sweating. White working-class voters, and various overlapping demographics - the elderly, Catholics, Jews - just aren’t warming up to Obama, and they’ve been the backbone for the party for generations. Liberal bloggers (and Saturday Night Live, and arguably the Washington Post) are responding by suggesting Hillary’s supporters are racist; these people may not be so eager to vote for Obama in November as the pundits insist. Once you insult a voter by calling them racist, they may not be eager to meekly repent by doing as their moral betters in the pundit class demand.

The shameful way that some in the Democratic Party are treating their own voters is shocking. The same sort of political smears usually reserved for Republicans are being used against their own. What will the Democratic message for West Virginia voters be in the fall? “Vote for us, you racist hick morons”? That’s hardly a compelling message for the Democrats.

The Obama coalition of wealthy white urbanites and black voters is not enough to win. The Democrats cannot win when they abandon the working-class voters that make up a critical portion of their base. Yet those are exactly the groups that Obama can’t seem to win.

Their are, of course, good reasons to want to be rid of Hillary Clinton, but her being unelectable is not one of them—certainly not as she keeps defying all the political odds. The Democrats have a choice, go with their heart or go with their brain. I shall leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what course the Democrats are taking.

Sen. Hillary Clinton is pushing her own version of a summer “gas tax holiday”—except that her plan would end up doing absolutely nothing to help consumers. Sen. Obama has been attacking her plan (and McCain’s) as an effort to “pander:”

On ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., was asked repeated to name an economist who supports her plan to suspend the 18.4 cent federal gas tax. Either she could not or chose not to. “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists,” she said, presenting her tax hike plan as a way to life the burden of soaring gas prices off middle class Americans.

Rival Barack Obama has called the plan, which is also backed by Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting, Sen. John McCain , “a pander” that won’t solve the high cost of gas. Asked about the gas plan in his interview with Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Sen. Obama, D-Ill., framed the proposal as a “classic Washington gimmick.” “You’re looking at suspending a gas tax for three months. The average driver would save 30 cents per day for a grand total of $28,” claimed Obama.

Although Clinton did not offer her own estimate as to how much relief the holiday would provide, she did try to distinguish her plan from McCain’s. “Senator McCain has said take off the gas tax, don’t pay for it, throw us further into deficit and debt. That is not what I’ve proposed. What I’ve proposed is that the oil companies pay the gas tax instead of consumers and drivers this summer.”

So, what Sen. Clinton proposes is that the oil companies pay the gas tax instead of consumers—and somehow those costs won’t end up getting passed right back to the consumers in the form of higher oil costs. No wonder Sen. Clinton doesn’t want to listen to the advice of people who actually understand economics.

Sen. Obama’s criticisms over the tax aren’t too far off—it is questionable how much a gas tax holiday would actually help consumers, and from a policy standpoint it’s also questionable whether we really want the government encouraging people to use more gasoline than they might this summer.

The Clinton gas tax plan takes the flaws of the McCain plan and magnifies them. At least the McCain plan would actually lower gas prices, while the Clinton plan would just pass the costs right back to consumers. The Clinton plan is definitely a pander—it panders to consumers by pretending to lower gas prices and it panders to anti-corporate sentiment by pretending that the oil companies will take the costs.

Clinton keeps demonstrating that when it comes to economic matters, she’s absolutely clueless—and the fact that she doesn’t want to listen to economists when she formulates economic policy should serve as a reminder why she and the other Democrats not qualified to be deciding this nation’s economic policies.

Hillary Clinton is challenging Barack Obama to a series of one-on-one debates in Indiana, in the style of the Lincoln/Douglas debates in the 1850’s:

So here’s my proposal - I’m offering Senator Obama a chance to debate me one-on-one, no moderators.

Just the two of us going for 90 minutes asking and answering questions. We’ll set whatever rules seem fair. I think that it would give the people of Indiana, and I assume a few Americans might tune in because nearly 11 million watched the Philadelphia debate, and I think they would love seeing that kind of debate and discussion.

As much as it pains me to agree with Senator Clinton, that is a rather good idea. The moderated debate format is stale and insipid, and the result of these debates are generally candidates spouting the same canned responses that they do on the stump. It’s rare that a candidate says anything interesting—the risks are usually too great, and the moderates rarely push them far enough to get them to truly go off script.

A one-on-one debate allows the candidates to really clash with each other. It lets them demonstrate their real mastery of the issues and it ensures that just reciting the same canned answers won’t fly.

Of course, that’s why such a debate has a snowman’s chance in Hades of happening. No candidate is going to take that risk in today’s world of blogs and YouTube. Candidates live in perpetual fear of saying something in a debate that might turn into the next “macaca” or “global test” moment.

Sen. Obama has no real reason to want to take up Sen. Clinton’s challenge—he’s still the frontrunner, and his best move is to let the clock run out and ensure that Clinton doesn’t receive any additional momentum. Even though he’s the more rhetorically gifted of the two, the cost/benefit calculus to him just doesn’t add up.

Still, if we really want a debate that puts political candidates on notice, that would be the format to do that. We want political leaders that can think on their feet and respond to the harshest criticism. We want political leaders who can face a challenge. We want political leaders who can give us answers that haven’t been processed and focus-grouped and analyzed to death.

In fact, Sen. Clinton’s idea should be extended to the general election debates. Let Sen. McCain debate the Democratic nominee one-on-one, with no moderators. Let us drop the artificial rules and let the candidates challenge each other rather than speaking past each other. These people are auditioning to be the leader of the world’s preeminent superpower—the very least of their challenges will be their political opponent. If they can’t take the heat of an unmoderated debate, how can we ask them to take the heat of leading the nation?

Since losing Pennsylvania to Hillary, I hear Obama is so bitter that he’s started clinging to guns and religion…

Looks like the margin will be right around 10%—and more interestingly if you add together all the popular vote including Michigan and Florida, Hillary has the popular vote. Will the Democrats decide to have their superdelegates override the will of the majority of their electorate? Will they do so by disenfranchising two major states in the process?

The Democratic chattering classes are firmly in the bag for Obama, but what we’re seeing is that he truly hasn’t been able to “close the deal” and Democrats should think long and hard about that.

UPDATE: Here’s something interesting. The second Obama stopped his speech, his whole demeanor changed. He looked worried.

UPDATE: Jennifer Rubin notes that while Hillary Clinton’s speech was rather upbeat, Obama’s negative attacks against McCain made him sound angry and small. Sorry, Sen. Obama, but you haven’t won yet, no matter how badly you’d rather it were otherwise.