Did it surprise anyone that Clinton took Pennsylvania? I’m willing to wager that the Obama camp wasn’t shocked she won the popular vote in that state either. The fact that the Obama camp hasn’t gotten it’s feathers ruffled by the defeat is what’s particularly bothersome.

Most of us knew Clinton would take Pennsylvania. Sometimes demographics don’t lie. She had a lock on the state’s voters long before the ballets were cast; older, white, and female. It was just a matter of determining the margin of victory.

What’s got me irked then?

Money.

Flush with cash, Obama reported spending $11.2 million on television in the state, more than any place else. That compared with $4.8 million for Clinton.

Wow. Obama sure spent a lot of cash on a state that was destined to sway towards Clinton. Not to mention, before the Penn. primary, it was statistically unlikely Clinton will win enough delegates to receive the Democratic nomination.

And from what I can determine, the vast amount of spending Obama put into this states primary could only mean one thing:

Obama has long since past the point of his race with Clinton as being just business. Now, it’s personal. It’s so personal that he’s willing to spend nearly 25% of his on hand cash on a state that was favoring Clinton from day one.

Now, who was saying something about Obama and Clinton becoming running mates? They better be put up in two White Houses then.

Hillary took a 10 point lead over Obama in Pennsylvania last night, showing Obama still has trouble connecting with the middle class- especially in a place where the Clintons have strong roots and connections to local politicians.

But it’s not enough for Hillary to overcome the lead in votes that Obama has nationwide, and unless something impossibly catastrophic should happen to Obama in the near future, there’s virtually no chance that she will ever be able to make up that difference.

So with the race continuing on further still, and each Democratic Candidate throwing knockout style punches at each other with neither going down for the count, it will get only uglier still until something or someone puts a stop to it.

With the super-delegates still waiting in the wings to make their final decisions, will they side with Hillary who just refuses to die and who plays largely to the usual Dem base, or will they side with Obama and all the unusual votes he carries with him- hoping the base will fall in place behind any candidate come November- so long as it’s not a Republican?

And speaking of Republicans, what is John McCain up to while the Dems go tooth and claw?

…McCain, who compared the struggles of Youngstown to his own back-from-the-dead campaign, insisted that in the end workers would be better off through retraining and education programs in technology he has promised them as president.

“I can’t tell you that these jobs are ever going to come back to this magnificent part of the country,” Mr. McCain told another questioner, Sam Carbon, a student at Youngstown State, who asked Mr. McCain about how he planned to save American jobs. “But I will commit to giving these workers a second chance. They need it, they deserve it. I know that’s small comfort to you, but I can’t look you in the eye and tell you those steel mills are coming back.”

Mr. McCain, who was on the second day of a weeklong tour to the country’s “forgotten places” while his two Democratic competitors battled for the nomination in Pennsylvania, sought to strike an empathetic note in the midst of his sober message.

“I’ve been left recently in the unfamiliar position of facing no opposition within my own party,” Mr. McCain said in remarks before he took questions at the public forum, which was held at the university. “And as you might recall, it was a different story last year, when I could claim the unqualified support of Cindy and my mother — and my mom was starting to keep her options open.” (Cindy is Mr. McCain’s wife.)

“Back then,” Mr. McCain continued, “there were some very impressive front-runners, there was a very formidable second tier of contenders, and then there was me.”

Despite being written off as “a hopeless cause,” Mr. McCain said, “a person learns along the way that if you hold on, if you don’t quit no matter what the odds, sometimes life will surprise you. Sometimes you get a second chance, and opportunity turns back your way. And when it does, we are stronger and readier because of all that we had to overcome.”

Mr. McCain added: “I bring up all this today, my friends, because the men and women of Youngstown know what it feels like to be counted out. You’ve been written off a few times yourselves, in the competition of the market. You know how it feels to hear that good things are happening in the American economy — they’re just not happening to you.”

Afterward, Mr. Carbon, a Republican, said that Mr. McCain’s answer had partly satisfied him, and that he would vote for him in November. He said he understood that manufacturing jobs would not return, but “I was looking for more about his views on tariffs and taxes on imported things.”

McCain’s vote for, and continued support of NAFTA, which is a program many in places like Youngstown hold responsible for the loss of American working class jobs in the first place, left many bitter, and some believe was a cause for him losing primaries to Mitt Romney who spoke out for change of NAFTA in areas that had been hit hard by the loss of factory jobs. But with talk of re-education and replacement jobs for those workers, he may win some of those folks back.

Of course… education is not exactly something America is excelling at, at this very moment- something no Candidate is really talking about.

Obama has managed, for the most part, to avoid too much heat for his connection to Rev. Wright- and all the condemnations of American society that the pastor has made in past years.  He issued a speech as intelligent and nuanced as any ever delivered to the American public, not for soundbites and easy news coverage, but to explain a piece of life and to engage in a dialogue that for too long public figures have been afraid to approach.  Controversial topics and personalities are such- because of the danger and fear that accompany the discussion they provoke.

But Obama doesn’t shy from multi-layered topics, or individuals, as evidenced by the assorted company he keeps.  The latest personal connection to bring him under fire- Former member of the 60s radical group The Weather Underground, current professor at U of I in Chicago, author, and political voice Bill Ayers.

Ayers, 63, spent 10 years as a fugitive in the 1970s when he was part of the “Weather Underground,” an anti-Vietnam War group that protested U.S. policies by bombing the Pentagon, U.S. Capitol and a string of other government buildings. Nobody was hurt in the attacks by the defunct organization, which the FBI labeled a “domestic terrorist group.”

Today, Ayers and his wife — fellow former Weather Underground fugitive Bernardine Dohrn — live in Hyde Park, where they moved after surrendering in 1980. Federal charges against the two were dropped because of improper surveillance, so they avoided prison.

Ayers and Dohrn have raised two sons of their own and adopted a third boy whose parents were Weather Underground members who went to prison. They’ve built stellar reputations as professors: Dohrn at Northwestern’s law school, Ayers as an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Ayers, a Glen Ellyn native who became active in SDS while attending the University of Michigan, is the son of late Commonwealth Edison CEO Thomas G. Ayers. Ayers has praised his dad for standing by him while he was on the lam.

A book Ayers penned about those years, Fugitive Days, landed him in hot water on Sept. 11, 2001. That morning, the New York Times ran a story about the book in which Ayers said, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Ayers’ statement was made before the World Trade Center attacks, but its timing led some to believe it was in response. “My book is in fact a condemnation of terrorism in all its forms — individual, group and official,” Ayers later said in a letter to the Chicago Tribune.

So the issue at hand is again- is Obama a patriotic American?  Does he love his country, or is he some sort of domestic terrorist trying to destroy our government from the inside?

This is the kind of question other Presidential hopefuls want to keep on the tips of tongues and in the fronts of minds across the nation as they all jostle for position as the top dog.  Obama is as patriotic as any of the others running for President, if not more-so- because it’s not purely symbolic like wearing a flag pin, or blind as voting for a war the President calls for without researching because to question the Commander in Chief would be “unpatriotic”.  No, Obama’s is the kind of patriotism of our forefathers.  A questioning, reasoning, never satisfied quest to better ourselves as a nation- seeking discussion with anyone who seeks that same goal, and listening to every voice, whether dissenting or like-minded.  He’s a candidate not of black and white, but of multi-faceted nuance.  And throwing the actions of everyone he’s ever met will not change that, and we can only hope and have enough faith in the general public to not be swayed by fear-mongering and name calling, but to look at every issues from every angle, and vote accordingly.

Well, you know… Personal for polite politics. Really, it could be much much worse. But this is what counts as personal attacks I suppose.

Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton took their hard-fought battle for the Democratic presidential nomination down to a deeply personal level in a nationally televised debate last night, questioning each other’s honesty, appeal to working-class voters, and electability in November.

Clinton, seeking momentum in the dwindling weeks of the primary campaign, accused Obama of associating with controversial figures, including his own former preacher. Though she called Obama a “good man” and said, after some prodding, that he could win the White House, Clinton said he would have many liabilities in the fall campaign.

“They’re going to be out there in full force,” Clinton said of the Republicans. “I’ve been in this arena for a long time. I have a lot of baggage and everybody has rummaged through it for years.”

Obama accused Clinton of running a negative campaign, pointing to her attacks last night as further evidence. Obama said Clinton herself could not pass the electability test she was imposing on him. “By Senator Clinton’s own vetting standards, I don’t think she would make it,” he said.

While Clinton criticized Obama for his acquaintance with Bill Ayers, a former leader of the Weather Underground, a violent 1960s radical group, Obama noted that her husband, former president Bill Clinton, had pardoned two members of the same group. With Clinton’s own political baggage, Obama said, “There is no doubt that the Republicans would attack either of us.”

The first 45 minutes of the nearly two-hour debate – broadcast by ABC from Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center – were devoted solely to politics and electability.

Of course, after such bitter fighting words *rolls eyes* the two both began to speak of the need for party unity. Whoo hoo.

After all this mindless squabble, the two finally opened up to debate about… *gasp* …issues!

In the second half of the debate, the two candidates delved into foreign and domestic policy, again airing their differences over whether to meet unconditionally with leaders of rogue countries – he would, she wouldn’t – and on their plans to shore up Social Security. Obama has said he would consider raising the cap on income that is taxed for Social Security, while Clinton has refused to commit to a method for keeping the program solvent.

Both insisted they would fulfill their pledge to withdraw combat troops from Iraq regardless of the situation on the ground, and both said they would cut taxes for middle-class Americans. And neither would be pinned down on whether they supported the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, which is under review by the Supreme Court.

Obama, responding to moderator Charles Gibson of ABC, said, “Well, Charlie, I confess I obviously haven’t listened to the briefs and looked at all the evidence.”

Asked the same question, Clinton replied, “I don’t know the facts.”

There’s just a top notch note to end on.

Barack Obama made some remarks last Sunday highlighting his frustrations with his failure to connect with the white middle American working class- that in turn made it even harder for him to connect with the white middle American working class.  Go figure.

At issue are comments Obama made privately at a fundraiser in San Francisco last Sunday. He explained his troubles winning over working class voters, saying they have become frustrated with economic conditions:

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

The comments, posted on the Huffington Post political Web site Friday, set off a storm of criticism from Clinton, Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain and other GOP officials. It threatened to highlight an Obama weakness — the image that the Harvard-trained lawyer is arrogant and aloof.

Of course the Obama camp went into damage control mode to attempt to defuse the flare-up, and put a little more context to his words.

”I didn’t say it as well as I should have,” he said at Ball State University.

There has been a small ”political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois, who are bitter,” Obama said Saturday morning at a town hall-style meeting at the university. ”They are angry. They feel like they have been left behind. They feel like nobody is paying attention to what they’re going through.”

”So I said, well you know, when you’re bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country.”

After acknowledging his previous remarks in California could have been better phrased, he added:

”The truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important. That’s what sustains us. But what is absolutely true is that people don’t feel like they are being listened to.

”And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives, and what we need is a government that is actually paying attention.

Of course, he still with these comments misses the fact that most of these people hold faith in these same principles and hold the same beliefs in these topics- even when the chips aren’t down.

Hillary Clinton never one to shy away from an opening to show how much she is part of whatever target audience she’s after at the time saw this as an opportunity not only to highlight her opponent’s weakness in this event, but also to show once again, how much she is “one of the people”.

”I was raised with Midwestern values and an unshakable faith in America and its policies,” she said. ”Now, Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it’s a matter of constitutional right. Americans who believe in God believe it’s a matter of personal faith.”

”I grew up in a churchgoing family …,” she continued. ”The people of faith I know don’t ‘cling’ to religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich …

”I also disagree with Senator Obama’s assertion that people in this country ‘cling to guns’ and have certain attitudes about immigration or trade simply out of frustration,” she said.

”People don’t need a president who looks down on them,” she said. ”They need a president who stands up for them.”

Of course, Clinton’s claims to mid-western normalcy ring about as true to some as her accounts of being fired upon while travelling to Bosnia (never happened, in case anyone forgot).  And with that in mind, Vice President Dick Cheney has stepped up to the podium and issued a challenge for Hillary to meet him out in the woods and have a “hunt-off”.

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Vice President Dick Cheney said that a hunting contest between him and the New York senator was “the only way” to determine whether Sen. Clinton’s tales of her gun prowess were for real.

“To be frank, Hillary Clinton’s stories about her adventures with guns don’t exactly pass the smell test,” the vice president told host Tim Russert. “If she really wants to show that she knows how to handle a rifle, there’s an easy way to do that: meet me in the woods.”

While some in the Clinton campaign expressed concern about their candidate accepting Mr. Cheney’s challenge, the idea of a hunting contest got the ringing endorsement of one member of her inner circle, former president Bill Clinton.

“Dick Cheney and Hillary in the woods with guns?” President Clinton said at a campaign stop in Pittsburgh. “Boy, I like the sound of that.”

But shortly after the vice president issued his challenge, Sen. Clinton seemed to back off from her earlier claims of hunting experience, saying that she had “misspoke” about her hunting exploits as a child.

“I fired a gun once, but I didn’t like it, and I didn’t recoil,” she said.

This is probably a wise challenge for her to avoid, as anyone who recalls Cheney’s hunting prowess figures this is just an excuse for him to shoot her in the face.

*“if the highest Shi’ite religious authority demand it”.

It was the first time Sadr has offered to dissolve the Mehdi Army militia, whose black-masked fighters have been principle actors throughout Iraq’s five-year-old war and the main foes of U.S. and Iraqi forces in widespread battles over recent weeks.

The news came on the day Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who launched a crackdown on the militia late last month, ordered the Mehdi Army to disband or Sadr’s followers would be excluded from Iraqi political life.

Senior Sadr aide Hassan Zargani said Sadr would seek rulings from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most senior Shi’ite cleric, as well as senior Shi’ite clergy based in Iran, on whether to dissolve the Mehdi Army, and would obey their orders.

“If they order the Mehdi Army to disband, Moqtada al-Sadr and the Sadr movement will obey the orders of the religious leaders,” Zargani told Reuters from neighboring Iran, where U.S. officials say Sadr has spent most of the past year.

That puts the spotlight on the reclusive Sistani, 77, a cleric revered by all of Iraq’s Shi’ite factions and whose edicts carry the force of Islamic law.

Sistani, who almost never leaves his house in Najaf, has intervened in Iraqi politics only a handful of times but on each occasion his rulings have been decisive.

It speaks volumes for the state of things in Iraq and our considerable poor estimations and cultural misunderstandings that a feat we (including U.S. backed Iraq Prez Nuri Kamal al-Maliki) have been trying to accomplish for years could come to pass on the words of a reclusive cleric living in Iran- a country that our government has no love lost for.

The fighting in Basra and Baghdad has brought Iraq back into the headlines after a long stretch of relative calm following the surge strategy that was put in place as well as a cease-fire called for by Moqtada al-Sadr last year.  With General Petraeus set to report to Washington again in the next few days, including face time with Presidential hopefuls Clinton, Obama, and McCain, it remains to be seen how the recent events will influence talks of withdrawing troops from Iraq, not to mention dialogue about the overall future of U.S. involvement in Iraq.

I’ve been grumpy over the stale mate between Obama and Clinton lately.  It’s really not all that exciting anymore.  I’m feeling a little run down by the constant name calling between the candidates (and the voters).  It’s just getting so… I dunno… blah. 

We just want a Democratic candidate!!

They say that technically, Clinton has no chance of winning.  Obama will statistically have more deletage votes. 

Newsweek broke it down for us a few weeks ago:

…no matter how you cut it, Obama will almost certainly end the primaries with a pledged-delegate lead, courtesy of all those landslides in February. Hillary would then have to convince the uncommitted superdelegates to reverse the will of the people.

Even coming off a big Hillary winning streak, few if any superdelegates will be inclined to do so. For politicians to upend what the voters have decided might be a tad, well, suicidal.

So what good can come out of such a futile battle? Why should we be happy to bear witness to the bad blood developing between Obama and Clinton?

VOTER REGISTRATION.

Get this. 

Democratic voters and registrations are at an all time high.  The Democratic party is spanking the Republicans in voter turnouts and registrants.  For example, in Pennsylvania Democrats have topped 4 million registered voters, the first time either party in the state has crossed that threshold.  That’s a four percent increase.

The Republicans, on the other hand, lost nearly one percent to 3.2 million. 

What this means is that no matter who wins the Democratic nomination, the voters will be out en mass in November.

Look out McCain.  Here we come.

Another set of primaries in the bank- here’s what we know…

Mike Huckabee is out of the race and lined up behind John McCain pretty much confirming what has already been known to the American people- McCain is the all but confirmed Republican Presidential Candidate.

Hillary Clinton picks up wins in Texas (barely) and Ohio (solidly), staying in the fight against Barack Obama, though Obama retains his delegate lead due to the way delegates are divided up in Texas. The Democratic race is likely to continue all the way until the DNC.

Who will McCain pick as his running mate- and how much longer will it be until the Democratic candidate is decided (and who exactly will be the one deciding it?) are pretty much the only questions we have to ask today. So on it goes.