Tonight Obama clinched a majority of pledged delegates

With tonight's results in Indiana and North Carolina, Barack Obama has now clinched a majority of pledged delegates. He won 66 in NC and 34 in IN.

After today there are 37 mini-races left in the remaining primary states and PR. Obama will be viable in all of them.

The percentage threshold for viability is very low, and Obama has been viable in every single district in the country where delegates have been awarded. That means the bare minimum number of pledged delegates he will get in the last six primaries is 37.

That, together with tonight's results, put him over the 1627 delegates needed to win a majority of the pledged delegates.

• The Obama website says that he has 1593 pledged delegates after tonight. Add 37 and that is 1630.
  
  
• If you use the Obama pledged total from the Green Papers, which is 1589.5 and then add 37, the result is 1626.5. Demconwatch uses GP as its source, so they show exactly what GP shows, by hook or by crook.
  
  
• However, Amot, one of the Demconwatch bloggers, made a convincing case that the real Obama total was 1.5 more than what GP showed at the time of Amot's posting. GP had shown America Samoa and Louisiana as having 0.5 and 1 fewer Obama delegates, respectively, than he believed was correct. GP now has the correct AS split of 2-1. So just correct for LA (i.e., add 1) so that 1590.5 is the Obama total, in which case 37 more is 1627.5.
  
  
• GP also shows 1 fewer Obama delegate each for Texas and Washington, as well as 0.5 delegate less for Democrats Abroad, as compared to Obama's site. Amot says that the results of the caucuses in those two states are not final yet, and apparently GP and Obama have different sources. He also says that the 4.5 - 2.5 split for DA is correct, not the 5-2 split that Obama's site has. So subtract 2.5 from 1593 to get 1590.5, which agrees with the previous bullet item.
  

The Magic Number after Guam and LA-6

We have a new superdelegate today after Don Cazayoux won the special election in Louisiana-6, in a district that Democrats ordinarily would not win.

The results below are based on the Obama website.

Delegates:	Pledged	Super	Total	Needed
Obama	1,494	258	1,752	273
Clinton	1,336	275	1,611	414
Remaining	404	263	667
(2,025 delegates needed for victory)

The Magic Number

The Magic Number
Based on http://origin.barackobama.com/resultscenter as of May 2.

The Magic Number(2,024 delegates needed)
Barack Obama	1,747	278
Hillary Clinton	1,608	417

My 3 Top Issues: Poverty, Health Care, War

(After I was elected as an Obama pledged delegate, the Obama campaign asked me to fill out an information form. One question asked me to explain my top three issues. Below is my response.)

Basic principles drive my positions on the issues. Jesus the Christ directs us to Love God, Love our Neighbor, Help the Poor, and Help the Outcast. As a result, the three issues that are most important to me are poverty, healthcare and the Iraq war.

• Why should any child suffer from poverty, hunger and lack of health care, when we, the wealthiest nation in the world, have the resources and the means to eradicate suffering among our most vulnerable citizens, our nation’s children, who have no voices?

• For 47 million Americans to be without health insurance, and for a very high proportion of them to be children, is just plain wrong. Even in the absence of this shocking truth, for our government to deny the basic dignity of health care for all of its citizens is an immoral transgression.

• Why should we continue to squander our treasure and the lives of our military heroes in Iraq at outrageous expense to our society? If we instead used these precious resources wisely, think of the social injustices that could be effectively addressed, the societal good that that could be procured, and the wrongs that could be made right, most of it here within our own borders.

My views on poverty, the war, healthcare and government’s role are exemplified by the following quotations:

• “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.” – Thomas Jefferson
  
  
• “Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.” – Edmund Burke
  
  
• “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.” – Jane Addams
  
  
• “Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” – Paulo Freire
  
  
• “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke
  
  
• “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” – MLK Jr.
  
  
• “Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.” – Edmund Burke
  
  
• “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” – MLK Jr.
  

Poverty:

• “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” – FDR
  
  
• “For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. …Then these righteous ones will reply, `Lord, when did we ever see you hungry and feed you?’ Or thirsty and give you something to drink? … And the King will tell them, `I assure you, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!’ ” – The Gospel of Matthew
  
  
• “Of course people cannot contribute to the nation if they are never taught to read or write; if their bodies are stunted from hunger; if their sickness goes untended; if their life is spent in hopeless poverty, just drawing a welfare check.
  
  “So we want to open the gates to opportunity. But we're also going to give all our people, black and white, the help that they need to walk through those gates. My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican-American school. Few of them could speak English and I couldn't speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast and hungry. And they knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them, but they knew it was so because I saw it in their eyes.
  
  “I often walked home late in the afternoon after the classes were finished wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew, hoping that I might help them against the hardships that lay ahead. And somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.” – Lyndon B. Johnson

War:

• “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.” – MLK Jr.

• “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.” – MLK Jr.

Healthcare:

• “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” – MLK Jr.

Obama vs Clinton Health Care Plans

As I said that I would do in my last post, I have studied and compared the high-level information on the health insurance plans of both Clinton and Obama. Just as I was finishing this post, I read the following:

Regardless of the Presidential campaign and proposals, it is important to have strong better options coming out of Congress.

Here are the four simple questions to ask of any health care proposal:

1. Is it Universal (covers all people)... but just that is not enough, you must also find out how the proposal deals with items 2, 3 & 4:

2. Is it Comprehensive (does it cover all needed conditions, prevention, treatment)?

3. How much is it going to Cost Individuals; is it affordable year-in and year-out and can you afford to get sick (their total cost in taxes, premiums, deductibles, copays, uncovered conditions/expenses, total out of pocket...)?

4. How much is it going to Cost Overall, total cost of the system to the country (and yes, we do need overall cost-control); and how is it paid for, and who is paying, all the pieces, direct and indirect?

As it turns out, these are also the concerns that I had in mind and that shaped my analysis. For that analysis, I used the side-by-side comparison found here. The comparison breaks out the provisions of each plan in 13 categories.

I think the merits of each plan can best be assessed by digging deep into the details to a greater degree than is presented at the link above. However, I have based my comparison on the information at this link, and it still took me a fair amount of time to do so. So of course, there are questions that I have that would require still more detailed information to answer (the devil is in the details, as they say). But I will use what I have, which I think is more than most voters would stop to consider.

I copied the table at the link into a Word document and appended an extra column in which I entered my comments. I also inserted some of my questions in the text as I was reading through the document, using the Insert, Comment menu function. These can be viewed by selecting the View, Markup menu function or the Show, Reviewing Pane function on the Reviewing Toolbar.

I used yellow highlighting for provisions that I considered most noteworthy. I used other highlight colors to point out some important provisions in both plans that are similar or identical to each other.

Based on my comparison, there are four important categories in which I judge that Clinton’s plan has an advantage over Obama’s plan, based solely on the information in the document. These are:

• Expanding access to coverage
• Premium subsidies to individuals
• Premium subsidies to employers
• Changes to private insurance

On the other hand, I am concerned about the effect of each plan on the national deficit. The estimated cost of Clinton’s plan when fully phased in is $110 billion per year. At that level, I wonder how we will prevent the deficit from ballooning even further out-of-control. My hope is that we as a nation would have the political will to re-set our national priorities to emphasize health care for all over war and dubious, unnecessary, multi-billion dollar weapons programs.

Obama’s plan is estimated to cost about half of Clinton’s plan. If economists and accountants agree that it actually would cost that amount, then that fact could make it more politically palatable in order to get it passed. I am still skittish about the 1994 collapse of national health care. The best plan in the world isn’t worth anything if we can’t get it passed into law.

Is Clinton’s plan far-and-away better than Obama’s? I don’t think so. However, based on what I now know, I do judge Clinton’s plan overall to be the better plan.

"Why are you for Obama rather than for Clinton?"

In my campaigning to be elected as a California Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention, one of the people I contacted by email wrote back:

Can you explain why you're for Obama rather than for Clinton?

I will be honest--and I'm embarrassed to admit it--but I know very little about their platforms. I know that Paul Krugman thinks that Clinton's health plan will cover twice as many people as Obama's. That seems very important. Also, heard on the news today that Obama's (military?) adviser thinks that the Iraq pull-out should start in 2010.

If you've campaigned so furiously for Obama, you must think he is the better candidate--and I assume that you think that he will put better policies in place.

What about beating McCain? My feeling is that Clinton would have a better shot at beating McCain.

Since you are so active politically, why not have an email list of like-minded acquaintances who you communicate regularly with? I would like to be on that email list!

Here is how I replied:

The last week (before April 13) has been kind of crazy. I was at the San Joaquin County Democratic Central Committee on Saturday, Alameda County Central Labor Council on Monday, Stockton Democratic Club on Tuesday and the Tracy Democratic Club tonight. The good part is that things are looking really positive for the election in which I am running.

I picked up some voter lists at the San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters office when I was there yesterday. These are for the precincts surrounding Williams Middle School in Tracy. On Saturday we will be walking the neighborhood asking Democrats that live near the school to come on out and vote for Lea (Austin, my “slate-mate”) and me.

Our party is blessed to have had three great candidates, each of whom could have made or will make an excellent president, or even be among the greatest presidents. I have the utmost respect for all three of them, including Senator Clinton. I do not seek to disparage any of our candidates. I would have voted and will proudly vote for any one of them
as our party's nominee.

You raise some good questions, and that led me to dig up some information that compares the healthcare plans of the three people left standing. I will study that information carefully. I think that both of the Democratic plans are far superior to what we have now.

As for troop pullout from Iraq, everything I have heard from Obama's own mouth says it would start in 2009.

Yes, I do think that Obama is the better candidate, in fact the one candidate that would be able to lead our country in the new direction that it desperately needs to go. I think that his policies would be more progressive than those of the Democratic Leadership Council to which Senator Clinton belongs. The DLC is a centrist organization that operates mostly to the detriment of the necessary future direction of the Democratic Party, in my opinion.

A big factor in my support of Obama is his judgment. I have the utmost confidence in his judgment to say and do the best thing in any given situation. I also admire his world-view, largely based on his childhood upbringing, as well as his innate vision of what our country can become and what needs to be done to get us there. I believe he will restore our integrity among the community of nations. I think he will demonstrate bold vision as president and implement bold initiatives, and even accomplish these things with bipartisan support. His can be a transformative presidency, rising above the partisanship that wreaks havoc in Washington, and leading others above it as well. Unfortunately, I think that Senator Clinton suffers from too much negative perception among many Americans, and that would seriously impair her ability to accomplish the same thing.

On the electability question, I feel strongly that Obama will beat McCain and that Clinton would have a much tougher fight against McCain than Obama. I have talked to people, including Republicans, and observed polling results that show that Obama will draw significant support from independents and even Republicans, which would not be the case for Senator Clinton.

By the way, I am not trying to win over Clinton supporters to vote for me instead of attending their own caucus. Each presidential candidate already has a determined number of delegate positions, and I figure that it would be an honor and a privilege for me to fill one of Obama's slots and represent the 11th Congressional District as one of Barrack Obama's pledged delegates.

As for communicating with other like-minded acquaintances on a regular basis, I will most definitely be doing that on Kephalos!

Obama's Army

Current TV is showing their footage of Obama's Texas operation. Check out that woman in a cowboy hat about 2 1/2 minutes in. Is that Maggie Fleming?

Great, inspiring video:

http://current.com/items/88906122_obama_s_army

Poor Judgment

Who is the epitome of poor judgment?

From lawprofessor at DailyKos:

From here on out, Dems, and especially Obama, who has made his own good judgment a major campaign theme, should be tying McCain to the phrase "poor judgment."

As one of the Keating Five, McCain was officially
reprimanded for having "poor judgment."

He showed poor judgment in supporting the decision to invade Iraq and continues to show poor judgment in wanting to stay there.

He shows poor judgment in continuing to embrace and validate the poor judgments of a president with a 19% approval rating. And the very most charitable characterization of the NYT revelations is that McCain has consistently exercised poor judgment in his association with lobbyists.

"Maybe they're just not into you."

Karen Tumulty of Time has an online article that quotes a senior Democratic strategist close to the Clinton campaign. I think the strategist hits the nail on the head. It's what I've been thinking for some time (emphasis mine):

But it's possible that the most difficult problem is not Obama; it could be Clinton. How can she retool her message — and her identity as a virtual incumbent — to resonate with an electorate that seems to yearn more for change than any other quality? Says one longtime Democratic strategist, who is close to the Clintons: "Fundamentally, she is who she is; she can't change who she is, and maybe this is not her time."

Disclosure: I support Barack Obama, and I am a volunteer for his California campaign.

9iu11ani's Daughter Supports Obama

I knew that Giuliani was estranged from his kids and that his kids were not going to campaign for him, but this tops even that.

Something Strange in Sarasota

Dan Tokaji's Blog has this:

"Any proposed reforms should of course await the results of the audit and recount to start next week, but one thing is already certain: sound election administration depends on people and procedures, not just machines."

and

"(I)ncidents like those in Carteret County [North Carolina in 2004] and Sarasota County are extremely serious and warrant careful scrutiny.

Fortunately, that appears to be what's happening. A recount of the election, along with an audit of Sarasota County's system, is scheduled to begin Monday. That audit will reportedly include parallel testing of the voting equipment -- a procedure that, in my opinion, should be done routinely in every election. There are a number of possible explanations for the high number of undervotes. One is the configuration of the ballot, which some voters have complained made it difficult to notice the race. Another possibility, and a far more serious one, is that voters actually made a selection for the race but that the machines for whatever reason failed to record them."

The search for the missing votes

Candidates Head To D.C. As Florida Audits Votes has this regarding the race with the missing 18,000 votes in Katherine Harris' old district:

The audit of Sarasota County's 13th District race will include ballot accounting, tabulator performance and forensic analysis, Secretary of State Sue Cobb said in a letter to Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent.

Officials will also conduct at least two "parallel tests" of the voting equipment, using four of the spare machines that were not used on election day.

What are the nuts and bolts of how these will be done? Please let me know in the comments.

These Republicans Deserve to Lose

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert