These people who are all Hillary's voters in the bag on her inclusion in the ticket - if they're so in the bag, why the fuck didn't they vote for Kerry either, despite Bubba and Mrs Bubba campaigning for him?

I don't think it's about policy differences at all, Gyuri. I'm saying people don't like his style. I;m saying people don't trust the rhetoric. I'm saying people find parts of his stump speech too heavy on the abstract and not heavy enough on the meat and potatoes. I'm saying people don't think he can relate to them. And it has nothing to do with him sending a "hate signal", either.

In the end, a President is someone Americans have to live with for four years, in their living rooms most every night. My feeling is they tend to elect the guy they'd prefer to have at a backyard barbecue. On that score, this race shapes most like '88: neither candidate is a lock. The primary difference is that McCain, as a non-incumbent Republican, has to deal with an unpopular Bush in the White House, whereas Bush Senior had a popular (if slightly demented) Reagan, which you would think would give Obama an advantage.

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Apart from the single mother bit, anyway...

Um...right. That's true, isn't it?

Why is it that we only hear about his father, ans not his mother? Didn't I hear somewhere that she lives in the UK?

Gramsci, I really think you are massively wrong on all of this.

Obama has connected with "real people" more than any candidate of my political life, with the possible exception of RFK. He's brought massive numbers of new voters into the system and convinced a huge number of people who never contributed to a campaign before to do so. There hasn't been a meat and potatoes stump speech for any winning presidential candidate since JFK (HRC's certainly wasn't one, either).

He currently has a problem with voters who are very uncomfortable with black people, especially black people who are better educated, wealthier and more articulate than they are. It is a highly regionalised problem, as all of the data have repeatedly shown. I don't think it is fatal at all, and I think he is very much devoted to trying to connect with as many of those people as he can between now and November.

And even if you are right, bringing HRC and Sideshow Bill onto the ticket isn't going to solve any such problem, while it will cause a huge number of other issues, as even HRC's supporters realise (look at Rendell is saying, for instance).

Obama's mother is dead. There actually was an article about her in Time about two months ago, so you can read more about her in Purves's new time waster.

It starts off mentioning when she took him to see the movie Black Orpheus, one of my all-time favorites but which he hated. I'd still vote for him, though (smiley emoticon).

Not surprisingly, I agree with all that Ursus says, with the one caveat that I would hesitate to hold Rendell up as an authority on anything, for fear of giving him any credibility (as he's likely to spout of nonsense at a moment's notice).

Though not really meaningful in any way, I do love the fact that Obama went all LBJ on Lieberman yesterday.

Agreed that was excellent. Someone has needed to woodshed the c*nt for years.

Also agreed that Rendell is the epitome of a loose cannon, but if the issues are so obvious that even he sees them . . .

Rendell wants the Flyers to play the Penguins outdoors at Beaver Stadium at Penn State annually. I think that's a brilliant idea. I'd love to tailgate in the winter for a hockey game. That would be awesome. Bettman says it's "intriguing" but he wouldn't want it to be annual and is afraid the weather would not cooperate. I thought the weather not "cooperating" was the whole point.

Er...as you were.

Whatever I said about Rendell earlier, please quintuple for that jackass Bettman.

Excuse the inside-blogging post, but one of my favourite ever bloggers, Jesse Taylor, has recently returned to Pandagon after many years off air. And he's been hitting them out of the park ever since. Go check him out.

I agree, GY. It's nice to see him back.

Definitely worth a visit, if just to see the "Obama meets Farrakhan" video near the top.

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Obama has connected with "real people" more than any candidate of my political life, with the possible exception of RFK

Certainly, if you look at those fundraising figures someone (I think it was GY) put up a few pages back, it's obvious that there are lots and lots of people who back Obama and many of them are first-time voters. That's all well and good.

But how do you explain the fact that 49.5% of Democrats chose to vote for another candidate - many of whom did so even after it became perfectly obvious he was going to be the nominee (he may be the first candidate since the adoption of the primary system to win a nomination despite losing a majority of contests from the month of March onwards)?

As Gyuri notes, it wasn't because his policies were particularly different from HRC's. It was because substantial portions of the democratic vote don't seem to like or trust him. Obama's numbers among those without college education are just plain ugly.

It seems to me you can either chalk that up to racism or you can chalk it up to the fact that he just doesn't connect well with those people. I'm sure the former is part of it; I just think the second is a pretty significant factor.

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As Gyuri notes, it wasn't because his policies were particularly different from HRC's. It was because substantial portions of the democratic vote don't seem to like or trust him.

Or because substantial portions of the Democratic vote like and trust Clinton. I'm not going to dismiss the racism in the Appalachian primaries, but at the end of the day Hillary was a strong candidate with an effective and very well funded GOTV machine. The fact that Obama outraised her in total and in potential for future funding is very impressive, but it tends to obscure the fact that she raised more than any other candidate in history apart from Obama.