It’s recently come to my attention that Hillary Clinton and I have more things in common that either of us might have thought. A non-exhaustive, likely-to-be-updated-per-comments list is below the fold.

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Drudge’s election day reports are almost always wrong, so but if he’s right this time about a 15-point loss for the Hildebeest, Operation Chaos may soon be in chaos itself. As a registered Republican, I can’t do much about that, but if you’re a registered Democrat or independent in this state, you can. Keep Hillary’s campaign alive, both for Rush’s reasons and because quite frankly, if a Democrat victory is a given this year, President Billary would be the lesser evil.

Meanwhile, in the primary that I can vote in, I plan to vote for Fred Smith. Pat McCrory struck me as a decent guy, and actually made the better imporession of the two in the recent Civitas debate, but John Hawkins thinks McCrory is a RINO, and as a recent transplant who’s almost as clueless about state politics as most people are about the national variety, I have little choice but to defer to John. I am curious, though, as to what kind of RINO McCrory (allegedly) is. From where I sit, RINOs come in two classes:

1. Real RINO. If this guy gets the nomination, we might as well cede the general election to Moore or Perdue, ‘cuz a Democrat is really going to win anyway. Examples of Real RINOs: Lincoln Chafee, Jim Jeffords, Michael Huffington (back in the days when they pretended to be Republicans at all). Depending on what issues you care about, Mike Huckabee may warrant the label also.
2. Quasi-RINO: OK, not really Republican in name only, and certainly better than any Democrat, just not Republican enough for one’s taste. Examples: John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Bush (definitely the first, and arguably the second).

My sense is that McCrory is more of a Class 2 RINO than a real one, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Errr, I mean, if we come to it, which we won’t if Smith wins.

UPDATE: Looks like Drudge was right for a change. At the local level, McCrory it is, so here’s hoping my sense about him was righter than my sense about Drudge being predictably wrong. Type 2 RINOs I can deal with, Type 1, not so much.

Captain Ed thinks that incomepoop Al Franken is finally on his way out of politics. One can only hope.

… how much Dan Besse’s campaign had to pay the Whizz Urinal not only to endorse him themselves, but also to run five letters praising him and zero letters opposing him on a single day.

The Democratic Primary may not seem all that nice, but according to Politico there’s a lot of much nastier stuff Clinton and Obama would like to say about each other but can’t.

H/t: Dean Esmay.

A new ad in North Carolina has gotten quite a buzz lately for daring to say bad things about the Democrat candidate who is supposed to be worshiped rather than challenged. Oddly enough, no one is attacking it on the merits, which they certainly could do since attacking two gubernatorial candidates for endorsing a guy who has a cozy relationship with another guy takes guilt by association to a whole new level, but that’s neither here nor there. Jason Zengerle of Beauchamp Central the New Republic thinks the ad is intended to benefit Hillary Clinton rather than any of the Republican gubernatorial candidates, writing:

What they didn’t mention at all is that the North Carolina GOP ad is intended to help Hillary in the May 6 primary. I mean, if the NC GOP really wanted the ad to help McCain, wouldn’t they be running this ad in October or November? This is clearly an attempt to play the race and the Wright card against Obama in the hopes of hurting him in the Democratic Primary. Which suggests that there are at least some Republicans out there who still think Obama is the more formidable general election candidate.

Methinks Zengerle made one typo: reminding voters about Obama’s racist chums makes an issue of his alleged racism, not his race. Thus, it is properly described as the “racism card,” not the “race card.” That said, while I agree that Zengerle’s explanation of the ad is plausible, I do not believe it is the only plausible explanation, nor even the most plausible one. Other possibilities:

1. The ad is intended to depress Democratic turnout in the primary and boost participation in the Republican one among independents, who are free to vote in either party’s primary.
2. Similar to #1, but the NC GOP is in the tank for a specific candidate (e.g., Orr or McCrory) who they expect would benefit disproportionally from such cross-over votes.
3. The NC GOP considers it a fait accompli that Obama will be the nominee, and is getting an early start on making sure 2008 doesn’t become the first year since 1976 that NC carried the Democrat nominee.
4. Similar to #3, but the NC has a certain amount of money that can only be spent on certain issues (e.g., state elections) or at certain times (e.g., in advance of the primary), so they are running this ad now rather than a very similar ad when they’d really like to run it.
5. The ad really is intended primarily to hurt both Democrat candidates for governor. They don’t care which one wins, only that whoever does be inextricably tied to Obama, not because he’s the more extreme Democrat candidate, but because he’s the one the NC GOP expects to be around in November.

Personally, I lean toward #5. I don’t see an attack on Obama, who is the odds-on favorite to win the NC Democratic Primary, hurting any other Democrat in that same primary. I do see a strategy of joining the Presidential nominee (whoever they think it will be) and the gubernatorial nominee (whoever it turns out to be) at the hip. Why? Simple: because NC voters usually elect Democrats as governor, but almost never elect them as President. If the presidential and gubernatorial candidates are generally perceived as two separate items in a cafeteria, the Democrats will likely win one race while the Republicans win the other. If they’re viewed as a package deal, Republicans win both.

UPDATE: No, Mr. McMaverick, just because a maverick state party declines to take marching orders from the suits in DC does not mean it is out of touch with reality. Your meddling, however, does raise questions as to whether you are out of touch with a very specific reality that the North Carolina gubernatorial race and your presidential campaign are two different races. Here’s an idea every maverick can love: don’t tell us how to run our campaign, and we won’t tell you how to run yours.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire has more.

I’ve heard more than a few talking heads say that the Democrats’ answer to the House of Lords, better known as the superdelegates, would never vote for the candidate who lost among democratically elected pledged delegates. If that’s true, why have superdelegates at all? That said, I do tend to agree with those who say the super-duper-pooper-scooper delegates would never overturn both the elected delegate count and the popular vote. Suppose we end up with a choice between the two? I’m torn between the following theories:

1. The Supreme Soviet of Delegates will vote to uphold the pledged delegates, thereby proving once and for all that their sole function is to give losing candidates false hope.
2. The Dear Leaders among Delegates will vote to support whoever wins The Popular Vote^TM, for the simple reason that they haven’t gotten over the 2000 election. This theory could get particularly interesting if the question of who won The Popular Vote^TM depends on whether or not Florida, let alone Michigan, is included in the tally.
3. Moveon.org, having bought and owned (pwn3ed?) the Democratic Party since 2004, will finally take possession of their property and nominate Obama.
4. The royal family will interpret the delegate / popular vote split as giving them cover to vote for the candidate of their choice. Upon examining the candidates, they conclude that Obama is an unelectable hack, and will nominate the candidate who has a better chance of defeating McCain.
5. The DeBeers of Democracy will interpret the delegate / popular vote as guaranteeing that no matter what they do, half of all registered Democrats will become convinced that their election has been “stolen,” thereby all but guaranteeing that the winner of the election will have only half the party behind him in November, running against a Republican most Democrats don’t mind all that much anyway. So they write off the 2008 election as either (1) unwinnable or (2) equally winnable for both candidates, and look to the long-term interest of the party. “Stealing” the election from Hillary will piss off her supporters in the short run, but they’ll get over it by 2012. “Stealing” the election from the black guy will remove a core constituency from the party for a generation or more. They nominate Obama.

What say you? Any other plausible scenarios I missed?

Of accolades from Patterico, Powerline, and anyone else who is either committed to victory in Iraq, or at least not so strongly committed to defeat that they’ll sacrifice every other issue under the sun for a promise we can lose the war rather than win. That’s OK, I’m sure that what he loses in support among conservatives, he’ll make up in newfound adulation from Andrew Sullivan types who aren’t conservatives themselves, but love to lecture conservatives on what “real” conservatism supposedly is.

Me, I’m mildly disappointed but not terribly surprised. I gave up on the guy a long time ago.

UPDATE: Beldar has more.

“I didn’t inhale.”

Given the recent news (olds?) on Barack Obama’s wacky brand of Christianity, you’d think that those idjits who harped about “Barack Hussein Obama” as a secret Muslim would be feeling rather embarrassed these days. You’d think wrong. It doesn’t matter that their original story was baseless, silly and 100% wrong. All that matters to these guys is months ago, they told us something really crappy about Obama’s religion, and now the MSM has “vindicated” them by showing that yup, there really is something crappy about Obama’s religion. It’s almost as if some nuts had claimed in 2004 that John Kerry wasn’t really a Vietnam veteran at all, or that he had enlisted in the North Vietnamese navy rather than ours, and then claimed vindication when the SwiftVets surfaced and told us what a crappy U.S. sailor he had been while serving in the Vietnam War.

Tom Maguire has a good piece on the more sensible and deserved attacks on Obama’s disturbingly cozy relationship with Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright. Of particular interest is his note that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth originally surfaced early in the primary season, only to be resoundingly ignored. My sole criticism of the group had long been the “fact” that they sat on the news until Kerry’s nomination had been sewn up. The silliest angle of all, I think, is that Obama should get a pass on Wright because he engaged him as a spiritual adviser, not a political one. That’s like saying “Don’t judge me by Mr. God-Damn-America, voters, I only look to that guy to find out what I’m supposed to really believe, not what I’m supposed to say to you to get elected.”