Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Thursday, May 08, 2008 )

A Live Blog of the North Carolina-Indiana Presidential Primaries*

4:00 p.m. While we wait out the early results, Hillary Clinton is once again mentioned by commentators as a favorite among working-class and blue collar voters who see her as being “one of them.” Given that Clinton comes from an affluent suburb and sat on the board of Wal-Mart and went to Wellesley and has made tens of millions of dollars in the last 10 years with her husband, working class voters rephrased themselves and said they liked that she was white.

4:15 p.m. Interestingly, both Clinton and Obama are now campaigning as underdogs.

5:15 More waiting. Now that we’ve got a few extra minutes, a little history trivia: Indiana is the state that made Ezra Pound want to leave the United States and become an Italian Fascist.

7:00 p.m. About half the voters at the exit polls say that the controversy over Barack Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright has swayed their decision, while the other half said it did not. But 100% of those asked say that they only tolerated this completely insubstantial media-concocted flap because policy discussions about whether or not everybody should pay into a national health care plan were a little too rarefied for them.

7:10 p.m. Obama has a beer.

7:20 p.m. Hmmmm….buffalo wings!

7:30 p.m. North Carolina polls close, and all the networks call it for Obama. Now comes the racial drill-down of the numbers that is sure to lift us all up as a people.

7:45 p.m. Is Joe Six Pack happy?

7:46 p.m. He’s OK. But he’s glad you asked. He was feeling a little sensitive and glad somebody paid attention to him for two minutes, even if it’s just people using him momentarily for political vantage. He’s kind of bashful about his Joe Six Pack.

7:55 p.m. Indiana certainly took a long time to finish voting. Are there some 1960 Chicago-style shenanigans going on here?

8:00 p.m. Rush Limbaugh’s “operation chaos” is working, as Republicans who hate Hillary Clinton are voting for her anyway to undermine the Obama Express. Now if Rush Limbaugh’s fans were actually going to vote for their own candidate John McCain in the fall, the rotund radio host might be on to something here. But since they’re not, it seems that Limbaugh is still just a garden variety idiot.

9:15 p.m. Obama says congratulations to Clinton for her win in Indiana.

9:16 p.m. “Are you patronizing me?” Hillary asks. “What the hell is so bad about Indiana.”

9:17 p.m. Gary, Indiana has still not come through. Was Obama too early when he called Indiana for Clinton? Who does he think he is, Wolf Blitzer?

9:30 p.m. Hillary thanks you for your support. “I’m broke,” she chuckles. “No, really.”

10:00 Clinton says she’s going to work hard to win the necessary 2209 votes. Wait, 2209? Oh! She’s including Michigan and Florida. Funny. Unfortunately, nobody told her: Those delegates were all drowned in butts of malmsey wine. C’est la vie.

1:30 p.m.–Mark Antony gives a speech using verbal irony and rhetoric to turn the common people against Brutus and Cassius. … I’m sorry, that’s not right. What I meant to say was that NBC’s Tim Russert uses shambling, hedging, veiled insinuations in an attempt to turn the super delegates against Hillary Clinton.

*OK, it wasn’t really live blogged. I did it after the fact late at night. If I could do it live, I’d be working for The New York Times, people.