No, really:

[Clinton's environmental speech] was a tour de force: so deep in the details that the propeller-heads were swooning, yet simple and compelling enough that I could follow it. On the day before his 62nd birthday, I couldn’t help cursing the 22nd Amendment, which limited Clinton to two terms. Heck, he’s still 10 years younger than McCain.

Now might be a good time to mention that Begala has been an employee of the Clintons for nearly two decades, and as a senior political correspondent for CNN during the most recent Democratic primaries (not to mention during the entire 2000 era), he was the clear architect of their unabashedly pro-Hillary bias.

After Hillary lost in the primary, Begala has been relatively scarce on CNN — apparently, he didn’t have anything left to say about the presidential race now that a Clinton wasn’t involved. (Note: CNN took so much heat for regularly featuring Begala and James Carville’s political commentary while they were paid staffers for Hillary Clinton, they briefly kicked them off the air for the final part of the primaries. Now, CNN has a massive disclaimer at the beginning of all his articles disclosing all his Clinton affiliations and promising that he’s no longer on the Clinton dole. Right.)

But now, just before the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, Begala reemerges to claim that neither the Obama nor the McCain presidential tickets are likely to be good enough, and that no one should care who they choose as vice president.

This is an ominous sign for the Denver convention, as Democrats are still worried about what sorts of antics the Clintons and their rabid fans might pull. Clinton is already going to ask that her delegates are seated — it’s considered an “honorary” measure, but it will do nothing to make the party appear unified behind Obama — and Bill Clinton has been wildly unpredictable and bitter regarding his post-primary remarks about Barack Obama.

Most people think the Clintons will do all they can to help Obama win. I’m not so sure. They seem to still be considering an Obama win tantamount to a Clinton loss. And Paul Begala’s timely reemergence is not a good sign.

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It’s 25,000 people who have “signed” an online petition, sponsored by a pro-Clinton group, “VoteBooth.” And considering the fact that online petitions regularly gather hundreds of thousands of votes, coupled with the fact that 18 million people voted for Hillary Clinton during the primaries, it seems to me that 25,000 people is a remarkably low number of participants.

And, to quote a colleague of mine over at Melted Reel, “we all know how effective online petitions are, and how seriously everyone takes them…” </snark>.

CNN, of course, is taking it very seriously. How odd! An international news outlet taking time out of its busy schedule to report on the tallies of various online petitions… I wonder why CNN is so interested in Hillary for VP.

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Makes sense, and the clues were clear.

But, in one last political power grab, undermining the media and surely making their campaign look foolish when Clinton does “suspend” her campaign tonight (or whatever word she chooses), Terry McAuliffe has released fake angry statements today about the AP report.

“Clinton will not give up! Victory or death! The media hates us!” seems to be the general theme of the faux-outrage.

I concede my earlier statement — Obama would, sadly, not be helped by having these people become a part of his campaign. The fact that they can’t keep their story straight, and apparently will keep politically posturing in the face of reality no matter what the cost — it’s just too much of the self-defeating “permanent campaign” everyone hates about Washington.

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How about: painfully obvious code.

Clinton’s speech tomorrow, the media has *somehow* found out (I wonder how) will feature her saying things like she’s prepared to do “whatever it takes” to get a Democratic victory in November. Brilliant analysts at CNN have deduced that the phrase is a secret code for Hillary’s desire, or at least willingness, to be Barack Obama’s Vice President.

First, it’s no secret: that’s what the last two months of “no one can win but me!” have been all about. And second, CNN knows exactly what she’ll say, and exactly what she means, because CNN’s employees also double as Clinton employees.

This has been covered ad nauseum on this site.

But will Obama take the bait? He can do whatever he wants and not make a wrong decision — her message conflicts with his, and she represents ‘the old way.’ But also, her supporters would be soothed by her VP role — something which remains appealing, even though most of them have come home to Obama.

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Only 16% of the Puerto Rico populace turned out to vote in the primary, which amounts to around 300,000 people.

That’s less than a quarter of Clinton’s prediction of “over two million voters.”

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A very big, very good day for Obama.

First, we have the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting, which took place today to decide what to do about Hillary Clinton’s much-bemoaned issue of seating the delegates from primaries in Florida and Michigan, both of whom broke the rules and theoretically deserved no votes at the convention. And the DNC, if you can believe it, almost followed its own rules.

(Analysis below the photo)

Among the millions of pounds of minutia discussed was the fairly straightforward issue of awarding a state which held an unapproved primary only “half-votes” at the condition, which is what they decided to do with both states. This is a huge boon to the Obama campaign, as it keeps him well within reach of the “magic number” for a delegate majority. (It also bolsters the potential Clinton argument of having won the popular vote, because it gives her more votes than Obama in each state.)

But that’s not all! Obama also quit his ridiculously controversial church this evening, which is the best possible thing he could ever have done. Now, whenever the pastors from that church get out of hand, no one can somehow suggest that Obama actually agrees with what insane religious zealots say. (As if, by the way, anyone actually believes the stuff they usually hear in church on Sunday.  …Okay, some people do.)

So, a stiff jab followed by a crushing uppercut, and suddenly Hillary Clinton and John McCain had better watch out — they just lost the only two things which have ever hurt Obama.

And they lost them on the same day. Ouch.

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Here’s the video — commentary below:

At first, it seemed like she had gone crazy — she had finally lost control of her already weak grip on reality, and started to publicly root for the death of Barack Obama. But it wasn’t true.

No, she didn’t go crazy until Sunday.

As of today, she is using her mouthpieces at CNN to both blame Obama for the fact that people are outraged, not her own foolishness, and also to claim that her mention of RFK had nothing to do with Obama, saying:

I was deeply dismayed and disturbed that my comment would be construed in a way that flies in the face of everything I stand for — and everything I am fighting for in this election.

She also blamed the editor of the New York Daily News, who was nice enough to give her Op-Ed space to explain herself, and Bobby Kennedy Jr., for god’s sake, for “misinterpreting” her comments.

And obviously they were misinterpreted. No, Robert Kennedy, a man who died on his way to becoming the nominee of the Democratic party, obviously has nothing to do with Barack Obama, her opponent, who happens to be a man on his way to becoming the nominee of the Democratic party. The only possible alternative, of course, would be that she was comparing herself to RFK. So… let’s just not delve too deeply into that possibility.

No, definitely not.

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Ever since May 6, when she lost heavily in North Carolina and barely managed to scrape out a win in Indiana — a state which was supposed to represent her base — Clinton’s behavior has been odd, to say the least.

Barack Obama’s status as the party’s eventual nominee seemed to be a certainty rather than a mere likelihood. But Clinton ramped up her rhetoric, choosing to loudly repeat her argument that Obama couldn’t win, rather than live out the remainder of her candidacy in reserved grace.

Some of her comments, such as repeatedly asserting that working class, white citizens would never vote for Senator Obama, seemed to be nothing more than political posturing — predictable, if damaging, ploys designed to rally her supporters in the remaining contests.

Other claims, however, were less obviously useful. And far less obviously true. For example, a mainstay of her campaign this month has been the idea that she is ahead in the popular vote, which she is not. Even if one assumes that she is softening our ears to the argument in preparation for the day it becomes true, which her campaign hopes will happen after Puerto Rico, it doesn’t change the fact that telling this lie with a straight face makes her seem either manically delusional or maniacally Karl Rovian — whichever you think is worse.

But now, today, we can safely say what it was all for. We know the argument that no one but her can win over certain demographic groups, bolstered by the claim that she is the new Al Gore — winner of the popular vote, but pitied loser of the prize — it was all meant to make her irresistible as a Vice Presidential candidate.

We know because her campaign, which up to this point had been mum and ambivalent about whether she would even accept a VP spot, launched a media blitz this morning which was so orchestrated, so calculated, and so transparently contrived that it had already been picked apart and disproved by lunchtime.

First we have Bill Clinton’s brand new interview with Time Magazine, in which he implies that Hillary deserves “nothing less” than a Vice Presidential bid.

That was the opening shot.

By 9:00 a.m. on Friday, rumors were flying around in the media, most of them from CNN, about alleged “secret negotiations” between the Obama and Clinton campaigns for Vice President. And it is no secret that the rumors started with CNN — the network still counts top Clinton advisers James Carville and Paul Begala among its employees.

The scuttlebutt ranged everywhere between talks that were already underway between the two campaigns, which Obama adviser Davide Axelrod decried as false on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,’ and threats from CNN’s political team that Clinton’s people were planning “Open civil war” within the Democratic party if she was not offered the VP spot.

These are false. All of them. After other cable networks immediately picked up on CNN’s outlandish claims, they actually went and checked with the Obama people, who swatted down the rumors, and the stories were largely gone from the front pages and TV news updates by midday.

But these rumors, which you must remember did not come about organically, but instead via a media firestorm initiated by the Hillary campaign, are meant to do the same thing the Clintons have been doing for nearly a month: to transform the Hillary-as-VP dialog from a possibility to a foregone conclusion.

Will it work? It seems terribly draconian to me. It doesn’t just smell of the old, selfishly opportunistic, strong-armed politics that Barack Obama has campaigned against for over a year now — it reeks of it.

In the end, it will all come down to how well they sell their argument of inevitability. Will the demographics still favor their storyline a month from now? It’s hard to say. But the Obama campaign hasn’t been interested in conventional wisdom thus far, and it’s hard to imagine them starting now, suddenly buckling under the fictitious muscling of the last, most desperate vestiges of the old regime.

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Oh, if only I was joking.

I’m very familiar with Ellsworth, and he’s honestly a stand up guy. And to be honest, his personality is that of an Obama supporter — fresh, idealistic, ready to have a chance to look at things in new ways. So it’s no surprise to me that he voted for Obama.

I suppose he wanted to follow the way his district/state voted when he declared for Clinton, but he’s clearly on the fence now, and has said repeatedly that his support for Clinton is conditional, and “not an endorsement.”

Sounds to me like the Clinton camp will have lost at least one more superdelegate by Friday.

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