March 4th Primary Results

Big night last night at the polls. The Republican nominee looks to be locked up, with McCain taking all 4 primaries last night and mathematically eliminating the Huckster. I'm a little sad. I would have loved to see the GOP attempt to justify running a candidate, like Huckabee, who denies almost every established scientific truth in the name of Gawd, and who believes we need to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage and a few other equally crazy positions. It would have been fun to see GW's vision of a unified GOP/Christocrat ticket cause the Republican Party to go down forever in a ball of flames, scandal, and shame. Alas, it is not to be. But fear not, Lovers of Truth and Sanity, McBush is still more than capable of destroying his party, and it remains a near certainty that no candidate running as the Second Coming of Bush, on a platform of No More Jobs and Tons More War, will ever win a spelling bee, much less the highest office in the land.

On to the news that matters, the Dems. Ok, so I am an admitted Obama supporter, just for the sake of full disclosure. So last night was a little tough for me to take. Obama looked poised to sweep Texas, which would have made it extremely difficult for Clinton to justify staying in the race. Yet, results via cnn.com:

Ohio: Clinton 54%(62 delegates) - Obama 44%(46 delegates)
Rhode Island: Clinton 58%(12) - Obama 40%(8)
Texas: Clinton 51%(16) - Obama 48%(10) ***Caucus Results Still Pending***
Vermont: Clinton 39%(6) - Obama 59%(9)

Not quite the Obama hammer-blow most folks were looking for. Clinton is a tough ol' gal, and she's not going anywhere without a fight. Obviously, Ohio was a big win for her, and RI was an unexpected windfall. That state was going to Obama, according to the ever-fallible Conventional Wisdom. Obama dominated VT, as was expected.

Texas is the big story. An incredibly close race, and the full results are still in the works. From my amateur understanding, Hillary took the overall majority in TX, but Obama may have "won" the state. We're still waiting on the results of the caucus to determine the final delegate allocation, but the talk is that Obama might actually walk away with more delegates, as he won the more populated precincts with more delegates to offer. This is still an unclear point as of now, as the results of delegate assignments are still coming in. In either case, Obama led the race before March 4th by 150 delegates, and after Clinton's wins last night, he still leads by something around 140 delegates. And there are only few hundred left to assign, so if the split continues to be 50/50, it will be extremely difficult for Clinton to close the gap. Hillary won some big states last night, but states don't get you the nomination, delegates do, and right now, Obama is flush.

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