Mr. Pierce is out there concern-trolling Hillary Clinton, or that's really the wrong way of putting it, because his concern is plainly sincere (he's glad to say that she's "the only sane and plausible choice available" and that the added benefit of electing a woman president is a "genuinely big honking historic deal"), and sort of meaningless in that he doesn't seem to doubt she'll win in any case, but the effect is trollish all the same:
as a seeker of votes, as an applicant for the world's most powerful temp position, for the second time in a row, she's proving to be something of a mediocrity. I realize that the results last night in West Virginia will not mean very much down the road. They are products of skewed demographics and the playfulness of a number of voters who would not vote Democratic in the fall if you paid them in gold to do so. I realize that a large part of the difference between her winning margin in 2008 and her losing margin Tuesday night can precisely be measured as the difference between running against the "black guy" and having worked for the "black guy." I also realize that she only lost the delegate count to Bernie Sanders 16-11, which does little to slow her grim and inexorable march to the podium in Philadelphia this summer. But, dear god, she really leaves West Virginia
with a very clean clock.
How clean? Well, Jesus, Charlie, 234,027 voters showed up (in an open primary) to vote for a Democrat, giving Bernie Sanders 51% of the vote to 36% for Clinton (the bulk of the balance going to local attorney Paul T. Farrell, Jr., representing the zombie coal industry, insisting if you keep pretending it's not dead it might turn out to be alive). Whereas in 2008, there were 359,910 voters in the Democratic primary splitting 67% for the same Hillary Clinton and 26% for young Barack Obama. That latter is what I would call a dear-god clock-cleaning. Whatever happened to young Obama, by the way? Did he find some more friendly career opportunity where he wouldn't have to depend on that vote-getting?
