The Only Numbers That Count

Behind the rise and fall of the polls and the trickle of primary and caucus results is the reality of who will pick next President of the United States.

At the Democratic Convention in late August, there will be over 850 super-delegates--governors, members of Congress and the Democratic National Committee, present and former Senate and House leaders as well as former presidents and vice presidents (Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale get a vote).

Even before Super Tuesday, more than one-third of the 2025 delegates needed to nominate have been chosen and are quietly lining up behind Hillary Clinton (at the latest estimate, 181), Barack Obama (80), John Edwards (29) and Denis Kucinich (2, including himself). More than half, 479, are uncommitted. You can see the list here.

Those behind Hillary Clinton include a considerable number of women and DNC members as well as New York and New Jersey Governors Eliot Spitzer and Jon Corzine. Obama has Sens. Pat Leahy, Tim Johnson, John Kerry, Claire McCaskill, Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson. John Edwards' list includes nine members of Congress and the DNC from North Carolina.

The new rules put in place after the 1972 convention were intended to take the choice out of the hands of party machines and kingmakers, but even so, picking the nominees is not a pure (large or small "d") Democratic process.

Then again, we have today's example of power to the people in Nevada. where as Gail Collins notes in her New York Times column, "the number of people in the state who have ever attended a caucus before is probably smaller than the number of people in the state who make their living as Elvis impersonators."

On to Super Tuesday...

Et Tu, Denis?

Denis Kucinich, of all people, turns out to be one of the members of Congress who will have to change their votes if President Bush’s veto of the expanded children’s health insurance bill is to be overridden by the House of Representatives.

Kucinich voted for the original House-passed version of the bill because it included health coverage for legal immigrant children. When this language was omitted in the final bill, he voted no.

“I cannot support legislation which extends health coverage to some children while openly denying it to other children,” Kucinich said.

Rationalization is the prevailing mode for all politicians, but if you chop that sentence in half, Kucinich is saying the bill has to be perfect or else. Meanwhile, the most liberal or progressive or whatever of Democratic presidential candidates is achieving the same result as his presumably polar opposite, George Bush.

If you tell Kucinich that politics is the art of the possible, he will undoubtedly give you one of his idealistic speeches. Meanwhile he has voted to deprive several million children of health insurance.

The Sexy Vegan Vote

If Denis Kucinich has any hope of climbing out of single digitdom in the Presidential race, it may be enhanced by a new study that suggests certain voters may find him irresistible.

The research shows that vegans, who don’t eat meat or animal byproducts, are sexually repulsed by people who do. Of all the ’08 candidates, Kucinich is the only vegan, along with his beautiful wife who is half his age.

They may not be a huge voting bloc, but vegetarians, estimated to be 2.5 percent of the U.S. population, are viewed as strong-minded and vocal in their views.

In rejecting meat eaters as sexual partners in the new study, they see their “bodies as being composed of the lives of others" and don’t want to be intimate with them “because of the smells and tastes of their body fluids."

According to a spokesperson for PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, "Sex is a very effective form of outreach and activism.”