Will the last one to leave the Hillary campaign please turn out the lights?

It was Clinton by a bare handful of votes in Indiana and Obama by a crushing 14% in North Carolina. All the smart money folks now say the only one who doesn’t know the Dem Party race is over is Sen. Clinton.

Matt Dowd, over at ABC, snidely remarks:

What do President Bush and Hillary clinton have in common? Neither had an exit strategy ready.

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Yeah, I’m just guessing. Clinton by 4 in Indiana and Obama by 8 in North Carolina and another month of campaigns in West Virginia, Kentucky and Oregon. Will this primary campaign never end?

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I had a pretty good day today. I went to Barnes and Noble, Borders and Books-a-Million and cut a few random pages out of the last chapter of a few mystery novels, then I went to Homeland and WalMart and filled up my cart with groceries and left the carts mid-aisle and then I went to Paseo and poured a bottle of Ozarka water into the tanks of a few beat up old POS cars.

Hope you guess my name.

David Sedaris on smoking in New Yorker.

Please, kids, don’t smoke. It’s the worst decision of my life that I make 40 times a day. Every week, I have to wipe the haze of soot and bits of sputum off my laptop screen. It’s a nasty, smelly, trashy habit that kills me by the millimeter.

And, God, I love it so.

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I’m not the only one. Here’s someone else with the same problem I have with blogging. AND some of the same problems with dating as Flibbi.

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I just noticed it’s been a week since my last unpost, the video below.

I’ve been spectacularly unengaged lately.

I completely missed the Spring Arts Festival, maybe my favorite event every year, and full-on blew off an obligation to volunteer for Soartstar.

In politics, it’s Indiana and North Carolina and gas tax holiday and Rev. Wright and denunciation and ho f’n hum.

I got asked out on a date and I went and it was … confusing, and now it’s over and I’m back to petting a cat.

I go to my AA meetings and keep my mouth shut and listen and the meetings are good and good for me and the one last night was as usual and I came home and fixed myself a sandwich and some pear halves with cottage cheese and went to bed early.

This week, I’ve been working hard and billing hours and I’ve got lots to do.

Next month, I’ll be taking Mom to Mississippi to visit her sister and the best part is that I’ll get to visit my son Jack in New Orleans.

I’m guessing my new meds are finally kicking in and that it’s to be expected that the highs and lows are never too high or too low. My goal was to get back to work and stop obsessing about trivia and I’ve reached that goal, whatever the price.

I’ve been reading my fellow bloggers with interest. My sister has an exciting new job and I couldn’t be more pleased and Nina is writing about her (non) love life and going out to dinner and it’s a very engaging thread to keep up with and MCARP is on a star tour of photo ops and that makes me laugh because it’s the punctuation to long exhalations about non-attachment. Those three seem engaged in a way that I’m just not right now.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not in any way unhappy. Like MCARP, I’m perfectly content to have no drama in my life. It is a good thing for me to habituate going to bed early, getting up early and going to work and billing hours and coming home and fixing dinner. It’s a good thing to have a fairly set schedule of AA meetings and Wednesday dinner with my Paseo companions. Not only are these things good and good for me and a goal I’ve been striving to accomplish, but it’s also an end to some other very self destructive elements that had been in my life for far too long.

It’s just not very interesting to write about.

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WANTED: Punk band enthusiasts for new band by the name Diebold Blitzkreig. Our first song to rehearse will be a cover of the Ramones’ “Blitzkreig Bop”. C’mon. It’ll be fun. You know you want to do it. Yes, I’m talking about you geezers who read this.

(At 12:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, and 98.9% of the votes counted, it’s Sen. Clinton 54.3%, Sen. Obama 45.7% and about a +10 delegate gain for Hillary. Not bad guessing on my part, he boasted.)

Since guesses about tonight’s primary in Pennsylvania are like belly buttons (everyone has one) and one is just about as good as another, my guess is that the primary will be about 54-46 in Clinton’s favor, with a net delegate lead of 10-12.

That said, I’d like to make a note or two about the fall campaign.

First, something’s happened with the Obama campaign that’s never, to my knowledge, happened ever before. He’s built an on the ground volunteer organization in every one of the 46 states where’s he’s campaigned so far. He didn’t use the Dem Party apparatus of teachers and union members, he built his own 3 million volunteers and contributors. About half of that 3 million donated an average of $100 each to his campaign. He’s declined the “old school” black organizations of street money in South Carolina and now in Philly in favor of his own brand of enthusiastic volunteers. The historical precedents are Goldwater and William Jennings Bryan and they aren’t really that close; Andrew Jackson, who created the Democratic Party in the first place, is the closest of historical analogies.

The unprecedented door to door canvassers and phone bankers are joined by another unprecedented aspect of the campaign.

Almost every voter in America has now seen a variety of repeated television commercials from his campaign. No campaign ever has spent so much money on television and radio for a year before the general election campaign. The vast majority of these ads have been the “meet the candidate” and “hope and change” variety. No Democrat has ever gone through a primary with so many “views” by the television viewing public and few have come anywhere close by the time November arrived and in the next six months, assuming his nomination, he will overwhelm even Republican ad campaigns of the past.

Finally, this is the first “YouTube” campaign. The internet has played a large part in this campaign in an unprecedented way for all three of the major remaining candidates. Obama’s campaign has seemed a quantum leap ahead of the others in this regard. His videos and blogging sites are 90-10 over the other two combined. Think about the Will.I.Am video, just for a single example.

The Clinton and Bush elections were the rise and flowering of the 24-hour news cycle cable elections, the Reagan and Bush I elections were the culmination of the 40 years of the television elections preceding them. It is difficult to assess at this point whether this campaign is like the break from the Civil War to FDR domination of the Republican Party and the Reagan break of Democratic Party domination that followed, but it “feels” like something brand new. I’m not suprised that the TV networks have not figured out how to cover or talk about this campaign, they are too busy with their short cycles of news.

No matter your partisan leanings, this is the first 21st Century election campaign and we are witnessing something remarkable, unique and historic. The political hack and historian in me is amazed. This is all aside from the fact that Obama is a mixed race candidate running against a woman, another remarkable, unique and historic event in America’s democracy/republic.

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The returns have now been made official.

My lying, cheating, stealing, low-down, no-good, so-called “friends” slashed and burned my retirement savings for another $6.00 last night at what was laughingly called “poker”, but what in reality was a “demean and punish” Blogblah night.

Oh, and happy birthday Hitler and Suzanne, your Oklahoma surrogate.

“Bitter”?

Hell yes I’m bitter.

I’m clinging to my belief in God in hopes that all of them will be punished in the hereafter.

mutter mutter mutter … .

They better hope I don’t also cling to my guns.

mutter mutter mutter … .

They better hope I don’t go all McCain on them and really get angry.

mutter mutter mutter … .

Hey, you kids! Get off my damn lawn!

mutter mutter mutter … .

I think I just pooped in my pants.

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