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Today, April 22, 2008, is the day of the Pennsylvania primary election.
For the first time in memory, my vote in a presidential primary might
actually have some bearing on who is nominated.
Hillary Clinton and
Barack Obama have much at stake in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary.
Clinton is expected to win, but a narrow win will be interpreted as an
Obama victory. An outright win by Obama would likely result in calls for
Clinton to throw in the towel, and those calls will be hard to resist.
Anything less than an Obama victory, however, will leave the Illinois
senator ahead in the delegate count, but the nasty fight between the
candidates will continue, with the final party nominee being determined
by the so-called superdelegates (the “party pols” of the poem), who are
mostly party leaders of one sort or another. Many believe that the negative
campaign ads of recent days benefit Republican John McCain as much as
the subjects of the spots.
I began writing the
poem above on my way to my polling place, Stephen C. Foster Elementary
School.
The second verse,
which contains something of a hidden message, uses the sort of rhyme
scheme I played with in my earlier poem “Sunday
Afternoon.”
Hillary Clinton, of
course, won the Pennsylvania primary, and she supposedly did so by 10
percentage points, the pundits’ declared minimum for considering her
victory “real.” In fact, with 99% of the districts reporting,
Pennsylvania’s Department of State Web site this morning reports only an
8½% difference in the voting, which still
gives her nearly 19% more votes than Barack Obama. What this means is
anyone’s guess, since Clinton or Obama will be running against John
McCain in the fall, not against one another. The Clinton victory
certainly means that the battle between the Democratic aspirants will
continue, perhaps with ever-increasing nastiness. Superdelegates may
indeed determine the Democratic presidential candidate in 2008
— LED, 4/23/2008
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