Garbage Time and Trash Talking

I hesitate to raise this point. Supporters of Sen. Clinton have taken her loss very hard, and they have every right to feel that she deserves respect and credit for the incredible race she ran. I was very impressed by how she finished so strong in the last month or so.

But I do think this talk of "winning the popular vote" is a bit disingenuous. By the most fair count (including all caucus state estimates and excluding Michigan, which was not a fair election by any stretch of the imagination), Obama won the popular vote, albeit narrowly. Still, there's nothing wrong with Clinton supporters being proud of her big wins at the very end--IF they also acknowledge the reality that Obama had this thing wrapped up some time ago. That reality seems a little hard to grasp for some.

There's an expression in sports which I think applies here. "Garbage Time" is often referred to in basketball games and football games as a time in the game where the outcome is not in doubt, but the winning team is just running out the clock, while the losing team is doing everything they can to make the score respectable, or pull off a miracle win.

Sound familiar?

(Of course I don't mean to imply that any candidate or state or voting group is garbage. Let's make that clear.)

But In the last month of the campaign, Obama was transitioning to the general election, engaging the McCain team on a series of issues and going to swing states to address voter concerns there. Sen. Clinton, on the other hand, was still campaigning full bore in the final states. Obama could have decided to continue to fully contest the primaries and leave the national stuff 'till later, but I think he was right to move on. If Obama had really contested every state, those popular vote totals would be different. Not that it matters much. But it's a little annoying that even at the end, Clinton was making that "we won the popular vote" claim. It's not true, and even if you accept the Clinton campaign's fuzzy math, it would only be true because of garbage time.

Now that I've offended the few (any?) Clinton supporters who read this blog, I'll move on to John McCain's speech Tuesday night.

Hooo boy, that did not look good. Forget the comparison with the dynamic Obama or the impassioned Clinton, just watch the thing for what it is. An extremely uncomfortable man giving a leaden, awkward speech. The weird thing is, I don't believe the speech was badly written. McCain just seemed incapable of delivering it in a convincing manner. The refrain "That's not change we can believe in," should have been a rallying cry, a phrase with some anger or at least determination behind it. McCain treated it like a punch line in a weak joke, plastering on fake smile every time he repeated the line. I thought maybe he was trying to go for a Reagan-esque, "there you go again," genial feel; but it totally didn't fit the material.

McCain has been trying to talk tough in the early part of this national campaign, trying to make Obama look young and naive, trying to raise fears of appeasement or weakness. But if you're going to trash talk, you better sound like your heart is in it. Because it wasn't Obama who looked weak Tuesday night.