[I'm stickying this not because I think it's the best post EVAH but because it comes as close as I can come today to naming and claiming what's happened in the primary season so far, and looking forward at what is to be done. Maybe this relates to bringiton's grand coalition. I know it has something to do with PB 2.0, though I'm not sure what.]

The village is a sack of pus waiting to burst.

But nobody's pricked it. Yet.

I accept that Obama is the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee for President. The superdelegates, as we argued all along that the rules said they could, decided, and they decided for Obama, presumably for good reasons. So count me a tepid Obama voter come November.*

Modulo the sunshine issues with FL and MI, Obama's nomination is legitimate enough. Given the givens.

But the system in which Obama got the nomination?

Illegitimate as all get out.

1. Start with the press picking our candidates for us again. They threw out the left and right sides of the spectrum by denying Paul and Edwards oxygen. Hillary's coverage was unrelentingly brutal and sexist; they were openly rooting for her to lose. And they denied us Gore in 2004 -- and arguably, in 2000. The Howler has chronicled all this for us with incomparably nauseating detail. And this year, the press uncritically propagated just about every meme that the Obama campaign distributed -- from Obama smearing the Clintons as racist after NH, through making the pledged delegate count "the magic number" to "clinch" (only votes can do that), through the doctored "War Room" video, through propagating Obama's RFK smear, and on and on and on.

2. Continue with the undemocratic nature of the caucuses that were responsible for Obama's seizing control of the narrative in February and for his margin of victory this month. Je repete: The caucus system disenfranchises whole classes of voters, and in states where caucuses are combined with genuine, secret ballot elections, caucus voters have more weight. (I thought that 3/5 of a person thing went out at some point in the 1860s?) Combine that with a complete lack of transparency and auditing, and you've a system that no small-d democrat should be supporting. Some of this material is on the record already; and the story of the 2008 campaign won't be fully told until it's all on the record. The caucus system is rancid. HoHo probably thinks they're like Vermont town meetings, but Vermont is a tiny state, and the town meeting doesn't scale.

3. Finally, if, as many suggested, Obama had supported re-votes in FL and MI, there'd be no question about his legitimacy at all. Since he didn't, he gets an asterisk. Unfortunate, but a problem he created. And a Clusterfuck it may have been, but it's a Clusterfuck whose outcome the DNC had been gunning for all along, so it's hard to avoid the suspicion--pace bringiton--that the whole mess was less accidental, and more purposeful, than might appear. (See under People, Corkscrews, Twisty As.)

So much for the legitimacy of the system.

Now let's talk about the only real winner in the election so far: The Village.

0. I've been saying all along that with McCain/Obama we were looking at a choice between the right, and the center-right (with nothing for liberals** except insofar as we can shove the Overton Window left through our own efforts).

1. The Village wins because the sack of pus that is the press is more swollen than ever.

2. The Village wins because the Obama campaign dishonestly and systematically reinforced every right wing meme (trope) engineered to take down the Clintons. And since anyone who accepts that version of history can't reason from correct premises, this pollution of our discourse has huge consequences (like Obama blaming "the battles of the 90s" on both sides. Simply not true. And those who believe it are, sorry, FITH).

2. The Village wins because every fucking Democratic loser and weakling for the past two decades has signed on with the Obama Movement, starting with Tom Daschle and ending with the Demomcratic leadership we elected in 2006 to do something, anything about the Bush administration, and that ended up sending out a bunch of Sternly Worded Letters and asking for a lot more money to, ya know, do something this time.

3. The Village wins because our tribunes of the people in the blogosphere folded like deck chairs the minute they got a whiff of power -- Exhibit A, the doctored "War Room" video, propagated in Drudge-like fashion without a shred of self-criticism or remorse -- then, amazingly, got nothing for their full-throated commitment.

4. The Village wins because "the real enemy" -- artificial persons, corporate entities who have more power than real people*** -- are more powerful than ever. Exhibit A: Telco immunity still on the table. Exhibit B: Single Payer is somehow controversial. (Readers, I'm sure you can come up with Exhibits C through N.)

5. The Village wins because the smarter and more opportunistic Republican operatives in the creative class have migrated to the Democratic Party, pulling it right, toward libertarianism. Arianna; Kos; Andrew Sullivan; and many others.

6. And the Village will win when there are more Blue Dogs in the House than there are now. Think things are bad now? Just wait.... Especially on things that the netroots cares about, but which go under a National Security umbrella -- like telco immunity, warrantless surveillance, net neutrality.... (This makes the D vs. R idea a little more nuanced. If the house always wins, all that matters is that you work for the house.)

So, while I would never claim "they're all the same" -- the same argument that marginal differences are not insignificant that I used for Hillary vs. Obama goes for D vs. R, and at least the D's don't glory in torture -- it seems clear to me that, whether the right wins, or the center right wins in November they'll both be out to fuck me--and more than Hillary would, since I'm in her base, and not in Obama's. Shock Doctrine, anyone?

So it behooves us to get the analytical tools and the language in place to prick the sack of pus now, yes? Others can handle the horse-race. Anything that drags the Overton Window left is good. If PUMA gives liberals some leverage, good. Another way forward is to do exactly what Hillary's speech gives us the mandate to do: Demand specifics from Obama on policy (and suggest better ones).

Oh, and anyone looking for oppo on the Republicans can check out our five years of archives; it all comes from before our tribunes of the people pissed away the media critique, so maybe it's all the more valuable for being old. Me, I'd start with Republicans torturing animals and Republican sex abusers (of course, the Republicans are all mixed in with the Christianists, who apparently now we have to suck up to, but you sort it out).

Anyhow, I'm bored to tears with the horse-race coverage, more power to others who want to do that! Anyhow, the Obama folks deserve to work with people they're comfortable with. And given that I'm a racist, that couldn't be me.****

NOTE * I wish people would stop saying the Democratic Party is a family. It isn't. It's a political party. It exists to further my interests and those like me -- which include soft power issues like justice, and public policy issues like universal health care. It's nothing like a family. I've got no duties to it, and no love for it or in it. And if it's not doing what I think it should do, then I'm not the one who needs the attitude adjustment.

NOTE ** Since the "creative class" [cough] has already destroyed the "progressive" brand.

NOTE *** I think there needs to be a movement to reclaim our own bodies from the corporations that treat us as "human resources." That's how I'd move beyond the National Feminist Party to The National Human Rights Party -- while keeping the focus on "our bodies." Posts on gardening, and wine-making, and cooking, along with a general promotion of lack of deference, are essential to that mission, not peripheral. Gardening and wine-making and cooking can all reclaim our bodies. When I garden, I'm not a human resource, but a person, me. Not so when I watch the teebee, for example, or experience the light hypnosis of a supermarket. (This also implies non-violence, ahimsa.)

NOTE **** It's a shame that the Obama campaign cried wolf with false charges of racism to smear the Clintons in the primaries, because now nobody's going to believe them when it really happens in the general, but presumably, having run a flawless campaign, they've got a plan to work around that...