Selling Hillary short
Intrade gives Hillary a 10% chance at winning the Democratic nomination. Tim Russert gives her a 0% chance. Is there an opportunity here?
Hillary has two paths to the nomination. One is for Obama to self-destruct, and it has to be something a lot worse than Bittergate or Jeremiah Wright. The other is to persuade the super-delegates to take the nomination away from the first African-American to get within striking distance of the Presidency. The Democrats couldn’t possibly be that stupid. Or could they?
I’m looking for slam dunks with my Intrade account, and I’m not comfortable betting on the absence of stupidity. A few days ago I sold Al Gore short, of all people. Apparently people thought there was a chance that the Democrats would take the nomination away from both Hillary and Obama and hand it to Gore. I don’t think so.
Today I shorted a Hillary contract. Hillary and Gore can’t both get the nomination, so one or the other bet has to win. If Hillary somehow weasels the nomination away from Obama, my gains on the Gore contracts offset the losses on the Hillary contract and I break even. If Gore gets the nomination, I lose money, since I’ll lose more on Gore than I win on Hillary. If Obama wins, I make money on both bets, and more than if I had bet against only one candidate.
We’ll see what happens. As events unfold, and as the numbers change, I may adjust my Hillary/Gore ratio.
May 26th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
There are many women who feel that Hillary has been treated unfairly..you should have seen the faces of the male talking heads who asked the question, “Who should Obama have as a running mate?” when this woman from Florida quietly said that she felt Hillary was treated unfairly to preface her remark that she would wait and see who McCain’s running mate was before voting for Obama and anyone but Hillary.
There has been a stong bias in TV towards Obama and against Hillary. I think that the powers that be realize that Obama, being just another male who thinks with half a brain at a time will be easier to manipulate than a post menopausal woman who has access to simultaneous information, you know, “women’s intuition.”
Then there are the feminists who remember history about votes for blacks and votes for women and are still pissed about being betrayed and abandoned by black men after the men got the vote.
Sexism is the first “ism.” Racism grows out of it. Having had close relationships with men of many races I know that men, even homosexual men, are far more like each other than they are like women. They are truly color-blind to the feminine aspects of women, it is only because women can communicate in both male and female styles that there is any communication at all between the sexes.
May 26th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
I think the “unfair treatment” claim undermines Hillary’s narrative that she is ahead in the popular vote and best positioned to beat McCain in the fall.
May 27th, 2008 at 4:56 am
Hillary doesn’t say she is being treated unfairly, it is just very obvious. For example in your post of Hillary in a very unflattering picture juxtaposed against a lovely posed picture of Obama which you included as a link.
I personally like to have both parties about equal. If there is a Democrat in the White House, one house of Congress should be Republican dominated. It creates gridlock…and that means that changes come up from the grass roots rather than from bought and paid for elected officials. So, if it looks like Democrats are going to take both houses then I want a Republican in the White House. The less laws that are passed the better. And the more changes that are acceptable to both parties (private organizations) the better.
I wonder what kind of chaos a write in campaign for an independent Ms. HR-Clinton would create???
May 27th, 2008 at 9:30 am
If Hillary got the nomination, would you still prefer gridlock?
May 27th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
If she couldn’t get the polarized politicos to agree on what to do, then yes I prefer gridlock. “First do no harm…” I know that Obama talks about change and that worries me because I don’t think he is old enough to be able to differentiate between the illusion of changes that aren’t different in substance. Hillary would almost certainly guarantee gridlock, so many from both sides rabidly hate her. Why do you think that is?
May 27th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
What I meant was, if Hillary got the nomination, would you still vote for McCain to ensure gridlock? There’s no gridlock if she is President. Her record in the Senate shows that other Democrats will work with her to get things done, regardless of what they think of her personally.
May 28th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
If it were between Hillary and McCain, I would have to cast the historical vote, the same with Obama. But then I would have to see about getting more Republicans in the Senate. Unfortunately, both California senators are Democrats and very popular, Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer; and Representative George Miller is also a Democrat. All of these people hold a position opposite to me on illegal immigration and so I engage in e-mail campaigns to thwart their efforts. So far so good. I think they are very short-sighted as liberals go, the actual problem is that women in “donor” countries don’t have the freedom to control their own fertility - a human rights violation. I don’t think women should be bred like animals to provide cheap labor for corporate profit. If the countries that do this to their women had to face the consequences of over-population they would change. I think that the idea of spreading life-saving medicines has exacerbated the problem. If you have 17 kids because 14 will die before adulthood without modern medicine, then with modern medicine you should have the option of having 3 kids live to adulthood without the stress of having 14 extras. Nobody has this on their radar, but eventually it will dawn just like it did to the Chinese.
I guess our best hope for gridlock as far as passing new policies and laws will be with the Supreme Court which is pretty much to the right.