Checking In From Gotham

Hey all, so I've been bumming around New York City for a couple days, as I'm in the area for a wedding. The city really appears to empty out on holiday weekends, so contrary to what you might think it's a good time to be here. Just got out of the Whitney Biennial (guess what, this year the curators decided to highlight self-referential "art about art"! Because it's such an undercovered subject in the modern art world), and now we're hanging at a coffee shop.

On the Hillary/RFK thing, I do think she was making a general point about nomination fights being protracted in recent history, but at Doris Kearns Goodwin pointed out today on Meet The Press, even that premise isn't true. In 1992, Clinton had wrapped up the nomination by April and Jerry Brown was just hanging around without any hope of catching him. And in 1968, Kennedy didn't enter the primaries until mid-March, I believe, and when King died on April 4 RFK was campaigning in his first primary test in Indiana. So comparing pre-1992 primary fights with post-1992 ones is just spurious. This is heavily front-loaded and the math becomes more apparent earlier.

That said, she has every right to stay in the race. But the reference to the Kennedy assassination, which she's actually done several times, is bad form, and I think she really ended up blowing it. I sensed some movement toward a unity ticket in the past few days before the comment, and now I don't think that's going to be at all possible. And it's really all her fault. The blind ambition on display is typical of anyone running for President, but there's something very wrong about an allusion to the assassination of a candidate in the context of a justification for staying in the race. And a Vice President just shouldn't ever draw the kind of attention to himself or herself that she clearly would, and she hasn't shown a lot of tact in the spotlight. So that's done. The unity ticket is dead.