Before the presidential primary campaigns got serious around the middle of last year, there were a couple of consensus assumptions: Hillary Clinton would waltz to the Democratic nomination and John McCain could very well be the first Republican knocked out.
Here at the end of February, Clinton is hanging by her fingernails and is clearly campaigning in a desperate style, and McCain has all but wrapped up the Republican race.
So how did things go so wrong for the conventional wisdom? Call it the revolt of the middle class. The rest of us struck back against what "they" told us what would happen. We were tired of what "they" kept telling us. We were sick of those who "they" were thrusting upon us, a queen-to-be awaiting her coronation, a slick and clever corporate CEO, a trial lawyer, a career bureaucrat who assumed we would ignore his various indiscretions.
What we told those people was that they weren't going to get a free pass for getting us into the mess that we're in: a souring economy, troublesome relations with countries that should be our friends, a failed system of education that's crippled our competitiveness, and a southern border that's been rendered meaningless. Don't get me started, there's more I could add in, but you know already.
For all their faults -- which are many -- Barack Obama and John McCain spoke to us plainly and positively and didn't try to sneak anything past us. They both will take office with the intention of getting things done. Now the choice will be between competing versions of what those things should be, instead of character failings.
The people have spoken.
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No strategery is going to bring Clinton back against Obama. If her message hasn't caught on with people by now, and her personality hasn't won her admirers, then she will lose no matter what she does. Only good old-fashioned hardball politics leading into the party convention can save her candidacy now.
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Okay, just who thought that the partial resignation of Fidel Castro would change things in Cuba and why would they even think something like that? Uh, the brother, Raul the enforcer, open up the political and economic system? Laughable. Go back and see who told us that this was a great opportunity for change, then ignore them in the future.
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"Duh" news item of the day. A study by associate professors at Wellesley College and Rutgers University shows that U.S. born adult males are imprisoned at a rate 2.5 times above those of immigrants.
As we've pointed out on this blog before, my observation from years of covering crime and court news is that the problem with immigrants from the south of our nation is drunk driving and, to a much lesser extent, domestic violence. They're not going around assassinating Ma and Pa Kettle like some claim. Sure, there's individual exceptions, but if they're rare enough to point out, then they're certainly not the rule. Plus, DUI and DV cases almost always result in probation and victim-impact classes, not prison, so these convicts won't show up in their figures.
Secondly, immigrants who commit crimes are less likely to be apprehended than U.S. citizens. There are quite a few open murder cases I can think of just off the top of my head in my neck of the woods in which the suspect is believed to have fled to Mexico.
Finally, while it's probably not a big deal where the results of the study are concerned, the authors do not differentiate between legal and illegal immigrants. No one cares about legal immigration. It's the illegal border crossings that people want to stop.
