David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. Obama steals the show, but Clinton (and McCain) take California
John McCain, in declaring his front-runner status, saluted Mike Huckabee to cheers and also congratulated Mitt Romney, to considerably less applause. That means Barack Obama got to speak last – everyone else was the warm-up act; he got to be headliner. But, then again, no other candidate wants to have to follow one of Obama’s rev-'em-up soliloquies.
Obama – who has won 11 states, compared to Hillary Clinton’s eight, including (as projected) California, with Missouri still up in the air – took the stage before McCain finished his speech.
MSNBC and CNN cut away to Obama, no doubt anticipating yet more verbal pyrotechnics; Fox News, unsurprisingly, stayed with McCain.
Was Obama’s interrupting McCain intentional? That’s going to be parsed pretty intensely, no doubt.
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama declared in his inclusive fashion. “We are the change that we seek.” And then he reprises his “Yes We Can” meme, which puts every motivational speaker on the planet to shame. Not like his South Carolina speech, but, you know, still charisma-heavy.
Fox News’ Brit Hume conceded “his characteristic charisma,” and pointed out a woman in the background reacting nearly ecstatically to his speech, noting that when it comes to politics, “Emotion is critical, too.” Does Brit have a man-crush on Barry (FYI: the name he went by when he attended Occidental College)? Has he ever said anything this remotely positive about a Demo(n)crat on FNC?
But, still: Consensus is still no one knows anything, yet, wait, McCain’s probably a given, now that he’s just been projected to take California. Obama and Clinton have essentially split the difference tonight, though the momentum seems to be with Obama (though Clinton’s spin will be his momentum may have been stalled given that he didn’t come close to clearing the table).
Clinton has said she wants a debate a week! Even MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann groans, noting that there’ve been so many even viewers at home have moderated one at this point.
CNN’s Larry King and Gloria Borger proclaim Romney a big fat loser. “Huckabee’s upstaged him in every way,” Borger says of Romney, which is apparently intended to underscore just how big a loser Romney is. More talk about Huckabee as McCain's running mate on all channels. On MSNBC, Matthews declared Romney’s Mormonism as his problem. Also that he won a couple more states after he had already been written off.
Aside: Only Clinton and Obama referenced the tornados and its victims in their speeches.
(Didn’t check into ABC’s coverage much since, when I did, it seemed they were just trying to get viewers up to speed with the cable news networks’ coverage. Didn’t watch CNN much because I didn’t buy enough wine to put up with Wolf Blitzer; their BREAKING NEWS Emails arrived hours after they were breaking news. And let me just suggest that the networks’ graphics departments overthought this a bit too much.)