Introducing Donkeylicious

Nicholas Beaudrot and I have started our own political blog, Donkeylicious. I hereby refer you there for all your werewolfish political commentary needs. As of today, War or Car is complete. It will stay up as long as the internet permits, a monument to three trillion dollars wasted on killing people for no good reason.

I only met Nicholas this summer, but he and I were blogging together during the weekends on Ezra Klein's site for two years, and then for the last year on Cogitamus after Ezra got fully absorbed into the American Prospect. He's excellent with numbers, and he was putting up some awesome county-by-county maps during the primaries to understand what was happening. This was the secret to his super powers. Here he is on February 11, 2008 -- almost four months before Hillary Clinton ended her campaign:

It's over. I'm calling it. When all is said and done, Barack Obama will have a Florida-and-Michigan-proof lead among pledged delegates (68 or more) to convince enough superdelegates to earn the nomination.

Even if Clinton manages a narrow loss, tie, or narrow win in Virginia, Barack Obama should win Maryland and DC handily. Combined with a likely big win in one of his home states (Hawaii), he'll have roughly a 100 delegate lead going into the Wisconsin primary. Let's be pessimistic and assume Obama loses by 15%. With 75 pledged delegates, that means his lead will drop to the high 80s.

We're now all the way to the Ohio and Texas primaries, with a total of 334 pledged delegates at stake. To claw back to a draw, Hillary Clinton will have to win a whopping 61% of them. There's no way that can happen; the only state where Clinton has managed a margin that large is Oklahoma. And remember, this is the pessimistic scenario; if Obama wins Virginia by 15% as polls indicate, and can play two out of three between Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to virtual draws, he'll have lead large enough that Clinton will have to pack it in.

So, yeah, he's good! As for me, I'm basically going to be doing the kind of political blogging there that you might remember from the halcyon days of this blog. With the election behind us, I'll be free to spend more time on more technical philosophy-blogging here.