Case in point:
1. Hillary Clinton on calls for her to drop out of the race.

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it.

Great, Hill. So I guess we shouldn’t vote for Obama because he might be assassinated! Good timing, too, for the Kennedy family.

2. Clinton asserts that the reason she hasn’t secured the nomination already is sexism. A May 19 WaPo article says:

In an interview after church services in Bowling Green on Sunday, Clinton for the first time addressed what women have been talking about for months, what she refers to as the “sexist” treatment she has endured at the hands of the pundits, media and others.

Compared to racism, she says:

The manifestation of some of the sexism that has gone on in this campaign is somehow more respectable, or at least more accepted,

Great. When you’re ready to stop whining and driving a stake through our party, let us know, Hillary.

American politics is a dog and pony show of the lowest order. Despite the worldwide coverage our presidential elections generate, the attention is hardly deserved. It’s not rocket science; it’s not even political science.

The high-minded among us would like the democratic process to be a contest of ideologies fought in the halls of power. Instead, a presidential campaign is a bare-knuncle brawl between two beauty queens with enornous sums of cash and a legion of expensive stylists. Are you smarter than a 5th Grader? If so, try to tone it down. All that fancy policy talk won’t fly at the Iowa State Fair or Koop’s Frozen Custard.

How do I know? I worked on the frontlines of the 2004 presidential race in Seattle, Washington. Seattle is the most educated city in the United States, where more than 25 percent of residents have at least a bachelors degree. It’s also one of the bluest enclaves on the West Coast. In spite of these fact I heard an unimaginable litany of irrational, inarticulate reasons why people were voting for George W. Bush and why they couldn’t stand John Kerry. Ideas had nothing to do with it.

Pop quiz: how did the Kennedy clan first make its money? If you answered bootlegging and other questionable activities, you are a winner. While we love the notion of Camelot or the image of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s casket, the reality of our politician’s private lives is something different entirely. We should be distrustful of any person who claims to want to lead us, but instead we follow politicians like sunflowers in the early morning light.

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In case you haven’t noticed, lots of fuss has been made about gender during the Democratic presidential primaries. Although we all know American society has been colorblind since the 1960s, a few naysayers are still trying to make race an issue this time around. Shame on them!

Far more enlightened thinkers than myself have pointed out that all of America’s latent prejudice and sexism has been brought to the fore as a nation that twice elected George W. Bush contemplates whether a black man or a white female is the more palatable candidate. While the popular notion seems to be that misogyny is a stronger motivator than bigotry, with male Democrats and Independents turning out for Obama because women have no place in politics, it could simply be that gender takes a back seat to disliking Hillary for who and not what she is?

Imagine for a moment that Oprah Winfrey was in the Democratic presidential race. Oprah’s face is instantly recognizable to millions and her show is and has been the most popular daytime network program for over a decade. If she were to campaign for herself, she would wallop both candidates because her name is a household word and she possesses unlimited financial resources. The claim that she is a political novice would be a non-starter because Oprah is ostensibly one of the most successful American entrepreneurs of all time, controlling a multi-billion dollar media empire which she built from the ground. What’s more, she generates ratings for her television show by using her money to dramatically improve the lives of people in need. She’s a self-made fairy godmother. Oprah might face many of the negative, misogynistic portrayals that have beset Hillary Clinton, but she would easily overcome them because her success is not due in any measure to her relationship with a man. Furthermore, she certainly doesn’t need to be president, the way Hillary seems to.

Hillary has been canny enough to characterize attacks against her as mere woman hating, but the truth is they are character assaults. Playing the gender card has thus far been a smart way to deflect the substance of most Clinton-bashing as sexism. What Maureen Dowd called “kill the witch syndrome” could just be your run of the mill resentment. Many in the electorate harbor disdain for Hillary not only because of what she is–the wife of former President Bill Clinton, but who she is, or who they think she is. Hillary has gone to great lengths to point out she is her own person, but over the past week voters in eight successive states have responded that they don’t like who that person is.Sorry Hill, but Democrats no longer have to vote for you. I hope I’m not onto something here, but people may have finally rubbed the Clinton pixiedust from their eyes.

As soon as John Kerry conceded Ohio in 2004, the Democrats began scrambling to find a national candidate to take on the Republicans in 2008. Indiana Senator Evan Bayh was on an extremely short list of candidates which included Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean. Although she denied she was even thinking about the presidency until after her reelection in 2006, no one doubted she would declare her intention at some point. When she entered the race she knew she wasn’t loved, but Hillary was already a national commodity so her candidacy was swathed in inevitability.

People have made the argument Hillary wouldn’t win because Americans don’t like legacies, though the Roosevelts and Kennedy’s tested this notion long before the Bush-Clinton-Bush swaps of my entire conscious life. Beyond the legacy issue though, Hillary has fooled herself into thinking that her past, her husband and her persona don’t matter. Americans are desperate to rebound from the truncheon of seven years of Bush and Cheney, but many are starting to realize they deserve better than a 2-for-1 Clinton co-presidency. After Bush 43, our expectations for the conduct, intelligence and personal integrity of politicians is at an all time low. When Hillary stepped into this moral vacuum, we were desperate for anyone electable.

Of course Hillary knew it would be hard, and she knew the media would pound her, but what if there is truth some of the lip flapping? Remarks about her wrinkles, cleavage and clothes may be immaterial, but what about claims that sleeping in the same bed as the President doesn’t makes her qualified? If another woman of national caliber, such as Oprah, were in the race she would have to contend with many of the snipes Hillary has weathered gracefully, but few Americans bring with them as much baggage as the Clintons.

On Super Tuesday I spoke with Columbia College Dean Kathryn Yatrakis about why she pulled the lever for Hillary, but likes Barack. Hillary, she said, would make very good cabinet appointments if elected. This is a hard point to argue, but Americans don’t think this far ahead. A 25-year-old pal of mine recently broke it off with a fuckbuddy because she still doesn’t know who is running for president. In the knockdown, drag out world of presidential politics, aptitude is worth bubkis. We’re not actually talking about running a country, the candidates are just selling themselves as the best person for the job.

While Hillary is right to feel she has gotten short shrift from the media, she set herself up for it. She may not be evil, but she is hard to like. On stage she doesn’t shine like Obama, she’s a female politician and she’s a Clinton to boot. I think America is ready for a female politician, but Hillary is not it. Few women aside from Oprah can match the brand name recognition of Hillary Clinton, but very few carry with them such a volatile legacy. Almost any other equally capable woman would stand a better chance because Hillary is too poorly liked and she tried to convince herself otherwise. Our national sport may be baseball, but when it comes to elections our national pastime is forgetfulness. On this count Hillary is guilty as charged.

Try explaining the Democratic party’s primary delegate award system to foreigner and you’re in for a headache. Last night, after a party, and ostensibly wasted, I tried my best to explain to a German sleeping on my couch how Democratic state primaries award delegates proportionally, unlike the winner-take-all system of the Republican primary cycle. Forget an explanation of why we do it this way in the first place. Good thing he didn’t know about superdelegates, otherwise I would have been at a complete loss.

Truth be told, I didn’t know a thing about superdelegates until three weeks ago. Even worse, I worked in electoral politics before enrolling at Columbia. Now I like to throw talk of superdelegates into my electoral spiel, trying to sound like an expert, but it’s a nebulous addition to our arcane nomination process.

Since Super Tuesday, former first daughter, Chelsea Clinton, has been making calls to superdelegates in an effort to secure their support for her mom. Whoopi Goldberg notably switched her endorsement from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton, while MSNBC’s David Shuster was suspended for saying he felt “Chelsea Clinton was being pimped out by her family in some sort of way.”

In today’s New York Times, Tad Devine, Democratic megawonk and former campaign strategist for Al Gore, describes the origin of the superdelegate system before laying out some of the pitfalls of allowing elected officials to sway the primary process before ordinary citizens are done voting.

If the superdelegates determine the party’s nominee before primary and caucus voters have rendered a clear verdict, Democrats risk losing the trust that we are building with voters today. The perception that the votes of ordinary people don’t count as much as those of the political insiders, who get to pick the nominee in some mythical back room, could hurt our party for decades to come.

Although it was meant to unite the Democratic party, the superdelegate system wreaks of cigar smoke and backroom politics, one of the reason why I can’t stand Hillary in the first place. Although the Obama campaign is also working hard to secure commitments from superdelegates, it once again feels like they are reacting to Hillary’s increasingly-desperate maneuvers to lock up the nomination by any available means.

I’m not a first-time voter, in fact, this will be my third Presidential, but I swore last time I would leave the country if Bush was re-elected. I’ll admit that I didn’t go as far as packing a bag, but it has taken nearly this long for my faith in America to be restored. The Obama Phenomenon not only represents a candidate, but the summation of the America I cherish; a country of ideals where the dreams of millions of immigrants have become a reality. After two questionable Presidential elections, people’s faith in our democracy is at an all time low, myself included. Millions of energized young voters are being brought into the process by the prospect of electing America’s first black or female president. If the Democratic candidate is chosen by superdelegate votes, this will confirm a falsehood believed by all young voters; their votes don’t matter. Devine says,

The damage would be amplified if African-Americans or women, two of the party’s key constituencies, feel that a candidate who represents their most fervent hopes and aspirations is deprived of a nomination rightfully earned by majority support from voters.

Obama may have a messy desk, but it’s no reason to usurp the nomination by stealth. Should the erosion of Hillary’s primary campaign happen slowly enough for her to secure the nomination outright, at least it will be a legitmate victory. I doubt she cares either way. Now that I’m well versed in superdelegate mendacity, I am free to explain to my foreign visitors why we have an electoral college.

Lisa Lewis isn’t sure. Although she does a good job of weighing the usual pros and cons of Patriots perfection (pro: history! con: they’re fucking assholes. Trust me, I’m a Redskins fan).

I actually have no answer to this post’s titular question. The Jets and Patriots harbor a bitter hatred towards one another, and their early season hijinks have given rise to a classic intra-division blood feud. But what’s good for the Giants is, by definition, bad for the Jets, especially since a Giants victory would probably replace the Jets’ 1969 Superbowl win as the greatest upset in NFL history.

And speaking of dilemmas. Over at Slate, John Dickenson saves you whatever time you were going to spend reading about last night’s debate:

Also, both campaigns think they’ve picked the right final strategy. Clinton is ahead in the polls; she doesn’t need to tear down Obama. Obama thinks he has the momentum after his win in South Carolina and the big Kennedy endorsements and doesn’t need to go on the offensive. Plus, they can still do the mean stuff in phone calls and mailers and through surrogates. (emphasis added)

Dickenson suggests that last night’s debate was a manufactured lovefest in spite of offering some scattered moments of substantive policy discussion. And manufactured it was: both candidates avoided raising the character issues that plagued the last Democratic debate, as they correctly realized that such petty bickering reflected as poorly on the state of the party as it did on the individual candidates. But this is America. Innuendo and petty bickering win elections.

Policy positions lose them, and Clinton said something that will likely come back to haunt her, should she become her party’s nominee: “the tax rates will go back to what they were before Bush became president.” Really, Hilary: have you, victim #1 of the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” learned nothing? Rehashing the Kosovar refugee fiction didn’t help her either (click on the link to find out what she was really doing in the Balkans in 1999. I’ll give you a sneak preview: not an awful lot)…

Only once a week? Do your research, New York Times editorial board. Not that they aren’t dead-on correct here…

HERE IT IS YOUR MOMENT OF ZEN: “The authors are from the Center for Hip and Knee Replacement, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY.”