Obama: The Kim Campbell of this race

How deep a conversation can you have in 20 minutes? Especially if you have an agenda that has "prepared the ground" for this conversation. Tongues are wagging after a 20-minute post-debate meeting between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Nobody really knows what they saw fit to discuss, but it probably wasn't to exchange pictures of their children. Of course, given the aggressive tone of the Clinton campaign leading up to South Carolina, feelings may have changed on Edwards' behalf since that meeting.

Obviously, Edwards isn't going to win the nomination. The indispensable delegate counter at MyDD.com shows Edwards at half the deleages of Hillary and Obama, after what will likely be his strongest state. It will take a near-even break between Obama and Hillary for such a small number of delegates to decide a convention. I'm not sure what Edwards is chasing after, but it's interesting to see that Hillary thought it worth the time to speak with him. And that she got the time from him.


As for the Kim Campbell reference, she was the only woman Prime Minister of Canada, and held the job for a whole five months. She was essentially left "holding the bag" in July 1993 after a disgraced Brian Mulroney resigned his prime ministership (Canadian Will Ferguson likened it to "taking over the controls of a 747 just before it plunges into the Rockies." Campbell then took over the leadership of their Conservative Party as they headed into possibly the greatest defeat of a government in Western democratic history. The Conservative Party headed into the election with 151 seats, the majority, and ended it with 2. Prime Minister Campbell lost in her own riding. (In fairness, the Conservative coalition had fractured, with leaders of the Quebec nationalist and Western alienation movements leaving to form their own parties).

Though assuredly screwed by Mulroney, Campbell also worsened things for herself. The reference is to a notorious G7 Summit, where the leaders of the Western world were gathered, and during break time had the (important) conversations, and Campbell was stuck talking to an ineffective functionary of the European Union. The Canadian media savaged her for being frozen out of the goings-on of the summit, though she was only two weeks into her brief tenure. Since then, whenever somebody (like Obama) is frozen out of the significant conversations due to their own incompetence, I think of Madam Campbell, Canada's only woman Prime Minister.