AND THE WINNER IS...: My apologies for the prolonged absence; I have had to endure a spasm of work-related activity these past couple of weeks. In addition to that, I am having an allergic reaction to something in my house; the rash is gone now, for the most part, and the hives have gone from being the size of baseballs to the size of dimes. They itch about the same, though.

In any case, I haven’t had much time to think about anything profound these past two weeks or so, so let me go out on a limb and engage in political prophecy. Come the Democratic convention in Denver in August, the junior Senator from New York is going to offer the junior Senator from Illinois the vice-presidential nomination. At this point, I don’t see either of the two candidates going to the convention with a majority of the delegates, which means that the super-delegates and the Florida and Michigan delegates will provide the margin for victory. The problem with the junior Senator for New York’s winning with these folks is this: the supers are party insiders, and the Florida / Michigan delegates don’t count, at least as the rules stand now. Those two states moved their primaries to an earlier point in the calendar in violation of Democratic Party rules and both campaigns promised to honor those rules. Indeed, the junior Senator from Illinois’ name did not appear on the ballot in those states. But his opponent needs those states to win now, and as those of us who have been watching the lady and her husband’s careers for some time now know, they will do anything to win, even if it means changing the rules in the middle of the game.

The problem with winning this way is this: it alienates the young, the more affluent, and, most importantly, the black vote. If the lady chooses to win in this manner, then there is no way she or any of her supporters in the African American political elites can explain her victory to the vast majority of black voters as anything other than a white woman using her position as a party insider to rig the vote and so steal the election from a black man. This, after the hopes raised by her opponent’s powerful rhetoric, will lead to an inevitable letdown, if not outright anger. Black voters may not vote for the senior Senator from Arizona, but they may decide to sit this election cycle out and not vote at all, which amounts to the same thing. In our 50/50 nation, any large disaffected group can sway an election one way or the other, and the gentle lady from New York cannot have any swaying in any of her core constituencies if she is to have any chance of winning. The only way to inoculate herself from the charge that she got the nomination in a backhanded fashion is to have the junior Senator from Illinois on the ballot with her. And that is my prediction for this month, boys and girls. Come back next month when I intend to do the Bible Code and Nostradamus one better by predicting the outcome of the Olympic water-polo event using the December 1956 edition of the Reader’s Digest as the basis of my prophecy. Now I will go into a trance, the better to divine the future and to ignore that damn rash. OMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!