Top Ten Reasons You Know Your Presidential Bid Is In Trouble

10. Your lead in your home state keeps shrinking.
9. Your opponent draws over 75,000 people to his nomination acceptance speech.
8. Great sound bytes like this: McCain may pay $100 for his loafers, but we'll pay for his flip flops (Bill Richardson).
7. Or this: I want a President who cares more about Barney Smith that Smith Barney (Barney Smith - average American).
6. You think the word maverick means sidekick.
5. The best you could come up with for your convention spin is: Mile High, Inch Deep (let's talk about the real issues facing Americans, ok).
4. You have so much experience that your running mate doesn't really need any.
3. You make fun of your opponent's "celebrity" status and then choose a beauty queen as your running mate.
2. Your choice for VP comes from your everyone-else-said-no list.
1. You pick your running mate because you think the American voters are so stupid they will vote for a ticket just because there's a woman on it, even though your Administration will be nothing but an affront to women.

And the Winner Is

Your life would not be complete if I did not show you this:



While it looks like Obama-on-a-stick, it is actually a planter. The artist is actually selling them, filled with a peace lily.

The Way Things Were Meant To Be

I can't help but think that everything in this hard fought campaign between Hillary and Barack turned out exactly the way it was supposed to. This convention was scheduled a long time ago, before anyone knew who the nominee would be, before anyone knew what would happen in the primaries. But how cool is it that these two candidates gave the speeches which were the highlights of the convention on the anniversaries of 2 momentous occasions? Hillary, the first woman to ever win a Presidential primary, a woman who fights for women's rights around the globe, spoke Tuesday night, the 88th anniversary of women's suffrage. And Barack, who many have compared to civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and who has stirred hope in so many Americans, accepted the nomination for President on the 45th anniversay of King's I Have a Dream address. That wasn't planned, it just worked out that way.

When Obama lost the New Hampshire primary, he gave the Yes We Can speech to his supporters. Artist will.i.am made this music video of the speech. You may have already seen it, but it's worth another watch, or 20. If you haven't already seen it, you will be sorry if you don't. And then you will want to watch it 20 more times, too.

The Roll Call Vote

We cast our ballots for the nominee at breakfast on Wednesday morning. At this point, Clinton delegates knew we were meeting with her at 1:00, and were expecting to be released, but we hadn't yet. Not all of the Clinton delegates voted for her - Arizona's votes ended up 27 - 40 for Obama.

The meeting was supposed to be just for delegates, but they ended up not even checking. I couldn’t believe how many people were there. It was this big convention hall completely packed full of people standing. When she finally got in, she said, “if I knew I had this many delegates, well…” (It was a joke.) In case you thought the the PUMA's were just an invention of the right wing media to make it look like Democrats don't back Obama, I can attest that they are real, we saw them there. They talked throughout the meeting, and one thing I overheard is that she didn't really mean any of the things she was saying, that she was forced to say them. I don't know about them, but the woman I supported during this campaign would not let anyone force her to do anything she didn't want to do. They left the room chanting McCain. I guess they didn't listen very closely to Hillary's speech on Tuesday.

Anyway, she told us we were released, and told us we should vote how we wanted to vote, but that she had cast her vote for Barack Obama. We had already voted, as has most delegations, I believe, so we weren't sure what would happen - were they going to have us recast our votes?

We got to the Pepsi Center right as the roll call vote began. It is a very cool process, the delegation chair of each state says something about their state and then how the votes are cast. It goes through alphabetically. Ted has the rundown of each state in his live blogging, but I will just tell you where it got interesting. California passed. They have a lot of votes, and David Schapira told me they probably wanted to be the state that put Obama over the top. California went for Clinton in the primary, but oh well. (BTW someone told me Barbara Boxer was really mad that CA passed.) Then Illinois passed, and using the same logic, it would make sense that they wanted to put him over top. Then New Mexico yielded to Illinois. I hadn't been keeping a tally of the votes, but thought that was kind of quick.

Illinois, however yielded to New York. Then I saw all of the secret service and Hillary in the middle of them walking towards New York. The crowd went crazy. Either, New York was going to announce that all of their 282 votes were for Obama and that would put him over the top, or something else. The delegation chair turned it over to Clinton, and she asked for a suspension of the rules and for Obama to be nominated by acclamation.

It was absolutely poetic, and for me as a Clinton delegate, absolutely the best way this could have ended. I think this was really the highlight of the convention for me.