Conin suffers from a disability resulting from a car accident 40 years ago, which left her wheelchair bound at  a time when there were no curb cuts or ramps and many places were inaccessible.  That is what fueled her passion about caucus information.

Among the information available in the report:

* The 37 primary states account for more than 97% of the vote — yet only 85.2% of the delegates

* The 13 caucus states account for less than 3% of the vote — yet for 14.8% of the delegates.

* The 13 caucus states have roughly 3.2 million voting age people with disabilities.  Unlike official state primaries, neither the ADA nor HAVA cover caucus-related disability issues and there is limited legal recourse to force the parties to comply with accessibility standards.

* The average turnout in primary states has been 18.7%.  This is more than four-fold the average turnout in caucus states, which has been 4.5%

* In the 37 primaries, Hillary Clinton is up 500,000 votes (counting Florida and Michigan; She is up by 350,000 votes if Obama is given 75% of the uncommitted vote in Michigan).  In the 13 caucus states, Obama is up 300,000 votes

* Clinton has won 20 of the 37 primaries, but only 1 of the 17 caucuses

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I have some comments on the primary-caucus system myself, but I prefer to leave those out for now and leave this as an announcement and summary of a very interesting report.

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SusanUnPC’s NOTE & Personal Story: In January, I received and mailed in an absentee ballot for the Washington state presidential primary. I voted for Hillary Clinton.

On February 5, 2008, I underwent emergency surgery and was in the hospital for a full week thereafter. I will never forget that date because the Super Tuesday primaries were that day, and I missed watching all the returns because I was on an operating table.

My caucus was held on Saturday, February 9, 2008. I was unable to attend, obviously, because I was still in the hospital on IVs with very strong antibiotics to fight a massive, life-threatening infection.

My nurses, physicians, attendants, and the hospital’s other employees — from janitors to the cafeteria workers who prepared my all-liquid diet — were also unable to attend.

They ALL expressed to me how VERY unhappy they were that they, like I, were disenfranchised.

So, besides disabled people, the people I know of who were disenfranchised that day:

• anyone who must work on a Saturday
• anyone who is in a hospital as a patient
• anyone who is ill from the flu or a bad cold
• anyone who cannot traverse the LONG hallways of big school buildings, and sit in extremely uncomfortable chairs for hours
• anyone too poor to hire a babysitter to care for children
• anyone who has worked all week and who dedicates weekends to spending PRECIOUS TIME with their children
• anyone who works all week and must devote Saturdays to necessary errands, chores, repairs — including oil changes on one’s car, trips to the grocery store and pharmacy, and on and on

IN OTHER WORDS, anyone but the MOST affluent, the MOST young, the MOST physically able is DISENFRANCHISED BY THIS ABSURD SYSTEM.

Oh yes, Barack Obama did very well in Washington state’s caucuses — he won by over 60%. I forget the exact percentage now.

And what happened to that absentee ballot I cast in January? Oh, a few weeks later, it was counted along with all the ballots mailed in by voters across the state of Washington.

Barack Obama barely reached 50% in those ballots.

But guess what.

MY VOTE — and the votes of all who cast absentee ballots — did not count for a single delegate in the Democratic party.

The Republican party did a much fairer thing — they allotted a percentage of delegates to the candidate who did best in the absentee ballot count, as well as at the caucuses.

If this isn’t utterly stupid, I don’t know what is.

If this isn’t utterly CRUEL and unfair to people who have a hard time taking HOURS off on a Saturday to exercise one of their most important DUTIES as an American citizen, I do not know what is.

So the latte liberals and young students got ALL the say on who the delegates are from Washington state.

It is completely unfair and undemocratic.

I am still furious.

Once in the Senate, he found a couple of other prominent supporters who were anxious to tear down the Clintons and, lo and behold, the first term Senator was running for president, in spite of earlier promising he would complete his first term and admitting he was too inexperienced to seek national office.

And, the funny thing is, he came so close. Riding on his oratorical skills and the backing of one of the wealthiest media magnates in the world, he put together a coalition of African Americans and and upper-income voters. Despite receiving a minority of votes cast by whites, Latinos, and Asians, and losing 7 of the largest 8 states in the nation (all except his home state of Illinois), his big margins in some Southern States and midwestern caucus states gave him a decent lead in delegates over Hillary Clinton. By stalling efforts at a revote in Florida, he looked like he had a good chance of keeping his lead in delegates and popular votes into the Democratic convention, where he and his supporters could extortion votes from remaining Super Delegates by threatening not to support Hillary Clinton if nominated.

Though potential road blocks emerged, particularly with the start of the Rezko trial, the media continued to treat Obama with kid gloves at the same time that it pilloried Hillary Clinton. All that started to change though as the race drew to an end, with Obama having emerged as the frontrunner. In the end, it was the controversy over his pastor and spiritual advisor, Jeremiah Wright, that brought Obama down. A series of videos emerged — sold and promoted by Wright’s church itself — which showed Wright angrily denouncing “the United States of White America” and “USKKKA”, which he said, purposely introduced AIDS into the Black community and brought the Sept. 11 attacks on itself. Wright also said that Hillary Clinton was not deserving of the presidency because “she’s never been called a nigger,” and proclaimed “God Damn America” as an alternative to God bless America. The repeated broadcast of Wright angrily making these pronouncements becamed seared in the nation’s consciousness.

Obama attempted to rescue himself by criticizing Wright’s remarks, dropping Wright from the campaign’s African American religious committee, and implying that he was not aware of these stands until recently. However, given that Obama had attended Wright’s church for 20 years, been married by him, had his children baptized by him, donated tens of thousands of dollars per year to his church, and lauded him in his book, Audacity of Hope (appropriately named for one of Wright’s slogans), the public wasn’t buying it. Obama’s popularity among every group but African Americans sank like a stone.

The first bad news came on April 22 in Pennsylvania, a state that the Obama campaign itself projected to lose by only 5 points. In the end, Obama lost by 20, getting barely a quarter of the white vote. Guam tilted for Clinton as well, and then the crushing blow came on May 6, when Obama narrowly lost two sizeable states he had projected to win, Indiana and North Carolina. Not unexpectedly, West Virginia and Kentucky went by huge margins for Clinton, who then squeezed out a win in Oregon as well. Clinton picked up dozens of delegates in a big Puerto Rico win, and won a narrow victory in the Michigan revote as well. The Montana and South Dakota primaries were close, but by that time the result was foretold.

Clinton’s string of victories had pulled her close to Obama in both the delegates and popular vote, with Obama’s margin in both dependent on exclusion of Florida. Obama had fallen far behind in the national polls, both directly against Clinton and in comparison with Clinton in match-ups with McCain. His string of defeats, including in states he had been expected to win, and his low level of approval among whites, Hispanics, and Asians, indicated that he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the national election. Every day, more and more super delegates were announcing their support for Hillary. Her nomination was secured. The only question that remained was whether Obama would maintain enough support from pledged and super delegates to force Hillary to accept him as her VP. If so, he still had a chance to redeem himself and survive to run again another day.

Well, though I am attracted to Hillary for a wide range of reasons, there is one definitive issue that confirms my support for her.  More beneath the fold.

The issue for me is health care.  I recognize that many people support Obama due to his 2002 position on Iraq, but I don’t see much difference between the two on how they will respond to Iraq now.  However, I do see big differences on the issue of health care.

I see this election as a almost a unique chance to achieve universal health care in the U.S.  And I’m afaid that if we don’t do it now, it could be decades before we achieve it.  And I want to express my appreciation to John Edwards and his campaign for helping to move us forward on that issue.

For me, the problem with Obama is not only that his plan does not call for universal health care, but that his campaign is actually based on fighting against universal health care.

Here you can see a screenshot of a mailer that he is still sending out.  It includes a picture of a stressed working couple, worrying about their health care future (sitting in virtually same position as the infamous Harry and Louise ad; click on the link and you can compare the two ads for yourself.  The text of Obama’s mailer is as follows:

Hillary’s health care plan forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can’t afford it. — Obama campaign mailer, January/February 2008

Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that the affordability subsidies in Hillary’s plan are just as aggressive or more aggressive than Obama’s.  Let’s also ignore the fact that Obama “forces” people to buy health care for their children. And Obama also talks about requiring people who don’t buy health care, but who later need it, to pay back premiums.  What makes more sense: for people to pay premiums all along or to be required to pay extensive back premiums after they suffer a catastrophic disease or accident and possibly can’t even work?

Put these points aside, though.  The key point for me is that the sine qua non of universal health care is mandating everybody to be part of it, whether through a tax-funded or employer-funded or user-funded (with subsidies) system.  If people opt out, then it is no longer universal.  To try to create an opt-in universal health care system would be like trying to create an opt-in universal social security system — it would destroy it before it ever got started.

Some people on this site have suggested that Barack’s strategy is two-step, that he is trying to build a non-universal health care plan as a first step toward a universal plan later.  However, even if true (and there is no evidence of that), I think it will be impossible to achieve since he is actively trying to seek election on the basis of his opposition to “forced” inclusion in a plan.

So, in the occasional moments when I wonder if I have made the right choice for president, I ponder the two candidate’s health care plans and the answer for me is clear.  In 2008, I will definitely give my support to the candidate campaigning for, not against, universal health care: Hillary Clinton.

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I’m a frequent diarist at Daily Kos and at MyDD.com