Can Hillary come back?

Uh-oh. Don’t tell me I’m going to have to come off my prediction that Sen. Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States. It looks like I might if the Obama phenomenon continues to pick up steam.

For those who have visited my office in the past year and half and seen Sen. Barack Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope” on my bookshelf, you know his popularity didn’t catch me by surprise. In fact, it was way back in the middle of 2006 that Obama was first recommended to me — and it was by none other than Nevada Sen. Harry Reid.

I remember it like yesterday because, as luck would have it, my appointment at Harry’s office in the federal building in Las Vegas was scheduled the same week that the Los Angeles Times wrote a highly critical piece about his land dealings in Clark County.

And since I had been giving Harry a pretty tough time in this column on a variety of other things at the time, I worried the meeting might devolve into something less than cordial. I hate it when that happens, but in my line of work it happens — often.

The meeting started out a bit tense, as I recall. Harry gets downright morose when he thinks he’s been wronged, and that day he most definitely thought the media were out to get him.

Eventually, as two Nevadans usually do, we found our way back to a more workable setting. I was able to speak with him about my business at hand (which was the Democratic Party debates in Las Vegas), and then we moved on to more general topics.

It was then that Sen. Reid recommended Obama to me. It wasn’t a Nostradamus kind of thing. He didn’t fall into a trance and say “Obama … will … be … the … next … president.” It was more like a father who points out the merits of his youngest son. “You should meet Obama,” he said. “He’s something.”

So I bought the book, read it and subsequently recommended it to readers of this column.

Who could have predicted that Obama would lead Hillary in delegates at this stage of the game? Not me. I thought the Machiavellian, race-baiting Clinton team would have dispatched the young senator from Illinois long ago.

Now some say you can put a fork in Hillary, that she’s done. Barring a lawsuit to force the Democratic Party to count Michigan and Florida’s delegates (a move many say is tantamount to cheating), or applying back-room political clout to superdelegates, she just can’t come back given the party rules that proportionately allocate delegates.

I’m not going to go that far — yet. But it is worth noting that math wonks have started to calculate how hard it is going to be for Clinton to come back.

For example, consider this from MSNBC:

“For Clinton to overtake Obama for the pledged delegate lead — which we think is the single most important statistic for the superdelegates to decide their vote — she’ll have to win 55 percent of the remaining delegates. Assuming next week goes Obama’s way in Wisconsin and Hawaii, that percentage rises to 57 percent. Toss in likely Obama victories in Vermont, Wyoming, Mississippi, Oregon, Montana and South Dakota, then Clinton’s percentage need tops 60 percent of the remaining delegates available. And this is simply for her to regain the pledged delegate lead.”

That’s a pretty tall order. Couldn’t happen to a nicer candidate (and I mean that both ways).

Great win

Congratulations to Las Vegas golfer, businessman, philanthropist and sports bettor extraordinaire Billy Walters for winning the pro-am at Pebble Beach last weekend.

Playing with an 11 handicap, he won the tournament by a record 10 shots. He and his pro partner, Fredrik Jacobson, finished at 38 under par. Jacobson shot 4 under and Billy shot 34 under for the four-day tournament.

Bill’s come a long way in golf from his days at the Las Vegas Country Club. The point of discussion that buzzes through every golf clubhouse in Las Vegas, however, is this: Would anyone in their right mind play Billy Walters as an 11 handicap?

Well, let me answer it this way: If you gave Billy Walters 11 strokes, put him at the amateur tees at Pebble Beach and then matched him against Tiger Woods from the pro tees, I take Walters — every time.

From the photo archives

We’ve sure come a long way in politics in Las Vegas.

At right is our state-of-the-art “Election Central,” set up at the offices of the Review-Journal for the 1966 primary.

We dug up the picture as part of our multi-year project to catalog and digitize our extensive library of photos.

Old-timers will have fun scanning the board for candidates Lamb, Ashworth, Dickerson, Fike and Laxalt.

Things worth reading

New York Times columnist Frank Rich last Sunday absolutely gutted the Hillary Clinton campaign for its bungling and its low, racist politics, which it continues to employ in hopes of holding off the surging Barack Obama. You probably missed it, unless you read one of the few copies of The New York Times that make it to Las Vegas regularly. The Review-Journal is not a subscriber to The New York Times wire. The Las Vegas Sun is, but as of this writing, its editors noticeably have decided not to re-publish it.

No matter. I’m here for you, baby.

Here’s a taste of what you will find:

— “The (Clinton) campaign’s other most potent form of currency remains its thick deck of race cards.”

— “But once black voters met Mr. Obama and started to gravitate toward him, Bill Clinton and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped caring about what African-Americans thought. In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user (by the chief Clinton strategist, Mark Penn, among others) ‘the black candidate’ (as Clinton strategists told The Associated Press) and Jesse Jackson redux (by Mr. Clinton himself).”

— The Clinton campaign has a “creepy racial back story. Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have ‘not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.’ Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was ‘making a historical statement.’ It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that.”

For those of you who read my Feb. 3 column on this very topic, you know this Rich column reinforces my biases on the low politics of the Clintons. There is absolutely nothing, in my opinion, they wouldn’t do to win the White House, including tearing up the Democratic Party into shreds for their own gain.

For a link to the full column, go to my Internet desk at www.lvrj.com/sherm. There are other stories and observations there for your edification as well. I update it periodically, so feel free to visit anytime.

Sherman Frederick is publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and president of Stephens Media. Readers may write him at sfrederick@reviewjournal.com.