At this point, I think we've all stopped hearing arguments of the form "Obama lost Massachusetts in the primary so he'll lose it in a general election" or "Obama won South Carolina in the primary so he'll win it in a general election" but there's a frustrating persistence of the idea that performance in a primary campaign in a swing state might be a good indication of general election strength there. In reality, there's just very little reason to believe that. I would very strongly prefer Obama over Clinton, but that doesn't stop me from very strongly preferring Clinton over McCain. All this throat-clearing by way of introducing a quote from this post from Noam Scheiber, commenting on some new Pennsylvania polling data:
A poll showing that Obama can get blown out in the Pennsylvania primary and still hold his own there against McCain suggests working-class white Democrats simply prefer Hillary, not that they find something inherently objectionable about Obama, whom they're apparently happy to support in the general.
Right. The poll indicates that Clinton will do much better than Obama
in the Democratic primary but Obama will do slightly better than Clinton in a general election. There's nothing paradoxical or even counterintuitive about that, but somehow we've gotten twisted around in knots over this sort of thing.
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Heads in the Sand
Here's the latest crazy Eliot Spitzer rumor we've heard. In the past few days, there has been a torrent of Spitzer coverage, so we apologize if it has surfaced elsewhere. But we don't recall coming across this tidbit already, and our Google News and Technorati searches for "spitzer lick" came up... clean.
This comes from a reliable ATL tipster, whose true identity is known to us, and who has given us good info in the past. But the tipster is two degrees removed from the young woman who allegedly interacted with Governor Spitzer, so apply whatever gossip discount factor you deem appropriate. Here it is:
[A friend of a friend is] a Swiss-Brazilian girl who went to D.C. to f**k Spitzer over the summer. Apparently he's been up to this for awhile.
Apparently, his dirty request is for girls to lick his ass. Which seems peculiarly apropos. And he wanted to get his wife in on the action. My friend thought his wife might have known, but wasn't sure.
Sounds pretty incredible, right? But the notion of New York's governor patronizing prostitutes would have sounded pretty incredible too, prior to Monday. If you can buy the notion of a sitting governor hiring hookers, why can't you imagine him sitting on their faces?
Also, our source claims to have heard about it three weeks ago, well before the scandal became public. At the time, he says, he "thought it was bogus." Little did he know.
It's hard to believe that Governor Spitzer thought he could keep his patronage of prostitutes secret for long, given his political prominence. As we heard someone quip on a talk radio show a few days ago, "Does he really believe that prostitutes don't read newspapers?"
Posted by BA | March 13, 2008 4:33 PM