Her campaign is rescued from the dead. As the Clinton campaign sagely points out "no Democrat has won the White House without winning West Virginia since 1916" and therefore Obama's primary loss shows that despite his large lead in the polls over John McCain, he can't possible win the election.
What's even more interesting is that no Democrat has won the White House without carrying Minnesota since 1912 (it went for Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose party) so given that Obama won Minnesota and Clinton won West Virginia, McCain is guaranteed to win the general election unless the eventual nominee can somehow completely replicate the social and political conditions prevailing in pre-WWI America. The outlook, in short, is very grim.
Excellent cartoon. Not being a Clinton supporter myself, I obviously don't think all expressions of opposition to her presidential aspirations are driven by sexist. It is, however, extremely telling about the sort of society in which we live that hostility to her presidential aspirations so often finds expression through these sexist scripts.
If I'm working at the NSCC, I'm not liking these poll results out of North Carolina and Texas one bit. One assumes the GOP will pull both of these out in the end, but you've got to spend money defending your incumbents, and you really don't want to be spending money on what ought to be safe Republican seats where conservative legislators untainted by any incredibly shocking scandals are just running for re-election.
He doesn't actually seem to have one when pitted against John McCain. Rather, Jewish Americans like Clinton best, Obama second-best, and McCain least. Keep this in mind next time you read an argument that seems to assume that white working class Clinton supporters would prefer McCain to Obama -- it's perfectly possible for Obama to be someone's second-choice, just as Clinton is the second choice of millions of Obama voters.
Some U.S. Christians are not reconciled to McCain's candidacy but instead regard the prospective presidency of Barack Obama in the nature of a biblical plague visited upon a sinful people. These militants look at former Baptist preacher Huckabee as "God's candidate" for president in 2012. Whether they can be written off as merely a troublesome fringe group depends on Huckabee's course.
Now there appears to be know actual evidence that Huckabee, working in tandem with God Himself, is actually fighting to deliver the presidency to black nationalist muslim devil-man Barack Obama but Novak's got plenty of idle speculation.
Don't miss Dave Weigel's writeup of Bob Barr's announcement of his candidacy for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination. I think this is a potentially significant turn of events as Barr, a former wingnutty member of the House GOP leadership, is an unusually credible LP standard-bearer and his biography is well-designed to attract the votes of conservatives who loathe the war and Barack Obama with equal passions.
Third party candidacies never go anywhere as candidacies but often wind up playing a substantial role in presidential campaigns nonetheless. Ralph Nader got only 2.7 percent of the vote in 2000, but that was enough to make a difference.
Man, Barack Obama's really got it coming and going. First John McCain runs around the country talking about how much Hamas loves Obama, now Edward Luttwak says Islam requires Obama's murder for the crime of apostasy. I'm no expert on Islamic law, but if this were any kind of real issue, shouldn't The New York Times be able to locate an actual Muslim who sees things this way?
Sam Stein has a piece out titled "McCain Touts Green Policies At Wind Energy Firm - But He Opposed Their Key Legislation". I'm not sure the underlying charge is all that damning -- basically it's about how McCain voted against a 2005 energy bill that would have done a lot to help wind power firms. But it was a whole tangle of subsidies for other stuff, too. Basically, McCain cares more about pork busting than he does about boosting wind power, but I think that's a judgment reasonable people can disagree about. I'd go for Kate Sheppard's "The Myth of Green McCain" for critique of the McCain environmental agenda.
But the interesting thing about the Stein piece is that it got emailed to me by the Obama campaign. In short, after months of the Obama press team sending me primary-focused stuff, now they're more focused on McCain-focused stuff. Not a shocking development, but a noteworthy and, I think, welcome one.
Photo by Flickr user kavo1 used under a Creative Commons license
Here in Washington, DC there are a lot of lobbying and PR firms. These firms do most of their work for businesses or business groups, and that's what they're best known for, but pretty much everyone who does corporate work in a serious way also does some similar services for some foreign governments or organizations. After all, one consequence of American near-hegemony is that ability to influence U.S. domestic politics is an important dimension of national power for many countries. So when you do what John McCain's done and staff your campaign with a bunch of lobbyists, you're going to wind up having staffed your campaign with a bunch of people with some ties to nasty foreign actors.
That's what made McCain's decision to fire a couple of people for being too cosy with SLORC so odd -- now everyone else is going to get scrutinized. And here's a bunch of scrutiny. It seems that Charlie Black, for example, has done work for Mobuto Sese Seko, Siad Barre, and Ferdinand Marcos, among others. There's also some stuff (less damning, in my view) Peter Madigan and Kevin Fay in there. And I assume that when eager-beaver oppo researchers have some more time to dig, they'll come up with more stuff. And of course given that McCain has put a hazy, militaristic vision of going bigger than "war on terror" to some kind of vaguely defined quest to stamp out all dictatorships everywhere, it's hard for him to say this kind of thing is all in the game.
On television, of course, it's difficult to make a nuanced point but it occurred to me when discussing the whole "should Hillary drop out" issue that a decision to end her campaign needn't deprive the Ellen Malcolms of the world their chance to register a vote for the first viable woman presidential candidate. If she announced that she was done campaigning on Monday, she'd still be on the ballot in West Virginia on Tuesday -- and in Kentucky a week later -- and she'd still probably win both states.
Folks are still out there voting for Mike Huckabee, after all. The difference is just that Huckabee isn't actively campaigning for their votes. He's endorsed John McCain and receded a lot from public view. And conversely, receding a bit and starting to transition to playing a constructive non-presidential role in Democratic politics is available to Clinton even if she doesn't drop out. What the party needs from her, fundamentally, is for her to avoid spending the time between this weekend and Puerto Rico launching a constant barrage of attacks on Obama. That's consistent with dropping out or with staying in the race, and dropping out is consistent with her most loyal voters still voting for her anyway. The specific modalities aren't very important, it's about shifting the national discussion to the problems with McCain.
William Galston and Pietro Nivola have an interesting piece on the rise of geographic segregation in political presences, where more-and-more people now live in whole counties full of co-partisans. It ends, however, with a pretty lame entry into the literature of bellyaching about polarization:
Because politics is a contact sport, hard-hitting partisan competition is unavoidably part of the game. A party system that differentiates sharply between alternatives has virtues, not the least being that it engages more voters, offers clearer choices and enhances accountability. But hyperpartisan politics also do damage, not least to public trust and confidence in government — and many Americans understandably yearn for less polarization. Because the underlying structure of our politics remains so deeply divided, the 2008 election may not requite their wish.
These upsides are what I wrote about in my "case for partisanship" article and stacking the upsides against the Galston/Nivola downsides, I think polarization looks pretty good. On the one hand, we have more engaged voters, clearer choices, and more accountability. All of those are good things. The downside is allegedly "public trust and confidence in government." But it's not even clear that that's a bad thing. I don't trust the government as much as I did before I learned that it was running a network of secret prisons in Eastern Europe and organizing an illegal surveillance program, but I'd say that's a merited decline in trust.
Why would we pine away for a shift that would make government less accountable but more trusted?
Michael Isikoff reports that the guy John McCain picked to run the GOP convention has done some lobbying for the military junta that rules Burma. Then there's this dissonant element of the analysis: "But some allies worry that Goodyear's selection could fuel perceptions that McCain—who has portrayed himself as a crusader against special interests—is surrounded by lobbyists."
But it's not just a perception that McCain is surrounded by lobbyists, he's actually surrounded by lobbyists. This is a quantifiable reality of McCain's campaign -- it's chock full 'o lobbyists.
I agree with this entirely. Yes it's true that most eleven year-olds probably aren't knowledgeable enough to make a well-informed choice about political candidates, but the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that most fifty year-olds aren't very well-informed either. And yet, everyone gets to vote (and, of course, many people choose not to). Everyone, that is, except for that would-be eleven year-old voter.
I'll be on Fox News around 1:30 PM to talk about the Democratic primary and how the party's so torn that the country will decide that four more years of war, recession, and tax cuts for the rich are the way to go.
I donated a small amount and supplied my work contact information below before the California primary. A few days later, I get a message on my home answering machine – not the numbers below and _not_ a listed number – thanking me for my support and inviting me to an event “at a neighbor’s house” two blocks from my house (miles away from the information I supplied below). I was not contacted at my work address. So they took my name from the donation and then located my unlisted home phone number and unprovided home address and put it in their database so they could contact me for a neighborhood meet up.
Not sure we need to give this team access to even the NSA's legal powers, much less it's new Bush-era unrestrained spying power. Just saying.
Via Lang at OpenLeft, here's a roundup of public opinion on the Supreme Court which shows that a plurality of people like the Court fine as is, but the number of people who think it's too conservative is substantially larger than the number of people who think it's too liberal.
I missed the fact that a couple of days ago Cindy McCain reiterated that there would be no disclosure whatsoever of her tax returns, the very same returns on which all of her husband's wealth has been stashed as well in order to avoid disclosure. Personally, I'm happy with that outcome. Normally, you want to know about the finances of your would-be presidents. But John McCain has such a sterling reputation as a reformer, that I'm sure they're hiding all this not because they have anything to hide, but purely out of a principled concern for the privacy of their children.
Certainly, I see no reason for the press to keep dogging the McCains about this.
What happens to Joe Lieberman if the Democrats take the White House and expand their Senate majority to 56 or 57 seats? Despite his support for McCain, I think Democrats will want his vote on non-war-related issues, so they'll hold their nose and let him keep his seniority in the caucus. Others say he'll be stripped of his seniority, lose his chairmanship of the government affairs committee, and then leave the party to become a Republican.
I have no idea what will happen, but there's very little logic to keeping him in the party. If you had a Democratic Senator who was aggressively campaigning for the GOP presidential nominee, Exhibit A for the case for letting him keep his chairmanship would be "well, he won the Democratic nomination for his seat." But Lieberman didn't win the Democratic nomination. Naturally, under the circumstances he didn't endorse the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senator from Connecticut nor has he endorsed the Democratic candidate for U.S. President. So you've got a guy who doesn't have the Democratic Party nomination, and doesn't support Democratic nominees for federal office. That would seem to make his case for being a Democrat look pretty tenuous.
Several of the smartest younger minds on the right have come together to launch a new initiative called "The Next Right" focusing on making conservatism more viable in the online space. It's supposed to be "something new on the right side of the blogosphere: an online community for change-minded activists and hardcore political junkies in the conservative movement."
It'll be interesting to see how it goes. I think that sometimes people underestimate the extent to which the left's edge in online media just follows straightforwardly from the demographic profile of the potential online audience (I think much the same can be said about the right's dominance of talk radio) and doesn't have anything to do with conservatives doing anything "wrong" as such.
I'm not really sure that an offer to retire Hillary Clinton's campaign debts would have a ton of appeal to Clinton. It seems to me that once she's out of the presidential race, she'll still be a fairly influential U.S. Senator who shouldn't have much trouble raising funds from folks looking to curry favor with her, and she's unlikely to face a serious 2012 challenge so her re-election fundraising can just go to pay off presidential campaign debt.
Ed Kilgore's case for an Obama-Clinton ticket has made me like the idea even less. He canvasses various things Clinton would allegedly bring to the ticket, but in almost every case I can think of better people to bring the quality in question. Then there's this -- "She would also bring some national security street cred to the ticket, which is an Obama vulnerability that I suspect is being underappreciated at the moment."
This reflects, I believe, an incredibly damaging mindset that's been crippling the Democratic Party for years and the prospect of excising this mindset is the single most appealing thing about the prospect of Obama being the nominee. Clinton's "street cred" on national security consists, of course, of being massively wrong on the most important national security issue of her career. Paradoxically, a lot of folks find her massive wrongness on this hugely important issue reassuring because they and their friends were also wrong and they view having made the right call to be a suspicious quality. After all, the Iraq War may have led to thousands of U.S. deaths, tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and millions of Iraqi refugees all at a cost of over $1 trillion and in ways that's damaged the strategic position of the United States, but war opponents were all a bunch of hippies.
I say good riddance to that. I got the war wrong, and I think that gives me less "cred" than I would have had had I gotten the war right and I think that, politically speaking, it makes sense to put people forward who aren't tainted by the war. But most of all we need to ditch the mindset that says "cred" on national security is composed of being hawkish even when that means being wrong.
None of which is to deny that Clinton would bring some very real strengths to the ticket. But it seems to me that, for example, Janet Napolitano brings just as much in terms of experience, ovaries, and a record of building political coalitions based on working class white and Latino voters.
Ambinder says that Barack Obama's fifty state voting drive is more than a voting drive: "On election day, Obama might have more than a million individuals volunteering on his behalf. That should scare the beejeesus out of the McCain campaign and the RNC."
One incredibly interesting question is to what extent the organizing tools Obama has put to good use thus far in the campaign can be made to work as tools of governance that put pressure on congress and so forth.
After Tuesday's results, I kind of expected a Wednesday superdelegate flood to Barack Obama. It didn't really materialize, though he did pick up some ground. And Thursday was the same way. And now looking at my inbox, it seems like more of the same as Rep. Peter DeFazio endorses Obama while Rep. Donald Payne switches from Clinton to Obama. Stuff on this scale doesn't -- and can't -- lead to a knockout blow, it's more of a death by a thousand cuts thing with the handful of superdelegate defections being especially damaging.
You read stuff like this and really feel sorry for University of Tennessee students (see also). It's fine for Glenn Reynolds to have as low an opinion of Barack Obama as he likes, but it seems to me that law professors should have some idea of what a "socialist view of government" consists of. I'm pretty sure Reynolds knows that Obama's not proposing the nationalization of industry or collective ownership of the means of production, so he must be confused about socialism.
John McCain wants Hispanic America to remember that he's not from the "I hate you and blame you for all the country's problems" wing of the GOP:
I think it's a pretty shrewd ad. Unlike white or black Anglos, Latino voters tend to eschew culture-based voting and instead act the way Thomas Frank thinks everyone should act with the poorer ones being Democrats and the richer ones being Republicans, and so the overall edge going Democratic given the income distribution. The risk for Republicans is that the orgy of hate we saw from their side in 2006-2007 will push many more prosperous Hispanics over to the Democratic side. McCain's mission is to communicate "I'm not a racist" to his most likely Hispanic supporters, and given the tendency of small business owners everywhere to love the GOP a specific focus on small business seems smart.
Barack Obama gets fake in touch with the working man:
At the Raleigh Times bar in downtown Raleigh yesterday, Mr Obama arrived in the late afternoon with his wife Michelle only to find himself momentarily beerless.
"Where's my beer?" he asked, loud enough for the reporters to hear.
"PBR," he said, choosing Pabst Blue Ribbon, an inexpensive lager, before working the crowd.
Zeroed in, that is, on the inexpensive mass market lager of . . . elitist hipsters. Jonathan Kulick calls our attention to this relevant clip:
Now what's fascinating and terrifying about the country we live in is that were it to happen to be the case that Barack Obama had tasted amber Maharaja IPA in the past, really loved amber Maharaja IPA, and therefore decided to order an amber Maharaja IPA that fact would have featured prominently in cable news coverage for days and doubtless been the subject of at least one Maureen Dowd column.
I think the waves of outrage washing throughout the Obamasphere over this remark from Hillary Clinton reflect an echo chamber mentality more than anyone else. Here's what Clinton's quoted as saying:
"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
As quoted, that's a dumb thing to say which seems to imply that non-white voters or perhaps all Obama supporters are lazy. But add a pinch of charitable interpretation into the dynamic, and I think Clinton's meaning is perfectly clear -- she really does do better than Obama among white working class voters in Democratic primary elections. I don't buy the argument, often made by Clinton supporters, that this edge among white working class Democratic primary voters indicates a substantial Clinton electability edge in the general election (it's one part fallacy, two parts baseless speculation, and then a grain of truth) but it's a common argument and not an offensive one.
Meanwhile, just from a tactical posture the closer this thing gets to being over the less point there is in Obama supporters getting super snarky and indignant about everything the Clinton campaign does. At this point, Obama's job is to start making people who find this sort of argument plausible like him more, not to crush Hillary Clinton.
Rob Goodspeed analyzes how many words each candidate's website dedicates to each issue. You can see that John McCain has very little to say outside his security/Iraq/veterans comfort zone. To me, that means it's vital for Barack Obama to try to hit McCain early in that comfort zone since that's where it'll be hardest to build an argument that convinces people, but I think Democratic strategists have a bad habit of preferring to stay within their own comfort zone.
Yesterday, Marc Ambinder reported "Another strategist, Harold Ickes, has told colleagues that he does not believe that she should think about dropping out until, at the very least, the questions of Florida and Michigan are resolved." It's worth pointing out that this makes no real sense. Nothing would do more to help resolve the Florida and Michigan issue than for Clinton to drop out and endorse Obama. If she did that, the only remaining issue would be to strike a balance between representing FL and MI at the convention and slapping FL and MI on the wrist hard enough that states don't pull this kind of stunt again. That's a needle you can thread any number of ways.
It's the fact that the campaign is continuing that makes the question difficult to resolve because it has both campaigns focused on maximizing their delegate counts rather than dealing with the aforementioned issue. Which, I suppose, is part of what makes it such an appealing pretext for staying in the race -- as a rationale it has a nice circular logic where the campaign can't end 'till MI and FL are resolved, but the issue can't be resolved until the campaign ends, so on and on we go.
I'm no longer convinced that John McCain should make a one term pledge. After all, as commenters to the previous post argued there are other ways to make TMBG relevant to the McCain campaign. Consider, for example, "Purple Toupee" which I think he should use as a theme song.
First, McCain's desire to see heightened China-Taiwan tensions in order to prompt a new Cold War and inflate his own sense of self-importance:
Chinese people were fighting in the park We tried to help them fight, no one appreciated that Martin X was mad when they outlawed bell bottoms Ten years later they were sharing the same cell I shouted out, "Free the Expo '67" Till they stepped on my hair, and they told me I was fat Now I'm very big, I'm a big important man And the only thing that's different is underneath my hat
And more broadly, a an anachronistic authoritarian streak:
Purple toupee is here to stay after the hair has gone away The purple brigade is marching from the grave
We're on some kind of mission We have an obligation We have to wear toupees
Betsy Reed has a shrewd piece in The Nation complaining about blind support by the more institutionalized, establishmentarian arm of the feminist movement for an increasingly appalling Clinton campaign.
The other day, I suggested that the single-transferrable vote method they use to elect the Cambridge City Council in Massachusetts might help other cities out with the problematic lack of competition in local elections. Reihan Salam told me that STV "used to be in the model code for cities, and was used (in similar form) in New York city, Cincinnati, and other big cities. It was abandoned due to fear of Communism and the threat (gasp!) of minority mayors." Well, now that we don't have to worry about Communism anymore, it seems like more cities should go back to this.
Note that adopting STV needn't mean that other cities would need to emulate Cambridge (and many other smaller cities) in abandoning strong mayors in favor of a council/manager system where mayor is a mostly symbolic post. The two issues are different and, in general, I think most American cities should have stronger mayors because there's generally more accountability at that level.
I also actually think that STV could ameliorate some of our gerrymandering issues. Most states could get by with 1-3 multiple-member constituencies which would simply reduce the significance of the precise contours of the district boundaries. People often don't seem to realize this, but the constitution doesn't actually mandate that we elect members of congress in the way that we do. Single member constituencies elected with first past the post voting happens to be the method every state uses, but like the proliferation of bicameral state legislatures this is just blind adherence to misguided tradition and not an actual rule.
Photo by Flickr user Allan Patrick used under a Creative Commons license
In a New York Times/CBS News poll in late February, Obama was defeating John McCain 50 to 38. Two months later, the Times/CBS poll had McCain and Obama tied. The poll that came out yesterday showed Obama reopening a lead over McCain — but clearly over this period a vulnerability for Obama was exposed.
As Noam Scheiber notes it's a bit curious of Kristol to have left out the precise numbers from the new poll. But what it says is that Obama hasa lead of 51 to 40 which is identical to Obama's previous lead. I'm hardly shocked to see Kristol playing some funny games, but shouldn't there be some kind of editing of the Times columnists? Surely the NYT has it within its powers to be aware of the results of its own polls and get its writers to characterize the trends accurately.
As we wait to hear from Indiana, it's always worth recalling that there's no real substantial difference between a narrow win in Indiana and a narrow loss in Indiana. A lot of our primary punditry has proceeded as if this is the electoral college and there's a huge difference, but the Democrats' rules for delegate allocation assures at this point that Indiana's going to be a push while Obama picks up a nice parcel of delegates out of North Carolina.
I'm seeing Harold Ford, Jr. on television talking about how maybe an Obama-Clinton ticket would be the best way for Obama to appeal to white working class voters. I think there's no doubt that enhancing his appeal to white working class voters should be an important considering in thinking about a VP choice. But when you consider all the possibilities, does anyone seriously think that Clinton is the politician with the most appeal to white working class voters? I think the evidence is clear that she has more appeal to them than Barack Obama does but she hardly seems like the best possible choice.
Hillary Clinton shows off her deep connection with the common man:
"We're going to knock balls out of the country's park," [Mrs Clinton] says, standing in a minor-league baseball stadium, "for the home team, which is America".
Arianna Huffington says John McCain told her shortly after the 2000 election that he didn't vote for George W. Bush, McCain's camp now denies this which prompted this funny rejoinder from Huffington about McCain's history of denying he did things he clearly did:
He denied ever talking with John Kerry about his leaving the GOP to be Kerry's '04 running mate -- then later admitted he had, insisting: "Everybody knows that I had a conversation." He denied admitting that he didn't know much about economics, even though he'd said exactly that to the Wall Street Journal. And the Boston Globe. And the Baltimore Sun. He denied ever having asked for a budget earmark for Arizona, even though he had. On the record. He denied that he'd ever had a meeting with comely lobbyist Vicki Iseman and her client Lowell Paxon, even though he had. And had admitted it in a legal deposition.
Clearly, I don't know what McCain did or didn't do in the voting booth in 2000, but considering the position she was taking at the time it does seem like the logical thing to do would have been for McCain to support Gore. In 2000, after all, Bush's signature initiative was a tax cut proposal that, at at the time, McCain opposed -- just like Gore. Similarly, McCain's signature initiative was a campaign finance reform proposal that Bush opposed but Gore favored. On foreign policy, I don't think a clear differentiation emerged between Bush and Gore, but many construed Bush's rhetoric as calling for a retrenchment of American commitments abroad at a time when McCain was calling to expand them and adopt "rogue state rollback" as a signature issue. Gore's running mate was Joe Lieberman, who's clearly someone McCain adores. As a career Republicans, you could imagine McCain deciding he couldn't possible vote for Gore and just not voting, but considering the issue positions and personal bitterness why would McCain have voted for Bush?
The issue landscape has changed a lot in eight years with Democrats generally moving left on domestic issues while McCain's moved right and seen the GOP mainstream line up with his previously idiosyncratic brand of apocalyptic nationalism even as the once-pressing McCain-Feingold issue has come to look trivial. But in the past McCain voting for a Democrat was quite plausible -- after all, he soon went on to discuss switching parties, to discussing being Kerry's VP nominee, etc.
It should be said that I wouldn't find anything especially objectionable about going for a policy most economists don't like if you were able to articulate some kind of reason for doing so. But all Clinton has to offer in response is vacant anti-elitist posturing.
Lisa Shiffren at NRO walks us another step forward in trying to mainstream the notion that Barack Obama had a secret Muslim upbringing -- "Make of it what you will. Certainly that he may have been educated or raised Muslim is no disqualifier, but if he is lying about his upbringing for political acceptance, it speaks to character. We don't know if he is, but we know Daniel Pipes is no crank."
Pipes is, of course, a crank as we saw in yesterday's post where he was busy complaining that the real threat is that sneaky Muslims will abandon terrorism and start using the democratic process to get their way. What makes this kind of thing so odious is that once you manage to present the question, there's no way to debunk it. Is John McCain a manchurian candidate controlled by North Vietnamese Communists? He denies it, but these cranks say he is and if he's lying it speaks to his character. And how's McCain supposed to categorically disprove the charges? After all, none of us really know what happened in those jungle prison camps. . . .
I should make an official prediction about tonight, right? Well, clearly the universe is conspiring to make this primary last as long as possible. So what's going to happen is that (of course) Clinton will win Indiana and Obama will win North Carolina. But Clinton will win Indiana by a larger margin than Obama wins North Carolina, and Clinton's supporters will note in somber tones that Obama lost the white vote in NC. At the same time, because NC has substantially more delegates than Indiana, Obama will actually make a small gain in net delegates causing his supporters (i.e. me) to become further enraged at Clinton's refusal to admit that she's lost and the press' insistence on indulging the idea that there's real doubt about the ultimate outcome.
In the course of making some good points about Bobby Jindal yesterday, Ross mentioned "the possibility that [McCain] would only serve one term." I've heard a lot of speculation about this from conservative pundits, but it seems like a fairly straightforward question that McCain ought to be asked and that he ought to give some kind of answer to.
I think it was Ramesh Ponnuru who first suggested that it might be a canny move for McCain to foreswear ambitions for a second term, and I think he was right -- it would assuage fears about his age, make conservatives happier about him, fit in with his "straight-talk" persona, and give us all more opportunity discuss TMBG's "James K. Polk".
I see a lot of folks mocking this grandiose claim from Bill Clinton:
Folks, it's always a mistake to bet against America. It was tough in 1968, and we came back. It was tough in 1992 and we wound up with the eight best years we've had in modern history.
Is that really such a crazy thing to say? I doubt that eight out of the best eight years ever happened during Bill Clinton's term in office. Indeed, one cause of the GOP sweep in 1994 was lingering bad macroeconomic conditions and growth was slowing in the second half of 2000. But there was a solid 5+ year peacetime boom in there with few precedents, and American living standards really did reach a peak in 1998-2000 that was higher than anything in our earlier history and that we've yet to regain. If you'd been president then, you'd be bragging, too.
Via Ryan Avent, David Scheicher has an interesting paper about the lack of partisan competition in elections for city council races:
Despite the attention given to the anticompetitive effects of gerrymandering on national and state elections, little notice is paid to the least competitive legislative elections in America: its city council elections. In cities with partisan elections, individual competitive seats are rarer than at the national level and there is almost never competition for partisan control of councils. Nonpartisan city council elections are even worse, with virtually undefeatable incumbents and no policy competition of any kind. The dominant explanation in the political science literature for this phenomenon is that the lack of partisan competition in local elections is a result of the issues at play in local politics. Local politics, the argument goes, is not ideological - it is only about the competence with which public goods are provided and the allocation of these goods to different groups. This claim cannot stand up to scrutiny. Debates over issues like policing strategy and urban development are ideological, and voters do have beliefs about them, but there is still no partisan competition.
This paper argues that the explanation for the lack of partisan competition in city council elections lies in the laws governing these elections. Several laws - by my definition “unitary party rules” - serve to ensure that the national parties are on the ballot in local elections and that candidates, activists and voters do not defect from dominant national parties during local elections. When combined with the little information available about individual council candidates, the existence of the national party heuristic on local ballots crowds out other information and the laws create severe barriers to entry for potential local parties. The result is that the vote in city council elections directly tracks the vote in national elections, despite strong empirical evidence that voters have very different beliefs about local and national issues. In cities in which one party dominates at the national level, there is no competition. Thus, local legislatures are extremely unrepresentative of voter preferences and have little democratic legitimacy. Repealing the unitary party rules would spur a rearrangement of the two-party system at the local level and create party competition at the local level.
The basic issue is that beliefs about national issues don't map well onto beliefs about local issues. The Progressives thought the solution to this was non-partisan local elections, and until recently I thought so, too, but the research indicates that the situation is even worse in non-partisan election cities. I always found the choice voting system used to elect the Cambridge, MA City Council to be pretty appealing and wonder if it would, in some ways, help bring about what non-partisan local elections were supposed to achieve.
Don Cazayoux wins in Louisiana, expanding the Democrats' congressional majority, and showing that between the low approval ratings for congress and the low approval ratings for the GOP, the GOP is losing. Meanwhile, very narrow popular vote edge for Obama in Guam means the territory's pledged delegates will be split 2-2.
Ed Kilgore describes the Labour Party's drubbing in recent local elections, combined with terrible national poll numbers, as "Bad News From Across the Pond." And certainly for anyone affiliated with the Labour Party the news is bad.
But then again, they've been in office for about eleven years now in a system with few checks and balances so on some level the fact that the Tories look positioned to win just seems like a two party system working the way it's supposed to -- having been beaten several times in a row, Labour repositioned itself, then won a bunch of elections in a row, and now the Tories have repositioned themselves and are poised for victory.
Guam -- A Place That Actually Probably Shouldn't Count
Consider this a Guam thread. Now why do we think Democrats allow territories that don't get to vote in presidential general elections to have a say in the presidential primary nomination? It doesn't really seem to make sense.
After Wright's bizarre and narcissistic performance at the National Press Club on Monday, Obama would have looked weak and irresolute had he not denounced him. But if there was a moment of courage in this drama, it was not Obama's condemnation of Wright but his earlier and now much-criticized effort to avoid a complete break with his unapologetic pastor. [...]
The catalogue goes back to Bailey Smith, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Speaking at a 1980 religious convention that was also addressed by Ronald Reagan, Smith declared that "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew." [...]
Two days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Jerry Falwell, appearing on Pat Robertson's "700 Club," declared: "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' " [...]
And, of course, there is the endorsement of McCain by the Rev. John Hagee, founder of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, who has called the Catholic Church "the great whore of Babylon" and "the anti-Christ."
E.J. asks "Do white right-wing preachers have it easier than black left-wing preachers? Is there a double standard?" I think there is a double standard, but it's a double for politicians not for preachers. After all, all those right-wing nutters attracted their fair share of condemnation. The difference is that a white politician is presumptively assumed to be "one of us" so if some religious figures he has a relationship with has wacked-out views, those are seen as his views and not necessarily a problem for the politician. A black politician, however, is expected to constantly prove that he's "one of us" rather than "one of them."
Ambinder reports: "Clinton advisors think their candidate is being held to an unreasonable standard. Why should she have to consistently demonstrate her capacity to win in major states? Why does the press persist in setting up new hurdles for her overcome every time she jumps over her old hurdle?"
That's even crazier than their new gas kick. Hillary Clinton has been subjected to a lot of unfair press coverage in her life. But I've never before in my life seen the press as willing to go easy on a candidate's claims to still be a viable contender. If anyone else had found herself in the situation Clinton found herself in in February -- losing a dozen primaries in a row! -- they'd have been proclaimed dead. And then on March 4, her one big chance to close the delegate gap with Obama, she didn't close the gap. The reason the press keeps setting up "new hurdles" is that she's already failed the hurdle of winning enough delegates to beat Barack Obama.
She's lucky these new hurdles keep popping up, because it's propping her candidacy up and, not coincidentally, probably good business for campaign reporters. But normally when your opponent racks up an insurmountable lead, you've lost the campaign. And that's the situation she's been in for months at this point.
During the early years -- 2003-2005 or so -- McCain certainly was less of a blind Bush cheerleader than was your average Republican elected official, but things like this video underscore that that's not necessarily saying very much.
Howard Wolfson responds to the fact that nobody thinks a gas tax holiday would be a good idea:
“There are times that a president will take a position that a broad support of quote-unquote experts agree with,” spokesperson Howard Wolfson said. “And there are times they will take a position that quote-unquote experts do not agree with.”
That seems eerily reminiscent of a certain least-popular president ever's attitude toward governance. What happened to the idea that Clinton is the candidate of policy substance, competence, and experience?
I think this element of Paul Krugman's grudging willingness to give Barack Obama credit on the gas tax issue deserves a response:
Just to be clear: I don’t regard this as a major issue. It’s a one-time thing, not a matter of principle, especially because everyone knows the gas-tax holiday isn’t actually going to happen. Health care reform, on the other hand, could happen, and is very much a long-term issue—so poisoning the well by in effect running against universality, as Obama has, is a much more serious breach.
I think that's wildly off-base. It's true that the health care plan Obama is attacking is, in fact, better than the plan he's proposing. But Obama's health care plan would, in fact, improve the situation. He's making the good the enemy of the better, which isn't admirable but it's not the worst thing in the world. Clinton is, by contrast, proposing to make things worse which isn't at all what you want to see your presidential candidates proposing. What's more, as Brad Plumer says this is hardly a "short-term" issue -- is Clinton really going to implement a cap-and-trade program if she thinks the correct policy response to rising gasoline prices is tax cuts? There's a big problem here.
A big day for superdelegates, as five endorse (three for Obama, two for Clinton) and one switches from Clinton to Obama. Over a dozen superdelegates have declared so far this week. Remaining ones -- especially the six governors, seventeen senators, and sixty-five representatives who are directly accountable to constituents -- should be encouraged to do so as well, in as timely a manner as possible.
Tyler Cowen ponders John McCain's health care proposals for a bit and then muses:
Trade aside, so far I've yet to see many actual policy proposals from the McCain camp. Mostly I've seen attempts to signal that they won't do anything too offensive to the party's right wing. Very few of these trial balloons seem to be ideas that McCain had expressed much previous loyalty to. I don't even think we should be analyzing these statements as policy proposals. We should be wondering why the Republican Party has given up on the idea of policy proposals.
I'm a little unclear on how this happened myself -- the GOP seems to have decided to blow a not-very-appealing idiosyncratic element of George W. Bush's personality into some kind of principled objection to policy proposals. Meanwhile, I understand that free traders are not very impressed with Democratic rhetoric these days but I think it'd be generous to describe this as a policy proposal:
John McCain Will Lower Barriers To Trade. Ninety-five percent of the world's customers lie outside our borders and we need to be at the table when the rules for access to those markets are written. To do so, the U.S. should engage in multilateral, regional and bilateral efforts to reduce barriers to trade, level the global playing field and build effective enforcement of global trading rules. These steps would also strengthen the U.S. dollar and help to control the rising cost of living that hurts our families.
There doesn't seem to be a recognition here that the multilateral WTO trade process has basically run aground. But it's run aground. A president who wants to lower barriers to trade in a way that's economically significant (as opposed to, say, the Colombia deal) needs some bright ideas about how to do this. In McCain's defense, such ideas are hard to come by, but if you want to tell people that lowering trade barriers is an important part of your economic strategy then you need some.
Here's a crazy media moment. ABC News is reporting on the candidates' gas tax dispute and instead of just going with claim and counterclaim a reporter informs us that he spoke to several economists about the issue and they all agree that "Obama is essentially right" that what Clinton and McCain are proposing wouldn't accomplish anything:
The pace of superdelegate endorsements seems to be picking up this week, with Iowa Congressman Bruce Braley signing on with Obama, Rep. Ike Skelton going for Clinton, and before that Senator Bingaman for Obama and also someone else whose name I forget. That's as it should be. Whichever candidate you prefer, it's just better to have the superdelegates state their preferences sooner rather than later.
Paul Newell is challenging Sheldon Silver in a NY State Assembly primary. That sounds a bit like a parochial local concern, but Silver is the super-powerful Speaker of the assembly and actually quite reactionary on a variety of issues including an unhelpful posture on the now-dead NYC congestion pricing initiative. Were he to lose -- or even just need to feel the fear -- that would send a loud signal about the rising political prospects of urbanism. Streetsblog has a worthwhile interview.
Phillip Weis went to college with Geoffrey Garin, Hillary Clinton's new top pollster, and recalled him as having been quite the radical. And thanks to the Crimson's extensive archives, you can actually read his old op-eds calling for, among other things, the violent overthrow of the government. Which is not, obviously, a good reason to vote against Clinton but it does put her campaign's Ayers-related attacks in a certain perspective.
It seems the GOP youth vote problems extend to Jenna Bush, who's not ready to commit to McCain:
I know some conservatives think George W. Bush's inevitable convention speech is bound to be a disastrous reminder to America that McCain represents continuity with Bush, but maybe she's one voter her dad can persuade.
Alex Massie wants to know who the most overrated and underrated U.S. presidents are. The trick with this sort of thing is you need a metric of "rated." Ross, for example, says Ike is underrated but my impression is that at this point Ike is already very highly rated (every foreign policy conference seems to open with a discussion of the need for a new Solarium project.
I'll use the 2005 Wall Street Journal poll of scholars as my baseline, and say that Eisenhower's at number eight so he's not a good candidate for underrated. I think Grant is undervalued at 29, Carter is undervalued at 34, and John Quincy Adams undervalued at 25. Overrated on the list are Kennedy at 15, McKinley at 14, and Reagan at 6. There seems in general to be a slant in favor of presidents who were very successful partisan politicians (even guys from long ago like Jackson and McKinley) and thereby entered the pantheon of "historical figures who present-day figures sometimes mention in a positive light" and an undervaluation of people who faced difficult political circumstances beyond their control and nonetheless did some good things.
Here's Robert Reich, former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor, explaining his endorsement of Barack Obama:
Reich, it should be said, started criticizing the Clinton administration from the left in the 1990s so his support for Obama isn't like the turnaround of a die-hard loyalist, but I do think it reflects the judgment of a guy who has a good sense of where the Clintons stand vis-a-vis other possible progressive leaders.
These are the latest youth cohort party ID numbers from Pew. As you can see here, the future looks a bit bleak for the GOP. The chart illustrates the fact that, contrary to myth, the Democratic edge with young people has usually been pretty small but now it's huge. In a micro-sense, of course, anyone whose experience consists mostly of eight years of peace and prosperity under Bill Clinton followed by Bush acceding to the White House under dubious circumstances and then leading us into inept governance, failed wars, and a shaky economy is bound to favor the Democrats.
But in a macro sense, you're looking at the undertow of the past thirty years of conservative identity politics. The right has had great electoral success mobilizing people against the kind of social transformation we've been experiencing for the past several decades (more and more assertive racial and ethnic minorities, secularists, cosmopolitan types, etc.) but they haven't actually halted any of these transformations and the lines of cleavage that have given the GOP the bigger half of the cookie in most elections since 1968 leave them with the smaller half among the youngest cohort.
In case you needed my opinion to figure this out, Reverend Wright doesn't seem to be doing his former parishoner any favors, choosing instead to hog as much of the spotlight as possible, reiterate the most objectionable of his greatest hits, and I guess just see what John McCain can do with this. One supposes this'll lead to a more open breach between Wright and Obama, which might help the latter in the long run, but it's a pretty depressing mess at this point.
In case you needed my opinion to figure this out, Reverend Wright doesn't seem to be doing his former parishoner any favors, choosing instead to hog as much of the spotlight as possible, reiterate the most objectionable of his greatest hits, and I guess just see what John McCain can do with this. One supposes this'll lead to a more open breach between Wright and Obama, which might help the latter in the long run, but it's a pretty depressing mess at this point.
As a married couple, John and Cindy McCain are multi-millionaires. But John McCain on his own is just a guy with some money in a Wachovia savings account. In other words, he's stashed all his considerable assets under his wife's name, and then proceeded to not disclose anything at all about his finances under pretense of protecting his daughter's privacy. It's absurd. Meanwhile, what could possibly be in there that he's worried would be damning. Stock in the Umbrella Corporation?
His opponents seem to be putting up a defensive effort that's reminiscent of recent New York Knicks squads. The fact that they're all Obama campaign volunteers may play a role in this.
I don't think early polling should be dispositive in anyone's thinking about anything, but can we put the notion that Hillary Clinton has some kind of decisive edge in swing states to rest with polls like this one out of Wisconsin? There are contested regions where Clinton looks stronger than Obama (specifically: PA/OH and FL) and contested regions where Obama looks stronger than Clinton (specifically WI/MN/IA, WA/OR, and VA) and for either to win they'll need to do pretty well in some regions where the other one is better.
Ambinder says "given that undecided superdelegates have said that their primary criterion for determining who they'll choose is who has the best chance of beating John McCain in the fall, there's no real reason for those superdelegates
