Barack Obama paraphrases Ronald Reagan's famous question: "Are you better off than you were four or eight years ago?"
Now personally, I'd say I'm much better off than I was as an awkward nineteen year-old college sophomore. On the other hand, I'm not sure that I'd give George W. Bush a ton of credit for that. Which is what's a bit odd about this question -- I'm not sure how tightly linked people's overall well-being really is to average economic trends. And at the same time the biggest victims of Bush's policies are the ones who are dead and thus don't have the chance to complain about it. A lot of people who were working eight years ago are retired today. And a lot of people who are working today were kids eight years ago. Many others have children today who they didn't have eight years ago. Or maybe eight years ago they were happily married and now they're divorced.
But even sticking to the strictly economic, we know that any given individual's wages tend to go up over the course of his/her career as he/she gains experience, skills, and seniority. Thus even during a period in which average wages stagnate, most people will actually be better off than there were a few years in the past.
With the fundamentals so favorable to Barack Obama, why can't he crack open a bigger lead against John McCain? What's wrong with him? Does he need to change tactics? Or is it, as Andrew Gelman explains, that what the fundamentals predict is a modest victory with Obama getting about 53 percent of the vote. Right now, that's exactly what he's in line for and I expect it's what he'll get.
Note that close-ish elections are probably how the world should be. A lot of people are conservative Republicans. Barack Obama is not a conservative Republican. There's really no reason for those people to vote for Obama, no more how badly the economy may be doing. I think the only scenario in which Obama could really win in a landslide would be one in which Bob Barr starts eating away at McCain's base vote.
I'm pretty sure the behavior Wal-Mart is engaged in here, pressuring employees to vote for John McCain, is illegal. But the real scandal is what's unquestionably illegal. There's an awful lot companies can do perfectly legally to block union organizing drives. But some of the most effective tactics are illegal. That doesn't, however, mean that following the law is smart business strategy:
On June 30 the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Wal-Mart illegally fired an employee in Kingman, Ariz., who supported the UFCW and illegally threatened to freeze merit-pay increases if employees voted for union representation. The decision came eight years after the organizing campaign failed, and four years after the case was originally heard.
Under these circumstances, union organizers have no effective legal recourse to violations of labor law and employers have no incentive to actually follow the law. And since employees know the laws won't be enforced if broken, employers only relatively rarely need to actually break the law in order to get the correct intimidating threat. Like the mafia, a company like Wal-Mart only needs to be seen to break a few kneecaps and get away with it for there to be an adequate intimidation effect to de facto deny a vast workforce its rights.
Photo by Flickr user wetwebwork used under a Creative Commons license
I think the McCain campaign's "Celebrity" ad and the whole line about Barack Obama being too arrogant or something are pretty ridiculous, but it's a bit puzzling to me to see liberals expressing the view that these are some kind of crypto-racist lines of attack. Given that Obama's black, and America's history, I think it's always going to be possible to read some kind of racial subtext into attacks on him. But both of these are lines of argument you could easily imagine being deployed against a white candidate and, indeed, they're fundamentally similar to arguments Republicans regularly make against Democrats.
Beyond that, trying to sniff out racial subtexts in these kind of things strikes me as overwhelmingly likely to prove problematic. People really don't like to be called racists. Obama really has had a brief tenure on the national stage and most people really aren't especially familiar with his legislative record or his agenda. If people hear about Obama's record their doubts may be allayed. If they're told that their doubts are really just racism, they get defensive. Personally, I think Obama's record on getting police to videotape interrogations speaks extremely well of him. For one thing, he was right on the merits of the issue. But beyond that, this is the kind of thankless cause that politicians normally avoid. Even those who might be willing to back a measure of this sort are rarely going to decide that it's worth investing actual time and energy in it. And Obama showed great skill in, over time, growing his coalition and defusing the initial opposition of law enforcement groups -- getting them to see that at the end of the day serious law enforcement professionals have nothing to fear from high professional standards and meaningful efforts to see that justice is done. But how many people know about this stuff?
The Bush administration wants to say that its officials have carte blanche to ignore congressional subpoenas, to which Judge John Bates replies:
The executive’s current claim of absolute immunity from compelled Congressional process for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law.
Pardon me if you've seen this point elsewhere, but in what sense is John McCain not a celebrity? I've seen him on the covers of magazines, on television, in newspapers, doing guest appearances on SNL, etc.:
Could you possibly be a major party presidential nominee and not be a celebrity? But in particular, McCain actually stands out among politicians as being someone who was a famous celebrity first and then parlayed his fame into a political career, rather than merely being someone who's well-known for being an important politician.
Kevin Drum's not the only liberal upset by a political press that can't seem to hold John McCain responsible for John McCain's campaign tactics. But isn't the image painted in today's stories -- of McCain as a kind of passive bystander to decisions being made on his behalf by his staff -- sort of more damning?
The presidency, after all, involves significant managerial challenges. And neither McCain nor Barack Obama has ever been a mayor or a governor or run an executive agency. Neither has ever run a company. McCain was a Navy officer, but he didn't achieve the kind of rank where he had substantial managerial responsibilities -- he flew airplanes, he didn't command ships. For both of them, their presidential campaigns are the largest enterprises they've ever run. That's not good preparation for the White House in either case, but we don't have much else to go on. And if we're supposed to believe that McCain can't seize control of his own campaign strategy, then what does that say about his executive leadership?
Business Week: "This ad asserts a McCain campaign talking-point that Obama wouldn’t make time for wounded troops unless cameras were allowed to follow him, but did make time to work out at a gym. This, of course, is a lie. It’s a blatant lie." But also the following scoop:
What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.
Obama Tour Doesn't Help In Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Quinnipiac University Swing State Poll Finds; Voters Care More About Energy Than Iraq --- FLORIDA: Obama 46 - McCain 44; OHIO: Obama 46 - McCain 44; PENNSYLVANIA: Obama 49 - McCain 42.
That's right -- Obama's tour didn't help. He's just winning in Ohio and winning in Florida. He must be shaking with terror.
St. Petersburg Times (Florida): "The Straight Talk Express has taken a nasty turn into the gutter. Sen. John McCain has resorted to lies and distortions in what sounds like an increasingly desperate attempt to slow down Sen. Barack Obama by raising questions about his patriotism. Instead of taking the Democrat down a few notches, these baseless attacks are raising more questions about the Republican's campaign and his ability to control his temper."
A new CNN/Opinion Research poll out Wednesday shows that despite nine solid days of blanket media coverage from overseas with Barack Obama cheered by adoring throngs of Germans and parlez-vousing with the French, making a three-point shot in the Middle East and standing outside No. 10 Downing Street, the freshman Illinois Democratic presidential nominee to be Senator Barack Obama of Illinois stayed static in the polls despite his well-covered long foreign tripsenator is stuck right where he was in the polls before he left.
How bad are things for Obama? Pretty bad: "He still leads Republican Sen. John McCain 51-44. But it's the same 51-44 as last time." Do you think that if Obama wins, then the day after the election all the headlines will be about how he hasn't yet really pulled away from McCain? Shouldn't the whole "our nominee is consistently behind in the polls" thing be worrying Republicans?
The obvious problem with the polls you see all the time about how the public feels about such and such an issue is that these surveys don't tell you whether the people actually care about the issue or not. Taegan Goddard, meanwhile, glossesThe Opinion Makers forthcoming from David W. Moore:
The author — a former senior editor of the Gallup Poll — says that today's opinion polls misfire due to an intrinsic methodological problem: survey results don't differentiate between "those who express deeply held views and those who have hardly, if at all, thought about an issue."
This is disturbing. Either Moore managed to find a publisher for a book thesis about as obvious as "college students like to drink," or else Moore's thesis actually isn't as bog obvious as I think it is. I'm not sure which is worse.
Or there's a third option: his thesis really is as obvious as I think it is, but everyone keeps pretending not to know it anyway. Which means it's worth a book. Good luck, David!
I think that option number three is correct. Nobody who thinks about this stuff a lot could possibly fail to have thought of Moore's point, but at the same time politicians and their aides very frequently do act as if they don't understand this. I think the reason is that referring to polling data, even bad data, is a good CYA mechanism when you need to make difficult decisions. A consultant who says "we don't have any valid data on this question, but I think you should do X" is going to get blamed if X doesn't turn out right. But if he can point to some data, and say that he's not making the recommendation, he's just pointing to the numbers then if things go south it isn't really his fault.
This is a pretty common organizational flaw. The natural tendency is to try to maximize whatever it is that you have a good measurement of, even if the measured quantity is only questionably related to what you're trying to do. Politicians know how to get an issue poll in the field, and there aren't great metrics for getting the information you would really want. So campaigns often go to war with the data they have, even while knowing that the data's no good.
Describing Barack Obama's support for a cap and trade plan as a tax on electricity when McCain is also trying to get credit for breaking with Bush and supporting a cap and trade plan is doubleplus good.
NBC News: "McCain and his campaign repeated at least two lines of attack against Obama, which when first said in early July, were called 'bogus,' 'wrong,' 'inflated' and 'misleading' by independent fact checkers."
It looks like the McCain campaign's strategy of relying on frequent lying may be getting their candidate something of a reputation as a liar.
In the relentless quest to find the soccer moms of this election, perhaps the answer will be found in the “active granny” vote — empty-nesters who have found a new freedom in their lives after the kids have left and who look at the world very differently than do their kids graduating college.
Not to rehash the entire Mark Penn debate, but has he missed the point that most people whose kids have just left home aren't grandparents? Surely having grandchildren should be a necessary condition for "active granny" status. Meanwhile, I'm surprised he's not encouraging candidates to play for the sniper vote.
Washington Post: "For four days, Sen. John McCain and his allies have accused Sen. Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true."
Unfortunately, much of the rest of the article proceeds as if harshly-phrased dishonest attacks exist on a continuum with harsh, accurate attacks.
They’ll also begin to use “Pelosi-Reid-Obama” in the all-in-the-same-breath way that Democrats now use “Bush-McCain” — to make the parties’ popular candidates indistinguishable from their less beloved incumbents.
This was more or less Bill Kristol's column a couple of days ago. The trouble is that as best I can tell, Pelosi isn't nearly unpopular enough for this to work. Her approval ratings are always in the thirties and so are her disapproval ratings. She's not a wildly popular figure, but she rates quite a bit better than George W. Bush and meanwhile is pretty obscure and unknown by a large block of people.
According to Jonathan Martin, the indictment of Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) is good news for John McCain (R-AZ) because it will "at least subtly remind voters about the clashes between the two senators over the years" over pork.
The Environmental Protection Agency is warning its pollution enforcement officials not to talk directly to congressional investigators, reporters and even the agency's own inspector general, according to an internal e-mail provided to The Associated Press.
Rick Perlstein can be a cynical as he wants to be about Richard Nixon and the founding of the EPA, but at the end of the day the upshot of Nixon's EPA-related cynicism was real improvement in the state of American environmental policy. The Bush administration has shown us that there are other ways of doing business.
Tom Edsall has a good overview of the election predictions offered by various political scientists. The consensus? A big win for Obama, unless he loses.
In truth, though, what's striking about the roundup is how little real disagreement there is. First there's Alan Abramowitz, Tom Mann, and Larry Sabato and their essay "The Myth of a Tossup Election" arguing that Obama will win easily. James Campbell, on the other hand, thinks it'll be close. Then we learn that "Vanderbilt's John Geer, in turn, is by no means convinced that McCain will lose as badly as Adlai Stevenson in 1952." Robert Y. Shapiro says it'll be close, Michael S. Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien argue that Obama will win but only narrowly because his race will turn off a segment of the electorate, Helmut Norpoth has a model that predicts a narrow Obama win, and then Sandy Maisel agrees with the Abramowitz/Mann/Sabato analysis.
Basically, predictions range from Obama winning narrowly to Obama winning easily with one guy calling it a toss-up. In other words nobody thinks McCain is likely to win.
My take on this is that the election is more unpredictable than the "Obama in a landslide" crowd thinks primarily because the fundamentals themselves are unpredictable. I don't think it's likely that there'll be a marked turnaround in economic conditions over the next few months, but macroeconomic trends are famously hard to forecast. Similarly, none of us really know what's going to happen in Iraq over the next few months. Elections are primarily determined by the fundamentals, and thus are in that sense more predictable than journalists usually imply, but it's not as if the fundamentals are all that easy to predict.
Back on Friday, Jamie Kirchick wrote a kind of unhinged tirade against myself, other liberal Jewish writers such as Eric Alterman, and J Street, the new progressive pro-Israel pro-peace PAC that was, honestly, too long to read on a Friday. It was suggested to me, however, that in light of today's announcement of six more J Street endorsements of House candidates that I might want to check it out especially the part where he "guarantees" that Robert Wexler wouldn't accept a J Street endorsement.
Needless to say, today's list of endorsees includes Rep. Wexler along with Rep. Lois Capps and Rep. Susan Davis plus wannabe congresspeople Sam Bennett, Ashwin Madia, and Tom Perriello.
The New York Timestakes a look at Senator Tom Coburn and all the legislation he's single-handedly holding up under the Senate's weird rules where one member can block a bill unless it's Chris Dodd trying to maintain some limits to presidential surveillance power. Tim Fernholz comments on efforts to put a stop to Coburn's obstructionism:
It'll be interesting to see how Harry Reid handles this one (the Times seems pessimistic about his chances for success) since it will be a preview of his ability to handle obstructionist Senators in 2009.
This is very right. During the Democratic primary there was a lot of emphasis on the relative level of commitment and general hard-core-ness of the different candidates as the independent variable in terms of what happens legislatively in 2009-2010. Realistically, though, if Barack Obama wins an enormous amount will depend on the procedural rules of the Senate and how the leadership and the Democratic rank and file interpret them. If a health care bill is handled through the budget reconciliation process (which you can't filibuster) then many things become possible that wouldn't otherwise be. More broadly, though I highly doubt this is going to happen, there's nothing stopping the Democrats from doing something along the lines of the proposed "nuclear option" and simply repealing the filibuster rule altogether. Alternatively, Tom Coburn could be allowed to hold up vast swathes of legislative activity. It really just depends on the extent to which Democratic members are interested in subordinating their own personal prerogatives as Senators to the larger effort to pass an ambitious legislative program.
To be a bit flip, you could say that rather than thinking in a serious way about public policy the conservative movement debates issues by asking "what would Reagan do?" Either that or you could flip over to the home page of the Heritage Foundation, the flagship policy outfit of the right, and find a prominent banner advertising Heritage's new What Would Reagan Do? website. At the moment, they seem to be having a special focus on energy policy.
Might I suggest that Reagan, having been a prominent political figure in the 1960s through 1980s, wasn't in a position to avail himself of 21st century research into the problem of global warming and the risks of catastrophic climate change. If Reagan were both alive today and actually possessed of the God-like powers that Heritage attributes to him, I like to think he would have taken that research into account. Alternatively, if he were alive today and just plowed ahead with policies that take no account of post-Reagan research, then he'd be nicely in line with mainstream conservatism but that would hardly be a very responsible way to behave.
Once again, John McCain has an unfortunate run-in with a straightforward effort to quote his words, and protests to George Stephanoupolous "I didn’t use the word 'timetable'" when, in fact, he called Nuri al-Maliki's plans for Iraq "a pretty good timetable" just days ago. Perhaps he meant to say "general time horizon."
When you think about the stunningly dishonest ad John McCain is running, falsely accusing Barack Obama of not meeting with troops during his trip abroad and falsely accusing Obama of some scheme to deny money to the troops, you have to recall the breathtakingly unprincipled way in which McCain has been pursuing the presidency from the beginning. Jon Chait writes about the audacity of flip-flopper allegations coming from the McCain camp:
If one needs any final proof of the ridiculousness of this quadrennial exercise, it is the fact that John McCain has embraced the flip-flopper attack. John McCain! I've said this before, I'll say it again: This is a man who, in his quest to make himself an acceptable GOP nominee, reversed his political philosophy (crusading anti-business progressive in the Teddy Roosevelt mode); his political orientation (frequently siding with, and nearly joining, Senate Democrats); and almost every particular undergirding it (taxes, the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill, his own immigration bill, etc.). But if you actually think that flip-flopping is a sign of flawed character, and not just a handy partisan cudgel, then, sure, Obama might be slightly cynical, but McCain must be a dangerous sociopath.
And I might add his couple of years spent as a moderate Republican was, itself, a reverse from his earlier orientation as an orthodox conservative. And with recent reversals to try to bring his thinking on Afghanistan closer in line with Barack Obama's, the floppery's not limited to domestic policy either. He's a guy who really wants to win the election, and he's willing to adopt pretty much any policy position and launch pretty much any dishonest attack on his opponent that he thinks will help him get there. If that means totally fictitious ads about Obama refusing to meet with soldiers, then fine.
Photo by Flickr user marcn used under a Creative Commons license
Responding to increasing indications that John McCain is looking seriously at Mitt Romney as a VP choice Noam Scheiber rounds up the evidence that Romney doesn't exactly have huge appeal to swing voters. Stepping back, though, before McCain does this I would urge him to recall what happened back in the primaries. Romney had a lot of advantages -- solid conservative positions on the issues, a lot of institutional support, and a ton of money.
But he wound up losing because, basically, people find him loathesome. Some find him loathesome because of his religion, some because of his flip-flopping, and others just because he's loathesome. But whatever the reason, people just really don't like Mitt Romney. Putting him on the ticket seems like an obvious recipe for disaster, but a potential boon to progressive bloggers who are really in need of a mockable choice.
Back during the primaries, everyone kept formally admitting that it was wrong to engage in the form of inference "candidate X lost group A in a primary, and therefore he's likely to lose group A in a general election against candidate Y of the other party" but I often got the sense listening to and reading pundits that they didn't really believe that. But the Pew Center's latest findings on public opinion among Hispanics should remind people that this is a very important caveat. Barack Obama did quite a poor job of persuading Latinos to vote for him over Hillary Clinton, but they're backing him very strongly against John McCain.
The numbers deserve to be put in a historical context:
Obama is, in short, in solid shape with this demographic. Which I hope will serve as a reminder for us next time. The way a lot of people were interpreting the Obama-Clinton primary results led to the conclusion that neither candidate could beat John McCain because both were showing "weakness" among some key groups, even though both were polling ahead of McCain in general election trial heats at the time. But the "weakness" of both candidates simply reflected the fact that they were evenly matched with about half of Democrats preferring each of their choices -- it didn't say anything about either candidate's actual strength in November.
Marc Ambinder reports from the stump on John McCain's bold stance against cancer with Lance Armstrong:
McCain developed an antipathy to tobacco lobbyists. He once threw lobbyist Charlie Black out of his Senate office because Black worked for Phillip Morris at that time. (Black now works for McCain as a strategist.)
And beyond Black, has McCain flip-flopped on any issues? Yes:
McCain now opposes sin taxes on cigarettes. He said he worries that Congress would put the additional money into a general revenue pool. "Does anyone here have confidence in Congress?" he asked the crowd. Moderator Paula Zahn was skeptical. Might McCain change his mind if researchers proved that raisng the tobacco tax would help lower smoking rates?
"It would have to be proved. I don 't think it's in the constitution of this Congress.” He hastened to add, “By the way, I’m not for anybody’s taxes.” He later implied that raising the cigarette tax would lead to more smoking as a way of explaining his decision not to support a Democratic attempt to use a tax hike to pay for more children’s health insurance.
So first McCain wants us to believe that he's so fanatically opposed to making public services more generous, that this is why he's opposed to raising cigarette taxes. Smoking is bad, says McCain, and it's important to promote public health by reducing its incidence. But it's even more important that we starve the government of funds for things like police and courts and infrastructure and health care and education and parks and the military than that we reduce the rate of smoking. Then, perhaps realizing that this is crazy, he turns around and asserts without evidence that higher cigarette taxes increase the rate of smoking.
Now all the evidence suggests that higher taxes lead to less smoking since, after all, what happens when the price of something goes up is that consumption goes down. But if this made-up fact were true, that would make McCain's position make sense, so why not just pretend it's true? After all, he's a straight-talker.
Photo by Flickr user pretamal used under a Creative Commons license
While Barack Obama took a premature victory lap today in the heart of Berlin, proclaiming himself a "citizen of the world," John McCain continued to make his case to the American citizens who will decide this election.
There were, of course, problematic parts, like introducing himself as a "citizen of the world." These carefully-chosen words, loaded in the context of the current campaign, were obviously intended to advance the image that Obama wants to present to American voters. It's far from clear, however, that "citizen of the world" is at the top of the list of qualities voters are looking for this year.
So Barack Obama, whose father is from Kenya and who attended school in Indonesia, now appears before a crowd of 200,000 cheering Germans in Berlin to proclaim himself a "citizen of the world." It makes you wonder whether he's running for president of America or secretary general of the United Nations, and it is reminiscent of Senator Kerry's ill-fated 2004 debate pledge to subject American policies to a "global test."
And tonight, we declare anew to our fellow citizens of the world: Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few; it is the universal right of all God's children. Look to where peace and prosperity flourish today. It is in homes that freedom built. Victories against poverty are greatest and peace most secure where people live by laws that ensure free press, free speech, and freedom to worship, vote, and create wealth.
And it seems like only yesterday that George W. Bush himself was warning against the "false comfort of isolationism."
Bill O'Reilly: "It is not a stretch to say that MoveOn is the new Klan." Here, for reference, is the kind of thing the Klan used to do:
MoveOn, by contrast, is currently touting a petition calling on politicians to boost America's use of alternative energy as a method of generating electricity. Chris Hayes' excellent article on MoveOn at ten years old makes clear, these efforts to marginalize MoveOn by painting it as an unhinged radical outfit are both extremely common and also way off base. Ideologically and temperamentally it's much more a descendant of the Common Cause reformist impulse than of any strain of radicalism whatsoever.
Jonathan Martin has a very interesting article in Politico about the huge capabilities gap between left-leaning and right-leaning new media in terms of doing reporting and the impact that this is having on the campaign trail. There's no equivalent on the right to what's being done at TPM Media or Think Progress or the Washington Independent or the Huffington Post in terms of finding new campaign stories and pushing them. There's plenty of commentary on the left, but on the right that's all there is.
The only real disagreement I would have is that I think Martin to some extent overstates the extent to which this is all about old-fashioned "shoe leather" when a lot of it is more research than reporting in that it's the kind of stuff you can do with Google (possibly while eating cheetos in your underwear) rather than by interviewing people. Indeed, in a sense I would say that one problem with conventional campaign journalism is that there's too much reporting. If you're standing outside at a John McCain press availability with a notebook or audio recorded, you're very poorly situated to debunk or verify anything McCain is saying. A well-informed person sitting at home with his laptop, by contrast, can actually bring information to bear.
Did McCain Back the New Counterinsurgency Strategy
Robert Wright and Jim Pinkerton raise an important issue -- it's very clear from the record that John McCain strongly supported the dispatch of additional troops to Iraq, but it's not at all clear that he supported the suite of counterinsurgency tactics that he now wants us to believe is what the term "the surge" refers to. Indeed, the basic shape of the Anbar Awakening -- talk to your enemies, make concessions to bad guys to get them out of the terrorism business, etc. -- doesn't sound at all like the kind of thing McCain supports philosophically.
I'm open to being corrected on this point if anyone has evidence of McCain saying something like "we really ought to be reaching out to the insurgency and negotiating with them" during or before the summer of 2006 then I hope they'll let me know. But fundamentally the tactical turnaround that led to a lot of the successes north of Baghdad doesn't actually seem to have been anything McCain was calling for.
UPDATE: For example, here's a June 2006 speech on Iraq where McCain lays out his views and doesn't call for anything like the Anbar Awakening tactics.
It's more bad news for Barack Obama as an MSNBC poll shows him maintaining a six point lead over John McCain in a political climate when he should be leading by sixty points. Another couple of months of this consistently beating his opponent, and Obama's really going to be in panic mode!
Interestingly, "Obama’s lead over McCain expands to 13 points when third-party candidates Ralph Nader and Bob Barr are added into the mix -- with Obama at 48 percent, McCain at 35 percent, Nader at 5 percent and Barr at 2 percent." I'm not sure what the implications are of including third party candidates in the poll this early in the process but since Nader and Barr are in fact in the race that does seem relevant. More broadly, the poll probably explains why Obama's campaign isn't assailing McCain as furiously as some folks I know would like -- the public is already pretty persuaded of the case against McCain and Obama's greater political need is to further burnish his own image.
It seems that the guy Bob Novak slammed with his car while he was walking in the crosswalk is in worse condition than before and "appeared to have casts on his neck and back." Novak is saying that the reason he sped away from the incident is that he didn't realize he hit the guy, but a witness says the victim was "splayed on his windshield."
I saw on television earlier this morning that for breaking traffic laws and seriously injuring a man through conduct that could easily have killed him, Novak is going to get . . . a $50 fine. That's ludicrous. Lawlessly running down pedestrians should be a serious offense.
Haven't we reached an odd moment in our history when the burgeoning consensus among the media is that one of Barack Obama's big problems is that he's too good at drawing big crowds? His vulnerability is that he's a charismatic guy who people want to see talk? It's a bit of a perverse perspective.
Photo by Flickr user Wolfgang Staudt used under a Creative Commons license
Tim Lee's been reading some of my posts on inane regulatory barriers and suggests I should get into the Institute for Justice's work. I actually first became aware of the insanity of occupational licensing rules courtesy of the Institute of Justice so I'll gladly give them props. I wouldn't really say this is an organization I support, since they do litigation on behalf of all kinds of libertarian causes I don't endorse like destroying public schools and destroying the environment.
Via John Sides, along comes political scientist Dan Hopkins with some empirical research into the "Wilder effect" question (PDF, the phenomena whereby black candidates get a smaller share of the vote than public polling would have predicted.
Titled "No More Wilder Effect, Never a Whitman Effect: When and Why Polls Mislead about Black and Female Candidates," the paper concludes that there really was a Wilder effect in the early 1990s but there isn't one any more. Here's the abstract:
Using new data from 133 gubernatorial and Senate elections from 1989 to 2006, this paper presents the first large-sample test of the Wilder effect. It demonstrates a significant Wilder effect only through the early 1990s, when Wilder himself was Governor of Virginia. Although the same mechanisms could impact female candidates, this paper finds no such effect at any point in time. It also shows how polls’ over-estimation of front-runners’ support can exaggerate estimates of the Wilder effect. Together, these results accord with theories emphasizing how short-term changes in the political context influence the role of race in statewide elections. The Wilder effect is the product of racial attitudes in specific political contexts, not a more general response to under-represented groups.
I've been on the edge of my seat wondering whether George W. Bush would speak at the RNC, or whether his gross unpopularity would lead the party to try to stash him away on a presidential visit to Madagascar or something. Apparently, though, no Madagascar for him -- spech is on for September 1. Now I'm wondering about Cheney.
One odd subplot of the campaign that I've caught occasional glimpses of in comments here are anti-Obama conspiracy theorists raising questions about why the original copy of his birth cerificate isn't available. The idea, it seems, is that Obama was secretly born outside the United States and his parents said to themselves, back in 1961, "this interracial kid will probably be president some day so we'd better cover up his place of birth and pretend it happened in Hawaii so he'll be eligible even though he'd actually be eligible anyway." Something like that.
At any rate, Dave Weigel's been tracking the conspiracies better than anyone and has the latest as the anti-Obama truth squad inadvertently uncovers evidence that they're wrong and still manage to process it into their theory.
Ben Smith notes that with McCain's press corps eager to ask some followup questions about McCain (a) not knowing when the surge happened, and (b) accusing Barack Obama of seeking to deliberately lose wars for political gain his campaign decided to cancel his press availability. What Smith doesn't note is that this cancellation comes hot on the heels of 48 hours worth of non-stop whining about how the press is paying too much attention to Obama's trip and ought to focus more on McCain.
Joe Lieberman on John Hagee: "Dear friends, I can only imagine what the bloggers of today would have had to say about Moses and Miriam.” But of course it's hardly just "bloggers" who are upset about Lieberman's recent antics -- polls show that such people as Connecticuters (Connecticutians?) and Jews all disapprove of Lieberman and his newfound love of rightwing nutjobs.
Well, girls, if you're out there following the American presidential campaign you'll be glad to know that The Washington Postis around to tell you that the perfect wife is always deferential, does everything she can to support her husband's career, and beyond that doesn't bore him with a lot of talking about stuff. Kay Steiger's not seeing it:
But a presidential candidate’s spouse that’s shy and uncomfortable speaking in public, might more often be viewed that as a liability and not an asset. But regardless of whether or not “perfection” is defined by impeccable manners, riding horses, and studying dance, it seems that that’s only one way that someone can be perfect. That version of perfection is rooted in antiquated stereotypes about how women should be quiet, speak when spoken to, and never express an opinion too loudly (if at all).
Meanwhile, the author of the piece, Libby Copeland, has risen over the course of her ten year career from being a Washington Post intern to being a feature writing at one of America's premiere newspapers. One assumes she's not, in other words, actually someone who thinks that Cindy McCain's traditionalist heiress lifestyle is something every woman should aspire to. It's odd. You don't expect comprised of a 72 year-old man and a 64 year-old woman to really be a model of forward-looking egalitarian marriage and I don't think there's really anything wrong with that -- they're people of their time, and they seem happy enough with it. But why would we want to hold this anachronistic model up as an ideal to which we should all be aspiring?
Mike Allen and Jim Van deHei finally take note of McCain's frequent gaffes. Interestingly, they view his proclivity for misstatements primarily through the lens of age -- perhaps McCain's getting old and losing his grip. To me, though, if take a broader look I think it's just a campaign that's not doing a good job of briefing people. We've seen Carly Fiorina not realize McCain disagrees with her about whether insurance companies should cover birth control, and several different McCain surrogates promise to "fully fund" No Child Left Behind even though that's not actually McCain's position.
Are they lazy? Are they arrogant? Understaffed? Have they just decided that these kind of mix-ups don't matter? I couldn't say for sure. But it's not a personal issue with McCain, it's reflective of a broader trend in his campaign toward people being unprepared.
We all know conservatives like to complain about media bias, but it's a bit rich to hear this kind of whining from John McCain, who likes to call the media "my base."
In an unrelated development, The New Republic's Jonathan Chait has a piece out about how awesome John McCain is.
The Center Cannot Hold, and It's A Center-Left Center
Another cool chart from the Monkey Change which compares the ideological distribution of the electorate to that of the House and Senate. All three curves are bimodal, but the voters clump closer to the center than do the members of congress. Were I David Broder I would argue that this shows the wisdom of the masses and the baleful influence of special interests in pushing party leaders to extreme positions, but realistically it probably reflects the fact that members of congress are much better-informed about politics than are average voters, and therefore members of congress tend to have more coherent ideological viewpoints.
The other interesting point is that the electorate seems, on the whole, slightly left of where the congress is. The "trough" of the voters' bimodal distribution is to the left of the House and Senate troughs, and the left peak in the electorate is substantially higher than the right peak but that's not true in the congress. You should probably expect congress to be somewhat to the right of the public thanks to the fact that the current gerrymander mostly favors Republicans and the apportionment of the Senate tends to overrepresent conservative parts of the country.
Then he pestered Gore to condemn Hillary Clinton -- who's no longer in the race -- for proposing a gas tax holiday, without so much as mentioning that John McCain -- who's still in the race -- is still supporting one.
Dave, like others alleging a double-standard here, is failing to appreciate that John McCain is well-known as a principled maverick who puts the national interest ahead of momentary political advantage so it's vital for the press to avoid doing anything that would damage that image. It's like that final scene of The Dark Knight.
I like this representation of where various prominent Democrats stand with regard to the DW-NOMINATE system of ideological classification a lot. In one picture, it sums up a lot of important points including the paucity of clear substantive differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on domestic issues, the fact that liberals should appreciate Nancy Pelosi as one of the good guys, the fact that Joe Lieberman's turn toward rancid rightwingery doesn't really seem justified by his previous history in office, and the fact that Sam Nunn would be a very odd VP choice.
Barack Obama displays the kind of outside shooting touch that Team USA desperately needs to crack the true zone defense utilitized in the international game:
They say we're going to start with a small ball lineup of Howard, Anthony, James, Bryant, and Kidd. Whether or not Carmelo at the four works depends on the matchups I guess. I would play Williams or Paul over Kidd to get their better shooting.
Marc Ambinder has the best analysis of the devastating impact of Nouri al-Maliki's statements to McCain's arguments about Iraq:
This could be one of those unexpected events that forever changes the way the world perceives an issue. Iraq's Prime Minister agrees with Obama, and there's no wiggle room or fudge factor. This puts John McCain in an extremely precarious spot: what's left to argue? to argue against Maliki would be to predicate that Iraqi sovereignty at this point means nothing. Obviously, our national interests aren't equivalent to Iraq's, but... Malik isn't listening to the generals on the ground...but the "hasn't been to Iraq" line doesn't work here.
"His domestic politics require him to be for us getting out," said a senior McCain campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "The military says 'conditions based' and Maliki said 'conditions based' yesterday in the joint statement with Bush. Regardless, voters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders."
Even granting the premise that Maliki's statements are purely about Iraqi domestic politics, all this amounts to is the fact that Barack Obama's plan for Iraq is, according to both the Maliki government and the McCain campaign's analysis, the only way forward that's politically viable in Iraq. Meanwhile of course the US military has more credibility with the American people than does the Iraqi government, but given the particulars of this case it's just a no brainer that if the Iraqi government doesn't want us to stay we have to leave. McCain even said so himself before conceding the point became damaging to his campaign.
It seems that the rising number of people who don't own landlines is having only a very tiny impact on political polling. But this looks like something that may be a real problem in 2012 or 2016.
I'm up outrageously early on a Saturday because I'm about to head off to see Nancy Pelosi talk to the Netroots Nation. I don't attend 8:30 AM events on a Saturday lightly, so I think it's time to once again remind people that whatever disappointments they may have with the new Democratic congress and its leadership that, at the end of the day, among real liberals in Washington, DC Pelosi is by far the most powerful. And among powerful elected officials in Washington, Pelosi is the real liberal. There's a reason she's the one who shows up to an event like this even when she's not courting the base in a primary.
To me, the case for getting rid of the electoral college is so straightforward as to hardly need articulating. Arguments about a straight first-past-the-post popular vote versus some other kinds of systems involving runoffs are things where reasonable people can disagree, but the electoral college is just an absurd anachronism rooted in an 18th century understanding of the nature of the country that hasn't been applicable for a long, long, long time. But if you want a really exhaustive account of the harm done, check out FairVote's report "Presidential Elections Inequality: The Electoral College in the 21st Century".
J Street has a very comprehensive look at American Jewish political opinions. You'll see that Jews massively disapprove of George W. Bush in general, and his foreign policy in particular, and his approach to the Middle East in particular particular. Jews are overwhelmingly backing Barack Obama and Democratic congressional candidates. Jews overwhelmingly favor more aggressive US diplomatic involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict, clearly believe that only a peace agreement can provide real security for Israel over the long run, and recognize the need for the United States to exert meaningful pressure on both sides to get a deal.
There had been some signs that Barack Obama's fundraising might be falling short of what the campaign needs to implement its strategy, but with the news that they raised $52 million in June that doesn't seem to be the case. Still, it's worth pointing out that despite Obama's edge over McCain, the RNC's enormous edge over the DNC means that it's by no means clear that Obama will really have a financial advantage in an overall sense. The McCain campaign and the RNC, recall, are working in a sufficiently hand-in-glove manner that the RNC ran an ad lauding McCain's willingness to break with the Republicans over climate change.
David Plouffe's email to supporters below the fold:
It seems that African-Americans and whites have, on average, different opinions about Barack Obama, leading The New York Times to report "Poll Finds Obama Isn’t Closing Divide on Race". Here, I guess, is there evidence:
Note that if we restrict our attention to white people, views are pretty similar -- 31 percent like Obama, 35 percent like McCain. The main difference is that black people are really enthusiastic about Barack Obama. Meanwhile, there's no sense of history or comparison here -- hows does this compare to other elections?
I would say -- Barack Obama has assembled a large army of paid staffers and volunteers, many of whom are black but most of whom are white. He's assembled an unprecedentedly large base of donors -- black and white. A plurality of Americans say they plan to vote for him for president and though Obama's coalition includes the vast majority of black Americans, whites outnumber blacks within it. I can't think of other examples of a comparable number of white people supporting a black candidate. Given the country's history, it's all pretty impressive if you ask me.
Ezra Klein has an interesting TAP article looking at some of the social science on why there are relatively few women holding elected office in the United States. It turns out that women who run for office do just as well as male candidates, but women are much less likely to run. There are various sources of this, but the most easily fixable one is that women are much less likely to be recruited.
This is a particular problem for liberals, since most liberals in America are women, meaning that sexist biases in candidate recruitment are going to deprive liberalism of a lot of possible recruits.
Can I just note that I seem to live in some kind of mirror universe where the fact that Barack Obama has, for months, maintained a modest lead over John McCain in every public poll constitutes bad news for Obama and that the specific reason it constitutes bad news for Obama is that the larger political climate is favorable to Obama. The trouble of course is that given the favorable climate the expectation is that Obama will lead, so in order to "really" win, he needs to win by some gigantic margin -- merely being the first Democrat in over thirty years to secure a majority doesn't cut it. Or something.
But wouldn't it be interesting to visit an alternative reality in which the goal of a campaign is to win the election rather than to beat arbitrary media expectations? In this world, a modest-sized but stable and consistent lead would count as an indication that you're winning. And the existence of favorable background conditions for your candidacy would assuage doubts that the lead is likely to vanish over time.
Then here’s the question. Why hasn’t the Obama campaign opened their Christmas gifts and made use of them? Why haven’t they gone after McCain’s “disgrace” remark regarding Social Security? Have they said anything at all about that? Why haven’t they hammered away at some of his statements and the inconsistencies surrounding them about carve-out privatization plans? Will they do anything with the implication identified above that McCain must be planning to cut benefits? Why so much silence from the Obama campaign on the Social Security issue?
He's not the only one. All I'd observe is that I recall Obama supporters having very similar sentiments about Obama's campaign against Hillary Clinton about 12 months ago. People wanted to see hard-hitting attacks and they were disappointed. Attacks came eventually, of course, but not until substantially later. And beyond that, the attacks mostly came as counterpunching efforts, a kind of judo. Now maybe this means that Obama's team has a brilliant strategy of patience that they're implementing. Or maybe it means that they made the wrong decision last summer and wound up getting lucky and winning anyway by accident and have no learned the wrong lessons.
J Street's got a petition going where you can tell Joe Lieberman how you feel about the idea of one of America's most prominent Jews going to hang out with Pastor Hagee who thinks Hitler was God's agent.
I decided to break with precedent and actually attend Barack Obama's "major foreign policy address" this morning at the Ronald Reagan Building Whose Name Contains More Words. As an official member of the press, you get a view of the action that's radically worse than what you could see on C-SPAN large because our seats are located behind the TV cameras. You do, however, have the opportunity to watch the speech alongside a bunch of other reporters, so that your coverage of it can reflect a pack mentality rather than independent judgment.
More to the point, even though the speech hasn't begun, the question must already be asked -- can America trust Barack Obama? After all, the advisory announcing the event clearly says "Limited workspace will be available on site. There is no wireless internet available." And yet, there is wirless internet available on the AWOW Reagan Ctr Atrium Hall network. If he'll mislead America about WiFi networks, what else will he mislead us about?
Photo of MSM by me, available under a Creative Cmmons license
For second time John McCain forgets that Czechoslovakia doesn't exist anymore. I would suggest that he look up the "Velvet Divorce" on Wikipedia but of course he doesn't know how. Might be the sort of thing people will want to refer to in case the endless political crisis in Belgium results in a separation.
I've been shocked by how little play John McCain's recent remarks on Social Security have gotten, especially considering his record of support for the Bush administration's unpopular privatization scheme. Maybe that's soon to change:
On Tuesday, a coalition of Democratic strategists, labor unions and liberal activist groups that helped defeat Bush's efforts in 2005 plans to launch a similar campaign. They intend to target McCain and dozens of GOP congressional candidates who have supported proposals to allow workers to divert some of their payroll taxes out of the Social Security system and into private investment accounts.
If this can soften McCain formidable support among his fellow seniors, that'd be a big deal for obvious reasons. We've rarely had a presidential nominee who's been so openly contemptuous of America's retirement security programs.
Marc Ambinder makes the relevant point about an Obama-Hagel ticket: "There's a much simpler way for Obama to reap the benefits of having Hagel endorse him -- and that is to have Hagel endorse him."
Right. Any prospective Obama-Hagel partnership would be premised on shared ideas about foreign policy, so the natural thing would be for Obama to tap Hagel for some kind of foreign policy job. I don't think it would be a bad idea to have an internationalist Republican representing us at the UN, say. But ultimately Hagel just needs to decide whether or not thinks his old friend John McCain's foreign policy views are so unsound that he wants to endorse his Democratic rival.
We all know that President Bush has given up on golf as a gesture of solidarity with the troops over in Iraq, but it seems he hasn't given up on hosting golf-themed fundraisers for John McCain.
How might political blogs and their readers affect the presidential campaign?
They will not change many voters' minds because the vast majority of their readers are already members of the choir and hold strong opinions about politics. So don't expect political blogs to make Democrats vote for John McCain or Republicans embrace Barack Obama. If political blogs change opinions, they will more likely do so indirectly -- by uncovering new information that is then amplified and discussed in media that reach a broader, and less partisan, cross section of the public.
This is all true enough but also, I think, an unduly limited way of looking at things. For one thing, having a relatively unpersuadable audience is, I believe, common to all explicitly political media. Only people who like following politics would tune in to Meet The Press and people who like following politics usually have strong views about politics and are thus unlikely to be swayed by things they watch there. But there are more questions to be answered than "should I vote for the Democrat or the Republican in November?" Blogs are much more likely to persuade people on issues like "John Edwards or Barack Obama" or even more so "as someone who doesn't even live in Maryland, should I care about the Al Wynn versus Donna Edwards primary?" or "is the telecom immunity provision of the proposed changes to FISA a big deal?"
Blogs are a niche medium for political obsessives, so they tend to impact readers' opinions on questions that normal people just wouldn't bother having opinions about at all. That's not the same as saying that no persuasion happens and it's all preaching to the choir. It's more like the members of the choir talking about choir-related issues that others may not really care about.
Photo by Matt Stoller used under a Creative Commons license
Ryan Lizza goes long and deep on Barack Obama's background in Chicago politics and his rise to the US Senate. I keep reading people debunking the idea that Obama is a messianic, saint-like figure and people criticizing the idea that Obama is a messianic, saint-like figure. Indeed, I've read so much commentary on the subject of how people shouldn't believe that Obama is a messianic, saint-like figure that I've become convinced that nobody actually believes that he is. But if they do exist, they'll be disillusioned by Ryan's article!
But in terms of worries I actually have seen expressed, I think the picture you get here tends to dissipate worries that Obama might turn out to be a Carter-esque failure or somehow who otherwise doesn't know how to get the job done. He's an eminently practical person -- practical enough to understand that to advance you need to stand a bit outside and above the systems you're operating in, but also very much operate in them. And not just to understand that (which is pretty easy) but to do it, which I think is very difficult.
“They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”
Asked which blogs he read, he said: “Brooke and Mark show me Drudge, obviously. Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. Sometimes I look at Politico. Sometimes RealPolitics.”
At that point, Mrs. McCain, who had been intensely engaged with her BlackBerry, looked up and chastised her husband. “Meghan’s blog!” she said, reminding him of their daughter’s blog on his campaign Web site. “Meghan’s blog,” he said sheepishly.
Not to get too pedantic here, but neither Drudge nor Politico are blogs and "RealPolitics" doesn't even exist. The thing I assume he's talking about isn't a blog either. Not that I necessarily expect a presidential candidate to spend a ton of time reading blogs, but maybe he should know what one is and if he doesn't read any and is asked about it could say that. Then on religion:
Asked if he considered himself an evangelical Christian, Mr. McCain responded, “I consider myself a Christian.”
“I attend church,” he said. “My faith has sustained me in very difficult times.” Asked how often he attended, he responded: “Not as often as I should.” He has recently been photographed going to church as his campaign has begun to make public the times he attends services.
Does he attend church when he's not campaigning for president? It sort of doesn't sound like it. Did you know McCain hasn't been baptized into the church he nominally belongs to? Again, I'm obviously not opposed to the idea of a non-observant president anymore than I'm opposed to a president who doesn't read blogs, but surely the straight-talk brand should require some honest answers to these questions.
I have to agree that it's incredibly unhelpful to have Bill Clinton and Al Gore praising John McCain on climate change. It's true, in a sense, that McCain is better than your average Republican on this issue. But that was much more true a couple of years ago when he was cosponsoring the McCain-Lieberman climate change half-measures bill. These days, though, that bill, inadequate as it is, has become the Lieberman-Warner bill because McCain dropped his support for it.
If McCain's not even going to support the most conservative cap-and-trade bill in the mix, then what is his nominal support for cap-and-trade worth, exactly? It's hard to construct an appropriate analogy here, but if Barack Obama claimed to be "for" something, and yet opposed every concrete effort to make it happen, I doubt GOP eminences grises would be leaping forward to praise him.
It seems that an increasing number of people adhere to the basic populist frame about the state of our economy:
On the other hand, most people still see themselves as "haves" which should blunt the appeal of populist remedies somewhat:
The fact that the trends are diverging is interesting and it's hard to know what to make of it. As you can read here household income is a strong predictor of whether or not you think of yourself as a "have" but there's also a large racial/ethnic component with middle income non-hispanic whites tending to see themselves as "haves" whereas middle income blacks and hispanics tend to see themselves as "have nots." It would be interesting to look at wealth in this regard (it seems like a better correlate of "have"-ness than income anyway) and see how much of the racial element survives independently of wealth effects.
Amity Shlaes mounts a stirring defense of Phil Gramm's "mental recession . . . nation of whiners" argument. I think it's telling that some strain of conservatism thinks that the debater's point that the economy's not technically in a recession until we see two consecutive quarters of GDP shrinkage should be at the center of how we understand this. The relevant point, it seems to me, is that the economic suffering is quite real, recession or otherwise.
[Among other things, if we experienced eighty straight years of 0.1 percent GDP growth, that would be an unprecedented recession-free span but also a large drop in per capita living standards]
I felt better after talking to the bubbly [Florida Governor Charlie] Crist, who's like human Prozac. "How can you not be optimistic about Florida?" he asked. "Is there a more beautiful place on the planet?" He then recounted a story that probably won't help him in the GOP Veepstakes: "John McCain told me, 'It's tough in those Rust Belt states. You really feel a bit of depression in people's outlook. But when you get to Florida, people feel great.'"
It seems that Chris Dodd's documents are going in the vetting process but Joe Bidens aren't. I like Dodd a lot, qua Senator, but one wonders how much he really brings to the table as a VP. Obama could definitely do worse, though.
John McCain's odds of winning the presidential election seem pretty dismal to be, but one does have to consider the possibility that enough active campaigning against Obama from active duty Army officers could be a big boost to McCain's cause.
AS asks: "Why is it twenty times more likely if you see an African-American political strategist on TV that they will be a REPUBLICAN strategists? Do cable news executives and producers get off on cognitive dissonance or something? It's really shocking."
I wonder about this myself. Step one of wisdom on this subject is to recognize that the "strategist" label is handed out in arbitrary ways to people who aren't really strategists. But step two is to recognize that I couldn't prove to you that African-American TV strategists are usually Republican. That's my sense, but I'd want to see a real quantitative analysis of the subject but certainly have no desire to do one myself.
Here's Stefan with another variant on the question of whether or not I suck:
I still want to know how you feel about writing about Middle East policy without knowing Arabic.
In all honesty, I don't feel that good about it. But it's not as if the political conversation in the United States is dominated by people with a deep understanding of the Arabic language, fully immersed in primary sources, and here comes Matt Yglesias with his blog ruining everything. I read people who do read and speak Arabic (and Persian), try to be appropriately humble about my knowledge level, and try to call out people who are putting bad information out there. I think that, at the margin, the public debate is better off for me participating in it rather than leaving things entirely to Tom Friedman, Fred Hiatt, and Charles Krauthammer. Meanwhile, it's not as if language competency is some guarantee of clairvoyance -- Bernard Lewis is a bona fide scholar of the Ottoman Empire and I assume his Middle Eastern language skills could trounce mine, but he's still talked a lot of nonsense about the contemporary Middle East and US policy toward it.
Over and above all that, I've tried to make awareness of my own shortcomings influence the opinions I express about American policy. One presupposition of a lot of current US policy -- but also of a lot of proposed alternatives to US policy -- is that the American government is actually or potentially capable of being really effective at micromanaging political outcomes in Iraq or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or wherever. I try to remind people that for a variety of reasons, language competence being high on the list, Pakistanis are almost certainly going to be better at manipulating the American elite than vice-versa.
Taricha asks "How long will McCain be able to keep up the balancing act of telling fiscal conservatives/economic & tax experts privately that he doesn't support the things he talks about publicly?" My guess is a very long time. The general quality of campaign coverage is very low, the press likes being kind to John McCain, and the press also likes being kind to the candidate who's losing so expect very little scrutiny here.
What's more, the pixie dust that makes this "all things to all people" magic work is the reality that President McCain is going to be facing expanded Democratic majorities in 2009 so people assume that McCain's campaign pledges are quasi-meaningless and that all this stuff would be reopened once he has to sit down with Reid & Pelosi.
The Washington Post reports that Barack Obama is running into some unexpected fundraising trouble with efforts to recruit big-dollar Clinton donors to his side not going as well as he hoped, and internet contributions falling off their previous furious pace. I wondered about this possibility in late June, and it seems to be coming true. The combination of Obama mostly focusing on showing his more centrist side while also maintaining a stable lead in the polls seems to me to discourage activists from giving to the campaign. People are thinking to themselves, why not save that money and by a G3 iPhone or give it to progressive Senate candidate?
It seems like she's out of the running, but my sentimental favorite for VP is Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano who's got a compelling personality and a solid substantive record for a politician who's had success winning statewide three times in a conservative state. Napolitano is well-profiled by The American Prospect's Dana Goldstein who emphasized Napolitano's role as a party-builder in difficult circumstances.
Dana thinks this won't be Napolitano's last high-profile job, and I certainly hope she's write. If the Vice Presidency is out of the question, she seems like she'd be an excellent choice for Attorney-General and also a logical candidate to replace John McCain in the Senate whenever he vacates that seat.
Josh Marshall had a series of posts up yesterday seeking a "Grand Unified Theory of McCain Crappiness." Some good points are made, but I think most of these posts wind up implicitly overstating the extent to which McCain was an effective politician at some point in the past and has only recently become crappy.
The reality is that he's been coasting for his entire political career, and his toughest race -- the 2000 GOP presidential primary -- was won where he lost badly. This feat of getting trounced by George W. Bush has somehow entered the collective imagination as an astounding political feat, but I'm willing to venture that it would actually be pretty easy for any vaguely plausible Senator or Governor to go up against the GOP frontrunner, imply that the party had become too right-wing, and lose the primary while winning a few contests in liberalish states with moderatish Republican Parties. McCain's 2000 campaign was appealing to liberals because it consisted of us watching a Republican talk smack about Republicans, comparing the conservative machine to the Death Star, pointing out that GOP tax policies serve only the interests of a tiny elite, etc. But as an electoral strategy this was perverse and the results were predictable.
This whole fiasco gained McCain "Maverick" status which he spent the next several years deploying quite cannily to "corner the market" on bipartisanship in the US Senate and turn himself into a very influential legislator. And, clearly, even though he comes off as utterly uncharismatic to us peons who have to watch him on television he's great at wooing the press in person. But this is his strong-suit -- he's a phenomenal Beltway player and operator, heir to a long line of skilled legislative players. But there's a huge difference between the kind of actions that appeal to the sensibilities of the press (breaking with your party, campaign finance reform, "straight talk," bashing Social Security) and the kind of actions that appeal to voters -- projecting empathy and outlining ideas that will make people's lives better.
On top of all that, McCain is currently facing the stark dilemma Reihan Salan points to of "keeping the Bush bundlers on side while also reaching out to working class voters" and I would say more generally the large majority of people who think Bush has been a terrible president. To win, McCain needs a coalition of basically everyone who still likes Bush (and he needs some of them to support him enthusiastically) plus almost a third of the normal anti-Bush people. That'd be hard for even the most charismatic of leaders to pull off.
Photo by Flickr user soggydan used under a Creative Commons license
For context here, McCain surrogate Carly Fiorina was arguing the other day that it's unfair for insurance companies not to cover birth control as part of her pitch to women voters. Then it was pointed out that McCain had voted against legislation that would address the issue. When asked about it he, well, didn't have much to say.
Former Senator Phil Gramm, one of John McCain's economic gurus, seems to think that current economic problems are purely subjective, talking to The Washington Times about a "mental recession" and whining that "we have sort of become a nation of whiners."
My understand is that economic downturns do have a certain psychological component insofar as expectations make a different to the economy, but we're clearly living through some very real supply shocks. The rising cost of food and energy, coming at a time when many people are seeing the value of their main asset decline, naturally causes hardship and slows economic growth. The fact that everyone has more difficulty obtaining credit than they did a couple of years ago doesn't help matters. These are all very real phenomena.
Am I the only one who still doesn't understand why Jesse Jackson said he wanted to cut Barack Obama's nuts off? Jackson seems to be so deep in apologizing-and-backpedaling mode, that we're not getting much of an explanation of what he was saying.
I'm working on some thoughts about Josh Marshall's long series of posts on what's wrong with John McCain, but consider that in the works. For now, let me note this from The Note:
McCain is writing the latest script with Steve Schmidt, who brings discipline, decisiveness, and determination to his new role -- and most importantly, the perception of all three qualities for the journalists and GOP insiders who were almost ready to give up on McCain.
It doesn't really surprise me to learn that The Note considerations "perception" of positive qualities among "journalists and GOP insiders" to be the most important thing a new campaign manager could have. But clearly that's a silly thing to believe. But I get the sense that McCain himself believes it -- that if he jiggers things just right GOP Machers + McCain Fanboys in the Press = National Electoral Majority.
The endorsement could hardly have been stronger. On Monday, John McCain’s campaign released a statement signed by 300 economists who “enthusiastically support” his “Jobs for America” economic plan, providing a heavyweight testimonial to the presumptive Republican nominee’s “broad and powerful economic agenda.”
There’s just one problem. Upon closer inspection, it seems a good many of those economists don’t actually support the whole of McCain’s economic agenda. And at least one doesn’t even support McCain for president.
There's not a shred of doubt in my mind that this scandal will dominate the cable news coverage of the campaign to an even greater extent than did coverage of Wesley Clark observing that being a POW is not the same as running the country. After all, the McCain campaign is lying here. And lying about their campaign's macroeconomic policies, which is a very consequential matter. So this is going to be a huge story on teevee, right? Of course it will.
Her office puts out a good statement that reaches the correct conclusion:
Congress must vigorously check and balance the president even in the face of dangerous enemies and at a time of war. That is what sets us apart. And that is what is vital to ensuring that any tool designed to protect us is used – and used within the law – for that purpose and that purpose alone. I believe my responsibility requires that I vote against this compromise, and I will continue to pursue reforms that will improve our ability to collect intelligence in our efforts to combat terror and to oversee that authority in Congress.
I don't believe that if Clinton and Obama swapped roles that they'd be acting any differently. But the reality is that as long as Obama thinks he's going to be wielding executive authority, he's going to be useless as a check on out-of-control executive authority. If Clinton wants to channel whatever regrets she has about losing the primary into taking up that cause, well, I think that would be an excellent decision for her to make.
Here's a fascinating result via Henry Farrell and Larry Bartels' book, Unequal Democracy. As you can see, among people with low levels of political information (as measured by knowing things like which party had more members in the House or which party was more conservative) liberals and conservatives alike are aware that inequality between rich and poor has grown in recent decades.
When you shift from low-information liberals to high information liberals, the proportion of liberals getting the inequality facts right goes up. But when you shift from low-information conservatives to high information conservatives, you see evidence not of growing awareness of the facts but of growing familiarity with conservative talking points and thus a decreasing proclivity to answer the question correctly. And I seriously doubt things would turn out any differently if you found a question where the shoe was on the other foot.
This relates to the skepticism I expressed last week that the "flip-flopper" allegation really hurt John Kerry quite as much as it sometimes appears. There's a lot of evidence from various sources that what happens when people pay attention to politics is they better align self-reports of their beliefs with the talking points associated with "their side." So you can get a lot of people claiming to dislike John Kerry because he's a flip-flopper when more likely they think Kerry's a flip-flopper because they don't like John Kerry and that's what Kerry's enemies were saying. If conservatives had decided to say that Kerry was stubborn, huge numbers of people would have believed that instead.
Barack Obama's lead in the polls is good news for his prospects, right? Wrong, says Gallup, who points out that the July polling leader lost in six of the last nine competitive US presidential elections. It seems to me that Gallup is generating a spurious level of counterintuitiveness through use of the "competitive" qualifier. If you look at the most recent fifteen presidential elections, the July polling leader has won big six times, won narrowly three times, and lost narrowly six times. That gives you the totally intuitive result that leading in July is better news that losing in July, but that it doesn't guarantee anything.
Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace.
Of course in their day, present-day retirees were working and their tax dollars were paying folks who were retired back then. And in exchange for that service when they were workers, today's retirees get to enjoy a secure retirement. Yes, on my dime. And in exchange I expect that when I retire, ensuing generations will be there for me. I call it generations looking after each other, so that those who built the present with labors in the past get to enjoy some of the fruits of their labor. The federal government calls it Social Security. John McCain calls it a disgrace.
Just because the slogan "Don't hope for a better life; vote for one" was used by the UK Tories in the late 1970s doesn't, to me, mean that the McCain campaign "plagiarized" anyone by using it. The idea of plagiarism is that you have one writer taking credit for the work of another writer which we think is wrong under a variety of circumstances. But we don't think it's wrong in the context of political campaigning.
Barack Obama didn't single-handedly write "Obama's convention speech" or "Obama's race speech" or "Obama's competitiveness speech." One gets the sense that Obama, who really did write a legitimately good book without recourse to a ghostwriter may play a larger role in his own speechmaking than is typical for a presidential candidate, but even if he doesn't he's not "plagiarizing" his speechwriters, he's giving speeches. Given that context, I think the general principle is that when it comes to political sloganeering you're free to borrow, modify, etc. as you like.
I've read a lot of conservative defenses of Jesse Helms' infamous "white hands" ad over the past few days, and I have to say it's all pretty dumb:
Granted, there's a difference between opposing affirmative action and being racist. Yes, this is an anti-affirmative action ad that seeks specifically to motivate white resentments rather than to appeal to an argument about fairness, but still, politics ain't beanbag. But the obvious difference in the case of the Helms ad is that it was an ad for Jesse Helms who started his career running a race-baiting campaign for a white supremacist candidate who went on to become a white supremacist television commentator who left the Democratic Party over the Democratic Party's abandonment of white supremacy who opposed making Martin Luther King Day a holiday who opposed the civil rights act, etc., etc., etc., and who never expressed any regrets about any of those things.
The context is clearly relevant and all points in one direction. The ad, absent Helms' career, would just be a demagogic campaign ad among many demagogic campaign ads. But in the context of Helms' career, it encapsulates his utter lack of remorse for his history of racial bigotry which, in turn, provides the context in which we must understand his anti-gay bigotry.
I think, however, that this will be the last I say on Helms. Ross Douthat takes the line I think conservatives ought to take on this character, as did Jonathan Rauch in 2002 and as does Max Boot. So I'll wish them and whomever else luck in building a post-Helms conservatism and hope for the best.
It seems that yesterday's Crocs gambit from John McCain was, as Marc Ambinder points out, literally a move straight out of the Bush playbook. Video illustration:
In the past decade, he has played on Mississippi riverboats, on Indian land, in Caribbean craps pits and along the length of the Las Vegas Strip. Back in 2005 he joined a group of journalists at a magazine-industry conference in Puerto Rico, offering betting strategy on request. "Enjoying craps opens up a window on a central thread constant in John's life," says John Weaver, McCain's former chief strategist, who followed him to many a casino. "Taking a chance, playing against the odds." Aides say McCain tends to play for a few thousand dollars at a time and avoids taking markers, or loans, from the casinos, which he has helped regulate in Congress.
The McCains own eleven houses and spent over $200,000 on "household staff" in 2007 so I suppose he can afford tens of thousands of dollars in gambling losses every year. At the same time, you wouldn't want someone to enjoy "playing against the odds" with the country's public policy. The fact that McCain seems to think there's some kind of "betting strategy" that can turn craps into a winning game also raises some questions about his math.
Photo by Flickr user techslut used under a Creative Commons license
Barack Obama's staffing up continues apace as he adds Dana Singiser as a Senior Advisor who "be responsible for the strategic management, development and implementation of a comprehensive national women’s vote program" alongside such existing staff as "Betsy Myers, Chair of Women for Obama, Becky Carroll, National Women’s Field Director and Judy Gold, Women’s Policy Advisor." Previous Singiser was Director of Women’s Outreach for the Hillary Clinton 2008 campaign and also worked for Clinton as Staff Director of the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee and before that she was Deputy Political Director for Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign.
John McCain runs against hope. And against hippies. Literally.
Perhaps this will be the last we hear about how he doesn't like to discuss his POW experience? Still, I think it's a decent ad that does the job of simultaneously hitting McCain's main biographical theme while also trying to position McCain as a candidate for those who think the country's on the wrong track.
UPDATE: Of course this also puts one in mind of Wesley Clark's remarks. As best I can tell, the argument of this advertisement is that having been shot down over Vietnam and held in captivity qualifies John McCain to run the country's foreign policy. Surely whether or not that's true should be a within-bounds issue for political debate.
Chris Bowers critiques the flip-flop line of attack against Barack Obama and observes "In fact, looking at the national poll trend lines at Pollster.com, the only line of attack that has ever clearly damaged Obama was the Reverend Wright flap back in March." Indeed as you can see above that's true. I might add that Wright-based attacks, while in many ways unfair, had the proverbial "grain of truth" advantage in that I think Obama really is more liberal than the Democratic nominees of the recent past in a way that trying to associate him with radical figures drives home.
The interesting thing about the 2008 election is that the political marketplace has responded to the collapse in support for Bush and the GOP in a pretty efficient manner -- with the Republicans nominating someone who's somewhat less conservative than Bush and whose association with the GOP brand is relatively weak, and the Democrats running on a more liberal agenda than they've had in recent cycles. McCain wants to exaggerate how moderate he is and how left-wing Obama is, not recycle attacks on John Kerry. I bet most people wish Kerry had won (actually, it would be interesting to see polling on this).
I was a senior when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Roughly 2,000 of us joined a vigil on the quad for several days. The vigil was an instrument of our grieving and a voice for racial justice on Duke's campus. Higher wages and union recognition for the non-academic employees—cooks, food-servers, maids, and janitors, most of whom were black—became the focal issue. We sat peacefully and largely silent day and night, studying for finals, listening to Dr. King's speeches and singing "We Shall Overcome" every hour. To this day I count it as a major event in my spiritual formation.
Jesse Helms came on the television and said that all of the students sitting on the quad at Duke should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to "marry a Negro" (Duke students were practically all white in those days). Unless the student's parents approved of that prospect, Helms advised, he or she should go back to class. We all took the words as vindication for our cause.
Again, one could imagine a white supremacist television commentator changing his positions and apologizing for some of his past actions (I believe such puny liberals as George Wallace did this) and moving on. But Jesse Helms didn't do that. And George Bush, Mitch McConnell, National Review, and the Heritage Foundation admire him greatly.
It really does seem a bit odd that a mayor with a 67 percent approval rating should be forced from office because of a term limits law. I suppose I understand the theory that presidential-level term limits serve as a check on tyranny, but there doesn't seem to me to be a good reason to worry about that at the local level of government.
Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) says he "was proud to support" the Webb GI Bill that he, in fact, voted against. I like the inclusion of the pride point, since after all we can't really assess his subjective condition. Maybe when he voted against the bill he was secretly ashamed of himself (he should have been) and to him that means he was proud to support it. Something like that. After all, only shrill bloggers call people liars.
The battle may not be avoidable. The current GOP platform is a 100-page document, and all but nine pages mention Bush's name. Virtually the entire platform will have to be rewritten to lessen the imprint of the president, who has the highest disapproval rating of any White House occupant since Richard M. Nixon.
And in the need for the re-write comes the problem, since it seems Republican Party activists are looking to stop McCainified "views on global warming, immigration, stem cell research and campaign finance from becoming enshrined in the party's official declaration of principles." A fight like that will probably be embarrassing for the McCain campaign since, at the end of the day, anything that underscores the hard-right's dislike for the guy is going to help him in this climate. By contrast, the inevitable speech by George W. Bush seems destined to be a disaster for McCain's quest for the White House.
Megan McArdle, based on a talk by Stephen Carter, comes to the view that "that when Americans say 'someone should do something' to stop a conflict somewhere, this is almost tantamount to saying 'we should do something', because at a most generous estimate, there are four military forces in the world capable of deploying into a conflict zone and shutting down the war: America, Britain, Australia, and Israel . . . when we decide not to intervene, we are making a decision that no one should act to halt the conflict."
There's some truth to that, but I think the perspective needs some nuance. It's true that very few countries can, acting alone, intervene in meaningful ways in civil conflicts. But that's not to say that those countries can't contribute constructively to military undertakings. It's to say that they can only contribute helpfully if the United States is also contributing and is thus able to help out with some of the logistical elements and/or perhaps do the pointiest fighting. But as we're seeing right now in Iraq, even the enormous US military establishment faces meaningful manpower constraints relative to the task of stabilizing medium-sized areas so when you're thinking about the feasibility of doing something or other, whether or not other countries are pitching in makes a real difference.
Then beyond that there's the question of politics. The African Union doesn't have a ton of military heft behind it. But there's a huge difference in terms of politics and legitimacy between an operation in Africa led by a western power and supported by AU member states operating joint blessings from the AU and the UN Security Council and an operation in Africa where a western power unilaterally intervenes.
Last, whenever people make these capacities-based arguments you do need to ask as a followup whether this just happens to be an argument they're wielding on behalf of a policy of aggressive unilateralism or whether they're also trying to advocate for steps to ameliorate the capabilities issue. Should there be a UN Standing Force? I think perhaps there should. Was the Center for American Progress correct to recommend that the 2006 QDR involve helping the African Union to build capacity "to solve regional conflicts, thus reducing the need to deploy U.S. forces"? I think they were.
Politico: "To many on the right, it was Helms, not Reagan, who was the true heart of the conservative movement."
Mitch McConnell: "Today we lost a senator whose stature in Congress had few equals, . . . Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in.”
Jesse Helms: "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights."
Of course as tends to be the case with Helms' most repugnantly racist bile, he said that a good ways back in the past. But even at that time, most Americans managed not to be repugnant racists. But not Helms. And unlike a lot of people who did take the white supremacist line in the 1950s and 60s, Helms never apologized and, indeed, never backed down doing things like mounting a filibuster against making Martin Luther King Day into a federal holiday. Remarkably, mainstream American conservatives are eager to tell us that this man is their hero. Even more remarkably, you sometimes hear conservatives talk about reaching out to black voters.
Anway, let me now go on the record to say that another McCain staff shake-up is, if not inevitable, very likely. McCain's staff is just too factionalized to remain stable unless McCain is consistently winning. And Schmidt is a Bush 2004 veteran who lacks the deep emotional ties to the candiate that other McCainiacs have. I predict that at some point, probably just before or just after the convention, there will be a move to "Let McCain be McCain," and new boss Steve Schmidt will be replaced with either John Weaver or Mike Murphy, to try to recreate the magic of the 2000 campaign.
It took all the way until July 7 for this story to surface in the NYT:
“I think the depressingly self-absorbed McCain campaign machine needs to get out of the way,” said Mike Murphy, a longtime friend and media adviser who has no role in the current operation but who still talks to Mr. McCain every few days. “They need to just let McCain be McCain.”
Fred Barnes knows just how to revive John McCain's listless presidential campaign -- gay-bashing his way to victory by more strongly emphasizing his desire to frustrate the goals of gay and lesbian Americans who want to serve their country in uniform or get married to people they love. There's perhaps no better time to recall that McCain guru/lobbyist Charlie Black used to be a Jesse Helms guy and liked his race-baiting campaign tactics.
Helms was undoubtedly the living connection between the racial politics of the Old South and the religion-based cultural politics of the New Right. He was the one surviving segregationist of stature who never regretted or retracted his opposition to the major civil rights legislation of the 1960s. His career-long opposition to any national gesture commemorating the civil rights movement (most notably, his interminable and often scurrilous rearguard efforts to taint the memory of Martin Luther King Jr.) made his strident rhetoric against voting rights enforcement and anything approaching affirmative action an afterthought. And Helms's two reelection campaigns (in 1990 and 1996) against African American Democrat Harvey Gantt pivoted on explicit race baiting, as Helms's Congressional Club allies later admitted to Link.
Helms practically invented the modern conservative politics of sexuality, along with the electoral mobilization of white conservative evangelicals, starting back in the 1970s. In 1977, he seized on Anita Bryant's successful campaign to overturn a gay rights ordinance in Miami and began building a national backlash against antidiscrimination laws. As early as 1979, he was making speeches about the terrible threat of "secular humanism" to Christianity, making the wonky Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies an unlikely villain. When the AIDS epidemic emerged in the 1980s, Helms began an extended and violently worded campaign to "protect" Americans from the "perverts" whose "disgusting" habits were responsible for AIDS, while attacking efforts to find effective treatments. Most memorably, Helms single-handedly made the National Endowment of the Arts' subsidies for "obscene" and "homosexual" artwork a culture-war staple for nearly two decades.
And there we go. Fortunately, public support for gay and lesbian equality continues to strengthen over time, so these kind of tactics should have a limited shelf life.
A totally crazy Saturday-morning thought: Wouldn't George W. Bush make an awesome high-school government teacher? Wouldn't it be something if his post-presidential life would up being that kind of post-service service? How's that for a model? Who needs Harvard visiting chairs and high-end lectures? How about Crawford High? (Or wherever?) Reach out and touch the young before they are jaded, or break them of the cynicism pop culture and possibly their parents have passed down to them. Whatever you think of President Bush, he's a likable guy in love with his country with some history and experience to share.
The best part will be when he explains to kids that the president does not, in fact, have an obligation to follow the law and can just order arbitrary detention and torture willy-nilly because, hey, we're a nation at (undeclared, neverending) war. "That's right kids, if President Obama wants to have your testicles crushed no law and no treaty can stop him -- that's what the constitution says!" But of course if those kind of opinions are good enough for Berkeley Law School then why not high school civics?
If so, the campaign has just taken a major turn in Mr. Obama’s favor. After all, if this campaign isn’t dominated by faux outrage over fake scandals, it will have to be about things that really did happen, like a failed economic policy and a disastrous war — both of which Mr. McCain promises will continue if he wins.
It's a good line. But of course if Democrats are really counting on responsible, substantive news coverage to hand them the election then John McCain has things in the bag. It's clear that the press, and thus the campaign as mediated by the press, will be dominated by some mix of fake scandals just as it always is (and if a fake scandal requires made up facts about Obama's record, then the facts shall be made up). The question is how much does this matter? Presumably it does matter at the margin.
And I think most of us liberals are pretty traumatized by the 2000 election when the press coverage was willfully horrible and things that made a difference at the margin turned out to be hugely important. But I find it hard to believe that, in general, the overall tenor of the media's coverage of silly campaign stories has a huge impact on election outcomes. Indeed, that's probably one reason why the quality is so low -- the stories are being produced by people who don't really think their work matters
In response to some new Spanish-language television ad from the McCain campaign, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) put out this statement (in English, as best I can tell) that the Obama campaign is sending around:
There's one thing Latinos have learned all too well after eight years of George Bush: politicians can say one thing, but it's what they actually do that counts. Senator John McCain's newest attack ad uses 'friends' to say one thing, but the facts show otherwise. If Senator McCain wants what's best for our families, he would not have voted against increased funds for our children's healthcare. And he would not have flip-flopped on his own legislation to firmly and fairly reform our broken immigration system. But he did. Senator Barack Obama has stood firmly with our families on all of these crucial issues. He did not flip-flop like Senator McCain. Bottom line: what's best for America and Latino families is a leader who won't flip-flop when it counts most.
I think that there's an important insight lurking amidst this campaign rhetoric, namely that I think the press and politicians often overstate the significance of the immigration issue to Hispanic politics. US politics mostly operates along a "culture war" dynamic with racial, ethnic, or religious blocs voting in highly divergent matters and this has long been the case. So as the Latino share of the vote increases, there's a tendency to seek out the key hot button issue for Latino voters and the view is that it must be immigration. McCain has (before flip-flopping and saying he would vote against his own bill) been a leader on pro-immigration reforms, ergo McCain should be able to appeal to Hispanic voters by emphasizing that fact.
If you look at it in detail, though, the Hispanic electorate mostly seems to vote the way Thomas Frank suggests everyone should in What's the Matter With Kansas -- poorer Hispanics vote Democratic, richer ones vote Republican, and social and cultural issues just don't seem to play very much. Because Hispanics are poorer-than-average this leads to a big pro-Democratic tilt. I think it's clear that Republicans can hurt themselves with the immigration issue by acting like racist demagogues but the GOP's primary problem with this voting group really is things like S-CHIP rather than a lack of sufficient immigration-related pandering.
As everyone knows, Democrats have struggled for generations with the perception that they're out of touch elitists. Barack Obama is no exception. He lives in Hyde Park, Chicago and ever since his book became a best-seller he's made a whole bunch of money. As a part-time professor at the University of Chicago he came to be acquainted with various pointy-headed professor types and he even ordered an orange juice at breakfast once which is the exact same kind of juice they serve at breakfast at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
By contrast, John McCain is an all-American regular guy who, like most people, earns his keep by marrying an heiress. Like average, everyday folks the McCain's rely on credit cards to make ends meet month-to-month "Cindy McCain charged as much as $500,000 in a single month on one American Express card and $250,000 on another, while one of their two dependent children had an AmEx card with a monthly balance as large as $50,000." Yes it's true, one of McCain's dependent children spent approximately the median annual household income of the United States in a single month and that's how McCain knows how to connect with regular people.
Similarly, Mrs. McCain "favors suits made by the German designer Escada, which typically retail for around $3,000 a pop" so she understands that most Americans welcome Wal-Mart's discount prices. And like many Americans, the McCains are very effected by developments in the real estate market, since "trusts and corporations controlled by her and her children spent nearly $11 million between the summer of 2004 and February 2008 on three condominiums in Phoenix and a pair outside San Diego." The McCains understand that these days many young people graduate from college saddled with debt and need a helping hand, that's why they spent "$700,000 for a 1,900-square foot, three-bedroom loft condo for her then-22-year-old daughter Meghan McCain" after she graduated from Columbia. Similarly, they know all about problems with inflation since they "increased their budget for household employees from $184,000 in 2006 to $273,000 in 2007, according to John McCain’s tax returns."
One thing that I think's gotten a bit lost in the progressive blog grumbling about Barack Obama's recent efforts to put a more centrist foot forward is that he's a substantially more liberal candidate than we've seen in quite some time. On an optics note, he didn't show up to a DLC National Conversation that was held literally around the corner from his national campaign headquarters. John Kerry spoke at the '04 version, Al Gore spoke at the 2000 version, etc. His health care proposals, though somewhat less far-reaching than Hillary Clinton's or John Edwards', are substantially more ambitious than what Kerry or Gore proposed. His climate change proposals are better than anything Kerry or Gore proposed. His foreign policy proposals represent a more daring break with the status quo than anything from the Clinton administration or the Kerry or Gore campaigns.
This is all true pretty much all up and down the line -- whatever disappointments one has with Obama (and there are sure to be more to come) -- he unquestionably represents a leftward shift relative to the sort of national candidates the Democratic Party has been putting forward in recent cycles.
Democrats can be very successful at the state level here -- they have the governorship and both Senate seats -- but the presidential vote has historically been much tougher to crack. The state has voted Democratic only twice in the last 50 years: The Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964, and Bill Clinton narrowly winning its three electoral votes in 1992.
What's interesting to contemplate here is the role of effort. Democratic Senate candidates in Montana campaign in Montana. Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Montana campaign in Montana. I don't believe that Democratic presidential candidates typically do campaign in Montana. But Barack Obama has been putting some resources into the state. And there's long been a real question in my mind as to how much of the gap at the presidential level can be made up merely by showing up. Now that said there's a good reason Democrats don't normally campaign in Montana, which is that in addition to having a conservative track record it has very few electoral votes so it's hard to imagine it being the pivotal state.
But this kind of thing does have governance institutions. If Obama were to win the election, but lose Montana by the same 59-39 margin that Kerry faced, then Senators Baucus and Tester are going to take that into account when considering how supportive of Obama's legislative agenda they ought to be. If it's close, or if Obama wins, then they face a different calculation. That kind of thing is the significance of playing for the landslide.
The other day, Jonah Goldberg was complaining about the left's alleged long history of anti-American sentiment:
The Nation ran a famous series then called "These United States," in which smug emissaries from East Coast cities chronicled the "backward" attitudes of what today would be called fly-over country. One correspondent proclaimed that in "backwoods" New York (i.e. outside the Big Apple): "Resistance to change is their most sacred principle." If that was their attitude to New York, it shouldn't surprise that they felt even worse about the South. One author explained that Dixie needed nothing less than an invasion of liberal "missionaries" so that the "light of civilization" might finally be glimpsed down there.
The trouble here, as Jon Chait points out, is that sometimes sneering condescension is warranted: "despairing about the political culture of the South in the 1920's, where disenfranchisement, lynching, and even slavery were routine practices, is a sign of insufficent patriotism? If that doesn't show the deficiencies of the right's style of patriotism, nothing does."
Now that's not to say that sneering condescension is always and everywhere a good thing. Even specifically on this point, it turned out in later decades that northern whites were a lot more interested in lecturing southern whites about the need to treat African-Americans better than they were in improving their own standards of conduct. But still, the real limits to the kind of sentiments Goldberg is complaining about mostly highlight the need for more self-scrutiny not, as he would seem to have it, more obliviousness to very real problems.
I did a panel this afternoon with Marc, Ross, and David Brooks at which Brooks, Marc to some extent, and also Fred Malek (yes this Fred Malek) were sort of harping on the idea that Barack Obama doesn't really have a McCain-esque background of breaking with his party's leadership and cutting deals with those on the other side of the aisle. This is, as best I can tell, totally true -- Obama has worked with Republicans on various issues, but never done anything comparable to McCain's work on, say, the McCain-Feingold bill.
To which I more-or-less say: shrug.
A sign of the long era of political dominance is that to a lot of people, I think the idea of a progressive Democrat running and winning as a progressive Democrat and going on to govern as a progressive Democrat just doesn't really scan. If you're going to win, and you're going to be a Democrat, then you have to be a "different kind of Democrat." And Obama sort of isn't. He's not the most liberal Democrat in congress, but then again most Democrats (by definition) aren't on the party's leftward fringe. He's a pretty ordinary Democrat, but much more charismatic and much better at giving big speeches about why his ideas are awesome.
And while he might lose the election, I and everyone else think he'll probably win.
Aspen's finest political reporter notes on the McCain campaign shakeup: "In the year and a half since McCain and Schmidt first got to know each other, the two have grown close, almost like father and son; each very deferential to the other." Is that how fathers and sons normally interact? I feel like it doesn't describe my relationship with my dad very well.
In a larger sense, having one of the main architects of Bush's re-election campaign become McCain's campaign manager seems like a good way to demonstrate that a vote for McCain is like a vote for a third Bush term.
Barack Obama's decision to come out against efforts to amend the California constitution to overturn the marriage equality ruling there has naturally raised questions as to how Obama squares this with his claim to be opposed to gay marriage. I think both Julian Sanchez and Josh Patashnik show that you can reconcile Obama's various views on the matter and there's not a logical inconsistency here.
That said, I just don't find those accounts especially persuasive. I can't peer into Obama's mind and see what he's thinking, but this looks like a political strategy rather than a logically coherent set of statements. Contra Andrew, I don't think chalking this up to "cowardice" is the most reasonable interpretation. If you want to see the cause of marriage equality advanced, you need sympathetic politicians to win elections. If the sympathetic politicians all say things that are politically toxic, they'll just lose and nothing will be accomplished. But of the sympathetic politicians hew to the more politically tenable line that special anti-gay constitutional amendments are wrong and discriminatory, and also appoint the sort of progressive jurists who are likely to look sympathetically on gay rights causes, then you'll get to equality.
To make an analogy, anti-miscegenation laws were a horrible injustice but it wasn't "cowardice" of the politicians who favored civil rights to avoid running around the country losing elections left and right over the issue throughout the 1950s and 60s. You want to ask a politicians to take some risks on behalf of a controversial cause, but not so many risks that they lose. Backing the California referendum would have been pure cowardice -- surrendering any opportunity to advance the cause of gay equality in the name of political expedience. What Obama's doing is clever, hard-nosed practical politics.
Meanwhile, Mark Ganz from the Puget Sound Health Alliance says he doesn't necessarily think it makes a difference who wins the presidential election. Either one could get the job done, he says, "if they chose to make this a central focus have the political skills and the ability to appeal to the American public." That seems a little blinkered to me. It's true that they're both talented politicians, but the relevant variable here isn't just how much does McCain or Obama care but what do McCain or Obama think. As best I can tell, they actually have substantially different opinions about health care! It's a fallacy to think that there's a "problem" here and that everyone is trying to "solve" it. There are actually different views about what the nature of the problem is.
Ganz then follows this up with music to my ears talking about the serious problems in quality and cost-effectiveness and name-checks this Peter Orszag slide:
Orszag himself will speak later. Ganz quotes Nelson Mandela "things are impossible until you do them" which is a slogan I like.
Barack Obama's set to deliver a big speech on national service later today. I'm not a huge fan of the "national service" concept, but whereas on many issues the devil is in the details on service I think it tends to be the reverse. Because the underlying idea is bad and illiberal, the people proposing national service schemes tend to avoid proposing specific policies that really match the rhetoric. Consequently, the details tend to be some good-to-harmless policy proposals yoked together with some fuzzy talk. The Obama campaign emailed around the following bullet points:
Encourage national service to address the great challenges of our time, including combating climate change, extending health care, improving our schools and strengthening America overseas by showing the world the best of our nation.
Expand AmeriCorps to 250,000 slots and double the size of the Peace Corps.
Integrate service-learning into our schools and universities to enable students to graduate college with as many as 17 weeks of service experience under their belts.
Provide new service opportunities for working Americans and retirees.
Expand service initiatives that engage disadvantaged young people and advance their education.
Expand the capacity of nonprofits to innovate and expand successful programs across the country.
Enable more Americans to serve in the armed forces.
That's very vague, but as I say seems harmless enough and we're not really in "Service Guarantees Citizenship" mode:
It seems worth noting that the best "service" initiatives around, like the PeaceCorps and Teach For America, aren't so much "service" as they are public sector jobs that are simply structured as to operate outside the normal contours of recruitment and employment. There's nothing wrong with that, but the relevant test should be effectiveness of outcomes (does TFA help kids learn, does the PeaceCorps help build the American brand) not whether or not it's creating an awesome servicey spirit.
Charles Kamasaki from the National Council of La Raza makes a point near and dear to my heart: "we have a racial paradigm in this country that is largely built either on slavery or on immigration and when you have a population that is of many colors and comes from many different places . . . it’s very difficult to fit that population into a traditional paradigm."
Ironically, this had come to my mind just minutes before when Kamasaki asked the audience if any Hispanics in the house could raise their/our hands. I'm never 100 percent certain how to answer questions like that. According to the racial paradigm, I think I'm supposed to raise my hand. But at the same time, I have white skin, I'm a fourth-generation American, and my knowledge of Spanish is limited to a summer semester I took at NYU years ago.
Arguably the panel I'm watching now, "Race and Politics in America: Where Are We in 2008?" with Richard Thompson Ford, Shelby Steele, Charles Kamasaki, and Ta-Nehisi Coates suffers from the opposite problem from the "Who Speaks for Islam?" panel -- all four participants are nonwhite. Surely white people have something to say about this. On the other hand, maybe you can actually get a broader range of views on an all-black panel, I have a hard time imagining a white person saying what Shelby Steele just said.
To add to what Atrios says here while I of course think people should keep whatever problems they may have with Barack Obama in perspective, it's probably actually helpful to his political ambitions to have him be criticized from the left. According to the silly conventions that govern our political debate, if you're not to some extent provoking vocal criticism from your base, there's considered to be something wrong with you.
Via Matt at Think Progress, an awful lot of people are concerned that John McCain will continue Bush's policies. This, clearly, rather than any "move to the center" is the key to Barack Obama's election strategy. Given the substantial edge McCain continues to have over Obama on national security issues, it seems that the main challenge is to get people to see that McCain will, if anything, govern to Bush's right on foreign policy.
Not Ideas About the Festival, But the Thing Itself
Ross had a big idea driven by watching Sandra Day O'Connor talk:
Over the past few years of court-watching, I've gradually moved from supporting some version of Scalia-style originalism to a much more radical judicial minimalism, in which the Court would show far greater deference to the other branches of government than either liberal or conservative jurists show today. (I have, of course, no qualifications to argue seriously for any theory of jurisprudence, but set that aside.) Of course, judicial nominees' fine-sounding theories of minimalism have a way of collapsing upon contact with the kind of power the Supreme Court wields, so perhaps we ought to consider enforcing it - for instance, by requiring a supermajority of the Justices (either 6-3 or 7-2) to deem any existing legislation unconstitutional.
When he explained that idea to me verbally yesterday, I liked it quite a bit because I, like Ross, increasingly think that the very strong system of judicial review we have in the United States is a bit of a problem. But the more I think about it, the less workable this proposal seems to me to be. Among other things -- where does this leave the Circuit and District Courts? And I'm not sure we can really define "deem any existing legislation unconstitutional" in an appropriate way, since our Court reviews cases rather than laws.
Meanwhile, to do this you'd have to change the constitution. Which is extremely hard. Indeed, it's essentially impossible. And as long as we're changing the constitution, I'd like to change that and make it easier to amend. It should, of course, be difficult to amend the constitution. But not as difficult as it is. And it's the difficulty of changing the text that helps make the stakes of Supreme Court jurisprudence so absurdly high. Other changes I'd like to see would including ending lifetime tenure for judges (something like 12 years give or take would be adequately long) so as to make it reasonable to expect presidents to nominate highly experienced people, and the inclusion of something like Canada's "notwithstanding clause".
[headline for this post doesn't really make sense, but I like the reference too much to let it go]
Well I’m on the ground in Aspen now at the Atlantic Ideas Festival that Just Happens to be Taking Place in Aspen (it’s been renamed...) and it’s really beautiful though I kind of wish there was more oxygen in the air. But they didn’t bring me out here just to enjoy the view, I’m supposed to write about the ideas in play at the festival. So here goes.
Shelby Steele offered some interesting thoughts on the subject of “white guilt” observing that in post-white supremacist America it can be very damaging to a person or institution’s reputation to be labeled as a racist. Consequently, people and institutions put a lot of emphasis on avoiding having that happen. This, according to Steele, often crowds out pragmatic consideration of issues like “is this actually helping people.” He gives vintage AFDC and affirmative action as practiced at most institutions of higher education as examples -- practices aimed at shoring up the legitimacy of elite institutions rather than aimed at actually solving problems of poverty and structural inequities in education.
That all seemed pretty plausible to me, actually. Then I thought he went awry by alleging that we’ve been overly “sensitive” in our conduct of war recently for reasons of white guilt and that this is why we’re bogged down in Iraq -- too much focus on the legitimacy of our efforts, and not enough focus on “winning.” I think this mostly shows that Steele has a lot more background in social policy than in military policy. I’d say, as the counterinsurgency manual says that legitimacy is absolutely vital in a modern war-fighting situation.
“Senator Obama had a terrific conversation with President Clinton and is honored to have his support in this campaign. He has always believed that Bill Clinton is one of this nation’s great leaders and most brilliant minds, and looks forward to seeing him on the campaign trail and receiving his counsel in the months to come,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.
Two:
Statement by Matt McKenna, Director of Communications, Office of President Clinton, on President Clinton's Discussion with Senator Barack Obama:
President Clinton had a very good conversation with Senator Obama today. He renewed his offer to do whatever he can to ensure Senator Obama is our next President.
President Clinton continues to be impressed by Senator Obama and the campaign he has run, and looks forward to campaigning for and with him in the months to come. The President believes that Senator Obama has been a great inspiration for millions of people around the country, and he knows that he will bring the change America needs as our next President.
So as it turns out my flight had DirectTV on it and I did get to see Barack Obama's speech on patriotism after all. I thought it was a little bit lame and defensive, frankly, though certainly not nearly as lame as the campaign's decision to hang Wes Clark out to dry for making a clearly true observation.
All that said, I read at the end of last week that McCain had "won the week" and I read the same thing after the week before that and yet despite all these winning weeks McCain is losing the election by a comfortable margin. And on some level I think this accounts for some of the lameness of the Obama campaign which, I'm now recalling, had a marked tendency to lapse into prolonged stretches of lameness during the primary only to raise it game at moments when Hillary Clinton's attacks seemed to be getting traction. The organizational elements -- field and fundraising -- were brilliant throughout, but on the messaging level it was kind of a judo campaign that only really looked good when it looked like they were about to get buried. Right now, McCain's flailing around and not getting traction with anything, and Obama seems to have retreated into a super-cautious mode just focused on parrying McCain's feeble blows.
Steve Harrelson represents District 1 in the Arkansas House of Representatives. He's also Majority Leader of the Arkansas House. And he also writes a very comprehensive Arkansas politics blog called "Under the Dome." This, to me, is a kind of fascinating development that potentially has a lot of promise for state and local officials who don't necessarily have big staffs. So I was glad to see that yesterday at DLC's National Conversation he was one of the panelists on a "breakout session" for state and local elected officials talking about "new social media."
Unfortunately, it seemed that there was virtually no interest in this from the audience. All anyone wanted to talk about was fear about what might go wrong on the internet. Could one of my kids write something on their Facebook page that embarrasses me? What if I become the victim of unfair attacks from anonymous people writing online? What about journalistic standards? Wither truth? The whole litany of internet-related fears. And I think you have to admit that these concerns have at least some validity. With any new significant technology you have your pros and your cons, your positive developments and some negative ones. But to me it's just fundamentally crazy to look at the brilliant new communications tools of the internet and primarily see something to be frightened of rather than new opportunities to take advantage of.
The good news, I suppose, is that at least as far as elected officials are concerned we should see a Darwinian process. Harrelson and others who start thinking about what new things they can do to communicate and connect with people should see more and more success, while those who want to recoil in fear will see less and less. But this also speaks to a real potential opening for institutions -- state and local government has enormous weight as a whole, and I suspect that whichever party or ideological tendency acts first to develop programs to make its people comfortable with new technologies and its possibilities can secure a real advantage.
Longtime troll TLB wants me to write about the announcement that the Democratic Convention will be simulcast in Spanish. Unlike anti-immigrant obsessives, I don't necessarily regard this kind of thing as a huge deal, but I actually do think there's something lamentable about the trend toward a greater volume of Spanish-language political communication.
It's just common sense that many jurisdictions provide services in Spanish or whatever other languages may be commonly spoken in any given area. But to me it makes a lot of sense to say that we should work to maintain a monolingual political conversation that expects citizens to be able to deliberate with their fellow citizens in English. Many countries have no realistic alternative other than to try to make bilingualism (or more) work but it's really difficult in practice (Will Kymlicka says some smart things about this in Politics in the Vernacular as I recall) and we shouldn't move in that direction.
Barack Obama's set to deliver a "major speech" on "what patriotism means to him and what it requires of all Americans who loves this country and want to see it do better." Since Americans do seem to have lingering doubts about the patriotism of Democrats in general and Obama in particular, and since Obama's very good at delivering setpiece speeches, this seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, I won't be able to see it live since I'll be traveling from Chicago to the Aspen Ideas FestivalThe Atlantic is co-hosting this week in Colorado.
John McCain doesn't know how to use a computer. John McCain doesn't know when he last pumped gas or what it cost. John McCain owns seven homes and forgot to pay taxes on one of them for the past four years. But at least he's not an elitist like Barack Obama. He earned his money the old-fashioned way -- marrying an heiress.
Too many libertarians seem to define libertarianism as a very specific and restrictive political program: as a laundry list of government programs to be abolished, or equivalently as a very short list of government programs that won’t be abolished. By that measure, libertarianism is nowhere close to successful. But if we define libertarianism more broadly as a set of general ideas and attitudes—pro-market, pro-tolerance, skeptical of authority—the last few decades look a lot better from a libertarian perspective.
But of course one reason "libertarianism" tends to get defined as a very specific -- and extreme -- political program is that when you open it up the way Tim has it sounds a lot like "liberalism." Which isn't to say that Tim, who'd describe himself as a libertarian, and I, a liberal, agree about everything. But it's to observe that the sorts of things that separate modern liberals from the economic right-wing are of a whole different kind than the sort of things that differentiated socialists from classical liberals. It was once the case that a substantial body of opinion in democratic societies thought that vast swathes of the economy should be either run directly by the government or else run as tightly regulated monopolies. In Europe, huge industries were nationalized and run by the state.
Nowadays, few if any people think that. Instead, you have left-right debates about things like how generously funded should public services be (and consequently how high should tax rates be) or should we make regulations to curb air pollution (of which carbon dioxide emissions now loom as an important variety) or in the name of public health paternalism (restrictions on where you can smoke, bans on trans fats). Say what you will about the "left" position on those topics, but none of these are calling into question the idea that the basic organization of the economy should be as a capitalist free market. At the same time, a lot of these issues weren't really on the table in the first couple of post-war decades.
The result is just a political debate that looks very different and in which, in particular, different kinds of values seem salient. Most liberals probably wouldn't describe themselves as "pro-market" unprompted, but nor are liberals are proposing to get rid of the market economy so being "pro-market" doesn't distinguish anyone in contemporary politics from anyone else.
I agree with Noam Scheiber that the Republicans probably should evolve in a "Sam's Club" direction and also that they probably can't evolve in a "Sam's Club" direction. But this seems way overstated:
Having said all that, these guys are right: The GOP is absolutely screwed. Even though the money comes from the same place it has for decades, the votes increasingly come from socially-conservative working-class people. At some point something's got to give. I just think it's going to be the GOP--which will basically cease to exist--rather than the moneymen and powerbrokers.
In the real world, it seems to me that in terms of the White House and governor's mansions, there's just a natural dynamic that leads the parties to more-or-less alternate in power since bad macroeconomic conditions are very bad for incumbents and yet not something that can be uniformly avoided. Beyond that, from 1933-1968 the GOP was almost uniformly shut out of power in congress, and rarely held the presidency, but even then it didn't "basically cease to exist." On top of all that, I don't think this is going to happen but you can easily imagine a scenario in which Barack Obama takes power in 2009, the country faces some kind of foreign policy fiasco followed by a terrorist attack at home, and the GOP comes roaring back in 2010 and 2012 without changing its ideological stripes much at all.
I'm heading off this afternoon to Chicago for the weekend where Sara's going to be speaking at the DLC National Conversation and I intend to return believing that only spending cuts and endless war can save the Democratic Party from the McGovernite wilderness (actually, surely liberals and centrists alike can agree on the national popular vote), so expect weekend blogging to be perhaps lighter than usual.
Then after that, I'll be continuing my jetset lifestyle by going directly from Chicago to Aspen, Colorado for the Aspen Ideas Festival co-sponsored by The Atlantic (or as we like to think of it, the Atlantic Ideas Festival in Some Town in Colorado) so expect a lot of posts about what the famous people say. Also stuff about how you should make Allstate, Altria, Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton, Chevron, Ernst & Young, JP Morgan, Mercedes Benz, and Thompson Reuters your choice for fine insurance, tobacco, aerospace, government contracting, oil, accounting, financial services, luxury cars, and "intelligent, information-based solutions, software tools, and applications" products respectively.
Photo by Flickr user cesposito 2035 used under a Creative Commons license
Obama campaign announces that Melody Barnes (from CAP and formerly Ted Kennedy) and Neera Tanden (from Hillarland) are joining the policy team as Senior Domestic Policy Advisor and Domestic Policy Director. Both excellent hires.
That picture above is, according to Gallup, the underlying issue preferences of the American public. It's interesting to note that even in these polarized times, there appear to be a substantial number of people who are at least in some sense torn between McCain and Obama preferring one on some issues and the other on some other issues.
You also see that national security has turned into a substantial disadvantage for Obama -- he's tied on the question of Iraq and losing badly on the question of terrorism. But he's in the lead because these are, at the moment, relatively low-salience issues compared to people's economic grievances. This leaves Obama with a choice of campaign strategies, he can try to emphasize the issues he's winning on, hoping to maintain the current low salience of security, or he can attempt to shore up his weaknesses by talking about national security and trying to persuade people that his vision of an aggressive, but focused and disciplined, full-spectrum campaign against al-Qaeda is the best way to keep the country safe.
The conventional Democratic strategy would be to try to duck the debate and hope the economy will carry him through. That kind of thinking is, however, one of the reasons Democrats have had their Heads in the Sand for many years. It's relatively likely that events in the world will lead to a renewed focus on national security at some point in the coming months, and it's also relatively easy for the McCain campaign to change subjects in this direction at a time of their choosing since security issues are, by their nature, visceral and frightening.
At the same time, McCain is the heir to eight years of failed policymaking from the Bush administration and Obama has a very solid case to make that he can do better. But will he make it aggressively?
I wish Barack Obama wouldn't frame his big picture talks about the economy as a "competitiveness" issue because competitiveness is a bogus concept (ask Paul Krugman) and since there's no such thing as competitiveness none of the items in Obama's competitiveness agenda will improve our competitiveness. This is all especially unfortunately, because I like the content a lot, and especially the felicity with which Obama makes the case for an activist, progressive government as a necessary complement to a vibrant market economy. From his remarks at yesterday's "competitiveness summit"
If we remain dependent on oil from dictators, we’ll endanger our security, imperil our planet, pay more at the pump, and sit on the sidelines while the jobs of the future are created abroad.
If we can’t give every child in America the chance to get a world-class education, we’ll cripple their ability to make a living in a knowledge-based economy, and watch China and India move ahead in the race for the 21st century.
If we can’t control skyrocketing health care costs, we’ll confront a mounting moral crisis, and a major anchor on the ability of American business to compete.
If we don’t rebuild our crumbling roads, rail bridges and electrical grid, we’ll see our standard of living suffer, while we leave our communities less safe from terror or natural disaster.
And if we don’t invest in and encourage innovation, we could cede America’s historic role as the engine of growth, and progress, and discovery for the entire world.
This is good stuff and insofar as it's inevitable that politicians address the public's sort of irrational fears of being "overtaken" by China and India this is the right way to talk about the issue -- as something that should inspire us to do better by investing in our citizens' capabilities rather than cause us to try to shut the world out.
It always surprises me that Jews have been able to get ahead in the United States. This is, after all, a country that's almost unique in the western world in that even in the 21st century it seems to include so many anti-semites in prominent places. Indeed, a frightening large proportion of prominent American Jews have their political views motivated by a racist loathing of their co-religionists and co-ethnics. Joe Klein, for example and again here is a big-time Jew-hater as you can see in not-at-all hysterical remarks from Commentary and the Anti-Defamation League that are in no way cynical political interventions masquerading as deeply implausible accusations of anti-semitism.
On the larger subject of so-called "dual loyalties" I think the psychological model of someone sitting at home scheming, twirling his moustache and saying "this idiotic military venture will be a disaster for the United States, but a brilliant victory for Israel!" is a little implausible. But the whole broader neoconservative ideological framework is obviously fraught with implications for Israel -- one reason to prefer wild thrashing about at a miscellaneous and ever-shifting cast of Arab-and-or-Muslim "bad guys" rather than a focused and disciplined campaign against al-Qaeda would be that the former implies that Israel's enemies and America's enemies are fundamentally one and the same.
Candidates whose biographies provide compelling campaign material use that fact to their advantage. And John McCain's biography does just that. Not only is it regularly mentioned explicitly by his supporters, but it underlies many of the implicit themes of the campaign. Which is really no surprise since it was his war record that launched his status as a political celebrity (feted by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan) and fueled his rise in the early days (I've seen a John Birch Society newsletter featuring an interview with McCain the "War Hero Who's Running for Barry Goldwater's Seat" from the 1980s) as a man without deep roots in Arizona sought to beat out rivals in a competitive primary.
There's nothing wrong with any of that, it's how politics works. But as Brendan Nyhan points out the press has a baffling habit of constantly claiming that McCain doesn't talk about his war record, or labeling each and every one of his frequent references to it as a rare break with his usual habit of not talking about his war record. He talks about it all the time!
Because it takes 60 votes to invoke cloture in the Senate, a lot of liberal groups are organizing around a "60 votes" narrative. Matt Stoller has some doubts, citing the fact that most major pieces of legislation pass with substantially more than 60 votes. I think, however, that that mostly reflects the fact that Senators don't like to vote "no" to no avail. A whopping 12 Senate Democrats, for example, voted for the first Bush tax cut bill to their neverending shame.
I'm fairly certain, however, that some of those Senators could have been persuaded to vote "no" if their votes would have been decisive. The trouble is that whipping becomes very difficult once your side is going to lose anyway, while being willing to hop on board often gives you an opportunity to make minor modifications/additions to legislation that you like.
Seth Pearce has a very kind review of Heads in the Sand as a "Living Liberally Page Turner" feature. He says "I really hope that Barack Obama and the other Democratic candidates running in 2008 read Matthew Yglesias's Heads in the Sands, and take its vision of a comprehensive liberal national security policy seriously." I hope so, too, but even more I just hope that you, the blog readers of the world, will buy the book. Saving the world would be nice, but it's sales that really matter.
Nate Silver created the above chart out of Rasmussen data and it shows a fascinating difference between Obama's relationship to his base and McCain's relationship to his. A pretty hefty chunk of Democrats hate Obama and are certain to defect to McCain. But an absolutely giant number of Republicans feel kind of "meh" about McCain. As Nate observes, this is a perfectly fine situation for McCain to be in if it's a close election, "But if the election doesn't look like it's going to be close, there could be a snowball effect in which Republican turnout is quite low."
I'd also say that this represents Bob Barr's opening to have an impact on the race -- all these Republicans with mixed feelings about McCain could, in principle, be drawn to a different take on conservatism.
John McCain's website's gotten a nifty makeover, giving no indication that he's a Republican and aimed at convincing people that he's the real environmentalist candidate in this race even though I don't believe you could find a single actual environmentalist or environmental group to bac that claim up. But it also has a navigation sidebar on the right-hand side reproduced over here on the left. As is common with John McCain, the idea of supporting a cause greater than self-interest is invoked. But in this case, it's an invocation to give money to John McCain.
The cause, in short, is greater than your self -- it's the greater glory of John McCain. That, my friends, is the kind of change you can really believe in.
Barack Obama announces a bunch of state directors:
Jackie Norris, Senior Advisor to Obama during the Iowa Caucuses will serve as the Iowa State Director. Mike Dorsey, who served as Obama’s Midwest Political Director in the fall and state director in Missouri, is heading to Montana. Adrian Saenz, the state director for Texas primary and caucuses, will lead the New Mexico campaign. Kat Pustay, an Alaska native who served as state director for the caucuses, has returned to Anchorage. Rob Hill, who directed the Oregon primary, will be staying in Portland.
I don't really know anything about any of those people, but Kat Pustay "who served as state director for the caucuses" seems to have done an excellent job so it's interesting that they're sending her back to her native Alaska rather than to a more traditional swing state.
It seems the Obama campaign has an ambitious plan to put staff resources into states it's unlikely to win, such as Texas and Wyoming, in order to be able to help out with registration and organization to assist downballot Democrats. In Texas, for example, Democrats are close to gaining control of the State Legislature (and thus the redistricting process). The best part, though, is this comeback from the McCain campaign:
"It’s revealing that Barack Obama has now been forced to expand the states on his map because he’s so weak in traditional Democratic targets such as West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and Florida, not to mention his ongoing problems in Pennsylvania and Ohio,” said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers.
Uh huh. Here's the latest polling:
I'm not sure that being ahead in Ohio (and Pennsylvania) and tied in Florida when winning either would deliver you the election qualifies as "weak."
Via Andrew Sullivan, Ralph Nader's not very taken with Barack Obama:
There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American. Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson?
I would find this more persuasive were it not for the fact that Obama does want to crack down on predatory lending and other forms of financial exploitation of the poor. And then there's this:
Still, key players who worked with Obama at Altgeld Gardens said he deserves credit for pulling together a team of hundreds of residents who rallied for improvements at their housing projects. Obama helped secure grants for a jobs program and pushed for asbestos removal. His biggest accomplishment may have been to leave in place a group of activist mothers, some of whom continue to work or live at Altgeld Gardens.
And then there's Obama's lead abatement bill. All that is to say nothing of minor details like Obama's support for programs that would create universal access to preschool and health insurance. You don't need to be blind to the very real flaws of Obama and his agenda to recognize that it really is a substantially different one from what's being offered by John McCain.
Tyler Cowen asks if there's anything new to say about Barack Obama: "I, for one, have nothing new to say about Barack Obama, even though I am exposed to more news about him than any other single person. I wish I did, but I don't."
Doesn't it seem, though, that he has nothing new to say about Obama because we're exposed to more news about Obama than about anyone else rather than it being an "even though" issue? That's about all I've got -- meta-commentary on things people are saying about not having anything new to say about Obama.
You'd never know this guy was the Republican candidate as opposed to maybe someone running on a Democrat/Green fusion ticket or something. Bill Burton put out a statement for the Obama campaign saying: "Barack Obama has a long record of bipartisan accomplishment and we appreciate that it is respected by his Democratic and Republican colleagues in the Senate. But in this race, Oregonians should know that Barack Obama supports Jeff Merkley for Senate. Merkley will help Obama bring about the fundamental change we need in Washington."
So, yes, under George W. Bush the United States of America is regressing to an understanding of humane treatment of people that doesn't reflect the enlightened views of Genghis Khan. That's your feel-good thought of the day.
Joseph Bruno, the GOP boss in New York State who's run the State Senate forever, is retiring. He's terrible and part of a whole terrible corrupt system. There's a chance that the Democrats will take control of the incredibly gerrymandered state senate, and if that happens it's gonna be a huge redistricting party afterwards.
Charlie Black's statement that "certainly it would be a big advantage to" John McCain for American civilians to be slaughtered by international terrorists helps bring to the surface the central paradox of our times. How reasonable is it to trust that a political movement will bring safety to the country when they themselves believe that doing so would ill-serve their interests? Insofar as representative democracy works as a system of government, the general idea is that politicians expect to be rewarded for good stuff happening and punished for bad stuff happening, and thus make some effort to try to see that good stuff rather than bad stuff happens. The post-9/11 GOP upends that relationship, and you repeatedly see instances of conservatives openly yearning for disaster to strike on the theory that that'll show the liberals or boost Republican electoral fortunes.
Meanwhile, if I were Barack Obama I'd be trying to think of a plan to counter the fact that not only does al-Qaeda scaring people serve GOP interests, but Republicans keeping power also serves al-Qaeda's interest in pushing the West into conflict with a broader circle of Muslims. According to Ron Suskind, the CIA's view was that bin Laden released a tape shortly before the 2004 election specifically in order to boost George W. Bush's re-election fortunes and there's no particular reason to think that that sort of tactic won't come back into play.
I only recently became aware that John McCain doesn't know how to use a computer. I suppose it's not that shocking, a lot of people his age aren't necessarily adept with newish technologies and a U.S. Senator is in a position to have his computing done for him. Still, I could see having some concerns about the leadership of someone who doesn't use the dominant new technology of our time. Eve Fairbanks reports that Mark SooHoo, deputy e-campaign manager for McCain, had this to say on the matter at the Personal Democracy Forum:
You don’t necessarily have to use a computer to understand, you know, how it shapes the country. … John McCain is aware of the Internet.
I dunno. Do you have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country? I think you might. If we had a president who didn't know how to drive a car, that would probably strike us as pretty odd. But I think you could plausibly claim that you don't necessarily have to have a driver's license in order to understand how automobiles shape the country. But that's because we assume that even someone who doesn't have a license has still been in cars sees highways, onramps and offramps, parking lots, quiet winding roads, overpasses, bridges, etc. If you hadn't done any of that stuff, then I think it really would be difficult to understand the implications of the technology.
But while people ride as passengers in cars all the time, I would imagine that someone who doesn't use a computer doesn't peer over the shoulder of his staff either. And under those circumstances, I think it really might be difficult to understand. But of course that's a defeasible assumption -- McCain could say something really insightful about information technology and its implications for politics and society and I guess we'd have to say "wow, that was smart." But I don't think he's done so and I don't think I'm going to hold my breath waiting.
It's interesting that the result of not one but both major parties nominating presidential candidates known as process-oriented reformers has merely resulted in an usually large volume of campaign finance shenanigans -- from McCain illegally backing out of the system after having used public financing to secure a loan, to Obama wriggling out of a commitment to use public financing for the general election. I bet that two years ago, reformers would have told you that a McCain-Obama matchup would be great for their cause. In practice, it's turned out to be terrible.
And I think it's not a coincidence. McCain and Obama both feel they can take the hit on these issues in part because they're both branded as "reformers" and thus don't need to worry as much about being perceived as corrupt. Years ago, of course, McCain had a different reputation as a consequence of the Keating 5 business and became a reformer in part in order to change that reputation. But politicians who have the clean image can feel free to ditch process constraints whenever convenient.
Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.
Josh Marshall runs this under an "uppity watch" heading, but I'm not sure I detect any racial animosity here. But what about the class cues? How many Americans have had the experience of being at a country club and watching some dude with a beautiful date hold a martini and smoke a cigarette? Certainly I haven't. Rove assumes that "you know this guy" but unless "you" are a wealthy person from the past, you probably don't know a guy like that.
I got a rare in-person request on Saturday from a dude who introduced himself to me at a glasses store to write something about Tim Pawlenty, since he seems to be a leading McCain VP candidate but nobody knows anything about him. The best place to start is probably Noam Scheiber's recent TNR profile which lays out the basic facts -- he's a young, smart, hard-working guy who marries social conservatism to a certain amount of populist rhetoric while mostly hewing to GOP fiscal orthodoxy. Like a lot of governors who've had to grapple with opposition party control of the state legislature, he doesn't have much in the way of grand accomplishments and also has a certain aura of moderation about him but it's a little bit hard to know exactly where he stands.
Basically -- he seems like a good VP choice along a bunch of dimensions beyond the fact that this seems like McCain's only hope of putting Minnesota in play.
McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes. His shifts in position that have occurred in this campaign seem not to have damaged that aura. Obama is much newer to most voters, less familiar and more dependent on the impressions he is only now creating.
If only David Broder had some ability to actually impact perceptions of prominent political leaders. Maybe somebody should give him a column in an important newspaper and frequent television appearances. Or maybe if Broder believes that McCain's reputation for straight-talk oughtn't be impugned by the facts, he might deign to offer us an argument as to why that's the case rather than sniffily informing us about auras.
Nobody seems concerned about this but me, but given how accustomed we've all become to the idea that Barack Obama will be able to raise vast sums of money for his campaign, isn't this factoid a little bit striking: "Mr. Obama’s fund-raising slowed abruptly in May, when the campaign raised $22 million, $10 million less than it had in April and an even sharper drop relative to his monthly performances earlier in the year."
What if the small donors who powered Obama's rise look at a guy who's ahead in the polls and who everyone is predicting will shatter financial records and think to themselves, "why bother." Small dollar fundraising requires you to overcome collective action problems and too much success may make that difficult. The psychology of donation seems to me to require both "buy-in" on the part of the donor and also a sense of being embattled.
As I noted when talking about his competitiveness speech, Barack Obama just doesn't seem to be able to reach his true rhetorical heights when going into detail about policy. But he has pretty good policies, as evidenced again by a speech he gave earlier today in Miami on "metropolitan policy." Like Ezra Klein I think it's good to see him frame it in this terms, since we're at a point where the boundaries of our functional economic units -- metro areas -- have very little correspondence with formal government boundaries. Another good framing point:
To seize the possibility of this moment, we need to promote strong cities as the backbone of regional growth. And yet, Washington remains trapped in an earlier era, wedded to an outdated “urban” agenda that focuses exclusively on the problems in our cities, and ignores our growing metro areas; an agenda that confuses anti-poverty policy with a metropolitan strategy, and ends up hurting both.
This is a point that urban policy people have been trying to push into the mainstream for a while. The fact that Obama's saying this means, among other things, that his team is paying attention to the right people. But we have poor people who don't live in cities, and cities are facing issues besides poverty -- among other things, we have the question of how to make it affordable for non-rich people to live in nice urban areas. Other highlights:
This is putting enormous pressure on the Highway Trust Fund, which can no longer keep up with all the repairs that have to be made. Yet Senator McCain is actually proposing a gas tax gimmick that would take $3 billion a month out of the Highway Trust Fund and hand it over to the oil companies. Well, at a time when the Highway Trust Fund is beginning to run a deficit for the first time in history, I think that’s the last thing we can afford to do. [...]
But when it comes to rebuilding America’s essential but crumbling infrastructure, we need to do more, not less. Cities across the Midwest are under water right now or courting disaster not just because of the weather, but because we’ve failed to protect them. Maintaining our levees and dams isn’t pork barrel spending, it’s an urgent priority, and that’s what we’ll do when I’m President. I’ll also launch a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years, and create nearly two million new jobs. The work will be determined by what will maximize our safety, security, and shared prosperity. Instead of building bridges to nowhere, let’s build communities that meet the needs and reflect the dreams of our families. That’s what this bank will help us do. [...]
Let’s invest that money in a world-class transit system. Let’s re-commit federal dollars to strengthen mass transit and reform our tax code to give folks a reason to take the bus instead of driving to work – because investing in mass transit helps make metro areas more livable and can help our regional economies grow. And while we’re at it, we’ll partner with our mayors to invest in green energy technology and ensure that your buses and buildings are energy efficient. And we’ll also invest in our ports, roads, and high-speed rails – because I don’t want to see the fastest train in the world built halfway around the world in Shanghai, I want to see it built right here in the United States of America.
Not that America was the world's leader in high-speed rail until the Chinese came along, but whatever -- I want to see the fastest train here, too. I'll be interested to see how much of a difference a somewhat different set of federal transportation policy priorities makes in practice. The Bush administration has been extremely hostile to rail transportation and not very interested in anything that's not cars. Nevertheless, the country's actually seen quite a lot in terms of light rail projects undertaken and cities trying to make themselves more bike friendly. It's at least conceivable that a relatively small change in federal policy could have a pretty big impact on decision-making at the state and local level -- as with education policy, the feds aren't really the key drivers, but they sometimes have the ability to leverage big changes with relatively small sums of money.
And boy-oh-boy is he pissed at Barack Obama, citing campaign finance shenanigans while ignoring the blatant criminality of John McCain's own shenanigans. This anti-Obama fervor is probably to be expected -- Brooks is a smart, perceptive, conservative Republican and Obama is not a conservative Republican so I wouldn't expect Brooks to find his campaign appealing. But earlier in the cycle, Brooks seemed surprisingly positive about Obama, and his current wave of detraction is a bit odd.
Obviously, it's somewhat hypocritical for Barack Obama to have implied that he would accept public financing in the general election and then back out of that once it became clear that he could get more money by not doing so. John McCain, by contrast, is just straightforwardly breaking the law on this issue. Which doesn't make Obama's gambit un-hypocritical, but it shows that if you're voting on the basis of "doesn't play funny games with campaign finance law" you should back Obama.
Clearly there's a larger issue with our campaign finance system here, and the past couple of decades worth of reforms seem to have mostly made things worse rather than better. I think Mark Schmitt's article on "Small Donor Democracy" points the way forward to a better tomorrow.
Interesting chart. But the accompanying analysis says "Barack Obama's appeal to younger voters and John McCain's support among older voters may have created a situation where the outcome will turn on the preferences of middle-aged voters -- particularly those in their 40s." You see analysis of this sort all the time, but it's all based on a mistake -- there's not a demographic electoral college where "winning" particular sub-samples of the population is the key to victory and therefore it's important to focus attention on the most evenly divided demographic groups. If John McCain persuades an Obama-supporting 25 year-old to switch to his camp, that has just as big an impact as one 45 year-old one 65 year-old or one 85 year-old.
Beyond that, if you do want to label any particular group as key (for the sake of deciding which TV shows to advertise on, for example) the reasonable approach isn't to look for closely divided groups, it's to look for groups with lots of people who haven't stated a preference on the theory that those people might be easier to persuade. Voters over sixty have a marked predilection for John McCain, but there are also a lot of undecided voters in this bloc that might be worth going after. For either campaign, who "wins" seniors is irrelevant, you just go after persuadable voters, and it's arguably among seniors where the biggest group of persuadables is.
The campaign says they're running it on a very aggressive 18 state play that includes Alaska, Georgia, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Virginia. Obama's fundraising edge should give his campaign the chance to buy plenty of ads in cheap, depopulated, unlikely spots like the MT/ND/AK trio where Democrats don't normally campaign at all.
UPDATE: Look, I'm not saying it's a bad idea to release a hilarious unsubtle ad. But if everyone can just take their "meta" hats off for a second, I'm sure they'll see that this is a hilariously unsubtle ad.
Jeffrey Goldberg notes that the number of Jewish members of congress is at an all-time high and seemingly set to rise. The same, I note, is also true of Mormons. Apparently mainstream Christianity can't get ahead in America.
Noam Scheiber says "I talked to eight or so GOP operatives for my Pawlenty piece and brought up Lieberman's name almost every time. About half thought it was a lunatic idea, the other half thought it was a decent idea but still highly unlikely."
Probably everyone's right. As with the previously discussed notion of a McCain-Huckabee ticket, a McCain-Lieberman ticket would be courting disaster -- you would confirm a lot of the conservative movement's fears about McCain, you'd be doubling-down on McCain's support for an unpopular war, Lieberman's not a charismatic guy or effective campaigner, etc.
But I continue to think that if McCain makes his top priority avoiding disaster, then he's just dooming himself to defeat. There's something plausible to be said along the lines of "most people think Bush is a bad president and I agree with them, but Democrats have responded to GOP unpopularity by positioning themselves substantially to the left of where they were in the late 1990s and nothing about Bush's record actually justifies that kind of move." Joe Lieberman is pretty well situated to try and make that argument. But to make it persuasively, McCain would really need to move to the center on non-war topics and make some decisive breaks with the Bush administration. Thus far, he seems to be doing the reverse -- sapping his dissent from Bush on climate and executive power of any content -- which I do think is the safe strategy, but timidity plus extremely unfavorable objective conditions are a recipe for losing.
Chris Bowers notes an interesting finding: If you take the current Obama-McCain national polling matchup and compare it to the Kerry-Bush result in 2004, you'll see an 8.1 percent swing in favor of the Democrats in the national popular vote. And if you apply an 8.1 percent swing in favor of the Democrats in each state, you get a map that's really the same as the map produced by the current state-by-state polling:
Not the most earth-shattering result on the planet, but a useful reminder that even though in principle the Electoral College allows for crazy divergences from the popular vote result, in practice gains in national polling tend to be distributed fairly evenly. So if you want to keep tabs on the race over the summer months there's probably no need to bother with the state-by-state polls.
In a memorable moment early this year, John McCain had to admit to a reporter that he had no idea what his position on contraceptives is, but "I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it." Igor at the Wonk Room fills you in (via) and it turns out that yes, indeed, McCain shares Bush's extreme views on the subject -- lots of abstinence education (something he perhaps could have used during his first marriage) and no funding for anything else.
I have no particular insight into the accuracy of Quinnipiac's polling but they've got John McCain down 12 in Pennsylvania, down 6 in Ohio, and down 4 in Florida. Obviously, with numbers like that McCain is toasty. Obama has a couple of plausible paths to the nomination that don't involve either Ohio or Florida but McCain needs them both.
Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal, proclaims "Glycerine" by Bush to be his "all-time favorite song." This is perhaps crazier than John McCain running on peace as a campaign theme. I'm a huge apologist for nineties alt-rock, but Bush is just not a very good band. Besides which the best Bush song is clearly "Machine Head"
"Everything Zen" is also better than "Glycerin," IMHO.
If you want to know why Barack Obama sometimes comes across as a candidate who doesn't like to talk about policy details, look no further than his speech on economic competitiveness yesterday. It's got a lot of details, but like Obama's other more detail-oriented speeches, it lacks the awesome rhetorical flair of the candidate's great speeches.
That said, as a policy speech it's pretty awesome, one of the best efforts to chart a truly progressive, forward-looking approach to the big picture questions that I've seen from a practical politician. Rather than a world in which we try to whether economic storms by slashing taxes and cutting services to the bone, or by sealing our borders to trade and immigration, Obama is outlining a vision in which government plays a crucial positive role in providing human capital (i.e., education), physical infrastructure, basic R&D, and in putting our energy policy on a sustainable basis.
This is the clearest example I've seen of Obama as education reformer, talking about universal preschool and investing more resources in the most challenging classrooms, but also noting that "resources alone won't create the schools that we need to help our children succeed" and we "need to encourage innovation – by adopting curricula and the school calendar to the needs of the 21st century; by updating the schools of education that produce most of our teachers; by welcoming charter schools within the public schools system, and streamlining the certification process for engineers or businesspeople who want to shift careers and teach."
On energy and infrastructure there aren't really any ideas that he hasn't advanced previously in the campaign, but the National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank concept gets a more substantial pitch than I'd heard since the day it was first mooted. Then come the criticisms of McCain and at the end some more lyrical moments:
We have a choice. We can continue the Bush status quo – as Senator McCain wants to do – and we will become a country in which few reap the benefits of the global economy, while a growing number work harder for less and depend upon an overburdened public sector. An America in which we run up deficits and expose ourselves to the whims of oil-rich dictators while the opportunities for our children and grandchildren shrink. That is one course we could take.
Or, we can rise together. If we choose to change, just imagine what we can do. The great manufacturers of the 20th century can turn out cars that run on renewable energy in the 21st. Biotechnology labs can find new cures; new rail lines and roadways can connect our communities; goods made here in Michigan can be exported around the world. Our children can get a world-class education, and their dreams of tomorrow can eclipse even our greatest hopes of today.
Noting that smoking has become a rather class-bound phenomenon, Tony Horwitz suggests that Barack Obama could try to court working-class voters by abandoning his efforts to quit: "Added bonus — Virginia and North Carolina, two leading tobacco-producing states, are both in play this election."
Note that several of America's greatest recent fictional presidents, including Jed Bartlett and Jeff Bridges' character in The Contender, secretly smoke.
In a striking turn of events, the McCain campaign has produced a good ad for their candidate:
Of course the idea that if you're primarily concerned about climate change you ought to vote for John McCain is ludicrous on the merits. Not as ludicrous as the idea that McCain is the candidate of peace, but maybe someone should ask McCain how he plans to "curb" carbon emissions while opposing a "mandatory cap" on them. Or why a candidate eager to tackle climate change would vote against the Climate Security Act.
With talk in the air of the Obama campaigning trying to target Georgia as a potential pickup reach, I think Nate at 538 raises a cogent objection, noting that it's "very difficult to imagine Obama winning Georgia without winning North Carolina, and if he's won North Carolina, he almost certainly won't need Georgia." That seems right.
Elsewhere in the same post, Nate notes that McCain at least claims to be treating Virginia as a safe state rather than a swing state in which case he may want to read the polls more closely or take note of who's winning statewide elections these days. Of course McCain's campaign HQ is in Virginia, so it's easy enough to do some covert organizing at this point while still maintaining blustery talk about winning Connecticut.
Photo by Flickr user Abbydonkrafts used under a Creative Commons license
We are proud to announce JStreetPAC's first round of candidate endorsements. The candidates are Donna Edwards (Candidate, MD-04), Debbie Halvorson (Candidate, IL-11), Rep. Charles Boustany (LA-07), Darcy Burner (Candidate, WA-08), Rep. Stephen Cohen (TN-09), Dennis Shulman (Candidate, NJ-05) and Mary Jo Kilroy (Candidate, OH-15).
Excellent choices all. Darcy Burner is probably familiar to blog readers, but for those who don't know her she's the lead actor behind the excellent Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq initiative and also someone who came very close to winning in 2006. Stephen Cohen is an incumbent and a solid progressive who's also a white guy representing a majority-minority constituency and some relatively less progressive forces are trying to leverage that vulnerability against him. Dennis Shulman's a great story, a blind rabbi with a PhD. running in New Jersey on an excellent agenda.
Candidates with sound views on Middle East issues have won before, but it's rarely been the case that there's been specific fundraising and organizing around these issues in congressional campaigns. Pulling off a few wins here will help change a lot of members' perspectives about where the political incentives lie.
Tinisoli asks: "What it means, if anything, that Gore is finally endorsing Obama."
Not much! You saw throughout the primary season that Gore was committed not to getting involved in the primary battle. And I think that even with the endorsement speech he delivered yesterday, Gore is continuing to savor his post-political somewhat above-the-fray status. At this point, there's no issue Gore is more associated with than climate change. And climate change plays a key role in John McCain's political strategy -- he's trying to establish a position that's sufficiently contentless to let him continue to vacuum up vast sums of money from polluting interests, while also getting the press to report that he's broke with Bush on a major issue. But while Gore did mention the climate change issue, he really didn't go after McCain on it.
Photo Courtesy of the World Economic Forum used under a Creative Commons license
Obama's ahead -- "The new survey shows Obama running ahead of McCain by 48 percent to 42 percent among all adults. Among registered voters, the margin is essentially the same -- 49 percent to 45 percent." Obama's also got the support of only 80 percent of Democrats, whereas John McCain has 90 percent of Republicans and John Kerry got 89 percent of Democrats in November 2004. So in principle he could expand his lead by several points purely through base-rallying gestures
Good catch by David Corn who notes that one of Barack Obama's senior hires, Jim Messina, is currently chief of staff for Max Baucus. Joe Lieberman's now winning the "worst Senate Democrat" race in a landslide, but before Lieberman really kicked it into overdrive, Baucus was in contention (see, e.g., here and here) so this isn't a very reassuring move.
It's sometimes difficult for someone like me to remember that many people -- most of them in fact -- don't get the bulk of their political news from the internet and haven't ever watched a political video on YouTube or Brightcove. Still, the pace of the growth remains extremely impressive.
For now, though, we're in an interesting middle ground where for a wide swathe of people online media is a hugely important slice of our information diet. For others, though, it's as if it doesn't exist at all. Consequently, there's a lot of opportunity for very segmented messaging. And in an election cycle where we also seem to be looking at a lot of age polarization in political allegiance, this can wind up having huge impacts. Obama can, for example, use the internet to do "base-energizing" stuff knowing that this will reach a huge proportion of his supporters while also remaining invisible to large groups of other voters who he may want to be courting in different ways.
If America had a President such that political leaders in the U.K. didn't feel the need to apologize about going to meet him? Surely it can't be good that "talks to the President of the United States when he comes to town" counts as a political liability for politicians in friendly countries.
Obama campaign announces a bunch of new senior hires for the general election:
Constituency Director: Brian Bond – formerly LGBT Outreach Director at the DNC
National Field Director: Jon Carson – formerly Obama for America Voter Contact Director
Senior Advisor to the Campaign and Chief of Staff to Michelle Obama: Stephanie Cutter
Industrial States Regional Director: Paul Diogardi – formerly Political Director for the Democratic Governor’s Association.
Battleground States Director: Jen O’Malley Dillon – formerly Iowa State Director for John Edwards for President
Chief of Staff to the Vice Presidential Nominee: Patti Solis Doyle
Latino Vote Director: Temo Figueroa – formerly Obama for America National Field Director
First Americans Vote Director: Wizipan Garriott
Northeast Regtional Director: Eureka Gilkey – formerly Obama for America Deputy Political Director
50-State Voter Registration Director: Jason Green – formerly Obama for America political and field staff
Campaign Chief of Staff: Jim Messina – formerly Chief of Staff to Senator Max Baucus
LGBT Vote Director: Dave Noble – formerly of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
West Regional Director: Matt Rodriguez –.formerly Obama for America New Hampshire State Director
Senior Advisor: Michael Strautmanis
African American Vote Director: Rick Wade
Patti Solis Doyle, former campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, as the chief of staff-designate for the vice presidential nominee seems like a noteworthy pick. Stephanie Cutter was a key spokesperson for John Kerry's campaign and before that was Communications Director for Ted Kennedy, so that's a pretty high-powered choice to work with Michele Obama.
I have my own personal nomination for vice president for McCain. It's Rudy Giuliani, precisely because he shares the vision of a practical, reforming, war-winning Republican Party that inspires John McCain, plus the stronger-than-usual grounds for hoping that he might be the rare candidate who can make a difference in an essential state--in this case, New Jersey.
Because more warmongering and corrupt associates is exactly what John McCain needs! At a minimum, I think this choice would be good news for liberal bloggers. Tim Pawlenty seems much less mockable.
Photo courtesy of Victory NH used under a Creative Commons license
Paulie Abeles has decided that she should dedicate her time and energy to seeking to exclude Sally Hemings's descendants from official gatherings of descendants of Thomas Jefferson. Sounds a bit odd and slightly racist. She's even been known to resort to dirty tricks in her question to keep the Jefferson clan all-white. So far, just a strange tale, but Ben Smith reports that she's also a McCain organizer:
A key organizer of John McCain's meeting Saturday with former supporters of Hillary Clinton is best known for her role in another bitter American fight: The effort by some white descendants of Thomas Jefferson to keep his possible African-American descendants out of family gatherings.
Paula Abeles emailed Politico yesterday to complain that her group had gotten short shrift in a blog item, writing, "I initiated the teleconference with McCain on Saturday and was solely responsible for the guest list." Another Clinton backer at the event, Will Bower, confirmed that she was "integral" to assembling the group.
This, of course, is the faction of Clinton supporters -- people who don't like black people -- where McCain has a very good shot at picking up new voters. The people who backed Clinton on feminist grounds or because they thought she had the savvy to deliver big time progressive legislation probably won't be following in Abeles' footsteps.
It doesn't seem to be working thus far, but John McCain continues to make a strong pitch for the support of Clinton-backing women:
"I admire and respect her," McCain said of Clinton.
Aides suggested that McCain's support for a gas tax holiday, a hawkish foreign policy and steps against climate change would appeal to many women.
Indeed, McCain respects Clinton so much that he's willing to say he respects her after joking around for a bit with an audience about calling her a "bitch" calling one's ex-wife a "bitch" (particularly odd considering how well McCain's ex-wife has treated him and how poorly he's treated his ex-wife):
Anyways, we'll see how this goes, but one way of respecting Senator Clinton would be to at least acknowledge that she was running for office to advance certain public policy goals and that John McCain doesn't want to advance those goals.
Clayton Williams is a prominent person in Texas politics. Prominent enough to secure the GOP gubernatorial election in 1990. During this election campaign he said various things that decent people find abhorrent, such as joking about rape that "As long as it's inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it." These remarks were publicized in Texas and perhaps played a role in Williams' 1990 loss. But this is a big country, and there are lots of non-decent people out there. Thus, Williams was tapped as a fundraiser for John McCain and put together an event that was going to raise $300,00 for McCain. So far, so good -- we already know that McCain has a fondness for sexist jokes.
But uh-oh, this fundraiser was scheduled for the time period when McCain is trying to woo women disappointed by Hillary Clinton's loss by touring his love of Abba. So when the McCain campaign got asked about the "lie back and enjoy it" remark, they swiftly canceled the fundraiser.
So that was the story -- McCain cancels fundraiser. Except now it turns out that the fundraiser's not canceled and the $300,000 is still being banked, the venue is just shifting to someone else's house. But to whatever extent McCain would have owed Williams favors pre-"cancellation" he still owes him favors now. It was the bundling of the contributions, not the use of Williams' house, that was the thing of value Williams was offering McCain.
No idea how seriously the idea of Wesley Clark as VP is being considered, but he's a good surrogate attacking John McCain's alleged national security credentials who's got the credibility and the guts to take it right to him.
I'm not sure I agree with the specific claims Jonathan Cohn is making here about Sebelius and Webb, but he does make the correct meta-level point which is that it's a huge mistake for activists and so forth to think about the veepstakes primarily as a question of short-term political tactics. Becoming Vice President of the United States dramatically increases the odds that you'll become President down the road, so it's actually really important -- more important than is generally recognized -- that the person who's picked be someone who's substantively good.
Now, there’s no question that men played a big role in Mrs. Clinton’s narrow loss, starting with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Mark Penn. And the evidence of misogyny in the press and elsewhere is irrefutable, even if it was not the determinative factor in the race. But the notion that all female Clinton supporters became “angry white women” once their candidate lost — to the hysterical extreme where even lifelong Democrats would desert their own party en masse — is itself a sexist stereotype. That’s why some of the same talking heads and Republican operatives who gleefully insulted Mrs. Clinton are now peddling this fable on such flimsy anecdotal evidence.
Exactly. In a country of 300 million people, there are bound to be some folks whose preference order is Clinton-McCain-Obama. And some of those people will be women. But the idea that Democratic women would defect en masse to the GOP in a fit of pique is a preposterous notion that seems to be founded on the underlying assumption that women can't respond to their political choices as rationally as men can. Needless to say, as Rich goes on to point out the thus-far available polling shows us the traditional gender gap where the party whose agenda is more favorable to the interests of women gets more support from women.
Rahm Has Ways of Making You Stick to the Talking Points
Rahm Emmannuel tells the HuffPost that he's sorting out whatever House Democrats may have had some trepidation about backing Obama. I like this part where he brainwashes David Boren best:
The famously acid-tongued Chicagoan may be right, Democrats like Ellsworth and Boren may not pose a problem. But the Republican National Committee is sure trying to make them one. GOP officials have blasted out press releases highlighting Boren's claim that Obama has the "most liberal" voting record in the Senate. "You go ask Boren," Emanuel says, "he'll tell you his view is that that was taken out of context, that he is going to support the nominee."
(He was right: "My comments were taken out of context and as I have said from day one I will vote for the Democratic nominee in November," Boren told The Huffington Post.)
Out of context is rapidly becoming my least-favorite politician tick. It's possible, of course, to genuinely take something out of context in an abusive way. But increasingly "context" seems to mean "you took the statement I actually made at face value without adding in a lot of caveats and so forth that I did not, in fact, say."
Ross Douthat, while acknowledging that there's little chance John McCain will pick Mike Huckabee, and even that picking Huckabee stands a decent chance of being a fiasco, says McCain should pick Huckabee. I think that's all probably correct, but it points to a larger issue that McCain is facing.
The issue, basically, is that the odds are that McCain will lose. But thanks to realignment and so forth, the odds are very strongly against a true blowout. Consequently, McCain needs to choose between playing it safe and piloting himself to landing at 47 percent of the vote, or doing some outside-the-box that risks blowing up his coalition and leaving him with only 40 percent but also provides an outside chance that the gamble will pay off. The rational choice is for McCain to play to win. But his problem is that his campaign is going to be run by professional political operatives. If these guys run a respectable campaign and lose at 47, nobody's going to blame them -- McCain was facing an ultra-charismatic opponent in an adverse political climate. But if they run an outside-the-box campaign and wind up losing in a landslide, then their reputations might be badly hurt.
For McCain's staff, it makes sense to kick field goals even though it's the fourth quarter and they're down by 20. They just need to keep the score close and live to fight another day. But to win, McCain probably needs to play to win and go for longshot conversions and risk getting blown out.
Pew reports on the National Popular Vote movement gaining steam, with NPV proposals having passed in Maryland, New Jersey, Hawaii and Illinois with bills on the move in Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island.
The way this works is that an NPV state commits to giving its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote if and only if states possessing a total of 270 electoral votes agree to do the same. This will, if enough states sign on, provide a "backdoor" way of transitioning to electing the president via popular vote without going through the all-but-impossible Article V amendment process. Thus far, obviously, you're seeing NPV pass in liberal states. But some cycle or other something will happen that gets conservatives worried about this. And there are plenty of right-wing states -- Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina -- that are too big to benefit from the electoral college's overweighting of small states, and whose interests currently get ignored in presidential campaigns since they're not "battlegrounds."
At least 14 Republicans won't endorse John McCain for president, though some say they "support" him and I guess nobody's gone the full Lieberman yet and said they're voting for Obama.
The interesting thing is that McCain has a remarkably diverse group of detractors. Some are in vulnerable districts and running scared, some are anti-war Republicans with safe seats, and some are conservative movement dead-enders who can't stomach the traitor. It's an impressive coalition.
This table from a Gallup article on Barack Obama winning women over but as has tended to be the case in recent cycles the marriage gap seems to be at least as big a story as the gender gap. As usual with this question, though, it's hard to say how much of the difference between single and married voters reflects the fact that singles are younger or racial differences in marriage rates.
Wow. Barack Obama is literally relocating huge swathes of the DNC to Chicago. Ambinder points out that this is more like a continuation of trends from previous cycles than a sharp break with the past, but it's still a noteworthy change.
In general, I think it's smart for campaigns to get out of the DC/Arlington that McCain (and Clinton before him) are operating in. Political junkies have a very distorted view of events (usually massively overrating the importance of everything that happens), and I would imagine that shifting to a location that's not lousy with 'em helps people keep some perspective on things.
“The 200-pound ball and chain around McCain’s foot is George W. Bush,” Hart says. “Unless he figures out a way to cut it loose, he’s going to be dragging it throughout this election.”
This tends to get discussed in quasi-mystical terms, like nobody can say what would suffice to cut McCain loose from Bush. But it would really be quite easy. The crux of the matter is that most voters think Bush has been a bad president and would like to see different policies implemented. Obama goes out on the campaign trail, says Bush has been a bad president, and then proposes policies that are different from Bush's.
John McCain could do this, too!
But he doesn't say Bush has been a bad president. He campaigned for Bush in 2000 and even more so campaigned for his re-election in 2004. He seems to have no regrets about that. On the trail, he's made continuing Bush's Iraq policies the centerpiece of his campaign. At the heart of his economic agenda is extending Bush's tax policies and his health care agenda is the same as Bush's. He joined Bush in opposing the Climate Security Act, endorses Bush's approach to Iran, and agrees with Bush that no action should be taken to provide people with viable alternatives to driving. Consequently, he's got this 200-pound ball and chain around his leg. But he could cut it off easily enough. The trouble is that his substantive views seem to be very similar to Bush's and he's dependent on the financial and logistical support of a very similar interest group coalition to the one behind Bush.
Another one from yesterday's requests thread: "Implications of the Mormon grassroots mobilization if Romney gets picked to be McCain's VP. I say it makes Nevada and Colorado tougher for the Democrats to pick up, and Michigan also, though not so much for the LDS factor."
I think that's right. There's also the potential that Mormon mobilization could put Oregon back in play. You saw from the McCain-Clinton matchup polling that McCain's not per se unacceptable to Oregon and the state has a much larger Mormon population than people realize. On the other hand, given the fact that evangelicals are already less-than-ecstatic about McCain, adding Romney make that problem even worse and hurt McCain in Ohio, Virginia, and elsewhere that the GOP counts on mobilizing these voters. More generally, Romney seems to be a figure who most Americans find despicable, which makes him a problematic VP choice.
For our inaugural request blogging, I take the question: "Which candidate's positions are more compatible with Parfit's philosophy, and why?" Parfit is, of course, Derek Parfit the distinguished philosopher and author of the brilliant Reasons and Persons. Were I Real Journalist I could, of course, just ask him. But instead I'll tell you what I think. For these purposes, I'll take "Parfit's philosophy" to mean "the views espoused in Reasons and Persons" since I haven't read the unpublished Climbing the Mountain and don't know what it said.
Parfit's philosophy is notable for its lack of direct engagement on public policy questions about the distribution of wealth, etc. But I'd say that from a Parfittian point of view, the key facts are that, on the one hand human civilization could plausibly persist for thousands of years (or more) but on the other hand it could plausibly be wiped out much sooner than that. Under the circumstances, the key priority is to avoid the Very Bad Outcome of total destruction. This tends not to get discussed in our political debates because it's also a Very Unlikely Outcome but one key point Parfit makes is that there's no ethically defensible reason to indulge the human psychological penchant for ignoring small chances.
Thus, I think you'd have to say that thought the odds of a McCain administration blundering into a civilization-destroying nuclear exchange with Russia are quite remote, they're also much higher than the odds of an Obama administration doing so. Relative to Obama, McCain puts a low priority on avoiding conflict and a high priority on the potential gains of toughness and resolve. It can be plausibly (though I think wrongly) mistakenly argued that the most probable outcome of a bias toward "toughness" is superior to the most probable outcome of a more conciliatory approach, but I don't think it can be denied that the anti-conciliators are increasing the chances of disaster. This pertains not just to Russia, but also to the fact that McCain is more likely to set into motion a chance of events that leads eventually to a Sino-American superpower standoff and a revival of 1950s-1980s situation of an elevated risk of total global destruction.
Similarly, on climate change the worst you can say from a pro-McCain point of view about Barack Obama's approach is that he may be hampering economic growth to an unnecessary degree. McCain, by contrast, is increasing the risk that we'll be exposed to an out-of-control climate feedback mechanism that renders the planet uninhabitable. In both the climate and the geopolitical case, it's conventional in U.S. politics to ignore the difference between a 0.001 percent chance of something happening and a 0.00001 percent chance of it happening, but Parfit warns us that when the consequences of the Very Unlikely Outcome are also Very Bad that we ignore these kind of differences at our peril.
Albeit by a narrow 5-4 margin. I bet all those dirty hippies who said that John Roberts would be another Scalia feel sorry now completely vindicated. Just remember, when John McCain gets to replace John Paul Stevens with another member of the Roberts/Scalia/Alito/Thomas school then all your individual rights are belong to the U.S. government. Unless, that is, you're a polluting corporation!
If, for example, Obama successfully withdraws from Iraq, passes a climate plan that looks something like his campaign proposal, and implements his healthcare plan, that would constitute a stunningly successful first term even if you think he's too much of a milquetoast in every one of these areas. But are these the three things he's most likely to fight hardest for? I don't know. He's consistently solid in almost everything, but that very consistency makes it hard to figure out what he's really passionate about. Now that the primary is over, maybe we'll start to find out.
I kind of wonder, too. Still, I've also felt throughout the primary process that an undue amount of attention was being paid to this kind of question. In general, I think there's a tendency to overrate presidential character attributes and skill in determining what happens. Over the years, for example, I've read dozens of accounts of what the Clinton administration "did wrong" in trying to get their health care bill through. And Jimmy Carter is widely viewed as having been an "ineffective" president even by those who don't buy the History's Greatest Monster view of his administration. But in both 1993-94 and 1977-80 a big part of the problem was just the congressional Democrats.
If Obama wins the election, marginal Democratic members of congress will face a basic choice. They can decide that their political interests will be served by making the Obama administration a "success" and agree to pass stuff that resembles what he's proposed. Or they can decide that their interests will be served by distancing themselves from every controversial administration initiative. If they choose the former, marginal Republicans will feel pressure to get on board. If they choose the latter, marginal Republicans will stand firm. What will happen? I'm not sure. The ideological distance within the party is much narrower than in 1977 and 1993, but I worry that the incentives are still bad and encourage defection rather than discipline. Either way, though, I think the key decision-makers will be in congress rather than in the White House.
Obama campaign launches new Fight the Smears website dedicated to knocking down sundry lies (about the pledge of allegiance, about Obama being a Muslim, etc.) floating around in chain emails slash Fox News broadcasts.
Karen Tumulty has the story. Will this work? I dunno. But it seems smart to get out in front of these things rather than pretending that they'll go away if decent people ignore them.
Barack Obama courting Hillary Clinton's big dollar fundraisers. What happens here is, I think, the best test of to what extent the Clintons are really behind Obama. When Howard Dean took over from Terry McAuliffe at the DNC, the Clintons seem to have indicated to their donors that there was no need to keep supporting the Committee. Obviously, the Clintons couldn't make anyone donate to the DNC, and they can't force anyone to give Obama money, but what they say behind closed doors will carry a lot of influence here.
This kind of reporting from Deborah Solomon at The Wall Street Journal is the kind of thing we're going to miss when Rupert Murdoch gets around to destroying the paper:
Both John McCain and Barack Obama promise to cut taxes for the majority of Americans. But an Obama administration would redistribute income toward lower- and middle-class households, while a McCain White House would steer the bulk of the benefits to the wealthiest families, according to a nonpartisan analysis of the still-evolving tax plans of the presidential candidates.
What's more, the story's not in the tank for Obama, either, correctly noting that his tax proposals, though better in distributive terms, are also kind of bad:
Both plans risk causing more economic damage than improvement, according to the detailed study by the Washington-based Tax Policy Center. While some of Sen. McCain's tax cuts could lift economic activity, the "adverse effects of the resulting increased deficits may make the net effect of the plan economically harmful," the report says. Sen. Obama's plan similarly "would substantially increase the deficit" and could create "additional complexity" to the tax code by offering a range of targeted breaks.
Here's a link to the Tax Policy Center's analysis. Long story short, both candidates have deficit-increasing proposals that will likely reduce economic growth. But McCain's take a bigger hole out of the budget and the benefits are much more concentrated among the wealthiest Americans.
The style and approach of general election campaigns are often conditioned by the method of victory in the primaries. The Obama team ends the season like a battle-worn Army division -- organized, relentless and skilled at fundraising, registering voters and getting them to the polls. Members of the McCain team feel more like survivors of a near-death experience -- convinced that the virtues of their candidate and the blessings of the political gods matter more than the money, phone banks and door-knocking of traditional politics.
This worries some Republican strategists. One recently described the McCain campaign to me as the political equivalent of a Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland movie: Every morning a few guys get together and say, "Let's put on a show!" McCain's state campaign organizations, coalition outreach and get-out-the-vote efforts are weak or nonexistent. But McCain campaign officials are convinced that they will win -- if they win -- in a different manner than the methodical Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004. McCain will either catch fire, or he won't -- and traditional efforts to boost turnout, in this view, are not likely to make the difference. Given its history, the McCain campaign is understandably proud of its stripped down, seat-of-the-pants, insurgent campaign style. But it may eventually be useful to have a serious campaign organization in, say, Colorado.
As Noam Scheiber says, it's hard to see any comparison in the merits of these approaches. If Gerson's take on the McCain campaign is accurate, then McCain is just doomed -- you can't run a nationwide, one-on-one, months-long campaign in the kind of seat-of-your-pants way that worked for McCain in the primaries.
This sounds like hubris born of a staff and a candidate that are unwilling to admit how much factors outside their control (namely, the Rudy collapse and the Huckaboom) played in delivering them a win in the primary.
In an interview he gave to the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes in 2006 for Hayes’s biography, “Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President,” McCain said: “I will strongly assert to you that he has been of enormous help to this president of the United States.”
Going further, McCain even told Hayes in comments heretofore unpublished that he’d consider Cheney for an administration post.
Asked whether he’d be interested in Cheney had the vice president not already have served under Bush for two terms, McCain said: “I don’t know if I would want him as vice president. He and I have the same strengths. But to serve in other capacities? Hell, yeah.”
McCain's just a guy who wants to continue most of Bush's policies and admires Bush's key henchmen and wants to keep them serving in government office. But that doesn't mean he represents more of the same. It's just a different kind of change -- hell yeah!
Analysis: The question is: On which issues do Bloomberg and McCain agree? Not that many...
I concur. I tend to think that this, like the idea of Barack Obama running with the much more conservative Sam Nunn, is just kabuki designed to make both candidates appear less orthodox than they really are. But this is especially acute in the case of Bloomberg who would seem to be a much better fit with Obama (not a good idea either) than with McCain. Let's just also note that a McCain-Bloomberg ticket would be incredibly short. However, in the unlikely event that McCain undergoes a magical transformation and adopts all of Mike Bloomberg's substantive views, I'll like him much better.
UPDATE: Ben Wasserstein has a definitive exploration of why Michael Bloomberg shouldn't become anyone's VP.
The cool kids of the conservative movement have long since moved on to much more complicated rationalizations for why coal and oil companies should continue destroying the planet unabated, but National Journal's poll of members of congress (respondents are anonymized except for their party affiliation) reminds us that for most conservatives lying and ignorance are still the key to the politics of global warming. Note this staggering remark from one GOP stalwart: "If there's one thing poll after poll indicates, it's that the science is not settled on this issue."
Because when I want to understand whether or not science is settled, I leap straight for a public opinion poll! Are ghosts real? The science is unsettled!
Last week, Michael Goldfarb kicked off his official blogging gig for the McCain campaign by observing "Attention disaffected Hillary supporters, John McCain is a huge ABBA fan." True or not, it's led to a brilliant series of Abba/McCain parodies at Jezebel.
One of the big problems with the boom in enthusiasm for Jim Webb as a candidate who can appeal to Scotch-Irish Appalachians is that he doesn't appear capable of doing so, as Eve Fairbanks writes:
Thanks to their analogous symbolic roles, Webb and Obama have one more politically important and bizarre similarity: They appeal to the same voters, wine-track Democrats who come out in unprecedented droves to vote for a black man or a hillbilly white because they want their party to be bigger than themselves. While you'd expect Webb to attract poor, rural beer-trackers, in his 2006 Senate race he didn't do any better than the previous Democratic candidate had among Appalachian voters in southwestern Virginia; instead, he was propelled to victory by Northern Virginia suburbanites — Obama's base.
Basically, Webb and Obama despite similar personalities and personae both get the votes you would expect anti-war liberals to get. Possibly related, check out this map (taken from here):
What's that a map of? Well, recently the Census Bureau started asking people about ethnicity and ancestry. So you might say you were "Irish" or "Italian" or "German" or "Chinese" or "Cuban" instead of just white or Asian or whatever. But about seven percent of people identified themselves as "American." And as you can see, that "American" bloc is really concentrated in Appalachia and the southern highlands. Webb's favorite ethnic group, in short, seems to be the ethnic group with the least ethnic consciousness.
Looks like Chellie Pingree wins the primary in ME-1 and Gerald Connolly wins the primary in VA-11. Both Democratic nominees shouldn't have much trouble winning in November. Pingree's clearly the right choice over her main rival, and I have mixed feelings about the result in Virginia. Connolly's rival was generally more progressive, but Connolly had better ideas on transportation and planning and since Connolly will wind up having influence over the region in which I live I'm not too heartbroken to see him prevail.
Ultimately, though, it seems to me that these races usually come down to local or candidate-specific factors in the end and thus wind up disappointing ideologues and political junkies who like to see broad national controversies play out.
Here's the start of that Obama bump, per Gallup. It ain't gonna be 15 points by the time of the convention, but there are some in McCain's world who legitimately believe that McCain will NEVER be ahead in the popular vote (but will still win the election.)
For one thing, I agree with Josh Patashnik that the popular and electoral votes are less likely to diverge in this manner than many people believe. But for another thing, isn't it pretty shocking for a campaign to be that pessimistic about its odds? If I were running for president, I'd want the people who work for me to be thinking "once the American people hear our message and learn the truth about our opponent, they're bound to swing to our side." You don't want your staff to be totally divorced from reality, but a little optimism never killed anyone.
As of ten minutes ago, this is what I knew about Kathleen Sebelius: She's governor of Kansas, she endorsed Obama, she has lady-parts, nobody seems to have very strong objections to making her Vice President. Sam Stein, though, offers a more thorough look. Adding more details doesn't really change my strong-strong feelings about Sebelius who continues to seem like a totally plausible choice.
You can tell it's general election time because Barack Obama's shifting his message back toward the center with yesterday's economic policy speech, with Austan Goolsbee re-emerging from the doghouse to take part in conference calls, and with Jason Furman -- a more veteran political operator than Goolsbee but someone with substantively similar views -- coming on board as a paid staffer. From the text of the speech, a shift away from the "I hate NAFTA more than you" rhetoric of the Ohio primary to something more like the center-left consensus view:
And because we know that we can’t or shouldn’t put up walls around our economy, a long-term agenda will also find a way to make trade work for American workers. We do the cause of free-trade – a cause I believe in – no good when we pass trade agreements that hand out favors to special interests and do little to help workers who have to watch their factories close down. There is nothing protectionist about demanding that trade spreads the benefits of globalization as broadly as possible.
This is all essentially fine by me because I'm a trust-fund scumbag the "center" wing of Democratic Party economic thought has shifted substantially left over the past few years. You can see that as many members of Clinton's economic team have grown more populist, in Bill Galston deciding that the era of big government is back, in any given Paul Krugman column, etc.
Via Brendan Nyhan, John McCain may not have invented the internet, but he sure does know how to use the lingo:
"You know, basically it's a Google," he said to laughter at a fund-raising luncheon when asked how the selection process was going. "What you can find out now on the Internet -- it's remarkable."
That's not change you can believe in! [horrifying grimace]
Adam Kushner wonders (via Dana Goldstein) will Facebook put college reunions out of business, since they make it easy to stay abreast of what's happening in other people's lives. I would imagine the reverse impact -- that Facebook will make more people feel vaguely in touch with a wider circle of other people, and therefore more interested in seeing them face-to-face after a five or ten year absence.
Dave Alpert reports that Gerry Connolly's your man in tomorrow's VA-11 Democratic Primary if you're interested in transportation and smart growth questions. Unfortunately, I think his opponent is more progressive on other issues so there's not necessarily a clear choice here.
Ross Douthat responds to queries about John McCain's mistreatment of his first wife:
As for my view of the matter - well, I tend to agree with James Poulos that an America in which politicians had a more difficult time recovering from flagrant private misbehavior would be a better place to live and vote and marry in. It's not that I think an adulterer can't be an effective political leader; it's that I'd like to see the social costs of sexual misconduct go up, at least on the margins, and having certain avenues to prominence closed off to you if you decide to ditch your family and take up with a younger, richer, healthier woman seems like a reasonable cost to impose on would-be divorcees. All of that said, though, we're obviously a long, long way from that state of affairs, and things being what they are, I'm not going to argue that social conservatives should deliver the White House to Obama in order to make a futile protest against the decline of masculine honor among our politicians.
That's cogently argued. But note that it's a cogently argued brief for the view that cultural conservatives ought to deploy the marital indiscretions of liberal politicians as a political issue while ignoring the indiscretions of conservative politicians. Just note that what looks like hypocrisy from the outside can often have a perfectly coherent explanation to the believers.
Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution argues that "McCain continues to embrace Bush policies on the most important issues, relying on a reputation for independence and moderation that could be lost in the heat of battle with Obama and the Democrats.... At the end of this long interlude, the only rationale for his election that has emerged is that Obama cannot be trusted to lead the country at a time of great danger because he is too inexperienced, naïve, liberal, elitist, and out of touch with American values. 'Elect me because the other guy is worse.' Not much of an argument in the face of gale-force winds blowing against the Republican Party."
I think that nicely frames some of the ways in which McCain and his supporters are talking past his critics. McCain can boast, accurately, that he's been substantially more personally independent of Bush and the Bush administration than have most of his congressional colleagues. He's not a die-hard Bush loyalist. But what he is doing is promising to continue Bush's policies on the most important issues -- on Iraq, taxes, health care, the economy, Iran, etc. he's not saying anything that wasn't in Bush's last State of the Union address.
That's not because Bush is controlling McCain's mind, it's just that despite the animosity between Bush and McCain their opinions about public policy are similar and they're beholden to a similar set of interest groups.
Here's some coverage of John McCain's deplorable treatment of his first wife. Basically, she got into a horrible car accident that left her disabled, at which point he had what seems to have been several affairs with different women before embarking on a months-long courtship of his current wife. Then he divorced his first wife, and married number two -- who conveniently enough happened to have been a wealthy heiress.
Now I have ample other reasons for thinking Barack Obama would be a better President than McCain, so I'm not going to pretend that this is my key driving force. But I'll agree with Nick Beaudrot that "I'm really curious what the more explicitly family-values-oriented conservatives like Ross Douthat think of this particular story."
There was a bizarre editorial in the LA Times yesterday about how Obama and McCain are really pretty similar dudes and it's awesome that they're both so centristy and the same. One could debunk this contention, but the editorial itself doesn't really argue for it. They concede, for example, that McCain and Obama have serious disagreements about:
Iraq
Iran
Health care
Taxes
Trade
Abortion rights
Gun control
That's a lot of disagreement! They also concede that the two candidates "have different plans to solve the mortgage crisis." What's more, after asserting that Obama and McCain "support the same policies" on the environment, they immediately acknowledge that they support different policies, "Obama's would reduce them to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050, while McCain's would cut them by 60%" though they fail to note the difference between auctioning permits and giving them away. In the course of acknowledging disagreement about abortion, they note that Obama and McCain would appoint different kinds of judges, but they don't seem to consider the fact that the federal judiciary actually deals with all kinds of issues other than abortion. Nor do they mention Social Security, which is kind of a big deal.
One could go on like this, but I'm not sure what the point would be. Clearly, though, there's a substantial difference between the candidates and I have no idea why the press would think that obscuring that is a good idea -- conflict sells papers! And it's true!
There are a whole bunch of interesting contributions to the NYT's "what went wrong" symposium on the Clinton campaign, but Kathleen Hall Jamieson's short but sweet offering comes the best of nailing it: "key groups of Democrats tagged her as a candidate who abetted a Republican president’s unwarranted pre-emptive action." Jamieson thinks this is an unfair tag, but I still think it was a fair one, and Clinton's inability to convince me and other people like me that I'm wrong is why she lost.
Armando says: "I'd like to interrupt this Unity Day message with a small reminder to the Barack Obama campaign and the Democratic Party — unless he picks Hillary Clinton as his running mate — the day he announces his Vice Presidential candidate will be a day of disunity."
I think Kevin Drum raises the right issue about this, namely the near-total lack of evidence that Hillary Clinton (as opposed to some number of her retainers) has any interest in the vice presidency. It's certainly true that if Clinton has a strong desire to be vice president, she arguably has it within her power to make a "I'm on the ticket or there's no unity" play. But if she doesn't want to be VP, then how disgruntled can her supporters really be about that?
Most current speculation on a mismatch between the popular vote and the electoral college currently focuses, for various reasons, on the prospect of McCain winning the election with fewer votes than Obama gets. Nate at 538, however, points out a significant way in which the electoral college is disadvantaging the Republicans -- it's based on where people lived during the 2000 census rather than where they live today.
If you re-did the allocation based on 2007 Current Population Survey data you'd give three electoral votes to Texas and one each to Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, and Utah. Most of those are solid GOP states, and the two that aren't (Nevada and Florida) have a distinct GOP tilt. Meanwhile, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania would each lose one electoral vote and Ohio would lose two. So consider that a reason for conservatives to want to get behind the National Popular Vote movement.
Meanwhile, there's obviously a problem here for Democrats in 2012. The good news is that as some of these states gain population -- especially Arizona, Nevada, and Texas -- they seem to be becoming less solidly Republican. But we're probably still quite a ways from Texas being a competitive state. So you see further evidence that the Democrats' future (or lack thereof) is in the Southwest and the party's ability to start reliably getting electoral votes out of Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico to replace some of the ones that are going to be taken away from the Northeast.
Another thought on these Clinton campaign postmortems is that there's a tendency in them to overstate the extent to which changes in the Clinton campaign account for her better performance at the end of the primary process than at the beginning of it. As best I can tell, the real cause of the change was just a change in which states were voting -- the schedule shifted to places where the sort of older working class white voter who formed Clinton's base were a larger proportion of the electorate. Holding demographics constant, there was little change in either candidate's performance over the course of the primary season.
Another long HRC campaign postmortem in which the word "Iraq" does not appear. For that matter, neither does "Iran" or "Kyl-Lieberman." But it's a bit perverse to look at this race wholly as an election Clinton lost. But these topics were integral to Obama's critique of Clinton and you can't understand the more purely tactical issues in the race without having some grip on the issues the candidates were debating.
Mr. Obama’s aides said some states where they intend to campaign — like Georgia, Missouri, Montana and North Carolina — might ultimately be too red to turn blue. But the result of making an effort there could force Mr. McCain to spend money or send him to campaign in what should be safe ground, rather than using those resources in states like Ohio.
That's the normal account you hear, but I think in some ways it's the least-compelling reason to try and run a geographically broad campaign. The best reason, it seems to me, is probably just that it's an appealing electoral strategy to be seen as running a broad-based, nationwide political campaign. Bush talked in 2000 about the problems of poor minority children in school not so much because he thought he was going to get huge numbers of black people to vote for him, but to signal to voters everywhere that he was "a different kind of Republican," caring, etc. Even if Obama doesn't have any realistic prospect of winning North Carolina or Montana he certainly wants to win in places like Minnesota and Virginia and parts of Minnesota are like Montana, parts of Virginia are like North Carolina and an image as a broad-minded person who campaigns everywhere can be helpful. After all, Obama's eruption onto the national stage was a critique of the red/blue politics of cultural division, so it's good to dramatize that by running a nationwide campaign.
Beyond that, the more places you campaign the more places you're in a position to take advantage of unexpected good fortune. If for some reason McCain commits some kind of horrible gaffe that alienates the people of the big empty square states, it's good to have laid the groundwork to take advantage of that. Or maybe Bobb Barr will catch fire in the Deep South. In a narrowcast campaign, you need to guess in advance how things will unfold over the next several months and that's just difficult to do. If you have the cash to run a wide-focus campaign, then you can simply try to respond competently to events as they unfold however they unfold.
I grabbed this shot from his website yesterday. There's literally nothing on the agenda except fundraisers. That shows one of the advantages that Obama's money edge is going to give him -- constant fundraising can help McCain close the gap, but it requires him to engage in constant fundraising. Meanwhile, much as McCain prizes his reformer persona, it's simply very difficult to be a real reformer when you're spending all your time begging big-dollar donors to write you checks for $2,300. Either you can grow a massive base of small donors (Obama) or you can stay in office without facing competitive election battles (McCain pre-2008) or else you become just another money-grubbing politician.
I'm hearing that some people feel Clinton spoke too much about herself and her campaign in her speech. I think that's totally wrong. It's the very fact that the speech dwelled at length on the Clinton movement, its meaning, and its accomplishments that it becomes an effective endorsement of Obama. Absent that stuff, it's just another speech about why you should vote for Barack Obama. With the Clinton-specific stuff, it becomes specifically a speech about how, given the outcome of the primary, the logic next step for Clinton supporters is to join Clinton herself in supporting Obama.
Far from an egocentric outburst, the talking about herself and her supporters made the speech the great speech that it was and helped a lot, I think, to break down the mutual barriers of bitterness that had built up. Something nominally more focused on Obama might well have come off as half-hearted. What she delivered was perfectly sincere and utterly in keeping with the main themes of her campaign, but also led to the desired conclusion. I think it was very skillfully put together.
I think this is very good stuff and certainly explains better than I could why her supporters ought to line up behind Obama. Genuinely moving, and excellent overall -- really a total home run.
All my liberal friends think the proverbial right-wing noise machine is going to go after Barack Obama in an even more demagogic and irresponsible manner than they went after the Clintons, and I’d have to say that the early evidence suggests they’re right. But not that conservatives care what I think, it seems to me that this is actually a substantial mistake. Crazy stuff about how Obama’s a ”marxist” a former ”street organizer”, a Muslim, and most of all blackity black black black mostly seems to me to obscure attention from a much more plausible campaign strategy. Every liberal I know is really excited about Obama because Obama’s a very charismatic, politically savvy guy who’s also got a substantially more liberal record that the successful Democratic nominees of the recent past.
Not “substantially more liberal” in the sense of “secretly worships Mao,” but in the sense of “like many people, but unlike most Americans, found Bill Clinton too moderate for his tastes.” Go read Chris Hayes’ case for Obama in The Nation and you’ll find an argument that was very convincing to me. But then again, I’m the kind of guy who reads Nation articles, I’m not the median voter. The liberal contention is that given the current state of the country, and given a charismatic candidate, the median voter is prepared to vote for a more liberal candidate than he’s been voting for over the past few decades. But that’s hardly an airtight case, and the GOP has their own well-liked nominee and one who, for good measure, is actually somewhat less conservative than the people the Republicans have been nominating recently.
They’ll probably lose one way or the other, but I think they’d be better off giving the convincing argument their best shot rather than opting for what seems like a flailing strategy of desperation.
Good rundown from Karen Tumulty. I'll just say as I've said before, though, that the whole campaign dogfight is irrelevant if not for their contrasting positions on the war five years ago. This is an interesting tidbit:
Consider the salaries: Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson was paid almost twice as much in a month — $266,000 went to his firm, according to her January campaign filing — as the $144,000 that Obama paid Gibbs for all of last year.
That's a huge difference. I wonder why Clinton would pay that much? Surely recruiting staff wouldn't have been a problem for her. Money being handed out on that level tends to re-enforce my suspicion that she was pushed to stay in the race in part by senior staff whose primary motive wasn't necessarily the good of the Clinton brand, or the Democratic Party, or the country. You want to pay your advisers enough to hire good people, but you don't really want to pay so much that their motivation becomes mercenary.
Here's Obama versus McCain by educational attainment. It's close in every bracket except those with graduate degrees, where Obama has a big edge. When you look at these numbers it's important to recall that the largest bloc of people with grad school diplomas are public school teachers. It sometimes gets glossed as a cohort of college professors, but overall the number of people with professionally oriented degrees (teachers, lawyers, dentists, journalism school graduates, etc.) far, far outnumbers PhDs in the United States.
From Benjamin Wallace-Wells' "The Great Black Hope" in the November, 2004 issue of The Washington Monthly:
Four years ago, the same could have been said about Cory Booker. And so, the most compelling question about the politics of race right now may be this: Is Booker the next Barack Obama? Or is Obama the next Cory Booker? [...]
In the late 19th century, the Republican Party was operating a shameless affirmative-action program for retired Union generals from Ohio. The result was a string of mediocre presidents. In the late 20th century, Democratic Party politics created a powerful market for moderate Southern governors. The result was one middling president, Jimmy Carter, and one pretty good one, Clinton. Politics has its archetypes and its demands, and they will be heard. There's now an emerging market for a certain kind of black president, the fulfillment of which will be both harder and, potentially, more powerful than any archetype we've seen before. It might be Obama, or it might be Cory Booker, or it might be someone else entirely. But chances are, somewhere in America, that person is watching Obama's career carefully, and dreaming.
And of course what we're seeing from Obama is that it's hard. The sort of politician who can appeal to white voters -- an Obama or a Booker -- tends to run into trouble with black voters early in his career. And as Reverend Wright has made clear to all of us, a politician who threads that needle successfully can wind up haunted by his associations from back when his primary political problem was convincing black people that he was sufficiently authentic. Majority-minority districting is to blame for some of this, but it's an intrinsic issue for black politicians as long as black and white perceptions of America remain pretty far apart.
I'd say public opinion findings like this are why America is poised to elect the black guy with a funny name instead of the white war hero: "A majority of Americans say they are worse off financially than a year ago, marking the first time in Gallup's 32-year history of asking the question that more than half of Americans give this pessimistic assessment." Nobody under 40 really remembers it, but the recession around the middle of Reagan's first term was really, really, really bad. It licked inflation, but at the cost of sky-high unemployment and the worst recession since the Great Depression. And even then the public's view of their personal finances was rosier than it is now.
Ezra Klein remarked yesterday on an interesting contrast between the 2000 and 2008 campaigns:
My hunch is that because Obama and McCain keep saying, in speeches, that they disagree, the press will actually report on their disagreements. The media is perfectly happy to be led around. The problem in 2000 was that Bush insisted he was a moderate and the press had no interest in questioning that.
That's true. There were a number of specific issues in 2000, most notably concerning the "patients' bill of rights" and the question of balanced budgets where Bush went out of his way to pretend he and Gore had the same position. The press largely reported Gore's efforts to point out that this was false as a kind of petty hair-splitting. That probably won't happen again this time around.
Unfortunately, however, no force on earth is going to get your average campaign reporter to pay cursory attention to McCain's claims about fiscal policy and realize that his proposal on taxes and spending are nothing but smoke and mirrors. People ought to keep complaining about this sort of thing, but they also ought to recognize that it's part of reality. One thing I never really understood about Paul Krugman's coverage of the Clinton-Obama fight is that he clearly believes that press coverage of candidate personalities is crucial to election outcomes, and that in particular media swooning over Obama's charisma is the key to his political success. But if that's true, then isn't a a good thing that the Democrats went with the charismatic guy? I'm kind of skeptical that press coverage and personae as politically influential as some people think they are, but insofar as they matter they're not going to stop mattering, and smart political movements will pick charismatic leaders.
On Tuesday, I wrote that "at some point in the next couple of months someone needs to write the inevitable column calling on Obama and/or McCain to name a 'shadow cabinet.'" In doing so, I failed to appreciate the marvels of internet time. Thus Tom Schaller blogs "now that Barack Obama has won the nomination, my initial reflex is that he ought to choose quickly—not rashly, of course, just quickly—and build a shadow cabinet of sort outward from there."
Now nobody genuinely offers a shadow cabinet when running for election, but one could imagine Obama doing something like what Bush did in 2000 when he made it pretty clear in advance that Colin Powell was going to be his Secretary of State. Of course here in 2008 there's no figure of Powell-like popularity to anoint. What's more, that served a very specific purpose of trying to (falsely) reassure people that the inexperienced Bush would pursue a calm, modest, moderate course in foreign policy. Normally, I think it's more advantageous to a politician to stay vague. The list of plausible Obama Secretaries of State and Defense has a lot of overlap with the list of people who might plausibly be quoted on TV and in the newspapers talking about the Obama foreign policy. You want, as much as possible, all of those people to be thinking to themselves "if I'm as helpful to Obama as possible, then maybe he'll pick me!" You want all the wannabes wanting to be as strongly as possible.
But for McCain this is a more interesting proposition. My assumption when Al Gore was running was that there would be a lot of overlap between the Gore cabinet circa 2001 and the Clinton cabinet circa 2000. Some people would leave, of course, as is always the case during an administration, but you could easily imagine some people staying on in their jobs and also many instances of things like Assistant Secretaries becoming Undersecretaries and Undersecretaries taking over as Secretaries.
But what about John McCain? We know he's truly, madly, deeply in love with Bush's choice to head up CENTCOM, General David Petraeus, but what about other Bush appointees? Will William Luti, formerly a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense and currently a Special Assistant to the President have a role in a McCain administration? Will Zalmay Khalilzad? Ryan Crocker? The question of whether or not a McCain administration would amount to a third Bush term has gotten a lot of play lately. Some clearer indication from McCain of how he intends to staff his administration, and what he intends to do with the hundreds of current Republican political appointees in office would shed some light on all that. Will he fire the overwhelming majority of them the way a Democrat would, or will he keep the majority on the way Bush would in a third term?
Have you noticed that throughout the course of this campaign, the proper noun "Clintonite," used since the 1990s to refer to Bill's supporters, became the simultaneously girly and threatening "Clintonista?" Just sayin'.
That seems paranoid to me. The Sandinistas and Zapatistas aren't girly, they're Spanish-speakers. The switch from "ite" to "ista," if it's even real, surely just reflects the growing influence of the Spanish language on American English, as in the growing popularity of "¡si se puede!" as rally chant.
I hadn't thought of this, but it makes sense. Jackie Calmes reports for the WSJ: "Some in the Clinton camp also noted a possible problem for a party-unity ticket: Bill Clinton may balk at releasing records of his business dealings and big donors to his presidential library." You have to assume the Obama campaign wouldn't agree to an Obama-Clinton without without at least their own vetting team getting a crack at those books. And it seems very unlikely that Obama would want to fight Bill's battle for non-disclosure to the public.
Over the course of this historic, thrilling, aggressive primary election, we've seen more female pundits than ever before writing and speaking about presidential politics. We've experienced unprecedented interest from male politicos in women's participation in the electoral process. And demands for women's leadership have been given their fairest hearing to date in the United States, with Democrats nationwide expecting Obama to give close consideration to female vice-presidential prospects -- not only because there are a few wildly successful and talented women who would be great at the job, but also as a gesture of good will toward the feminist energy that animated so many Clinton supporters.
This is all true. Beyond the Vice Presidency, I would imagine that an Obama transition team is now really going to want to be able to say that it's appointed the highest number of woman to cabinet positions.
The largest remaining scheduled moments in the campaign between now and November are the conventions and the debates. Is there any doubt that Obama is going to deliver a better convention night speech? Is there any doubt that, the first time he and McCain appear on a stage together, the contrast in age, height, and tone is liable to be pretty striking?
That's right in terms of convention speeches. So far as the debates go, I think the most noteworthy thing is that neither McCain nor Obama is very good at debating. To my mind, that's a stark contrast to 2000 and 2004 where we had matchups between two good debaters. I think this mostly reflects the fact that though debates are interesting media moments, they probably don't matter very much to outcomes, thus even though neither Obama nor McCain was especially impressive in their debates, they secured their respective parties' nominations. My suspicion, though, is that an Obama-McCain debate matchup will be really horrible to watch.
On the theme of Barack Obama as the candidate of optimism, John Judis' perennial pessimism about his chances in a general election is a useful corrective. In this edition, he breaks new ground by comparing Obama not to McGovern or Carter, but to Al Smith's doomed 1928 presidential run. Racism is supposed to be the 2008 version of the anti-Catholicism of 80 years ago.
Historical analogies are always tricky, but I think it's very difficult to compare anything to the Democratic Party of the 1920s. Here's Al Smith's electoral map:
Bad stuff. But whatever the role of anti-Catholic sentiment in that race, Smith's performance was really a huge improvement over what the Democrats did in 1924:
All the Democrats got in '24 was the "solid south" because they faced massive defections elsewhere to Robert LaFolette's Progressive Party. But the GOP secured a solid popular vote majority even in the face of a three-way race. That was terrible. But even without a Progressive in the field, the Democrats did terribly in 1920:
That year the Cox-Roosevelt ticket secured just 34 (!) percent of the popular vote, to 60 percent for Warren Harding. That was a blowout on the scale of Nixon in '72 or Johnson in '64. Judis acknowledges in his piece that no Democrat could have won in 1928, but you really need to look at the 1924 and 1920 races to appreciate how true that was. It's not just that Smith couldn't have won irrespective of his religion, but that the inter-war Democratic Party was absolutely hopeless in presidential politics. That's a very different context from the one in which Barack Obama is currently operating.
Long story short, I think it's true that Obama will be hurt in the fall by his race, but he's also operating in an environment where Democrats have some margin for error. Al Smith, by contrast, was operating from a position of hopeless disadvantage that had nothing to do with his religion.
I don't understand her endgame. One interpretation is that she's trying to solidify her position as the frontrunner for 2012 if Obama loses in November, but she's generating so much resentment among Obama supporters that it will arguably damage her standing within the party.
I've heard a lot of political junkies reason along these lines over the past month or so, but it's borne out by the data. Clinton's favorability rating among Democrats has taken a hit, but it's been a small one, and she's still very well-liked by most Democrats (as is Obama). Whatever her subjective intentions, her past month of campaigning has succeeded in harming Obama's chances in 2008 without measurably damaging the prospects for an "I Told You So" primary campaign in 2012. For a long time, I've kept believing that Clinton's desire to run again in 2012 if Obama loses in November would get her to drop out of the race in order to avoid unduly alienating people, but as we can see her decision to drag this thing out doesn't seem to have actually alienated many people thus far.
This old post from my friend Catherine on Obama's 2004 convention speech, and especially the attendant comment thread, makes for interesting retrospective reading.
Sometimes in politics you get these scenarios where left and right seem to be living in different worlds. I worried that my sense that McCain's speech from last night was a fiasco was something like that -- groupthink driven by watching it in a room full of liberals. It's clear, however, from The Corner that the right feels the same way. Yuval Levin, who even recommended the themes that McCain used, is especially good on the problems with the address.
On one level, this is just aesthetics, just the question of the delivery of the speech. But it does seem to me that McCain had trouble with the text largely because important swathes of it just aren't about stuff he cares about. He likes to talk about war, and steely resolve to continue prosecuting wars, but he's not into getting into the weeds of this person's tax policy versus that person's tax policy. Not that he can't talk domestic issues, but he likes to frame them as battles between the white hats of the public interest and the black hats of corruption. That's a limited frame for anyone to use, but it's an especially odd one for a conservative, which is presumably why all of McCain's memorable domestic crusades have involved him attacking Republicans rather than Democrats.
The fact that Obama's had this kinda sorta wrapped up since March 5 has tended to obscure the fact that his primary victory has got to be the greatest upset in the history of American presidential politics. In retrospect, whatever happens looks obvious and somewhat inevitable, but back in the day all that was obvious was that Clinton had the party locked down. Obama's entire meteoric ascent from the State Senate to the cusp of the presidency is just a very, very, very unlikely story. And it's a story driven by the fact that unlike a lot of other promising young politicians, Obama's been consistently willing to take risks. In both his 2004 Senate campaign and his 2008 Presidential campaign, Obama would have to count as a longshot. And, indeed, he was a longshot in his failed challenge to Bobby Rush. A lot of "promising" guys horde their promise so jealously that they never manage to actually deliver. It took a good deal of luck for Obama to make it to the top of the pack, but nobody succeeds without some luck, and nobody gets lucky unless they're in the arena.
It's a fundamentally bold, hopeful brand of politics. And I think it's no coincidence that that theme's been at the center of his campaign. Relative to Clinton, you see two people with similar policy agendas. But Clinton comes from a school of politics that says liberalism can't really win on the questions of war and peace, identity and authenticity, crime and punishment. It says that we live in a fundamentally conservative nation, and that the savvy progressive politician kind of burrows in and tries to make the best of a bad situation. It's an attitude very much borne of the brutally difficult experience of organizing for McGovern in Texas and running for governor in Arkansas at the height of Reaganism. Relative to McCain, Obama thinks it's possible to accomplish things in the world. He thinks the United States faces a lot of serious international challenges, but doesn't see them as primarily driven by menacing and implacable foes. Obama thinks that a combination of visionary leadership and shrewd bargaining can greatly improve our ability to tackle key priorities without any great expenditure of our resources.
All in all, the pessimist in me sees it as an approach to politics designed to set us up for a hard fall when it fails. But in a deeper sense I find it incredibly appealing. To me, it's incredibly frustrating to hear that ideas "can't be done" not because they won't work, but because people know -- just know -- that they're not politically possible, even though they're things that have never been tried. I think almost every worthwhile accomplishment of progressive governance -- from the UN and NATO and the NPT to Medicare and Medicaid and Title I school aid to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act to the ongoing feminist revolution that's completely transformed American society in a generation and a half with no sign of slowing down -- is the kind of thing that before it happened, a lot of people would have said that it couldn't happen. And of course sometimes the pessimists are right, but unless you sometimes assume they're wrong then nothing's ever going to happen.
Well, suffice it to say that he's a lot better at delivering setpiece speeches than are his rivals. I feel inspired and disinclined to write anything embarassingly gushy.
I thought it was strange that Harold Ford's on MSNBC right now deliberately sabotaging the Democratic Party, lavishly praising John McCain and McCain's speech. Then I remembered that Ford took over as head of the DLC so boosting the GOP is part of his job.
John McCain is clearly defensive about the allegation that his election would represent a third Bush term. And, obviously, as I've noted before McCain would represent a change from Bush. But still, on Iraq, whatever you make of the comparative Bush and McCain records, McCain is promising to continue Bush's policies. On Iran, he's promising to continue Bush's policies. On North Korea, he's promising to repudiate Bush's current policy in favor of Bush's earlier, failed policy. On judges, he's promising to continue Bush's policies. On taxes, he's promising to continue Bush's policies.
This last one is important, because fundamentally it's going to be very different to make substantial changes in the domestic policy sphere as long as you're committed to Bush's tax policy.
That does leave us with the important issue of climate change wherein McCain, though worse than Obama, would constitute a major improvement of Bush. That and mixed martial arts, where despite McCain's love of boxing and hatred of over-regulation, he thinks the government ought to step in and put a stop to Kimbo Slice.
Two -- it's interesting that he's shifted his aesthetic from his old black and white "fascist" aesthetic to a new green and white Islamofascist aesthetic.
Three -- despite the general badness of his speaking manner, McCain does have highs and lows. You can tell that he gets excited, personally, when talking in a generic way about how America is awesome. But when he waxes about reforming government institutions, it's obvious that McCain is bored and not at all the kind of person who's inclined to immerse himself in the details of these kind of issues.
Four -- even McCain's audience doesn't seem to like this speech.
Marc Ambinder writes about an RNC memo "that portrays the Democratic Party in a state of disarray and claims that legions of Hillary Clinton voters are poised to jump to John McCain." As Marc says, "privately, many Democrats would agree that that 'united' is not the best adjective to describe the party right now." If anything, though, I think this ought to give McCain serious pause. How is it that he's in a dead heat with an opponent who's party is an a maximum state of disunity?
It's hard for me (or anyone) to know for sure to what extent currently disgruntled Clinton supporters will unite around Obama. But everyone knows that some of them will do so. Obviously events can occur that will change people's opinions of Obama and McCain, but one's generic assumption has to be that the Democratic Party will grow more united between now and November and given current polling that spells trouble for McCain.
Rep. Bill Delahunt is one of those guys who you don't hear much about, but who's a solid progressive who's often tried to show leadership on issues that tend to get ignored. For example, according to Spencer Ackerman tomorrow he's hit on the bright idea of having two Iraqi parliamentarians opposed to the Bush/McCain/Maliki perpetual occupation policy come testify before his subcommittee:
Live from the Rayburn building, Rep. Bill Delahunt's (D-MA) Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight will hear from Sheikh Khalaf al-Ulayyan of the Sunni Accordance Front and Nadim al-Jaberi of the Shiite (and anti-Moqtada, anti-Maliki) Fadhila Party. Both men oppose an open-ended U.S. troop presence, which is a rather popular position among the Iraqi people.
I doubt parliamentary opposition in Iraq will, in practice, be a serious impediment to this policy since the local occupying power tends to have ways of making the occupied government see things its way if push comes to shove. Still, the parliamentary opposition, like the opposition in public opinion, is a token of how ill-advised this approach is.
While the nation’s investment bankers are paying a heavy price for their unbridled greed (in billions of dollars of write-offs), Gramm has fared quite nicely. He currently serves as a vice president at UBS AG, a colossal, Swiss-owned investment bank, the post, no doubt, a thank you for assiduously looking out for Wall Street interests during his 23 years in public office. Now, with the aid of his longtime friend Arizona Sen. John McCain, Gramm may be looking at a quantum leap in power and influence. [...]
Gramm might be interested in downplaying his role with the McCain campaign because, while the alliance might help with conservatives, it’s at odds with the maverick image McCain has worked so hard to project. Gramm is more closely aligned with the kind of influence-peddling represented by the Keating Five scandal, in which McCain intervened with federal regulators on behalf of a campaign contributor with a failing savings and loan. The scandal shredded McCain’s reputation and convinced him of the efficacy of reform.
In Gramm, McCain has chosen for a campaign adviser a former senator who espouses free market, conservative principles, but whose actions in public office served wealthy contributors and even himself. Exhibit A: Gramm’s cozy Enron Corp. connections. Not only did CEO Ken Lay chair Gramm’s 1992 re-election campaign, but Gramm’s wife, Wendy, earned $50,000 a year as an Enron director from 1993 to 2001 (not counting perks that included stock options). Meanwhile Gramm pushed the company’s aggressive—and ultimately self-defeating—political agenda to escape government scrutiny.
Viewed in one light, McCain's personal lack of interest in economics and domestic policy might generate okay outcomes -- lots of compromises with congressional Democrats. But viewed in another light, you can imagine it just opening the door to lots of corruption and shady dealings. Gramm is, in essence, what's lurking behind door number two.
