Winning the GOP Primary in Wingnutopia

Gallup reports a new poll using a somewhat misleading headline; "With Huckabee Out, No Clear GOP Front-Runner." The reason I say this is somewhat misleading is because there wasn't a clear frontrunner with Huckabee in. The GOP field this year is a mix of no-names, frootloops, and finger-in-the-wind flip-floppers. The Gingrich campaign is (perhaps prematurely) already being declared dead in the water, a victim of the candidate's mouth. Anyone who remembers Newt's days as speakers won't be surprised -- he was always one to speak before thinking, assuming that every random thought was brilliant and worthy of great attention. His current situation must seem very familiar to him.

What we do see in the Gallup poll is a sort of split between the more pragmatic primary voters who recognize their candidate has to win a general election and the true-believers, the 'baggers, and the talk radio-informed who demand nothing short of wingnut purity. In that poll, leading the pack -- albeit barely leading -- are Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. That would be the same Sarah Palin who recent polling shows would lose even to Dennis Kucinich (a "rout," in the pollster's words) in the general election. In short, be prepared for a lot of "who's the soul of the Republican Party?" articles, because the answer to that question isn't extremely clear.

And Newt's reportedly washed-up campaign? Scoring third right now.

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Three Speeches, One Winner

I was so tempted to call this post "Yes He Did!" but I guess I'll save that one for November. The word "historic" is being thrown around a lot this morning, as Barack Obama has the nomination of the Democratic Party all sewn up. For the love of God, can someone please put top Clintonista Terry McAuliffe out of our misery now? His forced excitement is freakin' annoying. Either Terry's deranged with some rare form of a manic delusional state or he does more cocaine than the entire Aerosmith road crew. He makes that shouting, bearded lunatic who sells Orange Glo on TV seem as calm as the Dalai Lama. Someone make him stop. Please.

Yesterday was a typical day for Team Clinton, with confused messages that suggested the left hand didn't know what the right was doing. While the Clinton campaign was busy putting down an Associated Press story that she was planning on conceding, Terry McAuliffe was all over the place saying that she would -- at least, under the right conditions. Asked on NBC's Today Show if Clinton would concede if Barack Obama hit the mark, McAuliffe told Meredith Viera, "Yes, I think if Sen. Obama gets the number, I think Hillary Clinton will congratulate him and call him the nominee."

Yeah, she didn't do that. Not only didn't she concede, she didn't even congratulate Obama on his victory. There are a lot of things you can call Hillary Clinton, but "gracious in defeat" isn't one of them. In fact, Clinton seemed to send the message that there was some way forward from here -- but the "Obama's the nominee" narrative left the station long before she stepped up to the stage. In fact, AP called it for Obama yesterday morning.

About that speech. It was nothing special. She left everything up in the air, neither conceding nor announcing she was going on what Al Giordano calls "a Kamikaze mission" of a convention floor fight. Giordano seems unconcerned. "Everything is good. She’s getting out," he writes. "She just has to negotiate her terms. But she stopped short of starting an internecine Civil War in the Democratic party. And nothing in her tone or words indicated otherwise."

Others were much, much less impressed. "I probably shouldn't write any more about this woman and her staff," said Matthew Yglesias in a very brief post. "Suffice it to say that I've found her behavior over the past couple of months to be utterly unconscionable and this speech is no different. I think if I were to try to express how I really feel about the people who've been enabling her behavior, I'd say something deeply unwise. Suffice it to say, that for quite a while now all of John McCain's most effective allies have been on Hillary Clinton's payroll."

Some are suggesting that Hillary absolutely must be Obama's running mate -- I'd link to a few, but you've probably seen a few already. I have my doubts. With her constant drumbeat of "Experience! Experience!" Clinton has done a pretty thorough job of setting herself up as the establishment candidate. In an election where voters are clamoring for change, this wasn't the wisest message to send and probably had a lot to do with the failure of her campaign. Picking up Clinton as the VP would tarnish Obama's change cred. I don't see it happening, but I suppose I could always be wrong.

Some are worried about Clinton extremists, who threaten to vote for McCain now that Hillary's out. But I'd be willing to bet real money that Obama already has a poll in the field to find out just how many of these dead-enders there really are. I'm guessing they'll find out that they're few and far between -- the shrillness and stridency of these voters makes them seem much more important than they really are. Besides, Hillary will endorse Obama eventually and these voters will likely be swayed by that. I doubt these voters will force Obama's hand. But you never know. It may seem overwhelming now, but Obama probably won't make a decision until July. The "Hillary must be VP" movement may have lost a lot of steam by then.

Another speech last night was made by John McCain, who took the opportunity to try to poach a few disaffected Clinton supporters. Poor, poor John McCain. It was awful. He delivered a confused message -- one that said that Barack Obama sucks and that John McCain is Barack Obama. Baghdad Johnny needs to make up his mind. Standing before a weird green backdrop that read "A Leader We Can Believe In" (Obama's motto is "Change We Can Believe in"), McCain delivered a hectoring speech in forced and wooden tones.

And he did it in New Orleans -- a place McCain has no business going. While McCain used the location to try to separate himself from George W. Bush, all he really did was guarantee that this photo would be all over the damned blogosphere today:



"We must also prepare, far better than we have, to respond quickly and effectively to a natural calamity," McCain said. "When Americans confront a catastrophe they have a right to expect basic competence from their government. Firemen and policemen should be able to communicate with each other in an emergency. We should be able to deliver bottled water to dehydrated babies and rescue the infirm from a hospital with no electricity. Our disgraceful failure to do so here in New Orleans exposed the incompetence of government at all levels to meet even its most basic responsibilities."

Yeah, that photo I just showed you? That's George W. Bush giving McCain a birthday cake the day that Katrina made landfall. So distancing from Bush -- dead. Washing his hands of his part in that disaster -- dead. If it's possible for McCain to have chosen a worse location, I'd like to know where that is.

It didn't help any that his reasoning was off-kilter and his message hopelessly inconsistent. I can boil the whole thing down to one sentence; "I've been in Washington for a billion years and that's why I represent change." Yeah, that doesn't make any sense to me, either. McCain delivered a terrible speech in such an extremely awful manner that my belief that there's no freakin' way this guy can win has been renewed.

Barack Obama may have done Baghdad Johnny a favor. He delivered his victory speech in the middle of McCain's "I'm Obama/I'm not Obama/I'm not Bush/Bush is right" speech and every network cut from McCain treading water to Barack Obama, who surprised no one by hitting it out of the park.

America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment -- this was the time -- when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals. Thank you, God Bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.

If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and watch it. It's nice to know that someone who gave a speech last night had some idea of what to do with a microphone and a crowd. Of Clinon's speech, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank writes a piece titled "In Defeat, Clinton Graciously Pretends to Win." Of McCain's speech, The American Prospect's Ezra Klein said, "It's a cuddly, almost delicate delivery, as if he were reading a storybook to really young children. It's extremely disconcerting."

Not only did Obama win the nomination last night, he also won the media contest, delivering a speech as fit for the history books as his historic win.

Dammit, I can't help it. I've got to say it.

Yes he did.

-Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; elections; 2008; Republican; Bush; propaganda; Primary; Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain all gave speeches last night -- only the Democratic nominee gave a good one

It's All Over But The Complaining

It's a measure of how screwed up this whole thing has become that the result of the Democratic primaries depended on the Rules and Bylaws Committee.

Of course, it didn't really depend on the RBC -- that was merely Clinton pretense. If the Florida and Michigan delegations had been seated as is, Hillary would've still been behind. Both delegations were seated, but with half the voting power. It was the solution to Michigan which really set Clinton supporters off. Seating the Michigan delegation as is would've been an expectation that lied somewhere between pretty unrealistic and completely insane. For all their arguments about democracy and the sanctity of the vote, the Michigan primary as it stood would've been a damned crooked and undemocratic contest. Barack Obama wasn't even on the ballot. McClatchy Newspapers said Team Clinton were "enraged" by the solution.

To give you an idea of how enraged, here's Clinton supporter Harriet Christian, who was thrown out of the committee meeting Saturday (video courtesy of firedoglake). Golly, I wonder why?



After a more than vaguely racist rant, she says she'll vote for McCain. In a previous post, I've already explained what kind of a voter Harriet is -- she's a dumbass.

I should point out that what Harriet Christian and other Clintonistas like her are freaking out about are four delegates who represent two delegate votes. That's what Clinton lost in the Michigan solution. In fact, if she'd gotten everything with full votes, she'd still be behind. I don't know what voters like Harriet expected, but it wasn't anywhere near realistic. She complains that Hillary lost two delegate votes out of over two thousand needed to win -- a less than 0.2% setback -- and shrieks like the primaries were stolen. But Clinton's a lot more that 0.2% behind.

This would be a good time to point out that both solutions were in Hillary's favor. Neither state was going to be counted and now she gains votes from both. In terms of things worth complaining about, this is somewhere in the neighborhood of winning a Mercedes instead of a Porsche in a contest. She isn't out anything, because she never had it in the first place. That the RBC took something away from her is one more Clinton pretense.

But the new narrative that Team Clinton is trying to get rolling is that she's the victim of sexism. OK. I'll buy that -- to a degree. I've argued that coverage of Clinton -- among the punditry, at least -- has sucked on that point.

It's been asked whether the nation is ready for a black or female president. The first two primary contests say yes -- and that trend's likely to continue. The question is whether or not the media is ready for a black or female president. And the answer there is mixed. Black? Yes. Female? Clearly not. Despite either being or living with women all their damned lives, most of the press seems to have no idea how to cover a woman's campaign seriously.

So there.

But to go back to Harriet, how on Earth can you argue that Obama hasn't been the victim of racism in this campaign? The fact is that both candidates have suffered the slings and arrows cast by freakin' morons. For every Chris Matthews, there's a Rush Limbaugh. In fact, where Matthews apologized for saying that Clinton was a frontrunner because "her husband messed around." Limbaugh, for his part, seems positively proud of his "Barack the Magic Negro" bit. We won't even go into high profile Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro. Harriet's not saying anything new.

Newsweek contributing editor Eleanor Clift puts it this way; "Blaming gender bias may help some women vent about an outcome they didn't want, but there are more mundane reasons for what looks like a failed nomination fight. If Clinton had not voted for the resolution that gave President Bush the authority to wage war, the door would not have swung open for Obama to enter the race. His antiwar stance gave him a moral claim on which to stake his candidacy. Secondly, the Clinton campaign's decision to not aggressively contest the caucus states allowed Obama to build up a lead in delegates that Clinton was never able to overcome. Now Clinton supporters are arguing that caucuses are undemocratic, and if only the Democrats had the same system as the Republicans, winner-take-all in the big primary states, Hillary would be the nominee."

"The sense of grievance that permeates the Clinton campaign is out of proportion to reality," she writes. It's hard to see how she's wrong. Clinton went into this the presumptive nominee and her strategy seems to have been to coast to the nomination. It didn't work -- mostly because it was a bad strategy. What she thought would be a coronation became a bona fide contest; one she began competing in far too late. Clinton's loss is Clinton's fault, she can't point to an outside cause of defeat.

Clift also brings up another good point. "But highlighting sexism undercuts Clinton's argument that she is the more electable of the two candidates," she says. "How can she be more electable if sexism is this strong within the Democratic primaries? What would happen in November? If she's the candidate, would hordes of men see the light?"

Sexism is what it is, just as racism is what it is. There aren't many who are going to become enlightened between now and November -- the vast majority of racists and sexists are just as stubborn as they are stupid. The general election isn't going to be any different than the primaries have been. People who aren't going to vote for a woman still won't, just like those who wouldn't vote for a black aren't likely to change their minds. Sexism, like racism, is a lousy argument. Even if both campaigns were equally guilty (and I don't think they are), they aren't the only sexists or racists in the nation. There isn't some "bigot tap" that the opposing campaign can shut off. And, even if there was, expecting the GOP candidate to shut it off would be insane. The Republican party has hot and cold running racism and sexism in high-pressure hoses.

The fact is that this thing is over. It's been over for some time. There are only two primaries left and Barack Obama is expected to win both. Closing the distance is fantasy. Hillary Clinton, for all intents and purposes, has lost her race. It's over.

But don't tell her that. She's running an ad in South Dakota that argues she's ahead in the popular vote. The problem there is that she's not. Of course, this ad is targeted more toward superdelegates than voters. But the superdels know the facts. Clinton's hoping the remaining uncommitted are stupid. The problem there is that they're not.

In the end, I don't think Harriet Christian represents all Clinton voters -- certainly not in terms of racism. But I also don't think her threat to vote McCain is representative. Christian bothered to go to the RBC meeting and raise hell. The vast, vast majority of Clinton voters did not. Harriet Christian is a Clinton extremist and probably not even representative of Hillary herself.

Hillary Clinton won't be spending tomorrow night in Montana or South Dakota -- she'll be in New York.

Members of Hillary Clinton's advance staff received calls and emails this evening from headquarters summoning them to New York City Tuesday night, and telling them their roles on the campaign are ending, two Clinton staffers tell my colleague Amie Parnes.

The advance staffers — most of them now in Puerto Rico, South Dakota, and Montana — are being given the options of going to New York for a final day Tuesday, or going home, the aides said. The move is a sign that the campaign is beginning to shed — at least — some of its staff. The advance staff is responsible for arranging the candidate's events around the country.

What does this mean? You figure it out. I'm done reading tea leaves. The Clinton campaign has continued beyond all rationality and predicting the irrational is a fool's game. It might just mean they're losing staff they no longer need post-primary. The fact that Hillary's blowing money on ads in a primary isn't the best sign that reality's seeping through the barricade Team Clinton has erected.

One thing's for certain. No matter what happens tomorrow night, the Clinton extremists won't be happy about it.

-Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; Barack Obama; elections; 2008; Democrat; primary; South Dakota; Montana; racism; sexism; Hillary Clinton has nothing left but complaints

Hillary's Math Problem

The candidate stood in front of a backdrop of smiling supporters, as candidates always do. One supporter waved a sign that read "COUNT EVERY VOTE," while Hillary Clinton advanced an argument that doesn't count every vote. "I believe that with your help we will send a message to this country because right now more people have voted for me than have voted for my opponent,” Clinton said. “More people have voted for me than for anybody ever running for president before."

Hillary Clinton and her surrogates have been arguing that she's won the popular vote. But the equation it takes to reach sum takes a detour through BS land. Clinton is including Michigan, where Barack Obama wasn't on the ballot, and discounting caucus states that haven't officially released their numbers. So, if you count the elections that don't count and discount a few that do, Hillary Clinton has a whopping 26,000 vote lead. With 33 million votes cast, that's less than 0.0008% -- a figure known among math wizards as "nuthin'."

ABC News' Jake Tapper takes on Clinton popular vote argument and concludes it's mathematically challenged. "One problem with these claims," Tapper writes, "they don't appear to be true."

The bottom line: Sen. Barack Obama likely won the popular vote as well -- even with those disputed contests in Michigan and Florida counting.

Tapper relies on pollster Gary Langer's analysis. Clinton's math requires that you give her a lot of rope. Langer points out that much of her numbers are pulled out of thin air. He runs his own numbers and comes to an entirely different conclusion. "Using these estimates of actual voters in the Iowa, Nevada, Maine, Washington and Texas caucuses, rather than the initial delegate counts, we get a net total Democratic vote to date of 17,607,152 for Obama and 17,504,742 for Clinton, an Obama lead of 102,410 votes –- even with Michigan and Florida included," Langer tells us.

Run real world math and Hillary's "lead" drops to a six-digit negative. Ouch.

For his part, Barack Obama claimed a major benchmark last night. "The polls are closed in Kentucky and votes are being counted in Oregon, and it's clear that tonight we have reached a major milestone on this journey," he said in an email to supporters. "We have won an absolute majority of all the delegates chosen by the people in this Democratic primary process."

So, not only has Obama won the popular vote, but the pledged delegate vote as well. In fact, Obama is also ahead in superdelegates. By no real measure is Hillary Clinton leading in any category. "Hopeless" is not a strong enough word to describe Clinton's situation. I believe the correct word for this is "screwed."

Still, Obama isn't running victory laps.

New York Times:

But even as Mr. Obama moved closer to making history as the first black presidential nominee, he stopped short of declaring victory in the Democratic race, part of a calibrated effort in the remaining weeks of the contest to avoid appearing disrespectful to Mrs. Clinton and alienating her supporters. Instead, he offered her lavish praise.

“Senator Clinton has shattered myths and broken barriers and changed the America in which my daughters and your daughters will come of age, and for that we are grateful to her,” Mr. Obama said.

There is some reason to worry, though. Kentucky seems rife with dumbasses. NYT reports that "just half of the Democratic voters said in exit polls that they would back [Obama] in the general election this fall."

On the other hand, it's hard to see either Clinton or Obama taking Kentucky in the general election. It went to Bush in 2000 and 2004. The electoral college is winner take all and a narrow loss is just as decisive as a landslide. The number by which a candidate would lose a state is irrelevant.

Still, I think this is as much a problem for Clinton as for Obama. Hillary's going to go back to the Senate very soon and, if she's seen as the person who lost '08, she's going to have a very bleak political future. She's going to have to campaign long and hard to make up for the damage she's done to the party.

At the moment, Obama and the Democratic party can afford the damage. A Quinnipiac University Poll shows McCain losing big to Obama -- 40% to 47%. As of this writing, Gallup daily tracking shows McCain losing 44% to 47%. Still, it's sad to see dumbasses willing to vote a sour grapes ticket. Any Democratic voter who believes McCain would be better than Obama is a brand-new kind of stupid. But it also seems to be an irrelevant kind of stupid.

Still, an untreated wound may fester. In her campaign to tear down Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton has delivered blows that are going to hurt. And BS arguments about the popular vote aren't going to help any. Clinton made the cut, so Clinton's going to have to stem the bleeding. She needs to get her dumbasses in line and back to reality. John McCain would be George W. Bush's third term.

It's pretty clear that Hillary Clinton's not going anywhere. "This is nowhere near over," Clinton said after winning Kentucky. "None of us is going to have the number of delegates we’re going to need to get to the nomination, although I understand my opponent and his supporters are going to claim that."

Here's a crazy idea -- just spit-balling here -- but what if Hillary attacked John Freakin' McCain? What if she acted like a damned Democrat and not a Republican? What if she started giving a crap about her party and her nation? What if she stopped making arguments requiring crazy math and actually got people to worry about the possibility of yet one more neocon presidency?

Like I say, it's a crazy idea. But it's an idea whose time has come.

-Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; Oregon; Kentucky; Democrat; elections; 2008; primary; Barack Obama; Hillary Clinton might consider doing something crazy, like trying to stop John McCain

Can't Win for Losing

Associated Press has a paragraph about last night's W. Virginia primary that made the phrase "damning with faint praise" pop into my head. Exit polling in that state revealed Hillary Clinton's base.

Clinton ran away with the contest partly by capitalizing on the state's nearly all-white population and its low number of highly educated residents — two segments of voters that have backed her solidly all year.

You go girl. You own the white undereducated -- otherwise known as the same people who'll vote McCain in the general election. Clinton claims that W. Virginia is a "key swing state." But that'd be a much better argument if it had the added benefit of being true. Unfortunately for Hillary, pollster Rasmussen list W. Virginia as "safely Republican" for '08. W. Virginia is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a "swing state." Look up "red state" in the dictionary and there's a map of W. Virginia.

In short, everything Clinton won last night would be taken away from her by John McCain. Winning a percentage doesn't matter in the electoral college -- that's winner take all. Making a dent doesn't count.

All in all, it looks like Clinton wins 20 delegates and Obama wins 8, giving Clinton a net gain of twelve. As I pointed out yesterday, at that rate Clinton will need to win nine or ten more primaries by the same margins to catch up -- there are only five left.

Adding insult to injury, the race that Clinton really needs to win -- in fact, the race that's her only hope -- widened last night. Barack Obama picked up two superdelegates. Clinton won W. Virginia but lost where it counts. Despite a better than 40% win, last night saw her lose ground in the superdelegate race.

And this adds one to Clinton's "big wins," which now total a whopping three. In primaries won by over 20%, Barack Obama has twenty-two under his belt. "Landslide" is never going to become Hillary's nickname.

All of which adds up to a meaningless win in W. Virginia last night. You've got to wonder what her strategy is here -- it doesn't look much like she actually has one. She has to convince superdelegates to back her -- she can't win in state primaries -- and she's making arguments that the general electorate may fall for, but that superdels must find vacuous. Nobody really thinks Clinton would take W. Virginia in the general, no one believes that wins in a state against a fellow Democrat is in any way representative of how she'd do against a Republican. In fact, her "big state" argument took a hit recently when polls showed that both New Jersey and California would go to Obama if their elections were held today. Not only does a win in a state not demonstrate how you'd do against a Republican, it doesn't even show how you'd do against that same dem later. Superdelegates know this -- most have run elections and seen how polls change.

If she can't convince superdelegates that she's the better candidate, despite being hopelessly behind in the primaries, then she has no chance. And, since none of her arguments are especially good, she has no chance. At this point, she seems to be trying to BS people who are election experts about elections. It's hard to see how that's going to work.

Of course, the truth is that she's just trying to keep her head above water. Nearly everyone agrees that Clinton can't win, but Obama can still lose. But what it would take for Obama to screw this up is an open question -- I think it would take a jaw-dropping scandal. A murder or an arson, maybe. It doesn't seem likely but state lotteries probably give worse odds. You've got to be in it to win it.

For his part, Obama is signalling just how slim he knows those odds are. While Clinton was celebrating in W. Virginia, Barack Obama was elsewhere. Not in upcoming primary states like Oregon or Kentucky, but in the bona fide swing state of Missouri -- today he's in Michigan. Both states are over, primary-wise, and these appearances have jack to do with Hillary Clinton. For Barack Obama, the primaries have ended. He's competing in the general election against John McCain, with no worries about Hillary Clinton and her "big win" in a red state.

This is just one more reason why Obama's winning the superdel argument. He's the one moving forward, away from a primary battle whose only real purpose is to get Clinton face time on networks. All that are left are scraps and bones and crumbs and there's no reason for someone with such a comfortable lead to fight over electoral dregs. He no longer needs to win against Clinton, his fight is now with McCain -- and the remaining superdelegates have to know that.

If she can't win the SDs, she can't win the race. And she can't win the superdelegates.

-Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; Barack Obama; elections; 2008; Democrat; primary; superdelegates; Hillary Clinton won big in West Virginia -- which is a sure bet to go to McCain in the general

Hillary Might as Well Campaign for McCain

Last month, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean urged superdelegates to commit to one of the two dem candidates ASAP. "I need them to say who they’re for, starting now," Dean told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. For close observers, this bit of actual leadership was a little surprising -- so far, Dean had been more of an idea man. Good ideas, sure, but ideas without any actual leadership. It was as if he'd just realized that the Democratic primary was a runaway train.

One SD has taken Dean's call to commit -- twice. Hillary Clinton woke up to some bad news today.

CNN:

The Obama campaign announced Thursday that former Democratic National Committee Chairman Joe Andrew -- who was appointed to that post in 1999 by then-President Clinton -- is withdrawing his endorsement of Hillary Clinton, and backing Barack Obama instead.

[...]

"Many will ask, why now? Why, with several primaries still remaining, with Senator Clinton just winning Pennsylvania, with my friend Evan Bayh working hard to make sure Senator Clinton wins Indiana, why switch now? Why call for super delegates to come together now to constructively pick a president?" said Andrew in a letter released Thursday.

"The simple answer is that while the timing is hard for me personally, it is best for America. We simply cannot wait any longer, nor can we let this race fall any lower and still hope to win in November. June or July may be too late. The time to act is now."

The timing suggests that Andrew saw how long the primary would have to go on for Hillary to win and that he decided his original choice had become too expensive. The dem primary is threatening to split the party, with some voters so embittered that they're telling pollsters they won't vote for the nominee if it's the candidate they're not supporting. It's a bad choice, a foolish choice, and a choice that far too many have already decided to make in November. Nothing would make Bush, McCain, and the rest of the GOP happier than to see a large group of Democratic voters refuse to vote for Clinton or Obama.

If Andrews' move reflects an undercurrent in the Democratic party, it may be bad news for Clinton. Sen. Claire McCaskill, an Obama-backer, suggested to Politico that congressional SDs are leaning Obama.

“The majority of superdelegates I’ve talked to are committed, but it is a matter of timing,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). “They’re just preferring to make their decision public after the primaries are over. ... They would like someone else to act for them before they talk about it in the cold light of day.”

Obama currently holds an 18-13 lead among committed superdelegates in the Senate, while Clinton holds a 77-74 lead in the House. Asked which way the committed-but-unannounced superdelegates are leaning, McCaskill — who has endorsed Obama — said: “James Brown would say, ‘I Feel Good.’”

The Clinton campaign disputes this, as you'd expect they would, but the way superdelegates have been breaking has favored Obama. While Clinton still leads in SD endorsements, Obama's been picking up endorsements at a faster pace -- many of Clinton's SD were there right out of the gate, when it looked like the primary would be a Clinton coronation.

Yesterday, CNN reported, "Sen. Barack Obama, hoping to put the controversy over his former pastor behind him, is getting some good news: five more superdelegates in the past 24 hours," while "Sen. Hillary Clinton picked up four superdelegates within the same time period." Anderson's defection makes that six new for Obama, four new for Clinton.

What should have Clinton-backers worried is that 18-13 score in Senate dems. Remember, Hillary's the one with "experience" -- meaning she's been in the Senate longer. Apparently, she hasn't made a lot of friends among her Senate colleagues. And that score represents a little short of half the dem SDs in the Senate. If that sample is representative, Hillary's fellow senators will choose Obama. And her 77-74 lead in the House is anemic.

For their part, the Republican party has chosen their dem nominee. Hoping to get a jump on the general election, the GOP is targeting who they see as the obvious winner.

Raw Story:

The Republicans have decided that Hillary Clinton's campaign is essentially dead, and all indications are that they're gearing up for a general election campaign against Barack Obama.

"Clinton, it seems, has been erased from the picture, Soviet-style," Politico's Jonathan Martin reports Tuesday.

Martin points to obvious signs that McCain has begun running against Obama. "On ABC’s 'This Week' last Sunday, he raised, unprompted, the Democrat’s views on capital gains taxes and his ties to a member of the radical Weather Underground group," he wrote. "In a conference call with conservative bloggers Friday, McCain responded to a question about words of support a Hamas political adviser had bestowed on Obama by saying it’s 'very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States.' He then noted leftist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s support for Obama, as well."

The McCain campaign's assessment of Clinton's chances seems to be "Hillary who?"

Once again, I find myself writing a "Hillary's undead campaign" post. Unfortunately, she seems committed to running not only her own campaign into the grave, but Obama's as well. When even Baghdad John accepts reality, it's time to give it up.

Like it or not, this primary will now be decided by the superdelegates. At this point, neither candidate can win enough delegates to take the nomination from primary elections alone -- there aren't enough left. This was true since at least March and every election since then has been a beauty contest. They've been showing off for superdelegates.

And those superdelegates seem to be going for Obama, the GOP is predicting Obama, McCain is running against Obama. What Barack Obama needs to do now is "run back" at McCain. Hillary Clinton, like it or not, is a distraction. She's not getting the nomination and, in her pointless quest to secure the impossible, is doing McCain's work for him. Despite Clinton's wins in what she calls the "important states," SDs are breaking for Obama. Winning these beauty contests isn't doing the job.

It's time to end this farce and have all the superdelegates commit -- as Howard Dean asked them to. If the Republican party knows who the Democratic nominee is going to be, shouldn't Democrats?

-Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; elections; 2008; Republican; Obama; Hillary; McCain and the GOP know who's won the Democratic primary -- why don't dems?

The Important States of America

The question going into the elections in Pennsylvania today isn't who'll win, but whether it'll make any difference. With most polls showing a tight race, the best either campaign can do is to try to spin what's almost certain to be a near tie. A win -- likely by Clinton -- will be nothing to write home about, percentage-wise.

For their part, the Clinton campaign have been trying to create a meme that delegates don't actually count, it's the states you win that count. Apparently, there are relevant states and irrelevant states -- relevancy seems to be measured by which states Clinton won. "The big states" that a Democrat has to win have gone to Clinton, the argument goes, so she's in the best position to win in November. This argument makes perfect sense.

Unless, of course, you refrain from lobotomizing yourself with an ice cream scoop. If you leave your brain intact, it doesn't make any damned sense at all.

Think back to the 2004 elections. There were these things called "battleground states" or "swing states." How many of these swing states were the big ones? Not many. According to the New York Times, the swing states were Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, and New Hampshire. Of those, Clinton has won Ohio, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Michigan, and Florida. The problem here is that Michigan and Florida don't count -- neither was a real contest. Obama has won Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

The argument that Clinton won all the "important states" and therefore is entitled to run for "President of the Important States of America" dies there. If you measure "important state" more realistically, Obama won more of those states' delegates. Meanwhile, Clinton's "big states" are a mix of sure dem wins, sure dem losses, and toss ups. Winning New York, for example, doesn't mean a damned thing -- does anyone on Earth expect McCain to take that state? A Democrat may need New York to win, but a Democrat win there is also a really safe bet. No one who lives in the real world would argue that Obama would lose the Empire State.

For his part, Bill Clinton kinda-sorta made the "important state" argument recently, only to abandon it -- all at the same event.

Washington Post:

Following a rally for his wife's campaign at Market Square in Pittsburgh, former president Bill Clinton suggested his wife would already be the nominee -- if she were running under Republican party rules.

"If we were under the Republican system, which is more like the Electoral College, she'd have a 300-delegate lead here," he said. "I mean, Senator McCain is already the nominee because they chose a system to produce that result, and we don't have a nominee here, because the Democrats chose a system that prevents that result."

I think he means that if all states were "winner take all," like the GOP races, Hillary would be in the lead. I was going to check this math, but you've got Florida and Michigan throwing everything off, along with Texas's weird "pri-caucus," which gave the regular voting to Clinton and the caucus to Obama. Just going through all the possibilities would make a post that would be just as boring for you as for me, so screw it. Let's just say that it doesn't matter -- we aren't playing by Republican rules (as much as Team Hillary have been acting that way), so this is hypothetical crap with no relation to the real world.

Besides, Bill immediately said that his glorious hypothetical Hillary victory would be under a really bad system. "Disenfranchisement is not a good strategy for Democrats," he said. "We do a better job when people are in power. So I just don't agree with that." Let's see if I've got this; Hillary should be winning, except she's not, because we're using too good a system for that.

Great argument, Bill.

Of course, the Clinton campaign is running out of arguments -- good or bad. An new analysis by Bloomberg shows that Clinton's chances of getting the nomination are slim to none. And getting worse with each contest.

To overtake Barack Obama in the nationwide popular vote, Hillary Clinton needs a bigger win in tomorrow's Pennsylvania primary than she has had in any major contest so far. And that's just for starters.

After more than 40 Democratic primaries and caucuses, Obama, the Illinois senator, leads Clinton by more than 800,000 votes. Even if the New York senator wins by more than 20 percentage points tomorrow -- a landslide few experts expect -- she would still have a hard time catching him.

Clinton needs "blowout numbers," says Peter Fenn, a Democratic consultant who isn't affiliated with either campaign. "The wheels would have to come off the Obama bus, and the engine would have to blow."

Considering what's already happened with the Obama campaign, I'd say that was unlikely. You remember the kid who'd wipe out on his bike then say, "I meant to do that?"

Yeah, that's Barack Obama -- only in his case, you believe him. His skill at getting out of potentially embarrassing situations is becoming legendary. The wheels aren't going to come off that bus unless he actually kills someone.

For the record, I don't think he'll kill anyone.

Needing a big win -- and not expecting to get one -- the Clinton campaign is trying to "pre-spin" the Pennsylvania results.

Christian Science Monitor:

The latest major polls show her winning the Keystone State by an average of five points. That would not be enough to make substantial headway in either her convention delegate count or the popular vote. But Clinton campaign aides have made clear that a win is a win and that they plan to spin even a narrow victory into a major loss for Senator Obama.

"If Obama fails to win Pennsylvania, it will be another sign that he is unable to win in the large states that a candidate for president on the Democratic ticket needs to win," Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson told reporters in a conference call last week.

There it is again, the pitch for the nomination to run for the President of the Important States of America. Like that Hawaii, Wyoming, Minnesota, S. Carolina, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Mississippi, or any of the other 27 states Obama has won? You ain't worth crap -- despite the fact that you're over half of the states in the country. Apparently, there are only a handful of states that actually count. Elections are held in your states just to keep you busy or something.

The unavoidable fact of the matter is that there's a very simple theme to this primary election -- the longer it goes on, the more ridiculous and insulting Clinton's arguments get.

Remember Pennsylvania, in the unlikely (but not unrealistic) event that Barack Obama wins your election today, you'll find yourselves labeled "not important" and an argument will be made that superdelegates should pay no attention to your votes.

Suddenly, you won't be relevant enough to be worth caring about.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; spin; propaganda; elections; 2008; Today's primary vote won't determine whether Hillary or Obama is the nominee -- it'll determine whether Clinton says Pennsylvania is important

Democracy for Democrats

I think everyone who reads my posts knows I'm not extremely happy with the Democratic primaries. If I had to sum them up in a word, I'd be torn between "stupid" and "overcomplicated." The way that the party's dealt with the Michigan and Florida primaries hasn't helped any. And Howard Dean's "hands off" attitude toward the whole thing is less a way of letting everything unfold naturally and more a lack of leadership.

And superdelegates? All documentation that the idea has ever existed should be loaded into a rocket and shot into the sun. Superdelegates are superstupid and nearly as undemocratic as the Electoral College. They're a solution in search of a problem.

From the outside, the Democratic primary process looks disorganized, divisive, and complex beyond all reason. From the inside, it probably looks pretty much the same way. Democracy is actually a pretty simple thing -- everyone votes, you count up the votes, and you're done. Throwing in superdelegates is a superfluous step.

That's not to say that the dems get nothing right. The Republican primary has its own problem. In making all states "winner take all," their delegate count doesn't reflect the popular vote at all. In that way, the GOP's process is just as undemocratic. Dividing the delegate count among the candidates reflects the math on the ground much, much better. In that way, the dems are one up on the GOPers.

Unfortunately, the machine's got to stop before you can fix it. And the primary machine isn't going to wind down until the primaries are over. It's too late for a fix to the races happening now, but we'll have four years to make sure the 2010 elections aren't the complete mess that the 2008 races have been so far. Once the smoke clears and a new president is sworn in, party members and lefties in general should have an agenda for the party -- reform. As the primaries are now, they're frustratingly destructive.

And screwy. How many superdelegates are there? It depends on what day you ask. Last night, I came across a piece by John Nichols at his The Nation blog that shows just how ridiculous the whole process has become.

In case you thought the race for the Democratic presidential nomination was a little too easy to follow, consider this notion: We do not currently know exactly how many delegate votes will be required to win the party nod when it convenes this summer in Denver.

How can that be? Because the number of superdelegates -- party leaders and elected officials who are guaranteed places at the convention -- keeps changing.

There used to be 794. Today there are 793. And, says Nichols, "that figure will change."

See, one superdelegate, Maryland Rep. Al Wynn, is resigning to become a lobbyist. He was defeated in a primary election by Donna Edwards. In quitting early, Wynn loses his superdelegate status and, since Edwards hasn't been elected to office yet, she's not an SD either. So the total number changes. Although, there could be a special election and Edwards could then become a superdelegate; in which case, the goalposts move back where they were.

Which leads us to more stupidity -- this sort of thing happens all the time. "Special elections for House seats in California, Mississippi and two Louisiana districts could conceivably add as many as four new Democratic members of Congress, upping the superdelegate total by four," Nichols writes. The operative word here being "could"... maybe... or not... who knows?

Yeah, it's a well-oiled machine.

Anyone who thinks a handful of maybe-sorta-kinda-not superdelegates can't possibly make any difference hasn't been paying attention. And anyone who thinks that, if the race remains tight, presidential candidates won't meddle in these elections hasn't either. In the worse case scenario, a presidential candidate would have an incentive to see that a Republican wins the seat, rather than a Democrat who'd become an SD for the other candidate. That could become unpleasant.

Luckily, there's a completely reasonable and perfectly sensible solution to all of this. I've already mentioned it -- all documentation that superdelgates ever existed should be loaded into a rocket and shot into the sun. They cause more problems than they solve -- mostly because they don't solve any problem. They're just a holdover from the bad old days when nominees were selected by party bigwigs in smoke-filled rooms. The whole idea is completely unworthy of a party that embraces the name "Democratic."

If we can't shoot it into the sun, we should bury it with a stake through its heart. Or banish it to Monster Island. Or lock it in a tomb deep beneath the pyramids. But we should never see or hear that word used in conjunction with verbs in the present tense again. If it takes an exorcist to get rid of it, then call the Vatican.

It's time to bring democracy to the Democratic party.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; elections; 2008; primary; Hillary Clinton; Barack Obama; Superdelegates take the democracy out of the Democratic party

'It is Such a Very Powerful Thing...'

"It's called a covenant. Two, or three, agree? They can do anything. A covenant is... powerful. Can you think of anyone who made a covenant with his friends?"

We all knew the answer to this, having heard his name invoked numerous times in this context. Andrew from Australia, sitting beside Doug [Coe], cleared his throat: "Hitler."

"Yes," Doug said. "Yes, Hitler made a covenant. The Mafia makes a covenant. It is such a very powerful thing. Two, or three, agree." He took another bite from his plate, planted his fork on its tines. "Well, guys," he said, "I gotta go."
--Jesus plus nothing: Undercover among America's secret theocrats, Jeffrey Sharlet, Harper's Magazine, 2003

Hillary Clinton was in a little trouble. Seems she'd exaggerated a trip she'd made to Bosnia as First Lady. In a speech in Pennsylvania, Clinton told supporters, "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

Yeah, it didn't so much happen. The BBC reports that a video of the landing and disembarkation showed "Mrs Clinton and Chelsea walking across the tarmac smiling and waving before stopping to shake hands with Bosnia's acting president and meet an eight-year-old girl." I don't know why, but it's the eight year-old girl part that cracks me up. Was she the sniper?

Anyway Clinton, caught in an obvious lie, tried to lie her way out of it. That never works. She says she misspoke. Now, if she'd confused Bosnia with Hungary, then I'd believe she'd misspoke. But you don't say "We just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles," when you mean to say, "We met a very nice little girl."

It may be that the only damned thing Donald Rumsfeld ever said that was worth anything was, "When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging." Clinton must wish she'd followed Rumsfeld's Rule of Holes. Instead of clearing everything up, she'd managed to make it worse. In desperate need of new headlines, Clinton spoke to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about Barack Obama yesterday.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a wide-ranging interview today with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, said she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor made.

"He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

Clinton hadn't really jumped into the controversy up to that point. She had her reasons and they were good reasons. But Obama's big scandal turned out to have no legs. After a short stint of falling behind Hillary in polling, Obama rebounded -- thanks mostly to an incredibly well-crafted and honest address on the issue of race in America. In a beautiful example of grace under pressure, life had handed Barack Obama lemons and he'd made the sweetest lemonade with them. Observers referred to the speech as "historic" and a "profile in courage." Hillary's big chance had come and gone. Barack Obama had not destroyed himself and that was the only hope she'd had left.

So, she forgot her good reasons for leaving religion alone and decided to poke the Rev. Wright controversy with a stick, to see if there was any life left in it. I don't think there was. But Hillary's own religious problem is coming to brighter light (it's always been there) and in poking Obama's with a stick, she roused her own.

It's ironic that she chose the wording, "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend," because Clinton has chosen both. She belongs to a secretive evangelical group known alternately as "The Fellowship" or "The Family."

Mother Jones:

Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. "A lot of evangelicals would see that as just cynical exploitation," says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who now ministers to decision makers in Washington. "I don't....there is a real good that is infected in people when they are around Jesus talk, and open Bibles, and prayer."

"When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group," we're told. "For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian 'cell' whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat."

From the outside, The Family looks pretty benign. For the most part, it's known for organizing the National Prayer Breakfast. But, like most groups that are problematic, it looks bad from the inside. In his expose for Harpers, Jeffrey Sharlet wrote, Family members "forge 'relationships' beyond the din of vox populi (the Family's leaders consider democracy a manifestation of ungodly pride) and 'throw away religion' in favor of the truths of the Family. Declaring God's covenant with the Jews broken, the group's core members call themselves 'the new chosen.'"

Is this what Hillary believes, that democracy is "a manifestation of ungodly pride" and that Jews have broken their covenant with the Almighty? If someone out there with access -- say, someone in the media -- could ask her about that, it'd really help to clear everything up.

The Family's reach goes far beyond Washington. MoJo tells us, "The Fellowship's ideas are essentially a blend of Calvinism and Norman Vincent Peale, the 1960s preacher of positive thinking." That anti-democratic thing comes from the Calvinism. God chooses the leaders of nations, not the nations themselves, so democracy is only a pretense. Someone might ask Hillary is why God chose Saddam Hussein to lead Iraq, being all evil and all.

"It's a cheery faith in the 'elect' chosen by a single voter—God—and a devotion to Romans 13:1: 'Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers....The powers that be are ordained of God,'" we're told. "Or, as [Family leader Doug] Coe has put it, 'we work with power where we can, build new power where we can't.'" "The elect" refers to the belief that the saved are already saved, preselected by God, and everyone else -- i.e., you and me -- was damned the day they were born.

What fun.

For myself, I find this all deeply unamerican. People have made reference to Team Clinton's sense that they're "entitled" to the Democratic nomination (most recently, Bill Richardson). Could it be that Hillary believes that God chose her, one of the elect, to be the President? Seems to me that they've got a pretty weak god going there, since his will can be so easily thwarted by one of the unsaved non-elect.

And what's with Coe's "Yay for Hitler" stuff? Shouldn't that be just a little concerning? In the quote I opened with, the people surrounding him were so familiar with the argument that they were able to finish it for him. While Obama can believably say he's never heard any of the "God damn America" stuff from Wright, it's a lot harder to believe that Clinton's never heard this from Coe.

It might be that Clinton's good reasons for keeping away from the subject of crazy-assed religious beliefs kept her from visiting the Wright scandal (at least, personally. Team Clinton members were free to comment and have been delighted to). Those good reasons were Doug Coe and The Family.

So, when Hillary says, "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend," ask yourself why she chose this family and this church. If it were just a shallow attempt at networking with powerful Washington insiders, that'd be bad enough. But if she joined up because she believes this crap, then we've all got a bigger problem than some guy in Chicago who thinks we should sing, "God damn America." We've got a candidate who's every bit the theocrat that George W. Bush is.

We don't need another president who thinks that God chose them. The last one sucked hard enough. Hillary has her own religious nutcase problem and now that she's opened Pandora's Box, someone ought to ask her about it. Does she believe in democracy or does she believe in The Family?

If her answer is the latter, then we have good reason to reject her as unfit for the presidency.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; elections; 2008; Democrat; religious right; Who has the bigger religion problem, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama?

Clinton's Mad Quest

Turns out a whole state had a primary yesterday -- who knew? You'd think all of that kind of thing would've been cancelled so networks could cover Eliot Spitzer 24/7. Nothing like a good ol' fashioned hooker scandal to suck up all the oxygen in the newsroom. About the only time I've seen the election campaigns mentioned in regular news rotation was to mention that Spitzer backed Hillary. It's kind of a "who cares?" sort of thing, since until a few days ago, he was widely respected on the left and the endorsement was worth bragging about. I don't see how you can fault her for it; as far as anyone knew, he was the cleanest guy on Earth.

That state that had it's primary yesterday? Turns out it's some place down south called "Mississippi." Barack Obama won. In fact, losing Mississippi wasn't the only bad news Team Clinton got yesterday; she also lost Texas.

CNN:

Sen. Barack Obama will win Mississippi's Democratic primary, CNN projects.

Sen. Barack Obama leads in the overall delegate count, according to CNN calculations.

Obama will also finish first in the Texas Democratic caucuses, which were held last week.

He will get more delegates out of the state than rival Sen. Hillary Clinton, who won the state's primary.

Not the best news she's gotten all week. Remember, Hillary has to win freakin' landslides to even get close to Obama's delegate count and, so far, that hasn't been happening. In fact, with the way Texas has panned out, she's actually losing ground.

Which means she has to win even bigger landslides down the road. Unless Barack Obama is caught with his own hooker, that's just not going to happen.

And that's where Clinton is right now -- her only hope is that Obama loses the nomination with an amazing screw up. There's no way that she can win it. Even her attack machine isn't making much of a dent, In fact, if Mississippi's exit polling is any reflection of the rest of the nation, all she's managing to do is polarize her own voters.

Associated Press reports that "Seventy-two percent of Clinton voters said they would be dissatisfied if Obama wins the nomination. Fifty-seven percent of Obama voters would be dissatisfied with Clinton." This despite the fact that "20 percent of Clinton voters said Obama is more likely than Clinton to beat Sen. John McCain; only 5 percent of Obama voters said Clinton was more likely than their candidate to defeat McCain." If a full one fifth of Clinton voters think Obama stands a better chance and nearly three-quarters are basically saying "anyone but Obama," then it pretty much tells us that Clinton has trained her voters to hate Obama. I'm sorry, which camp is supposed to be the "cult?"

The utter brainlessness of this is difficult to express in words. It would require some sort of primal ceremony that monkeys perform to truly capture its boneheadedness. At this point, Obama is about 99.9% certain to be the nominee and Clinton is treating him as if he were a Republican opponent. Hillary Clinton's campaign has moved beyond hopeless into stupid. Breaking the party is about the most braindead thing you could possibly do after Bush. '08 was (and, at this point, probably still is) a gimme. But Clinton's campaign is one of diminishing returns -- not only for herself, but for Barack Obama. Her ambition is not more important than putting a Democrat in the White House. You want to say, "President McCain," for the next four years?

Then say, "Yay for Hillary!" now.

I'm not even going to get into just how dirty and lousy and unfair her campaign against Obama has been. At least, not in depth -- you could write a damned book. The smear emails have been bad enough. Saying that John Freakin' McCain is more qualified was bad enough. Now she plays the race card -- while pretending that Obama's playing it.

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position," Clinton-backer Geraldine Ferraro told a California newspaper. "He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

Can you imagine how Clintonistas would be clawing their eyes out and climbing the walls if an Obama backer had said Hillary was only a frontrunner because she was a woman? We'd never hear the end of it.

And, when called on it, Ferraro claims that the Obama camp is playing the race card. "David Axelrod, his campaign manager, has chose to spin this as a racist comment because everytime anybody makes a comment about race who is white — he did it with Bill Clinton, he was successful; he did it with (Pennsylvania governor and Clinton supporter) Ed Rendell, he was less successful; and he is certainly not going to be successful with me," Ferraro said in response to the crapstorm she created.

See how that works? You get to attack someone for being black, but when they come to their own defense, they're playing the race card. Bass-ackward. She's clearly making the "affirmative action" argument, where anyone who's a minority and successful owes their success to their race. The unspoken implication is that minorities are never worthy of their positions. But pointing out that she's making that argument is some sort of reverse racism. Issues of race in America are hands-off to anyone other than the Clinton campaign, apparently. They get to talk about it all they want, but everyone else has to shut the hell up about it or they're being unfair.

There are a lot of issues of importance in this campaign. There are a lot of substantive arguments to be made. There are policy differences between Clinton and Obama that can be discussed. There is absolutely no reason why this process has to be dragged through the damned mud and get mired down with this dumbass, dirty, BS crap. If Hillary Clinton has nothing else to run on other than how much Barack Obama sucks, then we've got to question how good her arguments for herself can be. So far, all we've gotten is stupidity, brutality, and insults.

And it's breaking the party. At this point, calling for Hillary to step aside is futile. She's clearly beyond reason. But there has to be someone in her campaign who has some damned class, some group of superdelegates out there who still value truth -- someone, somewhere has to be able to tell her to tone it the hell down. That getting the debate and the campaign back on track means talking about substantive differences, not mudslinging and character assassination. Someone has to point out that Hillary's campaign is one hair's-width away from having a supporter call Obama a racist slur.

She can't win. Whatever lunatic crusade she's on, it can't succeed. All it can do is throw her party's chances in November out the window. Someone needs to tell her that the nation's more important than she is. Someone in her campaign has to tell her to wise up. If she's not going to quit, that she can act like a Democrat and not Karl Rove. Someone needs to tell her that trying to convince everyone that Barack Obama's the devil isn't going to do anyone any good.

Unfortunately, I think that's probably wishful thinking. For the Clintonistas, no one and nothing is more important than her ambition. Expecting sanity from that camp is obviously a pipe dream.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; elections; 2008; Republican; Mississippi; Texas; primary; propaganda; It looks like Hillary Clinton would rather John McCain win the White House than Barack Obama

Campaign of the Living Dead

Welcome to what is very likely to be the screwiest Democratic primary process of your life. You've got the undemocratic superdelegates, you've got the incredibly boneheaded "Texas Two-Step" -- which is, as we speak, poised to give the majority of that state's delegates to Barack Obama -- and you've got disenfranchised voters in Michigan and Florida. The nomination process is a well-oiled machine that's designed to screw everything up.

There's been a lot of worrying that an extended Clinton-Obama battle will harm the party, but a much more realistic concern is that voters will look at the process and decide the Democrats couldn't run an Appleby's, let alone a nation. Turns out the whole thing works great, but only so long as there's a clear frontrunner pretty early out. If it stays close after that, then the whole thing gets more stupid and poorly thought out as the race goes on. Florida's butterfly ballots in 2000 are starting to look like a comparatively better problem to have.

Fair or not, the unseated delegates from Florida and Michigan have become an untapped resource. Hillary Clinton needs them to have any chance in hell and her camp wants them seated as is. In Michigan, at least, this would be tremendously unfair, since Clinton was the only top-tier candidate on the ballot. Team Clinton can't like the idea of a "do-over," since Michigan's demographics favor Obama. Voters in the Democratic primary there were given a choice between Clinton, Dodd, Kucinich, and "uncommitted" -- uncommitted won 40% of the vote. Despite having no real competition in that state, Hillary took a slim majority of 55%. The idea that all Obama voters in Michigan went to the polls and voted for no one -- in an election that wasn't going to count anyway -- is insane. No one can seriously say that a significant percentage didn't just say, "Screw it," and stay home.

And now, certain news is probably causing certain uncertainty within a certain Michigan primary winner's campaign team:

The New Republic:

A member of the DNC's Rules And Bylaws Committee -- the committee that stripped Florida and Michigan of its delegates for moving their primaries before February 5th -- told me that Michigan plans to get out of its uncounted delegate problem by announcing a new caucus in the next few days.

"They want to play. They know how to do caucuses," the DNC source said. "That was their plan all along, before they got cute with the primary."

Michigan Democrats had originally planned on caucuses after the legally permissible Feb. 5 date, but then went along with top elected Democrats, including Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who pushed for an early primary.

What does this mean? For one thing, it means that the Michigan Democratic party is a bunch of game-playing jerks. For another, it means Clinton is about to lose a state. And, it's a state she's been counting among her wins. "We've won Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Michigan, New Hampshire, Arkansas, California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Tennessee," Clinton said tuesday night. "And today we won Rhode Island. And thanks to all my friends and supporters there."

Where Team Clinton needs to move ahead in the delegate count, there's no way she can do anything but lose some of the delegates she'd been counting. Hillary Clinton's score will move backward. This is real bad news for a campaign that not only needs to win every, single contest until the Democratic convention, but needs to win every single contest in a landslide. In fact, with every non-landslide win, Clinton needs ever-larger victories down the road. Re-doing Michigan and losing would be a disaster.

Add to this that the current noise is about a caucus and Clinton is toast. As I said earlier, Michigan's demographics favor Obama and he's always done better in caucuses. If she needs landslide wins, there's no way she can afford a landslide loss. At this point, it's getting harder and harder to envision a Clinton nomination. Both sides need superdelegates -- an idea that should be buried with a stake through its heart after this is all over -- but only one candidate will go to the convention as the people's choice. If that candidate doesn't get the nom, expect a crap storm of epic proportions.

The screwiest primary season of your life goes on, but it's already on life support. The process has been kept going by artificial means and the end is coming fast. The first stage of grief is denial.

Let's hope the rest go a lot faster, because the whole thing can't hold together much longer.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; elections; 2008; Barack Obama; Democrat; primary; Will Michigan be Hillary Clinton's end?

Statistical Soup

It's not a prestigious poll or a poll conducted by a giant cable news network. But it's a typical poll. An Austin, Texas TV channel finds pretty much nothing.

KVUE’s latest Belo Texas poll shows voter turnout will be key for Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- the democratic winner is anyone’s guess.

Voters decide who they prefer for president Tuesday and according to the latest poll, Clinton lead Obama by just one point -- 46 percent to 45 percent -- both numbers within the margin of error.

Neck and neck, anyone's game, a real nailbiter.

Except that's not how most news outlets are reporting polls. KVUE mentions the margin of error in the second paragraph -- most news outlets don't mention them at all. Other outlets tell you that Clinton's ahead in one poll, behind in another, while the margin of error renders these assessments meaningless.

The worst offender may be CNN, with a statistical monstrosity they call "the poll of polls." They jam together entirely different polls asking entirely different questions of entirely different demographics selected in entirely different ways for entirely different reasons and present this mathematical mishmash as if it meant a damned thing.

CNN's poll of polls, an averaging of the most recent surveys in each state, suggests the race is extremely tight, with Obama ahead by 2 points in Texas and Clinton ahead by 5 in Ohio. But the polls also indicate there are still many undecided voters in both states.

Of course, this is CNN going out of its way to avoid telling you that they don't have any useful information for you. "We Don't Know" is never a headline.

I'll admit it and it's no surprise to anyone who's read me more than once -- I'm a political junkie. I watch polls the way farmers watch the Weather Channel. And, like those farmers, I know the difference between forecast and prediction. Polls aren't predictive -- as much as they're presented that way. They're merely factual data that tell truth about a moment.

So, left with polling results that say, "We Don't Know," news outlets go out of their way to avoid that headline. Clinton's up here, Obama's up there, and if we combine several numbers that are related only by subject, we see that they add up to jack -- let's see if we can pull a story out of that.

The fact of the matter is that, in Texas at least, the race is just too close to call. That's the fact and that's the story -- as less than compelling as that story is. Networks don't like doing this the old-fashioned way. They don't like having to wait until the polls close to report the winner. If pre-polling won't do the job, then exit polling will.

The problem here is that networks keep up the pretense of waiting until the polls close to project a winner. In the Wisconsin primary, CNN projected McCain the winner -- ten minutes after the polls closed and with 0% of precincts reporting. OK, it wasn't really going out on a limb, but you get what I'm saying here.

In New Hampshire, this idea of the predictive poll came back to bite the media in the ass. And, faced with having to explain why they practically crowned Barack Obama the winner, they changed the narrative. "Why were the polls wrong?" everyone asked.

But the polls weren't wrong, they just weren't predictive. And, looking at them now, it's hard to see how anyone would've thought they could be. Pollster John Zogby goes a long way toward explaining what happened:

According to the exit polls, 18% of the voters said that they made up their minds on primary day. That is just an unprecedented number. I have polled many races, especially close ones, where 4% to 8% have said they finally decided on their vote the day of the election and that can wreak havoc on those of us who are in the business of capturing pre-election movements and trends. But nearly one in five this time?

Add the undecided to the margin of error in New Hampshire pre-polling and you've got a pretty substantial number. To look at data, see that big percentage of grey fog, and say you can see the future is either foolish or insane. The polls were correct, they just weren't very useful. When you have 18% making their decision at the last minute and polls showing a single-digit difference among the contenders, then you've got nothing, polling-wise.

You may be eager to know how the primaries and caucuses turn out today -- I know I am. For one thing, the future of Hillary Clinton's campaign may hinge on the results. But the polls are meaningless today and you're just going to have to wait. KVUE has it right -- nobody knows.

And that's the real story, because that's all the polls are saying.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; elections; 2008; primary; Democrat; John McCain; Barack Obama; Hillary Clinton; CNN; Texas; Ohio; The media hates it when polls don't tell them jack

Not the Best Argument

The war of words in the Democratic nomination contest has taken a turn for the absurd. In an ongoing debate, Hillary Clinton is accusing her opponent of using words. Oddly, she hasn't done this in pantomime. "There's a big difference between us -- speeches versus solutions," Clinton told supporters in Ohio earlier this month. "Talk versus action. You know, some people may think words are change. But you and I know better. Words are cheap." Do I really need to point out that these are all words themselves?

Clinton seems to be using (or, rather, trying to use) a page from Karl Rove's slash-and-burn campaign field manual. The Bush/Rove strategy had always been to attack opponents on their strengths, so Clinton is taking the fight to Obama's rhetorical skills. The problem is that, while Bush was able to cast doubt on John Kerry's war hero bona fides, you really can't make people doubt Obama's skills as an orator. All he has to do is open his mouth and it's right there -- the argument dies a painful death.

Besides, the idea that Barack Obama's just a font of empty rhetoric is easily shot down. All you have to do is look at his record and his bio.

Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post:

During the course of our endless presidential campaigns, lots of silly things are said by the candidates and the press. But few are more ridiculous than the idea that Barack Obama is just an empty suit.

We're talking here about a former president of the Harvard Law Review. Have you ever met the people who get into Harvard Law School? You might not choose them as friends or lovers or godparents to your children, but -- trust me on this -- there aren't many lightweights there. And Obama was chosen by all the other overachievers as top dog. Compared with the current leader of the free world, this guy is Albert Einstein.

Given his youth and relatively short time in government, it's fair to ask if Obama has the wisdom and experience to be president. But it's quite another to suggest that he has no vision, no program, no specifics.

In fact, that line of criticism invites a comparison in which Hillary Clinton doesn't fair all that well. In two years as a Senator, Obama has authored 152 bills which have passed. Meanwhile, in the six years Clinton has been in office, she's authored and passed 20 (research doublechecked here). For someone who's making noise about results, this is a pretty poor showing.

And Obama fares better not only on what he works on, but in who he does that work for. In this congressional session, Hillary Clinton was responsible for $110,520,000 in defense earmarks, while receiving $378,660 from earmark recipients.

Obama, meanwhile, created $3,300,000 in earmarks and accepted $97,250 from earmark recipients. And, when you look at who benefitted from those earmarks, it's hard to fault him for them -- $1,300,000 to Gas Technology Institute for research into hydrogen fuel cells, $1,000,000 to Illinois Institute of Technology for Hybrid Technology Conversion Kits for military Humvees, and $1,000,000 to Chicago State University for "Fuel Cells for Mobile Robotic Systems Project." Earmarks for green tech?

I'll take it.

On the argument that Obama's presidential campaign is nothing but words, without specifics, I'd argue that it's absurd to believe that a major presidential candidate could get away with not having any plans. Barack Obama has a 64 page Blueprint for Change (PDF). This spells out his positions and plans on issues ranging from healthcare to defense to Iraq to poverty to veterans. The argument that Obama offers nothing but empty rhetoric is false.

The fact is that words matter. Every action begins with words; it is planned with words, it is conveyed with words -- in a nation of laws, the result is words. And those words matter.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., Miami Herald:

The chief executive's power does not derive solely from the authority vested in him by the Constitution. To the contrary, it derives also, and in some ways, more so, from his ability to rally the people, to inspire them in some great challenge or crusade. We do not live - yet - in a dictatorship. Americans do not move because they are told to move. They move because they are inspired to. It is no accident that history's most successful presidents are the ones who were able to frame, with concision and grace, America's challenges and hopes, the ones who had greatest command over what Theodore Roosevelt famously called "the bully pulpit."


Think Ronald Reagan saying government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem. Think Franklin Roosevelt declaring that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Think Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg vowing a new birth of freedom.


Now, try to remember anything Millard Fillmore ever uttered. A hundred years from now, will anyone still be saying, "I'm the decider"?

In politics, words are actions. And the argument that someone can get anything done without being good with them is not a good one.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; elections; 2008; primary; Democrat; Hillary Clinton; Barack Obama; The US Constitution is "just words"