Early and Often

What to Watch for Tonight

2008-11-04T11:01:00.000-08:00

President

There now seem to be hundreds of articles about what to watch for in the presidential race, state by state, time-zone by time-zone. This one is as good as any. But I'm always interested in what Nate Silver has to say, so this one's worth a look too.

And here's the list of states to watch (according to poll closing times, translated to the Pacific time zone):

3pm PST: Indiana (most of the state's polls close at 3pm PST, but not 'til 4pm in some parts of the state)
4pm: Virginia, Georgia, New Hampshire, Florida (Western portion of panhandle closes at 5pm)
4:30: Ohio and North Carolina
5:00: Missouri and Pennsylvania
6:00: Colorado and New Mexico
7pm: Montana

Expect first waves of results to come in anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes after the polls close in that state. Networks and newspaper websites, if they're at all responsible will not call a state based on exit poll results unless there is at least a 10-point margin between the two major-party candidates. Again, Nate Silver explains why.

The best real-time mapping on-line will be on the front-page of the New York Times website. On TV, CNN has the best mapping, by far.

US Senate

Here are the Senate races to watch, with those at the top of the most likely to go Democratic and the ones at the bottom least likely to turn-over:

Virginia: Mark Warner (D) vs. James Gilmore (R) open seat
New Mexico: Tom Udall (D) vs. Steve Pearce (R) -open seat
Colorado: Mark Udall (D) vs. Bob Schaffer (R) - open seat
Alaska: Mark Begich (D) vs. Ted Stevens (R) - Stevens just convicted of concealing gifts
New Hampshire: Shaheen (D) vs. John Sununu (incumbent R)
Oregon: Jeff Merkley (D) vs. Gordon Smith (incumbent R)
North Carolina: Kay Hagan (D) vs. Elizabeth Dole (incumbent R)
Minnesota: Al Franken (D) vs. Norm Coleman (incumbent R)
Georgia: Martin (D) vs. Chambliss
Kentucky: Lunsford (D) vs. McConnell
Mississippi: Musgrove (D) vs. Wicker

US House (a few of the more interesting ones, listed by incumbent defending)

Don Young - R, At-Large, Alaska (yet another Alaska Republican under investigation)
John Shadegg - R, 3rd Dist., Arizona
Marilyn Musgrave -R, 4th Dist. Colorado (Congress's most infamous homophobe)
Christopher Shays -R, 4th Dist. Connecticut
Lincoln Diaz-Balart- R, 21st Dist. Florida
Mario Diaz-Balart- R, 25th Dist. Florida
Bill Sali - R, 1st Dist. Idaho
Don Cazayoux -D, 6th Dist. Louisiana (won special election earlier this year for Bobby Jindal's old seat
Wayne Gilchrist-R, 1st Dist, Maryland
Michele Bachmann -R, 6th Dist. Minnesota (recently called for investigation of "un-American" members of Congress)
Heather Wilson - R, 1st Dist, New Mexico
Steve Chabot - R, 1st Dist, Ohio
Jack Murtha -D, 12th Dist, Pennsylvania (famously called his constituents racists)
Nick Lampson- D, 22d Dist., Texas (Tom Delay's old seat)
Virgil Goode- R, 5th Dist., Virginia
Dave Reichert - R, 8th Dist. Washington (vs. top Netroots candidate Darcy Burner)

Gubernatorial

Missouri: Jay Nixon (D) vs. Kenny Hulshof (R) (open seat)
North Carolina: Beverly Perdue (D) vs. Pat McCrory (R) (open seat)
Washington: Chris Gregoire (incumbent D) vs. Dino Rossi (R)

Ballot Initiatives

Abortion: Parental notification in California, near complete ban in South Dakota and life begins at conception in Colorado
Affirmative Action bans in Colorado and Nebraska
Assisted Suicide: I-1000 in Washington
Education: ban on English as a Second Language education in Oregon
Elections: Top-two primary in Oregon
Gay Rights: Prop 8 in California would overturn right to gay marriage. Gay marriage bans in Florida and Arizona. An Arkansas measure would prohibit gay couples from adopting or foster parenting children
Transportation: $10 billion for high speed rail in California; Light rail expansion in Seattle area (Prop. 1); and making traffic worse in Washington state (I-985).

Proof that no good deed goes unpunished

2008-11-03T23:52:00.000-08:00

Mediocre coffee, but a company with pretty good corporate practices. Starbucks, thought it would do a good deed by giving a free cup of coffee to anyone who came in to a store claiming to have voted. However, those spoil sports here in Washington state Secretary of State's office have told Starbucks that giving away a free cup of coffee to voters is an illegal inducement. So, now Starbucks says it'll give a cup of free coffee to anyone that asks. Sam! Lighten up! A free cup of coffee does not a vote buy. While we're talking about inducements, here are a few other other ways to buy a vote -not a vote for a particular candidate, just a vote:

Free ice-cream: go to Ben & Jerry's for a free cup or cone
Free Doughnuts: a free doughnut for voters at Krispy Kreme (if you're Seattle, you're better off paying for a doughnut at Top Pot!)
Free GOTV calls for Credo Mobile members during voting hours
Free chicken sandwiches at Chick-fil-A. (sorry, no Chick-fil-A's in the Northwest)
Free sex toys: and last, but certainly not least, Babeland is offering a free Silver Bullet vibrator, or something called a Maverick sleeve to anyone coming in to their New York or Seattle stores with a voter registration card or proof of voting between Nov. 4-11. Interestingly, there's no indication that the Washington Secretary of State has contacted Babeland to shut down their vote buying operation. Sorry Starbucks.

Experts agree...

2008-11-03T17:54:00.001-08:00

...that Obama's gonna win this thing, big. There's been an uptick in both the state and national polls in the last day or so. Nate Silver gives Obama a 98.1% chance of winning the election. This is Karl Rove's electoral prediction map for tomorrow night (click for larger view):

I like it. Except, I think Obama has a real good shot at winning both North Carolina and Indiana. Then there's Montana and Georgia. Not so likely, but a strong possibility, especially Georgia where 1/3 of the registered voters are black. And there's a bunch of young white people who live in the Atlanta area. And there must be a few older white liberals to add to the mix.

A few more endorsements

2008-11-03T13:53:00.000-08:00

Better late than never. It's not like half the people in this state have already voted or something. In any case, here are a few more endorsements to throw your way:

King County judges

Most of these endorsements are based on bar association qualification assessments, combined with endorsements from progressive groups like WA Conservation Voters and NARAL Pro-Choice Washington (not that superior court judges often play a role in big constitutional issues, but it's an endorsement that helps filter out the bat-shit crazy Federalist Society types):

Superior Court #1: Susan Parisien

Superior Court #22: Holly Hill

Superior Court #37: Jean Rietschel

King County Charter Amendments

I really wish these things were not cluttering up the general election ballot, but they are. So here's some quick recommendations:

Charter Amendment #1: No. This would make the County Elections Director an elected position. This is a position that should remain ministerial not political.

Charter Amendments #2-7: Yes These are all housekeeping measures of various sorts and all pretty self-explanatory (i.e., no hidden agendas).

Charter Amendment #8: No This measure to make county offices non-partisan is an effort by a small group of businessmen to make it easier for Republicans to sneak into office in a very Democratic county. Voters have such little information as it is about local offices that they need the kind of shorthand signals party labels provide. It's an imperfect indicator but better than the nothing that many voters get in local elections.

Pierce County

As someone who spent ten years living in Pierce County, even running for office and sitting on public boards, I still pay a lot of attention to Pierce County politics. And, with Ranked Choice Voting (also known as Instant Run-off Voting), politics there will only get more interesting starting this year. But, I haven't had much time to focus on all the candidates there for all the offices. So, let me highlight just a few of the most interesting races:

Pierce County Executive

If I still lived there, I'd be having a tough time picking. On paper, Calvin Goings is the best candidate and that probably means you should vote for him. But, he sometimes has trouble making the best decision when constituencies he cares about are pulling in different directions. He's one of those stereotypically ambitious politicians who's always focused on the next election. The other real choice is Pat McCarthy. I like her a lot, but do worry about how much money is being infused on her behalf by the very, very sleazy builders lobby. I'd be tempted to rank Pat first and Calvin second. But with the Builders such a big factor in her campaign, I have to recommend the reverse - Calvin ranked first, Pat second.

Pierce County Council

The only one I'll comment on is the primary Tacoma seat on the Council, now held by Tim Farrell. Tim has been a fabulous councilmember, quite effective given that he's been in the minority almost the whole time. His district loves him, so he'll sail to reelection without any trouble. But, make sure you vote for him early and often to show him the love.

26th District House

Pat Lantz was a great legislator but, unfortuately, felt the need to move on. Kim Abel is the Democrat in the race to replace her. The Republican, Jan Angel, is a shill of the Builders and the very conservative Kitsap County Realtors. On the Kitsap County commission, she was a disaster on growth management, transportation and other environmental issues. Vote for Kim Abel.

Endorsements

2008-10-31T13:53:00.000-07:00

I'm kind of embarrassed by how little I've posted lately. One of the challenges I have in trying to blog about politics is that I always end up working on at least one campaign every year and just when the politics gets most interesting, I get the most busy. One of the things I'm way, way behind on is posting my local election endorsements. Early and Often started as a regular e-mail I would always send out with suggested election recommendations. Better late than never, right?

Here are my endorsements for this year. I'll start with just a few comments, but up-date with more details over the next couple days.

President - Barack Obama (D)
Barack Obama, of course. I don't think I need to provide any reasoning for this one, but if you need any persuading at all take a look (again) at Colin Powell's more than eloquent endorsement of Obama.

Governor - Chris Gregoire (D)
Chris Gregoire - She hasn't been a perfect governor. Often she's been way too cautious and that overcautiousness, more often than not, comes back to haunt her. This has been especially true with regard to transportation, an issue of critical importance to the Puget Sound voters, yet one she has only just begun to understand. But, I do think she's starting to get it and on almost every other issue, she's been a fabulous governor - on climate change, Puget Sound and water issues, education and children's health. The only reason she's not sailing toward reelection is because she has no charisma and no ability to communicate her long list of accomplishments. However, most people who are watching carefully, know she has been an accomplished governor. That's why even many of the newspapers that endorsed Rossi in 2004 have endorsed Gregoire this time around.

And then there's Dino Rossi. There's no other way to describe Rossi. He's an empty suit, with no real accomplishments in his six years as a state senator (in spite of what he claims, he deserves little credit for his role in the 2003 budget negotiations - then Gov. Gary Locke handed that budget to him on a platter). I used to think that Rossi was most like George W. Bush. Then Sarah Palin came along. Rossi is nothing more than Palin in pants. While Palin might be able to succeed as governor in redneck Alaska, that style of leadership ain't gonna work here. Oh, and Rossi's at least as corrupt as Sarah Palin.

Lt Governor - Rob Johnson (write-in)
The incumbent, Brad Owen, is Washington's answer to a blue dog Southern Democrat. He's anti-environment, spends way too much time fighting the war on drugs and doesn't have such great positions on social issues either. So, I'm recommending you write in my highly talented office-mate, Rob Johnson. Rob is one of the brightest, most good natured and hardest working progressive young politicos I've met. Rob, not Brad Owen, is the kind of person you want to have a heartbeat away from the governor's office.

Secretary of State - Sam Reed (R)
As long as I've lived in Washington, I've only voted Republican for this office. That's primarily because, with no term-limits for state elective offices, these kind of mostly administrative executive positions see little turn-over. Unlike governor, the secretary of state does not just serve two-terms and move on. As long as the incumbent stays above politics, he can keep getting himself reelected. Former secretary of state, Ralph Munro, worried more about his reputation for integrity than pleasing his party. And Sam Reed, since first getting elected in 2000, has done the same, most famously in 2004 when he refused to succumb to pressure from Republican activists and defended the integrity of the electoral process thereby preventing the Republicans from stealing the very close election on behalf of Dino Rossi. When Republicans were arguing before the state supreme court, without valid evidence, that the King County elections office was corrupt, Sam Reed's attorneys stood in the same court room defending the process. For that, he deserves to be reelected by big margins. Plus, Reed's reelection will annoy Republican blogger and conspiracy theorist, Stefan Sharkansky to no end.

State Treasurer - Jim McIntire (D)
Jim McIntire is a smart, PhD economist with 10 years of experience in the state House, much of that time as chair of the House Finance Committee. He can be a bit arrogant and maybe too cautious sometimes, but that's ok when his primary job will be to protect the state's excellent bond rating.

State Auditor - Brian Sonntag (D, sort of)
Sonntag's been Auditor for, probably, too long. Or at least it seems like too long. He's gotten a bit carried away with his new powers to conduct performance audits (as opposed to the financial audits that the office has always been empowered to do). And, it's been especially annoying that he has not clearly come out in opposition to I-985, which Tim Eyman keeps wrongly claiming is based on Sonntag's audit of WSDOT congestion relief programs. However, Sonntag is ultimately a good person who I think is just too old school to understand his own limitations and the limitations of his office. Plus, he has no viable opponent.

Attorney General - John Ladenburg (D)
I've known John for eight years and I can't imagine anyone better suited to be Attorney General of this state. Talk about a maverick. He'll be the kind of activist Attorney General that could appropriately shake things up a bit. He'll be a zealot on behalf of consumers and consumers are going to need a zealot working on their behalf for the next four years. The incumbent, Rob McKenna (cited by the Stranger as America's first male-to-female transsexual to hold statewide office) is probably the smartest Republican politician this state has seen since Dan Evans. McKenna has very smartly focused on non-partisan issues like identity theft, making lots of PSAs along the way to increase his name recognition on the state's dime. If the voters don't abort his political career right now, we're going to have to really worry about a McKenna governorship four years from now. As governor, McKennas will surely be much more partisan, just as he was while serving on the King County Council.

Commissioner of Public Lands - Peter Goldmark (D)
Not only has incumbent Doug Sutherland let Weyerhaeuser and other timber companies get away with harmful logging practices, he's openly and unapologetically a serial sexual harasser. Why the Goldmark campaign, or WA Conservation Voters won't make an issue of this, I don't know. With regard to logging practices, Sutherland has let Weyerhaeuser and the others run amok, clear cutting on slopes to the point that these practices are a huge part of the reason why we saw such bad flooding in SW Washington last year. On the other hand, Goldmark is everything you could want for the job- a rancher, organic farmer, molecular biologist, environmentalist and former state Secretary of Agriculture. This is exactly the kind of person who should be in charge of state forests and state logging practices.

Insurance Commissioner - Mike Kreidler (D)

I can't say enough good things about incumbent Mike Kreidler. In his last eight terms, he's been a strong advocate for consumers, has been a national leader in addressing heightened actuarial risks related to climate change and he's actively working to figure out a way that his office can create universal health care coverage in the absence of leadership on the issue from, well, from anyone else.

Superintendent of Public Instruction - Randy Dorn

Partly it's an issue of change. Terry Bergeson is running for a third term. But, also the era of worshipping the standardized test is nearing its end and there's been no greater proponent for having everything hinge on the WASL than Terry Bergeson.

Initiative 985 (Make Traffic Worse) - No!!!!
This is the one I'm working on this year. Another stupid idea from Tim Eyman, this was one actually stupider than most of his other stupid ideas. I-985 would open carpool lanes to general purpose traffic beyond his own narrow definition of rush hour. I-985 would also take away all revenue from red-light cameras, which have been proven to reduce pedestrian injuries (and which, by statute, are mostly used in school zones). It would also make it nearly impossible to use tolling to do anything but build a bridge. And, worst of all it would steal $600 million over the next five years from the state's general fund, money that now goes mostly to schools and health care, and funnel that money into "reducing traffic congestion," which in Eyman's distorted world means none of that money could be spent on transit, bicycle or pedestrian facilities, or really smart congestion relief programs like commute trip reduction. Reject this stupid initiative and send a message that Eyman's 15 minutes are way past expired.

Initiative 1000 (Death with Dignity, or Assisted Suicide)- No Endorsement
This is one of those issues where you just have to go with your gut. I voted against it when it was last on the ballot, but I'm thinking of voting for it this time. That's largely because Oregon's similar law has not turned out to be as big a deal as many originally predicted.

Initiative 1029 (Long-term care worker training & certification)- Yes
The newspaper editorial boards hate this one because it was put on the ballot by home healthcare workers organized under SEIU (the world's most effective labor union). Without even knowing much about it, I'm inclined to vote for it because it is sponsored by SEIU. Also, who the hell doesn't think we shouldn't have high standards for the people taking care of the aged and infirm.

Proposition 1 (Mass Transit Now) - Yes!!!!
It sucks that the only option for building a bunch more light rail, along with adding lots of express bus and commuter rail service, is our already high sales tax. But, in a state with no income tax, we don't really have any other options. Next year we'll get 14-miles of light rail, downtown to Sea-Tac and we'll, finally, enter the league of real cities. Six more miles, from downtown to Capitol Hill and UW. This measure will keep them going on taking the rail north to Lynwood, east across I-90 to Bellevue and Overlake and south to Federal Way. It'll also pay for a streetcar from the International District light rail station up to Pill Hill. Projects will start opening in 2016 and all will be completed by 2023. This all should have happened 40 years ago, back in the day when the feds paid most of the bill. But, all those old Scandinavian loggers and fisherman that used to decide everything in Seattle said no. Don't let the crazed right-wingers like Kemper Freeman and quaint old-school Seattlelites like Emory Bundy stop rail transit in its track this time. Vote YES! on Prop 1.

US House, 8th District (Bellevue, Renton, Auburn, Sumner) - Darcy Burner (D)
When you think about, it's kind of crazy that someone with virtually no relevant experience, like Darcy Burner, might be on the cusp of getting elected to Congress. But, then again, the incumbent, Dave Reichert, has been so ineffectual, even when his party controlled congress, that 8th District residents have nothing to lose. Actually, they have everything to gain. Sarah Palin fanatics keep saying that they like the Alaska governor because she's real and understands their plight. Well, Darcy Burner is real but, unlike Palin, she's also smart, hard-working, competent and reasonable.

36th District Open House Seat - Reuven Carlyle (D)

This is kind of a tough one. Because of the newly implemented top-2 primary, we have two Democrats running in this district. Both Carlyle and John Burbank are great candidates, but the edge has to go to Carlyle. I'm kind of tired of urban Democrats who are all about poverty and social service issues, yet leave all the other progressive issues -like transportation and the environment- to suburban Democrats. We need more smart, well-rounded and progressive urban Democrats to balance out the Eastside Democrats who so often fight our agenda. Reuven Carlyle more than fits the bill.

46th District Open House Seat - Scott White (D)

This is another Democrat vs. Democrat run-off with two candidates who both have a lot to offer. However, White gets the edge in this race because, well, he's a lot like Reuven Carlyle in the 36th Dist. race. Actually, so is Gerry Pollet. However, Gerry is a bit to much of a one-note song. He's been forever focused on cleaning up the Hanford nuclear reservation to the exclusion of giving much attention to so many other issues. Plus Pollet is a bit of a bridge burner. I see him having a much harder time working his agenda through the legislative process.

King and Pierce County Races coming soon....

Hope

2008-10-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

Ragin' McCain

2008-10-09T22:04:00.000-07:00

The bizarre, erratic and angry behavior we've seen from John McCain, in the debates, during the bailout negotiations and in interviews is nothing new. If anything, McCain has done a remarkable job of containing himself over the last several months. But, now with the stress of a tanking campaign causing the man to come unglued, that rage is reemerging. Some have speculated that McCain has recurring problems with PTSD. And with his medical records largely hidden from view, we may never know. But more Americans are certainly coming to the conclusion that it is McCain, not Obama, who is the risky choice to be the next commander-in-chief.

Check out this video on the history of McCain's pattern of raging outbursts, including a documented account of McCain backhanding a female constituent who came to him to talk about her MIA father:

A few thoughts on the first debate

2008-09-26T22:15:00.000-07:00

If there's any consensus among the pundits about tonight's debate is that it was a tie. McCain and Obama each had their moments and their failings. In some ways that outcome kept McCain's campaign alive, but at the same time it kept Obama in the lead.

I was profoundly disappointed that my prediction below did not turn out to be the case. With such erratic, impetuous, unbalanced behavior this week (not to mention the Veep pick) McCain deserved to have his temperament questioned and Obama could have put him away for good by effectively questioning whether McCain's behavior this week and decisions throughout this campaign underly a kind of instability that makes McCain just to risky to put into a commander-in-chief position. That said, basic game theory says you don't take chances when you're winning and maybe, essentially, questioning McCain's sanity was just too risky. Some things you just let speak for themselves.

As I write this, the insta-polls show that a majority of Americans believe that Obama won this debate :

From CNN/Opinion Research poll of Debate Watchers (1000 surveyed, +/-4.5% MOE):

Who Did the Best Job in the Debate? Obama 51%-McCain 38%
(Men 43-46 for McCain/Women 59-31 for Obama; 50+ years old 48-40 for Obama)
Who Would Better Handle Iraq? Obama 52%-McCain 47%
Who Would Better Handle the Economy? Obama 58%-McCain 37%

(similarly favorable numbers from a CBS of undecided voters here)

The talking heads were calling it a tie and given the state of the contest, a tie means that Obama retains his overall lead as reflected in the tracking and swing state polls. But, if most Americans who watched the debate believe Obama won (and remember, this foreign policy debate was supposed to be the one that McCain would have the upper-hand) it's pretty much over. Initial public impressions can and often do change, and we still have five-and-a-half weeks to the election, but McCain needed a game changer and by all appearances he didn't get one.

Next up, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, next Thursday, October 2. Can't wait!

PS Fascinating observation from David Gergen on CNN tonight. He compares Obama in tonight's debate to JFK against Nixon in the foreign policy debate in 1960. As Gergen notes, it wasn't that Kennedy won the debate, but the younger challenger, the one voters were unsure of, held his own against the older more experienced candidate and it was that debate that allowed JFK to win the election. Gergen says Obama did the same tonight. Of course, Eisenhower in 1960 was nowhere near as unpopular as W in 2008.

What to expect from tonight's debate

2008-09-26T12:39:00.000-07:00

The McCain campaign is already promising victory in tonight's debate, but I think this excerpt from Politico is more likely to be the story of tonight's debate:

...the candidate's penchant for the dramatic has also raised anew potentially damaging questions of his age, executive abilities and, most of all, his temperament.

McCain's attempt to shift the argument from the economy to character has, perversely, given Democrats an opening to question his own fitness to lead. Spur-of-the-moment decisions - from his choice of a running mate he hardly knew to his request that the first debate be delayed - reflect an impetuousness he's tried to associate with Obama's youth, his critics say, while undercutting his argument that he's a cool, tested old hand capable of coping with presidential pressure."

Chris Rock = Genius/Larry King =Idiot (Bill Clinton...don't even get me started)

2008-09-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

Chris Rock on Larry King:

KING: You must be ... proud that at this stage in our history a black man is running for president on a major ticket.

ROCK: Um, you know what? I'm proud Barack Obama's running for president. You know? If it was Flavor Flav, would I be proud? No. I don't support Barack Obama because he's black.

Nothing irritates me more than this attitude exhibited by Larry King. Yes, Barack Obama is black and, yes, that's historic and has the potential to go a long way in forever improving the majority culture's views of blacks and minorities generally. And for reasons I'll explain in a subsequent post that we may be on the cusp of electing a black president is something that is personally very important to me. But, Obama, regardless of race, is also the best damn presidential candidate since Bobby Kennedy in 1968. I continue to be amazed at how many people still seem to be determined to reduce Obama's candidacy to something only important because of his race (à la Jesse Jackson's candidacy in 1984).

Speaking of Bill Clinton, watch this video from the other night to view the former president's continued denial of the fact that his team lost. And, to see Chris Rock's beautiful slap down of Clinton:

Is he fucking crazy?

2008-09-24T19:11:00.000-07:00

The most astute observation on John McCain's effort to postpone the debate comes from, of all people, David Letterman:

You don't suspend your campaign. This doesn't smell right. This isn't the way a tested hero behaves. I think someone's putting something in his metamucil."
"He can't run the campaign because the economy is cratering? Fine, put in your second string quarterback, Sara Palin. Where is she?

What are you going to do if you're elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We've got a guy like that now!

Letterman made the statement after learning, mid-taping, that McCain had canceled his previously scheduled appearance on the show to, according to McCain's people, return to DC to help deal with the financial crisis. However, Letterman was well aware that McCain was at that moment just a few blocks away, being interviewed by Katie Couric.

So, what exactly is the sound made by an imploding presidential campaign? We're about to find out.

Update 7:11pm PDT: Go here for more about the canceled Letterman/McCain interview

Update 2 9:40pm PDT: Here's the video:

Is this the cultural touchstone moment that signifies the "cratering" of the McCain campaign's credibility with the American electorate? Some have already compared it to Cronkite's Tet Offensive editorial questioning the US's continued prosecution of the war in Vietnam.

Letterman, of course, is not the newsman that Cronkite was and TV audiences are segmented in a way that they never were back in 1968. But, somewhere in the neighborhood of four million will view Letterman's observation on TV; millions more are likely to see it on YouTube.

Like Cronkite's 1968 reckoning of the war in Vietnam, Letterman's belittling of the McCain campaign echoes a sentiment that is already growing by the day with the media and in the political zeitgeist as a whole. Examples abound from the media's loss of patience with Sarah Palin's dodging of their questions to conservative intellectual icon George Will's disgusted critique of McCain's erratic and needlessly risky response to the pressures of both real world events and the campaign itself. Short of some gigantic error by Obama in the debates (if those debates happen at all), or some series of events that turns the whole campaign on its head, Peggy Noonan will have nailed when back at the beginning of the Republican convention, she said "it's over!" Sarah Palin may well have turned out to be the beginning of the end.

Barack Obama is no John Kerry

2008-09-19T15:31:00.000-07:00

“I think it's pretty clear that Sen. McCain is a little panicked right now. At this point he seems to be willing to say anything or do anything or change any position or violate any principal to try and win this election, and I've got to say it's kind of sad to see. That's not the politics we need.” – Barack Obama speaking in Coral Gables, Florida today.

Why do Republicans Hate Community Organizers?

2008-09-07T14:11:00.000-07:00

From the Republican National Convention:

Rudy Giuliani:

“You have a resume from a gifted man with an Ivy League education. He worked as a — community organizer.” He paused and then said, “What?” as if to express befuddlement at that job title.

Giuliani had eloquent body language — a dismissive half-shrug — as he said the words, “community organizer.” Immediately the delegates on the convention floor burst into laughter and guffaws. (MSNBC)

Sarah Palin:

"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities."

From a story about local community organizers in the Metro Section of today's New York Times:

Still, it didn’t seem as if the festivities in St. Paul and Minneapolis had a huge impact on what was going on in the office [24 year old Peter] Nagy shares with Ann Sullivan, 51, who has been building up Acorn’s Long Island network since the mid-1990s.

Mr. Nagy began Friday at Hempstead High School, meeting with officials about registering students to vote, then returned to his office with its décor of newspaper clippings taped to walls, posters reading “Fair Housing. It’s not an Option. It’s the Law,” the Acorn newspaper with the front-page headline “Foreclosure Fighters,” and slightly unexpected bumper stickers reading: “God is Good All the Time.”

He and Ms. Sullivan met briefly with a Hempstead resident named Angela Davis, who has cerebral palsy and had worries about safety and services in her building. She lamented how hard it was to get residents to voice their concerns. “People are afraid to come forward,” she said. “They’re afraid they’re going to be evicted.”

Later there were meetings with tenants of a residence for the elderly, and with other residents facing foreclosure, and then time knocking on doors in Westbury to try to make contacts and generate interest in a meeting about foreclosure issues.

This paragraph from the same story may explain why Republicans hate community organizers so much:

“There are different kinds of power,” said Bertha Lewis, executive director of New York Acorn. “There’s electoral power. Movie stars have fame. Billionaires have money. Low- and moderate-income people have their numbers, and every great movement for social justice — Nelson Mandela preaching against apartheid, civil rights — have all been led by community organizers who took action and held their elected officials accountable.”

Oh, and by the way, the morning after Sarah Palin's speech, John McCain cancelled a previously scheduled appearance before a Twin Cities gathering of community organizers from Habitat for Humanity.

For more on community organizers vs. the GOP go here.

Notes from the Convention

2008-08-31T14:58:00.000-07:00

1. Michelle's speech: Don't tell my wife, but I think I'm in love with Michelle Obama. Seriously, she gave a phenomenal speech and I think set a new mark for what a First Spouse should be - passionate in her beliefs, compassionate and smart, smart, smart. Makes me think that maybe she should get a Senate seat in 2016 and then run for president in 2020.

2. The network television coverage, at least on NBC, revealed a distressing miscomprehension of the full historical meaning of this week's proceedings. I'm not just talking about the endless riffing on the divided party meme. While watching Michelle Obama speech, I was shocked to see that easily 3/4 of the reaction shots were of African-American delegates, when only about 24% of the delegates are black. Why did that bother me? Because it sent a message that the nomination of Barack Obama is something that's only meaningful to and for black people. No, it's meaningful to all of us. That a politically viable African-American is getting nominated to be president is obviously a huge deal, something that should be embraced by everyone (something even McCain acknowledged) But, the thing that's so magical about Obama, given our country's history is Obama's ability to transcend race in inspiring and giving hope to people of all races. This is one of the reasons why Obama, as I've said before is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime candidate who has the potential and the leadership skills to transform politics and reinvigorate this nation. It was narrow-minded and just plain wrong for the NBC television director to have chosen a disproportionate number of reaction shots of Africans rather than portraying the full diversity of Democratic delegates who are genuinely excited and inspired by the nomination of Barack Obama

3. Hillary and even Bill have largely redeemed themselves in my view (full redemption will, however, require fundraising and enthusiastic and frequent campaigning on behalf of the Obama/Biden ticket). And, with the media buying into idea that Sarah Palin will help attract disaffected Hillary voters, it's even more important for Hillary to counter that argument and be the one to call Sarah Palin unqualified and McCain unqualified for exercising the poor judgment to choose her.

4. The acceptance speech: not by any means my favorite Obama speech. I love the soaring and inspiring rhetoric of his early-Primary era stump speech, not to mention the 2004 keynote speech or the Dr. King birthday speech. But those speeches will be back, starting on Inauguration Day. For this point in the campaign, with some of McCain's attacks having gained some traction, this was the speech Obama needed to make. It the was the perfect mix of aspiration, recognition of the historic moment, recitation of policy changes he will make, justification for change and, yes, direct, hard-hitting and well-deserved attacks on McCain.

5. Two other speeches not shown on the network feeds but worthing watching a first or even second time: John Kerry's foreign policy speech from Wednesday night and Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer's speech from Tuesday. I don't like him as much as his friend, Montana Senator Jon Tester, but Schweitzer is quite the populist character. He wears blue jeans in his day-to-day work as governor and takes his Border Collie everywhere. I'm not sure exactly what it is yet, but he definitely has a future at the national level. If you didn't see the speech last week, check it out here.

6. All-in-all the week a huge success for Obama. Everything, including the reconciliation with the Clintons, was executed perfectly. It's too bad that McCain's cynical VP selection did have the effect of cutting short some of the excitement left by Obama after his speech. But, that unveiling can't take away the fact that the Democratic Convention saw the highest television ratings of any political convention ever, 22.4 million average viewership, with 38.3 million for the acceptance speech itself. Even before Gustav started to cut short the Republican Convention (in some ways, to their advantage) it's hard to see how the Republicans come even close to pulling of a show like this.

VPILF

2008-08-29T20:35:00.000-07:00

No, not me. But, I guess there are some out there that are more than ok with McCain's choice of Sarah Palin. If this site had been produced by a Democrat, it'd be crude and tasteless. But, fortunately, it looks like it was produced by a Republican, so it's funny.

Hat tip to Dan Savage at the Slog.

This new McCain/Palin campaign poster also came from the Slog, via Wonkette...

Well, he's still got racism

2008-08-29T08:27:00.000-07:00

All along, with Americans sick of George W. Bush and sick of Republican rule in general, there have always only been two ways McCain could beat Obama in November: (1) Obama's inexperience in government, particularly with regard to national security, and (2) persistent racism that would cause working class voters in swing states like Ohio to vote against Obama.

Now with McCain's shocking choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the inexperience argument is gone. Palin has been governor of Alaska for less than two years. Before that she was a city councilmember and mayor in Wasilla, Alaska, population 5400. I think she was also an Alaska Oil and Gas Commissioner.

Remember, John McCain turns 72 today. The would be oldest person ever elected to a first term as a president has now said that someone with only two years experience as governor of one of the smallest states in terms of population and no national political experience is ready to lead on day one. Surely, McCain cannot with a straight face say Obama is no longer ready to lead.

But, there's still the racism.

VP picks

2008-08-21T18:57:00.001-07:00

I'm still on vacation for a few more days and I'm looking forward to writing about what, on the surface at least, seems like an eerily close general election contest. But before I return from my summer hiatus, and before that text message comes in from the Obama campaign, I wanted to throw out my top hopes for a Veep pick.

After spending the whole Spring trashing her, you'll be surprised to hear that I'm very much hoping that Obama will pick Hillary as his choice for the second slot.

By the time she pulled out in June, I pretty strongly felt Hillary would be a terrible choice. I agreed with Jimmy Carter's assessment that "...it would be the worst mistake that could be made. That would just accumulate the negative aspects of both candidates." I also worried, and continue to worry, about Bill Clinton being a third wheel in an Obama/Clinton administration. While Hillary has become a constructive part of the team, Bill has only made more of an asshole of himself with his deep resentment of Obama's victory over Hillary (Examples here and here).

But, with recent polls showing that Obama has yet to consolidate the level of support among Democrats that McCain has attained with his party's base, choosing Hillary can only help Obama close the deal with older women and working class Democrats and allow him to more quickly move on to persuading independent voters that he's got what it takes to be an effective leader on both economic and foreign policy issues. And, Hillary will help with that task too as no one ever seemed to doubt her national security acumen or her ability to be a champion for working class voters.

Two other reasons why Hillary is the best choice at this point in time in this campaign - Obama needs to come out the Democratic convention and carry through the Republican convention, the big Mo(mentum). The media can't seem to look at this campaign as anything but a horse race. Bringing Hillary onto the ticket will be hugely popular with Democratic delegates, electrifying the convention hall in Denver with a buzz that will carry forward beyond the acceptance speech and into the big bus tour that will inevitably happen the following week, during the Republican convention.

Finally, choosing Hillary will bring a proven fighter onto the team. Since he's come back from vacation, Obama has been much more aggressive at taking on McCain, but for the remainder of the campaign he'll still be faced with the conundrum of needing to fight back against McCain but succumbing to his own message that by rising above politics as usual, he will more effectively solve people's everyday problems. Hillary never bought into that message so she can take McCain on even more aggressively than she took on Obama while the person at the top of the ticket stays above the fray telling Americans why he's the best choice to lead the nation for the next 4+ years. And, after the race for the Democratic nomination, does anyone doubt that Hillary will be an effective attack dog on the ticket's behalf?

Oh, and all that talk about PUMAs and open rebellion in the convention? Gone- if Hillary's the VP pick.

Are there downsides to picking Hillary? Sure. In some respects (e.g., the experience question) she could overshadow him (or, more likely, the McCain campaign could make sure she overshadows him). And, there are still lots of Hillary haters out there. But, I'm pretty sure most of the Hillary haters are also now Obama haters. And the experience question is going to dog Obama no matter what. I think the excitement a Hillary pick will have in Denver, the momentum in the media that follows, the consolidation of support among Democrats, the effectiveness of Hillary as tough as nails attack dog and the reality that she has been vetted and very likely brings no surprises more than outweighs any of the negatives.

Hillary for VP!

Next best choices?
One of my favorites was Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio. A win in Ohio pretty much guarantees victory and before Strickland was governor and a congressman, he was a preacher (a progressive-populist preacher) from the Appalachian part of the state. This guy can connect with working class voters like no one else. In helping Hillary win Ohio, Strickland also demonstrated that he has the kind of machine that can win that key state for Obama in November. However, Strickland long ago pulled himself out of contention (Was it just talk? I don't know).

I've also always liked Wesley Clark. Former NATO commander, so he has serious national security cred, and he opposed the Iraq invasion from the beginning. Also, we know he has no problem attacking McCain, but those attacks on McCain are probably the reason he's been out of contention for a while.

Tom Daschle, the former Senate Majority Leader would be a great choice. Daschle was pretty much the first Democratic politician with national name recognition to jump on the Obama bandwagon and he's been national campaign co-chair and a key adviser since the beginning. Of course, he may be too much of an insider, and too low-key in style to be the right person, politically, for the job.

I worry about Joe Biden because of his habit of putting his foot in his mouth. But, I've always been a fan of his - one of the smartest and most plain spoken politicians in DC. Obviously, his credibility on foreign policy (currently chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) would be a boon to the ticket. And, as Eli Sanders points out, the fact that Biden went directly from being a county council member to a successful Senate career -at the age of 30- provides Obama with a helpful illustration of how little political experience at the federal level can matter in the development of a smart, effective leader. On the downside, Biden is kind of boring and may not be the most effective attack dog that the ticket so desperately needs.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas would also be a great choice, but for a lack of national security experience. I think Obama needs that on his ticket to win in November.

Jesse Helms - His Greatest Hits

2008-07-04T14:46:00.000-07:00

In no particular order:

"To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing." — Helms responding in 1956 to criticism that a fictional black character in his newspaper column was offensive.
"The destruction of this country can be pinpointed in terms of its beginnings to the time that our political leadership turned to socialism. They didn't call it socialism, of course. It was given deceptive names and adorned with fancy slogans. We heard about New Deals, and Fair Deals and New Frontiers and the Great Society." — From a Helms editorial at WRAL-TV in Raleigh.
In 1993 sang "Dixie" in an elevator to Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African-American woman elected to the Senate, bragging, "I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing Dixie until she cries." (Chicago Sun-Times, 8/5/93)
As an aide to the 1950 Senate campaign of North Carolina Republican candidate Willis Smith, Helms reportedly helped create attack ads against Smith's opponent, including one which read: "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." Another ad featured photographs Helms himself had doctored to illustrate the allegation that Graham's wife had danced with a black man. (The News and Observer, 8/26/01; The New Republic, 6/19/95; The Observer, 5/5/96; Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms, by Ernest B. Furgurson, Norton, 1986)
"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." (WRAL-TV commentary, 1963) He also wrote, "Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced." (New York Times, 2/8/81)
A year before the election, when public polls showed Helms trailing by 20 points, he launched a Senate filibuster against the bill making the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. a national holiday. (David Broder, Washington Post, Aug, 29, 2001)
Over the years Helms has declared homosexuality "degenerate," and homosexuals "weak, morally sick wretches." (Newsweek, 12/5/94)
Helms lashed out at the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill in 1988: "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy." (States News Service, 5/17/88)
"We've got to have some common sense about a disease transmitted by people deliberately engaging in unnatural acts," (New York Times, 7/5/95)
When he made an appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live in Sept. 1995, a caller praised him “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.”
Helms looked in the camera and replied, “Well thank you, I think.”
The infamous "Hands" ad against Harvey Gantt in the '92 Senate race:

(Sources: NYT, AP, Americablog, Slog)

Good riddance you racist, hateful piece of shit (to paraphrase Dan Savage).

Think different.

2008-06-28T22:28:00.000-07:00

An amusing, but apt analogy that emerged from the race for the Democratic nomination was that Hillary was like a PC, Obama a Mac (see here and here). To take it a bit further, I've heard someone refer to McCain as a Unix mainframe. I'd say more like an old IBM running MS-DOS (and, as it turns out, maybe more like a dictaphone).

Still, it seemed more likely as a US Senator, that Obama would use some government issue Dell laptop, probably running Windows XP, or even worse, Vista. But, lo and behold, Obama does carry around a Mac. (I'm envisioning one of those snazzy black MacBooks).

A PowerBook, a MacBook, an i-Mac, 2 iPods, and an iPhone populate our home. So, I'm definitely one of these people who believe that creative people who care less about the machine and more about what they can do with it use Macs and other Apple products. And, in government, PCs are pretty ubiquitous, so you kind have to go out of your way to be a Mac user, especially when the technical support people refuse to help you set it up (but, then again, after the initial network set-up, you don't really need technical support with a Mac). So, hearing that Obama is a Mac guy only further completes the picture for me of Obama as something different than the typical politician. Then again, all the credit for Obama being a Mac guy seems to go to Michelle who bought him Mac.

Too little highway... or too few options?

2008-06-28T22:24:00.000-07:00

Via Sightline

An Obama for Washington state governor?

2008-06-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

The über-sleazy special interest group, Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW), is already pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into an independent expenditure campaign against incumbent Washington Governor Chris Gregoire. Check out this new ad from their "It's Time for a Change" PAC:

The ad, using footage from Obama's Key Arena appearance in Seattle last February, is laughable. Of course, Obama was talking about change from the ways of George W. Bush. However, Dino Rossi is every bit a politician cast from the same mold as George W. Rossi is an affable fellow who seems non-threatening in his ads but in reality is not very smart, would surround himself with right-wing ideologues in his administration and would use the powers of the executive branch to move the state as far to the right as he could get away with. His views on big issues like reproductive rights, environmental protection, transportation policy, and education clash significantly with the majority of Washingtonians. Gregoire may not be Washington's answer to Obama (more like Washington's version of Hillary - super competent and experienced, but not necessarily inspiring), but Dino Rossi would certainly be our state's answer to George W. Bush.

What He Said...

2008-06-06T12:42:00.000-07:00

From Kos @ Daily Kos:

Ugh.

Mrs. Feinstein said she did not need to urge Mrs. Clinton to hold a meeting. "I didn’t urge anybody to do anything. I know it’s a natural instinct. People, particularly in this case because Hillary represents a very large block of voters — the largest ever for anybody that has come in No. 2, and has the popular vote. She is I think desirous of protecting the issues that she cares about to the extent she can, seeing that the people are represented in this administration and certainly in the convention. And also to help with the ticket, and I know she feels that way because we have talked about this."

I know that this is all posturing for Clinton's VP hopes, but I wish Clinton surrogates would stop with the dishonest talking points. It really is time to move on.

The ONLY way Clinton can claim a popular vote victory is to 1) count the Soviet-style Michigan election results, 2) give Obama zero votes in the state, and 3) ignore the caucus states.

It was a close count, no doubt. Of course, if popular vote was the measure of victory, Obama would've run a different race. For one, he wouldn't have gone into "general election mode" a month ago, leaving votes on the table in the last few contests. But it wasn't, and Obama's team executed and won by every measure.

So can they please stop it?

Viewed live by over 12 million Americans

2008-06-06T12:02:00.000-07:00

Long time, no blog. Barack Obama is now the nominee, undisputed. Obama now gets to reintroduce himself to American voters and to the tens of millions who did not participate int the nomination process but will vote in November. Tuesday night's speech and all the history making that surrounded it was a nice way to launch that general election campaign. At least 12 million Americans watched it live - an astonishing number for a political speech. Obama did not disappoint:

But John McCain sure did:

5 Days, 5 Contests

2008-05-31T08:20:00.000-07:00

Finally! The end is upon us. By the middle of next week, Obama should be able to declare victory in the race for the Democratic nomination (at the site of the Republican Convention - nice move, Obama). Based more than anything on the outcome of the first contest, today's Democratic Party Rules and By-laws Committee meeting, Hillary should be ready to acknowledge that by conceding, hopefully on Tuesday night.

Contest 1: Rules & Bylaws Committee
With DNC lawyers taking Hillary's favored solution off the table, Michigan and Florida delegates will almost certainly be awarded at half value. Since both Obama and Hillary were on the Florida ballot, that means that the pledged delegate split for Florida should break out to 34.5 for Obama, 52.5 for Hillary.

The big question is how the RBC will deal with Michigan since Obama was not on the ballot there. The state party organization proposes splitting the delegates 69-59 in Clinton's favor. This is characterized as a compromise between Hillary's position of seating all the delegates and the initial Obama position of seating the delegates 50-50. Obama has agreed to this compromise, but Hillary is rejecting it, arguing that she should get no fewer pledged delegates than awarded in the tainted primary. She is also arguing that Obama should get no delegates, that the minority batch of delegates should go to the convention "uncommitted" as they were defined in the illegal Jan. 15 primary ballot. However, Poblano, the brilliant and anonymous statistician at FiveThirtyEight.com has shown that in a competitive race, by now with the other candidates dropping out, the primary election and subsequent delegate selection process would have awared Obama a majority of 65 delegates to Hillary's 63. But, even if you simply assume that most of the 40% of the votes for "uncommitted" in Florida were for Obama, with some for Edwards, plus add in the 5% of votes that were write-ins for Obama but never counted, and work that through the Congressional District proportional system by which delegates are awarded, the delegate split would end up close to the 69-59 proposed by the Michigan Democratic Party.

Even if this scenario is adopted by the RBC, it would likely need to be halved according to DNC rules. In other words, a net gain of only 5 full delegates for Hillary. This would be accompanied by an 18 vote margin for Hillary in Florida. That's for pledged delegates, the apportionment of superdelegates in both states is a separate issue. In all likelihood those would also be halved as well, in part to avoid creating two classes of delegate within the same state delegation.

Contest 2: Puerto Rico (Sunday)
It's absurd that a territory that can't even vote for president in November is apportioned significantly more delegates than Montana and South Dakota combined - 55 pledged delegates, plus 7 supers. There's a common misconception that because Hillary has done so well with Hispanic voters in other parts of the country. That's not going to help her in Puerto Rico, where the high mixed-race population feels more affinity with Obama than Hispanics in California or Texas. What does help Hillary is that she's the Senator from New York where most Puerto Ricans in America reside. Bill Clinton was popular in Puerto Rico, and Hillary as First Lady played a major role in helping with a big hurricane recovery effort there in the late 90s. The one recent poll (conducted May 8-20) shows Hillary with a 13-point lead - 51-38. Her winning margin may well fall under 10 points. By the way, Puerto Rico falls into the Eastern time zone at this time of year and polls are open from 8am-3pm. So, we should have results by 1 or 2pm Pacific Time.

Contests 3 and 4: South Dakota and Montana (Tuesday)
The polling in both South Dakota (15 pledged delegates/8 super) and Montana (16 pledged/9 super) is kind of stale (another sure sign that the nomination fight is over). But, all indications are that Obama will win by big margins of 15-20 points in each state. The real importance of these states will come in allowing Obama to finish out the primary season with two big wins in one night as he declares victory in the whole process and then starts rolling out big numbers of superdelegates the next day.

And that brings us to Contest 5, Superdelegates. Hillary may or may not concede on Tuesday night, but even if she doesn't, by Wednesday morning the remaining 190 or so superdelegates will start rolling out en masse for Obama. And our long national nightmare will be over. We can only hope.

Update (7:00Pm Saturday): Contest 1 goes to... Obama! The outcome was pretty much as predicted below. Harold Ickes and other HRC supporters on the committee were gracious on the Florida decision but got all pissy about Michigan. They felt that a 73-56 was more accurate an apportionment than the 69-59 proposed by Michigan Democrats. They reserved the right to appeal the decision to the Credentials Committee meeting in July. The magic number is now 2117 and Obama only needs 64 more to reach that magic number. He should reach it by Tuesday night, Wednesday morning at the latest.

Teddy on Bobby

2008-05-24T14:55:00.000-07:00

I have long thought that the assassination of Bobby Kennedy marked the death of the 20th century brand of liberalism. After Vietnam and the loss of America's faith in LBJ, RFK had become the last great hope of a liberalism based on the right of equality for all, communitarian compassion and a foreign policy that was pragmatic yet strongly informed by human rights ideals. And with Bobby, especially the person that Bobby had become by 1968 (transformed to a great degree by the Civil Rights Movement, his brother's death and the horrors of the Vietnam War), that liberalism came from a person of passion, depth, sincerity and conviction, along with charisma and the ability to inspire.

While there are a lot of reasons to be excited about the possibility of an Obama presidency, more than anything I'm excited about his potential to transform our nation and bring a new liberalism to American politics. I believe that Obama has the potential be to this era in American history what Lincoln was to the Antebellum America, Teddy Roosevelt to the Gilded Age and FDR to Great Depression-era America. JFK may have been on his way to being this sort of president, but I think RFK even more so.

In this week of news about the Kennedys, it's really worth taking a listen to Teddy Kennedy's eulogy of his brother, Robert:

Hillary and the Dead Kennedys

2008-05-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

I don't know what to say about Hillary's reminder to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader editorial board that it wasn't until June of 1968 that Robert Kennedy was taken out of contention in that's year's nomination fight. In this case, by an assassin's bullet. But, as furious as I've been with the willingness of Hillary's campaign to play the race card, my reaction to this episode has been to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe this time, it really it really is the misstatement of an exhausted candidate. But, here are some excerpts from some arguments from around the blogosphere that make me think twice:

From the XX Factor blog at Slate.com, first Rosa Brooks:

I think we know exactly what Hillary meant:
"Nice nominee you got there... sure would be a shame if anything happened to him."
Awfully big-hearted of her to be willing to stick around through August, just in case....

And, Melinda Henneberger:

I'm not saying she literally hopes he dies soon. (Plus, she's apologized, so case closed, right?) But Hillary didn't mean what she said this time just like she wasn't exactly shouting out to hardworking white people, and Bill didn't quite say Jesse equals Barack, and her surrogates never meant to push the whole image of him as a druggie in the 'hood, and she never meant to reanimate the whole highly racial Jeremiah Wright hoo-ha by saying—gosh darn the timing, just as things were dying down—that he woulda never been her pick for pastor. But either Hillary Clinton is one smart, savvy, and occasionally even on-message politician—in which case she is well aware of what it means to reference the possible assassination of a black leader in this country—or she isn't and doesn't. It can't be both.

And this conclusion from Emily Yoffe:

...I don't like the game of gotcha in which every ill-phrased remark is grounds for ending a candidacy. But recently Clinton has been making a string of offensive statements, from saying "hard-working white Americans" support her and not Obama, to comparing her effort to seat delegates from Florida and Michigan to the civil-rights marchers beaten in Selma. But calling forth the forces of madness to give her the presidency - please, let her end the madness of her campaign.

From BarbinMD on Daily Kos:

But this isn’t the first time she has made this same, offensive comparison. In March of this year:

TIME: Can you envision a point at which--if the race stays this close--Democratic Party elders would step in and say, "This is now hurting the party and whoever will be the nominee in the fall"?

CLINTON: No, I really can't. I think people have short memories. Primary contests used to last a lot longer. We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn't wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual.

Once might be a mistake, twice and it’s a tactic. An offensive, ugly tactic from a failed campaign whose only hope is to raise the possibility that something might happen to Obama. The willingness to say such a thing in a cheap effort to sway superdelegates is disgusting.

And, finally from Josh Orton at MyDD:

This must now end.

Over the past weeks, many have called for Clinton to end her campaign based on metrics. But with the infrastructure-building the primary keeps delivering, I've been reasonably comfortable waiting until June for closure.

But this is unacceptable.

The United States has a history of profound political violence - and the use of violence to oppress and coerce. And while I'm not quite willing to accept that Clinton spoke maliciously - it doesn't matter. There is no excuse for flippantly referencing assassination, especially given the historic nature of Obama's campaign and our nation's grim history of racial oppression through violence. When Hillary Clinton speaks of our history, she is not reflecting academically or only in a vacuum - her words and influence are real. To act otherwise is negligent, at best.

No context can save her. She must go.

Kentucky and Oregon

2008-05-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

In the next hour, we'll start to see results from Kentucky, with Oregon a bit less than 6 hours away. While it's now clear that Hillary will stay in for the last three primaries ending June 3, and for the DNC Rules Committee meeting on May 31 that will decide the fate of Michigan and Florida delegations, Obama will almost certainly have gained a majority of pledged delegates, whether you count all states excluding MI and FL or, likely, even if you include them. No one from the Obama camp, or from the Democratic powers that be will tell Hillary to step down until after June 3, but Hillary will lose all credibility if she doesn't concede shortly after the last primary.

In Kentucky, don't be fooled by early returns, which will start rolling in around 3:30 Pacific Time. Because of the time zone split in Kentucky, early results will mostly reflect returns from Louisville in the eastern half of the state. Western Kentucky is demographically pretty similar to West Virginia, so when those returns get factored, Obama will be lucky to crack 30%. Kentucky polling has been remarkably consistent at showing Hillary performing in the low-60s. The rest goes to Edwards, who as in WV remains on the ballot, and "Uncommitted," which is actually an option on the Kentucky ballot.

In Oregon's all-mail balloting, ballots have to be turned in by 8pm. Counting actually started this morning. So, we'll know the first results, mostly from the heavily Obama-favored Portland area right at 8pm PDT. Those early results are likely to get watered down a bit (or maybe not), but expect the final results to give Obama somewhere between 54 and 64% of the vote.

If all goes as expected, the meme that will enshroud the airwaves and print media is that it's all over, Obama is the nominee no matter what happens with FL and MI, but the Kentucky results show that Obama continues to have troubles gaining the vote of working-class whites (conveniently ignoring the fact that OR is almost as blue collar as KY and probably whiter). But, if all goes expected tonight, or if it's any better than expected, Obama may well get the superdelegates he needs to declare victory on June 3, or even earlier.

Better late than never

2008-05-14T14:55:00.000-07:00

John Edwards will endorse Obama tonight.

Would have been nice if Edwards had come out for Obama at that Charleston rally, but better now late than never. And, now as the NY Times points out, the news of the endorsement will push Hillary's West Virginia win off the lede on tonight's TV news broadcasts.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

John Edwards Endorsement

Clearly John Edwards voted for Barack Obama in past Tuesday's North Carolina Primary. For some reason, maybe it's because his wife supports Hillary, Edwards refuses to endorse in the race. A lot of pundits argue that, with the NC Primary passed, it's irrelevant. But, one way that Edwards could really help his favored candidate is by showing up on stage with Obama at his rally now scheduled for Monday morning in Charleston, WV.

As well as Hillary is doing in Appalachian areas, the results from the South Carolina primary indicate that Edwards has even more appeal with voters in that part of the country. Edwards would help Obama to no end by endorsing him at the rally, with the moment repeated on local news broadcasts in West Virginia throughout the 24 hours before the voters go to the polls. The benefit would be magnified by Edwards campaigning with Obama in Kentucky in advance of the May 20 primary there.

Whadaya say, John?

West Virginia Preview

2008-05-12T23:00:00.000-07:00

Obama fans like myself should probably look for something else to do tomorrow night. Watching election results won't be nearly as fun as last week. The only satisfaction we'll have is knowing that after the night is over Obama will still be ahead in pledged delegates, superdelegates, states won and popular votes won.

Not only does West Virginia have exactly the kind of demography that has supported Clinton in Ohio and PA -older voters, working poor whites, Catholics, racist crackers, but there also seems to be a high quotient of West Virginia voters who are absolutely convinced Obama is a foreign national, a Muslim, or even a terrorist. The best explanation for this is a high level of illiteracy, along with lack of Internet access, newspaper distribution or news broadcasts in the state. It makes you wonder if they'll be able to find anyone in the state with the aptitude to count the votes.

All the recent polls show Clinton winning by a more than 2-1 margin, 60-24 according to a Suffolk poll conducted on May 10-11; 56-27 according to a Rasmussen poll conducted May 4. Fortunately, Bill Clinton has done us the favor of establishing the expectation for Hillary's success when he urged West Virginia voters to make sure Hillary wins with 80% of the vote , or even 90% according to one state official.

Polls close at 7:30pm Eastern, so expect the networks to call it for Clinton by about, oh, 4:30 here on the West Coast. There are only 28 delegates at stake, so Hillary should not come away with more than about a 6-7 delegate net gain. Obama will probably pick up at least that many superdelegates in the following day or two.

More evidence that Clinton's continued candidacy has jumped the shark...

2008-05-11T17:15:00.000-07:00

Preachers and Presidents

2008-05-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times coverage of Jenna Bush's wedding:

The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell of Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston officiated at the ceremony. Mr. Caldwell, a longtime religious adviser to [President] Bush, has endorsed Senator Barack Obama.

John Edwards Endorsement

2008-05-10T16:23:00.000-07:00

Clearly John Edwards voted for Barack Obama in past Tuesday's North Carolina Primary. For some reason, maybe it's because his wife supports Hillary, Edwards refuses to endorse in the race. A lot of pundits argue that, with the NC Primary passed, it's irrelevant. But, one way that Edwards could really help his favored candidate is by showing up on stage with Obama at his rally now scheduled for Monday morning in Charleston, WV.

As well as Hillary is doing in Appalachian areas, the results from the South Carolina primary indicate that Edwards has even more appeal with voters in that part of the country. Edwards would help Obama to no end by endorsing him at the rally, with the moment repeated on local news broadcasts in West Virginia throughout the 24 hours before the voters go to the polls. The benefit would be magnified by Edwards campaigning with Obama in Kentucky in advance of the May 20 primary there.

Whadaya say, John?

It's the racism, stupid

2008-05-08T12:55:00.000-07:00

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on... Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again... There's a pattern emerging here."

-- Sen. Hillary Clinton, in an interview with USA Today

I have a theory. In mid-January, shortly before the South Carolina primary, when Hillary started alienating black voters with her comments about how Dr. King needed LBJ to effectuate the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, she and her most Rovian of advisors, Mark Penn and Bill Clinton, discovered that raising race would drive more working class rural voters to rally behind her (while also putting some fear into the minds of superdelegates). South Carolina went from being a state in play for her to a colossal disaster. With half the votes cast by blacks, Hillary lost to Obama by nearly 30 points.

She still had to fight John Edwards for those rural votes, but buried in the national discourse and in the results and exit polls the Clinton campaign could see that by forcing identity politics to the fore they would have an advantage with older white and working-class voters who were not only unfamiliar with Obama, but could actually be manipulated into fearing him.

This strategy, of course, would all have to operate at the most subtle of levels to avoid any chance of causing a backlash among Hillary's base of older women voters, the media and party leaders. Also, there was the risk of permanently alienating black voters who would still be necessary to win in November. So, no Willie Horton or Jesse Helms' white guy ripping up the rejection letter type ads. Only coded signals to provoke fears among white voters, along with taking every opportunity possible to marginalize Obama as "the black candidate."

In South Carolina, it started with Bill Clinton dismissing Obama's South Carolina victory by comparing it with Jesse Jackson's in 1984. And, then as the Obama campaign picked up steam, the race-baiting lost a degree of subtlety. Desperate times called for desperate measures. So, along came Geraldine Ferraro's statements, the darkening of Obama's image in campaign ads, and leaks of pictures of Obama in African garb to Drudge.

All along, Bill Clinton is becoming the rural specialist for the campaign, drumming up Hillary's rural, working class cred with the tobacco chewing set. As Maureen Dowd so wickedly stated it:

Then came the Big Dog, crazy like a fox, for the coup de graceless. Campaigning in Clarksburg, W. Va., he said that his scrappy wife can win working-class voters, as compared with Obama’s Viognier-and-Volvo set.

“The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules,” the former president said. “In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it.”

Oh, well, at least Bill didn’t use the word uppity.

The Rev. Wright "Controversy"

And, then came the Rev. Wright controversy. I'm not sure where YouTube videos came from. The Clinton's campaign's fingerprints are not on them in the same way they are with the other tactics mentioned above. But, I have no doubt they were happy to raise them with the press and did what they could to disseminate the videos.

Now, as the power of nearly de-railing the campaign of a leading contender for the presidency has clearly gone to his head, and as he has clearly gone off the rails himself, Obama was right to jettison the Rev. Wright from his life. In any case, the constant throughout this controversy has been the fact that Wright, for many older, especially rural older, whites helps invoke with Obama the same 60s trope of a radical black man associated with Jesse Jackson in the '84 race, or Al Sharpton in 2004.

The Wright issue also had the effect of dragging Obama into still painful debates from that last flared up during the 1990s over what share of responsibility falls on whites versus blacks to help heal the wounds and impacts of our 400-year history of racism in America (a bitter irony is that Bill Clinton earned his popularity within the black community by falling on the right side of this debate). From the awesome black blog, Too Sense:

....What people want is not for Obama to denounce Wright, but to denounce black people everywhere who have the gall to be angry at America for how they are and have been treated. What they wanted Obama to say was that racism is unequivocally a black problem, that white people have moved past it but that black people cling to grievances as an excuse for out of wedlock births, unemployment, or incarceration.

It doesn't matter that rhetorically and policy-wise, Obama has struck the right balance between personal and governmental responsibility. It doesn't matter that he's confronted black anti-Semitism, black homophobia, black apathy. When Obama dared to mention that white people might harbor irrational prejudices of their own--he was pilloried by conservatives and liberals everywhere who don't want to feel guilty suspecting every black teenager of being a drug dealer for "throwing his grandmother under the bus."

They didn't want him to condemn Wright, they wanted him to condemn black people. So of course they're not satisfied. For all the talk of how white people are attracted to Obama and the alleged "absolution" he could offer them, what they really want is for him to publicly shift the blame for the racial divide squarely on the shoulders of the black community, so white people can stop thinking about it.

And he didn't do that, so they're not happy.

Appalachia's Love Affair with Hillary

Racism is a reality in this race- fact is that there is a hard core 10-15% of American voters who would never vote for a black candidate, no matter what. One of the uglier episodes in the Indiana campaign was one white man's refusal to shake Obama's hand. Fortunately, most of those racist voters would not be counted on by any Democratic candidate. But, as George Packer at the New Yorker has pointed out, there are a percentage of Democratic voters, most concentrated in Appalachia, that will never vote for Obama.

This map, assembled by Meng Bomin at Daily Kos, shows how amazingly concentrated in Appalachia the anti-Obama Democratic vote resides (click on map for larger versions):

The purple denotes counties where Hillary won more than 65% of the vote through May 6. As you can see from the map -outside of Michigan where only Hillary was on the ballot, and in Arkansas for obvious reasons- most of the purple is in Appalachia- from Northern Alabama and Georgia, up through Western South Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, Western Virginia, South Eastern Ohio, Western PA and Southwestern NY (Some of the more detailed maps here show that John Edwards also did well in the sliver of South Carolina that falls in Appalachia - makes you wonder whether Edwards staying in the race would have helped Obama, which is inverse of the conventional wisdom).

Most of these Appalachian Democratic racists are in states like Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia that were not likely to go Democratic in the general election, even this year. But, there is also a large enough percentage of voters in Tennessee and West Virginia -states that voted for Bill Clinton- that will be lost to Obama. And then there are concentrations of these voters in key swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio (seeing a pattern here?), along with Virginia, which could be a Democratic win this year (and voted overwhelmingly for Obama, except in Appalachia). So, no doubt that the loss of these often Democratic voters in Appalachia and their racist ways are a real challenge to Obama putting together a winning coalition of states in November.

Reject and renounce the racism, along with those who would continue to exploit it for their own gain (i.e., Hillary Clinton)

What's scary is that this racist reality continues to fuel talk, even after Tuesday night's results in IN and NC, that it's ok for superdelegates to deliver the nomination to Clinton because, well, we're just not ready to elect a black president (Ed Rendell said this publicly many times). On today's media briefing call, Clinton chief strategist, Geoffrey Garin, raved about Hillary's improved performance with white voters in NC while all but dismissing black voters as a relevant voter class. This was followed by Hillary herself in the USA Today interview. I think this about my 100th FU to Hillary on this short-lived blog, but Hillary, Fuck You!

We, as Democrats, given our country's history, given our party's history, given our aspirations for racial equality should find this kind of race-baiting completely unacceptable. It's really the kind of thing that party leaders (also known as superdelegates) should hold out as a threshhold for determining the legitimacy of a contender for the nomination. If Obama has the most pledged delegates after the last primary (and he absolutely will), the nomination should be his, realities of racism be damned. This is a principle worth losing over, although I don't think that'll be result. In reality, I think it just adds some risk of losing. But, if we're not willing as a country and a party to take that risk this year, when will we be?

We must take on that racism, stare it down and defeat it. And, have we ever been in a better position do that in the realm of national politics than this year. McCain is a deeply flawed candidate (his association with Bush is far more damaging that Obama's association with Rev. Wright). Obama is one of the best candidates this party has ever seen. At the very least, he is our generation's JFK or maybe, better yet, RFK. Obama's message of hope and change, I predict, will be more powerful in the general election race, when that next level of more casual, less partisan voter gets engaged. He will maximize black and young voter turn-out and, I believe, capture the Hispanic and older woman vote that has been, along with the Appalachian racists, key to Hillary's base.

We Democrats might be taking on some incremental measure of additional risk of losing the presidency by nominating Obama because racism will be a real factor to overcome. However, Obama is completely capable of winning in the face of that racism. And, we as a nation will be better off for it.

Update: Meng Bomin has posted updated maps. The high degree of opposition to Obama in Appalachia is even more stark in the map of counties where Hillary won more than 65% of the vote. I've replaced the map in my original posting with this one and also updated my discussion of those maps.

How she loses

2008-05-07T15:20:00.000-07:00

Last month, former Clinton administration member and close Obama friend, Illinois Rep. Rahm Emmanuel, made this apt statement:

“The way the loser loses,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, who is close to both candidates but has made no endorsement, “will determine whether the winner wins in November.”

The response to last night's Indiana and NC primary results from Gore and Kerry strategist, Bob Shrum:

“The campaign may go on but the contest is now over: Obama is the Democratic nominee for president. Now the decision for her is how she wants to end this.”

But, presumably this is not how Hillary wants to end it:

Earlier this week Hillary Clinton instructed supporters to bet on the filly in the Kentucky Derby. In other words: Bet on Eight Belles, the only female in the horse race (and, Clinton obviously hoped, a potentially promising metaphor/omen for herself and her chances of winning the Democratic nomination).
Well, as local sports fanatic Seth Kolloen just pointed out via email (and on his blog), it didn’t go so well for the filly today.

In a development that you couldn’t even make up, Eight Belles finished second, but broke both her ankles during the race, collapsed at the end, and was immediately euthanized on the track.

(via Eli Sanders at the Slog)

Should she stay or should she go?

2008-04-23T22:03:00.000-07:00

So, it didn't turn out quite as I had hoped it would in Pennsylvania. I thought Clinton would only win by 5, shutting down her momentum. Instead, she won by 10, just as in Ohio. But, Hillary's in barely a better position than she was at the beginning of the week. The newspaper headlines were about Hillary staying in the game, but not about winning the game. Obama actually performed slightly better with a whole range of demographic groups than in Ohio. This from Kos:

Obama's percent of the vote:

OH PA
60 and older 28 38
White 34 38
White men 39 44
White women 31 34
Less than $50K 42 46
No college 40 38
College 51 49
Catholic 36 31
Protestant 36 53

What was a 10.5% win in demographically friendly Ohio has become an 8.6% 9.4% win in similar Pennsylvania, except the state was even less black and with a much smaller youth voter population (Pennsylvania's seniors accounted for 32 percent of the electorate, compared to 23 percent in Ohio).

And, those gains were made despite the Wright controversy as well as manufactured bullshit about "bitter" and flag pins and whatnot.

And, don't forget, Obama, had Ed Rendell's machine running against him, along with the machines of local electeds from around the state. (BTW, even though he supported Hillary -only because Obama had supported one of his opponents in last year's mayoral election- I really came to like Philly Mayor Michael Nutter. Definitely a politician with a bright future).

But, one thing that came through in Tuesday night's exit polling is that there is some seriously deep-seated antipathy and resentment developing between Hillary and Obama supporters, at least in PA. And, it's not the kind that's going to go away overnight. Those polls show that two-thirds thought Clinton attacked Obama unfairly; 50% thought Obama attacked Clinton unfairly (exit polls in other states were at 15% and 12%). Only 53% of Hillary voters say they will vote for Obama in November, 26% will vote for McCain.

As much as Tuesday night sucked for Obama, Hillary can still not win this nomination without a bunch of elite party regulars (i.e., Superdelegates) stealing away the election from a black candidate who's winning the nomination while playing according to all the rules. I don't know if Hillary and Bill know this, but certainly everyone else, including most superdelegates, does.

Also, as again Kos points out, Obama is kicking ass in state match-ups with McCain. In red states like Colorado and North Carolina, solid blue states like California, "purple" states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nevada, Oregon and Iowa (and Washington), Obama against McCain outperforms Hillary against McCain. Even in New York, he does a hair better than their Senator over Obama. And, of course, we can't forget that Obama is still way ahead in states won, electoral votes and, yes Hillary, the popular vote.

So, should Hillary exit the race? No. After May 6? Maybe.

As those exit polls indicated, and as increasingly amplified by the media, this campaign is heading into increasingly treacherous ground. But, as I've said before, if Bill and Hillary can keep their worst instincts under control, it's fine, or even desirable, for Hillary to stay in the race. The competition in each state allows both to build up grassroots networks that Obama can utilize in a general election campaign (for several reasons, McCain is unlikely to have a strong ground game going into the Fall campaign). And, of course, the media stays focused on the Democrats, while McCain speaks into a media echo chamber.

Also, I wanted to point to an argument by (now former) Stranger news editor, Josh Feit. Josh makes an argument I haven't heard anywhere else: Hillary is helping the eventual Democratic party nominee by re-building the bond between the party and working class voters:

The more the media keeps talking about Hillary as the lunch-pail candidate (and the more McCain is ignored during the primary season), the more this important bloc actually begins thinking and voting Democratic. It’s the old “everybody’s doing it” advertising ploy, and she’s getting free advertising.

For the first time in a generation—thanks to the media coverage during this prolonged campaign that’s linking the working class vote with a Democratic Party candidate—the Democrats are poised to represent Jane and Joe Six Pack.

But what if Obama gets the nomination (which still seems like a given)? Well, first of all, even without Hillary on the ticket, there’ll be an established connection between a Democratic candidate and working-class voters, an association that hasn’t been authentic in a generation or two. This will give the party and Obama an opening they previously didn’t have. (How is this campaign destroying the Democrats, again?)

I'm not sure I buy this argument. I'm worried that these working class voters are going with Hillary more out of racist antipathy toward Obama than class affinity with Hillary. But, then again, it's undeniable that these working class voters do not want to vote Republican this year. So, maybe if they can't stomach Obama in the Fall, they'll just stay home rather than vote for McCain.

And, in spite of what the NY Times ed board had to say on Tuesday night, I actually think that Hillary is backing off a bit from her original mission to destroy Obama. The uncommitted superdelegates seem to be getting more public in their warnings to Clinton that any attempts to destroy the likely nominee will bring them out in his favor.

There's also increasing chatter that she's running for the VP spot on the ticket - the more delegates she gets, the harder it will be for Obama to deny her the pick (as much as he'd like to) is the argument. While she ran for president to win, she would, after all, be the first woman VP and ensconce herself as the presumptive nominee next time around whether Obama wins or loses.

Whether she's staying in the race to be VP, or to be the nominee-in-waiting in case Obama screws up at the end, or because she wants to be in the strongest position possible to be the next Sen. Majority Leader, or because she just hasn't found a good opportunity to exit gracefully (hard to do when you're winning), as long as Hillary will not indulge in harming Obama's chances of winning in November, she should and will stay in the race. Of course, if she loses both NC and IN on May 6 (and there's a better than 50% chance she will), it'll be over.

Update: I just noticed this article in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. I guess whatever restraint Hillary might be inclined to show could, at any moment, be undermined by the "Billification" of her campaign. This is one of those classic Maureen Dowd columns in the making. And, a McCain presidency in the making too. Fuck you, Bill! They should have impeached your ass!

Pennysylvania Preview

2008-04-21T23:21:00.000-07:00

Today's the big day. Polls close at 8pm Eastern. That means those of us on the West Coast will start seeing results around 5:30 or so. Wait until at least 20% of the precincts have reported before jumping to any conclusions, more if the results are close. So, it may well be 6:00-6:30 Pacific before we have real clarity about the outcome and what it means.

Easiest place to check for nearly up-to-the-minute results is the NY Times home page. If you want to dig into county by county results go here. And, if you want to watch on TV, go with CNN, not because of the analysis but because of their amazing mapping tool.

Here's a run-down of the polling released in the last 24 hours or so:

Zogby: Clinton +10
SurveyUSA: Clinton +6
Suffolk: Clinton +10
Quinnipiac: Clinton +7
Strategic Vision: Clinton +7
American Research Group: Clinton +13
Mason-Dixon: Clinton +5
Public Policy Polling: Obama +3

And, here's the best analysis of that polling that I've seen (btw, Survey USA's final robo-poll has been the best predictor of final results this primary season).

My prediction? For a while last week, I thought Obama might actually pull off an upset and win this thing. That's almost certainly not going to happen (almost - I'll come back to that in a second). I'm having a hard time seeing Obama doing any better than the Survey USA poll, especially given the overall consistency of the polling and because voter movement has rapidly diminished over the last few days.

But, here are a few reasons why it could be even closer: The Obama campaign registered a lot of new Democrats in this closed primary, at least 60% of the late Democratic registrations. That, along with the Obama campaign's superior field effort could well translate into turn-out that surpasses what's predicted by the polling. And, finally, this film from Bill Maher's show may indicate a much better performance by Obama with those gun-clinging, bitter heartland Pennsylvanians than anyone would have guessed (go to the film about 1:30 into this recording).

One more reason why Obama could do better than expected -- if any of you saw him on the Daily Show last night, Hillary's continued participation in this race is starting to turn into a joke and no one wants their vote to be in furtherance of a joke.

With all this, I'm predicting that Obama comes within 5 points. With the media laying down 10 points as the spread, that would be perceived as a big win for Obama and help close the deal in Indiana.

Pennsylvanians: bitter but proud

2008-04-17T21:59:00.000-07:00

I never got a chance to see that debate last night. I think there's an ordinance here in Boston that when the Red Sox are playing, every TV in every bar must be tuned into the game. Even more so when the Sox are playing the Yankees as they were last night. Well, I got to see enough of the debate clips that I'm glad I missed it.

I just spent the last hour hanging with my counterpart for Environment Pennsylvania. Even though he's based in Philadelphia, he spends a lot of time in the state capital, Harrisburg, as well as Pittsburgh. He told me he could tell me hundreds of instances of Pennsylvanians who went from the undecided column or even soft support of Hillary to deciding to vote for Obama because of the bitter comments. Instead of feeling offended, these people felt that someone actually got it and was listening to them.

You could look at these second and third-hand accounts as unreliable anecdotal evidence but recent polling backs 'em up. According to a Zogby poll released today, 60 versus 29 percent of PA voters were more likely to agree with Obama's assessment of their bitterness than with Hillary's assertion that he's out of touch. That's a 31% margin - enormous. While Zogby polls have not been the best indicators of primary election outcomes this year, the sheer size of this margin shows that, yet again, Obama's frankness attracts voters, while Hillary's attacks on that frankness backfire. I'm sure Obama still regrets the statement - he really should have framed the discussion of this very real bitterness in a different way- but overall the episode should serve as positive reinforcement for the kind of direct honesty that is antithetical to Hillary's old school politics.

Updated prediction: By the way, the same Zogby poll shows a statistical dead heat in PA - Hillary 45-Obama 44. I'm not going to get carried away and predict an Obama victory, but I think there's a very good chance she's going to win it by less than 5%. I'm guessing that'll drive more superdelegates Obama's way (he's only behind in superdelegates by 22 or so) and lead to a small but significant Obama victory in Indiana- along with a landslide victory in North Carolina- 0n May 6. Then it'll be over.

Bruuuuuuce!!!

2008-04-16T12:15:00.000-07:00

Generally, I don't think celebrity endorsements mean that much, especially in a presidential race. However, today's endorsement of Barack Obama by Bruce Springsteen could not have been better timed. Springsteen, more than any anyone since Woody Guthrie, is the troubadour for the common man, particularly the common man living in a rusted out NE industrial town. You know, the kind of common man that Hillary is still portraying -to the point of self parody- as heartlessly dissed by an elitist Obama. (Check out this video of Clinton getting booed -by Steelworkers- after raising the subject, yet again).

As a teenager, I was a huge fan of Springsteen's and, really, still am. I saw him in concert with the E Street Band just a couple weeks ago. I had not seen him perform since 1988, and he and the band still put on a surprisingly exhilarating show. The biggest difference from the numerous shows I saw him perform in the 80s was how much Bruce talked about politics and the dire state Bush has put this country in over the last eight years. I kept waiting for Springsteen to follow on his description of the problem with an endorsement of Obama as the best shot we have at a solution. He didn't that night, but he used much of Obama's language of hope in talking about where we must go next as a nation. The endorsement did not come until today, but the foreshadowing was certainly there at the Seattle show.

Anyway, the endorsement letter is more substantive than most and worth a read. Here's my favorite passage:

...[Obama] speaks to the America I've envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that's interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where "...nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone."

...critics have tried to diminish Senator Obama through the exaggeration of certain of his comments and relationships. While these matters are worthy of some discussion, they have been ripped out of the context and fabric of the man's life and vision, so well described in his excellent book, Dreams From My Father, often in order to distract us from discussing the real issues: war and peace, the fight for economic and racial justice, reaffirming our Constitution, and the protection and enhancement of our environment.

PS. I'm in Boston this week for work. So, I'm looking for a bar that will actually have the TV tuned in to tonight's debate instead of the Red Sox. Any suggestions?

HRC: WTF!?!

2008-04-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess I was wrong about Hillary in some way giving it up. She obviously feels that Obama has given her an opening through which she can salvage her chances for winning the nomination. Really, it's a sign of what desperate straits she's in.

Except for all the ways she's played these same rural, older white Democrat's latent racism (e.g., disseminating pictures of Obama in African/Muslim garb, darkening his skin tone in campaign commercials a la Willie Horton, drawing pararallels between the Obama campaign and Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 88 runs, etc., etc.), this is may be the most despicable of Hillary's efforts to destroy Obama. It's certainly the most hypocritical.

A quick recounting...

First, Obama's response to a question from an attendee at a San Francisco fundraiser about his difficulty closing deal with PA rural voters:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Hillary's first response on Friday (only slightly more nuanced as she repeated the attack numerous times yesterday):

"I saw in the media it's being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who faced hard times are bitter," Clinton said this afternoon. "Well, that's not my experience. As I travel around Pennsylvania, I meet people who are resilient, who are optimistic, who are positive, who are rolling up their sleeves. They are working hard everyday for a better future, for themselves and their children.

"Pennsylvanians don't need a president who looks down on them, they need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them, who works hard for your futures, your jobs, your families."

And Obama's best, least defensive response, delivered Friday afternoon in Indiana:

How the media is letting this one unfold is almost perverse, undermining Hillary's claim that the media gives Obama a free ride. As many have pointed out, Obama was essentially echoing arguments made by Thomas Frank in his 2004 book, What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Obama has been talking about this phenomenon since at least 2004.

What's most amazing is Hillary's hypocrisy - a prime example of how Hillary is incapable of passing any sort of sincerity test. Comparing their backgrounds clarifies who is really most out of touch. Remember, Obama is the one who comes from a comparatively disadvantaged upbringing, while Hillary comes from an upper-class suburban background. Since she was about 27 or 28, she's never made less than $100,000 a year. And, as we all now know, she and her husband have made $110 million in just the last eight years ($110 million!!!).

Obama is certainly wealthy, thanks to two bestselling books and a nice fat Senate salary, along with his wife's hospital administrator salary. But, remember, he came from a very modest background, lived among poverty abroad as a child, and worked directly with laid-off steelworkers at a time when Hillary was pulling down big partner bonuses at the Rose Law Firm. At the same time, she was getting virtually free shares of a real estate partnership and pulling down miraculous windfalls off of cattle futures.

With two multi-million dollar homes - mansions really- in the wealthy enclaves of Chappaqua, NY and the Kalorama section of DC, it's not like Hillary is any sort of gun toting populist like, say, Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana. In fact, Hillary has a strong gun-control voting record. At a 1999 White House Mother's Day event, she urged Americans to push Congress to "buck the gun lobby." And, when it comes to religion, as we all know because of the Rev. Wright blow-up, Obama is the one with the more populist church affiliation (though, maybe in Hillary's world it doesn't count if it's a black church). Hillary's spiritual outlet is a cultish and secretive prayer group made up of members of Congress and other DC-based elites.

As Obama has now stated, his words were not artfully chosen; he made it too easy for Hillary and the Republicans to make it sound like he meant that religion and guns were merely a refuge from hard times. But as the Charlie Rose interview from 2004 proves, Obama has long talked about the Thomas Frank thesis of politicians exploiting people's value-based fears to distract them from voting with their economic interests. He was not discounting the social values themselves, or what they mean to voters.

I don't know how much damage this is going to do to Obama. The timing's not the best, but it could be worse. Fortunately, there's still 10 days (including a debate on Wednesday night) to recover and Hillary, handing out "We're Not Bitter" stickers to attendees at her campaign rallies yesterday, certainly seems well on her way to overplaying this and causing a backlash among both rank and file Democrats and superdelegates. And, again, to run to this extreme with one little less not so artful but nevertheless sincere and even sensitive statement shows that Hillary is in the last murmurs of a, however slowly, expiring effort.

As Harvard Sociologist and Political Scientist, Theda Skocpol wrote Josh Marshall yesterday:

I have been in meetings with the Clintons and their advisors where very clinical things were said in a very-detached tone about unwillingness of working class voters to trust government -- and Bill Clinton -- and about their unfortunate (from a Clinton perspective) proclivity to vote on life-style rather than economic issues. To see Hillary going absolutely over the top to smash Obama for making clearly more humanly sympathetic observations in this vein, is just amazing. Even more so to see her pretending to be a gun-toting non-elite. Give us a break!....

....This has to be one of the few times in U.S. political history when a multi-millionaire has accused a much less wealthy fellow public servant, a person of the same party and views who made much less lucrative career choices, of "elitism"! (I won't say the only time, because U.S. political history is full of absurdities of this sort.) In a way, it is funny -- and it may not be long before the jokes start.

It would be an ugly irony if this statement were to somehow undo Obama's pending victory and allow Hillary to emerge with the nomination. For one sloppily worded, but essentially accurate, political observation to defeat a once-in-a-generation presidential candidate would say so much about how fucked up the system really is. The ironic part is that Obama is the only candidate interested in transforming this kind of politics, while Hillary thrives on it.

My brush with Mark Penn

2008-04-07T17:19:00.000-07:00

Well, really it was with his PR firm, Burson Marsteller, and it was more of an indirect interaction.

Last year, I helped out with a campaign to phase out the use of a toxic class of flame retardants known as PBDE's (Polybrominated diphenyl ethers) here in Washington state. These chemicals are used in all kinds of home and commercial products, from consumer electronics to office furniture and mattresses. As these products age, the chemicals leach out into the environment and are ubiquitous in household dust, bodies of water and even in breast milk. In fact, just about every nursing mom that gets tested has these toxins in her breast milk. PBDEs are linked to liver and thyroid problems, as well as neurodevelopmental effects on fetuses and babies.

Through working on this, I came to know the dirty, deceptive tactics of Burson Marsteller. The company was hired by the Bromine chemical producers trade group (a pretty sleazy organization in and of itself) to fight off the bans in several states. Although perfectly effective alternative flame retardants are available (Sony, Apple, HP, Dell and IKEA have all long ago stopped using PBDEs), the industry, with B-M's help, tried to fight off the bans with the argument that, essentially, all our children would be burned alive if we banned PBDE's.

The methods used by B-M were particularly abhorrent. They created videos of living rooms and nurseries going up in flames; created fake fire safety groups such as the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation and American Fire Safety Council; hired retired fire chiefs as hired guns; and brought in people (from out of state) with severely burned faces to testify against the bill in legislative committees. These guys - Mark Penn's people - would stop at nothing to try to kill the bill. It worked for two years before, in the third try, outraged fire chiefs, the state Fire Marshall, and the Firefighter's union joined the environmental community's effort to pass the bill.

And B-M didn't just use these tactics in the fight over PBDEs. As a lengthy story published last May in the Nation laid out, B-M pioneered the technique of creating false grassroots organizations to make evil companies, or in some cases, evil governments, look good. The technique is known as "astroturfing." Hired by the commercial fishing interests to push back against warnings to expectant mothers not to eat fish species likely to be tainted with mercury, B-M formed an organization called "Healthy Mothers/Healthy Babies Coalition" to release a biased report urging mothers to eat as much fish as they wanted, even fish on the government's do-not-eat list. Penn and B-M have also done work for the union-busting uniform company, Cintas; worked to make Royal Dutch Shell look good in spite of a long record of human rights abuses in Nigeria; and the company has a contract with the Blackwater USA, which was contracted by the US government to provide security services in Iraq that killed eight innocent civilians as they fled a public square in Baghdad.

In other words, Hillary's most trusted advisor, until today, was the CEO of one of the most despicable, sleazy PR firms in the world (and by many reports, he remains in the campaign's inner circle). Mark Penn was Hillary's Karl Rove - a man who would stop at nothing to win. He was the architect of the plan to win the nomination by destroying Obama. Fortunately, it appears that she has not only jettisoned Penn , but also this strategy. Still, Hillary chose, for most, if not all her campaign, to be associated with this man and his strategies. It's one of the reasons, I believe, that she does not deserve the nomination (at least not the Democratic nomination!). Mark Penn may no longer be Hillary's chief strategist, but his impact on her character, as well as her campaign, lingers on.

The world has changed, you can too..

2008-04-07T11:54:00.000-07:00

I'll be back to the presidential race with some comments about Mark Penn (good riddance!). But, in the meantime, enjoy this great PSA.

Hat tip to ECB at the Slog.

Has Hillary given up?

2008-03-30T22:40:00.000-07:00

I've been too busy to do much posting lately, so let's see if I can catch up a bit...

In one of my last posts I predicted that the March 21 Politico article about "The Clinton Myth"
would turn out to be influential and shift the mainstream media's view of Hillary's competitiveness with Obama. Sure enough, over the last week or so we've seen articles like this and every liberal's least hated conservative columnist, David Brooks, talking about Hillary's "audacity of hopelessness."

And, it only got worse from there as we learned that Clinton campaign has serious financial problems. Slate magazine launched it's Hillary Deathwatch (which I've now added to this blog). Finally, Bill Clinton had to tell Democrats at the California convention "chill."

Thanks in part to Obama very smartly telling the press that Hillary should stay in the race as long as she wants, there has been a bit of a chill, but the media's and the political culture's narrative of this race is clearly winding down. (See this, this and that. Oh, and this too.)

Hillary seems to have acknowledged it too. She has quite noticably toned down her enmity toward Obama and directed it instead toward McCain. The best of example of this is what I witnessed at my own Legislative District Caucus, yesterday, where former Democratic party chair and current Hillary campaign co-chair Terry McAuliffe spoke to the crowd of over 1000 party activists with nary a mention of Hillary. Instead, he talked about party unity after July 1, heading into the general election. (BTW, from early estimates of those LD caucus results, it appears that Obama has increased his Washington delegate lead over Hillary from the February precinct caucuses.)

While it may be that McAuliffe preferred to avoid conflict in my legislative district, which with its mix of African-Americans of all classes, hyper-educated young whites and just about every other ethnicity you can imagine is about as pro-Obama as anywhere in the country outside Hyde Park. But, with Hillary having toned it down in almost every venue, now directing her attacks toward McCain instead of Obama, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Hillary has, at some level, given up. I don't mean that she's going to withdraw from the race just yet. As at least one journalist has theorized, there may even be a tacit agreement among the two candidates, to let voters in the remaining states have their say while they run down the clock to see if any sort of external circumstances or scandal or major mistake causes the Obama campaign to self destruct.

My prediction for how this plays out? Hillary will win PA, but not by as much as in Ohio. She may even win Indiana, but probably by less than in PA; and Obama will win NC, by a lot. But, after the May 6 primaries, it's all but over. Obama will be leading by 175-180 delegates, with not many more than that remaining to be allocated after May 6. Hillary may hold on until the last primary in Puerto Rico on June 1, but for all practical purposes it will be over. The trends in the polls are bearing this out; the uncommitted superdelegates are slowly but surely moving Obama's way, while many committed Hillary delegates are hedging in anticipation of a need to switch to Obama to avoid a party implosion.

Hillary can still try to win by destroying Obama, but it probably won't work and the reason she seems to have stopped attacking him is because every time she does, she bleeds a few more uncommitted superdelegates. She's boxed in and all she can do is wind down the clock and be there in waiting if the Obama campaign somehow suffers a collapse of its own doing. If this accomplishes nothing else for Hillary, at least turning her attacks on McCain allows her to rebuild good will with party regulars and Obama supporters so that she will be in a position to build power somewhere else - perhaps as the next Senate Majority Leader.

Hillary's Got a Credibility Problem

2008-03-22T17:38:00.000-07:00

From Americablog via Dan Savage at the Slog...

She claimed that there was no welcoming ceremony [on her arrival in Bosnia in 1996] because it was too dangerous, sniper fire was everywhere, she had to run for cover.
Not so much.

In the photo below, Hillary heroically strangles a Bosnian sniper who was about to play checkers with Chelsea. Seriously, read the caption, which quotes Hillary’s description of the scene, then check out the photo of the actual scene.

The power of narrative... to distort reality

2008-03-21T14:27:00.000-07:00

We've seen it in past presidential elections. It's really a force of its own in any political race. It's where coverage of politics really has become jarringly similar to sports journalism. I'm talking about the force of narrative, as contrived by the media but also helped along by the candidates and their campaigns.

There's a good essay by Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen over at Politico.com about the how the media has created a false narrative of a continuing 2-way race for the Democratic nomination when the delegate math makes it virtually impossible for Clinton to win the nomination. Even officials within the Clinton campaign cite a 10% probability Clinton winning the nomination. And that kind of win would not be very satisfying for any Democrat, except for maybe Bill and Hillary.

One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning.

Her own campaign acknowledges there is no way that she will finish ahead in pledged delegates. That means the only way she wins is if Democratic superdelegates are ready to risk a backlash of historic proportions from the party’s most reliable constituency.

Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote — which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle — and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else.

People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet.

As it happens, many people inside Clinton’s campaign live right here on Earth. One important Clinton adviser estimated to Politico privately that she has no more than a 10 percent chance of winning her race against Barack Obama, an appraisal that was echoed by other operatives.

In other words: The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe.

The force of narrative - contrived, manipulated, sometimes real - has helped both candidates at varying points during this campaign but, in this case, it's so far separated from reality that it's become irresponsible for the reporters, editorialists and headline writers who have fed into it to continue without stopping and taking a fresh look at the reality. As influential and widely read as Politico is with DC-based journalists and opinionmakers, this "stop the madness" essay could do for Obama what Saturday Night Live did for Hillary a few weeks back.

Enough about Rev. Wright, let's talk about Hillary's church

2008-03-20T21:43:00.000-07:00

I always thought Hillary went to some milquetoast, mainstream Methodist church. And, it seemed like her at somewhat conservative positions on a range of issues like reproductive choice (she wants to let pharmacists abstain from filling birth control prescriptions if it violates their morals), support for federal funding of faith-based social programs (which she supported long before Bush did) and a constitutional amendment against flag burning (she supports it!), were simply efforts to pander to heartland voters. Well, it turns out that Hillary has been praying for years in "fellowship" with creepy DC bible thumpers like Sam Brownback, Rick Santorum and Ed Meese.

Over at the Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us of a little noticed article published in Mother Jones last September about Clinton's involvement since 1993 in a DC prayer circle and Bible study group alternatively known as "The Fellowship" or "The Family."

I kid you not.

As Ehrenreich writes:

Clinton fell in with The Family in 1993, when she joined a Bible study group composed of wives of conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James Baker. When she ascended to the Senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's "most elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his downfall, Virginia's notoriously racist Senator George Allen. This has not been a casual connection for Clinton. She has written of Doug Coe, The Family's publicity-averse leader, that he is "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."

Furthermore, The Family takes credit for some of Clinton's rightward legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing "religious freedom" in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics...

....Sharlet generously attributes Clinton's involvement to the under-appreciated depth of her religiosity, but he himself struggles to define The Family's theological underpinnings. The Family avoids the word Christian but worships Jesus, though not the Jesus who promised the earth to the "meek." They believe that, in mass societies, it's only the elites who matter, the political leaders who can build God's "dominion" on earth. Insofar as The Family has a consistent philosophy, it's all about power--cultivating it, building it and networking it together into ever-stronger units, or "cells." "We work with power where we can," Doug Coe has said, and "build new power where we can't."

Obama has given a beautiful speech on race and his affiliation with the Trinity United Church of Christ. Now it's up to Clinton to explain--or, better yet, renounce--her long-standing connection with the fascist-leaning Family.

The original Mother Jones article is a must read as it explores the cultish aspects of this organization in great detail, along with more about how it has shaped Hillary's politics to a much greater level than most Democratic primary voters would find comfortable.

A full-length book about The Fellowship and its influence on powerful lawmakers is due out in May - The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power - HarperCollins.

Here's the deal

2008-03-19T22:38:00.000-07:00

Given the media coverage of the race for the Democratic nomination since the March 4 primaries, you'd think Obama was in real trouble and the race was neck-and-neck. Not true. According to RealClearPolitics, Obama has a 168 delegate lead over Hillary (133 lead with pledged delegates). Even Hillary's superdelegate lead has significantly diminished over the last couple months, with her now holding only a 35 delegate advantage in that category.

With plans for Michigan and Florida re-votes nearly dead, there's almost no way for Hillary to overtake Obama in the delegate count, nor in the popular vote. The only way she can win is for Obama to withdraw because of a scandal on the order of the Spitzer debacle, or for a mass of superdelegates to take the nomination away from Obama and give it to Hillary in a highly divisive, anti-democratic event that would virtually destroy the party's chances of regaining the White House in November.

So, soon, maybe as soon as the Pennsylvania primary has passed (especially if that vote is closer than expected), it will be time for Al Gore and/or Nancy Pelosi to step forward and broker a deal to allow Hillary to drop out and unify the party in time to win in November.

Here's the kind of deal that not only clears the path for Obama to get the nomination, but also gives Hillary a big consolation prize. And, no, I'm not talking about an Obama/Hillary ticket.

First, Harry Reid agrees to step down as Senate Majority Leader, with the Senate D caucus assuring Hillary she will be able to run for the position in December with no opposition. I'm not the first person to suggest that Hillary would be the most effective Majority Leader since LBJ. If we've learned anything about Hillary in this campaign it's that she' s a policy wonk extraordinaire and tactically brilliant. Plus, she has a stature within the party and the country not seen with any past Majority Leader. Her weakness as a communicator and the antipathy she engenders among large percentages of the electorate simply don't matter for a Majority Leader.

By early June at the latest, Hillary and Obama stand up before the press together, with Gore, Reid, Pelosi and Bill Clinton behind them, to announce Hillary's withdrawal from the race. She announces that she is moving aside in the interest of party unity and because she believes that after a hard fought race Obama has won the nomination fair and square. She will ask her pledged delegates to support Obama. Harry Reid will then announce his resignation from the Majority Leader role at the end of this Congress and the Senate Democrats will support Hillary as the new leader. Hillary will explain the importance of this role and why she is especially well suited for the position, again citing the strength of a unified party. Bill and Al will together offer their blessing. Obama will then close the event with a short speech about bringing American together. Hillary and Pelosi will be sure to give the press a good opportunity to get photos of them standing together as the next co-leaders of the legislative branch.

Two weeks later, Obama announces his VP choice (my favorite is Wesley Clark, a Hillary supporter), again with those Hillary and those other unified party leaders behind him.

Finally, Hillary gets to take a few weeks off, but by convention time, she and Bill are campaigning visibly and passionately for Obama and against McCain.

Obama Speech on Race and America: "A More Perfect Union"

2008-03-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

A simple explanation of why you'll soon be able to buy your own Wall St. investment bank

2008-03-17T22:24:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Golob over at the Slog has put together a great stick-figure primer to explain the sub-prime mortgage crisis, why it's now melting down world financial markets and why more investment banks are headed for the ignoble fate of Bear Stearns.

Golob also makes the argument this crisis is as least partly the Clinton administration's fault for its support of late 90's deregulation of the banking industry:

As pleasant as it would be to lay the current financial crisis entirely at Bush’s feet, a significant amount of the blame should go to Rubin and Clinton. Signing the (now clearly disastrous) Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in November of 1999—dismantling most of the Depression-era protections—was a classic bit of Clintonian triangularization, a gigantic sop to Wall street firms at the expense of Bill’s base of liberal and working class supporters. What could they do? Who could the people hurt by this act vote for? Nader? Let the checks from the financial services industry roll in!

Some might call this experience that matters.

How Obama wins

2008-03-06T16:00:00.000-08:00

The sometimes annoying Slate web magazine has an incisive piece by John Dickerson about Hillary's "too little, too late" victories in the Ohio and Texas primaries. The gist of the piece is that the race has now become a contest of numbers vs. narrative. Obama is winning by the numbers, and now Clinton has regained momentum on the narrative. More likely than not Obama will win the nomination because of his continued advantage on the numbers. But that's not a very satisfying kind of victory, and it's the kind of victory that could alienate a healthy percentage of Hillary supporters, allowing McCain to win in November.

So, how does Obama take the momentum back from Clinton and win the nomination on both narrative and numbers? Here's how:

Go on the attack. As Dickerson says, Democrats love a fighter. For a long time it worked for Obama to stand above the fray, but now he needs to get his hands dirty and show that he won't be afraid to take on McCain in the general. What is Hillary trying to hide in those tax returns? Where did they get that $5 million to loan the campaign? Why not release her scheduling books from the Clinton White House? What hearings has she failed to hold? What about her wink wink, nudge nudge to the Canadians on Nafta? And it's time to more directly confront Hillary on the Iraq war vote for what it was - a political calculation intended to preserve her ability to eventually run for president (just about everyone in Congress with political ambitions for higher office was doing it at the time - but a lot of Democratic officeholders weren't biting).

Win Wyoming and Mississippi decisively. He's well positioned to do it, but should not by any means take these states for granted. Loss of momentum may make these states, especially Wyoming a bit closer, but decisive wins will probably restore most of the net delegate loss from March 4 and restore a lot of Obama's momentum going into PA.

Keep up the record fundraising. This shouldn't be too hard to do, but now Hillary has a base of small donors too. Obama needs to keep up the pace and make sure he dominates paid media opportunities in PA. This, by itself, is not that important as Hillary, whom Obama outspent 2:1, showed in TX and OH. However, Obama cannot let Hillary get any advantage in PA, and the extra money could allow him to get a lot more creative with micro-targeted outreach to bring more less frequent young voters to the polls.

Double the Ground Game in Pennsylvania. Obama's campaign has an amazing field operation. Now that it's all about PA, Obama can bring almost all of his field capacity to that state, but this time with a deeper reach beyond the big cities and college towns to the suburbs and small regional centers that Hillary organized in Ohio.

Put the Nafta/Canadian consul and Reszko negative buzz to rest once and for all. The Canadian Consul memo will decrease in importance over time anyway, but Obama needs to put some responsibility on the media to not let Hillary get away with taking one passing statement out of context from the rest of the memo, which in its entirety actually makes Obama look smart and committed to real change on the trade agreement. The Rezko thing is a bit harder to deal with because it's out of his control. He should probably directly confront it in the Pennsylvania debate, repeat his mea culpa about the boneheaded move of letting this guy help him buy his house and then put it in context with the very true statement that he is not in any way tied to the issues for which Rezko is on trial. But, Obama needs to pro-actively make it a non-issue before Hillary can further exploit it.

Confront the Barack "Hussein" Obama is a secret Muslim agent crap in the most direct way possible. Every aspect of this rumor-mongering is vile and reprehensible, but Obama does have to directly confront the fact that he's got an Islamic middle name shared by a few Islamic bad guys (along with about half of the male Muslim world), had a Muslim dad, went to a school in Indonesia where he was exposed to some Islamic history and religion (in the same way that French school kids are exposed to Catholic history and religion) because so many Americans, even Democratic primary voters, are convinced that Muslim = terrorist. Obama can actually turn this in his favor by talking about how his exposure and family history gives him some insight and credibility with peaceful Muslim world leaders, which will allow him to work out a Middle East peace agreement and deal with other potential Muslim hot spots like Kosovo and Indonesia.

Learn to love the press. This is where Obama could learn something from McCain. Reporters are generally pretty nice, interesting people. Sure, spending more time with the press corps at the back of the plane, making himself available for daily on-the-record press briefings and getting to know the press that follows you around on a personal level is risky. It makes it more difficult to control your message and makes you more vulnerable to mistakes that could come back to haunt you. But, the risks will be worth the rewards as he gets more coverage and better coverage at this critical stage of the campaign. After all, reporters have feelings too.

Schedule time now for a Saturday Night Live cameo, the Daily Show, Letterman, etc., etc. in the week before the PA primary. These outlets owe Obama. They gave time and favorable treatment to Hillary going into the March 4 primaries, now it's his turn for the Pennsylvania primary on April 22. They'll all go easy on him (except maybe SNL - is Lorne Michaels "totally in the tank" for Hillary?) and this is part of the necessary strategy for a still largely unknown figure to familiarize himself with average voters.

Take up residence in Pennsylvania and talk to every voter possible. Watching Obama's schedule for a few weeks now, it seems that his pattern is to do a few big rallies in each of the big metropolitan areas in each state and not do a lot more in terms of direct voter contact. The big urban rallies are important because they draw a lot of local press, generate volunteers and general excitement around the campaign, but this is not going to be enough in PA. Obama pretty much needs to start living in PA and keep up an incessant schedule of big urban rallies, more intimate town halls, pressing the flesh events at factories and shipyards, and smaller rallies in medium sized college towns and smaller cities deep in Hillary territory. The campaign so far shows that the more people get to know Obama, the more intense his support grows. He needs to be campaigning the way Hillary was campaigning the last couple weeks - three, four, even five events a day that get him in direct contact with voters.

Make a couple of those "important" policy speeches at "important" universities. Ok, so the rub on Obama (thanks to Hillary) is that he's all talk, no substance. That's bullshit. One of the reasons that higher educated Democrats love him so much is because he's really fucking smart and he's got plenty of well-thought out policy positions on just about every issue out there. But, Obama needs to help more casual Democratic voters understand that at this stage of the campaign. So, he needs to go to the University of Pennsylvania and present his economic recovery and jobs program to the local press with lots of smart-looking professors standing behind them. And, then he needs to do the same thing at Penn State, with generals and foreign policy wonks standing behind him as he presents his national security plan to the press. Include some really creative stuff in both plans to get all the pundits talking about how brilliant he is.

Get Michelle Obama more visibly out on the campaign trail. Michelle's gotten a lot of flak for her mis-step about being proud of the US for the first time, but she is very much an underutilized asset for this campaign. In her smaller, more intimate events she's shown a remarkable gift for connecting with women voters. As the main breadwinner for her family, juggling work and kids with the help of her mom, she can connect with beleaguered middle and working class moms who share that struggle. And because she herself rose from a lower-middle class background she can connect with blue collar working women better than either Hillary or Barack.

Duplicate the formula that allowed Obama to win Catholics, blue-collar voters and women in Wisconsin. I don't know what made the difference myself, it may have just been about momentum. But Obama unlocked a secret to winning votes with these demographics that he needs to reproduce in PA. Get your pollsters to figure it out and mimic it in PA. Starting now.

Win Pennsylvania. Most of these items lead up to how he can win in PA. It's the only big state left. After WY and MS, it's the only contest over the next 6 weeks. If he wins PA, Obama will own both the numbers and the narrative, and Hillary will drop out. If Hillary wins PA, especially if by more than 5 points- brace yourselves for the convention bloodbath.

Finally, prepare for re-do of some kind in Florida and Michigan. This is not worth sinking a lot of resources into yet, but if these two states do reschedule a caucus or something, Obama will need to win at least one of these too. A win in PA will help (or maybe even stave off the need for a re-do), but he needs to be ready on day 1 to launch aggressive campaigns in each of these states.

Welcome to my Blog

2008-03-06T15:24:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my new blog, Early & Often! The name comes from an e-mail voter guide I've been writing off and on for probably 10 years now. And, while I won't write exclusively about politics on this blog, I'm probably going to write a lot about politics, so I thought it was an appropriate name.

I've been thinking about starting a blog since, well since pretty much the beginning of blogs. I've resisted, however, because of the time commitment and because a lot of blogs are pretty boring. Plus, everyone else has a blog. So why would anyone read mine? Well, I do feel like I've got something to say and, since, the blog will rarely, if ever, be about me, hopefully you'll find something in it occasionally interesting. If so, let me know in the comments section. If not, well go ahead and tell me that too, in the comments section.