Marginal Utility

by Ken Houghton

Dan from Madison at Chicago Boyz lays out the reality I've suspected for a while, in just a few sentences:

I think that something more sinister is up though. I believe that tons of Republicans crossed over and voted for Obama. Being an open primary there really is no way to tell how many did cross over, but the total lack of interest in a pretty much already decided Republican contest had to contribute to many conservatives and other HRC haters to cast votes for Obama. I am guessing that this is happening all across the country as well. The Dems may very well win this fall, but I believe they are in for a tougher fight than they may have bargained for.

He then confirms something I've long suspected about Obama's primary support:

Since I hate the woman from Hades so much I decided to vote for Obama, to do my part to keep her out of the White House.

I would hardly suggest that Dan is not a "rational voter." But it's difficult not to notice that his vote gets counted as much as Tom's in deciding "margin of victory—and, hence, apportionment of delegates.

Which is the rules as they are, which I'm told we have to follow, at least unless they pertain to superdelegates.

And then throws us a scary idea to those of us who have been watching his Trusted Advisors (Sunstein, Goolsbee, etc.):

Not that he will be much better, but I do think that he will have to turn drastically to the center during the general campaign - if he is the winner of the D primary.

Note: Dan from Madison notes that he lives in Dane County, so he's part of that 67-31 split, as well as the overall 75-25 D-R voting in the state.

Labels: 2008, Hillary Clinton, ObamaNation, Politics

by Tom Bozzo

The Rude One, on Mark Penn:

It's sad, really, how badly Penn wants to be Karl Rove when he's just, at the end of the day, like every cartoon villain who thinks he can control dark forces that will make him blow up or become a dessicated corpse...

And so it's even sadder that Hillary Clinton invested so much of her presidential ambitions in this wannabe intellectual... who says smart sounding things like calling groups of people shit like "Impressionable Elites" and "Permissive Parents," spouting vaguely coherent pop sociology like, "Numbers help you land on something that is incontrovertibly true." Well, that is until they don't.

The reason that Barack Obama has a movement behind him is that he went for a unifying movement. Clinton, listening to Penn, who saw how Rove eked out "wins" through targeting small, specific groups, is now in the position of trying to string together the Caffeine Crazies and the Unisexuals and the Working Retired into a crazy patchwork of a majority while creating the illusion of a movement.

And if that isn't enough, let's just say: Terry McAuliffe! And, unlike 19-year-old volunteers, these are Genuine Insiders paid lots of HRC's donors' money for this Quality Strategery.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, Politics

by Ken Houghton

Yes, it's another Clinton/Obama post. Feel free to skip, or wait for Tom's comment and read from there to here.

(On the plus side, Tom's attempt at pre-emption has saved me from having to discuss Mark Penn, about whom the less said the better, unless you are Lee Papa, which none of [the rest of] us is. Even if Papa does seem to share the ObamaNation double-standard that Their Man can go on Faux News every day, but HRC agreeing to debate him on there is Evil Calculated Pimping.)

Hilzoy continues the Cult* of Obama with a slagging of the HRC campaign almost worthy of Mr. Papa if he were taking his meds. And I blame Brad DeLong: partially because she does.

We learn, for instance, that "Hillary Clinton's seven years in the Senate have been pretty undistinguished." (Tom, for instance, knows better.) Of course, in fairness, Hilzoy disagrees with Tom about Terry McAuliffe's value: "Various Clinton insiders, including (according to Greene) Terry McAuliffe and Maggie Williams -- tried to get [Patty Solis Doyle] fired [after 2006]."**

When Hilzoy adds commentary, it is strange:

[T]he NYT story Greene quotes says that the campaign spent "$27,000 for valet parking, paid as much as $800 in a single month in credit card interest and — above all — paid tens of thousands of dollars a month to an assortment of consultants and aides."

$27,000 in valet parking, in a state that includes NYC, which was visited multiple times, in multiple locations, by multiple cars holding multiple people over multiple months? The only thing amazing about that is that it the number was so low.

Consultants? For someone doing a lot of internal polling, and probably preparing for a national run and higher office? I know Hilzoy and I do everything out of the goodness of our hearts, but the Mark Penns and Mark Kleimans get paid. (Unfortunately or not, they get paid win or lose. As Toby Ziegler says in the first episode of the second season of The West Wing (roughly) "I"m a political consultant." "How many races have you won." "None."

In fairness, the $800 in interest charges looks suspicious. The rest looks like the two make-up sessions for which John Edwards's campaign paid $400 ($200 each, which NYCites will assure you is a bargain) that have been miraculously transformed into "haircuts."

Then there is the evil of HRC herself. HIlzoy quotes Josh Greene—"[A]bove all, Clinton prizes loyalty and discipline, and Solis Doyle demonstrated both traits"—as if this were unique. (See Todd Purdum's Vanity Fair piece on Obama, for instance. Or find me any politician on the national stage who doesn't prize loyalty and discipline above all.***)

Hilzoy then invokes Brad DeLong's 2003 piec—the one I discussed extensively here,; the one that self-described "progressive" HRC haters (and, now, Obama supporters) continually invoke as "proof" of her evil. (In this, they are rather similar to the people who take Obama's admission of cocaine use in his younger days as defining his abilities and accomplishments.) The one that, until October of 2007, was missing its key paragraph (even if the 'graf was, allegedly, "hoisted from the archives"):

t is hard to tell how much power Hillary Rodham Clinton had. Certainly she did not effectively manage the process. But I did see Ira Magaziner in action. And it seems to me that the process was impossible to manage as long as Ira Magaziner was involved, and perhaps she did not have the power to fire him.

She did, presumably, have the power to fire Sollis Doyle, and has the power to fire Mark Penn, and much of Hilzoy's post is devoted to "she didn't do it, so she's a Bad Leader" ranting.****

After quoting the two articles at length, Hilzoy coming to rather a interesting conclusion:

[DeLong] later decided that he had been unfair: according to "her people", "she has done an awful lot more over the past fifteen years, and done almost all of it very successfully."

The sarcasm quotes around "her people" are, I hasten to note, not Brad DeLong's, and my previous, abundant respect for Hilzoy declines because of them. It is only the next sentence that causes that respect to fall off the cliff:

I have never really known what that "awful lot more" was, so I've never felt competent to judge what Hillary Clinton's people say.

Yes, this is the same woman who said (before inserting some long quotes from two others) that "Hillary Clinton's seven years in the Senate have been pretty undistinguished."

Quoting my fellow sufferer of Hansen's Disease:

I have read and heard plenty of good arguments making the case that Hillary Clinton will not be an ideal or even a good President. I've heard and read plenty of good arguments that she won't be the best candidate.

I have yet to read or hear a good argument making the case that Obama will be an ideal or a good President or even a better one than Clinton.

Mostly I've heard and read are arguments based entirely on the hope that he will be any or all of those things.

And I've heard and read a lot arguments based entirely on the fear of what the Presidential campaign will be like if Clinton's the nominee.

The end of the first, and the last, appears to be near the center of Patrick's analysis that left him "on balance I’m impressed. Not transported. Not uncritical. But impressed." with Obama. (The posting of Elise Matthesen's Straw Man, is presumably another story, one only compounded by Patrick's .*****)

Indeed, the closest thing we had to why Obama will make a good President was Hilzoy's post (cited with distinction by Patrick, Tom, and amanda as the first comment to Lance's post.) As Lance notes, "it basically makes a case I never doubted, that Obama has been one of the good guys." (My own doubts are public knowledge, and based on the public comments and publications of his circle of advisors, public [David Cutler, Cass Sunstein] and private [e.g., the "strong women" cited in Purdum's article]—but those are doubts that Obama is more a progressive Democrat than HRC, not that he'll do less harm than the Republican nominee.)

But Hilzoy's "Actually, I think we can" now appears to be selective advocacy presented as reasoned analysis.

I won't be crying that HRC (and especially Mark Penn) got out-triangulated. But it would be nice if people who claim to be Obama supporters were really more than HIllary bashers. (Tom, as noted before, does not fall into the latter category. I had hoped—apparently erroneously—that he was not alone in that.)

*Yes, Patrick, I'm calling it that; since your source asks why a man who continually invokes his religious beliefs is tagg[ed] with the term messiah,, I rest the case and await being pilloried)

**Hilzoy, among others, clearly agrees that it would have been better if HRC had followed that advice. But then I suppose she would have had to find something else about which to write.

***Barrack Obama, after all, is married to Michelle, who declared that she "might" support HRC if her husband loses the nomination, and then offered the bromide that "everyone in this party is going to work hard for whoever the nominee is."
****For the record, I'll go with DeLong and Ezra Klein on this one:

[T]he Clinton team has run a pretty good campaign. [B]etter, indeed, than what I thought they'd run. It may or may not prove to be enough, and looking back, there will surely be identifiable mistakes and botched opportunities.

which one can say of any campaign, even Obama's. Not that I would, since Lance and I already may be the only lepers left in the colony.

*****I assume it is clear that no one would accuse me of considering Obama a "starry-eyed idealist." If it isn't, see here. Warning: it's long.

Labels: 2008, Brad DeLong, Hillary Clinton, Mannion, ObamaNation, Politics

by Tom Bozzo

As reported by Judith Davidoff of the Cap Times, Chelsea Clinton does a good job explaining why I wouldn't be upset if HRC manages to pull her campaign out of its current doldrums.

Reference #1.

Reference #2.

Reference #3.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, Politics

by Ken Houghton

Tom's defense of Obama got me thinking about Brad DeLong and Hillary Clinton. The result is not pretty.

June 2003:

My two cents' worth--and I think it is the two cents' worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994--is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn't smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.

June, 2007, quoting without comment or update from a Harvard Crimson article on himself and Andrei Shleifer:

[DeLong] also played a role in the unsuccessful effort at creating universal health care, laying much of the blame for the legislation’s demise at the feet of then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, who had led the effort. In one of the most famous posts on his blog, DeLong wrote that, based on his experience working with Clinton, “there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.” He adds that she “had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts” to lead the effort.

In October of 2007, a new paragraph is miraculously inserted into what was previously this piece:

It is hard to tell how much power Hillary Rodham Clinton had. Certainly she did not effectively manage the process. But I did see Ira Magaziner in action. And it seems to me that the process was impossible to manage as long as Ira Magaziner was involved, and perhaps she did not have the power to fire him.

February, 2008 (edited to be Hillary-specific; nice comments about Barack Obama go without saying):

The arguments against Hilary Rodham Clinton are:

1. Her performance running Clinton-era health care reform in 1993 and 1994 gives no confidence in her ability to run the large organization that is the U.S. government.

The response...is by this point very convincing: [she has] demonstrated an ability to run an excellent political campaign. Running a successful presidential political campaign is not the same thing as governing a country, but [she has] demonstrated substantial administrative competence over the past two years...the Hilary Rodham Clinton who made such an administrative mess of health reform in 1993-1994 could not have run the campaign she has run over the past two years. Thus I am now confident that [she] has a reasonable shot of being in the top 20% of American presidents.

Anyone wonder why that first bullet is still prominent?

The thing is, it's not as if DeLong doesn't speak with the Patricks and Tboggs and others who know that Hillary Rodham Clinton has been a United States Senator from New York for seven years, not just one, and was both elected in 2000 (when she ran an intense campaign, learned the issues that affect people in New York state, and planned accordingly) and then re-elected by a wider margin after serving her constituents's needs from 2001-2006.

Apparently, until this week, though, he forgot that it's not 1994 any more.

Labels: 2008, Brad DeLong, Hillary Clinton, Meme-A-Riffic, Politics

by Ken Houghton

UPDATE II: Well, that didn't last long.

If I were an Active Republican (instead of one spurned by the Ancestral Party's strange delusion that my bedroom is its business), I might look at the data from Iowa and the anecdotal evidence from New Hampshire and assume that the Republican Party was making an all-out effort to keep Hillary Clinton from gaining the Democratic nomination.

Update: Glenn Greenwald notes possible Unintended Consequences of the Early Obama-nation. And I couldn't be happier.

Labels: 2008, Hillary Clinton, Politics

by Ken Houghton

One of the things we expect of our politicians is that they learn from mistakes. Many months ago, Brad DeLong posted about an encounter with Hillary R. Clinton and painted her in a seriously unflattering light—without bothering to mention that, high-profile as it was, it was Mrs. Clinton's first encounter with Washington politics.

Saturday, he corrects the record:

I am, I think, not fair to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her people say that if all she had done was 1993-1994 Health Care Reform, it might be fair to argue that she would be "abysmal." But she has done an awful lot more over the past fifteen years, and done almost all of it very successfully. It's the disaster of 1993-1994 that is the anomaly and the outlier, they say--and they have a point. She definitely has the political smarts and (on almost all issues) enough of a grasp of policy substance to distinguish truth-tellers from liars, which is the most important presidential qualification (one which George Bush definitely lacks, and the Republican candidates appear to lack). Managerial expertise is harder to gauge: there's nothing else quite like managing the Executive Branch.

And those most responsible for the current gap between what our health care system is and what it ought to be do not include Hillary Rodham Clinton. The real villains in 1993-1994 had names like Robert Dole, The HIAA, Newt Gingrich, and so forth.

UPDATE: In looking for Dr.DeLong's original posting, I found this one from May in which he made a similar point:

I am told that Hillary Rodham Clinton rejects Jonathan Cohn's claim that she "was right the first time" and stands by her judgment that the process and the plan were flawed"... we made a lot of mistakes." I think that she is right—and that ability to learn is one of the many things that makes her an attractivce politician today—certainly infinitely more attractive than any of the Republicans on offer.

Again, credit where due, and I can only blame my lack of reading anything not directly related to some other subjects for not having seen this piece before.

Labels: Brad DeLong, Health Care, Hillary Clinton, policy wonk, Politics

by Ken Houghton

Via Brad DeLong, Ezra Klein in the Los Angeles Times indirectly explains one reason why people like Hillary. Doing some selective but not inaccurate editing:

It wasn't so long ago that President Clinton's proposed reforms suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of moneyed interests and Republican opportunists.

The initiative was placed under the control of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ira Magaziner. Neither had the political experience to safely shepherd a reform of this magnitude.

It's worth saying here that although the U.S. has a very inefficient healthcare system when evaluated with traditional metrics such as the health outcomes of the populace or the costs of care, it is unquestionably the finest in the world at generating profits. There's a lot of money sloshing around, and quite a bit of profit to protect.

So the face of Health Care Reform was basically Hillary Clinton. And she lost to the "alternative," Managed Care:

Today, of course, it's clear that managed care has failed. After cost growth was effectively arrested in the mid-1990s, patients rebelled against being managed, and insurers decided that passing on the costs of unlimited care was less trouble than holding them down. Moreover, the same anxieties over spending growth and the precariousness of coverage that first burst onto the scene during the 1991-92 recession are now constant companions, even in periods of economic expansion. Since 2000, health premiums have shot up by 87%. Wages, of course, have not followed.

That may be why a recent New York Times/CBS poll found that 90% of Americans said they thought that the healthcare system needed either "fundamental changes" or to be "completely rebuilt." The last time the poll recorded such desire for reform was in January 1994. Indeed, according to the poll, 62% report themselves willing to pay higher taxes for universal coverage.

So what we have, in the collective memory, is an initiative led by Hillary that looks a lot better than what we have now.

In short, it appears that Hillary was ahead of her time.

People may not have long memories about policy details, but they remember the Grand Ideas. And they especially remember them when the alternative has been as dystopic as the current system.

Labels: Health Care, Hillary Clinton, policy wonk

by Ken Houghton

I'm in the midst of a more detailed response to Lance's post here, which was inspired by Garance Franke-Ruta's abomination at TAPPED.

It may take another day. In blog-years, that's an eon or three.

Fortunately, I (as would any sane blogger) read Eat Our Brains on a regular basis. So while Lance waits for more details, I'm going to send him (and all of you, everyone) over to read Caroline Spector's post on Hillary R. Clinton.

(Go now. No need to come back to me.)

Just in case you're still here, let's be clear. Caroline's got political bona fides I don't; she contributes (or at least contributed) to Democratic Underground. She's in the same age demographic as Franke-Ruta's Gallup Poll (18-49). And she's female. So when she says to Hillary:

You’ve got an image problem that no amount of nifty TV ads is going to cure. And sadly, the first hit to your image is one you inflicted yourself.

She lays on details—including ones I had forgotten. And, after the inevitable discussion of The Man from Hope, Caroline continues:

That’s just the tip of the personality problem. Despite the fact that you’re funny, and have managed to raise a lovely daughter who has, you know, manners, there are people who just find you grating. Sadly, you don’t have Bill’s easy charisma. And it doesn’t help that over the years you’ve stopped being a person to many people and are now an icon for everything horrible they can think of.

The other problem is your record on the War in Iraq. You voted for the resolution to allow Bush the power to invade, and you haven’t bitten the bullet and admitted it was a huge fucking mistake.

The next few paragraphs are even better, and I want everyone to CLICK THROUGH THE LINK, but I'll quote the end as well

I’m sorry, but it had to be said. By all means, run for office. But when things go terribly wrong, don’t say you weren’t warned.

because throughout, I'm quoting a member of that demographic—18-49, Democratic, female, progressive—that Garance Franke-Ruta thinks claims* is Hillary's base.

So all that's left to me are numbers, Lance. We'll get to them tomorrow by Wednesday,** I hope.

*Edited for clarity. As Scott notes, "Garance hasn't made [the case for Hillary] either." [italics his]

**Edited for accuracy

Labels: 2008, Eat Our Brains, gender bias, Hillary Clinton

by Ken Houghton

Some few obsessives We all remember the scene: candidate Jed Bartlet answering a question in NH about why he voted—multiple times—against a bill to support dairy farmers.

He says, roughly, "Yep, I really Rogered you on that one. Wouldn't blame you if you don't vote for me, but ONE in FIVE children in the United States can't afford to eat, and I won't do anything to make it more difficult for them." (I can't find the video on YouTube/Google Video; it's from this two-part episode.)

It's that moment that convinces Josh to join the campaign. A Presidential candidate who stands up and says, "Don't vote for me if you want; here's why I did what I did."

Hillary Clinton understood half of that, with a comment that earned her a Shakespeare's Sister Quote of the Day post.

She just didn't bother to say why she did what she did; there is no statement of principle, no indication of a conscious decision-making process.

"I weighed the choices, and couldn't do what you wanted because this is more important" is a decision, an answer. "I was fooled; if you don't like it, don't vote for me" is an invitation to your own political beheading.

Labels: 2008, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Politics