Marginal Utility

by Tom Bozzo

Via Jed Report.

Labels: Joe Biden, ObamaNation

by Ken Houghton

Via Bitch (whose site really needs an RSS feed), an Obama bumper sticker that is realistic and positive.

Buy it here; contributions go to Tom's favorite candidate.

Labels: ObamaNation

by Ken Houghton

(The Other Jim[my]) Webb? Nunn?

I've said consistently that the only VP candidate who will cause my absentee ballot to be lost is Sibelius, but I had assumed that the Democratic leadership was sane. (All right, SonOfaBirch could make me lose the ballot, too, but that's because at that point I would assume their goal was to lose as many states as possible.)

When the Republicans had an of-age deserter as their candidate, they paired him with—an of-age evader.

Why would anyone pretend that a younger-than-the-draft candidate needs a 70-year-old former Coast Guard Reservist to shore up his bona fides against a 72-year-old who advocates for perpetual war?

Labels: 2008, ObamaNation

by Ken Houghton

Dr. Black has a Deep Thought to make his television work better.

Meanwhile, Mark Thoma makes an endorsement that should be obvious.

Labels: 2008, ObamaNation

by Ken Houghton

During all the "gas tax holiday" contretemps last week, I kept asking if Obama had any plan, other than to sit there and let Johnny Mac run as a "populist."

The two responses were "Well, Obama said that the cut enacted in the Illinois legislature, of which about 60% went to consumer, did nothing to help the consumer" and "He wants to stop putting oil into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve."

I leave explaining the first to The Mendacity-Finding Duo of Greg Mankiw and Brad DeLong.

For the second, however, we now see (via Some Assembly Required), we find that stopping putting oil in the SPR is expected to do even less than the gas tax cut.

Waiting patiently for Stephanopoulos to ask Obama about that. (At least his response probably won't have all the economists in the blogsphere whining.)

Labels: 2008, Brad DeLong, ObamaNation, Oil, Republicans

by Ken Houghton

If I believed the punditocracy (including most of the web-based supporters of ObamaNation, e.g., here and here* UPDATE: Or here, with a hat tip to Mark Thoma), the "battle" between Their Man and HRC is much more brutal than anything the Republicans will throw at him, and will only damage his support among the Democrats who, since they still have a choice, are voting for her and may not turn up in the general election.* * Or something like that.

So it's nice to see that all the Macro factors (2006 being historic, a large number of retiring Republicans, Presidential popularity in the Nixon-just-be-resignation range) also translate, as Stan Collender details at Capital Gains and Games:

[S]pecial elections are typically dominated by the party in power. The incumbent party can usually, and easily, get its supporters to the polls. Combined with the almost always low-turnout in a special, that gives the incumbent party a huge and frequently insurmoutable advantage.

So what can you say when an insurmoutable advantage turns out not to be enough? What does it mean when the same thing has now happened in Illinois and Louisiana, two very different states in two exceptionally different parts of the country?

Maybe it means that all of those "benefit of the doubt, and besides we're at war" votes in 2004 have come to doubt? Maybe it means four more years of real-wage-losses and more deaths (even without the benefit of seeing the coffins) have taken their toll, and "you can't fool all of the people all of the time" is a truism because it's true.

Or maybe it's that running the same play every time gets as boring to MOR and socially-conservative voters as it is to those being tarred. Collender:

[T]he GOP campaign strategy in Louisiana was to tie the Democratic candidate to Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and paint the local candidiate as too liberal for the district. If using something as tried and true as the "liberal" label doesn't work, what does that say about what will be effective in November?

Maybe even Harry Reid could win if he were running as a Democrat this year.

*Though "the Sherman's March to the Democratic nomination for President" is a classic, if precious, phrase.

**Many of them appear to expect Obama's supporters not to turn up in the general election if HRC is nominated. Is this really an indication of their candidate's strength?***

***There might be an argument that it would be, but it seems rather specious without details of what those voters will do that is different from what they did, say, in 2004.

Labels: 2008, ObamaNation, Republican Party

by Tom Bozzo

That Obama's "bitter" remark is substantively wrong has evidently reached a height of liberal-opinion fashion. [*] I even agree that the partisan shift of the former Confederacy explains much of the Republican ascendancy. But would someone please then explain to me the ascendancy of God, guns, and gays politics? What do Karl Rove and minions not know that they think they know? Or, if it's just a new encoding of the "southern strategy"'s appeal to southern racism, why is it needed (or more effective)?


[*] I'd say "the," but Krugman's pronouncements are not so infallible when he's on the Clinton-v.-Obama beat.

Labels: ObamaNation, Politics

by Ken Houghton

UPDATE: I see Tom embedded the video. (It really was a year or two in blogsphere time.) So I'm just going to repeat his link to the text here.)

So, several hours later (probably a year or two in blogsphere time), I finally find the actual text of the speech described below. And the "not only wrong but divisive" come very early in a very long speech* that continues as:

1. Obama makes clear his long-term relationship with Rev. Wright**:
   

   In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:
   
   "People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."
   
   That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
   
   And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

   
   
2. He follows immediately by affirming his relationship with the Reverend
   

   I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
   
   These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

   
   
3. He gives the speech I was hoping for, and that was only hinted at in the NYT article:
   

   But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
   
   The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American....
   
   [W]e do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
   
   Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.
   
   Legalized discrimination...meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.
   
   A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

   
   
4. And puts it into a context:
   

   What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
   
   But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations....Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.

   
   
5. Where I might wish he had cited white examples—G-d knows there are enough of them—he stays the course of discussing Black churches:
   

   And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.*** That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
   
   In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community.

The rest is a run-of-the-mill speech, with a large dosage of "a pox on both houses" and closing with the Obligatory Anecdote. But it was in its essence the same speech he gave on the 14th, not a repudiation of the man who has been central to his life for those twenty years.

*William Jefferson Clinton haters: if and when this man is inaugurated, go back to expecting 90+ minute States of the Union, as if that were a bad thing.
**Note to Tom: this is how I "professed to know" their relationship
***Most of the extant research shows, in fact, that whites go to Church for social networking reasons, while black church attendees are there to worship: different reasons lead to different structures.

Labels: 2008, ObamaNation, Politics, Religion

by Tom Bozzo

'Cause David Plouffe told me to show you.




Text here.

Labels: ObamaNation

by Ken Houghton

UPDATE II: This post is superseded, to a large extent, by this one.

UPDATE: d at LG&M notes that it has begun.

After twenty years of attendance:

For nearly a week, Mr. Obama has struggled to distance himself from a series of controversial statements by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who characterized the United States as fundamentally racist and the government as corrupt and murderous. Mr. Obama concluded over the weekend that he had failed to resolve the questions, aides said, and told advisers he wanted to address the firestorm in a speech.

In his address here, delivered in an auditorium to an audience of about 200 elected officials and members of the clergy, Mr. Obama disavowed the remarks by Mr. Wright as “not only wrong, but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity.” But he did not wholly distance himself from his pastor or the church, Trinity United Church of Christ, on Chicago’s South Side.

Credit where due, he spreads the blame around:

“For some, nagging questions remain,” Mr. Obama said. “Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely — just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.” [emphasis mine]

Up until now, the case could be reasonably made—and it has been—that Obama was being singled-out. That no one knows or cares who Hillary's or John McCain's pastor is, and that this was either equivalent to a witch hunt or trivial at best.

And the case was correct, not matter how much Bill Kristol and/or Newsmax wanted it not to be.

And how the original response was enough. (Also correct.)

Now, Obama has declared that he spent twenty years going to a church and a pastor when he "strongly disagree[d] with with many of his political views."

I suspect what comes next will be ugly; uglier than it would have been, even, if Obama had stood up and supported his friend of twenty years instead of declaring him "not only wrong, but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity."

Obama still has his faith:

“It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years,” Mr. Obama said. “Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy — particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.”

but he just cast its rock adrift. And, unlike Samantha Power (with due respects, such as they are, to Brad De Long and Mark Lynch), Wright is not likely to be able to return after the general election.

And we have gone from being able to say that Obama was being singled out to making it legitimate to ask, "Why didn't you find another church, one more in keeping with what you say your beliefs are?"

It's a question that should never have been fair game, but Obama himself has made it so.

Labels: 2008, ObamaNation, Politics

by Ken Houghton

Wonder why Obama's Republican support came early? Wolcott lays it out.

Go. Read.

Tom Says: What Wayne Barrett (in the Village Voice article linked by Wolcott) shows is much more a concentration of fire on the front-runner than any outpouring of support for Obama from public wingnuts. That is, Obama is shown at most being damned with faint praise in the context of wingnut attacks on HRC. What I've looked at but Barrett seemingly hasn't is the excess of Republican crossover voting over 2004, which strongly suggests that the outpouring of Republican support for HRC is a phenomenon of McCain's locking up the Republican nomination.

Labels: 2008, ObamaNation, Politics

by Ken Houghton

I was going to get around to discussing Samantha Power as one of Obama's advisors, in the tradition of Cass Sunstein.

Now I don't have to.

Tom Adds: Observing expert witnessing action, I've seen very smart academics who aren't very good witnesses because they have difficulty restraining some tendencies that tend to serve them well in their day-jobs but that may backfire in some situations. Among those are entertaining any hypothetical, thinking aloud, and failing to tailor their presentations for the audience.

Power's situation was actually simpler in that she plain forgot that she was talking to a reporter and not someone to whom she could safely vent frustration. This being the big leagues, that's a pretty basic error — especially for someone whose HKS faculty page solicits media inquiries. A corollary of Henry Farrell's post is that the advice of very smart people who might occasionally shoot their mouths off is not exactly a scarce resource for upper-tier Democratic politicians.

So, at least until HRC is revealed to be Kodos in a human costume, Power and the Obama campaign did the right thing in parting ways.

Labels: 2008, ObamaNation, Politics

by Ken Houghton

[Dissenting opinion below -- Ed.]

Via Brad De Long (but somehow now missing from his main page), Jon Alter continues his absurdist claim* with a roundelay of anti-democratic screed in support of his previous anti-democratic screed.

Meanwhile, Scott Lemieux beats his chest, rents his clothing and generally wails, while DeLong himself agrees with Alter, but at least does so with some style. So let's look at Scott's declaration:

So this thing will go on for another month, and the chances of a debilitating convention fight...that could seriously compromise the Democratic nominee in the general have increased.

Damn. "Debilitating" "Could seriously Compromise." Never have the glories of Gaming the System been stated so clearly as an asset.

Don't get me wrong. I have sung the praises of Rory Harper before, even after he posted That Unmentionable Video (first link above). But any pretense that Rory's vote being worth somewhere between slightly over 9% of a delegate and a whole delegate has anything to do with "the will of the people voting in the Democratic Primaries" is self-delusional. [The delegate in question is to the Texas state convention -- Ed.]

You may argue—I suspect Scott or Hilzoy, to name two, would—that Gaming the System for Delegates is The Idea.** If you want to do so, of course, and claim to argue consistently, you can't also declare that Bush v. Gore "should not be taken as articulating a legal principle at all."

Or, you can argue that, since the system is set up so that a majority of the voter-selected delegates does not guarantee one the nomination, that it is a perfectly reasonable strategy to campaign for broad-based voter support (which may well cost you some delegates, since votes and delegates are not apportioned proportionately; see Rory above) and to use that to convince the Superdelegates that they should support you.

But that, in the Alter/Scott world, is Evil.*** (Stephen Schlesinger appears to know better.)

Apparently, even though more delegates does not mean more voters (i.e., the delegate selection process is often anti-democratic), it would be anti-democratic for superdelegates to consider the actual will of the voters.

So let's rehash the guiding principles:

1. Disproportionate allocation of delegates is perfectly fine, even when it means that the loser of the popular vote ends up "winning." [WTF? --Ed.] [Example: Nevada's delegate split, or TX's - kh]
   
2. Superdelegates choosing to vote for the good of the party—especially in a case where the presumptive nominee has less general support but a plurality of the delegates due to Gaming the System—is mean, evil, and anti-democratic.
   
3. As previously discussed, voters who choose to vote when their primary was scheduled are not important, because they should have known there would be a demand for a "do over."
   
4. Brad De Long's disparagements of HRC (when, it now appears, that the dispute was at least in part over whether NAFTA or Health Care should be the Administration's First Priority) are definitive, while Todd Spivak's interactions with Obama (including details that suggest that his Legendary Effectiveness in passing the videotape-interrogations law is exaggerated) or Joe Wilson's noting that Obama's own words belie his "I always opposed the Second Iraq War" position are "hit jobs." [Update: h/t to The Smartest Woman I Know for the Spivak and dKos links]

Glad we got that straight. Later, Scott will explain (at LG&M) why spending the next four months having McCain and Ari Fleischer concentrating their attacks solely on Obama is preferable to a continued narrative that focuses on Democratic issues and Democratic candidates, and keeps people interested in the Democratic Convention as possibly more than just a coronation.****


Tom Begs to Differ:

1. Jonathan Alter's "Hillary's Math Problem" simply points out that, by virtue of having failed to land a knockout blow on Super Tuesday and subsequently losing a mess of primaries and caucuses, Hillary Clinton cannot win the remaining states by large enough margins to undig her hole with respect to the more-or-less democratically-selected delegates. If that's an "anti-democratic screed," then I don't know what is.

2. Insofar as Clinton's late break was, in part, the result of some negative campaigning, I'm with Scott Lemieux in not looking forward to what will emanate from Mark Penn's bottom in the next six weeks. I'd almost be willing to throw my support to Clinton if she'd only shitcan the lot of her incompetent campaign advisers.

3. A byproduct of point #1 is that, barring a spectacular and improbable Obama implosion, Clinton can win the nomination only by deploying the superdelegates (i.e., the least democratic element in the selection process) against the pledged delegates (the more democratic element).

4. The anomaly that the system can produce a nominee who won fewer aggregate votes but won more states at least mirrors an anomaly in the national election system; for the standpoint of November, winning big versus winning really big in New York and California is a less valuable skill than being a strong candidate in swing states. Clinton's Ohio performance is, really, the first sign that she has strength in the latter area.

5. Sure, some of the rules are stupid (see: DNC treatment of FL and MI), but they were preannounced. Not contesting a state under those circumstances is quite unlike the HRC campaign's failure to set up a geographically broader campaign in contestable states and therefore getting blown out. It goes without saying that certain Clinton campaign strategists have some words regarding open primaries in redish-to-red states now that two of them have saved their asses.


*He's not alone in this, of course, he's just "prominent" and "liberal."

**Or, alternately, that Mark Penn should have thought to do it.

***It appears to be so in Hilzoy-world as well, which is why I recently called her a member of the ABC camp. She claims otherwise, so I'm hoping someone will cite a post of hers that acknowledges that Superdelegates can and should make up their own minds.

****I'm assuming neither candidate is going to give his or her acceptance speech at 3:00 a.m., or fail to vet their VP selection. And that neither is going to enter a tank without appropriately-sized head gear being procured first.

Labels: 2008, Brad DeLong, Democracy, LGandM, ObamaNation, Politics

by Tom Bozzo

Madison-based ChicagoBoy Dan's conclusion that Obama should face a tougher challenge in the general election than he has in the swing-state primaries is just about in the "well, duh" category — at least unless (or until) the U.S.S. McCain gets capsized by the captain's blatant prevaricating and/or his crankiness makes the Kewl Kids of the press fall out of creepy-old-man love. However, one thing that ain't quite so, according to the available data, is that there was an unusual surge in crossover voting in this year's Wisconsin primary.

Using advanced research tools, I discovered that, according to CNN's exit polling, voters on the Democratic side of the 2008 primary ballot were 62% Democrats, 28% independents, and 9% Republicans. In 2004, the CNN exit poll estimated that the Democratic primary electorate was 62% Democrats, 29% independents, and 9% Republicans. (CNN's poll suggests 23% of the Republican primary voters were independents and 5% were Democrats; they didn't poll the uncontested 2004 primary.) So, with turnout up around 33% over 2004, there were proportional surges in all three groups. And per CNN, Obama did in fact carry the Democrats — and the exit poll result should be considered confirmed by Obama's wide margins in Very Liberal Madison and Pretty Liberal Dane County. Had the Democratic surge been pro-Hillary, she'd have won the state.

Given the fraction of Republican identifiers, it should be clear enough that they were far from decisive thanks to the 17 percentage-point margin. The independents, I'd assume in the absence of evidence to the contrary, presumably would vote their actual preferences. Those may well be for the contest they'd like, rather than necessarily the candidate they'll vote for in November, but it can't hurt Obama to have drawn five times McCain's independent vote. Likewise, to the extent the Republican and independent votes were "strategic," it's far from clear how it benefits McCain for that portion of the electorate to have given him what every poll says will be the tougher opponent.

Last, the thing that's especially canny about Obama's campaign is that the Kumbaya post-partisan rhetoric is wrapped around a solidly solid center-left platform — which, in a "What's the Matter With 'What's the Matter With What's the Matter With Kansas'" way that I find agreeable — happens to be popular and thus doesn't require a move to the center. And let's not forget, Cass Sunstein may have less than an economic mind when it comes to polarization, but he's a pro-gay-marriage, anti-corporate-rights liberal.

Labels: ObamaNation, Politics

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 Ken Houghton

Dr. Black summarizes the issue:

As I've written before my biggest problem with Clinton isn't Clinton - I like her! - it's some of the people she surrounds herself with. Aren't they supposed to be the ones who know what they're doing?

Given Tom's recent posts, especially this one, I suspect he has no problem with that summary. (It appears that Hilzoy is in the ABC camp. Not absolutely certain about Scott. Patrick is an optimist. YMMV.)

But the consensus claim is that Obama works to solve issues, reaches across, finds compromises, all that noise. The "miracle" of a unanimous vote in the Illinois Senate is frequently invoked.

So while his wife continues to do her best Sherry Palmer imitation*, and Obama continues to win states (the two today coming as a surprise to no one, save possibly Barkley at Econospeak), it becomes clear that he could actually show his ability to lead.

I raised the issue last night at Brad DeLong's place. The current situation is that Democratic voters in Florida and Michigan are going to get less of a say in the selection of a candidate than Republican cross-overs in Iowa and Wisconsin are. And Obama supporters are happy with this. The most they will talk about is "do-overs." Scott trivializes them as "straw polls." (Campaign slogan: "1.7 million Floridians don't count")

Now, it's possible that a Democrat wins the White House without winning Michigan and Florida—but it's not the way to bet. And no sane Democrat should want to p*ss off people who actually went out in the mild of January in Michigan to vote.

But Hilzoy and Scott and a lot of other people—probably the same people who were righteously piqued that John Kerry gave up the fight for Ohio—are getting on their high horses about not seating FL and MI delegates because they broke DNC rules.

The irony is so thick that one has to laugh. Hillary Clinton fights for the rights of the voters in two states to have their votes counted, and this is evil.

And Barack H. Obama has a chance to lead. If he does it quickly.

The speech runs something like this:

"My fellow Democrats,

"Through no fault of their own, the voters of Florida and Michigan have been disenfranchised. Local Democratic Party organizers decided—in direct contravention of the national rules—to hold primaries at a time when they were told not to do so.

"Neither John Edwards nor my current opponent campaigned in either state, save to attend a victory celebration after the ballots were cast.

"But the people of those states—more than 2.1 million Democrats—voted.

"And now our choices are to disenfranchise them, to pretend they did not participate in the process, or to welcome them.

"I join now with my opponent in welcoming them, in asking that the delegates from the great states of Florida and Michigan be seated with the representatives of the forty-eight other states and the District of Columbia. It is not the fault of the voters that they voluntarily participated in the primary process.

"It is, however, the fault of their leaders that those primaries were held when they were held.

"Accordingly, I can for the so-called superdelegates from those states not to be seated for the first round of voting.

"Order and discipline must be maintained in the Democratic Party. And it is the responsibility of the party's leaders—not its voters—to ensure that irregularities do not occur.

"The leaders of Florida and Michigan are good people. Jennifer Granholm, Bob Graham, and the other Democrats who care deeply about their state had the best of intentions when they moved their primaries. But they were warned, and did not heed that warning.

"It is on them—not the voters—that the consequences must fall.

"So today I join my opponent in urging that the elected delegates from those two states be given their rightful place at and during the Convention, and that the punishment should fall where it belongs—upon the party leaders who deliberately disrupted their citizen's legitimate exercise of their democratic rights.

I will do everything in my power to ensure that the elected delegates from the states of Florida and Michigan are seated. The people's votes should not be "

Note the breakdowns: Obama loses virtually nothing by doing that, especially if Edwards's Florida delegates vote his way. (He's at a slight disadvantage in Michigan, but that could be balanced by 35% of the delegates being "uncommitted"—and therefore his for the taking if he supports them.)

But he has to do it while we can all still pretend it "makes a difference"—before Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas mark the official end of the "race."

Y'all keep telling me that Obama is a "leader," and that he finds solutions. Right now, he's got a great chance to prove it: within his own party, making certain that voters are not disenfranchised.

Obama has been conspicuously silent about the voters of two large, fairly populous states who were disenfranchised not by some Grand Republican Conspiracy, but rather by his own party. Let's see him lead.

If he does, this will certainly be my last Obama post. When he doesn't—or if he waits until the nomination is clearly his and then throws those voters (including nearly 570,000 in Florida who voted for him, and nearly 250,000 in Michigan who indicated a willingness or desire to do so) a bone—then I can be forgiven for posting the next Sherry Palmer* Michelle Obama slagging of any possibility that the Democratic process will not elect her husband.

*To be clear, I've only seen the first season of 24, and am thinking of the Sherry Palmer who kept manipulating her husband and his staff. I've heard she came back in later seasons, but cannot speak to them.

Labels: 2008, Democracy, ObamaNation, Politics

by Tom Bozzo

Ken's series of posts notwithstanding, I voted for Obama this evening. Just before 5:30, I put the 881st accepted ballot in the reader, suggesting that by 8:00 there would be a fair number more votes cast than the 1125 in the 2004 primary. My reasons are old-fashioned: I like his proposed policies on balance a little better than Clinton's, and I think he's run a much better campaign so far.

There's no question that the Republicans will send out the hounds regardless of who gets the nomination, but Obama's 50-state campaign shrewdly attacks a McCain candidacy at its areas of putative strength — appeal to independents and pan-partisan moderates — which is really non-evil Rovianism. Early indications are that Obama would force McCain to contest previously safe states like Virginia when the Republicans have dissipated tens of millions of dollars on candidates who can barely get their trophy wives to vote for them.

Much of the Obama backlash is risible. The meme that he's the candidate of pretty words and no substance doesn't hold water given the broad array of issues for which he's established more-or-less detailed positions. Others may, of course, think otherwise, but David Brooks's "the candidate's a lib—" column in today's NYT ought to be proof enough that I'm at least getting the solidly left-of-center-left candidate I think I am.

That's not to say that there's anything wrong with promoting hope. We got into this mess, in no small part, by forces that played first on apathy (it doesn't matter whether you vote for Bush or Gore; they're sides of the same coin) and later fear ('Don't Change Horsemen in Mid-Apocalypse'). And one thing was for sure at the polling place, there were a lot of young people registering to vote for the first time. Bryan Caplan might deplore the extension of the franchise to non-believers in Caplanism, and maybe some of those kids will cast votes that I wouldn't. But I'd have to think that it's harder to assemble 51% of the electorate for preservation of the current corporatist oligarchy the more people actually have their say.

Labels: Madison, ObamaNation, 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 Ken Houghton

Peter Dorman at EconoSpeak attempts to find the "intellectual roots of Obamaian Post-Partisanship."

The result pretty much explains my no-secret at all antagonism to seeing Obama as a purveyor of "hope":

Cass Sunstein. Sunstein has been cited as an advisor to Obama, and he has written extensively on the dangers of a world in which people only communicate with those they already agree with....

...I know how important it is to listen with an open mind to those whose point of view challenges your own. You do yourself and the quality of your thinking no favor when you live and converse in an echo chamber.

But there are two problems with the let’s-all-get-along school. First, there is the issue of power....

Second, what counts as moderation in America is often hopelessly skewed to the right, even by the standards of other capitalist countries. I generally distrust corner solutions—all this or all that—and look for blending and balancing, but if John Edwards is too far to the left to be taken seriously, I’m a speck on the thin edge of the political distribution, several sigmas out. In this respect, the Sunstein/Obama analysis is correct, but radically incomplete. We need to really extend the conversation to the vast regions beyond the pale of approved discourse. The resulting zone of consensus will be moderate by the standards of intelligent human thought but extreme with respect the political constraints we live under today.

So far I could have written this, if I could write that well. But he doesn't discuss Cass Sunstein's public statements, which in themselves exemplify the "partisanship" he studies. Sunstein on Obama in September of 2006:

As a member of the University of Chicago Law School community, where economic analysis reigns, he knows a lot about how markets work, and he is hardly committed to left-wing orthodoxies about either the economy or the culture.

Sunstein praises Obama at length, attacking Sean Wilentz for noting that

Dreams From My Father contains composite characters and other fictionalized elements—not exactly a portrait of sterling honesty or authenticity.

Talking about liberals with Salon, Sunstein says:

Liberals are sometimes defined as people who can't take their own side in an argument. I actually don't think there's a difference, though. I would say that there are many liberals who think that, in the last few elections, to vote for a Republican presidential candidate is just mindless, that there's no rational reason that people would vote Republican. If liberals are thinking that, there's probably a problem. I think many liberals think that to vote for Bush, some part of their brain is on fire and the rest of it isn't functioning, or that they've been fooled in some way, or that they're not paying attention. So I think that a lot of liberals are in an echo chamber where they share a set of views, some of which are probably wrong.

He attacks Wilentz for making the obvious connection (and not because its obvious):

In Wilentz' account, the delusional "Obama-awed commentators" have failed to learn the true lesson of the Bush Administration, which is that the last time America opted for intuition-based governance, it produced a "catastrophic presidency."

Sunstein, of course, was immune to that:

In contrast, in 2000 I had high hopes for President Bush. I thought he could be a very good president. I think he has failed terribly in part because his White House is [They started out somewhat open-minded on these issues, somewhat diverse, and after discussion the diversity was squelched and the extremism was increased.].

we have to wonder if this is the same man who told Salon

[S]avvy political entrepreneurs are creating the conditions of our experiment because they want to decrease internal diversity. Karl Rove could be described as a "polarization entrepreneur." [emphasis mine]

The evidence that they started out "open-minded" is notably lacking, which is why when Sunstein declares in his TNR piece that

Wilentz is right to say that some members of the press were excessively generous to Bush's candidacy, perhaps because they preferred him to the not-terribly-fun Al Gore. Many of Bush's supporters, in the press and elsewhere, have been disappointed, but they were hardly deluded.

we have to wonder what he thinks he himself was.

And, finally, we need to understand why we have to understand the other side:

As a law professor I would say, If you think there's nothing to be learned from Justice [Antonin] Scalia's opinions, then there's a real problem. Because some of his opinions are really good. And some of them are even right. And those that are wrong, you improve your thinking a lot if you grapple with what he has to say.

Great: my thinking will be improved,* even as my rights are further constricted. I believe this is what Sunstein means when he refers to Obama as "the visionary minimalist." So what is the case here? Much straw, little fire:

Unlike most Democratic senators, he acknowledges that large increases in the minimum wage might "discourage employers from hiring more workers," which helps explain his enthusiasm for the Earned Income Tax Credit, an anti-poverty policy with Republican roots that supplements wages but does not have disemployment effects. Rejecting the orthodoxy of many Democrats, Obama does not want to excise religion from the public sphere. He insists only that "[w]hat our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values." In 2005, Obama voted with Republicans in favor of the Class Action Fairness Act, which increases the rights of defendants in class action suits. After he received an e-mail from a pro-life doctor, Obama softened his website's harsh rhetoric on abortion, writing: "[T]hat night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own--that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me." [italics mine; emphases his]

For someone who talks a lot about reaching out to the other side, Sunstein fluffs a lot of Republicans, even from over thirty years ago.

Teresa has joined the list of those who are convinced Obama will be the nominee for the Democratic Party. So the answer to my semi-rhetorical question at the end of Caroline's endorsement on the basis of her pragmatism ("When did Democrats become Republicans?") appears more and more to be "when they nominated one."

Fortunately, either alternative is MUCH worse.

It will be nice, for the first time in eight Presidential elections, to be able to vote for a member of the Ancestral Party—even if he is passing.

*Can't I just outsource legal analysis to Scott or Bean, who actually spent time learning the background that Sunstein appears to prefer to actual consideration of the results of those decisions? Isn't Chicago the place where specialization is part of the Pentateuch?

Labels: 2008, ObamaNation, Politics, the rule of law

by Ken Houghton

With a rather appropriate title, former DU poster and more-politically-active-than-I (not that that takes much) Caroline Spector endorses the reality, not the illusion of Obama:

I was an Edwards supporter, and I actually think Hillary is better qualified, but against McCain, she’s going to have problems....

[paragraph discussing the Iraq War, noting that Obama, not having been in the U.S. Senate in 2002, can run as a "purer" candidate]

[O]ur economy is in the ******* in no small part because of the war. (The housing bust — so reminiscent of the S&L debacle of Saint Ronnie’s tenure — is a huge part as well, but that’s another post.) If Obama can tie the two together in peoples’ minds, he will have a real shot at winning....

And after watching the last year’s worth of coverage of Clinton’s campaign, I am struck by how much this country still just plain hates and fears women.

I feel like a traitor to my gender, but I’m likely going to vote for Obama in the Texas primary. I’d rather not give men a reason not to vote for a Democrat (Hey, notice the correct usage of the word!) this election. And I’m delighted that there are so many who are inspired by Obama and who see him as a force for change. But this is the eighth presidential election I’ve voted in. And in those mumbledy-mumble years, I’ve seen a lot. Most of it not pretty.

Sure, I’d love to be inspired. I’d like to Mulder this election. But we can’t afford that. We need to win. If we thought the last eight years were bad — just imagine four more years of war, our currency in free fall, and the rest of the world thinking we’ve lost our collective minds.

So forgive me for being pragmatic. I can’t afford to hope right now. If we win, I swear I’ll let a glimmer of it back into my heart.

We have come to the point of being able to say that our most-qualified remaining candidate is not our best candidate to win the election.

When did Democrats become Republicans? And, more importantly, can it last?

Labels: 2008, Eat Our Brains, ObamaNation, Politics