Lessons Learned from the 2008 Election

The 2008 election cycle was endless, at times exhausting, and often exhilarating. It had no shortage of surprises, twists, and turns. Before it starts to recede in our rear-view mirror, let us take stock of some of the lessons that we learned from it.

1) The pollsters were right. Before I get to the accuracy of the public polls, let me toot my own horn for a moment, and remind readers of my own projection from the previous blog entry:

...here is my fearless prediction for 2008. Obama will win the popular vote 53% to 45%, with the remainder going to Ralph Nader and Bob Barr...The final electoral result will be Obama 353, McCain 185.

The final vote total was Obama 52%, McCain 46%. As Maxwell Smart would say, "Missed it by that much!" In terms of the electoral vote, the count now stands at 349 for Obama, to 163 for McCain. Once you award Obama North Carolina's 15 votes (he currently holds a narrow lead) and award McCain Missouri's 11 electoral votes (he currently has a narrow lead), the final tally becomes Obama 364, McCain 196. What that means is that out of the 50 states, I called only one state wrong: Indiana, which Obama won 50% to 49%. Since my arm is aching from patting myself on the back, let's look at the professional pollsters:

The final realclearpolitics.com average of all the professional polls was Obama by 7.6%. Obama actually won by six per cent. With all the tricky variables at play--new voters, young voters, early voters, African-American voters, weather issues--the pollsters have good reason to feel proud. That is an excellent result. Particularly noteworthy among the pollsters was the Pew Research Poll, which called the election at 52-46, and for the second straight presidential cycle, nailed it perfectly. Rasmussenreports.com also called the race perfectly, at 52-46. An honorable mention must be given to the CNN Opinion Research Poll, which forecast a 53-46 result.

People love to bash the pollsters when they're wrong, accusing them of incompetence. They also love to bash the pollsters when they're right, accusing them of sucking all the romance out of politics. In this election cycle, the pollsters get nothing but serious props from me.

2) Our voting process is a disgrace. In the presidential campaign of 2000, had either Gore or Bush won handily in Florida, no attention would have be paid to the atrocious "butterfly ballot" in West Palm, the punch-card voting system with all its hanging chads, nor the problem of voters being illegitimately purged from the rolls. It was the closeness of the race that magnified these issues. Conversely, Obama's comfortable victory in this election has hidden the fact that our election process is still in a shambles, with intolerable lines, non-uniform procedures throughout the country, machines that break down, large numbers of votes that can't be recounted because there is no paper trail, and uneven distribution of machines that disfavor and burden poor communities.

Can somebody please explain to me why designing a voting system that works is so damned complicated? After all, every day millions of people use ATM machines. You walk up to the machine and it asks you, do you want $20, $40, or $60? You then make a choice from these "candidates," it completes the transaction, and produces a paper record of your decision. Millions of these transactions are carried out, error-free, every day. If people had concerns that the transactions were not secure, or that they would be recorded inaccurately by the bank, the system would collapse immediately. For decades, it has worked smoothly. Why on earth can this same technology not be replicated for elections?

Some analysts have suggested that paradoxically, early voting may have had the effect of actually lowering voter participation. This is because many people who observed three hour waits during the early voting period, may have become fearful about going on election day. The Atlanta Journal Constitution suggests that this dynamic occurred in Georgia:

It's possible that the 4- to six-hour lines many voters epxerienced during advance voting scared some people away from the polls on Tuesday, some country officials said. Both Fulton and Gwinett Counties said they saw and early push of voters on Election Day, but lunchtime and after work crowds never materialized. "Could it be that people were afraid of the long line they saw? said Gwinnett County spokesman Joe Sorenson."We definitely expected the polls to be full all day long."

It is estimated that once all the votes are counted, voter participation will be at 64% in the 2008 election, the highest percentage since William Howard Taft beat William Jennings Bryan exactly a century ago in 1908. Surely, however, we can do better than 64%.

3) How (not) to pick a vice-president. Much has already been written about the strange process by which John McCain picked Sarah Palin: He had met her only twice, and there was virtually no vetting of her before the choice. Robert Draper offers an anecdote in his article in the New York Times Magazine that shows how just how bizarre and impulsive the choice of Sarah Palin was:

After that first brief meeting, [top McCain advisor Rick] Davis remained in discreet but frequent contact with Palin and her staff — gathering tapes of speeches and interviews, as he was doing with all potential vice-presidential candidates. One tape in particular struck Davis as arresting: an interview with Palin and Gov. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona Democrat, on “The Charlie Rose Show” that was shown in October 2007. Reviewing the tape, it didn’t concern Davis that Palin seemed out of her depth on health-care issues or that, when asked to name her favorite candidate among the Republican field, she said, “I’m undecided.” What he liked was how she stuck to her pet issues — energy independence and ethics reform — and thereby refused to let Rose manage the interview. This was the case throughout all of the Palin footage. Consistency. Confidence. And . . . well, look at her. A friend had said to Davis: “The way you pick a vice president is, you get a frame of Time magazine, and you put the pictures of the people in that frame. You look at who fits that frame best — that’s your V. P.”

It is this kind of sophomoric thinking that led to the disaster that was Sarah Palin. Only now that the election is over, are we learning the full story of just how dysfunctional Palin was. FOX News reported yesterday that she had repeated blow-ups and temper tantrums, didn't know that Africa was a continent, and that a staffer who leaked information supportive of her was fired, then rehired, to avoid publicity. Other outlets are reporting that her shopping spree was far greater than originally reported:

According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards. The McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent “tens of thousands” more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast,” and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.

But the real problem with Sarah Palin is the same one that she would face in 2012: She's not very bright. Palin's problem was not one of experience, it was one of intellect. Who in their right mind would babble incoherently to Katie Couric that they had an understanding of Russia because Vladmir Putin flew over Alaskan air space?

There is a simple but profound lesson to be drawn from the choice of Sarah Palin: When picking a vice president, imagine them being interviewed for a full hour on Meet the Press. If the image doesn't work, strike that individual from the list immediately. The notion that Palin was ready for the presidency, but not ready for Meet the Press, was one apparently taken from Alice in Wonderland.

4) Miscellaneous. A few quick notes. As inspiring as Obama's victory gathering in Grant Park was, I was a little disappointed, for two reasons. First, Obama's tone seemed jarringly somber for such a upbeat occasion. Likewise, it was disappointing to me that when they cued the music at the end, Stevie Wonder, a staple of the Obama campaign, was not to be heard. I think that the Obama team forgot that the Grant Park audience was not there to hear a ponderous speech; they were there to celebrate the election with a great party! And no scene would have been more perfect than 100,000 people dancing while Stevie Wonder sang that Obama's election was now "Signed, Sealed, Delivered."

Finally, I suspect that I am only one of thousands of people who would stop at various points during the campaign and say to themselves, "God, I wonder what Tim Russert would say about that," or "I wish Tim Russert were here to see that." Russert's absence changed the campaign season in ways both big and small. His loss was yet another bittersweet reminder to all of us how life moves on even after the most talented among us have gone away. Rest in peace, Tim.
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 9:00 AM

 
Fearless 2008 Presidential Prediction!

On election day, 2008, there will be 152 initiatives and referenda on the ballots of the fifty states and Washington, DC. Such initiatives range from banning same-sex marriage in California, to changing the age of sexual consent for girls from 14 to 16 in South Carolina, to a prohibiting dog racing in the state of Massachusetts. There is one overarching issue, however, that all voters will be watching: The 2008 presidential election will be a referendum on the question, "Are the presidential polls any good?"

John McCain and his surrogates have been crisscrossing the country, gamely predicting the they will pull off a "Truman beats Dewey" shocker in the election tomorrow. That seems highly unlikely, for three reasons: 1) In the 1948 Truman/Dewey election, when the polls proved so wrong, the science of population sampling was in its infancy, and was far more primitive than the sampling techniques of today; 2) In 1948, pollsters Roper and Gallup were lulled into complacency themselves, ending their polling a week before the election; 3) The sheer number of polls today, and the subsequent averaging of them, is a significant check on sampling error in any given poll.

As I write this the day before the election, three pollsters have just issued their final reports of the campaign:

1) Gallup predicts that independents will break significantly for Obama, with the final result being Obama 55%, McCain 44%. In 2004, the final Gallup Poll showed the race a tie at 49% for Kerry and Bush.

2) The final Pew Research Poll has the race 52% Obama, 46% McCain. In 2004, Pew predicted a 51-48 margin for Bush, nailing the outcome exactly.

3) The final CNN/Opinion Research Poll shows Obama with a 53-46 lead in the election. Four years ago, the final CNN poll showed Bush with a 2 point advantage. Bush eventually won by 3 per cent.

At the statistically rigorous website, fivethirtyeight.com, numbers-cruncher Nate Silver lists the most recent, major, 14 presidential polls. All of them show Obama winning, ranging from the CBS/NYTimes poll, which shows an edge of 13% points, to the IDB/TIPP poll, which gives Obama a 2% national lead. It is noteworthy that the polls that incorporate cell phone sampling in their methodology give Obama the greatest leads. This is presumably because contacting cell phones expands the sample to a younger group of voters, who overwhelmingly favor Obama.

Before I give my own prediction of the popular and electoral outcome, I would be remiss if I didn't give some props to the poll which has predicted the winner of race accurately in 12 of the last 13 elections, stretching back 52 years: The Weekly Reader Poll. Every election cycle, the Weekly Reader takes the views of its readership, school children from K through 12. The only election since 1956 where the Weekly Reader Poll erred, was the Clinton win in 1992, and that was probably because they left Ross Perot off the ballot. Otherwise, the Weekly Reader's national poll of students from has been uncannily accurate. In 1972, the Weekly Reader Poll accurately predicted that Nixon would carry 49 states to only two for McGovern. In 1980, while some pollsters had the race close between Reagan and Carter, the Weekly Reader predicted a blow-out. The kids predict a similar Obama blow-out this year: 54.7 pcer cent for Obama, 42.9 for McCain. The other 2.5% went to other candidates. This result is almost identical to that of Gallup. On the electoral front, it was even more lopsided. The kids forecast a 420 to 118 electoral rout.

One last piece of data: A look at the offshore betting shops shows that they have made Obama a 10 to 1 favorite in the election. That is, order to win $100 betting on Obama, you would have to risk $1000!

So with all of that data to build on, here is my fearless prediction for 2008. Obama will win the popular vote 53% to 45%, with the remainder going to Ralph Nader and Bob Barr. In the all-important electoral count, Obama will eke by in Florida, and Virginia. Obama will also hold on to Pennsylvania, overcoming a surge of white, working class support for McCain. By virtue of superior organization, Obama will also squeeze by in Ohio, with comfortable wins in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and of course, Illinois. Early voting and a massive turnout by students and African-Americans in North Carolina will give Obama a win there. McCain will take Georgia, and will nip Obama in Missouri. Out west, Obama will triumph in Nevada, New Mexico, and gain a sweet victory in Colorado. McCain will escape humiliation in Arizona, and will win Montana and North Dakota. McCain will make no inroads in New Hampshire, and Obama will make no inroads in Nebraska. The final electoral result will be Obama 353, McCain 200.

I invite all readers to show some cojones, and make predictions of your own in the comments section!

Finally, many have told me that they fear a withdrawal phase once the election is over, a letdown from all the campaign excitement. Not I. Personally, I can't wait for the real business of governing to begin under a Democratic administration. And don't try to reach me on Wednesday morning; I'll still be out celebrating!
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 12:08 PM

 
"I Am Barack Obama, I Am Barack Obama"

The other day in my car, I was listening to my favorite radio station, XM-radio's POTUS '08 (Politics of the United States), dedicated entirely to the 2008 political cycle. A media consultant named Thom Mozloom happened to be on the air, waxing indignant about the Obama media strategy. The gist of Mozloom's argument was that given the economic circumstances of the day, Obama should be looking at a landslide victory; according to Mozloom, it was Obama's deficient campaign that was keeping the election close.

My reaction was strong and immediate: "What in the world is this guy thinking?" We live in a country that has been closely ideologically divided for decades. Barack Obama is a 47 year old African-American, who, when he first announced his candidacy in February of 2007, was given virtually no shot at winning the nomination, let alone the presidency. In small town America, journalists repeatedly show us that there are significant pockets of resistance to the idea of a president of color. The mere fact that Obama is poised to win this election is amazing. Landslide, indeed!

Just this week, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus visited a Walmart in Logan County, West Virginia, to examine citizens' views about Obama. Here is a sample of what she found:

"If I do vote, it will be Republican," said Charles Mount, a 31-year-old mechanic and registered Democrat. "There's just something about Obama. You hear so much about him being a Muslim. I don't personally believe that but I don't know that. I'm not going to take a chance on the leader of our country." "

"If Barack Obama gets in, it basically will be giving our America away to whatever . . . ," said Jamie Willis, 42, who voted for Clinton in the primary. Her husband, Brent Willis, 37, a contractor and registered Democrat, filled in the blank. "To be brutally honest with you, if Obama goes in there the [blacks] are going to go crazy -- and I'm not a prejudiced person."

Terry Sanders, a court clerk, said he "wouldn't vote for Obama if he was running for dog catcher. His values are completely different from mine. Why's he got a problem with the flag? He wouldn't put his hand over his heart. It casts a lot of doubt about what kind of man is this fellow."

Even more striking is Marcus' comment about these quotes:

These are not incendiary quotes cherry-picked from among multiple interviews or cajoled out of people reluctant to express a view. They came from the first eight people who stopped to answer my questions -- of whom just one said she supported Obama, citing the backing of the mineworkers union.

Obviously, Obama has had to face hurdles that no white presidential candidate would have to confront. If Obama were not black, the internet slurs--"he's a Muslim," "he doesn't say the Pledge of Allegiance," "he doesn't respect the flag," or more generally, in the parlance of Sarah Palin, "He doesn't see America the way we do"--would never have gained any traction whatsoever. The fact that two years into Obama's candidacy, these myths still exist, is best explained by Obama's wry comment, "I don't look like the other presidents on the currency."

Thom Mozloom's criticisms notwithstanding, for almost two years, Obama has run a campaign with virtually no margin for error, an incredible feat. To drive home this point, let's try a little thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that Obama carried with him the following baggage:

1) He finished fifth from the bottom of his class in college (McCain).

2) His spouse previously had a drug addiction that led her to steal drugs from her own medical foundation (McCain).

3) He has a daughter who is pregnant out of wedlock (Palin).

4) He has a spouse who for years belonged to group that advocated the secession of his home state from the Union (Palin).

5) He played an unethical role in a previous financial meltdown that cost the taxpayers billions (McCain).

Can you imagine what the right-wing attack machine would do with these facts? FOX News would be beating these issues to death. Well, actually they wouldn't, because no black candidate could survive a presidential race for five minutes with such baggage. The pregnant daughter alone would have people saying, "He's devaluing the presidency with his hip-hop values." That is why I would never saddle Obama with the absurd expectation that "he should win by a landslide." If Obama gets 270 electoral votes, it will be the most remarkable accomplishment in American electoral history. It will be a seismic paradigm shift. The good news, however, is that once a new paradigm is created, it is amazing how we as a country adapt to it, even to the point of forgetting—or perhaps repressing—that the old paradigm ever existed. Let me expand on this point with a brief story:

In 1939, two African-American men, Clarence M. Davenport and Robert B. Tresville, entered West Point, among the first black men to have done so. Their presence evoked outrage. After all, who really believed that black men had the courage, intelligence, values or patriotism to assume such roles? While it was standard for cadets to be assigned roommates, Davenport and Tresville were not only not allowed to room with white cadets, they were also not allowed to room with each other. So each roomed alone. For four years they endured a form of treatment called "silencing," in which white cadets would not speak to them unless for official business. Even in the chapel, white cadets would not sit with them. When Life magazine came to take a picture of Davenport's graduating class, he was excluded from the picture.

Both men became model soldiers. In the 1960's, Davenport was given the Legion of Merit for his command of the 10th Artillery Group, 32nd Army Air Defense Command in Europe. and retired from the Army in 1972 as a full colonel. And Tresville? He became the commanding officer of the Tuskegee Airmen's 100th Fighter Squadron, and in 1944, was killed on a mission off the coast of Italy. I mention these men for two reasons. The first reason is that these men are great heroes, unsung heroes, men who created a new paradigm, a new narrative about our military. The military is now perhaps the most integrated institution in our country, and many cannot even remember a time when blacks were shunned at West Point, and seen as lacking "good American values." The second reason is that Robert Tresville was married to my mom when his plane was lost over the Mediterranean Sea. It is because of the exploits of Tresville and Davenport that we now take for granted the Colin Powells of our nation.

Speaking of Powell, I agree completely with his assessment on Meet the Press that an Obama presidency will be "transformational." A world wide Gallup poll recently showed that three-quarters of the citizens in the 70 countries that they polled are hoping for an Obama presidency. This was true from Asia to Africa to Western Europe. In fact, Gallup only managed to find two countries where McCain was preferred: Georgia, and the Philippines.

This leads me to conclude that--in contrast to the overwrought warnings of Joe Biden--Obama will actually get the benefit of a global honeymoon period once he is elected. Temporarily at least, Al-Qaeda will be defanged, because it will become much harder to recruit terrorists when the American president is a role model in both developed and developing nations. When Obama is elected, black kids will start sitting up straighter in the classroom, and the notion that being studious is somehow "acting white," will lose all its destructive power. And instead of hearing the cynical and confused slogan, "I am Joe the plumber," we will hear children of all colors and creeds from all over the world saying, "I am Barack Obama, I am Barack Obama."
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 8:12 AM

 
John McCain and the Politics of Dishonor

John McCain likes to use words like "duty," "honor," and "putting America first," to describe the heart of his presidential campaign. It is clear that McCain sees himself as a lonely island of principle surrounded by a sea of corruption. And there have been occasions--as McCain will be quick to tell you--when he has taken difficult and principled positions on issues: originally opposing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, standing up for campaign finance reform, and taking, by Republican standards, a humane position on immigration.

But McCain's lofty rhetoric hides the fact that in the real world, acting in a principled way can be difficult and elusive. The same person who is a loving father and husband may become a destructive maniac when on the road in traffic; the same person who gives lavishly to his church is also quite capable of embezzling money from the office. The problem for John McCain, is that all too often in his life, when principle and personal gain have collided, it is the principle that has been thrown aside. In life, even the highest ideals often give way to factors like stress, ambition, and greed. For all his high-toned rhetoric, John McCain is a classic example of this. Let's look at some examples of McCain's lapses of honor:

1) The 2000 South Carolina Primary. In January of 2000, George W. Bush and John McCain were locked in a battle for the Republican nomination. The stakes were particularly high for Bush, who had just lost to McCain in New Hampshire by 18 percentage points. Bush had to win, but McCain had the early momentum. Suddenly, a new campaign strategy was hatched by the Bush team. In 1993, Cindy McCain had traveled to Bangladesh and adopted a Bangladeshi child named Bridget. Bridget had a cleft palate which needed medical treatment, and she had dark skin. The Bush partisans saw an opportunity there. During the campaign, South Carolina citizens suddenly began getting phone calls at dinner time, asking:

Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?

Other calls mused about Cindy McCain's drug use, and referred to McCain as the "fag candidate." The view of those on the ground in 2000 is that these calls were the work of Karl Rove, and of Charlie Condon, a Bush supporter and former South Carolina Attorney General. Not surprisingly, both men deny involvement in the vicious and well-orchestrated campaign, but here is what Condon had to say when asked about the smear campaign:

Our primaries have a way of doing that. There is a tradition of it, it is accepted behavior, and frankly it works. There are no regrets about 2000. To this day I don’t have one. If someone did those things, shame on them. But I did see that there was a need for bringing up issues.

So, under attack in South Carolina with poll numbers dropping, what did McCain do? He suddenly became a supporter of the confederate flag. McCain dropped his previous opposition to the confederate flag flying atop the Statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina. Asked by a reporter about his position on the flag, McCain expressed a newfound openness to it:

Personally, I see the flag as symbol of heritage.

McCain went on to lose the South Carolina primary by 11 points. By April of 2000, Bush had become the presumptive nominee. The campaign now over, and with the pressure off, John McCain had yet another change of heart about the confederate flag. In April of 2000, he returned to South Carolina and apologized for his support of the flag:

I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So I chose to compromise my principles...I believe the flag should be removed from your Capitol, and I am encouraged that fair-minded people on both sides of the issue are working hard to define an honorable compromise.


This is the quintessential John McCain: No one issues a more remorseful apology than John McCain. The problem throughout his political career is that when he is confronted with the prospect of losing, his principles collapse like an old lounge chair. Shortly after the South Carolina episode, McCain commented to an interviewer that there must be "a special place in hell" for those who had perpetrated the smear against him and his family. Remarkably, however, after blasting the villains who had sabotaged his campaign, McCain had another change of heart, and hired Charlie Condon, the likely culprit in the affair. Ann Banks describes it best in her article in The Nation:

Seven years later, who is running McCain's South Carolina campaign? Charlie Condon, the former State Attorney General who in 2000 helped spread the innuendo targeting [McCain’s daughter] Bridget. If you can't beat them, hire them--even if they've launched racist attacks against your own daughter.

Hiring the guy who smeared your own daughter with racist phone calls, ranks pretty high on my scale of dishonorable acts. The frightening thing about McCain, is that he apparently believes that if the apology is contrite enough, it wipes the slate clean on the bad act that preceded it.

2) The Keating Scandal Take the case of the Keating Five. McCain, along with four other senators, intervened with regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, a man who bilked investors out of billions in the Lincoln Savings and Loan Scandal. Keating was a friend and contributor of McCain, who had given him over $112,000 in contributions, and $13,000 in free trips to the Bahamas. (McCain reimbursed Keating only after Keating became a target of investigators). The intervention of the five senators kept the regulators at bay for two years, allowing Keating’s fraud to continue, which of course worsened the financial tragedy for unwitting investors. Predictably, here is the McCain mea culpa:

The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do…. It was the worst mistake of my life.

He gives great after-the-fact apologies, doesn’t he?

At the Rick Warren values forum, McCain was asked to describe his greatest moral failing. He responded:

My greatest moral failing, and I have been a very imperfect person, is the failure of my first marriage.

Of course, what he really meant by this, is that he had taken up with a hotter, richer woman, after his wife had been seriously injured in a car accident, had spent 6 months in the hospital and had 23 surgeries.

Based on this, I’ll make a wager right now: After he loses the presidential election, McCain will offer a full-throated apology for his campaign’s use of words like “socialist,” “terrorist, and “celebrity” to describe Barack Obama. But I guarantee that it will be a good apology. That’s what McCain does best…
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 4:37 PM

 
Obama Wins the Final Debate

In this election cycle, the conventional wisdom about the presidential debates is that they have been forgettable, poorly moderated, and gave us little new insight into the candidates. After last night's third and final debate, NBC's Tom Brokaw commented, "It seems unlikely that anything we heard tonight really did move the needle." Many pundits have suggested that the debates have been an irrelevant sideshow that has not told us much about the candidates. I beg to differ.

Regardless of the format, or quality of the moderator, debates always serve as a kind of trial by ordeal, an inkblot test for the candidates to reveal who they really are. In this regard, the three presidential debates were a tremendous success. When people criticize the debates, what they usually mean is that this or that debate didn't meet modern standards of entertainment; it didn't divert us in the manner of CSI, Dancing with the Stars, or for that matter WWE wrestling. But such critiques miss the point. I would submit that along with the economic crisis, historians will look back on the debates as the most decisive factor in the election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States.

The question going into the first debate in Oxford, Mississippi was, would Obama show the maturity and command that we look for in a president? Would McCain show the grace under pressure and independence from George W. Bush necessary to right the wrongs of the past eight years? I've said it before and I'll say it again: Barring any gross factual or rhetorical flubs--like Gerald Ford liberating Poland in 1976, or Bob Dole complaining about "Democrat wars"--style, or more accurately put, character, trumps substance every time.

And during the debates, character was revealed in spades. From the first debate to the last night's final one--ably guided by Bob Schieffer of CBS--there was utter thematic consistency: Barack Obama was even and reassuring, John McCain was seething and angry. There have long been whispers from McCain's fellow senators about his temper, his tendency to lose control, diss, and berate his colleagues. Before the debates, however, it was easily to dismiss such charges as hype and political jockeying. But the John McCain who couldn't bring himself to look at Obama in the first debate (something he categorically denied when asked about it by George Stephanopoulos afterward), the John McCain who contemptuously referred to Obama as "that one" in the second debate, and the John McCain we saw last night, were all of a piece. This is a man whose emotions are barely in check, who at times looked like he wanted to take a swing at Obama rather than engage him in debate.

McCain was not helped last night by the abundant use of split screen, repeatedly showing McCain while Obama was talking. The television audience was treated to a succession of blinks, eye rolls, flushed faces, and looks of pique from McCain that did nothing to comfort the viewer about his self-control. He looked like the principal of a high school in one of those teen movies who had been challenged by one of his know-it-all students, and was now caught between his desire to maintain his dignity and his desire to strangle the student.

It doesn't surprise me at all that the flash polls showed Obama winning the debate by upwards of 60-30. The situation set up perfectly for him. Obama is far more comfortable as the counter-puncher than as the aggressor. While some pundits judged him as too passive last night, what Obama did was employ a classic rope-a-dope technique: Allow your opponent to keep punching until he becomes increasingly tired, frustrated, and reckless. By the time McCain launched into his pre-scripted speech about William Ayres, millions of viewers, fresh off the latest stock market 700 point downer, were asking, "What's this got to do with the price of tea in China?"

It is ironic that John McCain experienced the same frustration with Obama that Hillary Clinton did. Just as Hillary complained repeatedly about Obama being "just speeches," I knew that McCain had lost it last night when he started referring derisively to Obama's "eloquence." And when McCain groused about Obama's "eloquence" just after Obama had stood up for the right of a woman to have a late-term abortion if her health were imperiled, McCain seemed particularly churlish.

The bottom line is that it is now Obama's race to lose. CNN has him ahead by a staggering 10 points in Virginia, a state where Bush defeated Kerry by 9 points. Obama is ahead by 4 points in Colorado, which hasn't gone Democratic in 16 years. And the Democrats are poised to get some sweet revenge in Florida where Obama has opened up a 5 point lead on McCain. And all of this is partly due to what the three debates revealed: Barack Obama is one of the most reasoned, steady, and disciplined candidates in our lifetime.
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 9:09 AM

 
The Vice Presidential Debate: Where Was Gwen Ifill?

Back in the 70's, the tongue-in-cheek, anti-war question was, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" In an embarrassing variation on that theme, the question taken from last night's vice presidential debate was, "What if they gave a debate and the moderator didn't show up?" Simply put, moderator Gwen Ifill of PBS was missing-in-action.The rhetorical battle between Biden and Palin was so unusual that it may have changed the nature of debate as we know it. Palin's strategy was ingeniously simple: If the moderator asks you a question about which you know nothing, simply refuse to answer it, and instead answer one of your own making. The Palin strategy produced a bizarre back and forth in which one never knew what Palin was going to say, because she paid so little attention to the question at hand, preferring instead to simply recite pre-rehearsed monologues. As a result, it wasn't long before the inmates, or should I say the inmate, was running the asylum, and the moderator had abdicated control.

I would grade the participants as follows:

Biden: B+ Biden was as disciplined and on point as I've ever seen him, making his points with a crispness and seriousness befitting a vice-presidential debate, even while Palin tried to distract him with a procession of winks, quips, jokes, shout-outs, and misstatements of fact that sometimes came so fast and furious that it was hard to keep up with her. Biden's grade would be higher if he hadn't seemed so nervous through much of the debate, leading to occasionally garbled sentences.

Palin: C Just for showing up and surviving the ninety mintues, Palin gets a C, though her survival depended largely on being able to dismiss any question that did not conform to the talking points that she had previously memorized. Early on in the proceedings she gave warning that the debate questions were in her view, an evil creation of the mainstream media, and that answering the moderator's questions was optional:

I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record...

Toward the end of the debate, in an oblique reference to her disastrous Katie Couric interviews, Palin continued her criticism of the mainstream press:

I like being able to answer these tough questions without the filter, even, of the mainstream media kind of telling viewers what they've just heard. I'd rather be able to just speak to the American people like we just did.

Ifill: F I'm not sure I've ever seen a debate in which the moderator was as docile as Ifill was last night.There are three basic tasks for the moderator of any major political debate: 1) Set an agenda by raising serious and relevant questions 2) Keep the participants on task so that they follow the agenda at hand. 3) Highlight any lapses of clarity, factual accuracy, or candor with follow-up questions. I don't believe that Ifill managed to accomplish any of these tasks last night.

Ifill was almost certainly affected by pressure from conservative groups, who viewed her upcoming book, Breakthough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, as a serious conflict of interest. In the view of Ifill's critics, her book, due to be released on inauguration day, would obviously be more relevant and more financially successful if Obama won the presidency, than if he did not. There is some truth to this complaint, so it is not unreasonable to conclude that Ifill felt the need to overcompensate during the debate by giving Palin free rein to pick and choose which questions she would answer.

Early on in the debate, I knew that things had gone awry when Joe Biden, in responding to a question about the subprime mortgage crisis, described John McCain as one of the biggest advocates for market deregulation. Ifill offered Palin a chance to respond to Biden's criticisms, and here was Palin's response:

I would like to respond about the tax increases. We can speak in agreement here that darn right we need tax relief for Americans so that jobs can be created here. Now, Barack Obama and Sen. Biden also voted for the largest tax increases in U.S. history. Barack had 94 opportunities to side on the people's side and reduce taxes and 94 times he voted to increase taxes or not support a tax reduction, 94 times.

For a moment I thought I was losing my mind. Tax increases? Who said anything about tax increases!? Am I already losing my memory at such a young age!? Clearly, tax increases were the first line on Palin's list of talking points, and she was determined to raise the issue, come hell or high water.

One of Ifill's many shortcomings during the debate was her inability to ask a question without simultaneously providing multiple choice answers. So she couldn't simply ask something like, "Who was at fault in the subprime mortgage meltdown? Instead, Ifill coddled Palin with this formulation:

Who do you think was at fault? I start with you, Gov. Palin. Was it the greedy lenders? Was it the risky home-buyers who shouldn't have been buying a home in the first place? And what should you be doing about it?

Every time she got such a multiple choice question, Palin breathed a sigh of relief, because she then knew that she could circle "all of the above." Likewise, Ifill didn't ask how Palin would facilitate peace in the Middle East; instead, she threw her a lifeline by suggesting "...is a two-state solution the solution?" Was anyone surprised by Palin's response: "A two-state solution is the solution." Bravo!

In the category of dumb questions, Ifill asked Biden about his statement that he, "would not be vice president under any circumstances." The problem with this question is that Biden said that when he was still a presidential candidate. Show me a presidential candidate anywhere who would say, "Yes, I'm willing to take the second job." It was later, after he had ended his campaign, that Biden told Brian Williams on Meet the Press that he didn't want the job, but if asked, he would accept:

SEN. BIDEN: Unlike most other people, I'm being straight with you. If asked, I will do it. I've made it clear I do not want to be asked.

MR. WILLIAMS: Do not want to be asked. But if asked, the answer, of course, would be yes.

SEN. BIDEN: Of course it would, because the--if the president--if the presidential nominee thought I could help him win, am I going to say to the first African-American candidate about to make history in the world that, "No, I will not help you out like you want me to"? Of course, I'm--I'll say yes.

I watched the interview live on July 22, and found it to be a candid and sincere statement by Biden. Palin was apparently referencing this comment by Biden in trying to defend her own statement that she didn't know what a vice president actually did:

In my comment there, it was a lame attempt at a joke and yours was a lame attempt at a joke, too, I guess, because nobody got it. Of course we know what a vice president does.

Huh? Biden's comments to Brian Williams on Meet the Press were dead serious. This is just another example of Palin winging it with no real knowledge of what she's talking about. Conservative writer Kathleen Parker put if perfectly when she wrote: "If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself." By the end of the debate, when Palin had relaxed a bit, she started to tap into her inner Tina Fey, getting more cutesy and folksy by the minute. I hope I never again have to watch a debate where I hear a "shout-out" to the third grade of Gladys Wood Elementary School. I hope I never have to hear canned lines again like "say it aint so, Joe." I hope I never hear the word "maverick" again. And I hope that the Commission on Presidential Debates thinks long and hard before giving another debate to Gwen Ifill.
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 5:24 PM

 
Obama, Palin, and the "Witness Protection Program"

In his piece yesterday about Barack Obama in the Washington Post ("Too Cool to Fight?"), columnist Richard Cohen said something profound. While discussing the concept of "swiftboating," Cohen pointed out that swiftboating isn't merely about smearing one's opponent; nor is it merely about spreading falsehoods. The essence of swiftboating, Cohen wrote, is taking your opponent's greatest strengths, and turning them into negatives, liabilities. John Kerry, for example, was so dumbfounded that someone would challenge his stellar war record, he felt it was unnecessary to vigorously defend himself against the charges--a decision he now sorely regrets.

Likewise, who would have thought that the McCain campaign would treat community organizing not as something that embodies basic American virtues like duty, self-sacrifice and commitment to justice, but rather something worthy of contempt? Who would have thought that inspiring millions of Europeans to once again believe in the U.S., would be treated by McCain and company as somehow un-American, and evidence of empty celebrity? And who would have thought that the candidate who excelled at Harvard and became president of the Law Review would be seen as "elitist," while John McCain, who finished fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, and Sarah Palin, who went to six different colleges in six years, would get a free pass?

In considering this Orwellian state of affairs, one has to conclude that swiftboating works not simply because of the virulence of the swifterboaters, it also depends on the passivity of the swiftboatees. It is for this reason that Cohen takes Barack Obama to task for a disappointing, namby-pamby performance on George Stephanopoulos, during which Obama seemed to lack any fight, any passion, regardless of how outrageous the smear against him. When asked whether McCain had picked a running mate who was "capable of being president," Obama could only muster a wan, "Well, you know, I'll let you ask John McCain when he's on ABC." Even Obama's strongest backers have to admit that this is pretty mealy-mouthed stuff. Cohen reached the same conclusion that I reached in many previous blogs, that Obama relies far too heavily on his trademark "cool," and is too slow to anger, to reluctant to fight.

There is an interesting parallel between Barack Obama and the great tennis player and humanitarian, Arthur Ashe. Ashe grew up in a very segregated Richmond, Virginia, and as a promising teenage tennis player, wasn't allowed to play at many of the clubs in Richmond. When he was allowed into tournaments, Ashe knew that he could not engage in any racquet throwing, arguing over line calls, or moments of petulance--standard etiquette for his white counterparts. Ashe knew instinctively that he had to be the perfect gentleman, lest he give the good ole boys reason to kick him out of the tournament. As a result, Ashe became, throughout his life, a model of comportment, and diplomacy. These traits, combined with Ashe's intelligence and empathy, were integral to the humanitarian work that Ashe did in South Africa and elsewhere.

All too often, however, people who are thoughtful, reflective and empathic are mistakenly seen as weak. Even Ashe's contemporary, Billie Jean King, an otherwise very wise woman, once said derisively about Arthur Ashe, "I'm blacker than Arthur is," perhaps the dumbest thing she ever said. My point is this: calm and diplomacy are great traits to own, but there are situations in life where it is passion and fight that carry the day. I believe that Obama is currently in the fight of his life, and he needs to recognize this and squarely engage the opposition.

Since the early days of the primaries, I've maintained that the most significant moment of the campaign was the heated argument Obama had with Hillary on stage in South Carolina. People have forgotten that before that memorable moment, even the black community had not fully gotten on board the Obama campaign. But Obama finally reached the boiling point in South Carolina, after Bill Clinton called Obama's opposition to the war a "fairy-tale," and when Hillary put out an ad claiming that Obama supported the policies of Ronald Reagan. Losing his temper in the South Carolina debate was the best thing that ever happened to Obama. The public got to see that he did have some fight, some fire, and it made him all the more human and authentic. That moment was a game-changer for Obama.

The problem is, we have not seen enough of this. The only other time during the entire campaign that I can remember Obama rising to anger was when Hillary, after repeatedly refusing to say that Obama was ready to be president, all of a sudden decided that the "dream ticket" would consist of her as president and Obama as veep. The raw cynicism of this got Obama's dander up once again, and he mocked Hillary's flip-flop beautifully. He needs to display more of this kind of passion.

So where should the campaign go from here? First, Obama/Biden should absolutely refuse to be boxed in by the fact that Sarah Palin is a woman. They should go after Sarah Palin in the same manner that they would go after John McCain. Yes, temporarily Sarah Palin has rallied the McCain troops. But in picking someone so manifestly unprepared to be president, McCain has created a vulnerability for himself large enough to drive a truck through. Obama and Biden have simply been slow to exploit it. The notion that Palin is ready to be president, but isn't ready for Meet the Press, is another one of those Orwellian absurdities that should be trumpeted by Obama, Biden, or both, every five minutes. I can hear Palin apologists already, saying, "But she's being interviewed by Charlie Gibson!" Fiddlesticks, that's a far cry from maintaining a daily dialogue with the press and with the voters, something one would expect of any candidate.

In keeping with this, the Obama campaign ought to start keeping a daily tally of the number of days that the McCain is hiding Palin from the Sunday talk shows. They should make a big deal out of it, declaring in a daily press release:

"It's been 10 days and counting since Sarah Palin has been in the McCain 'witness protection program.' When will she come out of hiding?"

The Obama campaign should beat this issue like a drum, because Palin's lack of readiness to be president is the ultimate issue, more important than her support for the "bridge to nowhere," more important than her faux opposition to pork barrel projects, more important than her denial of global warming. Smoking out Sarah Palin, and by extension, John McCain's judgment, should be project number one for the remainder of the campaign. And it's become fairly clear that Hillary won't do it. Hillary is content to continue her perfunctory, joyless, I'm-out-here-because-I-have-to-be form of campaigning. Now that Hillary has the luxury of sticking her thumb in Obama's eye by professing such loyalty to the "sisterhood" that she can't take on Sarah Palin, the time has come for Obama to move beyond "nice." He needs to find his inner toughness.
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 6:14 PM

 
Is the Sarah Palin Pick About to Implode?

As more information surfaces about vice-presidential choice Sarah Palin, it has become increasingly clear that Palin was a last-second choice on the part of John McCain, and underwent virtually no vetting prior to her selection. Multiple reports have indicated that McCain wanted Joe Lieberman for the position, but encountered such stiff opposition from party regulars that he was forced to drop such a plan. Another prospect, former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, was was also unacceptable to the party base, due to his pro-choice position on abortion. That left Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, sorely lacking in both charisma and depth, and Mitt Romney, with whom McCain's relationship is strained at best. It is also clear that McCain was influenced by the tremendous success of the Democratic Convention, and was pessimistic about his chances were he to make a predictable, ho-hum choice for veep. That is why, at the 11th hour, he chose Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, hoping that she would lend a new vitality and pizzazz to the ticket. The problem for the McCain campaign is, the pick was made with such haste, the McCain campaign knew little about her.

Since then, information has emerged which suggests that Palin is a lot longer on drama, and shorter on gravitas than McCain would have hoped. Let's take a look at what we now know:

1) The New York Times reports that Palin has hired a private lawyer to deal with the investigation into whether she improperly used her office as governor to try to get her ex-brother-in-law fired, during his bitter custody battle with her sister.

2) It has come out that during the 90's, Palin was a member of the "Alaska Independence Party," one of whose goals was the seccession of Alaska from the United States. Can you imagine if Barack Obama had belonged to a group which lobbied for Hawaii to secede from the Union? We'd never hear the end of it!

3) Palin campaigned against her own mother-in-law, who was attempting to succeed Palin as the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. Much of Sarah Palin's disenchantment stemmed from her mother-in-law's pro-choice views. Her mother-in-law, Faye Palin, who lost the mayoral race to the candidate that Sarah Palin backed, told the New York Daily news that she is considering voting for Obama.

4) While McCain praised Palin during his introduction of her, for rejecting the infamous "bridge to nowhere," is has since come to light that that before it became a national scandal, Palin was a staunch supporter of the infamous bridge. Further, in direct contradiction to what Palin said during her introduction, Alaska never gave the $400 million back to the federal government; rather, they simply transferred it to other projects. Simply put, during her debut in Dayton, Ohio, Palin fibbed when she said she has returned the money.

5) Depite the reformer label that Republicans have enthusiastically pinned on Palin, we now know that while Palin was the mayor of Wasilla, she brought in 27 million dollars of pork barrel spending, for a town with a population of 7,000. That may be a national record for pork barrel abuse per capita.

The McCain campaign has issued a series of statements purporting to show that they did serious job of vetting Palin before choosing her. However, the statements raise more questions than they answer. Staffers first told the Washington Post that the FBI had fully investigated her; the FBI, however, denied this, saying that they perform no such function for the candidates. Further, the New York Times found that the McCain campaign never bothered to talk to Palin's associates in Alaska. Here is Lyda Green, the State Senate president, who lives in Wasilla, where Palin served as governor:

They didn’t speak to anyone in the Legislature, they didn’t speak to anyone in the business community.

Representative Gail Phillips, a Republican and former speaker of the State House, questioned whether any serious vetting had been done on Palin, given the universal surprise in Alaska over the choice:

I started calling around and asking, and I have not been able to find one person that was called. I called 30 to 40 people, political leaders, business leaders, community leaders. Not one of them had heard. Alaska is a very small community, we know people all over, but I haven’t found anybody who was asked anything.

The fact that the McCainites knew so little about Palin diminishes her as a candidate, but it diminishes John McCain even more, making a mockery of his bromides about judgment, experience and prudence during a time of national peril. The selection of Sarah Palin was clearly an amateurish, slapdash process that resulted in a pick that may now blow up in McCain's face.

Of course the most lurid fact to emerge since the choice Sarah Palin is that of her daughter Bristol's pregnancy, a pregnancy putatively in its fifth month. This information was disclosed to to the press in the wake of rampant internet speculation that Bristol, now 17, had been the real mother of Sarah Palin's fifth child, Trig Paxson Van Palin. While I am aware that the internet is rife with false and slanderous rumors, many of which have indeed targeted Barack Obama, the facts if the birth of Trig Palin are so bizarre and unlikely, that they bear further discussion:

On March 5, 2008, Sarah Palin announced at a press conference that she was 7 months pregnant with her fifth child. The reaction to the news was universal; everyone was shocked because she didn't look remotely pregnant. A month later, while presumably 8 months pregnant with a child that she knew would have Down's Syndrome, she attended a conference in Dallas, requiring significant travel by air, itself a bit unusual for someone almost due. As Sarah Palin tells the story, she was in Dallas on April 17, when she began to leak amniotic fluid. Whether her water fully broke is, I suppose, a semantic issue. Despite this sign of impending childbirth and accompanying labor pains, she decided to give her keynote speech at the energy conference she was attending. Then, rather than simply check herself into one of Dallas' fine hospitals, she went to DFW airport, bought a ticket, checked her bags, dealt with the hassle of security, and made a 9 hour trip back to Anchorage (with a stop in Seattle), while not disclosing anything to Air Alaska, and while apparently leaking amniotic fluid. So Palin's version in a nutshell is that she got pregnant at age 44 and at seven months, wasn't showing at all--itself somewhat unlikely--had her water break, and chose not to go to a hospital in Dallas. Knowing that she would be delivering a disabled child that could come at any moment, she instead chose to return to Alaska, simply because she wanted to have her child in Alaska. To say that this strains credulity is the understatement of the year.

It is also important to note that during this time, Bristol had been absent from school for eight months with "mononucleosis," and that some of her schoolmates had reported seeing her looking pregnant. We are now told that Bristol is 5 months pregnant, which would put Bristol's conception at almost the exact time of Trig Paxson Van Palin's birth, conveniently knocking down the notion that Bristol could have given brith at that time. If indeed Bristol is five months pregnant, she could not be the mother of Trig. However, we have to take this on faith; if this was all a deception, why would we get the truth now? If Sarah Palin's version of events is true, it is the coincidence of a remarkable series of unlikely events, whose collective probability is close to zero. A few more troubling revelations about Sarah Palin could doom her to the same fate as would-be attorney general, Harriet Miers, and would-be vice-president Thomas Eagleton.

Finally, in conjunction with the Palin selection, let me say a few words about Hillary Clinton. Regular readers of this blog know that over the course of the campaign, I have regarded Hillary Clinton as a cynical and somewhat destructive figure. It was for that reason that I was overjoyed at the level of unity reached during the Democratic Convention. I said to myself, "Wow, I won't have to talk about Hillary anymore!" Well, with the selection of Sarah Palin, it looks like I spoke too soon.

John McCain's attempt to appeal to and co-opt former Hillary supporters is a gamble, not so much because of the experience issue, but because the success of McCain's strategy depends on Hillary being an accomplice to his plan to drive a wedge between Hillary's past supporters. The fact is, Hillary could undermine McCain's cynical use of Palin champion of women's interests, by simply standing up and saying firmly:

She is a woman, yes. But she stands against all the important things that animated my campaign: Universal health care, the protection of a woman's right to choose, the establishment of a living wage for working families, a progressive tax system that doesn't favor the rich, a major move toward green, renewable energy, and an immediate end to the war in Iraq, with an emphasis on diplomacy. Sarah Palin stands against all of these goals. She is no more a promoter of my agenda than Clarence Thomas has been a promoter of civil rights. I strongly urge any supporters of mine to see through this cynical ploy by Senator McCain, and support Barack Obama for president!

Barbara Boxer has already said words to this effect, and so has has Nancy Pelosi. But the person who really needs to speak out on Sarah Palin is Hillary Clinton. McCain apparently believes that if he can appeal to Hillary's narcissism and sense of victimhood, that she may stay silent while he siphons off some of Obama's support. Who knows, McCain may be right. So far Hillary has issued only the most tepid, innocuous statement about Palin. Over the next 65 days, I'll be watching to see how Hillary handles the Sarah Palin issue, and you can bet that Barack Obama will be watching as well.
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 5:38 PM

 
The New Racial Code: Obama as "Arrogant"

It is fascinating to observe the latest criticisms of Barack Obama. From conservatives and liberals alike we have begun to hear a new mantra, "he's too arrogant, he's being presumptuous." Let's be frank about what is really going on here. It is a new racial code.

Virtually everything about the Obama campaign has debunked the conventional wisdom: He outperformed and outstrategized Hillary Clinton in the primary season, and vanquished the Clinton machine. Goaded by John McCain to travel overseas, Obama toured the Middle East and Europe in a manner that was successful beyond all prediction. Despite the wishful thinking of Republicans that Obama would be snubbed and rebuffed by our troops in the Persian Gulf, they mobbed him with joy and excitement. France's Sarkozy and Britain's Gordon treated Obama with uncommon fanfare, and Sarkozy offered that the French would be "delighted" if Obama won the election. The 200,000 cheering Berliners who listened to Obama's speech symbolized something that I blogged about back on May 19, after John McCain's invidious comment that Obama was the "candidate of Hamas":

Moreover, in trying to tie Obama to Hamas, McCain completely missed the point. Hamas aside, Obama is the favored candidate of the entire international community. If there were a world-wide referendum on our presidency, Obama would trounce McCain. He would win in England, he would win in France, he would win in Canada, he would win throughout the world, precisely because he has had the same inspirational effect overseas that he has had at home. The international community is looking for diplomatic leadership.

Finally, Obama has led John McCain in almost every poll since the he became the presumptive Democratic nominee. I list these accomplishments not to sing Obama's praises; I do it rather, to point out how improbable and singular Obama's ascendance has been. Barack Obama's candidacy has been the ultimate "man bite's dog" story, an African-American candidate who has garnered a mass following. This is unheard of in American politics, and we have now begun to see the blowback. It comes in the form of "Who does he think he is!?" To be blunt about it, Obama is now being criticized for things for which no white candidate would ever be faulted. Let's take a look at some Obama's presumed offenses:

1) He's an Ivy Leaguer. The last three presidents, Bush junior, Clinton, and Bush senior, all had Ivy League educations. Clinton also spent time at Oxford as a Rhode Scholar. When did you ever hear carping about their Ivy League connections? When was it ever suggested that any of the three must be "elitist" because they went to Yale, or Harvard, or Oxford? Indeed with George W. Bush, the criticism was precisely the opposite, that his grades may not have qualified him for so fine a school as Harvard Business School. But there was never any hint that the three presidents' backgrounds were in any way disqualifying. But we do hear that about Barack Obama. Just yesterday, when Virginia Governor Tim Kaine's name emerged as a leading veep candidate, one writer suggested that because both Obama and Kaine went to Harvard Law School, the combination might be too "elitist" for the electorate. Huh? The sad truth is, Americans have gotten so used to the idea of African-Americans being underachievers academically, the image of Barack Obama becomes a little unsettling for some. Hence, in the minds of some voters, he becomes "elitist."

2) The "bitter comments." Obama's comments that small town America, when experiencing economic duress, clings to "guns and religion," caused a firestorm. And while it is easy to see how the remarks could be seen as patronizing, I believe that there was more to the reaction. Throughout history, we have gotten used to whites being patronizing and paternalistic toward the black community. What we don't often hear is a black man saying condescending things about the white community. So Obama's comment stood as another man bites dog story. And once again, the reaction of the blue collar community was, "Who the hell does he think he is!? This black guy thinks he's better than we are!"

Yes, Obama's words were ill-chosen, but it was his race that added the extra sting to his remarks. And the sad truth is, Obama's statement that things like guns and religion were hurting his prospects with blue-collar workers was baloney anyway. After all, those issues didn't hurt Hillary Clinton. The real problem that Obama had (and still has) in the hinterlands of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, is that he's black!

It is to his great credit that Obama has learned that the best way to deal with this issue is to address it head-on, rather than tiptoeing around it. That's why Claire McCaskill (still number one on my wish list for veep) introduced Obama this way in front of 2000 cheering, white, Springfield, Missourians yesterday:

They said a young black guy named Barack Obama couldn't get elected to the United States Senate from Illinois. They were wrong... They say he's arrogant, not patriotic, blah, blah, blah...The truth is he's humble, he's patriotic, and he's a devout Christian.

Obama, for his part, added:

Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he's not patriotic enough, he's got a funny name, you know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.

When Obama made the comment about the dollar bills, the audience (mostly rural and white) chucked heartily en masse: They knew damned well what he was talking about.

3. "I am a symbol...." In one of the most ill-conceived and reprehensible columns I've seen in a long time, Washington Post writer Dana Milbank bends over backwards, trying to make his case that Obama has gone from the "presumptive" nominee, to the "presumptuous nominee." Milbank starts out with this curious indictment:

He (Obama) ordered up a teleconference with the (current president's) Treasury secretary, granted an audience to the Pakistani prime minister and had his staff arrange for the chairman of the Federal Reserve to give him a briefing. Then, he went up to Capitol Hill to be adored by House Democrats in a presidential-style pep rally.

Let's be blunt. This is disgraceful stuff. Does Milbank seriously object to Obama meeting with economic advisors such as Paulson, Bernanke, Rubin and Volcker? Bernanke briefed John McCain in March on the potential rescue of ailing firm Bear Stearns, but apparently, Milbank thinks that was fine. Milbank's loopy column notwithstanding, we should be concerned if Obama did not meet with such advisors, not that he is meeting with them. Further, note the language that Milbank uses: In Milbank's parlance, Obama didn't "take part" in a teleconference with Paulson; rather, he "ordered up" a teleconference, as if by a snap of his finger. Obama didn't "confer" with the Pakistani Prime Minister; rather, he "granted an audience to the Prime Minister." I'm surprised Milbank didn't take it a step further and say that Obama "deigned to speak with" the Prime Minister."

But the worst of Milbank's shameful piece is yet to come: Milbank writes that Obama, while meeting with "adoring" congressional Democrats, declared:

I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.

This is the quote that launched a million conservative bloggers, each complaining about Obama's arrogance. The problem is, Milbank butchered Obama's real quote:

It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have just become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.

Obviously the real quote conveys a completely different meaning, but not the one that suited Milbank's purposes. My question is two-fold: First, how does Milbank sleep at night? And second, does the Washington Post have any editors?

It has become clear to me that over this campaign Obama has been held to a different standard than that of white candidates. What passes for confidence--or even acceptable puffery--among white candidates. becomes unacceptable arrogance if done by Obama. And even the term "arrogance" is a euphemism. What they're really saying is that he is "uppity." My advice to Obama? Keep being uppity; they'll get used to it.
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 10:32 AM

 
The Democratic Veepstakes Revisited

With the Democratic Convention approaching on August 25, and the Olympics running from August 8 through August 24, many are predicting that Barack Obama could make his vice presidential choice any day now. With that possibility in mind, it seems appropriate to take a look at the major players in the Democratic veepstakes. Rather than looking at the strongest prospects first, I prefer to do the opposite, using a process of elimination to rule out the also-rans. With that in mind, here they are:

1) Hillary Clinton. The most obvious rule-out is Hillary Clinton. News reports have suggested that the vetting process for Hillary never even got started, as Bill, understandably, was loathe to turn over information about the contributors to the Clinton Library. Such a list of names would almost certainly be controversial, with many of them international billionaires and potentates, and I suspect that neither Clinton wanted the humiliation of divulging that information and then not being chosen. Further, is it just me, or has anyone else noticed how peaceful the political arena has become since Hillary exited stage right? When Hillary was still in the fray, it was a little like having a drunk person at your party; only once they leave do you realize how noisy they were. The chances of Hillary being chosen? Zero.

2) Sam Nunn. Of all the serious veep prospects, perhaps the only disastrous choice for Obama would be former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn. Never seen as a progressive figure during his 24 years in the Senate, Nunn would seriously antagonize the left wing of the party, as many of his past positions have not been in synch with those of Obama. Nunn was a homophobic and reactionary figure during the "don't ask, don't tell" debate in the 90's, he has fought to limit appeals for death row inmates, and voted in favor of school prayer. To pick a running mate so ideologically inconsistent with Obama, for the sake of trying to win the state of Georgia, would be a cynical return to the old politics that Obama has forsworn. The final problem with Nunn is his age. He will be 70 this year. The age issue is quietly one of the most powerful things playing in Obama's favor. To choose a running mate so close to McCain's age would be to undercut Obama's advantage. The chance of Nunn being chosen is small, but it is greater than zero. It would be a collosal blunder.

3) Kathleen Sebelius. Kathleen Sebelius, governor of Kansas, is often talked about as the leading female vice presidential prospect. She's a popular governor of a midwestern state, and her father, John Gilligan, is the former governor of Ohio, leading some to believe that by choosing her, Obama might get a "two-fer," appealing to voters in both Kansas and Ohio. There are, however, two problems with Sebelius. First, she is viewed by many as a wooden, uninspiring speaker. Second, despite her support of Obama, she has been little seen during the campaign. I'm a political junkie, and I've barely seen her during the entire campaign. Given her minimal exposure, it is highly unlikely that she would be chosen..

4) Bill Richardson. Regular readers of my blog know that I've always felt that Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico, would add something to the ticket. With his impressive resume (Secretary of Energy, Ambassador to the UN), and his status as a Hispanic, Richardson has some very desirable attributes, as states like New Mexico and Colorado have become important battleground states. While Richardson earned the enmity of the Clintons when he endorsed Obama, I wouldn't expect that to be disqualifying. However, Richardson's low profile recently suggests to me that he is not on Obama's short list. Perhaps the Obama campaign concluded that a Black/Brown ticket was more than the country could handle. I believe Richardson's prospects are currently small.

5) Evan Bayh. Evan Bayh, senator from Indiana, is also the son of legendary senator Birch Bayh. Before his election to the senate in 1998, Evan Bayh was a two term governor, an important line on his resume. Bayh, a strong Hillary Clinton supporter, is the quintessential moderate Democrat, and would be a classic veep choice, a solid, competent and unexciting individual who may not help you that much, but would never do anything to hurt you. It is questionable, however, whether Bayh on the ticket would make Indiana, a Republican stronghold, competitive for the Democrats. Bayh's prospects of being chosen at this point are, like his politics, moderate.

6) Joe Biden. Joe Biden, senator from Delaware for the past 35 years, recently caused a commotion when he said on Meet the Press that he did not want the job of vice president and had "communicated that to the candidate." He went on to say however, that if chosen he would accept the role. When asked about this seeming contradiction, Biden responded:

if the presidential nominee thought I could help him win, am I going to say to the first African-American candidate about to make history in the world that, "No, I will not help you out like you want me to?" Of course, I'm--I'll say yes.

Biden has much to recommend him. While he serves in Delaware, he was born in Scranton, Pa, and his ties to the Keystone State would be very helpful to Obama. Further, Biden has a tremendous resume, serving on both the Foreign Relations Committee and the Judiciary Committee. There are two downsides to a Biden vice presidency. First, he is so influential in the senate that it would be a great sacrifice for the Democrats to lose him from that body. Second, Biden is so verbose, that it is almost guaranteed that at some point in the campaign he will put his foot in his mouth. After all, only Biden would be so loose-tongued as to describe Obama early in the campaign as "clean and articulate." His chance of being chosen is moderate to good.

7) Chris Dodd. Chris Dodd, senator from Connecticut, has served in the senate for 28 years. As head of the Banking Committee he has been a central player in finding a solution to the mortgage crisis, and he offers a progressive voice in the senate that is much in synch with Barack Obama. However, recent revelations that he received favorable treatment on his personal home mortgages from disgraced lender Countrywide, has tarnished both his image and his veep prospects. He took a hit when his hometown newspaper, the Hartford Courant, wrote that it was time that "Dodd got off his high horse, came clean and admit he screwed up." Dodd's chances, once good, are now only moderate.

8) Tim Kaine. It once looked like Obama had a bounty of riches to draw from if he wanted a veep from Virginia. At this point, however, former governor Mark Warner and Senator Jim Webb have taken themselves out of the running for veep. That leaves Senator Tim Kaine as the only game in town. Happily for Obama, Kaine is the best choice of the three anyway. While now a Virginian, Kaine also has roots in the Midwest, havin grown up in Kansas City. Kaine is a first-term governor of Virginia, having succeeded the popular but term-limited Mark Warner. Prior to that, Kaine had been the Lieutenant Governor, as well as the Mayor of Richmond. Kaine is Catholic having done a brief stint as a Jesuit missionary in Honduras during his college years, and like Obama, is a graduate of Harvard Law School. It is a feather in Kaine's cap that he was the first politician to endorse Obama outside the state of Illinois. On the stump, Kaine has been an effective surrogate for Obama. Kaine's unique set of attributes--Midwesterner, southern governor, Catholic, progressive, embodiment of the "new south"--fit Obama like a glove. The fact that Obama campaign recently opened up 20 offices in Virginia shows the priority they have assigned to it. Kaine's prospects for the veep are solid and strong.

9) Claire McCaskill. Claire McCaskill, first-term senator from Missouri, over the course of the campaign has been Barack Obama's most visible, and most trusted surrogate. It is also true, but not generally recognized, that she played a crucial role in Obama's success on Super Tuesday. As the evening wore on, on February 5, states that Obama had been hoping for--California, New Jersey, Massachusetts--began to fall into the the Hillary Clinton column. It was crucial for Obama's momentum to be able to claim at least a "tie" on Super Tuesday. A loss in the battleground state of Missouri would have given Clinton clear bragging rights for the evening. All night long he trailed in Missouri, but late returns that came in around midnight, allowed Obama to eke out a razor thin victory that nonetheless had huge symbolic implications. This was in no small part due to the efforts of Claire McCaskill. Of all the surrogates whom I have watched over the campaign, only McCaskill matches Obama on the charm scale. She radiates both intelligence and warmth, and is the prototypical modern woman: Divorced, successful working woman with six kids and step-kids, McCaskill is an attorney by profession. Before her election as senator, she served as a prosecutor and as a one-term governor of Missouri. Her zeal and good cheer in debate with her opponents reminds me of a latter day Hubert Humphrey. Some have suggested that pairing Obama with a white female might cause some primal resentment in conservative areas of the country, something to be considered. In my view, she is the best campaigner of all Obama's veep prospects, and her selection would further energize the party. Asked about her prospects however by Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press recently, McCaskill smiled and said, "If I were betting, I wouldn't bet on me."

Who do I think will get the nod? Frankly, I have no idea. I'm open to suggestions.
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 9:06 AM

 
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the New Yorker

The recent New Yorker magazine cover depicting Barack Obama as a Muslim and Michelle Obama as a gun-toting, Angela Davis style radical, makes one thing perfectly clear: As easy as it sometimes looks, creating a good political cartoon is a very difficult thing to do. The New Yorker cartoon fails badly, not because it is offensive, but because its satirical message is so unclear that it leaves the reader confused rather than amused. The cartoon is "too hip for the room," confronting us, jarring us, without conveying any clear-cut satire or humor. As such, the cartoon falls flat. The mere fact that the New Yorker editors were forced to run around all day trying to explain the cover, reveals how flawed the cartoon was.

As novelist-essayist Arthur Koestler pointed out years ago, all good humor works simultaneously on two levels, as two seemingly incompatible frames of reference collide to produce the explosive result that we call "humor." It could be as primitive as a dignified person slipping on a banana peel, that is, the high and mighty being brought down to size. Or it could be the woman, worried that her son is seeing a psychiatrist, who is reassured by a friend, "Don't worry, it will all work out as long as he is a good boy who loves his mother." When the psychiatric meaning and the everyday meaning of loving one's mother collide, we get irony and humor.

The problem with the New Yorker cartoon is that there is no second frame of reference to help us. We see the image and wonder, is the creator criticizing Obama, is he sympathizing, is he commenting on rumor-mongering? With so little context provided on the cover, we are at a loss as to how to respond, and that is not funny. Indeed, when CNN did a man-on-the-street poll about the cartoon, virtually no one saw it as a hip, ironic statement on viral rumor-mongering during the campaign. Rather, they tended to see it as merely an insulting depiction of Obama. That's not funny.

However, the cover could have been funny: Pulitzer prize winning cartoonist Nick Anderson, the current president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists comments, "“I think, as a piece of satire, it utterly fails." Anderson goes on to say that a caption such as "The Politics of Fear," would have added some context and clarity to the image. He continues:

It would have been even stronger had they shown an enemy of Obama painting the picture, or imagining it in their head.

Personally, I would have tweaked the cartoon by showing two images, a wholesome image of Obama and family, juxtaposed with an imaginary voter's hostile "email" version of Obama. This would have provided context and humor.

Contrast the failed New Yorker cartoon with one by cartoonist Matt Wuerker of politico.com that covers similar subject matter. Wuerker's cartoon depicts four blue collar white males sitting in a bar watching Obama on an overhead television set:

The first one says: Ya know he's a Muslim.

The second one says: And refuses to say the Pledge!

The third one says: And took his oath on a Quran!

The fourth one says: And what's worse, he's an elitist who thinks we're gullible ignoramuses!

Now that's funny! The image of four blue collar whites buying into every scurrilous rumor about Obama, then claiming that they get no respect, is a sad, painful and hilarious commentary on one of the important dynamics of this campaign. As such, it speaks more eloquently about Obama's difficulties with working class voters than virtually all of the so-called communications experts I have listened to on this subject. It is easy for such experts to bring out the cliche that Obama "can't relate" to these voters, or that he "can't close the deal." The fact is that Obama is great with working class indidviduals; he was a success with low income folks on the south side of Chicago. The deeper truth is that even the strongest message can be undermined by suspicion and racism. The New Yorker magazine was making a laudable attempt to address this issue, but failed.

On a related note, sometimes timing and circumstances determine whether something is funny or not. On Sunday, when CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer asked South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford if there were any differences between the economic policies of George W. Bush and those of John McCain, here was Sanford's response:

Um, yeah. I mean for instance, take, you know, um, uh, take for instance the issue of, uh, of, um (drums fingers), I'm drawing a blank, and, I hate it when I do that, particularly on television....

If you saw this exchange live, it was excruciatingly painful to watch. Blitzer himself said, "It was painful for me, and I was the questioner!" However, imagine a Democratic campaign ad in September, in which an ominous voiceover says, "Can you name any differences between the Bush economic plan and that of John McCain?" Cut immediately to Mark Sanford hemming and hawing without being able to answer. The voiceover then says, "Don't worry Governor Sanford, we can't think of anything either!" I can assure you, in this context, Mark Sanford will be hilarious! And I have to believe that the Obama staff is preparing such an ad even as I write this. And as for Sanford? You can scratch him off the veep list.
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 1:53 PM

 
Campaign Post-Mortem: Hillary, Sexism, and Media Bias

1) Hillary. Call me hard-hearted, call me mean, call me the last Hillary-basher, but very little that Hillary has done over the last month has given me any reason to cheer. I understand that now that she has lost, it's fashionable to take part in a pity party for Hillary. But you'll excuse me if I don't join in. Take, for example, her belated concession speech on Saturday. Media mavens fell all over themselves praising her effort. From the likes of Matthews, Russert and Buchanan I heard, "she knocked it out of the park," "she did everything Obama could ask," "she covered every base." In my view, all these bouquets were way over the top, for several reasons. First and foremost, Hillary was only giving the speech because a gun had been put to her head.

Earlier in the week when she spoke to her most stalwart supporters in the New York delegation, the head of the delegation, congressman Charlie Rangel knew that unless she acted quickly, not only would she permanently damage herself, she would take members of the New York delegation down with her. As powerful as Rangel is--chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee--he knew that it would stain his reputation to be seen as stiff-arming Barack Obama for a full week, as Hillary had originally planned. So he laid down the law, and pressured her to get it done by Saturday. Can you imagine? Hillary actually wanted to hold off for a week before conceding to Obama!

Why would she want to delay that long? Because she still harbored the warped view that she could call up super delegates, twist some arms, and get them to change their minds--an amazing feat of self-delusion. I truly believe that on Tuesday, June 3, the whole Hillary campaign experienced a kind of mass delusion. After all, what person in their right mind, on the very night that they lost the nomination, would have a former head of the DNC (Terry McAuliffe) introduce them as "the next president of the United States?" Further, if one really wants to be the vice-presidential choice--as Hillary apparently does--what sane person would simultaneously refuse to concede, insult the winner, and then dispatch surrogates (Lanny Davis and Bob Johnson) to start petitions and lobbying efforts on her behalf for the vice-presidency? This was truly crazy stuff.

The media however, were happy on Saturday that Hillary had done something right, so they could heap praise on her and deflect some of the criticism directed at them for their perceived anti-Hillary bias. The media love-in notwithstanding, for me, it resembled the student who produces a well-written term paper, but turns it in a week late. Nice, but nothing to write home about. One final note about the speech. It was striking to me that when Hillary would toot her own horn, her eyes would light up and her face would assume that classic Hillary-frozen-smile. When she would talk about Obama, however, she never smiled once. Hillary's endorsement of Obama was an act of agony for her.

2) Sexism. One of the misguided notions promoted by Hillary supporters is that sexism played a significant role in the campaign. They point to the taunting sign at the New Hampshire rally that read "iron my shirt," and see it as a broad sentiment, rather than a couple of kids acting out. They point to some of the lines uttered on cable networks such as, "every time I hear Hillary speak, I involuntarily cross my legs" (Tucker Carlson), "she could say 'I want to give Glenn Beck a million dollars,' and all I'd hear is, 'take out the garbage!'" (Glenn Beck), "when she reacts to Obama with the look... looking like everyone's first wife standing outside probate court... " (Mike Barnacle), and "when that voice of hers goes up and hits the high pitch, brother, you know every husband in America has heard that..." (Pat Buchanan).

The problem with these examples is that they are not evidence of a broad antipathy toward women; rather, they are Hillary-specific. Does anyone really believe that if the candidate were Nancy Pelosi, or Claire McCaskill, or Kathleen Sebelius, or Diane Feinstein, that Carlson, Barnacle, Buchanan, et al. would have said the same thing? Of course not, because those women are not seen as calculating, ruthless, or hostile in the manner of Hillary. On the very night that her opponent became the presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton is perhaps the only politician on the planet who would have been boorish enough to insult him with this line about universal health care, "I have been working on this issue not just for the past 16 months, but for 16 years."

But the clearest indicator that sexism played little role in the campaign was that in West Virginia (as well as Kentucky) a place where you'd expect sexism to show itself, males supported Hillary over Obama by 60-30%. When exit pollsters asked men whether gender was important to them, those men who said "yes" supported Hillary 64-29%. Men who said that gender was not important supported Hillary by 59-31%. So men who regarded gender as important actually supported Hillary more strongly than their counterparts. No evidence of sexism there. And here is some final food for thought: Of the 22% of West Virginians who said that "race" was important in their decision, 84% voted for Hillary. Is there any doubt that racism was a far more potent variable than sexism? The difference between the two candidates, however, is that you don't hear Obama whining about it.

3) Media Bias. Perhaps the most wrongheaded, mythical notion in the campaign is that the media were allied against Hillary. In trying to make this point, typically some pundit will adduce a study by one of those media watchdog groups that says something like "Between Super Tuesday and May, the percentage of positive comments in the media about Obama was 65%, compared to only 40% for Hillary Clinton." This is usually followed by, "Aha! Gotcha!" Unfortunately, this is an unforgivably shallow analysis. Simply looking at percentages, without relating them to specific events in the campaign, has no value whatsoever. For example, let's look at what was happening between Super Tuesday and May: Obama went on a winning streak of 12 events. Hillary ran out of money. Hillary lent her campaign millions of dollars. Patty Solis Doyle was fired and Mark Penn was demoted. Of course Hillary was getting bad press. She deserved bad press! The premise that both candidates should get the exact same percentage of positive comments from the media is preposterous. Obama ran the superior campaign, which was reflected in the media commentary. That's not bias, that's called journalism.

4) The Veep Revisited. First, the notion of Hillary as veep is a non-starter. She dissed and attempted to undermine Obama at every turn of the campaign. Were I Obama, I wouldn't let her within 50 miles of the job. And the reason we know that she won't be chosen, is the amount of praise that he's been heaping upon her. This is Obama's way of setting up a "soft landing" when he chooses someone else.

Further, it is trendy to suggest that Obama needs someone to win back Hillary's female supporters. I have a higher regard for her supporters than to think that they would allow John McCain to name the next two Supreme Court justices, that they would imperil a woman's right to choose, that they would let universal health care go abegging, that they would let McCain veto an expansion of children's health insurance again, or that they would vote for a continuation of the war out of some misplaced spite at Obama.

To the contrary, the demographic that Obama needs most is that of white males. I have already given my list of favorite prospects in previous blogs--Kaine of Virginia, Rendell of Pennsylvania, Richardson of New Mexico, among others. But currently my favorite choices are: Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Joe Biden of Delaware, and Bill Richardson. My favorite of those three? Chris Dodd, who is totally simpatico with Obama, who radiates strength and intelligence, and who has strong national security credentials. More on the veep in future blogs.....
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 11:35 AM

 
Why Did the Super Delegates Abandon Hillary?

As the primary season reaches its end, it is interesting to ponder why Hillary Clinton couldn't attract more super delegates to her campaign. At the time of Super Tuesday, February 5, Clinton led Obama by almost 100 super delegates (203-113). As I write this, realclearpolitics.com shows Obama with a current lead of 43 "supers" over Hillary (334-291). Even as Hillary has produced impressive victories in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Puerto Rico, her relative support among supers continues to decline. Since Super Tuesday, Obama has garnered 133 more supers than Clinton. So what happened? Here are my thoughts:

1) Hillary misjudged her constituency. Super delegates and average voters are two completely different breeds of cat. The Clinton campaign never quite grasped the fact that a pitch made at ordinary voters might have unintended effects on super delegates. As it turned out, many of the Clinton campaign tactics had the effect of alienating the very super delegates that she needed so desperately.

To give an example, for weeks Clinton has been making the pitch that "I'm ahead in the popular vote." The casual viewer tuning in to CNN, or the voter listening to her on the stump hears this line and is impressed by this new information. The super delegates, on the other hand, hear this claim, and understand it to be a fraud. Having followed this matter closely, they know that Hillary only leads in the popular vote if you award her every vote in Florida and Michigan--two primaries that didn't count--and award Obama no votes in Michigan, where he wasn't on the ballot, and no votes in the caucus states like Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington state, where raw vote numbers were not released. Here is Clinton making this claim in her victory speech in Puerto Rico:

We are winning the popular vote. Now there can be no doubt. The people have spoken and you have chosen your candidate. So when the voting concludes on Tuesday, neither Senator Obama nor I will have the number of delegates to be the nominee. I will lead the popular vote. He will maintain a slight lead in the delegate count.

To the average voter these sound like good selling points. To a super delegate these claims come across as tortured manipulations of the data. Michael Dobbs, the Washington Post Fact Checker, put it this way:

She seems to assume that if she says something loudly enough, and repeats it often enough, it will become true. Her victory speech in Puerto Rico was a minor masterpiece in carefully parsed self-delusion....After the Puerto Rico primary, and the rules changes adopted over the weekend, most estimates now put Obama within 45 votes of the 2,118 needed to secure the nomination. Clinton, meanwhile, is 200 votes away from the magic figure. That is hardly "a slight lead" in the delegate count.

Dobbs went on to award Hillary "two Pinocchios" for her popular vote claims. Clinton's artful use of the vote count plays very poorly with Democratic politicians, in part because it conjures up the image of George W. Bush's selective use of facts during his two terms. Honesty and straight talk are the currency of the realm in the Democratic Party, and when Hillary veers off of this path, her support among supers dwindles.

This same dynamic applies to the recent battle over the disposition of the Florida and Michigan delegates. On October 11, 2007, during an interview with New Hampshire Public Radio's Laura Knoy, this exchange took place:

Laura Knoy: "So, if you value the DNC calendar, why not just pull out of Michigan? Why not just say, Hey Michigan, I'm off the ballot?"

Hillary Clinton: "Well, you know, It's clear, this election they're having is not going to count for anything."

By contrast, here is Hillary Clinton speaking to senior citizens in Florida 10 days ago:

....people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded.... We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe...Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people...So we can never take for granted our precious right to vote. It is the single most important, privilege and right any of us have, because in that ballot box we are all equal. You’re equal to a billionaire. You’re equal to the president, every single one of us.

To the elderly voters of Sunrise, Florida, this is effective campaign rhetoric. To the super delegates, who are fully aware that Clinton originally fully supported the decision that decertified the Florida and Michigan primaries, this is outrageous stuff. Once again, Hillary's rhetoric smacks of the kind of manipulations that prevailed during the Bush years. An outlandish comparison between DNC policy and the Zimbabwe elections is a good way to energize your supporters, but it is not an effective way to woo super delegates.

2. The super delegates envision Obama as the better president. In the final phase of the primary campaign, Hillary Clinton's main theme has been that she is more electable than Obama. This notion has not gained much traction with supers for several reasons: First, as the polls constantly shift, the case could be made for the electability of either candidate depending on which poll you cite. At this moment for example, the realclearpolitics.com projection of the general election shows Obama with 228 electoral votes in hand, and Hillary with 229 electoral votes. Second, the fact that the general election is five months away makes all such polls fairly meaningless. It is mind-boggling to consider that the amount of time between today and the general election--154 days--is actually more than the time between the Iowa Caucuses and today--151 days. That's an eternity in political time! And finally, the super delegates all along have been concerned less with electability than they have a more fundamental issue: Who would make the better president?

Despite the fact that the stated policy differences between Obama and Clinton are miniscule, it is likely that each candidate would be dramatically different as president. That is because one's success or failure as president depends as much on leadership style, coalition building, atmospherics, and ability to inspire, as it does on one's concrete ideas for the country. And if Barack Obama sometimes seems too cool in his personal style, Hillary's problem is just the opposite: She brings drama and confrontation wherever she goes. The super delegates remember well why the phrase "politics of personal destruction" became so prevalent during the term of Bill Clinton. The world of the Clintons is filled with both victims and victimizers.

After claiming back in the 1990's that she and her husband were the victims of a "vast right-wing conspiracy," Hillary has recently suggested that she is now the victim of a left-wing conspiracy, in which the media is complicit. Further allegations of sexism, and "disrespect" toward Hillary have raised the temperature even more during the campaign. While such claims by Hillary are once again effective in mobilizing her base, they have little purchase over super delegates. While Hillary was exhorting her supporters to attend the Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting on Florida and Michigan, in the hope that they would pressure the committee into awarding Hillary a bushelful of delegates, Obama was sending out a memo to his supporters urging just the opposite, good behavior and decorum. The petulance and unruliness of the Clinton supporters in Washington did nothing to win over super delegates.

Obama and Clinton have marketed themselves with quite different brands: Since the beginning of his campaign, Obama had claimed that he would offer a new and more principled form of leadership. Clinton has claimed she is tough enough, even ruthless enough to beat the Republicans at their own game. Interestingly, both candidates have lived up to their billing. But as five members of Bill Clinton's cabinet have endorsed Obama, as Hillary has lost the endorsements of erstwhile friends such as Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, and Chris Dodd, it has become clear that only one of those brands represents the change that the majority of Democrats so desire.
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 8:07 AM