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As the Democratic race drags on, expect to see more and more hypothetical scenarios emerge as journalists dig deep into party literature, scouring for clues to how this mess will turn out. Chances are you'll hear about the “minority report” scenario.
Short story: When the DNC’s credentials committee meets in July (a date hasn’t been set), whichever candidate controls more of the committee’s 186 members will decide whether Florida and Michigan are seated. That’s because states allocate committee members proportionally based on their primary votes, so whoever wins more pledged delegates (Obama) essentially controls the committee. (DNC Chairman Howard Dean gets to appoint 25 members as well, so he could also hold sway.) However, if 20 percent of the members disagree with the committee’s decision, they can draft a minority report, which then goes to a vote at the convention in August.
This is an option Clinton’s supporters would no doubt take, since it could be her last lifeline. And this is what Clinton probably meant when she told the Washington Post that “we’ll resolve [the Florida and Michigan question] at the convention—that’s what the credentials committees are for.”
The problem with the minority-report scenario, though, is that it changes nothing. Even if the Florida and Michigan question makes it to the convention floor, whoever has more delegates will instruct them on how to vote. And realistically, we’ll know who has more delegates long before the convention. The only scenario in which the minority report could actually make a difference is if we go into the convention with a sizable chunk of superdelegates uncommitted. But think about how implausible that is. Once all 50 states (and Puerto Rico) are done voting in early May, superdelegates will face enormous pressure to pick sides. Whether or not there’s an official “superdelegate primary” that forces them to vote, most superdelegates will have to get off the fence.
And once that happens, Florida/Michigan will become a moot point. Whoever has more delegates will decide whether to seat them, which means that whoever has more delegates (without counting Michigan and Florida) will be the nominee. Period. To cling to the minority report as a Hail Mary solution to the Florida/Michigan question ignores the facts of the process.
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The contrast between the Democratic and Republican races would be funny if it weren’t so depressing. While Obama and Clinton bruise each other over Iraq, delegates, and Florida and Michigan, John McCain takes a grand tour of the Middle East and Europe, followed by a domestic tour touting his own biography. Voters tuning in have two options: brutal political warfare vs. story time with John McCain. It’s no surprise, therefore, that they’re choosing the latter.
Last week, a Gallup poll showed that more than 20 percent of Clinton and Obama supporters would vote for McCain if their favorite candidate didn’t get the nomination. A full 28 percent of Clinton supporters said they would vote for McCain if Obama were the nominee.
This calls for a little skepticism. Not that the poll is wrong, necessarily, but that voters are likely to feel a lot different come November than they do now. John McCain looks better now than he ever will again, especially when compared with the embattled Democrats. The moment the Dem nominee turns his or her full energies on McCain—his relationships with lobbyists, his tax-cut flips, his inadvisable and oft-twisted “100 years” remark—his sheen is bound to get a little scuffed. At which point the 20 percent will drop fast.
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Lots of Clinton news over the weekend, not all bad—but bad enough to
dock her another 0.6 points in the Rodhameter, bringing her chances of
winning to 9.7 percent.
Roughest of all is the latest national Gallup poll, which gives
Obama a margin-of-error-busting lead of 10 points—his largest this
year. Rather than destroying him, maybe the Jeremiah Wright flap only
made him stronger (in the short term, at least). That, or Bosnia is the new macaca. ...
Read more at the Hillary Clinton Deathwatch.
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In an interview with the Washington Post on Saturday, Hillary Clinton declared that she will take her presidential bid all the way to the August convention, if necessary.
"I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started and until we see what happens in the next 10 contests and until we resolve Florida and Michigan. And if we don't resolve it, we’ll resolve it at the convention—that’s what the credentials committees are for.” [Emphasis added]
Not quite. What Clinton fails to mention is that the credentials committee, which would decide which delegations get seated and which do not, votes in July. The committee is going to be dominated not by Clinton loyalists—although three co-chairs have ties to Bill Clinton—but by people selected by Barack Obama and Howard Dean.
Of the committee’s 186 delegates, Dean appoints 35 himself. This group is going to do whatever he tells them. If the DNC works out a compromise solution to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations, they’ll support that. If not, they’ll oppose it. The rest of the committee members, divvied up by state, are allocated proportionally. So if a state has four committee seats and the two candidates split the vote in that state's primary, Obama gets to appoint two members and Hillary appoints two. Since Obama has the lead in pledged delegates—and will have the lead going into the convention—he’ll also have more committee members, and will therefore control the committee when it comes to deciding on Michigan and Florida.
The one scenario in which the Florida/Michigan question could reach the convention is if 20 percent of the credentials committee decides to file a minority report. That could conceivably allow the entire convention to vote on the Florida/Michigan question. Needless to say, Democratic leaders will do everything they can to prevent this scenario from happening.
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After Mitt Romney endorsed McCain last month, we figured Romney would crawl into a cave, never to return until 2012. The strained smiles, the too-tight handshakes—it felt like a testy family reunion. But since then, Romney has said repeatedly that he would take the VP slot if offered. However, McCain didn’t exactly reach out.
Until today. Right now MittCain (too soon?) is taking a whirlwind fundraising tour around Rocky Mountain country, starting in Utah and finishing up in Denver this evening. The main reason is to drum up cash—McCain raised $11 million in February, compared to Obama’s $55 million. But it’s also a chance for the former rivals to show everyone that now they’re besties. (They look so exuberant it’s frightening.)
Naturally, speculators wonder if this means Romney tops McCain’s veep list. After all, presidential candidates have overcome former bitterness to forge alliances of convenience before. George H.W. Bush, for example, accepted Ronald Reagan’s VP offer after ridiculing Reagan’s “voodoo economics” during the primary season.
But McCain’s situation is different. For him, picking Romney would fly in the face of his entire “straight talk” image. (However spurious.) McCain spent much of the primary slamming Romney not for minor policy differences, but for fundamental dishonesty. Given that McCain already arouses suspicion among many conservatives, the last thing he needs is someone whose reversals on abortion, gay rights, and stem-cell research make McCain’s own reversal on Bush’s tax cuts look consistent. No doubt McCain needs the cash, but as Romney himself discovered, money can’t buy votes. Especially when there's video evidence your running mate can't stand you.
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Earlier this week, the Clinton campaign challenged Barack Obama’s claims that he was a University of Chicago law professor. So, we phoned up U Chicago for their take. The school’s press office indicated that he was technically a senior lecturer but not a professor.
Now it appears they’ve changed their story—or at least nuanced it a bit. They reiterate that he never held the title professor, but they say senior lecturers are, in fact, considered professors. It’s a point that one of our colleagues over at Convictions already made—that yes, technically senior lecturer and professor is not the same title but that trying to tease them apart as proof that Obama deliberately lied is just silly.
Here’s the university’s official statement:
From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School's Senior Lecturers have high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined.
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Sen. Bob Casey’s endorsement of Barack Obama is big for several reasons—he represents the battleground state of Pennsylvania, he appeals to working-class Dems, and he had said he would remain neutral in the race, making his decision to take sides a potential example for other fence-sitting superdelegates.
Casey says he endorsed Obama because he “can lead us, he can heal us, he can help rebuild America,” etc. etc.
But there’s also some back story there. Back in 1992, Casey’s father, Bob Sr., then governor of Pennsylvania, wasn’t allowed to speak at the Democratic Convention. The reason most commonly cited is that Casey didn’t endorse Clinton during his campaign. But more likely, as Kevin Drum argued awhile back, it had something to do with Casey Sr.’s desire to give a pro-life speech. Either way, the incident generated bad blood between the Clintons and the Caseys.
Friends tell the Times that had nothing to do with the decision to swing toward Obama. And given Casey’s previous statements that he would remain neutral, we’re inclined to believe them. Plus, Clinton campaigned for Casey during his 2006 race against Rick Santorum. (As did Obama.)
More likely, it was another generation of Caseys that influenced him. A “source” tells the Philadephia Inquirer
Casey's decision was also personal, motivated in part by the enthusiasm his four daughters - Elyse, Caroline, Julia and Marena - have expressed for Obama, the source said. "He thinks we shouldn't be deaf to the voices of the next generation."
Makes you wonder if targeting young people is just as valuable for its trickle-up effect—kids influencing their parents—as for its direct impact on youth turnout.
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The main criticism of Howard Dean since he took over as head of the DNC has been his silence. (First he was too loud, now he’s too quiet.) So now anything he says, however off-the-cuff, gets amplified to 300 decibels.
Sirens wailed, therefore, when he told CBS (you break that news, CBS!) that he’d like to see the nomination wrapped up by July 1. An aide clarifies to Politico that July 1 is really just a ballpark date, but it’s still a big deal that Dean is weighing in. In a separate interview with the Associated Press, Dean says:
“There'll be some nasty fights if it goes to convention, and people will walk out,” Dean said. “But I've also been talking to a fairly significant number of, by and large, nonaligned people about how we might resolve this.”
Contrast this with Hillary Clinton’s recent statement that she’s ready to take this to the convention, and you’ve got two very differing views of reality.
Dean stops short of favoring either candidate—that’s not part of his job description—but there’s a Pelosi-like quality to his statements. In the AP interview, Dean addresses Clinton’s recent claims that pledged delegates don’t have to vote as directed. Dean charitably calls that "a very technical argument” and adds, “You aren't going to get pledged delegates to move unless something really shocking happens.” He also told the AP that he doesn’t think superdelegates would support the candidate who doesn’t win the pledged delegate count. Given the numbers we’ve been looking at for weeks now, that’s tantamount to saying he thinks Obama has it wrapped up. But, of course, he can’t say that.
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The Clinton campaign is starting to remind us of that immortal scene from Dumb and Dumber, in which Lloyd, played by Jim Carrey, asks his crush what the chances are that she’d marry him. She gives him blunt odds: one in 1 million. After a moment of thinking, Lloyd’s face lights up: “So, you’re telling me there’s a chance.”
Hillary, we’re telling you there’s a chance. But right now—given the delegate count, the popular-vote tally, the failure of Florida and Michigan to secure revotes, the swing of superdelegates toward Obama since Feb. 5, and the growing itch among top Democrats to see this race wrapped up—we’d put your chances today at 12 percent.
Check back for daily updates at the "Hillary Deathwatch."
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It’s fascinating that candidates are allowed to acknowledge contingencies when talking about the economy but not in the case of Iraq. Here’s Barack Obama’s response Maria Bartiromo on whether he would raise taxes:
Well, look, there's no doubt that anything I do is going to be premised on what the economic situation is when I take office. I'm going to be sworn in in January, we don't know what the economy's going to look like at that point.
Sounds reasonable. Yet when his adviser Samantha Power said the same thing about Iraq—that Obama would have to evaluate the situation on the ground when he arrives in office—she was flayed alive.
There are differences, no doubt. Power used the phrase “best-case scenario” to refer to Obama’s plan for withdrawal. She also coupled it with her off-the-record-but-not “monster” comment. (If she hadn’t said that, the Iraq withdrawal exchange might never have made it overseas.) But given what could happen to the economy, perhaps Obama’s $30 billion stimulus package plan is a best-case scenario.
So, why is it OK to discuss hypotheticals with the economy but not with Iraq? Two reasons. For one thing, people know more about what’s happening in Iraq than they do about what’s happening to the economy, and therefore feel more qualified to challenge experts on the topic. But also, it’s that Democrats are politically tethered to withdrawal. Pulling out of Iraq has become an inflexible campaign platform. If conditions in Iraq were to improve (many suggest they are already improving), the Democratic candidates would have a hell of a time admitting it, since that would be seen as a victory for McCain. That’s why even hinting that conditions in Iraq could change—and that plans would then adjust—got Sam Power ousted.
It would be absurd for Obama’s opponents to drill him for saying he’d change his plan to meet current economic conditions. No more absurd, however, than the whole Power pile-on.
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- Barely Political does Tuzla.
- A trailer for Recession:
The Movie.
- If Sarah Silverman met Hillary Clinton: “I’m F*cking Obama.”
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It’s hard to remember, but the manic bickering between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton does have an end in sight: the Democratic National Convention. One of them will ascend the stage in Denver in late August, about 18 months after he or she started campaigning. But even total political junkies still haven’t fleshed out the nuances of the convention. With that in mind, we OD’d on DNC delegate rules to answer three burning questions that haven’t gotten much attention.
1. Can we get to the convention without knowing who our nominee will be?
No matter what Howard Dean and Harry Reid tell you, this is a possible—but not probable—scenario. Picture this: Hillary Clinton stays in the race until June, when all of the primaries and caucuses have been held, the Democrats decide not to hold a superdeledgate primary, and enough indecisive superdelegates still can’t make up their minds after all the voters have had their say, so they stretch their decision-making through the dog days of summer. Clinton, still convinced she has a shot, presses on to the convention. If enough superdelegates don’t go public and side with Obama or Clinton by then, we’ll go into Denver not knowing who the nominee will be—but that doesn’t mean the convention will be “brokered.”
2. Is a brokered convention possible?
Almost certainly not—but a “contested convention” is. Here’s the difference. The definition of a “brokered convention” is a convention with more than one round of voting. If a candidate does not receive a majority of the delegates (2,024) on the first ballot, then the convention will go to a second ballot. If there is still no nominee, a third, and so on. A “contested convention” is when neither candidate reaches the magic number through pledged delegates, but the winner gets the majority needed via superdelegates. A contested convention is settled on the first ballot, but the winner is in doubt leading up to that first vote.
Because we have only two candidates, a second round of voting is nearly impossible. There are a fixed number of total delegates at the convention, so an even split between Obama and Clinton would result in one of the candidates getting the majority needed to win. For example, there are currently 4,047 delegates total. If you split that evenly, one candidate would have 2,023 delegates and one would have 2,024.The candidate with 2,024 would win on the first ballot because of simple math. (Caveat alert! If there were an even number of total delegates, a candidate would have to scrounge up one extra delegate.) In this case, the superdelegates would still decide the nominee because neither candidate can reach 2,024 with pledged delegates alone. But that doesn’t make it a brokered convention.
Keep in mind two highly improbable reasons why that could not happen: indecision and John Edwards. From what I can tell, any delegate could abstain from voting. Considering the candidates essentially control their delegations, this is highly unlikely. Moreover, the campaigns would probably swap the dead-weight delegate out for an alternate if that was the case. (Every state has alternate delegates just in case.) Again, this isn’t going to happen, but it could.
Slightly more likely (but still highly improbable) is that John Edwards could be the difference in the primary. According to DemConWatch, Edwards currently has 16 delegates who are still pledged to his candidacy. Because he suspended (rather than withdrew) his campaign, his delegates have not been released from their pledges to him. Let’s return to our even-split example above. I was a tad misleading by suggesting that all of the delegates were to be split between Obama and Clinton. As of now, all but 16 of the delegates (4,031) will be split between the two. If there’s a completely even split of those 4,031, one candidate would have 2,015 and one would have 2,016. The leading candidate would still be eight short of the number needed for the nomination. If—and I’d like to reiterate how huge of an if this is—Edwards’ delegates continue to vote for him, then we would have a brokered convention because the Democrats would need a second ballot to settle on the nominee.
As you can see, the margin for a brokered convention is terrifically small. If it happened—which it won’t—it would totally overshadow every other historic political story we’ve seen this year. But it’s not going to happen.
3. Will we know whom the superdelegates eventually vote for?
Yes—which means that eventually Howard Dean, Al Gore, and Nancy Pelosi have to choose one of the candidates. All votes at the convention will be made public, but maybe not immediately. The superdelegates make their votes known to a state party official at the same time that pledged delegates do. Their votes are tallied and recorded by the secretary of the DNC, Alice Germond. Eventually Germond will make that list public, but that could take anywhere from two hours to two weeks.
Those are just three questions—there’s plenty more. If you’ve got burning queries, e-mail us and we’ll do our damndest to drum up some details.
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We’re used to spintastic e-mails, but one from the Clinton campaign yesterday seemed especially dizzy. In an e-mail titled “Just Embellished Words,” the campaign wrote that "Sen. Obama consistently and falsely claims that he was a law professor” (which he has indeed done). The e-mail backs it up with links to Lynn Sweet and Hotline, both of which confirm that Obama was never a professor.
Unsatisfied, we triple-checked with the University of Chicago, where Obama purports to have been a constitutional-law professor. Sure enough, he wasn’t exactly a prof. Obama is considered a senior lecturer at the university, but he was never a professor. According to the Law School’s press office, he was plenty qualified to be a professor, but he just didn’t have the time. Instead of making him a professor, they gave him the senior lecturer gig, which means he didn’t have to publish scholarly works (and therefore wasn’t on tenure track).
Obama started teaching in 1993, when he taught a course called Current Issues in Racism and the Law. (He was a practicing lawyer at the time.) He taught a variety of courses every year through the 2003-04 school year, before he started campaigning in 2004 for his current Senate job.
So, on principle, Clinton’s spin is right—when Obama says he’s a professor of law, he’s misspeaking. Consider us spun.
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In our constant pursuit for the most inspired piece of election art, this Pokemon homage is our latest obsession. It's too bad Fred Thompson wasn't the GOP nominee—then the creators could have just used Snorlax.
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Ever notice how politicians taunt each other with the exact
same insults of which they themselves stand accused? Case in point:
From a McCain email today:
STATEMENT BY MCCAIN CAMPAIGN ON BARACK OBAMA'S OLD-STYLE
POLITICAL ATTACKS [Emphasis Added]
And from Politico’s Playbook:
“Senator Obama, returning to the campaign trail in Greensboro, N.C.,
plans to castigate Senator McCain for an economic plan that Team Obama describes
as ‘vapid.’ ” [E.A.]
Now it’s Clinton’s
turn to accuse both her opponents of being frigid Machiavellian ice robots.
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Everyone has weighed in on Hillary Clinton’s fantastic voyage to Bosnia—Sinbad, Clinton’s former speechwriter, military men, and reporters who were there at the time. Everyone! Except, that is, for Sheryl Crow.
Crow, who accompanied Hillary, Chelsea, and Sinbad on their trip in 1996, has kept mum on the subject. Repeated e-mails to her publicist, Dave Tomberlin, yielded this response: “We're not going to take part in this circus ... our focus is on her music right now.”
Probably a smart move. Unlike Sinbad, Crow’s career survived the '90s. She doesn’t exactly need the publicity. Hillary, on the other hand, could use a little help here.
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When the National Archives released Hillary Clinton’s White House schedules last week, reporters quickly sifted the entire 11,000-page doorstop for clues to her record on NAFTA, her foreign-policy experience, and her whereabouts during the "blue dress" incident.
Missing from the analysis, however, was one of our favorite bloggy pastimes: word counting. Thanks to the New York Times' searchable database of Clinton’s schedules, we were able to tally the number of times certain words appeared. Here’s our Harper’s Index-style analysis of her years as first lady:
(Figures indicate number of pages on which the words appear)
Kofi Annan: 4
Barbara Streisand: 5
Jean Chrétien (prime minister of Canada, 1993-2003): 2
Mickey Mouse: 2
Hollywood: 21
Iraq: 0
Whoopi Goldberg: 12
Benizir Bhutto: 5
Disney: 19
Islam: 2
Photo-op: 200 +
Policy: 76
Dance/dancing: 157
Debate/debating: 20
Celebration: 63
Economics: 4
Opera: 67
Nuclear: 1
Resort: 47
Barracks: 9
Party: 200 +
Legislation: 9
Princess: 52
Premier: 20
Concert: 54
Hearing: 8
Trailhead thanks Seth Stevenson and Rebecca LeGrand.
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Forlorn over the Democrats’ delegate scrap, Gov.—and therefore superdelegate—Philip Bredesen came up with a modestly novel proposal: After all the voters have fun at their primaries and caucuses, the superdelegates should stage their own fiesta in June—complete with a binding declaration of support for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. Morevoer, they should have it in Dallas so that everybody can get there easily and the Dems can continue lavishing attention on a red state that has shown flashes of Democratic enthusiasm this year.
It’s a dynamite idea—one part common sense, one part idealism—and therefore exactly the kind of plan we’ve gotten used to the candidates eschewing this election. Yet, at a press conference yesterday, Hillary Clinton let out an unexpected glimmer of hope:
The governor from Tennessee suggested that there be a convention of superdelegates, and I think that it is an intriguing idea. I have not considered it long enough to have an opinion on it.
If she hasn’t “considered it long enough,” then that means she has considered it a little bit. (Clinton folks tell Ambinder they aren’t seriously considering the plan.) There’s hope yet! And, in the long run, that’s best for everybody. The superdelegate primary presents a rare opportunity for a win-win-win-win scenario for Clinton, Obama, the superdelegates, and the Democrats. Here’s why each party should be jumping at the chance:
Hillary: A June superdelegate primary silences the "drop out now" movement for a few months. Clinton has repeatedly said she’s staying in until June, anyway, and the specter of a superdelegate primary would give her justification for doing so. Plus, it buys her time in case she loses North Carolina and Indiana.
Obama: If Hillary isn’t going to leave the race until all of the states vote, anyway, then he may as well end it as swiftly and decisively as possible after that. A superdelegate primary would give him that venue, and he’d be favored to win since he would be the champ of pledged delegates and popular vote.
The superdelegates: Uncommitted supers get to defer their decisions for another three months, which prevents them from incurring the Clintons’ wrath if they side with Obama before all the votes are in. Plus, having a primary lends the superdelegate process a bit of integrity and transparency that might otherwise may get lost in translation at the convention.
Democratic Party: The sooner this fiasco ends, the better. Assuming Clinton stays in through June, this plan is much better than dragging the superdelegate-endorsement process through the dog days of summer. It already makes Howard Dean sweaty enough, as is.
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She wasn’t misspeaking this time. Hillary Clinton truly,
honestly believes that pledged delegates are going to change their minds and
this will help her win the nomination.
When she said
this in her Philadelphia Daily News
interview the other day, I figured it was a fluke:
And also remember that pledged delegates in
most states are not pledged. You know, there is no requirement that anybody
vote for anybody. They’re just like superdelegates.
But then she repeated it in a curious
new interview with Time’s Mark
Halperin:
[A]s you know so well, Mark, every delegate with very few
exceptions is free to make up his or her mind however they choose. We talk a
lot about so-called pledged delegates, but every delegate is expected to
exercise independent judgment.
That’s right. “So-called pledged delegates.” So now, we’re to assume, it’s not just superdelegates who will
overturn the pledged delegate count. Pledged
delegates are going to help overturn it, too. At this rate, why hold elections in
the first place? Let’s skip the rest of the primaries and go right to the
convention, where all the so-called pledged delegates can get down to the
business of ignoring the people’s votes.
The Clinton
camp vehemently denies
that it will actively pursue Obama’s pledged delegates. But then why float the
possibility? It makes zero
sense strategically. True, no one puts a gun to the heads of pledged
delegates and forces them to vote one way or another. But most of them would
never go switch their vote—that would mean burning bridges, betraying friends,
and reversing the will of their own constituents. And from a PR perspective,
it’s disastrous. The Clinton camp has been
screaming “disenfranchisement” in Florida and Michigan. Do they really
want to push an idea that would flush real votes down the toilet?
What began as a series of casual asides—first by Harold
Ickes, then by Clinton herself—is now starting to look a coordinated effort. We don't ask this question lightly, but what are they smoking?
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Via the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Harry Reid assures us that he and Howard Dean have things under control.
Question: Do you still think the Democratic race can be resolved before the convention?
Reid: Easy.
Q: How is that?
Reid: It will be done.
Q: It just will?
Reid: Yep.
Q: Magically?
Reid: No, it will be done. I had a conversation with Governor Dean (Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean) today. Things are being done.
I thought the point of avoiding a convention was so that backroom deals didn't decide who the nominee would be.
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Barack Obama released his tax returns today for the years 2000-2006. (Check them out here, if combing through your own tax returns hasn't been torture enough.) But Obama held public office for three years before 2000 hit. Why not release those as well and get the whole thing done with?
Symbolism would be my guess. The years between 2000 and 2006 is the exact span of time from which Hillary Clinton has yet to release her (and her husband’s) tax returns. Releasing those specific years, as opposed to the entire batch, turns a capitulation (Clinton has been calling for him to release them) into a challenge.
The parallels here are rich. During her 2000 Senate campaign, Clinton opened up her own records as far back as 1980 and made a big deal about her opponent’s refusal to release his own. Now the roles are flipped, with Obama revealing his taxes and challenging Clinton to do the same. Her rebuttal: She has 20 years of taxes on the books, compared to Obama’s six. Not a bad way to call attention to Obama’s relatively meager time spent in the public eye, but he’s still got her beat on the past eight years.
Neither candidate is glasslike in his or her transparency. Obama hasn’t opened up his personal papers and schedules from his time as a state senator. (He claims they’re badly organized or thrown away.) But Clinton’s refusal to release her tax returns until April—she’ll do it at least three days before the Pennsylvania primary, her camp assures us—should raise eyebrows. At least, with her White House schedules, she could use the Presidential Library’s dinosaur pace as an excuse. There’s nothing stopping her from releasing her taxes today, tomorrow, or the next day. If there’s anything damaging in there, better to get it out of the way now than right before a key election. If there’s not, she gets points for openness.
So how about it?
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Over at Slate’s polling haven, "Election Scorecard," we’ve been poring over a new poll from PPP (PDF) that suggests an Edwards endorsement would actually hurt Hillary’s chances to win the state. A jarring 31 percent of North Carolina voters would be less likely to support Hillary if Edwards endorsed her. About one-third as many people (12 percent) say they would be more likely to vote for her after an Edwards endorsement. The poll didn't provide any numbers speculating what an Edwards endorsement would mean for Barack Obama.
These are really stunning numbers for a reasonably liked, homegrown senator who had a legitimate shot at becoming president. According to this poll, nearly one-third of North Carolina Democrats and unaffiliated voters dislike Edwards so much that he would taint Clinton’s candidacy. Barely one-tenth of voters like him enough to have it positively affect their opinion.
The cynic would suggest that Obama voters sabotaged the question by saying an endorsement would hurt Clinton, but the numbers don’t completely follow that logic. After crunching some cross-tabs, we discovered that 35 percent of those Clinton-Edwards sourpusses are currently Clinton supporters. We’ll reiterate: Edwards is so toxic that one-third of Hillary’s Carolinian base would think twice before voting for her. No wonder he and Kerry didn’t win North Carolina in 2004.
We should caution that Edwards isn’t planning on making an endorsement of Clinton or Obama. With polls like these, maybe it should stay that way.
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What do you get when you cross Hillary Clinton, Chilean comedy,
synth pop, and Aphex Twin?
This. It's SFW, but probably NSF people with dwarf phobia.
[Via Gawker]
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As long as we’re chronicling
the number of references Hillary Clinton has made to the Tuzla sniper incident, don’t
forget her crowd-pleaser of a line in Dubuque all the way back in December:
So, we landed in one of those corkscrew landings
and ran out because they said there might be sniper fire. I don't remember
anybody offering me tea on the tarmac.
Tea, no. Adorable eight-year-old girls with flowers, yes.
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When we said the Bosnia sniper flap was our favorite subplot of this campaign, we weren’t expecting it to become the actual plot. But thanks to Hillary Clinton’s wildly inexpert handling of the controversy, it’s now dominating the news to the point of obscuring her substantive policy speeches.
After Sinbad disputed Clinton’s account of landing amid sniper fire in war-torn Bosnia in 1996, Clinton could have acknowledged her mistake and changed the subject. But instead, she doubled down, dismissing Sinbad as “a comedian” and ratcheting up the detail in her accounts of the trip: “There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport,” she said at a March 17 campaign event, “but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” That’s when the noncomedians pounced. Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post, Michael Hirsh of Newsweek, and CBS News all presented evidence that Clinton’s story had gone from dubious to plainly untrue. The bloody weapon was video footage of Clinton cheerily greeting a small Bosnian girl on the tarmac.
Yesterday, Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson said that Hillary “misspoke” in her March 17 speech. Clinton herself used the same word yesterday in an interview with the Philadelphia Daily News. She elaborated: “I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but that there was this 8-year-old girl and, I can't, I can't rush by her, I've got to at least greet her -- so I greeted her, I took her stuff and then I left.”
One problem with the “misspoke” explanation is that she’s been repeating the same story for weeks. In fact, coupled with anecdotes about pushing for peace in Northern Ireland and women’s rights in China, it’s been a focal point of her claims to foreign-policy experience. The other problem is that she's been given ample opportunity to revise her story. When Sinbad challenged her account, she declined. When Dobbs ran a "Fact Checker" piece questioning her account, surrogates emerged to unconvincingly defend her. Only when the footage explicitly disproving her story emerged did she back off. And even then, it wasn’t that she embellished or misled people. It was that she "misspoke." If someone wanted to chronicle instances of Clinton refusing to acknowledge mistakes—starting, of course, with her Iraq war vote—the Bosnia flap could be its own chapter.
The Post had a great piece yesterday about how both candidates have exaggerated their records at times. But there’s a big difference between taking extra credit for a bill you didn’t really work on—something Obama is apparently known for in the Senate—and retelling a repeatedly discredited story. Plus, the rule for politicians is the same as for memoir fabulists: When confronted, fess up. By waiting for incontrovertible evidence to present itself, Clinton only dragged out her own flaying—and gave voters reason to suspect her other claims, as well.
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The media drumbeat for Hillary Clinton to drop out has been building over the past week, with some notable push-back. But now the zeitgeist-capturing Obama Girl has spoken: Hillary must go.
The music isn’t quite as catchy as in the past, and it feels like a weak excuse to show Amber Lee Ettinger rolling around on a white divan. But there’s something tender about the way she sits down with Hillary and gently explains, girl to girl, why she needs to get out.
If Obama Girl doesn't get a Cabinet post out of this ...
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Perhaps the most shocking thing about Gordon Fischer’s Monica joke is that it didn’t happen until now.
A key Obama organizer and adviser in Iowa, Fischer posted an item on his blog over the weekend slamming Bill Clinton for his comment late Friday that many interpreted as an attack on Obama’s patriotism.
“Bill Clinton cannot possibly seriously believe Obama is not a patriot, and cannot possibly be said to be helping—instead he is hurting—his own party,” Fischer wrote. “B. Clinton should never be forgiven. Period. This is a stain on his legacy, much worse, much deeper, than the one on Monica's blue dress.”
Cue outrage. On a conference call this morning, Clinton spokesman Phil Singer called it the “most personal attack yet” and an indicator of the Obama campaign’s harsh new strategy. Fischer took down the post and replaced it with a two-part apology. The Obama campaign reiterated its line that “comments like this have no place in our political dialogue.”
So far in this campaign, we’ve seen some liberal umbrage-taking. But now it’s official: The Monica scandal is off-limits too. It’s still unclear, though, to what extent the ban applies. The scandal was a defining moment of her husband’s administration, after all. Is any reference to Monica considered unfair? If anything, the Clinton campaign is lucky the blue dress hasn’t resurfaced until now. Be sure that in a general election, Clinton's Republican opponents would not exercise the same restraint.
Also, here’s an idea. For one day, each candidate allows their surrogates to say all the hateful, inappropriate, uncalled-for things they can think of about their opponent. All the hurled insults would instantly cancel one another out. That way, they can get it out of their systems and bring the umbrage war to a stalemate. Or so we hope.
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In the beginning, it was about momentum. When she lost momentum, it was about pledged delegates. When she lost pledged delegates, it was about the popular vote. And now that she’s on her way to losing the popular vote, it’s about the number of electoral votes held by the states in which the candidates have won primary victories.
Sen. Evan Bayh, a Hillary Clinton supporter, proposed the new metric on CNN’s Late Edition Sunday. The logic: Clinton has won states with a total of 219 electoral votes, whereas Obama has won states with only 202 electoral votes. “So who carried the states with the most Electoral College votes," Bayh said, "is an important factor to consider because ultimately, that’s how we choose the president of the United States.”
And that’s not just the cry of a lone surrogate. (Keep in mind that Sunday show appearances by surrogates are always approved by campaigns.) On a conference call today, Clinton spokesman Phil Singer argued that Bayh “makes a compelling point. Senator Clinton has won and performed well in states [like Ohio and Florida] that will be general election battlegrounds.”
First off, let us reiterate a point that apparently can’t be said enough: There is no discernible connection between success in a primary and success in the general. You can argue that Obama wouldn’t be able to match Clinton’s strength in areas like rural Ohio, where she won whites in some counties by as much as 80 percent of the vote. But given the huge disparity in voter turnout between the primaries and the general, the unreliability of exit poll responses (how do you know someone is actually an “independent”?), and Obama’s relative strength in matchups against John McCain, it’s wrongheaded to think that Clinton’s electoral vote lead has any bearing on the “electability” question.
Second, it’s ironic that Bayh chose to push this particular metric. After 2000, he was a strong advocate of overhauling the Electoral College: “I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people and to me, that means it’s time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president.” Then, in 2006 he said, “I think our president should be chosen by the majority of the American people.” To be fair, his remarks about the new metric take into account the electoral system as it is, not as he wishes it were. But perhaps the Clinton camp could have found a better surrogate to push this particular argument.
Update 5:07 p.m.: A Frayster points out that Clinton herself supported abolishing the Electoral College back in 2000.
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You may remember Fred Thompson from such unmemorable primary films as You’re the GOP’s Only Hope, I Love You, You’re Lazy, Now Change, and his breakthrough role Failure to Launch. After the primary-going public didn’t buy Thompson’s presidential character, he was pushed out of his new career and forced to retire to Tennessee.
But now, Thompson wants back in—to Hollywood. After two months off the trail, he joined a Hollywood casting agency again, assumedly to pursue the law and politics roles he was acting in before he ran for president. But here’s the thing—if America didn’t buy him as a real president, they may not buy him as a fake one anymore, either.
In that case, Thompson will have to look for other roles. Our first thought: Forget showing his face—go 3-D and try voice acting. Thompson’s most memorable feature is his laconic Southern drawl, which echoed around the debate hall (especially compared with Ron Paul’s squeal.) Thompson could corner the market on the wise but gruff grizzly bear. At the least, it will mean Thompson is animated, for once.
And if that doesn’t work, he can always relive the horror film that was his primary run. Working title: Freddy Thomspon: Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue.
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Yesterday marked possibly our favorite chapter in possibly our favorite subplot of the 2008 election—the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s 1996 trip to Bosnia. Clinton’s story, in which she describes being hustled off the tarmac because of warnings of sniper fire, had already been pecked to death. The Washington Post’s indispensable “Fact Checker” ripped her version apart, as did Sinbad, who was along for the ride. (I love how news stories identify him as “the comedian Sinbad,” as if to differentiate him from all the other Sinbads out there.)
But yesterday the Jed Report issued the coup de grace, with a mashed-together faux trailer of the hypothetical film “Hillary in Tuzla.” The juxtaposition of Clinton saying "we were basically told to run to our cars" with video of an unhurried greeting ceremony on the runway is fairly withering. If that’s not enough to get Clinton to stop telling her now-thoroughly debunked version of the story, I’m not sure what will.
Update 1:14 p.m.: In a noontime conference call, Howard Wolfson read from "contemporaneous accounts" of Clinton's trip, which confirmed the gist of her story, that Bosnia was a dangerous place at the time. But he doesn't dispute the challenge to her specific anecdote about running off the tarmac: "It is possible in
most recent instance she discussed this that she misspoke with regard to the exit from the plane," he said.
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Remember how during the Democratic debates, Bill Richardson was always the can’t-we-all-just-get-along candidate? Whenever things got too heated, that's when Richardson would start intoning (to the point of irritation) about ending divisions, bringing people together, and rising above petty differences.
Now, in his endorsement of Barack Obama today, he’s sticking with that message, this time as a way of calling for an end to the Democratic race:
It is time, however, for Democrats to stop fighting amongst ourselves and to prepare for the tough fight we will face against John McCain in the Fall.
People say Richardson should have endorsed earlier—that he could have been more effective before the Texas vote. Perhaps. But on the other hand, Richardson now gets to do what he does best: intervene at the moment of greatest tension and say, Come on people, bring it in. He was always better at playing the peace-making voice of reason than the partisan warrior. So from that perspective, if Obama’s new strategy is to convince superdelegates to wrap this thing up, Richardson’s timing couldn’t have been better.
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In a scathing memo today, the Obama campaign describes Clinton’s “history of misleading voters” on issues like—deep breath—NAFTA, the Family Medical Leave Act, her Iraq vote, her foreign-policy experience, Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s religion, and her “35 years of public service.” It weaves these examples into a larger case that voters consider Clinton too untrustworthy to be president, citing as a coup de grace a new Gallup poll showing that only 44 percent of Americans consider Clinton “honest and trustworthy,” whereas 63 percent would say that about Obama.
But they ignore the poll’s most telling numbers: that a whopping 67 percent of Americans think John McCain is trustworthy.
If you’re surprised to see that McCain’s trust rating is so high, that’s probably because you’ve been paying attention to his reversal on Bush’s tax cuts, his recent 180-degree embrace of the religious right, and his close relationships with lobbyists. Needless to say, most people don't know or don't care. However well-known among reporters and commentators, McCain's deviations from straight talk haven’t penetrated the national consciousness. To the average voter, McCain is still a maverick. And the Gallup numbers reflect that.
McCain’s relative strength on the “trust” question could also owe to the relative quietude on the Republican front right now. While Clinton and Obama shred each other on the front page, McCain gets to schmooze donors, write legislation, and take long diplomatic trips, pausing only to lob the occasional hand grenade over into the Democratic bunker. Maybe that’s also why 20 percent of Dems say that if their candidate doesn’t win, they would vote for McCain, according to one poll. Given the state of both contests right now, no wonder voters think McCain has more integrity.
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The other day we discussed how both Clinton and Obama have stepped up their "disenfranchisement" rhetoric to tweak each other over revotes in Michigan and Florida. Now Clinton has taken it a step further. Here's a clip from her campaign's latest e-mail to "Interested Parties," describing the Obama camp's strategy:
First, disenfranchise voters - Prevent new votes in Florida and Michigan. Stop voting in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Oregon, West Virginia, Puerto Rico, Kentucky, South Dakota, Montana, West Virginia and Indiana.
So now Obama's attempt to wrap up the nomination before Pennsylvania is tantamount to disenfranchising the remaining states? So if Clinton had sealed the deal on Super Tuesday, that would have disenfranchised half the nation? Also, the idea that Obama wants to "stop voting" in North Carolina—a place where he's all but guaranteed to win—is just ... I'm not sure there's a word for it. The Clinton camp has a reputation for poll-testing messages, but I can only imagine a test audience laughing at this.
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Of all the explanations floated as to why three State Department employees were snooping around Barack Obama's passport files—and, it now turns out, Hillary Clinton's and John McCain's—the most plausible one is also the simplest: "imprudent curiosity."
That's what State Department spokesman Sean McCormick called it, and although his job is to spin, it rings true. Temp jobs are inherently unaccountable—you're in, you do your work, you're out. You're less likely to want to develop a lasting relationship with your employer and therefore might be more willing to take a peek at federal records, especially if they're sitting there under your nose.
Naturally, the State Deptartment had to react forcefully, lest anyone believe suggestions that the security breach was political motivated. Condoleezza Rice called Obama personally to apologize and promised a full investigation. But all signs so far point to plain old nosiness. It's hard to see partisanship playing a role: Andrea Mitchell points out that Maura Harty, the person in charge of management and consular affairs, has worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations. Plus, the same employees peeked at Clinton and McCain's files, too. Seems more like a case of managerial incompetence than partisan skullduggery.
But hey, at least Obama got another umbrage-taking opportunity out of it.
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A: To get superdelegates to the other side.
Two months and dozens of primaries after dropping out of the race, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson finally went public with his undying love for Barack Obama. He’ll be in Oregon with Obama today to officially announce his endorsement.
This isn’t exactly a surprise. There have always been rumors that Richardson’s precinct captains told their Iowa supporters to back Obama if Richardson didn’t meet the viability threshold at their caucuses. Earlier this month, just before the Ohio and Texas primaries, Richardson showed up on Face the Nation with a beard and a definitive message: “Whoever has the most delegates after Tuesday, a clear lead, should be, in my judgment, the nominee.” Richardson knew that Obama had the lead going into that Texahio Tuesday, and that he still would coming out of it.
We’re still not sure endorsements matter—Ted Kennedy flubbed miserably—but if they do, then this one might carry some weight. Richardson gained some national recognition when he was running for president, but his lack of star power doomed him. His résumé remains impressive, and he polled reasonably well in Iowa before Iowans decided a caucus threesome of John, Barack, and Hillary was exciting enough.
The significance of the endorsement isn’t what it would have been two months ago. If Richardson made an endorsement pre-Super Tuesday, his support would have been seen as simply a high-profile Latino supporting Obama. But now, Richardson’s a high-profile superdelegate who wants the primary to be over even more than he wants Obama to win. He could have continued to sit on the sidelines until after Pennsylvania’s primary, but he sidled up to Obama now to try to end the race before it hurts the party. When you dovetail his support with it's-about-time media reports that Clinton’s path to the nomination is blocked off, Richardson knows this could be a clarion call to other superdelegates.
There's been a smooth, if unimpressive, flow of superdelegates to Obama since Super Tuesday, but Clinton's victories have forced superdelegates to think twice about crossing the street to hang with the cool kid. Uncommitted superdelegates have spent the last two months nervously looking both ways before they cross. Richardson had the stones to be one of the first to start walking. He won't be the last.
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This election cycle has seen its share of kooky endorsers whose support the candidates would rather not have. But the latest celebrity to support Obama makes Louis Farrakhan look like Ted Kennedy.
The hugely popular Egyptian pop singer Shaaban Abdel Rahim, best known for his controversial political songs and outrageous style, will soon release a new track celebrating the end of Bush's presidency—and endorsing Obama. In an interview last week with Dar Al-Hayat, Rahim said that Obama is (roughly translated) “a good man, kindhearted, and better than Bush.”
Rahim, also known by his nickname “Shaabolla,” gained international notoriety in 2000 when he released the song “I Hate Israel.” (The song’s subtitle, “But I love Amr Moussa,” refers to Egypt's former foreign minister and head of the Arab League.) Since then, he’s had a rocky relationship with Egypt’s censors. They allowed “Israel” to be broadcast but banned his follow-up tune praising Osama Bin Laden. (Its chorus: "Bin Bin Bin Bin Bin Bin Laden.") Other songs he has rolled out include “Hey People, It Was Only a Tower” after 9/11, “Don't Hit Iraq” in 2003, and “We Are All Out of Patience” about the Mohammed cartoon controversy in 2006.
His new song, titled “Bye-Bye Bush,” doesn’t come out till next week, but Rahim provided the lyrics to the first verse to Dar Al-Hayat:
Before leaving, Bush wants to turn the world into a mess,
Since he is a bad omen, as if he was born in a fight,
Cursing you, Bush, or your father doesn't suffice,
It was a disastrous, black day when you were elected …
Back in 2003, Slate’s Lee Smith argued that popular music is “the most powerful form of expression” in the Arab world, which is why governments use it so often for propaganda. Pop songs have played a critical role during events like the 1919 revolution, the coup of 1952, the 1973 war with Israel, and President Mubarak’s “election” in 2005. In the past few years, Rahim has become synonymous with this kind of “engaged”—or politically conscious—music. In other words, a lot of people are going to hear this song. (We'll try to post a copy of the song once it's available.)
Some commentators, most notably Andrew Sullivan, have made the case that a President Obama would change the way the world looks at America. The corollary to that, however, is that Obama would also draw a lot of supporters whose views he and most Americans consider abhorrent. Jeremiah Wright, for all his disturbing remarks, never said, “It was only a tower.” Then again, Barack Obama has probably never heard of Shabaan Abdel Rahim.
With Mohamed Gamal Beshir
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Today's the New York Times A1 piece on Hillary Clinton, “Clinton Facing Narrower Path to Nomination,” is an exercise in understatement. It nudges the candidate ever closer to the cliff but, maybe because of politeness, or business savvy, or maybe even a perceived need for objectivity, refrains from pushing her over.
Adam Nagourney writes that to secure the nomination, Clinton now needs 1) to “defeat Mr. Obama soundly in Pennsylvania,” 2) to “lead in the total popular vote after the primaries end in June,” and 3) “some development to shake confidence in Mr. Obama so that superdelegates … overturn his lead among the pledged delegates.” For these reasons, her long-shot candidacy has “grown a little longer.”
That’s putting it mildly. The fact is, of the three scenarios Nagourney lays out, only two are even possible, seeing as Clinton can no longer win the popular vote. And of those, only one—some deeply confidence-shaking incident—could actually result in Clinton having a shot at the nomination. Let’s take these one by one:
1) Yes, she will probably defeat Obama soundly in Pennsylvania. But that’s only going to prolong her suffering. Clinton supposedly had momentum coming out of Texas and Ohio, but Obama quickly erased her delegate gains with his victories in Wyoming and Mississippi. The same thing could happen if Obama wins North Carolina and Indiana. And however much Clinton thinks a Pennsylvania win makes the case that she can win big states in the general, there’s no evidence that one leads to the other.
2) Now that revotes in Florida and Michigan are off the table (Michigan’s legislature is mere hours away from recessing), Clinton is not going to win the popular vote. Period. Obama currently leads by 700,000 votes, or more than 800,000 if you count caucus estimates. For Clinton to close that, she would have to win the remaining states by consistently large margins. Clinton netted about 300,000 votes in Ohio when she won 55 percent of the vote—a performance she could re-create in Pennsylvania but which will likely be her biggest victory in the remaining states. (Plus, the popular vote is itself an unreliable metric.)
But here’s the catch: Clinton’s camp has its own way of counting. Just as they at one point refused to count only pledged delegates—they always lumped them in with “automatic delegates,” a count in which Clinton still leads—they will insist on including Florida and possibly even Michigan in their popular vote tally. “The popular vote is the popular vote for all to see,” Clinton adviser Harold Ickes told the Times. “For people to claim that because the delegates weren’t seated you can’t count the popular vote seems somewhat goofy.” If you factor in Florida, Obama’s current lead is only 400,000. If you count Michigan as well—an audacious move, given that Obama wasn’t even on the ballot—his lead narrows to 70,000. So if you inhabit the Seussian world of Clinton math, then yes, she can win the popular vote.
3) The last scenario—that Obama gets somehow tainted in the coming months—is still possible. He appears to have weathered Hurricane Wright, but we won’t know the long-term repercussions until voters hit the polls. However, the Wright flap may have planted a seed that could become a larger case against Obama. If more inflammatory sermons emerged, for example, or if other allies strayed off message, Obama’s opponents could argue that Wright wasn’t an isolated case.
However: None of this changes the fundamental fact that Clinton can win only by overturning Obama’s pledged delegate lead—a truism that still has not gotten the traction it deserves. Ominous warnings about 1968-like riots aside, the prospect that Clinton would accept the nomination over the head of the people is fundamentally at odds with everything the party represents. She talks about wanting to enfranchise the people of Florida and Michigan. But then, inevitably, she would turn around and seek to revert the people’s decision, expressed through the pledged delegate count. Call me naive, but I find it inconceivable that the party would want this to happen, or that a candidate would want to win that way.
All this being a long way of saying, Hillary’s path to the nomination is not “narrow.” It’s barricaded. Yet still there seems to be a hesitation among the media to declare Clinton dead. Maybe it’s her zombielike ability to rise again—first in New Hampshire, then in Nevada, then most recently in Texas and Ohio. But people have to understand there will be no knockout blow, no head shot. Rather it will be a long, slow exit that causes pain to everyone involved.
The question is, who is going to tell Hillary it’s over? Certainly not Bill. Certainly not her aides. Only the superdelegates matter. Given that, Gov. Philip Bredesen’s proposal for a superdelegate primary in June—a manufactured knockout blow—seems like a remarkably good idea.
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In his continued attempts to move beyond smear campaigns and convince the American people that he’s a true patriot, Barack Obama has submitted to the ultimate American tradition: March Madness. While Anderson Cooper was interviewing him on his press plane this week, Obama was seen clutching an NCAA bracket in preparation for today’s games.
His Final Four: North Carolina, Kansas, Pittsburgh, and UCLA.
His winner: North Carolina over UCLA.
For a guy who talks about being an underdog in American society and the presidential race, those are some pretty conservative picks. Thirty-six percent of people who filled out their brackets through CBS Sports have UNC going to the final. The Tar Heels, Jayhawks, and Bruins are all No. 1 seeds, and Obama’s only non-No. 1 Final Four member is the same team Bob Knight has been hawking on ESPN all week. Even when he picks the underdog, he picks the trendy underdog.
The casual observer could read North Carolina and Pitt’s prominence as a sign that Obama is pandering for votes in the states’ upcoming primaries. But if that’s the case, he should have replaced (1) UCLA with (6) Purdue, (7) West Virginia, or (12) Western Kentucky; and (1) Kansas with (10) Davidson, (12) Villanova, or (16) Portland State.
Knowing that Obama won the Senate office pool in 2007, Hillary Clinton is wisely declining to fill out a bracket. If Obama busted Clinton’s bracket, the election would be over.
UPDATE 5:32 p.m.: Obama's full bracket is online.
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Note that now both Clinton and Obama are using the word disenfranchise to describe the other’s plans for Michigan.
Clinton has long insisted that failing to seat Michigan’s delegates would be equal to disenfranchising voters. (That is, after initially agreeing that Michigan wouldn’t count.) Today, she even lumped Michigan’s revote in with the “long struggle” of “women, African-Americans, Latinos and others” to “get to the point where barriers have been knocked down and doors opened.” What would you call that, disenfranchisploitation?
But now Obama’s camp is using the same terminology. Clinton supporters Jon Corzine and Ed Rendell, governors of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, respectively, wrote a letter today to Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm reiterating their willingness to pay for a revote. Obama spokesman Bill Burton fired back, denouncing their willingness “to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.”
The Obama campaign’s rationale, in case you missed it: Voters who participated in the Republican primary wouldn’t be included in the Democratic revote. They also argue that young absentee voters—think college students—wouldn’t be included, since there’s a rule saying you must show up in person the first time you vote.
So, to recap: According to Obama, Clinton’s plan would disenfranchise Republicans, independents, and young first-timers—his base. According to Clinton, Obama’s nonplan would disenfranchise traditional Democrats—her base. When it comes to appropriating voting-rights rhetoric to serve their own needs, both campaigns are doing a smashing job.
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With much fanfare, the National Archives today released 11,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s schedules from her eight years as first lady. Mark Halperin instantly reported that there was no “smoking gun” among the papers. (What would constitute a smoking gun? Meetings with lobbyists? “3:45 p.m.: Cover up land deal”?) The most curious revelation has been that Hillary was in the White House on the day of the famed “blue dress” incident. Also—surprise surprise—Clinton got face time with people who are now superdelegates. But beyond that, slim pickings so far.
The Clinton campaign was quick to turn this into a “challenge” for Obama. They urged him "to release relevant documents and information from his tenure in the State Senate relating to his schedule, to memos, to letters that he may have written to state agencies perhaps on behalf of Mr. Rezko or others."
We’ve seen this movie before: Candidate stonewalls against some reform, finally gives in, then denounces opponent for failing to adopt same reform. (Remember how John Edwards spun taking public funds into a virtue?) So, of course Clinton is now casting herself as the transparency candidate. But how valid is that? Here’s a quick comparison of their records on disclosure:
Tax Returns: Clinton released her tax returns from the White House years when she was running for her Senate seat and challenged her opponent to do the same. But her tax returns since 2000 are still private, and neither she nor her surrogates have provided satisfying answers as to why. (When Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, he released records from as far back as 1980, but refused to release those from 1978 to '79.) Obama has released his tax returns every year since 2004.
Earmarks: Last week Obama released a list of earmarks he had requested for Illinois since becoming a senator. Clinton has not followed suit.
Fundraisers: In January, Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet successfully pressured the Obama campaign to include more fundraisers on his public schedule. But that only includes those held at public venues like hotels, not private homes. Clinton has not opened fundraisers to reporters.
Donors and bundlers: Obama’s campaign lists the names of bundlers—people committed to raising more than $50,000—on its Web site but doesn’t include cities or states to go with the names. In February, Clinton’s campaign let reporters listen in on a highly staged conference call with major donors.
Personal papers: Now that Clinton has released her personal schedule from the White House years, she’s urging Obama to release his own from his years in the State Senate. When asked about the whereabouts of his pre-2004 records, Obama said he “didn’t have the resources to ensure that all this stuff was archived in some way…. [I]t could have been thrown out.”
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For a campaign whose unofficial motto is “Yes, We Can,” Barack Obama’s operation is acting awfully defeatist when it comes to a revote in Michigan.
A day after Michigan Democratic leaders deemed a revote unlikely, Hillary Clinton traveled to Detroit to call attention to the issue and urge Democrats to revive it. The trip shows just how big a deal this is for Clinton. Without revotes in Michigan or Florida, she loses a key argument in her increasingly tenuous case to superdelegates that they should overturn the pledged delegate count.
Obama’s people, meanwhile, are digging in their heels—some say running out the clock—until the Michigan Legislature’s recess begins on Thursday. The standoff is something of a Catch-22: The legislature can’t draft a revote plan without Obama’s approval, but Obama won’t approve it without seeing a concrete plan.
Politically, stalling makes sense for Obama. A Michigan revote would likely hand Clinton another victory and give her a boost in the popular vote. But his stance is hard to defend on democratic grounds. If there’s a chance to give Michigan voters a voice, how can Obama—the same guy who mocks Hillary for talking about “false hopes”—oppose that?
His campaign’s objections to the revote are a mix of the legitimate and the dubious. Obama attorney (and conference-call crasher extraordinaire) Bob Bauer penned a lengthy memo explaining how a revote wouldn’t allow people who had voted in the Republican primary to participate in the Democratic re-do. Seems fair, although plenty of states hold closed primaries that exclude Republicans and independents. Less convincing are the campaign’s claims that there’s not enough time or money. Back in December, states were still deciding when to hold their primaries. And neither campaign would have trouble finding people to finance the election, if they really tried. Most notably, Bauer doesn’t offer any alternative solutions.
Obama knows he has a winning hand in Michigan. All he has to do is twiddle his thumbs. It’s just funny, and a little sad, that his case rests on saying, “No, We Can’t.”
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Normally, we’d give John McCain the benefit of the doubt if he flubbed an obscure foreign policy factoid and hastened to correct himself. But in the past two days, McCain has managed to botch a piece of information central to the conflict in Iraq not once, but twice.
Speaking to reporters in Jordan yesterday, he said the United States must remain vigilant in combating Iran, since “al-Qaida is going back into Iran and is receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran.” This is, according to every piece of intelligence, just plain wrong. (Iran is supporting Shiite militias aligned against al-Qaida, which is Sunni.) Sen. Joe Lieberman, standing beside McCain, leaned in to whisper his mistake. McCain corrected himself: “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaida.”
Embarrassing, yes, but forgivable—maybe he just misspoke. Right?
Sadly, no. On conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt’s radio show the night before, McCain had said the exact same thing: “As you know, there are al-Qaida operatives that are taken back into Iran and given training as leaders and taken back into Iraq.”
Add this to the list of things that, come September, McCain will wish he’d never said. Topping that list would be the time he told the Wall Street Journal, “I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.” McCain’s opponent in the general election could have some nasty fun coupling that statement with the al-Qaida/Iran flub. The only thing worse than admitting ignorance is displaying ignorance.
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Unable to go through a day without holding a conference call, the Clinton campaign put Deputy Communications Director Phil Singer and Senior Adviser Harold Ickes on the phone to talk about Florida and Michigan today. Right off the bat, Ickes asserted that if Democrats don't find a way to hold a revote in Michigan, Democratic voters will be disenfranchised because the delegates probably won't be seated at the convention. As Yoda suggests, disenfranchisement leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Suffering leads to losing the White House.
Ickes claims that without their delegation seated, Michigan Democrats won't vote for the party's nominee in November. If that happens, he said it would be hard to put together 270 electoral votes in November. (270 is the majority needed to win the presidency.) The problem: Ickes is wrong--in one set of polls, Clinton hits 270 without Michigan.
SurveyUSA's monstrous polling project surveyed 30,000 people nationwide and then used state-by-state results in hypothetical matchups to figure out which Democrat would win more electoral votes against John McCain. Obama nabbed more than Clinton against McCain, but Clinton still won the White House. She did it by winning Florida, but losing Michigan.
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It’s become the accepted logic of this race that if a surrogate says the wrong thing, you "denounce and reject" them, fire them from your campaign, return their money, and toss your drink in their face at parties. Until today.
Don’t get me wrong, Obama slammed Wright’s words. He denounced the reverend’s use of "incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike."
But Obama refused to throw Wright under the bus. (Wright did sever his official ties to the campaign, however.) Instead, Obama distinguished between the words and the man. That doesn’t seem particularly new—smart people are often forgiven for saying dumb things. But the assumption in this election has been that if someone embarrasses you, they have to go. No exceptions. Geraldine Ferraro, Samantha Power, Bob Johnson, Bill Shaheen—so many people got axed along the way that rejection became the norm. Hillary Clinton immortalized the rule by insisting in a debate that Obama "reject and denounce" Louis Farrakhan, who had praised Obama.
By defending Wright, you could say Obama rejected the Reject-and-Eject Rule. Instead, he executed a deft rhetorical pivot: All at once, he distanced himself from Wright's words, embraced Wright as a person, and held him up as an example of the American attitudes that need changing. For the past week, his campaign worried that people would see Wright as representing Obama. So Obama flipped the story, arguing that Wright actually represents America. A flawed, twisted America, but a real one nonetheless. He sums up the trouble with Wright like this:
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country—a country that has made it possible for one of [its] own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old—is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know—what we have seen—is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
Notice how he incorporates Wright’s own quote—"the audacity of hope"—into the prescription for his (and America’s) own rehabilitation.
The idea behind Obama’s speech is that some remarks, and therefore some people, are too complex simply to accept or reject. He cast Wright not quite as a victim but as a product of his times: "For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years." To simply reject Wright would be to neglect the root causes behind his words. Obama always talks about ushering in a new kind of politics—the reject-and-eject rule can be the first assumption to go.
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In today’s big-deal Obama speech, he offered a smattering of memorable quotes on how he was going to unify a country that is deeply split along regional, racial, and religious fault lines. But for all that talk of unity, he never discussed how he planned to bridge the generation gap.
Obama said the word generation 15 times in today’s speech—with its context ranging between a reverence for past generations’ heroism and a disappointment that they can’t let go of their pasts. In the trickiest passage of today’s speech, Obama defended his Reverend-in-Chief James Jeremiah Wright* with accolades about Wright’s service in the marines and his 30 years of community service. According to Obama, Wright erred by getting bogged down in the politics of his generation. “For the men and women of Rev. Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years,” Obama said.
The generational argument offered Obama his best escape plan for wriggling out of the Wright quagmire. If he threw his family friend and spiritual adviser under the bus, he’d look like a scheming politician. If he embraced Wright in his darkest hour, he wouldn’t assuage concerns that he, too, wanted to damn America. So instead Obama designed an excuse for Wright’s actions—Wright is too old to understand the country’s current racial positioning, and his generation’s past clouds the country’s future. Obama’s pathos has always claimed to be the answer to this age-group fiction. The spin: Only Obama and his unique American story can transcend the culture-war murkiness.
It’s an argument Andrew Sullivan has already made at length—and it’s one that makes sense if you’re a young Obama fan. Past generations haven’t seemed to get the job done, and Obama is (arguably) the first politician of Generation X to run for president. Therefore, Obama is a better option than John McCain. McCain is so old, the thinking goes, that his generation taught Bush and Clinton’s generation how to be a generation. That’s no way to bring about change.
But even if he soothes the country’s racial rifts, he may create a new one in its place. All of this talk about Obama transcending our nation’s past harms an innocent bystander—old people. Senior citizen Democrats already like Hillary Clinton more than Obama. If identity politics hold through the general election, they’re likely to prefer McCain over Obama, as well. Rather than pander to what may be a crippling weakness, Obama is headed the other direction. His heavy reliance on generational rhetoric in today’s speech and his crochety-old-uncle excuse for Wright only highlights his efforts.
After he won South Carolina’s primary Obama said, “I did not travel around this state over the last year and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina, I saw South Carolina.” Seventeen percent of South Carolina voters were over 65. Seniors favored Clinton over Obama by eight points. The state favored Obama over Clinton by 28 points.
Ironically, Obama's willingness to break free from past generation's mentalities pays tribute to the politician Obama most resembles—John F. Kennedy. In JFK's inaugural address, he said:
We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
The torch has been passed to Obama, but he may end up burning too many bridges to use it.
*UPDATE 2:49 p.m.: I originally misidentified Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, as James Wright.
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Just a thought as we’re waiting for Obama to deliver his much-anticipated
speech on race.
NBC's First Read says
that this speech is make-or-break for Obama: “If Obama can't hit a homerun on
this speech today, then he won’t be president.” Sorry, what?? It’s one thing to say this will be a big speech. It’s
another to say his candidacy hinges on it. He has an insurmountable pledged
delegate lead, and the odds of Clinton
overtaking him with superdelegates are slipping.
Plus, Obama still
beats McCain in head-to-head match-ups. The idea that Obama could suddenly sabotage
his own candidacy with a single speech like this neglects the fact that he’s,
er, winning.
First Read also concludes that the Wright controversy has
“hurt Obama – so far.” The evidence: a new poll shows Clinton beating McCain by more points (five)
than Obama does (two). Before the Wright flap dominated news cycles, Obama had
a wider lead over McCain than Clinton
did. But to chalk that switch up to Wright alone seems questionable, especially
since we’re talking about a wide margin
of error:
Gallup
surveyed 685 "likely" voters across the nation from Friday through
Sunday. It says the margin of error on each result is +/- 4 percentage points.
That means neither Clinton nor Obama's lead in the new poll is "outside"
that margin. Clinton's
support could be as low as 47% (because 51-4=47) and McCain's could be as high
as 50% (because 46+4=50).
Something to keep in mind during post-speech analysis, too.
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Last week we surveyed the proposed scenarios for fixing the Michigan/Florida mess. Two of the four solutions involved costly Florida revotes. But now the chairman of the state Democratic Party tells us they’ve decided not to hold a revote. With that, the Florida Dems have simultaneously screwed Hillary Clinton and guaranteed their own irrelevance. Here's how.
Clinton’s situation is dire. She’s now trailing Obama by about 159 pledged delegates, according to NBC. Even if she scores a big win in Pennsylvania—say it nets her an extremely generous 40 delegates—that’s still not going to be enough to catch up. (Obligatory Slate Delegate Calculator plug.) Her candidacy therefore rests on whether she can persuade superdelegates to overturn Obama’s pledged-delegate lead. But since Feb. 5, Obama has won 47 superdelegates, and Clinton has lost seven. The chances that superdelegates will have an epiphany and swing to Clinton seem awfully low. Her one trump card, however, was the prospect of winning the popular vote. If Florida had revoted and she won a huge victory that propelled her past Obama in the popular vote—itself a skewed number—she might have persuaded superdelegates to swing her way. (Obama leads by roughly 700,000 in the popular vote, but that would have dropped to about 400,000 with Florida’s Jan. 29 results factored in, according to Real Clear Politics.) But now a popular-vote victory is as far out of reach for her as Obama’s pledged-delegate lead.
Meanwhile, Florida has left itself only a handful of scenarios, all unsatisfying: 1) Split the pledged delegates 50-50, 2) Allocate the delegates proportionally based on the Jan. 29th vote, or 3) Allocate them proportionally but halve the number, à la the GOP. In each these scenarios, Florida doesn’t really matter—at least not in any way but a symbolic one. In the first case, the 50-50 split won’t affect the pledged-delegate gap, which means those pledged delegates might as well not be there. In the last two cases, the delegates will be seated at the convention only if Obama, who now controls the convention’s credentials committee, allows them. And he’ll allow them only if he’s far enough ahead that their votes won’t make up the difference. So the chances are that Florida will attend the convention, but only because including its delegates is no longer a threat to Obama.
Maybe that’s why the Obama campaign was comfortable issuing this statement late today: “We hope that all parties can agree on a fair seating of the Florida delegates so that Florida can participate in the Democratic Convention.”
Clinton's campaign, for its part, is understandably irked: “Today’s announcement brings us no closer to counting the votes of the nearly 1.7 million people who voted in January. We hope the Obama campaign shares our belief that Florida’s voters must be counted and cannot be disenfranchised.” Ah, the "D" word. Expect to hear a lot more of that in the coming weeks.
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This morning, the New York Times ran a Bill Kristol column whose entire bloated argument balanced on a tenuous, factually incorrect fulcrum. Kristol claims that Obama can’t pretend he didn’t know his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was a controversial firebrand because Obama was in church when Wright started mouthing off. Kristol originally cited reporting that claimed Obama was at church on July 22, when Wright said the United States of White America was oppressing blacks.
Kristol and the Times have since issued an apology and a correction, but this was an especially preventable offense. Slate’s Map the Candidates tool shows Obama spent the day in Florida, fruitlessly addressing Latinos in Miami.
But the Times didn’t even have to steer their browsers to Slate’s waters. Their own candidate tracker shows that Obama was far from Chicago that day, as well. Kristol relied on reporting from conservative news site NewsMax.com, which is sticking by their story. Last we checked, the Times didn’t rely on reporting from biased outlets like NewsMax. Kristol might, but the Times doesn’t.
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In a race where identity politics is everywhere, you’d think Barack Obama would put more emphasis on his Irish heritage today. See above. (Update 12:45 a.m.: Obama's campaign sends word that he wore a green tie to a dinner with the Irish Women's Society in Scranton this evening.)
Last year, geneologists traced his lineage back to one Fulmuth Kearney, who sailed from Ireland to New York in 1850. (Various Irish counties claim to be his place of origin.) But it turned out his roots are Irish Protestant, not Catholic. On a day when both candidates are trying to boost their cred among Catholics in time for the primary in Pennsylvania, it might be unwise to remind everyone that his ancestors were on the other side.
Still, that didn’t stop his campaign from creating St. Paddy’s-themed Obama buttons. Nor did it stop the folks at Barely Political from creating a fake attack ad alleging that Obama is a leprechaun.
P.S.—That reminds me, Obama already has his own ice cream flavor. Seems about time for an Obama-themed drink, no? How about the "Irish Car Obama"?
Update 5:19 p.m.: A helpful reader points out that Obama does in fact have a drink named after him: A cheap Kenyan beer called Senator Keg.
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In her Iraq speech today in Washington, D.C., Hillary Clinton told the same story that comedian Sinbad mocked last week:
[T]here was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't go, so send the First Lady. That’s where we went.
I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.
We eagerly await Sinbad’s rebuttal. But until then, Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh reports yet another counter-narrative:
Clinton has seemed to exaggerate the danger she faced when, for example, she went to war-ravaged Bosnia in 1996. Campaigning in Iowa, she claimed she "ran" off the tarmac to avoid sniper fire. But Maj. Gen. William Nash, the commander of U.S. forces in Bosnia at the time, tells NEWSWEEK he was not aware "there was any threat of sniper fire." Nor was there any rush when her cargo plane landed.
Hrm, so has anyone confirmed Clinton's account?
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Today the Boston Globe seems to confirm rumors that Republicans voted for Hillary Clinton in Ohio, Texas, and Mississippi to undermine Barack Obama’s candidacy.
In Ohio and Texas on March 4, Republicans comprised 9 percent of the Democratic primary electorate, more than twice the average GOP share of the turnout in the earlier contests where exit polling was conducted. Clinton ran about even with Obama among Republicans in both states, a far more favorable showing among GOP voters than in the early races.
In Mississippi, her support among Republican voters (who comprised about 13 percent of voters) was a mind-boggling 75 percent.
There’s been plenty of skepticism about the “Rush effect.” It’s hard to find proof of tactical voting, since there are no data for how many Republicans normally cross over when their nomination is secure. Plus, there’s no way to know why Republicans voted for Clinton. Ambinder points out that if more GOP women crossed over than GOP men, that might undermine the Rush surge theory.
But regardless of the rationale, the GOP drift toward Clinton undermines Obama’s self-cultivated reputation as a uniter. Obama says he wants to create “Obama Republicans” in the mold of “Reagan Democrats”—but it’s Clinton Republicans (like Ann Coulter) who appear to have made the difference in Texas. (Clinton won about 119,000 Republican votes there, and she beat Obama by 101,000.) That said, Obama has retained his lead among independents.
There’s no way to conclusively measure the Limbaugh factor in the last few contests, but here’s a tip for Pennsylvania: Exit pollsters should ask Republicans whether Rush Limbaugh influenced their decision. Seriously. Barring that, they should at least ask GOP Hillary supporters what they think of her.
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For Barack Obama, Iowa just keeps on giving. First they handed him a decisive victory in the Democratic caucus in January. Then at this weekend’s district conventions, they gave him a second win in which he netted another nine pledged delegates, bringing his state total to 25. And with two more rounds of voting to go—one in April and one in June—he essentially gets four headlines for the price of one.
Obama’s gain comes at the expense of John Edwards, who lost eight delegates (so much for loyalty), and Clinton, who lost one. Perhaps talking smack about the caucus process wasn’t the wisest move.
Just for perspective: Clinton netted nine delegates in Ohio. Obama’s victories in Wyoming and Mississippi erased her gains from Ohio and Texas. Now Iowa 2.0 puts him in the post-March 5 lead and brings the total pledged delegate count to 1,409 and 1,250, by NBC’s count.
So, could the same thing happen in other caucus states? Clinton won the first round of Nevada voting (despite Obama winning more delegates), but Obama appeared to make gains in some counties in the second round of voting in February. (We won’t know statewide totals until Clark County, whose convention descended into chaos, holds a redo.) Other caucus states—Kansas, Nebraska, Washington, Maine, and others—hold second rounds of voting, which could give Obama intermittent delegate bounces.
I imagine this is what the rest of the Democratic contest will look like. There won’t be a knockout blow; just a series of small victories that will slowly bleed one candidate or another—but probably one in particular—of delegates. There are still potential game-changers, like a scandal that swings the superdelegates or a lopsided solution to the Florida and Michigan debacles. But chances are the race is going to drag on painfully until one candidate gives in to the math. If Hillary thinks she hates caucuses now, wait till they’re all done voting.
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It’s not going to happen. But here’s a hypothetical scenario that, however unlikely, could make John Edwards a kingmaker.
Saturday, Iowa Democrats will vote in the state’s county conventions. It’s a lot like the caucuses last January, only on a smaller scale. At 99 locations around the state, the 13,485 delegates selected at the caucuses will gather to choose delegates for the district and state conventions, which happen in April and June. Remember that in January, Edwards took 20 percent of the vote, which gave him an estimated 14 of the state’s 45 pledged delegates. (Iowa also has 13 superdelegates, bringing its delegate total to 57.) That means about 20 percent of the delegates showing up to tomorrow’s convention were selected as Edwards delegates.
These Edwards delegates have two options. (Well, three.) They can switch their allegiance to Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, both of whom have been pushing hard for their support. Or, if they’re able to meet the 15 percent viability threshold, they can stick with Edwards. Presumably, many of them have switched allegiances since January, and others probably don’t know they’re allowed to vote for Edwards now that he’s out. But if enough of them back him, they could put his delegates—again, the equivalent of 14 national convention delegates—in play at the state convention on June 14.
And as the Democratic race drags on, 14 delegates is starting to look like a lot. The last primaries are scheduled for June 3. If the delegate count is somehow tied—a long shot, given Obama’s current lead, but still possible—then Edwards’ 14 delegates would play a major role. There's a certain poetry to Iowa bookending the election like that, no? (Or, if you're concerned about the democratic process, a certain perversity.)
Back to reality for a moment. The other reason delegates might stick with Edwards would be if they think his priorities, particularly poverty, haven’t been addressed sufficiently. It’s the same reason Edwards hasn’t endorsed yet: He’s waiting for one of the candidates to take up the cause with the same fervor he did. Until that happens, he has no incentive to pick sides. Likewise, the longer his delegates hold out, the more pressure they put on Clinton and Obama to take up Edwards’ mantle.
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Here’s a question: Who doesn’t have a crazy, wingnut, off-message preacher supporting their campaign?
Right now, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is getting the most attention for, among other things, his statements that the U.S. government caused the AIDS virus; a speech in which he said, “God damn America”; and his less-than-kind words about Hillary Clinton. Obama has distanced himself from Wright in general terms but hasn’t denounced specific statements.
But Obama’s not the only one. Clinton has her own spiritual adviser in the Rev. Bill Graham, who, while generally respected, has made remarks about Jews and the media that wouldn’t endear Clinton to voters. (Their connection hasn’t been an issue on the campaign trail so far.)
Even McCain has embarrassing pastors in his life—more than one, in fact. Earlier this week, McCain “condemned” the words that John Hagee “apparently wrote”—Hagee has said some ugly things about gays, Jews, and Catholics. But McCain said his remarks may have been “taken out of context.” Meanwhile, the Rev. Rod Parsly, an Ohio televangelist whom McCain has called a “spiritual guide,” wrote in one of his books that Islam is a “false religion” predicated on “deception,” David Corn reports. Not exactly part of McCain’s campaign platform.
So, given that each candidate has an embarrassing pastor, shouldn’t there be a stalemate? As Ambinder points out, the McCain campaign can’t ding Obama for Wright’s words—as it implicitly did in an e-mail today—without expecting to be repaid in kind.
My guess is that for McCain, it’s worth it. The Arizona senator has had a bumpy relationship with evangelical leaders—don’t forget his “agents of intolerance” quip—and he probably calculates that it’s better to have these guys on his side, controversy and all, than to lose them and their supporters. Plus, there’s a big difference between his evangelical endorsements and Wright’s proximity to Obama. (Wright married Barack and Michelle, and gave Obama the title of his second book.) If it comes down to a guilt-by-association competition, McCain probably thinks he would come out on top. Clinton should feel somewhat more comfortable denouncing Wright—Billy Graham, whatever his past statements, isn’t exactly controversy incarnate. Still, her campaign is so far withholding judgment.
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There’s no written rule about what you’re supposed to say when asked if Barack Obama is a Muslim. But manners, respect for the truth, and disdain for the ugly rumors still circulating about his religion would suggest that you’d say something like, “No, Barack Obama is not a Muslim.”
But somehow, the rival camps can’t seem to bring themselves to utter those words. Last week on 60 Minutes, Hillary Clinton stopped short of an outright denial: “I take him on the basis of what he says. And, you know, there isn't any reason to doubt that,” she said. When pressed on whether she believes he is Muslim, she said, “No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know.”
Then today on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, McCain adviser Charlie Black used similar phrasing, saying he “take[s] him at his word” that Obama is not a Muslim.
What’s the game here? It’s like they’re hedging just in case it turns out one day that Obama is indeed Muslim, as if Tim Russert would then read back their quotes to them and demand to know how they could have been so sure. You could argue that it’s impossible to know someone’s religion in their heart of hearts. But come on. If someone said they were going to “take Hillary Clinton at her word” that she’s a Christian, they’d be rightly mocked. Obama’s case should be no different.
A recent NBC/WSJ poll showed that 13 percent of voters still think Obama is a Muslim. That’s up from 8 percent in December, suggesting that the smear (and yes, given the motivation, I’m comfortable calling it a smear) is getting traction. (See the full poll here.) For a campaign adviser, let alone a rival candidate, to answer the question of Obama’s religion in a less-than-definitive way—as if you’re just guarding against saying something you don’t know for sure—merely plays into the hands of rumor-mongers.
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Over the last two weeks, pressure has been building to get both Michigan and Florida’s delegations seated at the Democratic National Convention. Florida has set a self-imposed deadline of Monday to sort itself out, while Michigan has to reach a resolution by Thursday (before the state legislature goes on vacation). People have been proposing all sorts of solutions, from splitting the delegates to mail-in revotes. Because we can barely keep track of the proposals ourselves, here’s a guide to what’s on the table:
1) A Florida in-person primary. A classic do-over. Democrats show up to a polling place, vote for somebody, and go home.
Cost: An estimated $25 million. That’s a serious chunk of change for a state that has already paid for a primary. The only way that they could come up with the money is if Clinton supporters and Govs. John Corzine (New Jersey) and Ed Rendell (Pennsylania) followed through on their promise to raise money.
Whom it helps: Hillary Clinton. That’s why her campaign is the only group who wants this to happen.
Why it won’t happen: Nobody wants to shell out $25 million for a vote that’s likely to look very similar to the last one. On Jan. 29, Clinton won 55 percent to Barack Obama’s 33 percent. (John Edwards—remember him?—was still in the race at the time.) Currently, polls say she pulls 59 percent of voters and Obama grabs 39 percent. With other options on the table, Obama will never agree to this one.
2) A Florida mail-in primary. All registered Democrats would be sent a ballot in the mail at least two weeks ahead of the June 3 primary date. Ballots must be received by June 3, not postmarked by then. There would be only 50 in-person polling places across the state.
Cost: Originally, the plan was quoted at $4 million to $6 million. Now it’s inflated to $10 million to $12 million because of security precautions. The funding would almost certainly have to come from soft money, which means Corzine and Rendell may be involved, again.
Whom it helps: Clinton, but Obama could live with this option. For Obama, it gets the delegations seated and the mail-in procedure favors fervent supporters who will remember to mail in the ballot. For Clinton, she gets to grab the delegates she thinks have always rightfully belonged to her.
Why it won’t happen: It’s still unclear whether an all mail-in primary is even legal. There’s a huge hang-up on how to verify voters’ signatures that would take an emergency piece of legislation or an executive order to mollify. The Miami Herald has a great article on why that probably won’t happen. Plus, the people who like the idea—GOP Gov. and possible McCain VP Charlie Crist, Sen. Bill Nelson, and the state Democratic Party—are outnumbered by the nine Florida congressmen who don’t like the idea.
3) A Michigan in-person primary. It’s the same story as it was in January, except this time both Obama and Clinton are on the ballot.
Cost: It could run as high as $12 million, which would be paid for by soft money in one way or another. Corzine and Rendell could get tapped, or Obama and Clinton’s campaign could go dutch and split the bill 50-50.
Whom it helps: Obama. He’s already polling at a tie with Clinton, and he hasn’t stumped there. (Neither has she.) If he wins a populous swing state like Michigan, it would help him make the case to superdelegates that he’s the stronger November candidate.
Why it won’t happen: If Michigan Democrats can’t agree on the best approach, then it could fall apart. Otherwise, the outlook is good.
4) Seating Florida’s current delegation and arbitrarily tying Michigan. Everybody would agree to give up on the revote idea and come to a compromise. Florida’s delegation would be seated at the convention based on January’s vote, but each delegate would cast only half a vote as lingering punishment for cutting the line in the first place. Meanwhile, Obama and Clinton would agree to split the Michigan delegation 50-50. If you’re thinking that that doesn’t make any sense, you’re right. More on why below.
Cost: The best part of this plan: It’s free!
Whom it helps: Obama more than Clinton, most likely. He gets the Florida/Michigan monkey off his back and takes half the vote in Michigan. Obama’s campaign is on the record in favor of a 50-50 split. Plus, he gets to limit the damage in Florida, which Clinton would have won again.
Why it won’t happen: This is actually somewhat likely to happen if Michigan can’t figure out a way to stage a revote. But that doesn’t make it a good option. The idea behind seating these delegations was to make sure the two states’ Democrats weren’t disenfranchised. But splitting the vote 50-50 in Michigan essentially does disenfranchise them. Michigan would then have no impact on the race; its delegation would be window-dressing at the convention. Heck, even if you gave Michigan a bajillion delegates, it still wouldn’t matter if the candidates split its delegates 50-50. (See Slate’s delegate calculator for an illustration on how this would work.)
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So much for taking the day off.
All three presidential candidates returned to Washington, D.C., today to vote on a Senate bill that would put a moratorium on earmarks for a year. John McCain drafted the bill, and both Clinton and Obama have been trying to one-up each other’s hatred of earmarks, so naturally they all wanted to be seen supporting the ban.
But now, thanks to some strategic Democratic jockeying, the bill won’t come to a vote until later tonight. At which point, the candidates will have left for the trail—and McCain won’t be able to tout his vote on the bill. (Either way, it’s expected to fail.)
Still, the candidates did manage to score points during the day. To coincide with the vote, Obama’s campaign released all the earmarks he secured for Illinois in fiscal year 2007 and challenged Clinton to do the same. It’s the latest volley in the Obama campaign’s case that Clinton lacks transparency; they’ve been urging her to release her papers stored in the Clinton Presidential Library as well as her tax returns. However, the Associated Press points out that Obama has ignored requests for the same information related to his years as an Illinois state senator.
The funny thing is, you can barely call the earmarks issue a “debate” anymore, at least on the campaign trail. The candidates all agree! Sure, they can bicker over who opposed earmarks first and most vigorously. McCain sent out a memo today congratulating Democrats on their “new-found enthusiasm for suspending this practice for a year.” Obama’s transparency gambit is meant to make Clinton look soft on the issue. But in the end, they’re all anti-pork—a fact that could neuter what would otherwise be a strong weapon for McCain. Now if only they could vote on it.
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So this is why he refused to fully commit to a withdrawal. Let the Ron Paul comeback begin!
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… And goes
for it.
On a day when McCain is highlighting his own ethical
cleanliness by trying
to abolish earmarks for a year, Obama dings McCain for perhaps his most egregious
policy reversal: Bush’s tax cuts.
The logic of why he first voted against the tax cuts, then
supported making them permanent, is contorted at best. Jonathan Chait summed
it up most pithily:
McCain explained that his position was perfectly consistent
because, while he may have opposed the tax cuts in the first place, letting
them expire would amount to a tax hike; and, he said, "I've never voted
for a tax increase in twenty-four years . . . and I will never vote for a tax
increase, nor support a tax increase." In fact, McCain had proposed a
tobacco tax increase in 1998. Nor would his position have made sense anyway.
(Some economists favor higher tax rates and others prefer lower tax rates, but
none would oppose a tax cut and then oppose its repeal simply because it had
already been enacted.)
Now McCain says he thinks the tax cuts are necessary to
support a flagging economy. But Obama has an easy retort: How would you know? McCain himself admitted that he knows “a lot
less about economics than … about military and foreign policy issues.” The
flip-flop/confession combo is likely to be one of the strongest weapons against
McCain in the general. No surprise Obama wanted to be seen as the first one to
use it.
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Is Jeremiah Wright untouchable?
Barack Obama’s minister, who leads the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and who coined the phrase "the audacity of hope," has said some controversial things over the years. But new videos of his sermons, purchased and reported on by Fox News, could up the ante. Especially the one in which he goes after Hillary: "Hillary is married to Bill, and Bill has been good to us. No he ain’t! Bill did us, just like he did Monica Lewinsky. He was riding dirty," Wright said.
Obama has distanced himself from Wright in the past, comparing him to "an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don't agree with," but he hasn’t severed ties. (Wright serves on his African-American Religious Leadership Committee.) In fact, the Obama campaign doesn’t seem to have done anything to restrain Wright, or at least not successfully: He delivered the "Hillary" speech on Jan. 13 of this year.
Curiously, though, Clinton hasn’t spoken out. After the resignations of Samantha Power last week and Geraldine Ferraro yesterday, you’d think both campaigns would have a hair trigger when it comes to insults. Clinton was also adamant that Obama "reject and denounce" Louis Farrakhan. Wright hasn’t insulted entire groups of people like Farrakhan did, but, still, why give him a free pass? Also, it’s not just about Hillary’s pride. Wright may have violated tax code rules that prohibit churches from participating in political campaigns. It’s unclear whether the IRS will take action, but a rival campaign could legitimately gripe about it.
Three theories on why Clinton is holding back: 1) She doesn’t want to start a race war—at least not right now. Ferraro did enough damage by claiming she was being attacked "because I’m white." To go after Wright would look as if they’re trying to push the same narrative. 2) Wright is enormously popular. It’s not as if Hillary is going to be making inroads on the African-American vote anytime soon—Obama won 91 percent of blacks in Mississippi—but she’d rather not piss off people whose vote she needs in the general. 3) Wright is right. However inflammatory his rhetoric, his basic case against Hillary—that she doesn’t understand the American black experience in the way Obama does—is irrefutable. "Hillary Clinton has never been called a nigger," he said in one video. And it’s something Clinton would rather not draw attention to. While his words were disrespectful, they weren’t necessarily wrong.
If Clinton does in fact come out and condemn Wright, it will be Obama’s purest test of loyalty vs. exigency. It’s one thing to distance yourself from a friend and quietly ask him to tone it down. It’s another to throw him under the bus.
Update 2:55 p.m.: Instaputz points out a fourth possible reason for Clinton to hold back: Her own pastor's unseemly remarks.
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Always count on Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell to speak slightly too candidly. In a conference call just now, he responded to a question about Hillary Clinton’s unfavorability rating, which hovers around 43 percent: “When this started a year ago, I didn’t like Hillary Clinton.”
Rendell went on to speculate that by fall, Clinton’s unfavorables “will be down 8, 10, 12, 14 percent.” Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who was also in on the call, agreed, “As people get to know you and know what you’re about, a lot of that stuff goes off to the side.”
Who knows, maybe they’re right. But if eight years as first lady, six years as a U.S. senator, and more than a year on the campaign trail haven’t given people a chance to “get to know” Clinton, why should the next eight months be different?
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If there’s a lesson to be learned from Geraldine Ferraro’s fast-motion disintegration, it’s gotta be: Don’t fight it.
After her initial slip-up—Ferraro said that Obama was a successful candidate only because he’s black—she could have apologized and walked away. As a member of the fundraising committee, she didn’t rank particularly high on Clinton’s staff list. Instead, she decided to double down. She called back the Daily Breeze, the paper in which her comments first appeared, and accused the Obama campaign of “attacking me because I’m white.” In other words, she played what Ben Smith calls the race card card. That move ratcheted up the rhetoric another notch, all but guaranteeing her demise.
At the bottom of Ferraro’s rants, she had a kernel of a point: This election, like all elections, is largely about identity. As she herself acknowledged, “[I]n 1984, if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would never have been the nominee for vice president.” But what then? Was she suggesting that Obama should “admit” that his race is a factor in his candidacy? If so, that’s a losing battle. Should John Edwards then have admitted he was getting some votes because he was a white male?
Ferraro prided herself on not taking orders from the Clinton campaign, but this time she should have listened. In a mere two days, she managed to resurrect the subject of race—relatively dormant since South Carolina*—and give the Obama campaign reason to take offense. It also let them twist the Clinton campaign’s logic about Samantha Power’s “monster” remarks. If Clinton hadn’t demanded Power’s resignation, Ferraro might still have a job on the campaign. Howard Wolfson’s rebuttal—that Ferraro wasn’t as big a part of Clinton’s campaign as Power was for Obama—held water at first. But once Ferraro lashed out again, it was over.
In an ideal world, neither Power nor Ferraro would have had to resign. But the logic that both campaigns have imposed on the race—that wanton (Update 1:47 a.m.: Sorry, not "wonton.") surrogates have to go—made Ferraro's demise inevitable.
*Correction: We originally said North Carolina. That would be impossible, seeing as North Carolina hasn't voted yet.
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People have been talking about the popular vote as a possible trump card for Clinton. As in, Yes, Obama is going to win the pledged delegates. But what if Clinton wins the popular vote? The implication is that a popular vote win by Clinton could convince superdelegates, who will decide the election, to swing toward her instead of Obama.
Here’s the problem with that: The popular vote isn’t as pure a number as people think. For all the biases of the Democrats’ pledged-delegate selection system—proportional allocation, caucus math, open vs. closed voting—the popular vote has its own inadequacies. Namely, it understates Obama’s success in caucus states.
Caucuses have relatively low turnout compared with primaries. “To me, the caucuses don't provide the broad base of participation that I have fought for my entire life,” Clinton said even after winning Nevada. That’s why Obama’s strength in caucuses—he’s won all but two of the 15 caucus states so far—irks Clinton so much. They privilege energetic young people with free time, also known as Obama’s base.
But when you’re talking about the popular vote, the relatively low caucus turnout turns into an advantage for Clinton. Obama won Kansas, for example, with 74 percent of the vote. But only 37,000 of the state’s 401,000 registered Democrats—about 9 percent—turned out to caucus. Primary turnout, on the other hand, has been more than 30 percent in many states this year (although each state’s registration system is different, making the exact numbers difficult to measure). So had Kansas held a primary instead of a caucus, the state would have contributed more toward Obama’s popular vote tally. (For relative turnout in the 2004 caucuses and primaries, see here.)
The Clinton counterargument would be, Well, if Kansas had held a primary, Obama wouldn’t have won by as much, if at all. But that doesn’t change the fact that the popular vote does not fully reflect the results of the system agreed to by the party. You could conceivably calculate an alternative “popular vote” that extrapolates caucus results to imagine what the total tally would have been, had more people showed up to caucus. But that comes with its own dangers, since you don’t actually know how those people would have voted.
Still, the main point stands: The popular vote is tainted. If Florida and Michigan revote, there’s a chance Clinton would narrow the lead in the popular vote, and possibly even take it. (She still probably can’t catch up delegatewise.) In which case, keep in mind that even the popular vote has its flaws.
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On a Washington Post chat today, former John Edwards campaign manager Joe Trippi seems to hint that Edwards will not be endorsing:
John Edwards led on every single issue and pushed both Clinton and Obama on everything from the war in Iraq to Poverty. He has had an enormous impact on this election cycle and still will. I would caution that he may play a key role in bringing the party together by not endorsing -- that may not help him personally but it may be exactly what the party and the country needs.
Hear that? He will play a “key role” by not endorsing. Other leaders will look to his nonendorsement for guidance. Doesn’t Trippi know he doesn’t have to spin anymore?
Later, Trippi is a bit less decisive, “I really do not expect John Edwards to endorse at this point. Or I should say I would be surprised if he does. But then again he could surprise me.”
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A Rent-style song about Barack Obama.
An Obama-themed online Ro-Sham-Bo game called Barack, Paper, Scissors.
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In a campaign full of bizarre, vaguely defensible analogies—Obama is a Mac, Clinton is a PC! Obama is Starbucks, Clinton is Dunkin Donuts!—here’s a new one to consider: Obama is The Colbert Report, Hillary is Saturday Night Live.
Facile analogies aren’t particularly productive, but in this case, the two comedy shows’ campaign coverage is starting to reflect it.
After a skit last Halloween featuring Obama, SNL has seemed to drift Clinton-ward. First their sketch about how the media are “in the tank” for Barack. Then Tina Fey’s joking-but-actually- serious “bitch is the new black” endorsement of Hillary Clinton. Then Clinton herself went on the show. She didn’t get the show’s explicit endorsement, but they resurrected the old media-fawns-over-Obama trope in that episode.
Meantime, the crew over at Comedy Central is looking more and more Obama-friendly. Take the latest argument over whether “big states” matter. The Clinton campaign has claimed that Hillary’s strength in California, New York, and Ohio will matter in the general election. The Obama campaign is trying to flip Clinton’s argument around, pointing out in a recent memo that “more than 55% of her popular vote total and nearly half of her pledged delegates have come in just five states.”
But they might as well have just linked to Stephen Colbert’s withering takedown. “It’s not how many votes you get,” he snarked on Monday’s show. “It’s the geographic boundaries that contain those votes. Getting 10 million votes in one state is way better than getting 12 million votes split between two states.” As Jonathan Chait put it when Sinbad challenged Clinton’s account of her Bosnia tour, “When your main campaign theme is foreign policy experience, and that experience is persuasively refuted by a comedian, it's time to find a new theme.”
Also, look at the demographics. Obama is most popular among college-age kids with too much time on their hands, same as Colbert. Clinton, meanwhile, relies on older voters, just as SNL is also a boomer phenomenon that, compared with Colbert’s energy and pace, just feels tired. No doubt both shows strive for equal-opportunity mockery, but their roots show. You can’t help but think that Obama’s rise and Colbert’s supplanting SNL atop the political satire pile is no coincidence.
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Obscured in last night’s Mississippi results was the announcement by CNN that Obama won the Texas caucuses. The counting’s not done—we won’t have final results until March 29—but CNN still projected the likely delegate split:
After a comprehensive review of these results, CNN estimates that Obama won more support from Texas caucus-goers than Clinton. Based on the state party's tally, Obama's caucus victory translates into 38 national convention delegates, compared to 29 for Clinton.
And though Clinton won more delegates than Obama in the primary, 65 to 61, Obama's wider delegate margin in the caucuses gives him the overall statewide delegate lead, 99 to 94 — or once superdelegate endorsements are factored in, 109 to 106. [Emphasis added]
So … Obama won Texas? Depends on which count you think matters more—the popular vote or the delegate count. (There's plenty of debate over that.) It also depends on whose numbers you believe: MSNBC still has Texas as tied. But at the very least, if the final tallies on March 29 corroborate these numbers, Obama can make the case that he won Texas. (A case that, to be fair, his campaign has been making all along.)
Also, as First Read points out, this means that Obama’s victories in Wyoming and Mississippi do indeed cancel out Clinton’s March 4 victories. She netted about 15 delegates in the primaries that day, but Texas’ caucuses cut that number to six. In Wyoming, Obama netted two delegates and another five last night in Mississippi—thus erasing Clinton’s surge.
The math just gets uglier and uglier for Clinton.
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By Christopher Beam and Chadwick Matlin
Obama won. You can stop holding your breath now. Indeed, his victory in Mississippi added yet another notch to his belt, and with that we can begin the long slog to the Pennsylvania primary on April 22. (There’s a reason the phrase “death march” contains the word March.) Here’s what we can expect to see in the weeks to come.
Elephants in the room. Details should soon begin to emerge about revotes in Florida and Michigan. The main questions: Will the DNC reinstate the states’ full delegations? Or will the party continue to punish them by withholding their delegates? (The RNC stripped the states of half their delegates.) When will the votes be? (Expect late June, making Florida and Michigan the new Texas and Ohio, which were in turn the new Iowa and New Hampshire.) Do revotes favor one candidate, in particular? (They’re partial to Clinton. Polling in Michigan shows a tied race, and she’s up big in Florida.) Can Clinton catch up in the delegate count if she dominates these contests? (Probably not, but she could make the pledged delegate margin so narrow—as low as 80, perhaps—that superdelegates would have an even harder decision.)
Getting intimate. We’re going to get to know Pennsylvania like it’s our college girlfriend. We’ll grow acquainted with her baggage from past relationships—electing Gov. Ed Rendell over Pittsburgh sports-legend Lynn Swann, perhaps because some were uncomfortable with an African-American governor. We’ll get to know her friends from home—cosmopolitan transplants in Philadelphia, steel-belt workers in Pittsburgh, and wacky, independent farmers everywhere in between. Plus, don’t forget about getting inside her head—nothing’s sexier than probing her feelings on NAFTA, change, and experience.
Surrogate smack talk. The past week has featured a colorful cast of loose-lipped economists, feisty former candidates, leggy academes with attitude, and other surrogates gone wild. Don’t expect that to stop. As the Democratic race drags on, everyone will become sensitive about damaging (or, worse, appearing to damage) the eventual nominee—especially now that McCain can gad about unchallenged. As a result, underlings will hurl the most hurtful barbs, lest the candidates themselves look nasty. By the end of this, monster will sound kind.
Debate # 21. Remember that a Pennsylvania debate in Philadelphia was one of the most newsworthy forums of the season. It’s where Clinton wavered on drivers’ licenses for immigrants, which may or may not have been her first major slip that eventually caused her to lose Iowa and ultimately forced her descent into delegate denial. But Clinton always loves sidling up to Obama under the debate lights, so look for another gabfest sometime before April 22. In the midst of six (relatively) newsless weeks, there may actually be some content to come out of this one.
Foreign
policy posturing. Now
that the race is guaranteed to come down to superdelegates, the candidates will
sell themselves harder than ever as the anti-McCain. That means foreign policy
cred. This week, both candidates held photo-ops with panels of military men.
McCain has already scheduled
a trip next to Europe and the Middle East, including a stop in Iraq.
Will the Dems duck out of Quaker country for a swing through the fertile
crescent? At the very least, expect to hear more about Clinton’s role in healing
Northern Island, Obama’s trips to Africa, and, of course, Sinbad.
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It’s 8 p.m. and CNN can’t project a winner for Mississippi. Huh. (Update 8:43 p.m.: OK, now it's Obama.) They say exit polls suggest he “seems to be” ahead, but perhaps it’s not as decisive as expected. (Fox News is calling it for Obama.) Here are some other exit poll juicy bits (Obligatory disclaimer: Exit polls are unreliable!):
It’s about race, only more so than usual. Both candidates win their own, and overwhelmingly. Obama wins 91 percent of African-Americans—the highest yet—whereas Clinton won 72 percent of whites. Given that African-Americans make up 48 percent of Democratic voters, he almost could have won the election without the help of whites.
It’s not about gender. Women and men split almost evenly between the two candidates, with Clinton winning around 41 percent and Obama winning around 49 percent, according to MSNBC. It’s similar to what happened in South Carolina, where race trumped gender in determining how people voted.
Ads mattered. People who considered political ads to be important swung toward Obama, whereas those who didn’t care about them went for Hillary. This could reflect the fact that Obama outspent Clinton in the state by a few million. Or it could also reflect residual backlash to Clinton’s “3 a.m.” ad, widely considered to have helped her in Ohio.
Most people made up their minds early. But those who didn’t favored Clinton. Only 19 percent of voters said they had made up their minds in the last week. Of that group, 53 percent voted for Clinton. Those who decided before the last week favored Obama, with 62 percent.
The dream ticket. More than half of voters think each candidate should pick the other as their vice president.
Hating on McCain. For all the talk of Obama relying on independents and Republicans, Obama’s supporters were far less likely to have high opinions of John McCain. More than half of Clinton voters said they had a favorable opinion of McCain; only about a quarter of Obama voters felt that way.
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During a day’s worth of high-octane umbrage-taking over Geraldine
Ferraro’s comments about Barack Obama, Ferraro herself was unrepentant.
“If it makes David [Axelrod] happy I would get off the
finance committee. But I’m telling David that I will raise money for Hillary. And
if Barack Obama is the candidate, he shouldn’t really antagonize people like
me. Because he’s going to come to me and ask me to raise money for Barack Obama,
and I would do it for him too, if he stops doing this kind of horrendous attacks
at me.”
She has a point. There’s a risk in all this How dare you! perception warfare that
you alienate Democrats who would otherwise be glad to help out. Of course, for Obama, a sympathy vote now is worth as much or more than a dollar later.
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Hillary Clinton has resurrected the charge that Barack Obama’s campaign isn’t based on actions but “just words.” Her campaign sent out a “memo” today defending her foreign policy experience in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Bosnia, China, and Rwanda, with this intro:
Over the last few weeks, Sen. Obama has successfully undermined his credibility with a series of statements to reporters and voters that have been contradicted by the facts. Unfortunately, he’s doing it again today by having his campaign issue a fundamentally misleading attack aimed at glossing over the doubts Americans have about his readiness to be Commander-in-Chief. Once again, Senator Obama is proving the point that his campaign is about “just words.”
Not to nitpick here, but the “just words” angle seems like an attempt to bring back the Deval Patrick “plagiarism” flap. Obama’s defense, after all, was to borrow Patrick’s line that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and Martin Luther King’s speeches were “just words.” Is Clinton trying to tease this out of him again?
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In case you were bored ...
Here's how to make a Barack Obama balloon animal.
It's going to be a long six weeks.
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Obama will win today’s Mississippi primary. The question is by how much. But there's still room for small surprises. Here are a few factors to keep an eye on as the Magnolia State’s results roll in this evening (8 p.m. ET):
It could be closer than you think. Clinton’s people have been playing down the importance of Mississippi—each candidate held all of two events there in the past week—so a narrow win by Obama could be construed as a surprise pseudo-victory for Clinton. Mississippi’s Democratic electorate is about 55 percent black, which bodes well for Obama. But they need to turn out if he’s going to deliver the trouncing everyone expects. One bad sign is that African-American turnout in Texas was lower than expected—even lower than in the 2004 primary. If the same thing happens in Mississippi, Clinton’s estimated 40-point lead among whites could help her close the gap.
Could Obama cancel out Clinton’s March 4 winnings? In the states that voted March 4, Clinton netted about 15 delegates. (Texas is still tallying its caucus results.) Obama closed that gap by two delegates with his win in Wyoming on Saturday. Could he close it the rest of the way tonight? Doubtful. He would need to win 69 percent of the vote in order to beat Clinton by 13 delegates, according to Slate’s Delegate Calculator. Even in his most decisive Southern victory, Georgia, he took only (“only”!) 66 percent. More likely, he will net a handful of delegates today—plus most if not all of the state’s six superdelegates.
Would Obama put Mississippi in play? Some folks have floated the theory that if Obama wins the nomination, he could turn Mississippi blue in the general. The RNC protests the claim, pointing out that he would be up against some tough ideological barriers. (Think immigration, abortion, stem cell research.) Furthermore, a recent survey by American Research Group shows 48 percent of white voters saying they would not vote for Obama. But blacks make up 37 percent of Mississippi’s population. A huge turnout among that cohort in November, combined with a small percentage of white voters, could conceivably hand Mississippi to Obama. Today’s numbers will be a good indicator.
The last word … for a while. Mississippi is the last primary before we embark on the Bataan Death March to April 22. With today’s results, Obama has the chance to slingshot himself into the next few weeks. Clinton is still far ahead in Pennsylvania, so for Obama, April will be all about gap-narrowing. But a devastating victory today would start him out on the right foot—and remind people that in terms of pledged delegates, he is way ahead of Clinton.
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When Barack Obama characterized Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy experience as “having tea” with diplomats, Clinton fired back with anecdotes about a trip she took to wartime Bosnia in 1996. “Somebody said there might be sniper fire," she said, describing a dangerous corkscrew landing her plane had to make. "I don't remember anyone offering me tea on the tarmac.” But now that account is being disputed. By Sinbad.
Turns out the comedian, who was along for the ride with Sheryl Crow, remembers things differently, the Washington Post reports. "I never felt that I was in a dangerous position,” Sinbad said. “I never felt being in a sense of peril, or 'Oh, God, I hope I'm going to be OK when I get out of this helicopter or when I get out of this tank.' "
He also disputed Clinton’s claim that first ladies get sent to all the poorest and most dangerous countries. “What kind of president would say, ‘Hey, man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife ... Oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.’ ” The ridicule goes on. (Keep in mind that Sinbad is a fervent Obama fan.)
Clinton spokesman Phil Singer came back with this quip: “It appears that Sinbad's experience in Bosnia goes back further than Senator Obama's does. In fact, has Senator Obama ever been to Bosnia?” Good question—perhaps Pauly Shore could tag along?
Needless to say, it's kind of rough to become the punch line of a joke by a man who is himself a walking punch line. I guess we’ll need Sheryl Crow to break the tie.
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The 2008 presidential election has perfected a new category of gaffe: the otherwise sane, rational person saying something utterly irresponsible. Bill Sheehan started it with his coy drug reference, followed by Bill Clinton's comparison of Obama to Jesse Jackson, followed most recently by Samantha Power’s "monster" comment.
Welcome to the club, Geraldine Ferraro. Her inflammatory words, spoken to the Daily Breeze last week, were mostly lost in the frenzy over Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s dalliances yesterday. Here they are, ripped from context: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”
The Clinton campaign’s response was terse: "We disagree with her," said communications director Howard Wolfson.
Blog reaction has been combustible—how dare she suggest Obama is “lucky” to be black?—but focuses more on demonizing the former vice-presidential nominee than getting at where her words come from. But Ferraro bookends her unfortunate comments with two sound observations: 1) The media seem to dislike Clinton largely because of her gender, and 2) Obama is foolish to suggest that he will end partisanship. “Dear God!” she says. “Anyone that has worked in the Congress knows that for over 200 years this country has had partisanship—that's the way our country is.” Good points, certainly. But she could have chosen a better segue.
Her remarks show frustration that a tough, hard-working, hyper-competent woman like Clinton can still be swept aside by a force of nature. Ferraro is correct that Obama’s race has a lot to do with it (just as Clinton’s gender has a lot to do with her appeal to women). But of course it’s more than that. Gail Collins put it best in a column she wrote before the Ohio primary. If Hillary doesn’t pull through, Collins wrote, she should understand this: “She’s done fine. And she’d probably have won the nomination walking away if Barack hadn’t picked this moment to mutate into BARACK! You do your best, and if things don’t work out, it just wasn’t your time. Life isn’t always fair.”
It’s this realization that has turned surrogates on both sides into gaffe machines. It’s also why staff members of both candidates may have trouble working together in the general. Clinton’s people understand they’re up against a phenomenon; Obama’s people feel like they’re on the right side of history. But I wouldn’t chalk Ferraro’s comments up to racism or bigotry. Rather, they’re the product of high tensions mixed with identity politics in a campaign that is driving everyone a little crazy.
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Hardly a moment after news broke of Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s ties to a prostitution ring, speculation began about two women. One was the 5-foot-5, 105-pound, $1,000-an-hour prostitute named Kristen. The other was Hillary Clinton.
Spitzer initially endorsed Clinton back in May, but since then he has been a less-than-enthusiastic supporter. He talked her up on The Colbert Report last month but failed to appear at any campaign stops. During one conference call he held with reporters, he was weirdly off-message, arguing that Obama, of all people, supported his driver's licenses program. He promised to stump for her “maybe later in the week, or next week, if this continues,” but he didn’t elaborate on what he meant by “this.” He never ended up going.
The governor also caused perhaps the biggest headache of Clinton’s campaign so far: the flap over driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. After waffling during a debate in October on whether she supported the measure, Clinton came out against it. (Spitzer later backed away from the plan, as well.) But the damage was done.
That ugly experience turned Spitzer into a pariah on the campaign trail—Hillary didn’t want audience members raising questions about licenses any more than he did—but ultimately it may have helped her. By distancing herself from Spitzer early on, she now avoids the fallout from what could become this year’s Larry Craig scandal. (It lacks some of the juicy details, but just wait.) Still, after Clinton pushed so hard for Obama to not just “denounce” but also “reject” Louis Farrakhan’s kind words about him, Obama could ding her for a weak response. So far she has declined to comment.
One problem, though: Addressing the Spitzer flap raises the ghosts of scandals past, namely Monica Lewinsky. Clinton has so far managed during this campaign to avoid public mention of her husband’s diddling. If the Spitzer controversy drags out, it could become a painful reminder of the final White House years. (Of course, you could argue that it would make people sympathize with her all over again.)
But in the end, the Spitzer fallout is more likely to damage the party than Hillary’s candidacy. For the past eight years, most of the lying, cheating, child molestation, and public sex has been the proud reserve of Republicans (or at least they excel at getting caught). The Spitzer scandal could flip that story line toward Democrats. Just as voters recoiled from Mark Foley’s indiscretions in 2006, they could easily cast Spitzer as the incarnation of Democratic hypocrisy. (Just watch this ad to get a sense of Spitzer’s sermonizing.) In which case, come November, the party could have more to worry about than Clinton’s election.
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Gov. Eliot Spitzer apologized to his family and the people of New York today after the New York Times linked him with a prostitution ring. If Spitzer resigns, does he lose his status as a superdelegate?
Yes. Governors are automatically given a vote at the Democratic National Convention in August, but the moment Spitzer resigns, he gives up that vote to the next governor. The New York State Constitution says that if a governor leaves office early, the lieutenant governor—in this case, Lt. Gov. David Paterson—takes over for the rest of the term. Like Spitzer, Paterson has thrown his weight behind Hillary Clinton.
The thing is, Paterson is already a superdelegate. As a member of the DNC, he was selected as one of the party’s at-large delegates. That leaves two scenarios: If he takes over as governor and gives up his DNC member status, the party will hand if off to someone else, preserving the total superdelegate number at 795. But if he decides to hold on to the DNC vote, the overall number of superdelegates would drop to 794. In other words, Paterson can’t vote twice. There’s a twist, though: If the DNC wanted, it could always give Paterson’s at-large vote to Spitzer, thus maintaining the equilibrium. But odds are the Dems don’t want the controversy mucking up their convention. (Rest assured Larry Craig will be far from Minneapolis during the RNC.)
Will this affect Clinton's delegate count? Not much, if at all. If Paterson does keep his DNC status and the delegate count drops, Clinton will lose one superdelegate. But if Paterson throws it back to the party, they’ll probably pick another person who supports Hillary. (Of the 43 New York superdelegates who endorsed, 42 went Clinton.) If anything, Clinton should be more worried about having his support than not having it. Spitzer has been an enthusiastic supporter, pushing for her on The Colbert Report and volunteering to stump for her in Ohio. Clinton upbraided Obama in a debate for hesitating to “reject” the praise of Louis Farrakhan. Obama could always ask Clinton to do the same for Spitzer.
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Hillary Clinton’s simultaneous claims that Barack Obama is not prepared to be commander in chief, yet she would consider him for vice president, has drawn all the requisite scorn.
“I don’t understand,” Obama mused at a rally in Mississippi today. “If I am not ready, why do you think I would be such a great vice president?”
Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson explained on a conference call: “We do not believe that Senator Obama has passed the commander in chief test. But there is a long way between now and Denver.”
Setting aside the question of what could happen between now and August to prepare Obama for answering the phone at 3 a.m.—a terrorist attack? a flurry of security legislation?—it’s worth exploring why Hillary is working the VP angle so hard. The obvious reason is to convey inevitability—a logical stretch, given that she’s currently losing the popular vote, the delegate count, and the state count. But the real goal here is to sway superdelegates.
Clinton knows she can’t win the pledged delegate count. (To learn why, see here.) So if she’s going to clinch the nomination, she will have to persuade superdelegates to vote for her—and overturn the pledged delegate outcome. Naturally, many superdelegates are uncomfortable with this scenario. But by floating the possibility of Obama as VP, she’s trying to ease their consciences. They could still vote for him, she’s saying—just as vice president instead of president!
The problem is, Clinton’s hypothetical scenario isn’t worth anything unless it’s an actual promise to take Obama as her VP. Until that happens, it’s hard to see superdelegates factoring the veepstakes into their decision. And seeing as a Clinton-Obama ticket is next to impossible (he couldn’t seem less interested, for starters), she doesn’t gain much from hinting at it.
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Strained metaphor of the day goes to Lt. Gen. Joe Ballard, who on a conference call today compared the ability to be commander in chief to milking a cow:
“Just because you recognize the cow doesn’t mean you know how to milk it. … No one can tell you how to milk the cow. You have to know how to do that yourself. … There’s no doubt in my mind that Obama can recognize the cow. But his body of experience doesn’t necessarily make him know how to milk one.”
So whereas Obama would have to call in a team of cow-milking consultants (or just Google it), Clinton would go right for the udder.
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Saturday Night Live thinks it has a good thing in the Obama-Clinton brawl. Over the weekend, they aired a parody of Clinton’s "3 a.m." ad. The ad shows Clinton receiving a late-night phone call from President Obama, who is panicked about the Russians obtaining a nuclear device. The ad portrays Obama as an immature, whiny, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed baby. “Don’t you see that I’m in a panic?” he blubbers. “A blind, unreasoning, inexperienced panic?”
NBC’s First Read seems to think the sketch show sides with Clinton: “This last opening skit might actually have been written by the Clinton campaign; it was striking in how on-message the skit was for Clinton.”
But isn’t the sketch actually mocking Clinton? It’s lampooning her suggestions that Obama would be lost at sea in the Oval Office. The fake ad is bookended by Amy Poehler’s Hillary Clinton, who assures us that this is “a dramatization based on facts—not facts, but what we call specious campaign talking points.”
The last time SNL took on Obama, parodying the media’s love for the candidate, Clinton raised it at the Cleveland debate as evidence of bias. Tina Fey's all-but-endorsement of Hillary indicated pro-Clinton sympathies inside 30 Rock. But this skit, if read correctly, is unlikely to make it into any Clinton campaign memos.
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In Newsweek, Hillary Clinton answers the question that’s on all our minds:
How can you win the nomination when the math looks so bleak for you?
It doesn't look bleak at all. I have a very close race with Senator Obama. There are elected delegates, caucus delegates and superdelegates, all for different reasons, and they're all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose. Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to. This is a very carefully constructed process that goes back years, and we're going to follow the process.
Most striking is her suggestion that pledged delegates don’t have to stick with whomever they’re pledged to. While it’s true that they can change their minds, her campaign has denied putting pressure on pledged delegates to switch sides. Clinton spokesman Phil Singer reassured Politico’s Ben Smith that there was “no change” to the campaign’s stance on this front, despite reports that they were pursuing them.
Also, note Clinton’s use of the word elected rather than pledged delegates. This suggests yet another rhetorical shift, as if to emphasize her point that they aren’t actually forced to vote for the candidate they’re pledged to. A few weeks ago, the campaign suddenly started referring to superdelegates as “automatic delegates” (Hillary apparently dropped the phrasing in this interview), presumably to downplay the notion that there’s anything “super” or superior about the party leaders and elected officials who could decide the nomination. The “elected” switch seems to spring from the same logic—that renaming delegates will change perception of them.
Even weirder is Clinton’s distinction between “elected delegates” and “caucus delegates.” Both types of delegate are effectively the same—they get one vote to help decide the nomination. (One difference: Some caucus delegates won’t be selected until state conventions this summer.) But Clinton’s wording implies that “caucus delegates” are not “elected”—a clear jab at Obama’s strength in the caucus states. Plus, it makes room for the campaign to separate the two numbers. If Clinton started referring to the “pledged delegate” count without counting caucuses, she would be ahead of Obama by that count. That, if it happens, would be a crazy reversal: First, Clinton was insisting on conflating pledged and superdelegates. Now she wants to parse them out as finely as possible. Watch "linguistics consultant" become a full-time campaign position.
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More than 100 years ago, politicians danced when they went to Wyoming. There was no getting around it—if you wanted to represent the will of the people, you had to shake your groove thang. This according to an ancient article in The New York Times (PDF), which tells us that Wyoming politics used to be a “terpsichorean” affair. The details are too fantastic not to quote at length:
The chief factor in this pre-election gayety is that whenever there is to be a speaking by the aspirants to office it is always the custom to have a dance that same night. Hundreds of people turn out to hear the spellbinders, not because they love the oratory so much as that they are keenly bent on the terpsichorean festivities that come after the shades of night have fallen.
That’s the most exciting detail to come out of Wyoming. There’s little else to say about a primary that everybody expected Obama to win. Obama has proven that he does well in Great Plains and Rockies caucuses before, and a win in the least populous state in the Union shouldn’t change any of the macro-campaign narratives.
Clinton will probably downplay the loss by saying Obama can win in red states but not big, blue states important in the general election. We’re still trying to understand this logic, as new polls by SurveyUSA confirm that almost all big blue states will still back Obama in the general election. Obama, meanwhile, will try and say that his success in red states brings new Democrats into the process, which could benefit the party's ticket in November. There’s little proof of that in those SurveyUSA polls, as well. That’s why they call spin spin.
Wyoming is a useful example of what red-state Democrats would think if the campaign were shaped only by the media. Neither candidate had high-profile endorsements in the state (the governor doesn’t like either candidate), there were no polls taken, and the candidates only spent one day there. Voters most likely made decisions based on what they saw on TV and read from wire copy in the papers.
Or maybe they tapped into their state’s history and judged who would be the better dancer. We’ve seen Obama bust a move, but from what we could find, Clinton has only talked the talk. As First Read reminds us, Hillary Clinton released a video before Iowa that proclaimed “Dancing is hard, Caucusing is easy.” What Clinton didn’t realize, of course, is that sometimes the two are intertwined. In Wyoming, maybe caucusing was hard on Clinton because she didn’t hit the discotheque after her stump speech. Lucky for her, she can hang up her dancing shoes. There aren’t any caucuses left on the primary calendar.
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Both Democratic candidates spent Friday in Wyoming, poking their heads into a state that has only 12 delegates total. Despite this minor flurry of attention, the Cowboy State—that’s seriously its nickname—still won’t matter when all is said and done. With apologies to Wyoming Democrats, here’s why:
We already (think we) know who’s going to win—Barack Obama will win the Wyoming caucuses. Four states that border Wyoming have already voted—and all of them have gone overwhelmingly for Obama (by an average margin of 37 points). Maybe Clinton should have thought of enacting the mercy rule before the caucuses.
The spin is already set. If Clinton loses, the campaign will quickly spin the loss away. It’s another caucus loss in a red state that Clinton will say doesn’t matter in a general election. Obama’s people will say that it shows he’s back on track and that the losses in Ohio and Texas were aberrations. Clinton will say Ohio and Texas are a lot bigger than Wyoming, and wins in big states matter more. Around and around we go!
The delegate margin will be small. Even if Obama blows Clinton out of the water in Wyoming, his delegate haul will be minimal. To come out with a six-delegate advantage, he’s going to have to win with a margin of 41 percent, according to Slate’s delegate calculator. Needless to say, that’s unlikely, especially since Clinton has actually campaigned in Wyoming. The only times Obama has racked up more than a 41-point advantage are when Clinton doesn’t campaign in a state (Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, and Idaho).
Even if the press says this is a big deal, it isn’t. We’ve had more narrative changes in this primary than in an average episode of Lost. Yet, after Clinton’s wins, the press started frothing about how this is a whole new race and she once again has a shot at the nomination. She has a shot, but it’s not a whole new race. The same thing happened after Obama won Wisconsin. All of a sudden, Obama was the inevitable nominee, even though it was just one more state added to his streak. If Obama wins Wyoming, it’s still just one win. He was expected to win among the Tetons just like Clinton was expected to win Ohio and Obama was expected to win the Potomac. At this point, every new primary and caucus offers only marginal change.
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Didn’t want to let this one slip by before the end of the day.
Today on a conference call (if I had a nickel for every time I used that phrase), a reporter compared Samantha Power’s “monster” remark to the unsubtle allusion by BET founder Bob Johnson about Obama’s cocaine use.
Keep in mind that Johnson’s denial—in which he claimed he had been referring to Obama’s time spent as a community organizer—was one of the election’s most indefensible statements to date.
But today, two months later, Wolfson half-heartedly went to bat for him:
“In this instance, there was some initial … My recollection on this is not as good as it might be, it feels like it was a million years ago … There was some initial sense that Bob Johnson was referring to one thing, perhaps a sense he was referring to something else. … I don’t honestly remember if he ended up apologizing or not. … That is a decision he made. … I don’t mean to minimize his importance, but he is not part of daily campaign life that I imagine Samantha Power is or has been.”
There you have it. In one fell swoop, Wolfson recapitulates the whole sad flap: Johnson’s absurd denial, inadequate apology, and the campaign’s attempt to distance itself from his remarks, before finally settling back on the message at hand: Samantha Power.
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It’s been a rough day for Samantha Power.
The flap over her “monster” comment was just brewing when another, slightly more substantive charge emerged. In an interview with the BBC, Power said that Barack Obama’s plan to pull out of Iraq within 16 months isn’t a commitment but a “best-case scenario” that Obama will have to revisit when he becomes president.
The Clinton camp is all over this one, saying it shows Obama isn’t actually serious about quick withdrawal. In a conference call today, a Clinton surrogate compared the remarks to what Austan Goolsbee allegedly said to Canadian officials about Obama’s commitment to NAFTA.
He’s right—this is like the NAFTA flap. But not how he means it. As with NAFTA, both candidates have been much more strident in their campaign rhetoric than they can possibly be as president. Obama and Clinton have condemned the free trade agreement but stopped short of saying they will scrap it. The only “commitment” they’ve made regarding NAFTA is to “renegotiate” it, without specifying what parts they would renegotiate. (Both say they would reform the deal’s labor and environmental standards, but that’s not the part manufacturing workers in Ohio are concerned about.)
Similarly, both candidates are playing chicken on the subject of withdrawal from Iraq. Obama promises to “remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.” Clinton’s stance is less decisive: She promises to convene the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to start bringing troops home within 60 days. But neither candidate has presented a definite “timetable for withdrawal,” let alone explained the logistics of pulling out such a massive force in such a short period.
The fact is, Power is exactly right. Whoever becomes president will be confronted with a much messier situation than the candidates acknowledge. “Best-case scenario” might not have been the ideal choice of words—“goal” sounds a little more optimistic— but Power was correct to say that “you can’t make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009.” Essentially her point was that things change—a fact that neither candidate has been willing to admit. It’s disappointing that the first person to do so gets sacked.
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For the second time this week, Hillary Clinton raised the possibility of running on a joint ticket with Barack Obama. First was on Wednesday's morning shows. Then she did it again this morning at a campaign stop in Mississippi. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who has endorsed Clinton, floated the same scenario on a radio show today.
Clinton's campagin is usually unflappably on message (with some exceptions). This can't be a mistake.
But what's her goal? To deliberately plant the idea in people's heads is at odds with the campaign's never-say-die ethos. It's the equivalent of saying "if I win" rather than "when I win." Maybe she's trying to counter suggestions that the long Democratic battle is going to split the party—you couldn't ask for more unity than an Obama-Clinton or Clinton-Obama ticket.
Of course, there's a big difference between those two tickets. Clinton could use Obama's help, but Obama doesn't need Clinton. He can fill arenas on his own, thank you very much. Clinton, on the other hand, would be looking for a smart, young, dashing guy with red-state appeal. Who comes to mind?
Most people have dismissed the "dream team" scenario, arguing that VP is a lame duck position neither candidate would want. But the job has changed since Al Gore. Dick Cheney, whatever you think of his politics, has made the seat much more powerful—and therefore much more attractive to would-be occupants. How ironic would it be if Cheney's well-documented efforts to enhance the power of the executive branch ended up making the Democratic dream ticket possible?
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In a strange seven-and-a-half minute
address to supporters worldwide, Ron Paul said it was time to scale back
the campaign. He’s not quite quitting, but he’s not quite optimistic, either.
He admitted that he can’t achieve “victory in the conventional political
sense.” President Bush may want to steal that line for his next speech on Iraq.
Presumably, Paul supporters are taking this semi-withdrawal even harder than
the candidate himself. Throughout the campaign, it seemed his netroots thought
he could win even more than Paul’s campaign did. We thought it only fitting to
give him a Trailhead send-off by tapping into the pulse of our friends over at
the Ron Paul Forums. What follows are real comments by real Paul fans. (People
are identified by their usernames.)
BillyDkid: All
I can think of is that smug ass George Steffenopollis smirking and feeling self
satisfied with his "rightness". I am sick and furious about this
whole thing.
Actpulsa: Are
we through throwing blame yet? Can we stop and remember that this is about
liberty yet? Do we want us and our kids to be free? Can any one of us do it
alone? Are we on the same side of this war or aren't we? [Note: actpulsa is a frequent commenter on Trailhead’s
Fray.]
Pacelli:
“Regardless of what we want to read into Ron's message, or don't for that
matter, nothing has changed in terms of our duty as Americans in the past few
weeks. I, for one, could care less what is released by the campaign. The
campaign doesn't speak for me, nor does it need to.”
Nodope0695: I
didn't hear the word, "END" or "DROP OUT" anywhere in Ron's
video. I heard "WIND DOWN". He clearly stated that the campaign is
"SCALING BACK", that this is a NEW PHASE - that we ought to continue
to collect votes and delegates.
Dianne: If
someone has the ability to contact Ron Paul personally, I would really
appreciate you putting this in front of him. I for one am not ready to give up
the fight. Paul always said this campaign is about his supporters, not him. In
that case, Paul should allow us to make the decision as to whether we are ready
to support him as a third party candidate. [I’ll spare you the rest, but Dianne goes on to
create a ballot she wants Paul’s campaign to send out to donors]
If you’re feeling Paulstalgia
tap into Trailhead’s
Ron Paul archive. Some select choices: Our journey
inside the Ron Paul blimp and our attempt
to understand his fervent fan base.
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No sooner did the Clinton campaign demand Samantha Power’s resignation for calling Clinton a “monster” than she submitted it.
“I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor, and purpose of the Obama campaign,” Power said in a statement.
Power, a top foreign-policy adviser to Obama, originally told the Scotsman newspaper that Clinton “is a monster, too—that is off the record—she is stooping to anything.” Apparently she and the paper had different definitions of “off the record.” She later apologized, declaring her admiration for Hillary Clinton. But for the Clinton campaign, that wasn’t enough—a surrogate called the decision of whether to keep Power around “a test of character” for Obama. Presumably he has passed the test.
The resignation matters symbolically, but that’s about it. Power has called herself an “informal adviser” to Obama, and she wasn’t exactly part of the regular campaign entourage. (She did travel with the campaign in Iowa and South Carolina.) Her stepping down doesn’t mean she and Obama can’t talk. It just means they can’t appear together in public. Plus, keep in mind that Obama has already rolled out his major foreign-policy initiatives. Power could have been useful given Clinton’s latest attempts to bring Afghanistan front and center, but again, this is a resignation—not a restraining order.
Yet again we see how Obama’s talk about a “new kind of politics” opens him up to charges of “same old, same old.” Power’s words were nasty, sure, but hardly as offensive as Bill Shaheen and Bob Johnson’s winking hints about Obama’s cocaine use. Their charges had political weight, whereas Clinton was never, in fact, a giant, rampaging Cloverfield-style she-beast. But because Obama has sold himself as Mr. Clean, his opponents can point to any dirt as evidence of hypocrisy.
At the very least, Power’s transgression—coupled with Susan Rice’s recent slip-up and the Austan Goolsbee flap—will make the Obama campaign more careful about which surrogates they put out front.
Click here for Part 2 of the Samantha Power saga.
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Responding to calls for Hillary Clinton to release her tax returns, the campaign has said it will release them “on or around” April 15. But they still haven’t answered the central question: Why not release them now?
“I'm a little busy right now,” Clinton said two weeks ago, but since then hasn’t elaborated on the campaign’s rationale.
Naturally, the Obama camp has piled on, releasing a memo a couple days ago asking, “What does Clinton have to hide?” (Obama has released his tax returns since 2004.) They point out that during her 2000 Senate campaign, Clinton attacked her opponent Rick Lazio for not releasing his own tax returns.
Today in a conference call, Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson called the difference between Clinton now and Lazio then “night and day.” About 20 years of Clinton’s tax returns—from 1980 to 2000—are on the public record, he said, whereas Lazio had released none of his.
Of course, it’s not those 20 years people are interested in. It’s the post-presidential years, when the business dealings of Clinton and her husband haven’t undergone as much scrutiny. If there’s anything juicy in the financial documents, it would have to do with whether the Clintons used tax shelters to reduce their tax bill—something she has opposed for large corporations—as well as income from stocks and how much they gave to charity.
So if there’s nothing damning in the papers, why not release them now? And if there is, wouldn’t Clinton be better off confronting it now than on April 15, a week before the must-win (and probably will-win) Pennsylvania primary? Perhaps that’s too quick a turnaround for reporters to fully vet the papers, in which case the stalling might work, but you can be sure Obama’s oppo folks will be pulling all-nighters. As it is, Clinton’s stonewalling just feeds Obama’s case about her lack of transparency.
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Yesterday, we chronicled the recent gaffes of Obama surrogates nationwide. Less than 24 hours later, it's time to scratch another mark on the tally. One of Obama's foreign-policy advisers, Samantha Power, told a Scottish newspaper that Hillary "is a monster, too—that is off the record—she is stooping to anything." (The Scotsman did not regard her comment as off the record because she did not ask for confidentiality beforehand.)
Other newsworthy quotes from Power's interview:
The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.
You just look at her and think, "Ergh."
We f***** up in Ohio. ... In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.
These kind of gaffes didn't have to happen. The Scotsman interview was supposed to be about Power's new book, but instead it created a new line of attack for both parties.
(Hat tip to Ben Smith.)
Update 10:44 a.m.: On a conference call this morning, a group of Clinton surrogates calls for the Obama campaign to remove Power. Rep. Nita Lowey says this is “a test of character” for Obama. “If I or anyone had used the word Samanatha Power used, we would not be on this campaign this morning,” says communications director Howard Wolfson.
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The notion that Barack Obama has an insurmountable pledged delegate lead seems to have finally calcified. Check out this passage from today’s Wall Street Journal:
As of yesterday evening, Sen. Obama led Sen. Clinton 1,567 to 1,463 in the delegate count, according to the Associated Press, a gap that narrowed by only 12 delegates despite her wins Tuesday. Sen. Clinton can't close that gap in the handful of primaries left, but she could narrow it by winning over superdelegates, who account for 20% of the delegate total. That, in turn, could deprive Sen. Obama of an outright victory and delay a nomination until the party's August convention in Denver. [Emphasis added]
It’s true that Clinton is very, highly, extremely unlikely to close the pledged delegate gap. According to Slate’s Delegate Calculator, she would need to win 63 percent of the remaining pledged delegates just to tie it up. But this is the first time I’ve seen a newspaper essentially say it’s impossible. Both candidates have won by that margin before, and a lot can happen in seven weeks to turn the tide. That said, the point still stands that Clinton pretty much needs superdelegates to win.
The question now is, how close does Hillary need to come to call it a tie?
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Barack Obama's surrogates are really struggling these days. First Rep. Kirk Watson couldn’t name a single thing Obama has accomplished. Then economic adviser Austan Goolsbee gave the Canadian government the impression—inaccurately, he says—that they have nothing to fear from Obama’s NAFTA stance.
Now Obama foreign policy adviser Susan Rice goes and says that Hillary and Barack are “both not ready to have that 3 a.m. phone call.” Oops.
Around here, that’s what we call a Kinsley gaffe.
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At today's military photo-op/press conference, Hillary dropped this line, which seems to imply that John McCain is more prepared to be commander in chief than Barack Obama:
“And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” she said. “I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that, and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy.”
Seems oddly similar to Ann Coulter’s logic about why she would support Hillary: McCain would be so bad that she’d have to vote Democrat. Would Obama be so unqualified that Clinton would have to vote Republican?
It’s comments like this that could hypothetically hurt Obama in the general, should McCain seize on them. The attack ad: Not even Barack Obama’s own party thinks he’s qualified. Cue Hillary tape.
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For a while there, it looked like national security had been supplanted by health care and the economy at the top of the campaign priority. But now the pendulum is swinging back, with Iraq and Afghanistan returning to the fore. Or at least that’s what Hillary Clinton hopes is happening.
A few dozen journalists packed into a tiny room today in the Westin Hotel near Dupont Circle—“the size of a child’s bedroom,” quipped one reporter there—to watch Clinton discuss the “forgotten front line” in Afghanistan as a group of generals nodded in approval. Presumably the close quarters were chosen to lend it the air of a cabinet meeting or Joint Chiefs of Staff roundtable.
Clinton’s Afghanistan talking points were nothing new—increase international support there, improve security forces, crack down on narcotics—but her emphasis was. She differentiated between “ending the war in Iraq” and “winning the war in Afghanistan.” When it was his turn, former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke made the case that Afghanistan is “much more important than Iraq” for the United States in the long term. It's a distinction that will become important against John McCain, who insists that both wars can still be won.
Like all great political stunts, this one accomplishes a few things at once. First, it uses the nomination of McCain to bring the conversation back to defense, where Clinton thinks she is stronger than Obama. And second, it turns the debate from Iraq—on which Obama can slam Clinton for voting to authorize the war—to Afghanistan, thus giving her another opportunity to ding Obama for not holding oversight hearings on Afghanistan as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on European Affairs.
No matter that the press conference didn’t offer any new information or answer any questions. (The admirals and generals might as well have been reading off index cards. Leadership, experience, Day 1. I'm surprised they didn't put a phone on the table and have it ring on cue.) The purpose was to shift the discussion. Mission accomplished.
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Last night, after Barack Obama won Vermont, we called on our loyal readers to help us name an Obama ice cream flavor. Ben & Jerry's is famous for such flavors as Cherry Garcia (named for the Deadhead), Phish Food (named for the Dead successors), and Americone Dream (named for the not-dead Stephen Colbert), and if Ben & Jerry's delivered a victory for Obama, then it should also honor him with a taste of his own.
Plenty of you responded with riffs on Obama's name. Peanut Butter Barackle, Obamana Split, and Barackadamia Nut all raised a chuckle. But it was Aaron Nathan of Amherst, Mass., who really impressed. Eschewing Obama's name, he reached another level of ingenuity when he sent in his entry: "Yes, Pecan!"
Bravo, Aaron. Bravo.
Think you can beat it? Try us.
UPDATE March 6, 1:03 p.m.: The contest's original rules state that submissions of "Baracky Road" and "Obamaberry" will not be accepted. We've got to draw the line somewhere.
UPDATE March 6, 1:37 p.m.: A scandal is brewing! Accusations of foul play are swirling around the "Yes, Pecan!" entry. It appears the phrase was first coined on Obama's official blog. We dropped the ball on this by not Googling the phrase, where we would have seen the blog entry. Still awaiting word from Aaron Nathan.
UPDATE March 6, 2:31 p.m.: Aaron Nathan gets back to us with his side of the story:
Though I am disappointed to discover that I was not the first person to think of Yes, Pecan! (and how! That sure is a lot of pecan-talk on the Obama blog), it was an independent discovery, made spur-of-the-moment, Tuesday night in the Amherst College science library, where I was trying desperately not to do my reading for class.
We're trusting folk here at Trailhead, so we'll take him at his word. One last note, courtesy of Mr. Nathan, before we close this chapter:
P.S. I realize the weird way that being accused of plagiarism on an Obama-related matter fits into this campaign—perhaps some Trailhead research could unearth, for example, Deval Patrick’s as-yet undiscovered taste for pecans...
We have a source inside the Patrick administration looking into the matter. Seriously.
UPDATE March 6, 3:40 p.m.: Trailhead reader Gerrit H. mocked up the brilliant pint of ice cream you see above. Tremendous job all around, especially on the blue, red, and white scheme.
Also, several readers have e-mailed telling us that our East Coast bias is on display by thinking "Yes, Pecan!" rhymes with "Yes, We Can!" Down South, pecans are not pronounced pe-CAN, but puh-CAHN, according to Trailhead devotees (Trailheaders? Trailheadians? Trailheads?). Considering Obama adamantly believes in one America, we think he might be distressed by this development. As a result, we're looking for an alternate flavor for Ben & Jerry's stores below the Mason-Dixon. The front-runners are currently "Barackadamia Nut" and "Neopolitician." Got anything better? Let us know.
UPDATE March 10, 12:30 a.m.: Reader Craig Woodward points out that Cherry Garcia is not named after a Dead Head, but instead a member of the Dead. We should have known better and apologize for the misstep.
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John McCain is the first out with a response to the small blast in Times Square today:
The attempted attack that happened in New York City this morning when someone tried to harm a recruiting station in Times Square is unacceptable in America. I know Mayor Bloomberg as well as other law enforcement agencies are actively working, and I have been assured a full investigation is taking place and hope they bring the individuals to justice as quickly as possible. We cannot allow this to happen to the men and women serving in our military whether they are at home or abroad.
McCain is smart to pre-empt Hillary Clinton, the actual New Yorker, on this one. How can she expect to respond to national crises if she can’t handle the ones in her own state?? Given this, it's surprising we haven't heard from Clinton yet. Maybe she's only ready for these things at 3 a.m.?
On the other hand, it appears to be exactly the sort of attack that can’t be prevented, no matter how many al-Qaida training camps we break up. Police called the blast mechanism an “improvised explosive device” possibly planted by a man on a bicycle. It’s the sort of attack that, were it to become common on a slightly larger scale, would be every security expert’s—and politician's—nightmare.
Updated 3:04 p.m.: Clinton kicked off a press conference this afternoon with a statement on the bombing. She is "deeply concerned" about the incident, she said, adding that she is "grateful there were no injuries" and "minimal damage done."
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Major events on April 22:
- Pennsylvania's primary between New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.
- The first meeting of the season between the New York Yankees and the Chicago White Sox.
New York is favored in both.
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Earlier today, Ann Hulbert, one of our "XX Factor" colleagues, issued a call to arms: Could the nerds over at Trailhead predict what would happen if all superdelegates voted for the winner of their states?
Keep in mind this is a thought experiment. It's unlikely that superdelegates would be swayed by their state’s vote rather than by pledged delegate totals, their districts' results, or the national popular vote. So this exercise might require, as Hillary would say, “a willful suspension of disbelief.” But bear with us …
So far, Obama has won 25 states and territories to Clinton's 15, but her big-state victories yield more supers. From the states that have already voted, 289 superdelegates would vote for Clinton and 286 would vote for Obama. Incredibly, they still come out essentially tied. At this point, we should probably expect as much.
For the sake of argument, let’s extrapolate this method to the rest of the race. Based on our arbitrary, slightly informed predictions—we know it’s early, but again, bear with us—for the remaining states and territories, Clinton will win six (Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Puerto Rico, and Guam) and Obama seven (Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Wyoming). That would give Clinton another 63.5 superdelegates to Obama’s 61. (The half-super is because of arcane DNC rules toward territories' delegations.) Again, no big disparity there. In concert with Slate's delegate calculator, we get the final pledged and superdelegate tallies, assuming 10-point wins across the board. Obama: 2,020. Clinton: 1,888.5
That's right, even with all of these stipulations, neither candidate will reach 2,025 delegates—the number needed for a majority. Impossible, right? No. Our state-by-state delegate breakdown doesn't include about 50 20-30* nomadic superdelegates who aren't tied down to a state. Nor does it include the 40-50 76* superdelegates who haven't been named yet.
All of this means that the delegate system isn’t screwed up just because superdelegates are the ultimate free-agents, picking whomever they want. Even if they were forced to vote with their state, the two candidates would still be deadlocked heading into the next few months.
This insane scenario included a hell of a lot of confusing assumptions, so try your own hand at sorting out this mess. We'll provide the whole tool kit. Here's a spreadsheet with the state-by-state breakdowns of the superdelegations, and Slate's delegate calculator is ready and waiting for your predictions. Combine the two together and let us know what you come up with. Also, forward along any other nutso thought experiments that can fill the time between now and April 22. It's going to be a long ride.
*UPDATE Mar. 6, 10:49 p.m.: Some more clarification on these numbers. 76 superdelegates haven't been named yet, according to NBC. The rest I was referring to are stateless.
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March 4 is barely gone, and already Pennsylvania is the new Iowa. Translation: For the next six weeks, stat-happy media will lay the state out on a dissection table and poke its innards. So, to pre-empt this information glut, here’s a rundown of what the state looks like—its demographics, its geography, and how these factors might affect the outcome on April 22.
Like Ohio, but different. Pennsylvania is really three states. Off to the West, you have the large, heavily Democratic Pittsburgh, which looks more like a Midwestern city than an East Coast enclave. Like Ohio, Pittsburgh and much of western Pennsylvania is largely blue-collar and has therefore been hit hard by NAFTA. So look for that issue to dog Obama through April. Also like Ohio, western Pennsylvania has a strong union presence. Despite Obama's strength in cities, Pittsburgh's working-class whites are likely to swing the region toward Clinton.
On the other side of the state, you’ve got a bona fide liberal city in Philadelphia. With its mix of college students and African-Americans, Philly is more like New York and Atlanta than Midwestern cities like Columbus. It seems like a natural fit for Obama—blacks make up 43 percent of the city's population, as opposed to only 27 percent of Pittsburgh's—but keep in mind that cities in New York state and New Jersey gave Clinton their blessing.
Then, in the middle of the state, there’s the wide-open, rural areas that trend Republican. (The state’s two coasts and its middle are always struggling for dominance; hence its “swing state” status.) The boonies aren't particularly delegate-rich for Dems, but Obama could pick up a few extra votes with his red-state mojo. The candidates will also focus on the burgeoning suburbs surrounding Philly and Pittsburgh, which, thanks to an influx of immigrants and an exodus from the cities, are trending more Democratic than in the past.
Who lives there? The state’s demographics are nearly identical to Ohio’s. Pennsylvania is 86 percent white, compared to Ohio’s 85 percent. Same with its African-American population: 10 percent compared to Ohio’s 12 percent. It’s hard to say exactly how this population is distributed among Democrats, since there were no exit polls conducted in Pennsylvania in 2004. But Ohio exit polls show that 18 percent of Democratic voters were African-American, and that could be an indicator for Pennsylvania’s black turnout.
The state’s Hispanic population, meanwhile, was twice that of Ohio in 2006, percentage-wise. It has also increased over the past several years, which could give Clinton yet another boost. But that demographic doesn’t break down neatly, given that many of the state’s Latinos are relatively well-off. Obama did better than expected among Latinos in Arizona and New Mexico—Pennsylvania's might drift toward him as well.
What do the neighbors think? It’s instructive to look at how counties that border Pennsylvania voted in this year’s primaries. Pennsylvania borders six states—three of them went for Clinton (Ohio, New York, New Jersey), two of them swung toward Obama (Maryland, Delaware) and one of them (West Virginia) doesn’t vote till May.
In New York, the southwest counties that border Pennsylvania went overwhelmingly for Clinton, mostly by a margin of 30 points. You see similar results in the counties along Ohio’s eastern border.
The results are more mixed in New Jersey. Sussex County in the north and Gloucester County in the south swung for Hillary. But when you look at the swath of counties surrounding Philadelphia (Hunterdon, Mercer, Somerset), those areas voted for Obama. Like Jersey, Maryland’s border is ambivalent. The western panhandle favored Clinton, but, further east, Frederick and Baltimore counties favored Obama. That said, Baltimore’s influence isn’t likely to carry over into Pennsylvania.
Overall, if bordering counties are any indicator, Clinton is the clear fave.
The system. Pennsylvania holds a closed primary, meaning that Obama won’t benefit from the votes of independents and Republicans who might otherwise vote in the GOP race. This helps Clinton, given her strength among party faithful. Also, Pennsylvania doesn’t have any of that caucus nonsense.
Endorsement watch. Clinton has 13 of the state’s superdelegates, compared to Obama’s four, with nine still undecided. Among them, Clinton won the endorsement of Pennsylvania’s governor, Ed Rendell, who, while perhaps not the state’s most important endorser, is certainly the loudest. Six weeks is a long time, during which he could also stick his foot in his mouth, as he did when he told the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that white people wouldn’t vote for a black person. And while Obama is strong in cities, Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter endorsed Clinton back in December.
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By all accounts, last night’s Texas caucuses were about as calm and orderly as Cloverfield. Voting irregularities kept cropping up. (See the Clinton camp’s accusations, plus scattered reports of “individuals preying on elderly.”) People claimed they were getting shut out of polling locations. Police even descended on at least one Houston polling location to break up the “rowdy” crowd.
Caucus-goer and friend of the blog Grace Parra happened to be exercising her democratic rights at the Judson W. Robinson Jr. Westchase Branch Library in Houston when the fuzz showed up. Before that, people were getting shut out without explanation. She e-mails:
By 8 p.m., the crowd was still waiting to get in. Leaders (self-designated?) from the Obama camp would occasionally call out stats affirming Obama's early lead (these news flashes stopped as Hillary gained momentum), and bags of Hershey's Kisses and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups were passed around (even to Hillary fans, as an olive branch of sorts). Fueled by sugar, Obama fans repeated their war-cry, but the increasingly sassy Clinton camp shot back with "Men-o-pause!" and "Pantsuits! Pantsuits!"
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Actually sounds kind of fun.
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You hear the idea batted around that Democrats want this race to be over (perhaps among Obama supporters more than others). Republicans have chosen their man, the thinking goes—it’s time for Dems to wrap this up.
But that doesn’t take into account the extent to which the longest primary in history has energized the Democratic Party. Take this estimate that Texas’ primary turnout is expected to be more than 3.6 million on the Democratic side. Compare that with the 2.8 million Texans who turned out for John Kerry in the 2004 general election. I thought Clinton was delusional when she said in her acceptance speech tonight that she thinks Democrats can win Texas in the general. But look at those numbers.
By that logic, the longer the primary drags on, the more the party benefits. Democrats will probably turn out in record numbers in Wyoming and Mississippi next week, and again in Pennsylvania in April. And in swing states (Pennsylvania, North Carolina), energizing new Democratic voters could make a huge difference in the general.
The question is, how long can the race continue before the candidates really start to bruise each other? Sure, it’s great to get new voters mobilized in South Dakota, but at what cost? Hillary’s victories in Ohio and Texas owe partly to her heightened attacks on Obama (“3 a.m.,” NAFTA, Rezko). The coming months could make the past week look tame by comparison.
It’s a trade-off, no doubt. But it’s a trade-off that some members of the party’s leadership, Howard Dean in particular, would be happy to make. Dean’s 50-state strategy earned him scorn from Democratic establishment types. But it also set the stage for this year’s long primary, in which almost every state in the union may command the candidates’ attention. If anything, Dean himself couldn’t have designed a better primary narrative. It might enrage people concerned with solidifying a nominee. But in terms of party-building, it could be transformational.
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For those who made the smart decision to skip tonight’s circus, you’ve missed one especially exciting bit of news. Clinton’s campaign is alleging that Obama supporters committed various illegal acts during the caucus proceedings that discriminated against Clinton supporters. They say they have proof of the discrimination, but it’s unclear what that proof is. Now that we’ve soaked in some perspective (at least a few hours’ worth) on Clinton’s EMERGENCY conference call announcing the allegations, we’re ready to declare it an ultrashrewd political move.
Clinton has effectively pinned Obama into a catch-22. Obama can’t say that his supporters didn’t do it, because he has no control over his supporters. If he goes out on a limb and erroneously trusts his supporters’ morals, he could look like a naive liar and a cheater—never a good option heading into a six-week marathon to Pennsylvania. If he takes the other route and says nothing (which is what his campaign has done thus far), then he looks like he’s admitting defeat and recognizes that he can’t control his own supporters. As Michelle Obama infamously said, “[I]f you can't run your own house, you certainly can't run the White House.” In reality, Obama’s supporters are the equivalent of his across-town neighbors, but voters may not see it that way.
This catch-22 ploy isn’t new. Two weeks ago the Obama campaign trapped Clinton in a similar scheme by crying foul over a picture of Obama in native Somali garb—pictures that were reportedly leaked by Clinton staffers to make Obama appear to be a Muslim (which he is not). Obama demanded that the Clinton campaign take responsibility for the leak, but the Clintonites were silent during the first hours of the hubbub because they couldn’t verify that none of their 700 staffers released the picture. Eventually they said they knew nothing about it.
That’s the only way out of this catch-22, to claim ignorance and hope the scandal doesn’t trickle up. There are still too many details missing for us to know whether Obama will suffer because of his supporters’ alleged indiscretions. It’s hard for Obama to take umbrage at the allegations, especially because the claims are more serious and the potential fallout is steeper. It’s telling that we still haven’t heard Obama’s campaign directly respond to Clinton’s conference call. (Outside of an Obama lawyer’s heated exchange with a Clinton spokesman.) That doesn’t mean his supporters are guilty, it just means he has no way of knowing that they’re not.
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Forget the Hillary-Barack sideshow. Everyone knows the real story is the local races of presidential dreamers Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.
There was some doubt that the two long-shot candidates could win their own districts in Ohio and Texas, respectively. They both faced challengers looking to take advantage of their presidential distractions. (Kucinich foe Joe Cimperman called him “the absentee candidate”—“Show me one person here who's got health-care because of his fundraising with Sean Penn in Hawaii,” he said.) Kucinich dropped out in January to defend his seat. Paul hinted that he might do the same but remains officially in the presidential race.
Both candidates appear to have survived the attacks. Paul won 70 percent of Texas’ 14th District, overwhelming his opponent, Councilman Chris Peden. The full results of Kucinich’s district in Cleveland haven’t been tabulated, but early results showed him leading two-to-one over Cimperman.
Paul’s strength didn’t carry over to the presidential field, though. He’s trailing in the Texas presidential race at around 5 percent of the vote; same in Ohio. You’d think that might be a sign that he should drop out. Or you might think that McCain’s mathematical clinching of the nomination would deter Paul. But as he has pointed out, it’s not like he’s going to run out of money. Why not stick around for a few more races, rack up a few more delegates, and maybe score a speaking gig at the RNC? His constituents certainly don’t seem to mind.
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After stumbling through this primary season for what seems like eons (but was really just a month), Hillary Clinton finally realized her potential in Ohio tonight.
Precincts are still reporting their results, but all signs point to Clinton ramming Obama’s bandwagon. Polling averages showed Obama pulling within six points of Clinton, yet she leads by three times that margin with more than half of the precincts reporting. (Returns from presumably Obama-friendly Cuyahoga County are still streaming in.) A margin that wide could yield some real delegate gains—35 pledged delegates, according to our estimates.
But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s not forget that Hillary’s win only means she did what she was supposed to. She was always supposed to win Ohio because the majority of Democratic voters are working-class, economy-minded, NAFTA-hating Americans. Fifty-eight percent of Ohio voters said the economy was the most important issue, according to CNN. Obama’s strong suit has never been the economy, and having his top economic adviser say that Obama’s economic stances are all political stagecraft didn’t help his cause, either. That’s not to say she didn’t bring home the bacon when it mattered most—but she certainly didn’t cook it all by herself.
For Hillary, this is just the beginning. It doesn’t get any easier as we plow toward Pennsylvania, no matter how many times narratives flip for her by tomorrow morning. Saturday brings Wyoming’s caucuses, where she’ll probably lose to Obama’s track record in the Great Plains caucuses. Next is Mississippi, where 37 percent of the population is black. That’s another Obama win waiting to bloom.
Neither state is particularly important delegate-wise, but they will hold some sway because after Mississippi there are 42 days without a primary. The candidates will stage a biblical assault on Pennsylvania’s 44,000 square miles of blue-collar workers, New York transplants, and tortured sports fans. Clinton will need to focus every moment of her time on Pennsylvania, because it’s the beginning of a grueling state where she’ll need an average margin of victory of 26 points to catch Obama’s pledged delegate lead if the scenario above comes to pass. Anything below that 26-point mark in Pennsylvania would be crippling to her chances to catch him in pledged delegates.
But perhaps we’re post-pledged at this point in the campaign. There’s already word that Clinton’s mini-momentum spike may stem a flood of superdelegates to Obama. Clinton may not need to catch Obama in pledged delegates anymore. Now she needs to focus on convincing superdelegates that they want to back the candidate who wins big, blue states, not small, red ones. That’s still a tough sell when she'll fall short on pledged delegates.
Clinton is off to a roaring start to the new month, but in the end, she’s still likely to go out like a lamb.
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No one is ever happy to concede an election, but as political narratives go, Mike Huckabee has nothing to be ashamed of. After bobbing along for months in the basement of national polls with almost no national name recognition, this former Arkansas governor’s quixotic bid briefly launched him into the national spotlight, reorganizing the race for the Republican nomination overnight. Sure, he never really had a shot in a race that, unlike the Democratic side, is structured to weed out the competition early with winner-take-all primaries that starve people like Mike Huckabee of delegates. The fact that the odds were so stacked against him worked well for his public image; it made it much easier to ignore his wack-job approach to subjects like evolution in favor of his adorable jokes and extended metaphors. For that, we offer this eulogy:
Mike Huckabee, progenitor of quaint witticisms and mixed metaphors, bowed out of the campaign tonight with the aura of an aged prizefighter ceding to the reality of his waning strength. Appearing next to his wife, Janet, who stood by her husband with the statuesque dignity of a portrait, he spoke in the soft tones of a grade school principal bidding farewell to a graduating class. The country must be “the best nation we can be,” he said, but it was “time to hit the reset button.” Though he posted a promising batting average in the early days of this primary season, in the end Mike Huckabee simply couldn’t bring his runners home. His Boy Scout morals and Yogi Berra charm were insufficient to bring him home in the Pinewood Derby of American politics, but we will forever remember him, like we remember the famed Alamo upon which another great American battle was fought and lost, for making red and blue American seem ever so slightly more united in the color of his prose.
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The Clinton campaign needed a game-changer. It got a game-changer.
In an “EMERGENCY PRESS CALL” tonight, officials with the Clinton campaign complained of numerous “disturbing reports” from “all over the state” that Obama supporters were tampering with the Texas caucuses. (Transcript here.)
Among the accusations (or, as Clinton’s Texas director, Ace Smith, calls them, “documented instances”):
- Obama supporters closed the doors on Clinton supporters at some of the precinct conventions.
- Obama supporters monopolized the “packets” used to sign up caucus-goers. In some instances, they even “took them away from the premises” before the caucuses started, according to the Clinton campaign. Here’s why the packet matters, via the Dallas Morning News:
In most cases, the election judge [at a caucus] will have the packet with instructions, guidelines and other materials for the convention. If you gain possession of the packet, you can appoint yourself temporary chairman, get a friend to nominate you as permanent chairman and then quickly elect a secretary. If you do this, you control the flow and pace of the meeting. That could make a difference, especially if you're dealing with late arrivals and those not familiar with the process. There will be times when precincts will be merged under one election judge. That means the other packets will be up for grabs. Make sure you get one and don't allow a judge to stall you and then give the material to the rival camp.
- Some caucus results were being reported before the caucuses were even set to begin. A Clinton memo cites "numerous instances of Obama supporters filing [sic] out precinct convention sign-in sheets during the day and submitting them
as completed vote totals at caucus." In other words, cheating.
The charges are fairly broad, but the campaign promised to provide specifics. (Some are already available here.)
Whatever the merits, the campaign’s decision to draw attention to the issue as it was happening was a bold move. (Communications director Howard Wolfson made sure to point out that they had never done this before.) It’s now guaranteed to overshadow the election results, no matter who wins. If Obama pulls through in Texas, naturally the issue calls his victory into question. If it’s Hillary, the added sense of injustice could propel her even further back into the race.
On the call, which was abruptly and entertainingly hijacked by Obama attorney Bob Bauer, Clinton’s lawyer couldn’t say whether the campaign was going to take this to court. It’s too early to say. But it doesn’t matter whether this lands in court. If the flap manages to overshadow the election results, whatever they may be, then mission accomplished. Obama’s normally lightning-quick campaign has been slow to respond, suggesting that 1) there’s merit to the charges, 2) the campaign doesn’t want to dignify them with a response, or 3) the campaign wants to be extremely careful (especially post-Goolsbee) about what it confirms and denies. In any case, the Clinton campaign has made one thing clear: If Obama thinks he can walk away with the nomination, he'll have to do it walking on glass.
Read the rest of Trailhead's coverage on the emergency call.
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Clinton wins Rhode Island; Obama wins Vermont. And with that we're right back where we started.
The two victories, coupled with early returns that currently show 20-point margins in each state, mean that neither candidate will sneak a few extra delegates out of the off-the-radar states tonight. Any delegate gains Obama makes in Vermont are likely to be cut down by Clinton's slightly better-than-expected haul in Rhode Island. This stalemate is a microcosm of the match playing out on a grander scale in the overall pledged delegate picture.
But a stalemate isn't enough for Clinton--she needs to start making strides. If her 17-point lead holds in Ohio (26 percent of precincts reporting), that would allow her to strut into Pennsylvania.
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The conference call of glory has ended, and we've got a hot transcript of the exchange between Obama lawyer Bob Bauer and Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson. Click here to drink the raw political nectar.
We'll have a post coming soon summarizing this mega-flap, and what it means moving forward.
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More on the unreal conference call that's still happening. A reporter late to the party asks Howard Wolfson to identify the Obama campaign person who hijacked the call earlier. “He’s Bob Bauer, he’s someone we know very well,” Wolfson informs him. “B-A-U-E-R.” According to Wolfson, he was “attempting a vigorous defense of the indefensible.” This has got to be the best slap-down of the cycle, and the entire press corps has front-row seats.
Ace Smith, the Clinton campaign’s state director, chips in, “These are not accusations, these are documented instances … of Democratic voters being actively disenfranchised.”
The main charges being made: Clinton supporters were locked out of caucus sites; Obama supporters ran off with or manipulated the "packets" used to control the caucuses; some caucus results were reported before caucuses were even supposed to begin.
The question coming out of this is, what does it mean for the Texas results? (Last time I checked, Obama was ahead by a hair.) Will Clinton reject the results if he wins? Or, as Time’s Jay Newton-Small asks, will she even reject them if she wins?
Stay tuned for a transcript of the call.
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Screaming into our inbox, the following e-mail from Clinton's campaign:
** MEDIA ADVISORY **
Time Sensitive: Emergency Press Call To Discuss Caucus Intimidation and Irregularities in TX
Clinton has the entire press corps on a call right now detailing that Barack Obama broke myriad rules during today's caucuses. They're serious allegations and will overshadow all other story lines, including the results that come out of Texas' caucuses. More info at Ambinder.
It's way too early to tell whether these allegations are legit, but we'll try to pump news through as soon as we see it or get it ourselves. In the meantime, this is the freshest, most significant piece of evidence that suggests a prolonged Democratic battle could bloody both candidates. Also, Clinton has a higher burden of proof because the campaign has always said caucuses were unfair.
Bob Bauer, an Obama lawyer, just burst into the call and tried to call the Clinton camp's bluff. This is tremendously ugly and incredibly exciting, even by this campaign's standards.
A sampling of the kind of language being used on the call from Clinton folk:
"Obama supporters have taken over the caucus."
"What is happening at Texas today ... is not typical. It is actually quite extraordinary."
"These are not accusations, these are documented instances."
"Voters actively disenfranchised—this is outrageous."
"They let Obama supporters in, but they kept Clinton supporters out."
More details coming ASAP.
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CNN has called Vermont and Ohio for John McCain. (What’s his Ben & Jerry’s flavor?) But we’re going to go out on a limb and assume he’ll win the other two contests as well. McCain has been acting like the nominee for a few weeks already. Does tonight change anything? Here’s a quick portrait of the new landscape:
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Huckabee must go. If you include the delegates “released” to him by Romney, McCain will now have the 1,191 delegates necessary to clinch the nomination. So, Huckabee, despite
his skepticism when it comes to mathematics, pretty much has to bow out. (Of course, that’s what everyone said after Feb. 5.) The question is how. We’re betting on a rock concert.
[Update 9:21 p.m.: Huckabee is dropping out as we speak, kicking off his speech with a baseball metaphor. Where's the slap bass?
]
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The Democratic death march. The longer the Democratic race drags on, the more McCain benefits. If Hillary manages to survive through Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary, that gives McCain a six week head start to fundraise, plot strategy, and get eight hours of sleep a night.
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Find a veep. McCain claims he hasn’t given a single thought to his vice presidential pick. Nonsense. Gov. Charlie Crist, who helped McCain win Florida, is now reupping his own value by advocating another Democratic primary in Florida, which would guarantee a long and painful race for the Dems. Other
potential picks are no doubt getting in line to give McCain a great back rub.
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Taking care of business. You may recall that John McCain has a day job serving as a United States senator. By locking up the nomination now, he can spend more time with the day-to-day of writing and voting on legislation. This is a big deal for senators during presidential campaigns, who are usually vulnerable to charges of skipping votes. The more time McCain can log in the Senate, the more he can ding Clinton or Obama for playing hooky.
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Projecting inevitability. President Bush is expected to endorse McCain tomorrow. Shocker, I know. But the passing of the crown does let McCain start tapping the resources of the Republican establishment and acting like a president. Plus, the more he can do to tamp down the “maverick” label, the better. At the same time, though, with Bush’s approval rating still in the toilet, he wants to avoid looking like a third Bush term.
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It's time for our regular dive into the exit polls. The juicy bits from Ohio's Democratic results, according to CNN.
- Obama is seen as the most electable, but that doesn't mean everybody likes him. Of the 53 percent of voters who think Obama has a better chance of winning in November, 15 percent still voted for Clinton.
- For all the hubub we make over the debates, it seems like they actually matter. The 74 percent of voters who say the debates informed their vote are essentially split between Obama and Clinton. Among the 18 percent who said the debates didn't matter, Clinton was favored.
- More Ohioans think Clinton has a clear plan for the country (68 percent) than think that Obama has a clear plan (57 percent).
- Of the 25 percent with only a high-school education, Clinton is favored nearly 2-to-1.
- 23 percent of Obama supporters say Clinton inspires them. 31 percent of Clinton supporters say Obama inspires them.
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Obama has scooped up a state best known for its cows, hippies, and home-grown ice cream company. His expected win in Vermont isn't much to write home about at this point in the campaign. At one point, winning a state where black and Latino voters barely exist would have been big news for Barack Obama. But these days, winning the white vote is always a strong possibility (if not a likelihood) for Obama because white males have been breaking so strongly toward him.
His boring win did have one mildly interesting factoid: Old people finally love Obama! Seventeen percent of voters were 65 or older, and 61 percent of them voted for Obama, according to exit polls. Obama did better among seniors than he did among 50- to 64-year-olds, which means that if Obama can't call himself post-racial, he can call himself post-age.
And, yes, all of Obama's success is owed to Ben & Jerry's, which endorsed him after John Edwards dropped out. We're taking suggestions for the B&J flavor based on Obama. And no, neither Baracky Road nor Obamaberry are viable submissions. Only Obamatose supporters recommend those also-rans.
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Campaign typography analysis is so hot right now.
Back in November, the New York Times ran a cartoon analysis of campaign logo aesthetics. In the Boston Globe, a typography analyst wrote that Hillary’s “tall lower-case reminds me of someone with their pants pulled up too high.” Newsweek’s Andrew Romano recently examined the Obama “brand,” with its hip, bold, evenly spaced Gotham font.
Now, over at typeface firm Hoefler & Frere-Jones, the inventors of Gotham are weighing in. Whereas Gotham “isn't pretending to be anything it's not,” they write
Hillary's snooze of a serif might have come off a heart-healthy cereal box, or a mildly embarrassing over-the-counter ointment; if you're feeling generous you might associate it with a Board of Ed circular, or an obscure academic journal. But Senator McCain's typeface is positively mystifying: after three decades signifying a very down-market notion of luxe, this particular sans serif has settled into being the font of choice for the hygiene aisle. One of McCain's campaign themes is "Making Tough Choices:" is this the one you would have made?
To illustrate their point, they offer this repurposing of the Clinton and McCain fonts:
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The 2008 presidential race has seen some creative campaign strategies, most notably the infamous Ron Paul money bomb. But if Tom Brokaw is correct, the Obama campaign may have something else up its sleeve: a superdelegate bomb.
This morning, Brokaw told Joe Scarborough on MSNBC that someone "very close to the Obama campaign" told him they have 50 endorsers "ready to go public" with their support. Presumably, this would be Obama's coup de grace after March 4.
Here’s how it might work. The likeliest of scenarios today is a split decision: Clinton wins Ohio, Obama wins Texas. In which case, expect spin chaos. Obama’s people will point to the overall pledged delegate count. The Clinton camp will direct your attention to the popular votes and claim the Texas caucus doesn’t matter.
But the Obama campaign has two secret weapons: money and superdelegates. On the money front, the Obama campaign can finally reveal its February fundraising totals. Clinton announced last week that she had raised $35 million that month; estimates put Obama’s number somewhere north of $50 million. But they’ve waited to announce it, presumably because they wanted to get the timing just right.
After unveiling the cash, send in the superdelegates. Since Super Tuesday, Obama has netted a total of more than 36 new superdelegates, whereas Clinton has lost six. (They continued to trickle Obama-ward today.) If today’s contests are tight, all eyes will turn to superdelegates for guidance on who’s winning. Normally, it matters who's doing the endorsing. But, at this point, big names like Al Gore and Jimmy Carter won’t endorse until a candidate is locked in. Same with party leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, who don’t benefit from choosing sides. So it’s not about who endorses butabout how many people do. Were the Obama campaign to drop a 50-ton superdelegate bomb on the Clinton campaign’s head the day after a tie, it’s not hard to see where momentum would swing.
Combined with the moneybomb, the superdelegate bomb could decide the race. But like any bomb, it’s something you don’t use unless you have to. To that end, the Obama campaign might have leaked the news to Brokaw to try to scare Hillary into dropping out. That way, she would avoid an embarrassing exodus of superdelegates. But if the threat doesn’t work, and the results of March 4 are close, Obama will waste no time in pushing the red button.
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Sometimes the campaigns sound like they’re speaking two different languages. The Clinton team often speaks only in terms of total delegates, whereas the Obama people talk in terms of pledged delegates. Clinton’s camp uses the term “automatic delegates,” whereas Obama’s sticks with “superdelegates.” Tonight could produce another semantic split: Are we including Texas caucus results or not?
The last Ohio and Texas polls close at 7:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. ET, respectively. But Texas’ caucuses don’t even start until after that, which means we won’t know the full results until late in the night.
Hillary Clinton should be perfectly fine with that. If she gives her speech tonight around 9:30 ET, she’ll avoid having to address what could be an Obama rout in the Texas caucuses. (See here for theories about why Obama does better in caucuses.) On a conference call yesterday, Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson hinted that Texas’ caucus results would not factor into their interpretation of who won the day’s election. If Clinton is lucky, she’ll be able to shape the night’s narrative before the caucuses are even over.
It’s hard to imagine that spin surviving the night, however. Whatever happens in Ohio and Texas, everyone will wake up Wednesday morning with the cold hard numbers of the delegate count staring them in the face. And for better or worse, Texas’ caucus commands 67 delegates—more than Rhode Island alone.
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The online reaction to Hillary Clinton’s “3 a.m.” ad has
ranged from analytical
to rebutting
to outright mocking.
But what were people thinking as they watched it for the first time?
There’s a new “Damned Spot” video
up on Slate V that shows an audience's real-time reaction to the ad. Of the 554 viewers, the Clinton supporters are
generally approving. Undecided voters and Obama supporters are neutral and
vaguely disapproving, respectively, for most of the ad. But notice how their
opinions plummet the second Hillary’s mug appears onscreen at the end. It looks
more like visceral instinct than rational response.
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By Christopher Beam and Chadwick Matlin
By everyone’s account, March 4 is a fork in the road. But it’s a fork with all sorts of twisted, intersecting prongs. And because the primary has gone on so long, everyone from voters to pundits to the candidates themselves will be hypersensitive to every datum that emerges from the day’s four primaries. What does it mean if Obama saps Hillary’s strength among Latinos in southern Texas? How should we interpret a Clinton surge among Vermont’s Ben and Jerry’s-swilling college population? And what of the all-important left-handed female Catholic immigrants who voted between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m.?
We could spend all day dissecting all the mini-scenarios. Instead, let’s take a look at some of the broad situations that might play out over the next few days.
Scenario 1: Hillary wins Texas and Ohio.
a) She wins both big. Clinton would be back in the game, even if Obama wins Vermont. “Momentum” narrative would swing back her way, catapulting her into the long the stretch until Pennsylvania on April 22 (even if she loses in Wyoming and Mississippi next week). Her campaign may also prove it can pull off the decisive victories needed to make up Obama’s delegate lead.
b) She wins both narrowly. She would stick around, but pressure to exit the race would build. Much would depend on whether superdelegates swing toward her or Obama after the race—if Edwards or Richardson endorsed her, she’d still here to stay. If they went to Obama, Hillary could bow out. Still, her victories would raise questions about Obama’s ability to win big, Democrat-rich states in the general election.
c) She wins Ohio and Texas primaries, but loses Texas caucus. We would see another battle of semantics. Clinton would claim to have won Texas and would raise hell about the system being unfair. (Lawsuit, anyone?) Obama would argue it’s “about delegates.” Clinton would likely stay in the race, but the next few weeks would be long and bloody.
Scenario 2: Split decision: Clinton loses in Texas, wins Ohio.
If Obama's judgment-over-experience narrative works in Texas but the NAFTA flap dooms him in Ohio, things get messy very quickly. Clinton has the money to stick around, but with the GOP race settled, Democrats will be hankering for a nominee. Odds are she'll leave us within a week. But if she convinces superdelegates to resist Obama, she may have bought enough time to survive the span between Mississippi (March 11) and Pennsylvania (April 22). In that case, she could assume John Edwards' middle-class avenger mantle and campaign hard on a populist message. However, her biggest obstacle could be her own husband—Bill said Hillary had to win both Ohio and Texas or the gig was up.
Scenario 3: Obama beats her—twice.
a) Obama wins big. By "big," we mean a margin of seven or more points. Confronted with Obama's come-from-behind victory, daunting delegate math, and likely superdelegate defections, Clinton would have to ring her own death knell. We may even see a full concession speech Tuesday night. Even Bill would start endorsing Obama—and he’s a superdelegate.
b) Obama ekes out two wins. If it's a squeaker, Clinton will probably meditate on things for a bit. The delegate math will still be overwhelming, but she may be able to spin the narrow losses as ties that got out of hand. The press and Democratic Party officials won't buy this argument, but her supporters may. If she doesn't drop out quickly, look for previously sheepish superdelegates to flock to Obama as all of his high-profile surrogates start calling for Clinton to bail. Once that happens, it's only a matter of time—whether or not Clinton admits it.
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A lot of people have replied to Friday’s “Fuzzy Math” item about the Obama campaign’s claim that if there’s a tie on March 4, Clinton would have to win 75 percent of the remaining pledged delegates to catch up with Obama’s 162-delegate lead. The general feeling was that Plouffe meant to say she would have to win 75 percent of the popular vote rather than 75 percent of pledged delegates.
Two things. First, Plouffe was pretty explicit in the original conference call that he was talking about pledged delegates, which an Obama spokesman later confirmed. Second, and more important, I wanted to clear up a misconception about popular votes vs. delegate percentages.
It’s been conventional wisdom here and elsewhere that the bizarre Democratic delegate-selection system means that in the primaries, large leads in the popular vote often produce small leads in terms of delegates. But if you take a look at the Democratic primary results so far, the percentage of the popular vote a candidate wins is usually within a couple points of the percentage of pledged delegates they win. (Note that this doesn’t include caucuses, where you can only estimate turnout.)
Take CNN’s numbers. (These counts, on the individual state pages, include pledged delegates only.) In Georgia, Clinton won 31 percent of the popular vote; meanwhile, she won 30 percent of the state’s pledged delegates. In California, she won 52 percent of the popular vote and 56 percent of the delegates. In Massachusetts, she won 56 percent of the popular vote and 59 percent of delegates. The numbers in just about every other state follow the same pattern.
In some states, the percentage of delegates won was even larger than the percentage of the popular vote won. In Arkansas, for example, Clinton won 70 percent of the popular vote and 77 percent of the delegates.
I was a little surprised to discover this, given all we’ve seen and heard about how the Democrats’ proportional-allocation system makes it impossible to open up a wide delegate lead. Also, keep in mind that caucuses work differently, so Texas, with its oddball primary/caucus hybrid, is likely to produce different numbers in the popular vote and delegate count. But the general trend debunks claims that Plouffe was talking about popular vote rather than delegate percentages. (Plus, even if he had been, there’s no formula for converting popular vote to pledged delegates anyway.) The fact is, if Clinton won roughly 75 percent of a state’s (or a group of states’) popular vote, she would win roughly that percentage of their delegates, too.
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Barack Obama has a problem.
After reams of denials, it turns out that his top economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, did in fact meet with officials of the Canadian Consulate in Chicago. The substance of that meeting is still in dispute—according to a memo written by a Canadian official, Goolsbee cautioned them that Obama’s strong opposition to NAFTA “should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.” Goolsbee, who has written for Slate, says he “certainly did not use that phrase in any way.”
The problem is not so much that Obama has said one thing about NAFTA to Ohio and another to Canada. As we argued last week, it was always implicit that he doesn’t hate free trade quite as much as he now claims. (Also, Goolsbee is right that Obama has emphasized reforming labor and environmental standards more than overhauling the entire agreement.) What disturbs most about the whole affair is the pattern of blanket denials issued by the Obama campaign—denials that were at the time implausible and now, in retrospect, borderline indefensible.
When confronted with questions about the specifics of Goolsbee’s communication with Canadian officials, Obama spokesman Bill Burton repeated that “the story is not true”—as if denying everything would excuse him even if some details turned out to be true. Goolsbee himself told the Observer’s Jason Horowitz that “[i]t is a totally inaccurate story. I did not call these people and I direct you to the press office.” Saying that he “did not call these people” could be an example of fine-tipped parsing—“these people” could be referring to the Canadian embassy, not the consulate in Chicago; he could also be saying that he did not “call” them, but he did meet with them. Either way, it is, by any reasonable human being’s definition, extremely misleading, if not a downright lie.
It’s impossible to know how much the campaign knew. Perhaps professor Goolsbee wasn’t totally straightforward with them about who he met with and what he said. And maybe Goolsbee is right that the memo mischaracterizes his remarks. But by initially denying the story flat out, the Obama campaign allowed the press to poke small holes in the blanket which have now been teased into large ones. Obama didn’t need a bad press day 24 hours before polls open. But one thing his campaign can’t deny is that they brought this on themselves.