Category Archives: elections

Encouraged

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Matt Towery of Southern Political Report says that Senator Obama’s North Carolina win was bigger than expected because he picked up most of the last-minute deciders. This tells us something about momentum, maybe.

Of Indiana, Michael Tomasky writes,

The narrow Indiana margin was a stunner and is worth dwelling on. How did that happen? It’d be lovely to think that substance may actually have had something to do with it. That is, it may have proved that Clinton’s pander on the repeal of the federal gas tax really didn’t work that well, and that Obama’s willingness to stand up and call it clever politics but bad policy actually persuaded a large number of voters. Maybe it proved that Obama finally found a way to minimise the pastor problem (for the time being – it will persist into November). Whatever it was, Clinton expected and needed a lot more.

This morning, most reports I’ve seen suggest she’s not quitting yet. The vanity campaign will continue. However, Todd Beeton writes,

This is-it-over or isn’t-it division echoes the mixed messages we’ve gotten from Hillary Clinton herself tonight. First there was her speech, which, I have to agree with Timmeh, was at once a rallying cry and a valedictory; in it, Clinton made an awkward and blatant plea for funds, yet the post-primary fund solicitation e-mail her campaign sent out this evening was more “thanks” than “please;” and finally we have the news that Hillary Clinton will hold no public events tomorrow, yet we also get word from Andrea Mitchell that her meeting with superdelegates set for the morning is purely routine and she intends to be back on the campaign trail by Thursday after a fundraiser tomorrow night. What all of this accomplishes, of course, is to keep both options on the table so that they can see how the fundraising goes and how the media spins tonight before deciding whether to stay in or to drop out. There is a third option as well, which I believe was proposed on MSNBC earlier, which would be to do a sort of combination of both, i.e. campaign strongly over the next two weeks but more as an ally of Obama’s than as a foe until May 20th when they both will likely once again end up winning a state and use his likely majority of pledged delegate status as the tipping point to bow out gracefully.

We’ll see. If Senator Clinton continues to run a scorched-earth, negative campaign against Obama, we’ll know she’s completely unglued.

There’s also speculation that the undeclared superdelegates will declare for Obama in the next few days. This could put an end to the nomination fight before June. Let’s hope.

Update: Dylan Loewe writes at Huffington Post,

Obama cut into Clinton’s base dramatically. Hillary only won voters making less than $50,000 by a four point margin in Indiana. She also saw an eleven point drop in support among Catholics from Pennsylvania to Indiana. Additionally, as Tim Russert noted, Hillary’s slide among black voters continued to worsen. With 92% of African Americans voting for Obama in Indiana, one wonders which states Hillary thinks are winnable without the most loyal bloc of Democratic voters.

All eyes turned to Indiana and North Carolina to see what impact the Reverend Wright story would have on the race. Exit polls showed that, in both states, 48% of voters saw the issue as at least somewhat important to their decision. But that number fails to tell the whole story. Among blacks in Indiana, 44% viewed the Wright story as important. And yet, more than nine in ten black voters chose Obama. With voters citing Wright as important, but still voting for Obama, it would appear that, in fact, Obama’s response to the Wright crisis played as important a role in voter decisions as the initial controversy itself. Given his success, he clearly responded well.

Indiana voters trusted Hillary on the economy, but by a far narrower margin than previous primaries. In North Carolina, Obama won that category handily, suggesting that the fight over Clinton’s gas-tax gimmick ultimately favored Obama – and honesty. At almost every turn, voters rejected the politics of Hillary Clinton. By a twenty point gap, voters believed Hillary unfairly attacked Obama in Indiana, a reality that has no doubt contributed to the widening divide within the party.

C’mon, superdelegates, declare for Obama and put an end to this farce.

Obama Wins North Carolina

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Polls just closed in North Carolina, and the state already has been called for Obama. I don’t see the margin yet, but it can’t be very close.

Update: (Listening to Obama’s victory speech) That man sure can give a speech, huh?

Update: Indiana is still too close to call, MSNBC says, even though Obama pretty much conceded it and Clinton certainly accepted it. I’m not going to stay up to see final results.

Distractions

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Joan Vennochi writes in today’s Boston Globe:

THE REAL NEWS of April played second fiddle to the presidential campaign, the pope’s visit to America, and the Texas polygamy case.

The death toll for the US military in Iraq hit 49 in April, making it the deadliest month since September, according to the Associated Press. Around Iraq, at least 1,080 Iraqi civilians and security personnel were killed last month, an average of 36 a day, according to the AP tally. While that’s down from March’s total of 1,269, or an average of 41 per day, those casualties certainly don’t add up to a stable Iraq.

It’s not as if there is no news from Iraq, you know. Bradley Brooks reports for the Associated Press:

The US military fired guided missiles into the heart of Baghdad’s teeming Sadr City slum yesterday, leveling a building 55 yards away from a hospital and wounding nearly two dozen people.

Separately, the military said late yesterday that four Marines were killed on Thursday by a roadside bomb in Anbar Province. No other details were released, and the names of the Marines were withheld pending notification of their families.

The strike in Sadr City, made from a ground launcher, took out a militant command-control center, the US military said. The center was in the heart of the 8-square-mile neighborhood that is home to about 2.5 million people. Iraqi officials said at least 23 people were wounded, none of them patients in the hospital.

See Juan Cole for more details.

Similarly, awhle back John McCain came out with a health care “plan” that was such a bad joke it ought to have got him laughed out of the presidential race. It might have, had the American people heard anything resembling substantive discussion of it from news media. (See also Steve Benen.)

Instead, we get 24/7 coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. As Eugene Robinson said,

There’s something maddening about this presidential campaign. It has become irrelevant whether anything the candidates say actually makes sense. All that matters is how their words will “play” with voters who are presumed to be too stupid to realize that they’re the ones being played.

Bob Herbert, yesterday:

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is no doubt (and regrettably) a big issue in the presidential campaign. But what we’ve seen over the past week is major media overkill — Jeremiah Wright all day and all night. It’s like watching the clips of a car wreck again and again.

We’ve plotted the trend lines of his relationship with Barack Obama over the past two decades. What did Obama know and when did he know it? We’ve forced Barack and Michelle Obama, two decent, hard-working, law-abiding, family-oriented Americans, to sit for humiliating television interviews, reminiscent of Bill and Hillary Clinton on “60 Minutes” at the height of the Gennifer Flowers scandal.

We’ve allowed the entire political process in what is perhaps the most important election in the U.S. since World War II to become thoroughly warped by the histrionics of a loony preacher from the South Side of Chicago.

There’s something wrong with us.

Frank Rich points out in his column today that the alleged craziness of anything the Rev. Wright said pales in comparison to the utterances of one Rev. John Hagee, whose affiliations with John McCain seem to be an issue only among us leftie bloggers.

Here Rich gets to the heart of the matter:

Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.

Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell can blame America for the 9/11 attacks, and the Right blinks and yawns. Some obscure who-is-this-guy-again? college professor named Ward Chamberlain blames America for the 9/11 attacks, and the Right goes ballistic. Likewise, some redneck yahoos in Alabama get caught with an arsenal of explosives and weapons that included 130 grenades, an improvised rocket launcher and 2,500 rounds of ammunition, and it’s no big deal. But an exploding backpack in Las Vegas or, worse, the threat of homemade cherry bombs in Michigan causes Righties to beocme unglued if they suspect the perpetrator might be Muslim.

It’s all about fear. Righties base their political choices on what they fear. At the same time, they are drawn to what they fear; they obsess over what they fear. Because they are afraid of angry black men, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a big deal to them. He excites them because he vindicates them.

On the whole, the Left doesn’t react the same way to right-wing craziness. That’s partly because there’s so much of it, of course. We hear about a Republican politician associating with an extremist religious whackjob, and we think, What else is new? And news media, which has bought into the narrative that “religion” is something the Right holds a patent on, doesn’t ask questions about the religiosity of the Right. It’s only a “story” when it’s about the Left.

Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign continues to degrade everything liberalism stands for by sucking up to the Right. But I’ll have to save that for another post.

Trials and Tribulations

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It’s cold, dark and gloomy here in the New York City metro area, which pretty much matches my mood. Since it’s Kentucky Derby Day I thought I might just post some old Derby videos, but at the moment YouTube is offline. Naturally.

(Fortunately I’ll be spending most of the day rehearsing Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt with my community chorale. This will be our fourth rehearsal this week, which is one reason I haven’t been posting much. The performance is tomorrow. After that it’s back to regular daily blogging, I promise. But singing does cheer me up.)

Hillary Clinton is pushing her “gas tax holiday” plan for all it’s worth, convinced that Hoosiers are too stupid to realize that it’s not a serious proposal (and who’s an elitist now?). As Eugene Robinson wrote,

The House Democratic leadership opposes suspending the gas tax, so the whole thing is moot — except perhaps as a case study in political cynicism: Say any damn thing you think the voters want to hear, even if you know it’s a terrible idea and won’t happen anyway. Psssst, voters: McCain and Clinton think you’re too dumb to catch on.

Of course, Tuesday’s primaries are in states that solidly supported George Bush in 2004, so maybe they are that dumb. We’ll see.

Speaking of pain: For those of you who live with chronic pain, I have a three-part series about pain, suffering and Buddhism posted at the other blog. Posts are:

Pain and Suffering
Suffering and Attachment
Pain and Buddhism

More Jacksonian Than Jackson

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I keep thinking about what Steve M. said of Pennsylvania Clinton voters:

I think the white working class has been sold a line of BS in virtually every presidential election since 1968: I’m just like you. Maybe they believe it every four years, or maybe they’re just flattered that rich, privileged guys would pretend to want to be just like them. But they generally buy one rich, privileged guy’s act, even if that guy is, say, a successful Hollywood actor or an old-money Connecticut preppie.

This year, one guy just can’t pretend to be just like them. He looks in the mirror and he knows that, so he rarely tries. And a lot of them react to that. Maybe it’s not that they don’t like the color of his skin; maybe it’s just that he can’t possibly convincingly sell them the BS they want to have sold to them. (The rich, privileged woman, on the other hand, can.)

So, yes, there’s a barrier there, and it’s racial. But maybe it’s not truly racist. These people don’t get much out of the political system — the most they get is completely phony imitation. But they want it. It’s a form of flattery.

I’m not interested in splitting hairs over racial and racist. Things are what they are, and choosing a label for them doesn’t always help us understand them better.

The bigger question is, why do white working-class, less-educated voters screw themselves by falling for this act election after election? You’d think after the George Bush debacle they would have wised up. I guess not.

Amy Chozick and Nick Timiraos write in today’s Wall Street Journal that Senator Clinton won votes by persuading white working-class Pennsylvanians that she is one of them. That she is so not one of them is beside the point; she knows how to act the part.

For some time my allegory for Senator Clinton has been Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. I voted to send her to the U.S. Senate in 2000 with great enthusiasm. Her win that year was one of the few bright points in an otherwise dreary election. She didn’t accomplish much, to tell the truth, but I was willing to give her the benefit of many doubts until the October 2002 vote that allowed Dubya to invade Iraq. That and her subsequent support for the war — and the fact that for a long time her efforts to cover Bush’s ass were surpassed only by Joe Lieberman’s — killed my enthusiasm for kicking the bleeping football.

Still, plenty of people, including people I had thought to be clear-eyed about politics, are lined up for another kick.

If she succeeds in becoming president, you know what difference she will make in the lives of white working-class voters? Is there a word for a measurement just below squat? As a TPM diarist, Dan K, wrote,

The best Clinton will be able to accomplish in office, then, through her customary secretive, insider-based, power-broker approach, is another set of very middle of the road, incremental legislative changes: half a loaf here and there that helps us feel just a little bit good about doing just a little bit, but nothing that really solves any of the huge problems facing the country.

Yet the very voters who most need real change turn out for her, as they have turned out for so many other politicians who somehow persuaded white, working-class voters that the best candidate for the office is the one they most want to have a beer with.

This was not always true. Certainly, presidential candidates since Andy Jackson have trotted out their born-in-a-log-cabin routine to woo voters. But there were limits. Franklin Roosevelt was patrician to the core and never pretended to be otherwise. Nor do I recall that John Kennedy had to prove he had working-class connections, and the working class voted for him, anyway.

For that matter, nobody wanted to have a beer with Richard Nixon. If ever there was a man uncomfortable in his own skin, as the pundits like to say, it was Tricky Dick. Yet he won two presidential elections.

How exactly did we get to the point at which packs of highly paid media and political elite use their positions at the top of the power/communication pyramid to lecture working class folks about Barack Obama’s alleged elitism? And that the only people who notice how bleeped up that is are a few of us bloggers?

Mass media has played a part in this, but you’d think that 50 years into the mass media age people would be a little more sophisticated about media packaging. I guess not.

Elsewhere — See Josh Marshall on how the Pennsylvania primary left us exactly where we were before the Pennsylvania primary; Simon Jenkins on America’s love affair with war; John Cole on Clinton’s “vanity campaign.”

Pessimissm

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I would love to hope that today’s Pennsylvania primary will somehow put an end to the increasingly toxic nomination fight. However, poll numbers are all over the place. I fear we will have no clear resolution tonight, and the fight will go on.

I’ve got an incredibly busy day ahead, but will post tonight if I’m not too depressed.

Update: Sorry; I’m too depressed. I’ll post something tomorrow.

Update 2: Steve M. has some thoughts on why working-class white voters prefer privileged elitist Hillary Clinton, and it isn’t necessarily racism.

Update 3: Editorial in tomorrow’s New York Times, which endorsed Senator Clinton:

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

Thank you.

Threshold of Hypocrisy

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Remember when Senator Clinton was talking about the “commander in chief threshold” and how she and John McCain had crossed it but Barack Obama hadn’t?

Or when Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife, was praising John McCain to the heavens —

Mr. Clinton said all three major candidates remaining in the race are talented and special people.

He did not go into detail on Sen. Barack Obama, the Illinois Senator still locked in political combat with Sen. Clinton’s wife for the Democratic nomination. Their next battle takes place next month in Pennsylvania.

But McCain, who Mr. Clinton said is a “moderate”, “has given about all you can give for this country without dyin’ for it.”

He said McCain was on the right side of issues like being against torture of enemy combatants and global warming, which “just about crosses the bridge for them (Republicans).”

That last bit took place all of three weeks ago, so I realize why it might have sunk into the memory hole. Still, I had remembered it, and also remembered that the Obama campaign might have grumbled a bit but didn’t make a Big Bleeping Deal out of it.

Yesterday, Senator Obama said this:

“You have a real choice in this election. Either Democrat would be better than John McCain,” Obama said to cheers from a rowdy crowd in central Pennsylvania. Then he said: “And all three of us would be better than George Bush.”

“But what you have to ask yourself is who has the chance to actually really change things in a fundamental way so that 10 years from now or 20 years from now you can look back and you can say boy we really moved in a new direction and we put the country on a better path,” Obama added as he wrapped up an event at Reading High School.

Obama was trying to argue that he is the better choice over Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton in Tuesday’s primary in Pennsylvania. But the Illinois senator ended up mixing in praise for McCain at the same time.

The comment threatened to undercut Obama’s efforts — and those of the entire Democratic Party — to portray the GOP presidential nominee-in-waiting as nothing more than an extension of Bush’s unpopular tenure. At the very least, it provides fodder Republicans can use to prop up McCain.

Now, you and I could both argue that Obama shouldn’t have said that, although it used to be that candidates said complimentary things about their opponents on the stump, and this was considered gentlemanly, and no one took it seriously.

But today, Clinton supporters are going ballistic over what Obama said. The Clintons’ comments about what a strong leader McCain would be and how he is a moderate and not a wingnut Republican, however, were perfectly acceptable.

The mind, it is boggled.

Salutes

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Living in a time of war and economic collapse, what else do we have to talk about but middle fingers? I’ll let you judge whether Obama’s alleged gesture was intentional. Anyway, Republicans flip the bird so much better.

Meanwhile, Robert Reich and Sam Nunn have declared their support for Obama.

Polls are all the place now. I don’t think anyone really knows what’s going on in the Pennsylvania electorate.

Update: See John Whitesides of Reuters, “Obama keeps rolling as Clinton running out of time.”

“It doesn’t seem like she has the power to alter the dynamic of the race anymore,” said Simon Rosenberg, head of the Democratic advocacy group NDN.

Rosenberg said Clinton’s scenario for winning the Democratic nomination was no longer believable.

“In every way you can measure it, he’s won more delegates, he’s won more states, he’s raised more money, he has a better organization — all the metrics one has of how to evaluate the race indicate he is winning and she is losing,” he said.

Identity Crises

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That Bill Kristol is as hilarious as ever today. He is comparing Barack Obama to Karl Marx:

But it’s one thing for a German thinker to assert that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature.” It’s another thing for an American presidential candidate to claim that we “cling to … religion” out of economic frustration.

Note the “we.” Another member of the elite who doesn’t get it.

Obama in San Francisco does no courtesy to his fellow Americans. Look at the other claims he makes about those small-town voters.

Obama ascribes their anti-trade sentiment to economic frustration — as if there are no respectable arguments against more free-trade agreements. This is particularly cynical, since he himself has been making those arguments, exploiting and fanning this sentiment that he decries. Aren’t we then entitled to assume Obama’s opposition to Nafta and the Colombian trade pact is merely cynical pandering to frustrated Americans?

In Kristol’s world, the unwashed masses who live in those anonymous small towns are too dim to notice where their jobs went (which, if true, would make them almost as dim as Kristol) and wouldn’t be against “free trade” if demagogues would just leave the subject alone.

IMO Kristol shows us how really out of touch he is here:

He’s [Obama] disdainful of small-town America — one might say, of bourgeois America.

Either Kristol has no clue whatsoever about the real working-class folks of small town America, or he doesn’t know what bourgeois means. Or both. Either way, there is a huge class of Americans who are utterly invisible to Kristol.

This goes beyond just looking down on the simple peasants. Kristol doesn’t even know they exist. (See also fubar at Needlenose.)

Meanwhile, Obama is fighting back. ABC News reports:

“Shame on her,” Obama said, echoing one of Clinton’s own atacks on him. “Shame on her, she knows better.”

Obama said he was disappointed with her for her response and then launched into a new criticism of Clinton over her recent admission of being a hunter, and compared her sarcastically to Annie Oakley.

“She’s running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, how she values the Second Amendment, she’s talking like she’s Annie Oakley! Hillary Clinton’s out there like she’s on the duck blind every Sunday, she’s packin’ a six shooter! C’mon! She knows better. That’s some politics being played by Hillary Clinton. I want to see that picture of her out there in the duck blinds.”

Obama said he is amazed and surprised by this “dust-up” but admitted that his words were chosen badly. He said he deeply regretted … that his words were misinterpreted.

This is exactly the right response. He shouldn’t back down. I think it’s possible that, when the dust settles, this episode will have resolved in his favor. Senator Clinton is already having to answer questions about the last time she went to church or fired a gun.

Here’s what’s sad: If I had read this column by Carl Bernstein six months ago I would have said Carl had fallen victim to Clinton Derangement Syndrome. Now, I suspect it’s close to the truth.

Here are some really good “see alsos”: Kevin Hayden at American Street; Ron Beasley at Middle Earth Journal; RJ Eskow at Huffington Post; Oliver Willis.

Here’s a particularly excellent commentary by Gary Younge. And David Lightman of McClatchy Newspapers writes “A surge of new voters in Pennsylvania is likely to help Obama.”

Update: Robert Reich:

Bitter? You ain’t seen nothing yet. And as much as people like Russert, Carville, Matalin, Schrum, and Murphy want to divert our attention from what’s really happening; as much as HRC and McCain seek to make political hay out of choices of words that can be spun cynically by the mindless spinners of the old politics; as much as demagogues on the right and left continue to try to channel the cumulative frustrations of Americans into a politics of resentment — all these attempts will, I hope, prove futile. Eighty percent of Americans know the nation is on the wrong track. The old politics, and the old media that feeds it, are irrelevant now.

Read the whole thing.

Update 2: Quote du Jour from John Cole:

So, in case you are keeping score, yes, American voters are dumb enough to vote for Bush twice (and I include myself in that number, sadly). They are not, however, dumb enough to sit around and listen to an Ivy League educated lawyer who has spent all but two of the last 40 years living in a Governor’s mansion, the White House, and a NY mansion and who made 110 million over the past six years call someone else elitist.

Go figure.