Gerard Baker has an insipidly shallow column at the Times of London comparing “latte liberals” and “Dunkin’ Doughnuts Democrats.”
The fault lines in the contest instead fall largely along differences in identity – ethnic and gender – and values. Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton have, as we have noted before, both established massive, almost identically sized coalitions of voting blocs aligned along these cleavages.
Mrs Clinton wins heavily among white women, older voters and Latinos. Where they voted in large numbers on Tuesday, she won by large margins.
Mr Obama won states where his following of younger voters, African-Americans and white men predominated.
But one other critical factor – the one that may ultimately determine who wins this race – is whether the voter is sinking or swimming in the modern economy.
Mr Obama wins disproportionately among people who may be considered the winners in the global economy: the well educated, the mobile and the financially secure. Mrs Clinton’s voters are the strugglers, the class that feels itself left behind by an increasingly unfair global economic system.
Now, let us ask ourselves, why would that be true? Bill Clinton’s NAFTA policy played a role in creating an increasingly unfair global economic system, after all. Last year Hillary Clinton made some noises about breaking with her husband’s policy on trade agreements. Still, Hillary Clinton is just not the first name that comes to mind when I ask myself, which would most likely try to do right by American workers?
Until recently, the answer to that question was “John Edwards.” Now I don’t know.
I went to their web sites to check out Obama’s and Clinton’s proposals on trade and jobs. I was surprised to find more detail on Obama’s site on these issues than I found on Clinton’s. I will put their proposals side-by-side below the fold for easy comparison. The important point is that they are putting out nearly identical talking points about job creation and trade, and neither has made these issues the centerpiece of his or her campaign. I don’t see how one could argue that one of these candidates would clearly and obviously provide better policies for the strugglers than the other.
Gerard Baker, however, seems to think that’s the case. He has decided that since lower-income voters tend to vote for Clinton, then if the economy continues to go south more and more Dem voters will flock to Clinton.
So who prevails? That may well depend on the state of the economy. The more voters worry about it and the less they focus on ideals, the better Mrs Clinton’s chances. For her, bad news is good news. …
… People are trading down from Starbucks to Dunkin’ Donuts. These may not be the best circumstances for Mr Obama’s soaring rhetoric of hope in the future. His hope has to be that things do not get so bad that fear overwhelms it.
In 1992 Bill Clinton rode to an election victory under the slogan, “The economy, stupidâ€. Sixteen years later, we could say, given the apparent inevitability of a recession and given Mrs Clinton’s strong following among the less well educated in American society, that it is an even more fitting message for his wife.
Notice the part about the “less well educated in American society.” Here’s another bit from Baker’s column:
Mrs Clinton’s largest single demographic voting bloc was those who did not complete a high school education, where she won 82 per cent, against just 15 per cent for Mr Obama. The more educated you became – from high school drop-out, through high school graduate then some college, college graduate and finally postgraduate – the more likely you were to vote for Mr Obama. The only category he won, in fact, was the propeller heads with postgraduate degrees.
The problem with Baker’s theory is that people who already are well educated will not become less well educated if the economy continues to deteriorate. Of course, there’s always a chance that toxic chemicals from products made in China will damage their brains. But I see no compelling reason for a well-educated individual to switch allegiance from Obama to Clinton if he is, for example, laid off.
However, I suggest there may be other reasons why the less well-educated prefer Clinton to Obama. And I think the big one starts with an “r.”
Although you can find racism in all strata of our society, in my long and tired experience low-income, undereducated whites tend to be far more overtly and unabashedly racist than upwardly mobile, educated ones. I don’t have any sociological data to confirm that, so I’ll call this a hypothesis. And I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions, and please note that I’m not saying Clinton supporters are all racists, any more than Obama supporters are all sexists. But I postulate that some of those low-educated voters may just not be ready to vote for a black man. Having a white woman as a head of state may feel less alien to them. Most of them have mothers, after all.
Another factor is low information. Undereducated voters may think they know something about Hillary Clinton (exactly what is anyone’s guess), but Obama is a total unknown to them. And since they don’t read newspapers or follow politics closely, they probably aren’t learning much about him, either.
BTW, there’s a new Starbucks about to open in my neighborhood. It will be across the street from Dunkin’ Doughnuts, which makes a pretty decent latte.
GOP Nominee Probable John McCain was booed at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) today. Think Progress has a video. I’m told that Tom Delay appeared on Faux News this afternoon trashing McCain and claiming McCain supporters flooded the room with signs to drown out the boos. How dare they.
Dan Payne wrote at the Boston Globe before Romney announced he was dropping out:
Gathering nuts. Today the national Conservative Political Action Conference opens in Washington; it’s a gathering of right-wing Republicans, luminaries, and one president. Romney needs to wow them; John McCain needs to hire a food taster. If they take a straw poll and Romney wins, it will fire up right-wing radio for days.
At Salon, Joe Conason explains why McCain provokes paranoia on the right.
As Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, James Dobson and their lesser imitators furiously explain, they have strong reasons to distrust “straight talker” McCain, who straddles and shifts incessantly to advance his contrarian political strategy. He has so casually disrespected them and their opinions over the years, showing up routinely on the wrong side of so many of their issues, from climate change to gun control to campaign finance reform to the marriage amendment to the Bush tax cuts to judicial nominations, that endorsing him now would look like a wholesale abandonment of principle.
Moreover, the special interests of the right-wingers’ media panjandrums would be much better served by the defeat of a Republican ticket headed by McCain (especially if Huckabee becomes his running mate). In the aftermath they could argue that their party cannot win when the presidential candidate deviates from their dogma. Their profits and status would be depressed by a moderate Republican presidency, but greatly enhanced by a Clinton or an Obama in the White House.
For McCain to reach beyond the right-wing gatekeepers will be difficult, because rank-and-file conservative activists’ suspicion of McCain sometimes approaches paranoia. But like most paranoids, they have their evidence, too. Latent anger over his past betrayals was provoked into rage by his sponsorship of immigration reform that permitted a “path to citizenship,” better known as amnesty, or shamnesty, on the right. Beyond the issue itself were McCain’s alliances, not only with Sen. Edward Kennedy but with a broad coalition of liberal Hispanic and immigrant organizations.
More ominous still, for those of a conspiratorial bent, is the Reform Institute — the think tank founded by McCain, where senior fellow Juan Hernandez (who once served in the Mexican government) has divided his time between promoting liberal immigration policies and organizing Hispanics for McCain’s presidential campaign. As commentators in the right-wing blogosphere have noted with alarm, the Reform Institute has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from liberal foundations — most prominently the Open Society Institute, whose founder and chief funder is none other than George Soros. (Here I must disclose that I have worked for magazines that received OSI grants — and perhaps that also serves to emphasize the point here.)
You probably know already that George Soros is the Boogeyman.
E.J. Dionne:
Yet whatever divisions the Democrats face, it is the Republicans who confront an ideological civil war in which popular talk show hosts are serving as field generals determined to beat back McCain’s advancing army of Republican dissidents.
Despite his impressive victories, McCain continued to fare poorly on Tuesday among the conservatives who have defined the Republican Party since the rise of Ronald Reagan.
McCain won, as he has all year, because moderates and liberals, opponents of President Bush, and critics of the Iraq war continued to rally to him despite his stands on many of the issues that arouse their ire. And he prevailed because Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney continued to divide the right.
Huckabee became the champion of the Old South, winning in Arkansas, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama, and he nearly defeated McCain in Missouri and Oklahoma. Romney won a swath of states in the Midwest and mountain West.
McCain, in other words, lost the core Republican states and instead piled up delegates in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois and California. All are traditionally Democratic states unlikely to vote for him in November. Rudy Giuliani’s strategy, which was premised on his strength in such places, actually worked — but it worked for McCain.
Better and better.
CNN is reporting that Mitt Romney is dropping out of the race.
I don’t often agree with Mark Steyn — this may be the first time, in fact — but I’ve got to agree with him today.
The real story of the night, when you look at their rallies and their turn-out numbers, is that the Dems have two strong candidates either of whom could lead a united party to victory. Forget the gaseous platitudes: in Dem terms, their choice on Super Duper Tuesday was deciding which candidate was Super Duper and which was merely Super. Over on the GOP side, it was a choice between Weak & Divisive or Weaker & Unacceptable.
Steyn also says,
There was an explicit anti-Romney vote in the south. A mere month ago, in the wake of Iowa and New Hampshire, I received a ton of emails from southern readers saying these pansy northern states weren’t the “real” conservative heartland, and things would look different once the contest moved to the south. Well, the heartland spoke last night and about the only message it sent was that, no matter what the talk radio guys say, they’re not voting for a Mormon no way no how.
The Mormonism may not be the only thing. Four years ago, along with the swift boating, the GOP did a bang-up job characterizing John Kerry as an effete rich snot from (wink, nudge) Massachusetts. If you ask me, Mitt makes John look common, just as he makes John “Breck Girl” Edwards seem like testosterone on wheels. As Skippy says, “super tuesday has come and gone, and about the only thing that has been decided is what a loser mitt romney is.”
We also learned yesterday that southern Republican voters will not follow Rush Limbaugh off a cliff. Heh.
On the Dem side — although I don’t think the final delegate counts are established, but it still seems to be close to an even split between Clinton and Obama. Even so, some of the bobbleheads are already counting out Obama as an also-ran. Clinton won by not losing. California spoke for the nation. And, of course, Democrats lose by being Democrats. Lance Mannion writes,
The blonde, who is tougher in the mornings than I am, checked in at the New York Times website and found that Adam Nagourney has managed to see yesterday’s excitement as a loss for both Clinton and Obama. How did they both lose by winning a lot? Well, they’re Democrats, and the Democrats are divided, while the Republicans are rallying round.
I forgot one of the basic rules of Insider Thumbsucking: Everything that happens is bad news for the Democrats.
Third pot of coffee update: This Times editorial acknowledges that the Republicans look a little divided too. But the Democrats are worse divided. And of course Hillary’s being divisive.
Among us leftie bloggers and activists there’s a lot of back-channel Clinton versus Obama arguing going on in various listservs. Awhile back Michelle Obama said she would “have to think about” supporting Clinton if she’s the nominee. This has been turned into a blanket accusation by some Clintonistas that Obama supporters are losers who don’t understand political reality.
I think everyone needs to chill out. I clearly remember four years ago stumbling into nests of Deaniacs who swore they’d support no other Dem but Dean in the general election. Somehow, by November, this vow had been forgotten.
Clinton supporters paint themselves as pragmatists and call Obama supporters hopeless romantics, but in the past couple of days I’ve had close encounters with some Clinton supporters who were far more hysterical than rational. For example, one told me that a black man couldn’t possibly win in the South. (And Hillary Clinton could?) I’ve also been told Obama will disappoint me. Listen, politicians always disappoint me. I expect it. But the Clintons collectively have left me with a long list of disappointments that I doubt Obama could ever match. There are rumors Obama is some kind of right-wing Manchurian Candidate who will prove to be a Bush clone if he becomes POTUS. I say anyone who actually believes that has gone way beyond hysterical and is heading toward psychotic.
As candidates, both Obama and Clinton have strengths and weaknesses that, as the delegate count suggests, pretty much balance out. I agree with Josh Marshall:
The only arguments for one side or the other being a winner here come down to airy and finally meaningless arguments about expectations. And the result tells a different tale. It’s about delegates. It’s dead even. You’ve got two well-funded candidates who’ve demonstrated an ability to power back from defeats. And neither is going anywhere.
See also Brad DeLong and Jonathan Freedland.
Update: John Cole says,
Obama won more states, won more delegates, improved his numbers with key groups, widened his lead among minority voters, and over-all, outperformed Hillary. Period. The fact that the Clinton established machine has not been able to pull ahead should be a real clear sign of how much trouble they are in right now. This race was Hillary’s to lose, and last night she may have started doing just that. You will hear the Clinton camp talking repeatedly about winning the big prize- California. Winning California is irrelevant, as a Democrat is going to win Cali in the general regardless who it is.
I have to go out this evening, but I’ll be back and posting on results by 10:30 or so.
________________
Update: I’m back. I’m still catching up, but it seems Clinton and Obama have six states each at this point. This doesn’t tell us anything about how the delegates are being divvied up.
Obama just picked up Connecticut.
Update: OK, here are the Dem results so far, courtesy of Georgia10:
Hillary Clinton:
New York
Tennessee
Oklahoma
New Jersey
Massachusetts
Arkansas
Barack Obama:
Delaware
Georgia
Illinois
Alabama
Kansas
North Dakota
Connecticut
Minnesota
Again, the delegate count is more important, and Clinton is somewhat ahead in delegates at the moment.
Update: If anyone cares, all week the I Ching has been telling me Obama and Clinton will both win.
Update: Huckabee has won about five states now, MSNBC says. He may end up doing better than Romney.
Update: Obama has Utah.
Update: Clinton has Arizona.
Update: Tornadoes in Arkansas and Tennessee? We didn’t used to worry about tornadoes in February.
Update: MSNBC is estimating the Dem delegate count as:
Obama 594
Clinton 546
This is an estimate, remember, but the point is that it could end up being a pretty even split.
Update: I’m hoping there will be some more results after the hour (midnight EST).
Update: With 14 percent of the vote counted, Clinton is quite a bit ahead of Obama in California.
Update: Obama has Colorado.
Update: Missouri is too close to call with 97 percent of the vote counted. Whoa.
Update: Huckabee mopped up in southern states. The GOP race may be between McCain and Huckabee rather than McCain and Romney. Limbaugh’s head must explode.
Update: Clinton has won California.
Update: McCain also has California.
Update: Remember, most of the Dem primaries are handing out delegates in proportion to votes, not winner take all. So we won’t know until tomorrow how the delegates will be divided.
Update: There are hints Romney might drop out soon.
Update: I would like to stay up to see the result in Missouri. Obama is ahead by fewer than 5,000 votes. I’ll give it to 1 am EST.
Update: Obama gets Missouri, probably.
Update: Obama gets Alaska.
Update: Chuck Todd at MSNBC is saying the estimated Dem delegate count for today is
Obama 841
Clinton 837
This is not final, but we’re most likely looking at a split decision as far as delegates go.
The only Dem state still up for grabs is New Mexico. I’m guessing Clinton will have an edge there.
I’m going to bed.
Tomorrow is Super Tuesday. Conventional wisdom says the Dem nomination will not be settled tomorrow. In fact, Chris Bowers says it could be that the nomination will be determined not by voters, but by super delegates.
Meanwhile, it’s possible John McCain will sew up the GOP nomination tomorrow. Rush Limbaugh’s head will explode.
According to the McClatchy campaign blog —
It’s an understatement to say that conservatives are not happy that John McCain has emerged as the front-runner for the Republican nomination.
Radio talker Laura Ingraham today urged a platform fight to make sure McCain wouldn’t get his say on such issues as immigration or campaign finance regulation. Rush Limbaugh has said McCain’s nomination would turnoff so many conservatives it would destroy the Republican Party
Now, Human Events Online compares the early primary states that have launched McCain to the Axis of Evil in Iraq, Iran and Korea.
“The Republican Party has been hijacked,” says the article.
“Over the past month a new Axis of Evil has emerged – not one based in Damascus, Tehran or Pyongyang – but instead in Cedar Rapids, Charleston, South Carolina, Derry, New Hampshire and Boca Raton, Florida. It is the liberal and “independent†voters in these 4 states that have nearly completed a deed that makes Kim Jong Il envious -the near crippling of the American Electoral System.
“These four states have combined their native liberal populism with an imported liberal electorate and have forced the GOP to accept a nominee so distasteful that in more than one poll — the numbers of voters choosing not to vote and those choosing to vote third party actually exceed those who will hold their nose and vote for Maverick, War Hero, Amnesty Supporter, John McCain.”
Damn those voters.
Speaking of unhinged, Jim Nintzel writes at Salon —
Right-wing talking heads, including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin, have been seething about McCain for months. Limbaugh warned in January that if McCain gets the GOP nomination, “it’s going to destroy the Republican Party, it’s going to change it forever, be the end of it. A lot of people aren’t going to vote.” …
… That kind of emotional reaction to McCain, if overheated, extends to plenty of other issues: [conservative activist Rob] Haney complains that the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation “takes away freedom of speech as guaranteed in the Constitution.” He’s angry that McCain would support tackling global warming with “all those treaties that turn over our sovereignty to other countries.” And he argues that McCain “has been the darling of the press for years,” masking what he refers to as the senator’s secret liberal record. “It’s an unending litany of items that we find unacceptable in a Republican candidate who would represent Republican values,” Haney says.
In reality, McCain’s voting record in the Senate is by most measures conservative. The American Conservative Union has given him a lifetime ranking of 82 percent, although his 2006 ranking was 65 percent. Conversely, the liberal Americans for Democratic Action reports that McCain voted its way just 14 percent of the time between 2000 and 2006.
However,
… what McCain may need most to overcome the spat with GOP hard-liners is the rallying cry that would accompany a Democratic primary win by Hillary Clinton.
Tomorrow’s vote may or may not clarify the will of the electorate. Ain’t nothin’ gonna clarify the minds of wingnuts.
As David von Drehle says, this is turning out to be the year of the youth vote.
If you want to feel old, just tell a group of teenagers today that you can remember a time when the Clintons were hip. There was this guy on TV, see, called Arsenio Hall, and Bill Clinton went on wearing sunglasses and playing a saxophone, and, well, no, it wasn’t on YouTube — this was before most people had heard of the Internet — oh, never mind. There’s nothing new, for today’s young people, about a Clinton replacing a Bush.
Claire McCaskill’s daughter, to take one newly eligible voter, was all of 2 years old when that happened the first time. The Gingrich revolution came during her pre-K years; impeachment was around second grade. In other words, no matter how many times Hillary Clinton intones the magic word of 2008 — change — it’s going to ring a bit hollow, because she is an eternal piece of their mental furniture.
Obama, by contrast, radiates the new. He doesn’t just talk about change; he looks like change. His person and his platform are virtually indistinguishable. Obama, like Tiger Woods and Angelina Jolie, has one of those faces that seem beamed from a postracial future, when everyone will have a permanent, noncarcinogenic tan. He has small kids and a low BMI. His voice rumbles with authority, but his ears stick out like Opie Taylor’s. His campaign is crawling with cool young people, and the candidate fits right in. We’ve yet to see Obama flustered or harried; instead, he gives off the enigmatic Zen confidence of the guy who is picked first for every game.
Being out of touch with Youth is something one gets used to after a while. I realized many years ago that, to youth, I am an alien in their world. I accept this. This is not a value judgment; it’s just how it is. In fact, I’ve reached the age at which the people who used to be the youth I was alien to are now becoming the new aliens to new youth. If that makes sense.
At The Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg posts a video in which she talks to students at the University of Missouri, my alma mater. (None of the campus looked familiar. I think it was sacked by barbarians and rebuilt at least a couple of times since I was there.) The most intriguing point made by Goldenberg is that the earliest political memory of these young folks is the Ken Starr witch hunt of the Clintons. It seems to have left them with a revulsion to scorched-earth partisan warfare, which is one of the reasons they are flocking to Barack Obama.
Older people are more jaded, which is what happens to most of us who live past Youth. To paraphrase something someone said in an email, Obama’s “post-partisan” message works with Youth and not so much with DOFHs (i.e., DFHs who devolved into geezers) because we geezers lived through the political ugliness of the 1980s and 1990s, whereas younger voters either don’t comprehend how bad it was or believe that Obama can somehow bring it to an end.
I don’t think Obama can bring it to an end. However, all things that had a beginning will also have an end, including the whackjob Right’s dominance of politics. And I think what can end it, or at least chase it into the shadows for a couple of decades, is an overwhelming crush of public opinion against it. And if the young folks can lead us to that, good for them. I’ll follow.
I’ve been saying all along that the real task ahead of us is to heal the nation’s sick political culture. This will take a Really Big Movement, not just one leader. However, it would be good to have a leader who will allow himself to be led. As Tom Hayden says,
Are we the people we have been waiting for? Barack Obama is giving voice and space to an awakening beyond his wildest expectations, a social force that may lead him far beyond his modest policy agenda. Such movements in the past led the Kennedys and Franklin Roosevelt to achievements they never contemplated. (As Gandhi once said of India’s liberation movement, “There go my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.â€)
Truly great leaders are great because they transcend themselves and become the embodiment of the best ideals of the people. Lincoln, FDR and JFK, to a greater or lesser extent, achieved this. I don’t know if Obama has it or if he’s good at faking it. However, I do not believe Senator Clinton, for all her smarts and talent, is capable of leadership on that level. If she were, I think we would have seen it by now. Although she talks about change, what she’s really offering is her proven ability to finesse the status quo, not change it.
Lorenza Muñoz writes at the Los Angeles Times,
I don’t recall ever disagreeing with my mother politically.
Until now.
Our differences are so profound that we are tiptoeing around the subject, heeding the age-old advice never to discuss politics. It has gotten ugly. She calls me foolhardy, ignorant and a traitor to my gender. I tell her she is irrational, blind and stuck in the past.
I am an ardent Barack Obama backer. She is a passionate Hillary Clinton supporter. She is 67; I am 36.
It’s a fascinating piece. To the senior Muñoz, Senator Clinton embodies the struggles women of her generation faced. To the younger Muñoz, Senator Clinton embodies the struggles her mother’s generation faced but which are no longer relevant.
I’m closer to Mama’s age than to Daughter’s, but I spend enough time with younger feminist bloggers to understand that the way younger women see themselves and their sexuality and the Cause are pretty alien from the way I see these things. But I’ve learned to shut up about it. My kids are grown, and my biological clock stopped ticking sometime in the last millennium. At this point my biggest barriers are ageism and osteoarthritis. Feminism is not my fight any more. Young women have to deal with the world they inherited, not the one I grew up in, which is long gone. I can offer young women my support and encouragement, but not my advice.
Speaking of the good old days — I have long thought that one cannot understand the 1960s counterculture without understanding the 1950s. Looked at in a vacuum, the counterculture might seem frivolous and self-indulgent. But to me it was a healthy and natural reaction to the repression and hyper-conformity of the 1950s.
Similarly, the young folks may be gearing up to a kind of political counterculture, one that attempts to sweep away the toxic acrimony and pseudo-conservative insanity of the past couple of decades. They want freshness. They want a whole new political culture. Maybe they’re naive. But, folks, they’re right.
See also Katharine Mieszkowski, “Young Voters Are Stoked.”
Update: Let’s hear it from the young folks. See also Blogdiva.
Last night’s Dem debate was between two capable people who are serious about good government. This is a stark contrast to Republican debates. I don’t have much to add to Steve Benen‘s and Noam Scheiber‘s assessment of the debate. I will say only that I think it might have helped Obama more than Clinton. Voters got to see Obama’s policy wonk side, which revealed that he is more than a motivational speaker.
And if you watched the post-debate show on MSNBC, you were treated to John Amato of Crooks and Liars, who rocked.
After polling its members, Moveon has endorsed Sen. Obama for the Dem nomination.
I won’t predict how the votes will go Super Tuesday. Truly, this election cycle nobody knows anything. Before the primaries began, conventional wisdom was that the Dem nomination would be sewn up early (by Hillary Clinton) and the GOP nomination might be decided at the convention. Now it seems McCain is going to be the GOP nominee, but the Dem nomination will be up for grabs a little longer.
However, I do want to call your attention to some articles suggesting why the Big Mo’ is with Obama.
Laura Flanders at The Guardian find Obamania in Butte, Montana:
So can Obama’s magic move Butte? Before the morning was over, I was able to ask the question to a group of local activists. The Montana Human Rights Network was holding its annual Progressive Leadership Institute in the Finlen over the weekend, and two dozen local organisers gathered around to hear the speech in between workshops on running effective campaigns and running for local office.
“It’s not that he would change anything in Butte,” said Alan Peura, a city commissioner in Helena. “But he’s building momentum that we can use to make that change ourselves.”
Although John Edwards was by my survey probably the group’s favourite candidate, Obama roused them, not by his policy promises, but by the opening he presents for their work.
“At the very least, we’ll have four years of movement-building from the presidential bully pulpit, which is the polar opposite from what we’ve had,” chimed in Jason Wiener, a Missoula city councilman. …
… Ken Toole, one of the founders of the Network and a student of the conservative movement remembers how the right came to power. Gaining the White House wasn’t the last but rather the first stage of that process. “The best thing Obama could be is our Reagan,” said Toole. “Reagan didn’t deliver a whole lot in terms of policies, but he shifted the country’s direction.”
Even from Butte, it’s clear to organisers: Obama’s not the saviour: we are. He opens a door. We push.
Rosa Brooks, Los Angeles Times:
His endorsers are right to see Obama as their party’s best hope for 2008. Though skeptics contend that Obama lacks “experience,” this concern makes sense only if you think you have to be a Washington insider to be qualified to run for president. Obama began his career as a community organizer and civil rights attorney in Chicago — relevant background for someone who will have to deal with tough economic and social justice issues as president. He was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996 and the U.S. Senate in 2004; in all, he’s spent 11 years being directly accountable to voters (that’s four more than Clinton).
Is that “enough” experience? Remember that if you never develop good judgment, racking up “experience” just tends to make you older, not necessarily smarter. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were “experienced,” and they brought us the Iraq war. Clinton, who’s billing herself as the “experienced” candidate, voted for that war.
One must choose a candidate based on the issues for which they stand, the spirit they invoke and the people they are able to mobilize. …
…I have been devastated by too many tragedies and betrayals over the past forty years to ever again deposit so much hope in any single individual, no matter how charismatic or brilliant. But today I see across the generational divide the spirit, excitement, energy and creativity of a new generation bidding to displace the old ways. Obama’s moment is their moment, and I pray that they succeed without the sufferings and betrayals my generation went through. There really is no comparison between the Obama generation and those who would come to power with Hillary Clinton, and I suspect she knows it. The people she would take into her administration may have been reformers and idealists in their youth, but they seem to seek now a return to their establishment positions of power. They are the sorts of people young Hillary Clinton herself would have scorned at Wellesley. If history is any guide, the new “best and brightest” of the Obama generation will unleash a new cycle of activism, reform and fresh thinking before they follow pragmatism to its dead end.
Many ordinary Americans will take a transformative step down the long road to the Rainbow Covenant if Obama wins. For at least a brief moment, people around the world–from the shantytowns to the sweatshops, even to the restless rich of the sixties generation–will look up from the treadmills of their shrunken lives to the possibilities of what life still might be. Environmental justice and global economic hope would dawn as possibilities.
Is Barack the one we have been waiting for? Or is it the other way around? Are we the people we have been waiting for? Barack Obama is giving voice and space to an awakening beyond his wildest expectations, a social force that may lead him far beyond his modest policy agenda. Such movements in the past led the Kennedys and Franklin Roosevelt to achievements they never contemplated. (As Gandhi once said of India’s liberation movement, “There go my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”)
We are in a precious moment where caution must yield to courage. It is better to fail at the quest for greatness than to accept our planet’s future as only a reliving of the past.
On the other hand, Gail Collins writes,
Some of the Democratic resistance to Obama’s magic comes from people who are wary of politicians who want to win their hearts. Every great candidate has golden moments when the campaign merges perfectly into the zeitgeist of the people. But sooner or later it passes, and you’re left with a tired, flawed human being making a pitch to crowds of slightly deflated citizens. One of Hillary’s selling points is that we’re pre-deflated. We’ve known her so well for so long.
See also: Richard Adams, “King or Queen?“; Thomas F. Schaller, “And Then There Were Two“; Jonathan Alter, “Why Caroline Backed Obama.”
At the Boston Globe, Scott Helman writes,
They are younger, more diverse, and less rigid in their party loyalty. More of them are women. And they are coming out in droves.
The voters who are shaping the Democratic primary race form a very different electorate than the one that awarded Senator John F. Kerry the party’s nomination in 2004. But while it is evident that voters this year are changing the face of the Democratic Party, the beneficiary of their influence is difficult to predict.
The spike in Democratic voter turnout in primaries and caucuses from 2004 to 2008 is staggering – a 90 percent increase in Iowa, 30 percent in New Hampshire, and 83 percent in South Carolina. Florida Democrats were on pace last night to more than double their turnout from four years ago, while Nevada, whose noncompetitive 2004 caucuses drew only 9,000 people, this year saw 118,000 people vote.
This is great news for America. But there are other demographic groups out there not being heard from. Like, Republican women. Emily Bazelon writes at Slate,
Gender has mattered a great deal in the Democratic race, with women tilting between Hillary (New Hampshire and Nevada) and Obama (Iowa and South Carolina), and voting in larger numbers and by different margins than men. But they haven’t been the key to any Republican victories. In Florida, tonight, they accounted for 44 percent of the vote in their party, compared to 60 percent among Democrats. …
… The virtue of a party without a gender gap is that it’s not dodging the potholes of identity politics. The downside is that it’s muddling along without thinking much about what its women want. Listening to Romney’s and McCain’s speeches tonight, I don’t hear anyone wooing the ladies. Not even in a throwaway sentence or two. …
… What do Republican women want, anyway? They support the Iraq war in far greater numbers than their Democratic counterparts. But they’re just as worried about the economy. Beyond that, and the obligatory pro-life nod, no one seems to ask them.
One suspects the loyal Republican woman, like the loyal Republican gay or the loyal Republican African-American, is so full of self-loathing she’s afraid to ask herself what she thinks.
And then there’s the ignorant yahoo demographic. New York Times reporter Adam Nossiter visits Columbia, Tennessee.
“I wish there was somebody worth voting for,†said Buford Moss, a retired Union Carbide worker sitting at the back table of Bucky’s Family Restaurant here, with a group of regulars, in a county seat that — as the home of the 11th president, James K. Polk — is one of the ancestral homelands of Jacksonian Democracy.
“The Democrats have left the working people,†Mr. Moss said.
“We have nobody representing us,†he continued, adding that he was “sad to say†he had voted previously for Mr. Bush. He was considering sitting out this election altogether. “Anyone but Obama-Osama,†he said, chuckling at a designation that met with mirthful approval at the table.
In interviews around the courthouse square, voters stuttered over Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama in matchups with Republicans, particularly Senator John McCain, whose military credentials give him solid regional armoring. Some white voters voiced outright alarm over Mr. Obama, and though he is a Christian, allusions to his supposed Muslim ties were frequent, as were suggestions that he remained a disturbingly unknown quantity.
White men, in particular, expressed general fearfulness — over a possible terrorist attack, over an unnamed threat from Muslims, over Hispanic immigrants and over the weakening economy. These fears led them to reflect positively on Republican candidates, perceived as more hard-line on most fronts.
“I think our greatest fear is our terrorist enemies,†said Waymon L. Hickman, senior chairman of First Farmers & Merchants bank, whose headquarters building dominates Main Street here.
“You get Peloski up there and they say we’ve lost the war, and that just fuels our adversaries,†said Mr. Hickman, incorrectly pronouncing the name of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
We could spend all day speculating why America’s rural and small town white men are such a fearful lot, or why anybody in Columbia, Tennessee, spends more than 30 seconds a year worrying about terrorist enemies. Part of the problem is that these guys get all their information from Rush and Faux News, obviously. And their heads will explode before they’d vote for either a woman or a black man. These are the guys who will make John McCain a viable contender for the presidency, I fear.