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Barack Obama slams the Rev. Wright, Clinton's gas-tax plan receives
jeers, and Indiana is still a tossup, all of which brings Clinton down
0.3 points to 12.6 percent.
Obama's decision to
cut Wright loose Tuesday was an investment in the future: Let the story
dominate news for one more day, then hope it tapers off. In a press
conference, Obama said he's "outraged" at Wright's recent remarks about
Louis Farrakhan, the government inventing AIDS, and U.S. military
efforts being equivalent to terrorism. These comments "should be
denounced," Obama said, adding, "I do not see the relationship being
the same after this."
It's too early to say whether this move
defuses the Wright issue. Now that Wright got a taste of the
spotlight, he probably doesn't want to go away. (Obama had better hope
Wright's book tour happens after
Nov. 5.) But at least Obama can dissociate himself fully from his
pastor, as opposed to upholding the earlier wishy-washy (some would say
nuanced) disown-the-words-but-not-the-man stance he articulated in his
Philadelphia speech last month.
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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For those Democrats who worry that the protracted primary battle is exposing deep divides in the party’s base, Republican-style winner-take-all primaries are looking more attractive. For at least one Republican, the opposite is true: A Democratic-style primary that awards delegates proportially is looking pretty good right now. His name is Mitt Romney.
Several commentators have pointed out that, if the Democrats played by Republican rules, Hillary Clinton would hold a commanding lead in pledged delegates. (Democratic primaries mete out pledged delegates proportionally based on total votes, while most Republican primaries heap all their delegates on the winner.) Less attention has been given to the opposite question: What if the Republicans awarded their delegates like Democrats do?
To answer that question, Trailhead crunched the numbers from the earlier Republican primaries, back when Romney and Mike Huckabee were still in the race. We assumed that delegates are awarded in rough proportion to the candidates’ overall performance in the state. In reality, this is usually done on a district-by-district basis, but as we have noted on our Delegate Calculator, estimating delegates based on statewide results has a margin of error of only 3 percent.
Between Iowa and Super Tuesday, there were 17 Republican primaries that operated under winner-take-all rules (or something similar). In those states, John McCain won 649 delegates, while Huckabee won 110 and Romney won 105. Note that McCain averaged 36 percent of the popular vote, while Romney averaged 34 percent. The lopsidedness in delegates comes from the fact that McCain won big states like New York and California.
If we postulate a Democratic-style proportional system, McCain would have come out of Feb. 5 with an estimated 336 delegates to Romney’s 291 and Huckabee’s 164.
In the 12 caucuses during that same period, Romney considerably outperformed McCain, netting 188 delegates to McCain’s 55 and Huckabee’s 97.
So here’s the score through Feb. 5—two days before Romney threw in the towel:
|
McCain |
Romney |
Huckabee |
| Reality |
704 |
293 |
207 |
| Proportional |
391 |
479 |
261 |
If I were Romney, I’d be particularly bitter about California. He won 35 percent of the vote there to McCain’s 42 percent but got only 12 delegates to McCain’s 158. (The winner-take-all system is still done by district, so it appears Romney won at least a plurality in a small number of districts there.)
As the New York Times’ David Brooks wrote yesterday, the Democratic primary has exposed a deep divide in the party between urban, affluent liberals and more rural, working-class Democrats. It’s worth remembering that, just a few months ago, one of the guiding narratives in this election was how deeply divided the Republican party’s various factions were over who to support for their nominee. If the Republicans had a Democratic-style election process, those divides would be bitterly evident. It’s a strong testament to the role of election rules that we are now so focused on the other party’s identity crisis.
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Per The Hill, Hillary Clinton is requesting $2.3 billion in earmarks for 2009. That number alone doesn’t mean much unless you compare it to the combined $0 being requested by John McCain and Barack Obama.
Clinton has every reason to request a load of earmarks: She serves a big state with legitimate security needs. But as a general election candidate, a request that size—the most any senator received this year was $837 million—could be a real liability. Anytime Clinton mentions fiscal responsibility, a core part of her case against Bush, McCain could just drop the phrase “$2.3 billion.” Remember how he went to town on her Woodstock museum—and that cost only $1 million.
Against Obama, by contrast, McCain couldn’t say much. Obama has obtained earmarks in the past, but he released them earlier this year and pledged not to request more. (Obama's earmark requests for 2008 added up to more than $300,000.) The Arizona senator could always accuse Obama of opportunistically forgoing pork just during election season. But Obama could highlight exceptions to McCain’s blanket veto, such as aid to Israel, not to mention McCain’s own ethical slip-ups of yore. What might be a cudgel against Clinton would be a Nerf bat against Obama.
The Hill points out that the requests could be preparing a “soft landing” in case this whole presidency thing doesn’t work out. After all, it’s part of a senator’s job to obtain funding for local projects. But in softening her landing, she also makes her current opponent look stronger.
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Slate's Timothy Noah passes along this analysis:
“Right here, over 200 Hoosiers built parts that guided our military’s smart bombs to their targets,” Hillary Clinton says in a TV spot currently airing in Indiana. The camera zooms in on a shuttered factory in Valparaiso, Ind., formerly operated by a defense contractor called Magnequench—one of two Indiana facilities the company closed down after it was purchased by a Chinese consortium. Clinton’s voice-over continues:
They were good jobs. But now, they’re gone to China, and America’s defense relies on Chinese spare parts. George Bush could’ve stopped it, but he didn’t. As your president, I will fight to keep good jobs here and to turn this economy around. ... American workers should build America’s defense.
Just one little problem. As blogger David Sirota points out, the Chinese consortium’s acquisition of Magnequench occurred way back in 1995, when Hillary’s husband was president. Before the sale could go through, it had to be approved by an executive-branch panel called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Apparently it was, partly in deference to highly implausible promises by the Chinese that the weapons parts would continue to be built in the United States. (The takeover was also greased by participation in the deal by Archibald Cox Jr., son of the revered Watergate prosecutor and Common Cause chairman, now deceased.) In 2003 the Chinese welshed on its promises and moved production to China, prompting Sen. Evan Bayh, D.-Ind., to ask President Bush to intercede. Apparently Bush had some legal authority to force Magnequench’s return to U.S. ownership, but even Hillary seemed to concede, in a speech two weeks ago in Pennsylvania, that such a move was impractical at that late date. (“Couldn’t do it.”) The point is that no such divestiture would have been necessary had Hillary’s husband disallowed the deal eight years earlier.
Hillary’s chutzpah in flagging this issue is compounded by her criticism of the sale on national-security grounds (“They're building up their military. They want to compete with us every step of the way. And we're basically helping them.”) In the late 1990s, Republicans in Congress decided that U.S.-approved technology transfers to China under Clinton were creating a disastrous national-security breach, and conservatives tried to stir anxieties about imminent U.S. surrender to the Middle Kingdom to defeat presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000. Now, to win Indiana, Hillary Clinton seems to be saying that the wingers were right all along about that no-good husband of hers.
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In a press conference today, Barack Obama pronounced himself "outraged" and "saddened" at "the spectacle" of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s recent remarks alleging that the government invented AIDS, equating U.S. military efforts abroad with terrorism, and defending Louis Farrakhan’s denunciation of Zionism. "I do not see the relationship being the same after this," Obama said. On a personal level, it’s pretty sad—the presser looked painful. Politically, though, Wright may have done Obama an inadvertent favor. Obama won praise last month when he carved out a nuanced view of his relationship with Wright ("I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community"), but as time went on, this ambivalence dogged him. Hillary seized the moment to assure voters that Wright "wouldn’t have been my pastor," John McCain overcame an initial reluctance to attack Obama about Wright, and GOP state parties in North Carolina and Mississippi used the issue against down-ticket Dems endorsed by Obama.
Now Wright has forced Obama to put greater distance between the two men. If both the Rev. Wright and a bus had been on hand, Obama may well have physically thrown him under it. It will now be harder for Obama’s opponents to accuse him of making excuses for the excitable pastor. They’ll have to shift to asking why it took Obama so long to have this Sister Souljah moment. But that’s better than the alternative.
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The “gas-tax holiday” recommended by John McCain (and endorsed in part by Hillary Clinton) proposes a temporary reduction of the federal gas tax by 18.4 cents per gallon between Memorial Day and Labor Day. But how temporary would it likely be? Reimposing any tax once it’s been suspended is notoriously difficult politically, as McCain himself can attest. McCain opposed Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, but he subsequently voted to extend them because, he argued, failure to do so would constitute a tax hike. “I've never voted for a tax increase in twenty-four years,” McCain said, “… and I will never vote for a tax increase, nor support a tax increase.” If we accept this logic, then there is no such thing as a temporary tax cut. McCain, as a matter of principle, wouldn’t be able to reimpose the gas tax come Sept. 2. And it would be very difficult for Congress to do so, with Election Day just two months off.
But this discussion is probably academic. Yesterday, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Bush opposed the idea. Today, Bush moderated that stance, saying he was “open to any ideas.” But Congress wouldn’t likely support a gas-tax holiday, seeing as the gas tax supports road construction projects that are near and dear to the hearts of its members. Clinton's plan says she would make up that loss by raising taxes on windfall profits for oil companies, but that's no more politically palatable, either -- the phrase "windfall profits tax" brings back unwelcome memories of the Carter administration.
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A media frenzy over the Rev. Wright, a bump in matchup polls, and a key North Carolina endorsement buoy Clinton's chances 0.5 points to 12.9
percent.
The response to the Rev. Wright's speech at the National Press Club was so
negative, some papers must be prepping Barack Obama's obituary. "PASTOR
DISASTER," screamed the New York Post. The Washington Post's
Dana Milbank, under the headline "Could Rev. Wright Spell Doom for
Obama?," argues that Wright "added lighter fuel" to the
controversy by repeating some of his most inflammatory ideas. Indeed, Wright
criticized America's
foreign policy, praised Louis Farrakhan, and reiterated his conviction that the
government created AIDS as a method of population control. In Bob Herbert's
words, Wright went to Washington
"not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him."
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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After his speech today at the National Press Club, Jeremiah Wright was asked by the moderator whether he honestly believes, as he said in one of his sermons, that “the government lied about inventing the AIDS virus as a means of genocide against people of color.” That claim (which Bill Moyers inexplicably failed to ask Wright about in his April 25 interview) has been the weirdest of his various inflammatory claims.
Rather than address the substance of the question, Wright said, “Have you read [Leonard G.] Horowitz's book Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola”?
The Horowitz book, published in 1996, argues that the U.S. government created the AIDS and Ebola viruses in the course of performing cancer research on monkeys. Its author also wrote Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse, a book that purports to reveal “Bible codes hidden for 3,000 years that have major implications for personal and world healing,” according to his Web site. Horowitz doesn’t believe in Darwinian evolution, either, and he claims to be descended from Moses and King David.
Wright’s allegation about AIDS has no factual basis, of course, but medical experimentation on black Americans is well-documented. Wright today cited the Tuskegee experiment—a syphilis study in which the U.S. Public Health Service failed to treat 400 syphilitic black men in Alabama for 40 years—as an example. From there, he leapt to the conclusion that “our government is capable of doing anything.” Juliet Lapidos noted in a March 19 “Explainer” that nearly 27 percent of African-Americans believe that the AIDS virus was produced in a government lab, and 16 percent think it was created to control the black population.
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Last week we got all optimistic about John McCain’s decision to call off the cavalry in North Carolina, where the Republican Party was planning to run an ad attacking two Democratic gubernatorial candidates for their associations with Barack Obama using footage of the Rev. Wright’s sermons.
Alas, we spoke too soon.
Over the weekend, McCain walked back his suggestion that Wright was somehow off-limits. He gave two reasons: 1) He recently saw that Wright compared the Marines to, in McCain’s words, “Roman legionnaires who were responsible for the death of our Savior,” and 2) Obama said it was a “legitimate political issue.”
It doesn’t make much sense to assess McCain’s arguments using reason, since neither rationale is particularly rational. First off, Wright has said plenty of things equally or more offensive than the Marines line, never mind that Wright was himself a Marine. And secondly, what difference does it make that Obama called the issue “legitimate”? Was McCain just waiting for Obama’s say-so? If he was personally opposed before, it’s unclear why Obama’s words would suddenly change his mind.
From a political perspective, though, it makes perfect sense. Wright is political gold—the kind of ammunition that comes along rarely. So on the one hand, McCain wants people to know he’s upstanding and above the fray and all that. But on the other, he’d be a fool not to use Wright against Obama. This tension is likely to dog McCain through November. Then there’s always the possibility that harping on Wright could backfire. The moment it stops being about patriotism and starts being about race, McCain could get burned as badly if not worse than Obama.
Now there’s another GOP ad—this one in Mississippi—associating a local candidate with Obama while invoking Wright. What’s the word from McCain? So far, silence. McCain must realize he backed himself into a corner by asking the North Carolina GOP to retract the ad. When they refused, McCain looked silly, and Obama dinged him for it. He doesn’t want that story to replay itself, so better not to get involved. Hence the need to declare the issue “legitimate,” despite previous assertions.
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Barack Obama has been trying to keep the Rev. Jeremiah Wright out of the spotlight for a long time now. As far back as February 2007, he rescinded an invitation for Wright to deliver the invocation at his presidential announcement.
But now Wright is pushing back, closing his media tour today with a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Needless to say, this isn’t exactly the Obama campaign’s dream. From their perspective, any attention on Wright is bad. Obama has been struggling to win over working-class white voters—the last thing he needs is a media-driven refresher on his greatest liability. And indeed, Wright’s comeback may hurt Obama. But in the long run, it’s likely to help the candidate more than hurt him. Here’s how:
The YouTube ratio. Right now, Wright is defined as that guy you saw in that YouTube clip or looped on MSNBC. Naturally, it’s always his most heated remarks that get repeated. The more people see Wright in other contexts—on Bill Moyers, at the NAACP, at a conference of ministers—the less they’ll associate him with those initial images. It doesn’t hurt that when he tries, Wright can be charm itself.
Distance helps. In his interview with Moyers, Wright argued that Obama has to say certain things because he’s a politician. On the one hand, that argument makes the senator sound dishonest. But it also highlights that Obama and Wright are in different lines of work. As Wright said today, after Nov. 5, he’ll still be a pastor. He also challenged the idea that he’s Obama’s “spiritual mentor”—he uttered the phrase in a mockingly overdramatic voice. Rather, he said Obama is one of his members. That’s it. The more he distances himself from Obama, the more voters can see them as separate people with separate views.
The comeback kid. Wright may not be a politician, but he has a politician’s quickness—a quality that makes him remarkably entertaining to watch. When he was asked at today’s event how he feels about being an American, he diffused notions that he’s unpatriotic: “I served six years in the military,” he said. “How many years did Cheney serve?” When the moderator asked him to respond to Chris Rock’s joke that Wright is a “75-year-old black man who doesn't like white people—is there any other kind of 75-year-old black man?” Wright had the perfect retort: “That’s just like the media. I’m not 75.” (He’s 66.) It’s moments like these that could right Wright.
Changing the subject. Just as Obama turned the conversation away from Wright’s words with his race speech, Wright today tried to refocus the attacks on him as “attacks on the black church.” He discussed the evolution of black Christianity from the brush harbors where slaves convened to worship out of slaveholders’ sight through to the liberation theology of the 1960s. He reframed his own famous remarks as part of this tradition: “It is not bombastic, it is not controversial. It is just different.” This argument doesn’t excuse his most questionable comments—like, say, his claim that the AIDS virus was some government plot (which he utterly failed to address when asked about it at today's NPC event)—but it does explain the tradition from which he descends.
Better now than in October. The furor over Wright so far is nothing compared with what Republicans will drum up in the fall. John McCain announced yesterday that despite hinting that he’d leave the Wright issue alone—he asked the North Carolina GOP not to air an ad denouncing Obama and Wright—he now thinks Wright is fair game. So much for the civility race. Given that, it’s better for Wright to fight back and soften his image now than to allow his current image to calcify over the next six months. If he can go from Obama’s crazy minister to Obama’s controversial but thoughtful and witty minister, that will be a huge step in pre-empting the GOP onslaught.
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Hillary Clinton continues to have a logic problem. After her win in Pennsylvania, her campaign reiterated their claim that winning big, reliably Democratic states means she’s a more electable candidate in November. While that’s entirely possible, there’s no historical or logical evidence to back it up.
But just because it’s wrong doesn’t mean it’s easy to explain why it’s wrong. So we solicited Trailhead readers’ help to come up with the catchiest metaphors to help explain why Clinton’s logic is bunk.
You responded in record numbers and came up with some truly creative—and odd—responses. Our personal favorite one-line metaphor came from Trena Klohe, who wrote:
You may know how to saddle a donkey, but that doesn't mean you can tame an elephant!
The simplicity, yet coy vagueness of the particulars delighted Trailhead’s imagination. Have either Obama or Clinton truly saddled the donkey? Does beating McCain entail taming him or attacking him into submission? It’s the most existential metaphor we received, and we’re suckers for existential politics.
Other all-star oddballs came from Billy G. who sent in a lengthy, MadLibs-style post about FHM’s 100 Sexiest Women in the World list. It’s too lengthy to quote in full, but Billy G. was totally convincing in his assertion that Megan Fox is Barack Obama, Jessica Biel is Hillary Clinton, and Matthew McConaughey is John McCain. A snippet:
In FHM's survey [the democratic primary], a sizable minority supported Biel [clinton] over Fox [obama] because they find tattoos [reverend wright] repulsive, or because they prefer blondes [a candidate of the same race/gender], or because Fox [obama] recently made a prominent and profoundly stupid movie [comment] about vehicles that turn into crime-fighting robots [bitterness in small-town america], or because they rallied behind Biel's [clinton's] call for mandatory universal healthcare.
It gets better from there, but unfortunately doesn’t perfectly explain away Clinton’s faulty logic. Billy’s assertion was that straight men who preferred Fox would always choose Biel over McConaughey. Sure, but the differences between Fox-men and Biel-men weren’t fleshed out quite enough to take the crown.
Outside of the wildcards, the responses generally broke down into two categories—food and sports. The most common response involved a trip to a restaurant, grocery store, or pie shop that forced consumers to confront a painful decision—what to do when your favorite flavor of your favorite food is out of stock. In a nice allusion to McCain’s age, Ryan wrote:
Just because I choose green grapes over purple grapes now, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t choose purple grapes if the alternative was raisins.
True, but raisins have their own unique taste that you aren’t automatically opposed to. Plus, if raisins come out with a great ad campaign, there’s nothing stopping you from switching sides. The trouble with Clinton’s assertion is that almost all Democrats—even the ones who prefer her over Obama—aren’t going to jump ship just because of a flashy ad. The grape-raisin metaphor doesn’t pick at that weakness.
Instead, let’s turn to the bland world of sprouts, veggie burgers, and tofu. K. Richardson gets closer with his metaphor:
As a vegetarian, I may have a hard time choosing between the pasta primavera and the grilled veggie platter, but I’m still not ordering steak.
Much closer. Vegetarians have an automatic distaste and unwillingness to eat steak, which fills the void of the last metaphor. But this setup—choosing between two similar items at first, then being forced to choose the loser of the two over a totally unpalatable third item—ignores the big-state, little-state issue. For that, we’re forced to turn to the sporting arena.
The key knot we’re trying to unravel is why Clinton’s success among core, big-state Democrats in the primary doesn’t mean she’s the stronger candidate among all voters in the general election. Plenty of people tried a sports metaphor and missed the mark, but John Zepernick nailed it. I’ve edited his response down a tad.
Hillary has a good passing game (big states), but Obama has been grinding out yards on the ground all game (smaller states). … But it isn't clear that any particular game plan would be better or worse versus McCain. And even if Hillary has more passing yards in the championship game, there's no reason that Obama couldn't throw the ball well versus McCain. Especially since he has a weak secondary defense.
Spot on, but I’d posit that nobody knows what McCain’s defenses are yet. It may be his secondary, but it could just as easily be an injury-prone offensive line. As the great and clichéd sports aphorism goes, the only way to find that out is to play the game.
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On the last stop of John McCain’s umpteenth tour in recent memory—this one visitng “America’s forgotten places”—he swung through New Orleans for an opportunity to slam President Bush for his handling of Hurricane Katrine in front of the dilapidated houses of the Lower Ninth Ward. On its surface, the event was meant to look like the return of the maverick, unafraid to dis the current administration. When asked whether he blamed the country’s highest leadership, McCain replied, “Yes.” Sure, he has criticized Bush on Katrina, but never this harshly.
But come on—these days, saying Bush botched Katrina is like calling the sky blue. No one is going to challenge you. Heck, even Bush would upbraid himself if he were running again.
Since entering the race, McCain has been accused of abandoning bold stances and drifting in line with the administration. Back in 2001, McCain opposed Bush’s tax cuts; now he favors extending them. (Advisers say he’s “looking forward, not back.”) During his first run for the presidency, McCain opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade; since then, he has said he would support it. His feelings about ethanol have improved over the years, as has his relationship with Christian right leaders like Jerry Falwell, whom he once denounced as an “agent of intolerance.”
All this, combined with McCain’s unwavering support of the Iraq war, has allowed the Democratic candidates to paint McCain as Bush 3.0. So, McCain has to perform a balancing act—embracing the positive aspects of the Bush administration while distancing himself from the negative. It’s the distancing that’s supposed to earn him maverick points.
Unfortunately, slamming Bush on Katrina isn’t being a maverick—it’s common sense. Plus, it’s a subject on which McCain’s record is hardly pristine. In the wake of the hurricane in 2006, McCain said he was willing to commit “$4.2 billion, $10.5 billion, $50.5 billion” to recovery. Yet two months later, he voted against a bill that devoted $29 billion to Gulf Coast recovery, claiming the bill included unnecessary spending. Now McCain is hitting Bush without offering any specifics on how he’d rebuild the city.
Of course, this isn't really being discussed. Instead, critics are harping on McCain’s faux pas: After visiting the Lower Ninth, he said we need to “have a conversation about what to do—rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.” He later clarified that he meant the community should decide for itself. But the damage was done. If you’re trying to win over New Orleans, you don’t talk about tearing it down, whatever the merits.
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Clinton's
win in Pennsylvania changes the whole Deathwatch calculus. Back when
things were really dismal for her, no news was good news. As my
colleague Chris Beam aptly put it in early April,
her odds were like the health meter in Gears of War: It went up any
time it wasn't actively going down. Now that she's on the up-and-up
again, the adage about sharks applies: She has to stay in motion
constantly to stay alive. (Note: Apparently this is only true of some sharks.) So a new poll
that has Obama up 41 percent to Clinton's 38 percent in
Indiana—functionally a tie, given the margin of error—is a giant
inertia killer on the horizon. But continued attacks on Obama from
several fronts offset the damage, so we're only docking her 0.2 points,
bringing her to 11.9 percent.
Let's cover the bad news for Obama first: As Deathwatch mentioned yesterday, pastor-pariah the Rev. Jeremiah Wright recently gave an interview on PBS, which airs tonight. While some argue
that any humanization of Wright can help Obama in the long run, the
mere reminder that Wright exists cannot possibly help Obama today.
Wright continues to be a liability for Obama, as we are reminded by this ad that the North Carolina Republican Party claims it will run ahead of the state's May 6 primary.
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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Responding to our earlier post, Slate's James Ledbetter weighs in with a few more reasons Clinton shouldn't count on a 2012 win:
1)
HRC is not getting any younger; she
will turn 65 in 2012 and 69 in 2016. Multiple presidential bids are going to
take their toll on her;
2)
Let’s say Obama loses to McCain ’08.
Will Democratic voters really conclude that the problem is Obama (even if,
arguably, they should )? I don’t think they will. I think the standing
Democratic wisdom will be that Obama did a remarkable job on his first
presidential run, and another 4 years and he may be able to pull it
off.
3)
Leaving aside McCain’s age, in
general it is much harder to win an election against an incumbent president than
it is to win when the job is open. On this point, Bill Clinton’s election in ’92
was the exception that shows the rule – and remember, he won that year with only
42% of the vote, thanks to Mr. Perot.
Couple thoughts on #2: Obama has intimated that despite his
youth, this is his one shot at the presidency, as if to say he won't run
again. It’s a good ploy to disarm voters who argue that it’s "not his time" yet, but it’s
also hard to swallow. Even if Obama lost the 2008 election, he’d probably maintain
enough support to sustain another run.
But so would Hillary. If Obama lost to McCain, Clinton would find some
way to blame it on Obama, perhaps deservedly. In retrospect, she would be the Cassandra of 2008. Her 2012 campaign slogan would be, "Told You So." Think about the fallout after George McGovern's loss in 1972—party leaders
(and a lot of other Democrats) thought they'd taken too big a chance on the
guy, clearing the path for a low-risk establishment figure, Jimmy Carter. I
wouldn't be surprised if something similar happened after an Obama loss.
Hillary would return as the establishment savior.
Of course, it would all depend on McCain’s margin of victory.
McGovern got trounced by 23.2 points, pegging his candidacy as not
just a failure but a disaster. If Obama got beaten by a hair, the reaction
probably wouldn’t be so heated. But either way, I still think Hillary could
carve out a rationale for a re-run.
Update 3:11 p.m.: Whaddayaknow, Huffington Post has an interview with McGovern on this very subject. Turns out he does see parallels between his campaign and Obama's -- not that Obama will lose in the general, but that he'll be a victim of the same intramural warfare that dogged McGovern even after he won the nomination. There's also this fascinating parallel:
In '72, after he won the California primary and clinched the
nomination, McGovern's Democratic opponents argued that the delegation
should have been rewarded on a proportional basis, rather than
winner-take-all. It was, McGovern says, a changing of the rules in
mid-game that resulted both in the weakening of his campaign and his
limping into the convention. Thirty-six years later, he sees parallels
with the Clinton campaign's push to count the results of the
non-DNC-sanctioned Florida and Michigan primaries.
If Obama spent the summer fending off Florida and Michigan-related litigation, that's less time to focus on building a machine against McCain. Now that Clinton's case for winning the popular vote hinges on whether those two states "count," don't expect it to disappear anytime soon. As a matter of fact, they're ramping up the fight yet again.
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The Maximum Damage Theory has been floating around for some time now. It holds that Hillary Clinton knows she can’t win the nomination but wants to hurt Obama as much as possible so he’ll lose in November and she can run against McCain in 2012. So far, the theory hasn’t gotten much traction beyond blog comments.
But in an interview with the New York Times today, Rep. James Clyburn becomes one of the first leaders to articulate this view. Here’s the paraphrase:
Mr. Clyburn added that there appeared to be an almost unanimous view among African-Americans that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were committed to doing everything they possibly could to damage Mr. Obama to a point that he could never win in the general election.
Note that Clyburn doesn’t endorse the theory—he merely points out its existence.
But there’s a big problem with the notion, which is that both candidates have pledged to support the Democratic nominee in the general election. "I will do everything to make sure that the people who supported me will support the nominee," Clinton said this month. Obama also said that "the Democratic Party will come together" once the nominee is chosen. Even the spouses are onboard: Bill has said he would campaign for Obama were he to become the nominee, while Michelle Obama told ABC that "everyone in this party is going to work hard for whoever the nominee is."
So if that’s true—if the loser is going to campaign for the winner—it makes no sense that Clinton would simultaneously try to inflict damage on Obama. You can’t praise him and undermine him at the same time, at least not without the calculation looking awfully transparent. If anything, she'll have to do some serious atoning for her negative attacks on Obama in order to get back in the party's good graces.
I suppose it's not impossible that the primary will get so nasty that neither Clinton nor Obama will want to look at each other again, let alone campaign for each other. Or maybe Hillary secretly hopes Obama won't ask her to campaign for him, which would make the current negativity productive for a 2012 run. But in presidential races, unity is necessary, and necessity heals all wounds. Just ask Mitt Romney.
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Among the many assumptions swirling around the Democratic race, one has been that open primaries—elections in which independents and Republicans can also vote—benefit Obama. He’s been viewed as the bridge builder with broader appeal. But that appears to be changing. As John Judis points out in the New Republic,
[Obama] is now receiving his strongest support from voters who see themselves as "very liberal." In Pennsylvania, he defeated Clinton among "very liberal" voters by 55 to 45 percent, but lost "somewhat conservative" voters by 53 to 47 percent and moderates by 60 to 40 percent. In Wisconsin and Virginia, by contrast, he had done best against Clinton among voters who saw themselves as moderate or somewhat conservative.
It’s been generally accepted that Obama’s association with the Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers and his “bitter” comment didn’t hurt him much in Pennsylvania or nationally, because polls didn’t show any major backlash. (That is, if you’re willing to buy into the narrative that they mattered in the first place.) But those polls mostly involved likely Democratic voters. In Pennsylvania, which held a closed primary, that obviously doesn’t include independents and Republicans. So whereas those flaps may not have hurt Obama’s support among Democrats, it could turn out they hurt him quite a bit among other voters.
The test will be Indiana, which holds its open primary on May 6. If it’s true that Obama is now pegged as a liberal, Clinton may have a significant advantage. Obama currently holds a lead in the state, but again, those polls mostly deal with likely Democratic voters.
Clinton is even better off if you factor in the “Limbaugh effect”—the theory that Republicans pulled the lever for Hillary in Mississippi and Ohio in order to disrupt the Democratic race. Although again, things may have changed. According to the logic of the Limbaugh effect, Republicans voted for Hillary because they think she’s damaged goods. But now, after six weeks of WrightAyersBitterClingElitistgate, it could be Obama who they see as the more vulnerable candidate, which might lead them to vote for him. If I were Obama, I'd do as much as I can to tick off Rush Limbaugh between now and May 6.
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For the past few months, Hillary Clinton has emphasized that wins in big Democratic states like California, New York, and Pennsylvania make her more likely to beat John McCain in February. That, to say the least, has no factual grounds whatsoever. (Jeff Greenfield detailed why back in March.) The essential point: Just because women, the working class, and Catholics aren't voting for Obama now doesn't mean they won't vote for him come November. The same applies for Obama's base of African-Americans, educated voters, and young people: Just because they vote overwhelmingly against Hillary Clinton now doesn't mean they'll vote for John McCain in November. Sure, Clinton might be better suited for November because she won California, but there's simply no way to know.
A few friends and I were batting this idea around our inboxes this week, trying to come up with the best metaphor to explain why winning the primary doesn't guarantee success in the general. It was surprisingly hard. The best we could come up with:
Being a top flight relief pitcher doesn't make you the favorite to win the Cy Young Award.
Beating out all the other Idol wannabes down at the local karaoke one Saturday night doesn't mean Simon won't tear you a new one once you get to Hollywood.
Doing well in a qualifying heat for a NASCAR event doesn't mean you're going to win the race. You've got a different track, different weather, and different variables on the day of the real thing.
Needless to say, you can do better. E-mail TrailheadContest@gmail.com and submit your best metaphors debunking Clinton's logic. We'll publish the best ones later on.
UPDATE 5:32 p.m.: We're already getting some great entries, and I want to make one thing a bit clearer. We're not exactly looking for what the difference is between the primary and the general election, but rather a metaphor for why winning among Democrats in the primary doesn't mean you'll do better among all voters in the general election. A helpful hint that some readers have passed along, nicely summarized by Jack Davis:
Reverse the metaphor—it's not about the candidates, it's about the selection process of a voter/shopper/consumer—and what choice they will make given the alternative.
Feel free to keep sending the primary/general-election metaphors in, but try and tease out that other metaphorical conundrum if you're feeling up for a challenge. Also, all e-mail can be quoted unless requested otherwise.
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It must be nice to be Hillary Clinton right now. Adoring fans have
given her $10 million. The media have started to believe that she can
actually win. Jeremiah Wright is coming out of hibernation just in time
to derail Obama's candidacy once and for all. Sure, her chances of
winning the nomination are on the rise (by 1.4 points, to 12.1 percent). But you know what? She still can't win.
First, the good news: Raising $10 million in the 30 or so hours
after her win in Pennsylvania is a very good thing. It means people
still care about her, superdelegates can still trust her, and she can
still buy Star Trek pantsuits.
The money bomb is an impressive fiscal feat for Clinton. Even better,
it upstages Obama on his best political attribute—fundraising prowess...
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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We're hoping to start including more reader responses in our posts, so here's a good place to start. One reader, Mike, weighs in on yesterday's post about McCain's letter to the North Carolina GOP about its ad invoking Jeremiah Wright:
I think you've got it backwards with your interpretation of McCain's letter.
As the Boston Globe story you linked to with respect to Bush vs. McCain in 2000, it wasn't the Bush "campaign" that attacked McCain over the alleged out-of-wedlock daughter, it was "anonymous pollsters." Bush got the best of both worlds, as a result: McCain is damaged but Bush retains plausible deniability, since he could claim that he wasn't responsible for the attacks.
Obama's reaction seems on-target. If John McCain and the RNC really wanted the ad taken off the air, it would be. If they didn't want it aired, it wouldn't have been. As the party's presumptive new leader, the NC GOP wouldn't ignore with McCain said, unless it was said with a wink at the same time. Similarly, the NC GOP isn't going to want to piss off the RNC, especially since the RNC is the only Republican committee that has significantly outraised its Democratic counterpart (unlike the congressional and senate campaign committees), and the NC GOP will want some of those resources.
Rather, what you're going to see throughout the election is a replay of this over and over: non-McCain/RNC group uses racist/ xenophobic/ dishonest/ misleading/ fear-mongering ad > McCain and RNC demand that the ad be taken off the air and repudiate it > ad may or may not be taken off the air (really irrelevant at this point) > ad is replayed hundreds of times by Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, the Daily Show/Colbert Report, and any other outlet.
McCain then gets to take credit for taking the high route (which you gave in your post), bolsters his reputation as a maverick/"a different kind of Republican" and yet still benefits because the ad is still out there hurting Obama, and the best part is, now Republicans don't even have to pay for it to be aired, the media does it for them free of charge.
Its the model set by the famous LBJ ad showing a mushroom cloud with the phrase "In your heart, you know he might" referring to Goldwater using nukes in the cold war. It was only aired once by the Johnson campaign, but is the most famous political ad in history because it was so outrageous that even when it was pulled from the air, it was all anyone talked about. With today's mass media echo chamber, this kind of a strategy for getting a message out there is even more effective.
I think you're right, and I probably should have been a little more cautious about giving McCain the benefit of the doubt. Given what we've seen, there's every reason to be skeptical of candidates claiming to run clean campaigns. But I still think McCain could be an improvement. The whole "illegitimate black daughter" smear was so disgusting and hurtful that you'd think McCain would try to avoid sinking to that level. (Or I suppose you could argue he'd feel more justified doing it.) But there are other signs, too: He avoids publicly discussing his son in Iraq, even when it would be perfectly appropriate to do so. His stances on immigration and global warming are pretty nonopportunistic, too. Sure, he's a politician and will no doubt deliver plenty of low blows. And Obama could well bring out the worst in him, given his well-documented contempt for the junior senator. But on the spectrum of skeeviness, I think McCain leans toward the decent human being side. Of course, he has plenty of time to prove me wrong.
Got your own thoughts on recent items? Don't be shy.
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Hillary Clinton is screwed. Oh wait, she has a chance.
Actually, she’s screwed again. Hold up, she’s about to win!
The media can’t seem to make up its mind. Now, in the
post-Pennsylvania lull, journalists are deciding that in fact Clinton can
win. Over at The Fix, Chris Cillizza maps
out her path to the nomination. The
Wall Street Journal’s A1 proclaims,
“Clinton Win Stirs Doubts on Obama.” The New
York Times discusses
Obama’s “struggle to win over key blocs.”
Here’s what I don’t understand about all this: Clinton
was going to win Pennsylvania all along, just
as she was always going to win Ohio and Obama
is going to win North Carolina.
The only huge upset in this race has been New Hampshire. Otherwise, demographics have
decided everything. Sure, Obama is having trouble winning over “key voting blocs”
like seniors and the white working class. But that has been the story of this race
all along.
To be sure, the fact that voters aren’t coalescing around
Obama might worry some superdelegates. What
does it mean that he can’t “close the deal”? Democrats are used to having
the nominee decided early in the race, so the ongoing split is seen as a
weakness. The biggest concerns center on the fear that Clinton voters will ditch Obama for McCain. But
there’s evidence that abandonment cuts both ways. The Times piece points out that Pennsylvania
exit polls show “69 percent of white Democrats would vote for Mr. Obama in a
general election campaign over Mr. McCain; 73 percent of black Democrats said
they would vote for Mrs. Clinton over Mr. McCain.” That’s not a huge
difference.
But more importantly, the landscape is guaranteed to change
by November, and supers know this. McCain will make some dumb comments, as
would Clinton
were she to win the nomination. For superdelegates to shift to Clinton now on vague “electability”
grounds despite the delegate count would require a supreme lack of confidence in Obama, not to mention some serious
chutzpah.
Clinton’s
“path
to the nomination,” meanwhile, does exist. She could win Indiana,
raise truckloads of money, find some way to count Florida in the popular vote, and get Obama
to shoot himself repeatedly in both feet. All the while, she needs to run a
perfect campaign. But even then, superdelegates will have to look themselves in
the mirror and justify overturning the presidential victory of the first black
presidential nominee. If, after that, Clinton
somehow lost in November, would Obama’s base ever forgive them?
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Even as Hillary Clinton trails Barack Obama in pledged delegates, the popular vote, and number of states won, she has made it clear that she plans to stay in the race for the nomination. All of which brings me to this logical conclusion: It is time for Barack Obama to drop out.
If Clinton had the good of the Democratic Party in mind, she would have given up her bid the day after the Mississippi primary, which Obama won by 25 points. The delegate math was as dismal for her campaign then as it is now, even after Pennsylvania, and she was facing down a six-week gulf before the next election.
But Hillary Clinton isn’t going to drop out. There simply isn’t a function in her assembly code for throwing in the towel.
Obama, on the other hand, is fully capable of it. And if he’s really serious about representing a new kind of politics, now is the time for him to prove it in the only meaningful way left. Moreover, were he to play it right, dropping out now nearly guarantees that he’ll be elected president in 2012. Here’s the roadmap:
Obama drops out next week, stating that although he could almost certainly win the nomination by fighting it out until the convention in August, he is simply not willing to drag the party through a battle that will cripple its chances against John McCain. He then pledges to help support Sen. Clinton in her bid—with full knowledge that she will not take him up on the offer.
In one stroke, Obama will regain his messiah creds by making the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the party. His followers will be furious. The mere mention of Clinton’s name will provoke unspeakable acts. They will abandon Clinton in numbers sufficient to hand McCain the election in November.
Losing the presidency again after eight years of Bush will ruin the Democratic Party. It will become obvious that Clinton’s decision to stay in the race was the turning point in the election. The base will turn its wrath on party leaders like Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi, who failed to push Clinton out. Obama, as the de facto head of the party, will broker negotiations to install new leaders loyal to him.
McCain will be eminently more beatable in 2012. Demographics will continue to shift in Obama’s favor as his 14- to 17-year-old supporters come of voting age. Anyone foolish enough to challenge Obama for the nomination—and don’t rule out Clinton—will go nowhere. Obama’s utopian vision for a Democratic party unified around him will be complete. QED.
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I’m generally skeptical about suggestions that this general election will be more civil than most. Just look what happened to the Democratic race, which back in 2007 felt like an ice cream social compared with the GOP race. But there are signs of hope.
Today, the North Carolina Republican Party unveiled a new ad criticizing two gubernatorial candidates for endorsing Barack Obama, who, thanks to his association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is “just too extreme for North Carolina.” (Watch it here.) But before they even announced it, John McCain had sent a letter to the state GOP chair asking the party not to air it: “The television advertisement you are planning to air degrades our civics and distracts us from the very real differences we have with the Democrats. In the strongest terms, I implore you to not run this advertisement.”
It didn’t work. Despite pleas from both McCain and the RNC, the state party will still run the ad.
But the fact that McCain tried matters. One of the strongest of Hillary Clinton’s dwindling set of arguments is that Obama will be vulnerable to GOP attacks in the general election. Between Wright and “bitter” and the flag pin, he has already given them enough fodder for three elections’ worth of attack ads. So if McCain has decided not to make an issue of Wright, that’s a big deal. Presumably that means other, equally tenuous lines of attack would also be off limits, too.
Now keep in mind that McCain is no innocent when it comes to exploiting gaffes. He’s on the record calling Obama’s “bitter” comment “elitist.” (Although many would argue those comments are fair game.) And it’s possible McCain realizes he doesn’t have to exploit something like Wright—that the damage is done.
But if you’re willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, this could bode well for future campaign civility. Remember that McCain’s 2000 presidential bid suffered after rumors circulated that he had fathered an illegitimate black daughter.
Obama doesn’t seem quite ready to let McCain off the hook, though: “I assume that if John McCain thinks that it's an inappropriate ad that he can get them to pull it down since he's their nominee and standard bearer,” he said today. My guess: Take this series of events (attack, umbrage, apology, attack), put it on replay, and you’ve got yourself a general election.
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Tonight on Larry King Live: Bill Richardson. James Carville. The political showdown to end all political showdowns. A traitor versus a former compatriot. Benedict Arnold versus George Washington. Brutus versus Caesar. Anakin versus Obi-Wan. It all comes down to tonight.
Who will triumph? If the winner is judged by follicles, Richardson has the edge. These days, he's got more hair on his face than Carville has on his entire body. But never underestimate the man from the Beast of the Bayou. He's got Mary Matalin as a tag-team partner. Richardson better watch his back.
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