If Obama can't get elected in November, woe be unto us.
Four more years of the mess we're in now, and it'll probably only get worse. This has been my overriding worry.
And it's iffy that Obama can win, especially as a perceived elitist with ties to a preacher who is on record condemning the U.S. I can see the attack ads already. And these ads have a big effect.
Post is here.
From tomorrow's Christian Science Monitor: Hillary Campaign Advisors Wolfson and Garin say it's not that Obama can't win in November, it's that the data shows Hillary has a better chance:
At the top of the ballot, current state polling data show that Clinton would defeat Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, by 42 electoral votes, while the same polls show Obama losing to Senator McCain by 8 electoral votes, they said.
The Clinton strategists also came armed with charts looking at 20 House districts where freshmen Democrats won but which also voted for George Bush in 2004. Clinton defeated Obama in 16 of those 20 districts. Their argument: Clinton would help vulnerable House members more than Obama. Asked about the breakdown of endorsements from those 16 freshmen, Wolfson said that five had so far backed her and four, Obama.
As for how long she's staying in:
"We do not believe a nominee will be chosen unless or until somebody gets to 2,209 [delegates], which is the number including Florida and Michigan. So if that has happened by June 3, then someone will be the nominee. If that hasn't, then the nomination fight continues," Howard Wolfson, Senator Clinton's communications director, told a Monitor-sponsored breakfast on Friday.
We are not oblivious to the environment in which we are operating. But this is very much like a tennis match," Clinton's chief strategist, Geoff Garin, told reporters at the breakfast. "Sometimes, even when people are down two sets to love and down a couple of games in the third set, they end up winning by the fifth set. So Senator Clinton goes on with the same energy and commitment."
Since the race is ongoing, and superdelegates can change their mind up until they vote at the convention in August, here are the voter registration numbers (pdf)for West Virgina.
Seems to me the critical thing now for Hillary is voter turnout. Obama is brushing off W.Va. and KY and hoping people won't turn out, thinking their vote doesn't matter. Their votes may matter. They matter in the popular vote total and because we don't have a nominee yet, no matter how many pundits, pollsters and journalists think we do.
It's over when one candidate drops out or delegates are counted at the convention in August: pledged, unpledged, add-on and superdelegates.
As for the current state of electoral votes, from my earlier post, with Obama winning N.C. but losing W.Va., I don't think he gets past 265 votes in November. He needs 270. With Hillary winning W.Va. but not N.C., her total is 317.
Remember, as to this latest month of primaries, Indiana, Kentucky, Montana and South Dakota will go Republican in November no matter who the nominee is. Only W. Va. and N. Carolina are battleground states. Oregon will go Democratic whoever wins.
The real question is who has a better chance of taking Ohio, PA and Florida? Together those three states have 68 electoral votes. N.C. has 15, W. Va has 5. Together, Colorado and N.M.have 14.
From today's New York Times.
The fight for the Democratic nomination seems to be winding down. It’s not completely over, but the odds now overwhelmingly favor Barack Obama.
Assuming that Mr. Obama is the nominee, he’ll lead a party that, judging by the usual indicators, should be poised for an easy victory — perhaps even a landslide.
Yet Democrats are worried. Are those worries justified?
Before I try to answer that question, let’s talk about those indicators.
Political scientists, by and large, believe that what happens on the campaign trail, while it gives talking heads something to talk about, is more or less irrelevant to what happens on Election Day. Instead, they place their faith in statistical analyses that identify three main determinants of presidential voting.
First, votes are affected by the state of the economy — mainly economic performance in the year or so preceding the election.
Second, the approval rating of the current president strongly affects his party’s ability to hold power.
Third, the electorate seems to suffer from an eight-year itch: parties rarely manage to hold the White House for more than two terms in a row.
This year, all of these factors strongly favor the Democrats. Indeed, the Democratic Party hasn’t enjoyed this favorable a political environment since 1964. Robert Erikson, a political scientist at Columbia, tells me: “It would be difficult to find any serious indicator that does not point to a Democratic victory in 2008.”
What about polls that still seem to give John McCain a good chance of winning? Pay no attention, say the experts: general election polls this early tell you almost nothing about what will happen in November. Remember 1992: as late as June, Gallup put Ross Perot in first place, Bill Clinton in third.
There’s just one thing that should give Democrats pause — but it’s a big one: the fight for the nomination has divided the party along class and race lines in a way that I believe is unprecedented, at least in modern times.
Ironically, much of Mr. Obama’s initial appeal was the hope that he could transcend these divisions. At first, voting patterns seemed consistent with this hope. In February, for example, he received the support of half of Virginia’s white voters as well as that of a huge majority of African-Americans.
But this week, Mr. Obama, while continuing to win huge African-American majorities, lost North Carolina whites by 23 points, Indiana whites by 22 points. Mr. Obama’s white support continues to be concentrated among the highly educated; there was little in Tuesday’s results to suggest that his problems with working-class whites have significantly diminished.
Discussions of how and why Mr. Obama’s support narrowed over time have a Rashomon-like quality: different observers see very different truths. But at this point it doesn’t matter whose fault it was. What does matter is that Mr. Obama appears to have won the nomination with a deep but narrow base consisting of African-Americans and highly educated whites. And now he needs to bring Democrats who opposed him back into the fold.
It’s possible that this will happen automatically — that bad feelings from the nomination fight will fade away of their own accord. In recent decades, Democrats have had little trouble unifying after hard-fought primary campaigns.
But this time the division seems to go deeper than ordinary political rivalry. The closest parallel I can think of is the bitter intraparty struggles of the 1920s, which pitted urban, often Catholic Democrats against Protestant farmers.
So what can be done to heal the party’s current divisions?
More tirades from Obama supporters against Mrs. Clinton are not the answer — they will only further alienate her grass-roots supporters, many of whom feel that she received a raw deal.
Nor is it helpful to insult the groups that supported Mrs. Clinton, either by suggesting that racism was their only motivation or by minimizing their importance.
After the Pennsylvania primary, David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, airily dismissed concerns about working-class whites, saying that they have “gone to the Republican nominee for many elections.” On Tuesday night, Donna Brazile, the Democratic strategist, declared that “we don’t have to just rely on white blue-collar voters and Hispanics.” That sort of thing has to stop.
One thing the Democrats definitely need to do is give delegates from Florida and Michigan — representatives of citizens who voted in good faith, and whose support the party may well need this November — seats at the convention.
And to the extent that campaigning matters, Mr. Obama should center his campaign on economic issues that matter to working-class families, whatever their race.
The point is that Mr. Obama has an extraordinary opportunity in this year’s election. He should do everything possible to avoid squandering it.
"Broad and Squishy" [Emphasis added.]
Chris Bowers offers exactly what Barack Obama doesn't need: a vision and description of the Obama movement that is guaranteed to alienate exactly those voters Obama now needs to seduce. This is painful.
Cultural Shift: Out with Bubbas, up with Creatives: There should be a major cultural shift in the party, where the southern Dems and Liebercrat elite will be largely replaced by rising creative class types.And he then goes on to describe Obama in the precise manner the Republicans will want him described- as an elitist yuppie. Bowers seems to think this is a good thing. The word "myopia" comes to mind. So does the word "solipsistic."
Culturally, the Democratic Party will feel pretty normal to netroots types. It will consistently send out cultural signals designed to appeal primarily to the creative class instead of rich donors and the white working class.The problem being, of course, that we netroots types are very much irrelevant, while the white working class remains the swing vote that will decide the election. We vote Democratic. Our earlier iteration enthusiastically voted for Dukakis, who was exactly the type of candidate Bowers is describing. The white working class didn't vote for Dukakis. This year's election will be decided in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Missouri, and Florida. I want Bowers to explain how the so-called creative class carries those states. The self-absorption of this type of thinking is truly astonishing. . . .
We will see lots of emphasis on non-partisanship, ethics reform, election reform instead of on, say, placating labor unions, environment groups, and the LGBT community by throwing each of these groups a policy bone or two. Now, the focus will be on broad, squishy fixes that are designed to appeal to several groups at once.
Um. Yeah. Because placating labor, enviros, and the LGBT community is a bad thing. I agree that throwing them the occasional bone was not a good thing, but that's because they need and deserve much more than that. Nothing squishy. Nothing broad. Very specific fixes that have to do with things like economic justice, saving the planet from being rendered uninhabitable, and basic human rights. This actually gets to the appeal of Hillary Clinton, who is, like Al Gore, a hardcore wonk. Try telling union voters that there won't be a targeted focus on workers' rights. Try telling environmentalists that stopping old growth clearcutting and coastal oil drilling, and making those responsible for creating then help bear the burden of cleaning up Superfund sites, and banning the use of the specific toxics that are poisoning our air, water, and planet aren't broad or squishy enough. And I won't even begin to address the trepidation Obama's post-partisanship instilled in many LGBTs, oh, back around the South Carolina primary. . . .
I find Chris Bowers downright insulting.
And the U.S. never had a "historical conflict with Islam"--on the contrary (I'll cite to a recent New Yorker article).
UPDATE: New Yorker article here. Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by John Adams in 1797:
As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
Poor iguana. Story here.
May 8th, 2008 POMPANO BEACH, Fla. -- Power has been restored to 20,000 people in north Broward County, after an iguana caused a short circuit. The critter came in contact with some high-voltage equipment, which triggered Thursday's outage.
Electricity was out for roughly half an hour.
The iguana wasn't as lucky. Florida Power & Light spokesman Mayco Villafana says: "It's gone to another place."
Post is here.
Politico is reporting that Barack Obama will declare victory on May 20:
Not long after the polls close in the May 20 Kentucky and Oregon primaries, Barack Obama plans to declare victory in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. . . .The Obama campaign agrees with the Democratic National Committee, which pegs a winning majority at 2,025 pledged delegates and superdelegates—a figure that excludes the penalized Florida and Michigan delegations.So let me get this straight -- the first act of the self declared Democratic nominee Barack Obama will be to state that Michigan and Florida will not count? This is insane. Two key states in November will be dissed in the first act of the newly crowned Democratic nominee. At the least, Obama should wait until he has 2209 delegates counting the existing Florida and Michigan delegations. One assumes that will likely happen by the end of the primaries barring some unforeseen event. I can not understand the logic of this approach. . . .
By the way, the Obama campaign is badly mishandling this situation in other ways. In the Obama post NC/IN memo makes two very strange arguments. The first:
With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days. While those scenarios may be entertaining, they are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or its millions of supporters, volunteers, and donors.The "wild scenario" is counting Michigan and Florida. This is simply madness from the Obama campaign at this juncture. Obama is going to be the nominee. It is time for him to think about November. The second problem from the Obama memo is its disgraceful disrespect of voters:
[T]he popular vote is a deeply flawed and illegitimate metric for deciding the nominee – since each campaign based their strategy on the acquisition of delegates. . . . Essentially, the popular vote is not much better as a metric than basing the nominee on which candidate raised more money, has more volunteers, contacted more voters, or is taller.This is political lunacy. The Obama campaign needs to get its act together on these issues at this crucial time. . . .
Post is here. (Emphasis added.)
Ed Koch says what he thinks Clinton can't say:
"I believe Obama probably will win [the Democratic nomination], although in politics you never ever can count anybody out," said former New York Mayor Ed Koch. "I think Hillary is doing a magnificent job and is a great candidate and if anybody can pull it out, she can. But my honest opinion is, it probably won't happen. And that he will be the candidate and that he will lose." Koch's argument, while never voiced in public by Clinton, is thought to reflect the opinion of the senator and her key aides.Well, Clinton's isn't saying that, but is saying she is 'more' and 'broader':
"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.
The Obama campaign responds:
...that in Indiana, Obama split working-class voters with Clinton and won a higher percentage of white voters than in Ohio in March. He said Obama will be the strongest nominee because he appeals "to Americans from every background and all walks of life. These statements from Sen. Clinton are not true and frankly disappointing."
Clinton rejected any idea that her emphasis on white voters could be interpreted as racially divisive. "These are the people you have to win if you're a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that."
Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said Clinton's comment was a "poorly worded" variation on the way analysts have been "slicing and dicing the vote in racial terms."
Political correctness on speaking about demographics has arrived, so are accusations of racism for speaking about voters in terms of their voting habits by skin color that far behind? I hope not, we can talk about a division without promoting it to happen.
Also, from RonK:
... Barack Obama is the Presumptive Nominee. "The Math" still dictates that superdelegates will decide the nomination. Whatever superdelegates decide next week, or next month, the decisions that stick are the decisions they make in Denver, in August.
HIllary can campaign like hell, or she can go into quiet mode, or she can even try to pull the Unity bandwagon out of the ditch. None of that matters.
All that matters now is how Obama fares in the next three and a half months as "McCain versus Obama" plays out in the national media spotlight.
That sounds about right.
Post is here (emphasis added). Maybe some Democrats should have thought things through instead of letting themselves get swept up in the moment.
So writes our friend SusanG (and TalkLeft does think of her as a friend) at the Great Orange Satan's place (also our friend Singer at MYDD), citing Gallup:
Obama stacks up against McCain at this point is similar to the way in which Kerry performed against Bush in 2004 within several key racial, educational, religious, and gender subgroups. That is, the basic underlying structure of the general-election campaign this year does not appear to be markedly different from that of the 2004 election.Assuming that is true, and I do have quibbles with that, it is important to remember John Kerry LOST to Bush in 2004. This is not exactly the electability argument I think I would want to make. . . .
In this campaign, I've thought Hillary addressed issues better. Health care, for instance. I lived in Germany for a year and saw how well a universal health care system worked. It appeared everybody was happy with it. As a Rotary Club exchange student, I happened to lived with rich people. I never heard one complaint from them about their health care system. On the contrary, I got the impression they were proud that anyone in Germany--including themselves--could go to the doctor if they needed to go and get treatment without any hassles. And whatever the system cost, the rich people continued to remain rich.
While I would definitely support Obama against McCain in the general election, I still think Obama's ideas are somewhat half-baked and that Hillary would be a better fighter against the insurance and drug companies in her endeavors to provide the U.S. with a much-needed universal health care system.
Obama's high-flying rhetoric and inadequate solutions regarding the pressing issues don't impress me much. As Goethe said in Faust, "in the beginning was the deed" (not "the word"). (Emphasis added.) We need a president who can stand up against the special interests and get important things done.
Tod Beeton post here.
I was asked the other night: "Why is Hillary still in this thing?" I responded, "Has Barack won the nomination? Because if he has, why is he still campaigning?" Seriously, if the nomination is so settled as many Obama supporters like to claim, he's free to just go home to Chicago. No one's stopping him. Yet it's Hillary Clinton who is the object of the ire of Obama supporters who seem to honestly believe that Hillary Clinton's winning the nomination would be tantamount to her robbing him of something he hasn't won yet. What a joke.
Democratic strategist Ari Melbers's appearance on MSNBC Sunday during an hour long Obama love-fest hosted by David Schuster was particularly dishonest about the situation:
"Senator Clinton is highly unlikely to make up the elected delegate metric, which is the key thing here, that's the count from the people who've actually voted in these states...Even if she does her best, she's going to be down in the Democratic count and there's really no way she can legitimately win the nomination at this point."The central problem with this statement is the premise that superdelegates handing someone the nomination is inherently illegitimate when in truth, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will need superdelegates to win the nomination. As you can see from DemConWatch's handy chart, there simply aren't enough pledged delegates left to put either of them over the top.
Now, of course, in the mind of Melber and all proponents of the Obama inevitability campaign, the pledged delegate count is king, which means that if superdelegates hand it to Obama it's OK, but if they hand it to Clinton it's not. How convenient. The problem with this formulation though is that there's absolutely no basis or precedent for the presumption that the superdelegates are bound to the pledged delegate leader. As Howard Dean himself has said of the superdelegates:
Their role is to exercise their best judgment in the interests of the nation and of the Democratic Party. I am confident that they will carry out that duty responsibly and in accordance with the highest values of our democracy and our Party.Josh Marshall has more on the history of superdelegates that splashes a bucket of cold water on the notion that superdelegates must take their cue from the pledged delegate count. In fact, like it or not, they were created with the express purpose of keeping this count in check.
Obama supporters say that the superdelegates as a group should not overturn the verdict of the primary and caucus election process while Clinton supporters say that it's precisely the point of the super delegates to make their own considered judgment about who the party's nominee should be regardless of the finally tally of pledged delegates. The second accurately portrays why the superdelegates were created.
In fact, even this description puts too gentle a gloss on it.
But quite to the contrary, now we have phase two of the Obama inevitability campaign wherein the very people who've been fear-mongering about superdelegates "overturning the will of the people" are now concern trolling about the negative consequences for the party if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination via superdelegate. How is that for a self-fulfilling prophecy, one borne of a dishonest and divisive meme spread by Obama supporters intended to annoint Obama as the nominee before he's even earned it. So much for an honest debate, eh? And what was that about unity? The fact is, people only believe Hillary winning the nomination is "stealing" because the very Obama supporters who are now wringing their hands about what it would mean for the party if Obama lost told them so.
But the reason this isn't as cut and dried as many Obama supporters like to claim is because of the pesky matter of Florida and Michigan. Really, how can anyone talk about Obama's pledged delegate lead as reflective of voter intent with a straight face without taking into account the intent of millions of voters in two huge states that just happen to be...wait for it...Clinton strongholds? Now people are correct, of course, to say that the rules going in were that those two states wouldn't count toward the nomination, but to pretend that a pledged delegate count that will include Guam and Puerto Rico but not Michigan and Florida is somehow reflective of the "will of the voters" is disingenuous at best. By any strict interpretation of the phrase, Hillary Clinton is the only one really advocating for the will of the voters to be taken into account, while the Obama campaign and its Obama inevitability campaigners around the country would prefer to conveniently ignore those millions of votes that were cast. In fact, if the Obama inevitability campaign had its way, Hillary would have dropped out before voters in Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana plus all states in between and beyond had voted. In other words, people voting is merely an inconvenience to them because it just delays an inevitable Obama nomination. The inconvenient truth is that the lead that Obama currently holds in both pledged delegates and popular vote depends entirely on not counting millions of votes cast and in the absence of a remedy for Michigan and Florida, anyone truly advocating for superdelegates to reflect the "will of the people" should be demanding that they take the true intent of voters in all 50 states and territories into account when deciding whom to support.
See post here. I know I've not had a lot to say and have been linking to Talk Left a lot lately, but they've been saying pretty much what I think.
Ouch.
Paul Krugman says an Obama ad attacking Hillary on gas tax relief misrepresents what he said.
I did not say that the Clinton proposal would increase oil industry profits. If the ad implies that I did, it should be retracted.
....I was very clear when I wrote about the Clinton proposal that while I didn’t think it was good policy, it was not the same as McCain’s, and relatively harmless. If the Obama people are suggesting otherwise, they’re being deliberately dishonest.
Krugman's original column is here. It attacks only McCain's plan which is not the same as Hillary's. . . .
Krugman adds: "Just to be clear: I don’t regard this as a major issue. It’s a one-time thing, not a matter of principle…Health care reform, on the other hand, could happen, and is very much a long-term issue — so poisoning the well by in effect running against universality, as Obama has, is a much more serious breach."
As I wrote earlier today, meet the new boss, he's the same as the ones he's trying to replace.
Will Obama pull the ad?
Story here.
Praying in Pakistan has not been easy for Mesut Kacmaz, a Muslim teacher from Turkey.
He tried the mosque near his house, but it had Israeli and Danish flags painted on the floor for people to step on. The mosque near where he works warned him never to return wearing a tie. Pakistanis everywhere assume he is not Muslim because he has no beard.
“Kill, fight, shoot,” Mr. Kacmaz said. “This is a misinterpretation of Islam.”
But that view is common in Pakistan, a frontier land for the future of Islam, where schools, nourished by Saudi and American money dating back to the 1980s, have spread Islamic radicalism through the poorest parts of society. With a literacy rate of just 50 percent and a public school system near collapse, the country is particularly vulnerable.
Mr. Kacmaz (pronounced KATCH-maz) is part of a group of Turkish educators who have come to this battleground with an entirely different vision of Islam. Theirs is moderate and flexible, comfortably coexisting with the West while remaining distinct from it. Like Muslim Peace Corps volunteers, they promote this approach in schools, which are now established in more than 80 countries, Muslim and Christian.
Their efforts are important in Pakistan, a nuclear power whose stability and whose vulnerability to fundamentalism have become main preoccupations of American foreign policy. Its tribal areas have become a refuge to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the battle against fundamentalism rests squarely on young people and the education they get. . . .
Post at Left Coaster.
Aside from the usual jokers rending their garments over it, I don't find the gas tax holiday back-and-forth to be particularly earth-shaking. I already linked to two Paul Krugman posts that touched on the gas tax issue in previous posts; one of Krugman's posts was a specific critique of Sen. Clinton☼ and Sen. McCain's☼ different proposals and another was an op-ed where he again mentions the gas tax issue in a broader context. I agree with Krugman's view that Sen. Clinton's proposal is "pointless, not evil".
All politicians pander and I've never said Sen. Clinton is above pandering. That said, her proposal has been misrepresented or distorted by the Obama campaign (see here and here) and by some in the media (see here). Sen. Obama's☼ own history of pandering and his repeated voting in favor of a gas tax holiday in 2000 (when gas prices were much lower) make his current pronouncements on this matter, um, amusing. Some other posts on this topic worth reading: . . . [Go read them]
These are native to the area and they are gorgeous. Landscape architects love them. The yellow-flowering variety was used extensively in the design of a nearby shopping center that opened a few years ago (with a Starbucks, a Ben & Jerry's and a Jamba Juice).
Last weekend I'd opined the trees were going out of their annual blooming season, but it turns out they were just entering it. I took these shots today (including one of the tree that sits in the street outside my building). (That "North Miami Beach Welcomes You" sign is something new on U.S. 1.)
These Fox videos don't appear to link any longer. I'll try to get the videos from YouTube. Sorry.
