Political home building --- politics of structure

I think the most powerful explanation of Hillary Clinton's actions is that she is engaged in a winner take all competition with a thin but plausible hope of victory and is working towards that goal. I reject the hypothesis that she is setting herself up for a 2012 run against President McCain after sabotaging Obama's chances. The internal political logic is too convoluted as her base is demographically maxed out in providing her net margins and it will worsen over time for her.

If each campaign was a home construction firm, most campaigns would have built houses suitable for Dennis Kucinich on Jupiter, very low floors of initial bedrock support and fairly low ceilings. The home would be good for gnomes. John Edwards built a home good for the Artic circle with strong walls and a steep slope roof to allow the snow and support to rapidly fall off. Barrack Obama's campaign has built a home suitable for Manute Bol or Yao Ming --- low floors and very high ceilings.

The Clinton campaign has built a very different house as her structural advantages and disadvantages going into the campaign were very different. She had very high floors, but fairly low ceilings, she it was built for dwarfs in a low gravity environment. She knew that she had a solid 30% to 40% of the Democratic primary electorate attached to her hip, but gaining the remaining ten to twenty points to assemble either a majority or a sufficient plurality would be very difficult. She has had little room to grow, as this chart depicting the non-Gore opinion polling trends from Pollster.com shows.



Over eighteen months of campaigning she has added roughly 20% of her initial support to her coalition. And she has not picked up too many supporters from her opponents who dropped out. Obama on the other hand has more than doubled his initial support levels. This dynamic played out as Clinton was running as a quasi-incumbent with significant institutional, name recognition and organizational support. She did a good job of consolidating that support into a real and viable coalition unlike Joe Lieberman in 2004, but she has not been able to grow her base significantly.

In the counterfactual of an Obama nomination and an Obama loss in the general election, even if it is seen that Hillary Clinton was an excellent surrogate and supporter for Obama, she is weaker in June 2010 than she was in June 2006 as the Clinton nostalgia is a bit weaker, the demographics of the Democratic primary electorate are less favorable, the activists will be looking for something different and her fundamental problem remains. She can attract a significant coalition within the Democratic Party but that coalition will almost certainly be matched by an equal or greater anti-Clinton coalition. She knew that going into this cycle that would be the case, and her counter-plan to it was to run against multiple anti-Clintons, have them split the vote, win Iowa and New Hampshire to set up an information cascade in her favor and close out on Super Tuesday against one or more weakened opponents. Not a bad plan but reality intervened.

2012 is an absurd theory when the structure of the Democratic primary universe is less favorable than 2008 for Hillary Clinton.

I was not planning to write more on this subject, but 3,000 hits later, it is evident that people wanted to read some more.

Pennsylvania Delegate Spreads by District

As Pennsylvania's primary creeps closer, more and more people will be making delegate predictions. I would like us to focus on what the key values are for the different districts. Using GreenPapers as my starting point, I calculated the following cut-off points for Candidate X to receive Y net pledged delegates by district in Pennsylvania. I am also using the 85% rule so that if a candidate wins 85% of the popular vote in a Congressional District, they win all the available pledged delegates even if using the formula of the larger remainder, their opponent would have been entitled to one pledged delegate. Any errors of calculation are mine and mine alone.

More than words

By Libby [Updated]

Well my colleagues have been burning up the blog with their hot posts today so I'm just going to direct to you Spencer Ackerman's article based on interviews with Obama's foreign policy team. I found it through Media Matt, whom I think was impressed. Spencer was clearly impressed and it raised my respect for Obama, and even, dare I say, raised my hope that maybe he really means all that inspiring rhetoric about change and has the courage to follow through on it.

Of course, there's no sure way to predict what any candidate will do once they win, but I think it's the must read of the day for anybody who thinks Obama lacks substance.

Update: To be clear, but I wasn't so much impressed with his team. They actually scare me a bit. But then so does everybody's team. Too many old school conventional wisdom types for me.

I do like that his team at least seems to be somewhat diversified but that isn't what impressed me either. What impressed me was that he assembled a smart team but rejected their political counsel to back off from the "ending the mindset" messaging as being too politically dangerous.

I think his instincts on this are good and I'm almost believing that he's sincere about trying to do it after reading this piece.

Obama Off Public Financing Hook

By Cernig

TPM notes that McCain has just blown past the public financing cap set by the FEC, by over $4 million.

So it turns out that those that said Obama should just call McCain's bluff and wait him out, in full and certain knowledge that the Straight Talk Express was just the Little Engine Who Wouldn't, were correct. My apologies for doubting them.

And the game continues to be played the old-fashioned way, despite the maverick and the changer. But wouldn't it perhaps have been nice to see a fully public-financed and clean campaign in which both parties also pledged to eschew 527 attack ads? Ah well, in a different dimension perhaps.

Pastor Gate

by shamanic

Look, without wading into the intraparty and apparently intrablogospheric war that's happening right now, I just want to tell you how bizarre I find the whole Jeremiah Wright flap. I live in the south where, let's face it, the pastors make their living by demonizing me for being gay. Black and white. There are certainly liberal churches and liberal churchgoers, but there's an incredibly ugly strain of Christianity that lives alongside me, and I don't think you can be a queer southerner without learning to tune the jackasses out.

So I have to wonder what would happen if some of these white, conservative preachers got their sermons from before Georgia's anti-gay marriage amendment passed up on YouTube. Would it shock America to learn how much hatred of gays flows out of Christian pulpits?

Probably not, but as long as it's a white person saying it we can marginalize him as a religious wacko and go about our business. Only when it's a black pastor is the issue one of "hatred of America." A lot of these people want the Constitution replaced with some Biblical document.

By definition, a lot of these people, black and white, hate America because they hate the freedoms that let people live lives of which they don't approve. That's the simple fact of the matter, black and white, and as a freedom loving American, I think they're entitled to their opinion, but don't make this something it isn't. Preachers say all kinds of screwed up things in their pulpits, just like the rest of us do in our day to day lives. Black and white, there's a lot of animosity toward what most of us think of as living. Black and white, there's a lot of hatred pouring from the church doors.

Glad we live here and not some banana republic....

Otherwise I would have to be concerned that government collected information and resources could be used for political purposes. But since we live here, I don't care if the President can authorize on his say so wiretaps, or have investigators look at my e-mail, or low level contractors take a look at my passport files (how uninteresting that one is, except for the picture as it was taken during my Amish beard look-alike period). Nahhh... no need to worry, we can just trust them.

So I'll accept it as an honest mistake and imprudent personal curiousity when Barack Obama's passport files were repeatedly opened by unauthorized indviduals just as the campaign season was heating up.

Two State Department employees were fired and a third has been disciplined for improperly accessing Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's passport file, the State Department announced Thursday night.

Senior Department officials said they learned of the incidents only when a reporter made an inquiry Thursday afternoon. They said an initial investigation indicated the employees - all of whom worked on contract - were motivated by "imprudent curiosity."....

After seven years of being a paradigm of ethics and virtue, I trust everything that comes out of a Federal official's mouth. When have they failed to utter the complete truth in a comprehensive context... never... and when I see that passport records have been opened by unauthorized personnel in the past, it must have been an honest mistake...

The computer monitoring system, which focuses on politicians and celebrities, was put in place in recent years after the State Department became embroiled in a scandal involving the access of the passport records of Bill Clinton in 1992, when he was the Democratic presidential candidate.

Can't be a pattern here as that would require me to believe that government power is used politically, and we know that the Bush Administration never does that. It is just random luck that two charismatic, young, successful Democratic politicians have seen the State Department screw up on their own internal security procedures by having unauthorized individuals access their files in the midst of their presidential bids... just blind luck....

Murtha's Endorsement of Clinton

Hillary Clinton's superdelegate endorsement drought ended today when she scored an expected but needed coup in picking up the endorsement of John Murtha, Democratic Congressman who represents PA-12. PA-12 is an Appalachia district that is a bit convoluted in shape as it takes in the eastern and southern reaches of the Pittsburgh city region.



Murtha's district is a five pledged delegate district. It is also a fairly conservative Democratic district with a small African American population, and a small creative class population. It is an area of Pennslyvania that is similiar to the west of I-81 which is where Clinton cleaned up in the Virginia primary. I would be shocked if Obama only loses this district by 18 points which is what he needs to do to hold the district to a 3:2 split for Clinton.

Murtha is throwing his support in the same direction as his distrct. Not a big surprise.

Race in America

by shamanic

I'm listening to Obama's speech on Race in America right now and I'm pretty damn excited that there's a leader on the scene who will be able to initiate and encourage this discussion.

I feel like I have been very fortunate to have a particular window into African American culture through my participation in poetry slam. Slam is an arena where marginalized voices are welcomed and their talents nurtured by like minded artists. As many glowing things as I can say about it, I can also say that as a white poet in the scene, at event after event, I feel challenged to confront my own assumptions and (I'll be generous to myself here and put it in quotes) "racist" habits of thinking. I describe myself as anti-racist, which is really almost the opposite of trying to argue that I'm "not racist." I interact with people of color constantly. I see my own internal thought processes playing out all the time. I wish I could be free of racism. Since I'm not, I am anti-racist, beginning with myself.

Obama is a leader for the anti-racists among us. He can confidently address race and the still unhealed wounds of race in America, apparently without laying blame at the feet of one side or another. As a white person, I'm well aware of the culpability of my ancestors and those like them in past racism. I fight my own culpability in the present, however imperfectly. It looks like those of us who do that with consciousness and awareness are about to be able to point to the White House and say, "Yeah, that guy: He gets us."

Encourage the Conservative ID

Kevin Drum is looking at the National Review's Corner reaction to the Obama speech this morning, and is making a political error of grievious magnitude:

See? Barack Obama's just another race hustler. I suspect that the "official" conservative reaction in columns and op-eds will be more restrained, but the longer that race stays front and center in the campaign, the more time the real conservative id will have to ooze into the forefront. Obama can't be looking forward to that. [my emphasis]

In the past couple of years, one of the most reliable indicators of a winning Democratic issue is when the conservative movement ID is at the forefront of the public debate. It is ugly, repulsive and oozing with pus, and it alienates marginally attached Republican voters and winnable for the GOP Independent and Democratic voters. We want more of the conservative Id in the forefront of the conversation.

It is the same analysis that would have led one to conclude that caving in on Schiavo was a good idea. Instead the American public reacted harshly against this massive federal inteferernce into a painful and personal decision process.

It is the same analysis that would have led one to cower as the economic Id of the GOP was on full display during the privatize and destroy Social Security debate. Contrasting this Hobbesian vision with a collective security provided by the common effort led to a rapid squandering of any political capital that Bush may have thought he possessed for overt actions.

It is the same analysis that has made anti-immigration rhetoric the tough new thing from both the GOP and the DLC wing of the Democratic Party despite knowing that this rhetoric will piss off a massive and growing swing voting bloc. And also despite significant evidence that this rhetoric is not moving exisiting voters effectively into the anti-immigrants' camp.

It is the same analysis that has encouraged Democrats to cave on any national security fight until recently. It is the analysis that has given rise to massive liberal, progressive and activist disenchantment with our nominal politcal leadership. The conservative Id will try to insist that the boogey man hides under every bed and will robocall and attack ad alive any Democrat who opposes them but give a pass to collaborators.

The conservative Id is ineffective and counterproductive to advancing the GOP's political fortunes, and it is not something that should inspire fear in Democrats. Instead it should be welcomed as a golden opportunity to create a sharp and sustained politics of contrast that works.

Can Obama win Pennsylvania?

My good buddy Kyle Moore at Comments from Left Field asked me that question this morning via e-mail. I live in Pennsylvania and I think I have a decent feel for Democratic politics around here, and I think it depends on several definitions of winning...

Can Barack Obama accumulate 50%+1 votes --- extremely unlikely, but plausible if Clinton withdraws or meltdowns

Can Barack Obama accumulate 50%+1 pledged delegates --- unlikely but much more plausible than winning the popular vote due to delegate allocation rules.

Can Barack Obama do what he needs to do to maintain his overall edge over Clinton in Pennsylvania --- highly likely.

Can Barack Obama accumulate 50%+1 votes (5% chance)
6 weeks out of the election, Barack Obama is trailing Hillary Clinton by approximately 14 points accordnig to Pollster.com's combined polling measure. He has been closing against Clinton since approximately September/October 2007 where his gradual uptrend inflected to a much greater slope. So can he close the remaining fourteen points in the next five and a half weeks? I don't think so.

We can count on Obama to continue to consolidate his African American base, as Rasmussan has him up 79-13 in this demographic. SurveyUSA has Obama winning the African American vote 76:22. If we project that he continues to win the black vote by roughly 90-10 margins, and that African American voters make up 15% of the Democratic Primary universe, then he can expect to close the 14 point gap by four net points.

He then needs to pick up a net of ten points from white voters. There is significant space for him to grow among self-identified liberal Democrats and voters who consider Iraq and foreign policy the areas of greatest importance. However there is most likely significant overlap within these subgroups. Clinton will roll-up the conservative Democrats in the central part of the state (excluding State College) and do well with the white working class voters in Northeastern and Southwestern Pennsylvania. If she continues to hammer on NAFTA and has the press throwing up its hands in frustration over how confusing the Canadian side of the story is, she'll do very well here, and Obama can not count on making significant in-roads.

I think the most likely outcome is that the Clinton campaign (which is doing a good job of organizing its likely voters in SW PA at least) will break even with Obama's ground game, and grind out a healthy six to eight point win in the state, so my call is 52: 46 with 2 points going to 'other'.

Can Barack Obama accumulate 50%+1 pledged delegates

Unlikely, but plausible (10%-15% chance)--- The distribution of support for Obama and Clinton need to be arrayed in a very precise, heterogenous pattern that is minimally impacted by both campaign's strategic interactions. RuralVotes is projecting a Clinton blow-out, but I don't think this is likely given the make-up of the districts. Chris Bowers is also projecting a Clinton delegate win but by much smaller and to my local eyes, more reasonable numbers. For Obama to win the delegate count, he needs to win Philadelphia by massive margins (PA-1 and PA-2 by 80:20 margins (unlikely, but plausible) to rack up large SE PA delegate counts, win PA-14 by 19 points for a three delegate pick-up, and then run no more than 10 to 12 points behind in all of the even delegate districts and keep it within 15 to 18 in the remaining odd-delegate districts so that the splits are either 2:1, or 3:2 for Clinton. He would need a lot of things to go right, but if we assume a 90/10 African American vote split for Obama, as I did earlier in the post, the base for urban blow-outs is present.

Can Barack Obama do what he needs to do to maintain his overall edge over Clinton in Pennsylvania (90%)

As I see it, he just needs to avoid being blown out in the pledged delegate count, and the popular vote. The schedule becomes more favorable to him after Pennsylvania, and the number of outstanding delegates left to be won is shrinking rapidly. If Michigan and Florida are resolved without a do-over, he'll be leaving May with a string of victories for local momentum and a very solid pledged delegate lead, and at current trends, breaking even with Hillary Clinton in the superdelegate race. He will not have hit the magic number, but he'll be much closer. In Pennsylvania, he needs to do decent and not stick his hand or other appendage into a buzz-saw in order to do what he needs. And given the past history of his campaign, I am confident that a minimized loss operation is highly likely.

Mad Mullahs To The Right, Mad Mullahs To The Left

By Cernig

John McCain has a Mad Mullah problem. He's got John "Get the Jews To Israel so we can have Armaggedon" Hagee and now Ohio televangelist Rev. Rod Parsley who McCain has called his "spiritual guide". Parsley thinks Mohammed was a demon and that America was founded to destroy Islam.

Barrack Obama has a Mad Mullah problem too. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor for the last 20 years and someone Obama has described as his "mentor" (in religious terms, that's like a spiritual guide, right?) thinks blacks should sing "God Damn America".

And Hillary Clinton's a member of a secretive Christian group comprising mostly conservative Evangelists who want to bring Jesus back into Washington - which sounds awfully Dominionist to me and accords perfectly with her Republican Christian college days.

You gotta watch those Mad Mullahs. You think it’s a religion of peace and then next thing you know, whoops Apocalypse! (/snark)

Obama likely winner in Wyoming

By Libby

I'm bored senseless with all the bickering over electability and whose demographics are better but Jeralyn reports on the early returns coming out Wyoming, where it's effectively a closed contest in spite of CNN listing it as an open primary.

Huge turnouts in Wyoming. Registration ended Feb. 22, so those turned away today are not those who decided to vote this weekend, but those who didn't arrive in time. Everyone was told to come an hour early because you had to be in line at 9:00 am.

If Hillary's latest kitchen sink strategy was working, and she is indeed the clear choice of Democrats, one might expect she would be swinging that state like a carnival ride. When I checked CNN's numbers earlier, with 48% reporting, Obama was winning by 23 points. Blogger glitched out for a few hours here though, so in the interim, with 78% now reporting, Clinton whittled that down to a 19 point deficit. I'd venture a guess that Obama will still win with a hefty margin.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions about what that means for the candidates or the party.

Wherein I Worry More About Obama

By Cernig

Josh Marshall pegs it - Obama's campaign at the moment is suffering under the Clinton assault, tag-teamed as it is by the Republicans laughing gleefully at the Dems' discomfort.

Samantha Power's resignation is just one case in point - although I'm far more concerned about her claim in a BBC interview that Obama's Iraq withdrawal policy is just flimflam than about her calling Hillary Clinton a "monster".

As David Corn points out:

Non-News Flash: Aides to presidential candidates routinely refer to the competition in harsh terms, particularly when they talk to reporters off the record. More than once, a top Clinton person has told me that s/he believes Obama is a self-righteous fraud--or worse. It was, of course, always off the record. But if I had reported any of these remarks, I could have gotten the pop The Scotsman has received for disclosing Power's comment.

The Scotsman newspaper quoted Power as saying: "She is a monster, too - that is off the record - she is stooping to anything." I would not be at all surprised to learn that the conservative-supporting Scotsman newspaper deliberately burned Samantha Power when she thought she was speaking off the record. Only those who follow Scottish internal politics would know they're not above some very dirty anti-Left tricks in election season and that ethos may well have spilled over into their coverage of the American race. It's cost Obama not just an advisor but made him appear weak and manipulable. Not good for him.

But the Iraq matter is entirely more serious.

Power downplayed Obama's commitment to quick withdrawal from Iraq on Hard Talk, a program that often exceeds any of the U.S. talk shows in the rigor of its grillings. She was challenged on Obama's Iraq plan, as it appears on his website, which says that Obama "will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months."

"What he’s actually said, after meting with the generals and meeting with intelligence professionals, is that you – at best case scenario – will be able to withdraw one to two combat brigades each month. That’s what they’re telling him. He will revisit it when he becomes president," Power says.

The host, Stephen Sackur, challenged her:"So what the American public thinks is a commitment to get combat forces out in 16 months isn't a commitment isn't it?"

"You can’t make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009," she said. "He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator. He will rely upon a plan – an operational plan – that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground to whom he doesn’t have daily access now, as a result of not being the president. So to think – it would be the height of ideology to sort of say, 'Well, I said it, therefore I’m going to impose it on whatever reality greets me.'"

"It’s a best-case scenario," she said again.

Now, only the naive expect most politicians to keep their election promises. Heck, Dubya promised more diplomacy and less militarism during his presidency. But this one really does cut to the heart of Obama's current support base and to his own claim - which is far more than just a policy promise - to be different from the usual run of political hacks.

Yet again, I'm forcibly reminded of Tony 'all things to all people" Blair, and the disasterous misadventures of Iraqi occupation and surveillance state. America so doesn't need to be taken in by that kind of con job. Obama needs desperately to restore some credibility, at least for me, if he's not to be seen as what the Clinton campaign wants to paint him as - a snake-oil statesman.

There's a possibility that the other story of an Obama advisor going off the reservation might provide that. ABC's Justin Rood:

In a new interview with National Journal magazine, an intelligence adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign broke with his candidate’s position opposing retroactive legal protection for telecommunications companies being sued for cooperating with a dubious U.S. government domestic surveillance program.

"I do believe strongly that [telecoms] should be granted that immunity," former CIA official John Brennan told National Journal reporter Shane Harris in the interview. "They were told to [cooperate] by the appropriate authorities that were operating in a legal context."

"I know people are concerned about that, but I do believe that's the right thing to do," added Brennan, who is an intelligence and foreign policy adviser to Obama.

That wasn't just a personal opinion, Brennan made clear to Harris. "My advice, to whoever is coming in [to the White House], is they need to spend some time learning, understanding what's out there, identifying those key issues," including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, he said -- the law at the heart of the immunity debate.

"They need to make sure they do their homework, and it's not just going to be knee-jerk responses," Brennan said of the presidential hopefuls.

Last month, Obama voted to strip language in an intelligence bill that would have granted to Verizon, AT&T and other companies the immunity Brennan favored. The firms have been identified in lawsuits as having cooperated with a National Security Agency program to intercept phone calls and other communications data within the United States.

What does Obama think? "Sen. Obama welcomes a variety of views, but his position on FISA is clear. He and Brennan differ," said campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor.

Now, in the first instance Obama has only himself to blame for hiring a close associate of George "slam dunk" Tenet as his intel bod. Tenet handpicked Brennan as the Bush administration's director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center back in 2003 after "consulting with Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge." Brennan had previously been Tenet's chief of staff.

That's clearly the wrong man for Obama's campaign: someone who was approved by Tenet and the rest of the Bush administration as the man in charge of all terrorist intel analysis - which in the Bush administration was always going to be an appointment where the incumbent needed to be "right" politically too.

But Kevin Hayden sees the bright side:

It’s important to have commanders in chief who seek advice from experienced hands. But it’s also critical that they be capable of weighing that advice so they can make sound decisions - including rejecting advice they consider to be flawed. Obama is already demonstrating he can reason independently on the issue of retroactive telecom immunity, choosing Constitutional support over the thin argument that telecoms thought they were acting legally.

The only compromise available is if the government assumes the liabilities of the telecoms and takes the legal consequences that someone should bear for the illegal actions it instigated. And Obama has chosen to remain on the right side of the law, which is an attribute I applaud him for.

So one cave - to the opposition - and one internal tough and principled stand. You can see why I'm worried.

Rezko and Obama - much ado about nothing

By Libby

I didn't pay much attention to this story. It struck me as one of those overblown media feeding frenzies from the beginning. In terms of any misconduct by Obama, as the 'story' unfolds, it's clear that there's simply no 'there' there. However, I ran across this item this morning that suggests the case as a whole may end up tarring everybody in sight, including Clinton.

Since the name of Chicago defendant Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko has come up in national debate, it seems fair to look at donations from other defendants in Chicago’s “Operation Board Games.”

Of the other five defendants, three have donated to the Clintons or to Clinton supporters, three have donated mostly to Republicans, and at least two have donated to Obama’s political opponents. None have donated to Obama.

This is the famed Chicago political machine folks. They wrote the book on dirty politics in that city. Plenty of grist for the rumor mill for all, on both sides of the fence. Before this is over, I have a feeling both parties are going to wish that they never heard the name Rezko.

The bottom line is there is not a shred of evidence of misconduct on Obama's part. This is just another empty narrative built on rumor and innuendo, as Glenn points out, eerily reminiscent of Whitewater. You would think that Hillary, having lived through that would have restrained herself from making Rezko a central part of her smear campaign. It's rather disappointing that she didn't.

NAFTAgate lands on Hillary's doorstep

By Libby

There's been reams of analysis on how Hillary managed to swing her victories this past Tuesday. My take is the 3:00am ad probably didn't do much but the kitchen sink attacks probably helped her in that the media magnified them. However the biggest reason was the NAFTA controversy she ginned up. Today's news brings a new wrinkle in that story that suggests she threw that bomb to win the short term battle but that now looks likely to blow up in her face.

The Canadian press is reporting that the original leak came straight from PM Harper's right hand man, Ian Brodie and more importantly, it was the Clinton campaign that contacted them with the "wink-wink."

"Quite a few people heard it," said one source in the room.

"He said someone from (Hillary) Clinton's campaign is telling the embassy to take it with a grain of salt. . . That someone called us and told us not to worry."

Government officials did not deny the conversation took place.

If you haven't been following this, Steve Benen has the backstory and rightly notes that accusing Obama for something her own campaign did will likely backfire if the press now does its job and takes the story back to her doorstep. It's also useful to remember that Harper's administration is more than cozy with Bush.

I have two immediate reactions to this news. First is that the Clinton campaign strategy shows an alarming resemblence to Rove's tactics and second, it seems increasingly clear the wingnuts have decided that Clinton is their preferred candidate and are willing to do anything they can to help her win.

Meanwhile, there are now at least four documented instances of Hillary effectively saying that John McCain would make a better president than Obama. This will only lend fuel to the current theory making the rounds that Clinton is willing to sabotage Obama, and the party, in order to preserve her chances at another try in 2012 should she fail to snag the nomination this time around.

Post-March 4 thoughts, mostly for Obama fans

by shamanic

For Obama partisans, here's the deal: Yesterday played out exactly the way the Obama campaign memo from early February said it would, except that the margins were much smaller than what could have been anticipated in early February. Yes, all of us who like Obama were hoping he'd run the tables, but he continues to have a solid delegate lead that Clinton didn't make much headway against last night.

But truly, Obama had a terrible week leading up to yesterday's votes. And this is where we see the mettle of the man: if he's able to right the ship and regain his footing, then the odds favor him and the Democratic Party in November. If he goes into a tailspin, having finally been bitten by real, stinging politics, then he has no business being the nominee.

So this is where we find out whether he deserves it, kids. And this is where he's going to prove worthy or not of the faith that I and many others have put in him in our efforts to make him the party's standard bearer this year. And if he can't take this licking and keep on ticking, he's not the guy.

I'm confident he will, and I remain confident that he is the guy. And though I've certainly wavered on whether I'd be able to support Hillary Clinton in the fall, primarily for reasons of dynasticism, the fact is that John McCain is only too eager to get a lot of American service members killed in wars that let him replay Vietnam for the next half decade.

I wasn't born yet when the iconic image of Americans boarding helicopters on a rooftop in Hanoi was taken. I'm pretty frigging tired of the back and forth between the camps of the culture wars of the 1960s. It's not the world I live in, and for all the terrible things that Vietnam was to America and Americans, I'll say this about it: We've never had to send troops back there.

So Obama will prove himself to be a winner or a loser in this contest, but I'll be voting for the Democratic nominee for president in November. As the primary race proceeds, I say only: may the best candidate win.

Vetted Interests - Updated

By Libby

In arguing for Hillary's electability, her supporters often maintain that she has been under attack by the right wing smear machine for so long that she is completely vetted. But is that really true? Is there really nothing at all left unearthed that could come back to bite her in the general? Obama comes out today and asks a question that raises a doubt. Why won't she reveal her tax returns, as he has already done?

Interestingly, I just ran across this graph that shows the Clinton's net worth. I don't how reliable this site is, but it cites public sources for the data. If this is true then I'm certainly curious to know how it is that the Clintons' personal wealth skyrocketed from just under $3 mill to almost $35 mil in the last three years.

Perhaps, it's something as simple as wise investments in Chelsea's hedge fund, but if the Clinton camp wants to demand that Obama account for his dealings with this Rezko person, then I would think it's only fair they disclose the source of their own financial gains. Anything less looks a little hypocritical to me.

Update: To be clear, I'm not implying the Clintons have done anything untoward. The point is all the candidates, including Mr. McCain, should be held to the same standard of full disclosure.

Primary vs. General Elections

Al Gore won the 2000 New Hampshire Democratic Primary. George W. Bush lost the 2000 New Hampshire Republican Primary. One would assume that if primaries are good predictors of general election results that Al Gore would have won New Hampshire in the 2000 General Election. That is not the case.

Primaries are a non-random subsample of the entire electorate and making an argument that they are good predictors of future strength in a general election campaign is a very weak argument. However Jerome Armstrong is making that argument about Ohio and Obama:

Obama has a huge electability problem in the state. He took a total of 5 counties, and lost in 82 counties. Even though he's able to rack up a large number of urban black voters he did terrible among white voters, winning just 34 percent....

You don't win a general election in Ohio if you can only win in 5 counties.

There are a couple of problems with this argument.

The first is that most Democrats will vote for a Democrat in the general election over any Republican (and vice versa) so most Clinton voters in the Democratic Primary will vote for Obama in the general, and most Obama voters in the Democratic Primary will vote for Clinton in the general election.

Secondly, the universe of voters is much larger and more diverse in the general election. Independent and non-aligned voters who are less invested in the Democratic Party are more likely to vote in the general election, and they are a bit more unpredictable than independent but functionally Democrats in voting behavior independents who are more likely to vote in an open primary.

The third problem is a strategic decision making problem. The goal of the Democratic Primary process is to achieve as many delegates as possible. We know that the delegate allocation rules gives more weight to a vote in Cleveland than a vote in Cadiz. Winning as many votes as possible is one strategy maximize delegate counts as an 85/15 split will give the winner 100% of the delegates, but it is not an optimal strategy when there are two viable candidates. Each candidate has a delegate gathering strategy, and they interact with each other in a non-cooperative manner. And these strategies are not necessarily vote maximizing strategies for the primary.

However the goal of a general election is to achieve a plurality of all votes cast within an electoral college voting group. A vote in Tuscarawas County, OH is now just as valuable as a vote in Cleveland. Furthermore, McCain's base coalition is a very different base coalition than the one to be expected by either Democratic candidate in the general election and very different than the base coalition that either candidate assembled last night. In a primary between two popular figures, there is a decent chance of stealing significant elements of the other's base coalition (Clinton seems to have done this with the service unions last night) while there is a minimal chance of Clinton/Obama stealing significant support from McCain in the 'bomb everyone to the stone age' crowd. Two very different objectives with two very different sets of initial moves and therefore countering moves.

Now if you want to argue based on a combination of demographics, policy, persona and organization, generic issue trends etc... that Clinton has a higher probability of beating John McCain in Ohio than Barack Obama, then that is a legitimate and interesting argument. But a linear extrapolation from a primary to the general election is an extraordinarily weak argument.

Pennsylvania Democratic Politics Overview

Barring anything shocking happening, Pennsylvania will matter quite a bit this cycle. Shocking!

As Chris Bowers notes, with Wyoming and Misssissippi being highly probable net delegate wins for Obama, the pledged delegate math by the Ides of March is back to where it was Monday morning --- Obama up by a significant margin but with far fewer delegates left to contest. Pennsylvania right now is the only chance Clinton has a blow-out win that has enough delegates to matter. So let's take a quick look at the Pennsylvania Democrats.

1) Pennsylvania is a closed primary state, and it is a hard closure. Non-affiliated/unaligned/independent and registered Republicans voters do not vote in the Democratic Primary.
2) Pennsylvania Democrats are on the whole ideologically about the median national Democrat, at least measured by our House delegation.
3) 'Pittsburgh on end end, Philadelphia on the other, and Alabama in the middle' or Pennsyltucky are two quick and simple ways of describing the state politically as a whole. The rural/mountain regions tend to vote conservative to very conservative while the cities vote liberal and come out in large numbers.
4) Delegate allocation rules can be found at the Greenpapers.
5) Delegate allocation rules significantly favor Obama --- very plausible for him to lose the state by eight to ten points and win the delegate fight.
6) GOTV operations are not that good in SW Pa. The machine Democrats have been fighting a long and slowly losing battle in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh's home county) with the reformer Democrats as the reformers are able to out-hustle the GOTV on lower value races. Endorsements have not been delivering the same type of punch as they used to.
7) In 2006, most regional GOTV was provided by outside organizations; the Casey-Rendell coordinated campaign just sought to flush the Dem supermajority precincts and call it a day.

Initial thoughts

1. Clinton got at least one blow-out win that she needs and one solid victory (which could maintain itself as a blow-out), and a decent delegate count pick-up in Ohio.
   
2. Quite a few of my friends and acquaintances will be getting called in the next two or three days to see if they want to do paid GOTV.
3. Clinton closed the past three days hard
4. The most interesting thing to me in the exit polls about Ohio is the tiny gap that Obama had in Republican voters. Normally he'll win that group 65-30 against Clinton, the CNN exit polls are indicating that he won this group 54:46, so instead of being up a net of 3 points ina group that is 9% of the electorate, he is up a net of less than 1 point. I wonder how much is tactical voting by Republican partisans, how much is 'The Dem Race is interesting and I could vote for her" by Republicans and how much was general economic uncertainty.
5. Cleveland coming in as a break even city was surprising
6. NAFTA killed Obama in the last three days --- unlikely to happen again
7. Clinton looks like she overperformed tonight by not getting crushed in Vermont, and doing well in Ohio
8. Obama's early voting operation will probably give him a breakeven to tiny win in Texas
9. The delegate math still sucks for Clinton