May 12, 2008

Why She Won’t Quit

Filed under: Democratic Party — maha @ 10:06 pm

Well, I’m back. And I see Senator Obama now has a small majority of superdelegates. Senator Clinton is persisting in trying to win battles even as she’s already lost the war.

Word is she will win West Virginia handily. Michael Tomasky writes in a muted, roundabout way that his home state has been taken over by troglodytes and will go for McCain in November, even against Clinton. Meanwhile, Obama is charging into general election mode.

The pundits continue to talk about an Obama-Clinton “dream” ticket. They seem to think this would cause the Obama and Clinton factions to reconcile. I don’t think so. I doubt the Clinton supporters would be happy with second place; I know the Obama supporters wouldn’t accept it, were the situation reversed. I understand that people close to the Clintons say she doesn’t want to be veep, anyway.

People speculate that Clinton is just staying in to get as many votes as she can because she wants to make a deal, about something, with someone. But if not the veep spot, what?

Michael Crowley writes that the Clintons may still believe they’ve got a shot at winning the nomination if they can just hang on.

Impeachment taught them that the specter of defeat could endear them to the public. It’s no coincidence that, before several major primaries, Bill Clinton emphasized that Hillary’s survival was on the line, or that Hillary’s campaign has advertised rather than ignored efforts by pundits and party leaders to force her from the race. She has styled herself as a populist largely by adopting the pose of a fighter–one battling an elite political-media establishment that cares little for ordinary people (as exemplified by her derision of experts who trashed her gas-tax holiday proposal as a gimmick). What working-class American can’t relate to feeling stepped on by the fancy-pants establishment? …

…The Clintons aren’t just reprising the political strategy that helped them survive impeachment; they’re also re-enacting certain critiques of their opponents. They believe that Barack Obama, like the ’90s-era House Republicans, has abused the system. They fume that he ran up his delegate lead in low- population red-state caucuses like Nebraska, Idaho, and Kansas with the help of activists who don’t represent average Democratic voters. After losing Iowa, Hillary complained that its caucuses weren’t accessible to night-shift workers and military personnel. At one February fund-raiser, Hillary said the pro-Obama group MoveOn.org had “flooded” caucus sites and to “intimidate people who actually show up to support me.” (It’s not clear whether Hillary recalls that MoveOn.org was founded a decade ago to defeat impeachment.) Obama wants to “disenfranchise” Michigan and Florida voters, the Clintonites say, by not seating those states’ contested delegates. Though the Clinton campaign doesn’t often invoke Ken Starr or Newt Gingrich these days, in at least one case Hillary’s people have played the impeachment card. After the Obama camp hammered Hillary for delaying the release of her tax returns, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson exclaimed, “I for one do not believe that imitating Ken Starr is the way to win a Democratic primary election.”

Makes as much sense as anything else.

Spotlight

May 8, 2008

Obama’s Fatal Flaws

Filed under: Democratic Party, elections — maha @ 7:36 am

[Update: Now I see that Armando is smearing me by misrepresenting my point in the post below. He’s done that before, and not just to me. It’s a long-standing pattern. The boy can’t stand being disagreed with. Anyway, for any TalkLeft fans who drop by here, my point was not that it is “silly” to discuss Obama’s failure to connect with white working class voters. My point is that comparing data from the Virginia and North Carolina primary results without taking other factors into account is disingenuous. I’m sure Mahablog regulars understood that, as they can read.]

Oliver Willis sheds light on the dreadful weakness in Barack Obama’s candidacy that others lack the guts to discuss: Obama gets too many votes.

Brilliant snark, that.

Today many people are comparing Hillary Clinton’s campaign to the scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail in which the Black Knight wants to keep fighting after his arms and legs are cut off. I think the analogy fits some of Clinton’s followers even more tightly than it does Clinton herself.

Pro-Clinton bloggers obsessively continue to look for chinks in Obama’s armor. One compares the North Carolina results with the Virginia primary of three months ago and notes, in classic concern troll fashion, that Obama has “lost support.” Why that might be is a complete mystery to the blogger, but the inference is that Obama is just plain running out of steam. Demographic and socio-economic differences between the two states,* plus the effects of Clinton’s ugly “kitchen sink” campaign, are not considered.

[*For example, 31.7 percent of Virginians have college degrees, while 23.4 percent of North Carolinians have college degrees. Obama tends to do better among college-educated voters.]

Apparently we’re supposed to believe that the politician who lost both states in a rout would be a better general election candidate than the politician who, you know, actually won.

In fact, the politician herself is making the same argument (via Pam):

“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.

Yes, and I think we see what it is.


Greg Sargent writes,

On the Hillary conference call, Hillary chief strategist Geoff Garin made the case for her electability in some of the most explicitly race-based terms I’ve heard yet.

Garin argued that the North Carolina contest, which Obama won by 14 points, represented “progress” for Hillary because she did better among white voters there than she did in Virginia.

Translation: Obama may get more votes, but we get better votes (wink, nudge).

Armando wrote a bitterly whining post about “the problem” he thinks no one wants to talk about — “Barack Obama has trouble connecting with white working class voters.” He does, but I think that’s been talked about quite a bit. I believe I even addressed it awhile back. Then Armando says,

Discussing that concern is a mortal sin according to the Left blogs. I for one will not play the ostrich. I will consider the problem and ways Obama can solve it.

And that would have been fine, but in fact Armando does not “consider” the problem or ways Obama could solve it. He just whines.

Kyle Moore:

Armando failed to actually discuss ways of solving it, or, for that matter, do anything besides complain about the perceived taboo of talking about Obama’s failure to appeal to White Voters, thus murdering the one saving grace of his post.

I hope Armando is ready to admit to the Clinton campaign’s colossal failure to appeal to black voters, which would be a more critical problem for a Democrat. As Steve M documents, Dems have been losing the white, male working class vote for a long time. For example:

According to CNN’s 1996 exit poll, Bill Clinton lost the white vote (Dole 46%, Clinton 43%, Perot 9%). He lost the white male vote by an even larger margin (Dole 49%, Clinton 38%, Perot 11%). And he lost gun owners badly (Dole 51%, Clinton 38%, Perot 10%). However, Clinton won the popular vote overall 49%-41%-8%, and he won 70% of the electoral votes.

Do the Clintonistas seriously think their candidate would do better with white, less educated, working-class men than John McCain will do in November? Or that Dems can win in November without the enthusiastic support of African Americans?

And the fact is that Obama has won some states that are nearly all white, such as Wisconsin. David Sirota talks about the “race chasm.”

Recall the Race Chasm graph that I published in In These Times a few weeks back. It shows how Hillary Clinton has been winning states whose populations are above 7 percent and below 17 percent black. If Democrats nominate a candidate who isn’t well supported by the black community, and that community ends up not turning out to vote in the general election in strong numbers, those states in the Race Chasm like New Jersey and Pennsylvania could flip to the Republicans, and other states in the Race Chasm like Ohio, Florida, Missouri and Virginia could remain in the Republican column (NOTE: I’m in no way saying that Clinton cannot eventually rebuild her support among black voters in a general election, just like I don’t believe Obama cannot strengthen his white support in a general election - all I’m saying is that Clinton’s current weakness among black voters is at least as important a factor in this election as Obama’s current weakness among some white demographics).

Put another way, the black vote - though only 12 percent of the total popular vote - can make the key difference in the key swing states, meaning Clyburn is absolutely right: It is not only subtly racist to generally downplay the importance of the black vote, but it is also mathematically absurd, because the black vote will likely be a decisive factor in the general election.

Call it the problem the Clintonistas don’t want to talk about.

Spotlight

May 7, 2008

Encouraged

Filed under: Democratic Party, elections — maha @ 7:42 am

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

Of Indiana, Michael Tomasky writes,

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Dylan Loewe writes at Huffington Post,

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

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

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

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

Spotlight

May 6, 2008

Obama Wins North Carolina

Filed under: Democratic Party, elections — maha @ 6:33 pm

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

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

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

Spotlight

May 4, 2008

Distractions

Filed under: Republican Party, Democratic Party, News Media, elections — maha @ 10:30 am

Joan Vennochi writes in today’s Boston Globe:

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

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

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

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

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

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

See Juan Cole for more details.

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

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

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

Bob Herbert, yesterday:

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

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

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

There’s something wrong with us.

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

Here Rich gets to the heart of the matter:

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

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

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

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

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

Spotlight

April 28, 2008

Discouraged

Filed under: Democratic Party — maha @ 4:30 pm

Sorry I’ve been a bit absent. I’m very busy, and also very discouraged. The Democratic nomination process is still a mess. The situation in Iraq is deteriorating. Civil liberties are still eroding. George Bush is still President. What else is new?

The Rev. Wright story won’t go away. Apparently the Rev. has made some public appearances that made him look crazier and, by association, Senator Obama look worse. The wingnuts, the Clintonistas and the media generally are eating it up. Conventional wisdom is shaping up that Obama had better make another statement about Wright that puts more distance between them. I don’t have much else to say that Steve Benen didn’t say already.

While American media obsesses about the Wright non-issue, the rest of the world is still reeling from Hillary Clinton’s outrageously irresponsible threat to “totally obliterate” Iran if Iran attacked Israel. Bill Kristol reveals the GOP’s Dem nominee preference by praising Hillary Clinton. See also Gary Younge, “Hillary has cynically turned to the one argument she has left: race.”

Here is a terribly sad story in today’s New York Times. Right-wing bigots are doing everything they can to alienate Muslim Americans and push them toward becoming jihadists.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, critics of radical Islam focused largely on terrorism, scrutinizing Muslim-American charities or asserting links between Muslim organizations and violent groups like Hamas. But as the authorities have stepped up the war on terror, those critics have shifted their gaze to a new frontier, what they describe as law-abiding Muslim-Americans who are imposing their religious values in the public domain.

Mr. Pipes and others reel off a list of examples: Muslim cabdrivers in Minneapolis who have refused to take passengers carrying liquor; municipal pools and a gym at Harvard that have adopted female-only hours to accommodate Muslim women; candidates for office who are suspected of supporting political Islam; and banks that are offering financial products compliant with sharia, the Islamic code of law.

The danger, Mr. Pipes says, is that the United States stands to become another England or France, a place where Muslims are balkanized and ultimately threaten to impose sharia.

So his answer to this is to balkanize and marginalize Muslim Americans and make them feel like strangers in their own country. Brilliant.

“It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia,” Mr. Pipes said. “It is much easier to see how, working through the system — the school system, the media, the religious organizations, the government, businesses and the like — you can promote radical Islam.”

Mr. Pipes refers to this new enemy as the “lawful Islamists.”

First of all, this ought to demonstrate for the dittoheads why separation of church and state is important. As long as the establishment clause of the Constitution is in effect and extended (through the 14th Amendment) to apply to the states, “sharia law” could not be imposed on American citizens even if a Muslim majority were around to impose it. But since we’re talking about the same clueless wonders who think that “separation of church and state” is a liberal plot to destroy Jesus, I suppose we’re asking to much to get them to, you know, think.

This reminds me of an article by James Fallows in the September 2006 Atlantic, “Declaring Victory.” Fallows interviewed several antiterrorism experts, and some said one of the reasons there has been no serious acts of Islamic terrorism in the U.S. since 9/11 is that Muslim Americans are not, on the whole, interested.

The dispersed nature of the new al-Qaeda creates other difficulties for potential terrorists. For one, the recruitment of self-starter cells within the United States is thought to have failed so far. Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands are among the countries alarmed to find Islamic extremists among people whose families have lived in Europe for two or three generations. “The patriotism of the American Muslim community has been grossly underreported,” says Marc Sageman, who has studied the process by which people decide to join or leave terrorist networks. According to Daniel Benjamin, a former official on the National Security Council and coauthor of The Next Attack, Muslims in America “have been our first line of defense.” Even though many have been “unnerved by a law-enforcement approach that might have been inevitable but was still disturbing,” the community has been “pretty much immune to the jihadist virus.”

Something about the Arab and Muslim immigrants who have come to America, or about their absorption here, has made them basically similar to other well-assimilated American ethnic groups—and basically different from the estranged Muslim underclass of much of Europe. Sageman points out that western European countries, taken together, have slightly more than twice as large a Muslim population as does the United States (roughly 6 million in the United States, versus 6 million in France, 3 million in Germany, 2 million in the United Kingdom, more than a million in Italy, and several million elsewhere). But most measures of Muslim disaffection or upheaval in Europe—arrests, riots, violence based on religion—show it to be ten to fifty times worse than here.

The median income of Muslims in France, Germany, and Britain is lower than that of people in those countries as a whole. The median income of Arab Americans (many of whom are Christians originally from Lebanon) is actually higher than the overall American one. So are their business-ownership rate and their possession of college and graduate degrees. The same is true of most other groups who have been here for several generations, a fact that in turn underscores the normality of the Arab and Muslim experience. The difference between the European and American assimilation of Muslims becomes most apparent in the second generation, when American Muslims are culturally and economically Americanized and many European Muslims often develop a sharper sense of alienation. “If you ask a second-generation American Muslim,” says Robert Leiken, author of Bearers of Global Jihad: Immigration and National Security After 9/11, “he will say, ‘I’m an American and a Muslim.’ A second-generation Turk in Germany is a Turk, and a French Moroccan doesn’t know what he is.”

However, leave it to the usual knuckleheads on the Right to do what al Qaeda couldn’t — turn Muslim Americans into jihadists.

See also “Obama Team Remains Unshaken.”

Spotlight

April 22, 2008

Pessimissm

Filed under: Democratic Party, elections — maha @ 10:36 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

Spotlight

April 18, 2008

Salutes

Filed under: Democratic Party, elections — maha @ 1:17 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spotlight

April 17, 2008

Brush It Off

Filed under: Democratic Party — maha @ 6:05 pm


Spotlight

April 16, 2008

Debated

Filed under: Democratic Party, News Media — maha @ 10:16 pm

I didn’t watch the debate because I’m up to my elbows in other things. I understand it sucked out loud, though.

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