Cobbloviate

"How Come You Say You Will When You Won't?"

2008-05-12T17:35:38Z

Barack Obama’s big win in North Carolina came as no great surprise to me, given the significant African American and up-scale white Democratic demographic representation in the Tarheel State. I was mildly surprised, however, by his near-win in Indiana because Real Clear Politics.com’s last cumulative pre-election poll average showed him trailing Hillary Clinton by four points, and he eventually lost by only two. This difference hardly seems earth-shaking until you consider that in five of six previous primary losses in states outside the South where polling data is available, Obama’s percentages of the actual vote have fallen short, frequently well short, of the percentages indicated in the final RCP poll averages. Obama ran eleven points behind his final poll average in New Hampshire, ten points behind in California, and eight points behind in Massachusetts. In North Carolina, on the other hand, he ran six points ahead of the polls, and in Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama, his positive margins were eighteen, seventeen, and fifteen points, respectively.

Obviously, polls can’t ever be perfect. For example, despite duly diligent efforts of pollsters to contact voters from every segment of the electorate, it’s always a distinct possibility that the opinions of lower-income groups will be underrepresented. This could be critical in southern states, where African Americans represent a much larger percentage of the Democratic electorate than elsewhere, and it could help to explain the wider than expected Obama victory margin in several southern states, including North Carolina, where some 65,000 new African American voters have reportedly been registered since January alone.

Beyond that, polls are like computer programs. What they tell us can be no more reliable than what we tell them. Even opinion polls completed only hours before the voting polls open cannot account for what happens in the hearts and minds of the electorate in the all-important meantime. Surely, part of Obama’s shortfall in New Hampshire can be chalked up to a big but late shift of women to Senator Clinton in response both to the brutal media beat-down she endured after her upset loss in Iowa and to her well-publicized, ostensibly “unguarded” emotional moment a few days before the N.H. vote.

If last-second shifts help to explain why Obama has performed better in the polls than at the polls in several non-southern states, what explains the shifts themselves? Trying to make sense of Obama’s surprising loss in New Hampshire, some observers invoked the “Bradley Effect,” referring to the 1982 California gubernatorial race in which former LA mayor Tom Bradley, an African American, enjoyed a clear lead in the polls only to come up short on Election Day. The following year, polls had Harold Washington headed for a landslide victory in the Chicago mayoral election before he barely managed to squeak out a win. In response to these and several similar cases, the pointy-headed obfuscators of the blatantly obvious quickly trotted out “social desirability bias” to describe the phenomenon of whites misrepresenting their electoral intentions because they are too embarrassed to tell pollsters, especially black pollsters that they don’t want to vote for a black candidate. (It doesn’t sound scientific enough for some folks, I guess, but where I come from, we just call this kind of behavior “lyin.’”)

It’s hard to know how much of a role plain old prevarication by whites has played in generating the disparity between Obama’s polling percentages and his vote percentages outside the South, but I’m guessing it may be a significant one. If so, this raises some questions: Why would white Democrats outside the South be more likely to say they support a black candidate and then fail to actually follow through in the voting both? Are, as some suggest, northern whites simply more sensitive to the social stigma attached to any expression of opinion that might somehow be construed as racist? I love this interpretation because it makes northern whites who try to conceal their racial hang-ups seem more enlightened than southern whites who presumably have no such qualms. Unfortunately, this thesis doesn’t quite square with the fact that, to cite but one example, the percentage of white Democratic voters who actually admitted in exit polls that race had “mattered” in their voting choice was slightly higher in Indiana than in North Carolina, and the percentage (78) of those same whites who also voted for Clinton was a whopping sixteen points higher among Hoosiers than Tar Heels. However directly it may fly in the face of enduring regional stereotypes, from where I sit, Obama’s much stronger performance among whites in states like Georgia and Texas than in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania would seem to suggest that maybe whites in the South who say they support Obama are simply more likely than whites elsewhere to really mean it. This possibility likely says less about the greater racial tolerance of white southerners as a group, of course, than the relatively stronger economic and educational bonafides of southern white Democrats, among whom blue-collar types are as rare as a full set of teeth at a Porter Wagoner concert.

In any case, with the nomination of a black candidate now a virtual certainty, Democratic campaign strategists would at least seem to have a better idea of where they stand with white Democratic voters in the South than with Democratic whites elsewhere in the country. Regrettably for the Dems, white Democrats hardly dominate the electorate in these parts. So far as I can tell, even Bill Clinton, who won four southern states in both 1992 and 1996, only managed about 35 percent of the total southern white vote. I’m eager to see how close Obama, who wants to become our next “first black president,” can come to that figure.

In reality, it will probably be white voters outside the South who ultimately tell the tale for the Democrats this November. Constructing a reliable appraisal of the party’s prospects this fall depends on whether pollsters can find better ways to assure that the tale they hear from these voters between now and then is by any means a truthful one.

This typically wise and cogent commentary was also posted over at History News Network, http://hnn.us

"Guess What Boys? We'uns Won After All!"

2008-04-28T19:24:45Z

Just when I thought I was making a little headway in convincing white folks down this way that we lost the war and it’s time to move on, here comes a Newsweek piece by Michael Hirsh that’s likely to undo all my good work:

In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee led an ill-advised incursion into Pennsylvania. His army was defeated at Gettysburg, and thence afterward Lee beat a fighting retreat until the South lost the Civil War. One hundred and forty-five years later, the South--or what has become the South-Southwest--has won another kind of Civil War. It has transformed the sensibility of the country. It is setting the agenda for our political, social and religious mores--in Pennsylvania and everywhere else. Allright! Up to now, I’d been totally stumped as to how Barack Obama got 43 percent of the white vote in the Georgia primary—with John Edwards still in the race—but only 37 percent in Pennsylvania. Now that I think about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if this could be traced to back to Gettysburg and a mighty clever plan—for southerners, at least—whereby the Rebs would push into Pa. and pretend to be defeated while trained infiltrators would slip quietly from the retreating ranks and begin the subtle program of brainwashing that, a century and a half later, culminated in one in six white Democratic voters in the state’s 2008 primary saying “race matters” to them when they pick a candidate.
These Confederate subversives have not confined their nefarious activities to the Keystone State or to politics, however. Upon reading that an American Idol contestant was bumped after singing the provocative title song from “Jesus Christ Superstar,” Hirsh saw immediately that southern “nativism and yahooism” have clearly overwhelmed northern “eagerness for the new and openness to innovation--art, or at least high craft.” In a warp-speed history lesson, Hirsh explains that “the "radical nationalism" that has so dominated the nation's discourse since 9/11 traces its origins to the demographic makeup and mores of the South and much of the West and Southern Midwest--in other words, what we know today as Red State America.” According to Hirsh, RSA was settled by fiercely combative Scots-Irish immigrants who, after whipping up on the Celtic Catholics in Northern Ireland, came over here and fought off the Indians, rallied behind frontier ruffian Andrew Jackson, and clung thereafter to "a rather savage, unsophisticated set of mores" that was traditionally “balanced by a more diplomatic, communitarian Yankee sensibility from the Northeast and upper Midwest.” Alas, as of late “that latter sensibility has been losing ground in population numbers--and cultural weight.”
Hirsh eschews (Bless You!) the argument that the final groundwork for the South’s ruinous political and cultural takeover was laid by self-exiled Crackers who flocked to job-rich northern industrial cities during and after World War II, and despite being the nation’s most reviled and ridiculed non-immigrant whites of their era, managed somehow to imbue more rational, better educated northern whites with their peculiarly depraved racial and religious sensibilities. However, he does quote yet another in a seemingly inexhaustible stream of books bemoaning the so-called Southernization of America to the effect that " the nation's population center has been 'moving south and west at a rate of three feet an hour, five miles a year.'" I must confess that, until reading Hirsh, I couldn’t quite comprehend how our country’s supposedly recent turn to the right could be attributed to the South’s population growth when so much of that growth came courtesy of whites who were abandoning the ostensibly liberal North. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why these folks turned so suddenly and rabidly conservative once they got here? Is there something in the water, I wondered, in anti-gay, pro-gun, pro-creationist Cobb County, Georgia, where nearly 40 percent of the population comes from outside the state? Thanks to Hirsh, I now understand that these relocating right-wing Yankees had obviously already been “southernized” before they got here. Why else would they have come, after all?

To Hirsh, the extent and severe consequences of South over North are readily apparent and beyond question: “The coarsened sensibility that this now-dominant Southernism and frontierism has brought to our national dialogue is unmistakable. We must endure 'lapel-pin politics' that elevates the shallowest sort of faux jingoism over who's got a better plan for Iraq and Afghanistan." (Note to Hirsh: Take a close look before jumping to conclusions about which flag is more popular in lapels down this way.) "We have re-imported creationism into our political dialogue in the form of "intelligent design". (OK. I see. It’s actually an outbreak of “Southernism” that’s the matter with Kansas.) "Hillary Clinton panders shamelessly to Roman Catholics, who have allied with Southern Protestant evangelicals on questions of morality, with anti-abortionism serving as the main bridge." (I can’t believe this was happening right under my nose. I clearly missed the emerging spiritual bond between the RC’s and their natural allies, the Southern Baptists. Hirsh doesn’t mention it, but I ‘ll bet this affinity for Roman Catholics is particularly strong among black southern Protestants, who consistently show the strongest opposition to abortion, gay marriage, etc.) "On foreign policy, the realism and internationalism of the Eastern elitist tradition once kept the Southern-frontier warrior culture and Wilsonian messianism in check. Now the latter two, in toxic combination, have taken over our national dialogue, and the Easterners are running for the hills." (And here I’d thought all along that the Ivy League JFK retreads like Bobby McNamara and McGeorge Bundy were generally encouraging LBJ to jump right in on Vietnam while his southern buddy Dick Russell was trying to convince him to stay out.)
If one is not thoroughly convinced by the depth of Hirsh’s analysis and the strength of his logic at this point, there is our man, “W,” the absolute embodiment of nationally ascendant “Southernism.” In Bush, Hirsh finds “little trace left of the Eastern WASP sensibility into which he was born and educated, and which explains so much of his father's far more moderate presidency. The younger Bush went to Andover, Yale and Harvard, but he rebelled against the ethos he learned there. "(Drat! ol’ W. was probably on his way to being John Kerry until that scurrilous bunch of southernizers who so frequently prey on unsuspecting graduates of Harvard and Yale pulled the Confederate flag over his eyes.) "The transformation is complete, right down to the Texas accent that no one else in his family seems to have. Bush is a Jacksonian pod person. " Insofar as a “pod person” is either an “impostor” or “someone who mindlessly goes along with the official dogma or party line,” Hirsh has flat-out nailed our current prez, but even the most adamant Jacksonophobe would cringe at this monumental injustice to “Ol’ Hickory.”
All seriousness aside, the biggest problem I have with Hirsh’s piece is not his condescending, stereotypical treatment of the South, but the facile, arrogantly ignorant outrages he has committed against history in order to concoct an explanation that allows him to absolve his own crowd of any responsibility for the current state of national affairs. To be perfectly honest, when I first read the thing, I actually thought it was a spoof of a northeastern elitist’s view of America. The second time through, however, I realized that, instead of having his tongue placed firmly against the side of his mouth, the author apparently had his entire head wedged between some other, more remotely situated cheeks.

"Sorry, No Refunds or Exchanges!"

2008-04-24T23:14:00Z

It’s hard to escape the sense that a lot of Democrats these days are feeling like a guy who bought a car that looked all showroom sparkly and pristine in the photos on eBay, only to have it arrive covered with all sorts of dents and scrapes and spewing oil like an Oklahoma gusher. From the time of Ms. Oby’s grudging admission that she was finally proud of her country to the revelations about Pastor Wright to what seemed to be a fairly condescending analysis of why beaten-down and bitter working-class whites become gun-toting religious fanatics who oppose free trade to the thorough working-over the Illinois senator took from Mrs. C and the guys from ABC during last week’s debate, the once shiny and powerful Obama-mobile seems to have morphed into a rusty, rattling Ford Escort badly in need of a ring job.
From the Obama perspective, the nine-plus points separating him and Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania look pretty good compared to the twenty-point spread of a month ago, but not nearly so sweet as the three- to five-point gap pollsters were reporting as recently as last week. Although his lead over the Billarys has actually stretched out to eight points among Democrats nationally, the most recent Rasmussen poll pitting Oby against John McCain shows his three-point lead in another poll last week has now evaporated into a three-point deficit, putting him in roughly the same position as his Democratic opponent in a head-to-head matchup with the GOP’s forgetful old warrior.
Thanks in no small measure to the extended Chinese Fire Drill that passes for the Democrats’ nominating system, Oby still enjoys what amounts to a commanding lead in pledged delegates, but Hillary’s protagonists are right to point to the fact that her suddenly merely mortal opponent has harvested much of his earlier hay in fields where few Democrats actually graze. More than two-thirds of Oby’s 151 pledged-delegate advantage comes from wins in five Southern and seven Western and Midwestern “fly-over” states where the Democrats lost by margins ranging from 14 to 45 percent in 2004 and where, for the most part, their current prospects appear to reside somewhere between Slim and None, with Slim reportedly on his way out of town.
Hillary, meanwhile, gathered most of her nuts and berries in more traditionally Democratic electoral powerhouses like California, New York, and Pennsylvania, and when she won a Republican state, such as Ohio, she at least picked an important one. In current polls, she actually leads McCain in Ohio, while Obama trails. The same is true in Florida. The demographic breakdown of who backed whom in Pennsylvania looks much as it did in January. Oby’s got blacks and more educated whites while Hillary’s gang consists of blue-collar white men, white women, and old white coots in general. Perhaps suggesting that we, the long-suffering public, have by now enjoyed about all of this campaigning foolishness we can stand, the unfavorable ratings of all the candidates have gone up noticeably in recent weeks, but none have risen more sharply than those of Commando Clinton. Among much-courted Independent voters, over a three-month span she has gone from a 59 percent favorable rating to 58 percent unfavorable. If this keeps up, she’ll soon be dodging real sniper fire in this country.
Although this trend has doubtless long been apparent to the poll-obsessed Clintonistas, Hillary’s willingness to make herself even more of a She-Beast in order to scorch at least some of the Teflon off her opponent’s butt has clearly had some effect. The Barackster meanwhile, has done himself no favors. His response to an increasingly rough-and-tumble campaign has been to appear both whiny and patronizingly weary of it all, impatient to be done with a tedious and protracted process that exposes him to questions he can’t believe anyone would ask and to people who clearly make him uncomfortable.
Apparently, the Billary pitch to the Superdelegates— “We’d like to believe him when he says he isn’t an America-hating Muslim, but he still has a big downside that most folks who voted for him or were coerced into caucuses in his behalf three months ago just couldn’t see”—hasn’t gained much traction at this point. Reduced to pure political calculus, the Super-D’s decision comes down to something like this: ” Do we risk alienating a huge chunk of our most loyal constituency, blacks, because we think that Hillary Clinton is more likely to attract our most-needed but least predictable constituency, blue collar whites?” Even with Democratic voting in the 90 percent-plus range among blacks, southern states have remained effectively unattainable and are likely to remain that way, regardless of the nominee, so it comes down to whether Hillary ‘s greater popularity with working class whites in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio might offset losing the 5 to 7 percent of the total vote that defecting blacks might represent in those states. Unless I really miss my guess, there’s too much “if” in this proposition for the Democratic insidership to chance turning their upcoming convention in Denver into a horrific flashback of what happened in Chicago forty years ago. Slightly more than forty years ago, when pressed to remove F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ was said to have responded that he would rather have Hoover “inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” If the Dems do decide to turn a deaf ear to Hillary’s entreaties, I’d definitely suggest that they get themselves a waterproof tent and keep the flaps pulled tight.

" I Got Them Ol' Elitism Blues"

2008-04-15T17:03:46Z

A few weeks ago, in what was hailed as the most candid and insightful speech about race since the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama observed that "most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. . . . They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. . . . to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns—this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.”
Like many others, I praised Obama’s candid analysis of the way things look for a lot of whites these days, but I also remember thinking at the time that sometimes people who complain of being misunderstood are not particularly appreciative when someone appears to think they understand them better than they might understand themselves.
Now comes Obama last week explaining why he’s having a hard time connecting with blue-collar whites: "It's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.''
There’s a great deal of truth in what the Senator had to say, of course. The problem is that it also smacks just a bit of the same condescending rhetoric that could have been lifted from a speech by Al Gore or John Kerry. Regardless of Sen. Obama’s intention, his remarks recall a familiar Democratic liberal dichotomy wherein “we,” the educated and enlightened, are reminded why “they,” who enjoy neither of these advantages, behave so as to invite our contempt but really deserve our pity. Obama was trying to portray a people rendered bitter and dysfunctional by the failure of their government to meet their needs or listen to their concerns, but in listing the supposed results of their victimization, he also managed to make religious faith, gun ownership, and opposition to free trade seem as pathological as racism and nativism.
For all his soaring rhetorical transcendence of race, even sympathetic observers have noted that Obama, whose humble beginnings hardly qualify him for the Born on Third Base Club, seems almost palpably discomfited when he is required to interact personally with regular old white folk. Whoever arranged the bowling fiasco is surely manning the copier in the campaign’s Lubbock office by now, but what can you do with a candidate who goes to resolutely blue collar Hershey, Pennsylvania, and proclaims a Wilbur’s chocolate bud “quite tasty”?
The saving grace in this current flap is the icy and aloof Hillary Clinton’s laughably contrived effort to manufacture political capital out of it by reinventing her own Wellseley-Yalie, “ain’t bakin’ no cookies” self on the fly as a bible-thumping, gun-totin,’ beer-and-a-shot re-do of Rosie the Riveter who is personally offended by her opponent’s elitism. Hillary is already way into her characteristic overkill mode, and the media is flogging the story like a borrowed mule, but general reaction thus far doesn’t quite suggest the PR disaster that the talking heads have been talking up.
The possibility that he might emerge from this most recent dust-up relatively unscathed doesn’t mean Oby shouldn’t learn from it, however. The ability to convey empathy is the dominant component in the DNA of the successful politician. In head-to-head matchups, empathy trumps intelligence every time. If you doubt this, ask the aforementioned Messrs.Gore and Kerry. In his prime, Bill Clinton exhibited both these qualities, but stretching way back to Adlai Stevenson, a long line of failed Democratic candidates can lay their defeats at least in part to the gap between their prodigious abilities to stand back and explain what ails people and their utter incapacity to move in close and convince the same people that they truly understand how it is to live with those ailments.
At his best, Mr. Clinton brought to the hustings not only knowledge and smarts but an uncanny ability to sound absolutely convincing when he insisted, “I feel your pain!” The difference between Clinton and his would-be Democratic successors is the difference between the great many artists who can play and sing the blues and those few who can also seem to actually feel the blues. I’m not suggesting that Senator Obama’s ultimate success depends on turning himself into another Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters, but a little bit more B.B. King sure wouldn’t hurt.

The Billarys Say "McCain's The One!"

2008-03-25T20:44:26Z

At precisely 4:24 this morning, I was visited with an insight that underscored just what both Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are actually up against. Again taking advantage of their complete willingness to do the utterly unthinkable in order to get what they want (eventually, at least) the Billarys have decided that if they can’t deny Obama the nomination, they will at least deny him the presidency. They have reached this decision, I believe, not simply because they’re sore losers, which, God knows, they certainly are, but from a cold calculation that, if Oby is to be the nominee, Hillary’s still white-hot presidential ambitions are ultimately better served by seeing John McCain win in November rather than “her opponent,” as ol’ Bill slyly denotes him when he suggests that Obama comes up short in the patriotism department compared to McCain and Ms. Bill.

It’s all so startlingly simple that I’m sure this has occurred to a zillion other folks. If Oby wins, unless he’s unspeakably awful, he’s a shoo-in for re-nomination in 2012. If he is unspeakably awful, he’s probably soiled the nest for his would-be Democratic successor. On the other hand, if Oby isn’t elected this fall, Hillary has full-blown “I told you so” rights, and four years to lay a huge guilt trip on her party for withholding what was rightly hers this year, before graciously agreeing to accept its nomination in 2012. By that time McCain will make Methuselah seem prepubescent, and given his recent slip-ups, he might actually get confused and endorse Hillary himself. This scenario explains why, short of telling the truth, of course, the Billarys would rather do just about anything other than speak ill of Johnny Mac these days. In fact, Bill’s got such a case of McCain fever that if the two ever got off to themselves, the good senator would be well advised to have his suit cleaned immediately, just in case.

You may well scoff at such conspiratorial thinking, but if you think the Billarys are above such nefarious behavior, I‘ve got news for you: “THEY AIN’T ABOVE NOTHIN’!” We’re talking about people who lie with absolute aplomb not only purposefully but sometimes simply for the pure hell of it, just to see if they can get away with it, even when, as my mama used to say, “the truth would suit better.” Recall here Hillary’s recent account of her bravery under sniper fire in Bosnia. If you saw the video, you also saw that she was lying with such conviction and sincerity, that even though you already knew better, you could have sworn you were there with her, ducking the bullets zipping just overhead.

“What of party loyalty?” you ask. “What of it?” the Billarys respond. Ms. Clinton has hardly established herself as much of a Party girl, Democratic or otherwise. It has finally dawned even on self-absorbed New Yorkers that Hillary had about as much real interest in representing them in the Senate as Bill would have had in making out with Eleanor Roosevelt.(or vice-versa, for that matter) New York was simply the best launching pad for her presidential campaign. If Arkansas has as many people with as much money, she would just as soon senator-ized for them for a few years. (Some misguided concern for fairness forces me to point out that, if Oby goes to the White House, his career as a senator from Illinois will be effectively be “one and done.”) In raising a bodacious $20 million-plus war chest for her 2006 senatorial re-election bid against a no-way-in hell Republican opponent, Miss Hillary gobbled up dollars that might have gone to other truly needy Democratic candidates while, padding her 2008 coffers and scoring major intimidator points among prospective rivals for the Demo presidential nod.

At this point, certainly, the real beneficiary of the Billarys’ balls-out trashing of Obama would appear to be John McCain. The latest national polls show him leading Oby by nine points and Hillary by five. Meanwhile, among Dems,“her opponent” has regained a slight lead over the Bosnian war hero. The not-quite-right Rev. Wright doubtless has something to do with Oby’s skid, of course, and it’s too soon to tell whether he will become less burdensome as time passes. Meanwhile, McCain’s beloved “surge” appears to be slipping into reverse. A hundred years, huh, John? Regardless of what happens from here on ,one thing at least seems likely. If Barack Obama is elected in November, neither he nor his party will have to worry about sending any thank-you notes to the junior senator from New York and her former first-Bubba spouse.

The Politics of Candor v. The Politics of Race

2008-03-19T19:52:23Z

Anytime someone says It’s time we had a “candid conversation” about something, I instinctively cringe, recalling the fiasco of trying to talk to our adolescent son about sex or numerous horror stories about those dreadful “couples-encounter” sessions that, I’m convinced, ultimately enrich more divorce lawyers than marriages. Hence, it’s always an apprehensive moment when I get word of an impending free and frank discussion of race, a topic that Barack Obama has done his best to avoid throughout what, to date, at least, has been a remarkably successful campaign. When I first read the text of his speech, which he apparently wrote himself, I was overwhelmed by its exceedingly skillful conjoining of eloquence and truth. Barack Obama is one more sensitive and thoughtful dude, just the sort, unfortunately, who, up to now, hasn’t had a prayer of winning the presidency for more than a generation. His remarks had the ring both of courage and conviction when he spoke to blacks about whites:

"Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. ... They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. ... to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.”

No black public figure in recent memory has shown such empathy with blue collar whites or at least dared to articulate it this straightforwardly. I’m not completely sure how this is going to play with some of those whites, however. Sometimes people who complain of being misunderstood are not particularly appreciative when someone appears to understand them better than they might understand themselves.
Anyone familiar with the history of southern politics surely knows Obama spoke the truth when he confronted this country’s politicized obsession with race:

“We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism.(i.e., the politics of the Billarys) We can tackle race only as spectacle-as we did in the OJ trial-or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina--or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.”

It is, of course, in Obama’s interest to see the politics of race put aside, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t right about why it should be put aside. It’s at this point, however, where I think this speech--or any speech he might have given short of admitting that he should have openly repudiated Rev. Wright and departed Trinity Church a long time ago--probably fell short of the mark politically for a lot of white Americans.

I don’t question the sincerity of Obama’s explanation that he could no more disown Rev. Wright than he can
“.disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

I get this completely. I have lifelong friends whose racial views sometimes make me uncomfortable as well. That said, I’m not sure everybody is going to buy the analogy between Rev. Wright and Obama’s granny, who, after all, never stood up before thousands of people to bitterly and passionately express her negative views on black people. In truth, it’s hard to say whether, had he even been so inclined, Obama would have scored that many recovery points with whites by totally ditching the hatemongering Rev. at this point. This is probably a case where the political damage is too “done” to be undone. Despite their incredibly low bottom line, even the Billarys may have trouble figuring out how to capitalize further on this setback, but though Hillary’s best strategy is probably to hold back, as we all know, that ain’t exactly her style. There are no such restraints on the Repubs, however, and though McCain will probably steer clear of it, that ‘rhoided-up rhino, Rush Limbaugh and others his ilk who want desperately to run against Hillary in the fall are already having a field day. Certainly, we may be assured that Rev. Wright’s sermons will indeed be talked about “every day between now and the election.” Not only that, but the most offensive clips from the sermons will doubtless also appear in a video montage with Michelle Obama’s remarks about finally being “proud” of America and perhaps even that seemingly ubiquitous photo of Sen. Obama standing with his arms by his side during the National Anthem while Sen. Clinton and others hold their hands over their hearts. The politics of paranoia isn’t any fairer or more civilized than the politics of race, after all.
Johnny Mac, meanwhile, is cruising along, his gloomy message, summarized by Pat Buchanan as “The jobs aren’t coming back, and the immigrants aren’t going home, but there will be war” largely unscrutinized by a distracted electorate. For Barack Obama, it remains only to, in LBJ’s words, “hunker down like a jackass in a hailstorm” and hope the hailstorm subsides before inflicting irreparable damage. Having given one of the finest and potentially most significant speeches on race in America since the death of Rev. Martin Luther King, he may well have secured his place in history. Whether what he said will be well enough understood and widely enough accepted in his own time to secure his place in the White House remains to be seen.

Race: It's Not Just For Republicans Anymore!

2008-03-13T14:55:58Z

For all the ballyhoo about the big Billary bounceback, after the Wyoming caucuses, the Mississippi primary, and the final tally showing that, delegate-wise, Texas was actually just a draw, the knife fight and stomping contest otherwise known as the race for the Democratic presidential nomination stands roughly where it did on March 4. By my admittedly shaky calculation, if the Billarys capture 55 percent of the remaining pledged delegates, they would then still need to shanghai two-thirds of the 343 uncommitted superdelegates in order to claim the nomination. I’m not smart enough to see how they can pull all of this off, but I am too smart to say they can’t.
If sheer audacity counts for anything, they probably will. Despite her disadvantageous position, both the Billarys indicated last week that she might be willing to take on that promising though inexperienced young opponent of hers as a running mate. This offer to be "number two" to someone currently running "number two" to him probably smelled like "number two" to Obama, especially after Ms. Clinton knowingly gave the Republicans first-class, sound-byte fodder for the fall by suggesting that he was less qualified for the presidency than either she or Senator McCain. Presumably in a Clinton-Obama administration, she’d always be available to answer the red phone at 3 a.m. He’d be relegated to sharpening the pencils, under appropriate supervision, of course.
Touting her foreign policy bona fides, Ms. C also took credit for helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland in 1995, a claim that struck the former first minister of Northern Ireland described as “a wee bit silly,” given that her role was mainly that of “cheerleader” at the proceedings. (Well, Ol’ Bill always had a thing for cheerleaders, didn’t he?) Likewise, Senator Clinton is fond of patting herself on the back for that other time in 1995 when she boldly “spoke truth to power” at that Women’s Conference in Beijing by cataloguing a list of abuses to women around the world. She portrays herself as really angering the misogynist Chinese establishment on this occasion, but since she didn’t even mention China in her speech, it’s hard to know whether “power” was even listening when “truth” was spoken. In any event, here we have it: the two crowning achievements of her foreign policy experience, both equal parts fabrication and exaggeration.
Now comes Geraldine Ferraro, big-time Billaryite and Fritz Mondale’s running mate on the crash-and-burn 1984 Democratic ticket, insisting that Barrack Obama is where he is only because of what he is—a black man. No woman, white or black, would be so “lucky” sez Ms. Ferraro. (Note to Gerry: I don’t know that I’d ride that pony too hard. You weren’t exactly on the ticket in ’84 because of your brains or your popularity, Girlfriend!) When pressed to separate herself from Ferraro and her remarks, Ms. Clinton would only say that it was “unfortunate” that supporters of both camps had become a little overzealous at times. Although Ferraro ultimately resigned from Clinton’s finance committee, in doing so she was combative rather than apologetic, firing back at critics that she was tired of seeing anyone who criticized a black man being labeled a racist and charging that she was being attacked simply because she was white. Commentators suggested that Ferraro was clearly venting the anger and frustration of Ms. Clinton’s hard-core middle-aged white women supporters, but her sentiments are also likely to resonate with the blue-collar white voters of Pennsylvania in general, a number of whom don’t particularly cotton to the idea of black people moving into their jobs or their neighborhoods. James Carville wasn’t telling the Republicans anything they didn’t already know back in 1991 when he famously described Pennsylvania as Pittsburg in the West, Philadelphia in the East, and Alabama in between. In no small measure, the three Republican presidential victories of the 1980s were a register of how well the old racially coded “southern strategy” worked as a national strategy as well.
The liberal punditry has expressed puzzlement at Senator Clinton’s rather dismissive reaction to Ferraro’s outburst, but among hardened political cynics, for whom the Billarys are poster Boy-Girl, it’s not all that difficult to understand. Hillary got about 10-12 percent of the black vote in Mississippi and roughly the same in Ohio. No matter how polarizing, anything that can tap into white anger and frustration stands to help her more than it hurts. That she is cutting into the party’s chances in the fall with every such action is of no apparent concern to her. In the past the Republicans have benefited enormously from playing the race card against the Democrats. Now they stand to benefit from the Democrats playing it against each other. It’s no wonder that 24 percent of the Billarys’ votes in the Mississippi Democratic Primary came from members of the other party. The Democrat they most love to hate is the best thing they've got going for them right now.

"Creature from the Black Lagoon" Resurfaces in TX and Ohio

2008-03-05T18:18:29Z

For the last few weeks, I’ve been warning folks who were already making plans for the Obama inaugural that the Billarys are like the cinematic monster-fiend who, despite being decapitated, eviscerated and incinerated, rises from the depths just before they roll the credits for one last savage swipe at the noble but naive folks who are joyously celebrating its demise. On the morning after the Texas and Ohio primaries, I’m guessing they finally get the message. The Billarys will be around when the cockroaches and rats have long since given up the ghost, making one last pitch, spinning one last sorta-truth. The pundits seem to think that the Texas and Ohio results suggest that the Billarys “kitchen sink” assault on Oby has finally gained some traction, and there’s surely some truth to this. However, I began to pick up on a sense of some bumpy air ahead for the Obama squadron back on Feb. 24 when I read Nicholas Kristof’s NYT op-ed piece on “Obama’s Kenyan Roots.”
In the course of telling the remarkable story of “Mama Sarah,” Oby’s stepgranny, who lives in a house without electricity or running water--thank God, though, she does have a cell phone with solar charger—and other Kenyan relations who are sky-high about their kinsman’s presidential prospects, Kristof offered these tidbits about Sen. Obama’s father and grandfather:
Mr. Obama’s late grandfather is said to have been the first person in the area to wear Western clothes rather than just a loincloth. For a time he converted to Christianity and adopted the family name Johnson.
Later he converted to Islam, taking four wives. Senator Obama’s father, who apparently converted to Catholicism while attending a Catholic school, was also polygamous in keeping with local custom, taking an informal Kenyan wife who preceded Mr. Obama’s mother but remained a consort, according to accounts by local people and the senator himself.
The father, also named Barack Hussein Obama, was as much of a path breaker as his son. He went from herding goats in Kogelo to studying in Hawaii and at Harvard, even if his career as an economist was frustrated in part by ethnic rivalries.
As I read this, I was asking myself, “Did the Billarys by any chance suggest that Kenya was a great place to visit this time of year?”

Kristof was surely correct in observing that “If we call ourselves a land of opportunity, then Mr. Obama’s heritage doesn’t threaten American values but showcases them,” but he is surely a prospect for beachfront property in the Nebraska sandhills if he thinks that a lot of folks who are not terribly reactionary by most objective standards aren’t going to give a second thought to the prospect of electing a president whose grandpa was a Muslim polygamist who even hung out with somebody wearing a loincloth.
Even amid his fog of liberal delusion, Kristof confessed to worrying “that enemies of Senator Obama will seize upon details like his grandfather’s Islamic faith or his father’s polygamy to portray him as an alien or a threat to American values.” Thanks to you, Nicky Boy, Oby’s enemies don’t even have to concoct something to use against him. They can simply cite the New Yawk Times. Sure enough, the photo of Obama in a turban surfaced about this time. Then there was the hate-radio dude railing against “Barack Hussein Obama,” an incident that ultimately worked to the advantage of Clinton and (because of his swift, strong response) McCain, no matter how you slice it. As the still-presumed nominee, Oby now has to fight a two-front war against Johnny Mac and the Billarys, while facing the prospect of tougher questions about his association with some pretty sleazy Chicago types. The persistent buzz that Oby himself is really a Muslim (which Steve Croft helped to legitimize by asking Ms. Clinton about it on “60 Minutes” last week) is bound to prompt more serious scrutiny of his actual affiliation with the controversial Africentric Trinity United Christian Church in Chicago, an affiliation that, at best, ill comports with his efforts to portray himself as a race-transcendent candidate.
The upside for Oby is that no math exists that will allow the Billarys to come to the convention with more pledged delegates than he has. The potential downside for the Democratic Party is that if he does not succeed in the remaining primaries in reversing the impression of lost momentum, the superdelegate lean might start to shift back Billary-ward. At this point, a number of Obama’s highly energized black supporters might have a hard time accepting Hillary as the nominee under any circumstances, but with the Hillary as a brokered nominee, the Dems can probably expect the lowest black turnout in many moons. If the rap on Oby has been that he hasn’t been tested or hasn’t shown his mettle under fire, he’s about to get his chance. The drug-crazed porker, Rush Limbaugh, urged Republicans in Texas to cross over and vote for Hillary Clinton, explaining “I want Hillary to stay in this…. We need Barack Obama bloodied up politically, and it's obvious that the Republicans are not going to do it and don't have the stomach for it.”l The Repubs may think they will benefit from a bloodied Obama, but if he emerges from the next few weeks unbowed, he may well be an even more formidable opponent than the one who already seems to have Rush doubling his oxycontin intake.

So Barack, Which Is It, Boxers or Briefs?

2008-02-20T19:27:38Z

In last week’s installment, I demonstrated my amazing mastery of the blatantly obvious by suggesting that Barack Obama was bound to stub his toe sometimes between now and the last primary in June. Well, sure enough, this week he was caught cribbing some real zinger lines from his best bud,’ Massachusetts governor Duval Patrick, and his wife, Michelle, exhibited symptoms of Ferragamo-in-mouth disease when she declared that her hubby’s success made her proud of her country for the first time in her “adult life.” (African American ambivalence on this point is understandable, but in the broad public view, I suspect, Princeton and Harvard Law degrees hardly suggest strong grounds for smoldering resentment.) So what happens as a result of these potentially injurious gaffes? Oby goes out and lays a 17-point whipping on Billary in Wisconsin, where she held what seemed to be comfortable lead in the polls as recently as three weeks ago. Exit polls showed he even bested Clinton among voters who placed a premium on health care, an area where her expertise was presumed to count the most.
Basically, it seems that Senator C’s constituency shrinkage has become so severe that she and I now share the same demographic: white women over 60. (My estimates are based solely on the people most likely to laugh at my jokes when I’m out on the rubber-chicken circuit.) In reality, all of this suggests to me that many people are drawn to Obama not by where he stands on any particular issue but because he presents an attractive leader-model in whom they choose to believe with astonishing ferocity. Ironically, in this regard, he seems very much like the charismatic, inspirational (though also a bit short on specifics) Ronald Reagan, whose gravesite a desperately hopeful GOP checks for signs of exit every Easter.
Whether this determination to believe in Oby can sustain itself all the way through the primaries, the convention and the general election remains to be seen, of course. John McCain is understandably intent on making an issue of it if Obama welches on his earlier promise to use only federal funding for his campaign, but thus far the O-man seems all but untouchable, his loins girded with the same Teflon tighty-whiteys that served the ol’ Gipper so well and are clearly far superior to Mitt Romney’s magic Mormon underdrawers. Never one to give up on a good metaphor—or a bad one either, for that matter—let me observe that since effectively clinching his party’s nomination, Sen. McCain has acted as though his skivvies may be riding up on him a little. To my mind, at least, Johnny Mac was far more appealing when he was out there swing for the fences, saying what he really thought in defiance of the party poobahs who had long since written him off. Now that he’s the presumptive nominee, instead of inspiring, he seems brittle, tight, and well--old. If Obama survives the final desperate, last-ditch, shoot-the-wounded-and scald-the-kittycats Billary counter-blitz that is certain to come, and McCain doesn’t get his groove back, it could be a long fall for the Republicans.
It’ll definitely be a long fall for those of us who have to survive media coverage of the campaign. The obnoxious Chris Matthews, who never allows anyone to finish a sentence, was strutting around on MSNBC this morning after beating down a lowly Texas state senator who supports Obama by insisting that the man give him just one example of an Obama legislative accomplishment. Naturally, the poor guy couldn’t do it. My complaint is not that Matthews didn’t make a valid point, but that he chose to make it with some obscure little dude who was thrust on national TV for the first time, rather than with one of the dozens of nationally prominent Obama supporters he has interviewed on MSNBC over the last few months. What’s the matter Chris? Does the size of the old kahones vary inversely with the stature of the interviewee?
One last morsel for premature thought. Thinking back to Ms. Obama’s comments, if Mr. O is actually elected president, what kind of political fallout will there be for African American leaders who continue to premise their policy initiatives on the historic disadvantages facing people of their race? It’s not too hard for me to imagine a conservative line to the effect that the election of a black president should effectively bring down the curtain on the supposed era of atonement.

Hillary Gets Skunked, McCain Gets Pastor-Punk'd

2008-02-13T18:54:48Z

It’s been a big week for the Barackster, capped off with some really kick-ass wins in the Potomac primaries. He’s now the acknowledged leader in delegates and the Democrats’ proportional primary system makes it hard to gain ground unless you can just annihilate your opponent in several big primaries. While the Billarys stand to do well in Ohio and Texas, they don’t stand to do that well. The folks at RealClearPolitics.com show Oby with 1260 delegates at this point to Ms. C’s 1221. This means that, barring the release of photos of their opponent molesting a non-consenting farm animal, neither of them stands to collect the roughly three-fourths of the 1021 remaining pledged delegates needed to reach 2025 and win the nomination in the primaries. However, in order to overtake Obama and go into the convention as the leader the Billarys would have to capture more than 54 percent of the delegates from here on out. Obviously, every time Oby, who clearly has the “Big Mo” on his side, wins more of a state’s delegates than they do, the Billarys’ challenge gets stiffer. I have opined earlier that the Billarys would pick Oby clean in the backroom dealings with the unpledged Superdelegates, but it’s starting to look as though some of those folks might have their fingers to the wind—many of them are elected officials themselves and don’t want to be explaining why they didn’t go with the people’s choice—and may well resist the first Bubba’s entreaties and offers to share his little black book in exchange for their support of the Missus. It’s a fair bet that the recent departure of the Clinton camp’s top two people isn’t a sign that things are going swimmingly for them, and it does seem sometimes that the Clintonistas simply never anticipated that they would still be campaigning with anything really on the line at this point. It’s foolish to think that Oby won’t at least stump his toe sometime between here and June, but if he maintains his lead and enters the convention with the most delegates only to see Hillary leave the convention as the nominee, the Dems are almost certain to fall into what could well be debilitating disarray.
This is not to say that all is exactly sweetness and light over on the other side, of course. Living on Ramen noodles and Tic-Tacs and sleeping in his car, Pastor Mike is having a helluva good time exposing Johnny Mac’s serious problems with the snake-handling flat-worlders of the religious right. If the Huckster is angling to be the VP nominee or a cabinet member, he is definitely amassing leverage, but he is also seriously pissing off a man not particularly known for being even-tempered.* It’s hard to know how ol’ Huck would play as a VP candidate. He is certainly a better speaker and general all-around charmer than McCain, but he isn’t any more appealing to that pussel-gutted windbag Rush Limbaugh and his crowd than the presumptive nominee, and Huckabee’s “God-is-the pilot-I’m-just-along-for-the-ride” brand of theo-politics might not play so well with some of the Independents whose votes McCain needs to be elected. Say what you will about this campaign, there’s been no shortage of opportunities for second-guessing and micro-analysis. It hasn’t always been pretty, but it has damn sure been interesting.

*(Did you catch fellow Republican Senator Thad Cochran’s observation about his “friend” John McCain? Said Cochran: "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me." Cochran has endorsed Sen. Hothead, but I’m guessing he’ll be getting most of his campaign airplay this fall courtesy of the Dems.)

So Much For Polls and Prophesies

2008-02-06T15:23:47Z

Last week about this time I was prophesying that by about this time this week the Billarys might have opened up some significant breathing room between them and the upstart Barackster. So much for the polls, which in this volatile campaign are about as useful as yesterday’s racing form. Nor, so it appears, did I account sufficiently for the Democrats’ screwy system of proportional delegate allocation. Billary held on in most of the big ‘uns, thanks in no small measure to heavy early, pre-Obama surge voting in California. If the polls are a joke in this wholly unstable political climate, one can only speculate about how many early voters would now like to have their ballots back. Commentators continue to point to Obama’s strength among blacks, of course, and they were so pre-programmed on the idea that southern whites wouldn’t vote for him that they were at a loss for words when exit polls showed him getting 43 percent of the white vote in Georgia. One wonders whether this is a register of changing attitudes toward blacks or persisting hatred of Hillary. The answer is doubtless some of both, although, hardened cynic that I am, I have been struck by decreasing resonance of race among young folk in the South and elsewhere. White women are the very core of Hillary’s constituency, a fact that her campaign is trying to conceal by trumpeting her appeal to Hispanics. The Hispanic vote is big in California and significant in several other states, but turnout and cohesion are concerns in places where they aren’t part of unionized workforces. The attention given the Caroline Kennedy/Maria Shriver endorsement of Obama reflects the importance to his campaign of wooing away some of Hillary’s female following. There is an interesting dynamic operating, I think, among liberal women who are torn between the prospect of cracking the glass ceiling in a big way and a sense that they should be more intent on helping Obama break through another ceiling that has been much lower and oppressive. At this point, with 2025 delegates required to sew up the nomination, my buds at RealClear politics.com show Billary with 897 to Oby’s 822. These figures include those among the 796 unpledged “superdelegates” whose affinities for each candidate are known. Many of these folks, who are generally elected officials or party bigwigs of some stripe, have reportedly gone underground to escape heavy lobbying from both camps. It’s possible that unless the remaining primaries break sharply in one direction or the other, the superdelegates will be more interested in national polls addressing a candidate’s electability in November. If the nomination is ultimately decided by convention-floor hustling of these Super-Duper party insiders, and the nod goes to the Billarys, then the Obama-ites are going to be really pissed. Ditto this if Hillary manages somehow to claim the vaporized delegates from Michigan and Florida. If Obama’s poll numbers continue to rise and he shows up much more impressively than the Billarys in the head-to-head with McCain, most of the superdelegates are probably too desperate to get one of their own back in the White House to take a header with Hillary. However, if the contest for their affections comes down to lobbying, lying, backstabbing or bribing, bet on the Billarys making their acceptance speech while Barack tries to figure out who stole his jockstrap.

Over on the Republican side, things are going a lot more smoothly for John McCain. Pastor Mike has just about shot his Bible-belt wad and appears to be running for VP. ( Why not? It’s not as though he has lots of options, unless somebody has an opening for a religious zealot in residence.) Romney did somewhat better than expected yesterday, embodying, one suspects, the last expulsion of hate-filled, fire-rimmed flatulence generated by the Rush Limbaugh/Ann Coulter “McCain is the Anti-Christ” crowd. On Super Tuesday, I asked my class of three hundred how many had voted or planned to. I counted at most six hands. I thought that this pretty well contradicted all the reports of youthful enthusiasm for this campaign. Then I realized that these stories had been largely focused on the Obama phenomenon, and concluded that six Democrats out of three hundred would be about right for Georgia.

2008-01-30T18:04:28Z

Somewhere on the hard drive of a writer for the New York Times or The Nation or the like sits a draft of a hand-wringing article about the enduring racism that continues to dominate southern life. You could see it coming. The pundits on both the right and left were obsessed with the vast racial divide that the Billarys had supposedly opened within Democratic ranks, and a poll showed Obama with only 10 percent white support in South Carolina. Then, lo and behold, Obama actually captures 25 percent of the white vote in South Carolina, and yet another chance to hang America’s race problem around the South’s neck goes by the boards. (True to form, NPR did point out that Obama won “only” a quarter of the white vote in S.C.)
One of the more surprising exit poll stats to come out of the South Carolina vote was that Hillary got 29 percent of the white male vote while Obama got 27 percent. The big difference among white voters lay with women, who seem to have swung more strongly toward Sen. Clinton in the wake of a rather pointed question about her likeability posed during a post-Iowa debate and her almost-tearful episode in New Hampshire. In Florida, it appears that Ms. Clinton continued to ride that gender express, collecting 55 percent of the female vote compared to Obama’s 29 percent. (Obama appears to have done about as well among whites in Florida as he did in South Carolina.) Meanwhile, the New York chapter of NOW is condemning Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Monday endorsement of Barrack Obama (see below) as “the ultimate betrayal.” It’s worth noting, I’d say, that the media relishes talking about the racial divide but thus far won’t touch the gender divide with the proverbial ten-foot pole.
After enduring almost universal flagellation themselves for ol’ Bill’s somewhat racially suggestive flagellation of Obama in South Carolina, the Clintonistas appear to have reined him in at least temporarily. It would appear; however, that Bill’s antics may have contributed to the Kennedy clan’s decision to anoint Obama. This endorsement doubtless ticked the Billarys off big time, but how much it will really mean vote-wise is hard to gauge. I’m guessing a great many of the people who might be swayed positively by the recommendation of a bellowing, blimpoid Ted Kennedy were already leaning Obama-ward anyway.
If the polling data at this nifty site is to be taken seriously, the media impression that Clinton and Obama are running neck and neck for the nomination is something akin to wishful thinking. Hillary apparently holds substantial leads in all the big-ticket Super Tuesday states except her opponent's home state of Illinois, and unless Obama uncovers shots of Hillary doing something disgusting with Osama, she might well put some significant delegate distance between them next Tuesday. (The fallout from John Edwards’s withdrawal is difficult to gauge. He seems more likely to endorse Obama than Clinton, but it’s hard to know how throw-able a candidate’s support is these days. At most, Edwards’s departure is likely to matter only in states where the race is very close.) The prospect that Hillary is not necessarily “inevitable” again but may be “likely” raises the “What about Bill?” question, both for the general election campaign and a possible second Clintonista regime. Even in the primaries, Bill has had a hard time remembering that he’s not the candidate; so I doubt that will change just because Hillary wins the nomination.
Back in 1992, revelations of Bill’s sexual shenanigans were dubbed “spontaneous bimbo eruptions.” Sixteen years later, the bimbos are more likely botoxers than bobby-soxers, but it would be a reckless person indeed who’d bet that, for all his recent health problems, Bill’s immunity to monogamy isn’t still intact. If he has left his own special DNA-ridden version of the presidential seal anywhere it shouldn’t be, we are likely to hear of it early and often if he’s out campaigning to be first-hubby this fall. Moreover, should the Clintons return to the White House, he’ll be able to prowl his old haunts with nothing but time on his hands and lust in his heart.
The Republicans best chance to beat back the Billary assault appears to be John McCain, and more of them appear to be acknowledging as much. McCain nipped Romney in Florida in a race in which he could not count on the support of independents, but Romney still ran stronger among self-described conservatives. Here’s a stat for you. In Florida, Romney outpolled McCain 35 percent to 27 percent among those who described themselves as “enthusiastic” about the Bush presidency. Clearly, McCain has some work to do among the certifiably insane. It’s hard to say where or how far Romney goes from here. He made quite a surge in Florida, where he outspent McCain for advertising at about ten to one. The Florida win should give McCain a funding boost, but having already plunked down a reported $17 million of his own stash, how could Romney decide where to draw the line? If the Republican holdouts are indeed coming around, however grudgingly, on McCain, Romney is clearly toast. What he has accomplished with his own personally financed version of an economic stimulus policy is hard to gauge, although at this point, he does seem to be an exception to Kinky Friedman’s fundamental political maxim: “A fool and his money are soon elected.”

Is American Politics Ready for Democracy?

2008-01-16T15:18:58Z

It’s hard to believe, but the presidential primaries are starting to look a little bit like democracy. Ol’ Moneybags Mitt finally managed to win a state, even if it involved riding his dead father’s coattails. Unable to face the reality of a bloated, inept, demoralized auto industry that has been toast for some time and refuses to acknowledge it, Romney came in and swore that if he becomes president, the other forty-nine states be damned, he will do absolutely nothing but work on reviving Michigan’s economy even if it means giving every newborn in this country a federally subsidized Ford Explorer. Headstrong fool that he is, John McCain had told Michiganders the truth—many of those lost jobs in the auto industry ain’t coming back—but the sovereign voters were having none of it, of course. Now it’s on to South Carolina, where the Bible-thumping snake handlers are likely to make Huckabee the front-runner again, for a few days at least. Rudy Giuliani’s “If you want to see me, come to Coral Gables” strategy is not looking quite so foolish now as the Florida primary approaches rapidly with no real evidence of GOP coalescence behind a single candidate. On the other hand, if Rudy G. doesn’t kick major booty in Florida, which is, let’s face it, essentially New York with the thermostat on high, then he might just as well shake the 911 dust from his lapels and get on with the rest of his life.

On the Democratic side, conservative pundits and demagogues have been struggling to maintain bladder control as they giddily prophesy Democratic disintegration over the issue of whether blacks or women have the strongest claim to victimization. Speaking of coattails, Hillary has been riding Bill’s with black voters, but methinks ol’ Bubba may be overestimating his cachet on that side of the color line. His dismissive, almost contemptuous remarks about Obama hit a nerve even with some of the old-line black leaders who have endorsed his wife. Ditto her suggestion—not well phrased, but certainly not incorrect-- that some of the credit for Rev. Martin Luther King’s accomplishments should go to LBJ. Arrogant little turd that he is, Tucker Carlson made an excellent point yesterday while interviewing Rev. Al Sharpton. Sharpton, who has my vote for self-aggrandizing phony of the eon, could only splutter when Tucker observed that there appeared to be a passing of the torch among black leaders, as the old establishment types who essentially jumped aboard what they thought was the Hillary steamroller were learning to their frustration and dismay that younger African Americans preferred to make their own choice and most have chosen Barack Obama. There was a similar generational shift during the civil rights movement when the younger activists, many of whom—John Lewis, for example-- are represented in today’s old guard pro-Hillary contingent, seized the mantle of leadership from the NAACP with its more legalistic, less confrontational approach to securing black rights.

In the face of challenges to the establishment in both parties, the establishment mouthpieces are predictably prophesying disaster. Rush “Anybody seen my pills?” Limbaugh has already warned that a Huckaby or McCain nomination will utterly “destroy the Republican party.” Unless the pollsters are still smoking from the same stash they had in New Hampshire, Obama will win on the Demo side in South Carolina. If he does, look for the Clintonistas to invoke the 1972 McGovern debacle as a warning about what can happen when a political party starts taking democracy a little too seriously.

A Bounceback for "Hill and Bill."

2008-01-09T17:26:55Z

Monday night, as I was preparing to watch Ohio State get its predictable beat-down in the BCS championship, the talking heads were absolutely convinced that Hillary was about to suffer the same fate in New Hampshire and were even speculating about how much longer her campaign would continue. Dutiful Midwesterners that they are, the Buckeyes followed the script, but, for some reason, Ms. Clinton refused to go along. Some polls put Barack Obama as much as 10 points ahead in New Hampshire, but Wednesday morning headlines hailed “Hill and Bill” as “the Comeback Kids.”
The favorite tactic of those who had already written Hillary off was to blame the pollsters. It’s certainly true that hastily conducted surveys in primary elections where voters are just becoming engaged with candidates are not always reliable, but this is a fact of which the punditry should be well aware, and they were nonetheless willing to use such polling data to prophesy Ms. C’s imminent demise.
As to actual events and doings in New Hampshire that might have affected the outcome, there was, of course, Hillary’s use of the gender card to suggest that, for all of Obama’s talk about change, as the first really serious presidential candidate of the female persuasion, she was, in fact, the flesh and blood embodiment of change. Then there was the much-replayed video of Hillary showing her emotions and even flirting with tears. More than one observer has expressed skepticism about the sincerity of this display, which came after weeks of being characterized as cold and unfeeling and immediately on the heels of being asked point-blank about how it felt to be less “likable” than her major opponent, Senator Obama. (I’m not exactly a big fan, but I’m not prepared to say that she was flatly faking it on this occasion. On the other hand, it seems to me that the byword for her whole campaign has been “The key to spontaneity is preparation.”) It would be ironic indeed if, having spent much of both her Senate career and her presidential campaign to date trying to show men she’s as macho as the next guy, Ms. Clinton manages to salvage her prospects by showing women her softer feminine side.
The always irritating Chris Matthews of MSNBC is confident that Obama’s polling numbers were inflated by a fairly common “fudge factor” that results from whites telling pollsters they support a black candidate but voting otherwise once the curtains are pulled in the booth. This failure to follow through would’ve been less likely to operate in the Iowa caucuses where everyone’s preferences were visible to everyone else. Matthews may be right, although we won’t know until we can compare Obama’s primary totals to his polling numbers in several more primary states. It would be interesting to see how he would fare among blue collar white voters in next week’s Michigan primary, but he took his name off the ballot there after the national Democratic Party organization pulled Michigan’s delegates because the state is holding its primary earlier than it was supposed to. (The penalties for “premature evaluation” are fairly stiff, it seems. [OUCH!] The GOP has taken away half of Michigan’s delegates for the same reason.) Obama’s crew is urging Michiganders to vote “uncommitted,” but a helluva lot of them will have to do that to keep Hillary from claiming she won a great victory next Tuesday.
The issue of race has certainly been muted, to say the least, within the Obama campaign itself, and many established black leaders, including Georgia congressman John Lewis, have endorsed Ms. Clinton, due in part, no doubt, to the perception of Obama’s un-electability, not to mention the popularity with African Americans of her husband, the old hipster from Hope himself. The Iowa outcome, however, made Sen. Obama look a little less like the candidate of the impossible dreamers, and the sense that whites started ganging up on him once he emerged as a serious contender might well trigger a significant “blacklash” with implications for Ms. Clinton in states like South Carolina, where Obama currently leads in the polls and in Georgia, where the two appear to be locked in a virtual dead heat.
Here we are with the polls again. We can’t live without ‘em, in football or politics, it seems, but in either case, there’s recent evidence to suggest we better not bet the farm on them either.

Politics:Primacy, Pork and Punditry

2008-01-04T15:31:18Z

This piece graced the pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on January 4, 2008, but additional post-caucus bloviations are appended

Back when we were living amongst them, I thought that Iowans held their caucuses early just so they could bask in all the national media exposure that would never come their way otherwise. However, this year’s scramble by so many states to get their primaries pushed up as close to New Year’s day as possible suggests that there is a lot more at stake here than emotional gratification. A Boston Globe report shows that in the recent congressional appropriations bill vetoed by President Bush as too wasteful, Iowa, the nation’s thirtieth most populous state, was slated to receive the seventh-highest earmarked windfall, roughly $37 million. Beyond that, an additional $50 million in federal matching funds has been allocated for “Earthpark,” an indoor rain forest, dubbed “Earthpork” by critics, that would be located on the shores of beautiful Red Rock Lake near Pella, a town of 10,000, situated on Highway 163 along the famous Prairie City-Oskaloosa tourist corridor.
The really big-time “we-pick-first” payoff to Iowa, however, comes in the form of the roughly $2 billion in ethanol subsidies and trade protection benefits (about one-third of the national total) accruing to the state each year. We taxpayers are currently underwriting ethanol production at an estimated rate of 51 cents per gallon, and there is significant research suggesting that producing a gallon of ethanol requires substantially more fossil fuel energy than that gallon of ethanol actually contains. Never ones to be swayed by scientific data if polling data says otherwise, however, save for John McCain, our presidential hopefuls suddenly just can’t get enough of that ethanol-laced Kool-Aid, the latest imbiber being Fred Thompson, who voted against the subsidies back during his Senate gig but now realizes their vital importance to “national security.”
Other states are now rushing to line up behind Iowa in hopes of cashing in on a few early-bird specials. Michigan bumped its primary all the way up to January 15, in part, at least, to force the presidential candidates to talk about the needs and problems of the auto industry. New Mexico and Utah agreed jointly on a February 5 primary date because, the West, with its particular concerns on issues such as water, land use, and nuclear waste has heretofore been what Utah Governor Jon Huntsman describes as largely “irrelevant in presidential politics.”
After much last-minute jostling and maneuvering, six states will have already expressed their presidential preferences by the end of January, and twenty-two more will have their say on February 5. Although the selection process looks much different this year, the primary schedule was still being reshuffled in November, and for the most part, the candidates have followed the familiar old strategy of plopping a lot of their eggs in the Iowa and New Hampshire baskets. In South Carolina, for example, it seems candidates and voters are just beginning to get acquainted, although the primary is less than three weeks away. The states that moved their primaries into January will doubtless get more individual attention from the candidates than they would have otherwise, but in terms of face time with candidates promising good times and gravy to come, the February 5 “Gang of 22” is probably headed for a disappointment.
Conveying interest in local concerns is an instinctive skill for all successful politicians, but from where I sit, lavishing inordinate attention on the early bird primary states is akin assuming that the concerns of those who have pushed their way up to the rope line at a campaign rally are more valid than those of the masses behind them. In turn, allowing the broader candidate selection process to be influenced so heavily by the choices of voters in a handful of states, some of them arguably atypical, surely amounts to picking the persons who will contend to be president of all the people based on their effectiveness in pandering to the preferences and whims of a mighty small and not necessarily representative sample of those people.

. Apropos of the the point I was trying to make in the final paragraph, it was fun to see good old Angela Mitchell, whose latest facelift is so tight that she can't wiggle her toes with her eyes shut, proclaiming that 'the torch has been passed" to Barack Obama, based on the fact that he managed to stuff roughly 20,000 more Iowa Democrats into elementary school classrooms than Hillary Clinton did. Much has been made of Obama's success in a state where the mere glimpse of a black person still carries the presumption that said person must have missed the exit for Chicago, and I'm certainly not discounting his accomplishment. Still, in early primary elections where the presidency really isn't on the line yet, voters are traditionally suckers for the proponents of change, even those short on specifics. (Fully aware of the irony, I point to George Wallace's success in northern primaries in 1968.) It'll be interesting to see whether the folks at Fortress Hillary decide to take the gloves all the way off their girl in an attempt force Obama to mix a little more substance in with all that style. If they do, it will likewise be interesting to see whether voters take all that kindly to seeing their golden boy roughed up. I'm also eager to see whether black voters who have leaned toward Clinton primarily because they doubted that Obama could actually win might now reassess their postion based on the Iowa results. Regardless of how much one can make of those results, one thing's for sure: Hillary campaigned her frozen butt and persona off in Iowa, and there ain't no way to spin what happened there as a good sign for her. My gut, along with her consistently high negatives in polling data, has always told me that there are a lot of people outside New York (and at the very least, Iowa reminds outfits like the New York Times that there actually are such people) who simply dislike her too much as a person to support her as a presidential candidate. Don't kid yourself, she's a long way from dead, but when a lot of people are looking for excuses not to support you, gaffes and stumbles hurt you a lot worse than they might otherwise. On the Republican side, Rev. Mike Huckabee, the GOP's "breath of fresh air" equivalent to Obama, frustrated Mitt "Moneybags" Romney with his surprisingly strong showing. At this point, however, I still can't escape the feeling that Huckabee, who drew the majority of his support from evangelicals, is also something of a "protest" candidate, whose success reflects, at least in part, Republican voters' dissatisfaction with their other choices. Fervor is a good thing in politics, but cash is a lot better, and unless some of the Republicans' big guns put aside their fears about Pastor Mike's previous lapses into populism and open their hearts and checkbooks to him, it's going to be hard for him to get his message across in the twenty seven states that will hold primaries over the next month, especially since his "major player" status now gurarantees that he will have to devote a lot more effort to defending himself than he did when not many people took him seriously. Stay tuned, folks, it ain't football, but it's all we got.