I’ve been watching MSNBC’s early coverage of the PA primary, and it’s been a roller-coaster of hints that the race is very close and hints that Clinton may wind up winning pretty big. The gradual drip of exit poll date has, even more than usually, contributed to this confusing impression.
The one clearly interesting thing I’ve heard on this network so far is actually by Howard Fineman, who’s saying that Obama’s real PA strategy was to bleed HRC’s finances while limiting her margin of victory. Under that theory, if Obama avoids a double-digit loss while forcing the Clinton campaign into virtual penury, then he’s lost the battle, but maybe contributed to victory in the war. We’ll see.

The long hiaitus in Democratic primary voting is finally over, as voters troop to the polls in PA today. MSNBC’s First Read has a reasonably good assessment of the range of likely results, which will only have a big impact on the nomination contest if Barack Obama pulls off an upset win (which would be as big a blow to the polling industry as HRC’s win in NH), or if HRC wins by a bigger margin than in Ohio (i.e., by double digits). A very narrow Clinton win would produce the most intense spin wars, since most polls predict a high-single-digit margin for her. Even with a comfortable but not overwhelming victory in PA, she’s unlikely to make any significant net gains in pledged delegates, though she could shave Obama’s (roughly) 700,000 lead in the cumulative popular vote by somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000.
If you’re planning to watch the network/cable coverage of the primary results tonight, expect a lot of talk (particularly if there is a significant gap in time between the release of exit poll data and the “calling” of the state) about Obama’s relative performance among various categories of white voters–those without college educations, Catholics, Appalachians, etc., etc.–perhaps with comparisons to his numbers in Ohio. Another good bet is a lot of confused discussion about the cumulative popular vote totals, which will vary from count to count based on all sorts of definitional factors. And yet another lead-pipe cinch will be close scrutiny of exit poll data about the alleged willingness of Clinton and Obama voters in PA to desert the party in November if their candidate does not get the nomination. (Note, however, the TDS staff post earlier today pointing to historical evidence that such defections rarely happen in big numbers, whatever voters say months away from the general election.)
While it may not get much media attention unless the numbers are really surprising, total turnout–generally expected to be in the neighborhood of a record 2 million–will be interesting, not just in terms of the possible impact on the Clinton-Obama competition, but as a reflection of (a) the year-long national trend towards a significant expansion of Democratic registration, and/or (b) the existence or absence of “voter fatigue,” which some observers expect as a product of the increasingly negative nature of the contest, or of television ad over-saturation. The weather, described this morning by the Philadelphia Inquirer as “a near perfect spring day…across the Keystone State,” certainly won’t depress turnout.
Stay tuned here for updates tonight as developments warrant. We’ll try to add some value to the media chatter.

I have a very high regard for Ross Douthat of The Atlantic, exceeded only by Ramesh Ponnuru as a conservative commentator who consistently manages to rise above talking-points-distribution and cant, and make us all think twice about our comfortable partisan assumptions. But his contribution today to the backlash against the backlash to the ABC-sponsored Democratic debate last week is disappointing.
At considerable length, Douthat defends what he calls “the freakshow” of non-substantive candidate grilling on this basic ground:

[W]hen we elect a new chief executive, we aren’t just electing to live with their policy positions. We’re deciding to live with their personalities – their sexual appetites and Daddy issues, their spouses and their friends, their religious beliefs and their psychodramas – for four or eight long years.

Well, of course. But do we really need obsessive dwelling on such “issues” in network-broadcast candidate debates to give the country a peek at the personalities of potential presidents? Reading Ross, you’d think we were still living in the long-lost days when clubby journalists conspired to stifle reporting or discussion about, say, John F. Kennedy’s sex life or Richard Nixon’s use of profanity. They are truly long lost, for better or for worse.
So the question right now is not whether the public has a right to know about Obama’s choice of ministers or what a sociologist might deduce from what Obama or HRC says privately to donors, but whether that’s all the public needs to know. There is zero question that Americans know a lot more about certain of Jeremiah Wright’s opinions than those of Barack Obama on a host of subjects. It’s also clear that voters have massive sources of “information,” positive and negative, real and contrived and manufactured, about the personalities and “stories” of Hillary Clinton and John McCain. How much is enough? How much is too much? And if “debates” need to focus on such matters, why do we bother having supposedly sober journalists moderate? Why not just let Drudge and Dowd moderate, and show the whole thing on Entertainment Tonight?
Generally speaking, ABC’s defenders are depicting its critics as naive and wonky elitists who don’t understand real politics, or conversely, as cynics who are only upset that the debate didn’t go well for Barack Obama. I can’t speak for all the critics, but I have to say my own outrage at the debate was on the order of “Enough’s enough.” Contra Ross Douthat, my own fear is that we are in danger of electing a chief executive with far too little emphasis on their “policy positions” as opposed to their “personalities”–just as, arguably, we did in 2000 and 2004. And my only partisanship in rejecting the final descent into largely substance-free debates isn’t about Obama versus Clinton, but instead reflects an informed opinion that Republicans desperately want to make the general election a contest of “personalities” rather than “policy positions.”
Given his general body of work, I wouldn’t accuse Ross Douthat of that motive. But the idea that Americans need more and more of a style of campaign coverage that even he describes as a “freakshow” clearly ought to raise more suspicions of candidate or party special pleading than the views of the “freakshow’s” critics.

There was a revealing comment at National Review‘s The Corner yesterday by Mark Steyn, who sneers at a Michael Cowley quotation of a Bush political operative who said: “You guys never get it….People don’t vote on issues. They vote on character.”
Sez Steyn:

Well, why shouldn’t they vote on “character”? Barack Obama has no accomplishments, no legislative record, no nuthin’. So if you don’t want to vote on character (ie, his condescension to crackers too boorish to understand how sophisticatedly nuanced it is to have a terrorist pal and a racist pastor), what else is left?

Uh, gee, Mark, how’s about those “issues?” Does Barack Obama have to have “accomplishments” with respect to the war in Iraq to offer a slightly different form of leadership on Iraq than John McCain? And for that matter, do you really want to bet the presidency on John McCain’s “accomplishments” and “legislative record” when it comes to the economy?
Get used to this, folks. Republicans are going to do everything imaginable to make the general election “about” something, anything, other than the simple fact that they are out of touch with a majority of Americans on a wide variety of “issues.” This will definitely include elitist, snobby instructions to Americans that their interest in “issues” is a form of false consciousness that obscures their actual obligation to vote on the basis of “character,” as defined by people like Mark Steyn.

Just wanted to note, for the record, a couple of things I was involved in outside this site.
Yesterday I was one of 41 journalists (I’m pretty sure the list has grown since it was first published) signing onto an open letter to ABC deploring the tone and content of the Democratic presidential debate the network sponsored on Wednesday. Given what I’ve posted here on the subject, it seemed like a natural step to take. But I do want to make it clear I was acting solely for myself, and not for TDS or its co-editors.
I also did a post at TPMCafe commenting negatively on an effort by Jamie Kirchick of The New Republic (disputed on their site by Jonathan Chait and Isaac Chotiner) to defend the proposition that Sen. Joe Lieberman’s endorsement and active campaigning for John McCain is compatible with his past protestations of loyalty to the Democratic Party. I wrote this because I thought it would be useful to hear a Joe’s-Crossed-the-Final-Line argument from someone who’s never been accused of Lieberman-hatred or TNR-hatred–particularly someone who doesn’t accept the idea that Lieberman’s been some sort of crypto-Republican all along.

I’d be remiss in failing to end this week of political commentary without mentioning Jonathan Chait’s fine and definitive smackdown on Republican arguments (especially those expressed by self-styled-ultra-elitist George Will) that Barack Obama or Democrats generally don’t respect the cultural views of white working-class voters:

To urge the white working class to vote on the basis of economic policy is itself considered an act of elitism. When Obama and other liberals reproach blue-collar whites for voting their values over their wallet, argues Will, they are accusing those workers of “false consciousness.” A Wall Street Journal editorial took umbrage that Obama “diminishes the convictions of those voters who care more about the right to bear arms, or faith in God, than they do about the AFL-CIO’s agenda.”
But nobody’s challenging the validity of caring more about your religion, or even your right to hunt, than your income. The objection is whether it makes sense to vote on that basis. There are, after all, stark differences between the two parties on economic matters. Republicans do want to make working-class voters pay a higher proportion of the tax burden, restrain popular social programs, erode the value of the minimum wage, and so on.
Democrats, on the other hand, have no plans to keep anybody from attending church or hunting. A few years ago, their gun-control agenda revolved around issues like safety locks, banning assault weapons, and other restrictions carefully designed to have virtually no impact on hunters or average gun owners. Now Democrats have abandoned even those meager steps. The GOP’s appeal on those “issues” rests on cultural pandering rather than any concrete legislative program.

It’s much the same point I tried to make earlier this week: it’s bad to dismiss non-economic voter concerns as irrelevant. It’s far worse to dismiss economic concerns, which by and large do have a direct connection with public policy, unlike religion and gun ownership.
The idea that Democrats as compared to Republicans are the “elitists” when it comes to working-class concerns is just laughable–particularly when the supposed anti-elitists are folks like American Tory George Will or the editors of The Wall Street Journal.

Today brought the surprising news that my old boss, former Sen. Sam Nunn, has endorsed Barack Obama for president, along with his frequent collaborator in politics and policy, former OK Sen. David Boren.
Nunn and Boren last made news back at the beginning of the year, when they presided over a confab hosted by Boren that seemed to be designed to signal support for a “unity” third-party presidential run, probably by Mike Bloomberg. Back in August of last year, Nunn let it be known that he might himself be available for a third-party candidacy.
Since Bloomberg decided not to spend his dough on a presidential run, while the Unity ’08 “grassroots” effort to draft a third-party candidate sputtered out some time ago, it appears that Nunn and Boren looked at the presidential field and made their choice emphatically.
Maybe I’m prejudiced here, but I think Nunn’s support could be a reasonably big deal for Obama in a general election contest, if he uses the Georgian appropriately. Nunn’s national security street cred couldn’t be much higher, and in combination with his well-earned reputation for bipartisanship, should give pause to those chattering-class types who think John McCain is the “centrist” in the race, or is the clear choice for those who value national security above all other issues. If nothing else, he would be a pretty handy surrogate to put on the airwaves if and when Joe Lieberman attacks Obama’s national security views at the Republican National Convention in September. (I say this because one of the lost opportunities of the Kerry campaign was the failure to reach out to Nunn as the perfect person to answer Zell Miller’s attacks on the Democrat’s defense record in the Senate).
Not having been in touch with Nunn for a good long while, I have no idea whether his support for Obama would extend to support for HRC if she somehow wins the nomination. He did supply Bill Clinton with an important early endorsement in the 1992 cycle. But a lot’s happened since then, and Nunn and Boren clearly take Obama’s post-partisanship posture quite seriously. In any event, I don’t agree with those who may think these endorsements can’t matter because these guys aren’t superdelegates.

George Stephanopoulos has addressed criticism of his and Charles Gibson’s conduct as moderators in last night’s ABC-sponsored Democratic candidate debate, in the form of an interview with TalkingPointsMemo’s Greg Sargent. And George went straight to the “electability” defense:

Stephanopoulos strongly defended his handling of the debate. He dismissed criticism that it had focused too heavily on “gotcha” questions, arguing that they had gone to the heart of the “electability” that, he said, is forefront in the minds of voters evaluating the two Dems.

Ah yes, “electability,” which makes discussion of any criticism of a candidate, frivolous or serious, instantly relevant, on the theory that the opposition will hit the nominee with all this crap, so we might as well see how they handle its endless repetition today.
There are several problems with this line of “reasoning” that arrogates to journalists (not to mention the candidates themselves) the right–nay, the responsibility–to ape the nastiest hit tactics they can imagine emanating from conservatives later this year.
First of all, why is Stephanopoulos all that sure that “electability” is in the “forefront in the minds of voters evaluating” Obama and Clinton? Maybe he thinks that’s the only significant difference between the two candidates, and maybe he’s tired of hearing their substantive pitches, but that’s not necessarily true of actual voters who have heard far less of their policy ideas lately than any manner of gotcha stuff or “symbolism.”
Second of all, “electability” is a highly speculative concept at this stage of the presidential election cycle. Who knows how “electable” Obama, Clinton or McCain is going to look in October? I don’t; you don’t; George Stephanopoulos doesn’t; and grilling the candidates on their alleged “vulnerabilities” doesn’t cast much real light on that question, either.
Third of all, to the extent that we can measure “electability,” there’s a form of evidence that’s a lot more persuasive than how Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton answer nasty, contrived questions. It’s called general election trial polling. And so far, both candidates remain highly competitive, in roughly equal measure, with John McCain, even though McCain is benefitting from (a) an early nomination win, (b) years of positive media attention, (c) a heavy media focus on Democratic infighting, and (d) relatively low levels of scrutiny of the relationship between his current platform and his record. Unless the entire general election is going to be fought out over Barack Obama’s attitude towards flag pins or Hillary Clinton’s experience one day in Kosovo, then it’s hard to understand why such matters are the key to measuring “electability” for the Democratic voters of Pennslyvania.
And last of all, if “electability” was indeed the focus of ABC’s moderators last night, did it occur to them that asking the candidates how, exactly, they’d criticize McCain and his platform and record on this or that issue might be relevant to the topic? After all, the general election isn’t going to be merely an extended interview of the two candidates by the news media over their personal “stories.” What do they think of McCain’s new tax plan? How about his difficult-to-reconcile position on torture by the military and torture by the CIA? How will they handle his profession of being simultaneously a “maverick” and a rigorous foot-solider of the conservative movement? What if anything will they say about his foreign policy advisors? And on and on.
The more you look at it, the “electability” defense for endlessly superficial debates–and media “coverage” of campaigns in general–doesn’t make much sense. If George just came right out and said his network needed “fireworks” to boost ratings, it would sound more plausible.

Ross Douthat is a conservative, albeit of a somewhat heretical temperament, so his assessment of John McCain’s new “economic agenda” is particularly interesting insofar as he thinks the whole thing is, well, pretty poorly thought out and essentially a box-checking exercise.

McCain’s speech reads like an attempt to unify a divided party by offering every faction something to make them happy. For the GOP’s supply-siders and business interests, there are promises to extend the Bush tax cuts and slash corporate rates. For moderate Republicans clinging to seats in Democratic states, there’s a pledge to cut the Alternative Minimum Tax, which hits upper-middle class Blue Staters hardest. For free traders, there’s a shout-out to the Colombian Free Trade Agreement; for flat-tax obsessives, there’s a call for an alternative tax-filing option, featuring just two brackets instead of four or five. For deficit hawks and porkbusters, there’s a promise to veto any bill with earmarks, an attack on corporate welfare, and a call for a one-year freeze in discretionary spending and a top-to-bottom review of every agency’s budget. For entitlement reformers, there’s a call to means-test the prescription drugs benefit. There’s even something for the small band of conservatives (this writer among them) who have been agitating for a distinctively pro-family economic agenda, in the form of a pledge to double the tax exemption for dependents, from $3500 to $7000.

In other words, it’s all pretty much a politically-motivated grab-bag, with the desire to shower tax benefits on voters struggling rather painfully with McCain’s long-time theme of demands for fiscal discipline. McCain does seem to have figured out that it’s not exactly the right moment to pose as Dr. Root Canal (to use the term of abuse supply-siders have traditionally applied to fiscal hawks). But it’s not especially clear that offering something to everyone will work politically, either. As Douthat says:

This is almost certainly a wiser approach than campaigning as the prince of budgetary rectitude and nothing else, but by leaving McCain without a signal theme, it runs the risk that the media will end up deciding which aspects of his program get highlighted, and what narrative he ends up saddled with.

Well, yeah, insofar as one of those “media narratives” could involve getting out the calculator and figuring out that McCain’s tax proposals will once again shower corporations and the wealthy with the bulk of benefits, while dwarfing the negative fiscal consequences of even Bush’s tax plans. And maybe that’s why Ross concludes by suggesting that McCain could wind up vulnerable to claims than on economic issues, he’s “George W. Bush redux.” It might even, you know, be true.

For a variety of logistical reasons, I wasn’t able to watch last night’s Democratic candidate debate, sponsored by ABC. But I did watch some highlights–or as they put it, lowlights–put together by TalkingPointsMemo, and it does indeed look like the terrible reviews are justified. Here’s what Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales had to say:

When Barack Obama met Hillary Clinton for another televised Democratic candidates’ debate last night, it was more than a step forward in the 2008 presidential election. It was another step downward for network news — in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.

The main complaint is that the moderators spent an inordinate amount of tiime on substance-free gotcha questions and querelous follow-ups, mostly aimed at Obama. The whole show, which also featured constant commercial breaks, was generally so bad that the audience booed the moderators at the end.
This will probably be the last debate between the Democratic contenders in this cycle, and it is devoutly to be hoped that the news media have learned some things about how to conduct a debate that will be used during the general election. Last night’s event wasn’t, however, a good sign.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist