The two big questions among Democrats at the moment are (1) whether there is any way to avoid a presidential nomination contest that extends at least into June, and (2) whether this extended contest might ultimately be a good thing.
Given the remorseless mathematics of the nomination process (the link above refers to Chris Bowers’ exhaustive account), this basically boils down to a much simpler question: at what point, if ever, do Democratic Party poohbahs, exercising their power via the news media and superdelegates, force Hillary Clinton out of the race?
Clearly, there are those who think this should have already happened–that HRC’s odds of winning the nomination on the basis of primary and caucus results have gone down to the longest of long shots, leaving her with the Hobson’s Choice of going negative in a destructive way or losing quickly.
The reason it hasn’t happened is pretty simple. What HRC most needed after the March 4 primaries was a hit on Obama that didn’t have her fingerprints. And that’s exactly what she got with the Jeremiah Wright controversy. While you can make the argument that Obama’s dazzling speech in Philadelphia last week mitigated the damage, and just as importantly, may have cauterized the wound by taking the issue off the table for the future, it still represented an unforced error that gave HRC’s campaign some hope that Obama might “crater” without a divisive push from her rival.
On the other hand, the second big development after March 4, HRC’s apparent failure to secure a “do-over” or ratification of the MI and/or FL primaries, is a major blow to her ability to plausibly argue she will wind up the primary/caucus season with a pledged delegate plurality (almost impossible now), or an acknowledged popular vote plurality (still possible but increasingly remote).
But so long as HRC is winning primaries–particularly if Obama’s sag in general election trial heats with McCain continues–Party Poohbahs are very unlikely to intervene to administer a coup de grace.
So: to answer the $64,000 question as to when a concerted effort might be made to squeeze Clinton out of the race, the most compelling answer is that it will happen about fifteen minutes after she loses another primary. Like the participants in the NCAA basketball tournament, she’s into single-elimination territory now.
The good news for her is that it might not happen soon, and theorectically might not happen at all.
If you look at the rest of the primary calendar, after PA, which everyone expects HRC to win, there’s IN and NC on May 6. Obama’s currently favored in both, but not by large margins, and neither is exactly hostile territory. West Virginia on May 13 ought to be Clinton Country, as is KY on May 20. OR also votes on May 20, and Obama’s favored there, but not by a big margin. Obama’s narrowly favored in two of the three final states–MT and SD, voting just after an assumed Clinton win in Puerto Rico.
There’s zero margin for error here for HRC, and even if she ran the table, she probably would not win by big enough margins to take the lead in pledged delegates, and would struggle to gain a popular vote plurality. Moreover, there’s the example of past candidates who won big in late primaries (e.g., Ted Kennedy in 1980 and Gary Hart in 1984) but couldn’t win the nomination. But that’s the strategy she’s left with, and until such time as she loses, don’t expect her to be forced out of the race.

It’s a pretty fair assumption that Democrats looking towards the general election are feeling exceptionally conflicted right now. On the one hand, the extended Clinton-Obama competition, which could easily extend into June and could possibly remain unresolved until the convention in August, is clearly inflicting damage on both candidates’ general election prospects while giving John McCain an enormous breather. In a very unhappy article in The New Republic today, Noam Scheiber argues that it may take a relatively early superdelegate intervention to nail down an Obama nomination and give Democrats a shot at victory in November.
But on the other hand, there remain certain fundamental factors that are almost certain to boost the Democratic nominee down the road and create some serious problems for McCain. Chief among them is the economy. At Bloomberg.com, Alison Fitzgerald reminds us that incumbent parties have rarely if ever managed to hold onto the White House in a recessionary atmosphere. Moreover, John McCain’s relative ability to avoid association with the record of the Bush administration does not necessarily extend to economics; even his own campaign concedes that his chief economic talking point is support for making Bush’s tax cuts permanent.
Beyond the economy, the belief of many conservatives that McCain is going to win by making the election a foreign policy referendum centered on Iraq is exceedingly strange. Yes, the tactical successes associated with the “surge” in Iraq have made this issue less deadly for Republicans, but there’s simply no evidence that Americans are shifting towards support for perpetual war or a reconsideration of the judgment that the invasion was a mistake.
In other words, there’s almost no doubt that John McCain will be fighting a powerful, historically high “wrong track” sentiment that may actually grow stronger in the fall, particularly if gas prices rise to over $4 a gallon and the collateral damage from the subprime mortgage disaster continues to play itself out. It’s always possible that McCain’s battered-but-intact “maverick” reputation compounded by unhappiness over the views of the retired pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ will trump these fundamentals. But the fundamentals are not going away.

Lurking in the background of the interminable dispute over the Democratic Party’s handling of outlaw primaries in MI and FL has been the fear that keeping these two states unrepresented at the convention in Denver could hurt the ultimate nominee’s ability to win either or both in November.
Up until now, this fear has been largely subjective and anecdotal. But earlier this week, three Florida media outlets published a poll suggesting that Florida Democrats are indeed feeling invested in the controversy, with a significant number of them currently inclined to punish the national party for its alleged disrespect.
More specifically, 14% of respondents say a failure to seat the Florida delegation would make them “much less likely” to support the presidential nominee in November, with another 10% saying it would make them somewhat less likely to do so. It’s also worth noting that only 28% of respondents blame the Republican governor and legislature for the mess, with 25% blaming the DNC and another 20% blaming the Florida Democratic Party.
There’s clearly some intraparty factionalism affecting these results, since Clinton supporters are roughly twice as likely to want the original primary results to stand as Obama supporters (Obama’s support, BTW, has gone up modestly since the primary).
This is all interesting, and perhaps questionable. Given the high odds of a polarizing general election, and the certainty that the Democratic nominee will campaign heavily in the Sunshine State, you’d have to figure some of these bruised feelings among Florida Democrats would abate by November.
But on the other hand, if the Clinton campaign continues to make its championship of MI and FL primary voters a centerpiece of the case for her nomination, and particularly if there is a Credentials Committees fight before or during the convention, then this issue is likely to remain front-and-center in Florida political coverage for quite some time. If HRC wins the nomination, this particular problem might largely go away. But if the nominee is Obama, and he wins after fighting tooth-and-nail against any seating of Florida delegates, then we should all hope someone in Obama’s political braintrust is already devoting some long-term thinking to what the candidate can do during the General Election to heal the wounds. A fly-around to key media markets in Florida, and perhaps Michigan, the day after the convention, might not be a bad idea. Maybe he could distribute some of those convention goodie-bags the unseated delegates will have missed.

I didn’t cross-post an article I wrote for TPMCafe on the religious dimension of the Jeremiah Wright controversy and Barack Obama’s handling of it, in part because it overlapped with earlier observations I made on this site, and also because I’ve tried to keep TDS relatively free of my various non-political interests (hence, no posts, much as I’ve been tempted, about Georgia football or basketball).
But given the apparently endless nature of the Wright controversy, at least among conservatives, and the heavy emphasis placed on religious factors by Obama’s critics, you might want to give it a read, particularly if you are a Christian in search of relevant if non-momentous Holy Week reading material.

Surely one measure of the judgment of politicians who have supported and continue to support the Iraq War and those who didn’t and/or don’t is the overall cost, generally estimated at $2 trillion. That’s calamitous enough, as Joe Conason explains, given the original cost estimates:

How mistaken were the war’s optimistic promoters in 2003? The official line on the expected cost of rebuilding Iraq after ousting Saddam was just under $2 billion, according to testimony provided by Bush administration officials. That estimate did not include the likelihood, according to Paul Wolfowitz, the then-deputy secretary of defense, of whether Iraq’s oil reserves would cover the entire cost of invasion, occupation and reconstruction. Five years later, the estimated cost of the war to American taxpayers is well over $2 trillion, including the care we must provide for wounded Americans over the next few decades. Much of the Iraqi oil, of which production remains sporadic, is being stolen and smuggled away.
The difference between an estimate of $2 billion and a cost of $2 trillion could be considered a significant miscalculation, even in a Republican government.

But that’s not all:

Yet those figures don’t quite reckon with the real costs, which should include the rise in the price of oil from around $36 a barrel in March 2003 to well over $100 a barrel this month. Some economists go further, blaming the subprime mortgage collapse — and the ensuing deluge of bad paper that may capsize the world economy — on the effects of the war.

No matter how broad or narrow your estimates, the costs of this war have to cast a pretty heavy shadow on John McCain’s reputation for fiscal probity, and should make his obsession with appropriations earmarks–mostly peanuts as compared to a week or so of this war, which he supported from the beginning and wants to continue indefinitely–pretty laughable.

Today, as you probably know, is the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. And two national politicians–George W. Bush and Barack Obama–marked the anniversary with major speeches on the subject.
Anyone who doubts there are significant differences between the two parties on foreign policy and national security issues ought to read these two speeches. No, George W. Bush won’t be on the ballot this year, but John McCain has accepted and even championed Bush’s point of view on the original decision to invade Iraq and the “victory” strategy going forward. And no, Obama has not yet won the Democratic nomination, but Hillary Clinton, while disagreeing with Obama’s analysis of the original war resolution vote, does agree with him in most particulars about what to do now.
The gap between Bush and Obama is remarkably wide and deep. Bush still argues that the original decision to invade Iraq was justified by Saddam’s “threatening” behavior and the need for a more aggressive post-9/11 U.S. military posture in the Middle East. He’s still asserting the “flypaper” theory that al Qaeda’s involvement in Iraq has denied it the resources to attack America again, and still claims the invasion has made us safer. He’s still dismissing the post-invasion Iraqi turmoil as little more than a rearguard action by elements of Saddam’s regime, augmented by al Qaeda. And he’s still predicting “victory,” defined as a stable Iraqi democracy.
Obama, on the other hand, continues to argue that the invasion was based on lies, bad intelligence, ideology, and most of all a major strategic blunder. He continues to stress the handicaps the war has imposed on the United States, ranging from an overstretched military, to erosion of prior gains in Afghanistan, to neglect of Pakistan, to soured alliances, to the overall costs of the war in human and dollar terms. And he continues to deride the idea of “victory” in Iraq as based on a perpetual engagement with no real definition of success.
The only real change in Bush’s argument over time has been his shift from delusional talk about military and political progress in Iraq to celebration of the real (if limited) military progress associated with the “surge.” And as always, he stresses the allegedly baleful consequences of any sort of withdrawal, especially now that “victory” is in sight.
Meanwhile, Obama is honing his own argument on the “surge” as a tactical success within a strategic failure. His passage today on McCain’s Iraq position nicely combines his analysis of the “surge” with the claim that his own consistent opposition to the war gives him the upper hand in a general election debate on the subject:

If you believe we are fighting the right war, then the problems we face are purely tactical in nature. That is what Senator McCain wants to discuss – tactics. What he and the Administration have failed to present is an overarching strategy: how the war in Iraq enhances our long-term security, or will in the future. That’s why this Administration cannot answer the simple question posed by Senator John Warner in hearings last year: Are we safer because of this war? And that is why Senator McCain can argue – as he did last year – that we couldn’t leave Iraq because violence was up, and then argue this year that we can’t leave Iraq because violence is down.

To the extent that the small recent shift in public opinion towards optimism on Iraq has not been matched by any retroactive positive judgment on the wisdom of the war itself, Obama’s approach makes a lot of political sense. Let the Republicans, Bush and McCain alike, try to perpetually make untenable claims about the whole mess, and it will become clear that after five long years–longer, as Obama pointed out today, than the American engagement in either World War, and longer than the American Civil War–time is definitely not on their side.

Matt’s last post on the YouTube viewship (not to mention the hip-hop station listenership) of Obama’s big race speech yesterday is particularly fascinating to those of us with a background in political communications and speechwriting. Before now, there was an overwhelming conventional wisdom that the long, coherent, logically structured Political Speech was pretty much one of the biggest anachronisms in American politics.
Sure, there continue to be a few occasions–notably presidential State of the Union or Oval Office addresses, and convention acceptance speeches–where significant numbers of people actually watch, listen to, or read entire political speeches. But for the most part, politicians and speechwriters over the last couple of decades have learned to build speeches based not on the primary audience of people exposed to the whole product, but secondary audiences learning about it in print (hence the importance of the “lede”) or electronic (the genesis of “sound bites”) media, or even teritiary audiences who see or hear nothing other than media commentary or reaction by other politicians. Indeed, the recent (and believe it or not, it really is pretty recent) preoccupation by virtually every political campaign with “message” is a function of the fragmentation of political communications, even at the presidential level where more words are covered by the media more often, and campaigns have the resources to buy a lot of attention.
What Matt’s suggesting is that the new social media may be changing all that, and enabling candidates to get a broad and unflitered–in other words, primary audience–for longer and more nuanced communications that do the things soundbites or short “message” ads can’t–tell a story, address complex issues, convey a genuine sense of the candidate’s personality, and make a detailed argument.
It’s probably prudent not to get too carried away with this idea too fast. We don’t know how many of the million-plus people who’ve already downloaded Obama’s Philadelphia speech actually watched all of it. We don’t know how many of them were persuadable voters rather than Obama supporters. And we also don’t know if this is going to become a general phenomenon, or if Obama’s already-legendary speechmaking ability, and the explosive nature of yesterday’s topic, make him the exception rather than the rule.
But it all bears watching. And this is one old speechwriter who would be delighted if there’s once again room in political campaigns for logical appeals that take a while to deliver.

Barack Obama delivered a much-anticipated speech in Philadelphia today, designed to respond to the sudden firestorm of criticism he’s received for the allegedly anti-American views of his long-time pastor and spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
It’s a long and (for a politician) relatively complex speech, but its essence is pretty simple: Obama treats Wright’s perspective, along with the perspective of those most likely to be angered by it, as part of the legacy of racial divisions he wants to overcome in his candidacy, and utlimately, as a “distraction.”
Moreover, Obama categorizes Wright’s rhetoric–which has come across in the now-famous YouTube snippet as representing that enduring stereotype, the Angry Black Man–as generational, connecting to another key theme in his campaign:

For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.

There are a couple of remarkable things about that passage. First, Obama is contending that some of the more exotic and controversial beliefs of many African-Americans–the AIDS conspiracy theory being the most notable–are mainly attributable to the bitter experiences of those who actually experienced Jim Crow. I’m reminded of Richard Pryor’s routine about old black men–“there ain’t nobody more racist than an old black man”–who are very conservative in manner and unfailingly polite to white people, until they are out of earshot. In a society in which young black men remain the embodiment of so many cultural fears, this contention will seem counterintuive to people who view Jim Crow as a distant and largely irrelevant evil.
Second, Obama is accepting Wright and his church as flawed reflections of the good and evil within his own community. “As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me…I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.” This is a very old conception of the church–as old as the parish system of Europe, to say the least–but one that won’t make a lot of sense to those Americans who view church membership as an expression of consumer choice, and ultimately, of the spiritual discrimination and good taste of the religious consumer. They will continue to wonder why Obama didn’t just pick up and “move his letter” elsewhere the first time Jeremiah Wright said something outrageous from the pulpit.
How will this entire speech go over? It’s hard to say. It won’t satisfy those who expected Obama to “reject” Wright as he rejected Farrakhan. It will offer fresh ammunition to Republicans who claim the “real” Obama is revealed by his associations in Chicago. It will anger some people on both sides of the racial divide by its flat statement of moral equivalence between black and white resentments. But it may resonate with Americans (especially Catholics) who have loyally attended churches for years while rejecting or ignoring key elements of church teachings.
But more clearly, this speech ups the ante for Obama’s promise to act as a reconciler and unifier. After this speech, no one should be under the impression that he’s mainly interested in overcoming the narcissistic culture-based political conflicts of the 1990s. He’s now casting his candidacy as an opportunity to transcend one of the biggest continuing traumas of the 19th and 20th centuries, and of centuries before that: race. There’s never been much question that he was viewed that way by many supporters. But now it’s explicitly on the table, and we’ll soon find out how much reconciliation and unity Americans really want, and on what terms.

As Barack Obama has gotten closer to the Democratic presidential nomination, he has, predictably, become subject to a lot more media scrutiny, in part because of his Democratic and Republican opponents, but also because he’s been reasonably open about his personal background and past affiliations.
This scrutiny has become especially intense over the last few weeks, but at present, if you ask ten Obama supporters and ten Obama detractors about the issue that could most damage the Illinois senator, most of them would cite his relationship with Jermiah Wright, long-time (but recently retired) pastor of Obama’s Trinity UCC Church.
A brief video clip from Wright’s “God Damn America” sermon is getting viral attention. Obama has said he wasn’t present for this sermon, and vehemently disagrees with its sentiments, but he has remained in Wright’s flock for 22 years. Wright consecrated Obama’s marriage, and baptized his children.
Jack and Jill Politics (a leading African-American political site) blogger Rikyrah published a valuable post at Open Left over the weekend placing the Wright controversy in the broader context of Trinity UCC’s highly affluent, culturally and politically mainstream congregation. Beyond that, anyone familiar with the African-American preaching tradition–or for that matter, the shaper edge of recent Protestant and Catholic homiletics generally–will recognize Wright’s more provocative rhetoric as emblematic of a long-standing Christian effort to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” from a thousand pulpits.
Still, the Wright controversy clearly undercuts Obama’s effort to stand for racial, partisan and ideological reconciliation, and it’s no accident that he’s decided to make this the subtext of a major speech tomorrow in Philadelphia. It will be an interesting moment. Personally, the first time I really paid attention to Barack Obama as something other than a rising political star and outstanding speaker was back in the summer of 2006, when he delivered an address to the Christian Left Call for Renewal conference that was one of the most nuanced and interesting set of comments on the subject of religion and politics heard in a long, long time. It didn’t get that much attention. But what he says tomorrow will be heard by the whole political world.

Late last week a diarist at Daily Kos, going by the handle of Alegre, called on fellow supporters of Hillary Clinton to conduct a “writer’s strike” at the site. As Markos Moulitsas quickly noted, this is actually a boycott, not a strike–or maybe the right word is a secession, since the idea is for pro-HRC Kossacks to find somewhere else to blog and talk.
On its own terms, the boycott is a pretty unremarkable example of the inherent tensions of the blogosphere, where centrifugal and centripital forces are always fighting for ascendancy. As the largest single site in the political blogosphere, and as one that features both a vast and decentralized array of opinion, and a very strong sense of being a “community” with a distinct point of view, Daily Kos is especially conducive to this sort of tension. It’s not surprising there are intra-Kossack rebellions now and then. New blogs and spinoffs (remember that Markos himself began as a diarist at MyDD) are extraordinarily common, for the simple reason that netroots participants will often decide to form “communities” more closely tailored to their opinions and particular needs, or provide them with a more prominent platform.
On the other hand, the boycott also reflects the growing ferocity of the Clinton-Obama competition, and as such, should concern all Democrats. Alegre’s boycott call could have been clearer, but its main complaint is about the “abusive nature” and “horrid and sexist manner” of anti-HRC commentary at DKos, rather than the pro-Obama allegiances of front-pagers and commenters.
At the risk of putting words into a lot of mouths, I’d summarize the increasingly personal nature of the argument between Clinton and Obama supporters in the blogosphere, and beyond it, as follows:
Obama supporters are generally upset at what they consider to be a destructive rearguard action by HRC’s campaign to boost her slim chances at the nomination by severely damaging Obama’s general election prospects. Exhibits #1 and #2 in this indictment was her public suggestion that Obama is less qualified to be commander-in-chief than John McCain, and her alleged abettment, on national television, of the idea that Obama is some sort of crypto-Muslim.
While Obama supporters don’t often accuse Clinton supporters generally of being racist, they do accuse the Clinton campaign of appealing to racist impulses in the electorate.
Meanwhile, Clinton supporters in the blogosphere naturally feel more than a bit persecuted, because they are a distinct and enduring minority, and also because HRC-abuse long predated this presidential campaign. Much of this abuse obviously stemmed from her support for the Iraq War Resolution, but a lot also represented displaced anger at the alleged ideological and partisan heresies of her husband. As an example, an extraordinary amount of cyberspace has been devoted to attacks on HRC as the “DLC candidate,” even though she led what was perceived at the time as being the anti-DLC faction in the Clinton White House, at least in the early years of that administration. This attack-line is particularly infuriating to those HRC supporters (most notably Armando Llorens at Talk Left and to some extent, Blogfather Jerome Armstrong at MyDD) who think the Obama candidacy reflects the worst aspects of Clintoninan “triangulation.”
The “sexism” charge against Obama supporters is slightly less prevalent, though there are a host of feminist bloggers–some of whom actually support Obama–who are chronically upset about criticisms of HRC that follow sexist stereotypes. And some pro-HRC or neutral feminists, within and beyond the blogosphere, are convinced that the entire Obama campaign is a political example of the well-known real-life phenomenon of loyal, long-serving, talented women being displaced in hiring decisions by the first promising young man who walks through the door.
Personally, I’ve long argued that intra-Democratic arguments, particularly in presidential primaries, need to benefit from a free-speech presumption, including electability arguments, so long as they don’t directly suggest that the intra-party rival is objectively inferior to the partisan opponent, and more pertinently, so long as they do not ascribe invidious personal motives to fellow Democrats.
The Clinton-Obama competition is complex, but I think it would be helpful to sort it out in terms of the conditions just mentioned. Do readers agree? I’d be very curious to know.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist