For all the focus on the Republican competition in FL today, there’s an interesting story a-brewing on the Democratic side.
As you probably know, the Democratic National Committee stripped MI and FL of their votes at the Democratic Convention in August on grounds that the states violated the ban on pre-February 5 primaries, other than the sanctioned contests in IA, NH, NV and SC. More importantly, the DNC orchestrated a candidate boycott of campaigning in the two states, though HRC appeared alone on the ballot in MI and all the remaining candidates are on the ballot in FL.
Best anyone can tell, Clinton has scrupulously hewed to the letter of the boycott in FL, traveling there only for private fundraising and eschewing any public campaign activity. But she’s certainly violated its spirit, by (1) openly appealing to FL primary voters by pledging to fight for the seating of their delegates, and (2) holding an election night event in FL where she plans to claim victory in the supposed non-event. Obama has not followed her in either of these actions, and continues to maintain that the FL primary is meaningless (not that his campaign would likely ignore an upset win, if that somehow happened against all odds).
But ironically, the Clinton campaign is now claiming (reports TNR’s Noam Scheiber) Obama has violated the letter of the boycott by putting up a national cable TV ad that will be viewed in parts of FL.
If the chattering classes buy this line of attack, it will represent a pretty good exercise in damage control by the Clinton campaign, whose efforts to elevate the FL results over those in SC took a big hit when Obama won by a surprisingly large margin in the Palmetto State.
But all this speculation may miss an issue of considerable importance for the long-range future. Remember that the whole point of the MI/FL boycott was to protect the IA-NH duopoly control of the first phases of the nominating contest. Having crossed the Rubicon by championing the MI/FL scofflaws, Hillary Clinton is unlikely to stand up for IA and NH’s future status if she wins the nomination and then the presidency. Indeed, the competition-driven maneuvering over Florida could wind up inadvertantly changing the nominating process for many years to come, to the consternation of Iowans and New Hampshirites and the delight of their many detractors.
Moreover, to get very speculative about it, the big irony is this: having fought for ages against the argument that they are too racially homogenous to represent the Democratic Party, the duopoly’s increasingly slim hopes of survival may now depend on the nomination and election of the first African-American president, Barack Obama. If that’s right, there may soon be some NH Democrats who regret their intervention in what might have otherwise been an irresistable Obama march to the nomination.
Go figure.

So how bad was George W. Bush’s final State of the Union Address? And how anxious are Republicans about today’s Florida presidential primary?
Well, last night, long after Bush concluded his speech, I decided to check out National Review‘s site for SOTU reaction. No quick-react articles at all. And at NR’s The Corner blog, most of the talk was about Florida, with only an occasional irritable reference to Democrats being rude to Bush at the SOTU by not applauding this or that (as though congressional Republicans had not made a science of that during the Clinton years). Most of the Corner participants are half-crazed over the Romney Surge in FL, and worried that McCain’s last-minute endorsement by Gov. Charlie Crist may spoil it all.
To be sure, there’s a dutiful, phoned-in-sounding roundtable discussion of the SOTU up at NRO this morning, but it’s nestled amongst even more obsessive talk about Florida. George W. Bush is just a distraction.
Indeed, you get the feeling that if anyone mentioned “Bush” to conservative activists this morning, they’d assume you were talking about Jeb Bush, thought to be the shadowy presence behind Romney’s FL campaign, and locked in a Texas–er, I mean Florida–Death Match with the godless “moderate” Charlie Crist.
BTW, for us Democrats, The New Republic has posted a useful guide to the Bush-Crist rivalry by FL reporter S.V. Date. Ideology aside, they both want to be in the position to make State of the Union Addresses someday.

One of the few sure bets you can place in the 2008 presidential contest is that the campaign of one-time frontrunner Rudy Giuliani will take a lethal hit in Florida tomorrow. He’s running a weak third (or even fourth) in every recent poll, as John McCain and Mitt Romney battle for a key win. And as Byron York reminds us in a dispatch from Rudy’s less-than-vibrant Florida operation, this state was supposed to be not just a “firewall” for Giuliani, but the beginning of a long sweep of delegate-rich states:

The RealClearPolitics average of polls counted 41 surveys taken in Florida between February 25, 2007 and December 2, 2007. Giuliani led in every one of them, by margins as high as 23 points. And not just a long time ago — in one CNN survey taken in the last week of November, Giuliani led by 21 points.

The fascinating thing about Giluliani’s collapse is that it is primarily attributable to a strategic error, the decision to avoid contests in early states. It’s not as though another candidate caught fire and displaced Rudy; McCain’s return from the dead was largely a result of a vacuum created in no small part by Giuliani’s occlusion, and the candidate who really did come out of nowhere, Mike Huckabee, took votes from Rudy’s rivals. And while Rudy did take some hits late last year over his tangled love life and its possible impact on NY taxpayers, much of that was old news, and it accompanied the fall in the polls more than it caused it. He’s done pretty well in the debates, and in fundraising. But it hasn’t mattered much.
You just can’t avoid the conclusion that the Giuliani campaign gambled and lost on the proposition that it’s possible to maintain a viable national nominating campaign without the oxygen derived from success in early states. The decision to concede IA (and later, MI) quickly drove Giuliani from the front-runner position in NH. The dive Rudy took in NH immediately eliminated his previously strong standing in SC. And now, the cumulative effect of all those retreats has driven him to also-run status in his very best state, FL (he even trails in the polls in NY!).
This is precisely what a lot of people predicted when Giuliani first began leaking his “February 5 strategy” many months ago. Like Al Gore’s campaign in 1988, Rudy and his consultants thought they could repeal history, diss the IA-NH duopoly, and roll to victory as everyone applauded their brilliant audacity. Instead, Guliani is about to become one of those rare presidential candidates who loses almost entirely because of unforced errors. We’ll never know how he might have done with a different strategy. But we do know this one was just plain wrong.

Going into yesterday’s SC Democratic primary, the CW had firmed up to a remarkable degree: Obama would win on the foundation of a solid African-American vote, but would lose white voters so overwhelmingly that the victory would be not only narrow, but pyhrric, setting up a decisive loss for the “black candidate” to Hillary Clinton on Super Tuesday. There was also talk that the racial dynamics of the contest might depress turnout.
Well, once gain, voters interrupted the CW, just as they did to Clinton’s benefit in NH. Obama won by a two-to-one margin, far above anything predicted in the polls, and while much of this performance was indeed attributable to a huge margin among African-Americans, he picked up one-fourth of the white vote as well. In an echo of his Iowa win, Obama actually won white voters under 30. As for turnout: SC Democrats not only smashed every past record, but exceeded the turnout among Republicans last week, which is pretty remarkable given SC’s status as perhaps the reddest of southern red states.
As the headline of an Alec MacGillis analysis of SC in the Washington Post aptly put it, Obama won by “A Margin That Will Be Hard To Marginalize.”
That’s not to say that SC eliminated the talk that Obama’s candidacy has become engulfed by a racial, ethnic and gender arithmetic that cuts against him down the road. Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics has done the best (so far) analysis of these factors in the early contests, and other than an unmistakable and massive swing towards Obama among African-American voters, the evidence is mixed. It’s hard to say that Obama can’t win white votes after finishing first and a close second in IA and NH, two places whose state songs could be “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” And it’s also worth noting that in SC, the kind of upscale, highly educated white voter demographics (other than young voters, whom we won) he carried in IA are in short supply, at least in the Democratic ranks. That won’t be the case in a lot of Super Tuesday states.
But it’s also unmistakably true that up until now, Clinton has had significant and in many cases overwhelming leads in the polls in a large majority of the Super Tuesday states, not to mention Florida on Tuesday. And she still leads in super-delegates by a two-to-one margin, despite some recent Obama gains.
The latest buzz is that Obama’s going to get some especially dramatic endorsements in the next few days. One is from yet another red-state moderate Democrat, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, one of the most widely praised young Democratic electeds in the country. Another is from the ultimate Old Lion of Liberalism, Ted Kennedy, whose niece, Caroline Kennedy, created some buzz of her own with a New York Times op-ed piece endorsing Obama as someone who could become “A President Like My Father.”
All in all, it’s as though voters are determined to make this election year as exciting and unpredictable as the college football season that just ended.

E.J. Dionne today put his finger on an aspect of the Obama-Clinton rivalry that’s been percolating under the surface for a while. Noting the similarities between Obama’s frequent beyond-left-and-right talk–and more specifically, the tribute to Ronald Reagan’s leadership qualities that Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been pounding him about–and the 1992 campaign message of one Bill Clinton, Dionne concludes:

In many ways, Obama is running the 2008 version of the 1992 Clinton campaign. You have the feeling that if Bill Clinton did not have another candidate in this contest, he’d be advising Obama and cheering him on.

E.J. might have added another parallel: Bill Clinton’s trump card in the 1992 nominating contest was his overwhelming support among African-Americans.
I’ve written before (as has Matt Compton) that Obama’s “Clintonian” trans-ideological and trans-partisan rhetoric has been a source of considerable ambivalence towards his candidacy by self-conscious Left Progressives in the party and the blogosphere (indeed, Armando Llorens of Talk Left today plays off Dionne’s column to blast Obama for an insufficiently partisan approach). But there’s a little-noticed flip side to this phenomenon. Despite the long association of the Clintons with the Centrist/DLC/”New Democrat” wing of the party, there’s pretty strong pro-Obama sentiment in centrist circles as well (something I first noticed at the DLC annual meeting last summer, where there was quite visible support for Obama among the several hundred state and local elected officials in attendance). Some observers were surprised by the raft of recent endorsements of Obama by red- and purple-state centrist elected officials in recent weeks (e.g., Janet Napolitano, Claire McCaskill, Jim Doyle, Tim Johnson, and Ben Nelson). Less attention has been paid to support for Obama in SC by long-time white centrist Democrats like former Gov. Jim Hodges, Charleston Mayor Joe Riley, and former state party chair Dick Harpootlian.
In general, the early caucus and primary results have shown relatively little consistent correspondence between voter ideology and candidate preference; that’s a key reason that identity factors (age, race and gender) have played so obvious a role. So the “Clintonian” features of the Obama campaign aren’t just a small, ironic quirk. They are part and parcel of a contest where pinning down the candidates on a conventional left-right spectrum is exceedingly difficult.

In SC this week, John Edwards has continued his campaign’s complaint that he would be winning in that state and nationally if it weren’t for the news media’s obsession with his two rivals.
He’s obviously right that disproportionate media attention has been paid to Clinton and Obama, even prior to Iowa, though the historic nature of their candidacies was clearly a factor as much as any bias. Since Iowa, however, the focus on the two national front-runners has been completely natural, if somewhat self-reinforcing.
Moreover, the idea that Edwards’ only political handicap has been media negligence just doesn’t bear much scrutiny. He’s been running a relatively poor third in polls in his native state for many months, mainly because of his longstanding inability to attract much African-American support. And you can at least partially forgive the punditocracy for treating his loss in Iowa–his obsessive focus for years, building on a big head start in popularity and organization, and benefitting from an environment where national media coverage wasn’t that big a factor–as the crushing blow that Edwards supporters had long conceded it would be. Live by Iowa, die by Iowa.
The dispiriting Clinton-Obama slugfest in SC has given Edwards one last chance to significantly exceed low expectations–which he failed to do in NH and NV. If he succeeds, and the media continue to ignore him, then he probably has some right to complain.
But if Big Media probably shouldn’t be blamed for Edwards’ travails, I personally think they have played a major role in the “racialization” of the Clinton-Obama rivalry. It’s significant that all the race-talk began on the night of the NH primary, when the networks gave exceptional (and IMO, unmerited) credence to the “Bradley-Wilder Effect” of hidden voter racism as an explanation for Clinton’s upset win. I know some people blame the Clinton campaign for “racialization,” but it should be fairly obvious that if her campaign wanted to “go there,” it would have done so prior to the vote in the whiter-shade-of-pale states of IA and NH. Maybe the race-talk was inevitable in any contest including Obama, and maybe identity-based voting is higher than it otherwise would be in a competition where actual policy differences were visible to anyone other than the most serious wonks. But Big Media definitely let the race-genie out of the bottle, and it’s unclear when or whether it can be bottled back up.

One of the more interesting subplots in the Republican presidential contest is the attitude of conservative elites towards long-time intraparty nemesis John McCain. Most don’t like him, for a variety of reasons ranging from his sponsorship of campaign finance reform, to his wavering record on tax cuts, his past feuding with the Christian Right, and his habit of cosponsoring legislation with Democrats (most importantly, on immigration reform and global climate change). Sure, he’s flip-flopped at least partially on some of these issues, and has won some conservative brownie points with his championship of Iraq escalation and his frank support for a permanent U.S. military engagement in that country. But many conservatives opinion-leaders still don’t trust him at all, and their views appear to be shared by a significant number of conservative voters in the early primaries.
But results are results, and between McCain’s wins in NH and SC, and his uniquely strong showing in general election polls, conservatives are having to come to grips with a McCain nomination, particularly if he wins in FL.
In general, conservative elites are talking about McCain much as many of their Democratic counterparts talked about Howard Dean during the brief period in the last presidential cycle when his nomination looked “inevitable.” And just as some of those Democrats longed for reassurance from Dean that all his revolutionary rhetoric hid a conventional politician, conservatives are openly asking McCain for a pander or two to make them feel better about succumbing to his nomination.
Here’s an interesting opening bid by the L’Osservatore Romano of conservative opinion, National Review:

McCain will never win over all conservatives, even if he gets the nomination. But he can reassure conservatives if he pledges to name a conservative running mate and identifies respected conservative legal figures to whom he will turn when nominating judges. He can promise to approach immigration reform piecemeal rather than comprehensively. He should say that strong evidence that the illegal-immigrant population is shrinking will have to arrive before he legalizes any large segment of that population. And he can acknowledge that scientific advances have weakened the case for federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research.

Note the pointed reference to the veep choice, which should pour some cold water on neocon fantasies of a McCain-Lieberman ticket (no career-long supporters of abortion rights need apply), along with the demand for a flip-flop on stem cell research, and a full surrender on immigration reform.
At present, it’s unclear exactly how much leverage conservative elites have with McCain. He’s done pretty well without their support, and the real-world obstacle to McCain’s nomination is Mitt Romney’s bottomless campaign treasury, not conservative hostility. But expect to see more of this bidding for McCain’s allegiance if his electoral success continues.

There is a new and (no matter whom you support) disturbing CW dominating analysis of the Democratic nominating contest at the moment. It’s that Obama is becoming the “black candidate,” repelling the white and brown voters who will determine the ultimate outcome. Indeed, this point of view is feeding the Clinton campaign’s efforts to downplay an expected Obama win in South Carolina this Saturday. After all (suggest the pundits, not the Clintons), SC is just about black folks, who won’t matter down the road. Typically, Dick Morris is the bluntest in publicly presenting this point of view, but I can tell you, it’s endemic in the DC chattering classes.
Totally aside from the corrosive effect of such race-based political assumptions–including the planted axiom that white and Latino voters don’t want to be on the same bandwagon as African-Americans–they strike me as a being over-simplistic from even a cold, amoral perspective. Here’s a new flash for the punditocracy: there are African-Americans who live in states other than South Carolina.
A case in point: the most under-discussed story about the Nevada Caucuses was that (according to the entrance polls) the African-American vote was a large as the Latino vote. Among the latter, it was widely reported that Clinton won by a little better than two-to-one. But among the former, Obama won by better than five-to-one. And lest we forget, Clinton was running even with or even ahead of Obama among African-Americans nationally until very recently.
In the February 5 states, African-American voters will almost certainly outnumber Latinos in a majority of states, will be crucial in quite a few (e.g., Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Arkansas, New Jersey, Delaware, plus Obama’s own Illinois) and will be a significant factor in others, including California. If Obama’s margins among black voters match what he won in Nevada–not a bad bet, given the “racialization” of the campaign–then he can lose white and Latino voters substantially and still be competitive.
In other words, it’s not all that clear which candidate would ultimately benefit from a “racialization” of the nominating contest. And to use Mickey Kaus’ infelicitous term, Obama’s “ghetto” may be bigger than the pundits realize.

The “electibility” argument among Democratic presidential candidates is complicated enough from the get-go, as illustrated by a recent exchange between Jonathan Chait and Ezra Klein about the general election strengths and weaknesses of Obama and Clinton, which pretty much covers the waterfront of informed speculation.
But two new factors are pushing the electibility debate in new directions. The first is the re-emergence of John McCain as the Republican front-runner. He’s the only GOPer in shouting distance of the two Democratic front-runners in general election trial heats, and actually runs ahead of Clinton in some. And there’s a reason for that: aside from his famous appeal to independents, and the media adulation he enjoys, he’s the one candidate hardest to typecast (except on the subject of Iraq) as mired in the same ideological delusions that gave us the Bush administration. His one major electoral weakness, the hostility of movement conservatives, won’t be much of a problem in a general election (and they seem to be coming around; elite conservative attitudes towards McCain at the moment strongly resemble those of establishment Democrats towards Howard Dean just prior to Iowa in 2004–resigned).
The second factor, though, cuts in the opposite direction. It’s now virtually certain that the economy will be in recession during the critical period prior to the general election. This will represent a real anchor on the Republican ticket, regardless of its composition. And this is not a subject conducive to any McCain Magic. The Arizonan’s economic message is basically one of fiscal austerity seasoned with a commitment to heavy defense spending. It’s hard to imagine a prescription less well suited to hard times.
This problem may catch up with McCain in the primaries; Mitt Romney would be insane not to exploit the advantage of being both more knowledgable and more conservative than McCain on economic issues. But if McCain does win the nomination, all the talk about service and courage and straight talk won’t matter much to people who are worried about their jobs, their pensions, and their homes.

Well, what can I say? World financial markets are in an uproar; the Fed has discarded all decorum in issuing a major interest rate cut; the Bush administration, after spending most of the autumn posturing against federal budget deficits, is now in a panic-stricken drive for a “stimulus package;” and the two leading Democratic candidates for president are going after each other like crazed weasels.
I think giving this day a few hours to sort itself out would be a prudent idea.