As a bit of a Cassandra on the subject of the possibility of an unplanned and hideously divisive Democratic National Convention, I was interested to read a “movie treatment” called “Four Days In Denver” that New York magazine commissioned TV commentator and West Wing scriptwriter Lawrence O’Donnell Jr., to write. The idea is that Democrats arrive in Denver with Barack Obama enjoying a lead in pledged delegates and popular votes, but without enough superdelegates to win the nomination outright. Then the fun starts.
I won’t reveal the plot of O’Donnell’s fantasy, but if you read it, be sure to take it as entertainment, not a semi-serious prediction of what might happen. For one thing, the premise that HRC’s candidacy would survive final Obama leads in pledged delegates and popular votes is dubious in the extreme. Most of the dramatics that O’Donnell conjures up would have certainly played themselves out long before the convention itself, while he omits entirely some events (e.g., credentials, rules and platform fights) that really could happen.
At some point over the next few weeks, if the subject isn’t made moot by primary results, we’re thinking of publishing here at TDS some thoughts from convention veterans of the real issues posed by the possibility of a convention where the nominee is not certain going in. But I’m reasonably sure none of them will begin with a superdelegate sex scene. And that’s one of many reasons I’m toiling away here instead of pulling down big bucks in Hollywood.

HRC’s campaign is not the only one getting some extra scrutiny this week. Jason Zengerle of The New Republic has done a major article analyzing the personnel and strategy of John McCain’s campaign. He unravels the complex John Weaver-Rick Davis rivalry that’s been at the center of the campaign’s various purges and power struggles. And he also explains the odd Davis-driven decision to organize the general election campaign around a “regional autonomy” model that sounds a bit like one of those plans for stabilizing Iraq.
One thought I had after reading Jason’s fine piece is that it’s clear McCain’s back-from-the-grave nomination victory will tend to freeze the current campaign structure, leadership, strategy and message into place even if they aren’t necessarily right for the general election. That, after all, is how John Kerry wound up going into the 2004 general election with a questionable campaign structure, leadership, strategy and message. At about this stage four years ago, I can remember some Kerry supporters muttering to each other things like: “How can you convince a candidate his campaign is making potentially fatal mistakes when he’s just won the nomination after being left for dead?” I wonder if any McCainiacs are muttering similar things to each other today.

Any hopes Hillary Clinton’s campaign had that it could make the demotion of “chief strategist” Mark Penn a neutral or even positive story is rapidly dimming, as political journalists line up to criticize its general competence.
The latest example is a harsh article in The Politico by Jim Vandehei and David Paul Kuhn with the unforgiving title: “Clinton leadership a study in missteps.” A sample:

Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday.
It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling — if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign.

Ouch.
For what it’s worth, I personally think a lot of the criticism of Clinton’s campaign is an exercise in 20-20 hindsight. Her third-place finish in the Iowa Caucus disguised an organization in the state that was probably better than that of past winners. Her fundraising, and even her small-dollar fundraising, has vastly outstripped all precedents. And obviously, she’s survived political near-death experiences at least twice in the course of this campaign.
The problem is that in Barack Obama, Clinton has faced a candidate and a campaign that are operating on a whole ‘nother level. As Peter Beinart put it in a Washington Post op-ed piece yesterday, Obama’s [campaign] “has been an organizational wonder, the political equivalent of crossing a Lamborghini with a Hummer.”
And despite his obvious vulnerabilities against Clinton and potentially against John McCain in a general election, Obama has created a political movement that constantly threatens to change the rulebook.
Let’s put it this way: is anyone confident, in retrospect, that Hillary Clinton would not have already locked up the nomination weeks ago if Obama were not in the race? Could, say, John Edwards or Bill Richardson or Chris Dodd have really challenged her financially, or picked up enough votes to have come close to the powerful women/Hispanic/African-American coalition she would have been able to put together if Obama hadn’t run?
I certainly doubt it. So maybe the best assessment of HRC’s candidacy at this point is that she’s run the kind of campaign that should have and probably would have won if so many constellations hadn’t suddenly lined up against her.
That’s how it looks post-Penn, and how it may look post-Pennsylvania as well.

There’s been a link up top of the site for a few days about Democracy Corps’ new survey and analysis on how Democrats ought to deal with national security issues in this election cycle.
There’s a lot of valuable stuff in this analysis, but I’d like to zero in on a couple of specific points involving perceptions of a very important voting category, defined by DCorps as follows:

There is a bloc of 12 percent of the likely electorate, “Democratic Wanna-Ds,” who say they would vote for a Democrat in a generic presidential ballot, but then do not pick either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama in the named ballot match-ups. Most of these Wanna-Ds, 57 percent, are moderate-conservative Democrats, while 29 percent are self-described independents; a fall-off in support from the moderate-conservative Democrats is a major reason both Clinton and Obama are now trailing.

In other words, these are the folk who are the most likely targets for a Democratic general election campaign.
Two things about “Democratic Wanna-Ds” jump right off the page in DCorps’ polling on national security issues.
First of all, by a 49-46 plurality, “Democratic Wanna-Ds” think John McCain would “mostly bring a different approach than President Bush” to national security and foreign policy issues. This is highly similar to the perception of Republicans, and sharply divergent with that of most Democrats. Thus, one obvious way to help convert the “Wanna-Ds” to the Democratic presidential candidate is to constantly highlight McCain’s congruence with Bush security policies, instead of letting him use occasional differences like Guantanamo or (some) torture practices to look like a GOP “maverick.”
Second of all, by a startling 33 percentage points, the “Wanna-Ds” say they worry more that Clinton or Obama will be too reluctant to use military force abroad, than McCain being too willing to use military force abroad. Given the wording here, the question is about as clear an indicator of which party’s candidates control the “center” on national security as you are going to find. And the Wanna-Ds are way off the Donkey Reservation here.
These numbers reinforce a simple but critical point about the emerging battle-lines of the general election, in which virtually every issue other than national security will almost certainly help produce a Democratic win: the Democratic nominee must work overtime to expose the extremism and recklessness–in other words, the Bush-like qualities–of John McCain’s national security record and platform, while removing every reasonable doubt that he or she is willing to use military force to protect national interests where necessary and appropriate. This latter objective does not mean “moving to the right” or agreeing with McCain on specifics like Iraq or Iran, but it does mean making it clear that differences on those specifics and others are based on a strong and clear-eyed Democratic commitment to national security.
It would be a tragedy if Democrats succumbed this year to the ancient temptation of changing the subject from national security to economic or other domestic issues, treating the former as “Republican territory” that will be conceded as simply less politically potent. There’s a clear case to be made that Democrats are actually superior in managing the country’s international challenges, but we’re going to have to actually make it.

I’ve got a brief piece up today on the DLC’s Ideas Primary site drawing attention to the growing contrast between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s staunch support for public financing of both presidential and congressional campaigns, and John McCain’s back-peddling on this issue, despite his reputation as a champion of campaign finance reform.
Given McCain’s terrible fundraising record, and the emerging Democratic fundraising advantage, this is all kind of ironic, and a token of the ideological hostility of conservatives to campaign finance reform generally.
Check it out, and makes notes for those future moments when McCain’s trying to reclaim the reform mantle.

The big political news this Monday morning is last night’s announcement by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that Mark Penn was being “demoted” from his role as Chief Strategist for HRC, though he’ll apparently continue to do some residual polling. It took nearly a week, but the move was clearly the result of Penn’s meeting last Monday with the Colombian ambassador to discuss the status of congressional action on a free trade agreement with the U.S. Penn is CEO of the public relations giant Burson-Marsteller, which has a $300,000 contract with the Bogota government. Given the Clinton campaign’s criticism last month of a meeting with Canadian consular officials by Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee to discuss the future of NAFTA, Penn’s departure is hardly a big surprise.
It was a really bad week for Penn, since the Colombians promptly canceled their contract wth Burson-Marsteller after the story broke.
Readers who don’t know Mark Penn from Pennzoil may wonder why this staff change is being treated as such a big deal. It’s pretty simple: Penn has long become the symbol of pretty much everything about the Clinton campaign that its detractors, and even many of its supporters, don’t like: its alleged arrogance, its corporate-friendliness, its “poll-driven” lack of passion, and its early strategy of depicting the candidate as “inevitable.” Labor folk have been angry for a good while about Penn’s continued leadership of Burson-Marsteller, which makes a fair amount of money advising corporations on how to fight unions. And a lot of people towards the left end of the party have strongly disliked Penn for years dating back to his partnership with Dick Morris in the Clinton White House and the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign, not to mention his role in Joe Lieberman’s 2004 presidential run.
At this very late date, it’s hard to imagine that Penn’s departure will make a lot of difference to Clinton’s campaign. But I’d expect we’ll soon start hearing stories that the move has miraculously revived campaign morale; they could use some signs of positive motivation right now, real or contrived. So Penn’s unhappy moment in the political spotlight may continue for a while yet.

One of the more interesting phenomena in the Democratic presidential contest has been the very strong showing of Hillary Clinton (and correspondingly poor showing of Barack Obama) in Appalachia–the stretch of mountain areas in the eastern United States, including much of West Virginina; significant portions of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia, and smaller portions of New York, Ohio, Maryland, South Carolina and Alabama.
I have a personal interest in this story, as someone whose “people” were mostly Scotch-Irish folk who came down the mountain trails from Pennsylvania through the Carolinas to Georgia (two of my great-grandfathers were ministers in that quintessential Appalachian sect, the Primitive Baptists).
In the blogosphere, The DailyKos poster DHinMI has been the most acute in pointing out the geopolitical implications of HRC’s strength in Appalachia, particularly in terms of future primaries in PA, NC, KY and WV.
But the whole Appalachia-for-Hillary story has to be taken with a large grain of salt due to demographic factors that have little or nothing to do with the Scotch-Irish heritage or the Mountain Ethic. Most obviously, Appalachia is a virtually all-white region. Its voting base is also relatively old, and relatively bereft of the upscale, highly educated white voters who have been warm to Obama’s candidacy even in parts of the Deep South. Finally, the Democratic primary vote is low in many parts of Appalachia (outside heavily unionized areas of West Virginia and portions of Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Virginia), where Republican voting loyalties go straight back to the Civil War. And Appalachia is also not much of a fertile territory for political independents, partisanship being a fighting matter for many residents.
Still, overall, in the two Appalachian states I’m most familiar with, Georgia and Virginia, Obama’s percentage of the white vote appears to have been notably lower in mountain counties than elsewhere. This can’t be dismissed simply as a function of racism, given Obama’s better performance among white voters in places like central and southside Virginia, and South Georgia, where politics has always been far more dominated by race. So something’s going on, even if it’s just the natural resistence of Appalachian voters to Obama’s highly nuanced message of progressive bipartisanship as opposed to pure class warfare. Obama’s famous wine-track appeal isn’t terribly communicable to moonshine-track voters.
But I do want to draw attention to, and express some strong doubts about, one recent effort to expand this analysis beyond the Mountains and into the general election. Yesterday Michael Barone published a long article on the US News site that casts the Obama/Clinton divide among white voters as one of “academics versus Jacksonians.”
Barone’s description of pro-Obama white voters as “academics” is obviously a massively distorted over-simplification, made easier by the fact that his account ignores all those lily-white states where Obama trounced Clinton. Are Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming and Idaho Democrats mostly “academics?” I think not.
But his analysis of “Jacksonian” Democrats–used to describe the vast Scotch-Irish diaspora that extends to East Texas, to the Little Texas region of New Mexico, to that country music haven of Bakersville, California–has some merit, marred as it is by almost total reliance on number-of-counties-won as a misleading measure of voter preferences. Working and middle-class white Democrats of southern origin wherever they are do indeed seem to be tilting decisively towards Clinton, if not always by Appalachian-level margins.
It’s Barone’s extrapolation of this trend into the general election–arguably, given his Republican allegiance, the real point of his entire disposition–that’s most questionable. Having established that Obama’s got some problems with “Jacksonians,” Barone pivots to this argument:

Of course, the real Jacksonian in this race is John McCain. He is descended from Scots-Irish fighters who settled in Carroll County, Miss. Former Sen. Trent Lott, who once worked as a fundraiser for the University of Mississippi and therefore knew the folkways of elite types in his state very well, once told me that he had relatives who had known McCain’s relatives in Mississippi. “They were fighters,” he said, as best I can remember his words. “They would never stop fighting you. Those people would never stop fighting.”

Aside from the fact that Barone confuses the conservative, WASPy Delta planter tradition of Ole Miss with the “Jacksonian” tendency in Mississippi and southern politics, the idea that John McCain is catnip to Scotch-Irish “Jacksonians” is highly questionable. If that were the case, you’d think McCain would do particularly well among Scotch-Irish Appalachian voters in Republican primaries, eh?
Remembering that in the definitive GOP primary of 2000, South Carolina, McCain won the non-Scotch-Irish lowlands but decisively lost the Scotch-Irish highlands, I looked at some of the 2004 primary results before the contest was decided and didn’t see any “Jacksonian” longing for McCain. He won exactly one highlands county in SC this time (and by a small plurality over Huckabee and Romney). He lost every single country in mountain Georgia. He lost every single country in mountain Virginia. And in an area where he had a lot of important endorsements, he lost about half of mountain Tennessee (generally getting a little over one-third of the vote). His margins in Appalachian Ohio tracked his statewide totals.
If Obama is the Democratic nominee, he’s got a lot of work to do to reduce Republican margins in Appalachia (that have existed in every presidential election since the Civil War, other than 1932 and 1964). HRC’s got a base of support to work with. But the idea that John McCain is the Chosen Son of the Scotch-Irish in the ancestral mountains and beyond, is at this point just spin.

Yesterday we published a guest post by Franklin & Marshall professor Stephen Medvic that offered a different take on the superdelegate debate than we usually hear. His analysis is based primarily on a challenge to the idea that delegates chosen by less-than-purely-representative formulas in lightly attended caucuses and open primaries really can be said to represent the popular will of Democrats.
I’d like to add two notes to the argument undertaken by Dr. Medvic.
First, virtually the entire debate over superdelegates seems to be based on the assumption that their sole purpose is to counteract or ratify caucus and primary results. As I recall from the original discussions surrounding superdelegates, there was another, much simpler rationale: ensuring that major Democratic elected officials would get to attend the convention as delegates. One of the byproducts of the earlier reforms in the nominating process had been to significantly limit elected official participation, except for those who happened to run for delegate positions on successful candidate tickets. And this in turn reinforced a fear that the Democratic Party was increasingly becoming bifurcated into a national party dominated by constituency groups and issue advocates, and state and local parties (and their elected officials) who represented voters, and arguably, the Democratic rank-and-file.
I raise this point for the simple reason that superdelegates do not have to have full voting rights, or the freedom to withold or change pledges of support, to exist. It’s not necessarily and all-or-nothing proposition. That’s worth keeping in mind when the subject is, as it will certainly be, taken up by the party after this election.
My second point relates to Dr. Medvic’s argument that only closed primaries electing delegates on a more strictly proportional basis are truly legitimate as expressions of the Democratic “popular will.” I generally agree with him about caucuses, with the qualification that caucuses vary in nature from quasi-primaries to highly demanding multi-hour events. And in terms of participation, there’s also no fixed pattern: Iowa’s caucuses are famously among the most demanding, but also have relatively high levels of participation and a lot of popularity among Democrats and the public as a whole.
The open/closed question is more complicated. A uniform system of closed primaries would require a uniform system of party registration among the states that current does not exist. A number of state, including several in the South, have no party registration at all, and states also vary in terms of the privileges typically accorded to independent or “undeclared” voters. And it’s no secret that many registered independents are functionally partisans, or at least lean strongly in one direction or the other. Closing primaries means excluding these voters from the party in a fairly overt way, making re-registration, instead of candidate support, the only way to expand formally expand the party’s electoral base. Absent any indication that non-registered-Democratic participation in presidential primaries significantly distorts outcomes, the political costs of demanding closed primaries strikes me as potentially high.
But actually, there’s a way out of this dilemma that’s already at play in many states: radically liberalized registration procedures. Same-day voter registration not only helps attract non-voters to the polls; it also makes it much easier for registered independents (and even Republicans) to re-register as Democrats and participate in closed primaries and caucuses. This is why the formally closed caucuses in Iowa, to mention one example, attracted so many independents: they were able to re-register right outside the caucus room. Arguably, requiring re-registration would deter most casual or tactical voters from participating in Democratic primaries and caucuses, while making true battlefield conversions much easier, and formally expanding the party’s base.
Dr. Medvic has raised some very important issues, but there may be ways to address them without abolishing superdelegates altogether or restricting the franchise in the Democratic nominating process.