Hillary Clinton accomplished exactly what she needed to accomplish yesterday, winning the popular primary vote in Ohio and Texas (plus Rhode Island), breaking Barack Obama’s winning streak, beating the expectations as of about a week ago, and re-exposing the weaknesses in Obama’s voter appeal that the post-Super Tuesday contests seemed to have repaired.
But in the ultimate measurement, pledged delegates, HRC will probably wind up with a pretty small net haul of around 15. In part that’s because Obama seems to be narrowly winning the strange Texas Caucuses that convened after the polls closed last night (the results will take a couple of days to finish trickling in), which will determine one-third of the state’s pledged delegate total. It should be noted, however, that she did make some progress in reducing Obama’s overall popular vote lead for the entire nominating process,which could become an important psychological factor in determining superdelegate support. And the TX and OH wins might well slow or stop the drift of superdelegate support towards Obama that’s been evident in the last few weeks.
Finallly, March 4 showed she could beat Obama in large, expensive primary states where he’s outspending her heavily.
The exit polls for OH and TX showed HRC posting her usual big wins among white women, self-identified Democrats, and less-educated and lower-income voters. But she made improvements elsewhere, especially in Ohio, where she won white men by 19 points, and ran even with Obama among voters with some college education, and those earning over $100,000. In both the big states, she reduced Obama’s lead among independents to single digits. And in TX, she got the two-to-one win among Latinos she needed, along with a big turnout.
Age continued to be the sharpest differentiator of candidate support; in OH, Obama won 70% of the youngest cohort, those under 25, while Clinton won 72% of those over 65.
Flipping all this around, Obama’s clearly got some problems with white working-class voters that lose him primaries in states where his margins among younger and highly-educated voters, including independents, aren’t overwhelming and African-American voters make up less than 20% of the Democratic electorate. If PA shows the same patterns next month, there will be some seriously worried talk among Democrats about his ability to win midwestern industrial states in November.
The other source of concern for the Obama campaign is the already-heavy media belief that he “can’t take a punch”–that negative campaining gave HRC the boost she obviously got from late-deciding voters.
We’ll see what happens next, but it’s certainly beginning to look like the contest will go past the primaries and caucuses and be determined by such factors as the Florida/Michigan issue and superdelegates.
In the meantime, I recommend Chris Bowers’ take on the delegate situation after yesterday, and John Judis’ analysis of the March 4 exit polls.

If Hillary Clinton wins big in Ohio today–where Barack Obama seemed to be headed towards an upset win just a week ago–you can bet the punditocracy will attribute the turnaround to “NAFTA-Gate” (yes, friends, a full generation after the Watergate break-in, American political reporters still attach the suffix “gate” to every imaginable political controversy, big or little).
In case you somehow missed the saga (hard to imagine, since it’s received saturation treatment from the MSM over the last few days), “NAFTA-Gate” refers to an incident wherein Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee (by all accounts a brilliant and non-Machiavellian gent) attended a private meeting with lower-level Canadian conciliar staff in Chicago, after which said staff prepared a memo suggesting that Goolsbee told them that Obama’s sharp rhetoric about NAFTA was merely “political positioning.” The memo was subsequently leaked to the Associated Press under suspicious circumstances, possibly by the office of conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
There are a lot of reasons this incident, which might have been considered a nothing-burger at a different time and place, drew so much attention, beyond the efforts of the Clinton campaign. Most obviously, it occurred on the eve of a crucial primary in Ohio, which is arguably ground zero for the anti-free-trade sentiment that has gradually become dominant in the Democratic Party over the last decade. Being considered soft on NAFTA in Ohio is a bit like being perceived as hostile to ethanol or caucuses in Iowa.
Moreover, “NAFTA-Gate” was immediately inflated by something of a perfect storm of highly divergent media interests: political beat reporters eager to rebut allegations that they had given Obama a free ride; centrist editorial writers alarmed by both candidates’ anti-NAFTA rhetoric; Republican operatives and conservative noise machinists happy for the chance to take Obama down a notch; and then the Lou Dobbs types always ready to pounce upon “evidence” that politicians say one thing about trade to the folks and then sell them down the river behind close doors, on the advice of people like Austan Goolsbee.
It’s richly ironic that the politician benefitting from “NAFTA-gate” is the wife of the man most often accused by his Democratic critics of feeling the pain of trade-affected workers while promoting contrary policies, Bill Clinton, who signed NAFTA and then pushed it through a closely divided Congress.
But still, the Obama campaign undoubtedly set itself up for this bad press by going after HRC on NAFTA. And it gave the story a long shelf-life by initally denying any back-channel Obama-Canada discussions, and then, once Goolsbee’s name surfaced, trying to claim he was just some academic economist speaking for himself.
Largely lost in the controversy is what Goolsbee actually said to the Canadians. The undisputed part of the story is that he encouraged Canadians to understand Obama’s remarks on NAFTA within the broader context of his overall views on trade and globalization, which have been consistently positive. And if you are looking for any deep meaning in the whole kerfuffle, it’s that Barack Obama is himself a symbol of globalization. It’s no accident that so much of the world has become fascinated with his candidacy and what it might mean for an America often viewed as simultaneously isolationist and militarist.
Beyond its affect on Ohio and the presidential nominating contest, the ultimate effect of “NAFTA-gate” will probably be minor. One friend of mine quipped today that most Americans might learn for the first time that Canada is a signatory to NAFTA. Daniel Drezner has suggested that the Canadians have finally found a way–albeit the worst way–to become relevant to an American presidential campaign.
Best I can tell, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, much like Democrats generally, think and live in that shadowy borderland that divides “yes, but” and “no, but” attitudes towards trade agreements with other countries. You don’t have to consider them hypocrites or scoundrels for leaning towards “no, but” arguments while campaigning in Ohio, and then leaning towards “yes, but” positions if actually elected president and put in charge of this country’s international economic policies. You can’t take the politics out of politics, and in terms of everyone’s reaction to this strangely overwrought incident, that may be the residual lesson of “NAFTA-Gate.”
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
I would add to Matt’s analysis, however, one proviso: Kerry, who had one of the most consistent pro-trade voting records of any Senator from either party, never promised to renegotiate past or suspend future trade agreements. His big concession to anti-NAFTA Democrats was to promise a comprehensive review of all existing trade agreements to see if they were serving their original purpose. Much of his rhetoric about “Benedict Arnold CEO’s” had to do with tax subsidies for offshoring rather than trade policy.
But I agree with Matt’s basic point that the tension between Democratic rhetoric and Democratic policy on trade didn’t start with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. Indeed, lest we forget, Al Gore was the man who vanquished Ross Perot in the famous debate over NAFTA in 1993. By 2000, his campaign had adopted the official position of the NAFTA-hating AFL-CIO, that labor and environmental standards had to be included in the “core” of any bilateral or regional trade agreement, a condition squarely violated by NAFTA, and contrary to the trade policies of a Clinton administration in which Gore had been a major figure.

A big new presidential candidate survey by the Pew Research folks is getting a lot of attention this week. Its top-line finding was that Obama and Clinton are running seven and five points, respectively, over John McCain. And there’s lots of interesting if somewhat predictable data about the strengths and weaknesses of the three candidates.
But because the survey’s subtitle was “Increasing Optimism About Iraq,” I thought I’d read that section carefully to see if the findings were in accord with the growing CW that the American public is moving toward John McCain’s position on the war.
Turns out the main two findings that support this subheadline are questions that ask how the current military effort is going, and whether respondents think the U.S. will “succeed” or “fail” in Iraq. Compared to a year ago, assessments of the current military effort have shifted from 67-30 negative to 48-48 (they had actually moved to 54-41 positive in September 2007, during all the hype over the Petraeus testimony). And by a 53-39 margin, respondents now say they think the U.S. will “succeed” in Iraq, whatever that means. They said the same by a much narrower 47-46 margin a year ago.
So that all sounds good for John McCain, right? Well, not so fast. On the bedrock issue of whether Americans think going to war in Iraq was the right or wrong decision, the numbers haven’t budged over the last year. In fact, the percentage saying it was the right decision has actually dropped from 40% to 38%, with the contrary position is held by a steady 54%.
But what about the future of the war? When the question is posed as to whether the U.S. should get troops out or keep troops in, Pew shows a modest trend towards “keep them in” (47-49 as opposed to 42-53 a year ago). But in the secondary question, respondents are given four options: remove all troops immediately (14%), bring troops home gradually, over the next year or two (33%), keep troops in but establish a timetable for withdrawal (16%), or keep troops in without a timetable (30%). It’s a highly dubious way to frame the question, since it’s not clear there’s much if any difference between “bring troops home gradually” or “keep troops in with a timetable.”
Those two “out gradually but definitely” options between immediate withdrawal and indefinite continuation of the war command 49%, up two percent from a year ago. And those two options are a lot closer to the positions of Obama and Clinton than to McCain’s.
So far all the growing “optimism” on Iraq, more than half of Americans still think the war was a mistake, and nearly two-thirds want to get the troops out according to some definite timetable, if not immediately.
Meanwhile, John McCain not only voted for the war and supported the war, but has attacked anyone considering it any sort of mistake, or wanting to bring it to an end unless “victory” has been accomplished. After all, he spent quite some time attacking Mitt Romney for being willing to even use the word “timetable.” Moreover, he’s made this a signature issue, which means that he won’t benefit, as some less Iraq-focused candidate might have, from a shift of public attention to other issues that don’t favor the GOP, like the economy or health care.
So even this survey (from an organization whose data has long showed stronger public support for the war than that of others) shouldn’t provide much comfort for John McCain. He’s fighting an uphill battle on Iraq, and just because it’s a slightly less impossible climb than it once appeared is no reason to think he’s going to get to the top.

Maybe the death of William F. Buckley, Jr., has made me less appreciative of less compelling conservative writers. But for whatever reason, Mike Gerson’s Washington Post column today, on the alleged chafing of Christian conservatives against the yoke of the GOP, really rubbed me the wrong way.
Why? Well, on one level, Gerson is accurately giving voice to the restiveness of evangelical conservatives in a political coalition that has subjected God to Mammon pretty regularly–a restiveness expressed in actions ranging from interest in issues antithetical to the Wall Street/K Strreet wing of the conservative movement, to votes for Mike Huckabee. But on a deeper level, he’s reminding the flock that their only true home is in the party opposed to a Democratic Party that has “embraced abortion on demand, moral relativism, and intrusive, bureaucratic government.”
In other words, says Gerson, let’s hear it for the “essentially countercultural” position of evangelical conservatives that makes them “restless in any political coalition.” And let’s keep reminding Republicans that the Christian Right is honked off about the paltry return on investment they’ve received for their abundant support. But hey, in the end, even if they sport body piercings and wispy goatees, their restiveness will not and should not develop into an actual rebellion.
This annoys me for the simple reason that Gerson is describing and then trivializing a serious moral quandry for evangelical conservatives that he has personally done a lot to create. Many of them rightly fear that in hewing to the GOP, they have bought into a false prophetic stance: trading their Christian birthright for a mess of political pottage. During his long relationship with George W. Bush, Gerson was one of the most vocal cheerleaders for this marriage of convenience.
But now that it has predictably implicated them in a vast array of political sins that are hard to square with New Testament values–from corruption and celebration of privilege and spoilation of the Creation to unjust war and even torture–“restiveness” is not what I’d call a proportionate response. And unless and until Michael Gerson is willing to suggest that evangelical conservatives should seriously consider taking a walk from their sordid and spiritually dangerous relationship with the Republican Party and the latter-day conservative movement, then he’s just another pottage salesman trying to convice another generation of suckers to swallow their “restive” consciences and pull the lever for the GOP.

One usually begins an obituary by quickly identifying the deceased’s main occupation in life. How do you do that with William F. Buckley, Jr., who died today at the age of 82? He was a magazine founder and editor; a newspaper columnist; a television talk-show host; a prolific author of both fiction and non-fiction books; a political activist, organizer and theoretician; a candidate for office; a phlanthropist; a sportsman; a pretty fair amateur musicologist and theologian; and of course, a great satirist.
Buckley will undoubtedly be best remembered as one of the chief intellectual forces in the development and rise of the late-twentieth century American Conservative Movement. And that’s undoubtedly true; aside from his prodigious institution-building and writing and talking, his own previously-unusual blend of libertarian and traditionalist thinking, fused in no small part by a militant anti-communism, was emblematic of the movement itself at its height.
Like conservatives at large, Buckley was wrong about a lot of things, big and small; perhaps his worst political sin, for which he largely apologized later, was his dismissal of the civil rights movement. He also wasted his vast talent on defending more than his share of despicable figures, from Francisco Franco and Joe McCarthy to Spiro Agnew and a host of other hammer-headed conservative politicians. But he was also capable of surprising friends and enemies alike with uncomfortable heresies, such as his support for the Panama Canal Treaty, his frequent attacks on the War on Drugs, and most recently, his rejection of the war in Iraq.
His journalistic accomplishment were legion. Back in the day, before it assumed the burdens of a governing conservative movement, National Review was one of the liveliest, funniest magazines available, even if you disagreed with all of the content. And then there was Firing Line.
For those too young to remember it, Buckley’s television talk show, Firing Line, was on the air for an incredible 33 years (1966-1999), with 1,504 episodes. One small token of the show’s longevity was an episode that reconvened a panel of young British commentators who had been Firing Line regulars for a season or two, as OxBridge students. At their reunion, they were all Members of Parliament. And that was a good couple of decades before the show finally went off the air.
As for the quality of discourse on Firing Line–which over the years probably featured as many guests from the Left as from the Right–I can only say that the contrast with what passes for political debate and analysis on television today is truly depressing. The worst Firing Line episode ever was almost certainly better than the best exchange of sparkling repartee on Crossfire. And Buckley’s eagerness to confront the Left in open debate was light years away from the bullying agitprop of Fox.
But in the end, what many of us will most remember about William F. Buckley, Jr., was his satirical wit, which stood out pretty sharply in the non-ironic era of the 60s and early 70s, when Laugh In represented the acme of sophisticated humor. Buckley’s wit was not of the knee-slapping or one-liner variety, though his response to a question regarding his first act of Mayor of New York during his guerrilla 1965 campaign for that office was an exception: “I’d demand a recount.” More typical was his comment after actress Shelley Winters said on a TV talk show that she was a liberal because “growing up as a girl in the Depression, Herbert Hoover hated me while Franklin Roosevelt gave me a bowl of hot soup.” Quoth Buckley: “Mr. Hoover was truly a man of remarkable foresight.” And he could wax satiric about even the least humorous topics. After attending his first post-Vatican II vernacular Mass, this rigorously obedient Catholic said it felt like “entering Chartres Cathedral and discovering that the stained glass had been replaced by pop-art posters of Jesus sitting in against the slumlords of Milwaukee.”
Buckley once said he offered his frequent polemical enemy Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a “plenary indulgence” for his errors after Schlesinger leaned over to him during a discussion of the despoilation of forests and whispered: “Better redwoods than deadwoods.” And that’s certainly how a lot of us on the Left feel about the legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr. (see progressive historian Rick Perlstein’s tribute to WFB’s decency and generosity at the Campaign for America’s Future site). He made us laugh, and made us think, and above all, taught us the value of the English language as a deft and infinitely expressive instrument of persuasion. I’ll miss him, and so should you.

In the “Noteworthy” box at the top of this site, you’ll find information about a conference being held in Washington tomorrow by the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, entitled “The Future of Red, Blue and Purple America.” We want to draw attention to this conference not just because TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira is co-moderating it, or because it features such distinguished panelists as Ron Brownstein, E.J. Dionne, Anna Greenberg, Alan Abramowitz, Mark Schmitt and Michael Barone (who knows his numbers even if you don’t like his politics). The subject is one of those few issues where Left and Right can truly cooperate: establishing the demographic facts and trends that shape political competition and enliven political analysis.
The conference will go through some of the big demographic trends, including suburbanization; race, immigration and class; family structure; religious practices; and generational change, and seek some empircally-based consensus. If you’re in the DC area tomorrow, you should definitely try to attend. And if not, you should read Ruy Teixeira’s excellent framing paper for the conference, which covers all the above topics and more.

Our Roundtable Discussion at this site on base and swing voter strategies surprised me quite a bit. Given the diverse nature of our contributors, and widely varying interpretations in the party of the most recent political trends, I had expected a more traditional argument between those focused on specific categorities of swing voters, and those suggesting that the Democratic base is growing rapidly enough to justify a strategy tailored to mobilization.
Instead, there appeared to be general agrement that base and swing voter strategies need not conflict, and might well work in tandem. But other divergences from the ancient debate on this subject were more interesting.
Robert Creamer and Chris Bowers each proposed a new taxonomy of base and swing voters, with the former dividing the electorate into true base voters plus persuadable and mobilizable voters, and the latter defining anyone who needs motivation to vote as a swing voter, while identifying a subset of base voters as “swing activists” who provide much of the resources necessary to appeal to swing voters.
Joan McCarter, whom we asked to discuss the Mountain West as a “swing region,” added another oft-forgotten distinction: between swing voters and ticket-splitters. The latter have declined in importance nationally in recent years, but still matter a lot in certain parts of the country.
Meanwhile, Al From focused on documenting the stability of partisan and ideological attachments in the electorate, even in the “wave” election of 2006.
And Bill Galston brought the discussion into the context of the current Democratic nomination contest, noting that the basic difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in general election trial heats is that the latter puts a signicantly larger number of swing voters into play, both positively and negatively.
There were other interesting points made in the course of the Roundtable, such as Creamer’s argument that “persuasion messages” are always about candidates, not issues, and Bowers’ important reminder that abstract talk about national swing-voter targets can be irrelevant to the contests in the “swing states” that actually determine presidential elections. And there was a striking convergence between Bowers and From–representing two very different ideological traditions within the Democratic Party–that a successful progressive administration will be the key to long-term expansion of the Democratic base.
Finally, I hope my own contribution to the Roundtable will continue to be useful in the future as an introduction and history of the swing/base debate.
You can download a PDF version of the whole Roundtable here. And we will continue to refer to this debate if and when additional reactions come in.

NOTE: This is the sixth item in The Democratic Strategist’s Roundtable Discussion on swing and base voter strategies. Focusing on the Mountain West as a potential “swing region,” it’s by Joan McCarter, who is a Fellow/Contributing Editor at Daily Kos, where she posts as McJoan.
Print Version
Ed Kilgore began this roundtable discussion with two questions: are swing voters worth the trouble? Can Democrats win with base mobilization alone?
From a regional perspective, and specifically the region that currently holds the hopes of so many Democrats—the Mountain West—there’s little choice for Democrats but to find a way to appeal to swing voters. In the Mountain West region, comprised of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, Republicans hold about a 12 point registration advantage. The reality is that a Democrat doesn’t win in many parts of the region unless they can appeal to the always elusive independent or unaffiliated voter, not to mention some Republicans.
This isn’t a new phenomenon for Democrats in the West—it’s why you rarely find a Western Dem who is an enthusiastic supporter of gun control, for example. Finding avenues of nonpartisan, and even anti-partisan, appeal have been critical to the survival of the Western Democrat in the lean years since Ronald Reagan helped solidify the region as solidly red, as has keeping the national party at arm’s length. The key for the Democratic Party in shaping a strategy for the 2008 elections will be allowing Democrats running in the region to run with a high degree of independence from the national party’s message and structure. The key for Democrats running in the West will be to find those issues that can be branded as Democratic and that uphold our progressive values.
Note: this discussion has been well informed by a Democracy Corps survey and memo from April, 2007.
(1) Who are the swing and base voters?
In the Mountain West, swing voters can be just about any voter. While in each of the states the Republicans have a distinct registration advantage, that imbalance obviously doesn’t play out state-wide or in every race. Part of this is due to the inheritance of Western voters of the idea of the Western character. Paramount to that ideal is independence, an ideal that plays out politically to an extent in voting behavior. Historically, party structures in the Mountain West have been relatively weak; politicians are more likely to run as individuals first and members of a party second and voters pride themselves on voting for the individual, not the party. There’s a marked anti-partisan attitude among traditional Western voters.
Getting an empirical handle on the exact voter breakdown in some of these states to determine base vs. swing percentages is a challenge. If you take the last two presidential elections as establishing the base Democratic vote, the range is from 26 percent in Utah to 48.5 percent in New Mexico. It’s not a perfect measure for the voting demographics, but gives an essential baseline, particularly in states like Idaho and Utah where it takes a real yellow dog to vote for the Democratic nominee.
It’s important to note that, in the context of this region, anti-partisan is not the equivalent of bipartisan. Western voters are highly pragmatic, looking for problem solvers first, and ideological debate is of less interest than action on many issues. While they would like the parties to work together, it’s more important that things get done, even if that takes a bulldozer of a politician, like Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer was in the 2007 legislative session, to do it. Because the independently minded voter places a higher value on action than on compromise, contrast is more important than comity in appealing to them. The individual candidate is also more important than the party he or she represents for many Western voters.
Thus, the prototypical swing voters in the Mountain West are better defined as ticket-splitters than as “swingers.” They might be perfectly willing to send the Democrat that they know and trust back to the House of Representatives in DC, but if a fellow Democrat is running for another House or Senate seat, they’ll probably look to the Republican in the race, just to make sure their own sense of checks and balances is maintained. As a result, their ticket gets split.

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I guess we’d be derelict in faling to note the big political story of the day: the New York Times piece on John McCain’s questionable dealings with lobbyists, particularly a certain lobbyist named Vicki Iseman. There’s the story, and then there’s the story about the story, and it’s hard at this point to know where the evidence will lead next.
But it was amusing to watch certain conservatives who can’t stand John McCain, but who hate the New York Times, chase their own tails in reacting to the story.
As usual, Rush Limbaugh descended into madness most quickly and thoroughly. In an email to The Politico, Limbaugh said this:

The story is not the story. The story is the drive-by media turning on its favorite maverick and trying to take him out. The media picked the GOP’s candidate, the NYT endorsed him while they sat on this story, and is now, with utter predictability, trying to destroy him.

Gee, if only we’d known the New York Times had the power to choose the Republican presidential nominee. We’d have lobbied for Tom Tancredo.