Today’s two presidential primaries are not expected to provide many fireworks. Clinton is heavily favored in KY, as is Obama in OR (though her percentage margin in the former is likely to significantly exceed his in the latter). OR’s all-mail-in-ballot system will get some television attention. Because OR requires mailed ballots to be received by election day, its system won’t delay the count as is often the case in neighboring WA. But it certainly makes exit polling more of a challenge (presumably, the phone interviews of voters that will be used as the functional equivalent of exit polls will be done by pretty early today).
There were rumors last week that Obama would all but claim victory in his primary night event in IA, on grounds that he would have clearly won a majority of pledged delegates. But as part of his continuing effort to let HRC exit the race gracefully, he’s made it clear there will be no official victory claims tonight. Meanwhile, HRC is sticking to her argument that the pledged and overall delegate targets must be adjusted to include MI and FL, a measure by which Obama still has a ways to go. Meanwhile, Clinton is already claiming a popular vote lead, based on a measurement that includes FL and MI and excludes four caucus states where raw votes have not been reported. We’ll hear more about that from her tonight. But don’t expect any dramatics.

Having gone out on a shaky limb to endorse the idea of an Obama-Clinton “unity ticket,” I will hasten to raise objections to the very different idea of a “unity ticket” between Obama and a non-Democrat.
This idea was raised most recently by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who argues that Obama’s post-partisan campaign pitch can best gain credibility through a ticket that includes Chuck Hagel or Mike Bloomberg.
Ignatius clearly doesn’t understand that Obama’s own “unity” message is about mobilizing voters across party lines to demand change, and then to extend to Republicans in Washington an iron fist/velvet glove proposition, offering political cover for cooperation and threatening retribution for obstruction. It’s not about organizing some big barbecue of Democratic and Republican solons and striking split-the-difference compromises on legislation. To put it another way, Obama has embraced High Broderist goals, but not High Broderist methods, when it comes to bipartisanship.
Sure, you can make the argument that putting a Republican like Hagel or an ex-Republican like Bloomberg on the ticket would resonate with those non-Democratic voters Obama really does want to reach. But these names don’t necessarily perform magic outside Nebraska, which Obama can’t win, and New York, which Obama can’t lose. And such a gesture would legitimately honk off a lot of Democrats, who figure that an all-Democratic ticket ought to be able to win in a strongly pro-Democratic election year.
To be crassly political about it, there’s no percentage in excessively angering the Democratic base with a vice-presidential choice unless it’s a clear game-changer. Had John Kerry convinced John McCain to leave the GOP and run with him in 2004, the step would have produced a king-hell backlash from Democratic activists, particularly those in the labor and feminist movements. But arguably, it would have pretty much ended the general election in Kerry’s favor, and victory, like love, covers a multitude of sins. None of the names being kicked around by people like Ignatius have anything like the electoral clout that McCain might have had four years ago. Sure, Bloomberg has an incredible amount of personal wealth, but money isn’t exactly Barack Obama’s biggest handicap in a general election.
The odd thing I can tell you about from personal conversations with Obama supporters after my Obama-Clinton pitch is that a lot of the same people who would seriously consider hara-kiri if HRC’s on the ticket seem entirely open to a non-Democratic running-mate. And some of these same people dislike the Clintons in the first place because of their supposed lack of loyalty to the Democratic Party and its principles.
For all the legitimate objections to an Obama-Clinton “unity ticket,” it would be decidedly strange if a coalition of Beltway Bipartisans and lefty Obama-ites convinced the putative nominee to diss Democratic unity in favor of a “unity ticket” that compromised Obama’s case for progressive change, without a whole lot of return on a questionable investment.

There’s a front-page story by Krissah Williams in today’s Washington Post that focuses on Democratic women who say they’d rather see John McCain become president than vote for Barack Obama, mainly due to anger over perceived insults to Hillary Clinton during the nominating process.
Any of you who happen to fall into the category of feminists-for-McCain should give a gander to a new article by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker slicing and dicing a recent speech by the putative Republican nominee that represented an extended dog whistle to anti-choicers and other cultural conservatives regarding judicial appointments.
Toobin begins by noting that McCain’s May 6 speech at Wake Forest University was timed to draw extremely limited attention from the news media and the public at large. Moreover, Mr. Straight Talk’s pithy remarks were loaded with code language explicable only to lawyers and to conservatives obsessed with the supposed liberal conspiracy to use the courts to destroy faith, family and country. Aside from the usual stuff about “activist judges” and “separation of powers” (the latter being pretty rich at a time when the primary threat to the separation of powers is coming from the Bush administration), you’ve got an oblique reference to a Supreme Court decision that laid the constitutional groundwork for Roe v. Wade, and another oblique reference to an opinion by Justice Kennedy that conservatives love to cite as evidence that the Court is determined to extinguish U.S. sovereignty.
Here’s the money quote from Toobin:

Might [McCain] really be a “maverick” when it comes to the Supreme Court? The answer, almost certainly, is no. The Senator has long touted his opposition to Roe, and has voted for every one of Bush’s judicial appointments; the rhetoric of his speech shows that he is getting his advice on the Court from the most extreme elements of the conservative movement. With the general election in mind, McCain had to express himself with such elaborate circumlocution because he knows that the constituency for such far-reaching change in our constellation of rights is small, and may be shrinking. In 2004, to stoke turnout among conservatives, Karl Rove engineered the addition of anti-gay-marriage voter initiatives to the ballots in Ohio and other states; last week, though, when the California Supreme Court voted to allow gay marriage in that state, only hard-core activists were able to muster much outrage. When it comes to the Constitution, McCain is on the wrong side of the voters, and of history; thus, his obfuscations.

It’s been obvious for a while that John McCain’s presidential ambitions depend on maintaining the exaggerated and ephemeral reputation for “moderation” and “independence” bestowed on him by the news media in 2000, while quietly reassuring conservative activists that he’s their man. That’s why exposing the dishonesty and implicit extremism of McCain maneuvers like his Wake Forest speech are important. And it’s also why Hillary Clinton supporters who think it makes sense to help McCain become president are actually in danger of betraying everything the New York Senator stands for.

If you like insider accounts of political campaigns, you’ll probably love Michelle Cottle’s latest TNR report on her soundings of Hillary Clinton staffers about “what went wrong.” What’s remarkable about this article is how little agreement there appears to be among folks “on the inside.” There’s a fair amount of anger expressed towards former chief strategist Mark Penn and former campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle (which you’d expect, since they were the people in charge of message and organization, respectively, during HRC’s fall from inevitability to second place), but beyond that, the explanations of “what went wrong” are all over the place.
This analytical disarray may just reflect the small and probably random sample of HRC staffers willing to talk to Cottle, even on a strictly off-the-record basis. But another factor is probably in play: the natural human tendency to play what-if, and attribute political setbacks to correctable internal “mistakes” rather than uncontrollable external forces.
What’s largely missing from the insider accounts quoted by Cottle is a recognition that Barack Obama’s campaign surprised virtually everybody in politics. It’s hard to remember this, but there was an extended period a few months after Obama entered the race when the CW was that he was a flavor-of-the-month who had created some excitement but was rapidly losing steam against the powerful, disciplined Clinton Machine. One of the post-mortems quoted by Cottle suggests that HRC’s big mistake was in not going nastily negative on Obama from the get-go. But that’s pure hindsight: a negative campaign made no sense for a candidate with Clinton’s poll standings and resources prior to Iowa, a state whose Democratic caucus-goers are notoriously averse to intraparty attacks. And after Iowa, when it became obvious that Obama’s was generating previously unimaginable numbers of volunteers and cash, and building a never-seen-before electoral coalition, Clinton’s campaign was already in desperate survival mode. Another little fact that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that a couple of days before the NH primary, the chattering classes were busy writing HRC’s political obituary, in anticipation of a blowout Obama victory that would have nailed down the nomination then and there.
Perhaps the Obama phenomenon was predictable, but not many political experts actually predicted it in any detail. (I certainly include myself in this assessment; the only aspect of Obama-mania I anticipated was the rapid and massive shift of African-American support to him after Iowa). So it’s a little strange that so many people inside and outside the Clinton campaign are so sure her initial strategy should have been based on improbable developments instead of the lay of the land as it first appeared. Sure, the acid test for any political campaign is the ability to adjust to the unforeseen, but given HRC’s success in avoiding electoral extinction again and again during the primaries, you have to admit she showed some deft footwork.
The bottom line is that “what went wrong” with Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the emergence of a once-in-a-lifetime politician whose particular assets made him very nearly unbeatable once he established himself as a viable candidate. Here’s hoping that John McCain’s brain trust goes with a high-percentage game plan like HRC’s, and underestimates Barack Obama’s ability to change the rules.

One of the lesser-appreciated Dark Arts of modern politics is counter-scheduling: the anticipation of an opponent’s Big Event with a Bigger Event that sops up media attention. We witnessed a classic example yesterday, when the Obama campaign arranged a flag-waving rally as a backdrop to John Edwards’ endorsement just before Hillary Clinton appeared on all three major networks for interviews in the wake of her landslide win in West Virginia.
John Nichols at The Nation has a good summary of how this particular deal went down, which not only stole the media spotlight from HRC, but made her remarks sound less like a victory statement than an implicit admission of ultimate defeat.
I’m sure the Obama folks spent much of the day chuckling over this coup, but it’s not so clear that the Edwards endorsement will bring that many tangible benefits to the front-runner. He can’t “deliver” pledged delegates, and a lot of his early superdelegate support had already bled away to Obama (particularly in NC). And those who expect the endorsement to cause a rush of white-working-class voters in KY to Obama will probably be disappointed, given the very limited impact of earlier “key endorsements” in this contest.
But Edwards’ move, like that of a growing number of previously uncommitted superdelegates, does increase the perception that Obama is the putative nominee, and that does have value. Indeed, it will be interesting to see if Obama overperforms expectations in KY and OR next week by attracting voters who simply want to be with a winner. In this odd, momentum-less nomination contest, that would be something of a first.

The best comment I heard on television last night in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s victory speech in West Virginia was MSNBC’s Keith Olberman, who observed that the Obama and Clinton campaigns has embraced “different realities.”
In Obamaland, the nomination contest is basically over, since HRC would have to win absurdly impossible percentages of the available pledged and unpledged delegates to get a majority. The cumulative popular vote measurement (on which, of course, there is no consensus) is irrelevant even in the unlikely event that HRC catches up by June 3.
In Clintonland, all the superdelegates are still up for grabs, and both pledged delegate and popular vote totals have to include Florida and Michigan.
We’ll see a sharpening of this divergence next Tuesday night, when Obama will claim a majority of total pledged delegates, and quite possibly an overall majority, while Clinton will deny the math on grounds that Florida and Michigan must be factored in, while superdelegate announcements of support aren’t binding.
It’s now up to HRC–with or without a major push from superdelegates and/or from hungry unpaid vendors–to make these realities converge, if and when she chooses.
The one thing virtually all Democrats can agree on today is the significance of the special congressional election in Mississippi yesterday, where Democrat Travis Childers comfortably won a district that George W. Bush carried with 63% in 2004.
In their analysis of the Mississippi results for The Hill, Jackie Kucinich and Bob Cusack summed it up in a way that will make donkeys bray with joy:

The sky is falling on House Republicans and there is no sign of it letting up.
The GOP loss in Mississippi’s special election Tuesday is the strongest sign yet that the Republican Party is in shambles. And while some Republicans see a light at the end of the tunnel, that light more likely represents the Democratic train that is primed to mow down more Republicans in November.

It’s anybody’s guess at the moment whether Hillary Clinton still really sees a path to the Democratic nomination, or just wants to pick up anticipated wins in West Virginia and Kentucky to increase her convention and general election leverage and then fold her tent. If she does intend to push on until such time as she is mathematically eliminated, her biggest problem now isn’t so much the pledged delegate or popular vote totals, but the strong pressure mounting on superdelegates to wrap this thing up (perhaps, so goes the CW, next Wednesday, when Obama is expected to win in Oregon).
Her strongest argument with the supers right now would be that Obama isn’t electable. I say “would be,” because general election polls continue to show Obama running as well as or better than her against John McCain. The latest, a new ABC/Washington Post survey, shows Obama leading McCain 51-44, while HRC’s lead is 49-46 (it also has Obama with a 12-point national lead over HRC for the Democratic nomination).
Sure, the Clinton campaign can and will make a complicated argument that the battleground-state distribution of her vote in trials against McCain makes her the stronger candidate. But she needs more than that to sway the supers. Clear evidence that she is likely to win, and Obama is likely to lose, against John McCain remains the piece still missing from her case for the nomination.

Over at TNR’s The Plank, a variety of people have been invited to debate about the advisability of an Obama-Clinton “unity ticket.” As it happens, Alan Wolfe and yours truly were the first to send in submissions, both supporting the “unity ticket.”
I tried to be sensitive to the various arguments against the “unity ticket,” especially those of Obama supporters who view this possibility as a self-repudiation of Obama’s message and the very rationale for his candidacy. I also made it clear there are plenty of practical obstacles to an Obama-Clinton collaboration, most notably the fact that we don’t know if either principal is open to it at all.
But in the end, my own conclusion was that a unity ticket would most efficiently resolve the candidate-centered divisions in the Democratic Party that have grown ever more apparent as the primary contest has dragged on, allowing the party to briskly move on to a tough general election campaign. I’m sure other participants in the debate will argue otherwise, and as always in these extracurricular essays, I was speaking for myself, not TDS.

It’s been a crazy 18 hours or so in the Democratic presidential contest. The early take on the impact of yesterday’s primaries was that both candidates had lost the opportunity for a big victory, with HRC once again avoiding disaster by narrowly winning Indiana. As the staff post this morning showed, however, the media narrative quickly shifted to one of gloom and doom for Clinton. And Matt Compton was probably right in suggesting that a stampede of network pundits led by Tim Russert’s midnight declaration that Obama had won the nomination was largely responsible for this dramatic mood swing.
As a skeptic about the almighty power of the punditocracy to dictate political developments, my attitude today has been: Show me the superdelegates! Maybe Matt’s right that the trickle of new superdelegate endorsements for Obama (see his Update below) could soon become an irresistable tide. We’ll probably know within another day or two if the Supers are going to end this thing, or hold off for a while to see if Obama commits some terrible error that reinforces the Clinton campaign’s implicit claim that he’s unelectable. And as Matt points out, there are tactical reasons why the Obama campaign might want HRC to stay in the race until May 20.
But if superdelegates and party leaders decide, for whatever reason, to let the competition go on, I strongly suspect they are letting the Clinton campaign know it’s time to be very careful about criticizing Obama. If he commits some grievous mistake, or if something politically damaging about him suddenly emerges, I don’t think HRC is going to be in a position to “pile on” as she did with Rev. Wright or the “bitter-gate” controversy. Democrats are worried about the general election, and while that worry is the last, best hope of the Clinton campaign, she can no longer risk feeding that mood directly.