Last night’s Democratic presidential primaries in NC and IN changed nothing, or changed everything, depending on whose account you choose to accept (see the previous Staff post for a compilation of post-primary “reads.”)
From one point of view, HRC survived yet another definitive blow to her candidacy by pulling out a narrow win in IN, which mattered more than NC because it was perceived as a “toss-up” state. (Clinton’s own spin last night capitalized on Barack Obama’s ill-advised remark after PA that IN would be a “tie-breaker.”). The next state to vote is WV on May 13–a place where Clinton should win very big–followed by KY (another likely Clinton win) and OR on May 20, and then MT, SD and PR on June 3. In the middle of this final stretch comes the May 31 meeting of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee where Clinton is praying for a decision to seat at least some delegates from MI and FL, while retroactively validating her popular vote margins in the two states.
From another point of view (the one most often heard from media pundits last night), Clinton lost her one chance to throw a monkey wrench into Obama’s nomination by losing NC, and/or by losing the overall combined delegate and popular vote by a sizable margin (Obama basically erased the popular vote margin Clinton won in PA). She’s out of money again, as witnessed by her cancellation of today’s campaign events to focus on fundraising. Moreover, Obama is now clearly out of the tailspin that briefly threatened his candidacy when the Rev. Jeremiah Wright decided to claim headlines for several days. He can now afford to cut a deal on MI and FL, and exert pressure on superdelegates and party leaders to seal the deal well before the convention.
As Chris Bowers pointed out pungently in a late-night post, the “changes everything” interpretation is a little strange, insofar as the delegate and popular vote math that suddenly seems so compelling to the chattering classes after last night’s results has been pointing to the virtual certainty of an Obama nomination for well over a month now, and maybe longer:

All of the arguments that could be used by the punditry to declare the nomination campaign over could have been used really at any point since Wisconsin. For some reason, those arguments appear to be sticking tonight, whereas they weren’t earlier. According to the logic that ends the campaign tonight, there was no reason to torture us for the past two months, except to damage Democrats for the sake of damaging Democrats

Chris hints at one factor in the shifting media narrative of the contest that I’ve always thought was an irrationally big deal: the fixation of the media with “wins” and “losses” in particular states, compounded by a focus on beating expectations. In terms of the actual mechanics of winning the nomination, even if you care about non-delegate factors like cumulative popular vote, it really doesn’t matter at all whether one candidate or another “wins” the popular vote in individual states. This isn’t a general election, where a “win” gets you electoral votes. But without question, media coverage of the nominating process has given vast and undeserved attention to this phenomenon, for the obvious reason that it’s “better television” to “call” a state for Clinton or Obama–particularly if it’s an “upset”–than to report the slow, complicated cumulative math of pledged delegates and/or total popular vote. This is probably the price we pay for a system of nominating candidates that’s staged by individual states over a long period of time.
As we get closer to the final decision, however, the math has to take over, and absent some “upset” that’s viewed as a “game-changer,” that’s what seems to be happening in media perceptions today.
So where does that leave us? Assuming she can raise or lend herself enough money to give herself that option, Clinton’s candidacy now comes down to avoiding extinction by superdelegates and party leaders in the hopes that some external event–i.e., a “scandal” or major “gaffe”–will suddenly make Barack Obama look truly unelectable. For that reason, the best indicator to look at from now on is probably not pledged delegates or popular votes, or any particular primary outcome, but general election polls. HRC desperately needs a batch of polls showing that she’d beat John McCain handily while Obama would lose to him by a significant margin. Her campaign may even succeed in convincing superdelegates to hold off on shifting to Obama for a while just to make sure he doesn’t “crater” in general election polls after he’s become the putative nominee. But if such polls don’t give her what she needs (and they haven’t so far), it truly is over, sooner or later.
For history-minded readers, I can recall a precedent for HRC’s situation, way back in 1968, when Nelson Rockefeller (in tacit alliance with Ronald Reagan) launched a late challenge to the nomination of Richard Nixon. Rocky’s whole campaign was about electability: Nixon was famously a loser, and would lose to Hubert Humphrey in November. About a week before the Republican Convention, a major poll came out showing Nixon running better against Humphrey than Rockefeller, instantly croaking Rockefeller’s candidacy and guaranteeing Nixon the nomination. Like Rocky then, Clinton’s fate is now in the hands of the pollsters and the superdelegates and media wizards who consult them.

We at TDS will have plenty to say tomorrow about the NC and IN primary results, and what they mean in terms of the Democratic nominating contest. But for tonight, I just want to note a small curiosity: when’s the last time in a highly competitive contest that one candidate conceded, and another claimed victory, before the networks called the race? That just happened with respect to Indiana, where every network other than CBS (which called it early for HRC) is waiting for the results from Lake County, which Obama is expected to win by a large margin.
The Obama campaign almost certainly doesn’t think it can get enough votes from Lake to completely erase Clinton’s statewide lead. Still, given the importance of an election night victory claim for HRC–which, predictably, she made by quoting Obama’s ill-advised “tiebreaker” comment about IN–you’d think the Obama folks would have used the reticence of the nets to keep the waters muddy until most television viewers had gone to bed. It’s probably another sign, reinforced by the overall “unity” theme of Obama’s NC speech, that they’re focused on ending the nomination contest gracefully. Unless, of course, they’re playing with the idea of some sort of Truman-like “surprise” if Lake somehow pulls out the Hoosier State for them. That’s unlikely, but this has been an unlikely political year, hasn’t it?

I’m probably a bit too inclined to criticize political writers who don’t seem to know a lot of political history. Sometimes it’s very relevant, but sometimes not so much: history does get made with each new electoral cycle.
But when a political writer makes a historical claim that’s, well, just not accurate, that’s another whole thing. In a new piece in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert pens a familiar complaint that Hillary Clinton’s extended challenge to Barack Obama is selfishlessly destructive. But she bases that judgment not just on HRC’s slim prospects for victory, but on the the idea that this kind of late challenge is unprecedented in its defiance of the natural process that quickly crowns front-runners:

Presidential-primary races tend to proceed along self-reflexive lines. The candidate who is ahead—or who is perceived to be—receives more press coverage. He collects more contributions and endorsements, and these generate still more media attention, which brings in more money, more votes, and so on. Meanwhile, his opponents find that they cannot pay their staffs, or afford to hire a bus, or attract more than a clutch of peevish reporters to their news conferences. Hoping to make it onto the short list for Vice-President, the laggards throw their support to the front-runner, and the contest comes to an abrupt, if not necessarily satisfying, close.
Hillary Clinton is perhaps the first candidate in primary history to run this process in reverse. The longer the race has gone on, the lower the odds have become that she will finish the season leading either in the popular vote or in elected delegates…. Nevertheless, rather than growing weaker, she seems to have become more formidable.

You don’t have to go back to the Whigs to assess Kolbert’s assertion that HRC is the “first candidate in primary history” to mount a late, apparently hopeless challenge. The primary-dominated nominating process began in 1972 on the Democratic side, and arguably in 1976 on the Republican side. During that relatively brief period, late primary challenges to the virtually assured nominee occurred among Democrats in 1976, 1980, and 1984, and among Republicans in 1976 and 1980. While the 1976 Democratic challenges by Frank Church and Jerry Brown, and the 1980 Republican challenge by George H.W. Bush, produced mixed results, Reagan ’76, Kennedy ’80, and Hart ’84 represented powerful late-season campaigns that threatened to deny the nomination to the overwhelming front-runner. Kennedy and Hart won particularly impressive late-primary sweeps. And in 1984, the currently notorious Democratic superdelegates made news for the first and last time prior to this year by nailing down Walter Mondale’s nomination in the teeth of a late-primary Hart gale-force wind.
It’s true that none of these late challenges succeeded, and that all of the eventual nominees (other than the slightly threatened Ronald Reagan of 1980) lost the general election. So make what you want of the implications of HRC’s current challenge. But she’s not the first to launch one.

In an especially blatant example of a journalist letting himself be used to send up trial balloons for a political campaign, Bill Kristol’s New York Times column today announces that all sorts of people in John McCain’s political operation are thinking fond thoughts about Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal as a potential running-mate for the Arizonan.
Just to make sure the campaign’s purposes are served in exquisitely nuanced detail, Kristol spends a big chunk of the column making it clear that the Jindal Option will only be considered seriously if (a) Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, and (b) it appears likely McCain’s going to lose unless he throws something of a Hail Mary pass.
I’ve always thought Bobby Jindal made a lot of sense as a Hail Mary choice for McCain. He’s young (36), but has federal and state experience, without any direct complicity in Bush administration disasters (including Katrina). He’s non-white (Indian-American), but has won statewide in a place not noted for racial tolerance. He’s a Catholic of the particuarly fervid brand characteristic of converts (he was raised as a Hindu). He’s by all accounts crazy smart. And most importantly, serious conservative ideological types adore him, unlike the unconventional veep choice most often mentioned, Condi Rice. As I noted back in February, Jindal was the plurality favorite in a reader survey of McCain running-mate options at National Review Online. So it’s not surprising that the McCain campaign lofted this trial balloon right now, at a comfortable distance from the moment when the veep deal will actually go down.
The most interesting feature of Kristol’s column today is something entirely different: in a piece supposedly about John McCain and Bobby Jindal, Kristol managed to work in eight (8) references to Jeremiah Wright, or roughly seven more than might have been justified by the context. I’m guessing the injunction to repeat Wright’s name to the point of self-parody came to Kristol in the same package of talking points that asked him to see what the chattering classes thought of a McCain-Jindal ticket.

As we get ready for another small round of Democratic presidential primaries tomorrow, which are likely to add up to no more than another small accretion of data in the nominating process, it’s not a bad idea to make a large mental note about the need for truly systemic reforms in the system before 2012.
In that connection, RealClearPolitics has published a speech by the excellent Jay Cost which really hits the nail on the head about the basic problem with the current nominating process in both parties:

At its core, the current nomination system is a disjointed hybrid of the old, state party-centered way of choosing nominees and the new way that places power with rank-and-file partisans. The reforms of the 1970s did not amount to root-and-branch changes, but rather 20th century updates to a 19th century system.
Perhaps this accounts for the powerlessness of the national committees. They are tasked with bringing coherence to an incoherent system. I would suggest that whatever changes are made – whether the national parties are strengthened or not – the goal should be to impose coherence of form and purpose. Right now, both processes have one foot in the past and one foot in the present.

That’s exactly right. Whatever you think of the particular strengths and weaknesses of the present method of nominating presidential candidates, no one charged with designing a system de novo would come up with anything like the status quo. At some point, both parties are going to have to decide once and for all whether the nomination of a presidential candidate is a function of the national party or of state parties and state governments. The current system is indeed an incoherent hybrid that is difficult to “reform” in small ways because it represents wildy divergent traditions and impulses.
You’d think that the agonizing if exciting Democratic contest this year would be enough to spur root-and-branch reforms, and maybe it will. But then again, our election administration “system,” another incoherent amalgam of 19th century state-based traditions and 20th century notions of fairness and uniformity, suffers from many of the same problems, as was exposed in the most dramatic fashion possible by the 2000 presidential election. Yet nothing’s really changed since then.
I had to chuckle at one phrase used by Cost in his speech: the Democratic nominating system, he said, is designed to produce “confusion and delay.” As some of you may recognize, this is the horrible judgment meted out on the perenially popular Thomas the Tank Engine children’s TV show for the consequences of mistakes made by its anthropomorphic locomotives. It makes you wonder how many train wrecks we must endure in our electoral system before we finally redesign the tracks.

In British local government elections today, Gordon Brown’s Labour Party took a serious drubbing, finishing third with 24% of the total popular vote to the triumphant Tories (44%) and the Liberal Democrats (25%). It also appears that London Mayor Ken Livingstone has lost to Tory Boris Johnson, who would become the first elected Tory mayor of the city.
Explanations of the terrible Labour showing range from voter fatigue with a party that’s been in power for eleven years; a weakening economy; and some controversial recent tax changes. Some on the Labour Left argue that the entire Blair-Brown “New Labour” project has gradually eroded the party’s electoral base.
The next national parliamentary election is not required until 2010, though Brown could call it earlier. If the local election pattern held, the Tories would likely win a landslide victory similar to Labour’s back in 1997.
Two years can be an eternity in British as well as American politics, but Brown’s obviously got some fence-mending to do.

Former John Edwards strategist Joe Trippi has a fascinating article up on the Campaigns & Elections site arguing that in retrospect, Edwards should have stayed in the race instead of dropping out before Super Tuesday. Indeed, Trippi spends a good part of the piece kicking himself for not urging that course of action when the candidate was trying to decide whether to continue a low-budget, trunctuated campaign or pack it in:

My mistake was not seeing more clearly then what is so obvious to me now: He could have kept his agenda in the forefront by staying in the race and forcing Obama and Clinton to focus on those issues because he, John Edwards, would hold the key to the convention deadlock. And maybe, just maybe, a brokered convention would have stunned the political world and led to an Edwards nomination.

With all due respect for the brilliant Mr. Trippi, he should stop kicking himself, because even with the benefit of hindsight, it’s really less than “obvious” that Edwards could have become a kingmaker or king by continuing his campaign.
Sure, it’s easy to say that with Obama and Clinton perhaps heading towards a photo finish, Edwards might have amassed and held onto enough delegates to hold the balance of power. But what would he have done with it? Forced Barack Obama to adopt an individual mandate in his health plan? Demanded that Hillary Clinton attack her own husband’s administration, or suddenly apologize for her Iraq War Resolution vote?
The truth is that Edwards’ agenda wasn’t sufficiently different from those of his rivals to give him any particular leverage over what either of them would do as a candidate or as a nominee. Even without the lure of Edwards delegates, Clinton and Obama have competed to offer Edwards-style economic populist rhetoric, for the simple reason that the primary landscape rewarded it. And in any event, both have lost significant control over their messages thanks to media-driven controversies over Jeremiah Wright, “bitter-gate,” and Bosnian sniper fire.
Trippi doesn’t specifically say that Edwards might have risen phoenix-like to do a lot better in the late primaries, but he does mention Pennslyvania and North Carolina as states that probably would have been “strong for Edwards.” Perhaps, though it’s more likely that he would have been chewed up in the vast money competition between Clinton and Obama through Pennsylvania (particularly given his acceptance of public dollars with strict spending limits), while suffering the same demographic problems that made him an increasingly weak third-place candidate between Iowa and South Carolina. By now, the odds are high that he would be facing the same humiliating defeat in his home state of NC that faced him in his native state of SC just before he dropped out.
So let’s say for the sake of argument that even if Edwards struggled to the finish line without a big bloc of delegates, an incredibly tight Clinton-Obama contest centered on superdelegates might have given him the opportunity to essentially name the nominee. I take Trippi at his word that Edwards isn’t interested in securing anything for himself (e.g., another Veep nomination or a particular Cabinet post). So what would he “get” for an endorsement, other than the personal gratification of getting to make it? In a general election campaign against John McCain, either Clinton or Obama will talk about, say, poverty, exactly as much as is necessary. It’s not as though McCain will be seriously competing for the votes of those who care about entrenched poverty. Likewise, the gulf between either candidate and McCain on Iraq, on Iran, on health care, on economic policy, on tax policy, will be very deep without any particular encouragement from John Edwards. Furthermore, the race as it exists today between Obama and Clinton may wind up being close enough that an endorsement from Edwards would be crucial, without an extended campaign in which he would probably have been forced to say things about his rivals that would not endear him to either, or to most Democrats.
Even if I’m wrong about all that, I suspect Trippi’s nearly alone in his suggestion that a deadlocked convention and dispirited party just might have turned its lonely eyes to Edwards as the nominee. Even under Trippi’s highly optimistic scenario, Edwards would have lost a vast number of primaries and caucuses to the two candidates whose aspirations would need to be put aside to pave the way for the North Carolinian. The prospect that has so many Democrats terrified right now–the disgruntlement of African-Americans or of women at the rejection of their champions–would be doubled, not eliminated, by the nomination, against the wishes of Democratic voters, of yet another white man, however progressive.
So maybe Trippi gave Edwards the right advice before Super Tuesday. By suspending his campaign, he’s been able to stay out of the candidate crossfire, get some rest, spend time with his family, and get ready to play a role in the general election and, we all hope, the next administration. He can still have an impact on the nomination if he chooses (so far he has not, even though you’d think the NC primary would have been a good opportunity to make a splash), can still make a well-received convention speech, and can bask in the rehabilitation that usually accrues to losing candidates who leave the campaign trail honorably, and on their own terms. Joe Trippi shouldn’t wish he’d helped deny John Edwards, or himself, that relatively soft landing.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll came out yesterday that did something very interesting: it tested likely general-election attack-lines on the three surviving presidential candidates.
Respondents were asked how concerned they were about McCain’s age, history of flip-flops, and closeness to George W. Bush. For Clinton, they were asked about her own perceived flip-flops, her honesty, and the role that her husband might play in her administration. And for Obama, they were asked about his patriotism, his closeness to controversial figures like Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, and his “bittergate” comments.
A site called FiveThirtyEight.com has published a nifty chart that ranks the results on these “concerns,” and also compares them to the media coverage of each. You can read it yourself, but the basic finding was that Hillary’s alleged flip-flops and McCain’s closeness to Bush and alleged flip-flops rank at the top, while McCain’s age, Hillary’s relationship with her husband, and Obama’s supposed lack of patriotism rank at the bottom. The last two items have obviously received a lot more media attention than public concerns might justify–not to mention the massive media coverage of “bittergate” and Wright, which stimulate concerns about Obama that rank in the middle of the scale.
It’s probably worth observing that “flip-flop” concerns about HRC and McCain may be misleading since some of those respondents voicing them are probably strongly progressive or conservative voters who in the end won’t defect to the opposition candidate. Conversely, McCain’s age could become a hotter topic during the discussion about his running-mate choice (a big deal to conservatives in particular due to concerns that McCain might be a one-term president), and would definitely draw attention if it’s reinforced by some incident like Bob Dole’s famous fall from the platform in 1996.
Interesting as they are, these findings don’t really get at the sort of meta-attacks that stitch together these and other “voter concerns.” It’s already obvious that the GOP plans to hammer Obama as an inexperienced dilettante who’s out of touch with the political and cultural mainstream; and Clinton as a divisive and dishonest ideologue who will perpetuate the savage political climate of the recent past. For McCain, the conjunction of concerns about “flip-flopping” and closeness to Bush is potentially toxic. If Democrats succeed in defining McCain as a man who is constantly reinventing himself to disguise his desire to continue Bush’s deeply unpopular policies and champion a deeply unpopular GOP, the Straight Talk Express could hit some major potholes.

At first glance, I thought Karl Rove’s Wall Street Journal op-ed today was going to be interesting: it began with the observation that Rove had learned something about John McCain that was “politically troubling.”
Then I read the whole piece, and it turns out that Rove’s worried that John McCain doesn’t talk enough about his war record:

When it comes to choosing a president, the American people want to know more about a candidate than policy positions. They want to know about character, the values ingrained in his heart. For Mr. McCain, that means they will want to know more about him personally than he has been willing to reveal.

No, Rove’s not talking about McCain’s marriages or finances or religion or temper or relationships with lobbyists. It’s his experiences as a POW in Vietnam.
Keep in mind that McCain’s already done a “biography tour” that’s almost entirely about his and his ancestors’ military records. Most of his ads are about the “values ingrained in his heart” by same. But we’re supposed to believe that policy-saturated Americans want to know a lot more about McCain’s favorite subject “than he has been willing to reveal.”
Put aside, if you can, the irony that Rove was the chief strategist for a primary campaign (Bush 2000) that was implicated in probably the most scurrilous effort to date to to impugn McCain’s character and values.
Eight years later, Rove’s certainly justified in hoping that scrutiny of John McCain will shy away from his policy views. It kind of reminds me of an incident many years ago when a mischievous New York Times book editor recruited William F. Buckley to review a hagiographical book about his political nemesis, New York Mayor John Lindsay. Noting the abundance of photos of the ruggedly handsome mayor, Buckley observed: “If I were commissioned to write a favorable book about John Lindsay, it would consist entirely of pictures.”
And if I were commissioned to write a favorable op-ed column about John McCain, it would consist entirely of references to his military record. That seems to be Karl Rove’s opinion as well.

In non-Jeremiah-Wright related political news, John McCain has re-released his health care plan, and the bottom line is that if follows George W. Bush’s most recent proposals, which were assessed by most health care experts as representing some point along the spectrum that leads from unserious to dangerous.
Like Bush’s plan, McCain’s focuses on replacing the employer subsidy for health care with tax incentives for the individual purchase of health insurance. Thus it arguably represents an attack on the very idea of group health insurance purchasing, throwing federal resources into subsidies for the expensive and highly discriminatory individual market. This is somehow supposed to hold down costs.
Like Bush’s plan, McCain’s does nothing to restrict pre-existing condition exclusions and other “cherry-picking” practices of health insurance companies, which both restrict coverage and boost costs. Indeed, by creating a national market for health insurance policies, McCain would virtually guarantee that companies will begin to migrate towards states with exceptionally weak regulations governing pre-existing conditions and other discriminatory practices. Indeed, the idea seems to be that “excessive” state mandated coverage is the source of the current price spiral.
McCain does promise to provide what sounds like token money to promote private or state “high-risk pools” for the unfortunates who can’t get health insurance. But this is by far the vaguest part of his proposal, and offers at best a take-it-or-leave it opportunity for crappy policies at prices that may be prohibitive.
Reflecting most conservative health care “thinking” over the last decade or so, McCain’s plan is remarkably retrograde, taking the health care system back decades to one where individuals are essentially on their own without benefit of collective purchasing clout. Politically, the whole point will be to breezily describe the McCain plan as “market-based” (indeed, that’s in the title of the Washington Post article linked to above), while attacking Democratic universal plans as “socialized medicine.”
It’s appropriate that McCain’s big health care speech yesterday was introduced by former Sen. Connie Mack (R-FL), a lobbyist for health insurance companies, which under the McCain plan would enjoy new taxpayer subsidies with virtually no accountability for what they provide.
McCain’s health care plan represents yet another area in which his efforts to claim “distance” from George W. Bush are, well, counter-factual. If he’s the “change” candidate on health care, it’s small change, and for the worse.