Amidst the blizzard of endorsements rolling out in the Democratic presidential contest right now, it’s unfortunate for Hillary Clinton that this unwelcome one will get a lot of attention for its sheer absurdity.
Yes, the loathsome (not a word I use lightly, or would apply to much of anyone else in politics) right-wing “pundit” Ann Coulter says she’ll “campaign for Hillary” if John McCain is the Republican nominee. On Hannity and Colmes, no less.
It says a lot about the condition of the Republican commentariat that some conservatives are taking Coulter’s ravings seriously enough to try to logically rebut them. Indeed, RealClearPolitics just put up a link to a blog post by Captain’s Quarters’ Edward Morrissey entitled: “Has Ann Coulter Finally Jumped the Shark?” Which leads to the question: Can a shark jump the shark?
Maybe conservatives will finally get fed up with her tiresome act and stop buying her books and otherwise giving her publicity, consigning her forever to the footnotes of future dissertations on the debasement of American politics in the Bush era.

Since many members of the chattering classes have already weighed in with general impressions of last night’s excellent Clinton-Obama debate from Los Angeles (Noam Scheiber’s take was reasonably close to my own), I thought I’d mention just one factor that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention: the impact on the Democratic debate of John McCain’s emergence as the likely Republican nominee.
It was most noticeable on the immigration issue, where the cramped defensiveness of past exchanges gave way to a wonkathon that mostly centered on the question of the extent to which illegal immigrants are depressing low-end wages (though Wolf Blitzer made every effort to drag the candidates back to the tedious and highly misleading question of drivers’ licences). The simple reality is that John McCain’s history on immigration reform largely takes the issue off the table in a general election contest. It could still play hell in down-ballot races, but unless McCain does a full-scale massive flip-flop, immigrant-bashing won’t be a major feature of the presidential discussion.
Just as importantly, McCain’s extremist position on Iraq is setting up a contrast that should benefit the Democratic nominee. It’s no wonder that his “100 years” remark on the duration of the U.S. combat deployment in Iraq came up a couple of times in last night’s debate. And McCain’s championship of the Iraq “surge,” which he’s now mentioning in every other breath, is another large target. Obama’s litany on post-surge conditions in Iraq (“we’re now back to merely intolerable levels of violence with a dysfunctional government”) last night was a good preview of what we’re likely to hear from either Democrat in response to McCain’s “victory” talk.
Given the widespread concern of a lot of Democrats about McCain’s viability in a general-election contest, it’s important to keep in mind that he brings some specific weaknesses to the table as well, even if his age and temperament don’t wind up becoming problems for him.
Speaking of partisan contrast: Anyone who watched the two California debates over the last two nights had to come away deeply impressed by the superior level of discourse in the Democratic event, and its general spirit of party unity. It ended, after all, with the audience practically coming unglued with joy at the suggestion of a Clinton-Obama or Obama-Clinton ticket. Had anyone suggested a McCain-Romney or Romney-McCain ticket at the end of the remarkably shallow Republican grudge match in Simi Valley, it would have been considered a very bad joke.
Just yesterday, Karl Rove penned an article for The Wall Street Journal that concluded:

Both Democrats and Republicans are in spirited and, at times, heated contests. The difference is Democrats are running a nasty race that has as its subtext race and gender. The Republican race, on the other hand, is a serious debate about serious ideas.

I suspect the Boy Genius would like to take those words back today.

Coming soon to a Republican Talking Point near you:
National Journal has published its 2007 ratings of U.S. Senators, and lo and behold, Barack Obama is dubbed the “Most Liberal Senator.”
This brought back some memories for me, because four years ago I got involved in a complex and heated argument with the NatJo folks (largely offline) about the same designation awarded to Sen. John Kerry, who by a strange coincidence, was also running for president that year.
I discovered that the methodology for these ratings involved some very questionable rules. One involved ignoring missed votes (extremely common among presidential candidates), with the even more questionable exception of eliminating whole categories of votes if the Senator missed an arbitrary percentage of them, making the rating then depending on whatever was left. Another problem was the exceptionally subjective definition of “liberal” and “conservative.” Party-line votes, whatever their substance, were defined as ideological, and in some cases (e.g., votes to resist GOP tax cuts for violating budget rules) votes that united “liberals” with some conservatives were labeled “liberal” entirely.
I haven’t had a chance to look at NatJo’s current methodology–beyond noting they’ve now decided against rating Senators with a large number of total absences, a practice that exempts John McCain (but not Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton) from any rating or label, and which, if it had been employed in 2004, would have made John Kerry “Unrated” instead of “the Most Liberal Senator.”
But fortunately, Steve Benen at Political Animal has leapt onto these ratings like a panther, and made a lot of the points I’ve just made above, with updated examples. Meanwhile, Brian Beutler has the best general description of the NatJo system: “This is philistinism masquerading as social science–it’s the U.S. News College Guide of Washington politics.”
Much of this controversy, of course, could be avoided if National Journal and others who do these ratings would simply use the term that the senators they are describing actually apply to themselves: “progressive.” “Liberal” has of course been contaminated by many years and many billions of dollars of stereotyping abuse by the Right. Moreover, it’s confusing because it means something entirely different in the international context: more like “conservative,” in fact. “Conservatives” would undoubtedly howl if the National Journal decided to provide them with a label they rejected, such as “Reactionary” or “Authoritarian” or “Bushian.” Why the double standard?
Let’s hope these ratings receive the cold shoulder they deserve.

I don’t know how many of you watched the Republican presidential debate last night. It wasn’t just bad (and it was adjudged as bad by Republicans as well); it was surreal. Perhaps it was the bizarre presence of Air Force One looming over the candidates, hunched as they were over a table at the Ronald Reagan presidential library. Maybe it was the ghostly presence of Reagan himself, which seemed to grip the candidates and questioners alike. Indeed, the theme of the entire debate was “WWRD?”
Amidst all the inane and idolatrous babbling about the 40th president (at one point Mitt Romney said “Ronald Reagan” so many times in rapid succession that he sounded like he had forgotten himself and fallen into a chant or even a prayer), there was something of a debate that nicely illustrated the odd world of the Republican “base.”
The key juncture was the bicker-fest between McCain and Romney over the former’s allegation that the latter had once uttered the accursed word “timetables” in connection with our glorious march towards total victory in Iraq. After fifteen minutes of this stuff, Ron Paul had to jump in and remind them that they were equally out of touch with reality on the larger issue of the war, and shouldn’t waste time fighting over who said what when. Perhaps lost in the crossfire was the fact that both Romney and Huckabee passed up a clear opportunity to express some slight concern over McCain’s infamous “100 years” statement on how long our troops might need to stay in Iraq.
If you are one of those people who worry about insufficient partisan differentiation, take a long look at the Iraq debate on the campaign trail. Among the Democratic candidates, nobody disputes that the Iraq War was a boneheaded disaster that needs to be ended quickly; instead, they argue over their earler positions and what that says about their judgment. Until Bill Richardson got out of the race, they argued some about small residual troop deployments. Among the Republican candidates (except for Paul, of course), the Iraq War was a fully justified response to 9/11 and Islamofascism; we’re winning the war now, thank God and Petraus; but just in case, let’s have permanent bases and keep troops there forever. Can’t repeat that Vietnam “cut and run,” can we?
Since the general public’s a lot more in line with the Democratic than with the Republican perspective on Iraq, I do hope as many of them as possible were watching that debate last night. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something a bit disturbing about the spectacle of an old white man–the probable nominee–baiting another white man for being a wussie about the war as they sit around in a giant aircraft hanger.

I’m with Matt Compton, and with a lot of observers, in praising Sen. John Edwards for the policy heft he brought to the presidential campaign, and encouraged others to emulate.
Edwards’ political strategy, on the other hand, just didn’t work.
I’ve written a brief post on this topic for The New Republic’s blog, The Plank. Check it out.

With less than a week to go until Super Tuesday, the presidential field continues to dwindle, and the low odds of some sort of brokered convention on either side have dropped considerably.
Sen. Edwards’ departure from the campaign won’t have a dramatic effect, but since he might have picked up a scattering of delegates next week, it hastens the day when one of the survivors will be able to nail down the nomination. If, however, Edwards chooses to endorse Obama, he could shift the dynamics of the campaign towards a referendum on Hillary Clinton as opposed to an audition of Barack Obama.
Matt Compton, a native North Carolinian, will post some retrospective thoughts about Sen. Edwards’ campaign shortly, and I may add a few notes later on about what we’ve learned from his message and political strategy.
On the Republican side, the McCain win in Florida and its nature, combined with an endorsement from Rudy Giuliani and the consignment of the Huckabee campaign to life support, have brought the Arizonan to the very brink of “inevitability.” The only remaining question is how much energy and money Mitt Romney can bring to a last-ditch effort to beat McCain in enough February 5 states to give anti-McCain conservatives hope they can deny him the nomination.
In that connection, as always, I looked at the National Review site to gauge the temperature of conservative opinion-leaders towards McCain. Are they prepared for a savage insurgency? Is Romney, with his own weaknesses, a suitable vehicle for that task?
Sure enough, the magazine has a symposium up today assessing the damage and weighing next steps. Nobody’s threatening to take a dive in November. Noted McCain-disparager Hugh Hewitt is the most combative, comparing McCain to Nixon (not a compliment, despite Hewitt’s past service as director of the Nixon Library), and demanding that conservatives (among whom, he says, McCain can never be numbered) rally around Romney to the bitter end. Several commentors gamely recommend various panders McCain could offer to reassure them. Mona Charon publicly expresses the private fear of many conservatives that McCain doesn’t think he needs them. And a couple of participants mock McCain’s apparent belief that invoking the name of Ronald Reagan on every available occasion will bring conservatives around.
What I find most surprising about this discussion, and others like it, is that conservatives seem less worried about McCain as a president than McCain as a candidate. They are especially alarmed about a McCain-Obama matchup. This is in sharp contrast to what I am generally hearing from Democrats, many of whom are terrified by McCain’s general election poll standing, and are particularly worried that a McCain-Obama contest would provide an unfavorable comparison of Obama’s short resume with McCain’s unique ability to pose as an experienced insider with outsider credentials.
All of this speculation on both sides will prove academic if HRC wins the nomination; a Clinton-McCain contest would likely become a 2004-style partisan slugfest in which McCain struggles to overcome his party’s low popularity while HRC struggles to overcome her high personal negatives, with turnout probably mattering more than persuasion. And lest we forget, there’s always the possibility that Mitt Romney will mount an ideologically driven comeback that will either deny McCain an easy nomination or force him to say and do things that will reduce his general-election appeal.
We’ll obviously know a lot more in six days.

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

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

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

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

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

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