David Paul Kuhn at The Politico has a good, understandable explanation of how the Democratic Convention’s credientials committee functions. This is worth reading now that Hillary Clinton’s pledging (for the moment, at least0 to take a credentials challenge over the likely non-seating of the MI and FL delegations all the way to Denver.
The two takeaways from Kuhn’s piece are that (1) DNC Chairman Howard Dean controls the appointments to the Credentials Committee that will have the balance of power in a fight between Clinton and Obama, and (2) if HRC wants to take the fight to Denver, she certainly can, since it only takes 20% of the Credentials Committee to justify a minority report to the Convention itself, and a subsequent vote.
But a lot of this is murky.

Neither campaign tracks projections on Credentials Committee seats, according to aides charged with the arcane process of counting delegates. The DNC also does not track these totals but relies on state parties to report their totals as they are determined.
Adding to the confusion surrounding the Credentials Committee, a subject that has perplexed many party veterans, is the fact that Democrats have not found themselves studying the minutiae of convention rules since 1980. Since then, convention votes, including those in the Credentials Committee, have been pro forma.

Prior to 1980, credentials fights really used to be pretty common. We’re beginning to understand why a significant effort was undertaken to make them go away.

The new Pew poll that Ed discussed earlier today has some bad news for Republicans beyond Barack Obama’s success in rebounding from the Wright controversy. Its “right track/wrong track” assessment shows “[j]ust 22% of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the country, the lowest percentage observed in any Pew Research Center survey since the fall of 1993.” We all remember what happened to the party holding the White House in 1994, eh?
Undergirding this latest lurch of public opinion into a great dismal swamp of disatisfaction is a dramatic deterioration of confidence in the economy. The percentage of Americans saying the economy is “poor” has doubled–from 28% to 56%–in just the last two months. Altogether, 11% rate the economy as “excellent” or “good,” and again, that’s almost exactly how Americans felt in August 1993. 55% of Republicans currently say the economy is in recession or depression.
The current upsurge in violence in Iraq may be the least of the incumbent party’s problems come election day.

As a follow-up to Matt Compton’s post last week on YouTube viewership of Barack Obama’s “race speech,” it’s worth noting that the numbers just kept growing in the intervening days. Ari Melber of The Nation reported yesterday that total YouTube downloads of the speech have reached more than 4.3 million, more, it appears, than the estimated 4 million viewers who watched the speech live on cable television.
Though there was probably some overlap between cable and YouTube viewers, it’s still pretty amazing that perhaps 8 million people watched all or significant portions of a political speech that didn’t emanate from the Oval Office or a Joint Session of Congress. If Obama does ultimately win the Democratic presidential nomination, you’d have to figure that his acceptance speech in Denver is going to set some viewership records through multiple media.

NOTE: This is a guest post by Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
It’s said that truth is the first casualty of war. But truth, and realism, also take a pretty good beating in politics—especially in nominating contests.
Consider what’s happened to two of Sen. Barack Obama’s brainiest advisors: Austan Goolsbee and Samantha Power.
Goolsbee, a widely respected economist who teaches at the University of Chicago, is the Obama campaign’s top economic advisor. (Full disclosure: Goolsbee has also worked with PPI and is a friend). He was muzzled after accounts of his meeting with Canadian government officials were leaked to the media (apparently by the Canadian Prime Minister’s staff). According to these accounts, Goolsbee reassured the Canadians that Obama, if elected president, would probably not follow through on his campaign promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Running hard in economically stressed Ohio, Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign pounced immediately, citing the reports as proof that her loathing of NAFTA is more sincere than Obama’s, even if it was her husband who signed the treaty into law back in 1993.
Goolsbee insists he was misquoted. But even if he didn’t actually tell the Canadians that Obama’s anti-NAFTA bark is worse than his bite, that’s probably the truth of the matter. After all, Canada is America’s biggest trading partner, Mexico is our third-biggest. With or without NAFTA, trade with our neighbors is only likely to grow. The idea that either President Obama or President Clinton would begin an historic, change-oriented presidency by picking a gratuitous fight with Canada and Mexico over a 15-year-old trade treaty is preposterous. And that’s not just the opinion of this pro-trade Democrat: the stoutly liberal John Judis has a new piece out today arguing that both candidates are using NAFTA as a symbol of globalization that misses the treaty’s genuine positive and negative aspects.
Samantha Power, author of a Pulitizer Prize-winning book on the Rwanda genocide, A Problem from Hell, resigned as a top Obama foreign-policy advisor for calling Hillary Clinton a “monster.” She promptly apologized and quit the campaign. But the flap obscured another, far more substantive Power utterance, namely a remark she made to the BBC in which she characterized Obama’s promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months as “a best case scenario.” She added:

You can’t make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009. He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator.

Here, Power was telling the truth, and a very reassuring truth at that. Of course, it exposed Obama to charges from the Clinton camp that he doesn’t really mean what he says about pulling out of Iraq, any more than he means what he says about renegotiating NAFTA. In a speech last week at George Washington University marking the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, Clinton had this to say:

Senator Obama has said often that words matter. I strongly agree. But giving speeches alone won’t end the war and making campaign promises you might not keep certainly won’t end it. In the end the true test is not the speeches a president delivers, it’s whether the president delivers on the speeches.

Fair enough, except that Clinton is also promising more than she can deliver on Iraq. “Here’s what you can count on me to do: provide the leadership to end this war quickly and responsibly,” she said at GWU. And she reiterated her pledge to start bringing troops home within 60 days of taking office, at a rate of one to two brigades a month, according to consultations with military leaders.
The problem is, you can end America’s involvement in Iraq quickly, or you can end it responsibly. You can’t do both. Consolidating the recent security gains in Iraq, keeping relentless pressure on al Qaeda in Iraq, working to reconcile feuding ethnic and religious factions, training Iraqi military and police forces, and pressing the Shiite-Kurdish government to integrate the Sunni Awakening movement into those forces– all these tasks are going to take time, and they’re going to require a substantial and sustained U.S. military presence. As a candidate who claims superior foreign-policy experience, Clinton should know that.
The voters get it. A recent Gallup poll found that more than six in 10 Americans think the United States is obliged to remain in Iraq “until a reasonable level of stability and security has been reached.” And while voters want candidates to have withdrawal plans, 8 in 10 say they are against immediate withdrawal.
At the same time, more than 60 percent of Americans say the Iraq war has not been worth the costs. Such sentiments, however, have not kept Sen. John McCain from playing the overpromising game from the other side. Returning last week from a trip to Iraq, McCain announced that America and its allies “stand on the precipice of winning a major victory.” Such triumphalism may be catnip to hard-core conservatives, but it probably grates on the nerves of a war-weary public that has just marked five years of occupation which have claimed 4,000 American lives.
What gives? Have all our presidential finalists momentarily lost touch with the reality principle?
There’s something about nominating contests that seems to suspend the standards of veracity candidates are normally held to. Apparently, all’s fair in the fight to identify with the inflamed emotions of core partisan or “base” voters, or, in the case of NAFTA, with Ohioans who feel that trade has somehow cheated them out of well-paying manufacturing jobs. In tailoring their message to party activists and local constituencies, candidates too readily indulge in a political version of poetic license, in which accuracy and realism yield to simplistic gestures and symbolism.
Thus, bashing NAFTA becomes a way to show solidarity with working Americans anxious about the impact of global competition on their jobs and incomes. These anxieties are real enough, and voters are right to demand vigorous new responses from government—a new social contract that includes a comprehensive system of worker training, universal health care, portable pensions for all workers, a fairer and more generous college-aid system, and more. But all that is complicated and costly, and let’s face it, such worthy prescriptions don’t pack as much emotional punch as refighting the battle of NAFTA all over again.
So, at least until the primaries end, we’re likely to be stuck with candidates insisting on 100 percent fidelity to crowd-pleasing positions they must know, deep down, they will have to modify in the general election—at which point, one hopes, reality will make a welcome and overdue reappearance on the scene.
Somebody does, however, need to tell John McCain that the primary season is over, and he no longer needs to thrill conservative audiences with promises of “a major victory” in Iraq.

For those trying to distinguish Barack Obama’s foreign policy/national security views from those of Hillary Clinton, and/or seeking to understand how Obama might deal with a security-heavy general election debate with John McCain, Spencer Ackerman has penned an interesting take for the American Prospect based on extensive discussions with Obama’s international policy team.
Ackerman distills both a negative and positive aspect of the “Obama Doctrine.” The negative dimension is Obama’s rejection of the political premise that Democrats can’t put too much distance between themselves and Republicans on security issues due to the party’s poor reputation on the subject. The positive dimension is an approach to post-9/11 security threats that puts a premium on fighting terrorism through a military focus on al Qaeda and an economic and diplomatic focus on “dignity promotion” as opposed to simple anti-Islamism or mechanical democracy promotion.
It’s well worth the read, whether or not you buy Ackerman’s notion that Obama is presenting a “doctrine” as opposed to a very different way of addressing widely accepted security challenges.

On the heels of Adam Nagourney’s survey yesterday of Hillary Clinton’s difficult strategy for winning the nomination, Ben Smith of The Politico gets deep into the math of HRC’s effort to claim a majority of the overall popular vote. He concludes, like many observers, that absent a deal to “count” popular votes from MI and FL, HRC’s goal of a popular vote majority depends on either big landslide wins in the upcoming states she’s expected to do well in (PA, KY, WV and PR), or surprise showings in states where Obama is thought to be leading (e.g., NC, OR and IN). Complicating the picture even more is the fact that four caucus states (IA, NV, ME and WA) have not reported, and may be incapable of tabulating, actual raw votes.
Smith also links to a useful if complicated chart at RealClearPolitics that displays various popular vote configurations. It has Obama up by just over 700,000 votes without FL, MI or the four non-popular-vote-reporting caucus states, three of which were won by Obama.

In a minority view, Chris Bowers thinks the Obama campaign’s decision to resist a deal or “re-do” for Michigan could invite a credentials fight in the DNC and at the convention, on grounds that the required majority of delegates may arguably be based on a count that includes MI and FL.

Adam Nagourney of The New York Times has a good summary of Hillary Clinton’s current strategy for winning the Democratic presidential nomination:

She has to defeat Mr. Obama soundly in Pennsylvania next month to buttress her argument that she holds an advantage in big general election states.
She needs to lead in the total popular vote after the primaries end in June.
And Mrs. Clinton is looking for some development to shake confidence in Mr. Obama so that superdelegates, Democratic Party leaders and elected officials who are free to decide which candidate to support overturn his lead among the pledged delegates from primaries and caucuses.

But the growing unlikelihood of a “re-do” or a delegate deal for MI and FL is a big obstacle to the second goal, which may be the key to an HRC claim to superdelegate supremacy.

The fight over Florida and Michigan is just partly about delegates. Victories in new primaries in those states are among the only realistic ways for Mrs. Clinton to erase Mr. Obama’s advantage in the total popular vote.
Mr. Obama’s edge over Mrs. Clinton is 700,000 votes out of 26 million cast, excluding caucuses and the disputed Florida and Michigan results. About 12 million people are eligible to vote in the remaining contests.
Aides to the two candidates said even with the best possible showing for Mrs. Clinton in the states ahead, it was hard to see how she could pass Mr. Obama without Michigan and Florida.

That’s why (as Ed Kilgore has argued here) it’s in Clinton’s interest to accept absolutely any deal she can get on delegates for FL in particular, to preserve her 300,000 popular vote win there. And that may be why the Obama campaign seems increasingly committed to the status quo, despite the risks that involves for the general election.
The other big thing to watch is whether Obama quickly recovers from the polling “swoon” that seemed to hit him when the Jeremiah Wright controversy exploded. If his speech on the subject was as effective with the public as it was with most of the media, that should begin to happen soon.

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post has a useful item today listing the top ten states that might flip from one party to the other in the November presidential election. Eight of the ten (IA, NM, NV, CO, OH, VA, FL, and MO) went Republican in 2004; only NH and MN are viewed as (unlikely) prospects to go the other way.
Cillizza doesn’t get into this, but most observers would add a second tier of potential battleground states, including three carried by Bush in 2004 (AZ, AR and WV) and three carried by Kerry (MI, PA and WI).

For all those Democrats worried to distraction about the tone and duration of the Clinton-Obama contest, there was a timely reminder in Illinois over the weekend of the fundamental advantage Democrats may enjoy in November. In a special election to replace former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Democrat Bill Foster won a solid victory over Republican Jim Oberweis, a self-funding candidate who also benefitted from a million dollars in RNC expenditures (roughly a third of the national committee’s cash-on-hand).
This is a strongly though not overwhelmingly Republican district won ten times by Hastert, and carried by Bush with 55% of the vote in 2004. Foster ran about ten percent ahead of John Kerry’s 2004 performance there.
You can read about the special election at just about every site in the progressive blogosphere. But you might also want to check out John Fund’s assessment in the Wall Street Journal today, which suggests the results might well be a November harbinger similar to those of special congressional elections prior to the “wave” elections of 1974 and 1994.