This morning, in a move that surprised pretty much everyone who follows NC politics, Gov. Mike Easley endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton. Easley has held statewide office for 16 years, he is a superdelegate, and he remains one of the the most well-known politicians in North Carolina.
But he’s not the most popular state government employee — not by a long shot. That honor belongs to Roy Williams — the men’s basketball coach at the University of North Carolina.
And this morning, while Gov. Easley was talking up Sen. Clinton, Ol’ Roy took Barack Obama on a tour of the Dean Dome and then organized a little scrimmage where the Illinois senator got to shoot some hoops with a whole bunch of current and former Tar Heels.
While Obama plays a lot of pick up basketball (and has some actual ties to the game — his brother-in-law is the head coach at Oregon State), the Heels proved to be a stiffer set of competition from what he sees in his normal game. He only took three shots (including one over National Player of the Year Tyler Hansbrough) and missed them all. Still, Coach Williams encouraged his team to involve Obama, at one point yelling, “You’ve got the future president of the United States wide open.”
There are, of course, pictures and video and multiple multi-page threads about the scrimmage on the Inside Carolina message boards.
In many outlets Easley’s endorsement is competing with (and in some cases losing to) all this coverage. In North Carolina, I think you have to call today’s media cycle a draw. Because in all the stories and discussion, it seems like just about everyone has highlighted the “future president” sound bite from Roy.
This allows me moment for some basketball history. Though this might sound silly, the Carolina/Duke rivalry is deeply tangled up in politics. Roy William’s legendary mentor, Dean Smith, is a famous champion of Democrats and progressive causes. He integrated the UNC basketball team, and then helped to integrate the city of Chapel Hill. He is an outspoken critic of the death penalty and a contributor to Democratic candidates. His counterpart at Duke, Mike Krzyzewski, is a prominent Republican who once got into a spot of trouble for organizing a fund raiser for then-senate candidate Elizabeth Dole on Duke’s campus. Roy has never been a public campaigner in the same way that Smith is, but to many people, the event with Obama this morning sure sounded like an endorsement.
If that’s how most North Carolinians end up taking it, it’ll help Obama in the state.

It’s still too soon to know if actual voters will care about this, but the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s self-exculpatory publicity offensive (encompassing, so far, a PBS intervew with Bill Moyers, a speech to an NAACP gathering, and a National Press Club appearance) is clearly not good news for the campaign of Barack Obama. The Right is in full cry over it. Progressives seem divided over how they and/or Obama should respond, if at all. And Hillary Clinton’s campaign, while officially quiet on the latest Wright controversy, will obviously exploit it under if not over the radar screen in NC and IN.
The timing couldn’t be much worse for Obama; he’s locked into a close race in IN; his lead in NC (where HRC just obtained the endorsement of Gov. Mike Easley, a guy popular with conservative white voters in the state) may be shrinking. Worse still, though it could be an outlier, there’s finally a national general election poll (AP/Ipsos) that provides some evidence for Hillary Clinton’s relentless argument to superdelegates that she’s more electable than Obama (it has her up 9 points over McCain, while Obama’s lead is 2 points).
Perhaps the worst thing for Obama is that the Wright furor appears to be beyond his control at present. He’s already done one “big speech” on the subject. His efforts to make his relationship with the theoretically-retired Wright a thing of the past have been completely blown up by Wright’s highly visible re-emergence. It’s reasonably clear that Wright, who obviously feels he has bigger fish to fry than just some presidential election, may not relinquish the spotlight any time soon. And since the main impact of Wright’s latest remarks–particularly at the Press Club–is to reinforce some of his most controversial past statements, it will be difficult for Obama to act as though something new has happened that requires a different response than his denounce-not-renounce posture in his “big speech.”
Maybe it will blow over in a day or two. Maybe the excitement of the chattering classes over Wright will once again prove to be less than communicable to voters. Maybe Obama will even benefit from some sympathy at his plight, or from a long-overdue media scrutiny of John McCain’s much larger group of nutty clerical supporters. And maybe he’ll follow Todd Gitlin’s advice and take on his pastor as a man who’s crossed the line from prophetic courage to self-Wrighteous narcissism.
None of this brouhaha, BTW, changes the relentless mathematics that makes Obama’s nomination likely no matter what happens next Tuesday in IN and NC.
But at a time when Barack Obama wants voters to focus on his economic views, it’s the wrong time for Wright to crash back onto the national stage.

One of the big cookie-cutter trends in recent Republican governance at the state level has been the imposition of photo ID requirements for voting, rationalized by entirely unsubstantiated “concerns” about voter fraud. Today the U.S. Supreme Court, in a complicated 6-3 decision with multiple opinions, upheld one of the toughest photo ID laws, that of Indiana.
The basic impact of this decision is to place the burden of proof on those potentially affected by photo ID laws to demonstrate discriminatory impact, while relieving the state of any real obligation to demonstrate actual or potential “fraud.” Evidence of partisan intent in enacting such laws isn’t, apparently, relevant.
Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog has a full analysis, which emphasizes that the nature of the decision will encourage future litigation, and also notes the stubborn refusal of the Court to examine the implications of its own intervention in state election laws in Bush v. Gore.
But Hasen also has a comment about Justice Scalia’s concurring opinion in the current case that deserves some attention, particularly from those Democrats and independents who look with equanimity towards a McCain presidency:

Justice Scalia’s opinion (joined by Justices Alito and Thomas) concurring in the judgment is uncharacteristically brief. It reads the applicable constitutional standard differently, one that simply gives carte blanche to most states to pass laws with any kind of neutral justification offered. It is unclear to me…whether Justice Scalia would today uphold a poll tax like that struck down by the Court in Harper. Certainly Justice Scalia seems to think that if a law doesn’t burden most people, it should be upheld unless it imposes a “severe and overall” burden on the right to vote.

In this and many other constitutional areas, Scalia’s radicalism could well become Court doctrine if a Republican president gets to appoint a couple of Justices. For all of John McCain’s alleged “moderation” and “maverick” character, he’s never once departed from conservative orthodoxy on Supreme Court nominations. And here’s what he’s said about his own inclinations as a potential president:

On the issue of appointments to the Supreme Court, McCain mentioned that Sam Brownback would play an advisory role in helping decide who he should nominate for the Supreme Court. As models of who he would select, John McCain pointed to Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia.

More importantly, the “consolidation of the conservative base” that McCain has been undertaking since he nailed down the Republican presidential nomination depends very heavily on implicit and explicit promises to give conservatives an aggressively counter-revolutionary Court–the overriding goal, in particular, of Right To Lifers and other cultural conservatives. Scalia is their ideal Justice, and today’s suggestion that a Court made over in his image might look indifferently towards a reimposition of poll taxes is the kind of thing that pro-McCain Democrats and independents need to be reminded of constantly.

Despite all the Chicken Little hand-wringing about potential damage resulting from the heated Democratic Presidential campaign in the wake of the Pennsylvania primary, there was some bad news for McCain in the results coming out of PA. Frank Rich explained it well in his Sunday NYT column “How McCain Lost in Pennsylvania“:

…as the doomsday alarm grew shrill, few noticed that on this same day in Pennsylvania, 27 percent of Republican primary voters didn’t just tell pollsters they would defect from their party’s standard-bearer; they went to the polls, gas prices be damned, to vote against Mr. McCain. Though ignored by every channel I surfed, there actually was a G.O.P. primary on Tuesday, open only to registered Republicans. And while it was superfluous in determining that party’s nominee, 220,000 Pennsylvania Republicans (out of their total turnout of 807,000) were moved to cast ballots for Mike Huckabee or, more numerously, Ron Paul. That’s more voters than the margin (215,000) that separated Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama.
Those antiwar Paul voters are all potential defectors to the Democrats in November. Mr. Huckabee’s religious conservatives, who rejected Mr. McCain throughout the primary season, might also bolt or stay home. Given that the Democratic ticket beat Bush-Cheney in Pennsylvania by 205,000 votes in 2000 and 144,000 votes in 2004, these are 220,000 voters the G.O.P. can ill-afford to lose. Especially since there are now a million more registered Democrats than Republicans in Pennsylvania. (These figures don’t even include independents, who couldn’t vote in either primary on Tuesday and have been migrating toward the Democrats since 2006.)

This would be less surprising if it was soon after McCain clinched a winning number of delegates. But it’s been a while, now. One would expect a large portion of PA GOP voters to sit their primary out, since their votes didn’t count for much. However, when more than a quarter of PA GOP voters cast ballots against their nominee, even after the nomination is decided, McCain and the GOP have some healing of their own to do before they can crow about divisions between Democrats.

Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal does us all an important service today by evaluating and rejecting the idea that the consistent over-estimation of Barack Obama’s vote in early (i.e., unadjusted to reflect actual voting) exit polls is explained by the so-called Bradley-Wilder Effect–the reluctance of interviewees to admit they are going to vote against an African-American candidate.
As Blumental points out, the BWE, if it exists at all, is more likely to occur when voters are actually interviewed, especially “live” and in person. But exit polling is relatively private–voters are handed a questionnaire and allowed to fill it out and deposit it in a box, just like secret-ballot voting itself. So if the BWE is truly a significant factor, a pro-Obama bias would be showing up in pre-election polls as much as or more than in exit polls, and that hasn’t been the case other than in isolated instances (e.g., NH).
This matters because a widespread belief in the BWE might well lead observers to discount Obama’s standing in general election trial heats against John McCain.
But Blumenthal’s alternative explanation of the pro-Obama bias in exit polls is interesting as well: he attributes it to the same exit polling bias in favor of younger voters that was generally accepted as the reason for the pro-Kerry inaccuracy of the initial 2004 general election exit polls. This bias was supposedly addressed and dealt with after those elections, so it’s re-emergence today is certainly annoying if nothing else. Or maybe I’m just reacting as one of those Democrats who saw the early exits in 2004 and spent much of the evening calling friends and family to tell them to ignore the red sea on network election maps, because I “knew” Kerry had actually won.

For your Monday morning edifiction, four published pieces stand out. Paul Krugman reminds us that George W. Bush once convinced some people that he was a “maverick” (remember “reformer with results” and “compassionate conservative?”).
Robert Novak spits fire at two archbishops who enabled pro-choice politicians to receive communion at papal masses in Washington and New York (lest anyone credit Pope Benedict with tolerance or diplomacy, Novak insists these invitations to Pelosi, Kennedy, Kerry and Giuliani were acts of “disobedience” to the Vatican’s own wishes).
Christopher of Bloomberg.com does a sober assessment of the value of Barack Obama’s “gigantic” database of donor and volunteer information.
And most striking of all, Karl Rove uses his Newsweek column to raise concern-trolling (the disingenuous expression of advice to political enemies) to hitherto unknown levels of hypocrisy, offering Obama tips on how to deal with his “elitism” problem.

Confused by the conflicting claims over the current and future status of the cumulative popular vote in the Democratic presidential contest? Take a look at Steve Kornacki’s methodical deconstruction of the issue in the New York Observer.
Fair warning: Kornacki’s account is framed in a way that expresses considerable hostility to the Clinton’s campaign’s arguments. But his math is solid, and does fairly explain the various methods of counting this or that state in or out.

Our staff post this morning flagging Alan Abramowitz’s article in The New Republic “Cheer Up, Democrats” merits a little amplification, given the exceptionally-favorable data he reveals. As Abramowitz explains:

According to every known leading indicator, 2008 should be a very good year for Democratic candidates at all levels. There are many factors that point to an across-the-board Democratic victory in November, including the extraordinary unpopularity of President Bush, the deteriorating condition of the economy, the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, and the fact that Americans prefer the Democratic position to the Republican position on almost every major national issue. However, the most important Democratic advantage, and one that has received relatively little attention in the media, is the fact that for the past six years the Democratic electoral base has been expanding while the Republican electoral base has been shrinking.
Since 2002, according to annual data compiled by the Gallup Poll, the percentage of Americans identifying with or leaning toward the Democratic Party has increased by about seven percentage points while the percentage identifying with or leaning toward the Republican Party has decreased by about six percentage points. Fifty-two percent of Americans now identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party while only 39 percent identify with or lean toward the Republican Party.
A surge in Democratic enrollment across the country has pushed the party far beyond its competitor in many of the key battleground states: There are now about 800,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in Pennsylvania, for example. And even in states without party registration, such as Ohio and Virginia, the fact that turnout in the Democratic primary dwarfed turnout in the Republican primary suggests that a similar movement has been taking place. As a result of these gains in Democratic identification, the 2008 election could see a number of formerly red states, such as Virginia, move into the purple column, and several formerly purple states, such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, move into the blue column.

And Further,

The fact that Democratic identifiers now decisively outnumber Republican identifiers means that in order to win, Democrats only have to unite and turn out their own base. If Obama wins the national popular vote by even a single percentage point, it’s worth remembering, he’ll almost certainly win the electoral vote as well. In order for John McCain to win, on the other hand, Republicans not only have to unite and turn out their own base, which they have been fairly successful at doing in recent elections, but they also have to win a large majority of the small bloc of true independents and make significant inroads among Democratic identifiers, which they have not been very successful at doing recently.
Political commentators often assume that Democratic voters are inevitably less motivated and united than Republican voters–that they either won’t turn out or, if they do turn out, they will defect in large numbers to an appealing Republican candidate like John McCain. Leaving aside the question of just how appealing John McCain will be in November after undergoing several months of withering attacks from an extremely well-funded Democratic campaign, this image of Democratic voters is badly outdated

If Dems can unify, project a clear message and mobilize their base, Abramowitz predicts that Obama will be inaugurated on January 20th. But Clinton supporters will also find Abramowitz’s case for a growing Democratic edge encouraging, should she win the nomination. His argument also points to substantial Democratic gains in congressional, state and local elections, no matter who gets elected President.

In my last post, I should have probably said a bit more about Noam Scheiber’s “Rendell Factor” theory about Barack Obama’s poor performance in certain Philadelphia suburbs. The theory is weakened by the fact that Obama beat Clinton two-to-one in Rendell’s home base, Philadelphia County (where Philly Mayor Michael Nutter’s endorsement didn’t cut much ice for HRC, either). Indeed, there’s not much evidence that endorsements in PA carried a whole lot of weight. After all, Obama’s marquee supporter, Sen. Bob Casey, Jr., is from Lackawanna County, which Clinton won with a crushing 74% of the vote.

There are two online articles today that take a closer look at the PA Democratic primary results, and even though they begin with different questions, obtain a similar answer.
TNR’s Noam Scheiber wants to know more about Barack Obama’s spotty performance in the Philadelphia suburbs, which surprised a lot of non-PA observers. He comes up with a couple of explanations, and this is the one I found particularly interesting:

Obama tends to win the counties that are either strongly Republican (like Lancaster) or strongly Democratic (like Delaware, or Philadelphia itself), while Hillary tends to do better in counties that are either narrowly Republican or narrowly Democratic—and, within that band, the more Democratic the better. Which makes sense. The narrowly Democratic counties have strong Democratic parties and are therefore places where [Gov. Ed] Rendell’s help would have really mattered.

Noam’s guess that relative weakness of the Rendell organization explains Obama’s relatively strong performance in heavily Republican Philly suburbs may be plausible, but we’ve seen this pattern before.
That brings me to Jay Cost’s article at RealClearPolitics. Jay does a careful and complex comparison of the vote in Ohio and Pennsylvania counties, and discovers, to his own surprise, that Barack Obama actually did better than expected in central Pennslyvania, and not just in university towns like State College.

[It] is noteworthy that central Pennsylvania is the most Republican part of the state. We have found again and again in this primary season that, outside of the South, white Democrats in heavily Republican areas tend to prefer Obama more than other areas. It is unclear what has caused this trend, but the observations in central Pennsylvania are consistent with it.

While Jay doesn’t get into explanations of the phenomenon in his article, it’s worth noting that in this state at least, it’s probably not attributable to tactical voting by Republicans, or to the legendary Republican Hillary-hatred. PA held a closed primary, and moreover, it’s not one of those EZ-Re-Registration states where GOPers can stroll to the polls and become a Democrat-For-A-Day. Something else is going on here, and as Jay notes, it’s a national pattern, at least outside the South.
Obama-skeptics rightly point out the general-election irrelevance of his primary and caucus strength in “Republican states.” But they sometimes forget that there are “Republican areas” in battleground states, and that in the end, a vote is a vote.