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.

The March issue of Campaign & Elections ezine, Politics has a freebie cover story by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. “Tuned Out: Cultural Libertarians Are A Growing Force in America. But Just How Can you Reach Them?”
Much of the article is a plug for Republican/Libertarian Ron Paul as a prototype presidential candidate of the future, without even a mention of Paul’s disturbing flirtation with white supremacist groups/ideology. But the authors do shed some light on Paul’s popularity with Libertarians, if not racist groups.
There’s also a fair amount of dubious speculation about “long-tail marketing” being the wave of the future in politics, as well as the economy. The authors cite a study of public opinion polls indicating that “15 percent of the electorate can more or less be described as Libertarian,” which doesn’t tell us much about what they actually do at the ballot box.
The merit of the article, in terms of Democratic strategy, is that it illuminates a significant ideological minority that divides its voters between Democrats, Republicans and the Libertarian Party and sheds light on what they think about a host of issues in current context. The sidebar, “7 Ways to Win Our Vote” limns current Libertarian preferences regarding online gambling; internet tax proposals; eminent domain; Iraq; immigration; medical marijuana; and health insurance. Democrats have an edge with Libertarians on most of these issues and other issues concerning personal and lifestyle freedom. Republicans will do better with Libertarians who are more focused on taxes, shrinking government and expanding unfettered trade.
It’s unclear whether the Libertarian percentage of American voters will grow in the years ahead. No doubt, Democrats can bite off a healthy chunk of the Libertarian-leaning constituency with the right kind of candidates. My guess is Obama would have a better chance than Clinton to win Libertarian votes in this cycle, although neither one satisfies the inflexible standards of free-trade ideologues. One suspects that many, if not most self-described Libertarians are not all that rigid on all their issues, so there is likely not much benefit in tailoring a strategy to win their votes.

Surely one measure of the judgment of politicians who have supported and continue to support the Iraq War and those who didn’t and/or don’t is the overall cost, generally estimated at $2 trillion. That’s calamitous enough, as Joe Conason explains, given the original cost estimates:

How mistaken were the war’s optimistic promoters in 2003? The official line on the expected cost of rebuilding Iraq after ousting Saddam was just under $2 billion, according to testimony provided by Bush administration officials. That estimate did not include the likelihood, according to Paul Wolfowitz, the then-deputy secretary of defense, of whether Iraq’s oil reserves would cover the entire cost of invasion, occupation and reconstruction. Five years later, the estimated cost of the war to American taxpayers is well over $2 trillion, including the care we must provide for wounded Americans over the next few decades. Much of the Iraqi oil, of which production remains sporadic, is being stolen and smuggled away.
The difference between an estimate of $2 billion and a cost of $2 trillion could be considered a significant miscalculation, even in a Republican government.

But that’s not all:

Yet those figures don’t quite reckon with the real costs, which should include the rise in the price of oil from around $36 a barrel in March 2003 to well over $100 a barrel this month. Some economists go further, blaming the subprime mortgage collapse — and the ensuing deluge of bad paper that may capsize the world economy — on the effects of the war.

No matter how broad or narrow your estimates, the costs of this war have to cast a pretty heavy shadow on John McCain’s reputation for fiscal probity, and should make his obsession with appropriations earmarks–mostly peanuts as compared to a week or so of this war, which he supported from the beginning and wants to continue indefinitely–pretty laughable.

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.

Today, as you probably know, is the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. And two national politicians–George W. Bush and Barack Obama–marked the anniversary with major speeches on the subject.
Anyone who doubts there are significant differences between the two parties on foreign policy and national security issues ought to read these two speeches. No, George W. Bush won’t be on the ballot this year, but John McCain has accepted and even championed Bush’s point of view on the original decision to invade Iraq and the “victory” strategy going forward. And no, Obama has not yet won the Democratic nomination, but Hillary Clinton, while disagreeing with Obama’s analysis of the original war resolution vote, does agree with him in most particulars about what to do now.
The gap between Bush and Obama is remarkably wide and deep. Bush still argues that the original decision to invade Iraq was justified by Saddam’s “threatening” behavior and the need for a more aggressive post-9/11 U.S. military posture in the Middle East. He’s still asserting the “flypaper” theory that al Qaeda’s involvement in Iraq has denied it the resources to attack America again, and still claims the invasion has made us safer. He’s still dismissing the post-invasion Iraqi turmoil as little more than a rearguard action by elements of Saddam’s regime, augmented by al Qaeda. And he’s still predicting “victory,” defined as a stable Iraqi democracy.
Obama, on the other hand, continues to argue that the invasion was based on lies, bad intelligence, ideology, and most of all a major strategic blunder. He continues to stress the handicaps the war has imposed on the United States, ranging from an overstretched military, to erosion of prior gains in Afghanistan, to neglect of Pakistan, to soured alliances, to the overall costs of the war in human and dollar terms. And he continues to deride the idea of “victory” in Iraq as based on a perpetual engagement with no real definition of success.
The only real change in Bush’s argument over time has been his shift from delusional talk about military and political progress in Iraq to celebration of the real (if limited) military progress associated with the “surge.” And as always, he stresses the allegedly baleful consequences of any sort of withdrawal, especially now that “victory” is in sight.
Meanwhile, Obama is honing his own argument on the “surge” as a tactical success within a strategic failure. His passage today on McCain’s Iraq position nicely combines his analysis of the “surge” with the claim that his own consistent opposition to the war gives him the upper hand in a general election debate on the subject:

If you believe we are fighting the right war, then the problems we face are purely tactical in nature. That is what Senator McCain wants to discuss – tactics. What he and the Administration have failed to present is an overarching strategy: how the war in Iraq enhances our long-term security, or will in the future. That’s why this Administration cannot answer the simple question posed by Senator John Warner in hearings last year: Are we safer because of this war? And that is why Senator McCain can argue – as he did last year – that we couldn’t leave Iraq because violence was up, and then argue this year that we can’t leave Iraq because violence is down.

To the extent that the small recent shift in public opinion towards optimism on Iraq has not been matched by any retroactive positive judgment on the wisdom of the war itself, Obama’s approach makes a lot of political sense. Let the Republicans, Bush and McCain alike, try to perpetually make untenable claims about the whole mess, and it will become clear that after five long years–longer, as Obama pointed out today, than the American engagement in either World War, and longer than the American Civil War–time is definitely not on their side.

Matt’s last post on the YouTube viewship (not to mention the hip-hop station listenership) of Obama’s big race speech yesterday is particularly fascinating to those of us with a background in political communications and speechwriting. Before now, there was an overwhelming conventional wisdom that the long, coherent, logically structured Political Speech was pretty much one of the biggest anachronisms in American politics.
Sure, there continue to be a few occasions–notably presidential State of the Union or Oval Office addresses, and convention acceptance speeches–where significant numbers of people actually watch, listen to, or read entire political speeches. But for the most part, politicians and speechwriters over the last couple of decades have learned to build speeches based not on the primary audience of people exposed to the whole product, but secondary audiences learning about it in print (hence the importance of the “lede”) or electronic (the genesis of “sound bites”) media, or even teritiary audiences who see or hear nothing other than media commentary or reaction by other politicians. Indeed, the recent (and believe it or not, it really is pretty recent) preoccupation by virtually every political campaign with “message” is a function of the fragmentation of political communications, even at the presidential level where more words are covered by the media more often, and campaigns have the resources to buy a lot of attention.
What Matt’s suggesting is that the new social media may be changing all that, and enabling candidates to get a broad and unflitered–in other words, primary audience–for longer and more nuanced communications that do the things soundbites or short “message” ads can’t–tell a story, address complex issues, convey a genuine sense of the candidate’s personality, and make a detailed argument.
It’s probably prudent not to get too carried away with this idea too fast. We don’t know how many of the million-plus people who’ve already downloaded Obama’s Philadelphia speech actually watched all of it. We don’t know how many of them were persuadable voters rather than Obama supporters. And we also don’t know if this is going to become a general phenomenon, or if Obama’s already-legendary speechmaking ability, and the explosive nature of yesterday’s topic, make him the exception rather than the rule.
But it all bears watching. And this is one old speechwriter who would be delighted if there’s once again room in political campaigns for logical appeals that take a while to deliver.

To this point, Obama’s big speech on race yesterday is getting widespread praise for its unexpected honesty and candor. Watching MSNBC, I heard it called unprecedented and brilliant, and was actually compared to Martin Lugher King’s “I Have a Dream” address.
If you do a quick survey online (and ignore The Corner) the criticism, such as it is, boils down to one simple thing — the speech was too long. It offered too many opportunities for negative soundbites. In fact, as I was watching the speech, one of the very first headlines that MSNBC put up read:

Obama: Racial anger is “real”

But that only remains true if the one way that people hear the words of Obama’s speech is in a 20-second clip. The thus-far remarkable thing about this election is that it no longer has to be that way.
The campaign put the video of the entire speech on YouTube before lunch. Twenty-four hours after Obama walked off the stage in Philadelphia, this 37-minute address has already been viewed more than 1,000,000 times. As I write this post, 20 additional people are watching the speech, it’s currently the “most-viewed video” at YouTube. ‘d bet my lunch that another 1,000,000 people will watch this speech before the week is out.
The New York Times posted a transcript of the speech in full online, and by 3:00, it was among most popular stories on the website. Formatted for the web, Obama’s remarks spill over seven pages, but the article has already been emailed and shared by thousands of NYT readers.
And the web isn’t the only nontraditional outlet for the speech either. Minutes after Obama walked off stage, I got a call from a college buddy who was driving through Richmond on the way to North Carolina. He was flipping through the radio dial, heard the speech, and stopped to listen. As soon as Obama wrapped up, a DJ cut in to explain why the station had stopped playing music to carry the speech live. My buddy thought he was listening to NPR, but it turns out this was a local hip-hop station.
I’m sure millions of people watched clips from Obama’s remarks on the network evening news. But millions more are experiencing the speech outside the mainstream media. They’re reading, watching, and listening to this speech in full, then discussing it and sharing it. The evening news is still important, and the cable shows still matter. But the filters are no doubt becoming less important, and that in turn means that the soundbite might lose some of its stranglehold on political communications.

For Republicans, Bush-Cheney 2004 is the model of a successful presidential campaign. The operation was run from top-to-bottom from an office in Arlington, Virginia. There was Karl Rove, who was the chief strategist. There was Ken Mehlman , who was the campaign manager. Beneath them, there were consultants, deputies, communications staff, and field teams. The political department divided the country into six regions, and assigned managers to each. The press department divided the country into five regions, and assigned spokespersons for each. There were staffers on the ground in all of the battleground states, but the campaign centralized everything.
John McCain’s campaign is also headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, but if this report from Marc Ambinder is accurate, his campaign is planning on approaching the 2008 race in a way that is profoundly different:

Instead of funneling authority through a few central figures at campaign headquarters in Arlington, VA, plans call for it to be dispersed to up to ten “regional campaign managers” – spread at satellite campaign offices throughout the country…The regional managers would have the authority to hire and fire, to adapt field programs to fit the needs of the states in their region. Unlike regional political directors, they would be part of the senior staff table at the campaign’s Arlington headquarters. Message and media, for the most part, would still be run through Arlington.

The closest model for this type of campaign is that of John Kerry in 2004. He centralized his message and media operations from a campaign office at McPherson Square, inside the District, then outsourced much of his field operation to 527s like America Coming Together. Those political organizations were then left to organize voter registration drives and GOTV in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, and by law, they were completely autonomous from the Kerry campaign, with contact between the two entities strictly disallowed. This entire 2004 strategy, however, was born out of necessity. The 527s could take unlimited donations from big donors, while Kerry could not. Had his advisers been given GOP-like resources, they likely would have chosen to run the campaign in a way similar to that of Mehlman and Rove.
And Democrats won’t be taking the Kerry route in 2008.
Sen. Clinton’s campaign is centrally organized — perhaps to an even greater degree than that of Bush/Cheney 04. Until she went broke in January, her fundraising operation was dominated by appeals to big money donors. Her senior staff is filled with veteran Democratic party insiders. Even after serious errors in political judgment, campaign strategy and message is developed in large part by its pollster — Mark Penn. Once the vision for the campaign is mapped out, field operatives like Ace Smith and Michael Whouley are dispatched to states, Mandy Grunwald develops the ads, and press staffers like Howard Wolfson deliver the talking points.
Obama’s campaign is something else entirely — with energy and organization pushing from the bottom up. He, of course, employs strategist and consultants, field operatives and press staff. But much of the support and enthusiasm for his candidacy begins directly with voters, and his electoral strategy is founded on the idea of empowering their efforts. The fundraising operation is predicated on giving individuals the ability to tap into their personal networks of friends and family to raise small dollar donations in large numbers. Right now, the volunteer created Yes We Can video is featured on the front page of barackobama.com. And in an even more direct example, the campaign set up wikis for its volunteers in California and Texas as a way to distribute information and resources to precinct captains.
Ambinder calls the McCain strategy decentralization, but it’s not. Splitting the field strategy into ten satellite campaigns will in effect create ten top-down, regional campaigns for president. It’s a tactical response that might give the GOP some added mechanical flexibility.
In 8 months, we will know whether that was brilliant or foolish, but it is definitely not a real change in strategy.

Barack Obama delivered a much-anticipated speech in Philadelphia today, designed to respond to the sudden firestorm of criticism he’s received for the allegedly anti-American views of his long-time pastor and spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
It’s a long and (for a politician) relatively complex speech, but its essence is pretty simple: Obama treats Wright’s perspective, along with the perspective of those most likely to be angered by it, as part of the legacy of racial divisions he wants to overcome in his candidacy, and utlimately, as a “distraction.”
Moreover, Obama categorizes Wright’s rhetoric–which has come across in the now-famous YouTube snippet as representing that enduring stereotype, the Angry Black Man–as generational, connecting to another key theme in his campaign:

For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.

There are a couple of remarkable things about that passage. First, Obama is contending that some of the more exotic and controversial beliefs of many African-Americans–the AIDS conspiracy theory being the most notable–are mainly attributable to the bitter experiences of those who actually experienced Jim Crow. I’m reminded of Richard Pryor’s routine about old black men–“there ain’t nobody more racist than an old black man”–who are very conservative in manner and unfailingly polite to white people, until they are out of earshot. In a society in which young black men remain the embodiment of so many cultural fears, this contention will seem counterintuive to people who view Jim Crow as a distant and largely irrelevant evil.
Second, Obama is accepting Wright and his church as flawed reflections of the good and evil within his own community. “As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me…I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.” This is a very old conception of the church–as old as the parish system of Europe, to say the least–but one that won’t make a lot of sense to those Americans who view church membership as an expression of consumer choice, and ultimately, of the spiritual discrimination and good taste of the religious consumer. They will continue to wonder why Obama didn’t just pick up and “move his letter” elsewhere the first time Jeremiah Wright said something outrageous from the pulpit.
How will this entire speech go over? It’s hard to say. It won’t satisfy those who expected Obama to “reject” Wright as he rejected Farrakhan. It will offer fresh ammunition to Republicans who claim the “real” Obama is revealed by his associations in Chicago. It will anger some people on both sides of the racial divide by its flat statement of moral equivalence between black and white resentments. But it may resonate with Americans (especially Catholics) who have loyally attended churches for years while rejecting or ignoring key elements of church teachings.
But more clearly, this speech ups the ante for Obama’s promise to act as a reconciler and unifier. After this speech, no one should be under the impression that he’s mainly interested in overcoming the narcissistic culture-based political conflicts of the 1990s. He’s now casting his candidacy as an opportunity to transcend one of the biggest continuing traumas of the 19th and 20th centuries, and of centuries before that: race. There’s never been much question that he was viewed that way by many supporters. But now it’s explicitly on the table, and we’ll soon find out how much reconciliation and unity Americans really want, and on what terms.