In his National Journal column today, Ron Brownstein conducts a definitive slicing-and-dicing of the claims of the Clinton and Obama campaigns about the implications of Barack Obama’s relative weakness among white working class voters in the Democratic primaries.
While he takes sides on several of these disputes, he identifies the big question, particularly in terms of Barack Obama’s prospects in a general election, as exactly how many white working-class voters a Democrat has to have, particularly since Al Gore won the popular vote and John Kerry came close with historically low levels of support from white voters without a college education.
Brownstein ultimately agrees with TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira that any successful Democratic presidential candidate probably needs to get without shouting range of Bill Clinton’s 1996 performance of 44% among white non-college voters.

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.

A new Census Bureau Report on demographic trends in the U.S. population came out yesterday, and the buzz is about its estimates and projections of a rapidly growing Hispanic population, fed by relatively high birth rates more than by immigration.
Hispanics now make up 15% of the U.S. population, up from 12.6% in 2000. More strikingly, one in five children now born in the U.S. are Hispanic.
62% of the increase in the Hispanic population since 2000 is atttributable to births in this country.
This is no longer the surprise it used to be, but the states with the highest percentage increases in Hispanic populations during the last seven years are mostly in the South.
By 2050, the Census Report predicts, Hispanics are expected to make up nearly a third of the working-age population. Indeed, Hispanic immigration and birth rates will immeasurably help cushion the impact of the retirement of the baby boom generation.
The political impact of the growth in the Hispanic population will obviously occur in stages, given that population’s youth, variable citizenship status, and relatively low levels of voting. And anti-Hispanic or anti-immigrant sentiment will likely continue to be concentrated in areas with visibly large Hispanic public school participation but low citizenship and/or voting rates.
But over time, Hispanic political clout is likely to grow at a rate that will marginalize anti-Hispanic or anti-immigrant appeals in most parts of the country.

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.

In his WaPo op-ed, Harold Myerson opines on the Democratic Party’s pursuit of the elusive “white whale” (working class). Meyerson notes that union membership has declined from 35 percent of the labor force in the 1950’s to 12 percent today (only 7.5 percent of the private sector). No doubt the figures for white workers are even smaller. Myerson sees unionization as Job One for getting the Democratic Party in position to win an enduring majority of the white working class:

In every election during this period, union members have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate at a rate about a dozen points higher than the general public and about 15 points higher than the non-union sector. In 2004, for instance, Kerry won 61 percent of union members while getting just 45 percent support from nonmembers….White male union members gave Kerry 57 percent of their vote; white male nonmembers, 38 percent — a 19-point gap. Fifty-seven percent of white male union members who didn’t go to college voted for Kerry, while only 34 percent of white male, non-union non-collegians backed him — a 23-point gap. Equivalently gaping differentials are present in exit polling clear back through 1972.

“White working-class voters vote two to one Republican if they are not in unions. They vote two to one Democratic if they are union members,” echoes Robert Borosage in his Campaign for America’s Future post “Bringing the White Working Class Into the Progressive Majority.”
Myerson sees enacting the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 800, S. 1041) as an essential first step for helping unions regain lost membership. More than 60 million workers would join a union of they could, according to a 2006 study by Peter D. Hart Research Associates and another survey found that private sector companies illegally fire employees for engaging in union activity in more than 25 percent of organizing campaigns. Not surprisingly, McCain, along with all other GOP Senators, has opposed allowing the bill to get a floor vote. Senate Democrats are nine votes short of the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture and get the EFCA and other progressive legislation moving.
In addition to EFCA, Borosage calls for more vigorous support for unions from federal, state and local government:

We have a great stake in turning that around, not simply by passing the Employee Free Choice Act, which is the centerpiece of reviving the right to organize, but by turning government at all levels into an ally of unions. “FDR wants you to join a union,” they used to argue in the 1930s. We have to make that slogan true for governors, mayors, legislators and the next president

Borosage sees women workers as a potential wedge for unions and Democrats seeking a larger portion of the white working class vote. “We should be focusing more and more resources and energy on our secret asset among white workers—women, particularly single women…Single women vote overwhelmingly on economic issues and overwhelmingly for Democrats and progressives.” White women workers have had low rates of voter turnout, Borosage concedes. But he adds that they have been “turning out in large numbers” this year.
Myerson credits the AFL-CIO ‘Working America” program, which mobilizes unorganized workers for political action, with helping to secure “large majorities in recent elections for such Democratic candidates as Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland.” With more support from rank and file Democrats, Working America and union GOTV campaigns may make the difference in November.

One thing everyone in politics should agree with is that if Barack Obama was going to respond to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s recent publicity offensive, he was correct in doing it quickly, and with some atypically emotional heat.
Obama did that today, in a news conference wherein the implicit message was that Wright had betrayed his earlier refusals to repudiate his pastor by converting his temporary and accidental notoriety into a fresh controversy. Indeed, Obama clearly conveyed the sense that Wright, for selfish reasons, was deliberately trying to damage Obama’s candidacy. Here’s the key quote: `The person I saw yesterday was not the person I had come to know over 20 years.”
In other words, Obama is suggesting that Wright’s latest utterances are not simply a validation of the toxic views featured in the selective videos of his sermons that conservatives and Hillary Clinton’s campaign have been battening on for many weeks. They represent a new repudiation not just of Obama, but of Wright’s own legacy.
This is probably the best Obama could do in his situation, so long as he is unwilling either to defend Wright or repudiate his own past association with his pastor. And to the extent that the candidate is expressing outrage that Wright has chosen to re-insert himself into the presidential campaign in a huge way, he will benefit from a universal sense of sympathy from everyone in electoral politics who has suffered from the publicity-seeking efforts of old friends and family to ride the connection to fame and fortune. That probably includes a few superdelegates.

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.