Whatever you think of Hillary Clinton’s recent appropriation of Florida 2000 rhetoric (“Every Vote Must Count”) as part of her argument for ratifying that state and Michigan’s primaries, you’ve got to admire her timing. Seems like every cable news show I watched last night or this morning alternated between reports about her speechifying on the subject with hype about Sunday’s HBO movie, The Recount, often with live interviews with actor Kevin Spacey, who plays Gore aide Ron Klain in the flick. If this keeps up another couple of days, some viewers may tune in on Sunday expecting HRC to do a cameo.

I realize that criticizing Sen. Joe Lieberman’s recent behavior is like shooting fish in a barrel, but his latest outrage, an op-ed published today in the Wall Street Journal, really does demand some attention, if only because the man remains a member of the Democratic Senate Caucus, and could wind up with an important job if John McCain’s elected president.
You can read the piece yourself, but its basic thrust is that somehow, between 9/11 and today, the entire Democratic Party, with the exception of Lieberman himself, has abandoned its foreign policy legacy and surrendered to a horde of America-hating leftists. He hasn’t changed at all, he says; everybody else has.
I would recommend that Sen. Lieberman talk to a psychologist about the implications of thinking that he exclusively represents a tradition that many millions of other people define differently. Perhaps the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, and perhaps Joe Lieberman is not the only true Democrat in America.
Until recently, I thought the saddest spectacle I had seen in politics was Zell Miller’s willingness to let himself be so thoroughly used by people who had nothing but contempt for him and everything he had ever stood for in public life. This is worse, if only because of the contrast between Miller’s extended stormy relationship with the national Democratic Party, and the honor that party bestowed on Lieberman less than eight years ago. After he visits the psychologist, Sen. Lieberman might want to take a long look at Miller’s post-apostasy political career. Last time I saw his name in the papers, in the autumn of 2006, Miller was speaking at the gala launch of a Pennsylvania group called Democrats for Santorum. In other words, he was pretty much just talking to himself.
Joe Lieberman’s within his rights to say what he thinks and support whomever he wants to support for president. But he really needs to stop pretending he speaks for Democrats, or for Democratic traditions. To be sure, Lieberman’s value to McCain and his other new Republican buddies would drop dramatically if he dropped the “D” from his title altogether. But honor ought to account for something, even in politics, and next time Lieberman is inclined to call his former colleagues and former supporters anti-American extremists, he should admit he’s not the still point in a turning world.

My home state of Georgia has contributed more than its share of interesting personalities to the political life of this country, but none was more unlikely than Hamilton Jordan, who died yesterday at the age of 63. In one amazing decade from 1966 to 1976, Jordan started as the driver for a long-shot gubernatorial candidate and eventually engineered a successful presidential campaign, before becoming White House chief of staff at the tender age of 32.
It’s often forgotten that Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential bid was one of the most improbable victories in U.S. political history, based in no small part on a mind-bending coalition of African-Americans, evangelical Protestants, and former Wallace supporters. The campaign’s blueprint was very much Ham Jordan’s work.
Like Carter, Jordan didn’t fare as well in the White House as in its pursuit, and like Carter, his later life took some unexpected turns. Afflicted with three different kinds of cancer, Jordan devoted much of his time to work as an advocate and philanthropist for children with cancer and diabetes.
I didn’t really know Jordan, beyond brief encounters when I served as a low-level policy advisor to his unsuccessful 1986 Senate campaign. But those who did know him described him as tough, canny, and completely unpretentious, in the best Georgia tradition. After a turbulent and remarkable life, may he rest in peace.

I have to agree with Digby that it’s a little unseemly to be delivering eulogies for Ted Kennedy, while he is still alive. Still it was kind of moving to see his fellow Senators of both parties expressing their love and best wishes for him. Senator McCain was right on target in calling Kennedy “the last lion.” But hold the eulogies. Ted Kennedy is a tough guy, who has the kind of fierce spirit physicians like to see in patients with serious illnesses. There are good reasons to hope he will win this battle.
So often we don’t express or even feel our appreciation for people until after they are gone. So it’s a good thing that he is getting his due now. He certainly deserves it. There is no question that Ted Kennedy has been one of the greatest U.S. Senators ever, maybe the greatest, and his tangible accomplishments during his 45 years in the Senate surpass even those of his revered brothers, whose lives were cut short by assassinations.
It’s been many years since Ted Kennedy has been considered a serious contender for the presidency. But he has nonetheless left his mark on just about every piece of progressive legislation introduced in the Senate since he was first elected in 1962. Certainly no Senator has been a more steadfast opponent of efforts to roll back the clock of progress. Throughout his career, Kennedy has been the Senate’s most tireless advocate for the disadvantaged and downtrodden and a ringing voice for the powerless.
I had to smile when I saw a video-clip of Senator Byrd saying that Kennedy didn’t really need a microphone. I once saw Kennedy deliver the keynote address of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday service in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, a sanctuary well-accustomed to the highest standards of American oratory. Kennedy grabbed the podium like he owned it and rang the rafters with a fiery call to action on behalf of the poor and oppressed that provoked gales of cheering and shifted the amen corner into overdrive. I remember thinking “That’s the loudest man I have ever heard.”
America still needs that voice, and the Democratic Party needs it more than ever. For me Ted Kennedy will always be the emblematic Democratic Senator, the one you point to in showing rookies “this is how it’s done.” Add my prayers for his complete recovery to the many being expressed to his family. Get well, good Senator. You’re still needed on the front lines.

HRC’s landslide win in KY today was almost exactly what one might have expected based on last week’s results in WV. In other words, two weeks of media talk about Obama’s inevitability aren’t moving any votes in states where both demography (a predominance of relatively less educated and less affluent white voters, many of them Appalachians, along with the familiarly huge HRC margins among white women) and ideology (relatively large numbers of self-identified Democratic moderates and conservatives) are cutting against him. This latter factor is somewhat new; in most of the early primaries, there was virtually no ideological factor dividing Clinton and Obama voters. Obama did post one of his better performances in KY among the 11% of voters who were self-identified indies, losing them only by 7 points. But Clinton crushed him among moderates (67-30) and conservatives (73-18). These two categories reresented 63% of primary voters. And the stated willingness of Clinton voters to support Obama in the general election, while a bit better than in WV, remained low, with about a third saying they’d vote for McCain, and only a half saying they’d stick with the Democrat.
Oregon, of course, will be a different story; early media hints about the exit polls (or more accurately, phone polls of mail-in-ballot voters) indicate a very comfortable Obama win that will, according to his campaign’s math, and that of most media observers, clinch a majority of pledged delegates (excluding MI and FL). But going forward, the Obama campaign definitely needs to come to grips with the potential threat of an odd combination of progressive women, older voters of various ideological hues, and self-identified Democratic moderates and conservatives, who are at least open to the idea of defecting or taking a dive in November. There’s plenty of time to deal with this challenge; potential Democratic defections will undoubtedly decline as McCain’s views become more apparent; and Lord knows Barack Obama will have the rhetorical and financial resources to change the dynamics of a general election in which he’s already running ahead of or even with McCain in early polls. And moreover, the putative-nominee-loses-late-primaries phenomenon is hardly new or unique. But Obama’s team would be well advised not to completely dismiss the implications of HRC’s recent wins.

Over at TPMCafe, we’re having a conversation about Eric Alterman’s new book, Why We’re Liberals, a sweeping analysis of liberalism, its successes and failures, and its future as a successful political ideology. Eric offers an introduction to his book in an opening post, and so far, rejoinders have appeared from Joan McCarter of DailyKos, from libertarian Brink Lindsey, and from yours truly. (Digby will participate at some point as well).

Today’s two presidential primaries are not expected to provide many fireworks. Clinton is heavily favored in KY, as is Obama in OR (though her percentage margin in the former is likely to significantly exceed his in the latter). OR’s all-mail-in-ballot system will get some television attention. Because OR requires mailed ballots to be received by election day, its system won’t delay the count as is often the case in neighboring WA. But it certainly makes exit polling more of a challenge (presumably, the phone interviews of voters that will be used as the functional equivalent of exit polls will be done by pretty early today).
There were rumors last week that Obama would all but claim victory in his primary night event in IA, on grounds that he would have clearly won a majority of pledged delegates. But as part of his continuing effort to let HRC exit the race gracefully, he’s made it clear there will be no official victory claims tonight. Meanwhile, HRC is sticking to her argument that the pledged and overall delegate targets must be adjusted to include MI and FL, a measure by which Obama still has a ways to go. Meanwhile, Clinton is already claiming a popular vote lead, based on a measurement that includes FL and MI and excludes four caucus states where raw votes have not been reported. We’ll hear more about that from her tonight. But don’t expect any dramatics.

Brave New Films has produced a must-see video-clip at therealmccain.com, depicting John McCain’s amazing record of flip-flops on key issues and shattering his “straight talk” image. Viewers are left with the indelible impression that this guy will say anything to get elected, and thinks nothing of contradicting himself within seconds. The flick has gone viral and reached #1 in YouTube’s “News & Politics” category, and has elicited more than 600 reader comments at the website thus far.
In addition to the devastating main feature, the website also presents a collection of video clips of McCain’s ‘greatest hits,’ including “Bomb, Bomb Iran” and spotlighting his cozy relationships with fat cat lobbyists and his failure to support educational benefits for vets.

Having gone out on a shaky limb to endorse the idea of an Obama-Clinton “unity ticket,” I will hasten to raise objections to the very different idea of a “unity ticket” between Obama and a non-Democrat.
This idea was raised most recently by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who argues that Obama’s post-partisan campaign pitch can best gain credibility through a ticket that includes Chuck Hagel or Mike Bloomberg.
Ignatius clearly doesn’t understand that Obama’s own “unity” message is about mobilizing voters across party lines to demand change, and then to extend to Republicans in Washington an iron fist/velvet glove proposition, offering political cover for cooperation and threatening retribution for obstruction. It’s not about organizing some big barbecue of Democratic and Republican solons and striking split-the-difference compromises on legislation. To put it another way, Obama has embraced High Broderist goals, but not High Broderist methods, when it comes to bipartisanship.
Sure, you can make the argument that putting a Republican like Hagel or an ex-Republican like Bloomberg on the ticket would resonate with those non-Democratic voters Obama really does want to reach. But these names don’t necessarily perform magic outside Nebraska, which Obama can’t win, and New York, which Obama can’t lose. And such a gesture would legitimately honk off a lot of Democrats, who figure that an all-Democratic ticket ought to be able to win in a strongly pro-Democratic election year.
To be crassly political about it, there’s no percentage in excessively angering the Democratic base with a vice-presidential choice unless it’s a clear game-changer. Had John Kerry convinced John McCain to leave the GOP and run with him in 2004, the step would have produced a king-hell backlash from Democratic activists, particularly those in the labor and feminist movements. But arguably, it would have pretty much ended the general election in Kerry’s favor, and victory, like love, covers a multitude of sins. None of the names being kicked around by people like Ignatius have anything like the electoral clout that McCain might have had four years ago. Sure, Bloomberg has an incredible amount of personal wealth, but money isn’t exactly Barack Obama’s biggest handicap in a general election.
The odd thing I can tell you about from personal conversations with Obama supporters after my Obama-Clinton pitch is that a lot of the same people who would seriously consider hara-kiri if HRC’s on the ticket seem entirely open to a non-Democratic running-mate. And some of these same people dislike the Clintons in the first place because of their supposed lack of loyalty to the Democratic Party and its principles.
For all the legitimate objections to an Obama-Clinton “unity ticket,” it would be decidedly strange if a coalition of Beltway Bipartisans and lefty Obama-ites convinced the putative nominee to diss Democratic unity in favor of a “unity ticket” that compromised Obama’s case for progressive change, without a whole lot of return on a questionable investment.

MyDD‘s Jonathan Singer flags a Poblano post discussing a scenario in which, Nebraska, as one of two states (yes, Maine is the other) that do not have the anti-democratic winner-take-all system of allocating electoral votes, could actually cast the decisive electoral vote that puts Obama in the White House.
It’s an unlikely scenario, admittedly, since Dems haven’t won a Nebraska electoral vote since LBJ. But it is not an implausible one. Although McCain is up 11 points state-wide in a new Rasmussen poll, Poblano and Singer crunch the poll numbers, including the 2004 election data, and see Obama running close to even in NE’s 2nd district (Omaha), with an outside chance to take NE-1 (Eastern Nebraska). Poblano then plugs these potential wins into one plausible scenario, and voila, Nebraska is a king-maker.
In any event, hats off to Nebraska and Maine for rejecting the winner-take-all electoral votes system — which ought to be a high priority for democracy-loving state legislatures everywhere. Plaudits to NE, also, for their unicameral state legislature, arguably more democratic with a small “d.” Now, if Nebraskans will just vote right in November…
Photo Alert: Campaign ’08 is not likely to produce more glorious photographs from a Democratic perspective than the shots of the huge Obama rally (75K) at Portland’s gorgeous Waterfront Park (See here, here and here.).