In an especially blatant example of a journalist letting himself be used to send up trial balloons for a political campaign, Bill Kristol’s New York Times column today announces that all sorts of people in John McCain’s political operation are thinking fond thoughts about Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal as a potential running-mate for the Arizonan.
Just to make sure the campaign’s purposes are served in exquisitely nuanced detail, Kristol spends a big chunk of the column making it clear that the Jindal Option will only be considered seriously if (a) Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, and (b) it appears likely McCain’s going to lose unless he throws something of a Hail Mary pass.
I’ve always thought Bobby Jindal made a lot of sense as a Hail Mary choice for McCain. He’s young (36), but has federal and state experience, without any direct complicity in Bush administration disasters (including Katrina). He’s non-white (Indian-American), but has won statewide in a place not noted for racial tolerance. He’s a Catholic of the particuarly fervid brand characteristic of converts (he was raised as a Hindu). He’s by all accounts crazy smart. And most importantly, serious conservative ideological types adore him, unlike the unconventional veep choice most often mentioned, Condi Rice. As I noted back in February, Jindal was the plurality favorite in a reader survey of McCain running-mate options at National Review Online. So it’s not surprising that the McCain campaign lofted this trial balloon right now, at a comfortable distance from the moment when the veep deal will actually go down.
The most interesting feature of Kristol’s column today is something entirely different: in a piece supposedly about John McCain and Bobby Jindal, Kristol managed to work in eight (8) references to Jeremiah Wright, or roughly seven more than might have been justified by the context. I’m guessing the injunction to repeat Wright’s name to the point of self-parody came to Kristol in the same package of talking points that asked him to see what the chattering classes thought of a McCain-Jindal ticket.

Apropos of Ed’s post below citing the need for systematic reforms of our nominating process before ’12, abolishing the superdelegates or redefining their role and qualifications should top the list. Toward that end, Josh Marshall has an instructive TPM post “Thumb on the Scales” mulling over the history of the superdelegates, which were established in 1982, and he notes:

The more palatable argument was that the superdelegates balanced out the idealism of party activists with the more pragmatic experience of party regulars and elected officials who had experience winning actual elections. But however you argue it, the supers were put there precisely to second-guess the results of the primary and caucus process.
…Indeed, it’s not only that the concept is less palatable today. The sociology of the party is simply different; from the inside I don’t think the party’s critics any longer see its shortcomings in that way. The superdelegate concept was just a bad idea that got kept on the books because it seemed not to have any practical effect other than to give federal officeholders and sundry party bigwigs credentials to attend the conventions.

Marshall also comments on the important distinction between superdelegates who are elected officials, vs. party operatives:

…there are almost 800 superdelegates and they’re divided roughly equally between elected officials and party officials. While I think the superdelegate system should probably be scrapped in its entirety, the rationale for the elected folks is far, far greater than for the party operatives. The electeds are basically every Democratic member of Congress, Democratic governors and then a few miscellaneous folks like ex-presidents, ex-vice presidents and ex-congressional leaders. These folks are actually elected by Democrats on a fairly regular basis. And if they abuse the power they can be held accountable at the ballot box.

I come down with Marshall on the side of getting rid of them before ’12, as a way of making a clean break with the notion that it’s OK to thwart the will of the voters in some circumstances. Getting rid of them altogether would make a simple statement that the 21st century Democratic Party has faith in the decisions of voters. If the Party is going to keep the superdelegates, however, I would agree with Marshall that they should insist that only elected officials, not unelected party operatives, can serve in this capacity.
I can think of only one situation in which the super-d’s can serve democracy in an honorable way: in the event that a candidate gets enough delegates to secure the nomination despite the fact that her/his opponent got more popular votes. This can happen when a candidate loses or wins enough districts by a huge margin, despite having more/less popular votes nation-wide. In that event, the superdelegates could decide to give the nomination to the popular vote winner. But it should be stipulated that the superdelegate designees would be empowered as delegates only when the popular vote winner receives fewer delegate votes.
There are other reforms of the nominating process that merit consideration before ’12, including the primary calendar and possible incentives for caucus states switching to direct primary elections. But abolishing or reforming the outdated superdelegate system should be a simpler, and quicker fix.

As we get ready for another small round of Democratic presidential primaries tomorrow, which are likely to add up to no more than another small accretion of data in the nominating process, it’s not a bad idea to make a large mental note about the need for truly systemic reforms in the system before 2012.
In that connection, RealClearPolitics has published a speech by the excellent Jay Cost which really hits the nail on the head about the basic problem with the current nominating process in both parties:

At its core, the current nomination system is a disjointed hybrid of the old, state party-centered way of choosing nominees and the new way that places power with rank-and-file partisans. The reforms of the 1970s did not amount to root-and-branch changes, but rather 20th century updates to a 19th century system.
Perhaps this accounts for the powerlessness of the national committees. They are tasked with bringing coherence to an incoherent system. I would suggest that whatever changes are made – whether the national parties are strengthened or not – the goal should be to impose coherence of form and purpose. Right now, both processes have one foot in the past and one foot in the present.

That’s exactly right. Whatever you think of the particular strengths and weaknesses of the present method of nominating presidential candidates, no one charged with designing a system de novo would come up with anything like the status quo. At some point, both parties are going to have to decide once and for all whether the nomination of a presidential candidate is a function of the national party or of state parties and state governments. The current system is indeed an incoherent hybrid that is difficult to “reform” in small ways because it represents wildy divergent traditions and impulses.
You’d think that the agonizing if exciting Democratic contest this year would be enough to spur root-and-branch reforms, and maybe it will. But then again, our election administration “system,” another incoherent amalgam of 19th century state-based traditions and 20th century notions of fairness and uniformity, suffers from many of the same problems, as was exposed in the most dramatic fashion possible by the 2000 presidential election. Yet nothing’s really changed since then.
I had to chuckle at one phrase used by Cost in his speech: the Democratic nominating system, he said, is designed to produce “confusion and delay.” As some of you may recognize, this is the horrible judgment meted out on the perenially popular Thomas the Tank Engine children’s TV show for the consequences of mistakes made by its anthropomorphic locomotives. It makes you wonder how many train wrecks we must endure in our electoral system before we finally redesign the tracks.

A host of recent opinion polls indicate that the economy has replaced the war in Iraq as the leading issue of concern for Americans, at least for the time being. While some Republicans may welcome the distraction from the Iraq mess and think they are in safer territory in discussing economic issues, they will find scant comfort in comparing economic performance under Democratic and Republican administrations. To see why, check out this insightful and well-documented eriposte chart (flagged in Rick Perlstein’s current post at Blog for Our Future), comparing economic data under Democratic and Republican presidents. A few examples culled from the chart:

Real Disposable Personal Income Growth per year 1953-2001: D 3.65 %; R 3.08 %
Unemployment 1962-2001: D 5.1%; R 6.75%
GDP growth 1962-2001: D 3.9%; R 2.9%
Inflation 1962-2001: D 4.26%; R 4.96%
Percentage growth in Total Federal Spending 1962-2001: D 6.96%; R 7.57%
Yearly budget deficit 1962-2001: D $36 billion; R $190 billion

Mercifully for the Republicans, economic data from the current Bush Administration is not yet included, since the chart compares completed Administrations.

In British local government elections today, Gordon Brown’s Labour Party took a serious drubbing, finishing third with 24% of the total popular vote to the triumphant Tories (44%) and the Liberal Democrats (25%). It also appears that London Mayor Ken Livingstone has lost to Tory Boris Johnson, who would become the first elected Tory mayor of the city.
Explanations of the terrible Labour showing range from voter fatigue with a party that’s been in power for eleven years; a weakening economy; and some controversial recent tax changes. Some on the Labour Left argue that the entire Blair-Brown “New Labour” project has gradually eroded the party’s electoral base.
The next national parliamentary election is not required until 2010, though Brown could call it earlier. If the local election pattern held, the Tories would likely win a landslide victory similar to Labour’s back in 1997.
Two years can be an eternity in British as well as American politics, but Brown’s obviously got some fence-mending to do.

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.