The big political news this Monday morning is last night’s announcement by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that Mark Penn was being “demoted” from his role as Chief Strategist for HRC, though he’ll apparently continue to do some residual polling. It took nearly a week, but the move was clearly the result of Penn’s meeting last Monday with the Colombian ambassador to discuss the status of congressional action on a free trade agreement with the U.S. Penn is CEO of the public relations giant Burson-Marsteller, which has a $300,000 contract with the Bogota government. Given the Clinton campaign’s criticism last month of a meeting with Canadian consular officials by Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee to discuss the future of NAFTA, Penn’s departure is hardly a big surprise.
It was a really bad week for Penn, since the Colombians promptly canceled their contract wth Burson-Marsteller after the story broke.
Readers who don’t know Mark Penn from Pennzoil may wonder why this staff change is being treated as such a big deal. It’s pretty simple: Penn has long become the symbol of pretty much everything about the Clinton campaign that its detractors, and even many of its supporters, don’t like: its alleged arrogance, its corporate-friendliness, its “poll-driven” lack of passion, and its early strategy of depicting the candidate as “inevitable.” Labor folk have been angry for a good while about Penn’s continued leadership of Burson-Marsteller, which makes a fair amount of money advising corporations on how to fight unions. And a lot of people towards the left end of the party have strongly disliked Penn for years dating back to his partnership with Dick Morris in the Clinton White House and the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign, not to mention his role in Joe Lieberman’s 2004 presidential run.
At this very late date, it’s hard to imagine that Penn’s departure will make a lot of difference to Clinton’s campaign. But I’d expect we’ll soon start hearing stories that the move has miraculously revived campaign morale; they could use some signs of positive motivation right now, real or contrived. So Penn’s unhappy moment in the political spotlight may continue for a while yet.

Marking the 40th anniversary of the assassination of his father, Martin Luther King III has an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution proposing a cabinet-level officer “whose responsibility will be to make a measurable impact on eradicating poverty.” King explains further that,

A poverty cabinet member is necessary today more than ever. Our next president will be taking over a government that faces virtually the exact same poverty rate my father found so appalling back in 1968. The U.S. Census Bureau reports the current poverty rate is just over 12 percent, as it was in 1968, while the number of people living in poverty has grown from 25 million to more than 36 million, including 12 million children. Even worse, a family of four with two children and an annual income of $21,027 is not even considered poor by our government’s reporting standards. Many people have become immune to these statistics, but we cannot wait for another Katrina to truly grasp that America is awash in poverty.
The work of the cabinet officer must transcend the ceremonial. His or her principal focus must be highlighting successful programs working at the local level, developing new, more accurate measurements for poverty, and setting benchmarks for success by which the administration will be judged.

It’s an interesting idea, and one which has reportedly elicited some interest from the three leading presidential candidates. We’ve got cabinet secretaries for Treasury, Commerce, Labor and other departments that address economic concerns, but mostly from a business perspective. But a cabinet secretary charged with focusing exclusively on reducing poverty could be a significant step toward making government more responsive to human needs than corporate concerns.
When King’s father was assassinated, he was organizing the Poor Peoples’ Campaign, a national coalition to advocate for impoverished Americans of all races. Democrats who want to honor Dr. King in a meaningful way would do well to give his son’s suggestion serious consideration.

People who have been watching this primary campaign have spent so much time talking about how Barack Obama is using the Internet that it almost seems like a waste of breath to mention something else.
But these numbers for February (compiled by WebGuild) are so striking that I’ve got to bring them up.
Obama spent $1 million on Google ads, Clinton just $67,000.
Obama spent $99,341 on Yahoo Web Ads, Clinton $9,186.
Obama spent $58,000 on Yahoo search ads, Clinton nothing.
Obama spent $4,900 on Facebook advertising, Clinton nothing.
But the strongest contrast between the two campaigns is what each paid outside firms. Obama paid web consultants $93,162 in February, while Clinton didn’t make any payments to firms that specialize in the Internet. She did, however, pay her ad consultants $997,000 and her media consultants $2,540,000.
You get what you pay for.

One of the more interesting phenomena in the Democratic presidential contest has been the very strong showing of Hillary Clinton (and correspondingly poor showing of Barack Obama) in Appalachia–the stretch of mountain areas in the eastern United States, including much of West Virginina; significant portions of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia, and smaller portions of New York, Ohio, Maryland, South Carolina and Alabama.
I have a personal interest in this story, as someone whose “people” were mostly Scotch-Irish folk who came down the mountain trails from Pennsylvania through the Carolinas to Georgia (two of my great-grandfathers were ministers in that quintessential Appalachian sect, the Primitive Baptists).
In the blogosphere, The DailyKos poster DHinMI has been the most acute in pointing out the geopolitical implications of HRC’s strength in Appalachia, particularly in terms of future primaries in PA, NC, KY and WV.
But the whole Appalachia-for-Hillary story has to be taken with a large grain of salt due to demographic factors that have little or nothing to do with the Scotch-Irish heritage or the Mountain Ethic. Most obviously, Appalachia is a virtually all-white region. Its voting base is also relatively old, and relatively bereft of the upscale, highly educated white voters who have been warm to Obama’s candidacy even in parts of the Deep South. Finally, the Democratic primary vote is low in many parts of Appalachia (outside heavily unionized areas of West Virginia and portions of Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Virginia), where Republican voting loyalties go straight back to the Civil War. And Appalachia is also not much of a fertile territory for political independents, partisanship being a fighting matter for many residents.
Still, overall, in the two Appalachian states I’m most familiar with, Georgia and Virginia, Obama’s percentage of the white vote appears to have been notably lower in mountain counties than elsewhere. This can’t be dismissed simply as a function of racism, given Obama’s better performance among white voters in places like central and southside Virginia, and South Georgia, where politics has always been far more dominated by race. So something’s going on, even if it’s just the natural resistence of Appalachian voters to Obama’s highly nuanced message of progressive bipartisanship as opposed to pure class warfare. Obama’s famous wine-track appeal isn’t terribly communicable to moonshine-track voters.
But I do want to draw attention to, and express some strong doubts about, one recent effort to expand this analysis beyond the Mountains and into the general election. Yesterday Michael Barone published a long article on the US News site that casts the Obama/Clinton divide among white voters as one of “academics versus Jacksonians.”
Barone’s description of pro-Obama white voters as “academics” is obviously a massively distorted over-simplification, made easier by the fact that his account ignores all those lily-white states where Obama trounced Clinton. Are Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming and Idaho Democrats mostly “academics?” I think not.
But his analysis of “Jacksonian” Democrats–used to describe the vast Scotch-Irish diaspora that extends to East Texas, to the Little Texas region of New Mexico, to that country music haven of Bakersville, California–has some merit, marred as it is by almost total reliance on number-of-counties-won as a misleading measure of voter preferences. Working and middle-class white Democrats of southern origin wherever they are do indeed seem to be tilting decisively towards Clinton, if not always by Appalachian-level margins.
It’s Barone’s extrapolation of this trend into the general election–arguably, given his Republican allegiance, the real point of his entire disposition–that’s most questionable. Having established that Obama’s got some problems with “Jacksonians,” Barone pivots to this argument:

Of course, the real Jacksonian in this race is John McCain. He is descended from Scots-Irish fighters who settled in Carroll County, Miss. Former Sen. Trent Lott, who once worked as a fundraiser for the University of Mississippi and therefore knew the folkways of elite types in his state very well, once told me that he had relatives who had known McCain’s relatives in Mississippi. “They were fighters,” he said, as best I can remember his words. “They would never stop fighting you. Those people would never stop fighting.”

Aside from the fact that Barone confuses the conservative, WASPy Delta planter tradition of Ole Miss with the “Jacksonian” tendency in Mississippi and southern politics, the idea that John McCain is catnip to Scotch-Irish “Jacksonians” is highly questionable. If that were the case, you’d think McCain would do particularly well among Scotch-Irish Appalachian voters in Republican primaries, eh?
Remembering that in the definitive GOP primary of 2000, South Carolina, McCain won the non-Scotch-Irish lowlands but decisively lost the Scotch-Irish highlands, I looked at some of the 2004 primary results before the contest was decided and didn’t see any “Jacksonian” longing for McCain. He won exactly one highlands county in SC this time (and by a small plurality over Huckabee and Romney). He lost every single country in mountain Georgia. He lost every single country in mountain Virginia. And in an area where he had a lot of important endorsements, he lost about half of mountain Tennessee (generally getting a little over one-third of the vote). His margins in Appalachian Ohio tracked his statewide totals.
If Obama is the Democratic nominee, he’s got a lot of work to do to reduce Republican margins in Appalachia (that have existed in every presidential election since the Civil War, other than 1932 and 1964). HRC’s got a base of support to work with. But the idea that John McCain is the Chosen Son of the Scotch-Irish in the ancestral mountains and beyond, is at this point just spin.

Obama can win the Democratic nomination even if he loses the Pennsylvania primary. But PA may be an excellent proving ground for testing his November prospects with one of the largest groups of swing voters, the white working class. As Kate Sheppard explains in her post in today’s American Prospect:

The question for months has been whether Barack Obama can appeal to the working-class, white demographic that has been Hillary Clinton’s stronghold. It propelled her to victory in Ohio, and has appeared to remain solidly behind her throughout the primary. But with nearly three weeks still to go before Pennsylvanians head to the polls, Obama is taking his campaign directly to these voters — and fine-tuning his populism in the process. It’s a good exercise for a candidate who will need the support of blue-collar, swing voters in the general election.

Obama has tweaked the “soaring rhetoric” of his earlier speeches to more effectively connect with the bread and butter concerns of PA workers, according to Sheppard and Michael Powell in his New York Times article “Obama Is Moving to Down-to-Earth Oratory.” As Powell notes:

Mr. Obama’s effort to master a plain-spoken and blunt language that extends back centuries in Pennsylvania is accompanied by no small stakes. Voters here, as in neighboring Ohio, where Mr. Obama lost the white and aging blue-collar vote, tend to elect politicians whose language rarely soars and whose policy prescriptions come studded with detail.

It may be working. Some recent polls indicate a narrowing of Clinton’s lead, as TDS noted yesterday.
However, PA is not the perfect test for winning white working class voters because the demographic is skewed toward older workers, as Powell explains:

Mr. Obama grabbed a big chunk of the male working-class vote in Wisconsin, and another chunk in Virginia and in Maryland. But Pennsylvania is both blue-collar and aging — it has the third highest median age in the nation. And that has proved to be a troublesome demographic for him and a rich target for Mrs. Clinton.

If Obama wins PA, or does substantially better than expected, McCain will have a lot to worry about with this pivotal constituency.

A lot of Democrats groaned when Ralph Nader announced he was running for president yet again. But he’s not the only minor party candidate who could make a splash. Former Congressman Bob Barr of GA, who formally left the GOP for the Libertarian Party two years ago, is mulling a run for the presidency on that party’s ticket.
If he runs, he would draw on the celebrity he gained as a prominent media critic of the civil liberties abuses of the Bush administration. He’d probably attract much of the following of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, without bearing the burden of Paul’s unsavory association with racists.
Here’s what an anxious Washington Times piece said about Barr’s prospects:

“Barr obviously is dangerous. At least he negates any possible Nader benefit,” said David Norcross, a New Jersey member of the Republican National Committee and its Rules Committee chairman, arguing Mr. Barr would hurt Republicans at least as much as Ralph Nader, who has announced his own independent presidential bid, would hurt Democrats.
Republican campaign pros said a Barr bid could range from causing them some damage all the way to being the equivalent of Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential bid, which many Republicans think split their party’s voters, unseating then-President Bush and electing Democrat Bill Clinton.
“Sure, it will hurt. We’ll just have to see how much. Will it be like Perot’s run? Always that chance,” said South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson.

We’ll know soon enough. Barr may announce his candidacy as early as this weekend, and the Libertarian presidential nominating convention will be held Memorial Day weekend in Denver. At this point, Barr’s best-known rival for the bid would be the eccentric ex-Democrat Mike Gravel.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

Yesterday we published a guest post by Franklin & Marshall professor Stephen Medvic that offered a different take on the superdelegate debate than we usually hear. His analysis is based primarily on a challenge to the idea that delegates chosen by less-than-purely-representative formulas in lightly attended caucuses and open primaries really can be said to represent the popular will of Democrats.
I’d like to add two notes to the argument undertaken by Dr. Medvic.
First, virtually the entire debate over superdelegates seems to be based on the assumption that their sole purpose is to counteract or ratify caucus and primary results. As I recall from the original discussions surrounding superdelegates, there was another, much simpler rationale: ensuring that major Democratic elected officials would get to attend the convention as delegates. One of the byproducts of the earlier reforms in the nominating process had been to significantly limit elected official participation, except for those who happened to run for delegate positions on successful candidate tickets. And this in turn reinforced a fear that the Democratic Party was increasingly becoming bifurcated into a national party dominated by constituency groups and issue advocates, and state and local parties (and their elected officials) who represented voters, and arguably, the Democratic rank-and-file.
I raise this point for the simple reason that superdelegates do not have to have full voting rights, or the freedom to withold or change pledges of support, to exist. It’s not necessarily and all-or-nothing proposition. That’s worth keeping in mind when the subject is, as it will certainly be, taken up by the party after this election.
My second point relates to Dr. Medvic’s argument that only closed primaries electing delegates on a more strictly proportional basis are truly legitimate as expressions of the Democratic “popular will.” I generally agree with him about caucuses, with the qualification that caucuses vary in nature from quasi-primaries to highly demanding multi-hour events. And in terms of participation, there’s also no fixed pattern: Iowa’s caucuses are famously among the most demanding, but also have relatively high levels of participation and a lot of popularity among Democrats and the public as a whole.
The open/closed question is more complicated. A uniform system of closed primaries would require a uniform system of party registration among the states that current does not exist. A number of state, including several in the South, have no party registration at all, and states also vary in terms of the privileges typically accorded to independent or “undeclared” voters. And it’s no secret that many registered independents are functionally partisans, or at least lean strongly in one direction or the other. Closing primaries means excluding these voters from the party in a fairly overt way, making re-registration, instead of candidate support, the only way to expand formally expand the party’s electoral base. Absent any indication that non-registered-Democratic participation in presidential primaries significantly distorts outcomes, the political costs of demanding closed primaries strikes me as potentially high.
But actually, there’s a way out of this dilemma that’s already at play in many states: radically liberalized registration procedures. Same-day voter registration not only helps attract non-voters to the polls; it also makes it much easier for registered independents (and even Republicans) to re-register as Democrats and participate in closed primaries and caucuses. This is why the formally closed caucuses in Iowa, to mention one example, attracted so many independents: they were able to re-register right outside the caucus room. Arguably, requiring re-registration would deter most casual or tactical voters from participating in Democratic primaries and caucuses, while making true battlefield conversions much easier, and formally expanding the party’s base.
Dr. Medvic has raised some very important issues, but there may be ways to address them without abolishing superdelegates altogether or restricting the franchise in the Democratic nominating process.

For much of the last month, we’ve been treated with a series of polls showing Hillary Clinton blowing out Barack Obama in Pennsylvania.
This week, that started to change:
A survey from Rasmussen yesterday showed Clinton leading Obama by just five points, 47% to 42% — down from 10 a week ago;
A poll from Survey USA yesterday showed Clinton leading 53% to 41% — down from 19 the month before;
A survey from Quinnipiac University today shows Clinton leading by nine points, 50% to 41% — down from 12 points two weeks ago; and
A survey from Public Policy Polling today shows Obama actually taking a lead, 45% to 43% — that’s a shift of 28 points from the last time PPP polled the state two and a half weeks ago.
There is definitely movement in this primary, so how does this change expectations? Does HRC no longer need to win by double-digits?
Interesting question. But remember there’s another twenty days to go.

Yesterday, the DNC announced plans to embed local bloggers with each state delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
This strikes me as worth mentioning.
During the last presidential election, both the DNC and RNC issued credentials to bloggers for their respective conventions. But these were the big guys — writers for sites like Daily Kos and RedState.org.
Over the last four years, we’ve watched the steady rise of state-based blogs, people focused on local politics and community issues. It’s entirely appropriate that the DNC is making an effort to include these local activists. It’s even better that they’ll be coming to Denver as part of the official state delegations — that’s well-deserved recognition for the energy they are bringing to Democratic parties across the country.
But the press language suggests that each state will be allowed just one blogger, and that each must apply through the DNC by April 15 and meet a set criteria in order to be credentialed.
So here’s my question — what does the DNC plan to say to the random pledged delegate (or even superdelegate) who is already slated to be part of the state contingent and who also writes and maintains her own blog? Does she count against the state’s total for its blogger totals? Is she prohibited from posting to her blog during the convention?
I know the last thing Democrats need is yet another controversy involving the composition of state delegations to the convention. But let’s hope this one gets resolved with the good humor and comity lacking so far in other disputes.

(NOTE: This guest post, by Dr. Stephen Medvic, Associate Professor of Government at Franklin & Marshall College, addresses claims that superdelegates threaten to overturn the “popular will” of Democratic voters.)
During this presidential cycle, criticism of the Democratic Party’s superdelegate system has been widespread and, at times, vociferous. Much of it has emanated from supporters of Sen. Barack Obama’s candidacy, who fear a superdelegate “coup” on behalf of Hillary Clinton to “overturn” the pledged delegate results from primaries and caucuses. But there’s a legitimate and important debate over the institution of superdelegates above and beyond their impact on this particular contest, and that’s what I will address in this essay.
There is no doubt, as many knowledgeable observers have pointed out, that the creation of superdelegates in the early 1980s was a move by party insiders to enhance the power of the party establishment. But the arguments made against their role in the process are a bit misguided.
First, today’s superdelegates are hardly the party bosses of yesteryear. Prior to 1972, the party establishment did wield considerable power in selecting the party’s nominee and that establishment did consist, for the most part, of older white men. Taken as a group, these men were certainly less progressive than the reformers who changed the party rules following the 1968 election. It is a mistake, however, to think of them as a homogenous cadre of conservatives. As Byron Shafer noted in Quiet Revolution, his history of the post-1968 Democratic Party reforms, the “orthodox Democratic coalition” was essentially blue-collar and included not only organized labor but civil rights organizations as well. It was replaced, incidentally, not by the rank-and-file, as is often suggested by opponents of the superdelegates, but by an “alternative Democratic coalition” of elites that was thoroughly white-collar.
Nevertheless, today’s establishment – embodied by the superdelegates – is extremely diverse, especially when compared to party insiders circa 1968. It is true that over 60 percent of the superdelegates are men, but that is the result of the fact that elected officials continue to be disproportionately male. Among the roughly 400 superdelegates who are not elected officials this discrepancy virtually disappears because party rules produce a significant level of gender balance on the Democratic National Committee (and members of the DNC serve as superdelegates). And while I am unaware of the precise demographic make-up of the superdelegates, it is safe to assume that minorities are represented in proportion to their numbers among Democratic Party constituencies. Indeed, party rules for DNC membership encourage “representation as nearly as practicable of minority groups, Blacks, Native Americans, Asian/Pacifics, Hispanics, women and youth, as indicated by their presence in the Democratic electorate.”
Furthermore, the notion that nearly 800 party leaders might coordinate their decisions in some sort of modern day smoke-filled room is laughable. The superdelegates cannot even be accused of group-think, since they are currently split almost evenly between support for Hillary Clinton and for Barack Obama. And because half of them are elected officials, they are likely to consider their constituents’ preferences when they determine their own. The charge against them, then, must simply be that they weren’t chosen in primaries or caucuses. But is that process worthy of the devotion that critics of the superdelegates appear to afford it?
Craig Holman of Public Citizen recently complained that superdelegates are “a device to try to reduce the influence of one-person, one-vote,” as if the non-superdelegates (or pledged delegates) represent equal numbers of voters. Of course, they don’t and there are numerous ways in which they fall short of that standard. The most obvious is the use of caucuses to allocate pledged delegates in some states. In Nevada, more people turned out in support of Clinton and, yet, Obama received more delegates. To be sure, most of those critical of superdelegates are also likely to oppose caucuses for selecting delegates. But are primaries considerably more democratic?

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