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?

Read more…

Like many of you, no doubt, I’ve read a lot of back-and-forth over the last few days about “who won and who lost” in the recent Maliki-Sadr conflict in Iraq. Dick Polman of the Philly Inquirer has a good if not impartial summary of the debate in his blog today, and I agree with his assessment that it’s hard to say Maliki “won” since he started the dispute and then abandoned it before any sort of victory.
But this argument seems to miss a much bigger point that’s getting lost: the generally accepted fact that Maliki’s own party and government had to go to the Iranians–and not just any Iranians, but the Qods Force militia of Iran”s Revolutionary Guards–to get consent for a cease-fire that would be binding on Muqtada al-Sadr, who is himself living in Iran. Given the longstanding Iranian sponsorship of Maliki’s Dawa Party and its close ally, the Islamic Supreme Counsel of Iraq, it’s kind of hard to avoid the impression that Iran, not the U.S., is the Big Dog in Iraq, and indispensible to any sort of tenuous peace and security. I mean, really, if “our side” has to crawl to Qom to get Sadr’s chain yanked, how can any sane person promote a policy that simultaneously aims at pacifying Iraq while threatening Iran with war? Neocon heads should be exploding over this chain of events.
I’ve only seen one conservative reaction to this particular aspect of the current crisis, and it’s truly interesting. The Tank blog on the National Review site has a post by Steve Schippert that claims the government/Dawa/ISCI mission to Qom is a sign that Maliki’s standing up to Iran, and was dictating terms to Sadr through the Iranians.
That does indeed seem to be the only way to square this particular circle and avoid an explosion of heads, but it’s not terribly compelling on the face of it. The Iranians have relationships with all sorts of Iraqi Shi’a that go back a long time, involving large subsidies, safe havens, military and ideological training, religious identity, and a common hostility towards Sunnis, Israelis, and yes, Americans. The best evidence, reinforced strongly by this latest series of events, is that a stable Iraq requires Iranian support, and that if everything goes the way war supporters want, the best-case scenario is an Islamist regime in Baghdad aligned with Tehran, or at least very friendly towards Iran. How to reconcile that with neocon enthusiasm for war with Iran is a puzzle beyond my ability to solve.

David Paul Kuhn at The Politico has a good, understandable explanation of how the Democratic Convention’s credientials committee functions. This is worth reading now that Hillary Clinton’s pledging (for the moment, at least0 to take a credentials challenge over the likely non-seating of the MI and FL delegations all the way to Denver.
The two takeaways from Kuhn’s piece are that (1) DNC Chairman Howard Dean controls the appointments to the Credentials Committee that will have the balance of power in a fight between Clinton and Obama, and (2) if HRC wants to take the fight to Denver, she certainly can, since it only takes 20% of the Credentials Committee to justify a minority report to the Convention itself, and a subsequent vote.
But a lot of this is murky.

Neither campaign tracks projections on Credentials Committee seats, according to aides charged with the arcane process of counting delegates. The DNC also does not track these totals but relies on state parties to report their totals as they are determined.
Adding to the confusion surrounding the Credentials Committee, a subject that has perplexed many party veterans, is the fact that Democrats have not found themselves studying the minutiae of convention rules since 1980. Since then, convention votes, including those in the Credentials Committee, have been pro forma.

Prior to 1980, credentials fights really used to be pretty common. We’re beginning to understand why a significant effort was undertaken to make them go away.

I’ve just read the Meridian, Mississippi speech with which John McCain launched his “biography tour,” and found it more interesting and troubling than I expected.
Most obviously, I can’t recall any major speech by a president or presidential candidate that was devoted so thoroughly to the subject of the speaker’s own family background–not just the immediate family (which, for example, was the background theme in Richard Nixon’s famous “Checkers” speech, and in Bill Clinton’s “Place Called Hope” speech, and is obviously important to Barack Obama’s “story”), but the Family Heritage. McCain goes into considerable detail to establish himself as the scion of a very old (by American standards) and very distinguished warrior tribe, whose traditions he first spurned and then half-heartedly embraced, before rediscovering them in the crucible of his imprisonment at the Hanoi Hilton.
In so doing, McCain runs afoul of two pretty important American political traditions: ambivalence towards military leaders in politics, and an expectation of modesty about the accomplishments of one’s forebears.
On the first point, yes, five (W.H. Harrison, Jackson, Taylor, Grant and Eisenhower) or perhaps six (if you add the planter-soldier George Washington) American presidents were professional soldiers. Several others were wartime military leaders but not really career military professionals (Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and Teddy Roosevelt). But the list of military leaders who sought and failed to obtain the presidency is equally long, from Winfield Scott and George McClellan to Scott’s namesake W.S. Hancock, to Leonard Wood, to Douglas MacArthur, to Alexander Haig, to Wes Clark. And among those who succeeded, Jackson, Grant and Eisenhower were almost universally revered national heroes of an unparalleled magnitude.
While there’s nothing uncommon or surprising about John McCain’s highlighting of his own military record, his decision to identify himself as primarily the product of the military ethic, by family background as well as by personal experience, is unusual, and perhaps risky in a country that has always honored professional warriors but has also insisted on civilian control of the military. It’s no accident that the last Annapolis graduate to become president, Jimmy Carter, chose to identify himself as a peanut farmer rather than as a nuclear submarine officer.
McCain’s insistence on establishing a distinguished pedigree is counter-intuitive as well. The current president of the United States, after all, went to inordinate lengths to create a public persona remote from his actual aristocratic background as grandson of a U.S. senator and son of a president. Another president who often touted his own military service–John F. Kennedy–did so in no small part to provide a common link to Americans who might otherwise dwell on his father’s wealth and political connections. FDR’s polio, and TR’s cowboy-hunter-soldier machismo, offset their elite backgrounds. And most American presidents and presidential candidates have talked about their ancestors mainly to stress their humble roots, and thus accentuate their own accomplishments. In the Meridian speech and elsewhere, John McCain seems to be visibly struggling, even today, to live up to his family’s martial tradition. It’s all pretty remarkable.
The theme of the callow young man achieving maturity and then complete identification with his patrimony is as old as the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son. It’s complicated in McCain’s case by the fact that his callowness, by his own account, appears to have survived the Hanoi Hilton and persisted well into late-middle-age and into his political career (viz. the admitted serial carousing, not to mention the Keating Five).
It’s tempting to speculate that by design or accident, McCain’s self-description is an analogy for his latest political transformation from the “maverick” who flirted (or at a minimum, whose staff flirted) with becoming John Kerry’s running-mate in 2004 to today’s reinvented conservative. He’s rebelled against his heritage, but now, in the crucible of this campaign, McCain is falling back on the fundamentals of family, faith, party, ideology, and yes, maybe even a hereditary strain of military jingoism, and is determined, as prodigals often are, to live up to the heritage to a fault. This must be immensely reassuring to the conservatives who have for so long mistrusted him. And it’s an appeal that is also seductive for the many Americans who constantly struggle to reconcile libertarian impulses with the tug of traditions, even bad traditions.
Maybe this is all emphemeral, and at some point John McCain will abandon the biographical message to focus on policy issues. But Democrats need to understand what he’s trying to do in presenting himself as the embodiment of the Prodigal Son seeking to lead the Prodigal Nation back to its heritage of greatness, and react accordingly. In 1996 Bob Dole offered himself as “the bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth… a time of tranquillity, faith, and confidence in action.” Bill Clinton successfully turned that offer into a contrast between nostalgic reaction and progressive action. At present, McCain is advancing a more appealing version of Dole’s political package, gussied up with plenty of Prodigal policy offerings that will make it harder to typecast him as reactionary. Exposing him will not just be a matter of deriding media credulity or hammering his voting record in the Senate. It will require an unwavering spotlight on his basic message and its troubling implications.
In a 1999 review of McCain’s memoir “Faith of My Fathers,” and of Robert Timberg’s hagiographical “John McCain: An American Odyssey,” Nathanial Tripp offered this assessement of both books and of the martial hymn that inspired the title of the first:

The problem with this hymn, and these books, is that they are not about leadership, they are about followership. Admittedly, the hymn’s type of rhetoric seems to have an almost narcotic effect on some voters, but distrust of authority is a salient legacy of Vietnam. Furthermore, civil leadership demands humanity, compassion and the skills of negotiation and compromise, which are often contrary to the military mind. Chimerically, McCain may go from the Keating scandal to campaign reform, from heavy smoking to anti-tobacco legislation, setting a zigzag course toward the White House and defying those who will put him in a box. But there is something hauntingly familiar about his confusion of mission with personal ambition.

This remains an important observation. If John McCain’s main credential for presidential leadership is his “followership” of the military traditions of his forefathers and the ideological traditions of the GOP, then the rest of us should rightly object to the harnessing of our future to his past.

I reported this last week as a possibility, but now it seems to be happening: a movement among North Carolina Democratic congressmen to consolidate in support of Barack Obama. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that:

North Carolina’s seven Democratic House members are poised to endorse Sen. Obama as a group — just one has so far — before that state’s May 6 primary.

The entire delegation had been pledged to John Edwards for the greater part of the primary campaign. When he suspended his campaign, all the members received calls from the other camps. As the WSJ says, only Rep. G.K. Butterfield had switched his support to this point.
The mass endorsement is significant beyond its potential effect on the NC primary. All seven congressmen are also superdelegates.
Update — The Raleigh News & Observer has a quote from the Obama campaign which makes it clear that this thing might still be in the works:

“We’re pleased to have the support of Rep. Butterfield and are working to earn the endorsement of his colleagues in the N.C. Congressional delegation,” wrote spokesman Dan Leistikow in an e-mail to Dome. “Despite the Wall Street Journal’s optimism, none of them has (told) our campaign that they are ready to announce their endorsement of Senator Obama, so we’ll keep working on it.”