Lest anyone entertain delusions about the GOP taking more of a high road in campaign ’08, The New York Times has an instructive article by Kitty Bennett, “R.N.C. Snaps Up Domain Names“. Bennett explains:

At least 25 domain names related to Hillary Rodham Clinton have links to the Republican National Committee: the names were either registered by the R.N.C. last year or showed up on servers the committee uses…The party has also begun preemptively registering domains that could be used to attack John McCain, like mccainamigos.com, voteagainstmccain.com, flipflopmccain.com and hatemccain.com.

Bennett notes the GOP’s edge in ‘cybersquatter’ warfare:

The Democratic Party and the campaigns have shown little of the verve and creativity of the R.N.C. …The party has been focused more on the national convention, registering variations of denverdemconvention08.com in February, but so far apparently no domains related to Mr. McCain.
The election has “triggered an avalanche of cybersquatter activity,” according to NetNames, a domain name management service. Speculators have registered nearly 2,000 domain names related to presidential candidates as of last week. Names related to Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy made up over half of the registrations, followed by Mr. Obama with 635 and Mr. McCain with 269.

It would be a mistake to overstate the importance of hogging domain names as a political tactic, and it’s hard to see how it will affect many votes. But it does show that there is not much the Republicans won’t fund to help muzzle Dems’ messaging resources.
Although it’s a stretch to attribute all of the tactical lag to the Democrats superior moral ground, no one should be surprised that the GOP has a stronger proclivity for purely obstructionist tactics (some history here) and an edge in deploying them. The DNC might benefit by setting up an internet-savvy task force to anticipate such shenanigans and respond accordingly.

Yesterday I suggested that there was growing and probably irresistable momentum towards a “do-over” of the Michigan and Florida Democratic presidential primaries whose results are not, under present rules, being rewarded with actual pledged delegates (MI and FL’s superdelegates, BTW, aren’t being offered seats, or even hotel rooms, at the Convention either).
That’s still true, but the events of the last 24 hours have shown that arranging a “do-over” is pretty complicated. Yesterday MI and FL Democratic leaders issued a manifesto demanding that their delegates be seated. DNC Chairman Howard Dean quickly responded that it ain’t happening, and that Democrats in the two states needed to come up with a “do-over” plan to pick recognizable delegates. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fl) fired off an open letter to Dean saying that the national party needed to pay the substantial (as much as $20 million in FL alone) costs of any “do-over” primary. Dean responded that it wasn’t his problem. And today, reports emerged that MI Democrats are considering a caucus to elect delegates.
A lot of this is pure Kabuki Theater designed to establish the high moral ground on this controversy. MI and FL Democrats want the national party to acknowledge their primaries were legitimate expressions of popular opinion. The DNC wants MI and FL to acknowledge they broke the rules, and agree to a do-over of their own initiative, without massive DNC subsidies. And the Clinton and Obama campaigns obviously have a big stake in the outcome, and will probably have to agree to any proposed resolution.
A caucus in MI makes a lot of sense; the party’s done them before, and would probably hold so-called “firehouse caucuses ” that are basically closed primaries with very limited numbers of polling places. Florida’s a tougher place to hold caucuses, since they don’t have any experience with them, and participation might be down sharply from the earlier primary.
More importantly, the candidates have variable interests in the structure of any do-overs. Obama has done famously well in caucuses. And aside from the impact of caucus do-overs on the delegate count, lower participation would almost certainly reduce the impact of both states on the total popular vote for the overall nominating process, in which HRC is, by some assessments, getting close if the FL results are included, and could actually be ahead if the more tainted (because Obama was not on the ballot) MI results are included.
The most likely compromise would be for MI to hold caucuses, and FL a primary, with some but not total DNC and/or candidate subsidies. Aside from the equitable argument that the two states should pay some price for their scofflaw behavior, the reality is that both would benefit from massive candidate spending, and would, assuming their contests are scheduled for May or even June, play the kind of crucial role in determining the nomination that far exceeds what they hoped to accomplish by breaking the rules in the first place.
But that’s all easier said than done, and given the complex number of players in this decision, and their Kabuki Theater positions, this will ultimately be a big test of Howard Dean’s leadership abilities.

If you like political “insider” stories, there are two of them creating a big buzz in Washington this morning that touch on the Democratic presidential contest.
First up is a big Washington Post front-pager by Peter Baker and Anne Kornblut that details the much-rumored infighting within Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The lede pretty much summarizes the whole piece:

For the bruised and bitter staff around Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Tuesday’s death-defying victories in the Democratic presidential primaries in Ohio and Texas proved sweet indeed. They savored their wins yesterday, plotted their next steps and indulged in a moment of optimism. “She won’t be stopped,” one aide crowed.
And then Clinton’s advisers turned to their other goal: denying Mark Penn credit.

Much of the story is about Penn, HRC’s pollster and sometimes “chief strategist,” who vocally and successfully urged the candidate to go after Barack Obama’s credibility as a potential commander-in-chief, encapsulated in the now-famous “3 a.m. ad.” Penn has some personal issues with other HRC staffers that go back to his days advising Bill Clinton. And according to the story, he’s come within inches of getting fired on a couple of occasions during this campaign.
The most interesting revelation in the article may have been this tidbit about HRC:

One of Clinton’s favorite books is “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s account of Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet, and she assembled her own team of advisers knowing their mutual enmity in the belief that good ideas come from vigorous discussion

An example of this “vigorous discussion” is a pithy exchange between Penn and long-time “rival” Harold Ickes during a campaign conference call:

“[Expletive] you!” Ickes shouted.
“[Expletive] you!” Penn replied.
“[Expletive] you!” Ickes shouted again.

Nice.
Meanwhile, in other obscure but politically significant news, there’s been a strange new twist in the so-called “NAFTA-Gate” saga.
Ian Brodie, chief of staff to conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has been a prime suspect in the leaking of a memo by Canadian conciliar officials discussing a meeting with Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee in which the Canadians were allegedly reassured that Obama’s candidate’s attacks on NAFTA were “political positioning,” not an indication of future policy.
Nobody’s yet documented this claim about Brodie, but now it transpires that he told a group of reporters back on February 26 that the Canadian diplomats had been approached by someone from Hillary Clinton’s campaign with reassurances similar to those Goolsbee’s accused of offering. Meanwhile, Brodie has ordered an investigation of the leaks of the memo about the Goolsbee meeting. Lord only knows where this story’s going next.

Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics has a typically lucid analysis of how HRC won Ohio and Texas, and how the results compared with previous primaries. His bottom line is that Obama was showing some momentum in Wisconsin, but it’s now gone for the moment.

It should be clear that Texas and Ohio performed in a manner roughly consistent with the states prior to Wisconsin. From this, we might infer that any momentum that Obama developed after the Potomac Primary was not carried through yesterday. Wisconsin did not help him in Texas and Ohio – as Virginia, Maryland, and DC seemed to help him in Wisconsin. The states voting yesterday seemed to vote “normally.”

In other words, the Democratic contest is still dominated by demographics, though as Cost notes, HRC is currently making a few gains in “Obama categories” of the electorate, partially reversing the gains Obama made in the “Clinton categories” in the Potomac Primary and more clearly in Wisconsin.
On another front, there’s growing speculation that the contest at present creates a lot of momentum for the idea of a “do-over” of Michigan and/or Florida. As J.P. Green suggested earlier on this site, this may be the only way to resolve the “people’s choice” argument. HRC supporters Ted Strickland and Terry McAuliffe seemed to be hinting at that last night, and Obama’s already on record supporting a “do-over” if it’s done right. It may be the only way for HRC to get close to Obama’s totals in pledged delegates, and to get close or take the lead in the total popular vote–a big deal in terms of the moral and psychological case for letting superdelegates decide the whole contest.

Hillary Clinton accomplished exactly what she needed to accomplish yesterday, winning the popular primary vote in Ohio and Texas (plus Rhode Island), breaking Barack Obama’s winning streak, beating the expectations as of about a week ago, and re-exposing the weaknesses in Obama’s voter appeal that the post-Super Tuesday contests seemed to have repaired.
But in the ultimate measurement, pledged delegates, HRC will probably wind up with a pretty small net haul of around 15. In part that’s because Obama seems to be narrowly winning the strange Texas Caucuses that convened after the polls closed last night (the results will take a couple of days to finish trickling in), which will determine one-third of the state’s pledged delegate total. It should be noted, however, that she did make some progress in reducing Obama’s overall popular vote lead for the entire nominating process,which could become an important psychological factor in determining superdelegate support. And the TX and OH wins might well slow or stop the drift of superdelegate support towards Obama that’s been evident in the last few weeks.
Finallly, March 4 showed she could beat Obama in large, expensive primary states where he’s outspending her heavily.
The exit polls for OH and TX showed HRC posting her usual big wins among white women, self-identified Democrats, and less-educated and lower-income voters. But she made improvements elsewhere, especially in Ohio, where she won white men by 19 points, and ran even with Obama among voters with some college education, and those earning over $100,000. In both the big states, she reduced Obama’s lead among independents to single digits. And in TX, she got the two-to-one win among Latinos she needed, along with a big turnout.
Age continued to be the sharpest differentiator of candidate support; in OH, Obama won 70% of the youngest cohort, those under 25, while Clinton won 72% of those over 65.
Flipping all this around, Obama’s clearly got some problems with white working-class voters that lose him primaries in states where his margins among younger and highly-educated voters, including independents, aren’t overwhelming and African-American voters make up less than 20% of the Democratic electorate. If PA shows the same patterns next month, there will be some seriously worried talk among Democrats about his ability to win midwestern industrial states in November.
The other source of concern for the Obama campaign is the already-heavy media belief that he “can’t take a punch”–that negative campaining gave HRC the boost she obviously got from late-deciding voters.
We’ll see what happens next, but it’s certainly beginning to look like the contest will go past the primaries and caucuses and be determined by such factors as the Florida/Michigan issue and superdelegates.
In the meantime, I recommend Chris Bowers’ take on the delegate situation after yesterday, and John Judis’ analysis of the March 4 exit polls.

Even if Obama is your candidate, Hillary Clinton’s Texas and Ohio victories may be a good thing. Sure, he would have preferred to put it away yesterday. But a closer race keeps interest and turnout high. The fact that our two candidates who are locked in a high turnout race are an African American and a woman underscores the Democratic Party’s creds as the Party of hope for the disempowered and gives campaign ’08 an aura of heightened historical significance.
The narrowing race also keeps both candidates sharp and forces McCain to split his attacks, while getting hammered by both Dems. When we get to the convention, Clinton and Obama will be more seasoned and better prepared to rumble with the Republicans’ toughest front-man. Because of the extended campaigns, Obama, Clinton and their troops will have learned more about the political arts of self-defense, ad-making and buying, media interviews, speechmaking, targeting demographics, GOTV, leveraging issues, strategy and tactics etc.
That’s the good news.
There are, however, a couple of ways the aforementioned scenario could sour. Badly. Despite the media emphasis on delegate-counting, the popular vote is the key to claiming the moral high ground. If Super-D’s give the nomination to the loser of the popular vote, it won’t be worth having, and most of them, one hopes, are smart enough to know that and to do the right thing. But what if the popular vote totals going into Denver are so razor-close that neither candidate can convincingly claim the moral high ground? Imagine the deal-making and bitterness of the loser’s supporters. Imagine the field day McCain could have in mocking the Democrats’ commitment to “democracy.” A near-tie in popular vote totals would be less of a problem if ALL delegates were allocated by popular votes in their districts.
I get it that the super-delegate idea was conceived to check convention delegates on occasions when they don’t reflect the popular vote. But the potential for abuse is just too high. May the genius who cooked up the super-delegate scheme go join the GOP and let them benefit from his sage advice.
The other booby trap now looming larger is the Michigan-Florida mess. After last night, Obama still leads in the popular vote tally of all the primaries except MI and FL thus far by 582,718, while Clinton leads by 40,363 when MI and FL are included in the count (Obama wasn’t on the ballot in MI). It’s a little more difficult to assign blame here. But changing the rules without an agreement from both Clinton and Obama would be an equally-disastrous response. If they are not both on board with whatever is decided, expect mayhem.
Both of these obstacles can be overcome — the first by either candidate getting a clear majority of the popular vote and the second by Clinton and Obama reaching agreement on what should be done about FL and MI, sooner, better than later.
Looking toward the future, Democrats have a big job ahead in adopting reforms to insure that the popular vote total always prevails. The focus should be on dismantling the super-delegates and other vestiges of Party elitism, and moving in the direction of direct popular election of our nominee, so it becomes clear to all that we are the party that champions the will of the people.

If Hillary Clinton wins big in Ohio today–where Barack Obama seemed to be headed towards an upset win just a week ago–you can bet the punditocracy will attribute the turnaround to “NAFTA-Gate” (yes, friends, a full generation after the Watergate break-in, American political reporters still attach the suffix “gate” to every imaginable political controversy, big or little).
In case you somehow missed the saga (hard to imagine, since it’s received saturation treatment from the MSM over the last few days), “NAFTA-Gate” refers to an incident wherein Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee (by all accounts a brilliant and non-Machiavellian gent) attended a private meeting with lower-level Canadian conciliar staff in Chicago, after which said staff prepared a memo suggesting that Goolsbee told them that Obama’s sharp rhetoric about NAFTA was merely “political positioning.” The memo was subsequently leaked to the Associated Press under suspicious circumstances, possibly by the office of conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
There are a lot of reasons this incident, which might have been considered a nothing-burger at a different time and place, drew so much attention, beyond the efforts of the Clinton campaign. Most obviously, it occurred on the eve of a crucial primary in Ohio, which is arguably ground zero for the anti-free-trade sentiment that has gradually become dominant in the Democratic Party over the last decade. Being considered soft on NAFTA in Ohio is a bit like being perceived as hostile to ethanol or caucuses in Iowa.
Moreover, “NAFTA-Gate” was immediately inflated by something of a perfect storm of highly divergent media interests: political beat reporters eager to rebut allegations that they had given Obama a free ride; centrist editorial writers alarmed by both candidates’ anti-NAFTA rhetoric; Republican operatives and conservative noise machinists happy for the chance to take Obama down a notch; and then the Lou Dobbs types always ready to pounce upon “evidence” that politicians say one thing about trade to the folks and then sell them down the river behind close doors, on the advice of people like Austan Goolsbee.
It’s richly ironic that the politician benefitting from “NAFTA-gate” is the wife of the man most often accused by his Democratic critics of feeling the pain of trade-affected workers while promoting contrary policies, Bill Clinton, who signed NAFTA and then pushed it through a closely divided Congress.
But still, the Obama campaign undoubtedly set itself up for this bad press by going after HRC on NAFTA. And it gave the story a long shelf-life by initally denying any back-channel Obama-Canada discussions, and then, once Goolsbee’s name surfaced, trying to claim he was just some academic economist speaking for himself.
Largely lost in the controversy is what Goolsbee actually said to the Canadians. The undisputed part of the story is that he encouraged Canadians to understand Obama’s remarks on NAFTA within the broader context of his overall views on trade and globalization, which have been consistently positive. And if you are looking for any deep meaning in the whole kerfuffle, it’s that Barack Obama is himself a symbol of globalization. It’s no accident that so much of the world has become fascinated with his candidacy and what it might mean for an America often viewed as simultaneously isolationist and militarist.
Beyond its affect on Ohio and the presidential nominating contest, the ultimate effect of “NAFTA-gate” will probably be minor. One friend of mine quipped today that most Americans might learn for the first time that Canada is a signatory to NAFTA. Daniel Drezner has suggested that the Canadians have finally found a way–albeit the worst way–to become relevant to an American presidential campaign.
Best I can tell, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, much like Democrats generally, think and live in that shadowy borderland that divides “yes, but” and “no, but” attitudes towards trade agreements with other countries. You don’t have to consider them hypocrites or scoundrels for leaning towards “no, but” arguments while campaigning in Ohio, and then leaning towards “yes, but” positions if actually elected president and put in charge of this country’s international economic policies. You can’t take the politics out of politics, and in terms of everyone’s reaction to this strangely overwrought incident, that may be the residual lesson of “NAFTA-Gate.”
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
I would add to Matt’s analysis, however, one proviso: Kerry, who had one of the most consistent pro-trade voting records of any Senator from either party, never promised to renegotiate past or suspend future trade agreements. His big concession to anti-NAFTA Democrats was to promise a comprehensive review of all existing trade agreements to see if they were serving their original purpose. Much of his rhetoric about “Benedict Arnold CEO’s” had to do with tax subsidies for offshoring rather than trade policy.
But I agree with Matt’s basic point that the tension between Democratic rhetoric and Democratic policy on trade didn’t start with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. Indeed, lest we forget, Al Gore was the man who vanquished Ross Perot in the famous debate over NAFTA in 1993. By 2000, his campaign had adopted the official position of the NAFTA-hating AFL-CIO, that labor and environmental standards had to be included in the “core” of any bilateral or regional trade agreement, a condition squarely violated by NAFTA, and contrary to the trade policies of a Clinton administration in which Gore had been a major figure.

Democrats are going to the polls in Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas and Vermont today. And with Hillary Clinton appearing to have seized the late momentum in both Ohio and Texas, there are a variety of scenarios that could come out of the results. Noam Scheiber goes through them thoroughly today; Jonathan Chait does the delegate math; and Chris Bowers reports that HRC’s staying in at least until Pannsylvania next month unless she loses the popular vote in both TX and OH.

Project Vote has a post that ought to command concern and attention from a broad spectrum of Democrats, “Low-Income Americans Denied Voter Registration Opportunities, New Report Shows.” The post summarizes the findings of an important new study “Unequal Access: Neglecting the National Voter Registration Act, 1995-2007” conducted by Project Vote and Demos, indicates that for the 12 years after this hard-won law was enacted “Voter registrations from public agencies that provide services to low-income Americans have declined dramatically.”
In examining state-by-state data, the post notes,

…In states across the nation—Virginia, Florida, Texas, Nevada and many others—public assistance agencies are neglecting to offer voter registration to all clients and applicants, as required by the law. Because of noncompliance with the NVRA, the rights of thousands of low-income citizens are violated daily…Registrations from public assistance agencies have declined 79 percent between 1995, when the Act was first implemented in, and 2006; in other words, registrations declined from 2.6 million to just 540,000 by the 2005-2006 reporting period. Field investigations and analysis of available data strongly suggest that low registration rates are a result of states’ noncompliance with the law.

It comes as no shock that, according to the report, “Department of Justice has failed in recent years to actively enforce the public assistance provisions of the NVRA.” The harm done to Democratic candidates is considerable. In 2006, for example, 13 million voting-age citizens from households earning less than $25,000 were not registered.
More surprising is the decline in some states that had Democratic governors or secretaries of state during the period of the study. Can’t blame the GOP for that; It’s on us.

Daily Kos’ DHinMI has a very informative post about independent expenditures on behalf of the Democratic candidates in OH and TX. It’s basically a tale of the competition between three groups who have been supporting HRC almost from the beginning–the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Emily’s List, and the American Federation of Teachers–and two who have more recently endorsed Obama–the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers. Looks like SEIU in particular is really kicking out the jams for Obama in OH and TX:

Through the Wisconsin primary, the three groups backing Clinton spent about $4.4 million. In Ohio, they have continued the model of what worked well in the early states—lots of direct mail, probably directed at women, followed up with phone calls. In Ohio, they have boosted their program. Whereas in most states they appear to have sent about 6 pieces of mail, it appears that in Ohio their target audience has received up to 8 pieces. They have also run a small amount of media, and are now following up the mail with phone calls. The total expenditures come to about $500,000.
FEC reports indicate that SEIU will probably spend over 5 times as much as AFSCME and EMILY’s list in Ohio. They’ve spent $400,000 in mail, almost matching AFSCME and EMILY’s List. In addition to the mail, they have also spent $200,000 on phones, $425,000 on a paid canvass program, and $1.4 million on electronic media. All together, with staff, production and other expenses factored in, SEIU has spent over $2.6 million in Ohio.
Obama will benefit from other expenditures. While EMILY’s list has spent $140,000 in media in Texas—such a small expenditure suggests it’s probably Spanish language radio, or possibly cable ads on networks that focus on women, like Lifetime—SEIU has dropped over $1.7 million in to that state. They have spent $700,000 on media, almost $500,000 on a canvass program, $300,000 on phones and almost $300,000 on mail.
The amount SEIU has spent just in Ohio and Texas now equals the combined spending of AFSCME, the AFT and EMILY’s List from the start of the campaign through the Wisconsin primary.

If Obama manages to pull off wins in these two states, he’ll owe a lot to his new union friends.