For all the focus on the Republican competition in FL today, there’s an interesting story a-brewing on the Democratic side.
As you probably know, the Democratic National Committee stripped MI and FL of their votes at the Democratic Convention in August on grounds that the states violated the ban on pre-February 5 primaries, other than the sanctioned contests in IA, NH, NV and SC. More importantly, the DNC orchestrated a candidate boycott of campaigning in the two states, though HRC appeared alone on the ballot in MI and all the remaining candidates are on the ballot in FL.
Best anyone can tell, Clinton has scrupulously hewed to the letter of the boycott in FL, traveling there only for private fundraising and eschewing any public campaign activity. But she’s certainly violated its spirit, by (1) openly appealing to FL primary voters by pledging to fight for the seating of their delegates, and (2) holding an election night event in FL where she plans to claim victory in the supposed non-event. Obama has not followed her in either of these actions, and continues to maintain that the FL primary is meaningless (not that his campaign would likely ignore an upset win, if that somehow happened against all odds).
But ironically, the Clinton campaign is now claiming (reports TNR’s Noam Scheiber) Obama has violated the letter of the boycott by putting up a national cable TV ad that will be viewed in parts of FL.
If the chattering classes buy this line of attack, it will represent a pretty good exercise in damage control by the Clinton campaign, whose efforts to elevate the FL results over those in SC took a big hit when Obama won by a surprisingly large margin in the Palmetto State.
But all this speculation may miss an issue of considerable importance for the long-range future. Remember that the whole point of the MI/FL boycott was to protect the IA-NH duopoly control of the first phases of the nominating contest. Having crossed the Rubicon by championing the MI/FL scofflaws, Hillary Clinton is unlikely to stand up for IA and NH’s future status if she wins the nomination and then the presidency. Indeed, the competition-driven maneuvering over Florida could wind up inadvertantly changing the nominating process for many years to come, to the consternation of Iowans and New Hampshirites and the delight of their many detractors.
Moreover, to get very speculative about it, the big irony is this: having fought for ages against the argument that they are too racially homogenous to represent the Democratic Party, the duopoly’s increasingly slim hopes of survival may now depend on the nomination and election of the first African-American president, Barack Obama. If that’s right, there may soon be some NH Democrats who regret their intervention in what might have otherwise been an irresistable Obama march to the nomination.
Go figure.

So how bad was George W. Bush’s final State of the Union Address? And how anxious are Republicans about today’s Florida presidential primary?
Well, last night, long after Bush concluded his speech, I decided to check out National Review‘s site for SOTU reaction. No quick-react articles at all. And at NR’s The Corner blog, most of the talk was about Florida, with only an occasional irritable reference to Democrats being rude to Bush at the SOTU by not applauding this or that (as though congressional Republicans had not made a science of that during the Clinton years). Most of the Corner participants are half-crazed over the Romney Surge in FL, and worried that McCain’s last-minute endorsement by Gov. Charlie Crist may spoil it all.
To be sure, there’s a dutiful, phoned-in-sounding roundtable discussion of the SOTU up at NRO this morning, but it’s nestled amongst even more obsessive talk about Florida. George W. Bush is just a distraction.
Indeed, you get the feeling that if anyone mentioned “Bush” to conservative activists this morning, they’d assume you were talking about Jeb Bush, thought to be the shadowy presence behind Romney’s FL campaign, and locked in a Texas–er, I mean Florida–Death Match with the godless “moderate” Charlie Crist.
BTW, for us Democrats, The New Republic has posted a useful guide to the Bush-Crist rivalry by FL reporter S.V. Date. Ideology aside, they both want to be in the position to make State of the Union Addresses someday.

The Nation has a trio of insightful articles meriting a read from Democrats interested in political strategy. Matt Stoller’s “Dems Get New Tools, New Talent” in The Nation reviews the latest developments in “field” — new ways to increase person-to-person contact of voters. Stoller describes the new software and technological landscape for field organizers and provides a revealing account of the ’04 Dem presidential campaign’s failure to efficiently deploy the latest tools and techniques of voter contact. Stoller lets political consultant Zack Exley ask a key question for Dems in ’08:

Democrats have enjoyed bumper crops of field organizers for two presidential cycles. The next big question is this: Will the nominee succeed in harvesting these crops and making the very best use of these organizers? Or will she or he put blockages and bureaucracy in the way of these young organizers, as happened in the 2004 general election?

Stoller argues that a competent, state-of-the-art field operation can be worth 3-5 points in a general election. Much depends on Dems meeting this challenge.
In her equally-provocative Nation article, “Grassroots Reseeded: Suites vs. Streets,” Laura Flanders asks a similar question:

Now is when the talk meets the walk. The Deaniacs have come into their own–men and women who were trained in Dean’s 2004 campaign are plotting the strategies of all the Democratic front-runners. Dean of the scream is coaching the state parties, and something like the infectious grassroots glee that Dean’s supporters felt years ago appears to be animating (especially) Barack Obama’s volunteers. Forty years after the coming apart of 1968, could this be the year that Democrats finally permit regular people to play a real role in party politics? Or is a whole new cohort of eager-beaver change-makers signing up for heartbreak?

Flanders notes the success of the Obama campaign’s preference for organizing over canvassing. “Canvassers assess voter preferences. Organizers inspire commitment,” says Marshall Ganz, a Harvard proff/’Camp Obama’ trainer quoted by Flanders.
The last Nation article, John Nichols’s “Progressive Democratic Challengers,” makes the case for ’08 as a very good year to weed out DINO’s and other congressional Dems who have supported the Bush-corporate agenda — and replace them with a new generation of authentic progressive Democrats. Nichols discusses the congressional candidacies of progressive Maryland Democrat Donna Edwards and others, and asks:

But what will Democrats in power do in 2009? Will they be as disappointingly cautious and unfocused as the Democrats of the 2007 Congress, who frustrated not just the party’s base but a broader electorate that gives the Democratic Congress lower ratings than the Republican White House? Or will they develop the progressive agenda and display the strategic sense needed to give meaning to all this year’s talk of “change”?…These local primaries have national importance, as they could answer an essential question: will a Democratic Party that muddled its message after gaining control of Congress in 2006 advance a progressive brief in the post-Bush era?

Nichols is encouraged by the energized candidacies of Edwards and other strong progressives. No doubt, their success will depend on their campaigns’ ability to tap the grass roots strategy, tools and commitment cited by Stoller and Flanders.

One of the standard observations made about the Democratic presidential nominating contest is that Barack Obama’s rhetorical skills often have an amazing impact on people who hear him speak—but that these skills are less relevant to the kind of broad-based, national contest he faces on Super Tuesday.
A case in point: After winning the South Carolina primary, Barack Obama made one of his signature speeches, lyrical and soaring; responsive to the critics of his campaign while promoting the broader themes of healing America’s divisions and bringing a new generation of voters into the process. It was a home run with runners aboard.
But he made that speech at about 9:00 pm EST on a Saturday, a time when relatively few Americans are watching television, much less television news. This is such a dead time for TV that the networks often spend it airing old reruns. Eight years ago, Obama’s speech would have been regarded as a tragic waste of eloquence.
Today, however, we live in an age of multi-media video, and Obama’s speech is getting the kind of secondary exposure that would have been unheard of in the recent past.
Minutes after Obama finished thanking the people of South Carolina, his campaign had uploaded the speech in its entirety to YouTube. As of today, it’s been viewed 323,534 times, and as I’m looking at it now, eight more people are watching it with me. That’s the most of any news clip today. Including me, 1,445 different users YouTube have made the video a “favorite”– the most of any clip of any kind in the last 24 hours—which gives it additional exposure. So far, it has won 14 different honors on the site.
In some ways, it seems remarkable that close to a third of a million people would choose to watch a 20 minute political speech on their computers. But Obama’s campaign has counted on people doing just that, and it’s one of those hidden factors that could affect the nominating contest down the road.
Today, Howard Kurtz writes about how Obama’s media team has made a conscious effort to avoid the kind of media cycle gamesmanship that has become the hallmark of campaigns durng the last two decades. David Axelrod — Obama’s chief strategist — told Kurtz, ” What we don’t do is spend six hours a day trying to persuade you guys that red is green or up is down… what’s powering this campaign is a rejection of tactical politics.”
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal described how the Obama campaign avoided playing the “street money” game in South Carolina. He made a conscious decision to avoid putting local political leaders in the payroll in order to get support from their voters. Instead, the campaign brought in organizers and built a new organic network of supporters and volunteers.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about how the Obama campaign was building a new community of supporters online, bypassing the existing Netroots infrastructure almost entirely.
These are all examples of how the Obama campaign is doing something new: leveraging technology and community organizing to reach people one on one. It is avoiding the traditional and even nontraditional filters — the conventional media, the leaders of the blogosphere, and the Party establishment — to speak directly to voters. Both online and in the two states where Obama spent the most time (Iowa and South Carolina), that is paying off and people are responding to him.
The question remains, however, whether that strategy will continue to work when the playing field expands into a nation-wide contest — one where Barack Obama simply does not have the time or resources to court his voters so personally. His real hope is that voters use the new infrastructure he is helping to build to come find him. And no matter who wins the Democratic presidential nomination, Democrats should learn from his campaign’s experience in developing a media strategy for the general election.

One of the few sure bets you can place in the 2008 presidential contest is that the campaign of one-time frontrunner Rudy Giuliani will take a lethal hit in Florida tomorrow. He’s running a weak third (or even fourth) in every recent poll, as John McCain and Mitt Romney battle for a key win. And as Byron York reminds us in a dispatch from Rudy’s less-than-vibrant Florida operation, this state was supposed to be not just a “firewall” for Giuliani, but the beginning of a long sweep of delegate-rich states:

The RealClearPolitics average of polls counted 41 surveys taken in Florida between February 25, 2007 and December 2, 2007. Giuliani led in every one of them, by margins as high as 23 points. And not just a long time ago — in one CNN survey taken in the last week of November, Giuliani led by 21 points.

The fascinating thing about Giluliani’s collapse is that it is primarily attributable to a strategic error, the decision to avoid contests in early states. It’s not as though another candidate caught fire and displaced Rudy; McCain’s return from the dead was largely a result of a vacuum created in no small part by Giuliani’s occlusion, and the candidate who really did come out of nowhere, Mike Huckabee, took votes from Rudy’s rivals. And while Rudy did take some hits late last year over his tangled love life and its possible impact on NY taxpayers, much of that was old news, and it accompanied the fall in the polls more than it caused it. He’s done pretty well in the debates, and in fundraising. But it hasn’t mattered much.
You just can’t avoid the conclusion that the Giuliani campaign gambled and lost on the proposition that it’s possible to maintain a viable national nominating campaign without the oxygen derived from success in early states. The decision to concede IA (and later, MI) quickly drove Giuliani from the front-runner position in NH. The dive Rudy took in NH immediately eliminated his previously strong standing in SC. And now, the cumulative effect of all those retreats has driven him to also-run status in his very best state, FL (he even trails in the polls in NY!).
This is precisely what a lot of people predicted when Giuliani first began leaking his “February 5 strategy” many months ago. Like Al Gore’s campaign in 1988, Rudy and his consultants thought they could repeal history, diss the IA-NH duopoly, and roll to victory as everyone applauded their brilliant audacity. Instead, Guliani is about to become one of those rare presidential candidates who loses almost entirely because of unforced errors. We’ll never know how he might have done with a different strategy. But we do know this one was just plain wrong.

Regardless of what happens concerning Florida’s delegation to the Democratic convention, Florida is likely to be a key swing state in the general election. Florida ranks fourth among the states in electoral college votes, and Democrats have shown they are highly competitive there. To better understand Florida’s demographics Warren Bull’s BBC News article “Florida’s Hispanics weigh their vote” is a good place to begin. Bull notes:

About 20% of the Sunshine State’s population is Hispanic (rising to more than 60% in Miami Dade County) and it has long played an influential and sometimes decisive role in American politics…George W Bush would never have become the 43rd US president without the backing of more than half of Florida’s Latino voters.

Bull’s article also has a sidebar chart on Florida demographics with the following Census factoids:

Population: 18m
White, not Hispanic: 61.3%
Hispanic: 20.2%
Black: 15.8%
Home ownership rate: 70.1%
Median household income 2004: $40,900
US median: $44,334

Bull quotes Florida political analyst Dr. Paul Pozo on the diversity of Florida’s Hispanic community and its regional strongholds:

In the central part of Florida, the majority of the Latins are Puerto Rican. Some Central Americans are there also, and Mexicans in the north of Florida. South of Florida is basically the Cuban-American community.

Bull’s article doesn’t have the percentages for each Hispanic subgroup. But Adam C. Smith’s 2004 article in the St. Petersburg Times, “Parties court the ultimate swing vote: Florida’s Hispanics,” has a sidebar chart that indicates 31.1 percent of Florida Hispanics are Cuban, 18 percent Puerto Rican, 13.6 Mexican and 37.4 “other Hispanic and Latino.”
Adds Smith:

Hispanics account for about 12 percent of Florida’s electorate. The share made up of faithfully Republican Cuban-Americans has dropped from at least 80 percent a decade ago to 60 percent today. In 2000, Bush won 80 percent of the Cuban vote in Florida, while Gore won 60 percent of the non-Cuban Hispanic vote.

Victor Manuel Ramos notes in his Orlando Sentinel article, published by HispanicBusiness.com:

There are more than 1.1 million Hispanic voters statewide, including 207,000 in Central Florida. And they are the only major voter group that has grown — by 8,300 — since 2006. Statewide, a majority are Republicans.
By contrast, 42 percent of Central Florida’s Hispanics are registered Democrats, compared with 22 percent Republicans. That party alignment may explain why candidates haven’t invested much here.

Pozo has this to say about the ideologial breakdown:

The difference is in ideology. The Cuban-American community is more conservative and likes the Republican Party more than the Democrats. The Hispanic people in Central Florida are more inclined to the Democratic Party, and of course they feel different in so far as foreign relations.

Bull discusses the play of key issues of concern to Florida Hispanics, including: immigration; a high rate of foreclosures; health care reform; high drop-out rates; a depressed construction industry and the economy in general. Bull’s article links to a BBC demographic profile of Florida, which notes that seniors are 18 percent of the state population — the highest percentage in the nation.
Winning votes of Florida’s complex Hispanic demographic is a tricky challenge for Democrats. But with 27 electoral votes at stake, it’s not one Dems can afford to overlook.

Going into yesterday’s SC Democratic primary, the CW had firmed up to a remarkable degree: Obama would win on the foundation of a solid African-American vote, but would lose white voters so overwhelmingly that the victory would be not only narrow, but pyhrric, setting up a decisive loss for the “black candidate” to Hillary Clinton on Super Tuesday. There was also talk that the racial dynamics of the contest might depress turnout.
Well, once gain, voters interrupted the CW, just as they did to Clinton’s benefit in NH. Obama won by a two-to-one margin, far above anything predicted in the polls, and while much of this performance was indeed attributable to a huge margin among African-Americans, he picked up one-fourth of the white vote as well. In an echo of his Iowa win, Obama actually won white voters under 30. As for turnout: SC Democrats not only smashed every past record, but exceeded the turnout among Republicans last week, which is pretty remarkable given SC’s status as perhaps the reddest of southern red states.
As the headline of an Alec MacGillis analysis of SC in the Washington Post aptly put it, Obama won by “A Margin That Will Be Hard To Marginalize.”
That’s not to say that SC eliminated the talk that Obama’s candidacy has become engulfed by a racial, ethnic and gender arithmetic that cuts against him down the road. Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics has done the best (so far) analysis of these factors in the early contests, and other than an unmistakable and massive swing towards Obama among African-American voters, the evidence is mixed. It’s hard to say that Obama can’t win white votes after finishing first and a close second in IA and NH, two places whose state songs could be “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” And it’s also worth noting that in SC, the kind of upscale, highly educated white voter demographics (other than young voters, whom we won) he carried in IA are in short supply, at least in the Democratic ranks. That won’t be the case in a lot of Super Tuesday states.
But it’s also unmistakably true that up until now, Clinton has had significant and in many cases overwhelming leads in the polls in a large majority of the Super Tuesday states, not to mention Florida on Tuesday. And she still leads in super-delegates by a two-to-one margin, despite some recent Obama gains.
The latest buzz is that Obama’s going to get some especially dramatic endorsements in the next few days. One is from yet another red-state moderate Democrat, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, one of the most widely praised young Democratic electeds in the country. Another is from the ultimate Old Lion of Liberalism, Ted Kennedy, whose niece, Caroline Kennedy, created some buzz of her own with a New York Times op-ed piece endorsing Obama as someone who could become “A President Like My Father.”
All in all, it’s as though voters are determined to make this election year as exciting and unpredictable as the college football season that just ended.

We lead with a quartet of posts with special relevance to SC today: First, for those who have been wondering about the SC poll numbers, Mark Blumenthal has “South Carolina: Why So Much Variation?” in his Pollster.com post
Adele M. Stan’s “Can Black Women Save the Liberal Coalition?” mulls over the new leverage African American women have in the primaries in The American Prospect. See also Amy Alexander’s post in The Nation, “Black Women Talk Barack” and Elizabeth G. Hines’s Alternet piece “What Black Women’s Votes Mean for the Presidential Race.”
The Clinton campaign is doing a lot of things right, chief among them is the way they have worked the Hispanic vote. The Politico’s Gebe Martinez “Clinton’s Hispanic Edge” may be the best article yet written about the Latino vote at this juncture in the ’08 campaign.
Time magazine’s Rani Molla probes the factors driving “The Democrats Turnout Triumph” in the primaries, and wonders if the pattern will hold in the general election.
Lest we forget, GOP front-runner John McCain has a messy track record, and The Daily Kos‘s Smintheus has the skinny in his article “McCain still lying after all these years.”

The national media have pretty clearly decided that John McCain is now the front runner in the GOP primary. With strong performances in New Hampshire and South Carolina, he has won two of the three traditional, nominee-deciding states. That fits a narrative that is easy for journalists to describe and analyze.
And it’s not just journalists projecting a McCain victory — Sen. John Edwards raised the specter of running against McCain in the last Democratic debate, and the McCain camp is reporting that they raised more than $7 million dollars in the month of January. To me, that looks like lots of Republicans are buying the hype as well.
But if you’re a McCain booster, there are some underlying issues that have to make you worry.
For starters, the nominating process is a race to win delegates, and McCain isn’t actually ahead. In fact, he’s well back in third place — the Arizona senator has 36 delegates, while Mike Huckabee is second with 40 and Mitt Romney leads the pack with 59.
At this point, Huckabee’s appeal is probably limited to his core group of evangelical supporters, and more importantly, he’s out money. He’s probably done. But Romney has been strong everywhere, winning contests in Michigan and Nevada, placing second in Iowa and New Hampshire (both of which added to his delegate totals). Earlier in the month, his campaign reported that they’d managed to raise $5 million, and of course, the multimillionaire can always give his campaign another infusion of cash.
As Ed has said before, there is a history of deep-seated distrust for John McCain among the GOP establishment. McCain has been a champion of campaign finance reform, outspoken critic of torture, and he acknowledged the threat of global warming when many said it was a myth. For whole lot of conservatives, no amount of stumping for Bush or speaking at Liberty University can make up for his earlier sins.
That conservative uncertainty has definitely played itself out so far in the election. After the New Hampshire Primary, former Sen. Rick Santorum was interviewed on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, and two questions in, he launched into criticism of McCain:

[O]n the economic side, he was against the President’s tax cuts, he was bad on immigration. On the environment, he’s absolutely terrible. He buys into the complete left wing environmentalist movement in this country. He is for bigger government on a whole laundry list of issues. He was…I mean, on medical care, I mean, he was for re-importation of drugs. I mean, you can go on down the list. I mean, this is a guy who on a lot of the core economic issues, is not even close to being a moderate, in my opinion. And then on the issue of, on social conservative issues, you point to me one time John McCain every took the floor of the United States Senate to talk about a social conservative issue. It never happened.

After South Carolina, when there was serious discussion about rallying around McCain as the most electable candidate in the GOP field, Rush Limbaugh launched into a diatribe:

We are supposedly damaging the conservative movement. We should just shut up. Just sit by and watch all this stuff and let it happen and just be quiet. What is the point? By the way, it’s aimed at people in talk radio. Why should we in talk radio “just shut up,” and start supporting the front-runner of the moment? Especially when you realize that’s what the Drive-By Media wants! Why should we in talk radio sit here and take our marching orders from the Drive-By Media and others in our movement who write what they write, for liberals in the Drive-By Media. Why should we do that. McCain, frankly, has shown conservatives little but contempt over many years.

At this point in the race, there is still deep opposition to McCain’s presidential campaign in the Republican Party, and it’s not just among opinion leaders, either.
John McCain has yet to win a majority of self-described conservatives. In New Hampshire, he lost them by 7 points to Mitt Romney; in Michigan, he lost 23 to 41, again to Romney; in South Carolina, it was 26 to 35, this time to Huckabee. McCain’s victories, when they’ve come, have been delivered by self-described moderates and Independents, and it’s no coincidence that both his wins have been in states with open primaries. He has also received a huge boost from the fractured state of the GOP field, but his success has served to drive his rivals out of the race.
For Republicans, the last test before Super Tuesday is Florida, and it’s a closed primary — if McCain is going to win, all of his supporters will have to be registered with the GOP. Immediately after South Carolina, polls there showed him ahead. Now, Romney has serious traction, and going into this weekend, it’s anyone’s guess who’s actually in the best position to win.
If McCain loses, his candidacy is in serious trouble. It will be an indication that he can’t compete without additional support from independents. And on Super Tuesday, that could spell disaster in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Montana, New York, Oklahoma, and West Virginia — where the primaries are all closed.
If McCain can’t solve his conservative problem, then the person with the most money and the best organization will become the GOP nominee, which will leave Democrats running against Mitt Romney in the fall. And like many conservatives, most Democrats would be happy with that contest.

E.J. Dionne today put his finger on an aspect of the Obama-Clinton rivalry that’s been percolating under the surface for a while. Noting the similarities between Obama’s frequent beyond-left-and-right talk–and more specifically, the tribute to Ronald Reagan’s leadership qualities that Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been pounding him about–and the 1992 campaign message of one Bill Clinton, Dionne concludes:

In many ways, Obama is running the 2008 version of the 1992 Clinton campaign. You have the feeling that if Bill Clinton did not have another candidate in this contest, he’d be advising Obama and cheering him on.

E.J. might have added another parallel: Bill Clinton’s trump card in the 1992 nominating contest was his overwhelming support among African-Americans.
I’ve written before (as has Matt Compton) that Obama’s “Clintonian” trans-ideological and trans-partisan rhetoric has been a source of considerable ambivalence towards his candidacy by self-conscious Left Progressives in the party and the blogosphere (indeed, Armando Llorens of Talk Left today plays off Dionne’s column to blast Obama for an insufficiently partisan approach). But there’s a little-noticed flip side to this phenomenon. Despite the long association of the Clintons with the Centrist/DLC/”New Democrat” wing of the party, there’s pretty strong pro-Obama sentiment in centrist circles as well (something I first noticed at the DLC annual meeting last summer, where there was quite visible support for Obama among the several hundred state and local elected officials in attendance). Some observers were surprised by the raft of recent endorsements of Obama by red- and purple-state centrist elected officials in recent weeks (e.g., Janet Napolitano, Claire McCaskill, Jim Doyle, Tim Johnson, and Ben Nelson). Less attention has been paid to support for Obama in SC by long-time white centrist Democrats like former Gov. Jim Hodges, Charleston Mayor Joe Riley, and former state party chair Dick Harpootlian.
In general, the early caucus and primary results have shown relatively little consistent correspondence between voter ideology and candidate preference; that’s a key reason that identity factors (age, race and gender) have played so obvious a role. So the “Clintonian” features of the Obama campaign aren’t just a small, ironic quirk. They are part and parcel of a contest where pinning down the candidates on a conventional left-right spectrum is exceedingly difficult.