In the tight Democratic presidential nominating contest, the first-ever Nevada Caucuses, which were pretty much ignored by political observers in the long run-up to IA and NH, have suddenly been invested with great significance. An Obama win there, we are told, will interrupt the Clinton “comeback,” virtually guarantee Obama a SC win, and make the whole race dead even going into the Feb. 5 mega-event. A Clinton win, by contrast, continues her “big mo.” And one poll showing a virtual three-way tie in Nevada has given new hope to the Edwards campaign that it can survive and then even thrive outside the Clinton-Obama crossfire.
The problem is: nobody really has a clear idea about participation in the Caucuses, since there’s no history to cite.
For a good impressionistic account of the confused situation on the ground in Nevada, I recommend a MyDD diary by desmoulins, an Edwards organizer from Las Vegas.

Less than 100 hours now to the NV caucus and turnout is still a massive question mark, that will determine the outcome. All year, I’ve felt this will be a low-turnout affair driven by activists combined by whatever campaign had the resources and organization to drag in casual, non-activist supporters. All year, I’d hoped that would be Edwards, with a combination of long-term organization, a strong message, momentum from Iowa, and the support of SEIU and Culinary. All year, I’d presumed that if Obama got those breaks instead, as he did in the end, he’d surge past and win handsomely. And all year, I’ve presumed that the Clinton support was very soft and would melt away when we entered the final 2 weeks, and people started to focus intensely on the race.
I still have no idea if any of that will prove to be prescient or, as is usually the case, I’m way, way off base. In short, its exciting as all get-out to be in a race that nobody has any clue how its going to go Saturday.

The diary also has a deep-in-the-weeds account of the last-minute teachers’ union lawsuit aimed at invalidating the at-large Caucus sites being set up on the Las Vegas Strip to make it easier for casino workers to participate (thought to be a large boon to Obama).
If you recall the accounts (here and elsewhere) of the confusion surrounding Caucus Night in Iowa, a place where Caucus procedures are a venerable science, you can imagine the chaos likely to ensue in Nevada on Saturday.

It appears that the grown-ups in both campaigns may prevail after all in the dust-up about the Clintons’ remarks concerning Martin Luther King, LBJ and Obama’s Iraq position, according to Jeff Zeleny’s New York Times article “Obama Tries to Stop the ‘Silliness’.” Zeleny quotes Obama:

I don’t want the campaign at this stage to degenerate into so much tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, that we lose sight of why all of us are doing this…We’ve got too much at stake at this time in our history to be engaging in this kind of silliness. I expect that other campaigns feel the same way….I think that I may disagree with Senator Clinton or Senator Edwards on how to get there, but we share the same goals. We’re all Democrats…We all believe in civil rights. We all believe in equal rights. We all believe that regardless of race or gender that people should have equal opportunities.

Bravo. And then he shows how generosity of spirit can win hearts and minds:

They are good people, they are patriots. They are running because they think that they can move this country to a better place…I think that Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have historically and consistently been on the right side of civil rights issues. I think they care about the African-American community and that they care about all Americans and they want to see equal rights and justice in this country.

After giving Obama due credit for taking the high road, it seems fair to acknowledge that the Clinton’s remarks were stretched by the media to imply more than they intended. Might be wise for all Dem campaigns to eschew the circular firing squad approach going forward and save the more splenetic denunciations for the real adversaries. They would be the GOP guys chortling on the sidelines.
Perhaps we should cap the whole thing with an appropriate quote from the mature, prophetic voice of one who was born on this day 79 years ago, but who never saw his 40th birthday. “Our enemies will adequately deflate our accomplishments. We need not serve them as eager volunteers.”

No one has explained the lessons of NH and IA for the Edwards campaign better than Mike Lux in his Open Left Post “Anger and Progressive Populism.” I think it is a must-read for Edwards campaign strategists. The nut graph:

Edwards’ message was one of pure, undistilled anger at the big corporations who are dominating our country’s politics: he was angry at those corporations, and he was going to “fight them,” “beat them and beat them and beat them some more,” and “stand up to them.” That message certainly resonates with me, and probably does with most of the OpenLeft.com community. And there is no doubt that Democratic primary voters, and voters in general, are angry at the special interest elites. But it didn’t lift Edwards past 19% among first choices. I think the problem has been that the anger is the only thing that voters were hearing. The lesson of the Edwards failure to me is that anger alone is not enough: that we have to combine the righteous anger we feel with telling people about the new ideas we have. Edwards had produced a bunch of great policy papers earlier in the campaign, but his core message in debates and advertising felt like it was all about the anger. If we can give people a sense of how we are going to change things and solve problems, and combine it with our anger at injustice, then we can win elections.

It’s getting late in the game. But If Edwards can restore more balance between the attack and solutions parts of his messaging over the next three weeks, and either Clinton or Obama stumbles, he may do well enough to survive Tsunami Tuesday and become competitive on the home stretch.

As the Democratic presidential contest gets ever-more-intense, and delegate counts gradually become as important as poll numbers, a lot of attention is now being paid to “superdelegates,” the 796 DNC members and elected officials who get an automatic ex officio ticket to Denver. They matter in part because they collectively represent nearly 20% of the entire convention; and in part because they will go to Denver officially unpledged–i.e., they cannot legally be bound by primary or caucus results, and they can in fact change their endorsements at will.
The best place to track superdelegates and their preferences is a site called 2008 Democratic Convention Watch, which not only keeps up with the numbers but also posts varying counts by other sources. By their own count, 282 superdelegates have endorsed, with Clinton holding 175, Obama 73, Edwards 27, and Kucinich 2 (these numbers include superdelegates from MI and FL, which may be excluded from the convention). Obama has been narrowing the gap in recent days, unsurprisingly. That leaves another 514 superdelegates up for grabs, and again, they can shift allegiances at will.
A quick look at the endorsement lists shows some unsurprising patterns: the three main candidates pick up big chunks of superdelegates from their home states, while HRC is benefitting disproportionately from DNC member support. But beyond that, the lists are pretty polyglot, and certainly don’t fit any of the left-center ideological boxes that some observers have tried to build for the candidates; Blue Dogs and Progressive Caucus members are all over the lot.
Superdelegates are unlikely to decide the nomination; plenty of the currently unaligned folks will feel some pressure to follow their state’s primary/caucus results, and a concerted superdelegate effort to counteract clear majority support for a candidate from elected delegates would almost certainly backfire. But they do represent a modest firewall against the nightmare contingency of a late development that makes a putative nominee a general election disaster. And in the very unlikely case of a highly competitive contest that’s not resolved by the primaries, then they could become a big prize indeed, even now in an era where convention conference rooms will be officially smoke-free.

Sen. John Kerry’s endorsement of Barack Obama last week was generally met with indifference or derision amongst the political chattering classes (never a hotbed of Kerry support). If his endorsement had value, many said, why wouldn’t it have been secured before the NH primary, which Kerry won four years ago?
The DailyKos blogger DHinMI has a response that’s worth reading. If Kerry turns over his fundraising-contact database to the Obama campaign (a logical assumption), there could be some buried treasure there in terms of voter profiles and fundraising potentials. That makes sense unless Obama (and perhaps HRC) have already mined the known universe of Democratic activists and donors.

Three big national outlets have released new national polls during the last few days–CNN/Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, and CBS/New York Times. All three have Clinton maintaining a national lead over Obama, though one–ABC/Post–has Obama closing to within five percent. All three have McCain running first and Huckabee second among Republicans; one (CBS/NYT) is distincting in showing Romney plunging into single digits.
Some of the variations are simply of degree. For example, the ABC and CBS polls both over-sample African-American Democrats, and both show Obama now leading HRC there, but the former shows a much larger Obama lead. And all three show McCain making gains among moderate Republicans and independents, but differ somewhat in the other candidates’ standing with these groups.
But the finding that struck me most was in the ABC/Post poll, where the usual questions about the attitude of voters to the idea of the first female, African-American, or Mormon president was supplemented with a question about John McCain’s age.
Looking at the “effect on enthusiasm” of such candidate attributes among voters in both parties, the poll found these “net effects:”
Obama as first black president Dems: +22 GOP: -2
Clinton as first woman Dems: +32 GOP: -20
Huckabee as first Baptist minister Dems: -17 GOP: +5
Romney as first Mormon Dems: -25 GOP: -23
McCain as first at age 72 Dems: -35 GOP: -22
In other words, the “first” characteristics have a positive overall net effect for both Democrats, and negative overall net effect for all three Republicans. But the biggest negative impact of all is the knowledge that McCain would be the oldest candidate ever elected president (Reagan would become the second oldest, at 69).
If nothing else, this kind of polling may soon make McCain’s age and health the issue a lot of observers have expected it to become for a long time. And if he has the bad luck to have one of those moments like Bob Dole’s fall off a platform in 1996, it could be a real problem for him.

After my last post on the Democratic presidential contest in GA, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the perhaps-even-more-pivotal GOP race there. According to the new AJC/Mason-Dixon poll, Huckabee’s romping in the Peach State, leading McCain 31-18, with Romney at 14, Giuliani with 9, and Big Fred at 8.
Sure, some of the Huckabee juice in GA is attributable to his southern identity, and/or to the prominence of conservative evangelicals in the GOP there. But it’s also worth noting that an issue which has become a Huckabee handicap in many conservative precincts, his championship of the so-called “Fair Tax,” is a positive in GA. The Bible of the Fair Tax movement is a book by Georgia congressman John Linder and the ubiquitous Atlanta-based conservative talk radio gabber Neal Boortz. Georgia Republicans have been exposed to a torrent of propaganda on this topic for a long time. Given Boortz’s well-known libertarian tendencies, it may privately bug him that the leading advocate for his tax plan is that Christian Socialist Huckabee. But hey, it sells books, and probably attracts votes as well.

Now that my home state of Georgia has become relevant as one of the larger February 5 venues, I’ve been paying some attention to the state of the race there, and it illustrates how non-ideological the contest has become on the Democratic side.
There’s a new AJC/Mason-Dixon poll out, which shows Obama leading Clinton 33-30, with Edwards trailing at 14%.
In the absence of cross-tabs for that poll, one is driven to a review of the heated competition for big-name endorsements in GA among the Big Three campaigns, which tell you a lot about what the campaign’s not about (big hat-tip to the blogger RuralDem for compiling the lists of endorsements).
As I noted in a post back in October, much of the old-line moderate-conservative white Democratic Establishment in Georgia has lined up in support of John Edwards. Aside from the overlap of these folks with the identity-group of trial lawyers, there’s not much about them to suggest they’re down with the anti-corporate, “fighting populist” rhetoric of the Edwards campaign this year.
The Obama-Clinton competition for Georgia endorsements, mainly of African-American elected officials and other notables, is fascinating for its absence of any ideological, racial, gender, or even generational character.
HRC’s got two congressmen: John Lewis and David Scott. Obama’s also got two: Sanford Bishop and Hank Johnson. Scott and Bishop are Blue Dogs; Lewis is a member of the House Democratic leadership; and Johnson has the most liberal voting record of any Georgia congressman. Go figure.
Beyond Congress, HRC has been endorsed by the only two black statewide elected officials, Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond, and Attorney General Thurbert Baker (who flipped from an early Obama endorsement). Obama’s been endorsed by the best-known African-American elected official, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin. Clinton’s endorsement by civil rights icon John Lewis is countered by Obama’s endorsement from civil rights icon Joe Lowery. HRC has the bulk of behind-the-scenes African-American business and civic leaders, while Obama has the bulk of black state legislators and clergy. (There’s also a sizable biracial group of legislators that endorsed Bill Richardson, whose state chair, former congressman Buddy Darden, is a prominent DLC/Blue Dog backer; they are now up for grabs). Again, if there’s any discernable pattern on racial, gender, or ideological lines, it’s hard to find.
Maybe endorsements don’t matter much, but in Georgia at least, they do paint a fascinating picture of how little the 2008 contest seems to revolve around what we think of as the normal intraparty conflicts. I hope and trust that’s a good thing.

Unity ’08 started life as very much a “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” movement. The idea, hatched by two well-known if long-toothed political operatives, one Democratic, one Republican (Gerald Rafshoon and Doug Bailey, respectively), was to create a grass-roots, internet-based campaign that would mobilize the gazillions of Americans disgusted with partisan polarization, recruit volunteers, raise money, gain ballot access, and then draft a platform and a bipartisan ticket and sweep to victory in November of 2008 over the dead carcasses of the donkey and the elephant, with high-minded folk everywhere applauding madly.
So how’s that worked out for them? Well, yesterday brought the unsurprising news that Rafshoon and Bailey have left Unity ’08 to work for a draft-Bloomberg outfit, while Unity ’08 itself sheepishly admits failure and “scales back” its operations from little to none.
Seems that Unity ’08 has only signed up 124,000 “volunteers”–measured very loosely–and has $1.4 million in the bank. That’s sofa-cushion change for Mike Bloomberg, who is said to be willing to spend somewhere between a half-billion and a billion smackers if he decides to run for president–an increasingly likely prospect despite all his public disavowals of candidacy. Aside from the Unity ’08 crowd, Bloomberg can also count on support from the Village Elders crowd of former elected officials that assembled in Norman, Oklahoma the other day to call for some sort of bipartisan Government of National Salvation.
These developments are depressingly predictable and familiar. History is replete with examples of extra-partisan, extra-ideological “populist” movements that take a turn towards the authoritarian desire for a Big Man who can squash the petty, squabbling parliamentarians and govern in the “true” national interest. Mr. Smith often yields to Mr. Bonaparte.
I am not–repeat not–suggesting that Mike Bloomberg is some sort of proto-authoritation, or that in the unlikely event he won the presidency, he’d suspend the constitution or arrest Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell. My simple point is that the exasperation with political parties and “gridlock” expressed by Unity ’08 and the Draft Bloomberg crowd reflects an attitude of despair towards democracy itself that isn’t very healthy, and that has a long, unsavory history in world politics.
It’s telling that the Unity ’08 founders, and the Village Elders as well, claim to represent tens of millions of Americans who are eager to abandon the two major parties–yet their “movement” now depends entirely on Mike Bloomberg’s polling, and his willingness or unwillingness to throw enough money into a campaign to buy crediblity. You’d think the irony would give them pause. We’ll soon see.

I know we need to move on regarding NH, but a couple more notions about HRC’s big win merit a mention. Karl Rove has some intriguing insights about NH in his Wall St. Journal article, “Why Hillary Won.” I thought these two were instructive:

Sen. Hillary Clinton won working-class neighborhoods and less-affluent rural areas. Sen. Barack Obama won the college towns and the gentrified neighborhoods of more affluent communities. Put another way, Mrs. Clinton won the beer drinkers, Mr. Obama the white wine crowd. And there are more beer drinkers than wine swillers in the Democratic Party.
The dirty secret is it is hard to accurately poll a primary…Our media culture endows polls — especially exit polls — with scientific precision they simply don’t have.

Rove sees HRC’s ‘Muskie moment’ as a big, humanizing net plus. He gives Obama’s track record a scalding critique, which may well become the GOP meme should he win the nomination. Obama’s long-term strategists might be wise to begin working on the rebuttal right now. Come to think of it, Obama is a very appealing candidate, but he could use a little warming-up too.
Rove clearly places a lot of value in the “likability” thing turning the tide for HRC. He does seem to want her to win the Democratic nomination, probably on the theory that her relatively high negatives make her vulnerable, as some netroots writers and a few msm’ers have charged. But that doesn’t mean Rove is right (see elections, 2006 for proof of his fallibility). IA and NH together have convinced me that any of our candidates can beat any of theirs on a good day. It’s up to Democratic activists, campaign workers and rank and file to make it a good day.
Another WSJ article, “Polls Missed Late Voter Shift, Key Absence” by June Kronholz has a couple of insights – one in particular – worth mulling over before we refocus on near and long-term campaign concerns. Kronholz explains:

Pollsters also overestimated the turnout of young voters, who overwhelmingly favored Mr. Obama in exit polls but didn’t surge to vote as they had in Iowa. Although Mr. Obama won the biggest share of independent voters and “walk-ups” (those registering to vote that day), neither was enough to offset the tide of women shifting to Mrs. Clinton.

In other words the youth vote returned to normal in NH. If she is right, somebody deserves a huge pat on the back for mobilizing the youth turnout in IA.
The last thought I have about NH: With 38 percent of NH voters making up their minds on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, is it so unlikely that a pivotal number of basically undecided voters said to themselves in effect. “Jeez, who died and made Iowa queen? I’m not 100 percent settled on any one candidate — they’re all pretty good — and I’m not quite ready to let a small fraction of Iowa’s eligible voters decide who runs the world. I guess the only way to slow things down for now is to vote for Hillary.”