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American Primaries: The Maine Event!
Elki
get busyModerator, ClubPA mod
get busyModerator, ClubPA mod
IRC: [url=irc://irc.slashnet.org/2008primaries]irc.slashnet.org, #2008primaries[/url]
A fighter in search of an opponent
What does McCain do now? I don't see him pandering further to his right-wing. The C-PAC speech is probably as good as they'll get. Does he just start running against one of them, and if so, who?
The best scenario for McCain, that I can think of, is for Bush and the Senate Republicans to get behind him and introduce some nice sounding but generally nasty bills and force Clinton and Obama to rack nays against the likes of the I Love America Act and Terrorists Are Not Very Nice Act.
A fighter in search of an opponent
The Economist wrote:TUESDAY, February 5th, was as exciting as it gets in American politics, bar presidential election day itself. The country not only held the biggest primary in its history. It also witnessed a pivotal moment in the most dramatic presidential race in a generation. Twenty-four states from Massachusetts to Alaska held primaries and caucuses, including such mega-states as California and New York. By the end of the day, almost 3,000 delegates had been allocated under what are often arcane rules.
The races had everything that one could want from politics. A former first lady trying to make it back to the White House as the first female president. A charismatic black man trying to break the ultimate colour bar. A war hero who had seen his campaign on life-support six months ago and who is loathed by his party's right wing. A businessman who spent some $35m of his own fortune—$110,000 for each of the delegates he secured—to prove the principle that you cannot, in fact, buy an American election.
Throw in several more ingredients—tight races, confused polls (some differing by as much as 20 points), worries about the war in Iraq and the teetering economy plus a palpable desire to make a break with the catastrophic Bush years—and you can see why Super Tuesday was a national obsession, watched in bars, restaurants and at house parties from coast to coast.
The Republican primary produced a clear front-runner in John McCain. Mr McCain not only won the most delegates and the most important states. He also saw the non-McCain vote fragment between Mike Huckabee (who did surprisingly well) and Mitt Romney (who didn't).
The result was much murkier on the Democratic side. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both emerged from Tuesday with plenty to brag about. Mr Obama fought a woman who had once been regarded as the unbeatable favourite to a draw. Mrs Clinton, by being deemed to have survived, may have stalled Mr Obama's recent momentum.
The confused result is partly because the two sides are so equally matched (“we won our states and they won theirs” was one Obama spokesman's verdict). But it was also because the Democrats have adopted a primary system that might have been designed to make a tight race a lengthy agony. The Republicans allocate most of their delegates on a winner-take-all basis (for instance, Mr McCain won all of the New York delegates). The Democrats allocate their delegates proportionally, generally cutting up the pie according to the share of votes that the candidates win in each congressional district. Their race will now go on for weeks, and quite conceivably until the Democratic convention in Denver in the last week of August.
The prospect of a protracted Democratic civil war provides the Republicans with an important opportunity. By all rights this should be the Democrats' year. Democrats cast more than 60% of the votes on Tuesday, with twice as many Democrats as Republicans turning out in some states. But the Republicans have done well in choosing the one candidate who has a broad electoral appeal. The Clinton-Obama stalemate provides them with an opportunity to reunite their party and to start raising money for the main battle while the Democrats are still tearing themselves apart.
No longer the underdog
Four days before Super Tuesday, Mr McCain addressed a crowd in Chicago. He was unpolished but pugnacious. He spoke of terrorists who put explosive vests on mentally disabled women. He spoke of Democratic leaders who want to surrender in Iraq. He promised to reach out to Democratic, libertarian, vegetarian and even Trotskyite voters. He promised to beat either Mrs Clinton or Mr Obama like a drum. He barely mentioned his Republican rivals.
Mr McCain did not quite clinch the Republican nomination on February 5th, but he pulled far ahead of Mr Romney and Mr Huckabee. He won the biggest states (New York and California) convincingly. He did well across the map, sweeping the north-east (bar Mr Romney's home state of Massachusetts) and proving his appeal from leafy Connecticut to dusty Oklahoma. He added around 600 delegates to his tally, against Mr Romney's 200 and Mr Huckabee's 155. He acknowledged, with feigned reluctance, that he is no longer the underdog, a position that has played well to his gritty strengths.
Mr Huckabee, who had failed to win anything since Iowa, crowed that his five victories on February 5th showed that he is the only man who can beat Mr McCain. As usual, he found Biblical analogies. “Sometimes one small smooth stone is even more effective than a whole lot of armour,” he said (translation: “like David, I can topple giants.”). And “we've also seen that the widow's mite has more effectiveness than all the gold in the world,” (translation: “Mr Romney is rich but God prefers me.”).
Mr Huckabee's joyous fans, of course, needed no translator. Jim Bob Duggar, a volunteer, likened campaigning for the former governor of Arkansas to going on a religious mission. He brought all 17 of his home-schooled children to the candidate's election-night party. “We have a bus,” he explained. Yet although Mr Huckabee surpassed expectations, he failed to break out of his niche in the South and among his fellow evangelicals.
Mr McCain is marching relentlessly towards the nomination, albeit with a rival clinging to his coat. He is winning partly because voters admire him, but also because he has the best chance of upsetting the Democrats in November. He may lack Mr Obama's eloquence or Mrs Clinton's grasp of policy detail. But while Mr Obama was in short trousers and Hillary Rodham was waffling to her fellow students about “searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living”, Mr McCain was having his teeth and bones broken by North Vietnamese interrogators.
Mr McCain also has a reputation for straight talk (mostly, if not entirely, deserved) and for defying his party in ways that impress centrist voters. Of all the Republicans, he takes the toughest line on curbing global warming, which surely helped him in eco-minded California, where he won 42% of the vote to Mr Romney's 32% and Mr Huckabee's 12%. He has long fought waste in Washington, DC and unlike Mrs Clinton he does not shower pork on his home state. He welcomes immigrants, which pleases Hispanics, who shunned xenophobic Republicans in 2006 but helped George Bush win in 2000. He also advocated the “surge” of American troops in Iraq before any other candidate, and that policy appears to be working.
But Mr McCain has serious handicaps, too. One is his temper. “It is startling to contemplate how violent John McCain was well into his 20s,” notes Matt Welch, a critical biographer. Drunk on shore leave in Cuba, he charged into a brawl between Marines and sailors. He admits to having “loved” such encounters.
Mr McCain no longer brawls, but he still cusses like a sailor, even at fellow senators. He is quick to accuse adversaries of bad faith or even corruption. And he does not seem to care whom he insults. People who insist that Vietnam still holds American prisoners-of-war, for example, he calls “dime-store Rambos”.
Most Americans will forgive Mr McCain his wild youth, especially since he freely supplies so many details about strippers, affairs and knocking over power lines while larking about in his plane. Many will turn a deaf ear to his cursing too. It was not diplomatic of him to shout “Fuck you, you goddamned slant-eyed cocksuckers” at the North Vietnamese guards dragging him off to be tortured, but voters will probably cut him some slack, given the circumstances. Plus, and infinitely more important, he has since then pushed hard for reconciliation with Vietnam.
Nonetheless, some voters will find the prospect of President McCain faintly alarming. Mr Welch says he offers “a more militaristic foreign policy than any US president in a century”. That is an exaggeration. But Mr McCain was unwise to suggest that America could remain in Iraq for a century. He meant only that America might keep bases there, as it has in Japan and Germany. But the Democrats are already using his words against him.
Another problem for Mr McCain is that he appals big chunks of the Republican base. His campaign-finance reform was aimed at curbing the influence of money in politics. But it failed to do so, and parts of it have been ruled unconstitutional. Many conservatives see campaign-finance reform as a tool for politicians to restrict speech about themselves, and most right-wing talk-radio hosts, who are touchy about free speech, hate it.
He is distrusted by several other types of conservative too. Supply-siders deplore his initial opposition to the Bush tax cuts (though he now says he wants to keep them). Those who fear that America is being flooded with illegal immigrants decry his (failed) attempt to make those illegals legal. Those who either doubt that mankind is cooking the planet or are unwilling to pay much to stop it are repelled by his support for cap-and-trade: Mr Romney says it would add a whole 50 cents to the price of a gallon of petrol.
Mr McCain calls himself a social conservative, but he does not seem terribly enthusiastic about it. He rarely mentions gay marriage. Although he now says he favours overturning Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that barred states from banning abortion, he once said the opposite. And some Republicans worry that he would nominate insufficiently conservative judges, though he did help get Mr Bush's two Supreme Court picks, both of whom are popular with conservatives, confirmed in the Senate.
Many influential conservatives are rallying to stop Mr McCain. Talk-radio reviles him. James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a big family-values group, says he will abstain if Mr McCain is the nominee. Ann Coulter, the author of such nuanced books as “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans”, says she would even prefer Mrs Clinton in the White House, because “with Hillary, we'll get the same ruinous liberal policies” but Republicans will not be blamed for them. Pragmatic Republicans will doubtless ignore Ms Coulter, but not all Republicans are pragmatic. Mr McCain has won one battle but has a long march ahead.
Fraternal enemies
The Democratic contest had none of the Republican one's clarity, and the pundits are still probing the entrails for guidance. Mrs Clinton may have blunted the Obama insurgency that had been building since the Illinois senator won South Carolina by 28 points and Edward Kennedy anointed him as the new JFK. But she failed to restore her earlier position as a front-runner.
She did win the biggest prize of the night: California. She held onto her strongholds in the north-east. She also proved that she can compete nationally by winning several “red” states such as Oklahoma and Tennessee, which voted for Mr Bush in 2000 and 2004. Her success in Massachusetts was particularly sweet. Mr Obama won the support of the state's two US senators, Mr Kennedy and John Kerry, as well as the governor, Deval Patrick. But Mrs Clinton trounced Mr Obama by 15 points (56% to 41%)—a victory not only for her campaign but for the Clinton name over the Kennedy name.
This solid performance came after a dismal period for her campaign. Mr Obama raised $32m in January compared with her $13.5m. (Mrs Clinton has lent her own campaign $5m, a sure sign of distress.) A clutch of national polls showed her double-digit lead collapsing. A Zogby poll on the eve of the election put him 13 points up in California. The Clintonistas went into Super Tuesday with the air of people expecting defeat.
Mrs Clinton tried to set up a series of “face to face” debates with Mr Obama—the classic ploy of a losing candidate. Her spokespeople were reduced to pointing out that she is ahead among “super delegates” (party functionaries who wield ex officio votes) and demanding that the party recognise the results of the Florida and Michigan primaries (which the Democratic National Committee has ruled illegal). The fact that they included Michigan was particularly telling, given that hers was the only name on the ballot.
So Mrs Clinton had a good night; but Mr Obama hardly had a bad one. He seems to have won about the same number of pledged delegates as Mrs Clinton. He won in 13 states to Mrs Clinton's nine. He advanced into her backyard by winning Connecticut (which abuts New York). He held his own state, Illinois, by a wider margin than she held hers, New York. He narrowly won the bellwether state of Missouri. He can boast even more than Mrs Clinton can of being a national candidate, winning such diverse states as Kansas, Georgia and Alaska.
This performance is particularly remarkable considering where Mr Obama has come from. Mr Obama is a freshman senator who could not even get a floor pass to the Democratic convention in 2000. Mrs Clinton led Mr Obama by two to one in the polls last October. Even in the wake of her humiliation in Iowa in January, Terry McAuliffe, Mrs Clinton's campaign manager, boasted that “this thing will be over by February 5th”.
The deadlock between the two candidates can be seen at every level. Mrs Clinton is entrenched in the Democratic heartlands of California and the north-east. Mr Obama is strong in the Midwest (he won Minnesota and Kansas easily) and in a number of southern and mountain states.
Race, sex, age and dirt
Mrs Clinton won handily among Latinos and white women. She beat Mr Obama by two to one among Californian Latinos. She won by about 20 points among women across the country (and women make up almost 60% of the Democratic electorate). The Obama campaign mounted an endorsement-fest in California on Sunday featuring Oprah Winfrey, Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver, the state's first lady, who strode onto the stage wearing riding clothes and announced that “if Barack Obama was a state, he'd be California.” But this seems to have done nothing to shift the female vote in California or elsewhere.
Mr Obama won handily among blacks and white men. Early exit polls suggest that he attracted the support of three-quarters to nine-tenths of black voters everywhere except New York state. He won by particularly large margins in two states with big black populations, Georgia and Alabama. But he also did well among white men, squashing Bill Clinton's assertion that he is a latter-day Jesse Jackson: he won 40% of white men in Georgia and 50% in California. He also won easily among young people and better educated voters (“Latte liberals” in the dismissive phrase of Mrs Clinton's operatives, most of whom seem to have Starbucks cups firmly in hand as they say it). Mr Obama won 65% of voters aged 18-29 in Missouri, for example.
The striking exception to Mr Obama's youth appeal was California, despite an energetic ground operation. CNN exit polls suggest that Mrs Clinton beat him in the 18-24 group by four points. But the racial divide seems to have trumped the age divide: Mr Obama won 62% of whites aged 18-29 but Mrs Clinton won 67% of Latinos in the same age group.
The deadlock is deeper than geography or demography: it is about different forms of leadership. Mr Obama is the most inspiring American politician for a generation. Mrs Clinton is an inspiration-free zone—her speech on Tuesday was particularly excruciating—who nevertheless exudes an air of serious-minded competence. Mr Obama's supporters want a president who can inspire Americans to be their better selves. Mrs Clinton's supporters want a leader who can negotiate health-care reforms and mortgage bail-outs. The Obamaites regard Mrs Clinton as a divisive bore. The Clintonites dismiss Mr Obama as a talented wind-bag.
All this points to a drawn-out and acrimonious battle as the two sides desperately try to amass delegates in the remaining 22 states, plus Washington, DC and three overseas dependencies. As the battle reverts to something more like state-by-state politics and less like the TV-based battle of Super Tuesday, Mr Obama will have a chance to engage in the inspirational rallies that are his forte.
Mrs Clinton is gearing up to use the next few weeks to undermine Mr Obama's policy credentials. Her campaign remains as keen on “one-on-one debates” as it was in the dark days before Super Tuesday. The theory is that though she can't beat him for inspiration she can grind him down in face-to-face combat, and there is no doubt that she is the better debater. She is particularly keen to attack him on health care. Mr Obama argues that her idea of a health-care mandate is like forcing the homeless to buy a house. Mrs Clinton argues that his scheme leaves the uninsured vulnerable without any control on costs.
Mr Obama, of course, will use every chance he gets to bring up the subject of Iraq. Try as she may, Mrs Clinton can provide no good excuse for her vote, in 2002, to give Mr Bush the authority to wage the war. In many Democratic eyes, she is a warmonger at worst, and naive at best—neither quality being desirable in a chief executive.
And the race could get dirty. Clinton operatives happily note that Mr Obama faces a sticky moment on March 3rd when the trial for fraud of Antoin Rezko opens. Mr Rezko is a Chicago property developer from whom Mr Obama bought a property and from whom he has received large donations. The Clintons are hardly without their dodgy connections, of course. But they contend that, until now, Mr Obama has been largely unscrutinised, while they have survived the microscope. A long, nasty battle, one that might not end until Pennsylvania, or even Denver, is surely a prospect to gladden every Republican heart.
What does McCain do now? I don't see him pandering further to his right-wing. The C-PAC speech is probably as good as they'll get. Does he just start running against one of them, and if so, who?
The best scenario for McCain, that I can think of, is for Bush and the Senate Republicans to get behind him and introduce some nice sounding but generally nasty bills and force Clinton and Obama to rack nays against the likes of the I Love America Act and Terrorists Are Not Very Nice Act.
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COMIC SANS OH MY GOD
Re: OP
Flag burning bill anyone?
And yeah, I know the margin was greater than 94,000 in Florida, but it would be a huge coup if correcting voter disenfranchisement put Obama over the top as far as the total Super Tuesday vote.
Posting from the other thread because it seems kinda important.
Indeed, just making sure we were on the same page; though you got your disenfranchisement all mixed up in this new post. :P
I would be really interested to see someone do this to a Hillary supporter who really knew their stuff. As I am betting that most Obama supporters don't know that much about policy and are not as articulate.
Oh god. I'm not even going to correct it.
WE HAVE TO ENFRANCHISE MORE VOTERS. ONE FOR ALL ALL FOR ONE.
Or something.
"I'm sorry I raped you in 2000. How's your illegitimate black daughter?"
Let's do gay marriage again! Weeee!
I'd rather see them do it to a McCain supporter.
EDIT: Also, I'd assume most supporters don't know crap about specific policies, regardless of the candidate. God knows I didn't know shit about health care before volunteering and actually reading up on it so I could make good arguments.
Not many people seem too interested in voter fraud.
Probably because most of the claims come from Ron Paul supporters.
Is that Pat Buchanan?
Hell yeah, Oregon's DP law just went into effect, SOMEone's gotta be upset about that.
No Double Penetration in Oregon?
Damn no more Pornegon.
Did I say people in New Jersey suck?
I meant people in New Jersey not Christine Samuels.
And Hakks is cool. And Jon Stewart.
I TOTALLY knew that.
No, we're blaming Hakks for Obama's loss in NJ.
Can someone link to this again, please?
Given the fiasco in Florida back in 2000 you'd think the Dems learned their lesson
Apparently not. The guy that screwed the pooch on the California voting has been screwing the same pooch for many years without being punished.
Ouch.
After the stupid charges made about NH I've come to take a dim view of web-liberal hyperventilating over this kind of thing.
Also - Real Clear Politics seems to show Obama creaming Hillary in Virginia and Maryland.
The problem is that 9 times out of ten the "fraud" is just some hippie or rondroid flipping a shit over simple incompetence or an honest mistake that has nothing to do with any kind of fraud whatsoever.
This isn't to say that fraud doesn't happen, but wolf has been cried so many times I'm pretty much inured to it.
Is it my bias, or are they stuck in the 90s?
Sadly I can't get past the header of the video which says "Casted".
Really, people?
Really?
Well some people claim they had changed parties but when it came time to vote they were still listed as Democrat so they couldn't vote for their favorite isolationist. There was a video of that but how many times have Ron Paul supporters bitched about being disenfranchised so far?
Also lol speech by JFK about secrecy in the government.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I16EXf2wQHA
What's the consensus on Obama's chances tomorrow? Good/bad/awesome?
Derrick knows his stuff
Good to awesome would be my read. Louisiana and Nebraska seem like locks, and Washington has a young liberal population.
edit: Though Maine is going to be a test. It's pretty poor, rural, and Northeastern with a relatively small young/college population. None of which has really been Obama stomping grounds. I don't know if he expects to win, but if he does it'll go a long way to silencing the "Obama needs to expand his base" crowd.