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American Primaries: The Silly Season
Elki
get busyModerator, ClubPA Mod Emeritus
get busyModerator, ClubPA Mod Emeritus
Barack Obama rolls on
The Economist wrote:ANOTHER week and another painful defeat for Hillary Clinton. On Tuesday February 19th Barack Obama won two more contests for the Democratic nomination. Victories in a primary in Wisconsin and a caucus in Hawaii seal his ninth and tenth victories in a row. Hawaii is small and Mr Obama was born there, so Mrs Clinton might dismiss his runaway 75-24% victory (with 71% of the precincts having reported results). But Wisconsin hurts: it is good-sized swing state that Democrats need to hold in the autumn if they are to beat John McCain. Mr Obama won it by 17 percentage points.
Just as troubling for Mrs Clinton, Mr Obama won it on her ground. Blue-collar voters had previously gone to Mrs Clinton by sizeable margins; this time he split their vote. He also narrowly won among women, a strong block for Mrs Clinton. He won among white males clearly. And he once again piled up big victories among newly enthusiastic young voters, the better educated and higher earners. By a margin of two-to-one, voters in Wisconsin said he was more likely to beat the Republican nominee (certain to be John McCain) in November.
Mr Obama has confirmed his status as the front-runner whereas Mrs Clinton, to have any chance, must somehow engineer sizeable victories in Ohio and Texas on March 4th. They once looked very favourable to her and she still leads in opinion polls. But Mr Obama’s big win in Wisconsin bodes well for him in nearby Ohio, which shares a big white working class. Texas’s unusual hybrid primary-and-caucus vote makes it hard to win a big delegate advantage even with a hefty win among voters. And Mr Obama, carrying the aura of a winner, has narrowed Mrs Clinton's lead in both states and has two weeks to focus his campaign on them.
Mrs Clinton has two strategies left to her. One is to sharpen her attacks on her rival. Before Wisconsin her campaign staff had pushed a story that Mr Obama used speech lines lifted from Deval Patrick, his friend and the governor of Massachusetts. Mr Obama and Mr Patrick shrugged this off, voters were unbothered. Instead Mrs Clinton is likely to stress her theme of greater experience, while ramping up her economic populism. She did both in a speech after polls closed on Tuesday. She said she would lead “without on-the-job training”. She also argued, more substantively, about his health-care proposal. Hers would require every American to have insurance. His would lack such a mandate, which, she said, would leave 15m people uninsured. Expect this number to crop up repeatedly in the next few weeks.
The other path for Mrs Clinton is the inside politics of getting the delegate count more favourable to her. She and her husband are leaning hard on Democratic bigwigs and politicians known as superdelegates, who may vote for anyone they wish at the nominating convention. Having closer connections with the party leaders, they hope superdelegates might help her pull out a win even if she loses to Mr Obama in “pledged” delegates chosen by the primaries.
And she continues her fight to seat the delegations from Michigan and Florida. Both states had their delegates stripped for holding contests earlier than Democratic rules allowed. And all campaigns agreed not to run there. But Mrs Clinton’s name alone remained on the Michigan ballot, meaning she won it by a big margin. And as no one campaigned in Florida she won handily, mainly on the strength of her greater name recognition.
The risk for Mrs Clinton is that she gets stuck with a reputation for being willing to do anything to get the nomination, even if that were to mean stealing away Mr Obama’s electoral victory. With the fight against Mr McCain looming, she runs the risk of looking both aggressive and desperate, hardly the person the Democrats would want taking on the Republicans’ genial and confident war hero.
The Economist wrote:ONE of the most interesting political videos on YouTube features a young Obama supporter, Derrick Ashong. A camera-wielding interviewer collars Mr Ashong in the street and starts to pepper him with questions. The interviewer assumes that his victim's casual appearance—he is wearing a baseball hat, a shell necklace and is chewing gum—betokens an equally casual approach to politics. “Do you have any specifics?” he demands aggressively. “What are their policies?” Mr Ashong delivers a series of carefully argued replies that could form the basis of an editorial in a serious newspaper. The interviewer is increasingly abashed. But, having delivered his defence of Barack Obama, Mr Ashong concludes the interview by saying “I'm independent. I'm not a Democrat. I might vote for McCain.”
Independent voters have been marginalised over the past decade. Armies of partisans have marched over the political battlefield. Elections have been much more about energising the faithful than reaching out to wavering voters. The 2004 election was the electoral equivalent of the Somme—trench warfare between the blue army and the red army enlivened by the occasional daring raid.
There are growing signs that this era of American politics is coming to a close. George Bush, America's polariser-in-chief, has an approval rating of little more than 30% at a time when Arnold Schwarzenegger, an advocate of “post-partisanship”, scores double that. Colin Powell, no mean judge of the American mood, has declared that he will vote for the presidential candidate who can “do the best job for America”, whether that candidate is “a Republican, a Democrat or an independent”. Michael Barone, the co-author of the indispensable “Almanac of American Politics”, speculates that we are moving from an era of “trench warfare” to an era of “open-field politics”.
Over 30% of Americans call themselves independents—more than call themselves Republicans and about the same as call themselves Democrats. These independents are younger and better educated than the average American. They are pragmatic, anti-ideological and results-oriented, hostile to both Big Labour and Big Government but quite prepared to see the government take an active role in dealing with problems like global warming.
Over the past decade or so, independents have been forced to act like either “soft” Republicans or “soft” Democrats—reluctant conscripts into one or other of America's armies. But in this election the opposite is happening—more and more partisans are thinking and acting like independents. Polls show that at least two-thirds of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. A Washington Post poll last year showed that 77% of voters would consider voting for an independent.
By a chapter of accidents the Republicans have ended up with their one presidential candidate ideally suited to attracting independents. The party's thumping in the 2006 mid-term election was almost entirely due to its waning fortunes among independent voters. Conservatives pulled the Republican lever in the usual numbers. But independents voted for Democrats by 57% to 39%. John McCain is thus a gift from heaven.
The very qualities of Mr McCain that infuriate Republican loyalists endear him to independents. He has frequently clashed with Mr Bush, a man whom independents loathe. He has wrestled with special interests in Washington, and repeatedly gone into battle with his own party, particularly over immigration reform. Mr McCain has demonstrated his strength among independents: he led the field among them by ten points in New York, 23 points in California and 31 points in Illinois.
This gives him a chance of pulling off a surprise upset in the general election. Most analysts expect the Democrats to carry all the states John Kerry won in 2004, plus Ohio, which has shifted to the Democratic column. But Mr McCain might scramble these calculations by winning New Hampshire, where more than 40% of the electorate are independents and where the Arizona senator is almost an honorary citizen. That would give him a 270-268 victory in the electoral college.
A case for Obama?
This suggests Democratic primary voters need to pay close attention to independents. The polls suggest hard-core Democrats would be happy either with Hillary Clinton or Mr Obama. But there is no doubt who does better with independents. Until this week, Mrs Clinton's strength has been her ability to turn out the vote in solid Democratic states such as California and solid Democratic constituencies such as blue-collar voters. But she repels many independents who associate her with Beltway business-as-usual.
In contrast, Mr Obama sounds the themes that most appeal to independents—frustration with America's broken politics; hope of finding pragmatic solutions by reaching across the partisan divide. And independents have not disappointed him. Mr Obama beat Mrs Clinton among such voters almost everywhere, even in her strongest states such as New York and California. A recent Pew poll suggests Mr Obama has a 62% approval rating among independents, the highest of any candidate.
This should weigh heavily on the minds of the Democratic “superdelegates” (office holders and party elders who have an ex officio vote in the convention) if they are called upon to break a tie in the delegate race. Mrs Clinton's biggest problem is not that she is being out-campaigned by the silver-tongued Mr Obama. It is that she seems to belong to the previous era of American politics—the one of battling political machines. Republicans have accidentally stumbled through to the next age of politics, although the message has not yet reached the backwoods wing of the party. The big question now for many Democrats is whether their party can do likewise.
Elki on
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Posts
Also, 527s make me sick. I'm grateful to McCain and Feingold for campaign finance reform, but letting 527s slip through was a mistake. Unfortunately I don't see what can be done to curtail them, really.
NNID: Hakkekage
I hope pride goeth before a fall. The fall of Chris Matthews.
It remains that Michelle Obama is awesome, however. Obama Girl should go bi or something.
EDIT: Holy crap.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/us/politics/21mccain.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
EDIT: Wait, this was 8 years ago? What the fuck? Why do I care?
(We have a tradition of fucking things up, unfortunately).
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Goddamn I wish I had a credit card
NNID: Hakkekage
Link when I can find an article.
Clarification: The New York Times is releasing information regarding McCain's relationship with one Vicki Iseman and the campaign's efforts to keep the two separate to avoid further endangering his image.
So many skeletons for the party's to dig up so little time
Thanks! Is there another forum I should have post it in, you think? I wasn't sure I wanted to mess up the primary thread with it. I'm sick today and not really thinking staright.
It's from 8 years ago... Kinda suspicious that it shows up now. I can't see Obama behind the reveal, and Clinton would have waited until she was the nominee.
EDIT: It could be the "miracle" Huckabee was waiting for.
EDIT 2: Keith mentions Hucks ten seconds after I made the first edit.
I really don't know where it would fit, to be honest. I just like it. Some of it is apt, and some just plain funny.
NNID: Hakkekage
I don't know, maybe I've just seen her at some bad times, but she's always come across to me as a pointy, possibly evil robot.
I'm a part of history!
Oh wow. McCain, you're not this stupid.
She had a cute pink outfit on the video I saw that highlighted all three speeches from yesterday.
She just seems kind of cocky. But I do admit, attractive.
NNID: Hakkekage
Haha, I was quoting you to make that joke, but you beat me to it.
Well excuse me Mr Quid and his giant snazzy pimped out counter
God
NNID: Hakkekage
Or just the Times itself. They have every incentive in the world to try to dig up some old bones in any of the candidates' closets.
Wow. Hillary's kind of a bitch.
Isn't there another way for you to donate?
I'll donate on your behalf but I've already donated once so I won't bump that number up.
Well, he wanted to say 'no', but he couldn't get his arms up high enough to push her away.
...I'm so sorry.
Games: Ad Astra Per Phalla | Choose Your Own Phalla
I don't know if the Obama Campaign accepts Simon gift cards
I use them on Amazon...
NNID: Hakkekage
Little known fact: in the event of a delegate tie, the republican candidate is determined by a round of "simon says."
I would be all "up high!" and he would just look at me and I would be all, oh geez
:?
NNID: Hakkekage
No evidence of romantic involvement beyond vague concerns of such from McCain's people, but certainly a shady politician-lobbyist relationship, particularly centered around Iseman's connections to telecoms and McCain's committee positions. None of this would be terribly interesting were it not for a mention that the two had been forcibly separated. There's a quote from an involved party saying they "intervened to protect [McCain] from himself". Take it as you will.
[Edit] - Oh god, Pat Buchanan's about to weigh in on this on MSNBC. Everyone grab a TV.
jeez
that is straight up terrible
I was willing to accept that site as informative with just a little bias until I got to "FACT: Michigan and Florida's Delegates Should be Seated at the Convention," and from there down it just gets progressively more misleading
Stop. Take a deep breath.
You're going to be okay.
Wouldn't seem to let me submit the NYT article to fark, so I just tossed this one.
"Huckabee may have gotten his miracle. Her name is Vicki."
And suddenly I'm hearing the Scrubs musical episode in my head.
Freakishly, I agree 100% with Buchanan. This is shoddy journalism and should not have been printed as written. It's full of ancient innuendo and that editor should be suspended.
In short, Obama should never ever mention this.
let's not forget, though, that it is still mathematically impossible for Huckleberry to win, short of McCain dying or conceding
Apparently they learned of it just before the Iowa caucus and sat on it until after he'd all but sewn up the nomination. Kinda dickish on all parts there.
At the same time, it's theoretically possible for Huck to prevent McCain from getting the nomination, which takes it to a convention, and after the first votes, delegates are free for all. You know - what we've been talking about with the Democratic Party this entire time.
Although, actually, I suppose with Romney's endorsement of McCain, if we assume him to have those delegates, he's over the top now, isn't he?