Marbury

strong people, good hearts

It's interesting that the superdelegate declaring for Obama today - Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota - was keen to say that there's no reason for Clinton to drop out:

She should continue her campaign," she said."I have faith that our candidates wil figure this out and this will come to a conclusion in early summer."

"They are strong people and have good hearts," she said.

This may be Klobuchar's personal feeling on the matter, but it's also a sign that the Obama campaign is wary of being seen trying to strong-arm Clinton out of the race.

Senator Klobuchar also said that Obama could dissolve the 'hard vinegar edge' of contemporary politics. Could this woman sound any more Minnesotan if she tried?

brothers in arms

The parallels between John McCain's candidacy and John Kerry's in 2004 are hard to resist. Both started out as front-runners. Both saw their support evaporate to the point where it was expected they would drop out of the race. Both staged remarkable comebacks at the last minute.

Now, McCain is beginning his general election campaign in earnest by emphasising his military experience, just as Kerry did four years ago. Kerry's heroic narrative was fractured by the the Swiftboat attack ads and the controversy they generated. McCain, we can assume for now, is unlikely to receive the same treatment, and will at least be better prepared for it should it occur.

But the Swiftboat episode wasn't the reason for Kerry's defeat. Of more importance was that he never managed to communicate a compelling vision of a Kerry presidency. The 2004 Democratic convention seemed almost exclusively designed to showcase Kerry's military heroism, and as a result Kerry's candidacy always seemed to be facing backwards.

Elections, as Winston Churchill could have told you, are usually more about the future than the past. War veterans Bob Dole, George H.W Bush and Kerry, all of them vastly accomplished public servants, were rejected in favour of draft-avoiders and relative ingenues because their visions of the future failed to measure up to those of their opponents.

McCain is right to tout his military valour. But if he's to win in November he'll have to recognise that it forms the underpinning of the story he tells about his candidacy, rather than the story itself.

cats for obama

I suspect these are college-educated, wine-drinking cats.

the finger-wag

This is the kind of thing that makes me doubt whether Obama's grasp of pitch and tone is sufficient to beat McCain in the general:

I think the president needs to use the bully pulpit to change our culture,” he said Thursday, talking energy at a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser in Manhattan. “We are a wasteful culture. It’s always been that way because of our history. We do everything big.

Imagine the GOP response (you may not have to imagine it soon): So, Senator Obama, you want to make America small? You want to use the 'bully pulpit' to tell ordinary decent Americans how they should be running their lives? Because you and your New York Times-reading liberal friends know what's best for us? Give us a break. Here's what you may not have learned from your time abroad, Mr Obama: here in America, we kinda like things big. Being Sweden doesn't suit us.

the people are still speaking

This report demonstrates why Obama has been careful not to add his voice to the small but growing chorus of Democrats calling on Clinton to drop out of the race (even as his surrogates join in):

Not long ago, in the days leading up to the primaries in Wisconsin, Ohio and Texas, it was hardly uncommon to come across Democrats attending Clinton campaign events out of what they described as a sense of nostalgia, with the unspoken worry that time could be running out to see her.

But with the contest in Pennsylvania more than three weeks away, followed two weeks later by Indiana and North Carolina, much of that skeptical talk has been replaced by an enthusiasm for voters to have their voices heard in the historic campaign, whether they support Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama.

The worst thing Obama could do now is be seen to be attempting to hustle Clinton out of it.

die hard

This state-of-play report from Chuck Todd has lots of juicy stuff in it and ought to be read in full. He thinks Clinton ought to stay in. First, she might just win (when he refers to the possibility that another piece of Obama-controversy could pop up and undermine confidence in him, I can't work out if Todd is speaking in the abstract or if he has something in mind). Second, she's acting like a kind of badass sparring partner for Obama, toughening the rookie up for his big fight with The Mac:

The party ought to lay off the calls for Clinton to drop out, at least for now, because her presence at worst is making Obama a better candidate. The Wright flare-up was the first true political crisis of Obama's national political career, which is remarkable given how close he is to being the Democratic nominee. Who knows when the Wright controversy would have circulated had the nomination been locked up.

friends like this

From an NYT report today:

Two senior advisers and one close ally said they would urge her to quit the race if she lost Indiana two weeks later, on May 6.

This meme - that if Clinton loses Indiana and/or North Carolina on May 5, she should drop out - is dangerously close to becoming the conventional wisdom, in the media and the party. The Clintons know this and are fighting back vigorously on any suggestion that the nomination race shouldn't be allowed to continue until, well, November if it damn well needs to. Expect them to make plenty of excited references to Puerto Rico in the coming weeks.

UPDATE: HRC on Saturday:

“You know, we are in the fourth quarter and it is a close contest. We are running up and down. We are taking shots,” Mrs. Clinton said, speaking over a crescendo of applause. “And in the next months, we’re going to have 10 more contests, from Indiana to Pennsylvania — all the way to Puerto Rico!

 

is al gore the answer?

That's the question posed by Joe Klein. I mean, it depends on what the question is, really. For instance, if it's 'Which politician most resembles Citizen Kane in his gone-to-seed old age?' then yes he probably is the answer. If it's 'Who is the least pompous man in America?' then, no.

Anyway, back to Klein. His rather rambling piece eventually makes its way to an interesting suggestion:

Let's say the elders of the Democratic Party decide, when the primaries end, that neither Obama nor Clinton is viable. Let's also assume—and this may be a real stretch—that such elders are strong and smart enough to act. All they'd have to do would be to convince a significant fraction of their superdelegate friends, maybe fewer than 100, to announce that they were taking a pass on the first ballot at the Denver convention, which would deny the 2,025 votes necessary to Obama or Clinton. What if they then approached Gore and asked him to be the nominee, for the good of the party—and suggested that he take Obama as his running mate?

shakedown

Aim at foot. Shoot.

no silver lining

Looks like I was wrong about that.

obama's foot still on gas/throat

This Halperin post asks why  - if the Dems race is soooo over - the Obama campaign is attacking Clinton more vigorously than ever? Why aren't they moving to an 'inevitability' strategy, and rising above it all?

I think (8) speaks well of Obama's team. It's good to be paranoid in politics. After all, it was the Clinton team's complacency - their assumption the race would be more or less over by February 5th - that landed them in the position they're in now.

snapshot

Mixed news for Obama from the new NBC/WSJ poll. On the one hand, his reputation seems to have survived the Wright scandal. His numbers have stayed solid. However, this is partly because the Wright story hasn't filtered as far out beyond 'high-information' voters as you might think. About half didn't know who Wright was. Amongst those who did know, 55% were very disturbed by it. In other words, there's a lot more mileage left in this story for Obama's opponents, and it's something he'll have to keep dealing with for the foreseeable future.

For Clinton, it's disappointing news: her reputation has suffered more than Obama's in the last few weeks. It's unclear why. It may be related to the sniper fire story, or perhaps to general Clinton fatigue...

jean-paul mccain

Neal Gabler in the NYT has an interesting take on why the media love John McCain:

Seeming to view himself and the whole political process with a mix of amusement and bemusement, Mr. McCain is an ironist wooing a group of individuals who regard ironic detachment more highly than sincerity or seriousness. He may be the first real postmodernist candidate for the presidency — the first to turn his press relations into the basis of his candidacy.

...Mr. McCain can be called the first postmodernist presidential candidate (because of) his acknowledgment of the symbiosis between himself and the press and, more important, his willingness, even eagerness, to let the press in on his own machinations of them. On the bus, Mr. McCain openly talks about his press gambits. According to Mr. Lizza, Mr. McCain proudly brandished an index card with a “gotcha” quote from Mitt Romney that the senator had given Tim Russert of “Meet the Press,” ...In exposing his two-way relationship with the press this way, he reveals the absurdity of the political process as a big game. He also reveals his own gleeful cynicism about it.

This sort of disdain might be called a liberal view, if not politically then culturally. The notion that our system (in fact, life itself) is faintly imbecilic is a staple of “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” “Real Time With Bill Maher” and other liberal exemplars, though they, of course, implicate the press in the idiocy. Mr. McCain’s sense of irony makes him their spiritual kin — a cosmological liberal — which may be why conservatives distrust him and liberals like Jon Stewart seem to revere him.

This is a witty take on McCain but I'm not sure it's correct. A post-modernist would deny that there is something 'real' or 'authentic' outside of the game - he or she would suggest that the entire election process, including the election itself, is a glittering, empty charade. There's a more traditional narrative at work in McCain's guying of the press. He plays up the absurdity of the process only to contrast it with the seriousness, the real-ness, of the election, the issues at stake, and the authenticity of his own character. I think he's actually a romantic rather than a post-modernist.

scaredy-cats

The Clinton campaign's hopes of winning rest on the possibility that the superdelegates will vote, en masse, for her. This is unlikely, to put it mildly, unless we find out something new about Obama that absolutely shatters his credibility (he names Steps as his favourite band, for instance) - for at least a couple of reasons:

First, they know that, given Obama's lead in pledged delegates, all hell will break loose in the party should they tip the decision to Clinton - and they'll be blamed.

Second, many of them will depend on the kinds of people supporting Obama - young, new voters - to win future elections. These people may walk away from the party if Obama loses. The converse is not true. Clinton's core is made up of loyal Democrats who will vote for Democratic candidates in most situations.

So why are the superdels, or at least the super-duper dels (the Gores and Pelosis) not calling for an end to this race? Why not just get it over with?

PoliSci student Brendan Nyhan has a simple explanation based in economic theories of incentives:

There are two classic economic problems here. The first is that the collective benefits of pushing Hillary out are much larger than the individual benefit to any one party leader (i.e. there's a positive externality). Why would Pelosi or Reid risk becoming a hated figure to millions of Hillary's supporters? As a result, everyone is likely to sit back and hope that someone else will pay the cost of forcing her out.

The second problem is it's difficult to coordinate a joint effort to push her out. In other words, there's a collective action problem. If all the leaders could magically come together to ask her to withdraw, it might be less costly to them individually to push her out, but any effort to make this happen would inevitably leak, generating untold recriminations and infighting. The incentives to defect from such an agreement would also be strong. As a result, no one is likely to chance it.

In other words, it's 'You tell her'...'No - you tell her...'

clinton as the next cheney - now there's an idea

I'm just saying, MoDo, an acknowledgement would have been nice...