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By Brendan Loy
RealClearPolitics's Jay Cost has an excellent analysis of what it will take for Hillary Clinton to make a "moral claim" on the Democratic nomination.
On the flip side, the best argument for the superdelegates to coalesce around Obama, and end this thing sooner rather than later, is simply this: Clinton can only win the nomination in a bloodbath. She cannot win it cleanly. Obama can.
By Brendan Loy
The most intense debate over Florida and Michigan since the 2006 BCS controversy heated up late today, as the governors of the two states issued a statement demanding -- demanding! -- that the Democratic Party find a solution to the ongoing delegate impasse. Never mind that Governors Granholm and Crist are the very people who effectively disenfranchised their own constituents by moving their states' primaries to forbidden dates, thus inviting the parties' promised delegate-stripping penalties. They now want the DNC to fix the mess that the states themselves created:
"The right to vote is at the very foundation of our democracy. This primary season, voters have turned out in record numbers to exercise that right, and it is reprehensible that anyone would seek to silence the voices of 5,163,271 Americans. It is intolerable that the national political parties have denied the citizens of Michigan and Florida their votes and voices at their respective national conventions."
Look, I don't deny that the "disenfranchisement" thing is a real issue, but it's pretty hard to stomach this sort of righteous rhetoric coming from two governors who walked into this situation with their eyes wide open. Just as Obama says to his supporters, "we are the change we seek," I say to Governors Granholm and Crist: you are the disenfranchers you decry!
Anyway, DNC chairman Howard Dean is having none of it:
"We're glad to hear that the Governors of Michigan and Florida are willing to lend their weight to help resolve this issue. As we've said all along, we strongly encourage the Michigan and Florida state parties to follow the rules, so today's public overtures are good news. The rules, which were agreed to by the full DNC including representatives from Florida and Michigan over 18 months ago, allow for two options. First, either state can choose to resubmit a plan and run a party process to select delegates to the convention; second, they can wait until this summer and appeal to the Convention Credentials Committee, which determines and resolves any outstanding questions about the seating of delegates. We look forward to receiving their proposals should they decide to submit new delegate selection plans and will review those plans at that time. The Democratic Nominee will be determined in accordance with party rules, and out of respect for the presidential campaigns and the states that did not violate party rules, we are not going to change the rules in the middle of the game.
Amen, Howard!
Said a source close to Dean: "Everyone seems to be asking what the DNC will do. But the question is: what will the state parties do."
According to Politico's Ben Smith, the Clinton campaign's "official line remains to reject re-votes in Florida and Michigan." But as I've noted previously, there have been some hints of that position softening in the last couple of days. In particular, it sure sounded like Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland was endorsing a re-vote last night:
I expect the Clinton position will continue to soften. Demanding re-votes (actually, the first and only legitimate votes), instead of demanding that the illegitimate delegate slates be seated, is obviously the right move for them, both morally and strategically. Prepping for an August credentials fight is a losing proposition for them; fighting for re-votes is a winning one. How can Obama argue against such a proposal? If he does, he'll look as shamelessly opportunistic and self-serving as Clinton usually does.
Bottom line, if she plays her cards right, a "re-vote" -- unlike a "just count the delegates" gambit -- is something Hillary can actually make happen. And what's more, it's the right thing to do.
Anyway, very interesting stuff. This issue is definitely not going away.
P.S. What's the statute of limitations on referring to the Dean Scream in headlines about the former Vermont governor and/or his home state? At least five years, right? Phew. :)
By Brendan Loy
Kos: Clinton campaign making Obama "blacker." And blatantly lying about it, to boot! Lovely! (Hat tip: yea.)
[UPDATE: Upon further review, I think this story is much ado about not much. On the one hand, Clinton certainly hasn't earned the benefit of the doubt, but on the other hand, this seems, just on its face (no pun intended), more likely to be a slightly ham-handed application of a standard negative-ad tactic than anything racially motivated... and I don't think I can justify imposing a double standard on anti-Obama ads just because he's black and people are hypersensitive to it.
As I said in comments, "I guess I've gotten cynical enough about Hillary where I'm a bit too eager to ascribe the worst possible motivations to her." But I'm going to walk this one back a bit.
Original post after the jump.]
Continue reading "It's 3 AM, your children are asleep, and Barack Obama is black. Black!!" »
By Brendan Loy
You may have missed it amid all the political drama -- I know I did -- but Championship Week, which actually lasts the better part of two weeks, began yesterday with first-round games in the Horizon League and quarterfinals in the Big South and Ohio Valley conferences. There were two upsets: #8 Loyola over #5 Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the Horizon, and #6 Tennessee State over #3 Morehead State in the OVC.
The action continues tonight with the Sun Belt first round, the Patriot League quarterfinals, and two of the four Atlantic Sun quarters. Probably the most interesting storyline comes out of the Patriot, where #2-seed Navy is looking for its first NCAA bid in a decade. They host recent Big Dance (and Brendan Loy) darling Bucknell, the #7 seed, in the quarters tonight.
Here's the full schedule. Tomorrow, the first of "my teams" puts its season on the line, as NEC #6-seed Central Connecticut State travels to #3 Sacred Heart for a conference quarterfinal. The Blue Devils haven't had a great season, but all they gotta do is win three straight (probably against #3, #2 and #1, in that order), and they're in! God, I love March.
By Brendan Loy
TPM Café contributor cscs: "I think one thing is clear this far into the Democratic primary race: Both Obama's and Clinton's supporters must now drop out of the race."
By Brendan Loy
Jerome Armstrong, father of the netroots, has a post up on MyDD arguing that "Obama has a huge electability problem in [Ohio]." Armstrong's evidence?
[Obama] took a total of 5 counties [in last night's primary], and lost in 82 counties. ... You don't win a general election in Ohio if you can only win in 5 counties.
Arrrgh. This is such obviously, transparently flawed reasoning. As I've noted previously, "winning a primary in a given state [or county] does not mean you'll win the general election there, and likewise, losing a primary doesn't imply that you'll lose the general."
In a Democratic primary, between two Democratic candidates, some Democrat has to lose every county. (And every state, for that matter. But cf., Hillary's bogus swing-state argument.) The fact that somebody loses in the primary doesn't in any way suggest that the losing candidate couldn't win in November, running against a Republican. Those are two entirely separate calculations.
The fact is, in order to win in November, either Obama or Clinton will need to win the votes of a large majority of the Democrats who supported his/her opponent in the primaries. But it's impossible, by definition, for either of them to win a majority of their opponent's votes when they're running against each other. Again: someone's gotta lose. So a loss, by itself, tells us nothing about the November landscape.
Put another way: a vote for Clinton, without more, does not imply "I would never vote for Barack Obama." And a vote for Obama, without more, does not imply "I would never vote for Hillary Clinton."
Armstrong's argument could be just as easily, and with equal validity (i.e., none), be turned against Hillary Clinton:
She lost all of Ohio's major urban counties. You don't win a general election in Ohio if you can't win the urban counties. Clinton has a huge electability problem in Ohio.
But that's crap! Obama's victories in those urban counties in no way suggest that Hillary would lose to John McCain there. Likewise, Clinton's victories in various "swing" counties (as well as tons of solidly Republican counties) tells us nothing about her, or Obama's, general-election prospects there. Nothing. Nilch. Nada.
Simply put, last night's Ohio results provide no valid cause for concern about either candidate's chances in November, because primary elections simply are not a remotely reliable or relevant gauge of general-election prospects.
Well... maybe not quite no valid cause for concern. This, I'll admit, is a little disconcerting:
[B]oth exit polling and copious anecdotes from my colleagues on the trail suggest that some Ohioans were less ready than white voters elsewhere to elect, as Obama says, a black guy with a funny name. ... [T]he exit polls had about 20% of Democrats (and these are Democrats, remember) saying that race was a factor in their decision; of those, three quarters went for Clinton.
That data point is, I must admit, potentially a reason to worry about Obama's general-election chances. (If Ohio's Democrats cite race as a reason for voting against the black guy, what will happen when you add Republicans and independents into the mix?) TNR's John B. Judis elaborates:
The exit polls ask voters whether the "race of the candidates" was "important" in deciding their vote. If one looks at the percentage of Clinton (and earlier Edwards) voters who said it was "important," that is a fair estimate of the overall percentage of primary voters who were not inclined to vote for Obama because he was black. ...
In some February 5 states, the overall percentage of white (or Latino) primary voters who voted for white candidates partly because of race was pretty high. It was 9.5 percent, for instance, in New Jersey. In the general election, that percentage is likely to double; and some of these additional voters will be white working class or Latino voters that a Democratic candidate needs to win. In Wisconsin, the number was very low--only 6 percent. But in Ohio, a crucial swing state, it was 11.4 percent. That's a real danger sign for Obama in a state where elections can be decided by one or two percentage points.
If Armstrong wants to build a case that Obama has an electability problem, those are the numbers he should be citing, and then maybe he'd have a respectable argument. But the mere fact, without more, that Obama lost a bunch of Ohio counties to Clinton, is an absolutely ridiculous basis for such an analysis.
P.S. It should be noted that people who cite "race" as an important factor in their vote, and then vote for the white candidate, are not necessarily racists. They may simply be partisan Democrats who are worried about electability, and believe that other people, who are racists, would derail Obama in November. Such a stance enables racism, but it is not itself based on racism, as such. More importantly, this rationale would not carry over to a general election.
By Brendan Loy
There will be a lot of talk in the coming days about how only 612 pledged delegates remain to be allocated in the Democratic presidential race; 2,642 have already been given out. However, those numbers aren't entirely accurate, technically speaking.
As I've explained before, most of the states that have held caucuses to date haven't actually allocated their national convention delegates yet. Rather, they've allocated and elected delegates to county, district and/or state conventions, which will in turn apportion and select delegates to the national convention, often in a multi-stage process. For instance, Iowa, the state that got this crazy primary season going just over two months ago, won't actually finish allocating its national delegates until June 14! Anyway, when you add it all up, there are actually 965 pledged delegates still to be allocated.
Rather than recognizing this procedural reality, the media's delegate counts generally extrapolate from the Election Day results and pretend those extrapolations are final, assuming that the various county, district and state conventions will reflect the election results and will produce no surprises. Making such an assumption is probably preferable to simply ignoring the technically-unallocated caucus delegates, as the New York Times is doing, because in truth, major surprises are unlikely -- and ignoring the caucuses altogether is much more misleading, in terms of providing an accurate picture of the "state of the race," than ignoring the formalities.
However, with the candidates scraping and clawing for every delegate, it would be foolish to completely ignore the forgotten election calendar. While major shifts are unlikely, it's entirely possible we could see at least a handful of delegates going in unexpected directions due to procedural snafus and shenanigans, back-room deals, and people simply changing their minds. So, after the jump, I've combined the "forgotten calendar" of low-profile delegate-selection events with the primary and caucus calendar, to produce a more complete picture of what the next few months will look like, if this nomination battle continues into the summer.
By Brendan Loy
So, Hillary's "firewall" holds. It looks like she'll win by a large margin in Ohio, and a narrow one in the Texas primary.
Given the delegate math, it remains very, very difficult to see how she can win the nomination, barring a major Obama collapse that causes both voters and superdelegates to have some serious buyer's remorse (and fast). Moreover, in the big picture, she's clearly in far worse shape than she hoped to be by this point, even as of Super Tuesday's immediate aftermath. (Various Clinton surrogates are on record as saying in mid-February that they expected to be ahead, or nearly tied, in the delegate count after Texas and Ohio. Instead they're still down by triple digits.)
But certainly, this means she'll fight on, at least to Pennsylvania on April 22. That's a long seven weeks away, and as one commentator on Fox pointed out, she really has nowhere to take her newfound "momentum." She'll lose Wyoming on Saturday and Mississippi on Tuesday, and then run into an empty calendar (well, except for those low-profile delegate-selection events) with no opportunities to convert momentum into delegates.
Ultimately, her success will depend not really on winning primaries (which, barring a game-changing event, she can't realistically do consistently and convincingly enough to turn the pledged-delegate tide), nor on swaying large numbers of superdelegates (which she can't realistically do without first turning the pledged-delegate tide), but rather on shaping the campaign narrative in such a way that an Obama collapse -- i.e., a game-changing event, or series of events -- can occur. It's all about the news cycles now.
P.S. A less obvious ramification of Hillary's success on Ye Olde Super Tuesday is that it severely complicates the transition from obsessive political blogging to obsessive college-basketball blogging here on the Irish Trojan's Blog. :)
P.P.S. Speaking of the blog, I'm going to un-mark the open thread, so it can return to its natural place in the post chronology. If you want to view all of my posts from yesterday, click here.
By Brendan Loy
Y'all know I support Obama over Clinton, but if the facts reported by Fox's Steve Brown are true, I don't like this... I don't like it one bit:
In the end, of course, Hillary won Ohio, so this probably didn't matter (though I haven't looked at the district delegates). But whatever the facts of this particular situation, this business of judges arbitrarily ordering certain polling places to stay open later than others is a big, and growing, problem. (It would be an even bigger problem if we elected the president by popular vote. In fact, I may add something about this issue to my Electoral College paper.)
We need to improve the rules that are set up beforehand for dealing with contingencies like bad weather -- and then we need to stick with those rules. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is obviously wrong when she claims that "things like flooding and ice and bomb threats" are "things no one can predict." All you had to do is watch the Super Tuesday television coverage a few weeks back, when it was reported that tornadoes had literally destroyed polling places in Arkansas and Tennessee, to know that severe weather can disrupt voting. As for the foreseeability of election-day "bomb threats"... well, um, New York City had an election scheduled for September 11, 2001. 'Nuff said.
I'm not sure what the solution is to this problem, but the piecemeal system we have now is no good. It invites abuse by candidates and judicial activism by judges, and it will seriously erode whatever public confidence remains in our election system if it continues unchecked.
P.S. Oh, and I'm sick and tired of "ballot shortages." For heaven's sake, print three or four times as many ballots as you think you'll need. At this point, there's no reason for anyone ever to be "surprised" by high turnout. Heck, why not simply print any many ballots as there are registered voters? Surely ink and paper aren't that expensive these days, and the additional costs would be well worth it, IMHO, to avoid this constant drumbeat of "WE RAN OUT OF BALLOTS!!!" nonsense.
By CNN
Sen. Hillary Clinton wins the Texas primary, CNN projects; Texas caucus results yet to come.
By Brendan Loy
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