Download Full Content – Printable Pickings
Today we have a detailed look at the chaos in the Dem race. New Republic’s Noam Scheiber is first in Slouching Towards Denver: The Democratic death march.
When Democrats contemplate the apocalypse these days, they have visions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugging it out à la Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter at the 1980 convention. The campaign’s current trajectory is, in fact, alarmingly similar to the one that produced that disastrous affair. Back then, Carter had built up a delegate lead with early wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, and several Southern states. But, as the primary season dragged on, Kennedy began pocketing big states and gaining momentum. Once all the voting ended and Kennedy came up short, he eyed the New York convention as a kind of Hail Mary.
Any candidate trailing at the convention must employ divisive tactics, almost by definition. For example, much of the bitterness in 1980 arose from the floor votes Kennedy engineered to drive a wedge between Carter and his delegates. At one point, Kennedy forced a vote on whether each state’s delegation should be split equally between men and women. Carter counted many feminists among his delegates, but the campaign initially opposed the measure so as to deny Kennedy a victory. “You had women who were with Jimmy Carter who were crying on the floor,” recalls Joe Trippi, then a young Kennedy organizer.
The Kennedy strategy worked both too well and not well enough. Kennedy won many of the floor votes thanks to Carter’s unwillingness to squeeze conflicted delegates. He captivated the rank and file with his mythic “Dream shall never die” speech–a stark contrast to Carter’s ham-handed rhetorical style. (In his own speech, Carter famously confused former vice president Hubert Humphrey with Horatio Hornblower, a fictional character from a British book series.) But, for all the maneuvering, the delegate tally barely budged. Kennedy won the convention’s hearts and minds; Carter locked up the nomination. …
… If McCain winds up facing Obama, he’ll enjoy yet another advantage: a nominee weakened by attacks from a fellow Democrat. “Clinton hit a raw nerve several weeks ago when she said she had thirty-something years of experience, McCain had twenty- to thirty-something years, and Barack Obama had a speech,” says Representative Arthur Davis, an Obama supporter. The suggestion that Obama isn’t ready to be commander-in-chief is “unusually corrosive,” Davis complains. Indeed, when I asked various Republican and neutral Democratic operatives to name the most damaging twist in the primaries, most cited this same critique. “It’s very good messaging–that he’s not fit to be commander-in-chief,” crowed one Republican strategist. “When you get the Democrats saying it, that’s kind of the nuke in the whole thing.” One of his Democratic counterparts was even more blunt: “It’s one thing for John McCain to say [Obama's] not as muscular. It’s another thing to have a girl saying it. It has some influence on swing voters.” …
Larry Sabato from the University of Virginia writing in the WSJ.
… Why are the primaries and caucuses so different from the general election? It is for a simple, often overlooked reason. A reasonable, highly rounded estimate of all primary and caucus voters in all 50 states–projecting forward to June–might be about 40 million for the Democrats and 20 million for the Republicans. While many independents participated in the nominating contests, overwhelmingly the voters were highly partisan Democrats and Republicans. A relative handful of partisans voted in the other party’s contests.
This year, Mr. Obama has been the clear beneficiary of most of that “crossover vote”, though lately Mrs. Clinton has received a slice, too. (Some Republicans vote in the Democratic primaries because the GOP race is over; some favor one of the Democrats because they genuinely like him or her; others are trying to nominate the candidate they regard as weaker for November.)
The Democrats have at least double the GOP number of votes because there is far more enthusiasm on their side in 2008, and because the Democrats are taking longer to pick a nominee. The GOP contest was resolved early, thanks mainly to the Republican winner-take-all rule in most states and districts. This Republican practice contrasts starkly with the ever-so-fair–maybe too fair–proportional representation of the Democrats. (Isn’t it remarkable that a candidate can win a big swing state by a landslide margin, and emerge with only a half-dozen-delegate majority? Have the Democrats ever considered giving some bonus delegates to the statewide winner in each state? They ought to do so in the future.)
The total of 60 million for all the nominating contests sounds like a lot, until you consider that in November, perhaps 130 million to 135 million Americans will cast a ballot. Who are the extra 75 million voters in the fall? Some are Democrats and Republicans who did not show up for the winter and spring preliminaries, but a large chunk–40 million or so–are “swing voters” who can vote for either side. This number includes pure independents, as well as so-called weak Democrats and Republicans, who often stray from their party’s column. These 40 million swing voters will decide the contest in every single hotly contested state.
Therefore, the party nominating results tell us surprisingly little about how a state will vote in the fall. …
Walter Shapiro in Salon.
Forget buyer’s remorse — the real malady likely to be triggered by the never-ending Democratic presidential race is buyer’s confusion. It has already been seven weeks since a majority of Democrats cast their votes in the Woozy Tuesday Feb. 5 primaries, and even longer in fast-forward states like Iowa and New Hampshire. Those voters picked their candidates back in the innocent days when Bear Stearns was regarded as a pillar of Wall Street and Eliot Spitzer a pillar of rectitude.
Sixteen years ago, the last time the Democrats won back the White House, fewer than half the delegates had been selected by the end of March, with big-state primaries in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and California still on the docket. This campaign year the Democrats are already down to seeds and stems with 82 percent of the delegates having been chosen by March 11. This simple arithmetical fact — combined with the scheduling of the 2008 Democratic Convention six weeks later than in 1992 — is what gives such an air of unreality to the final installments of the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton soap opera. …
… In truth, there is little that is small-d democratic about the way that the Democratic Party chooses its nominee. In some states only registered Democrats can participate; in others, the party’s primaries are open to all voters regardless of ideology, so even Rush Limbaugh’s dittoheads could have their say. And which matters more in choosing a nominee, the Texas primary or the late-night Texas caucuses that were a cacophony of chaos?
Had Michigan and Florida worked hard and played by the (Democratic Party’s) rules, it is likely that Hillary Clinton would be a lot closer to parity with Obama had these rogue states held valid primaries. This is not to argue (as the Clinton campaign has done with more loudness than logic) that the results of these outlaw January contests should be honored. Rather, Michigan and Florida serve as reminders of the built-in flaws in the Democrats’ botched version of Decision 2008.
Politics is purported to be the art of the possible. But the only possible way of achieving clarity in this Democratic race for president is a clear-cut verdict from the final burst of primaries. If Obama holds his own in states like Indiana and North Carolina (both May 6), the race would be all but officially over. If Clinton, on the other hand, sweeps Pennsylvania (April 22) and follows up with solid victories on May 6, then the rush to judgment becomes a tiptoe on cat feet.
With more than five months to the Denver Convention, the problem for the Democrats remains the crazy-quilt schedule that caused far too many to vote too soon. That is the real buyer’s remorse — a front-loaded political calendar that has turned most partisan Democrats into now-irrelevant bystanders just when a real decision is needed.
Mark Steyn with a look at today’s radical chic.
There was a sad little interview in the New York Times the other day. Carmen Peláez is a playwright and, therefore, a liberal, but she’s also a Cuban-American, and she was a little disappointed in her ideological soulmates’ reaction to her latest play. Rum & Coke examines in part the West’s cultural fascination with Castro and the revolution that time forgot. You know the sort of thing — the Che posters decorating the Obama campaign offices in Houston; Michael Moore’s paean to Cuban health care, though it doesn’t seem to have worked out so great for Fidel. The enduring sheen of revolutionary chic is in forlorn contrast to the decrepitude of the real thing. “When I started writing the play, I thought people just didn’t know what was happening in Cuba,†Miss Peláez told the Times. “But the longer I live here, the more I realized, they don’t care. . . . They would rather keep their little pop revolution instead of saying it is a dictatorship. I had somebody come to me after a show and say, ‘Don’t ruin Cuba for me!’ Well, why not? They’re holding on to a fantasy.†…
Mike Lupica’s column today says Patterson and Hillary are talking too much. He’s telling too much truth and she’s telling too many _____ (you fill in the blank).
… Because up to now the only thing David Paterson hasn’t told us is that he had to dodge sniper fire on his way to his next girlfriend. Paterson apparently expects New York Democrats to start singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” because he’s the governor who didn’t have to pay for it, even as college kids start to think hanging with him would be a lot more fun on spring break than going to Florida.
“[Paterson] is a progressive and a decent guy,” Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, someone who knows Paterson from Albany, was saying yesterday. “But he needs to understand that the political climate in this country right now, this whole presidential election, is about character. If there’s one message that the American people are sending, it’s that. We all ought to be listening.”
Brodsky, a Hillary Clinton supporter, was asked if that includes the United States senator from New York as well as the new governor of the state. “It means all of us,” he said.
But both the governor of New York and the senator from New York get called out on character now, and judgment. Why? Because neither knows when to zip it, that’s why. Paterson keeps telling us about all the women he’s had – send up a flare if you think there aren’t more to come – and his Delta House past. And Hillary Clinton talks herself into a world of trouble by making a trip to Bosnia in 1996 sound as if it were a scene out of “Black Hawk Down” when it wasn’t anything of the kind. …
…
… It is why the new governor of New York looks more honest talking about women on the side than the woman running for President looks talking about a trip abroad. Yesterday, Clinton was still answering questions about Bosnia even as she desperately wanted to change the subject back to Barack Obama‘s pastor, saying again that she misspoke and then adding this:
“I’m human which, you know, for some people is a revelation.”
Not so much.