My little politics blog

I gather you're none too familiar with Hurricanes.

BARACK OBAMA:

You know I-- I-- I've held up pretty good. But I've been religious about getting my exercise. You know, so I've been working out every morning. That helps.

STEVE KROFT:

Playing some basketball?

BARACK OBAMA:

Played a little basketball. We realized that we had played basketball before Iowa and before South Carolina. We didn't play basketball before New Hampshire and Nevada. And so now, we've made a clear rule that on election day, I have to play basketball.

STEVE KROFT:

Did you play basketball on-- on Super Tuesday?

BARACK OBAMA:

Absolutely.

Obama and the Details
11 Feb 2008

One anti-Obama meme that I notice has gotten a lot of support even among people sympathetic to his cause is the notion that he's somehow shallow or insufficiently well-versed in policy matters. Obviously, I can't crawl into either candidate's brain and take a look around, but this idea doesn't seem to me to be especially well-supported by the evidence. Instead, it seems to draw support from a kind of implicit Law of Conservation of Virtues -- the pretty girl can't be smart, the not-so-good-looking guy must be really nice -- that has people notice that Clinton is well-versed in policy but isn't a charismatic figure, and Obama is charismatic so it "must" be that he's not well-versed in policy. He's cool and she's the nerd.

This suits the media's taste for parallels and lazy narratives into which events can be squeezed. But there's really not much basis for it...

Texas and Ohio Won't Decide the Democratic Race

Floating around coverage of the Democratic primary is this notion that nothing really matters until Texas and Ohio. Or, at least, to the extent that Barack Obama's victories in the primaries that precede Ohio and Texas matter, it's only to help him build momentum for Ohio and Texas, when all the real delegates are at stake. Here's an entirely typical passage from today's Washington Post:

Hillary Clinton, effectively tied with Obama in delegates and facing difficult races the rest of this month, is looking to gain any possible advantage to slow her rival's momentum until March 4, when the campaign reaches what her aides believe will be friendlier territory in the Ohio and Texas primaries.

What you'd never get from reading this coverage is that Ohio and Texas aren't that much more important than other states.The states that Obama won over the weekend had a total of 185 pledged delegates. Tomorrow's primary states have 168. That's a total of 353 delegates. Ohio and Texas, meanwhile, combine for 224 delegates. (That's my back of the envelope calculation from the numbers at wikipedia.)

And Obama won enormous blowout victories over the weekend, and is up by double digits Tuesday. So even if Clinton wins Texas and Ohio, it will be impossible for her to make up just the delegate advantage Obama has won and should win over these few days.

--Jonathan Chait

The anger was mostly directed at Senator Clinton, her husband, and her campaign, for a series of what have come to be known, redundantly, as "negative attacks." The most egregious, because so coldly premeditated, was a radio spot that took as its hook a snippet of audio from an Obama interview in which he said, "The Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last ten, fifteen years." A smooth-voiced announcer then adds:

Really? Aren't those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we're in today? Ideas like special tax breaks for Wall Street? Running up a nine-trillion-dollar debt? Refusing to raise the minimum wage or deal with the housing crisis? Are those the ideas Barack Obama's talking about?

Obama's Democratic critics worry that his soaring rhetoric of reconciliation is naïve. But, as Mark Schmitt has argued in The American Prospect, Obama's national-unity pitch should be viewed as a tactic as well as an ideal. It might lengthen his coattails, helping Democratic candidates for the House and the Senate in marginally red districts and states. It would not protect him from attack, of course, but it would enable him to fire back from the high ground. And, as a new President elected with a not quite filibuster-proof Senate, he would be in a better position to peel off the handful of Republican senators he would need to make meaningful legislative progress than someone who started from a defensive crouch. Hillary Clinton would make a competent, knowledgeable, and responsible President. Barack Obama just might make a transformative one.

Obama and Clinton on 60 Minutes last night, transcripts here:

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/02/hillary_clinton_barack_obama_t.html#more

(There was some substance -- not a ton -- but this one made me smile:)

Quote:

BARACK OBAMA:

You know I-- I-- I've held up pretty good. But I've been religious about getting my exercise. You know, so I've been working out every morning. That helps.

STEVE KROFT:

Playing some basketball?

BARACK OBAMA:

Played a little basketball. We realized that we had played basketball before Iowa and before South Carolina. We didn't play basketball before New Hampshire and Nevada. And so now, we've made a clear rule that on election day, I have to play basketball.

STEVE KROFT:

Did you play basketball on-- on Super Tuesday?

BARACK OBAMA:

Absolutely.

Does anyone ever comment on the messanic nature of Krugman's fans?

Moreover, the Obama campaign arguably had more reason than the Clinton campaign to focus on the earliest contests and slight the later ones. Obama, after all, was coming from behind. He had to win some of the early contests. If he had lost every state through Super Tuesday, it would have been all over for him. He therefore had a pretty strong reason to put everything he had into those states, and hope that whatever momentum he got would carry him through in places like Maine and Nebraska. Clinton, by contrast, only had to anticipate that Obama might win enough states to keep going to know that she had to focus on the post-Super Tuesday states. She has a lot less excuse for making this misjudgment than Obama did. But she made it, and he did not. That tells me something.

I also found this account fascinating:

"Initially, Clinton's former White House chief of staff, Maggie Williams, was brought in to run the campaign even though Solis Doyle was still there. The result was confusion and awkwardness for the staff, who weren't sure who was really in charge. But even more problematic was the campaign's money crunch. Over the last seven years, Clinton had raised $175 million for her reelection and her presidential campaign. But Solis Doyle didn't tell Clinton that there was next to no cash on hand until after the New Hampshire primary. "We were lying about money," a source said. "The cash on hand was nothing." In turn, Clinton didn't tell Solis Doyle that she was lending her own money to keep the campaign afloat. Solis Doyle found out third-hand. And when she asked Clinton about it, the senator told her she couldn't understand how the campaign had gotten to such a point."

Did they actually burn through all that money? Without creating strong organizations in post-Super Tuesday states? And did they lie about it? How, and when? I'd love to see some more reporting on this.

Obama's recent successes, in fact, don't just speak to his popularity as a Democratic candidate. A close look at his victories show a fundamental shift not just in who's winning but in who is voting for the winner. Obama's victory in Louisiana could be, if one were especially cynical, written off as success with "black voters." But what of Nebraska, just to take one example? Obama won the state 68 to 32; he won Nebraska's second congressional district 77 to 23. And while it's true that this district (my home district, by the way) encompasses the University of Nebraska and the capital (pointy-headed academics and whatnot), it's also 80% white, with a mean household income of about $50,000. These are not latte liberals. They are just barely caffeinated.

That's something I could never figure out with the demographics the exit polls are producing...

How can Obama's supporters be both affluent and highly educated while being mostly young students?

Students are rarely affluent, they survive on Cup-o-Noodles.

Butrflynet wrote:

Does anyone ever comment on the messanic nature of Krugman's fans?

It's been mentioned several times before in other contexts. He makes up his mind first and then finds data/reports to support his positions and pretends that any that don't agree with him, don't exist. He's used the same sort of tactics in pushing healthcare reform for the last year or two but people his followers seem to get that glassy-eyed look and stutter "But Krugman said..." when you point that sort of thing out to them.