My little politics blog

Mr. Semetis catered a Clinton event, a rally she did not attend, at the offices of District Council 37, the public employees' union, on Dec. 15, charging the campaign $2,300, plus $192.63 in tax. Officials promised him that his business, Sale & Pepe Fine Foods, would be paid by check or credit card in a couple of weeks. After a few weeks passed, he started calling to see about the holdup.

...

Mr. Semetis, however, is not the only one who has been having trouble lately collecting money from the Clinton campaign. The Hotel Ottumwa, a family-owned hotel in Ottumwa, Iowa, played host to an event attended by former President Bill Clinton on New Year's Eve for several hundred people and had been trying for almost a month and a half to get paid.

The hotel had initially asked for payment of the $9,125 bill up front but kept being put off. But the owners figured that if any political campaign was good for it, Mrs. Clinton's would be.

"People were a little more comfortable with Clinton because they've got money," said Kay Whittington, one of the hotel owners.

Last week, the owners heard about an item on the local news about a Des Moines cleaning company, Top Job Services Cleaning, which had been trying unsuccessfully to recoup $7,500 from the Clinton campaign.

Legitimately Huge Turnout in Hawaii

As previously noted, Hawaii caucus turnout has never been above 5,000. The Obama camp's pie-in-the-sky prediction was 18,000.

Final tally? 37,247.

Yeah, but this just goes to show that Obama only wins in states that hold contested elections. Sure, he wins big in caucus states, he wins big in primary states, he wins big when turnout is low, and he wins big with record-high turnout. But what the Obama-worshipping media is overlooking is that in each of the 25 state contests Obama has won so far, his name appeared on the ballot. It's time to stop giving Obama a pass on this critical issue.

Remember, if Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama's name will not be on the ballot in November. And only Hillary Clinton has demonstrated that she can win when Obama's name is not on the ballot. In fact, she's undefeated in contests where Obama is not on the ballot, making her clearly the more electable general-election candidate.

Wins, Not Spins

Jason's post points to what I think is an underlying irony of the whole "work, not words" narrative that Hillary Clinton is trying to impose on her campaign--namely, that Obama seems to have steadily outworked her on the ground (especially in the post-Super-Tuesday states), while her campaign has devoted an awful lot of its energies to a series of (not very successful) spins: that first Super Tuesday and now March 4 would be "decisive"; that she could win by taking superdelegates, or flipping pledged delegates, or getting Michigan and Florida delegates seated; that red states and small states and states where black people live and states that hold caucuses or open primaries are "second-class" or "insignificant" and shouldn't really count. And on and on.

There's definitely a campaign in this race that seems more about doing the hard work than merely talking a good line. It's just not Clinton's.

--Christopher Orr

The Obama campaign management success should become a part of the story, a part of the narrative of the campaign itself. How can Hillary continue to beat on Obama's lack of experience and preparedness when he has now thrashed her in 10 straight contests? How can she make the argument when the proof is against her?

He simply has produced a better managed campaign, with deeper organization, better tactics, and a good sense of timing. Are these not the very qualities that we should look for in a President? Is this not far more revealing than Obama's messy desk?

Hey, now, kgrant, Hillary will be ready from Day One. She never promised to be ready to lead or manage _before_ Day One. So the fact that she's running a shambling, decomposing zombie of a campaign in no way undermines her candidacy or her argument -- nor does it have any bearing on her attacks on Obama's flimsy executive chops. Sure, he's a good chief executive now. But this isn't Day One. This is Day One-Minus-Three-Hundred-Thirty-Six.

The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would "be over by Feb. 5," Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year's. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.

That's why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance.

[...]

Clinton fans don't see their standard-bearer's troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones's Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.

But it's the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it's a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate's message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

But it's the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it's a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate's message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

But in her beautiful closing answer in the Austin debate, I glimpsed a different, more genuine, almost valedictory Hillary Clinton. She talked about the real suffering of Americans and, echoing John Edwards, said, "Whatever happens, we'll be fine." She described what "an honor" it was to be in a campaign with Barack Obama, and seemed to mean it. The choice before her is to go down ugly with a serious risk of humiliation at the polls, or to go down classy, with a real chance of redemption. Why not the latter? Besides, it would wreck the spring of all her critics in the press. If she thinks of it that way, maybe it's not such an outlandish idea after all.

The New Republic

The Audacity of Data
by Noam Scheiber
Barack Obama's surprisingly non-ideological policy shop.
Post Date Wednesday, March 12, 2008

...

As it happens, Thaler is revered by the leading wonks on Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Though he has no formal role, Thaler presides as a kind of in-house intellectual guru, consulting regularly with Obama's top economic adviser, a fellow University of Chicago professor named Austan Goolsbee. "My main role has been to harass Austan, who has an office down the hall from mine, " Thaler recently told me. "I give him as much grief as possible." You can find subtle evidence of this influence across numerous Obama proposals. For example, one key behavioral finding is that people often fail to set aside money for retirement even when their employers offer generous 401(k) plans. If, on the other hand, you automatically enroll workers in 401(k)s but allow them to opt out, most stick with it. Obama's savings plan exploits this so-called "status quo" bias.

And, yet, it's not just the details of Obama's policies that suggest a behavioral approach. In some respects, the sensibility behind the behaviorist critique of economics is one shared by all the Obama wonks, whether they're domestic policy nerds or grizzled foreign policy hands. Despite Obama's reputation for grandiose rhetoric and utopian hope-mongering, the Obamanauts aren't radicals--far from it. They're pragmatists--people who, when an existing paradigm clashes with reality, opt to tweak that paradigm rather than replace it wholesale. As Thaler puts it, "Physics with friction is not as beautiful. But you need it to get rockets off the ground." It might as well be the motto for Obama's entire policy shop.

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You'd be hard-pressed to find a political philosopher in Obama's inner wonk-dom. His is dominated by a group of first-rate economists, beginning with Goolsbee, one of the profession's most respected tax experts. A Harvard economist named Jeff Liebman has been influential in helping Obama think through budget and retirement issues; another, David Cutler, helped shape his views on health care. Goolsbee, in particular, is an almost unprecedented figure in Democratic politics: an academic economist with a top campaign position and the candidate's ear.

One major reason for these differences is the candidate himself. Cutler told me Obama is adamant about consulting bona fide experts. "The staff kept saying, 'What he wants to know is that he's really talking to experts in the field. When you go see him, you know, make it clear that you're an expert.'" When it comes to economics, it's very difficult to achieve expertise without an academic background. It's a field that prizes rigorous results, supported by reams of painstakingly sifted data.

...

For their part, the Obama wonks tend to be inductive--working piecemeal from a series of real-world observations. One typical Goolsbee brainchild is something called an automatic tax return. The idea is that, if you had no tax deductions or freelance income the previous year, the IRS would send you a tax return that was already filled out. As long as you accepted the government's accounting, you could just sign it and mail it back. Goolsbee estimates this small innovation could save hundreds of millions of man-hours spent filling out tax forms, and billions of dollars in tax-preparation fees.

...

Like their intellectual godfather Thaler, the Obama wonks aren't particularly interested in tearing down existing paradigms, just adjusting and extending them when they become outdated. (Thaler urges his students to master the same traditional, mathematical models their colleagues do if they want to be taken seriously.) For example, a central tenet of the economic thinking favored by Bill Clinton and his Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, was that cutting the deficit lowers long-term interest rates, which in turn stimulates the economy. The Obamanauts are perfectly willing to accept the relationship between long-term rates and economic growth. But recent evidence suggests that low rates weren't quite as central to the success of the Clinton years as they appeared, and that investments in infrastructure and R&D might be as important as deficit reduction. Not surprisingly, Obama plans to focus less on the deficit than Clinton did.

...

The Clintonites were moderates, but they were also ideological. They explicitly rejected the liberalism of the 1970s and '80s. The Obamanauts are decidedly non-ideological. They occasionally reach out to progressive think tanks like the Economic Policy Institute, but they also come from a world-- academic economics--whose inhabitants generally lean right. (And economists at the University of Chicago lean righter than most.) As a result, they tend to be just as comfortable with ideological diversity as the candidate they advise. Just before the Iowa caucus, I saw Goolsbee approach New York Times columnist David Brooks in Des Moines and gush when the quirky conservative agreed to pose for a picture.

And yet, just because the Obamanauts are intellectually modest and relatively free of ideology, that doesn't mean their policy goals lack ambition. In many cases, the opposite is true. Obama's plan to reduce global warming involves an ambitious cap-and-trade arrangement that would lower carbon emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. But cap-and-trade--in which the government limits the overall level of emissions and allows companies to buy and sell pollution permits--is itself a market-oriented approach. The companies most efficient at cutting emissions will sell permits to less efficient companies, achieving the desired reductions with minimal drag on the economy.

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=4d40a39e-8f57-4054-bd99-94bc9d19be1a

Despite Obama's reputation for grandiose rhetoric and utopian hope-mongering, the Obamanauts aren't radicals--far from it. They're pragmatists--people who, when an existing paradigm clashes with reality, opt to tweak that paradigm rather than replace it wholesale. As Thaler puts it, "Physics with friction is not as beautiful. But you need it to get rockets off the ground." It might as well be the motto for Obama's entire policy shop.

Think of the contrast here as the difference between science-fiction writers and engineers. Reich and Galston [Clinton guys] are the kinds of people who'd sketch out the idea for time travel in a moment of inspiration. Goolsbee et al. [Obama guys] could rig up the DeLorean that would actually get you back to 1955.

The second difference is that the Obama hands tend to feel less hemmed in by establishment opinion. As one Obama adviser puts it, "Democrats want to be just a little bit different from Republicans, but not so different that they get attacked for being weak." Like Hamilton, the Obamanauts generally reject this calculus--not because they favor some radical alternative, but because clinging to received foreign policy wisdom can preclude highly practical courses of action.

Tempting! Let me think on it. (I'm a girl so my most pressing question is WHAT IS SHE GOING TO WEAR?! ;-))