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In a move that will reduce David Broder and political consultants to tears, Michael Bloomberg published a NYT op-ed announcing that he's not running for president. Despite his stated belief that "an independent can win," this was the only rational decision (see my previous posts on Bloomberg hype for more). So who will the third party utopians turn to next?
The New York Times obit of William F. Buckley implies that his most notable characteristic was his use of big words, which they reference in the headline (that's what "sesquipedalian" means) and the lede:
William F. Buckley Jr., 82, Dies; Sesquipedalian Spark of Right
By DOUGLAS MARTINWilliam F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died on Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 82.
Is that really what's most notable about him?
Dispatches from the shady political culture of Louisiana, where Republican Governor Bobby Jindal passed what sounds like a long-overdue ethics reform package:
[L]awmakers are known to scour the chambers for willing lobbyists when a day’s session ends, hoping to cadge a dinner invitation. They need not look far.
Mr. Jindal took that penchant on as well, effectively aiming a blow at the Capitol’s de facto sister institution, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, where business is transacted nightly, courtesy of lobbyists (“sponsors,” in legislators’ parlance).
The governor, ignoring cries of pain and going against the unswerving devotion to Louisiana’s food culture, pushed for the $50-a-meal cap, at any restaurant. No more unlimited spending.
In a town where legislators have been known to proclaim paid-for meals a principal draw to public service, this was an especially unpopular move. Last week, State Representative Charmaine L. Marchand of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans said the limit would force her and her colleagues to dine at Taco Bell, and urged that it be pushed to $75 per person, to give them “wiggle room.”
No public groundswell took up her cause, and the $50 limit held.
Who knew Taco Bell was so expensive in Louisiana?
Via Andrew Sullivan, Kay Bailey Hutchison has joined the long list of Republicans who have suggested since Sept. 11 that anti-war dissent is treasonous, saying that a bill requiring a rapid withdrawal from Iraq would "put a bullet right in the hearts of our troops who are there." (She later claimed she meant to say "bullseye" rather than "bullet.") I've added the quote to my timeline of attacks on dissent since 9/11.
Contrary to my counterintuitive hype of a possible Ron Paul third party presidential candidacy, he has apparently ruled out an independent bid: "I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican Party, so there will be no third party run" (via Michael Crowley).
However, I do feel validated by the poll (via Douthat) showing Paul doubling Michael Bloomberg's support if they both ran as third party candidates. As I've written before, Bloomberg has no constituency and no rationale for a candidacy. But that hasn't stopped the folks at the Draft Bloomberg movement from making this silly video calling on him to save us:
Total signatures on their petition to date: 11,605. Total signatures on the petition to save "Friday Night Lights" (a far more worthy cause, though probably just as quixotic): 11,530. Go FNL!
How do you make a political scientist mad? Screw up the basics of the legislative process.
Julie Rovner's NPR report on some governors' opposition to a Bush administration ruling that would restrict eligibility for the State Children's Health Insurance Program concluded with this infuriatingly obvious misstatement:
Congressional Democrats are sympathetic to the governor's pleas, but to overcome a certain veto [of an SCHIP expansion], they'll need to convince a majority of Republicans -- something they've been so far unable to do.
But as Rovner should know, it takes a two-thirds majority in both chambers to override a veto. Given that the Democrats have majorities in the House and Senate, they don't need a majority of Republicans in either chamber. And, in fact, a proposed SCHIP expansion passed the Senate by a veto-proof 67-29 vote but a veto override attempt in the House failed by only 13 votes (273-156) despite Republicans voting 154-44 against it.
Newt Gingrich's think tank sent out a press release about its decision to open a Silicon Valley office that cites this bit of evidence of their techno-savviness:
An example of American Solutions' dedication to using new technology occurred when Newt Gingrich made an appearance in the virtual world of Second Life for a Solutions Day workshop on September 27, 2007.
If you haven't seen it, the video of the "appearance" is one of the most surreal things I've ever seen (skip to about 1:15 in the video) -- Newt flies in and rambles on about technology in front of a crowd of about fifty wacky-looking avatars:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote this about the appearance:
Gingrich’s “American Solutions” project is a collection of workshops… designed to look at the nation’s problems through the lens of new technology.
The most radical example was a question-and-answer session that Gingrich hosted in “Second Life,” an on-line realm in which large numbers of people — using 3-D characters — interact with each other.
The “metaverse” is an important way to create new kinds of classrooms with participants from all over the world, Gingrich said. “This is the new technology of the 21st century,” he said.
There were some bugs. The comments of cyber-hecklers had to be removed. And upon arriving in a digital amphitheater, Gingrich’s figure was immediately approached by a lovely young digital lady, who arrived moments before her clothes did.
I hate arguments like this one from Geraldine Ferraro:
But if [superdelegates switching to support Barack Obama] are actually upset over the diminished clout of rank-and-file Democrats in the presidential nominating process, then I would love to see them agitating to force the party to seat the delegates elected by the voters in Florida and Michigan. In those two states, the votes of thousands of rank-and-file party members will not be counted because their states voted on dates earlier than those authorized by the national party.
Because both states went strongly for Mrs. Clinton, standing up for the voices of grassroots Democrats in Florida and Michigan would prove the integrity of the superdelegate-bashers. The people of those states surely don’t deserve to be disenfranchised simply because the leaders of their state parties brought them to the polls on a day that had not been endorsed by the leaders of our national party — a slight the voters might not easily forget in November.
The sad reality is that Democrats in Florida and Michigan were disenfranchised the day that the national party punished them for moving up their primaries. Without a competitive race in their states, voters never had a real chance to evaluate the candidates. Under those circumstances, the frontrunner will win every time. The votes that were cast are just not a meaningful expression of Democrats' preferences, particularly in Michigan, where Obama and Edwards weren't even on the ballot (!).
Bill Kristol trots out the buzzwords of 2000 and 2004 in an attempt to link Barack Obama to negative stereotypes of Al Gore and John Kerry:
Barack Obama is an awfully talented politician. But could the American people, by November, decide that for all his impressive qualities, Obama tends too much toward the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry?
It's sadly predictable. I can see "preening self-regard," but how is Obama patronizing or haughty?
Kristol's subsequent claim about how John McCain differs from Obama is even less believable:
It’s fitting that the alternative to Obama will be John McCain. He makes no grand claim to fix our souls. He doesn’t think he’s the one everyone has been waiting for. He’s more proud of his country than of himself. And his patriotism has consisted of deeds more challenging than “speaking out on issues.”
While it's true that McCain himself doesn't claim to "fix our souls," his political program is based on the idea that dedicating oneself to the country is a patriotic duty that gives meaning to life, as Matt Welch writes in his book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick and a Reason Magazine article:
I have learned the truth,” he writes in Faith of My Fathers. “There are greater pursuits than self-seeking.…Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself.”
That “something” is the “last, best hope of humanity,” the “advocate for all who believed in the Rights of Man,” the “city on a hill” once dreamed by Puritan pilgrim John Winthrop... Any thing or person perceived as tarnishing that city’s luster has a sworn enemy in the Arizona senator. “Our greatness,” he writes in Worth the Fighting For, “depends upon our patriotism, and our patriotism is hardly encouraged when we cannot take pride in the highest public institutions, institutions that should transcend all sectarian, regional, and commercial conflicts to fortify the public’s allegiance to the national community.”
...For years McCain has warned that a draft will be necessary if we don’t boost military pay, and he has long agitated for mandatory national service. “Those who claim their liberty but not their duty to the civilization that ensures it live a half-life, indulging their self-interest at the cost of their self-respect,” he wrote in The Washington Monthly in 2001. “Sacrifice for a cause greater than self-interest, however, and you invest your life with the eminence of that cause. Americans did not fight and win World War II as discrete individuals.”
McCain’s attitude toward individuals who choose paths he deems inappropriate is somewhere between inflexible and hostile. Nowhere is that more evident than when he writes about his hero Teddy Roosevelt, a man whose racism... and megalomania... do not merit more than a couple paragraphs’ pause in McCain’s adulation of his expansionist accomplishments. “In the Roosevelt code, the authentic meaning of freedom gave equal respect to self-interest and common purpose, to rights and duties,” McCain writes. “And it absolutely required that every loyal citizen take risks for the country’s sake.…His insistence that every citizen owed primary allegiance to American ideals, and to the symbols, habits, and consciousness of American citizenship, was as right then as it is now.”
Newsweek's Jon Alter has joined the chorus of criticism of Hillary Clinton's campaign, calling it "one of the worst run campaigns in modern political history." But how do we know that? Mostly because she seems to losing the race for the nomination. I want to believe Hillary's campaign is not well run -- that's certainly been my personal view for the last month or two -- but we should be cautious about indulging that impulse. Virtually every losing campaign is described as badly run, particularly when the candidate once led in the polls. Hillary-bashers like me can point to various anecdotes about mismanagement and infighting, but losing causes those sorts of anecdotes to leak and become the focus of media coverage.
In a general election, the same sort of inferential problem applies -- everyone thinks Michael Dukakis ran a terrible campaign in 1988, for instance, but the state of the economy suggested that George H.W. Bush would win. More generally, the literature on projecting presidential outcomes suggests that campaigns and/or candidates may only matter on the margin.
So how can you objectively determine what a good campaign is? In a general election, you could look at how the campaign did relative to the projected outcome based on the state of the economy, though this puts a lot of faith in your model of the presidential vote. For instance, Bill Clinton outperformed the projected outcome in 1996 as estimated by the "bread and peace" model of Douglas Hibbs. Given that many experts also think he ran a good campaign, we might have more confidence in that judgment. By contrast, Michael Dukakis did almost exactly as well as the model predicts, suggesting that he was not really the problem.
The problem in Hillary's case is that we have no equivalent models for primary elections, so it's not at all clear how to project outcomes and measure possible effects of campaign management or candidate performance. In other words, beware of 20/20 hindsight on the quality of Hillary's campaign.
Matthew Yglesias, who backed off the last time he claimed to read John McCain's mind, is again stretching it with the claim that McCain "doesn't even care about the economic challenges facing the country":
If reporters start judging McCain by their usual rules, then he'll have to turn himself into in just another carefully-hedging pol. But one who's a million years old, one who thinks the problem with the Bush foreign policy is that we haven't started enough wars, and one who doesn't even care about the economic challenges facing the country.
What the evidence to support that claim? How would we even know if it were true without him admitting it outright?
One interesting aspect of the controversy over John McCain's possible/alleged affair with a lobbyist is that it's forced the New York Times to admit that the newspaper is loathed by many conservatives:
Later in the day, one of Mr. McCain’s senior advisers directed strong criticism at The Times in what appeared to be a deliberate campaign strategy to wage a war with the newspaper. Mr. McCain is deeply distrusted by conservatives on several issues, not least because of his rapport with the news media, but he could find common ground with them in attacking a newspaper that many conservatives revile as a left-wing publication.
Here's a followup story the next day:
Operating on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, many conservatives who had long distrusted Mr. McCain on a variety of issues, including his peculiar fondness for talking to reporters for hours on end, rallied to see him at war with a newspaper they revile as a voice of the left.
The Republican pollster Frank Luntz needs to keep his weird fantasies to himself:
On Hannity & Colmes, while conducting a focus group analysis of the February 21 Democratic presidential debate, Frank Luntz asked the focus group participants: "How many of you want [Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton] to really argue? Raise your hands." Luntz then asked: "And how many of you want them to make love to each other?"
Yikes.
The Politico's Ben Smith quotes more silly Mark Penn spin:
"It would be hard to imagine a nominee from this party who didn’t win" any of a series of big states — New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. (I'm not sure whether he mentioned California, but obviously that's on the list.)
But as Chris Orr notes, Penn's argument is nonsensical:
Even leaving aside the fact that two of the states on this list had votes that don't count and three others haven't voted yet, this is another example of sheer nonsense emanating from the Clinton camp. Illinois, where Obama basically doubled Clinton's vote, is larger than Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, or Pennsylvania. Indeed, including Massachusetts on this list at all is just daffy, as Obama has already won four states (Illinois, Georgia, Virginia, and Washington) that are larger.
That's right. As I pointed out, Obama has won four of the ten most populous states that have voted so far (excluding Florida and Michigan).
Can Bill Richardson possibly expect to raise much money with this email?
I am writing to you today because we still have a substantial debt left from the campaign. It is my firm intention to meet every obligation we incurred. But I need your help.
Will you make one more contribution to help us zero out our debt and close the final chapter on "Bill Richardson for President"?
I can't imagine anyone besides New Mexico lobbyists is fired up about retiring Bill Richardson's debt. And why would you run up debt on a long-shot campaign in the first place? It's not like spending another $100,000 (or whatever) was going to make the difference.
You should know that "The Hollywoody Show," a satirical online video series about entertainment co-produced by my friend (and former Spinsanity co-editor) Ben Fritz, is now featured on the newly launched Comedy.com. (Woody first appeared on Dateline Hollywood, the satirical entertainment news site that Ben co-edits.)
Also, Julie Buxbaum, one of my wife's best friends from college, just published an extremely well-reviewed debut novel called The Opposite of Love
Make sure to check them both out today...
Via Angus at Kids Prefer Cheese, a fantastic New York Post photo composite of your favorite dynastic couple:
Amusing, and much classier than their offensive "surrender monkeys" cover from 2006:
Following up on my post on where Obama is winning and losing, here are some updated graphs breaking down his support at the state level.
First, here's a plot of a flexible polynomial fitted to state two-candidate vote totals by date -- you can see the upward trajectory in Obama's support levels, though the line weights each point equally:
In a linear regression, the strongest predictors of Obama's overall support are whether it's a caucus (+), Democratic presidential vote (-), and black population (+). Here's the plot of presidential vote, which indicates that Obama does worse in heavily Democratic states (the fitted line excludes the outlier of Washington, DC):
By contrast, Obama does better in states with larger numbers of African Americans, though the trend is concentrated among primary states (the linear fit is only for those states):
State education levels (specifically, the proportion of the population with a college degree) are also somewhat positively correlated with Obama support:
Finally, the strongest predictor of Obama's white support is the number of Southern Baptists in the state (-), which has been suggested as a measurable proxy for "Southernness":
Out of sample predictions from a model like this are likely to be highly inaccurate, but for what little it's worth, a regression of Obama support on black population, Hispanic population, state population (logged), 2004 Democratic presidential vote, a dummy variable for whether the state has a caucus, proportion college graduates, and Southern Baptist population predicts narrow losses for Obama in PA (48%) and OH (49%) but a big win in Texas (66%).
I'm usually a hater when it comes to people floating third-party scenarios, but why isn't anyone talking about a Ron Paul third-party run? What is he going to do with all that money? He can't possibly spend it all on his lame ads, can he?
Josh Marshall resuscitates an unwelcome bit of liberal jargon by referring to the so-called "Taliban wing" of the Republican party:
The truth is that there's little apparent difference between Obama's position [on Israel] and Hillary's or, for that matter, anyone else in the mainstream of the Democratic party or most of the non-Taliban wing of Republican party
As we noted at Spinsanity, this phrase was popularized in 2001 by Julian Bond, the former head of the NAACP, and subsequently came into wide usage as part of a disturbing post-9/11 pattern of comparing one's political opponents to terrorists, Saddam Hussein, etc. By 2004, Senator Tim Johnson -- a moderate Democrat from a red state -- was using it on the campaign trial. It had seemingly died down since then so I'm sad to see it back in use.
Maureen Dowd Sunday:
Hillary says Obama is “all hat and no cattle.” You’d think she’d want to avoid cattle metaphors, so as not to rile up those with a past beef about her sketchy windfall on cattle futures. She could simply say he’s all cage and no bird.
Via Bob Somerby, what Hillary actually said:
She slipped into a "you all" and criticized Bush, the former Texas governor.
"There's a great saying in Texas," she said, "all hat and no cattle. Well after seven years of George Bush, we need a lot less hat and lot more cattle."
It's all too reminiscent of her misquotation of President Bush as saying Al Qaeda is "not a problem anymore" back in 2003, which spawned a widespread media myth, or her distortion of a quote by Alberto Gonzales about the Geneva Conventions. Imagine if she hadn't been a reporter first!
(For more, see my previous posts about her on this blog and our coverage on Spinsanity.)
It took David Brooks four years to write his first New York Times column about a random book he found on his way to catch a plane:
Last week, while driving from a campaign event in Keene, N.H., I stumbled upon a used bookstore that I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager. I stopped in — even though I was rushing to catch a plane — and came upon a sad book published anonymously in 1911.
But it took the precocious William Kristol less than three months to match that feat:
Browsing through a used-book store Friday — in the Milwaukee airport, of all places — I came across a 1981 paperback collection of George Orwell’s essays. That’s how I happened to reread his 1942 essay on Rudyard Kipling. Given Orwell’s perpetual ability to elucidate, one shouldn’t be surprised that its argument would shed light— or so it seems to me — on contemporary American politics.
It's the equivalent of the Thomas Friedman column about his taxi driver on the way to/from the airport.
It's great to see Tim Russert using his position as moderator of "Meet the Press" to bring some new voices into the Sunday show world. Oh wait...
Then we reunited the renowned "Capital Gang" for some insights and analysis on this extraordinary campaign. With us, Margaret Carlson of Bloomberg News, Al Hunt of Bloomberg News, Robert Novak of the Chicago Sun-Times, Kate O'Beirne of the National Review and Mark Shields of PBS' "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."
I don't understand. No one watched "Capital Gang" when it was on CNN. Why would we want a reunion now? The fresh insights of Robert Novak and Mark Shields?
From the troubling counterfactual department: What if George Allen was the presumptive GOP nominee right now? Many Republicans have lamented that he would have been the candidate with the greatest appeal to the different wings of the party. But he also has an ugly history on racial issues that could have made a general election race against Barack Obama incredibly ugly. (By contrast, with McCain as the Republican candidate, the racial issue is seemingly off the table.)
My post breaking down state-level support for Barack Obama is cited by Jonathan Last in today's Philadelphia Inquirer (where we had a Spinsanity column back in 2004):
None of this is to say Obama cannot win white votes, too. His victories in quite-white Iowa, Minnesota and North Dakota all prove that. But those are caucus states and states with homogeneously white populations. Obama has not been able to win consistently in (a) primary states with (b) racial makeups closer to the national average. His victories in Missouri and Connecticut are important because they show that he can win this type of primary. But regression analysis suggests race is a factor in these contests.
Here's Duke poli-sci fellow Brendan Nyhan summing up the phenomenon: The theory is that "Obama's race isn't an issue in overwhelmingly white states because race isn't salient there, whereas Obama can win in states with large black populations using a coalition built on black support. But in states with moderate black populations, race is sufficiently salient to reduce his vote totals among whites, and he can't ride the black vote to victory in the same way as he does in more heavily black states. I'm not sure if that's true, but the data are at least broadly consistent with the story." Other academics and pollsters, including the indispensable Jay Cost of Real Clear politics, have noticed much the same.
For those of you who enjoyed this, this, and this, see Ann Althouse for another example of Eric Alterman dissembling in his attacks on a critic. Pretty soon he's going to be busting out his resume...
One of my biggest problems with modern punditry is the way that commentators repeatedly accuse their opponents of being mentally ill. I've been writing about it since this piece on Spinsanity back in 2001. The worst offender is Charles Krauthammer, an actual psychiatrist who repeatedly accuses his opponents of mental illness, but there are many other examples.
That's why I'm so annoyed when Bob Somerby, the author of The Daily Howler, constantly makes cavalier accusations of mental illness even as he admits that he shouldn't:
Mental illness causes great suffering. Ideally, it shouldn’t be joked about. It shouldn’t be flippantly “diagnosed” as part of our public discourse.
But when the Times leaves Maureen Dowd in print, it’s hard to avoid such talk.
Somerby goes on to write that he thought of "mental disorder" and "mental illness" when reading her latest column. But back in 2003, Somerby complained about Krauthammer's on-camera diagnoses.
I'll repeat his words: Mental illness causes great suffering. It shouldn’t be joked about or flippantly "diagnosed" as part of our public discourse.
When Ezra Klein and Newt Gingrich agree, watch out!
Klein wrote the following on his blog yesterday about the threat that Hillary Clinton's new superdelegate strategy will rip the party apart:
Put another way: If Hillary Clinton does not win delegates out of a majority of contested primaries and caucuses, her aides are willing to rip the party apart to secure the nomination, to cheat in a way that will rend the Democratic coalition and probably destroy Clinton's chances in the general election...
This demonstrates not only a gross ruthlessness on the part of Clinton's campaign, but an astonishingly cavalier attitude towards the preservation of the progressive coalition.
Surprisingly, Gingrich also warns of a Democratic meltdown in a WSJ op-ed today:
So the Democrats are caught in a double-bind: Disenfranchising the voters in Michigan and Florida while allowing party insiders to pick the party's nominee has all the makings of a Democratic civil war.
You might think that as a Republican I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do. All of us do. A tainted or "stolen" Democratic nomination has the potential to delegitimize the election itself and its outcome. And tainted victories produce hobbled administrations. Much as I might have agreed with the outcome of the 2000 general election, the rancor and vitriol it produced created divisions among Americans where none naturally existed before, irreparably damaging the Bush administration.
Gingrich's solution: Revote in Florida and Michigan. I don't think that's likely, but the threat to unity within the party is real.
Paul Waldman has another take on John McCain's exaggerated "maverick" persona:
But is John McCain really a maverick? A look beyond the media's repetition of the word at McCain's actual record suggests that the answer is no. In fact, McCain is a reliable conservative, and if not a perfectly loyal Republican, at least a reasonably loyal one.
According to Congressional Quarterly's party unity scores, which track how often members of Congress side with their party on key votes, over the course of his career McCain has voted with his party 84 percent of the time—not the highest score in the Senate but hardly evidence of a great deal of independence. Similarly, the American Conservative Union gives McCain a lifetime rating of 82.3, making him a solid friend of the right's. And according to the widely respected Poole-Rosenthal rankings, McCain was the eighth-most conservative senator in the 110th Senate.
...McCain's breaks with the GOP are "high profile" precisely because the press is so eager to paint him as a maverick and rewrite a story with which they are well familiar.
Here's how it usually works. Imagine that the Democrats and Republicans have a conflict over a piece of legislation, and on both sides, party unity is fairly strong. Only a couple of senators—let's say Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine, two centrists—have decided to break with their respective parties and join the other side. Reporters will find the positions taken by these two unremarkable, since Nelson and Snowe have crossed the aisle many times before (their party unity scores are regularly in the 50s, compared to McCain's 84). The news stories that follow will still describe the story as a clash between the two parties, and Nelson and Snowe will be footnotes at best, bit players in the drama whose actions don't change the underlying news narrative.
But if John McCain decides that he will join Snowe and side with the Democrats, the story being written in the media undergoes a dramatic shift. It now becomes not a story about a conflict between the Democrats and the Republicans, but a story about a conflict between John McCain and the Republicans. He instantly becomes the lead actor in the tale, as Democrats fade into the background. His name will be in the headlines, and every article about the topic will include quotes from McCain, reminders of past breaks with his party, a quote from a representative of a conservative interest group attacking McCain, and stirring descriptions of the Arizona senator's courageous independence, political consequences be damned.
There is one other key factor to understand in the making of the "maverick" myth. Look at the times when McCain has differed with his Republican colleagues, and what you find is that in almost every case, the position held by most in the GOP was broadly unpopular with the public. Campaign finance reform, regulation of tobacco, even the Bush tax cuts (to which the public was indifferent and which McCain could hardly support, having criticized them as Bush's opponent in the 2000 presidential race)—in every case, the position McCain took put him on the right side of public opinion. So what the press calls "maverick" stands could just as easily be interpreted as highly political efforts to maintain McCain's strong popularity with the general public.
For more, see Matt Welch's McCain: The Myth of a Maverick (which Waldman annoyingly doesn't cite even though his article is titled "The Maverick Myth").
The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which opposes efforts to crack down on immigration, notes the ugly nickname for John McCain that I flagged a couple weeks ago:
The Arizona Senator will never please the talk-radio and Internet voices who now refer to him as "Juan McCain." He shouldn't try. Most Americans agree with him.
I love John McCain's take on how to solve the deadlock in Congress on warrantless wiretaps:
Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican presidential hopeful, weighed in on the debate. When Mr. McCain learned that the House had voted down a 21-day extension and that the powers were likely to lapse at midnight Friday, he said: “That’s too bad. That’s very unfortunate. It’s symptomatic of the gridlock of partisanship here in the Congress.”
To break the gridlock, Mr. McCain said, “people that are patriotic Americans need to sit down together and work this out.”
It sounds a bit like his proposed solution to the conflict in Iraq:
"One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit,'" said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.
Via Josh Marshall, Mark Penn is spinning again -- check out this silly quote:
"Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn't won any of the significant states -- outside of Illinois?" Chief Strategist Mark Penn said. "That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama."
As I've shown, it's true that Obama has not done as well in larger states, but the claim that he hasn't won "any of the significant states" is silly.
What makes a state "significant"? The most obvious metric is how close it was in 2004. And if you sort the states that have voted so far by the competitiveness of the 2004 presidential vote (and exclude Florida and Michigan), you can see that Obama has won six of the ten closest states (Obama votes below are expressed as a proportion of the total Obama+Hillary vote):
| State | Kerry | Obama |
| NH | 0.50 | 0.48 |
| IA | 0.49 | 0.57 |
| NM | 0.49 | 0.49 |
| MN | 0.51 | 0.67 |
| NV | 0.48 | 0.47 |
| WA | 0.53 | 0.69 |
| NJ | 0.53 | 0.45 |
| CO | 0.47 | 0.68 |
| DE | 0.53 | 0.56 |
| ME | 0.54 | 0.60 |
However, Penn probably preferes to sort the states by population since that includes California (also, he referred to Illinois in making the statement). If you parse the states that have voted so far that way (again excluding Florida and Michigan), you can see that Obama has won four of the top ten:
| State | Obama |
| CA | 0.45 |
| NY | 0.41 |
| IL | 0.66 |
| GA | 0.68 |
| NJ | 0.45 |
| VA | 0.65 |
| MA | 0.42 |
| WA | 0.69 |
| AZ | 0.45 |
| TN | 0.43 |
Of course, with all that said, we should be cautious about extrapolating from the primary to the general election.
Update 2/17 9:37 AM: TNR's Noam Scheiber makes a similar point in responding to Clinton supporter Harold Ickes's claim that Hillary has won important swing states and Obama hasn't.
Mark Penn, the pollster who serves as Hillary Clinton's chief strategist, is a notorious spinner, but does he really expect us to accept the sort of claims he's making to justify Hillary's electability?
In a memo touting Clinton's electoral strength, Penn claimed that "Hillary Clinton has withstood the full brunt of [the "GOP attack machine"] and actually emerged stronger." "Stronger"? She has unfavorability ratings in the high 40s and the general election hasn't even begun.
Penn was later quoted making the following statement:
"She has consistently shown an electoral resiliency in difficult situations that have made her a winner," Mr. Penn said. "Senator Obama has in fact never had a serious Republican challenger."
While it's true that Obama has not had a serious GOP opponent in his state or federal campaigns, Hillary only has had one (Rick Lazio) during her two Senate campaigns. So how could she have "consistently shown an electoral resiliency in difficult situations"? There's only been one competitive race. I don't think "consistently" means what Penn thinks it means.
Factcheck.org debunks one of Ron Paul's pet conspiracy theories:
Paul claims that a secret conspiracy composed of the Security and Prosperity Partnership and a cabal of foreign companies is behind plans to build a NAFTA Superhighway as the first step toward creating a North American Union. But the NAFTA Superhighway that Paul describes is a myth, and the groups supposedly behind the plans are neither secret nor nefarious.
See also the fundraising letter I flagged back in October and Jamie Kirchik's TNR piece on him for more.
For those of you who haven't yet read Matt Welch's McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, Jon Chait's new TNR story on the ideological incoherence of the supposed "straight talker" is well worth a read. (See also Welch's critique of various endorsements of McCain by newspaper editorial boards.)
This Google ad just showed up in my sidebar:
Lovely. I expect we'll be seeing more of this if Obama takes the Democratic nomination. (To be fair, however, the website for the shady newsletter the ad is promoting actually says "Whether Democrat or Republican – Clinton or Romney – Huckabee or Obama – if you don't prepare your portfolio, this won't be a good election year.")
There's been some debate among pundits about where Barack Obama has been successful and why. To try to make some sense of what's going on, I decided to actually look at the data. (My pundit card will soon be revoked.)
One issue is how to compare across states given the change in the number of candidates running over time. The method I used is to focus on how well Obama did relative to Hillary Clinton by looking at the proportion of their total vote that Obama received, which (a) attempts to adjust for the departure of John Edwards and (b) contains much more information than simple win/loss tallies. (I also excluded the home states of Illinois, New York, and Arkansas and the largely uncontested states of Florida and Michigan from the analyses below.)
When you focus on Obama's proportion of the two-candidate vote, it's striking how he's run up huge margins in so many of his wins but his losses have almost all been relatively narrow:
Obama has won nine states with more than 60 percent of the two-candidate vote and three states with more than 70 percent, but he's only received less than 40 percent of the two-candidate vote once.
The first question is whether Obama is doing as well in caucuses as it appears. The answer is yes:
Weighting states equally, he's received an average of 66 percent of the two-candidate vote in caucuses and only 51 percent in primaries. Why? Kevin Drum's readers suggest the following explanations, which seem plausible, though the data can't really arbitrate between them:
Caucuses require organization and Obama was better organized. They require enthusiasm and he has more enthusiastic supporters. They require time, and his demographic has more free time. They're mostly in small states, and Obama targeted small states. They're dominated by activists, and activists tend to support Obama.
Another issue is how Obama's performance has varied according to the racial composition of the states in question. Despite my worries about a possible ceiling in white support, Obama has done well both in states with high black populations and heavily white "red states" (as Matthew Yglesias and other commentators have noted). The data indicate that this pattern, which is plotted below using a quadratic fit, appears to hold up across the full set of primaries and caucuses to date:
One claim I've seen thrown around to explain this pattern is the existence of racial threat. According to this story, Obama's race isn't an issue in overwhelmingly white states because race isn't salient there, whereas Obama can win in states with large black populations using a coalition built on black support. But in states with moderate black populations, race is sufficiently salient to reduce his vote totals among whites and he can't ride the black vote to victory in the same way as he does in more heavily black states. I'm not sure if that's true, but the data are at least broadly consistent with the story.
Another pattern observed in exit polls is that Obama has not done as well as Hillary Clinton among Hispanics. At the aggregate level, the data do show that he's done worse in states with larger Hispanic populations, though the association doesn't seem to be particularly strong:
Finally, Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic recently claimed that Hillary "can't win the small states (unless she controls the machine -- think Nevada)" while "Obama cannot win the states where the majority of Democrats reside." But as Yglesias argued, this claim seems to depend heavily on California:
This seems like a mighty gerrymandered "can't" for Obama. He can win Democratic states like Washington, Connecticut, and Delaware. He can win states the Democrats sometimes carry like Iowa and Missouri. Is the criticism that Obama can't win big heavily Democratic states? Well, he won his home state of Illinois and Clinton won her home state of New York. So this amounts to saying Obama lost California. Which, of course, he did. And it's a big state so California gets a lot of delegates. But one can hardly proclaim the winner of California the winner on some "states where the majority of Democrats reside" theory when Obama's winning more states and winning more delegates and winning them in all regions of the country.
Let's take a closer look. First, here is Obama's vote plotted against the log of state population (graphing by raw population is useless because California is so much larger than the other states):
As you can see, he has generally done better among smaller states, as Ambinder observed.
Turning to Ambinder's second claim, we can look at the Obama vote relative to the Democratic presidential vote in the 2004 election:
Again, we see that Obama has generally done better in the least Democratic states.
So is Ambinder right? One last way to assess the claim is to look at how Obama's vote varies with the log of state population*Democratic presidential vote, which roughly approximates the number of Democratic voters by state:
Once again, Obama appears to do worse in states that are larger and more Democratic. The question is why. One possible explanation is that it is harder (i.e. more expensive and time-consuming) for him to reach base voters in those states to move them off their default preference for Hillary. By contrast, in smaller and less heavily Democratic states, there are fewer caucus and primary voters for him that he can reach more effectively. Another possibility is that Hillary's elite support is stronger in larger and more Democratic states, whereas Obama has greater support from "red state" Democratic politicians who are concerned about Hillary's performance in the general election.
It's hard to separate the associations between these variables because larger states are (on average) more black and Hispanic, more Democratic, and less likely to have caucuses. But when we put all these factors together in a linear regression (including both black population and black population squared), we find that the U-shaped quadratic relationship for black population and the positive relationship for caucuses are statistically significant, while the other factors are not. In other words, the evidence so far is consistent with the conventional wisdom that Obama does best in heavily black and heavily white states and in caucuses and he does less well in moderately black states and primaries.
[Disclaimers: This is all just a rough cut at early aggregate voting data. We only have 30 observations so far. Finally, we can't make direct inferences about individual behavior based on aggregate data.]
Update 2/11 12:06 PM: Kevin Drum links and asks an additional question:
I'd add a caveat to this. Brendan actually finds that all five pieces of CW are true, but that the last three aren't statistically significant. In other words, there's at least a 5% possibility that they might be the result of chance.
But this is a one shot deal, and I wonder if the results are significant at, say, a 90% level? In an academic setting this wouldn't be good enough, but in a real-life setting where this is the only data you have (no followup studies, folks!), most people would probably think that 90% certainty was fairly convincing. For better or worse, it looks to me like the CW is likely true on all five counts.
To answer the question, the other variables aren't close to being significant. However, I wouldn't put too much stock in the results of any of these hypothesis tests because (a) hypothesis testing is riddled with epistemological problems and (b) it's difficult to achieve significance in small samples.
Update 2/11 3:50 PM: Josh Patashnik at TNR flags a more elaborate regression model predicting the Obama vote by the Daily Kos blogger poblano, who states that he "looked at pretty much every variable could think of that we can quantify about a state and that might affect the Obama-Clinton vote share" before putting together a model with nine variables. However, as Patashnik notes, the performance of the model over the weekend was "only so-so":
Poblano at Daily Kos has done a great job putting together a regression predicting Obama's share of the vote in each state. I'm not totally sold on it--it performs very well for the states that voted prior to when the model was constructed (which it obviously should, given that that's how the parameters were chosen in the first place), but did only so-so for this weekend's states (overestimating Obama's support in Louisiana and Nebraska, and underestimating it in Washington and Maine).
This is what's known as "overfitting" and it's the reason I didn't make predictions for upcoming primaries based on the regression model I discuss above. The problem is that model performance usually deteriorates dramatically when you make predictions out of sample (i.e. for new data). Poblano's search for explanatory variables is likely to make this problem worse.
Bill Bishop at the Daily Yonder (formerly of the Austin-American Statesman) also passes along two graphs showing that at the county level (rather than the state level) Obama actually did better in more Democratic counties in both California and Missouri:
The lesson is that the answers we get depend, in part, on the level of aggregation we consider. Remember the Gelman et al study of the relationship between income and party, which finds that the association varies by state income (PDF). In the poorest states, income is closely related to party affiliation, but the relationship weakens as state income increases. It's possible that something similar is going on here.
Finally, per Roger Ford's comment below, I pulled all the available exit poll data to look at how the white vote for Obama varies with the black population in the state, which is a more direct measure of the racial threat hypothesis above. Here's the graph of interest plotted with both a linear and a quadratic fit:
The quadratic relationship is statistically significant in a regression including the other factors listed above, though I'm not sure why white support for Obama would increase in heavily black states relative to moderately black states. (Whites there are more comfortable with minority elected leadership?) The linear relationship isn't statistically significant, but see above for the appropriate caveats about hypothesis testing.
Update 2/11 4:38 PM: The graph of population*Democratic presidential vote and the discussion of it above have been updated to correct an error caught by TerryVB. (Specifically, I switched the X-axis from log(pop)*presidential vote to log(pop*presidential vote).)
Update 2/11 9:52 PM: To try to understand variation in the white vote, I tried poblano's idea of using Southern Baptist population as a continuous variable that can proxy for "Southernness" (as suggested by IKL in comments below). And indeed the relationship between Southern Baptist population and Obama's white support is striking (and statistically significant):
Once you account for this variable, the relationship between black population and Obama's support among whites vanishes.
Update 2/12 10:06 AM: Plots of state education and income are inconclusive in bivariate form, though education is positive and statistically significant in a multiple regression as poblano notes:
The reason, I'm guessing, is that the education-Obama relationship only shows up once you control for Democratic presidential vote. If you disaggregate by states Kerry and Bush won, it seems to be positive for "red states" and negative for "blue states":
Update 2/13 9:49 AM: Pollster.com's Mark Blumenthal provides an accessible overview of some of the pros and cons of regression analysis for those who are not familiar with it. But it's worth noting one additional limitation. He links to another regression post by Jay Cost at Real Clear Politics which finds that Hillary Clinton does better in states she visits more. Cost suggests that this means her visits are effective in increasing support. While that might be true, it is also possible that Clinton is visiting states where she has more support (or where her support is increasing). Regression can't handle this problem, which is known as endogeneity, directly (different approaches are usually required). The general issue is that regression tells us nothing about causality; it can only tell us about possible associations between variables.
Update 2/14 12:42 PM: techne and other commenters argue that Obama's support in heavily white states is driven by the public nature of caucuses, which is possible. As such, I've made a new version of the graph showing Obama support by black population with a linear trend fit only to the primary states. This version is much more dramatic as a result of including Washington, DC (it also includes VA and MD):
Also, Cost makes a thoughtful case for why primary/caucus campaign visits might not be endogenous in a comment below.
With John McCain's lock on the GOP nomination deflating elite interest in Michael Bloomberg, pundits have to look elsewhere to engage in pointless speculation about third-party presidential candidacies. Bizarrely, Robert Wright suggested on Bloggingheads that Mike Huckabee might run -- an unlikely idea that was immediately squashed by Huckabee's statement today on "Meet the Press" that he would vote for the Republican nominee. It may be a signal, though, that the pointless speculation will now focus on McCain-hating conservatives rather than anti-partisan centrists.
As others have noted, Mitt Romney justified his exit from the Republican presidential race yesterday by smearing advocates of withdrawal from Iraq as wanting to "surrender to terror":
If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.
Unfortunately, it's the latest chapter in a long pattern of GOP attacks on dissent since 9/11. Click here for the full timeline (now archived at a permanent page).
A friend in law school point out that Chelsea Clinton appears to have fooled the Wall Street Journal into misrepresenting her mother's career:
Ms. [Chelsea] Clinton said that, as president, her mother will "get the government back into the student-loan business" and do away with the federal financial-aid forms that families must fill out, drawing nods of approval from the audience.
Without a 2% government loan to go to Yale Law School, Hillary Clinton may have had to take a job at a high-paying law firm to pay back her debt rather than going into public service, Ms. Clinton said. "I might not be here today," she said.
Clinton did go into public service immediately after law school. But as McClatchy notes in a story on her claims to "35 years of change," she actually left her nonprofit job after less than a year and subsequently spent 15 years in a corporate firm:
Clinton worked at the Children's Defense Fund for less than a year, and that's the only full-time job in the nonprofit sector she's ever had. She also worked briefly as a law professor.
Clinton spent the bulk of her career — 15 of those 35 years — at one of Arkansas' most prestigious corporate law firms, where she represented big companies and served on corporate boards.
It's no wonder the Journal is confused, of course. The Clinton campaign has repeatedly suggested that she worked in nonprofits for most of her career:
She routinely tells voters that she's "been working to bring positive change to people's lives for 35 years." She told a voter in New Hampshire: "I've spent so much of my life in the nonprofit sector." Speaking in South Carolina, Bill Clinton said his wife "could have taken a job with a firm ... Instead she went to work with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children's Defense Fund."
...Her campaign Web site biography devotes six paragraphs to her pro bono legal work for the poor but sums up the bulk of her experience in one sentence: "She also continued her legal career as a partner in a law firm."
To be fair, McClatchy does point out that Hillary did extensive public service work while serving as a corporate lawyer. But that's not what she and her family are implying.
The annoying pattern of silly extrapolation from the primaries to the general election continues.
Rush Limbaugh is
