Megan McArdle, Matthew Yglesias and I explore the Democrats, Rev. Wright, and end games.
« Michigan Primary Trouble: The Final Snag? | Main | The "I Would Be Remiss" Post » The Page: Democratic End Games18 Mar 2008 05:11 pm Comments (19)
Megan's statement that Hillary's voters will vote for him seems misinformed. Maybe she hasn't been reading much of the pro-Clinton blogs lately that are rating Obama as as bad as or worse than Bush, praising TV guys like Pat Buchanan, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Bill O'Reilly, Karl Rove and other conservatives as the voices of reason, the Pew poll that showed Obama bled Clinton voters to a much greater degree than she did-and that was before his defeats in OH, and TX and his upcoming defeat in PA, and before the Wright stuff broke. Also, Marc raised a good point. At the end of this, Hillary will likely have had more democrats vote for than for Obama. She will have won the majority of delegates from closed dem primaries and from dem states. To say Obama is the choice of democrats is inaccurate. He's the choice of democrats+independents+republicans, but among purely democrats, it's probably Hillary. And reading a bunch of commentary on watching TV on his speech today only reminds me of the Pauline Kael NYT quote after Nixon won in 72 of "how'd he win, I don't know a single person who voted for him?" The media and the blogs are largely echo chambers and no one realizes how others view things. The Obama supporters and liberals who loved it can't see how large numbers of people could be turned off and discouraged by it, and vice versa. I think, on balance it hurts him going forward in the general but helps him for the nomination. 
Re: Would Obama supporters vote for Hillary in the general: Partisan divide must be balanced against how totally screwed up the American economy/foreign standing/Iraq war/political machine is. Which is to say, many of us Obama supporters may look at a Clinton/McCain race and say, Fuck it, let McCain have it - the Republics screwed it up, let them try to dig out of it. Leaving that aside, there is not one Obama supporter I know here in the Dartmouth region of NH that will vote for Clinton - and the feeling is so strong that I doubt they'll change their minds.
I too am at least hoping that the "i'll never vote for him/her" vein of the party is simply a side effect of a hard fought primary. Super, I have a question. I'm sympathetic to the fact that the speech may have wowed Obama supporters more so than Hillary supporters (I've heard some pretty rank things about the speech over at MyDD). For myself, I think that regardless of whether it made you change your mind about Obama, it was a pretty amazing speech, just content-wise. But you said that many people would be turned off or discouraged by it, and I'm wondering why? I get not being compelled by it, or not having your mind changed by it, but what about the speech would make you like Obama less? And Marc, can you guys do more of these?
I am luckily pretty detached, since I wasn't rooting for either of them in the first place. There are lots of different forces at work. The Republicans have wanted to run against Clinton for years, which makes me like Obama. One reason their platforms are generally conceived to be similar is that, with discussions like the one above, there are no serious policy debates. The "news" is being driven by ratings, and the great mass of people are uninterested, and would take a while to understand, the differences in insurance plans HRC and BHO each have for medical stuff. I don't know the difference, so maybe I'm not one to talk. I do not expect any of the three remaining Presidential candidates to do anything to fix the situation in Israel/Palestine, so, for at least the next four years, the terrorists have won their giant, anti-American recruiting poster. I don't know who is greener.
You didn't really mean to call this "The Page," did you, Marc?
Thank you ever so much for sharing this and thank you ever so much for saying what I want someone, anyone to say. I am a 48 year old white woman who is a devout Obama supporter and I am damn sick and tired of the main stream media pretending that Hillary has any other function in this race then to diminish Obama so much that he becomes unelectable. I wish she would do what's best for the party and for the American people and admit it is IMPOSSIBLE for her to win and drop out. But because all the leaders in the Democratic party are so afraid to hitch their wagons to hope and change and a different way of doing politics that they can't tell Hillary, the party is over and it's time to go home. I will never vote for her and now it has become a game of whether she will piss me off enough to work for the John McCain campaign, which to be truthful would be worse then eating broken glass. So thanks again for the honesty and I guess I'll have to go at least another 5 weeks with the bullcrap of Hillary and Obama being tied. They aren't even close.
I guess I'll have to go at least another 5 weeks with the bullcrap of Hillary and Obama being tied. They aren't even close. Deb: they most certainly are "close." If you look at their pledged delegate totals in the aggregate, his portion is something like four or five percentage points larger than hers. Fifty-three forty eight fits most people's definition of "close." And in the popular vote, it's a similarly small edge, even counting the numbers in the manner most favorable to Obama. The fact is it's a close contest so far. What makes it so difficult for Clinton is that there isn't much voting left to go, which makes overcoming even modest deficits an extremely daunting task. Barring the eruption of a near-campaign ending scandal, Obama won't be overcome as the pledged delegate leader. But he could still be passed as the popular vote leader, given the possibility for Clinton to wrack up sizable margins in Pennsylvannia, Kentucky, West Virginia and Puerto Rico. Wishing that Hillary Rodham Clinton were far behind Senator Obama does not make it so.
From Liza: "I just need to say this : Sunlight is not your enemy." LOL. One could add, for Matt and Marc's benefit: "Neither is the treadmill."
The Atlantic, defined succinctly: "Unfit Goths for Obama '08"
"What is the female version of 'elders'?" It's elders. Dang. That's like asking what's the female version of senator.
I wish that some intrepid journalist would confront Hillary Clinton directly and ask her just how she imagines that the Democratic Party could stay glued together in the event that the superdelegates throw her the nomination in spite of Obama's insurmountable delegate lead. The question the Party needs to ask itself is not whether there is some theoretical scenario by which HRC could win. The question is, how could she win without fracturing the Party and alienating the millions of newly-inspired African-Americans, youth, and progressives who have come to the political process because of Obama? That's the 800-lb. gorilla in the room, and the sooner we face up to that question, the better.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/16/4538/35934/187/477813 In case anyone hasn't seen a thorough analysis of the delegate math, enclosed is a link to a good one. Bottom line, there ain't no way for Hillary to pull it off by the numbers, so she has to rely on some alternative scheme to seduce the superdelegates into voting her way. Part of the problem for Democrats is that there is no way that she can close the gap without running a lowdown nasty campaign intent at battering Obama and making him appear to be unelectable. Cheerfully reciting her healthcare plan isn't going to get the job done. So IMHO we're in for a couple months of big-time ugly, unless the superdelegates come to their senses and put Hillary out of her misery sooner than later.
obama's speech was somewhat lacking in total honesty. he portrayed geraldine ferraro's comments as implying "that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action". her comments did nothing of the sort, they were simply a statement of fact that was twisted by obama's supporters and the media. they painted her as a racist for simply having an opinion that obama would not be where he is if were he white or a woman. as jon stewart joked, she was so determined to attack obama that she gave the interview to the powerful newspaper the Daily Breeze. but, as political-buzz.com says: "...Obama is so arrogant as to believe that he - and only he - can comment on race and politics...." obama also said, "In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans." that would be news to john edwards, who received the most white votes in S.C., and hillary clinton, who received the second most. they pretty much split the white vote and obama cleaned up with 80% of the black vote, and a few days later, edwards was history. but if obama had stated those facts correctly, he would have made ferraro's case for her, and it wouldn't have made a very good talking point in his speech. when you're on a roll, it's much better just to cook the books. obama has spent his entire campaign calling hillary and everyone else who came before him worthless dinosaurs who don't know how to get anything done. is that somehow not attacking his opponents? yet hillary is portrayed by obama supporters as a horrible woman who is always attacking, one who should get out of the race even though the process has not played itself out. some of us take offense at that. there have been a lot of democrats fighting the good fight for many years while obama was, hmmm, oh yeah, writing his two autobiographies. he has led the most charmed political life of anyone in recent history. despite his general lack of experience, everyone has treated him with kid gloves. how much of that special treatment has been borne out of fears of being labeled racist? probably the last guy to get such a free ride was the president obama professed such admiration for, ronald reagan. but this is not 1980. if and when obama gets the chance to prove himself, the republicans are not going to roll over and play dead, no matter how many arrogant speeches full of untruths he cares to deliver.
manrod, You might want to take a few minutes and review the number of predominantly-white states where Obama has won more delegates than Clinton. VT, WA, CO, MN, ME, IL, MO, KS, NE, ID, UT, WY, ND, CT... There may be more, those are just the ones off the top of my head. And so far as your point that Obama "has led a charmed political life," you might consider that he has earned his way. He lost his first attempt to get into the Illinois Senate, and he tried again, and won. He took his Harvard degree and went to organize poor folks on the tough streets of Chicago, while he could have been making millions on Wall St. What has Hillary done other than coast as the wife of a POTUS? Before that she sat on the board of Wal-Mart and LaFarge Cement, two of the world's most obnoxious corporations.
The voters don't like the idea of the superdelegates throwing the election to HRC: By 55%-37%, Democrats and independents who "lean" Democratic say an outcome in which Clinton lost among pledged delegates but prevailed with the help of super delegates would be "flawed" and unfair" — including 77% of Obama supporters and 28% of Clinton supporters. http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-03-17-poll_N.htm
It was, in many ways, a brilliantly written and delivered speech—something we've come to expect, of course, from Barack Obama. It did an excellent job of providing context for the black experience in America, explaining how the average African-American could gravitate to a controversial church like Jeremiah Wright's, and how those experiences might understandably be misunderstood by white America. It took a stab at uniting the black and white American experiences under the common problem of economic anxiety, brought on by the real enemy of working people in our country: unfettered corporate greed. In this regard, the speech still should have gone much further. More on that in a minute. It was a brave speech. Barack Obama has been running as a post-racial candidate this entire election cycle. Today, he turned into the wind, and tackled the racial crimes, conundrums, and tragedies that have buffeted our nation since its inception. Obama challenged our country to deal with the race issue in the here and now, to no longer keep this conversation tucked away in our racially homogeneous tribes, where our separate white and black safety zones allow us to say what we really think about the other. He did so knowing that after today, there is no going back. As an unnamed Obama adviser was quoted as saying, "Race is now officially on the table. It’s not going away after this,”. Race will be a part of his candidacy for the remainder of the primary, and, if he is so lucky, the general election. This is not something Obama wanted to happen, but at this point in the midst of the Wright controversy, it is obvious he felt he had little choice. Even braver, rather than offering banalities on unity and togetherness, he picked at some of the ugliest scabs in our national discourse, in effect claiming that his candidacy possesses the unifying power to do so without making the wounds worse. That said, while I feel that the speech was a rhetorical victory, I am worried that in certain ways, it was a missed opportunity, and possibly a political failure. The speech can be judged by who its intended audience was, and who it ended up becoming. His intended audience should have been the white blue collar males that, after the Virginia primary, were flooding towards his candidacy, but after Ohio, and Jeremiah Wright, have been flooding away from it. Instead, the speech seemed more tailored towards the media, and Obama's base. Political journalists have swooned over it all day long. Chris Matthews probably had to change his pants twice on Hardball tonight, calling it "the greatest speech on civil rights in our nation's history". It's a fine civil rights speech, and deserves much praise, but Barack Obama is not running to make a point, or win the argument about race in this country. He is not running for Civil Rights Leader of America. He is running for President of the United States. In a country with a still-white majority population, the two are unfortunately incompatible. Fascinating frames like the following are crack for the media:
But I've since heard more than a handful of other white folks—on both the left and right—say things like, "that wasn't a very nice thing to say about his poor old grandmother." Instead of getting the intent of the story—to remind people that Obama's experience is actually as a black and white man—a lot of white blue-collar folks hear that anecdote and think how rude it was for this young black man to say that about that poor old white woman. Plus, they're reminded about how they too, sometimes get scared around young black men. And soul-searching introspection on those feelings is likely not their next step. As Obama himself said today, "I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own." So why is he attempting to do that very thing at its greatest crisis point? I've even heard from some Democrats—yes, Democrats—who say maybe it was Obama's resentment of his white grandmother's attitudes towards blacks, that led him to a racially charged church like Jeremiah Wright's. I think such arguments are absurd and deeply narrow-minded. Unfortunately, so is the state of typical white racial thinking in this country. What Obama also did not do with the speech was explain why he spent 20 years listening to a pastor condemn America, hate on white people, and spit on Israel. That's not what's really been happening the last 20 years in the Trinity Church of Christ, of course, but it effectively is what much of white America has come to believe. Yes, Obama described Wright's outlook as "a profoundly distorted view of this country". And yes, Obama explained that Wright is more than the sum of these snippets of controversy: "The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor." Fine. The retort I hear then is why does Wright say the U.S. government gave AIDS to black people? What the speech really needed to do today was, at length, directly address the economic considerations from on high that have intentionally spurred the racial divisions in our country since the American Revolution. It needed to be, in many ways, his Howard Zinn speech. It was good for Obama to start by empathizing with lower-income white Americans who feel robbed by affirmative action, who see no special value in their own white skin, who "don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race." But the argument stopped with empathy. It is absolutely critical that if you venture into why lower-income whites are resentful of affirmative action, you must complete the circle by explaining how our corrupt economic system requires whites to focus their anger on tiny programs like affirmative action, rather than the massive, non-racial corporate forces that are taking away black and white jobs, black and white health care, black and white homes. The reason Obama must focus primarily on economics, rather than race, is that with two wars being fought abroad, a looming recession, a housing crisis, trade deals shipping our entire manufacturing base overseas, blue-collar white Democrats really don't feel the urgent need to solve this race problem in America. It is, unfortunately, probably the last issue on the plate—if it's even on the plate. With one candidate focusing his attention on a controversial topic, which, though eloquently discussed, isn't at the top of voters' concerns, which other candidate is poised to jump right into an opening on the economy? Yep. But, you say, Obama had to address this Wright controversy—it was eating his candidacy alive! I completely agree. The way in which I believe he would have been better served is by unifying the discussion of race more fully with the economic pressures that have caused these racial fractures in American life in the first place. It was still a brilliant speech. He has retaken the news cycle—no small feat after what he's been through the last couple of weeks. But it's just a news cycle, and the questions will continue to linger among lower-income white voters about Obama's racially questionable church-going. It's not fair that Barack Obama should be judged by what Rev. Wright has occasionally said. But as life is not fair, many white voters still will do so. He is still the front-runner for the nomination, and will still likely obtain it. The problem isn't with getting the nomination—it's how does he defeat a cultural icon like John McCain in the general election without grabbing a big share of independent white votes in swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Missouri. His current base—young, affluent educated whites, and black voters—can't bring him over the finish line. And if he is ever going to silence the critics who say he is all hope and no results, he is going to have to throw some serious economic red meat on the table—sooner, rather than later. If he cannot get away from the race discussion, he must drag it over to the economic one.
Wow... the anklebiting continues - from "manrod": obama also said, "In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans." that would be news to john edwards, who received the most white votes in S.C., and hillary clinton, who received the second most. they pretty much split the white vote and obama cleaned up with 80% of the black vote Manrod isn't *thinking* - SC has bulit a powerful coalition of black & white legislators - this is what Obama meant. The Hilbots are hellbent on teasing out any small, muddy point, throwing it up against a wall, and seeing if it'll stick. I am reminded, again, how Bush managed to coopt the White House for 2 terms....
I hate to say it, but it looks to
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I just need to say this : Sunlight is not your enemy.
Posted by liza | March 18, 2008 5:39 PM