This is no non-answer answer. The upshot of Howard Dean's statement is quite clear and, if accepted, it fully settles the question at issue between the two campaigns.

At bottom that question is this: Does the legitimacy of the unpledged delegates' votes depend on their casting those votes for whichever candidate has a simple majority of pledged delegates going into the convention?

Dr. Dean's answer is quite clearly no. Unpledged delegates are, in Dr. Dean's view, free to vote with or against the majority of pledged delegates, provided only that they "exercise their best judgment in the interests of the nation and of the Democratic Party." In other words, the legitimacy of the unpledged delegate vote is not a function of the pledged delegate vote, but rather rests on independent grounds.

The argument from Obama supporters has been that for the unpledged delegates to defy the "will of the electorate", as that will is embodied in the ballots of the pledged delegates, would be an illegitimate exercise of their discretion. Dr. Dean's response is that the unpledged delegates cannot, by defintion, go against "the will of the electorate" because they are part of the relevant electorate in this case.

Dr. Dean does not merely assert this view as a mechanical fact about the process. Rather, he provides a rationale for its correctness. This is truly a moment when political theory is on the hot seat, and Dr. Dean seems to have recognzied this.

He does not shy away from the challenge. That is why he cites the overall diversity of the unpledged delegates, their demonstrated willingness to take responsibiity for party business, and their (in most cases) own election by relevant electorates. This is Dr. Dean's argument for the legitimacy of the unpledged delegate vote.

Dr. Dean is saying that an individual unpledged delegate has already earned, through one of another of the accepted means, a right to his or her vote, and that this vote is, as a matter of principle, equal in weight and authority to that of any pledged delegate. He is not merely reciting the rules to us; he is telling us why those rules are, in his view, just.

Now we are of course free to lament the role of unpledged delegates as an unfortunate fact about process. The same might be said of the fact that pledged delegates can be selected in caucuses that have far higher barriers to participation, and consequently far lower turnout, as a rule, than primaries. Or that the DNC was able to punish Florida and Michigan by denying their pledged delegates any role at the convention. Or that the convention is free to restore the role of those Michigan and Florida delegates, if it so choses, despite those state's parties having broken the rules. No doubt, all of these facts of the process, and others, can be cited to show that the decision of the convention will not be as fully democratic as it might be.

But if we accept Dr. Dean's argument, then none of these complaints touches his essential point, which is that, in the process as it stands, unpledged and pledged delegates share an equal franchise as electors of the Democratic party's nominee, and that is right for them to do so. Dr. Dean's argument comes down to this: There are no more grounds for doubting the legitimacy of an unpledged delegate's vote, whatever that vote might be, than there are for doubting the legitimacy of a pledged delegate's vote.

Posted at February 17, 2008 12:25 PM in response to Howard Dean On Super-Delegates: "Their role is to exercise their best judgment"

Virginia, Missouri, New Mexico, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Washington. Perhaps there are others that ought to be on this list, but as to these seven, Senator Clinton has won two, Senator Obama five.

Mr. Hunt,

The real picture of swing-state strength, if that is what we are talking about here, is a good deal more complex than this list would suggest:

1. Washington should probably not be on this list at all, as it is unlikely to swing Red unless the Democrat is also in danger in big states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

2. Missouri, New Mexico, Colorado, Iowa, and New Hampshire are all genuine swing states. Of these, Obama won three and Clinton two.

3. Virginia is a Red state that is nevertheless a possible Democratic get this cycle. That's one for Obama. There are two more like it that have voted so far: Arkansas and Tennessee, both won by Clinton.

In short, both candidates are showing good strength in swing states.

Posted at February 15, 2008 11:14 AM in response to States that Count (Democratic Edition)

Dan K.,

I agree that disaster stemming from collective decision raises the old many-hands problem: who can be held accountable when so many are involved?

But it seems to me that the only corrective to this is precisely to reject the notion of collective or group guilt, and instead to insist on handing out blame as accurately, that is to say as proportionately, as possible. Making everyone who had any hand in a disaster equally responsible for that disaster is no better than declaring them all equally innocent: where all are guilty, as Hannah Arendt used to say, no one is.

For me, the most important thing, where blame for the Iraq disaster is concerned, is to reject any attempt by George Bush and the neoconservative war party to dissipate their own responsibility for events by pointing to all the people they managed to con or pressure into providing them with political cover. Sen. Clinton and the other 110-odd Democrats who voted for the resolution deserve their share of the blame, to be sure. But theirs must remain a distinctly minor share, precisely so that the real culprits are left with the major share they alone deserve.

As for Axelrod, I only wish he had "focus[ed] his answer on the broader question of the causes of Pakistan's currently distressed condition". I think this is precisely what he failed to do, instead reaching for the cheap shot against Sen. Clinton.

Posted at December 28, 2007 11:57 PM in response to Hillary, Murdering Bitch

Dan K.,

Thanks for your willingness to continue the dialog. Obviously, I think you're wrong on the merits, but it's good--clarifying, let me say--to have such a thoughtful interlocutor to disagree with. If we on the left are going to throw brickbats at one another, we may as well help each other hit the right target--it increases the chances of our learning something.

Maybe it's a stretch that the chaotic and turbulent conditions in Pakistan that claimed Bhutto's life were exacerbated by the Iraq war; and maybe it's not...

For me the stretch, more specifically, is the notion that the 40% or so of Congressional Democrats who were willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt on the Iraq resolution in October of 2002, contributed in any meaningful way to Bhutto's assassination in December of 2007.

That's the implication I can't quite swallow. That's the implication that goes down sideways. I'm afraid that nothing you've said quite smooths its path.

Posted at December 28, 2007 9:18 PM in response to Hillary, Murdering Bitch

Dan K,

Thanks for the extended reply. Please see my responses to some of your remarks below:

The fact that the Republicans in general, or Bush in particular, have a much worse approach to health care than any of the Democrats is irrelevant to the Democratic debate. Similarly, the fact that Clinton's foreign policy errors in the Senate are not as bad as Bush's many crimes and mistakes is irrelevant to the Democratic debate.

I wouldn't go so far as to say "irrelevant". I know that I would be much harder on Sen. Obama's refusal to embrace the principle of universality if the rest of his health care policy did not represent a vast improvement on the status quo that the Republicans are mostly interested in defending (when they are not trying to make it worse). Similarly, I would be much harder on Sen. Clinton's Iraq vote if she had been leading the drive for war back in 2002, rather than responding to an agenda framed by a Republican president. What I think is true, is that the fact of a far greater policy distance between any Democrat and any Republican doesn't make intra-Democratic policy debates irrelevant or trivial. On the contrary, they are of course precisely what the primaries should be about.

The notion that Clinton just wanted to give Bush a big threatening stick, and didn't expect he would actually use it, doesn't wash.

You might be right. I honestly don't know what Sen. Clinton thought Bush was likely to do with the authority. I'm pretty certain, based on her contemporaneous public remarks, that she knew, as all who were paying attention did, that there was a war party in the administration, that had wanted war with Iraq long before 9/11, and that wanted it still, come hell or high water, and that there was, at a minimum, a serious danger that Bush would side with that party. Becausse of this, I think she can fairly be faulted for not anticipating that Bush would abuse the authority given him -- as well as for not protesting, sooner and in stronger terms, when he did just that.

Be that as it may, my point was merely that the grant of authority was both useful (it helped get the inspectors in) and also horribly abused (that it gave Bush the opportunity to launch an unnecessary war). I can easily imagine a different president using that same authority wisely, rather than abusing it horribly. That doesn't make it a good risk to have taken, or to take in the future. Had I been in Sen. Clinton's place, I hope I would have had the presence of mind and the courage to have voted no, as I wish she had done. And I freely acknowledge that everyone who voted for that resolution bears some share of responsibility for the war -- though vastly less, in my view, than the President who asked for the resolution, started the war unnecessarily, and then bungled what he started.

It is also weak to suggest that the war would not have been a mistake if it had been executed by a competent manager such as Clinton, rather than bungling idiots such as Bush.

Agreed. I didn't mean to suggest such a thing. What I do think is plausible, however, is that the initial mistake of starting the war would not have been compounded by so many others, of such magnitude, if a less self-deluded administration had been in power.

[I]t is a plausible conjecture that the war has had harmful side effects throughout the region, including in Pakistan, and Axelrod raised that conjecture, and a reminder of Hillary Clinton's role in enabling this war, in a completely responsible way.

I agree that that conjecture is plausible--indeed, as a general proposition, it is highly probable. The next part, however, is where you lose me.

Axelrod was not merely raising a general conjecture about the harmful regional side-effects of the war, while also reminding people about Sen. Clinton's Iraq vote. He meant of course to suggest that those two things are tightly coupled as cause and effect, but that is far less than the half of it.

The key element of his remarks--and the one that has caused all the fuss--is the one your account leaves out. For Axelrod also pretty clearly meant to link the vote for the Iraq resolution, though the medium of the war's harmful regional side effects, to the murder of Bhutto--the domestic political impact of which, after all, was the topic about which he was being asked.

Either he was claiming some causal link between Sen. Clinton's vote and Bhutto's murder, or his remarks make no sense in context, as a reply to the questions he was being asked. I think the intended subtext was reasonably clear: Won't Bhutto's assassination cause voters to look with favor on Clinton's claim of greater foreign policy experience? Why no, it will cause them to doubt her all the more, since she helped bring this about with her ill-advised vote for war in Iraq.

That causal chain, if we try to trace it back from Bhutto's murder to Clinton's vote, is simply too long, with too many links in it that owe little or nothing to the vote on the Iraq resolution, and with too many other chains of events leading off in completely different directions, to make this claim even remotely plausible.

It may be that Axelrod does not beleive it himself. It may be that he was just doing the standard campaign flak's job of trying to deflect unwelcome questions by returning them to the comfortable terrain of a tried-and-true campaign message and that, in this process, he found himself asserting more than he would if he were looking at the matter sine ira et studio. In fact, I'm inclined to think that this is exactly what happened; it is easy to imagine oneself making such a blunder under such circumstances, and then digging oneself further in the hole in the aftermath.

All I was trying to show, in my partial defense of Larry Johnson's post, is that those who have reacted negatively to Axelrod's remarks were not reacting to nothing. Taken at face value they are both bizarre and, especially given the occasion, highly inappropriate. I'm inclined to cut him some slack, but I can easily see why others might not be so inclined.

Posted at December 28, 2007 5:20 PM in response to Hillary, Murdering Bitch

Dan K,

I think you are right that Larry Johnson's post was hyperbolical: Axelrod's remarks were not the moral equivalent of the right-wing demonology according to which Sen. Clinton is responsible for Vince Foster's death, nor was Sen. Obama playing "the terrorist fear card" in his own remarks -- they were banal, but not barbed.

That being said, your defense of Axelrod's remarks is also unpersuasive. If what Axelrod was really trying to say was:

that Hillary Clinton contributed to the enabling of a very bad policy decision which is in turn a contributing factor to an Al Qaeda resurgence, which is itself a contributing factor to a distressed situation in Pakistan, which is finally a contributing factor to today's assassination.

--then he really ought to have thought better of saying it. For if, in tracing the extent of someone's responsibility for an event, it requires a chain of four "contributed to's" to get from that person's own actions to the event itself, it's pretty unlikely that there will be much responsibility left to apportion by the time one gets there.

Yes, Sen. Clinton's vote for the Iraq use-of-force resolution was a mistake -- the power credibly to threaten Hussein was useful (it got him to comply with a tough inspection regime), but Bush proved a singularly untrustworthy steward of that power (he wanted his war, inspectors or no inspectors, WMD or no WMD). And yes, the Iraq war, particularly as launched under conditions determined by Bush (that is, with neither real international legitimacy, nor a robust multi-lateral commitment, nor a serious post-war plan), did divert attention and other valuable resources from the fight against the Taliban/Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. And yes, that diversion did allow those forces to regroup, on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border. And yes, that regrouping was no doubt one element in the ability of those forces to wreak increased havoc inside Pakistan, including (if it turns out to be the case) having a hand in Bhutto's assassination.

But, in the first place, it is far from clear to what extent U.S. policy has been able to influence events inside Pakistan, whether for good or ill. My hunch is that our actions have had, and will have, far less impact than we might hope or fear -- that events inside Pakistan are unfolding very much on their own schedule and along lines determined largely by that country's own turbulent history.

Secondly, to the extent that U.S. foreign policy has had any role in contributing to the conditions that led to, or made more likely, Bhutto's murder, surely the preponderant responsibility for that must lie with the administration that has been making and carrying out that policy, for the region in general and for Pakistan in particular, over the last seven years -- and not with any single Democratic Senator, no matter how prominent? It is not Hillary Clinton's Pakistan policy that stands in ruins tonight.

Larry Johnson overreacted -- but he did not overreact to nothing. Axelrod's swipe at Clinton over the Bhutto killing was completely unwarranted.

Posted at December 28, 2007 2:52 AM in response to Hillary, Murdering Bitch

I think the reason Clark did not say those things here is because, in this Op-Ed, he was speaking in the voice of a professional strategist offering candid advice to decision makers. (It is a mode with which anyone who has watched his Congressional testimony on Iraq, or his military affairs commentaries on Fox or CNN, will be immediately familiar.)

I mean to say that Clark was, in this Op-Ed, among other things, modeling the behavior he was calling for on the part of top military leaders--to be straight with political decision makers about the costs and risks of a policy they (that is, the decision makers) are contemplating. Hence the warning: "if it's clear how a war with Iran would start, it's far less clear how it would end."

I take it Clark would not exactly be wrong to suppose that some significant chunk of WaPo readership is indeed already contemplating a policy of war with Iran--or soon will be. I further take it that he wants those readers to know what kind of dangers and uncertainties such a policy would entail--not to spur them on, but rather to get them to stop and think.

This strikes me as a far more natural interpretation of his words here, and of their fit with his prior public statements, than to suppose that he is trimming his sails in hopes of gaining favor with hawks in the foreign policy establishment. Who, after all, would be fooled? Presumably, even Very Serious People can use Google--or at least have research assistants who can do it for them.

As to your question about the "precise rendering" of the dictum that war must be the last resort: I suppose it depends on what you will accept as "precise". The idea of "last resort" is not subject to context-free definition; any statement of it will necessarily leave a wide field for the judgment of particular cases. Examples are probably of more use here than categorical statements. (For Clark, for instance, Kosovo and Afghanistan met the test; Iraq did not.)

Also, as I indicated before, this idea is part of a family of ideas; it is difficult to elucidate any member of that family without touching on all the others. In that spirit, here is Clark own attempt at an answer, this time in another of his modes--that of the part-time academic with a professional interest in the Theory of Just War.

Posted at September 17, 2007 10:27 PM in response to Wesley Clark Warns Against War with Iran

"My main points are that Clark is an experienced bomber, he didn't warn against war and he has endorsed HRC."

I'll let the first and third points pass without comment, since they're the argumentative equivalent of waving a fistfull of bats in the on-deck circle--it may look impressive to your fans but you won't make any contact while doing it. Whether point two gets you on base depends on whether your interpretation of Clark's words in the Op-Ed is superior to Todd Gitlin's. For dozens of reasons, I think it rather obviously is not. Here's one:

Clark writing in the Huffington Post, on March 7 of this year (emphasis added):

An attack on Iran will put additional strain on our already overextended military. It could well affect the United States' ability to extricate our forces from Iraq, as our troops will likely face even more attacks on the ground. And there will be potential for hostilities on American embassies abroad, a hike in oil prices, and an increased likelihood of terrorist attacks wherever Hizballah has active cells. You just don't know, and quite frankly, I don't want us to find out.

...Make your voice heard. Tell George W. Bush war with Iran is not the answer. Visit StopIranWar.com and sign the petition today!

Still convinced Clark is not "seriously warning against" war with Iran? If so, how do you explain his lengthy prior record of doing just that (the HuffPo quote being but one example among many)? I suppose it will be by claiming that those prior statements were insincere, and that only now is Clark showing his true colors by offering "half a presciption for war" -- presumably in a bid to be part of the action once it starts?

Wouldn't it be a less strained interpretation to read this Op-Ed as a (thinly) veiled restatement of his earlier warnings--here given in the persona of a professional military man offering unvarnished advice to the political decision makers (namely, us)?

Posted at September 17, 2007 9:18 PM in response to Wesley Clark Warns Against War with Iran

Do you have any evidence that Clark's is being "insincere" in offering that final lesson? Here, as elsewhere, he certainly seems to lay a great deal of stress on it. What makes you suppose that this stress is merely rhetorical, whereas everything else he says is functional and pragmatic?

And as you answer that question, please be aware that whatever support you summon for your view will have to be weighed in the balance, by any fair-minded reader, against Clark's established record of very publicly sounding the alarm that we are headed for war with Iran, and of calling for that war to be averted--a record that culminated in his co-founding of StopIranWar.org.

As to the supposed banality of the lesson that "war is the last, last, last resort": Well, I suppose it depends on what you have in mind in calling it that.

It is certainly not a new idea, I'll give you that. Indeed, it's part of a very old family of ideas that are in some sense as commonplace as those associated with, say, "limited government" or "checks and balances" or "human rights". The idea's value and power are another matter. I can only say that it seems to have retained enough of both, that the administration felt compelled to make a pretence of believing in it themselves, in late 2002 and early 2003, before utterly violating it in the event.

Posted at September 16, 2007 3:52 PM in response to Wesley Clark Warns Against War with Iran

Actually, it's more like "Stee-rike Three!" Does the following passage (from the same Op-Ed) sound to you like someone describing an achievable end-state--or more like someone warning about its extreme uncertainty and unlikelihood?

But if it's clear how a war with Iran would start, it's far less clear how it would end. How might Iran strike back? Would it unleash Hezbollah cells across Europe and the Middle East, or perhaps even inside the United States? Would Tehran goad Iraq's Shiites to rise up against their U.S. occupiers? And what would we do with Iran after the bombs stopped falling? We certainly could not occupy the nation with the limited ground forces we have left. So what would it be: Iran as a chastened, more tractable government? As a chaotic failed state? Or as a hardened and embittered foe?

And while you're at it maybe you have an explanation for why someone who is supposedly so eager for war with Iran would help start a Web site called StopIranWar.org?

Back to the dugout, slugger.

Posted at September 16, 2007 11:48 AM in response to Wesley Clark Warns Against War with Iran