The GOP controlled congress when TANF was reauthorized. If you think there was a shot in hell of keeping 30 hours, you are living on another planet. Hillary actually did pretty well to get the 35 hour compromise, as it looked for a while like 40 hours was a real possibility.

This is such standard politics, and Hillary did the very obvious thing given the circumstances. I find it hard to believe that this is really your primary obstacle to voting for her.

I also find your war argument unconvincing. Their policies are the same, but you don't think she's passionate enough about ending the war? And the level of her passion is a dealbreaker? Wow.

I think its kind of dumb for anybody to assume that feminists have to vote for Hillary. Likewise, despite being a Hillary supporter I can see plenty of good arguments for Obama.

But these are some of the most unconvincing arguments I've seen for some time.

Posted at February 5, 2008 3:45 PM in response to Why would a feminist vote for Obama?

Err, a semantic point that is not irrelevant.

The poll shows that Obama has closed the gap since early January. This should surprise nobody.

The poll does not show that Obama is closing on Hillary right now. That may be the million dollar question for a lot of people, but only the daily tracking polls can answer it.

Posted at February 3, 2008 1:00 PM in response to Obama Closing On Hillary In Another National Poll

"I think state by state exit poll turnout breakdowns will quickly tell the story of this unique election day and the tea leaves will be left for another day."

The exit polls will actually be really bad for measuring the characteristics of the population that is turning out. In states that have early voting, they are pretty worthless. Even when you don't have that problem, they are not very valuable because they are designed to capture a population approximating certain demographic assumptions. So they really just reflect the pollster's turnout models, rather than a random sample of the voting day population. Crosstabs are still useful, but raw proportions of people across races, age groups, etc really are not.

Posted at February 3, 2008 9:57 AM in response to What changed Saturday between Clinton and Obama?