taricha's Blog

We now know the media's Dream Ticket

2008-06-11T22:54:50Z

With the revelation of exorcism in the past of Bobby Jindal, we can now say for certain what the media's dream ticket will be:
Obama/Webb vs. McCain/Jindal

Neither VP pick is safe but Sweet Jesus, it would be fun to cover. There would be identity politics of every imaginable flavor, and fear not - the frequent discussion of Webb's Reagan era writing would make gender a central campaign issue, and therefore, viola - the ever relevant Hillary! I'm sure as soon as the talking heads realize that they don't have to choose between Webb and Hillary, if they pick Webb she comes along for free, then all discussion of the Hillary veep prospects will be engulfed in the flames of Webb-mania. As for Jindal the headlines just write themselves: "McCain's face of Change," the "Future of the GOP", "Like Obama but Obama-ier", just let your imagination run wild. And the best tidbit would be Jindal's story of exorcism, "A Powerful Story of Faith, and Demons." Virtual oceans of ink are begging to be spilled on the endless emotional storylines that those 4 men could have weaved between them.
Would any of it be good for the country? Probably not. Would any of it be helpful to the actual presidential candidates? Hell no. These VPs bring powerful upsides, but lots of downsides too, and in the end they are just too fascinating to serve their nominees well.

Lying GOP undercuts the Fiction of the Honorable McCain campaign

2008-05-13T04:16:40Z

Mark Salter, McCain's colorful speechwriter, biographer, and most recently author of the fictional Honorable Campaign of McCain wrote a letter of outrage (OUTRAGE I say!) to Newsweek, deploring the fact that their cover story discussed the negative attacks that are the basis of the GOP general election strategy.

The characterization of Republican presidential campaigns as nothing more than attack machines that use 527s and other means to smear opponents strikes us as pretty offensive. [snip] From the beginning of their article, Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe offered a biased implication that Republicans have won elections and will try to win this one simply by tearing down through disreputable means their opponents.
[snip]
Suggesting that that we can expect a whispering campaign from the McCain campaign or the Republican Party about Senator Obama's race and the false charge that he is a Muslim is scurrilous.

It's offensive, biased, and scurrilous! However, it's also utterly predictable. Not even a day after Salter had written his oh-so-genuinely offended letter, the House GOP leaders took this section of an interview with Obama:

JG: If you become President, will you denounce settlements publicly?
BO: What I will say is what I’ve said previously. Settlements at this juncture are not helpful. Look, my interest is in solving this problem not only for Israel but for the United States.
JG: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?
BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable.

And the good ol' non-smearing, GOP house leaders - in a feat of reading incomprehension - turn it into:

Israel is a critical American ally and a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, not a ‘constant sore’ as Barack Obama claims," Boehner said.

"It is truly disappointing that Senator Obama called Israel a ‘constant wound,’ ‘constant sore,’ and that it ‘infect[s] all of our foreign policy.’ These sorts of words and characterizations are the words of a politician with a deep misunderstanding of the Middle East and an innate distrust of Israel," Cantor said.

Well Senator McCain, we're now in the general election, and so far, it looks like the Republicans could stay on the high road for less than one day. I guess we should applaud them for trying, and pretend to be as shocked an appalled as Mark Salter.

A Question for Josh: poblano and the Death of the Horserace?

2008-05-07T16:56:00Z

poblano, for those who have lived in a hole the past couple of months is a blogger with a background in research (but not politics) whose posts can be found at dailykos, and now at his own site fivethirtyeight.com . He built from scratch over the course of the primary season a model to predict outcomes of these contests and analyzed all sorts of possible factors. He eventually settled on the conclusion that just a handful of factors are necessary to completely predict results, and his model has been entirely horserace-blind. His results have been quite good. In fact he has routinely outperformed most polling organizations, and vastly outperformed the majority of bloggers who shape the web's CW and who are in turn shaped by it.
his last 3 predictions:
PA: Clinton by 7.4 - actual Clinton by 9.3
IN: Clinton by 2 - actual Clinton by 1.5
& NC: Obama by 17.2 - actual Obama by 14.8 (15.0 head-to-head)

This post by Kaus over at Slate captures the audacity of his last two predictions brilliantly:

"Obama by double digits" in N.C.: Predicted by a blogger using a sophisticated model that ignores ... what's been happening in the campaign. Like Rev. Wright. I predict this person is wrong! ... Update: He was right. ... [via Insta] 9:27 P.M.

So here's my question, Josh. You are one of the most thoughtful voices on the big picture questions of the race. Early on, there was a mini-civil war between the momentucrats and the numerocrats (which the numerocrats seem to have handily won), but what I see now goes much further than that and questions the fundamental nature of the horserace interpretation of politics. I see a guy able to make predictions of who a region will vote for and how strongly by looking at boxes they check on a census and historical political leanings of their location. When he predicts more accurately than by actually asking people what they think, and what's important to them, and even who they say they are going to vote for, totally blind of issues and scandals, I see that as a fundamental game-changer in how we view politics. I see this as the death of the Horserace. You have convincingly written in the past about the perils of liberals ignoring the fundamental nature of the horserace in politics. How do you explain the success of a nearly politics-blind model?

Coincidence? Particular to Obama? Particular to this primary, or this year? Mass hysteria? Very interested in what you think.

Wright would not have been my pastor (except when I needed him)

2008-03-25T20:55:19Z

It's interesting that Hillary claims that she would not have associated herself with Reverend Wright.
But the truth is she did associate herself, apparently being seated with Wright at the prayer breakfast during the Lewinsky scandal.

In addition to this photograph it seems she was seated at a table (and seating arrangements near a first lady are not coincidental) next to Wright.

It is true what she says. You can choose your pastor. You also can choose who comes to your prayer breakfast, and who you sit next to.

The Soundbite From Obama's Race Speech

2008-03-18T16:26:16Z

What's the soundbite going to be? How do you boil down Obama's speech into a snappy response? This, to me is it.

Wright's mistake was underestimating America's ability to move forward.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Implicit in this argument is that to continue wallowing in the mire of racial paranoia is to make exactly the same mistake Wright made: assuming that America is in racial paralysis.

"Kenneth Starr" & "Monster" settle VP question

2008-03-07T08:23:37Z

I think what the last few days of name-calling say, whether this was the intended message or not, is that America can forget about the "dream ticket." Perhaps killing the dream could have been done more gracefully, but I doubt it could have been done more thoroughly than the back and forth this week did.
From this point forward, media outlets talking about a "dream ticket" are ignoring the underlying lack of respect and trust that these two people have for each other, and merely stroking their own ratings fantasies. There is absolutely nothing in the organization and style of these two candidates that suggests they would ever consider putting themselves in a dependent situation with people they don't fully trust.
Then again, she is still married to Bill.

Negative campaigning reflected in exit polls?

2008-02-20T03:17:03Z

from CNN exit polls:
Which Candidate Attacked Unfairly?
Only Clinton - 26%
Only Obama - 6%
both - 27%
neither - 37%

Obama seems to be clearly winning the spin war over the negativity issue, even though his numbers might be taking hits from the attacks themselves. I wonder if this is something Clinton will take into consideration going forward.

Obama's "sexist language"?

2008-02-17T09:01:49Z

Based on commentary from ABC news blog here, Obama may be using sexist language when he said before the Louisiana primary that, "You challenge the status quo and suddenly the claws come out."

ABC blog continues.

The CLAWS come out? Really?

Andrea Mitchell and Norah O'Donnell seemed to suggest Obama may have been -- if not playing the gender card, then using language women voters might find offensive.

Language such as "when she's feeling down" "periodically" she "launches attacks."

"Claws"…"feeling down"...I find it hard to envision Obama using the same language if he were facing, say, former Sen. John Edwards, D-NC.

I find it impossible to parse "launches attacks" as sexist, and "periodically" really seems like a stretch. I think the actual video of the comments here probably does damage to the idea that this was some carefully crafted message to hit Clinton on her gender. The whole response is filled with pauses while he seemed to search for the right word.
"I understand that, you know, Senator Clinton ... um ... periodically, when she's feeling ... uh down ... launches attacks, and ... uh as a way of - of ... you know, trying to boost her ... uh boost her appeal."
Maybe he found exactly the gender-biased words he was looking for, but it seems again a stretch that this was the goal.
As for the "claws" comment, surely that's sexist because as noted, that would be hard to imagine being directed at a male candidate right?
"Will Barack Obama finally show some claws?" asks CNN's Wolf Blitzer in this daily show clip from the end of October. (about 55 seconds in. Extra bonus, that's a clip from Clinton's "inevitable" days.)

Buchanan County, VA

2008-02-13T02:29:46Z

I'm guessing Jessie Jackson didn't carry this county in '84 or '88.
Obama - 9% - 226
Clinton - 90% - 2,243
According to wikipedia, "the racial makeup of the county was 96.75% White, 2.62% Black...the per capita income for the county was $12,788..."
Sounds like a fun place, road trip anyone?

A Defense of the Supers

2008-02-11T19:57:45Z

It is becoming increasingly popular to bash superdelegates in recent days, for several obvious reasons. Most fundamentally, the fact that the pledged delegates are beginning to hint at one story, while the superdelegates currently are on the opposite side inspires people in a fit of democratic fervor to speak out against these tyrants (okay, no one's called them "tyrants" ...yet). More than just a few people have declared their lack of faith in the SDs, including a prominent SD herself.

If we could just put the torches and pitchforks down for a brief moment, I'd like to propose a few hypotheticals in which we'd be in real trouble without superdelegates.
1. The Ron Paul: If candidate x, running as a Democrat has a lot of ideas that critically undercut the party's platform, it is clearly in the party's interest to mobilize against that candidate. After all, the candidate owes at least some of his support and his visibility to his party affiliation, and should not be able to ride those coattails to cut off the party at the knees.
2. Late scandal: Pledged delegates are decided at caucuses and primaries months before the national convention, and legally bound in their vote. There are any number of scandals that could become known after the delegates from the voting have already been pledged. Without superdelegates, it would be impossible to insure the Democrats don't walk into the general with a candidate that is going down in flames. Imagine trying to rally the party around an indicted candidate.
3. Accountability: Consider the possibility of a tight election in the final states to vote. 11th hour tactics crossing all reasonable bounds of ethics could be employed. The mere existence of superdelegates as a final after-the-primaries primary discourages such self-destructive behavior.
4. Last minute rebellion against the party: This one is barely even hypothetical. Consider if Clinton strongarmed the seating of Michigan and Florida delegates to tip the votes her way while the DNC was still vigorously opposed to it. The superdelegates again offer a check against such party-endangering tactics.

It's useful to take a step back and evaluate what the likely priorities are of these superdelegates. They are elected democrats, and they are the quiet machinery of the democratic party itself. A few individuals back one candidate or another for power in a possible future administration, or out of loyalty for favors done in the past, but this is the vast, vast minority. On the whole, there is likely no group of people that is as devoted to the idea of advancing the Democratic party than these superdelegates. These conspiracy theories of SDs quietly biding their time in hopes of being able to subvert the will of the Democratic voters are just that - Conspiracy Theories.