Over-Estimating McCain

The media love affair with John McCain continues unabated by reality. Here's Michael Kinsley in Time magazine:

Republicans have pulled some dirty tricks before: Swift Boats, Watergate, you name it. But this time they have gone too far. In its desperate hunger for victory at any cost, the Republican Party is on the verge of choosing a presidential candidate, John McCain, who is widely regarded (everywhere except inside the Republican Party itself) as honest, courageous, likable and intelligent.

What people like Kinsley really like about McCain is that he's so willing to talk with the media and eagerly appear on shows like Kinsley's former gig at "Crossfire." He certainly treats the media a lot better than he treats the Senate colleagues who have been targes for his volcanic temper.

McCain may be well-liked but that doesn't necessarily make him a strong nominee for the Republican Party. Obama is much better liked than McCain and Hillary doesn't have nearly the association with the Republican Party that McCain has. Either way, McCain won't be a favorite as long as he's projecting a 200 year war in Iraq

--Or is that 400 years?

McCain Needs "Reverse Obama"

A McCain Dilemna. As he moves toward sewing up the Republican nomination, John McCain is facing a difficult problem. The hard core right-wing activists who are now calling themselves "Reagan conservatives" are deeply suspicious of McCain and he needs to find ways to placate them if his campaign is going to have any energy and enthusiasm. But, every move McCain makes to shore up his right flank will cost him votes among moderates, independents, and weak Democrats. These kinds of swing voters are so disgusted with the war, George W. Bush, and the right-wing that they'll be primed to pounce on any "flip-flopping" McCain does to make himself look more conservative. Rush Limbaugh himself believes that he can help McCain more by criticizing him than supporting him. As Limbaugh states on his radio show:

If I really wanted to torpedo McCain, I would endorse him . . . Because that would send the independents and liberals who are going to vote for him running away faster than anything. What people don't realize is that I am doing McCain the biggest favor that can be done for him by staying out of this . . . If I endorsed him thoroughly and with passion, that would end the independents and moderates, because they so despise me and they so hate me.

Needless to say, Limbaugh makes his living by being self-centered. So he doesn't realize that the same point applies to Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, George Bush, and especially Dick Cheney. If John McCain seeks support from these guys, he might as well seek endorsements from jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff, page-seducer Mark Foley, and gay-denying bathroom Casenova Larry Craig.

The Second Dimension of the McCain Dilemna. Actually, the McCain dilemna runs even deeper because the role model he most needs to emulate is in fact Barack Obama. The right-wing commentariat makes the mistake of trying to place McCain under the umbrella of conservative heroes like Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill. However, because they're gazing at their own conservative navels, they don't realize that Barack Obama has already pulled the first Ronald Reagan since before . . . Ronald Reagan. Above everything else, Obama's unshakeable "likeability" is changing the political field. On the one hand, many voters like Obama so much that they not only ignore but they're eager to ignore criticisms of him for being inexperienced, weak on health care, and the most liberal member of the Senate. On the other hand, Obama's rock star charisma is pulling his politial fans to the left so they can support him.

In the final two weeks of the 1980 campaign, Reagan convinced a relatively liberal American electorate to move to the political right in order to vote for him. In many ways, Obama has already trumped Reagan. He's become the charismatic face of liberalism in the same way that Reagan became the trusted face of the political right and Obama has already pushed the American political spectrum to the left as people move to support him. McCain might agree more with Reagan's policies, but it's Barack Obama who owns the Reaganesque charisma needed to move large masses of voters in new directions.

The Reverse Obama. This allows us to identify one dimension of what John McCain is going to need to accomplish to win the election. In essence, McCain has to fully reverse the "Obama effect" and induce the American electorate to move back in a right-wing direction. Where the American electorate opposes the war, McCain needs to make people enthusiastic about the occupation of Iraq. Where the American electorate now accepts universal health insurance, McCain needs to get them to rethink. The same is the case with economic policy, gay marriage, and other issues where public opinion has moved to the left and accelerated that movement as a result of Obama's popularity. To win, McCain would have to be so much more personally popular than Obama that he could reverse Obama's own effect on the voting public as well as the public's general rejection of the Republican Party and the right-wing. That's an extremely tall order and I don't think McCain's up to it.

The Bitter Fruit of an Early Lead

Back in October when Hillary Clinton was peaking in the polls, the staff here at RSI warned that her 50% poll numbers were more BAD news than anything else.

Yesterday, a Washington Post/ABC poll came out with Hillary at 53% and Obama at 20%. Most of the time, political candidates consider it to be really good news if they make that kind of big leap in the polls. But I think 53% is more Trojan horse than gift horse for the Hillary campaign . . . If the numbers are real, they might be a sign that Hillary is peaking too soon. That's especially because Hillary's going to become more of a target for negative media coverage and right-wing smears the farther ahead she gets. If Democrats start listening to the negativity, the numbers will go back down. Being so far ahead also creates the likelihood of complacency, decreasing creativity, and lower energies as candidates and their staffs sit on their huge leads. That can also bring the numbers back down.

According to Karen Tumulty of Time, one of the problems with the Hillary Clinton's campaign is that Hillary's top people didn't think that Obama was going to be really competitive and that Hillary consequently didn't have to organize much in the way of caucus operations or a get out the vote ground game.

.As a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns who is not affiliated with any candidate this time around puts it, the Clinton forces "get to every state later. They spend less. They don't get the best people." . . . The campaign's inner circle has finally begun to expand. Austin, Texas, advertising man Roy Spence (who helped come up with the state's "Don't mess with Texas" slogan) will aid in shaping the candidate's message . . . Adviser Harold Ickes, who for months has been urging the Clintons to focus on ground-game vulnerabilities . . . Moaned a top official: "The work on the ground was never done. We have been consistently outhustled in the field."

I think Hillary would make a better president, but that's not all that primary elections are about. They're also about whose campaign organizations are going to do the best in the general election. If Barack Obama's campaign organization has indeed consistently more effective than Hillary's, then that's an argument for nominating him. It's also an argument for Obama's potential effectiveness as a president. After all, any president has to maintain an on-going political campaign if they're going to be successful in office.

McCain Goes for the Coulter Vote

The Senate passed an intelligence bill that banned waterboarding torture, but John McCain voted against the ban even though he had previously condemned waterboarding.

It would be easy to say that McCain was "against waterboarding before he was for it" and score cheap rhetorical points that way.

But I prefer to score cheap rhetorical points in different ways.

Instead of being inconsistent and hypocritical (what politician isn't inconsistent and hypocritical), McCain is taking his shot at getting the most important conservative vote in the country--Ann Coulter's.

Coulter indicts McCain as insufficiently conservative on a wide variety of items, including immigration, right-wing judges, McCain-Feingold, and global warming.

But Coulter also excoriates McCain's previous opposition to waterboarding as a form of torture.

He (McCain) hysterically opposes waterboarding terrorists and wants to shut down
Guantanamo.

Obviously, support for torture is a big litmus test for Ann Coulter and her hard-right acolytes. For a lot of people on the right, 9-11 was worth it because it gave them an opportunity to defy American law and international law, stick it to liberals, and show how tough they were by supporting torture for al-Qaida suspects. I'm sure McCain sees this and is beginning a political "full monty" in which he strips himself of all his previous moderate and reform positions and exposes his "inner right-winger" for all to see.

Anything for Ann's vote.

Barack Obama Night at RSI

Barack Obama Night at RSI

Obama Rolls. Barack Obama crushed Hillary Clinton in Virginia and Washington DC with majorities of 75, 60, and 64. Hillary didn't congratulate him, but I don't see any reason why I shouldn't.

Congratulations to the Obama campaign.

Obama's also moving ahead in the delegate count and he's poised to be a better front-runner than Hillary. I think that Hillary would make a better president than Obama, but he'll be the stronger front-runner. There's tremendous enthusiasm associated with his candidacy and the Obama campaign is doing an equally tremendous job of taking advantage of that enthusiasm.

That's not the case with Hillary's campaign. Her support has always been fragile in the sense that her numbers sink whenever she or one of her surrogates slip up and they've had really bad slips with the black community.

In fact, another Hillary surrogate, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, slipped up tonight by claiming that Obama would lose a lot of votes in Pennsylvania because he's black. Rendell's facts are right. I've got relatives in Northern Pennsylvania who I'm sure wouldn't vote for Obama for racist reasons and I ran into plenty of racists in Philadelphia. But the politics of that kind of statement are ham-handed and stupid. He's implying that Hillary Clinton would welcome the white racist vote just as much as someone like Ronald Reagan or George Bush. That's not only stupid, it's morally wrong. Rendell's also stupidly implying that Obama would deserve to win the Pennsylvania primary if so many racists weren't voting. Why couldn't he just say that Hillary has been making an effective case for herself in Pennsylvania.

That's the kind of dumb statement that cuts into Hillary's already fragile vote and makes it more likely that Obama will win. With friends like Rendell, Hillary doesn't need enemies.

Obama's Friends. I'm not sure Barack Obama's friends are so hot either. Obama endorsers Claire McCaskill and Tim Johnson were among the 19 Senate Democrats who voted against key Democratic amendments to the awful warrantless wiretap/telecom immunity legislation that passed the U. S. Senate today. As Glenn Greenwald points out in a great post, people like McCaskill and Johnson aren't necessarily voting to endorse the Bush administration's criminal behavior just out of fear of the Republicans or the corruption engendered by telecom lobbying cash. They also believe that the Bush administration should be able to do what it wants and that the telecom companies that cooperated with them should not be held accountable. If Obama is going to carrying out massive change as president, how is he going to do so with a substantial rump of Democratic Senators who see the world in the same terms as Dick Cheney unless he's carrying a very big hammer. That's not to mention the weak and easily influenced Democratic leadership of Senators like Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller.

Obama as Symbol. Joe Biden famously used a racial stereotype to refer to Barak Obama as "clean." But Obama actually is becoming a symbol of someone who is clean in the sense of not being tainted by controversy, failure, or any of the other kinds of scars that accumulate with sustained presence in any area of endeavor.

Don Banks of SI.com picked up on this theme while interviewing an NFL head coaching candidate about the new trend to hire NFL head coaches who had neither head coaching or coordinator experience.

"To me, the whole run on these head coaches this year is a little like Barack Obama's candidacy,'' the coach said. "The experience factor may be light, but these guys who don't even have any coordinating experience, they're squeaky clean. They don't have any negatives that you can attack. The interesting thing is that their lack of a track record is actually seen as a positive.

"I can't help but think that if a guy is that clean, he sells better. If you have no blemishes, you can mold them and spin them to your fans and the media any way you want. Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War because she was in the Senate at the time, and if she hadn't, she probably would have been labeled a traitor. But it's still being held against her, while Obama didn't have to cast a vote, so he can say he was against the war from the very start.''

Like untested NFL coaches, Barack Obama is selling better as a candidate than the battle-scarred Hillary Clinton. As is the case with NFL coaches, however, the very difficult problems of American government are not going to go away if Barack Obama is elected president. Obama's campaign has been very good at portraying him as a squeaky clean, no blemishes kind of candidate and the right hasn't succeeded in bruising him up with their racial innuendo at all. But the question that bothers me is whether Obama would remain squeaky clean after he started withdrawing troops from Iraq, dealing with the federal budget, and getting any kinds of meaningful reform legislation through the Congressional meat-grinder.

I don't think so and I'm wondering what Plan B is going to be.

More On Stealing Your Lunch Money

Here's an article from Washington state GOP chair Luke Esser when he was in college. I guess he meant it as humor, but the sense of his barely suppressed yearning for vote suppression is as palpable as Bill Kristol's yearning for endless war.

Blame us for the rain tomorrow. Forget what the weatherman says, and plan on wearing those galoshes Tuesday. You better trust us. We’re taking care of everything.
There’s a very good reason why we have decide to rain on your parade. It’s just politics. And taken the right way, politics can be a lot of fun, almost as fun as sports.
We all remember those great political traditions — whistle-stop tours, kissing babies, voter fraud, dirty tricks, and voting a straight Republican ticket.
Of course, no honest person would be content to blindly vote a straight Republican ticket. That’s because a few of the G.O.P. candidates aren’t conservative enough to deserve the honor of sharing party affiliation with the likes of President Reagan.
Like any sport worth its salt, in politics you have adversaries, opponents, enemies. Our enemies are loudmouth leftists and shiftless deadbeats. To win the election, we have to keep as many of these people away from the polls as possible.
Now your average leftist loudmouth is a committed individual and can almost never be persuaded to ignore his constitutional rights. The deadbeats, however, are a different matter entirely. Years of interminable welfare checks and free government services have made these modern-day sloths even more lazy. They will vote on election day, if it isn’t much of a bother. But even the slightest inconvenience can keep them from the polling place.
Many of the most successful anti-deadbeat voter techniques (poll taxes, sound beatings, etc.) that conservatives have used in the past have been outlawed by busybody judges.
The only means of persuasion left available to us are Acts of God, who we know is exclusively on our side. I’m talking about seriously inclement weather. I want Biblical floods and pestilence. I will settle for rain, sweet rain. The deadbeats won’t even go out in the rain for their welfare checks (they send one of their social workers to
pick it up). There’s no way they’ll vote if it’s raining.
Unfortunately it hasn’t been raining nearly enough lately. Some October days were positively balmy. That means the clouds need a little help.
Borrowing some of the great traditions of the natives of our area, Washington conservatives will gather in Bellevue tonight to hold their first annual Rain Dance. Those interested can gather in the northeast parking lot of Bel Square (corner of N.E. 8th St. and Bellevue Way) at 8 p.m.
Working together, we can assure that only people of substance will vote tomorrow. Remember to bring your dancing shoes tonight and don’t forget those galoshes tomorrow.

Thirty Down, Thirty to Go

This morning, I weighed 213 on the hospital scale. That's down 30 pounds altogether from the beginning of the diet on Jan. 7 and 3 1/2 pounds from my last weigh-in ten days ago.

That's very good and there's some side benefits. With a little more spring in my step, I did a little run up the stairs at Rader Hall yesterday. People are starting to notice as well.

I'm especially proud that I didn't fall into binge given what a horrible week I had last week. Randall Swain announced last week that he was leaving Morehead State for Eastern Kentucky University--goddamned EKU! Between being mad at Swain and coming to grips with the fact that we might be down to four faculty next semester, I've been really down in the dumps.

But at least I didn't take out my discouragement by eating like there was no tomorrow. I also hopped back on the exercise bike last night.

Thirty down, Thirty to Go!

Did a Republican Steal Your Lunch Money!

That question came to mind when I saw that the Republican state chairman in Washington State had stopped the electoral count at 87% of the votes cast last Saturday.

Here's Mike Huckabee's campaign being as outraged over GOP malfeasance as any liberal.

The Huckabee Presidential Campaign will be exploring all available legal options regarding the dubious final results for the state of Washington State Republican precinct caucuses, it was announced today. Campaign Chairman Ed Rollins issued the following statement: "The Huckabee campaign is deeply disturbed by the obvious irregularities in the Washington State Republican precinct caucuses. It is very unfortunate that the Washington State Party Chairman, Luke Esser, chose to call the race for John McCain after only 87 percent of the vote was counted. According to CNN, the difference between Senator McCain and Governor Huckabee is a mere 242 votes, out of more than 12,000 votes counted-with another 1500 or so votes, apparently, not counted. That is an outrage.

Can't these people do anything with violating the law, trampling on people's human rights, torturing people, promoting the worst kinds of bigotries, or being grotesquely unfair?

It seems the answer is no!

But it might all be a matter of socialization. I've heard the Republican Party demands evidence that a person has stolen lunch money from little kids before letting them work as "political operatives."

And then there's Ann Coulter and kittens.

Needed: Nose-Holding Instructions

It seems that "Democratic elites" are worried about the Obama/Hillary campaign still going while John McCain runs victory laps and takes aim at the Democrats.

The still airtight race likely will go on for many weeks with 370 delegates at stake on March 4 in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont. Without a sweep of wins in the upcoming contests, the Democratic race could come down to theconvention in August, which some party officials dread will happen.

But why? Both Obama and Hillary are looking like much stronger candidates than they were in December while McCain is the weakest "presumptive nominee" since Jimmy Carter in 1980. I don't know what's worse for McCain, the fact that he lost to Huckabee in Kansas and Louisiana or the fact that he's only getting 26% in Washington state where he's winning.

John McCain's mother hit the nail on the head when she said that conservatives would have to "hold their noses" before they voted for her son. Perhaps the McCain campaign should send out instruction pamphlets on the proper technique for holding the right-wing schnoz.

McCain and the Identity Politics of the Right

As I wrote last night, the activist right-wing will never accept John McCain because of the power of identity politics among conservatives. McCain may agree with a lot of conservative positions, but the conservative movement will never embrace McCain because he isn't "one of them."

There are several dimensions on which McCain is a stranger to the right. Here's a couple.

MCCAIN'S REASSERTION OF TRADITIONAL MASCULINITY. The most important cultural achievement of the conservative movement has been the temporary enshrinement of weenie-boy masculinity as the dominant mode of political manhood. Painfully conscious of their own failures in terms of conventional ideals of male athleticism and big man on campus popularity, conservatives like George Bush, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, and Tom DeLay adapted a comic book ideal of exaggerated masculine gestures and promoted that ideal to the public as what "real" masculinity was all about. Selling George Bush as more of a man than more conventionally masculine guys like Al Gore and John Kerry was one of the keys to his victories in 2000 and 2008.

But John McCain is just as far from the weenie world of right-wing masculinity as any liberal democrat. A jock, fighter-pilot, and all-around cool guy, McCain doesn't need, understand, or have any respect for the hyper-masculine posturing of the activist right. That's why McCain has been such good buddies with guys like John Kerry. He shares a kind of ease with masculine give and take that somebody like Rush Limbaugh wouldn't be able to achieve if he had 100 million listeners rather than 13 million.

To put it crudely, John McCain just isn't the same kind of man Limbaugh and the other weenies of the right. Even worse, McCain is a constant reminder to the right of the kind of men they aren't.

MCCAIN MINUS THE RACIAL/GENDER NARRATIVES. Figures like William Bennett argue that Barack Obama "transcends race." That's nonsense. At the Obama event I attended in Lexington, KY last fall, there was a strong, specifically African-American presence. There were a lot more African-Americans in the audience than there are at most Kentucky political events. A couple of black students from local high schools also came forward to give short speeches and an African-American music student from the University of Kentucky gave a powerhouse rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Obama was definitely running as "the black candidate" as well as the candidate of the whites in the audience. Indeed, Obama's living multi-culturalism was part of the excitement of the event.

However, there's going to be a very real sense that John McCain is going to be transcending "whiteness," or at least the traditional Republican version of whiteness, in the general election campaign. Republican presidential candidates from Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush have been running as specifically white men who have been promising to oppose the aspirations of black people, keep black people under control, or find ways to keep black people "in their place." I believe it was Howard Kurtz who captured the Republican spirit when he stressed that the GOP candidates as the first presidential debate of the 2008 election represented "hierarchy."

To my knowledge, however, McCain has no racial narrative in his campaigning. Seemingly outside the debates over segregation and integration, McCain doesn't support the Confederate
flag, hasn't made a point of campaigning against "activist judges," doesn't have a big crime agenda directed against black males, and isn't a big opponent of affirmative action. In other words, McCain isn't trying to rally Republican voters around white supremacy or the many stand-ins for white supremacy that Republicans have been promoting for the last 40 years going back to Nixon.

I have a lot of doubt that McCain is going to push hatred of Muslims, hatred of gay people, hatred of Hispanics, or hatred of women in the form of anti-Hillary stereotypes if he runs against Hillary. Given the absence of bigotry, a McCain presidential campaign "just isn't going to feel like a Republican campaign" to a lot of right-wingers. Once again, McCain isn't one of them.

Obama's Cool Androgyny

THE FIRST METROSEXUAL PRESIDENT. Today, Megan Beyer, the wife of a former lieutenant governor in Virginia, referred to Barack Obama as "in many ways . . . the first woman president." Actually, I can see that in a certain way. One element in Obama's cool is that he has a certain androgynous air about him. I don't mean in any crude sense that he "looks like a woman," but Obama doesn't project the kind of testosterone posturing that signifies someone as "male" in our political culture. That's one of the things that makes Obama unique. David Bowie thin, Buddha-like in his relaxation, and transcending any need to prove his manhood, Obama doesn't have any of the strutting macho that characterizes George Bush, Dick Cheney, or even John Kerry. That wouldn't make Obama the "first woman president" any more than Bill Clinton was the "first black president." But I can see presidential historians someday referring to Obama as the "first metrosexual president."

MITT QUITS. Mitt Romney dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination today. Outside all the money he's going to save on his campaign. I'm not sure why he quit. Sure, Mitt's initial strategy of winning Iowa and New Hampshire fell apart. But there still were a couple of scenarios under which Romney could have won the nomination from McCain. It was especially easy to see Romney pressing McCain's record hard and McCain blowing up about it at some point and ruining his campaign as a result. There was also a strong possibility that McCain wouldn't do very well at managing a front-running campaign. McCain's the front-runner because the Giuliani and Fred Thompson campaigns fell apart not because he's doing such a great job running his own campaign. Mitt should have stayed around to see how well McCain handled prosperity.

THE RIGHT KILLS THE MCCAIN CAMPAIGN. People on the right complain a lot about "identity politics" among blacks and women. However, conservatives themselves are the most determined purveyors of group identity in American politics. It's just that the group with which they identify is "conservatives" or now "Reagan conservatives." That's why the right is never going to be satisfied with McCain no matter how many conciliatory speeches McCain gives. He's just not "one of them."

Ultimately, the right is going to kill the McCain campaign after he becomes the Republican nominee. The underlying problem is that the right will be be policing every McCain speech for deviations from conservative orthodoxy and what figures Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter do best is blast away at anything that is not conservative enough. And McCain will have to kowtow to the right if he doesn't want to see his campaign founder on intra-party disputes. Unfortunately for McCain, that means he's not going to be able to do much to convince moderates, independents, and weak Democrats to forget the Bush administration, the war, and the faltering economy and once again vote for a Republican. The Republicans underestimate the extent to which non-conservatives have tuned them out on issues like the war. If McCain wants to win the election, he's positively going to have to move a lot of moderates, independents, and weak Democrats to give up hard and fast opinions. Having to bow to right-wing orthodoxy every time he opens his mouth will prevent McCain from doing that. In my opinion, John McCain doesn't have much more chance of being elected president now than he did last July when he hit bottom.

Hillary by a Hair

Well, it's all over but the shouting and I've got self-congratulatory e-mails from both the Obama and the Clinton campaigns. Contrary to Kos, I think Super Tuesday will end up with Hillary getting a hairs-breadth edge.

In a lot of ways, it was a Red State/Blue State primary. Where Obama really cleaned up was in the red, red states like Idaho, Alaska, North Dakota, Georgia, and Alabama. Of course, it certainly would be wrong to deny that Obama is a strong candidate who is competitive on a national basis. After all, he also won in Connecticut, Delaware, Missouri,and his home state of Illinois. Likewise, I saw very few states where Obama didn't outpoll the leading Republican by big margins.

At this point, it wouldn't be too speculative to say that Obama's chances of winning the nomination are better than 50-50. But Obama's main strength today was in states where Democrats have had to listen to the Hillary-hatred of their neighbors for a long time.

Hillary proved her resilience as well in hanging onto core states like California, New York, and New Jersey in the face of the most recent surge of Barackomomentum. Tonight was also a big night for her.

In fact, I see Hillary as coming out very slightly ahead because there was real reason to fear that her candidacy would fall apart in the face of Obama's momentum. As was the case with New Hampshire, Hillary has shown that she isn't going to be swept away.

It also looks like Hillary is going to win the overall popular vote by a hair. As of about ten minutes ago, Obama had a 57,000 vote lead at 5,628,649 to 5,571,039 according to my hand tabulation. However, it looks like Hillary is going to overcome that lead in California.

Right now, it's neck and neck with Obama having an overall edge because of momentum. I'm for Hillary, but I think the race is great for the Democratic Party and progressive politics in this country. I can be pretty happy whoever wins.

A Pause in Barackomentum

CNN has an interesting tidbit on late-deciding voters:

According to the exit polls, Obama and Clinton are essentially splitting those voters, with 47 percent going for Obama and 46 percent for Clinton.

That one percent differential is not what the Obama camp wanted. It looks like Barackomentum has slowed down somewhat.

I still think a lot of people are 51-49 in their own minds. But Hillary's getting her share of that group.

Early Primary Results: Democrats

As of 9:25pm

Hillary wins:
New York, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee,

Obama wins:
Illinois, Georgia, Delaware,

Analysis: Nobody is going to sweep the Democrats. What Hillary Clinton has accomplished is "hold serve" by winning New York and New Jersey. If she can take California, Super Tuesday will be a success and she can still claim the upper hand. Yeah, Hillary!

At the same time, Barack Obama has shone real strength by winning Delaware and having early leads in Connecticut and Kansas. If Obama wins in California, there's a good chance that he'll have the upper hand.

Very few of these states are close at all. Most states outside Delaware and Connecticut look like they're very solidly in one camp or the other. Hillary and Obama both look like they have a lot of home states.

Bob Knight: The Dick Cheney of Sports

Today Bob Knight resigned as head basketball coach at Texas Tech. Knight is the relentlessly bullying, supremely self-centered basketball coach who made his national reputation for abusing players and winning championships at Indiana University.

I was actually a camper at a Bobby Knight camp at West Point when he was the Army coach in 1970. Even though I was a callow high school sophomore, I could still tell what a jerk he was!

The sports world will miss Bob Knight about as much as the world of politics is going to miss Dick Cheney.

The Obama/Hillary Smackdown

The 51-49 Solution: I can't believe that Rebecca Traister of Salon is the only person who is undecided about the Democratic primaries. I think a lot of people are 51-49 between Obama and Hillary in their own heads. Obama has made his case for the importance of being inspiration and he's convincing. So is Hillary Clinton's argument for the importance of a hard-headed approach to the right. Whether Obama or Hillary wins, I don't think the other Democrat is being repudiated. That's why a Hillary/Obama or Obama/Hillary ticket could be in the works. Democratic voters might demand it.

From a Sample of One. Whenever I muse about the future, I think about one student who thinks of the "standard path" of going to college, getting a job, and raising kids as the equivalent of a death sentence. Because of the similarity between this student and the "alienated youth" studied by Kenneth Kenniston in the late fifties, I wonder if there isn't a bigger explosion developing under the surface of American society than we currently acknowledge. If Obama represents a return to the Kennedyesque optimism characterizing the early sixties, I wonder if a cultural revolution like the late sixties isn't right around the corner again.

A Bad Feeling. I'm sticking with my previous analysis of the Democrats. Nobody knows who's winning, but the dynamic is easy to identify. Hillary may still be ahead or she might have slipped behind. But her support is very fragile and might easily fall apart in the face of the Obama surge.

Does My Gut Have Shit for Brains? The John Cusack character thought his gut had "shit for brains" in High Fidelity. Hopefully, that's the case with my gut as well, because my gut feeling is that Obama is turning the corner on Hillary Clinton and might rack up an impressive set of victories tomorrow. Given that I'm a Hillary supporter, I really hope I'm wrong. Here's to keeping hope alive.

Super Bowl and the Greater Evil

Patriots Lose! Patriots Lose! It's great to see the New England Patriots lose. They're the Dick Cheney's of pro sports--an evil organization that doesn't give a crap about its players no matter how much they've contributed to the team's success.

Too bad an ostentatious asshole like Tom Coughlin of the New York Giants had to be the coach of the team that beat them. I've always rooted for guys like Coughlin to fail as well. But in this case, the Patriots were definitely the greater evil.

Approaching the Half-Way Mark

At my Friday weigh-in, I was 216 pounds. That's about the same as Muhammed Ali and Mike Tyson in their primes. So, I'm not in bad company even if I still have 36 pounds to go before reaching my target of 180.

Here's the run-down of where I am. Weighing 216 means that I lost about 4 3/4 pounds last week and that I've lost 27 pounds altogether since I started the diet 28 days ago.

I'd say that's a decent bit of dieting and I'm still pretty surprised that I'm progressing so fast. My initial goal was to about half a pound a day, but I'm losing about 3/4 pound/day. That's mostly a reflection of how fat I was at 243 and I know all the biblical invocations about pride.

But what the hell, I'm not a Christian anyway.

My big thing this week is brussel sprouts. I'm almost as obsessed with the brussel sprouts I'm now eating as I am with the sweets and pizza I'm not eating.

Maybe my next obsession will be water.

Anyway, ultimate goal was to lose 63 pounds. So I'm only 4 1/2 pounds from being half-way there at 211 1/2. That's my goal for next week, to get myself half-way home to the end of this diet.

If only I could develop any enthusiasm for a healthy lifestyle.

Quick Hillary Notes

Who's the Establishment Candidate? With the Kennedy family, Oprah Winfrey, and a bunch of Democratic governors endorsing him, Barack Obama now looks much more like an establishment candidate than Hillary. There's a "Clintonista" faction of people like Terry McAuliffe in top Democratic circles, but it's just a faction. Broader Democratic elites haven't been any more accepting of Hillary Clinton than the media. They're living the fantasy that Obama will take the country beyond the "politics of polarization" and that they can all be moderate and collegial and that they won't have to fight to get anything done. When will they ever learn?

How Valuable the Kennedy Endorsement? Not very. Ted Kennedy's a much more compromised figure than even Bill Clinton. Decades after Chappaquiddick, Kennedy was still partying like it was 1959. And how does a Kennedy endorsement make Obama look young and vital? Although Kennedy's done many valuable things as a legislator, he's a throwback to the mind-boggling hypocrisy of the John F. Kennedy administration (Sing "Happy Birthday, Mr. Presid-e-e-e-nt" in your best sing-song voice to get an idea of what I'm talking about) and a dinosaur who embarrassed everybody at the 2004 Democratic convention.

Not a great moment for Obama.

Hillary More Inspiring than Obama. One of the things I found interesting about the Thursday debate was that Hillary Clinton was more inspiring than Obama on issues like health care. Hillary started with a strong statement Democratic Party principles of universal access to health care and then talked about the details of her proposals. That gave her proposals a sense of drama and purpose that Obama's litany of details couldn't match.

The Bill Problem. I don't have much of a problem acknowledging that Bill Clinton's undisciplined, shoot-from-the hip pronouncements and "it's all about me" narcissism would be an occasional problem for a Hillary Clinton administration. But it also looks like a manageable problem because Bill Clinton can recognize when he screws up just as well as anybody else can and now he's sticking to his talking points. One of the things I like about Hillary, and about Bill, is that they learn from their mistakes. I haven't seen that in Barack Obama or his people yet.

Is Ann Coulter Biting the Hand

Ann Coulter remains an inspiration to media whores everywhere.

As unhappy as she is with the Republican primaries, she still figured out a way to get herself a lot of media attention by declaring on Fox that she would support Hillary before she voted for John McCain.

No, and if you're looking at substance rather than whether it's an R or D after his name, manifestly, if our's candidate than Hillary's going to be our girl, Sean, because she's more conservative than he is. I think she would be stronger on the war on terrorism. I absolutely believe that.

Like most of Coulter's stuff, this is very clever. But there's a little honesty wrapped in Coulter's relentless cleverness. The clever part is that she got a nice little three-fer out of her Hillary endorsement. Of course, she managed to lash out at McCain and get some publicity for herself (need to sell that next book!). But Coulter also lashed out at Hillary by giving her an "Ann Coulter endorsement" that Coulter knows will hurt Hillary among Democrats.

Atta girl, Ann!

But Coulter's also being honest to the extent that she's always thought that Hillary would keep the troops in Iraq indefinitely.

I've heard her say that on right-wing radio.

Unlike most political pundits, Coulter tries to get under the surface of candidate statements to guess the direction a politician would take in office. On the one hand, Coulter basically sees McCain as an aggressive reform liberal than most Democrats despite his current nods to the right. On the other, she views Hillary as a steady imperialist who would stay in Iraq despite her stated policy of withdrawing American troops.

For Coulter, that makes Hillary a clear choice over McCain.

But being clever doesn't make Coulter right.

Hillary Clinton isn't any more of a steady imperialist than Dennis Kucinich. In 1998, the Clinton administration wanted to invade Iraq over Saddam's booting out the inspectors, but they desisted because they couldn't get any support for the adventure.

In 2002, she was in the ambivalent position of believing that Saddam Hussein deserved to be overthrown. But that wasn't her main thought. Sen. Clinton by then, Hillary preferred inspections and negotiations over invasion but also decided not to be identified with anti-war sentiment. Playing politics, she voted to authorize a war she really didn't want.

As president, Hillary would still much prefer negotiations over military conflict. That's exactly what people like Coulter hated about Bill Clinton's administration. Likewise, I think a Hillary administration would be a much steadier hand at negotiating than either Obama or the temperamental John McCain.