Bloody Politics II: Dicing McCain

My original prediction for the 2008 presidential election more than 15 months ago was 57-43 for the Democrat.

There's a decent chance that will stand up because John McCain is such a weak candidate.

This week's blow-up over Vicki Iseman underlines McCain's essential vulnerability.

The Candidate from Default, Arizona. Fundamentally, McCain is a default candidate of the Republican Party. First McCain, then Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and finally Mitt Romney were tried on by Republican voters before being discarded like cheap shirts. Of all the Republican candidates, McCain was not as unlikeable as Romney and not as ridiculous as "Rudy's Next Mistress" Giuliani or "Hard-Working" Fred Thompson.

Republican voters didn't really want him, but they ultimately decided to pick "Good-Old John" McCain off the floor and make him their nominee--by default.

The Democrats have a much better default candidate in Hillary Clinton. But it looks like the Dems are finding Barack Obama so electrifying that we're going to reach beyond the known in nominating our presidential candidate.

If there's one thing the nation knows about John McCain: he's no Barack Obama.

Sleeping with Lobbyists. In 2000, Vicki Iseman was a 32 year-old lobbyist who did not look like she had had her first plastic surgery yet. She might have had a face-lift or two since then though. There seems to be broad agreement among the MSM, right-wing blogs, and liberal bloggers that McCain probably did not have an affair with Iseman and that it might not have mattered if he did because McCain's connections with lobbyists or lying is the real issue.

I beg to differ.

McCain was in deep enough with Ms. Iseman that his staffers talked with him several times about the impropriety of their relationship and finally confronted her. The left blogs are saying that the problem was that McCain's connection with Iseman as a lobbyist wasn't consistent with his image as a reformer. But McCain is someone who is clearly comfortable with lobbyists. His main campaign guy for 2000 and 2008, Rick Davis, is a lobbyist. Longtime GOP lobbying bigshot Charlie Black is running his lobbying business from the back of McCain's bus this year. For his campaign people to confront him about the relationship with Iseman, they had to think Iseman was doing something besides lobbying McCain.

Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

I'll admit there's a chance that there was no sexual fire behind the smoke between McCain and Iseman. But not much of a chance.

My opinion is that the sexual innuendo involved in l'affaire Iseman has really damaged John McCain's candidacy. The idea of McCain having sex with a lobbyist resonates in a lot of ways. If the Obama campaign means anything, it means that Democrats, moderates, and independent voters want a clean break from the last generation of politics. McCain's involvement with Iseman is so damaging because it illustrates just how deeply McCain is tied to "the politics of the past."

First, there's the fact that McCain's an old-looking 71. The media always prints pictures of McCain that make him look younger and more vigorous than he really is. But it isn't working. One of the main knocks I hear about McCain is that he's "so" old and stories of him sleeping with a "40 year old lobbyist" reminds people of his age in a visceral and creepy kind of way.

Perhaps worse, the idea of an affair with Vicki Iseman reminds voters of the influence of big money over the last generation of office-holders in Washington. It reminds voters of the "old politics" of influence and corruption during Bill Clinton's and George W. Bush's presidencies. By raising his money primarily from the internet, Obama represents a break from "the politics of the past." In being seen as "sleeping with a lobbyist," McCain becomes a powerful embodiment of things about the past that voters want to think they're getting away from.

The other area where his involvement with Vicki Iseman hurts McCain is that it reminds voters of their disdain for Republican hypocrisy. The idea that McCain's in bed with a lobbyist who's young enough to be his daughter reminds voters of all the affairs that moralistic Republicans ranging from Newt Gingrich to Bob Livingston to Rudy Giuliani have had. People don't like adultery, but they especially dislike adultery from the party of evangelical sanctimony. McCain's never been an evangelical and he hasn't made much of an effort to fake it, but Iseman reminds many voters of their contempt for the influence of the religious right in the Republican Party.

The Monster Under McCain's Bed. The worst thing about the whole Iseman affair for McCain is that he has a lot of enemies and they look like they could be dishing dirt on McCain throughout the fall campaign. One of the amazing things about George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign was that Bush had never had enough of a falling out with his fraternity brothers, drinking buddies, or business associates that any of them talked to the media about Bush's days as a hard-drinking, coke-sniffing, party guy.

Not so with John McCain. As David Brooks points out, the person who went to the Times with this story had to have been in McCain's inner circle. Brooks speculates that the problem is the long-standing rivalry between mainstream McCain loyalists like campaign manager Rick Davis and reformist loyalists like John Weaver, but what matters here is that people who have grudges against John McCain have proven that they're willing to take their anger out by reporting embarrassing stories to the media.

This could be the real monster under McCain's bed. Given McCain's self-righteous tilting against the politics of money, his sucking up to the media, his volcanic temper, and the fact that he's been a Senator for 24 years, there must be a lot of people out there who with axes to grind against him. Seen from this perspective, the New York Times story on McCain's involvement with Vicki Iseman might be the first in a long series of juicy revelations about John McCain from the people who have scores to settle.

It could be a long nine months to the election for John McCain.

Bloody Politics 1: Slicing Obama

Notes from Blood Week in American Politics

1. Blooding Barack Obama. It's probably too late for Hillary to come back on delegates, but this is the first week in a long time that Barack Obama has really been bloodied by bad news.

The first two things that nicked Obama were his and his wife's doing. Obama plagiarized Duval Patrick for a passage in one of his speeches.

Borrowing three or four sentences of a distinct kind of formulation was morally wrong even if Patrick is a great friend of Obama's. But even if one accepts the excuses and justifications from the Obama camp, the idea that Obama has been lifting material for his speeches just doesn't sit right. Politicians might steal from each other all the time, but Obama is supposed to be smarter, slicker, and generally better than other politicians. It shouldn't have happened.

But the plagiarism wasn't a big deal by itself. In fact, Obama would have escaped damage altogether but for the fact that his wife Michelle foolishly made a reference to not being "proud" of America in one of her speeches. Part of the magic of the Obama candidacy is that he might end up moving political opinion to the left in the same way Reagan moved it to the right. But this kind of gaffe makes Obama look like the kind of elite, critical leftist that the right's been complaining about for years. I imagine Republican ad people were running various attack ads through their minds as soon as they heard about Michelle Obama's comments. After all, she was pretty much writing the ads for them.

Finally, Barack Obama stated last night that an army captain had told him that his unit had been forced to use captured Taliban weapons because they couldn't get replacements for their own weapons. After Obama was portrayed as very much mistaken about this, Jake Tapper of ABC called the army captain and got a confirmation on the lack of replacements and spare parts. But I don't think that ends the problem for Obama. The fact that Obama was the subject of "controversy" could end up damaging him the same way that Whitewater damaged Hillary Clinton even though there never was any evidence that he had done nothing well. As HRC has learned to her chagrin, just the fact that you're being attacked makes you look guilty.

Obama did the right thing with the information from Iraq. But it still might hurt him anyway.

A Shrinking McCain Cuts Down No Obamas

These days when I think of John McCain, I find myself humming the Jimmy Dean song "Big Bad John."

"Big Joh-n-n, Big Bad John"

McCain has to be big and bad--a larger than life soldier, patriot, reformer, and embodiment of everything American--if he's going to beat the apparent Democratic candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

But today, John McCain shrunk dramatically in stature yesterday as a result of New York Times and Washington Post revelations about his "relationship" with a 40 year old lobbyist named Vicki Iseman back in 2000.

Pictures of Ms. Iseman actually make her look much more like a Rudy Giuliani mistress than a "McCain Girl." Unfortunately for Ms. Iseman, Rudy was already involved with mistress Judy Nathan who became Mrs. Rudy no. 3 in 2000. It looks like Iseman settled for John McCain instead and that she was on her way to becoming Mrs. Big Bad John no.3 before she was derailed by McCain's staff.

That's what separates "patriotic and honorable" Republicans like Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and John McCain from "despicable" men like Bill Clinton--they marry their mistresses instead of abandoning them.

Notes from Underground argues that McCain's campaign planted the leak to get the story out of the way during a dead spot in the Republican campaign.

That may be true, but I don't think the story is going away. I believe McCain's "stature" has been diminished enough that it will take a lot of work for him to recover.

To have a chance in the fall election, McCain has to look so good to voters that they'll ignore his support for the war, opposition to abortion rights, his heavy reliance on lobbyists for his campaign,. and a bunch of other problems. But he won't stand a chance of doing that if his stature is being constantly undercut by these revelations.

And my bet right now is that McCain is going to have a rough ride. He's made a lot of enemies over his last 10-15 years as a reform-oriented media hound and there's a good chance those enemies might start feeding the media with juicy McCain stories.

If that's the case, McCain won't have enough stature to even give Obama or Hillary a good fight.

Obama Wins Wisconsin--Plus a Side of Flies

Barack Obama won a big victory in Wisconsin tonight with a 58-41 margin.

If Obama also wins in one of his home states of Hawaii and Washington State's nonbinding primary, that will substantially narrow the chances for any Hillary comeback.

She pretty much has to win Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania and run the table on all the straggly primaries like my state of Kentucky to have a chance. I don't think super-delegates are going to put her over the top and also think it would be a disaster if they did. Think Hubert Humphrey backroom nomination in 1968 as an example of what being a less than fully legitimate Democratic nominee can get you.

Given that I've been supporting Hillary, all of this is a big disappointment.

That's partly because Hillary's running out of excuses for losing.

She could say that the Wisconsin's primary set up well for Obama because it was an open primary where independents and Republicans could vote on the Democratic side. Moreover, independents broke at least 2-1 for Obama.

But Wisconsin is a swing state and the fact that independents broke for Obama implies that they would be more likely to vote Democratic with Obama heading the ticket.

That's a good argument for Obama being the more electable Democrat against Republican middleweight John McCain.

But there are a couple of flies in the Obama ointment.

The plagiarism issue of Obama lifting passages from the speeches of Duval Patrick rankles. As someone who has evaluated a lot of plagiarism cases, Obama's use of the Patrick speech strikes me as dishonest. I've heard a lot of excuses about politicians stealing lines from each other and Patrick making excuses, but I still think it's wrong and that the issue could chip away at Obama's teflon coating.

Right-wing bloggers have also picked up on Michelle Obama saying that

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction. And just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment I've seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic, common issues and it's made me proud.

It's poor form for any political figure to defy the norms of conventional patriotism in the U. S. It looks like this one might slide by in the glow of the Wisconsin victory, but Michelle Obama seems to be just as much a loose cannon as Hillary Clinton's husband.

That could blow up in Barack's face just like it blew up in Hillary's.

A Plagiarism Problem for Obama?

Hmm. I picked up an item by John Nichols in a blog for The Nation about Barack Obama lifting passages from speeches by Masssachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. Nichols emphasizes that the story has been shopped around by people like Howard Wolfson from the Clinton campaign. As a result, I'll need some independent confirmation before I believe it.

However, Nichols does produce an interesting comparison between Obama and Patrick.

Here's Patrick in 2006 on the campaign trail in Massachusetts responding to a
foe's suggestion that he was long on rhetoric and short on substance:
"Her dismissive point, and I hear it a lot from her staff, is all I have to offer is words. Just words. 'We holds these truths to be self-evident -- that all men are created equal' -- just words. Just words. 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself' -- just words.'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country -- just words. 'I have a dream' -- just words."

Here's Obama speaking Saturday night to Wisconsin Democrats:
"Don't tell me words don't matter. 'I have a dream' -- just words. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' -- just words. 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself' - just words. Just speeches."

I deal with plagiarism issues as a college professor who gives a lot of writing assignments. If a student had turned in something like this as a writing assignment, I would view them as doubly guilty of plagiarism. First, there is the use of Deval Patrick's formulations as though they were Obama's own thought or writing. This includes both the fragments from famous speeches like King's "I have a Dream" speech and the repetition of the phrase "just words" as a way to make Obama's main point about the importance of words. Obama is clearly using Patrick's words here. The second point of guilt is that Obama's speech adjusts Patrick's formulations in small ways that don't change the meaning of the words but make the speech appear to be his own.

I'm not sure about the ethics of plagiarism in speech-making. I know Joe Biden got ripped for lifting stuff out of a Neil Kinnock speech during his previous try for the presidency in 1988. But the issue is complicated here by the fact that speeches by presidential candidates are often fully or partially written by speech-writers. If Obama plagiarized the formulations from Patrick's speech himself, there's a problem. If an Obama speech-writer or intern lifted the stuff from Patrick, the problem is with Obama's staff and not so much with the candidate himself.

It will be interesting to see if the story has legs.

McCain Wants Bush to Be Quayle

During the 2006 Congressional campaigns, I wrote about the way the Republicans used the unpopular and disgraced current president, George Bush, as a Dan Quayle look-alike, scheduling him to rally the troops in the smallest, most out-of-the-way Republican strongholds.

It appears that the McCain Campaign wants to do the same thing. According to the New York Times:

. . . look for Mr. Bush to make solo appearances on behalf of Mr. McCain before evangelicals and in Republican pockets across the country, and to campaign in places where there are important races for the House and Senate, like Idaho and Kansas, which will not be critical destinations for the Republican nominee.

Maybe McCain will have a rule about W not making appearances in towns larger than five hundred. That way, Bush won't embarrass him so much.

The Master Mentality and Obama

After Barack Obama's victory in South Carolina, the crowd in Columbia chanted "Race doesn't matter!" and the candidate himself expanded on the theme, arguing that

"his victory disproved those who argue that people "think, act and even vote within the categories that supposedly define us . . . I did not travel around this state and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina. I saw South Carolina," he said. The election, he said, "is not about rich versus poor or young versus old, and it's not about black versus white. This election is about the past versus the future."

Unfortunately, the past seems to be reasserting itself even as Obama edges into the lead for the Democratic nomination. There's a set of Obama jokes that reiterate the master mentality among whites by posing Obama in the role of omniscient servant.

For example, there is a web site at http://barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com/ that has Barack Obama widgets like "Barack Obama thought you could use some chocolate," "Barack Obama warmed up your car for you," or "Barack Obama offered you his seat." On this site, Obama is represented as a kind of super-cool, androgynously handsome version of the butler played by Anthony Hopkins in Remains of the Day. There's something typically but still disconcertingly white in all of this. The implicit expectation is that Barack Obama would be doing favors and service for white people and that white people are people who can normally expect to be served by black people even if those black people are super-hot presidential candidates. If you're white, Obama will warm up your car, get you some coffee, and find out the weather for you before you even know you need these things done.

I'm surprised they didn't say Obama would shine their shoes.

The link for the widget site came from an article by Slate's John Dickerson on Obama. For Dickerson, this is a matter of whether Obama can become "too cool."

But how could Obama bringing me hot chocolate be too cool?

Dickerson has a couple other examples of the Barack Obama "super-servant":

And on the New York subway Friday morning, one of our copy editors, Ellen Tarlin, heard one woman joke to another: "Obama, will you pick me up after my noninvasive minor surgical procedure?" To which the other replied: "Obama, will you hold my hair back when I puke?"

I'm not sure what to make of this yet. One thing I'm interested in is whether these kinds of people are going to vote for Obama. In a way, I don't see any reason why they shouldn't. But if that's the case, it's a sign of how far we're getting away from the faux macho of the Bush era. It's also an indication of how deeply entrenched the white master mentality is even in those who'll be voting for a black president.

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.