Eric Allie, Caglecartoons.com

As the Bush era draws to a close, Europeans are anxious to know what about American policy will change when he’s gone - particularly if a Democratic victory occurs as planned.

According to this lead article from French business magazine Challenges, while a Democrat in the White House will mean a leftward tilt - it won’t be anything like the European left - and it certainly won’t mean the end to American Exceptionalism.

The article says in part:

“In view of the ongoing presidential campaign, the American exception seems as strong as ever. Where else but in America would a primary race go on for more than a year? Where else would candidates obtain tens of millions of dollars a month from their supporters? Where else would party foot soldiers have the chance to select the candidate for the highest post? … All three candidates take lyrical flight in discussing the American dream. Above all, none will hesitate to resort to force.”

And in describing what a Democratic regime might look like, the article cautions:

“Clearly, a Democratic victory in November would undoubtedly open the door to a more left-wing America. But it would be a kind of American left, certainly not modeled on Europe. Both candidates have rejected a “single payer” system for health insurance, like the Canadian and European models. The change ahead will not mean the end of the American exception, but the end of American triumphalism.”

LEADING ARTICLE

Translated By Kate Davis

May 8, 2008

France - Challenges - Original Article (French)

All countries are exceptional. But the United States gladly considers itself exceptionally exceptional, different from all other developed countries in its social organization and its fundamental values. The State is less extensive and the distribution of wealth more unequal. The United States is also more strongly committed to what Margaret Thatcher called the “Victorian values:” individualism, voluntarism, patriotism.

Thus the Bush government, which supports conservative values domestically and demonstrates an unlimited self confidence externally, is the most “exceptional” known in recent years. But at the end of Bush’s mandate, isn’t the United States entering a new cycle, characterized by the rejection of conservatism and a convergence with Europe’s standards?

In reality, three quarters of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction and for example, vigorously support a system of universal health care. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both have promised to address that. They also want to improve their image in the world. The next government will certainly initiate significant reforms, such as closing Guantanamo or adopting a more rigorous environmental policy in order to address some of the country’s more aberrant characteristics.

Yet in view of the ongoing presidential campaign, the American exception seems as strong as ever. Where else but in America would a primary race go on for more than a year? Where else would candidates obtain tens of millions of dollars a month from their supporters? Where else would party foot soldiers have the chance to select the candidate for the highest post? John McCain won the nomination of his party despite strong internal opposition. Barack Obama is the leader of an uprising against the Democratic old guard.

All three preach a patriotism specific to the United States. John McCain boasts of his service in Vietnam. Barack Obama claims that there is no red or blue, but only one America united by common values. The three candidates take lyrical flight in discussing the American dream. Above all, none will hesitate to resort to force. John McCain sings, “Bomb, bomb [bomb, bomb bomb] Iran.”

READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated foreign press coverage of the U.S. elections.

How dirty does the upcoming 2008 campaign promise to be? The focus has been on what the GOP might try to do to Democratic Senator Barack Obama if he gets the Democratic presidential nomination. But MSNBC’s David Shuster contends that the Republicans also have a treasure chest of goodies ready to use against Senator Hillary Clinton if she heads the ticket:

Two Republican officials at the Republican National Committee who are involved in “opposition research efforts” in preparation for the general election say the RNC’s oppo research dossier on Sen. Clinton runs more than 1,200 pages in length.

FYI: In some newsrooms two sources (not named in the story but revealed to editors) are enough to confirm a story. Some editors insist on three if it’s a huge development. MORE:

According to these officials, the book includes “previously undisclosed information about Hillary Clinton’s connections to the Whitewater scandal, travel office firings, and Democratic fundraising efforts.” Given that the book has not been shared with us, we’ve been unable to confirm this assertion. Furthermore, the Republican officials would not describe the nature of the “new information.”

However, I was not directed away from a front-page story in today’s Washington Times about memos/documents from the estate of Sam Dash, Ken Starr’s ethics adviser during the early stages of the Whitewater investigation. The Dash Whitewater memos and documents have been turned over to the Library of Congress (where they were presumably available to the Washington Times reporter/researcher). The documents reportedly show that prosecutors concluded that Hillary Clinton concealed information and misled a federal grand jury about her work for the Savings and Loan at the heart of the Whitewater investigation. The allegation that she concealed and misled is not new, and was sourced by reporters who covered the investigation in the 1990s (including me) to “attorneys close to Starr” or “sources in the office of the independent counsel.

The documents from Dash’s estate, however, mark the first available “documentary evidence” that Ken Starr’s office drafted a criminal indictment of Senator Clinton, also known as a “pros memo” and debated verbally and through written memos whether Clinton should actually face charges.

According to Shuster, they decided not to go after Clinton because they had doubts about the strength of their evidence and their ability to convict a first lady.

But such memos, documents, and etc. about the internal debate in the office of the independent counsel could be a gold mine for negative ads, etc.

So this means Obama is pristine and won’t face negative campaigning that will fill hours of air time for Sean and Rush et al? Hardly.

By the way, to put the RNC’s opposition research effort into context, I’m told the dossier on Senator Obama is 1,000 pages in length and that Republican researchers spent a few weeks in Chicago recently collecting information on Obama’s ties to the Weather Underground” and separately to Tony Rezko (who is currently on trial for federal corruption charges).

The difference here is: Clinton’s campaign has been saying she is totally vetted and that there is nothing new that can come out or be used against her. If there are some alleged 1,200 pages to play with, it’s unlikely that she’d face a free issue-oriented path to the White House.

Prediction: The formidable slime/distraction machine will run…no matter who is the Democratic nominee.

I began this piece the other day and should have posted it then. I’m late to the party. I was responding to a commenter who wrote:

It’s really sad how much the talk circles around race.

It’s a constant reminder how far we haven’t come.

Even though I knew that to be true, this campaign is just a daily reminder.

The comment was in response to me quoting Thomas Schaller. The irony is that much as I liked what Schaller had to say the other day I’m highly ambivalent about him. I’ve been railing against his Whistling Past Dixie plea for Democrats to abandon the South and turn Southern racism into a (p.18) “burdensome stone to hang around the Republicans’ neck” for a very long time.

Democrats are too quick to hang that racist label on Republicans, and tactical ideas like Schaller’s miss the point don’t they? Back when Schaller wrote his book I was advocating that we should instead address our own racist past as highlighted by Republican Bruce Bartlett in, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past, and redouble our efforts to fight racism whenever and wherever we find it.

You’ve got to wonder if Hillary’s not getting away with her nonsense now — party bigwigs, where are you? — because of our own record of putting strategy before substance! (Speaking of which, I can only hope Ms. Genardo is wrong about John Edwards not endorsing because he’s holding out for a Cabinet position.)

Now I’m no expert on demographic shifts and voting patterns but these days events seem to be taking on a life of their own. And I’m left wondering if, hoping even, that with Blacks having moved back to the South, this religious, rural, evangelized, conservative Southern region that flipped from Democrat to Republican might surprise everybody and just as quickly flip right back.

Voter stats from the Georgia primary in February show an unprecedented surge of black and young Democratic voters:

— Democrats cast nearly 53 percent of the 2,007,544 ballots counted on Feb. 5.

— Within the Democratic primary, African-Americans cast 55 percent of the vote. This is the first time that’s happened. White voters made up just a tad less than 40 percent of the Democratic vote.

— White voters made up 96 percent of the Republican presidential primary vote.

— African-Americans cast 30 percent of all votes on Feb. 5. In November 2006, with gubernatorial candidate Mark Taylor at the top of the Democratic ticket, black voters cast only 24 percent of all ballots. This is the number causing Republicans to lose sleep.

— In addition to juicing turnout among black voters, the Feb. 5 primary showed signs of a shift in party preference among the state’s youngest voters. You read above that Democratic voters accounted for 53 percent of all ballots.

But 61 percent of voters 24 and under picked up a Democratic ballot.

— Young voters are notoriously unreliable, but young African-American voters — 24 and under — had a voter turnout rate of 26 percent. That’s remarkably strong. Turnout among young white voters was 22 percent — again, not too shabby.

Josh Goodman at Governing Magazine casts a skeptical eye on whether blacks could ever be enough to push Georgia over to Obama in the general election, but still finds their impact could be considerable: Read the rest of this entry »

A Gallup analysis of exit-poll data finds Democratic Senator Barack Obama’s support among white voters if he runs against GOP Senator John McCain is about the same as Senator John Kerry’s was in the 2004 Presidential election:

Barack Obama’s current level of support among white voters in a head-to-head matchup against John McCain is no worse than John Kerry’s margin of support among whites against George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election.

Much of the talk following Tuesday’s Indiana and North Carolina primaries has focused on just how electable Obama — now the highly probable nominee — will be in the general election. The Clinton campaign has argued that Obama’s weaknesses among white voters and blue-collar voters will hurt him against McCain in the fall.

But it appears that the way Obama stacks up against McCain at this point is similar to the way in which Kerry performed against Bush in 2004 within several key racial, educational, religious, and gender subgroups. That is, the basic underlying structure of the general-election campaign this year does not appear to be markedly different from that of the 2004 election. This conclusion is based on an analysis of exit-poll data from 2004 compared to the Obama-McCain matchup in 4,000 Gallup Poll Daily tracking interviews conducted during the first five days of May.

My DD’s Jonathan Singer (who is a former TMV coblogger) writes:

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I interviewed the author and political pundit, Cliff Schecter about his latest book, The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Him - and Why Independents Shouldn’t. You can read more about the book at its website and I also recommend this article in U.S. News and World Report.

In his book, Schecter makes the case for why, although he supported McCain in his run in 2000, McCain no longer deserves support and in fact, his candidacy should be fought actively, without hesitation and on all fronts. Schecter outlines his reasons for these sentiments and fills in those reasons with more details than you may be able to absorb. Schecter draws a portrait of both McCain’s political trajectory and the parallel trajectory of how his political choices since 2001 are a thumbing of his nose at the very people who got him to the presidential precipice in the first place.

A couple of disclosures before I offer you my phone interview with Cliff: I’ve never been a McCain supporter. And I haven’t known of Schecter that long either - here’s the first post I ever wrote about Schecter. However, it was fascinating talking to someone with a seemingly vast knowledge base about someone whom I’ve never really studied.

JMZ: You argue on behalf of former McCain supporters who should be able to realize that McCain isn’t what he once was. Who, then, is the alternative and why?

CS: Well. There’s always, “What we have versus what we’d like to have.” I’m an Obama supporter and he has a lot of appeal to Independents. But he hasn’t done it the way McCain did it – by attacking his own party in big speeches. Obama has done it by standing up, not by splitting. Obama talks about rising above partisanship and reaching out to all people on all sides and getting past the muck where politics has gotten so nasty. Obama says, I’m going to talk to you like an adult. And that’s what McCain had called “straight talk” – but he hasn’t given us much of that [this election cycle.]
Read the rest of this entry »

Cartoonists are having a field day with the results from last night’s Indiana and North Carolina Democratic primaries. A large number of them are lampooning Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party’s divisions.

Here are three of the most timely ones (we’ll run others throughout the day tomorrow):

Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune

Mike Lester, The Rome News-Tribune

RJ Matson, Roll Call

CNN just showed Senator Hillary Clinton at a campaign appearance, gearing up for the upcoming West Virginia primary — and the subject comes up: with the number of pledged delegates, the popular vote and fund-raising against her, why won’t she quit her battle with Senator Barack Obama for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination?

The New York Daily News has an article detailing the reasons why. And a key reason, the paper says, is her camp’s feeling that Obama has little appeal to white collar voters:

While the case for Hillary Clinton to stay in the race is shakier than ever, one ugly reason for staying in could be found Tuesday amid the ruddy, sun-kissed Hoosiers who cheered her on to victory at the Indianapolis Speedway.

With Clinton posing alongside pioneering Indy speedster Sarah Fisher, there were almost no African-Americans to be seen. Many in the white, working-class crowd were simply not ready to back Barack Obama….

Such feelings leave Clinton and the Democratic Party in a tough spot. With the largest number of remaining delegates now being party insiders, they have to decide if Obama can overcome enough of that antipathy - essentially deciding if enough working-class whites will back away from the black candidate, whether because of the false Muslim rumors, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright flap or old-fashioned racism.

The paper reports that this need “gives her a reason to stay in the race.”

So how long is it likely to go? According to the Daily News, it’s likely Clinton will fight on all the way to the convention, unless there is a truly massive outcry for her to leave:

Two separate sources in the Clinton orbit insisted Tuesday night it’s now more likely Hillary will pursue her quest until the August convention in Denver - unless party leaders rise up en masse and publicly tell her it’s time to stop. The math, after all, remains solidly in Obama’s favor.

“I can think of no reason why it would not go to the convention now,” one top Hillary Democrat predicted. “Why should she get out?”

And then there’s a section that could be a red warning flag:

Some insiders still want to make sure no new bombshells will explode around the freshman Illinois senator.

Will there be new allegations surfacing? Perhaps in original, blind sourced reporting on the Drudge Report? If those surface, look for fingers to be pointed at the Clinton campaign, even if it’s not the source.

He could slip and stumble some more, her polls could continue to be strong, and once the party decides what to do with Florida and Michigan, his lead in the popular vote will be very narrow,” an insider said.

A top Democratic source with insight into Bill’s and Hillary’s states of mind says the Clintons are convinced that a Democratic presidency is all but certain no matter how messy the fight for the nomination.

In that scenario - which the Obama side and some Democratic elders worry is wishful thinking at best, delusional at worst - there’s no downside for Hillary doing whatever it takes for as long as it takes.

The problem is the meaning of “whatever it takes.” If it’s via a continued campaign aimed at driving up Obama’s negatives so they can convince Superdelegates Obama is unelectable, it’s likely to received a lot more poorly by party bigwigs than it would have been two weeks ago.

Already former Senator and presidential candidate George McGovern today jumped ship from Clinton and endorsed Obama. And there are new reports that Clinton has had to lend her campaign $6.4 million more — bringing the total $11.4 million. If this keeps up, watch for late night comedians to do jokes with her name and Mitt Romney’s in the punchline.

If Clinton plays out her campaign based on issues and makes a graceful exit, the Democrats have a chance at unity. If her campaign remains an aggressive negative campaign, complete with eleventh hour negative campaign ads, it could backfire with some superdelegates and will make the Democrats’ attempts to unify their fractured party even more difficult — not to mention negate any possibility of a “Dream Ticket” which more and more seems like an In Your Dreams Ticket.

FOOTNOTE: Just how bad was the political news last night. GO HERE and look at the photos that show how poorly Bill Clinton serves his wife when he stands by her side after a defeat.

Cartoon by John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri

For more blog discussion on this story go here.

So what happened to Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in last night’s Democratic presidential primaries?

To find out, you can read a host of news articles and weblog posts (including several perspectives here on TMV). Two MUST READS that just hit the Internet are columns by Dick Polman and Christopher Hitchens.

Polman — one of the country’s best political columnists starts out with this:

Behold these case studies of clinical denial…

Britney Spears, last December: “My sister’s not pregnant.”

John McCain, in January: “Any recession is psychological.”

Hillary Clinton, last night: “I win, he wins. I win, he wins. It’s so close!”

Polman then strips the assertion down detailing a host of factors. Here are some excerpts (read the original in full to get all the details):

1. By slaughtering Clinton in North Carolina and neary beating her in the wee hours in Indiana, Barack Obama racked up an overall net gain of 200,000 popular votes…..

2. Her squeaker win in Indiana, combined with her landslide loss in the more populous North Carolina, means that she will slip farther behind in the overall pledged-delegate competition…..

3. On the psychology/perception front, Obama’s performance last night foiled the Clinton argument that she owned the momentum and that the frontrunner was inexorably fading…..

4. Unpledged superdelegates want to see some clear evidence that voters view Clinton as the more electable and more appealing candidate, despite Obama’s frontunner status. Neither race last night supplied that kind of evidence…..

Polman says it’s “strains credulity” to think (a) Clinton will find fundraising easy, (b) the party will decide to give her Michigan’s delegates, (c) and that “superdelegates are going to deny the nomination to the candidate who, barring a documented revelation that he is an alien from a hostile planet, is now demonstrably poised to finish out the primary season with the most pledgees and popular votes.”

He concludes:

I suspect that the Clintons know all this, despite her display of public denial….And her husband clearly recognizes the lay of the land. He stood behind Hillary last night looking as if he’d been smacked with a two-by-four. The visual of Bill meant more than anything she had to say. The end of an era was in his eyes.

Hitchens provides less detail but makes some pointed observations…and again cannot get the image of Bill Clinton’s face as he stood behind his wife on a very bad political night out of his head:

Of all the slogans that Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama might have picked to distinguish themselves from one another, “Prolier Than Thou” was probably the least convincing.

Yet in the closing days of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, it seemed as if the two graduates of the nation’s most privileged law schools, and the two former residents of the Ritziest parts of Illinois, were in a race to don the bluest collar and the most stained factory overalls.

Not since a desperate George Herbert Walker Bush (father of the current incumbent) started munching on pork-rinds, donning a Teamster cap and squeezing behind the wheel of a big rig in 1992 have I seen anything so condescending and ridiculous as the recent competition between Clinton and Obama to down the most beers, pose with the most guns, boast of the most hunting expeditions and so forth.

What did the voting boil down to?

However, it was not really the class vote at which people were looking. In North Carolina, Senator Obama reaped almost one hundred per cent of a constituency which the commentators quite frankly called by its primary color.

In Indiana, that constituency is not such a large share of the electorate.

Nobody especially likes to bang on about this, but this is as good an explanation as any for the discrepancy between the two candidates and the two states.

And, since West Virginia and Kentucky are next up – and reporters are almost unconsciously describing these two states as for some reason more “natural” for the former First Lady – in a short while we will be seeing the pendulum of politics swing back again.

There is less and less point in pretending that this campaign is not “about” race.

As far as I can calculate it, though, Mrs Clinton can carry all the next five states AND Puerto Rico and still not get an arithmetical majority.

Nonetheless, she continues to act as if she knows something that the rest of us do not. And I can tell you that it spooks the Obama campaign.

He ends looking at her speech in Indiana…and Bill Clinton:

And she looked tireless and energetic and full of vim and vigour in her – ill advised I felt – electric blue trouser-suit. It’s this amazing love of combat for its own sake that has won her so much grudging respect even from many Republicans.

However, just take a look at the speech and notice the lugubrious, white-haired, red-faced, scowling and bored figure standing so listlessly just behind her.

How can a campaign once renowned for slickness and spin have permitted such a horrid spectre at the feast?

And this dreary, resentful and shambolic person was once himself described as the country’s first black president. If his wife loses we shall know why.

Indeed. I’ve said it here many times: when the story of this campaign is written it will be said that Bill Clinton on balance sandbaggged his wife’s campaign.

The negativity that he reportedly championed (and did convince her to implement) helped divide the party and harden opposition to her. Raising the race card, even though he denies he did, put Hillary Clinton in a position where she started the primaries enjoying strong black voter support that Obama had problems getting, to her loss in North Carolina where she got less than 10 percent of the African-America vote. The Clinton’s frittered away a key constituency — a glaring fact of their campaign. She needed the black vote.

It’s definitely too early to write the Clinton’s political obituaries.

But if Hillary Clinton’s candidacy dies and they call CSI, CSI will likely find Bill Clinton’s fingerprints.

Cartoon by RJ Matson, The New York Observer

So now that the North Carolina and Indiana primaries are over — ending in split decision wins — who are the winners and losers in Tuesday’s primaries? Is it just Senator Barack Obama (who won North Carolina) or Senator Hillary Clinton (who narrowly won Indiana)?

Is it that clearcut? Here’s our take:

WINNERS:

Senator Barack Obama for winning a victory in North Carolina that went beyond the conventional media wisdom that was building — that he could lose there.

Senator Hillary Clinton for surviving by winning Indiana and keeping her candidacy alive, although some insist it is now on life support..and the batteries are almost dead.

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh for his reprehensible “Operation Chaos” campaign to convince voters to use their precious right to vote to sandbag another party that appears to have worked in Indiana. Data suggests it had an impact.

Zogby polling for its final poll on North Carolina. Matt Drudge who yes indeed did call it earlier in the day (and we had our doubts about that report…).

LOSERS:

Senator Barack Obama for not being able to end Clinton’s candidacy with two solid wins (this could change if the final Indiana vote changes).

Senator Hillary Clinton for not just losing to Obama in North Carolina while aides talked about her gathering momentum, but for starting out Campaign 2008 with a good chunk of black voter support and ending the night with shockingly low black voter support (remember that at the beginning of the campaign Obama had a problem getting African Americans to vote for him and against a Clinton).

The Limbaugh “dittoheads” who felt the precious vote for which so many have died should be tossed away to sabotage another political party, as if democracy in a time of national crisis were some cutesy game (and we add in this category any Democrats who also played the same game crossing over in Republican primaries).

THE BIGGEST LOSERS:

The Superdelegates who will either have to act soon…or later…to put an end to the contest and face the possibility that, no matter what they decide, half of the committed Democrats won’t vote for the candidate they opposed (which some feel means they should be committed).

Political pandering: By most accounts of the talking heads and experts, Clinton’s embracing of the gas holiday tax and dismissive comment that she didn’t have to listen to economists didn’t do her much good and probably hurt her.

To read some excellent analytical live blogging on the night’s voting GO HERE.

What happens next? The media and weblogs are filled with tidbits about a night that could have been a “game changer,” but not what Clinton had in mind.

UPDATE: An interesting post from Talk Left’s Big Tent Democrat (one of the best pro-Clinton bloggers on the Internet) on what Clinton should do next:

My own view is she should run her campaign against John McCain. She will win West Virginia and Kentucky by huge margins.

She might even challenge Obama in Oregon.

What she should not do, imo, is run against Barack Obama. If there is a path to the nomination for her, and I doubt there is, it won’t come from attacking Obama now.

Some additional tidbits and excerpts:

–The Politico: Clinton cancels morning shows:

Tim Russert, a colleague reports, just said that Hillary Clinton canceled her scheduled appearances on the morning shows tomorrow.

It’s a sign of weakness she can ill afford at a moment when questions about whether she can continue are mounting.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why is the man above smiling? Because, apparently, he has a RIGHT to.

If all goes according to projections and Senator Hillary Clinton somewhat narrowly wins the Indiana Democratic primary (CBS has projected she will narrowly win it), he has a right to smile. Because if early indications are correct, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh may have provided a textbook case of the influence of radio talk show hosts on partisans in the 21st century.

His “Operation Chaos” — designed to get his listeners to vote whenever they can in Democratic primaries for Clinton to prolong the Democrats’ highly divisive Clinton/Barack Obama Presidential nomination — could have given the Cinton the winning edge, if the victory margin in the end is like what seems to be shaping up now. The New Republic’s The Plank:

Some reporters have speculated about the impact of the “Limbaugh effect” — partisan Republicans crossing over to vote fr Hillary Clinton solely to help weaken the Democrats against John McCain. The sieze of the effect is hard to measure. But there is one numerical measurement, first pointed out to me by the Pew Survey’s Richard Auxier following the Pennsylvania primary, that gives some sense of it.

One exit poll question asks Indiana voters who they would support in a Clinton-McCain contest. 17% of them say McCain. Of those voters, 41% say they would vote for McCain over Clinton. In other words, these voters, 7% of the Indiana electorate, voted for Clinton in the primary but have no intention of supporting her in the fall.

Now, this isn’t a precise measure of the “Limbaugh effect” — no doubt there are some Republicans who backed Obama in the primary out of anti-Clinton sentiment, but plan to vote for McCain in November. But it is a good place to start when making a ballpark estimate. And it’s a sizeable number — 7% may wind up being as big as her margin of victory.

The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein looks at exit polls and reaches the same conclusion: Limbaugh played a role in motivating some voters whose motive was basically to sabatoge the Democratic primary…something some Democrats have tried in cross-over primaries the past but not on such an organized, sustained and serious scale. Stein’s post must be read full but here are some excerpts:

Did Rush Limbaugh actually impact the Democratic primary?

The loud-mouthed radio talk show host has been encouraging Republicans to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton to continue the “chaos” in the Democratic race. And a sampling of some key exit poll information suggests he may, to a certain extent, be having an effect.

Thirty-six percent of primary voters said that Clinton does not share their values. And yet, among that total, one out of every five (20 percent) nevertheless voted for her in the Indiana election. Moreover, of the 10 percent of Hoosiers who said “neither candidate” shared their values, 75 percent cast their ballots for Clinton.

These are not small numbers. By comparison, of the 33 percent of voters who said Sen. Barack Obama does not share their values, only seven percent cast their ballots in his favor. Basically, more people who don’t relate to Clinton are, for one reason or another, still voting for her. These are not likely to be loyal supporters.

He goes into some detail then writes:

The numbers suggest one of three things: A) Clinton’s support in Indiana, while clearly there, is not entirely solid; B) a large swath of Indiana primary goers simply didn’t like the nominees and thought of Clinton as the lesser of two evils; or C) Limbaugh’s hatchet plan could be having political ripples.

Perhaps it’s a mix of all three.

Republican partisans will applaud what truly seems to be a Limbaugh success. And his “legend” as someone who can press a button and get followers to do his bidding (or jettison previous beliefs and get with the party line) will grow. Some Hillary Clinton supporters will say Well, what does it matter why they vote the way the do — they have the right to vote as they vote. (Which they do.)

But there is an ineffable stench of political sleaziness when Republicans — and Democrats — decide to cross party lines to sandbag the other party. Who would have ever thought 20 or 30 — or 10 — years ago that partisans of either party would vote in another party’s primary specifically to prolong the other party’s turmoil or weaken that party’s candidate? There have been charges that siphoning off another party’s votes has been used via third parties but this hasn’t been an actual calculated strategy until now. Welcome to mega partisan 2008.

Perhaps when Superdelegates look at these numbers, it might influence their perceptions on the components of the Indiana vote….particularly as Limbaugh starts hyping his impact and if the mainstream media latches on to the story.

P.S. Limbaugh’s power isn’t just because he’s a partisan. He is also a talented, first-class broadcaster who knows how to use the broadcast medium and get and hold an audience. He makes it look easy, and it isn’t — which is why so many other conservative and progressive talk show hosts have failed.

This may be the first vote in which his influence can be measured in qualitative terms.

UPDATES:
–Read Andrew Sullivan.

Obama’s speaking. He won NC. Indiana’s too close to call. No upsets. Best case scenario for her, status quo ante.

With that, Hillary remains mathematically challenged. Doomed even. He wins.

So why have we been talking about white working-class males? Schaller suggests Hillary botched the black vote:

Though a majority of black voters may inevitably have gone for Obama, nothing precluded the wife of the so-called first black president from keeping Obama’s margins among blacks significantly narrower — say, losing to him by 4-to-1 or even 3-to-1, rather than the devastating 9-to-1 margins by which Obama has often won African-American Democrats. “The Clinton campaign has been focused on Barack Obama’s performance with white working-class voters in a few states, but they fail to mention Senator Clinton’s abysmal performance with black voters all over the country,” says political consultant and Obama supporter Jamal Simmons. “She has gone from leading among black voters to losing them 90 percent to 10 percent in Pennsylvania. One would expect Obama to win these voters, but 90-10 is a total collapse that Obama is not experiencing among any constituency. Simply put, Hillary Clinton has a black problem.” […]

To understand the power of the black vote thus far in the 2008 Democratic primary, consider the fate of the two candidates in their own home states, both of which voted on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5.

Unsurprisingly, a whopping 93 percent of African-Americans in Illinois supported Obama. And even though New York was and surely will remain his low-water mark for black support, 61 percent of black New Yorkers still voted for him.  […]

What might the situation look like now if Clinton had managed to keep Obama’s 90 percent black support just to 80 percent? It’s impossible to know for certain, because it depends on where specifically — in which states and districts — she garnered those extra black votes. But NBC News political director and delegate math expert Chuck Todd ventured a conservative, back-of-the-napkin estimate. “I’m not sure how many more delegates she would have gotten at 20 percent performance, but I’d guess roughly 25 to 30,” Todd told me. “That may not seem like a lot, but it would have swung the net delegate margin by 50 to 60, or about a third of his current pledged delegate lead.”

To supplement Todd’s delegate estimates, I looked at something much easier to compute: the extra popular votes Clinton would have amassed in 13 primary states with significant black populations — Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin — had she won just 20 percent of the black voters in those states.  […]

And the difference it would have made is striking: In those 13 other states, had she drawn just 20 percent of the African-American vote, Clinton would have shifted more than 270,000 votes from Obama to herself, a net swing of more than half a million votes. Which, by the way, is roughly the amount by which she trails Obama in the overall national popular vote right now.

LATER: Hillary is speaking, “…Tonight we’ve come from behind, we’ve broken the tie, and thanks to you it’s full speed on to the White House!”

Joe, the fact that you have to ask answers the question — yes, Limbaugh had an impact. But a marginal one that doesn’t weaken anyone. To engage is good. Kind of pathetic don’t you think that the Grand Old Party is reduced to that?

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh has urged his Republican listeners to vote for Senator Hillary Clinton in today’s Indiana primary, pointing to what he said is a double standard when it comes to cross-over voters, the Boston Globe reports — and another newspaper reports signs of “hardcore” Republicans voting Democratic.

Indiana’s primary is open to Republicans and independents, as well as Democrats. Limbaugh is urging Republicans to cross over and vote for Clinton to extend the Democratic nomination fight and, he hopes, further damage the eventual nominee.

Exit polls suggest that Limbaugh’s soldiers could have made a difference March 4 in Texas, where Clinton pulled out a narrow win in the primary, though Obama won the simultaneous caucuses.

Limbaugh told listeners on Monday that Democratic Party officials in Indiana are trying to intimidate Republican voters with monitors at the polls. So he issued these orders: “Flood these precincts. Vote for Mrs. Clinton as an act of defiance against these police-state tactics as a form of protest.”
Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a new SCREAMING HEADLINE!!!! on the Drudge Report — which many suspect to be the opening salvo in a day when the camps of Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama will try all day to “set expectations” on how the race will turn out…in other words, give out disinformation so when the votes are counted they can then declare it a huge victory even if it is not.

DANGER DAY: HILLARY FACES ‘15-POINT DEFEAT’ IN NC; SEES INDIANA WIN, screeches the monster headline on Drudge. It reads in part:

Hillary Clinton’s inner circle now fears a stinging defeat is likely in North Carolina.

“Look, we worked hard and gave it our best shot, but the demographics, well, they are what they are,” a top campaign source explained to the DRUDGE REPORT as voting began Tuesday morning.

A big scoop? YES. Since few polls (look for yourself here) predict that kind of win. Most, in fact, show a TIGHTENING RACE and some analysts now raise a possibility unheard of just weeks ago: that there is a chance Obama could lose this race. Even Kos, founder of the huge The Daily Kos blog, is looking at a ton of polling data and doesn’t come up with a trend towards a 15 percent Obama win.

But to the uninitiated:
Read the rest of this entry »

Happy as the Republicans may be with their recent voter ID victories, they might want to rethink their strategy in light of yesterdays news that more than 3.5 million new voters registered in the first three months of the year.

Many of us believe those Voter ID laws are clearly intended to block the vote — if not, why not advocate, instead, Rick Hasen’s suggestion that we affirmatively, pro-actively register everyone? With an opt-out provision of course.

But the news yesterday makes it look to me like no matter what they throw at us (and in Indiana, they got game) they’re not going to slow this thing down:

Voter excitement, always up before a presidential election, is pushing registration through the roof so far this year — with more than 3.5 million people rushing to join in the historic balloting, according to an Associated Press survey that offers the first national snapshot.

Figures are up for blacks, women and young people. Rural and city. South and North.

Overall, the AP found that nearly one in 65 adult Americans signed up to vote in just the first three months of the year. And in the 21 states that were able to provide comparable data, new registrations have soared about 64 percent from the same three months in the 2004 campaign.

Those voters are bound to turn some Red States Blue:

Cherie Poucher, director of elections in Wake County, home of the state capital of Raleigh, said registrations among the parties have historically kept pace with each other — until this year. In the two weeks before the April 11 registration deadline, she said, the Democrats gained about 8,000 voters in Wake County while the GOP lost several hundred.

“We have never seen something like that before,” Poucher said.

In Pennsylvania, where Clinton’s victory in the April 22 primary kept her campaign alive, there were 40,000 more Republicans than Democrats in Bucks County in April 2004.

Among the new registrants in the first three months of this year, 6,537 signed up as Democrats while 2,200 did so as members of the GOP in the county north of Philadelphia. And 12,554 filed applications to switch to the Democratic Party. By the beginning of April, Bucks had become a Democratic county by a margin of nearly 4,000 registered voters.

Cordisco said party leaders had initially set a goal of turning the county blue by 2011. Then came the extended primary battle that gave Pennsylvania an important role. And while Clinton won Bucks County by a margin of 25 percentage points, accounts suggest that many of the new registrants are black voters inspired by Obama.

Superdelegates, are you listening?

Among the new voters in North Carolina is Shy Ector, 25, of Durham. She favored Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry while a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill four years ago, but never actually took the time to make sure she was registered to vote. Barack Obama’s candidacy was enough to make sure she did this year, she said.

“I was like ‘Oh, now this is a reason to vote. This is different,’” Ector said. “I was inspired and I was excited.”

New voters are generally less reliable. So there’s no guarantee this year’s newcomers will stick around in years to come — or even cast ballots in November if their candidate doesn’t make it.

“I will be very disappointed, and it will take me some time to recover,” Ector said of an Obama loss to Hillary Rodham Clinton. “I’m not going to say I’m just going to write off politics for good, but it does make you feel like you’re doing all this work for nothing, and nothing’s coming to fruition.”

Even if some discouraged new voters drop off, the numbers are striking.

Er, and I’d say, we’ve only begun to fight!

A new Ipsos poll gives Senator Hillary Clinton a substantial national lead as the favorite among Democrats over her rival for the Democratic Presidential nomination Senator Barack Obama:

The latest Ipsos poll conducted over the weekend shows that on the eve of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has taken over the lead in popular support from Democrats nationally. Among Democratic supporters across the country, 47% say that if the 2008 Democratic presidential primary or caucus was being held in their state today, they would choose Clinton, while 40% would vote for Barack Obama.

These results are in contrast to a poll conducted by Ipsos from April 23rd to April 27th and released last week which showed that Obama had a forty-six percent to forty-three percent lead over Clinton on this same question. Democratic support for Clinton remains highest from women (51%), who have a high-school education or less (58%), and very low income respondents (57% among those with an annual household income of $25,000 or less).

And how would the two Democrats fare against GOP Senator John McCain?
Read the rest of this entry »

On this, the eve of what I sincerely hope will be the end of the primary season, I am proud to bring you a letter from a registered, card-carrying Democrat. This letter is right now being submitted to the Clinton campaign, the Democratic party, and others. He says, among other things:

As a child I was promised that anyone could grow up to be President. For the last 20 years only 2 families have controlled the White House and your election would extend that to 24 or 28 years. That is the death of the ultimate promise of American opportunity.

And:

I have watched you pander to insurance companies, to big oil interests, to the political right, and to religious groups. In short, everyone except actual people who could actually vote for you.

To find out what else he has to say to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party as a whole, check out this Message from a Voter.

Nowhere do you experience the agony and ecstasy of following political polling results more than in the scientific tea-leaf readings now coming out of North Carolina. Each makes sense when you read them.

Here are two of the latest.

1. WTVD in North Carolina sees a nail-biter:

On the eve of the North Carolina Democratic Primary, with 25% of votes already cast, Barack Obama has no breathing room in his hope to defeat Hillary Clinton in popular votes.

According to SurveyUSA’s 8th and final tracking poll, conducted exclusively for ABC11 Eyewitness News, on the final day of the fiercely fought campaign, Senator Barack Obama holds on with 50% of the vote to Senator Hillary Clinton’s 45% of those polled.
There is no foreseeable outcome in North Carolina, regardless of which candidate wins the popular vote, where one candidate collects significantly more convention delegates than the other.

AND

2. FiveThirdyEight.com predicts it’ll be Obama by double-digits.

In Pennsylvania and Indiana, the previous times that we conducted this exercise, the results from our regression model were closely in line with the composite polling averages in those states. In North Carolina, however, while most polls show a tightening, single-digit race, our model steadfastly forecasts a solid, double-digit victory for Barack Obama.

If you’ll recall, the way that I produce these projections is to rely purely on demographic data from previous primaries. So the unstated assumption is this: if voters in North Carolina behave like demographically-aligned voters in other states, this is about what we should expect. On the other hand, if something has changed in the way that some groups of voters view the candidates — our model may be inaccurate.

There does appear to me to be some evidence that Hillary Clinton is overperforming the position she has generally held throughout most of the recent primaries. But there is also some strong evidence that the current polling in North Carolina may be understating Barack Obama’s support in that state.

Read it in its entirety since it’s a detailed analysis.

Choose the poll that fits your political bias and believe it, and pooh-pooh the other one.

The gas tax holiday which many experts and politicians say is an ineffective idea and could make things worse is now forefront in the battle between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for votes in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries.

Clinton calls for it. Obama opposes it.

Hillary Clinton’s new ad attacks Obama:

Here’s Obama’s response ad: